The Movie Crash

Tonight I went to church for the inaugural Academy Awards movie night sponsored by the social action committee. I thought the new event was a great idea—a chance to see some good movies (most of which I would never otherwise get a chance to see), and to have some good, and, I hoped, deep discussion about the issues the movie addressed or reflected. Tonight’s movie was Crash. There were about 20 people there, ranging in age from five to 80-something.
I won’t even attempt to write an astute review of the movie itself. I have a terrible memory, and I need to see a movie at least three times before I feel like I’ve really taken it in—and while this is also true for the things I read, I seem to be especially flawed at following a plot on screen. I was excited nevertheless to talk about the movie afterwards, to see what a movie about race relations in L.A. might say to a bunch of liberal Christians living in West Central Minnesota.

After the movie, as usual, everyone was reluctant to talk. Maybe it was because it was 9:30 on a Sunday night, or because the popcorn had made everybody full and sleepy, or because the movie was so powerful and full of emotions most good rural Minnesotans don’t ever express, nasty things like loneliness and hate and anger, that to talk about it, to try to make sense of it, was threatening. But then a few people said a few things, like how the characters’ prejudices had been motivated primarily by fear, like how easy it can be to react to fear with violence.

There was a long silence, and then, an older woman said, “I have to tell you people something. It’s something I did 30, maybe 40 years ago.” She went on to tell about a black minister who was invited to come to our church to preach one Sunday. “There had never been a colored person in Morris before that,” she said, and I cringed at the word colored, but then I forced myself to keep my heart open, to listen to what she was saying. “The minister had a little girl exactly my daughter’s age,” she went on, “and so they asked me if I would have the family in my house for the night. He was coming from Minneapolis, and it was a long drive, you see, so they had to stay the night. I thought, now this is something I can do. But then I thought about how we only had one double bed for our daughter. My daughter would have to share a bed with that little colored girl. And you know what? I just couldn’t do it. I’m ashamed to say so, but back then, I just couldn’t do it.”

We were silent, all of us, looking away from her, down at our laps. And then, after about a minute of silence, she said, “I wonder if any of you have ever done something like that.” It was a statement, not a question, but when I looked up, everyone was nodding. Nobody else said anything, but that nodding, serious and honest, said it all.

I thought of the moment in the Greek Orthodox liturgy when the minister bows slightly toward the parishioners, and they bow back, to show that everyone is forgiven, that all the sins of the past week, all the major and minor hurts caused by the people we love, have been forgiven. In the old days you would go ask forgiveness at that moment in the liturgy of anybody whom you’d harmed, and there would be kissing and hugging and weeping, a noisiness God would certainly be pleased to witness, but today, there is just that bow, symbolic. And that was how it was with us, sitting in silence in a shared recognition of our guilt.

I was a 20-something out lesbian in graduate school before I came face to face with my own white privilege, my own racism. I was part of a lesbian discussion group that met weekly to talk about everything from politics to images of GLBT people on T.V. One week between meetings, out of the blue, a message came over the discussion group’s listserve, used mostly for announcements, from a woman of color who had been a regular attendee at the discussions. She wrote that the group made her feel left out and disrespected, and that she would not be coming back.

How could this be? I wondered. We talked about issues that matter to all of us. The group was diverse; at least 1/3 of the regular attendees were women of color. I felt my defenses go up. Why didn’t she say anything if she felt left out? I found myself asking. Why in the world would she send out an e-mail? Surely she was the only one feeling this way.

White women responded in anger and pain. We’ve done everything we can to make the group safe, they said, over and over, in language that ranged from incredibly hateful to gentle and sad.

But then more women of color wrote in to tell their stories. One of them, I remember, wrote, “You don’t get to tell us how we feel. If we say we feel the group is not safe for us, then you have to accept that we’re telling the truth. And then, you can either pretend you didn’t hear us or else try to figure out why.”

I was asked to co-facilitate a series of discussions with a lesbian of color to get us back on track. I was neutral, trusted by at least some of the women of color, my peers told me. I would be a good choice, non-threatening. I decided I would do it, but I knew that in order to do it, I had to take a good, hard look at my own reaction when the first e-mail was sent over the listserve. I had to think about how comfortable and easy it is to walk around in my white skin. I can be anyone, really, with my white skin—nobody has to know where I came from or who I love or what language we spoke at home or how much money I had growing up.

I also knew I would have to talk to the women who had written in, face to face if possible, to let them know I wanted them there, that I, for one, needed to hear their voices, to learn from them. "It’s not about me teaching you white women how to get over your racism," one of them said to me, and I answered, "You’re right, but let me be honest and say I don’t know how else I will learn." She decided to come back—not to teach me, exactly, but because she could tell I honestly didn’t know how else to move forward now that I had seen the truth about the group and about myself.

It wasn’t going to be easy, this new understanding of myself as a white woman with white privilege. The world suddenly looked different to me, startlingly brighter and more painful to the eyes. Whenever the guilt of my white skin got to be too much, I would think, but my life hasn’t been easy. Surely there are people of color whose lives have been easier than mine. It’s not all about color, is it?

And then I would remember that I had not felt left out of the group because of my “hard life.” I had felt left out of discussions in college classes, maybe, or in the dorms, or in the bars or the activist groups or wherever—this haunted feeling of being so different than nobody would love me if they knew the real me—but I could hide those insecurities however I wanted, with alcohol or jokes or silence or lies.

