Tag Archives: Guest Post

The God of Joshua and Jesus, by Ted Grimsrud

Author photoOne of the more challenging passages in the Bible is the story told in the book of Joshua. God’s chosen people enter the “promised land,” meet with opposition from the nations living there, and proceed—with God’s direction and often miraculous support—to kill or drive out the previous inhabitants. The book ends with a celebration that now the Hebrew people are in the Land, poised to live happily ever after.

Probably the most difficult aspect of the story to stomach is the explicit command that comes several times from God to the Hebrews to kill every man, woman, and child as part of the conquest. This element of the story is horrifying, even more so in light of the afterlife of the story where it has been used in later times to justify what are said to be parallel conquests—such as the conquest of Native Americans and native southern Africans. I wonder as a Christian pacifist what to do with this story. But, really, even for Christians who are not pacifists, how could any moral person want to confess belief in such a genocidal God—or accept as scripture a book that includes such a story?

Exhortation not history

I want to see if we can find meaning in the story that will help us put it in perspective and protect us from uses that find in the story support for our violence. More than defending Joshua per se, I want to defend the larger biblical story of which it is a part—an essential story for faith-based peacemakers. So, the first step for me is to recognize the type of literature, in a general sense, that Joshua is. I will call it “exhortation,” not “history.” It was an account likely written many years later than the events that inspired it may have happened. It was shaped in order to offer exhortation to its readers and hearers to seek faithfully to embody the teaching of Torah. I do not think it was meant to tell the people precisely what happened in the Joshua years.

I would characterize the Joshua story, then, as a kind of parable, a story (mostly if not totally fictional) that makes a point. To see the Joshua story as kind of a parable does not take away the troubling elements of the story—however, I think such a view changes what is at stake for we who believe in the Bible. What is at stake for us, most of all, is to try to discern the lesson the story is meant to make—not to feel bound to believe that the details are factual. Thus, for one thing, believing the Joshua story conveys important truths does not require us to accept its portrayal of God (or of the vicious character of the “conquest” of the promised land) as normative for us.

In what follows, I will not work at discerning what it is that we should make of the still present problem of why the Hebrews would have told a story with such problematic details about their tradition and their God. Such reflections are important, but they are beyond what I am able to articulate right now. Rather, I want to focus on what I understand to be the ethical, political, and theological concerns of the parable. Especially, I want to focus on the place of the Joshua story in the larger story the Bible presents us with. How does the Joshua story contribute to the Big Story that culminates in the life and teaching of the later “Joshua” (that is, Jesus)?

A political agenda

My Old Testament professor Millard Lind, in a class I took from him on based on his book, Yahweh is a Warrior: The Theology of Warfare in Ancient Israel, gave a useful framework for me to think about Joshua and other stories of divinely initiated violence. Lind focused on the understanding of politics in the Old Testament. He suggested that what was most interesting and revolutionary in ancient Israel was its attempt to create an alternative to the coercive, hierarchical politics of the empires and nations of the world, an alternative to what he called “power politics.”

We may think about the main elements of the Old Testament through this alternative politics lens: Creation and fall, the exodus and Torah (including the Ten Commandments, Torah’s spirit of empowerment, the concern for vulnerable people in the community, the sense of being over against Egypt, and the Sabbath regulations [day of rest, forgiveness of debts, anti-centralization and social stratification, and the jubilee provisions concerning land ownership]). Then we may think of Joshua, the Judges, the turn toward kingship, the prophets’ critique, and the impact of exile. Finally, we may turn to the New Testament picture of Jesus in the gospels and the apostolic witness in Paul and Revelation. All of these materials may be helpfully understood as presenting an alternative political orientation to the power politics of the nations.

Let’s focus on the Joshua story—the so-called “Conquest.” On the one hand, in this story we may see an emphasis on what Lind called “theo-politics” over against state-politics or power-politics. “Theo-politics” is a useful term for categorizing the alternative politics of the Bible. In the Joshua story, following on the heels of the exodus and Torah-revelation in the wilderness, we see a de-centering of human power structures. We also see that sustaining the Hebrews’ status in the land will be based on their faithfulness (or not) to Torah. So, in this story we have a reiteration of the countercultural politics introduced with the exodus.

