It’s Not Pornography, It’s Just Love
- Tim Merrill -
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Pornography? No! This is, after all, a God honoring blog that just might use the occasional shocking image to get a message across. While it may at first appear that the joyous woman in the center of the photo has forsaken her wardrobe, a closer examination reveals that she is only guilty of being very close to a friend with a generously sized arm. A refreshed view allows us work past the pornographic illusion and witness the love expressed here.Is this the only illusion where love has been mistaken for pornography? Think of how people, including Jesus’ disciples, viewed the Savior as he shared the good news of living waters with the scandalized Samaritan woman at the well. (John 4:1-42)Millennial Practice may require us to look a bit more deeply before arriving at judgment. This could develop a skill in us, allowing for the discovery of God’s love in the midst of living portraits of apparent disgust. Are we willing then to despise shame and reach into the muck and smut of this world and extract precious gems of grace? Can we afford not to?
Admission – I’ve been seen paying a prostitute. As is the practice of many otherwise respectable middle age church attending married men, I have on several occasions reached into my pocket and handed a prostitute a ten or a twenty in exchange for a favor. Although I have felt ill-at-ease when doing this publicly, I have never felt a sense of shame about it; I actually wish Christians did more of this type of thing. My wife knows about these activities and, as you can imagine, she is not comfortable with this sort of thing but she is very understanding and ultimately affirms my actions. And some of you thought you knew me.
OK, before you start calling down heavenly fire down on me, let me explain. The woman in question, who we will call Daphne, has become a very important friend to me. I first met her at the church. I remember the disgust on the older folks’ faces and the frenzy of the children as we made our first encounter. Daphne and her husband/pimp had sought refuge in a covered stairwell which led to the lower level of our church. There they pulled out their kits and started injecting themselves with the liquid cocaine they had stolen from some local medical facility. Their choice of locations may have been wise but their timing was awful. Little did they know that this church used the back door to enter and exit Sunday Worship Service. Little did they know that they had made themselves comfortable right as the benediction was being passionately voiced? Little did they know benedictions, prayers, affirmations and other parts of the sacred liturgy usually wore off by the time most members of this church hit the door. On this Sunday, when the members hit the door and saw the couple, there went the "make you perfect in every good work" part of the benedictory blessing
After comforting the grossed out kids and the angry saints, I made my way to the stairwell. Daphne and her hubby seemed a bit oblivious to the tempest they had stirred; after all, they had one purpose in mind, to escape the pain of being the kind people who would shoot up on church property. Reaching the two, I had little idea of what to say or do. Ministry in Camden prepares you for some of everything but some situations overwhelm strategy, experience and creativity. All I could do was ask permission to pray with the couple. Hubby quickly pushed back against the impending kairos moment by diverting to religion and responding, “I’m a Jehovah’s Witness. I believe that…” I calmly interrupted, “Brother, you're shooting up on the church stairwell. Does your religion really matter right now?” Hubby bowed his head in defeat as Daphne lifted her head in desperation and immediately launched into grotesque candor. She poured out, in tears and sweat, a hideous biography: birth at her mother’s rehab center, abused again and again, teen mom, daughter taken by child welfare, streets, drugs, beatings, more drugs, hubby, prostitution and more drugs. Having become accustomed to the unparalleled lying expertise among addicts, I was neither prepared for Daphne’s shameless honesty nor her humble benedictory cry, “Please pray for us.” Undeterred by the noontime heat or the whispers of outraged church members wafting in the warm breezes behind us, we sat in the shade of the filthy little stairwell and invited God into this mess.
