On My Way? (First Publication)

I haven’t been posting much writing on Heaven in My Foot for some time (boo hoo), but I have a good excuse (yay!)—always a great comfort in this life of desires and demands.  I’ve been writing for print.  And guess what?  My first publication came in the mail last week and should now be available at more complete newsstands.  Titled “Wine for Those Who Faint,” the piece was about 6 years in the making and appears in the current issue of Image (issue 68).  It’s a personal narrative of intertwined illness and faith framed by reading Leviticus, the book of the Hebrew Bible which lays out ritual law for the priests of ancient Israel, including the instructions for animal sacrifice.  The narrative of my illness covers up to about 9 years ago. 

Image is a journal of literature, art, and faith—“Beauty will save the world” is their refrain.  I’ve been reading it for a couple of years and have learned from experience to expect something that astonishes me in every issue.  I favor the poetry, creative nonfiction, and publisher-and-editor Gregory Wolfe’s regular essays.  Before reading Image I thought contemporary religious poetry was limited to pietistic doggerel; I’ve been happily corrected.  Image also produces a biweekly free newsletter on the arts and faith and does a bunch of other wonderful things that you can learn about on their website.

As I love it so, I will send a free copy of Image (issue 68 with my essay) to the first two inquirers who want to become acquainted with this great journal.  Just send me an e-mail and we’ll take it from there.  It can also be purchased at some bookstores (if they carry Image), and on the Image website here.

I have two other essays that will be published, so I hear, in books this year.  Taken all together, these developments give me the unfamiliar feeling of being on my way.  Where to remains unknown.

Able to Not Believe: Guest Post by Alan Shefsky

I don’t believe in God.   At least I don’t believe I do.  Which is to say that for the most part I travel through my days reasonably contented in the idea that the world of rocks and plants and beings, and the vast universe besides, is what there is.   This isn’t to say that I think that there is only the physical, the tangible; rather that the world of the not-tangible, the universe of mystery and poetry, of love and dark matter, are tied to and inseparable from the physical.  There is love because there are lovers, and except in the rhyming sense it isn’t tied to the heavens above.   If there is transcendence it is of a human kind; I don’t believe in transcendence in any metaphysical or spiritual sense.   I believe we are born into a life of potentially profound wonder, and I believe that when we die, alas, we die.   Precious, then, is this life and its moments, truly painful the times of darkness.

How to account for my non-belief, my belief in a world of no-God?   I am reasonably sure that it has always been with me.   I grew up in Reform Judaism, attended religious school and Hebrew school, had a bar mitzvah, and although God-language was certainly present, God-presence—for me— was not, nor God-existence.   The idea, to the extent that it struck me, simply never struck me as real.   Still, being Jewish struck me as real, and so, Jewish I continued and continue to be.   There are of course some wrinkles in being Jewish and believing in the non-being of God, and I haven’t smoothed them all out, nor do I expect that I will.   Yet I am able to live my Jewish-ness, and to study and reflect on it, such as I do.  And I am able to not believe.

There are wrinkles, too, in being a Jewish non-believer in God and having as a very close friend a person who is a Christian believer in God, and ours a friendship in which deep and wide-ranging discussions are a central, delightful part.  Of course, wrinkles in a friendship aren’t necessarily a bad thing; indeed the wrinkles, in time, become part of the texture of the friendship.  And too, we learn from each other.

This friend is (you may have guessed) Priscilla, the author/artist of this very blog, who is among other things “a theological kind of gal . . . incarnational and sacramental . . .”   She is a person who engages deeply and questions radically matters of religion and faith, someone for whom religion and faith provide meaning and nourishment, and for whom God’s presence is, at times, present. Her faith and her practice are part of who she is, and the kind of friend she is, and how she lives.  

My friendship with Priscilla is also, happily, a friendship with her husband Larry, with whom I’ve been known to engage in a conversation or two on matters sublime and ridiculous.   He is, also, a theological kind of guy in his own right, as well as a man of letters (and numbers), a thinker and writer on matters of faith and on a vast range of other topics.

So it is that I come (finally) to the topic of this present essay, a consideration of the just released book, “God is Dead” and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself: Theological Engagements with the New Atheism, in which a short story by Mr. Larry Gilman appears.   The book, edited by Andrew David, Christopher J. Keller, and Jon Stanley, published by Cascade Books, seeks to respond, from a Christian perspective, to the new crop of atheists whose books have splashed into bookstores recently (those by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, etc.), as well as simply to explore matters of faith and religion.   Besides Larry’s story, the book is comprised of essays, interviews, poetry, and visual art. The pieces touch on a number of different points on the theological and philosophical map, from Augustine and Aristotle, to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, to Thomas Merton and Wendell Berry.  In the essays that treat of the New Atheists, the general consensus seems to be that their arguments are so weak as to hardly merit response, though they are in fact taken to task for, among other things, their poor understanding of theology, their lack of depth, and their tendency to ramble.