On the other hand, in the Joshua story we also come face to face with overwhelming violence and its celebration. The Hebrews in the story may have been marginalized and recently liberated slaves and the “Canaanites” in the story may have mainly been kings and oppressors (see Norman Gottwald’s account in his famous book, The Tribes of Yahweh). Yet the story that was written and then retold became a story that kings and oppressors could and did use to justify their conquests during the era of Christendom—an utterly devastating story.

Reading Joshua as part of the bigger story

How do we understand the Joshua account to fit with the bigger biblical narrative? We may think in terms of something like what Walter Brueggemann has called the Bible’s “primal narrative”—the core story of God’s liberating acts that is repeatedly recounted throughout the Bible. We may read the primal narrative with what we could call a “theo-politics” lens. We start with God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah when they are first called to something new—their descendants will “bless all the families of the earth” (Genesis 12:3). This promise may be seen as the core element of the biblical story (I develop this point in my book, God’s Healing Strategy: An Introduction to the Bible’s Main Themes).

What follows in the story is the path, at times quite tortured, that God’s people take in trying to carry out the vocation implied in that promise. In the Christian Bible, this path leads ultimately to the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21–22 where the nations are healed by the leaves from the tree of life.

Abraham and Sarah’s immediate descendants face various adventures that culminate, by the end of Genesis, with them in Egypt. The settling in Egypt turns ominous in the book of Exodus. The Hebrews are enslaved. They have multiplied far beyond Abraham’s clan and have little sense of identity. They cry out, God hears, Moses arises, and they are delivered (without any generals or a king!). After their deliverance, God gives the people Torah as a gift to guide their common life as a counterculture in contrast with the ways of empire. Torah details a just and peaceable society with decentralized power and a sense of the value of each person (which involves a special focus on protecting the well-being of marginalized people in the community).

We are given the sense that to live out Torah, the people need a particular place where human flourishing may be embodied and practiced in the flesh in order to lead to the promised blessing. However, we are also given the sense that the only way to imagine such an embodiment of Torah would be in a territoried community, a geographical region with boundaries and sovereignty as a people. However, also, from the start we get the sense that this existence in a territoried community is contingent upon faithfully embodying Torah—the landedness is meant to serve the vocation, not to be an end in itself.

As it turns out, to be established in a particular land will require violence. People will be displaced, and the community will need coercive force to maintain its borders. There seems no way to have landedness (at least to the degree it requires sovereignty and boundaries) without also having violence. This seems the case even if from the story of the exodus it is clear that this necessary violence is not meant to be the monopoly of a centralized human power structure. Instead, at the beginning the necessary violence comes in the form of God’s direct intervention.

So, when Joshua leads the Hebrews into the promised land, the land of Canaan, inevitable violence takes place—on a large scale, as the story is told. The story makes it clear that this violence is God’s. At most, the human role is secondary. The on-going human leadership in the community is not based on gathered military might but on faithfulness to God’s commands.

The growing problem with territorial sovereignty

In Joshua as the people enter the land, in Judges as the people settle and establish their on-going community, and in the first part of 1 Samuel, the violence to maintain territorial sovereignty remains ad hoc and does not lead to permanent structures of power: no standing army, no collection of generals, no human king. However, the tension and sense of insecurity without such structures prove to be intolerable for Israel’s elders. These elders (and note in 1 Samuel 8 that the initial call for a king is not a popular demand from “the people” but a demand from the elite, the “elders”) make a decisive move to restructure Israel’s politics to “be like the nations.” According to the story, the main representative of God among the people, Samuel, argues vehemently against this restructuring, but he is ultimately told to accept it by God.

There is, earlier in the story, a brief account of how human kingship might work in harmony with Torah—Deuteronomy 17:14-20. This kind of king would be subordinate to Torah and would refuse to centralize military power and wealth in his and his main supporters’ hands.

As the story continues, though, it becomes clear early on that neither Samuel’s warnings nor the strictures from Deuteronomy 17 would be heeded. Kingship in Israel and Judah does indeed lead to centralized power, wealth accumulation in the hands of the few, disenfranchisement for the many, and a militarized society. The prophets make it clear that the on-going departure from Torah would have terrible consequences. And when their warnings are borne out, their words were remembered and provided a theological rationale for continued faith.

