naunce and grace in embodied trust...

As I explore the practice and meaning of embodied trust more deeply, it's  become clear that I must expand my poetry canon beyond my treasured favorites. Decades ago I encountered the work of Alicia Ostriker in an Oxford anthology: Chapters into Verse - A Selection of Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible. A poem she entitles, "The Story of Joshua," moved me in its clarity, nuance, and paradox. That is most certainly one of the gifts of the Hebrew Bible: its variegated insights entwining literal insights within the sacred embrace of myth, archetype, contradiction, paradox as well as history recited factually and from a robust imagination. 

The Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann wisely notes in his Introduction to the Old Testament: Canon and Christian Imagination that given the evolving redaction of these texts by a variety of liturgical leaders ranging from the most primitive to the evolving priestly caste, words like "wilderness" and "chaos" are simultaneously part of ancient Israel's origin stories as well as a description of their exile in Babylon to say nothing of the inward/outward spiritual journeys of individuals. He writes:

The sojourn material is organized around a series of encounters at different oases, as Israel moves, in stylized telling, by stages. Attempts have been made to recover the itinerary of the sojourn by identifying

 various oases and connecting them in terms of realistic possibilities of travel. The narrative give the impression, however, that the oases are in fact only staging arenas for narratives of crises, so that any geographical recovery of the sojourn is likely impossible... it is important to understand the function of "wilderness" in the tradition. It is easiest to take "wilderness" as a geographical reference, and that is surely what the tradition itself understood. As a geographical location, the term refers to the area traversed by Israel between Egypt (slavery) and the promised land (and secure well-being.) This is clearly how the tradition presents the matter of wilderness. Since the exodus itself is something of an act of imagination, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the wilderness that is presented with geographical realism is an arena of imaginative construal. It is a launching pad for God-Israel transaction in an environment of acute risk and deep jeopardy. In the lived experience of Israel, it is plausible that the sixth century deportation, when Israel was removed from the land, provides (another) "historical" connection of Israel to the wilderness (where) the wilderness serves to comment upon the palpable experience of "exile... especially when noting that the tradition reached something like final form in the sixth or fifth century (where) contemporary experience is read into and through the ancient remembering. (pp. 59-60)

We know that families do much the same thing - blending fact with fiction, the truth with imaginative recollection - at reunions, funerals, and weddings. The arch of Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead" books is a recent example of how the same story can be told from the perspective of four very different individuals. It is the same story, with the same events and players, but with dramatically different insights. The Christian texts of the second testament carry on this tradition in the highly selective and romantic rendering of everyday life in the faith community as given by St. Luke, the careful way St. Mary Magdalene has been written out of the story, as well as the symbolic retelling of Genesis from the experiences of the Apocalypse of John. The stories of the Hebrew Bible offer us a complex yet stunning mosaic of insights - and Ostriker illuminates this in "The Story of Joshua" like this:

The New Englanders are a people of God settled in those which were once the devil's territories. (Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World, 1692)

We reach the promised land

Forty years later

The original ones who were slaves

Have died

The young are seasoned soldiers

There is wealth enough for everyone and God

Here at our side, the people

Are made with excitement.

Here is what to do, to take

This land away from the inhabitants:

Burn their villages and cities

Kill their men

Kill their women

consume the people utterly.

God says: is that clear?

I give you the land, but

You must murder for it.

You will be a nation

Like other nations,

Your hands are going to be stained like theirs

Your innocence annihilated.

Keep listening, Joshua.

Only to you among the nations

do I also give knowledge

The secret.

Knowledge that you are doing evil

Only to you the commandment:

Love ye therefore the stranger, for you were

Strangers in the land of Egypt, a pillar

Of fire to light your passage

Through the blank desert of history forever.

This is the agreement.

Is it entirely

Clear, Joshua,

Said the Lord.

I said it was. He then commanded me

to destroy Jericho.

Choosing to hold competing truths together in tension is, I have come to believe, a part of learning to live with embodied trust. I know that within my life - and clearly within my heart - are opposing truths. Much like St. Paul in Romans 7 there have been times when I have known what is good, true, and loving, but have been unable to do such - no matter how hard I tried. I know that God's love shines on the just as well as the corrupt, too. Or as Bono says: Grace trumps karma! 

Most of the time I resonate with these truths intellectually, but now I yearn to trust them in my limbs. I suppose it's part of a twenty year sojourn that began one Christmas morning in Tucson when I announced: "I want fish for breakfast!" Before that morning I had been a conscientious practicing vegetarian of the ovo-lacto variety. I made that bodily commitment while on the road of living as a conscientious objector to the war in Vietnam. It only made sense that I would stop eating flesh if I was opposed to killing. Like other young idealists, I was intent on eradicating contradictions from my life. Some fifty years later I smile at my naivete, but back in the day I was earnest and as doctrinaire as pacifist could be. That's why my Christmas pronouncement about a fish breakfast stunned my family. Really? Are you nuts? You've ALWAYS been a vegetarian. Why don't you wait until after the Christmas morning Eucharist is over: if you still want fish, then we'll do it. And we did. That breakfast of fried catfish was an incarnational prayer that confessed: Ok, I am a mess of contradictions, like everyone else, and I trust that God still loves me. My failings - and sins - were real. The wounds I had brought to those I loved did not disappear. And, I was making peace within my flesh with grace.

I still am - and this quest for embodied trust is growing deeper - as I learn to make peace with embodied paradox. Another wise poet, Scott Cairns, puts it like this in "Imperative."

The thing to remember is how

tentative all of this really is.

You could wake up dead.

Or the woman you love

could decide you're ugly.

Maybe she'll finally give up

trying to ignore the way

you floss your teeth as you

watch television. All I'm saying

is that there are no sure things here.

I mean, you'll probably wake up alive,

and she'll probably keep putting off

any actual decision about your looks.

Could be she'll be glad your teeth

are so clean. The morning might be

full of all the love and kindness

you need. Just don't go thinking

you deserve any of it.

Now it's time to pack for a few weeks of wandering with my sweetheart through our beloved Montréal.