Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe and Producer Carl Thorpe discuss the connections between literature and faith. They share their love of reading, background in literature, and then discuss some favorite poetry.
Transcript
DDM [00:03]: Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May. And
MET: I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.
DDM: This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.
MET: Carl and I are back with you today and we’re here to share with you a bit of our expertise that we don’t often get to delve into anymore. Today we’re talking about literature and the Bible.
MET: Now, there are whole podcasts devoted to this topic, so we don’t plan on trying to be comprehensive – that would be impossible. But we wanted to talk about a few connections and provide some examples. So before we get into anything really analytical or otherwise smarty-pants sounding, I’d like to talk about how this is personal.
MET [1:13]: Carl and I actually both have degrees in English (the number of books we have in our house is obscene). So, obviously we are readers and have a love for stories, the written word, etc. Let me tell you about my love affair with words.
MET: Oddly, it probably began with my dad. I say oddly because when I was young my dad wasn’t around a lot of the time. He was an oil hand and was out on the rigs a lot in my formative years. But when he WAS home, he read to me. I mean, just about every day. I distinctly remember when I was very young that he read all of Winnie the Pooh by Milne and he would go through a few pages every night. It was really important and special to him. I have no idea how old I was at the time, but it was one of the first books I remember. And I’ve pretty much been reading every since.
MET: I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that I have a pretty active imagination. Carl will tell you that if I am sitting quietly it probably means my mind is going about a million miles a minute. There is always something going on in my head. Reading gave me both something to focus on, and a way to exercise my imagination. And I was intent on it.
MET [2:33]: For example, I hated books with pictures in them. I know young kids are always trying to get out of doing real reading by trying to find books with as many pictures as possible, but I sought out the chapter books that eschewed illustrations – because I did not want things sullied by what somebody ELSE thought the story looked like. If I was reading something I was imagining in my head what the people and places looked like. I had their voices pitched in my head. I had given them accents appropriate for their station or location. I had a world based on this narrative. The last thing I wanted was for some other dingbat to come along and try to tell me what things looked like because I ALREADY KNEW. I did not want somebody else’s notions of what a story looked like because I had that taken care of. I was a relatively reserved kid, and bookish, and didn’t like kids books and didn’t want pictures. I think a lot of adults thought I lacked imagination. But the reality was that I was immersed in it.
MET: So I grew up inhaling novels, short stories, whatever. And I got so far ahead of my peers. I groaned at everything we read in school because I thought it lacked substance. So, once again, my dad took things into his own hands.
MET [4:00]: When I was in 6th or 7th grade, my dad realized I was about to give up on my English classes. I loved reading, but school was just awful. So, he gave me something that probably changed my life – a literature textbook. I think it was meant for seniors in high school or freshman in college. It was a very basic collection of British lit covering all eras, so there was really no focus, and an actual expert would have rolled their eyes, but I was entranced. I read it from cover to cover. It had poetry in it like I had never read. It had stories in it like I had never come across. That book, as much as anything else in my life, set the course for my academic career. I just had no idea you could do those things with words. And I had no idea there was such a rich history of story-telling and craft. I probably became a literary scholar with that book.
MET: I learned to read and analyze that way. I learned to understand things through this process. I knew how to make sense of a text well before any of my peers, and by the time I was in high school everyone knew that if you had questions about a literary text, I was the person to ask.