I co-facilitated a series of tearful, gut-wrenching discussions, circular and confusing and angry and also full of a deep hope and trust. Most of us (though not all) stayed with it; we got the group back to a place that was safer, at least, for everyone, a place from which we could move forward with a new kind of vision.

I long to have those kinds of conversations at my church. I long for all of us to do what that old woman did, to confess our sins of bigotry and hate. I long to talk openly about why our church is so white, even now, when 10% of Morris’ population is comprised of people of color.

Walking out of the church tonight, I had so many conflicting feelings. I had to fight the feeling that I was so far ahead of everybody in that room because I had thought about my own racism, had faced it and chosen to be an advocate for people of color. I started to make my “I’m so open minded and progressive” list: I thought about the books I’d read and the people I’d spoken with and the marches I’d attended and the letters I’d written and the classes I choose to teach with larger numbers of students of color and immigrant students, classes nobody else wants.

It’s easy to feel smug.

It’s also easy to feel hopeless. I wondered if I should have said something, should have tried to push open the door that old woman had cracked, should have told stories about my own racism or, better yet, stories my students have told me about their experiences of living as people of color in this town, in this world. I should have suggested a study about racism in our community, a series of open dialogues that looked carefully at what we could do to live out our faith.

I also worried about what the silence meant in terms of the church’s open and affirming struggle. If we couldn’t go further than a simple confession of racism from one old woman, if a movie like Crash couldn’t lead us to open, honest dialogue about how we might be keeping people of color from coming through our doors, then how were we ever going to be able to vote yes to openly welcome GLBT folk into the church? Was I deceiving myself by believing this was a place I belonged?

But then I remembered the power of silence. There is a time to be silent, as Jesus taught us, a time to simply listen, to take in, to not talk back in defense of one’s actions. There is also a time, of course, for anger and honest, harsh words, but perhaps tonight was not that time. The only witness for a confession like that elderly woman’s, honest and flawed and full of grief, is silence, after all.

There was no way to make her feel better. There was no answer—even our own confessions would not have worked as an answer, because her story is a story all of us have lived, are living, if we really think about it. I have to believe her story changed each of our hearts ever so slightly, just enough so that a little clarity and humility got in. I know I could use more of both; I’ve grown a little too smug about my work as an ally to people of color recently, and that means that I’m probably not seeing what else needs to be done. But tonight, the old woman’s flawed, honest, heartbreaking story was enough to open me up. There's nothing like a little humble honesty to inspire someone to act out of integrity and love when the time is right. Tomorrow and the next day and the next, I hope her story gives me the strength I need to know what to do next.

Virgins and Oil

I decided I would read each of the Greek Orthodox Holy Week services this year in place of my morning meditation. This morning, I read the Monday night service, which centered around the parable of the 10 virgins who wait for the bridegroom to show up to take them to the wedding feast. Half of them run out of oil while waiting, and of course the bridegroom comes at exactly the moment when they have gone looking for more oil. Because they aren’t there when he arrives, they are locked out of the wedding feast.

The parable is part Boy Scout motto, part Mean Girls. (Did I mention that when the “unprepared” virgins ask the other ones to share some of their oil, they are refused?) It’s always been more than a little troubling. It reaffirms already problematic stereotypes about women. It positions God as a man-to-be-desired, one who takes his time, who deserves to be waited for, one with the power to turn people away. In the story, there are no second chances, no rewards for the women who took the initiative to DO something when the oil ran out and their friends didn’t want to help. In fact, it’s the selfish women who are rewarded instead. Those holier-than-thou bitches who primly refused to give their friends a bit of their oil get to go to the wedding. The others are turned away.

I’m much more comfortable with the Jesus who preached the Sermon on the Mount, the parable of the Good Samaritan, the parable of the Prodigal Son. I love the Jesus who took on the Pharisees, calling them hypocrites, who cleaned the temple of the money changers, who said that the greatest commandments in the law were about love. I’ll even take the Jesus who told us that a rich man was less likely to get into heaven than a camel was to get through the eye of a needle (though I remember asking my Sunday School teacher when I was about seven, “But what about the nice rich people?”) Jesus was a person of conscience who was not afraid to speak out against the powerful, to turn the dominant paradigm on its head. And that’s why I claim the term “Christian”—because I want to follow that Jesus, to live with conviction, to speak truth to power, to create social change, to challenge the status quo. Usually I fail miserably at doing these things in any given day, but I aim to do them, and I do what I can to center all of my life’s work on these goals.

The thing is, though, that this Holy Monday service isn’t about the virgins or the oil exactly. In fact, the actual gospel readings read during the service are readings of conscience and passion, stories of Jesus’ righteous anger and heartbreaking grief. Jesus argues logically and thoughtfully with the Pharisees about everything from the purpose of money to the most important commandment. He cleans out the temple. He weeps for the Jerusalem that couldn’t hear the truth, that turned him away.