I confess, however, to being far more interested in the pieces that explored faith in the writer’s own terms, not so much in the context of response.   Also, as a poet myself, I was drawn to the nuance and metaphor in the several poems, the visual art, and of course the one piece of fiction, Larry’s lively “The King of the Mice: An Earnest Fable for My Atheist Friends.”

One challenge for me in reading these pieces was simply the unfamiliarity of the terrain.  These are, after all, Christian-centered writings, so the language and the references are quite different from what I’ve encountered in Jewish theological and historical texts.  There is also the way that atheism as a concern exists differently in Christian than in Jewish history and imagination, where practice perhaps receives more attention than belief, and identity and continuity—and perceived threats to them—tend to be the more pressing concerns.  Further, it seems clearly to be the case that the New Atheists, themselves coming from a Christian background and from within largely Christian societies, position themselves especially against religion-as-Christianity.   So for me as a Jew, it can feel like I’m reading about someone else’s battle.

Additionally challenging to me were those arguments — theological and/or specifically Christian — that were stated in absolute terms.   It is compelling to read of God as the ground of being, and to imagine the writer’s profound experience of that grounding presence; also to read of the Christian experience of faith, of community, of love.   It is less compelling to read that those not so inclined or so moved are, therefore, groundless; that their lives can be defined only in terms of absence or a not-choosing.   Absolute certainty is fascinating to see, to try to imagine, but in the end I cannot help but find it disagreeable.   I don’t believe in God, but I also don’t believe in (that is, agree with,) atheistic — or theistic, or Christian — certainty.

By way of providing a more specific look at God is Dead, and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself, here are some notable excerpts. 

D. Stephen Long, writing in the Forward, considers various kinds of atheism and asks:  “Is all such atheism worthy of engagement?  And how should Christians in particular respond to its resurgence?”   He continues, in effect laying out the terms of the engagement for many of the book’s essayists: “No one should be surprised by its resurgence.  A-theism is a parasitical consequence of the ‘return of religion,’ a return that continues to surprise persons who seem confused as to how to respond to it . . . .  That reasonable people still have faith — and actually practice it — strikes some as odd.  Many of these skeptics were convinced by the narratives spun by the great masters of suspicion, narratives insisting that the gains of the Enlightenment would surely be irreversible by the twenty-first century and that these gains would result in reasonable people eschewing belief.” [xiv]

Ronald A. Kuipers also references the Enlightenment in his essay “Faith as the Art of the Possible: Invigorating Religious Tradition in an Amnesiac Society”: “I have been trained in an intellectual tradition that rejects the Enlightenment belief in the possibility of religious neutrality, that is, of anyone not being religious in some sense.” [146]  I guess I remain under the Enlightenment’s sway, as I am inclined to think that it is indeed possible to not be religious in any sense, and that the perception otherwise might be caused by religion-tinted glasses.

Merold Westphal, in his insightful essay “Atheism for Lent,” discusses at length the philosophies of three major “masters of suspicion”: Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche.   Westphal doesn’t attempt to respond to or refute these philosophies; rather he recommends that believers themselves engage in a kind of suspicion, a “Lenten self-examination leading to repentance.”  His message is an affirming one, leading him to caution against cynicism, lest “in practicing suspicion we may lose sight of grace, God’s ever-present help in forgiving us and creating within us a clean heart.” [77–78]

As for the “New Atheists,” whom the book seeks to engage, the typical sentiment is expressed here by Stanley Fish, interviewed by Stanley Hauerwas: “They think that they are refuting something, where in fact they haven’t even taken seriously the existence and primacy of that which they think to refute even as a possibility.  In a way . . . I find their work profoundly uninteresting.” [111]

Charles Taylor, interviewed by Ronald A. Kuipers, elaborates:  “I happen to have quite a negative view of these folks.  I think their work is very intellectually shoddy.”  He continues, “They all believe that there really are some knockdown arguments against belief in God.  And of course, this is something you can only believe if you have a scientistic, reductionist conception and explanation of everything in the world, including human beings.  If you do have such a view that everything is to be explained in terms of physics and the movement of atoms and the like, then certain forms of access to God are just closed.  For example, there are certain human experiences that might direct us to God, but these would all be illusory if everything could be explained in scientistic terms.” [126]

The idea of atheism as being somehow essentially and necessarily linked to “reductionism and scientism” is an idea that occurs in several essays, and it is one that I believe draws too simple a dichotomy between a theism that respects mystery and transcendence, and an atheism that appreciates only cold, hard facts.   For my part, I am interested in the experiences that “might direct us to God,” or that might instead direct us to a profounder sense of meaning and of being.

