Adam / Eve / Steve / Stevette

Last night in Bible study we hosted Pastor Yee from the Nineteenth Avenue Baptist Church.  Who knew Baptists could be so rad?

We read Genesis 2 (starting at verse 5) and 3 -- basically the Garden of Eden story.  That's a well-trod one and one I usually just dismiss as yeah-yeah-every-culture-has-creation-stories.  If anything, when I think about it, I just get annoyed at modern Christians who read into the "woman came from man's rib" and "Eve fucked up" things and find justification for male supremacy.  Also shit like this.  Puke.

She suggested a reading though, that looked at the Garden story not as prescriptive transgression and punishment story (i.e. Listen to God or else...), but as a descriptive story that can help us think about the nature of humanity in relation to God.  She explained that most Biblical scholars believe that this part of Genesis comes from the Jahwist source which is characterized by an emphasis on relationship.

We didn't get all into the from-the-rib thing, but we did talk about the names Adam and Eve, prompted by T, a transwoman who told us that she was mostly of the mind to just throw out all this Adam and Eve bullshit because it has nothing to do with the loving God she knows.  "What about Steve?" she asked, "And Stevette?"  She insisted that the trans community has always existed and that the gender binary in this story is a bunch of bullshit.  Boom.

Adam, PY agreed, is the Hebrew word for human.  (Flashback to the first year of college, when we learned to push back on the idea that the man is the universal and that then woman is a variation; that White is universal, and that People of Color are variations from that norm.)

I was still tripping on the part that went, "And he called her Eve because she would be the mother of all the living."  That cause and effect relationship made no sense to me.  Sounded a little like "because I said so."  So when I asked, PY told us that "Eve" is a lot like the Hebrew word for "living," which is kind of interesting.  God created humans, and then so that humans could have companionship, God created living.  I'm gonna keep thinking on that one.

So eventually the two major tensions that we got to in this story are:
(1) That we are not God.  That's what we came to know when we decided to do things our way instead of God's way.  Reading it this way, the silliness of the don't-eat-that-tree rule can fall away as just one arbitrary instantiation of God's order:  When we follow God's rules, participate in God's order, we experience Eden.  Eden: all creation living harmoniously. When our free will leads us away from God's just order, we eventually experience the humiliating pain of relative powerlessness before God -- a pain that can translate into the trampled end of oppression, but also the trampling.  Those with "power" (in the human sense) deceive themselves as somehow deserving of it, as somehow godlike.

We are not God.  We are not eternal. We know death -- not because we are being punished with it as a result of Eve's disobedience, but because death is fundamental the experience of humanity.  There was death in the Garden before they fucked up.  It takes a lot of death to make living possible. Plants and animals die for our consumption, and for consumption by innumerous other species.  But in right relationship with God, trusting absolutely in God's provision, we could live without the overwhelming desire to put off death.  We wouldn't scramble to create ways for us to have power over death.  We'd know we're not God and be cool with that.

(2) That we are image-bearers of God.  When after they hide from God and are found, God asks them, "Who told you you were naked?"  God made us Good, but then when, as a result of our free will, the world came out of God's order, we came to "know" that we are not good enough as we are, that we have reason for shame.

I thought of the question that's been hanging around me over the past few months.  I was telling my therapist a story that I was thought was fairly inane about a dude whose attention I'd wanted so badly in college.  My tone was amused, self-deprecating; it's not an issue for me anymore -- over it.  I was smiling, but she wasn't.  She does that.  Makes me take myself more seriously than I'm wont to do.  My storytelling ended abruptly when she interrupted me saying, "I wanted to be important enough to him that..." to ask me, "Ellen, who taught you that you're not important?"

"Who told you that you were naked?  I made you Good."

When we thought about it that way, it made sense to us why Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, from absolute harmony.  If we'd followed God's plan, lived under God's justice, we would be unconcerned with our not-Godness and we would be in touch with our Goodness.  We wouldn't know power struggles -- on interpersonal and international levels.  We wouldn't know war, rape, the use of imprisoned bodies for profit.  We wouldn't have to know.

The word ignorance was tossed around the table.

I thought about the afternoon a few years ago when I was driving home by myself, up 57, and I got a call from my principal.  I love driving up and down 57 between Champaign and Chicago, but that's because I generally run melancholy.  For most of the year, it's not not a bleak landscape.  Definitely bleak in late November, which is what I'm pretty sure it was.