The disasters that befell Judah (destruction of kingdom and temple) did not mean God’s failure but vindicated God’s warnings. Because the long-forgotten books of the law were found during Josiah’s ill-fated kingship, the people had resources to sustain their sense of identity and the sense of the promise given to Abraham and Sarah. As a consequence of the failures and, at the same time, due to the sustenance of the core vision, the community was able to respond to the disasters with creativity and resilience. As it turned out, the loss of territory opens the possibility to revisit the initial tension between a community established with decentralized power dynamics and the need for territorial sovereignty. This time, the community was able move toward the decentralized power side of the tension instead of the territorial sovereignty side.

Beginning with Jeremiah 29 there is an embrace (or at least an explicit acknowledgement) of a vision to carry on the promise where scattered faith communities would “seek the peace of the city where they found themselves” rather than to hark back to a vision of a territorial kingdom as the necessary center for peoplehood sustenance and the vocation to bless the families of the earth. Though the story line that follows continues to be centered in the “holy land” with its rebuilt temple, it evinces little hope for re-establishing a territorial kingdom as the condition for the sustenance of the peoplehood. Though little noted in the biblical texts, the Judaism of this time continued to spread and solidified its existence as a scattered peoplehood outside of the “promised land.”

The politics of the second Joshua

When we get to the story of Jesus, we are introduced to a political vision that takes non-territoriality for granted. Jesus shares with his namesake, Joshua, a message that God saves (the meaning of the name). He brings a message about the kingdom of God and is ultimately seen to be a royal, messianic figure. But his message repudiates the coercion and centralization of power politics that a territorial kingdom requires. In that sense, he becomes a kind of anti-Joshua.

Jesus’s community embodied a politics of servanthood not domination, free forgiveness not the centralized control of access to God, and non-possessiveness not accumulated wealth. He set his notion of God’s rule over against the Pharisaic purity project, the centralized Temple, and brutal Roman hegemony. Rather than the eradication of the impure Other that we see in Joshua, with Jesus, we see him healing the impure. Rather than the sense that God intervenes violently on behalf of the promise that we see in Joshua, with Jesus we learn that God’s intervention on behalf of the promise is decidedly and necessarily nonviolent. Victory through self-giving love replaces victory through violent conquest. With Jesus, the promise does not need a state with justifiable violence that requires defending boundaries. In fact, what we learn from the second Joshua is that such a state is most likely to be hostile toward God—and in fact such a state (Rome) does execute God’s true human emissary. We must note, too, that Jesus seems to believe that this vision was present in his tradition from the start: “I came to fulfill Torah, not abolish it.”

The biblical story concludes in Revelation with New Jerusalem, established not through the sword but through the self-giving witness of the Lamb and his followers. Babylon is overthrown by this witness, and the result is the healing of the nations, even the healing of kings of the earth. Politics are utterly transformed.

The role of the Joshua story

The Joshua story is crucial. It shows that territorial sovereignty is not possible without violence. As we read the trajectory of the biblical story, we get the sense that what Joshua sets up is a kind of experiment. Will it be possible to embody Torah in concrete life through controlling a particular territory that might be administered in just and peaceable ways? Doing so could indeed serve as a means to bless all the earth’s families. That Israel could envision a blessing through territoriality is seen in the vision recorded twice, in Isaiah 2 and Micah 4: People from all the earth come to Israel to beat their swords into plowshares and learn the ways of peace.

As the story proceeds, though, we see that the very means to establish Israel in the land carried with them the seeds of failure. Indeed, the land could not be secured without violence—and once the land is secured, the dynamics of violence do not disappear. The initial tension between a decentralized theo-politics on the one hand and territorial sovereignty on the other hand came to be resolved on the side of territoriality. That is, Israel could not be sustained apart from the centralized authority of kingship and its attendant power politics.

However, as Deuteronomy 17 and 1 Samuel 8 warn, such a politics of domination cannot help but undermine Torah. Such a politics cannot help but be corrupt and violate the very conditions of existence in the promised land—as the story tells us. In the end, after the Babylonian conquest, Israel again is presented with the tension between territoriality and theo-politics. This time, in tentative ways, the tension is resolved more on the side of theo-politics. Certainly, the strand of the biblical tradition that culminates in the ministry of Jesus clearly resolves the tension in this way.

When we reread Joshua in the light of these later developments, we will recognize that the violence there is stylized and exaggerated. In exaggerating that violence, Joshua helps show the inevitability of power politics being a dead end and the impossibility of the promise being channeled through the state. Joshua itself points toward countercultural politics by helping to clear away the illusion that theo-politics ultimately could find expression in a territorial kingdom.