Taking the criticism of atheism even further is Ben Suriano, in his essay “On What Could Rightly Pass as a Fetish,” in which he criticizes the “popular valorization” of atheism, which “chooses to ignore that the predominant form of modern atheism is deeply dependent upon and perpetuates an ideological, and therein idolatrous, construction—one that is itself not a progressive coming-of-age or a sobering up, but rather the preservation and refinement of a pagan trajectory of power seeking.” [27–28]

Another of the book’s recurring themes concerns the ideas that atheists hold about religious belief and seeks to respond to these ideas and present religious belief more clearly.  Thomas Inchausti writes, in his essay “Thomas Merton’s Apologies to an Unbeliever”: “The god they do not believe in is certainly not a god I ever believed in . . .  Merton believed that the religious problem of the twentieth century was twofold:  (1) atheists identify faith itself with the most mindless expressions of religious fanatics, and (2) the ‘faith’ many ‘believers’ have kept is sentimental and self-aggrandizing . . .” [4]  Inchausti explains, “Merton would agree with those atheists who deny God’s existence as some sort of super ‘decider,’ concept, or thing, but he would disagree with those who then draw the conclusion that God, therefore, does not exist.  What does not exist is the God-object.  What does exist is a presence revealed in and through the love that rises in us out of a ground that lies beyond us.” [6–7]

Again, it is this kind of exploration of belief that I find most compelling, more so than description of atheist non-belief.  Also and especially compelling is description of how belief might manifest itself, how religious practice might enhance the practice of living.  Ronald Kuipers, in the essay noted above, discusses

what it might mean to partake in and pass along a religious tradition . . . that, when healthy, invigorates its members for the ongoing task of healing and restoring . . .  society . . .  Membership in such a religion. . . can, at its best . . . inspire a kind of faith that I will describe as ‘the art of the possible.’  Such a faith can give those graced by it the courage to shape their lives in relation to the mysterious contours of what the agrarian poet, novelist, and philosopher Wendell Berry calls ‘the human definition.’  Although such an art of living does indeed call upon us to relinquish the push for cosmic mastery that has come to dominate our species, such a responsive, creaturely life involves much more than merely acquiescing before some authoritarian limit.  Crafting such a life should be understood, instead, as a work of love that makes space for the beloved, a life that readies a place that may be graced by new and unpredictable redemptive possibility.  [147]

It is just such a life, just such religious practice that I see Priscilla and Larry engaged in.  And so it is in my knowing of them in this context that I come to the reading of this book and the writing of this essay.  In this context, how not have deep respect for belief and religious practice?  Also, knowing Priscilla, and knowing the ways that her religious practice and her illness “practice” delicately, deliberately intermingle, how not consider the place of my own chronic illness in my coming to or moving from belief, and the place of non-belief in my experience of illness?  What might “ground of being” and “being in the presence” mean when one’s being, in the present moment, is so familiar to pain, when one’s very ground feels unforgiving?

Recently in one of our meandering conversations, Priscilla and I talked about gratefulness, about what it means to be grateful and, especially, whether one can experience it — and express it — without having in mind, believing in, a transcendent ground/source of being.  Priscilla thought yes, certainly yes; I thought probably no: no God, no “one” to be grateful to.   And still I am grateful.

Alan's poetry and other writing can be read on his website, alanshefsky.com.

The Rath of God

The picture on Facebook is, I decide, a reasonable approximation of the Russell Rathbun I know only by voice: Homiletic jazzman, trickster preacher. He delivers sermons like an actor tripping, dropping things, falling out of a chair. I’ve never heard someone make such good use of “yeah,” “ya know,” “I don’t know,” “I mean,” “uh,” “um,” and “like.” He plays up his own fumbling, repeating himself, stumbling over words, inventing on-the-spot awkward constructions of phrase and term. I have heard him restart a sermon three times, saying that he hadn’t got it quite right yet. I’ve heard him pretend to be somebody else, preaching in the wrong church. He may tell a story, fictional, personal, or historical, or he may retell a gospel tale with an alternative ending where everything goes disturbingly wrong.

