14 October 2014

After the Praying, I'm Still a Bastard

In my junior classes we just wrapped up a unit on faith poetry. We surveyed a broad range of poems, ranging from atheist screeds against belief to faithful endorsements of God's power and beauty.

My favorite (new) poem from the unit was "Unholy Sonnet: After the Praying" by Mark Jarman. I will reproduce it below and then explain what I loved about the poem:

After the praying, after the hymn-singing,
After the sermon's trenchant commentary
On the world's ills, which make ours secondary,
After the communion, after the hang wringing,
And after peace descends upon us, bringing
Our eyes up to regard the sanctuary
And how the light swords through it, and how, scary
In their sheer numbers, motes of dust ride, clinging
There is, as doctors say about some pain,
Discomfort knowing that despite your prayers,
Your listening and your rejoicing, your small part
In this communal stab at coming clean,
There is one stubborn remnant of your cares
Intact. There is still murder in your heart.

Ah! That last line. But to begin at the beginning, it took me awhile to move past a bit of a superficial interpretation of lines 2-3. I had read it fairly straightforwardly as the "world's ills" being stuff like poverty and pain and war and how our own ills are "secondary" in the face of the overwhelming suffering in so much of the world. However, Jarman isn't making a surface-level comment here, but indicting the preaching in both conservative and liberal churches for being too outward in their denunciation of evil. In both places, the world's ills are emphasized to the point that our own fallenness, our own depravity, somehow becomes secondary.

For conservative churches the world's ills are gay marriage or cohabitation or wealth redistribution, so as long as you aren't living with your gay partner and voting Democrat you are doing well. For liberal churches the world's ills are poverty and conformity and capitalism, so as long as you are against poverty in the abstract, heterodox in your religious beliefs, and can go on a good rant about the evils of major corporations you also are doing well.

This is a caricature, of course, and painting with too broad of a brush, but I think the point holds. The churches that appeal to me, the ones that will last when the liberal or conservative topic du jour has lost its intensity are the ones that speak to me not about how bad stuff is out there and how messed up other people can be--be they communists or capitalists, homosexuals or homophobes--but about the murder in my own heart. In other words, I need to be reminded regularly how big of a bastard I am. I can always readily nod along to condemnations of evil in others. Who can't? Part of being a really big bastard is that it is easy to see how other people are bastards. What I need when I sit before the word of God is to hear how bad I am and how good Christ is to me. Despite my bastardness. 

I love how Jarman forces us to consider the question of the efficacy of church: does church work? There is violence in this poem. The light swords through the sanctuary. The dust motes are scary in their sheer number and cling to the air, which for those paying attention is impossible to do. We make a stab at coming clean. And for our efforts we leave and feel better, but there is that unsettling small voice when we leave reminding us that this did not do the trick. What ruins us is not on the outside, but on the inside. Despite the prayers and the sermon and singing we are still murderers.  

My students seemed to view this as entirely cynical and hopeless. I let them think that for awhile. I try not to be too directive in guiding their interpretations. After their frustration mounted, I told them that this is the gospel. This is who we are. Murderers. Adulterers. Thieves. Greedy. Covetous. Blasphemous. There will always be murder in our hearts. No communal stab, no sermon, no song will cleanse us. In Christ alone our hope is found.

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