Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

Haiku by Derek Weiss

Miserable eyes -
She sleeps with them half open
and dreams of honour.

At Sevenoaks Mall
Pelvic bones the new cleavage -
not as soft, or warm

We'd never work out
but she's only a picture
so it's ok

The paper people
are always more beautiful
to our dying eyes

Insecurity -
She looks better than TV -
Her insides ignored

I gave up - and found
her gaze - the prize for losing
all my useless games

Do You Like Britney Spears? by Derek Weiss

Do you like Britney Spears?

Don’t you hate her?

She’s such a slut! I hear.

Britney Jeau Spears,
born December 2, 1981,
Kentwood, Louisiana,
Cradled and known
by her mother
Lynne
and her father
Jamie
called Bit-Bit
by her little sister.

mouseketeer

half iconic
the first album cover
legs spread
knees in
little skirt
flirting fun smiles
a child’s satisfaction
in that pleasing, plain face
fifteen?
no one
between her legs
nothing falls here,
between her legs
photoshoped shadows
that precious place, precious

crossroads

dancers ride her
convocation
Jesus loves her
little children
dressed up like her

fashion statement

if sex sells,
what sells sex?
but reproduction.
if sex is
reproduction,
what is reproduced?
but the image.

  (Between the desire and the spasm…
   Between the essence and the decent
   lies the image)

sex her up and reproduce her
tv screens, html, magazines and my hollow mind
hanging upon the beam across the shop a tacked
up picture, not yet ready
to get back to playboy
but maxim’s not heavy
and more exposure
just snap and print
and its already
more ready than we’ll ever be

to see
all this silent skin and sales
frail eyes gilded with mere hope
where they close in on their own lonely stares
where falls the image

without a glimpse through
without a mere look through the tomb
the Spirit beyond
the paper pupils
her beauty

Adam and Eve and Lust by Derek Weiss

This is part of a letter I wrote to a younger friend who asked me for a Biblical definition of lust. I thought it was suitable for publication here because, while there is no end to books written by and for Christian men about lust, very few approach the topic from the perspective of social justice for women. Be aware that it is written by a man for a man, though I am sure women could benefit from reading it and contextualizing it for themselves too. -- In the first chapter of Genesis, we read that God created man, who was surrounded by material things. God had taken time – more time than he needed, five whole days! – to create a world in which Adam could live. And God wanted Adam to “subdue,” or care-for-for-his-own-benefit, these things. (Genesis 1:28) God gives Adam all the vegetation, and tells him to harvest and eat it. (Genesis 1:29-30) God wanted Adam to relate to the material world, to work with it, and to benefit from it. For our purposes, it is important to note that when the story is fleshed out in the second chapter of Genesis, there is a point when God had given Adam the Garden of Eden to tend (2:15), but had not yet created Eve (which happens in 2:21-22). Let’s call this phase in Adam’s life “pre-Eve Adam.” At this point, Adam would have rightly thought that every existing thing existed for himself and for God. As long as he gave glory and time to God, Adam could be essentially selfish. With the exception of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which God had forbidden him to use, he could make use of all of the natural resources of the world. If he wanted to cut down some trees to make a house, he could. If he wanted to milk a cow for milk, he could. He did not have to ask the trees or the cows what they thought: he did not have to relate to them as persons. The only being he had to relate to as a person was God. Now, given the environmental quagmire we humans have put ourselves in, it is important to realize that he was suppose to be a gardener and not an exploiter. He was not given a mandate to destroy the earth, but to develop it for his own benefit and God’s glory. I like how Eugene Peterson paraphrases Genesis 1:28: “God blessed them: ‘Prosper! Reproduce! Fill Earth! Take charge! Be responsible for fish in the sea and birds in the air, for every living thing that moves on the face of Earth.’” We are to be responsible for the earth. I think God will hold us responsible if we choose to destroy it. But that is an aside. Let’s continue with the story. God sees that Adam is alone, and decides that this is not good. (2:18) The Biblical writer goes out of his way to mention in the next couple of verses that the animals were not suitable helpers: Adam needed more. You had asked me to write some thoughts on lust, so here is where these thoughts begin to take flesh. Lust is essentially the denial of God’s first pondered thoughts in this narrative. Lust says, “It is good for man to be alone.” Lust is, at bottom, a choice to be alone, even when in the company of another. Lust is the denial of relationship. But I am getting ahead of myself. God creates woman out of the rib of man. He does not create her out of the ground, as he has created the animals (2:19), but out of Adam himself. Adam realizes this: He exclaims, “Flesh of my flesh!” We can relate to woman differently than we relate to plants and animals because she is a part of us. She is essentially connected to us. She is not an “it” or a “thing.” She is not a plant or animal for us to use. Lust is a denial of God’s gift of woman as companion. Lust treats woman as if she is another plant or animal created for us to subdue. When we lust, we retreat to Adam’s pre-Eve state. We may think when we are looking at or touching a woman lustfully that we are appreciating her. But lust is not a matter of appreciation, but of confusion. We are confusing “woman” (literally “From-Man,” and thus “From-Us”) with “plant and animal.” We are denying the goodness – and fleeing from the risk and hard work – of genuine community. Much has been written on the evils of “consumer culture,” but I think one of its worst manifestations is in how selfish and inward-looking it can make us. Consumer culture would have the consumer, as an individual, serve only him or herself. In so doing, it purveys the lie that I can live as pre-Eve Adam, forgetting the existence of other people except in how they can serve me. But when Eve is created – and she is created in the hearts and minds of young men in playgrounds and classrooms and school dances daily - Adam is drawn outside of himself into community and relationship. Lust is the denial of true relationship and the affirmation of complete solitude. A tragically common example of this denial is the person who fantasizes excessively about sexual partners who live to please and worship the fantasizer alone, while never actually going out and having real relationships. This person needs others, but chooses to cut themselves off from real relationship. This person needs God and others to help them out of their terrible solitude. God was not content to leave Adam alone. He lovingly seeks to provide Adam a “helper.” (2:18,20) The word “helper” there is intriguing. It has been used in the past to justify exploitation of women. But the word is also used in Hebrew Scripture to refer to the way that God “helps” Israel: God is Israel’s “helper.” Implicit in the English word “helper” is a sense of lowliness and servitude, but this is not the case in the Hebrew. Eve was Adam’s helper, and, in many ways, his savior. Adam alone is not good. When Eve was created, Adam was drawn outside of himself, into relationship. When you lust, you choose to treat someone like an object to be used, instead of a person to interact with. An extreme example of this is pornography: you will probably never meet the woman on the page or screen splayed out before you. She is simply an object to you. If you actually knew her as a person – her friendship, warm love, her story and life – or if she were your kin – perhaps your sister, daughter, or wife – you would think very differently about her image. In fact, you probably couldn’t think about it lustfully, because relationship – that great destroyer of lust – would prevent it. But as things are, she is merely an object for you to subdue to your own desires. Martin Buber called this the “I/It” relationship, contrasted with the “I/Thou” relationship of two people who relate to one another well, as Adam and Eve were intended to. A similar thing can happen when you are touching a woman. You forget the relationship – you may forget the person altogether – and desire only to get what you want. Or, you remember the relationship: you touch HER, the one who is a part of you, drawn from you, the one God has given you, made in His own image, who re-minds you of Him – the one you know. You connect with your mouths, and exchange the breath of life that God gave each of you. You share intimately because you know intimately – and are known.

