Let me tell you about "Way to Water: A Theopoetics Primer"

* I received the book for free for review purposes from Wipf & Stock.

This is not quite a book review. Nor is it a book report. But I really want to tell you about my experience reading A Way to Water: A Theopoetics Primer by L. Callid Keefe-Perry.

I don’t find it to be a coincidence that I ran across a quote from Toni Morrison this week. In Beloved, she wrote, “Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” This quote, as well as a litany of verses from scripture and hymnody flowed through my head as I read Way to Water: A Theopoetics Primer by L. Callid Keefe-Perry. Morrison’s quote from Beloved came to mind (and while formulating this review) as I was curious about how Callid would define theopoetics. Through Callid’s extensive writing and exploration, I found that theopoetics cannot be limited to a confined prosaic definition. Theopoetics is not something to be hoarded by the academic; it is instead a field that calls for creation and (re)creation within an active community of faith.

And that’s when I head the voice of Jedi master Yoda in my head: “You must unlearn what you have learned” (If you read Way to Water, I hope you hear Yoda’s voice, too. And God’s.). I went to graduate school to study rhetoric and professional communication. I then converted to Christianity from Hinduism. I then went to a non-denominational seminary and a Lutheran seminary to study theology. I then became a parish pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. I would like to think of myself as a learned person, which is why unlearning is a terrifying concept for me. Because of my life experiences, I’m very interested in how people talk about God and contextual theology. But I’ve also used my studies in rhetoric as a binky of sorts; it’s one of the many shields I’ve hid behind in explaining theology to others and relying on the confines of definitions. Heaven forbid we place God in a box, yet I’ve inadvertently done that on many an occasion. But an exciting aspect of unlearning is relearning.

In Way to Water, I was reminded that I’ve been living a half-life of sorts within boxes and confines, and that experiencing God in our lives is something much more than needing an explanation. A reliance on concrete definitions. A reliance on needed tidy answers and conclusions. A delusion of grandeur that as a “theologian in residence” of sorts in a parish, I know more (well, I don’t). That the ways we talk about God can become our own idols and golden calves that we hold near and dear. Through Way to Water, I’m (re)learning that it’s more about exploring the work of a living and resurrected God in the world with others. I had a St. Paul the Apostle moment when scales fell from my eyes (see Acts 9:18-19, “And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored. Then he got up and was baptized, and after taking some food, he regained his strength”) and I could imagine seeing the God-created world differently. Reading this primer has opened my eyes not just to how people talk about God, but taking conversations further in how people share with on another how they experience an experiential God.

As an ordained Lutheran pastor, I deeply resonated with theopoetics being more that just flourishing language to talk about God. In reading Way to Water, I felt in my bones the need to realize that God’s Word is the Living Word, the Word made Flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. It’s lovely and amazing to re-encounter the Living Word in a new area. Christianity is meant to be lived and experienced; otherwise, why would God come to us in the person of Christ if God didn’t want to truly know and live our experiences? Words can communicate, but learning through experience and lived-ness... interwoven with words can be profound.  Way to Water also made me realize that theologians have a particular vocabulary (click here to see what I'm talking about), and that how we communicate our experiences with God and with one another can be exclusive. If we are to share our experiences of God with one another (laity, ordained, seeker, conversation partner...), we must not be afraid to stumble where words might not be able to contain such an experience, because we just might find the words, the expressions, the experience of God alive, and perhaps God anew. Way to Water also brought me back in touch with my experiences with the Living and Loving God and made me excited about hearing and sharing with people on their experiences of God in their lives.

Reading Way to Water led to new discoveries in how I think about experiencing God, inviting conversation about how others experience God, and forming the words of those shared experiences into a holy and communal place. As Callid’s work is a primer, it whets my appetite for more conversation and more dialogue. As an ordained minister who is a woman of color in a predominately white denomination, I would love to see dialogue between theopoetics and the embodiment of race in theology. I appreciate Callid’s emphasis on safe spaces and hospitality in the area of theopoetics, but as a woman of color who’s pretty good at identifying as “other,” I wonder about how invitations are extended? Who extends such invitations? How are spaces deemed as “safe”? Who works to make such spaces “safe”? How can we work with concepts of hospitality, especially in a time when people feel they may be encountering inhospitable environments? As for a fleshy incarnational embodied experience, I also wonder how theopoetics will be in conversation with social media?

After reading Way to Water: A Theopoetics Primer, it feels fitting to have questions on conversation.

Review of Way To Water: A Theopoetics Primer, by Callid Keefe-Perry, is published by Cascade Books. More reviews of this book will be published here, this coming week: http://homebrewedchristianity.com/2015/02/25/theopoetics-book-blog-tour/ 

 

Wilderness

Ash Wednesday was hard.

I had a hard time looking at my Facebook feed, seeing smiling selfies with the imposition of ashes upon many a forehead. Looking at those pictures, I found myself wanting to scream at the computer screen. I wanted to tell my friends and colleagues, "This is absurd! You have the markings of ashes on your forehead, yet you look so damned happy."

Then I had to stop and think, "Okay, Tuhina, what is going on?"

I didn't observe Ash Wednesday this year. Or maybe I did, but not in a traditional setting. I spent most of Ash Wednesday in bed. I wasn't going to church for a multitude of reasons. Some of those reasons were:

• I'm currently about 3,000 miles away from the parish where I serve;
• I was sick due to an overly generous visit from the snot fairy;
• I wasn't prepared to drive a car not familiar to me in the aftermath of an ice storm in the South; yet most of all...
• I wasn't ready to have ashes placed on my forehead and I wasn't ready to hear the words pronounced to me, "For you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

I'll admit, I find myself in a wilderness of sorts. Death lurks around the corner in this wilderness. I vacillate between the cool calmness of logic and the tempest whirlwind of emotion. Logically, I think I understand that my father is dying from cancer. This cancer defies logic, though. This cancer is vicious; the man who was a force to be reckoned with is still incredibly sharp in mind, but cruelly trapped in a body that is failing him. Emotionally... well, my emotions are encased in the shiny silver ball ricocheting all over the pinball machine of the classic five stages of loss and grief. My pastoral colleagues tell me this is normal; if I'm going to be entirely honest, I don't know what normal is anymore.

Ash Wednesday is particularly difficult this year because I'm not ready to hear the words, "For you are dust, and to dust you shall return." I'm not ready to hear those words this Lent because my father wishes to be cremated when he dies. He wishes to truly return to that form of ashes whence we came, from the adamah from which we have been formed. And this year, on Ash Wednesday, to have the imposition of the ashes on my forehead felt too real, too close to my father's mortality, too close to the tactile nature of adamah.

As a Lutheran, I am grateful for the sacraments, especially for their tactile nature. I am grateful for the bread and the wine that are Christ's body and blood, that feed me and sustain me and keep me connected to the body of Christ. I am grateful for the water that has led to my own death and rebirth. But it's the tactile nature of ashes pressed to living skin that I had a hard time with this year. The ashes of my personal Ash Wednesday were not the burned up palm leaves from last year's Palm Sunday. My ashes were instead were the particles of dust flying around as I sorted through the items that accumulated throughout the course of my parents' marriage. This Ash Wednesday, I think I get it.

"For you are dust, and to dust you shall return."