MET [5:18]: In high school I was a stand out in the performing arts and I had a reputation for just GETTING reading and writing. Everyone knew I could act. Everyone knew I could sing. And everyone knew that there was no way I was going to be valedictorian, but the valedictorian came to me for help in English. So, when I was on my way to college, and I mean literally driving there, to move in, I was planning on majoring in theater and minoring in music. Everyone thought I was going to be the next big thing on Broadway. And here is where it’s both a little sad, but also maybe a little serendipitous because it led me to the success I have today – my lack of self-confidence got in the way. I was afraid I wasn’t pretty enough to make it on stage. And I was afraid I would never be a good enough dancer to make it in the chorus. So, I literally gave up on my theater dreams right there in the car, and decided to focus on the other thing I loved – literature. When I got to college, I signed up to major in English. That set me on an intellectual path that eventually got me here
CRT [6:31]: I was a voracious reader as well when I was a kid. Both of my parents and my sister were readers, so there were always books in every room of our homes. I wasn’t as worried about pictures in my books as you were (and I’m sure you won’t discount such magnificent illustrations in children’s books as the scene where Chester tries to drive a steak through Bunnicula’s heart). Like you, I found much of what we read in school to be drivel until I got into AP English classes in high school. I did have the advantage of a parent, my Mom, with two English degrees that regularly engaged with me on the books I was reading. She read the books I read for AP and we discussed literature regularly.
MET: Before we get into a lot of lit, like what you’re talking about, we should explain just how different our literature backgrounds are. I studied lit at a very conservative, very religious school. There was 100% an agenda there. And, to be frank, I did not get a very good literature education. There were a few classes here and there that were standouts – I’ll mention one or two in a bit – but it was not great. I hardly learned anything modern. I didn’t learn ANY theory at all. I mean NONE. Which maybe doesn’t sound like a big deal but I was SO behind when I went to grad school. It’s a miracle I came out in one piece. And what I did learn was just bad or wrong a lot of the time.
MET: I remember a roommate who was also taking a lot of lit classes walking into our house one day after a few English classes and throwing her books on the ground and proclaiming loudly, “Not EVERY character is a Christ figure!!!” My professors forced a Christian interpretation on a lot of things where it was inappropriate.I remember one day in class where a professor had us read a poem by e.e. cummings. I don’t know how much you know about cummings, but he’s a modern guy, and isn’t scared of taking risks. This poem is about sex. I mean, it’s about a car, but it is 100% about sex. And it is graphic. You would either have to not know how to read or live in a bubble with no contact with the outside world to miss the fact that this poem is about sex. And my professor stood in front of an entire class of seniors and acted scandalized because we had suggested it was sexual because, according to him, it was obviously about a man proposing to a woman.
MET [9:14]: Let me tell you something – this is an important lesson about art: all those well-meaning lit and art teachers who told you art can mean anything you want it to were lying to you to make you feel better about not knowing what the heck you were talking about. Art does NOT mean anything you want it to. Art can be interpreted in any number of ways; but that does not mean all interpretations are valid. Sometimes you can be flat-out wrong.If you read 1984 and then tell me it’s about how the government should invest in more surveillance programs you are, in fact, dead wrong. This is a major failing of education. If we were teaching students to understand texts, the world, ANYTHING, which teach you that there are only one or two answers,we’d have jettisoned standardized testing ages ago, and we would have fired all the hippies who wanted everybody to feel good about themselves who went the other way and said, all answers are valid. These are equally nonsensical positions. The world is complex and nuanced. If you want to understand it, you have to think that way, too. Which means there can be a lot of right answers, some will be better than others, and you can always be wrong. The question isn’t, what is the right answer? The question is what does the evidence indicate? Making sure you can’t answer those questions is a way of keeping you unable to challenge power. If you stay docile and unable to analyze a problem you can’t figure your way out of a situation. As long as we aren’t able to think through things, we are not a threat to those with money or political clout. So don’t tell me your humanities classes don’t matter.
MET: Which brings me back to this English professor. And this prof was dead wrong about e.e. Cummings. There was no textual evidence for his claims. I got a lot of that at my school. When I got to grad school I understood literature pretty much by sheer force of will.
CRT [11:29]: Like you, I didn’t head to college expecting to major in English, though I took a bit longer to realize where I needed to be. I started out as a computer engineering major. Unfortunately, engineers really ought to understand things like math and physics and more math. Those were not my strong points. So at the end of my first, abysmal semester at Texas A&M University, I decided to take a bunch of non-engineering core courses, intending to figure out some other major. None of those classes were English classes, as I already had the basic English credits due to AP exams in highschool. But I took two sociology courses, a journalism course, political science, and philosophy. And it was amazing. It was clear that I needed to be working with words, not numbers.