“Biblical politics”

The story the Bible tells, then, becomes a story pointing toward a kind of countercultural politics—decentering the state (rejecting empire and the coercive maintenance of geographical boundaries) and advocating organizing for shalom apart from the state through decentralized communities of faith that are open to all comers.

“Biblical politics” is revolutionary in its own way. But it does not underwrite a focus on directly overthrowing the state and doing without any human authority—though even more certainly the Bible strongly repudiates the kind of obeisance toward the state all too characteristic of post-Constantine Christianity. The state, it seems, can be seen most of all in the biblical story as simply existing, for better and for worse. It should not set the agenda in either a positive or negative way for peace people. Theo-politics is about peace work is all its forms, generally independent of territorial kingdoms or modern nation-states. There can be some common ground; more often there will be tension and even conflict between peace people and the nations.

The main point, though, is to work for human flourishing in local communities and global connections of resistance wherever they may be enhanced. Perhaps this will lead to a whole new global order (we may hope; the current order is doomed). More importantly, is the much more modest affirmation of such work as the only way to embrace life in healthy and sustainable ways—or at least it’s the best we can hope to do.

—Ted Grimsrud, Harrisonburg, Virginia, is Senior Professor of Peace Theology at Eastern Mennonite University and was a pastor for ten years. He has written numerous books, including God’s Healing Strategy: An Introduction to the Bible’s Main Themes, revised edition (Cascadia, 2011) and, most recently, To Follow the Lamb: A Peaceable Reading of the Book of Revelation (Cascade Books, 2022). He blogs at Thinking Pacifism, where this essay was first published.

Do I Dare, a poem by Joseph Gascho

If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.Psalm 139:9-10

Do I dare to tell my Darwin friends
about the giant hand
that led my surgeon’s hand
for six whole hours?

Do I dare to tell my Dawkins friends
about the gentle hand
that held me
for 40 days?

Do I dare to think
it was no dream,
that gentle, giant hand,
holding me,
lovingly?

—Joseph Gascho, Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, is a retired cardiologist and emeritus professor of medicine and humanities, Penn State University College of Medicine. The Annals of Internal Medicine awarded him both poem of the year and photograph of the year. Positive Exposure 109, on museum mile in New York City, has featured his photography exhibit, “The Operating Theater.”  In addition to other books of photography and poetry (see  jgascho.com), he has written Heart and Soul: A Cardiologist’s Life in Verse (Wipf and Stock, 2023) .

AAA Baseball, by Joseph Gascho

The pitcher on the local team was a farmer boy
who sometimes had to leave the game
bottom of the seventh to milk the cows.
He had a wicked curve, but no control. Thought
it was something I could do
so I nailed laths to the barn,
stepped off 60 feet and every evening
after chores.
I’d hurl the ball an hour or two.
Got good enough to hit the strike zone
almost every time, looked up
in the World Book how to grip the ball
so it would curve, heaved extra bales of hay
to bulk my forearm muscles up
and by the year I turned 18
I joined the team, lost only once all year.
Last game there was a scout
who’d heard about my perfect game,
said I had the stuff
and by 21 I made the AAA club
in Omaha, pitched 20 times, waited
for the Sox to call me up.
They never did. Don’t know
what might have been had I played
Little League at five, had Dad paid
someone to show me how to throw,
had been molded from a different mix of DNA.

I heard my kids the other day
bragging to their friends
about my trophies on the wall.
That night I pitched them in the trash.

—Joseph Gascho, Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, is a retired cardiologist and emeritus professor of medicine and humanities, Penn State University College of Medicine. The Annals of Internal Medicine awarded him both poem of the year and photograph of the year. Positive Exposure 109, on museum mile in New York City, has featured his photography exhibit, “The Operating Theater.”  In addition to other books of photography and poetry (see  jgascho.com), he has written Heart and Soul. A Cardiologist’s Life in Verse (forthcoming, Wipf and Stock) .

Excavating the Darkness: A Sisterhood of Recollection, a guest post by Miriam Blank

“Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content” –Helen Keller

My brothers have been taking Dad out for breakfast a few times a year for the last 5-10 years. Recently my sisters and I noted a longing to also connect with Dad in a meaningful, intentional way.

So we began to meet through group conference calls. We each came with questions for Dad about our early years together as a family, and how he experienced various events, like the birth of each child.

Then we talked of my sister Carol’s early diagnosis with retinitis pigmentosa when she was only about 7. Beverly and I were diagnosed in our early twenties, so it did not impact our early years of growing up.