Rev. Rathbun is one of the founders of House of Mercy church in St. Paul, Minnesota. Since discovering the sermon audio files on the House of Mercy website, I’ve been getting some church right here at home. Not every day, but, I confess, sometimes as much as three times a day.

Church being theatre, and me being theatrical, I have occasionally sat in the pews and wished I could coach the actors. But Rev. Rathbun has snapped something in my brain and the possibilities now seem more open than ever—even, pardon me, devilishly open.

There’s a saying in the academic field of performance studies: performing is making not faking. My excuse for not remembering who said it is that I fainted on the way to the PhD and never finished. Anyway, the question becomes, What are you making? What are we making, coming together in this way in church? What kind of moment are we making between ourselves and God? In Russell Rathbun's preaching, the awkwardness, the fumbling and stumbling, the open ordinary vulnerability become part of the sermon, part of the point. It’s all about mercy and grace, which make no sense, mean nothing, matter not a whit—unless you feel your smallness.

Rev. Rathbun is honest about the Bible, too, which makes me want to shout halleluja and shake my hands in the air in a fit of gratitude. In a sermon about Moses, he apologizes for the possible incoherence of his speculations and rapid-fire delivery. “I’m sorry, but I just have a lot of ground to cover,” he says as he picks up speed, “if I’m going to try to wrest the good news out of this founding narrative in the holy scripture where the greatest of all prophets begins his career with a murder,” trying to keep up his speed and starting to stutter, “and he and God go on to conspire to murder m-millions of children, and so I gotta go.”

With all that conscious fumbling, he’s quite smooth. In one performance sermon, he lets smooth take charge. When I first heard the drums and guitars start up, I thought, “Oh no, this is going to be awful.” But it wasn’t. Strange, insistent night sounds and Russell Rathbun mixing and blending John the Baptist prophesying the coming of Christ with newspaper accounts of a Christmas shopping stampede where glass doors were broken down and a man trampled to death. Reverend Rathbun is slippery and smart and so is the band. There isn’t really a message. The lines of the gospel and the newspaper article become like bars of music repeated and juxtaposed. Hope and brokenness and a good driving beat.

photograph by Jonathan Haynes (not the image from Facebook)

Sample sermons:
Among Us
Children of God
Concerned About Bush

Russell Rathbun’s first book is
Post-Rapture Radio: Lost Writings from the Failed Revolution at the End of the Last Century

Blessed

After a sabbatical of some months I have decided to revive my blog on the Baha'i Faith (Baha'i the Way). I am going back into it, though, accompanied by many question marks. I have always wanted it to be something more than, "blah blah blah Baha'i; blah blah blah," which I think was a bit of a risk for me as an ex-Baha'i. When I first started, the answer to that desire was to write as well as I could. Of course, I mean to continue that. But now I think I am also going to be bringing more of my own theology into it too. At least, that seems to be what is happening. The piece I've just put up may be of interest even to the Baha'i-ignorant. I've written a call-and-response sort of thing using a commonly recited passage from the Baha'i writings as the structure. It is entitled Blessed.

An Atheist Prays

At fifteen I decided high school was unbearable. I told my mother that I had to either graduate early or do something else for a year. Foreign exchange programs coo’d seductively in my ear, and at first I thought I would go to a Spanish-speaking country. Logical: I had studied Spanish for three years. But I had already been to Spain and Mexico, and I thought, probably naively, I would be reasonably comfortable traveling to any other Spanish-speaking country. I decided I would rather go somewhere I would not be comfortable. The interviewer took note. So when my assignment came I read those mellifluous four syllables, In-do-ne-sia, in black type on the white page and realized I would have to consult our globe to find out exactly where it was.

Some months later there I was, a sixteen-year old atheist ambassador from Texas, living with a Muslim family in a Muslim region of a very religious, mostly Muslim, country. Atheism is essentially illegal in Indonesia. That is, every citizen must declare to the government a religious affiliation. The first pillar of the official government ideology, the Pancasila (pronounced pancha seela), is belief in one supreme God. At the time I went, the five officially acceptable religion choices were Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

In Indonesia an atheist is a Communist is just about the worst thing you can be. During the McCarthy era in the United States, left-leaning Americans were harassed, interrogated, black-listed. But in Indonesia anti-communism was a deadly force. In 1965-66 many thousands of supposed Communists, maybe even as many as a million, were killed. Some of their names came from lists supplied by the United States.