Not only does the little stairwell occasionally serve as a public toilet, it is also a clandestine location from which drug addicts break in and steal quick sale items. I have witnessed the stairwell provide asylum for suburban addicts who hide there after encounters with drug dealers that have taken violent twists. The homeless sometimes find the stairwell to be a great place for a nap or a good night’s rest and others see it as a comfortable spot to simply drink a beer or smoke a Black and Mild in peace. I’ve never been able to put the stairwell’s most haunting application into perspective. There is a tall skinny wide-eyed young redhead who descends into its depths, finding there a safe place to scream. I can only imagine what horrors drive her to the stairwell. She won’t discuss the details; she simply thanks me for allowing her the space to let loose. Strangely, I somehow find more abundance of the scared, the holy, the divine, and the anointing amongst the echoes of her agonizing wails than I have ever experienced in official sanctuary sitting one level above this grimy little sanctuary of the wounded. As far as I’m concerned, this anally situated haven on the city side of the church is where the real preaching takes place – only there, instead of us preaching to them, our community preaches to us.
In the years since that warm spring Sunday afternoon, Daphne and I have enjoyed a relationship of pure honesty. She tells me when she is using and when she is attempting to quit. She lets me know when she is getting beat-up by hubby and when she has beaten him up. She cries when discussing the negligible prospects of getting custody of her daughter. I once asked Daphne, after getting totally sick from taking Oxycodone for a knee injury, “How can you take this stuff?” Daphne matter-of-factly replied, “Yeah, you feel that way the first couple of times you use them but then you get into it.” I limped back into the house and flushed the pills down the toilet. Daphne and I enjoy the evolutionary fruits of symbiosis. Our relationship offers Daphne, through her tears, the healing waters of release and cleansing. These same waters fulfill my yearnings for belonging, authenticity and honest encounters with the Divine – so precious, uncommon and humbling amidst our mediated and hyper-controlled Christian bio-ecology.
When I ask, Daphne tells me the truth. Like most working girls in Camden, Daphne lacks the luxuries of glitzy clothes, garish makeup and stiletto heels for her trade. She just hikes up her skirt or lifts the waistline of her pants to accentuate the curves of her silhouette. On seeing her in this state, already knowing the situation, I ask where she’s going. “Oh, you know, I gotta do like four” is her typical reply. At five dollars apiece, I know she has to bring home $20 for hubby to score some heroin and keep his fist away from her eyes.
I’ve never possessed the evangelistic muscle that I have seen in friends, colleagues and family members. You know, the kind that in moments like these cripples the wayward with conviction and sends them running to the nearest alter of repentance. I don’t think this my gift or calling. I suspect I’ve been modestly equipped to just hang around with people who are doing or about to do dangerous, self-destructive things. Maybe my presence serves as a reminder that God neither blushes, nor does he turn his head in disgust. I’ve learned that such reminders are important for those trying to heal after dehumanizing bouts of self-demolition that seem to breach the farthest parameters of forgiveness. Thus, the only sermon, the only appeal, the only gospel I can offer Daphne on such chilly evenings is to reach into my pocket and proffer a crisp twenty. This sacred offering may not seem a fitting substitute for Daphne’s running to the altar, falling on her knees and confessing her every sin, but at least, for this night, she is spared the inhumanity of what usually occurs while on her knees.
Most of my Christian sisters and brothers seem to describe the anointing as some spirit/emotion/charisma amalgam. They usually connect this to a moment of prayer, song or preaching. While I love spirit, emotion, charisms, prayers, songs and good preaching, the anointing hits me during discomforting episodes. Believe me, when I talk with Daphne and reach into my pocket for a bill or two, I look both ways to see who may be scrutinizing my activities. Forsaking evangelical zeal and bravado, I approach such encounters with hesitation and reservation; I do worry about my reputation and $20 represents nearly 5% of my weekly income. Yet, awkwardly swimming among the testy waters of my aversions and apprehensions eventually transforms me and then thrusts me into vigorous waves of grace, leaving me embarrassingly drenched within floods of humble blessing. Yeah $20 spares Daphne a bruising at the hands of her husband but it goes so much further in healing my festering wounds.