We noted how we each responded to Carol’s early loss of sight. For Dad, there was the shock of being told he should send his daughter off to a school for the blind. Beverly noticed how she didn’t want to ever look clumsy like her younger sister did, stumbling into things or sweeping her hand across the floor to find something she had dropped. As for myself, just a toddler at the time, I had no conscious clue of this shadow that had fallen across the face of us three sisters who would all go blind slowly across the decades to come.

Mom combing my hair surrounded by my two sisters, in the log cabin where we grew up in rural Oaxaca, Mexico.

Now our conversations with Dad have begun to trace the early days of lives altered by blindness. My heart has been pierced as I note that my sister Carol in some ways had to carry her blindness alone as a little girl. She didn’t know what it was to see better. She only knew she tripped into things when others didn’t. She knew she was somehow different.

But emotionally, where do you put the stigmatization of having to run around the outskirts of the sport field while your classmates play and look at you oddly? Mom and Dad obtained exemptions like this for her gym class. But no one could know all she had to navigate as she bumped into other students in the dark hallways, trying to find her locker. She put her head down and pushed forward. She just did the next thing, plowing through the best she could.

It is a consolation to re-collect these memories as we gain new insights. We are listening together to our unique but similar life vignettes:

  • How we tried to hide or minimize the effect of our waning sight.
  • How we pushed ourselves to not feel different.
  • How we colluded with denial.
  • The sadness of feeling helpless.
  • The sorrow of not being the one who can help others in practical ways.
  • The insights gleaned from being an outsider; being the different one.
  • The pain of the sharp furniture corners.
  • The electrical current running through my gut as I hear, for the first time in detail of Carol being knocked unconscious from a bike crash.

And now we can’t stop. It is like, loop by loop, we are knitting a sweater together. We are connecting stories and gaps in our own memories and experiences. I think there were ways that our lives ran on different tracks, and our blindness didn’t join us together as much as it could have. But now, a doorway has opened and something sweet is happening as we listen.

This work of excavation is turning on lights of understanding and compassion. All three of us currently see less than five percent of what a sighted person sees. Yet what we actually can see can be confusing to both us and others.

The retina of the eye is an extension of the brain, and where there are gaps in vision, the brain tends to fill in that gap, making the person with retinitis pigmentosa think they can actually see more than they can. We navigate in familiar settings with relative ease, so that at times others think we see more than we do. Beverly’s daughter, who lives with her, once said, “Mom, I keep forgetting you can’t actually see.”

So, our experience is one of feeling “normal” and yet sometimes not normal at all. As John M. Hull says in Notes on Blindness: A Journey Through the Dark, “It is so hard to be a normal person when one is not a normal person.”

For example, for practical reasons we have to limit the number and types of things we would like to do. Everything, including social interactions take more energy for us. Our days can be interrupted in hundreds of unexpected ways where a solution require sight. Just now I asked one of my housemates to come and deal with a yellow jacket in my kitchen.

Our path is often hindered. Our lives are not marked by efficiency in the physical world.

I am drawn to the words of Henry David Thoreau, “Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.” It is now an unexpected goodness to be walking in a new way with my two sisters in our “less than normal” lives, with reverence and love.

–Miriam Blank, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is a professional counselor, spiritual director, and certified life coach.  In the past Miriam worked 15 years as a registered nurse and certified nurse-midwife. She is author of the prior post, “Body Fading, Essence Soaring.”

Winter Color, by Julia Baker Swann

I hear a slow summer wind in this sponged carpet of russet needles
under my feet. Smoldering burnt orange around silver tree roots and evergreen.

Husks of tall blonde meadow grasses sway in the barely-breeze.
Skeleton seeds wait, gold even without light.

Rocks splattered with the creep of fungus and lichen. White, yellow,
and neon.
In the warm pockets around each stone’s breath, bright clover tests growth.

When inside my home the clouds are a heavy drape.
I crave the sun-spill across the floor.

When I go out the moss grey sky is a complex churn.
I would need violet, black, and even a dab of rose to paint these layers.

The subtle hues ask me to quiet. To clothe myself
in terracotta and winter-berry, silver-tone, tawny down,

deer-skin, dusted pine, honey-sap and moth-wing white.
To chant these muted colors like a bold prayer,

treasuring the particular sounds.