CRT: Nearing the end of that second semester, I was certain that I was going to major in sociology. I went to my advisor to start the process of changing, but at the last minute, I chose English. I honestly can’t remember why. It might have been that at the time I thought teaching might be where I was heading career wise, and it seemed much more likely that I would be able to get a job teaching English than sociology. Maybe it was the voice of my Mom in my head who got two degrees in English. But for whatever reason, I ended up switching over to English.
CRT: Unlike Elizabeth, I was in a program with an extremely diverse faculty that were not bound by the University to teach a certain worldview. As an example of the type of course that I had access to in my program that Elizabeth did not was a undergrad/grad bridge course in feminist theory.
CRT [13:03]: My primary interest in literature was post modern literature. The basic premise of postmodern anything is a profound skepticism and abandonment of grand, overarching narratives made up of capital T truths that can explain the world. Truth, in postmodern literature, is relativistic, and the truths we choose to believe are more often created by power structures rather than objective facts.
CRT: When I was studying literature as an undergrad, I was an outspoken atheist. I saw many connections in the texts that we read with the faith that I had been a part of when I was younger, but it wasn’t personal to me. I assume that meant that I was approaching literature from a very different angle than you were, Elizabeth. How would you say your faith and literature connected in your mind?
MET: The question of how my love of literature and my faith life connects is pretty simple actually – but as I got older and started to think in a more adult fashion about that connection, it took on a more mature pallour. I’ll explain. There are a few things I love about lit – the story, the meaning, and the quality and interplay of the language and text, that kind of thing.
MET [14:18]: When I was young, my family was insistent that I knew the stories of the Bible. To a weird extent. I mean, I didn’t just go to Sunday School, I went to Bible Study, Mission Friends, I read my Bible all the time, and my family gave me Bible stories on tape to listen to. But we didn’t talk about them a lot. I was just kind of left to my own devices to figure out why they were important or what they meant. So I learned really early on that the Bible was full of complex, contradictory, and REALLY wild, supernatural, and dramatic stories. So it wasn’t hard for me to think of the Bible as a book with a lot of good stories in it. And that appealed to me.
MET: Meaning was important. As early as 11 or 12 I learned that texts have many meanings. And because I had figured out that the Bible was a text, I put it together in my head that the Bible could possibly be interpreted in more than one way. And I thought that was FASCINATING. I also realized very quickly that had major implications for the arguments that I did not understand but I knew were going on out there in the religious world. Instead of turning me off, that made me want to know more. I wanted to figure out what this text was, what were its many meanings, and what they meant to people.
MET [15:42] And as for the language – my interest there is probably what should have indicated where my intellectual life was headed as much as anything else. I had heard sermons before on what words means in Greek or Hebrew or whatever and what that meant for the Bible or for the people of the day…and it was almost always in service to a particular ideology, which I didn’t necessarily pick up on, but I DID recognize that this meant language mattered. I realized that there was slippage around these words. I remember someone in my youth group lecturing me on why I should only read the King James Bible because the language is so much more beautiful, and I remember thinking, but not saying, if you are reading the Bible for pretty language as opposed to historical language or contextual language you’re going to get a very different Bible. These were not welcome additions to my Southern Baptist Youth Group retreat share circle conversations. So before I even knew what any of this meant, I had an appreciation of the Bible AS literature. I liked it as a book. I mean, yes, it was holy scripture. But I also just kind of thought it was an interesting read.
MET: When I grew up and learned more, I actually figured out I was way more right than I knew. For example – The Psalms are lovely. But we too often don’t think about what they are. They are songs or poems. If we think about them just as essays or monologues we don’t really get what’s going on. The Psalms aren’t just a guy writing down his thoughts. They are art. The Song of Solomon is pretty much erotica. Right there in the middle of the Bible. And it generally gets skipped because of that. But the Bible includes a whole dirty book. What are we supposed to do with that information in context with the rest of the Bible? There are two creation stories. They don’t match. How are we supposed to read a Bible that literally can’t get its stories straight unless we acknowledge that the operative word is “story?”