The virgin thing, well, it’s in the service mainly, it seems, because of its many metaphoric possibilities. We pray to be ready when Jesus comes back, dressed in our best, spotless outfits, our faces warm and lit with abundant oil. We pray that we will never forget that the fellowship of oil is what will lead us to God’s forgiveness and love. (What fellowship? my head says. The virgins didn’t show any sense of fellowship. But my heart is caught up in the metaphor of our souls as vessels filled with the fellowship of oil, forgiven, connected, loved). We ask God to help us recognize the blessings in our lives, to shore up the oil we need to light our own paths to righteousness. These are paraphrases, to be sure—the metaphors in Greek are much more startling and beautiful than what I’m writing here—but you get the idea. It’s as if the writer of this service was trying to reclaim the story in a way that was not so troubling, not quite so wrought with the problematic social context of Jesus’ day. Tonight’s service, which I'll read tomorrow morning, is the only one in the Greek Orthodox church that was written by a woman—I’ll be looking for some similar reversal or reclaiming.

You don’t get to choose the Jesus you want to believe in, one of my friends once said to me, but of course that’s not true. We are all choosing what to see all the time. There is little consistency from gospel to gospel about what Jesus said or did or why he said or did it. No consistency about how much he knew about his suffering or death. No consistency about how much he understood his power to heal or how central that healing was to his ministry. And, even within the gospels, even among the stories that are consistent, there is no consistency about his message. Was he a loving man who ate with the loners and outsiders, or a man who preached a harsh, horrible fate for anyone who didn’t believe he was the Son of God?

But would we want a Jesus without contradictions? Wouldn’t such a Jesus be a little too divine to be the human-divine dual-natured Son of God? And would we want only one account of who he was and how he lived? Would we want only one perspective, one memory, of what he did or said?

I gave up long ago the notion that there are people wiser than me who have interpreted the gospels as they are meant to be interpreted, that I don’t get to be a part of that tradition. Anyone who has ever studied textual analysis knows that while some interpretations might be more “right” than others because of the readers’ particular knowledge of history or language or something else, there are always multiple ways to read any text.

When I sat down to write this, I knew I’d be writing about the Holy Monday service, but I didn’t want to get caught up in translation or to start quoting from the text—I don’t have that kind of time tonight. Like the writers of the gospel, everything I’m putting down now comes from my memory of what I read this morning and also my memory of what I felt or thought about while reading it. Of course I am remaking my own understanding as I type it now, deepening in some places, holding back in others, thinking about who might read this, what they might think. That is the nature of writing (even more so, to be sure, when one is recounting events from years before rather than hours before the writing). It is also the nature of living.

Jesus wasn’t talking to us when he preached his sermons or told his parables or talked to his disciples. In each case, he knew his audience, knew what they needed to hear or see him do. This doesn’t mean he was a fake, but rather that he was a thoughtful, versatile preacher and advocate for justice, one who chose his words carefully and lovingly.

At UMM, where I teach, this week is Pride Week. Today I went to part of a training—in between my creative writing class and a student leadership recognition dinner—sponsored by Outfront Minnesota. The training focused on advocacy around the anti-marriage amendment that has been introduced and re-introduced in the state legislature. We talked about the importance of telling the kinds of authentic stories our audiences would understand, that kinds of stories that might move them to act justly. Jesus is, at least for me, the best example for how to do this. He didn’t talk in statistics or facts—he told stories. (That’s not to say that for some audiences, stats might work better than stories—but one has to pick her audience). He didn’t try to hide his own agenda—it was always front-and-center, transparent.

Who knows how the stories we tell our legislators, our neighbors, our families, our friends, will be written and rewritten by those listeners? Who knows how our stories will change the societies in which we live? But stories are powerful. Words are powerful. We just have to have a little faith.

The friend who long ago told me I couldn’t choose the Jesus I wanted also told me this: that I had to get over my pessimism, my depression, had to have some faith that things would get better later, in another time and place. I said, Why? So that I can extricate myself from my responsibility to create positive change in the world? No, she said, rolling her eyes. So that you’ll have the strength you need to do that work.

About this, she was certainly right. I have mixed feelings about the “other time and place” part—I don’t have a clear idea of what the afterlife, if there is one, will hold for me or anybody else. But without faith that things will get better—that someday all loving couples will be able to marry, that someday Pride Week or Women’s Week or Black History Month won’t be contested or belittled on college campuses, that someday the “oil of fellowship” will ensure that no women or children (or men) or people of color or immigrants are victims of direct or indirect violence—without that kind of faith, that vision, where would we find our strength?

"American" Easter

When I was a kid, I learned there were two Easters: “American” Easter, the one most of my friends celebrated, and “Greek Easter,” the “real” Easter. American Easter often fell on Greek Palm Sunday, so when all of my friends were joyfully eating whatever they gave up for Lent, I was bitterly following a strict Holy Week diet (eating nothing from an animal for seven days) and going to church at least once every night.

Actually, that’s the narrative most Greek-Americans tell about their childhoods, but truthfully, I loved Holy Week. It was my favorite time of year. Now, the closest Greek Orthodox Church is three hours away. Since I moved to Minnesota six years ago, I have driven into the Twin Cities to attend “Greek” Good Friday and Easter liturgy every year. I miss the earlier though less ornate services, like Lazarus Saturday, a simple Liturgy the day before Palm Sunday that ended with the women gathering in the church to dye the eggs for Easter and fold the palms for Palm Sunday. I loved the way the palms felt in my hand, so smooth, and the way they smelled, like new grass but without the silvery-brown smell of dirt. I loved carrying the new Palm Sunday cross home and taping it to the head of my bed for another year. (We had to burn the old one; anything blessed in the church could not be discarded unless it was burned). The Monday and Tuesday services in honor of the woman who poured oil over Jesus’ feet (my favorite Bible story), the Wednesday ritual of Holy Unction, and Thursday’s crucifixion were sad and, at the same time, full of promise. We knew what was coming: the candle emerging from the tomb, the priest proclaiming, “Come, receive the light,” and later, the Easter lamb on the spit, the magiritsa (lamb-gut soup), and the bounty of cheese and milk and yogurt and ice cream and chocolate, everything we couldn’t eat during Lent.

