An Open-Letter to the Poco Prof par Excellance

Dear Professor Rivera:

I've been haunted by my words in class yesterday: "I wish president bush thought g*d was omnipotent."

The truth is: I think president bush probably plays lots of lip-service to g*d's omnipotence: G*d...the ultimate supreme container for all power on earth and in heaven. And it is the rhetorical nature of this lip-service that I wonder about.

It seems to me that g*d's omnipotence is (usually) used for two reasons: 1) to deny creaturely agency and thereby duck responsibility for creaturely decision-making & the consequences thereof 2) to deny creaturely agency and thereby encourage creatures to remain complacent (and thereby complicit) with life/structures as they are. In my working context, I often hear the latter. Lots of women have been told to hold on, to wait for the glory of god to reveal itself to them, when they could be going to therapy, entering into healing circles and healing wounds. In the political context I hear the former. G*d intended Sept 11; therefore the US is/was intended to occupy/enslave the nations assummed to have perpetrated the 'terrorist acts.' No colonial agenda; just divine justice.

What would it mean for pres bush to believe, I mean really believe, that g*d had ALL power and agency? Would he continue to extract, demand and pollute and conceive of it as divine mission? Or would he put down his agenda of mass destruction and wait for the lord to reveal himself? Either way, a sense of participation (either by receiving revelation, or embodying the missio dei) is implicit. Hasn't omnipotence run its course? if by omnipotence we mean power and by power we mean the full capacity to make things happen???

I was pissed off in class yesterday and I'm afraid, because of the anger I feel/hear/experience in my body, that I disrupted and postured in unhealthy ways. I am sorry for that. No one was even arguing FOR omnipotent theology! The voices that have trumpeted omnipotence theology in my/the past were rapists, consumers of the most cruel content, genuinely abusive/selfish human beings (though of course that's not all they were/are). It's hard to separate the "concept" from the living damage caused in and through the concept. And yet, I am highly aware that reliance upon God's power has pulled more than one body/community through trials and tribulations. Sometimes I think my frustration is just the fear of loss that I know comes when G*d-talk/G*d-thought comes out of the closet in complex clothing: never pure, never clean, just dressed up in all kinds of costumes for different celebrations/pilgrimages/funerals. Sometimes I want G*d to come out looking just like me, but then I remember, I need grace in here that I cannot get without the "there" there.

Thank you for your class. I am stretching and growing because of it/us/you.
Love,
Emily Joye

Fierce

Thanksgiving Alphabet

Air to breathe
Beloved: the book and the One
Coffee in the morning
Denial when it saves you
Emptying the garbage
Finding new friends
Glenda Hope
Hermeneutical horizons
Inching closer to graduation
Jessica Petrone
Kissing Lincoln over and over (when he lets me)
Lesbians
Mom
Natural highs and natural byes
Oakland
Peace Particles and PSR
Quality films
Red blood
SafeHouse
Theology talks with theology types
Unlocking the hard places
Virtue ethics
Wonder
Xoxoxox
Yearning by bell hooks
Zap Mama

Bearing the Cross?

Read this report by the National Labor Committee...

www.nlcnet.org/article.php?id=479

Just another example, not to be exploited but witnessed, of how symbols are contextually constricted. One person's resurrection sign is another person's sign of torture and exploitation. I am working on this in my head (academia) and heart (faith communities), but I must say, it's articles/reports like this that make me put my head down in shame of what christianity can/has become.

Untitled

I wanted to say something to you
but then i realized you weren't you anymore,
not in the way I always framed you being before,
so instead I opted for silence
and learned a whole lot more in the process of registration.
Sounds broke through, still.
The thing I wanted to say remained
except the materiality of it changed.
As a consequence
our bodies moved closer and further away,
the desires and fears we used to classify as "yours" and "mine"
somehow got murky,
and the 'irreducible ambivalence' of this corporeal existence--
with all its dangers and elixirs--
began to fly in our faces.

4 Proclamations

A couple things I feel like proclaiming to the world right now:

1. Rain began to fall from the sky around 2pm. I was tapping my keyboard, writing a paper for Professor Mary Tolbert, and looked out the window right in time to see the pavement slowly change color as it got drenched. Holy moment.