MET [17:59]: And then in college I took a life-changing class that made the connection in the opposite direction. I took a class on religion in literature. It was maybe one of my favorite classes ever. I think if the professor and I had ever sat down and talked about policy in any way about any thing we might have been at each other’s throats. But it was a great class.
MET: We read literature with religious themes. We started the class reading very old hymns as poetry, and then read ancient Christian poems, and worked our way up through major writers who had included religion in their writing as a major theme. I was introduced to Flannery O’Connor in that class. That rocked my world. I actually named a dog Flannery. Flannery O’Connor was problematic in about a thousand different ways, but between her novel Wise Blood and her short story Parker’s Back I was pretty sure she had uncovered the mysteries of the Bible Belt. So all my life I saw a connection between literature and religion. Even if I couldn’t articulate it always, it was a part of my thinking.
CRT [19:10]: As I said, I don’t really have a lot to say as far as connections between my faith and my background in literature, but I guess my love of postmodern literature definitely led me to a more universalist view of religion. All roads leading up the same mountain. Stuff like that. Isn’t it more limiting of God to insist that he revealed themself to all people the same way than it is to allow them to appear to people in different ways throughout time and place? I once heard a priest talking about alien life in the cosmos and whether or not Jesus would have visited them. He found that question a bit silly, because in his mind aliens wouldn’t necessarily need a savior, and if they did, God would take the form of them to do it, just as Jesus came in the form of a human.
MET: Well, I’m definitely interested in Jesus’s humanity.
MET: It doesn’t do a lot of good to talk about these things without getting into specifics, so I’m going to talk about some poetry. Now, understand I could talk about this for hours. I am ready right now to tell you about the Dream of the Rood or religious themes in Gawain or if you want to talk about prose I am prepared to have a multi-session discussion on Flannery O’Connor or John Steinbeck. We could make this happen. But, I say as Carl’s eyes get big and he shakes his head at me, I will not do that to any of us. I am actually going to use an example from John Donne and James Weldon Johnson.
MET [20:46]: John Donne wrote poetry during the Elizabethan Age and was what you would call a metaphysical poet. His works are noted for their metaphorical and sensual style. He is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, and ironies. These features were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of English society. Another important theme in Donne’s poetry is the idea of true religion, something that he spent much time considering and about which he often theorised.
MET: What Donne is particularly famous for among budding lit scholars outside of all that mumbo jumbo, though, is his strange poetic juxtaposition in his writing. And by that I mean, he is basically known for two things: very spiritual poems about how loving and great God is and how much we need him, and incredibly dirty poems that you would have been embarrassed to read in your intro to lit class.
MET:This is beyond a Song of Solomon situation. Donne’s poems are basically erotica. Which lit students find delightful when compared to his incredibly virtuous and holy works, So I thought we’d take a look at something he did and see if we could locate the spiritual.
MET [22:19]: I’m going to tell you about a weird little poem Donne wrote called “The Flea.”
MET: “The Flea” is, in it’s most straightforward interpretation, a man trying to convince a woman to have pre-marital sex with him. He uses the insignificant flea as a metaphor – if a flea bites him, and then bites, her, then their blood has mingled in that flea’s body. Their bodies are already unified, and it was no sin. So this next step wouldn’t be, either.
MET: The flea, he says, is their marriage bed. He also says it is three lives in one – the woo-er, the woman, and the flea. This is a point where Donne moves the poem from just the physical to the spiritual – three spirits in one is a reference to the Trinity, and comparing their marriage bed (or the flea) to something as holy as the Trinity moves the seduction away from something sinful into something sacrosanct. So, when the woman kills the flea with her nail, Donne (or whoever is dictating the poem) is rebuffed. Killing the flea is a rejection of the seduction – she has killed the supposed “marriage bed,” she knew was not one, but was just his manipulation. So Donne actually gives the woman in this poem a bit more agency, a bit more personality than a lot of women had in things like chivalric literature.