—Julia Baker Swann is completing an MA in Theopoetics and Writing at Bethany Theological Seminary and is poetry editor at Geez Magazine. She is author of The Moon Is Always Whole, her first poetry collection (DreamSeeker Books/Cascadia, 2020).

Country Night, by Jean Janzen

Lying awake I remember branches
scraping the night window, I, a child
away from my crowded home to my
cousin’s spacious country rooms,
she and I in separate beds.

How to hold the memory of my heart
racing in the dark, the small body
curled, the wind wild? How to hold
that child until dawn ignites the leaf
with its tiny separate rooms,
the stem clinging?

—Jean Janzen, a poet living in Fresno, California, is the author of six previous collections of poetry who has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and other awards. A graduate of Fresno Pacific University and California State University of Fresno, she has taught at Fresno Pacific and Eastern Mennonite University. Janzen is author of What the Body Knows (DreamSeeker Books/Cascadia, 2015).

To the Three Ducks Flying Beneath the Dog Star, by Kathryn Winograd

So little you know, wild-winged
and unshaken beneath a dog star,
half-grazing the pines, the bare winter
aspen I stand in the dark wash of
waiting for the tip of a yellow moon.
In Ohio, girlhood, these April stars
circled a pond bull-dozed
by my father, a raft of cattail
where the red-wings spun their nests
above the scrim of caught water.
Tonight, in this near dark, so close
my hand could circle it,
Sirius hovers above the red
factory lights of Pueblo
and the Sangre de Cristo blue-
washed in this hour.
I am cold in this wind,
in this spine of the Milky Way,
these blue white stars named
for a bear or a lyre or a woman
weeping her dead into a river.
I think I was still half-sleeping
in a field of grass, in a haze
of stars, in a far and nameless
country you care nothing
about, burying and unburying
those I love. Such quiet,
the mining trucks to the north
stalled and the little generator
of a shed where no one lives
in winter shut down.
And then, your wings, almost
against the moon. Why
must I always be alone,
searching for something beautiful?

Kathryn Winograd, a poet and essayist, divides her time between Littleton, Colorado, and a “pie in the sky” cabin her husband and she dreamed of for twenty years before stumbling across forty acres of high meadow ranch land near Phantom Canyon. She is the author of six books, including her most recent collection of essays, Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, which received the Bronze Medal in Essay for the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Her first collection, Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation, was a finalist in the Foreword Reviews 2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards.  Her poetry collection, Air Into Breath, an alternate for the Yale Series for Younger Poets, won the Colorado Book Award in Poetry. She currently teaches for Regis University’s Mile High MFA. She wrote “To Three Ducks Flying Beneath the Dog Star” during the first months of the pandemic.

Hemmed in by God’s Love, a guest post by Jen Kindbom

Caffeine is a mixed blessing for me. It gives me the laser-beam focus especially handy in creative endeavors (such as writing these words) or monotonous tasks (such as grading hundreds of papers). Not only that, it almost instantly relieves those headaches that a couple of Aleve, a nap, and a big glass of water just won’t touch.

But caffeine also makes me jittery, shaky, and paranoid. For example, I distinctly recall sewing in my attic and fearing acutely that at any minute I would be arrested and hauled off to prison–for what offense, I do not know. How to express my relief when I realized it was no accidental crime haunting my conscience, just the frozen mocha. . . .

Then I think of Psalm 139, which I’ve studied with my first-year character ed classes for the past six years or so. Psalm 139 conveys the depth of God’s love for God’s people on a very personal level. We see God’s hand upon each of us at our very core. We see God’s knowledge of each of our thoughts before we’re aware of them, and—one of my favorite images, particularly as one who sews—we see God’s love hemming each of us in. There’s no escaping a good hem.

I find it particularly comforting that the message of this psalm is not one of conditions. The words do not say “You perceive my thoughts from afar and abandon me when they’re too much.” The words do not say “You love me unless my thoughts are off the deep end irrational, or too fast for me to keep up with.” The words do not say “You hem me in until I’m afraid and I can’t quite pin down why.”

No.

They say “You hem me in, behind and before.”

When children are overwhelmed by questions that seem too big or even too irrational, loving and thoughtful adults at their best respond kindly to them. So it is with God, so we see in the psalm. What if it rains inside? What if the house blows away? What if there’s a bee in the field?