As a teenager, I’d hold vigil in the church on Thursday night, taking turns staying awake at the foot of Jesus on the cross, praying for forgiveness and peace. (It wasn’t all on the up-and-up, these retreats. I remember giggling late at night with other Greek girls after the priest had gone to bed. I recall comparing our first kisses—I had to lie about mine since I didn’t have any desire to kiss boys—but that’s another story). The next morning, we would help the women decorate Jesus’ tomb, lovingly winding carnation stems together after the Friday morning service of Old Testament readings. Usually, only the girls who had spent the night were at that morning service, and sometimes Fr. George would let us read some of the passages, a rare honor for a girl. There was also a Friday afternoon service, when Jesus was laid to rest in the tomb, and then the Friday evening parade around the church with candles, the first hint of Easter light. I never failed to feel changed when I would crouch under Jesus’ tomb to be born again with Him. As I emerged from the tomb, I would think to myself, everything will be different this year, I am sure of it. I don’t know exactly what it was that I wanted to change, except, well, everything.
Easter Liturgy is the highlight of the week. It starts at about 11 p.m. and goes until 2 or 3 in the morning. In the Twin Cities, I always arrive early, speaking in Greek to whomever is standing behind the candles so he (it's usually a he) will know I belong there. After six years of these annual retreats, I have begun to recognize some of the people, but only in relation to someone I knew from back home. One woman who sits in the third row on the left reminds me of old Mrs. Gerves who had a chapel in her home, who would press silver crosses into my hand on an almost annual basis after my mother mother died. “Too rich for her own good,” one family member who shall remain nameless used to say about her, but I loved her smell, a mix of fish and baby powder, and felt there was some sincerity in her kindness and faith (even though she once showed me a jar of cold cream and claimed that God had carved a cross in it while she was sleeping). The voice of the man who sits toward the back sounds my Theo (uncle) Elias’, deep, imposing, melodious. The family I always sit beside is like my cousins’ family, second generation, the brother and sister laughing out loud and poking each other, the father joining in, the mother holding out as long as possible and finally giving in as well.

But really, I am always looking for my mother, and she is never there.

What would my mother think if she could see me standing alone through that long liturgy, singing the old Greek hymns? I admit it is rather lonely: no cousins to giggle with, no waiting Easter meal, not even a partner who shares my faith. Would my mother wish I had never come out, had never moved away? What would she think, moreover, if she could have seen me today, in the United Church of Christ/United Methodist Church I attend in my now hometown? By chance, it was my turn to serve communion today on “American Easter.” I found myself saying “Christ is Risen” to each church member who made his or her way to the bread and cup (an ordinary loaf, not the special antidoro baked with special prayers and an official stamp, and grape juice instead of wine). After six years, I know these people, or rather, I know at least a little something about each of them—where they live in town, who they live with, how many grandchildren they have, recent hospital stays or divorces or family deaths, where they work—something perhaps inconsequential, but enough to make me feel I belong here--in a way.

When I feel lonely at church, which is often, I think it is because these people don’t know me, not in the way I was known as a child in my church, and certainly not in the way my mother was known as an adult. There is no history here, no grandfather who came from Greece to start a life here, no father who jumped ship illegally and married my mother so he could stay, no old people who have known me all my life, who know who I am named for, who remember how lost we all were when my mother died a long and painful death. But then I remember that nobody really knew my childhood loneliness, the different-ness I felt, something larger than what people called my “creativity” or my “intelligence” (something larger, even, than my queerness, though even now I can’t name it exactly). And nobody really knew my mother, either, I suppose, at least, not in the way I knew her. Who saw her brooding over a difficult question about politics or ethics? Who heard her curse every injustice she saw on the news as if it were her own, private sorrow? Who saw her rolling down the hill in front of our house on a summer afternoon, or studying a new growth in the garden, or holding me on her lap?

Since I was 18, I have called myself Greek Orthodox and atheist and Buddhist and agnostic-Unitarian and finally Christian again (in about that order, give or take). I have come around to a new kind of Christianity. I like to think I’m a liberal, seeking-truth kind of Christian, the kind that longs to hear Jesus’ story because it is a story of social justice, of radical love. When I first realized I could read the Bible by myself in third grade, it was, after all, this Jesus of conscience and strength and truth-telling whom I loved, not the dark, frowning Jesus in the Byzantine icons or the skinny, pale man hanging on the cross. That doesn’t mean I don’t miss the old Byzantine hymns or the icons and stories of the saints or the incense or the prayers of old, those humble, beautiful, timeless prayers (if one can get past the sexist language and self-flagellation that is so much more terrifying and honest than the prayer of confession we recited today). But I am comfortable in a different and perhaps more important way with the theology of the church I now attend—though I doubt I’ll stop making my annual pilgrimage to a Greek Orthodox Church in the Twin Cities anytime soon.