Bebop Lesson: Triune Faith - Tritone Intervals
Though it is the safer of my two relationships with women who have worked the streets, my relationship with Daphne is enough to make one squirm. Squirming seems to be a standard feature of any theology lived among the distorted stanzas of the human song. My friends within the Street Psalms Community have identified such an approach to reflecting on our faith as the practice of Jazz Theology. As a true bebopper would do, I’ve taken the notion a step further and have called it Bebop Theology. I do so because Bebop’s name is derived from chords of pain, specifically the flatted or diminished fifth, which became the core tone of this Jazz genre. Like my relationship with Daphne, the flatted fifth is an awkward offering when served up as a Christian metaphor. The flatted fifth is a triton interval or what the church had designated as diabolus in musica (the devil in music). Not only was its use forbidden in the medieval church, it was also unheard of in popular American musical forms such as swing and the blues. It took the working stiffs, the band members of jazz legends such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Coleman Hawkins and Louis Armstrong to rebel against their masters and form a new expression of the music which would include both its joys and its pains. As jazz historian Piero Scaruffi suggests, innovators such as Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, John Coltrane, Charlie “Bird” Parker, and Dexter Gordon became musical poets and philosophers instead of mere entertainers. He goes on to say these Bebop titans “were former slaves who, once liberated, turned their back to their masters and migrated to distant virgin lands.”
Though it is the safer of my two relationships with women who have worked the streets, my relationship with Daphne is enough to make one squirm. Squirming seems to be a standard feature of any theology lived among the distorted stanzas of the human song. My friends within the Street Psalms Community have identified such an approach to reflecting on our faith as the practice of Jazz Theology. As a true bebopper would do, I’ve taken the notion a step further and have called it Bebop Theology. I do so because Bebop’s name is derived from chords of pain, specifically the flatted or diminished fifth, which became the core tone of this Jazz genre. Like my relationship with Daphne, the flatted fifth is an awkward offering when served up as a Christian metaphor. The flatted fifth is a triton interval or what the church had designated as diabolus in musica (the devil in music). Not only was its use forbidden in the medieval church, it was also unheard of in popular American musical forms such as swing and the blues. It took the working stiffs, the band members of jazz legends such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Coleman Hawkins and Louis Armstrong to rebel against their masters and form a new expression of the music which would include both its joys and its pains. As jazz historian Piero Scaruffi suggests, innovators such as Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, John Coltrane, Charlie “Bird” Parker, and Dexter Gordon became musical poets and philosophers instead of mere entertainers. He goes on to say these Bebop titans “were former slaves who, once liberated, turned their back to their masters and migrated to distant virgin lands.”  |
| Amadi (pictured here at age 7) loves music but isn't feeling the flatted fifth. |
As with Bebop, gospel notes belted out from the context of street-born urban pain often require good measures of abiding patience before listeners may enjoy the resident beauty lodged between dissonant theological intervals. Those deeply ensconced in the cult of tradition, restriction and the insider language of christianese will generally miss or misinterpret such sacred chords and regard such notes as scandalous or even pornographic. Such was the experience of Jesus – scandalized, rebuked and rejected as he liberated disreputable women (John 4, John 8:1-11), a social pariah (Luke 19:1-10) and countless victims of blindness and disease (John 9). Like Bebop, Jesus confronts humanity’s painful notes and weaves them into redemption’s lyric. His lived theology, complete with love of enemies and suffering for and with sinners, is a total rejection of the notion of diabolus in musica. If we assign the notes of pain and discomfort to Satan, then what do we do with the cross - the ultimate symbol of agony and distress. What do we do with the one who suffered there - living, loving and dying with scandalous women, corrupt tax collectors and five dollar prostitutes working Camden’s streets? How do we put his agonizing wails from the cross, the ultimate tritone, into perspective? In the once dead and now living Christ, dwells the affirmation that Daphne’s song, as scary sounding and dis-harmonic as it may initially sound, is nonetheless an essential Kingdom song. It is a tune that must gain resonance within our ears if we are to truly enjoy the transforming melodies of the Divine.
Personally, I feel that the tritone, when sung at length as harmony by a group of meditators, will take singers and listeners to a place where they will be in touch with Divinity. Perhaps this is a reason why it was so threatening in ages past.
Next: My but You've Gotten Fat!
Coming Soon: Reflection and the Rhythms of BeBop