Imagine these are your thoughts, as they have certainly at times been mine. Imagine God putting tender hands on each side of your face, kissing your forehead, and then taking your hand and walking with you, listening as we talk it out, answering your questions in ways that acknowledge that to you, the fear is real and also that you are safe. In that moment—as in every moment—God hems you in. God hems me in, behind and before.

The psalmist prays for God to search me and us, to know our anxious thoughts, caffeine-induced or otherwise. He prays for God to let us know of any offensive way within me and you—not to condemn us or to add a brick to the wall between us and God but because God knows the possibility of an unhurried mind. And God desires that for each of us: thoughts and a mind at peace in the hem that is God’s love.

Jen Kindbom, an Ohio-based writer, teacher, and designer, is author of Cadabra (DreamSeeker Books, 2015)  (2015) and the chapbook A Note on the Door (2011). Her poems have appeared in Adroit Journal, Connotation Press, Literary Mama, and other journals and anthologies. Jen is interested in lifting the veil of poetry for her students, and pursues ways to integrate poetry and creative writing into her high school English classes.

The Death of Faith? Or Faith as the Backbone of Hope? a guest post by Peter Dula

Thirty years ago, the great American poet, A. R. Ammons, gave a reading down the road at Washington and Lee University. Christian Wiman, now a poet but then W&L economics major, describes it like this: “Ten minutes into his reading he suddenly stopped and said, ‘You can’t possibly be enjoying this,’ then left the podium and sat back down in the front row.

No one knew what to do. Some people protested from the pews­–we were in a place that had pews­–that they were in fact enjoying it, though the voices lacked conviction and he didn’t budge. Finally the chair of the English Department cajoled the poor poet into continuing. Ammons mumbled on for another fifteen minutes before the cold mortification of the modern poetry reading, and the beer-lacquered bafflement of the press-ganged undergraduates, did him in. “‘Enough,” he muttered finally, and thudded his colossal body down beside his wife like the death of faith itself.” (pp. 5-6, He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art)

I am a teacher of theology and philosophy, a reader of fiction and poetry. It has also been my dumb luck to have faked my way through over 8 years of chairing a Bible and Religion department. So when Wiman, one of the greatest contemporary theological interpreters of the word faith brings up its death in a context which runs together the humanities, university students, and a department chair all sitting in a church, I feel like someone has hacked into my mind. The mind of someone whose doubts about vocation, church, university and God, when they arise, as they sometimes do, usually arise together in a tangled mess (which I suppose suggests either a failure of compartmentalization or mild depression).

What can Wiman mean when he says that Ammons sat down like “the death of faith”? Was Ammons losing faith in poetry, asking himself, mid-reading, whether poetry still matters? Or in himself as a poet, worried that he was too cerebral to ever be as popular as, say, Frost. Or was he just losing faith in himself as a reader?

I confess I looked up Youtube videos of Ammons reading to see if we could simply blame this on his lack of personality. But while he is no Amiri Baraka, he didn’t seem to me any worse than your average great poet.

Or is it just that, like most of us on occasion, he has lost faith in those “beer-lacquered press ganged undergraduates.”? Nietzsche famously quit his university post because he found it absurd to demand philosophy of himself or his students at particular hours of the week. Philosophy, he insisted, cannot be scheduled, and hence can have no home in the university. Just so, maybe Ammons’ doubt is not about poetry but about whether the university constitutes a livable habitat for poetry.

But I am avoiding the point. If Wiman had described Ammons’ despair as the death of faith, period, then we might reasonably be invited to speculate, as I am, about faith in this or that. But he describes it as the death of faith itself. That last word is what stops me in my tracks because I think it must mean all of these things, the death of Ammons’ faith in poetry, himself, the students, the whole thing.

The eleventh chapter of Hebrews says that “faith is the substance of things hoped for.” Substance is a philosophical term usually related to other philosophical terms like being, essence, and accident, terms, you may be thinking, that are all the justification needed for our culture’s marginalization of philosophy.

But if you can be patient for two more minutes, I am wondering, What kind of stance is a sub-stance, a standing from below, an under-stance?

Understanding is a puzzling word. Say that our chemistry faculty here at Eastern Mennonite University understand chemistry. Why does our language encourage us to picture chemistry as a weight that they must bear up under, or picture them as the tent poles to chemistry’s canvas? Is that related to the way that, for our students, they stand for, that is, represent, the discipline of chemistry, as if on a witness stand?