I knew none of this before arriving. And nobody pegged me as a Communist. But my atheism baffled many. I took up my unexpected diplomatic mission with pride and proclaimed my anti-faith whenever asked. I wasn’t really there, though, to proclaim my ways. Come to think of it, I’m not sure what I was there for. An experience. An adventure. To learn other people’s ways. Ta’aruf, I have recently read, is the religious obligation in Islam to know the other. I was not religious. My “other” was.

Signs and acts of faith were everywhere. They were new and different, and I didn’t have pre-formed negative associations with them, as I did with the forms of Christianity which I knew, or imagined I knew, in the United States. And as part of being with my family and classmates, I pretended to pray. A militaristic ritual began each school day when the elected head of the class barked out commands: “Setiap Siap” (All ready), at which everyone stood. “Doa Mulai.” (Begin prayer), at which we all bowed our heads in silence. Then, if memory serves me correctly: “Selesai.” (Finish).

For religion studies I joined the Islam class. After a few weeks the Christianity teacher sent a student to call me to his room, thinking, I guess, that I rightly belonged to him. A long awkward conversation in his bad English and my bad Indonesian ended with an agreement that I would join his class temporarily, so long as he understood that I was not Indonesian, and I did not have to believe. Why, he asked, didn’t President Reagan simply order all Americans to choose a religion? I attended a few times then reverted. I was not Christian, and I was going to study Islam.

Nothing of the kind actually happened, not in school. I sat through Islam class and understood almost nothing. “It’s a great class when they do the chanting,” I wrote home while sitting there, “but right now they’re only talking.” Unintelligibly to me. It was hard enough to learn, without any skilled assistance, the language of daily life, and impossible to simultaneously acquire the special vocabularies of 15 subject areas from scratch. The whole school system baffled me. Instead of students moving from one class to another for different subjects, with a few exceptions, students stayed together in one class, and the teachers moved around. We studied everything simultaneously. In the U.S., algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus each have their own dedicated year of study, whereas in Indonesia, several maths were taught one or two days of the week—algebra, statistics, and trigonometry—so that on Monday the math would be something I had learned two years ago, and on another day something I wouldn’t learn until the next year. Physics and Chemistry were each allotted two classes a week, and on Wednesdays biology, physics, and chemistry followed one after the other with double periods, filling the day. “The classroom is constantly filled with noise,” I wrote in a letter, “and the teacher often seems to be talking to herself while the students come and go as they please.”

I didn’t understand how the result could be anything other than brain soup. I attempted early on to understand, then surrendered. I never knew what was going to happen until it happened. I occasionally took a math test on whim. I completed the drafting exercises with zero comprehension. And I nearly passed out a couple times when we rallied for the country, beaten by the equatorial sun in the concrete courtyard. But mostly I just sat on the little metal bench, wrote letters, and waited out each day, subsisting on the affection of my classmates, particularly Ita, who played with my long nails, bit my fingers, and pinched my face to express how cute she thought I was.



I intend, though, to be writing about prayer and the beginnings of faith. When my host family prayed together before a special meal, I too made that perfect gesture: down-turned eyes and upturned, open, empty hands. My host parents faithfully performed salat five times a day, the children rarely even once a day. This seemed healthy to me—it was a personal matter, not something dictated or enforced. But during Ramadan the family often prayed the evening prayer and Tarawih together, and the father made a point of directing me to pray as well. He said it was good for me.

I have no idea how well I understood what Tarawih was. I recently found the word in the daybook I kept and a quick Google search yielded the explanation that it is a special prayer performed by Sunni Muslims during Ramadan after the evening salat. On the first day of Ramadan one of the sisters, two years older than me and a college student, taught me to make wudu, the ritual washing performed before prayer. Then I prayed next to her, following her movements by watching from the corner of my eye. And I must have followed others on other evenings, because I remember thinking with resentment at one point that I prayed more often than my sisters did. They liked me in the cloak enough to snap this wretched picture.

I fasted too. Thirty days. During Ramadan I received a box of Girl Scout cookies from my little sister in the United States. They were Samoas—oh my—rounded squares with a hole in the center; coconut, caramel, and chocolate drizzled on a vanilla cookie base. I tucked the box in my personal cupboard and told no one. Mid-afternoon the next day, I shut myself alone in the room I shared with one sister and ate. I stalled out with only a few cookies left. I think it took about five minutes. Then, sitting on the floor with my back against the door, I realized I was thirsty. I was really thirsty. But I was fasting, wink, wink. I couldn’t get water in the bathroom because it wasn’t potable, and I couldn’t get water from the kitchen because I would be found out. I suffered in secrecy till sundown, my just due.