This, but waaaaaaay grayer.

She told me that the school-wide antiracist project that R and I had been working our asses off to launch had failed to meet a hurdle it had to meet in order to move forward.  All our efforts were essentially for naught.  It'd be dishonest to withhold the truth that the humiliation of such a public failure didn't sting.

But when I got to thinking about it, I got viscerally overwhelmed by the realities of the what it looks like for racism to keep sneakily and slowly but steadily pushing our babies out of our classrooms and into prisons.  Most of the way up, I earnestly wished (as embarrassing as it is to admit) that I'd never learned what I have about racism.  I tried to understand why so many of our colleagues refused to get on board with our project, and I thought back to high school, when I had no idea I was White and that it mattered.  I could have had the English teacher life I'd imagined for myself when I sent in my college applications: drinking tea before a sea of adoring students who behaved just like I wanted them to and who loved literature like I did.  My own book club.  That possibility seemed so fucking blissful as I drove up, my shitty driving worsened by the sobbing that was puffing up my eyes.

But I do know, and I know that it's better that I do.  What I didn't want to know, but was having to confront, was not just that racism is ubiquitous, but that I am almost powerless before it.  "Ignorance is bliss," but not really because the more life-giving, sustainable thought is, "I am not God."

hell, prison, punishment, and justice

My dear friend Caroline graced me with a stream of consciousness email that she spoke into her phone while driving across a couple of states that included a bunch of hilarious little language ditties (eg. "my wife on earth" instead of "my life on earth") as well as a really moving consideration of what happens when we die.

Heck, I don't know.  Obviously.

Caroline talked about how she was running out of the motivation to do good stuff in her life so that she would have it made when she dies.  That's not a/the reason to do good stuff, she said (but she said it better).  We should do good stuff because it matters now.

I've never been one for the whole heaven/hell thing myself, but watching Cosmos today freaked the shit out of me and reminded me that I wanted to think and write about the similarities between hell and prison and what they reveal, not about our afterlife, but about our now-life.

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When I first started going to church at New Covenant, and while doing some research to find out if/how wack that church is (Turns out it isn't.), I came across this piece Ron wrote about hell.  Here's an excerpt:

“Judgment” and “justice” are key biblical issues, and a key part of the Judeo-Christian hope is that God will bring a final judgment—ie., a re-ordering of society so that the relationships between people are what they ought to be in the broadest and most wholesome sense of that hope. 

However, “hell” as a word describing separation from God is a very small part of the imagery the biblical writers use to describe the future of those who reject God’s re-ordering of human society. 

The word “hell” appears 16 times in the NIV. Three are a mistranslation of the word “Hades,” which means “the place of the dead.” In the other 13 instances, “hell” is probably a terrible translation of the word “Gehenna” (literally, “garden of Hinnom”), which actually referred to a place just outside the walls of Jerusalem... 

And in another post:

[R]eferences to “Hell/Gehenna” in the New Testament are almost all from words credited to Jesus and are almost all warnings to church/religious leaders not to abuse their influence. Never once does Jesus threaten the tax gatherers, the prostitutes, or the wounded and oppressed with “Hell”
 …
 “Gehenna” was a very concrete location in Jesus’ time. The books of Kings and Chronicles tell us that a wealthy family named “Hinnom” owned a garden near Jerusalem which first King Ahaz, and then even more audaciously, King Manasseh turned into a place for burning children as a sacrifice to the god Molech. When he came to the throne, King Josiah was so distraught by this practice of his forefathers that he destroyed the altars and turned the garden into a garbage dump—the beautiful garden did, in reality, become a place where the flames never went out and the worms never died out.
 Jesus would have passed by this place when he visited Jerusalem.  And, everyone who heard Jesus use the word “Gehenna” would have pictured the main city garbage dump and known its history.

If we put this image that every hearer would have pictured immediately,  together with Jesus’ use of this image as a warning to church/religious leaders, we have Jesus warning current synagogue leaders and future church leaders not to let their arrogance cause them to turn God’s garden into a garbage dump. It is church leaders, not the lost and outcast of Jesus’ day, who are consistently warned of the danger of harming others in a manner that turns their own lives into the garbage of history.