If I do not yet understand understanding it may not be possible for me to understand how faith understands hope, stands under hope: hope, say, that the humanities still matter, that my prayers get past the ceiling, that my lectures are not just bottles to the sea, that I will die before the small tuition-driven liberal arts college dies, that Mennonite Church USA is at least one member of the body of Christ. Faith is the sub-stance of hope means faith is the backbone of hope, the skeleton that gives shape to hope’s flabby flesh, keeps it from declaring “enough” and collapsing back into its chair with a thud.

Or is that not yet quite right? If you’ll let me chase this rabbit into one more thicket, is it rather about the way hope stands? As if faith names the correct posture of hope, not slouching, but also not quite upright? Not faith standing under hope but hope itself when it is, as it were, sitting?

A few days ago, weeks after Wiman’s Ammons story had left me so unsettled, I came back to the book. And it turns out that Ammons also came back. Two chapters later Wiman writes,

The day after Ammons gave his disastrous reading, he squeezed absurdly but cheerfully into a student desk and tried to convince ten un-awed undergraduates of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s greatness as a poet. . . . All I remembered of the hour was the poignant incongruity of that towering, ungainly, large-spirited man trying to convey with words and gestures the pinpoint specificity of a poem.

–Peter Dula is Associate Professor of Religion and Culture, Eastern Mennonite University, and author, Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology (Oxford, 2011). Before coming to EMU in 2006, he was the Mennonite Central Committee Iraq Program Coordinator. This post first appeared in a January 2019 newsletter reporting on Haverim, an EMU alumni groups supporting the Bible and Religion Department. He co-edited the Cascadia book Borders and Bridges.

A Writing Place, by Phyllis Miller Swartz

I had been writing about place—the places of my childhood and the places in a historical fiction book—so when I read the invitation to the Poetics of Place writing retreat, I signed up.

Come to Jacob’s Creek, the invitation had said, in the beautiful Laurel Highlands. The conveners stressed that scheduled activities, according to the brochure, would be offered in the spirit of Ecclesiastes 4:6: “Better is one hand full of quietness than two hands full of toil and striving after the wind.”

But I came with some trepidation. I was a new writer, after all, and I would join a group that included authors of books published by Cascadia, often through its DreamSeeker Books imprint.

Come to relax, a post-registration e-mail told me, and bring ten photocopies of a piece of your work for critique.

Those two sentences, I thought, didn’t fit.

But they did, I found.

One evening we stood on a porch under the rain and heard the words from a poem by Mary Szybist savoring the world’s taste and acknowledging that in exchange for such gifts the poet “did nothing, not even wonder.”

The Poetics of Place conference became for me a call to wonder, to pay attention. There’s something holy about loving the place where you are, someone at the retreat said one evening, and something especially holy about loving a place others don’t love. So notice the signs of life that emerge from the decay of a place.  What are you witness to in the place you live?

Photograph by participant Joseph Gascho.

And I learned to pay attention, close attention, to words. In workshops with people who wrote—a pastor, a musician, a doctor, an editor, a professor, a retired volunteer—I saw how to notice what words are actually saying, as opposed to what was meant. I learned to hear the rhythm of words and to examine each word to find its reason to exist. And I found that to lay my work open for others to see and question and offer impressions and suggestions, is to ask for a gift.

At the retreat we, who loved words, immersed ourselves in them. We plucked words from our ordinary lives and set them on paper so we could see them more clearly. We mediated on God’s call to record words, tracing the biblical commands to write through the Old Testament narratives and the prophets, through the gospels and the epistles, and into Revelation. Even at meals, we played with words in our talk.

When I drove into the Laurelville Mennonite Church Center on the first day of the retreat, I parked my car and sat for a moment, feeling too timid to walk inside, to spend the weekend writing with people I didn’t know and who had written more than I had. But I left the retreat three days later, richer and glad I had come.

—Phyllis Miller Swartz taught school for over 30 years, from HeadStart to middle school, high school, college, and more after “graduating with the hippies from Antioch College.” She is author of Yoder School, a memoir to be released through the DreamSeeker Books imprint of Cascadia Publishing House as the inaugural title in the new DreamSeeker Memoir Series. Jeff Gundy, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Becca J. R. Lachman, and Anita Hooley Yoder developed the Poetics of Place retreat. They in turn invited participation of Michael A. King and Cascadia Publishing House/DreamSeeker Books, publisher of many of the retreat participants, including Swartz.