I loved the fast, though. I can’t say exactly why, something like stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia. I often went running at the very end of the day when my body was finally cruising on stored energy. I came home feeling exhilarated, disciplined, and a bit cocky, just in time to see the final countdown on television and break the fast with whoever in the family happened to be about.

It must have been beautiful a couple hundred years ago, when there was no electricity, and the call to prayer came from a practiced human voice, live. But my affection and nostalgia has attached to the cheap amplification of what I always assumed was a pre-recorded call. It would sound from all directions five times a day, most noticeably in the late afternoon, when the streets quieted briefly, and the population fresh from afternoon naps and second baths, prayed or did not pray, depending on faith and inclination. I learned to be home before that time, home before Maghrib, sunset. Unless I was out with a sister; exceptions were made.


One of my sisters advised me against windsurfing during the fast. She thought I might get water in my mouth and that it would invalidate my fast—not something I could bring myself to be concerned about, since I didn’t even believe in God. Besides, I desperately needed my windsurfing time. It was a hard year, in many ways. For one, I was far more idle and restricted than I was used to being, and the windsurfing was a brief interval a couple times a week when I had some sense of freedom and could enjoy a friendship with my teacher that wasn’t conducted according to social expectations and a prescribed script.

I remember reading the Qur’an in English, probably a poor translation, but I don’t remember much of it. And I enjoyed many long conversations with one cousin of the family who, among his family peers, was the most serious about Islam. Of those talks I remember this: a feeling grew in me—I might find a faith I can believe in. I did; the Baha’i Faith, the very next year.

And then I left the Baha’i Faith twelve years later. I wouldn’t exactly say I believe in a faith now. I believe in grace, in the freely given gift of the love we most desire. My theology is definitely Christian, and apparently so am I, though I still find the admission about as embarrassing as being found out having sex with animals. And I do not believe in Christianity like I believed in the Baha’i Faith, as a perfect divine system that will save the world. I believe in God.

That is not near as embarrassing to me as it used to be. My mom recognized me early as her religious child, but my pride found a partner in my atheist identity. When my Indonesian host cousin described Islam to me, I softened a bit. I think I found a calming orderliness in it which gave me pause—okay, this religion-thing may not be as completely crazy as I thought. I have always felt a debt of gratitude to him and to the other Indonesian Muslims I knew.

Twenty years have passed since I set out on that journey. There is much more talk of Islam in American public culture now. About a year ago all the bad news about Islam was leaving me a bit disoriented. I wanted to stand up, hold my hand in the air and say to I don’t know who, “Wait a minute, I don’t understand!” I did not learn a lot about Islam in my year in Indonesia; I did not come home able to discourse freely on Islamic theology and practices. But I knew and loved people, and they knew and loved me. There were difficulties between us, yet I never, ever experienced anything even remotely scary associated specifically with Islam there. How, I wondered, do I reconcile my experience with the news?

Although I do miss my Indonesian host family (because they are a prominent family I have been particularly careful to keep pictures, location, and identifying information out of this piece), I’m not in touch with them any more, for reasons I won’t explore here. So I started looking into Islam through the web, trying to reduce my ignorance a tad, but mostly seeking a fresh positive connection that would help me understand the old one in this new context. Eventually, I found myself looking for the kind of Muslim I would be if I were Muslim—an interesting exercise, since I didn’t know what that was or what the options were. I’m getting a better idea, though, and I may post some of my thoughts on Islam here in the future. I am not uncritical, and I am not the theological virgin I was twenty years ago. So I come to my exploration with my own religious point of view. But I would like to support the good life of moderate Islam, which helped me, and which I believe is endangered just now. It is hard to hear from an Indonesian friend that his family is not considered truly Muslim anymore by many of the people he grew up with as neighbors because they are not down with jihad. And “jihad,” here, does not refer to the inner struggle with self.

A couple months before leaving Indonesia I attended prayers with several hundred thousand people on Idul Fitri (Indonesian spelling), the holy day at the end of Ramadan. I debated whether to pray or photograph and one sister urged me to take pictures, which I did. It was an experience; it was fascinating; it was beautiful, and strange and alien and fun. And even if I had made wudu, worn a prayer cloak, and followed the gestures, it would not have been real prayer. It wasn’t real prayer any of the times I did do those things, not yet. But it was something; it was a beginning. Benign fakery got me started.