MET; That is a very short synopsis of a complicated poem, but I wanted to highlight a few things:
MET [23:59]: This was the time of Queen Elizabeth. And people my parents and grandparents age love to tell us how in the old days things were so much more wholesome but that is absolutely untrue. This is back in the 1600s and Donne, who was a priest, is talking about how to most effectively seduce a woman into premarital sex. And this was widely read poetry.
MET: There has never been a time when things were more wholesome. We have always been obsessed with sex and drugs. We have always been a people who want to have sex and get intoxicated. We want to feel good and make bad decisions. It is who we are as a species. And anyone who tells you “not in my day” is either lying or has such selective memory that they are not worth arguing with. Don’t believe me? Read Shakespeare. Read Greek mythology. Read literally anything.
MET: The reason I say this is because Donne takes this idea and juxtaposes that with the holy. Throughout Donne’s work he says, “Okay, we’re physically bound andsexually obsessed creatures – how does that connect us to God?” And I can’t think of a more interesting question to explore in art. And one that could span the ages.
MET [25:24]: The other poet I want to tell you about is James Weldon Johnson.He was an American writer and civil rights activist. Johnson was a leader of the NAACP, where he started working in 1917. Johnson established his reputation as a writer, and was known during the Harlem Renaissance for his poems, novels, and anthologies, collecting both poems and spirituals of Black culture. He wrote the lyrics for “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, which later became known as the Black National Anthem, the music being written by his younger brother, composer J. Rosamond Johnson. In 1934, he was the first African American professor to be hired at New York University. Later in life, he was a professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University, a historically Black university. In recognition of his scholarship and impact, New York University established the James Weldon Johnson Professorship in 2020.
MET: Those of you who took American lit courses (and I realize this might be way out of the experience of some of our international listeners) will remember that the Harlem Renaissance was a time of real rejuvenation in Black culture and arts. It wasn’t just that more Black people were involved in the arts, it was that Blackness was being infused into the arts.
MET [26:51]: And that’s why I wanted to talk about Johson’s poem “The Creation.” I first came across this poem at a speech tournament When I was young my dad taught speech at high school for a few years, and when one of his students couldn’t make it, I often got roped in to sub in for a random event here and there as a junior high student. One of the events that is common is poetry recitation – you memorize a poem and recite it dramatically. A young woman that was at a tournament I subbed at recited this poem “The Creation” and I was just blown away. I couldn’t have told you why, but I wrestled with this poem for years after that.
MET: Johnson tells the story of the creation in Genesis. It’s not a wild departure in any way – you know what’s coming next at every turn. But what Johnson does is different in that he tells the story in the tradition of Black story telling. When God looks over his creation, he simply says, “That’s good.” That simple phrase, “That’s good,” hit me like a ton of bricks. My God had always said, “It is good,” or “It is finished,” or something so weird in syntax or strangely phrased that it was supposed to sound churchy, I guess, but in this poem God simply says, “That’s good.” And the idea of a God who can just look at something and say, “Yeah. Pretty good,” filled me with such joy and hope that I didn’t know what to do with it. This was a God who got me.
MET: And the God of Johnson’s poem was so relatable. Johnson’s poem starts out with God sitting there and saying, “I’m lonely – I’ll make me a world.” I get that. That was me as a kid. We were all lonely children who made up worlds for ourselves. We understand this God’s motivation. And when God makes a man, the imagery Johnson uses isn’t a thunderous creator, but that of a mammy leaning over a child. This is a tender God. A God that cares for his creation. Johnson’s poem isn’t amazing because of it’s creative content – the story in Genesis isn’t new.It is amazing because it tells the story in a new but faithful voice
CRT [29:25]: I want to talk about a contemporary poet named Jay Hulme. H-U-L-M-E. And I’m going to ask Elizabeth to read these poems and then I’ll talk about them. I want to start with a poem that goes along with the poem Elizabeth was just talking about.