My church is in the process of determining whether to become open and affirming—publicly welcoming of all people, including gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people. The conversation has lasted more than a year and promises to go on until at least next January. It is a painful process, but one I’m willing to stick out because I have, ironically, the kind of faith in the people who come Sunday after Sunday that I believe my mother had in the other Greeks in Akron, Ohio. They frustrated and annoyed her. They were at once too much like her and nothing like her at all. They loved her unconditionally, knew her better than anyone, didn't know a thing about her. She served them and argued with them and worked with them in the kitchen and laughed at them behind their backs and stood up for them when others did the same and fasted with them and yelled at them and once, famously, talked a good number of them into signing a petition that, to make a long story short, really pissed off our priest (who was at least as stubborn as my mother).

They did all of these same things to and with her. They were also at her bedside when she was dying. I won’t forget them. I have no idea how they would feel about my life now, about what I believe or who I live with or how I live, and I rarely have an occasion to see them anywhere except, occasionally, at a funeral or wedding--but I won’t forget them. They are my heart-family, my faith-family; they always will be. I can see all the ugliness and back biting and conformity and sexism and heterosexism and patriarchy and dogmatism that made me leave—but I can also see the mystery, the beauty.

I will never feel completely comfortable at the church I attend now, just as I will never feel comfortable at any Greek Orthodox church in the country; but I see now that I am living in a way not so different from my mother’s way—except I’ve had the chance to choose this way, to live it with a freedom she never had.

On Maundy Thursday, one of my former students gently washed my hands in preparation for the meal. As he turned my hand over, I couldn’t help but remember the priest crossing my forehead, my cheeks, my chin, each palm, and finally, the back of each hand with holy oil on Holy Wednesday, calling me forgiven. And when I washed the hands of the teenage boy sitting on my other side, and later, when I helped clean up in the kitchen, I couldn’t help but think of my mother, talking with the teenagers at church (whom I believe she really listened to) and casually chatting with the other women while cleaning up (though here, there are men in the kitchen, too—imagine!). It doesn’t look so different, except that my mother never had the chance to choose a partner or a church, to explore her spirituality, to live out her talents for the good of the world (though one might argue that raising children of conscience was that living out, more than most people do), to realize she was worthy of washing and of being washed in this ritual-way (this was the priest’s job, after all).

Today, a friend agreed to dye eggs with me on “Greek” Palm Sunday because, although she didn’t understand exactly, she figured out that doing so mattered to me. I told her we were a day late, that we were supposed to do this on Lazarus Saturday, and she didn’t shake her head or tell me I need to start living in the present. When I (perhaps incongruously) made the sign of the cross and sang a Greek hymn nearly two thousand years old while using crayons and vinegar-tablets to decorate the eggs, when I mixed prayer with complaints about campus politics, when I confessed I couldn’t eat the eggs until next Sunday because I would be keeping the Greek Easter fast, and she just nodded, just kept dipping egg after egg into the colored dye, I realized I had chosen my friends and that they knew me as well as anyone can know anybody else. Did my mother have such friends?

It’s easy for me to believe my mother was an insider in a way I’m not at my church now, but there was the matter of her intelligence, her anger at injustice, her serious questions about life, things that set her apart, things that probably made her feel lonely. Maybe there were others who felt or thought as she did, but I don’t know whether she found them, whether she or they were ever able to truly talk or not-talk in the way of good, close friends (one woman comes to mind, but were there others)? Who knows who my mother would have become if she’d lived longer? Who knows how I would understand her life in relation to my own if I had known her longer? And who can say that there is any cure to loneliness, really, for anyone who is living the hard questions, who does not back away from them, who refuses to numb out and just go on with their lives? Who knows how my life will shake out, for that matter?

Everything is mystery. We are Easter people, my minister reminded us today, not Good Friday people. When we mourn on Maundy Thursday, on Good Friday, we can do so without losing hope because we know what’s coming. The thing we long for most—the empty tomb, the women’s discovery, the risen Christ, the good news, the light—we already have. Maybe we no longer know the story in the shape or color or scent we imagined we’d know it when we were kids, but we can stop longing, stop thinking that this will be the year that everything will be different, better, changed. The resurrection is here. It is real. It is new and not new at the same time, but it is real.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

I seem to have developed the worst memory for what I read—as well as a terrible habit of watching Law and Order reruns whenever I'm exhausted at the end of the day. I had a mother who was fanatical about making sure our lives never revolved around T.V., so naturally, as an adult, I chose a partner who insisted when we moved in together that we needed satellite T.V., and I find myself turning on the television much more often than ever before (but never, it seems, at a time when something actually good is on!). I don’t know if the T.V. habit is pure laziness or connected in some way to a need to turn off my brain after a long day or (as one friend suggested) an attempt to numb out so I won't have to do the writing I'm supposed to be doing. Probably a combination of all of the above. In any case, I’m hoping this blog will get me back into the habit of reading daily and thoughtfully, of living the way I used to live, partly in my regular waking life and partly in the imaginary world of whatever I am reading. I always write better, and more, when the T.V. is off and that imaginary world is alive in me.