Tomorrow is the festival of Eid al-Fitr (common English spelling) for much of the Muslim world. In Indonesia, after early morning communal prayers, people will visit the homes of family and friends, eat mountains of food, and greet each other with the words “Mohon maaf lahir dan batin”—I ask forgiveness in body and soul.

To my Indonesian host family: for the time I made Texas chili with beer and expected you to eat it; for my skimpy bathing suit, which you wisely disappeared; for my teenage materialism; for my need for constant activity; for all the ways I contributed to our trouble with each other; and for my inability to remain in contact—I ask forgiveness in body and soul.

Take, Heat, This Is My Body

“You know,” Larry said, “Episcopalians are funny about bishops.” Yes, I have noticed this. A couple weeks before the Bishop of Vermont was to visit our church, the small signs were about—proud announcements from the priest, invitations to a Dinner With the Bishop, that sort of thing. Episcopalians, when they aren’t upset about their bishops, can be rather giddy about them.

Well, I have not made my peace with those shepherd’s crooks the bishops sport when they smile for the camera; otherwise, I like the bishops just fine. I like the bishop of Vermont very much. I like the presiding bishop. And we are blessed to have Gene Robinson as our bishop neighbor in New Hampshire. His choice of a Palestinian shepherd’s crook for his crosier goes a long way to cutting the dork-factor I feel about those things. But I wouldn’t exactly say a visitation from a bishop gets me excited. Interested, yes. Excited, not really.

A cool truck is a different matter. While I never even noticed bishops until recently, I have always had a thing for trucks. When I was three I was bonkers for the garbage truck. My earliest memory of urgency is of abandoning the breakfast table to get a glimpse of it. And later, at my dad’s house, I remember at least once following the garbage truck around the block to achieve more sustained viewing satisfaction.

I don’t love all trucks, especially not the I’m-not-a-man-without-my-gas-guzzling-useless-truck trucks. But when the snow is deep I drag a chair to a window and watch our neighbor plow the driveway clear. If I can’t rise from my resting place to see what rattling beast passes the house, I feel a little tense from the deprivation until the sound passes away. And, I confess, the annual visitation from Brailey’s Firewood and Trucking is a thrill. It comes and goes as quickly as a communion wafer and a sip of wine.

Firewood claims its own liturgy and calendar. Summer is Advent, the season of preparation. Winter has barely slipped behind us before the cold is little more than an arm’s length ahead. “It is hard to believe,” Larry says, “that a few months ago I was climbing down piles of snow to get to the wood.” He called it his wood-mine this winter. The five steps out the door were disappeared under snow because he didn’t shovel them clear. He stepped out and up onto the mound, then descended the white slope to retrieve firewood at true ground level. But all that snow and cold seems implausible to our summer minds. Our world is a riot of green. We act on faith that winter will come again.

The division of labor is simple. I’m an invalid, but I have my uses. I order the wood; I write the check; I watch Larry do everything else.

Except this year. Larry was in the shower when the truck arrived. The hurrying about to greet, direct, pay, and thank fell to feeble me. Plus snapping a few images for my blog. “Just don’t take a picture of me,” Bernie said, “I haven’t shaved yet.” I assured him, with regret, that he would not be visible. (That is his assistant in the picture.)

Firewood is sold by the cord, a measurement of approximate volume—four feet high, four feet wide, eight feet long. Bernie’s truck holds one and a half cords. These days we buy two loads. It’s like receiving communion from a visiting bishop twice in one day, only really massive and we have to pay. The price this year was $200 per cord. Assuming we use the full three cords, that’s $600 to keep us cozy for nine months—heavy heating in December through March and lighter on either end. Six hundred dollars is a figure to be proud of in Vermont, and let me tell you, we are proud. We are also excessively pleased with every efficiency measure we have taken. Like praying without ceasing, we celebrate them ad infinitum.

We buy “green” firewood from freshly cut trees; that is the cheapest and most common way to buy it. It doesn’t actually look green. It looks sort of orange. As it dries, it grays. And it should be dried, or seasoned, before burned. The atmosphere takes care of that: stack it, cover it, give it time. We buy our wood a year in advance. By the time we burn it, it’s dry. Good thing, because the drier the wood the more efficient the fires—and the cleaner the chimney. Water is one of the primary ingredients in the formation of creosote, the uncombusted gunk that builds up in a chimney and burns in chimney fires. We don’t want a chimney fire, so we keep the chimney clean.