2. I am obsessed with a song on Bruce Springsteen's new album Magic. The song is actually a hidden track after "Devils' Arcade." This song strangely captures my theology (in a nutshell). Perhaps Christianity's greatest historical gift is this lesson: a person can be remembered. She broke the mold with that brother, in-deed.
***Other artists in season/on my playlist right now: Thelonius Monk, Astor Piazzolla, Alicia Keys, Anonymous 4, Beethoven, Coldplay, Yann Tiersen (as always), Common and Norah Jones.

3. Wade has been gone for 3 months because he is doing a CPE internship in Palo Alto. When he drinks lattes, he text messages (is that a verb now?) me to tell me about it. When I imagine him kneeling before his patients/clients/friends at the VA, in the way he kneeled before me during a foot washing ritual 2 years ago, I thank God. This is how friendship is done.

4. Bodies first. Bodies matter.

Martha

Blueish grey sweater sits beneath a black scarf
that swirls and twirls around her neck
almost as beautifully as the veins circulate
the top of her hands.
I have missed those hands, the way they
illustrate her point and make fists that illustrate
her fierce force--a living, breathing, sometimes suffering
force that refuses to look away, that refuses to look too long.
She sees me.
She always has.
I see a horizon in her, something way way beyond here,
yet obtainable somehow, just not now. Her spontaneous, self-effacing
laughter and southern accent crystallize in my consciousness, lure me
out of the scared places into the spacious places. The spacious places.
Honesty there, with her, in her.
Such dignity and grace, in that one body, on that one face.
Her gaze is a spacious place.
She sees me.

War

On the corner of arrow highway and central avenue,
the words of Audre Lorde ring in my ears
as I look upon the latest cosmetic surgery offering
on a billboard, propped for all to see:

vaginal rejuvenation surgery.

Get that pussy tight, at your local docs office,
where the docs tightening that pussy are women too.
The gaze is no longer "male."
The gaze is only interested in what's for sale.

Don't buy it.

The women are walking

to work, in shoes they bought
this past weekend, at the store
on the infamous boulevard/platform
of the aristocracy, knowing the click of their
heels sounds more like the victory ring of a cash
register than something (not) seen in their eyes.

The women are walking

on sidewalks in their neighborhoods
where they peer into the windows of
houses not their own, where families
not their own look different and somehow
the same.

The women are walking

in the morning, trying to lose the baby fat
they accumulated last year that their husbands
can’t help but comment on even though they
know it’s “messed up.”

The women are walking

too close to the charcoal colored pavement, also known
as the street, in hope that a drunk
driver will lose control and side swipe them, which
everyone would say “was such a tragic accident,” which
appears much easier for people to live with than
the curiosities post-suicide(s).

The women are walking

with headphones on so they can hear a chorus line
or simple ballad that makes more sense than
the morning headlines (sitting there, back on the coffee
table at home just waiting to depress the hell out of anyone
and everyone).

The women are walking

on hiking trails in the forest, instead of aisles in church
because g*d in the trees and on the moss is more accessible
these days than God at the altar, in the cup and bread, or living
vicariously through some middle age priest who fucks women
half his age while preaching grace.

The women are walking

in the downtowns, with signs in their hands that display
the word “NO!” all over them: no to war, no to reproductive
regulation, no to companies that deny a living wage, no to rape,
no to environmental degradation.

The women are walking

into the arms of each other, because there’s nowhere else
to go, nor would they want to go anywhere else because
these arms hold the whole world up while the sky is falling.

The women are walking

a way.

Love In Color

I recognize:

strands of hair,
a baby grand that sits on the south side,
marble walls with diamond tiles,
a woman in the portrait that hangs next to the clock,
husband's jacket slumped over the dining room chair,
the eyes of her, that peer at me, allways, even if only in my head,
a semi crumpled lunch bag, on the counter, in the kitchen,
the skirts and blouses, the earrings and eyebrow toners,
sun spots on her hands, more wrinkled now than before,
dead leaves, layering the sidewalk on Lee Avenue,
leather seats in an Acura on highways too long from home,
picture frames
framed pictures
thick, desiring soil, in the back yard where she plays,
the afghan throw, on the couch, pleated gold,
my prayer beads, both aesthetic and pragmatic,
layers behind and beneath the blonde,
the time keeper that tocks and ticks, on the west side and in my secret spots,
book shelves covering the white-washed walls, in berkeley, in Cofoid,
sweaters, holding me when she is not (t)here

all these things

my mother's brown