This weekend I read Aimee Nezhukumatahil’s poetry collection miracle fruit. The first poem, “One Bite,” opens with a vivid image of the miracle fruit for which the book is named. It goes on to tell the story of the old man who sells the fruit on the roadside, who is wearing only one sandal and calls the speaker “Duttah.” So far, the poem is well-crafted, and its narrative is interesting—but I am not yet dying to keep reading. But then I get to the last two lines. Who can resist a book whose opening poem ends with the questions, “So how long before you lose/ a sandal and still walk? How long/ before you lose the sweetness?”

And that is how many of Nezhukumatahil's poems work, starting with quiet, vivid imagery, weaving a story that seems either quite simple or else intellectually intriguing, but not full of the wholeness of a poem. But then, the ending blooms into a question or statement or image so profound that the reader is left breathless. I kept feeling the urge to go back to the beginning of each poem and re-read it, to try to make sense of those fantastic endings that seemed at once so out of place and yet so exactly right. Take the poem “Swear Words,” which seems at first to be about how a mother responds to her daughter's use of Tagalog curses—until, at the end, “Diablo” becomes an actual devil dancing on the kitchen counter, making a mess of things.

Many of Nezhukaumatahil's poems weave together multiple narratives or curiosities or ideas. There are few stanza or line breaks that clearly signify shifts. The speaker seems to be chatting casually with the reader at first, but then suddenly she describes the colony of bees that “shake out a hymn on legs and wing as thin as a baby’s eyelash” or hands the reader a beautiful, wide impossibility like “Who knows/what god I will inhale.”

Nezhukumatathil is an American-born daughter of a Filipino mother and an Indian father. She writes of visits to the Phillipines and India, of her childhood in the U.S., of lovers and students, with a humor that is the antithesis of so many “funny” poems getting published these days. Word play, hilarious finds (like the billboard in Manilla that proclaimed “Welcome to…the only Catholic Country in Asia! (beware of pickpockets)” or the creative writing student’s dutifully crafted by characteristically vague metaphor “suddenly as anything” or absurdities like cheese curds are never included in a poem just because they are “interesting” or “funny.” They are always pathways into some deeper insight. It is rare to find a poet whose work appeals so profoundly to both the head and heart.

What does Nezhukumatahil’s work have to do with the subject of this blog? She is inventing, it seems to me, a new kind of spirituality that is at once Filipino and Indian and solidly American, that is about meditating on the word or story or memory or thing in order to catch the fullness of its mystery without actually bothering to slow down. And yet we do slow down, because we are taken by the endings, or the suddenness of a fresh metaphor that means exactly two things and something altogether new--never forced, never overreaching. Her work is also about not taking oneself too seriously--something all of us writers could stand to remember--but also about taking oneself seriously enough to write authentically. To me, her work is prayer in its purest form, a walking, living, breathing prayer that permeates all of life—and the kind of poetry I aim (and usually fail) to write myself.

Don't lose your shoe!

Today, when asked, “What do you think the theme of Cinderella is?” a fifth grader answered enthusiastically, “Don’t lose your shoe!”

I was observing a service-learning student who is teaching creative writing in the elementary school. The fifth graders had been working on a short story for a couple weeks, and today, they were learning now to bring together all the elements of story writing, to make something of meaning. The idea that stories need to mean something isn’t a simple concept to explain or understand.

As soon as the kid shouted out, “Don’t lose your shoe!” several students kicked off their shoes and wiggled their toes. I had to keep from laughing out loud.

Later, the fifth graders diligently continued to work on their stories while my student made the rounds. One student sat at his desk, hands folded, not writing. My student approached this boy and said, “I’ve never seen you before. Are you in this class?”

He shrugged.

“Is this where you’re supposed to be?” she repeated, using the teacherly method of asking the same question in different words.

“No,” he said slowly. “I’m supposed to be in French.”

I’m pretty certain there is no French class at the elementary school in our small, rural town, but the kid got up and wandered out of the classroom anyway.

All day those two boys’ comments—“Don’t lose your shoe!” and “I’m supposed to be in French”—have been delighting me between meetings and classes and even during the somber Maundy Thursday service I attended today. In fact, I wasn’t going to blog today, but I felt compelled to play with those two sentences on the page, to see what sense or meaning I could make of them.

Now, as I write this, I realize there is a connection, clear as day. The story of Cinderella is about displacement. Like the confused fifth grade boy, Cinderella finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time, longing for something more romantic, more appealing (French?). OK, maybe sitting through a lesson on theme isn’t comparable to scrubbing out the chimney, but still. Who wouldn’t rather be in French than practically anywhere else?

But there’s another way to look at the story. Perhaps it is not about displacement as much as it is about risk. Another student in the class was quick to point out that the lost shoe led Cinderella to finding her true love. It's not the losing, but the finding, that matters in the end. But who knows if the prince will really treat Cinderella any better than her wicked stepmother and stepsisters? Who says the fairy godmother won’t need to sweep into her life yet again at some later date to save her?

We aren’t capable of knowing our stories in their entirety any more than we are capable of remembering with any certainty what led us to the place--physically and spiritually--in which we find ourselves. There is something fairy-godmother-ish about making sense of one's own story, a mystery that can't be pinned down. And yet we must--if we want to be fully alive, if we want to keep growing, we must.