(That was around the time that I learned that I really like learning about the historical context of scripture, especially learning all of the alternative translations for given words.  And the time I learned how grateful I am to have Ron as a teacher.)

Twelve years of Catholic school and nobody ever explained it to me that way.  I would just go in to Confession once a semester, and just in case God was real, recite my obligatory, "Bless me, father, for I have sinned, it has been six months since my last confession.  These are my sins..."  And I always said, "I could be nicer to my brothers," because I couldn't think of any sins.  (What kind of fourth grader is all up in their own brokenness?  Well, I wasn't, anyway.) Then I'd say my six Hail Mary's, or whatever penance I was given, just to make sure that I didn't end up still carrying those "sins," (of not being as nice to my brothers as I could be) and thereby going to hell.

I only ever imagined hell through readings of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," and other stuff like that (which is probably why I never believed in it, and further, found the whole God thing to be a strange bunch of bologna). My second grade "Religion" teacher drew a circle on the chalkboard, and said, "This is your soul."  Then, she drew an "x" in the middle of the soul, and said, "This is a sin on your soul."  Then she drew a bunch more x's.  Confession, she explained, does this: and she erased the x's in the center of the circle.  (Jess and I think it's so funny how in Catholic school, you have "Religion," as if the Catholic stuff we learned is universally "religion."  Jess remembers lamenting, "God, Religion sucked today!")  

Saying, "Bless me, father for I have sinned," etc. and then saying my Hail Mary's brings me no closer to "being nicer to my brothers."  The Hail Mary's are a punishment (a really ineffective one for a ten-year-old who doesn't know what "and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus" means.)

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Thursday, one of the guys I work with at the prison told me that his best friend of fifteen years had committed suicide.  He was innocent, my friend explained, and he wouldn't just tell the parole board that he felt remorse for his crime (which you have to convincingly do to be released on parole).  My friend said that he had begged his friend to just fucking apologize already, to not let his integrity keep him in that shit-hole any longer.  

I've been thinking a lot lately about how obsessed with are with punishment, about how that obsession fuels mass incarceration even more than the prison industry that has emerged and now thrives alongside mass incarceration.  

I've never been the victim of a violent crime, nor has anyone close to me.  So I get that I don't get what it's like to be victimized in that way.  And I can understand the desire to throw someone away for 40+ years.  I have zero stomach for sexual violence, domestic abuse, or child abuse -- hearing/reading about them makes me want to vomit immediately.

But throwing someone away for 40+ years (or whatever) is not justice.  There is no justice for the rape of a child, for the murder of a mother, for the theft of peoples' life savings.  Throwing someone away for 40+ years is certainly some serious punishment, but it has nothing to do with God's kind of justice.

I let my (fabulous) new roommate Ricky borrow my copy of that Rob Bell book I'm always yammering on about, so I can't quote it directly, but I know that in it he argues that God has always wanted to be with us -- but that we can't be with God if we want to bring along our shit.  Our violence, our greed, our racism, our sexism, etc.  If we insist on holding on to that stuff, we remain disconnected from God; we remain in hell.

The kind of justice I'm looking for, when I think about why I do work in the prison industrial complex, is that kind of ubiquitous shit-dropping.  I'll never call locking people in cages justice, and I'll keep on working toward the collective creation of a community-without-our-shit.  Even though that's way more complicated and difficult (and certainly humanly impossible) than our current efforts toward justice.

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We love punishing, maybe because we're not capable of coming together to create real justice.

Caroline said, brilliantly: "And lately I've been wondering if perhaps people are going to be what fixes the earth.  Like, perhaps our real story will be that we evolve and become a good enough group of species that we stop destroying each other and the earth. Or maybe even that at some point the whole entire world and all of the species in it will become evolved enough that we stop wanting to kill each other.  But then I drive and see a bunch of animal carcasses and I think, "If my desire to go to a baby shower in St. Louis and see my best friend and have the convenience of driving in a car is outweighing my fear that I might mistakenly kill an innocent animal as I drive, then there is no way that wild animals are going to stop eating one another in order to stay alive."

When we're ready to drop the shit, we can draw closer to God.  If we continue our obsession with punishment, we continue to heap garbage into that dump.  

I feel like we can get better, but not that much better without the help of some of those wildly mysterious (and sacred) coincidences described in the post where I got punked.