Giacometti Fixed My Head

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Giacometti, Homme Qui Marche, 1947 (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

I’ve worked for twenty-seven years (and counting) as an engineer on water resource problems, but I’ve never had a career. As much as I think the water work needs doing, it’s never felt like something I pursued because it was rich and valuable to me. Rather, it’s just been a series of jobs in which I’ve felt restless, like I’ve had an itch I can’t scratch.

In 2017, I finally discovered writing, and it’s been a paradigm shift in satisfaction with my work. When writing, I often feel like I’m doing what I’m made to do. At times, my day job in engineering still feels like a storm that could shipwreck my soul, but my writing serves as critical ballast, preventing capsize. Though I won’t feel I’ve had a writing career until my words get published (which is yet to happen), the writing itself often gives me joy.

And yet. And yet.

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Slavery and the New Testament, Part 1: Expect Liberation

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Photo by Miltiadis Fragkidis on Unsplash

The story goes that Martin Luther King Jr. used to carry around a copy of Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited everywhere he went. In that book, Thurman tells a story about his grandmother, who had been a slave in the American South before the Emancipation. She would often have her young grandson read aloud to her from the Bible, mostly from the Gospels, sometimes from the Prophets, but never, said Thurman, from the New Testament Epistles.

Why? Because the Epistles contain verses that, on their face, suggest a blithe acceptance of slavery. For example, 1 Peter 2:18 states, “Slaves, accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also those who are harsh.” At least four other passages in the Epistles express a similar sentiment: Ephesians 6:5, Colossians 3:22, 1 Timothy 6:1, and Titus 2:9.

While such passages don’t endorse the institution of slavery (rather, they assume the existence of it and direct the behavior of slaves given that assumption), they also don’t condemn it, as any morally-aware person should. My guess is that Thurman’s grandmother once experienced these passages as bludgeons, notoriously used by white preachers and slave masters to keep Black slaves in line.

While most contemporary Christians would like to disown these verses, the hard fact is they remain part of the New Testament, sprinkled there like a virulent sneeze on a birthday cake. For any Christian who understands the New Testament as authoritative scripture, the challenge becomes how to situate them within the only acceptable view of slavery—that it’s a moral abomination.

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Rowing into the Future

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Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

Hebrew actually and logically speaks of the past as what lies in front of us so that we can see it and of the future as what lies behind us so that we cannot see it; it understands life as like rowing a boat, with our eyes on where we have been and our back to the invisible future.

John goldingay, Models for scripture, p. 292

When I came across this passage, I immediately thought of Psalm 22, the psalm famously on Jesus’ lips as he’s dying on the cross in the Gospels according to Matthew and Mark. The psalm opens with the line,

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

As we might expect, the next twenty-one verses include descriptions of the poet’s present suffering and pleas to God for help. But less expected, for me, are the lines between these complaints and petitions, lines in which the poet remembers God’s faithfulness:

“In you our ancestors trusted;
    they trusted, and you delivered them.
To you they cried, and were saved;
    in you they trusted, and were not put to shame” (vv. 4-5)

And:

“Yet it was you who took me from the womb;
    you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.
On you I was cast from my birth,
    and since my mother bore me you have been my God.” (vv. 9-10)

How valuable memories of God’s faithfulness can be to us when we are struggling. Our back is to the future; we cannot see it. It’s opaque and fickle, subject to uncertainty and change. But, the past lays spread before us, in our memory. And when we recall God’s past faithfulness, it reminds us that the same faithful God sits in our boat today and will again prove faithful as we row into the future.

Half the Black Congregation Walked Out on the White Presbyterian Preacher

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Onesimus Our Brother: Reading Religion, Race, and Culture in Philemon

Philemon is the shortest of Paul’s epistles. Although even identifying the subject matter of the letter is controversial, readers typically understand the letter as Paul’s request that Philemon, a Christian slaveholder, welcome back his estranged slave, Onesimus, and treat him as if he were Paul himself, i.e., with love and gentleness.

I recently read an excellent essay in which Demetrius K. Williams, a Black professor and pastor, describes three main strategies interpreters have taken with the letter over the years. (The essay is entitled “‘No Longer as a Slave’: Reading the Interpretation History of Paul’s Epistle to Philemon,” and is published in a volume called Onesimus Our Brother, pictured above. Black interpreters and commentators wrote most of the essays in the volume.)

Strategy 1: The Letter Shouldn’t be Part of the New Testament

One strategy has been to question the divine providence of the letter and the appropriateness of its place in the New Testament (NT). Indeed, this seems to have been a popular reading of the letter in the early church. According to Williams, several of the so-called “church fathers,” including John Chrysostom, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Jerome referred to opinions that the letter was “trivial, insignificant, banal,” and “unspiritual.”

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A Lesson in Anti-Racism: Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black

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Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan

In recently reading Esi Edugyan’s majestic 2018 novel, Washington Black, I noticed a thematic similarity with Paul’s New Testament letter to Philemon, which I have studied for the past few years as I’ve been writing a novel telling a backstory of the letter. Both works suggest an important distinction between two possible motives for helping someone.

In this post I’ll spell out the distinction in both works, then draw from it what I think is an important lesson for white allies hoping to support their black and brown neighbors in the swelling anti-racism movement. Spoiler alert: What follows will divulge plot information you may not want to know if you plan to read Washington Black (which I highly recommend doing).

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Complete First Draft

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Photo by Yusuf Evli on Unsplash

After a year of research and just under two years of writing — early mornings, late nights, and everything in between — I’ve finally finished a complete first draft of my first novel. Whew!

Next up: revisions. After working through the many notes I’ve given myself on earlier chapters, I plan to follow this framework for revising, laid out by the good folks at Gotham Writers Workshop. Seems like a wise approach.

Zechariah in the Temple: An Advent Devotion

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Frankincense Incense
Frankincense. Image by xbqs42 from Pixabay.

The following is an imaginative fictional account of Zechariah’s experience in the temple (Luke 1:5-20). I suggest reading the passage of scripture first, and then my fictional account.

I hurried through the Nicanor Gate and into the Court of the Priests, the sun low in the sky. The smell of smoke, blood, and animal dung drifted on the breeze. I shimmied out of my traveling clothes and immersed in the cool water of the bronze laver. I washed off the hill-country dust, still clinging from the day’s journey, and I thought of Elizabeth. With her tender hip, she couldn’t manage the animals anymore, and the boy from next door knew little about goats; they always looked too scruffy, too dirty when I returned home. If only we’d had a son. 

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Flash Fiction: Lost and Found

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Keys
Image by Uwe Baumann from Pixabay

Rain pelted the windshield of Marcie’s fifteen-year-old sports car as she turned into the driveway of the subterranean parking lot. Some of the rain was virtually snow, translucent splatter sticking to the glass before a wiper blade cast it aside with other unwanted water. As she descended the steep ramp into darkness, Marcie’s thoughts drifted back to her annual review meeting that morning. As usual, her numbers weren’t great, and her supervisor had hounded her about setting a new round of goals she really didn’t care to meet. She’d spent the afternoon updating her resume.

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