The Image of God in the Face of Longing by Derek Weiss

“We have taught our images to be free ; are we glad?
  are we glad to have brought convenient heresy to Logres?”

-Charles Williams, “Bors to Elayne: on the King’s Coins,” in Taliessin Through Logres

A Christian response to popular culture must touch on the all-pervasive obsession of that culture with images, and particularly with the Image: the Image of God – that is, the image of people. Technology, once the respected servant of necessity but now a slave of desire, has allowed an unprecedented promulgation of images in the forms of advertising /entertainment. People tell fewer stories, but consume more images. Films are considered “sensational” and “mind-blowing” because of special-effects. Newspaper and magazine articles get shorter, while the pictures within get larger.

Yet the one type of image that has grown to dominate others is that type which manipulates the sexual desires of its viewers. Pornography is a source of tremendous damage to Christian men and women, and it is no longer easily avoided: magazine stands feature prominent displays of splayed, air-brushed, nearly-nude women and men. These images lie: the look in the half-open eyes of the woman says, “Come to me, all you who thirst, and I will give you satisfaction. You do not have to work for my love, but will simply have it. I will make you a God.” Yet these images do not produce satisfaction when viewed, but a more deeply consuming desire for more images, or, worse, a desire to be an image of these images: something rather than someone; something other than a child of God: then follows eating disorders and steroid-culture and credit cards maxed-out from spending on “the right look.” We desperately try to shed the Image of God in which we are made in order to be remade in the image of the image of popular culture.

This should concern Christians, for Christianity is, at its Root, about The Image: The Image of the Invisible God, Our Lord Jesus. (Col. 1:15) If Christians claim to follow The Image that is Lord over all other images, and The Image that we ourselves are images of, we must be able to provide thoughtful criticism of popular culture’s use of images, and an alternative.

