Piss Christ

I met a guy recently who knew I was a Christian, and this made him want to have a little fun with me, I think. To test out what that means and what it doesn't. He asked me if I knew about Andres Serrano's controversial photograph, Piss Christ. The artist took a crucifix and submerged it in a jar of his urine and then photographed it. The results are striking. What is in fact his urine looks like it could also be amber. He asked me what I thought. I said that I thought it was a beautiful photograph, and that the joke is on the artist. Christ will be fine. Meanwhile this guy is fooling around with his own waste. 

Our conversation made me think more about what we do when we try to degrade Christ (and I don't mean to ascribe intent to the artist. I know nothing about him. The scenario itself posed the sacrilege interpretation). It seems to me that humans could hardly bring Christ lower than be brings himself, willingly and for our sake. In Mark 7, when Jesus heals a deaf and mute man, he puts his fingers in the man's ears. He touches his tongue. This suggests Jesus isn't afraid of our bodies or of what comes from them, our ear wax, our spit, our piss. But he longs to see us, bodies and souls, healed and put right. And he lets his own body be broken and his own blood be spilled to bring that about.

It strikes me that there is a crazy hubris in imagining we can cheapen Christ. I don't mean to suggest that irreverence isn't a real thing. But when Christ's premise is to impoverish himself so that we can be rich, it seems like the joke will always be on us if we oppose him. 

Easter Morning

Easter Morning

by Jim Harrison

On Easter morning all over America
the peasants are frying potatoes in bacon grease.

We're not supposed to have "peasants"
but there are tens of millions of them
frying potatoes on Easter morning,
cheap and delicious with catsup.

If Jesus were here this morning he might
be eating fried potatoes with my friend
who has a '51 Dodge and a '72 Pontiac.

When his kids ask why they don't have
a new car he says, "these cars were new once
and now they are experienced."

He can fix anything and when rich folks
call to get a toilet repaired he pauses
extra hours so that they can further
learn what we're made of.

I told him that in Mexico the poor say
that when there's lightning the rich
think that God is taking their picture.
He laughed.

Like peasants everywhere in the history
of the world ours can't figure out why
they're getting poorer. Their sons join
the army to get work being shot at.

Your ideals are invisible clouds
so try not to suffocate the poor,
the peasants, with your sympathies.
They know that you're staring at them.

Dark Gethesemane

It is Holy Week, and it's been a cool and windy one so far, but that suits me. It reminds me of the arrival of spring in the midwest more than the SC springs I have witnessed the last few years, where we can all be languishing in summer-like warmth even in March.

My sister and I had a good rant the other day about the necessity of Easter hymns at Easter. It looks as though this year we'll both be celebrating the day at churches where the powers-that-be don't share our convictions on this question. And at my church, mine will be the hands that miscarry the music. Haha. I'm playing for the kids, a song I had no say in choosing, but I couldn't refuse. It's Easter. And kids. Though I do think we could do better by them.

There's a scene in Gilead where John Ames tells his son about having been frightened of him when he was a little baby. He writes: "I would sit in the rocking chair and your mother would put you in my arms and I would just rock and pray until she finished whatever it was she had to do. I used to sing, too, 'Go to Dark Gethsemane,' until she asked me if I didn't know a happier song. I wasn't even aware of what I was singing."

I didn't grow up with "Go to Dark Gethsemane," but I know my mom did. I've heard her mention it. So I've been trying to learn it this week, I guess to more deeply itch exactly where church won't scratch me. I was listening to versions of it yesterday on my way to school, and the song is so very bleak that it was making me laugh, maybe in the way Marilynne Robinson is getting at when John Ames sings it to his baby son:

Go to dark Gethsemane, ye that feel the tempter's power;
Your redeemer's conflict see, watch with Him one bitter hour,
Turn not from his griefs away; learn of Jesus Christ to pray.

Follow to the judgement hall, view the Lord of life arraigned;
O the wormwood and the gall. O the pangs his soul sustained.
Shun not suffering, shame, or loss; learn of Christ to bear the cross.

Calvary's mournful mountain climb, there, adoring at His feet,
Mark the miracle of time, God's own sacrifice complete.
"It is finished," hear him cry. Learn of Jesus Christ to die.

Early hasten to the tomb, where they laid His breathless clay;
All is solitude and gloom, Who has taken him away?
Christ is risen. He meets our eyes. Savior, teach us so to rise.


Learn to pray. Learn to bear the cross. Learn to die. It's quite the pitch James Montgomery gives us in this hymn, or I guess I could say that it's quite the call to follow Christ. I could also pretty honestly say that I've spent lots of time and effort trying to avoid suffering, shame, and loss, and maybe especially the Christian variety of those. I used to pray that the people I respect wouldn't find out I was a Christian and thus think less of me. Now I hope they will find out I am a Christian and that I will not fall for some diminished version of what that means. I'm maybe not prepared to propose singing "Go to Dark Gethsemane" with the kids on Sunday, but I do love the resources this song suggests Christians have in Christ's example. If we aren't afraid of suffering, shame, or loss, we have something pretty tremendous at our disposal. Because the truth is those things are unavoidable anyhow, but Christ gives them meaning. But who, being on the outside of faith, would ever be drawn to this? It is the foolishness of the Gospel. It is wonderfully counter-intuitive and it's funny to see it both ways at once.

one for sorrow, two for joy

Yesterday I was reading in Ezra, which has this description of how the people of Israel, who "gathered as one man to Jerusalem," responded when the cornerstone was laid in order to rebuild the temple. It feels so very true to life:  

But many of the priests and Levites and heads of fathers' houses, old men who had seen the first house, wept with a loud voice when they saw the foundation of this house being laid, though many shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people's weeping, for the people shouted with a great shout, and the sound was heard far away.
(Ezra 3:12-13 ESV)

The Lantern Out of Doors

Sometimes a lantern moves along the night
That interests our eyes And who goes there?
I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where,
With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?

Men go by me whom either beauty bright
In mould or mind or what not else makes rare:
They rain against our much-thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite.

Death or distance soon consumes them: wind
What most I may eye after, be in at the end
I cannot, and out of sight is out of mind.

Christ minds: Christ’s interest, what to avow or amend
there, eyes them, heart wants, care haunts, foot follows kind,
Their ransom, their rescue, and first, fast, last friend.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins

Concentration

"Concentration was so difficult that I had dug myself a sort of little black cave into the subject I was reading, and there I burrowed and scratched, like the Count of Monte Cristo, expecting Heaven knows what sudden revelation." --Elizabeth Bishop

Prayer

by Marie Howe

Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more important
calls for my attention—the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggage

I need to buy for the trip.
Even now I can hardly sit here

among the falling piles of paper and clothing, the garbage trucks outside
already screeching and banging.

The mystics say you are as close as my own breath.
Why do I flee from you?

My days and nights pour through me like complaints
and become a story I forgot to tell.

Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning
to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.