MET:
God as a Carpenter; hands shot through with nails In that moment, perhaps, He remembered the things He’d created, In thirty years Of hammer striking wood. And in His pain He thought Of all Creation As good enough; Still good.
CRT: Jay Hulme is a transgender man who found God just before the Covid-19 pandemic began, having been an atheist since birth. Much of his poetry since 2020 has been about his journey as a queer Christian in a changing, often hostile world. Like his imagining of God on the cross in the poem Elizabeth just read, Hulme looks at the world as something that is still good, even as his very identity makes people revile him.
CRT: Many of his poems have direct analogues in the Bible. For example, in Matthew and Mark, we find the story of the woman who was hemorrhaging who touched the hem of Jesus’ cloak in the faith that she would be healed. Jesus notices and tells her that her faith has healed her. Hulme writes his version as this:
MET:
Jesus at the Gay Bar He's here in the midst of it — right at the centre of the dance floor, robes hitched up to His knees to make it easy to spin. At some point in the evening a boy will touch the hem of His robe and beg to be healed, beg to be anything other than this; and He will reach His arms out, sweat-damp, and weary from dance. He'll cup the boy's face in His hand and say, my beautiful child there is nothing in this heart of yours that ever needs to be healed.
CRT [31:39]: This is, perhaps, the first time one has encountered the idea of Jesus being at a gay bar. For many Christians, that is the last place they would expect to find him. And if he is there, for many believers, he would be there to drive the people out like he did in the temple with the money changers, but no, here he is dancing. Like the woman in the Bible, a boy touches the hem of his robe in hopes of being healed.. To be something other than “this.” In the Bible, Jesus tells the woman that her faith has healed her, but people at that time would have seen the fact that she even touched him as a huge transgression of Jewish purity laws. She was likely suffering from years of menstrual bleeding, and purity laws dictated that she not touch anyone, least of all an unrelated man. She was unclean. Jesus doesn’t chastise her for that. He doesn’t even forgive her for touching him, which the law says would have made him unclean as well. Similarly, Jesus doesn’t chastise the boy for touching him, but here we see a change. Jesus tells the boy that there is nothing in him that needs to be healed. Jesus tells him that he is already whole, and Jesus sees no need to “forgive” the boy for anything. Hulme once again references the Bible in his poem “Like Thomas”
MET:
Like Thomas I have been building myself out of scraps of shattered dreams; God hands me flour and water, says: I know what it's like. The surgeons say I have only to count backwards from ten and when I wake I will be reborn. And reborn I touch my own body for the first time; incredulous at the miracle right before my eyes.
CRT: Here, Hulme touches the scars on his own body from gender affirming surgery as proof of his own rebirth or resurrection, just as Thomas touched the scars on Jesus’ body.
CRT [33:44]: In addition to Hulme’s grappling with faith and identity in his poetry post conversion, Hulme’s earlier work is at times in conversation with faith, though it very often is unpleasant From “Broadmead”
MET:
They told me I was Satan Those side street preachers With gospel grin
CRT: From “I Am a Man” when talking about leaving home after coming out
MET:
Pitchforks raised to chase away the man I have become I left them, on a hurricane Tuesday When the weather broke against me Like the wrath of a God Others told me existed.
CRT: I wonder how one is able to even imagine a loving God when your identity is supposedly an abomination and the cause of your own family denying you. In Hulme’s case, I think it is because of his command of words and language that he was able to find a place on the margins for himself and others like him in Biblical narratives that are supposed to be settled, capital T truths.
MET [34:53]: Okay – I have loved getting to talk about some things near and dear to me – literature is never far from my heart. And I have loved getting to do that with Carl. We hope we have given you something to think about and maybe inspired you to do a bit of reading. Rev. Deborah will be back soon, and we have some good things planned. Carl and I have loved experimenting with you over the summer. It’s good to know we can try a variety of approaches.
MET: Thank you for listening to The Priest and the Prophet. find us at our website, priestandprof.org.
MET: If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast at priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at priestandprof.org slash donate. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.
DDM: Music by Audionautix.com
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