We can provide better than an alternative: we can point the way to the maker of images, the Image of the infinite and loving God. When Our Lord presented Himself as a human, He re-declared all humans to be essentially good. As the Athanasian Creed states the mystery, Christ is one Christ, “not by conversion of the Godhead into Flesh, but by taking of the Manhood into God.” Our Lord Jesus is the great re-iteration of the very first thing said about humans in scripture: “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness,” and soon after, “God saw everything that He had made, and indeed, it was very good.” (Genesis 1:26; 31a)

What does it mean to be in the image of God? To the original hearers of Genesis, the terms “image” and “idol” were virtually synonymous (cf. 1 Sam. 6; Ez. 7:20; Daniel 2-3). If you wanted to know what the god Baal looked like, you would go to Baal’s temple and look at his image/idol. Likewise, if you want to know what the Lord God of Genesis looks like, look at His image: humans. In other words, when you look at a human being, you are seeing an image, or a likeness, of God. If you want to see what God looks like, look at another person. “Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even to the least of them, you did it to me.” (Mat. 25:40) This is why St. James points out that it is ridiculous and wrong to bless God while cursing those who are made in the likeness of God. (Ja. 3:9)

--

We see in popular culture, saturated with images, a question and a longing: The question is, “Who am I in the image of?” The question is heard in the chinging of the cash registers of a billion-dollar fashion industry, which is mostly shallow imitation. It is heard in the convulsive vomiting and groaning stomachs of the ten percent of women who suffer from eating disorders in North America. It is seen in the empty eyes of thirty-five year old women and men, in the prime of their lives, who feel completely unlovable because of a few extra wrinkles or pounds, or a receding hairline.

Most of these people choose to make themselves in the image of culture. Since the breakdown of the religious worldview in the west and the rise of Postmodern thinking, many have accepted that there is only culture. I exist in reference to culture and nothing more. My image is therefore not worthy of reverence, but should be consumed by others as I consume others. In the terms of Martin Buber, I am not a Thou but an it. I am a cog in the wheel of cultural consumerism: Marilynn Monroe to Madonna to Britney Spears to who? To another product, but not another person. If I can have the physique of him, if I can have a girlfriend who looks and dresses like her, if I can be like them, I will have an image that I know, somewhere deeper and sacred within me, I must have.

But that image is a lie, for that her, the “perfect woman” with the “perfect look,” does not exist. The image of Jessica Simpson spread invitingly on the cover of Maxim Magazine is not the person of Jessica Simpson: Firstly, because the image does not accurately represent what Jessica Simpson looks like (makeup and perhaps mutilation [plastic surgery] beforehand, lighting and positioning techniques during the shoot, and airbrushing and “trimming” later – all meant to offer an object of desire); Secondly, because Jessica would not, in person, look at me that way, and I not at her with my unabashed, lusting gaze. I am not her husband or boyfriend. The only person whom I have the strength to lock eyes with in that way is my own love, and even then it is dangerous. Images, if they do not lead to a truth beyond them, are destructive. That image of Jessica is mere entertainment and only entertainment: Jessica is not entertainment, but a person.

Or is she? The Christian may answer yes, because Jessica is made, like all of us, in the Image of God. In the image of God a person is freed to be themselves, because they are made in the image of one who is beyond culture, beyond mere reference. All long to relate to the Omnipotence, the Infinitely Varied, the God of Ten Trillion Galaxies, who would have them be who they are to Himself; and also to themselves and to others. This is the image redeemed: the image where we find Jesus.

Long-Term Compassion for the Unborn by Derek Weiss

The Governor of South Dakota recently signed a bill which criminalizes the practice of abortions within state borders, except in cases where the mother's very life (and not just her health - a vague distinction) is at risk. Abortions would not be a legal option for victims of rape or incest.

This brings to mind some interesting stories from early church history. Historians have explained the incredible growth experienced by Christianity in the first two centuries in a number of ways. One of the more notable ones is that Christians often adopted babies who were either left by society to die after their parents were killed by plagues, or babies who were left to die of exposure because they were unwanted - an abhorrent though relatively common occurrence in the Roman world. Beyond simply acting as witnesses of God's compassion, these Christians would create huge families as they adopted all these new children. These rescued kids were raised by Christian parents, generally with the help of the whole local Christian community, and became fundamental members of the Christian community that expanded rapidly across the Roman Empire.

Stories like these are used by Christians today to inspire them in their fight against abortion. Rightly so: Christians should take pride in the compassionate work of their spiritual ancestors, people who took on the hard work of child-rearing in their devotion to a God who loved "the least of these." But these stories serve as so much more than just smug reminders that we are on the "right" side of this issue: Besides demanding our service to unborn victims of abortion, they also demand are continued service to "unwanted" children who are born.

South Dakota has one of the most dismal social service records in the United States and, in fact, the Western world. Will the Christians of this State, and of the United States as a whole, step up to adopt and care for the children who are born there because of this law? Their responsibility is not just for the lives of these children while they remain unborn, but for their lives after birth as well. And if Pro-Life groups fight to ban abortions using state intervention, should they also fight to provide government assistance for the (often poor and single) mothers and children who are now forced to have these babies? Of course they should. Our Christian heritage, and our Lord Jesus Himself, call us to no less.

Derek Weiss is on staff at TWU in Langley, BC.