Today, in between observations at the elementary school and a campus meeting about ways to better partner to support struggling students, I was a guest speaker in a class, where I talked about intersections between feminism and lesbianism. In response to a student’s question, I found myself talking about how surprising it was to discover I had a place in a small, rural town in West Central Minnesota, where I am one of only three Greek-Americans and a handful of queers. What I tried to say (though probably without much clarity) was that this place has pushed me to grow spiritually and intellectually in ways other places likely would not have. I lost my shoe (left my last home-place) and ended up in Morris instead of in French, but, well, here I am.

But maybe there is some middle ground between “don’t lose your shoe” and “I’m supposed to be in French class.” Maybe, in fact, we are supposed to live in that middle ground. It is surely the place where we are most alive if not least afraid.

I imagine those two fifth grade boys walking carefully along a tightrope, their hands stretched out as far as possible, fingers spread wide. Below them is everything they fear and long for, and from this vantage point, there is no distinction. And so they just keep walking, steadily, until the tightrope ends and they find a trampoline waiting (fairy-godmother-like) to keep them safe when they take the plunge. On the way down, they pull off their shoes and toss them recklessly into the air. I imagine those worn sneakers falling fast, bouncing over and over on the trampoline and resting finally beside the boys, who by then are lying on their backs, looking up, still bouncing a little, red with the rush of adrenaline that accompanied the fall.

I can hear those boys laughing. I can see them wiggling their toes.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Matthew Shepherd

Today, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni came to the University of Minnesota, Morris, the small, public liberal arts college where I teach creative writing and first-year writing and coordinate the service-learning program. I had the opportunity to meet with her and two of my students for an hour to talk about writing and, later, to hear her give a public reading and lecture.

I love Divakaruni's novel _Queen of Dreams_. Admittedly, it is the only one of her 14 books that I have read (though after her reading tonight, I will certainly be reading more). It is a beautifully written book that resonates with the topic of this blog--writing, spirituality, and social justice.

When reading Divakaruni's novel, it is clear that she is as much a poet as she is fiction writer. Her sentences are lyrical and heavy with vivid imagery. I use the word "heavy" intentionally, because when reading _Queen of Dreams_, I felt I was part of a world that was dangerous and oppressive, full of secrets and weariness and responsibility.

The book is about a topic close to my heart, and one which many of my students have asked me about in the private conversations I described in my first post yesterday: how to live out multiple identities with integrity, and how to do the work which one is meant to do in the world. In this novel, Rakhi, the main character, struggles with what it means to be a mother, an ex-wife, a daughter, and, in the end, an Indian-American woman in a post-911 world. She struggles with her mother's gift of dream-telling, a dream she did not inherit, and her own gift of making paintings. What these gifts mean, and what responsibilities the gifted hold, are key themes in the novel.

The novel at first seems to revolve around the intimate world of Rakhi's family, her struggle to understand her Indian heritage through the memories of parents who will not talk about their past. But the landscape of the novel unfolds (as all our private lives, at one time or another, unfold) until it seems to hold an entire history of migration, of violence against women, of post-911 violence against anyone suspect of not being a "real" American. Ultimately, Rakhi discovers the redemption available to her in the music of her heritage--and in those old melodies come to life in modern sounds.

The night after I had finished the novel, I found myself thinking, strangely, about the night Matthew Shepherd died. At the time, I was living in Tempe, Arizona, and I attended an impromtu memorial service on the mall at Arizona State University. I remember weeping and weeping, kneeling beside a professor of mine who was wracked with grief for this young man neither of us knew. I remember how scared I was after the service as I walked back to my apartment. I had never before (perhaps stupidly) been afraid of the dark. In fact, as a child, I had somewhat cherished the silence and privacy of the nighttime, the chance to lie alone in bed and think and think and think and then to fall into a dream that was full of color and light and, sometimes, meaning. I rarely had nightmares when I was child. That same love of nighttime stayed with me into my adulthood.

But I digress. That night, as I was walking, I thought about how sad it was that there had been no one at the memorial service who represented my other identity, my Greek-American identity. Since coming out, I'd lost my connection to that community of richness and color and light, of incense and song and dance, of language full of idioms so musical and personal I sometimes weep now when I hear them spoken out loud. People representing other faiths, other ethnic groups, had been there to show solidarity--ministers and civil rights activists and immigrants and people of color and...

And then I saw him, a large, Greek man wearing the cloak and tall, black hat of a Greek Orthodox priest. I knew right away that he had been there, standing somewhere in the crowd, but had not spoken. Why not? Who was he? (Later, I would learn he had been asked to leave the priesthood because he was gay, but on that night, he was simply a Greek priest I didn't recognize, someone who had been compelled to come to the service but not strong enough to speak for the people he represented, my people, the very people who no longer affirmed me because I was a lesbian).

I longed to talk to him, to say something in the language I was sure we shared as our first language, our heart-language, but I was afraid. I would have to demand to know why he had come dressed in his priestly robes but hadn't been strong enough to speak. I would have to out myself to one of a handful of priests in the area--and I wasn't ready just yet to get turned away officially from the churches here. I was still an interloper, going some Sundays to take communion, to smell the incense, to sing the songs, to pray.