The first ritual, however, after the visitation of Brailey’s Firewood and Trucking is not to stack the wood but to breathe and admire it. The smell is sweet and pungent, particularly the oak, and Larry is always sure to get some right up his nose. Proper firewood, around here anyway, is all hardwood: oak, maple, beech, ash, yellow birch. That may sound like we are burning trees that could be used to make furniture or fine lumber, but we aren’t.

A forest these days has to be well managed to produce high-quality timber for those purposes. The trees need to be straight, wide, and without knots or disease. A really good forester will manage a forest for many things, including wildlife and aesthetics, but a lot of small, crooked, funky, knotted, and misplaced specimens must be taken out to favor the ones with cash potential. Those culled trees have little market value except to us and our kind. Selling it as firewood doesn’t turn a profit for the landowner, but it defrays some of the cost of logging those trees. Profits, if they come at all, are longer-term. Those favored trees which have been released from competition will grow fatter, taller, faster.

After contemplating the new mounds of wood with our noses and eyes, we speculate as to whether the wood will fit into the available stacking space, a fun but nearly pointless occupation—the only way to find out is to stack it. Larry does the work in dashes over several weeks. I often sit by in a chair watching him and fretting about things like the lack of circulating air space between stacks, whether Larry is working too hard, and if his end stacks are solid enough.

The end stacks are important. We are free-form wood stackers as we don’t have a shed or other built structure in which to put the wood. Larry picks out straight, even pieces from the pile and builds a structure at each end of each rank by laying three pieces one direction and then three pieces perpendicular to those on top of them, alternating to the full height of the rank. If the pieces are chosen and arranged carefully, they make solid supports between which the rest of the wood can pile up.

Last winter we started burning with the wood nearest the back door. This year we will stack the new wood there and burn from the other end. The oldest wood will burn first, and any wood we burn this year from the new pile will have had many months to dry. As the wood pile is between the house and the hillside, there’s no room to dump the new load near where it will be stacked, hence our dependence on and great affection for the miracle that is the wheelbarrow. Larry likes to say that he moves these heaps by hand four times: out of the mound into the wheelbarrow, out of the wheelbarrow into the pile, out of the pile into the house onto the floor next to the wood stove, off of the floor and into the stove. Heating with wood is light on the purse, heavy on labor.

Some of the wood must be split fine as well. Chopping or cutting wood breaks the fibers; splitting wood divides them. The one shortens the wood, the other thins it. Chopping isn’t really done much anymore, actually. Axe-work is inefficient. The logs are cut to a usable length with a chainsaw or a saw; a mechanical splitter divides them into smaller pieces. Then Bernie dumps the resulting perfection in our yard—three cords green hardwood, cut and split.

But to build a fire Larry needs smaller splits; they light and burn more easily. He used to split wood by hand each winter morning—a hard ritual right out of bed. The house is cold, the snow is deep, the world is still rather dark. Stand a straight piece on the block, raise the maul high, aim for the center, come down with force. Then stand the resulting pieces, each in turn, and do the same again. These days Larry makes a stash of splits in the summer. He piles them behind the chimney and extends his supply through the winter with small logs and large splinters from the main pile.

When the stacking’s complete and the wood snug under weighted sheets of metal, Larry likes to stand at the door on rainy days to watch the water run off the makeshift roof, carefully tilted and shingled. “Look at that,” he always says. “Look at all that water. It can’t get at my wood. It can’t get at it. Heh!” There’s a final mess of scraps in the driveway. Larry rakes them up, and the summer wood-work is done.

How odd it is, Larry will comment at least once in the summer, that he walks past the woodstove scores of times not even thinking about it. But when the cold comes it will be his frequent, happy preoccupation to keep the fire going and the house warm. You know, Vermonters are funny about their firewood. We love it.

A couple weeks ago Larry and I attended a Sunday service at Weston Priory for the first time. A few folksy monks with guitars led a whole bunch of folksy non-monks in singin’ and prayin’. I felt my usual mix of alienation and sweetness. One lyric snagged my attention; during communion we sang, again and again, “You are the bread and the table.”

The table?

If God is the bread, the wine, and the table, presumably of wood, then God is also the three cords of green firewood, cut and split. Take, heat, this is my body which is given for you. The Eucharist, to me, means that the very substance of the world is the body of grace. We eat it, drink it, piss it, breathe it. We are inseparable from it. Love these atoms; this material body matters.

Our summer wood stacking is done. Alleluia, alleluia.