Then, just as our paths shifted away from each other, I heard the man humming the Greek mourning song. Roughly translated, it goes like this: "May your memory live forever, my beloved brother, where there is no pain, no suffering, but life everlasting." It is a song of both anguish and survival, a song pure and sweet and frantic in the rise and fall of its simple melody. And upon hearing it, every grief of my life came to the surface, and I began to weep again, this time from a deeper place, a place that held no anger, no guilt, no fear--just pure, immeasurable grief. But then something else happened, too: every rupture in my life seemed to heal, to bleed and bleed into our mourning song until there was no blood left, to give itself up for this blond, skinny boy whom so many in my cultural community would likely say did not deserve to be remembered.

I went home and wrote a poem in memory of Matthew Shepherd. For months I revised and revised and revised it until I was ready for others to see it, and ready, at the same time, to out myself to anyone who might read the poem.

I wanted to do more, but what could I do? When that moment of transcendence faded, the fear came back. Even now, I cannot walk alone at night without being haunted by terror. I felt guilt, too, for how little I could do, for how safe I was, for how much I had. I wanted to go back into the closet, to use the darkness as a place to hide instead of a place to rest.

And so I did the only thing I could do: I wrote the poem, and I sent it out. It turned out to become my first published poem. Since then, I have published several other poems that I consider to be brave poems. I have tried to do as much as I can as an advocate and support person for young GLBT people who are coming out or struggling with hate or loss or loneliness, but nothing ever feels like it is enough.

But what is enough? Perhaps at times it is enough to pay attention to the synchronicity we find around us, to recognize each gift. A book, like _Queen of Dreams_, that helps us to think more deeply about the questions we are living. A visiting writer who says what we need to hear to keep on writing. (Chitra said so many wise things today, including a reminder that one purpose of good literature is to learn to see the world from multiple perspectives, to alleviate prejudice and hate). The memory of an old, Greek man humming the ancient mourning song that connected my identities, losses, and fears so clearly and deeply and concisely that I can feel them and hold them in my heart without feeling I am being pulled apart.

Why Blog?

I wasn't going to do this. First of all, I am severely technologically impaired, to say the least. Second, my life seems to me to always be too full--I never have enough time to get anything done, so why take on another responsibility? Third, I am one of those writers who puts off writing whenever something that seems at the time to be more "important" or "necessary" comes up, and who has been known to abandon my spiritual practices when I need them most, and, finally, who has been known to get discouraged, exhausted, overwhelmed, and even depressed in the process of working for social justice. Lastly, I am generally shy. My partner and friends might disagree, but believe me, when it comes to the question of what it means to live a life of integrity, I feel wary of making myself vulnerable in my exploration.

So, as I said, I wasn't going to do this. But in the last year, I have had so many young writers, activists, and spiritual seekers ask me how I do "it." The "it" was one or more of the following:

**Write.
**Balance my need to stay centered with my desire to create positive change in the world.
**Send out what I write for publication, only to be rejected many, many more times than I am published.
**Justify living a middle-class life in a world of poverty.
**Live as a feminist when to be a feminist is so poorly defined.
**Make decisions about how I present myself to the world physically (i.e., how I dress, whether I wear make up, etc).
**Continue to live and stay involved in a small, rural community that has not always been the most affirming place.
**Continue to work in an ivory tower when there is so much work to be done on the ground.
**Stay involved in a church community that has not always been affirming--and stay involved in a struggle to make that community truly "open and affirming."
**Stay connected to my heritage as a first-generation Greek-American.
**Balance my multiple identities.
**Live as an out lesbian in a small, rural community.
**Speak truth to power.
**Work for social change without getting discouraged at how little can be done.
**Be a lesbian and a Christian.
**Call myself a Christian when to do so means to claim a very troubled heritage.
**Live as an ally to people of color and other oppressed people.
**Stay sane while working in the service-learning field.
**Stay sane while teaching on the college level.
**Teach, write, pray, and/or work in service-learning when there are so many other things I could/should do.
**Did I mention stay sane?

I didn't know what to tell them, mainly because I honestly don't feel I do any of these things particularly well. I would respond to these questions in long, elaborate e-mails, or (when inspired to do so) with a poem or story, or (most often) in long conversations behind the closed door of my office or in the small closet that is the Queer Resource Center at the university where I teach or in the office of the service-learning program that I coordinate or while walking or driving across town or in the reading room of my church or while working out next to someone at the gym or even, occassionally, over the phone to someone who would not give me her name.

Before, during, and after the conversation, I would panic, thinking perhaps that I would say, had said, was saying the wrong thing, that I was nothing more than a fake who really had no answers. And I would have to lift up every interaction that came from such honest and difficult places of confusion and pain in prayer, hoping that I and the other person had, in those intimate and awkward exchanges, found something of meaning.

So, in the spirit of "lov[ing] the questions themselves," as Rainer Maria Rilke put it, I decided to make the dialogue public. I hope this blog will keep me honest--will help me to grapple with these questions (rather than falling into a numbed-out way of living that ignores them), and will encourage me to continue to explore them in a way that might elicit conversation or thought or even change in myself and in any readers who happen to find their way to this place.

I plan to draw on a long tradition of mothers and sisters (and, occassionally, fathers and brothers) who have grappled with the connections among writing, spirituality, and social change as they relate to the hard work of living lives of integrity--and to tell stories from my life (without, of course, telling stories from the lives of so many who have come to me with these pressing questions--and so, if you are one of those people with whom I've exchanged such conversations, don't be afraid that I will reveal them here!).

This is a broad topic, to be sure. Perhaps tomorrow I'll realize I'm crazy to have thought this was a good idea.

More later.