Impudent but not Irreverent: Mary Karr's Less Holy Bible

"The Less Holy Bible" comprises 20 poems set apart from others in Mary Karr's collection Tropic of Squalor (2018). "Less Holy" is what we expect from Karr, whose memoirs of addiction and affairs earned her a reputation for being a "black belt sinner." When she tells The On Being Project that she's "a real church lady" who reads scripture every day, she herself seems a little surprised. These poems, she says, are her personal responses to particular books of the Bible. While she gleefully skewers authorities, ex-lovers, and herself in these poems, she's never less than serious about our potential to cause pain and find grace.

My favorite is called "Revelation," a natural choice for the final book of this bible. Subtitled "A Messenger," the poem begins, "It was anybody's son at the door." Already we have sympathy for the bike messenger in a green slicker who plowed through heavy rain to bring her the contract for a lucrative job. She invites him to step inside while she handles the papers, and we get to know him, his hopes and his obstacles. As he rides off "green wings extended / behind in the wind," she reveals his appropriate name and prays to be "rich again," thinking not of the money but of how this encounter has enriched her. Us, too.

Connecting content to the Biblical names is fun. While psalms in the Bible are words set to music, "Psalms: Carnegie Hall Rush Seats" sets musical ecstasy to words. Obadiah's litany of disasters inspires "Obadiah: A Perfect Mess," about a confluence of pedestrians packing the sidewalk, men moving a piano, and a downpour -- apparent disaster mitigated by kindness. The sorry descendants of David in Kings I and II inspire an imprecation on political shysters that she calls "The Obscenity Prayer," modeled on the Lord's prayer ("And empower our asses / that they destroy those / who ass against us").

Karr is playful even when her subjects are grim. "We live on a scab," Karr writes in the first poem, "Genesis: Animal Planet" about her own genesis in a town settled uneasily over petrochemical toxins and the goo left by prehistoric life. The numbers in "Numbers" are statistics from her hometown's cancer epidemic, blithely ignored by executives whose polluting factory is the cause. "Exodus" recalls the inner voice that told her "run, you little bitch." A neighbor in New York who molests children is subject of a poem she calls "Ecclesiastes," perhaps because she's thinking, as the Bible book says, there is a time to kill. "Hebrews" and "Lamentations" concern Holocaust survivors and 9/11.

The title of one particularly intense poem is a bitter joke. As the names of gospel writers Mark and John are slang terms for "victim" and "sexual predator," Karr gives us "Marks and Johns: The Blessed Mother Complains to the Lord Her God about the Abundance of Brokenness She Receives." When the title gives away so much, who needs the poem? But as the voice of St. Mary recounts the self-harm, scars, and losses suffered by desperate people who kneel at her altar, she has a vision of each one as "a cross my son is nailed to." It's a twist that helps us to see the Crucifixion in a new way.

"I try to see God in everything," Karr told On Being, a practice she carries on in the stand-alone poems of Tropic of Squalor, too. Some concern God's working within a person to break them out of stifling or harmful self-concern. They don't always make it, like the daughter whose parents' love can't keep her from harming herself ("The Burning Girl"). Karr indicts probably her entire readership who live in a "city of I-beams and mirrored towers," heads bent over phones in the line at Whole Foods, oblivious to the whole world's wonders within their reach ("Discomfort Food for the Unwhole"). But there's also Karr's appreciating her difficult father's appetite for life unmediated by literature ("Illiterate Progenitor"). And Karr's memory of playing basketball with fellow inmates of a rehab center includes a miracle from which she takes the inspiration to want to live again ("Loony Bin Basketball").

I'm keeping this Less Holy Bible on the shelf within easy reach of the other one.

• I discuss two more selections from the Less Holy Bible in Poets on Prayer (01/2022)
• I appreciate Karr's collection Sinners Welcome (2006) in Discomfort and Joy (06/2020).
• A piece of Karr's essay relating poetry to prayer kicks off Where Prayer Meets Poetry: the Collect (05/2020), about an Anglican specialty.
• Mary Karr's poem "Etchings from the Plague Years" (1993) was my introduction to her work. My seminar group considered it in a theological reflection. See Vocation and Plague at our class blog, the second half of the article.
• Watch Karr and others in a forum arranged by On Being with the Episcopal National Cathedral

Theology for Breakfast: "Forward Day by Day" May-June-July 2022

Every morning I read the day's meditation on scripture in Forward Day by Day, and I've culled highlights every quarter going back to 2013.

May: Cowboy Gospel Through marriage, Rex Peterson has adopted the life of a cowboy. His meditations borrow from experiences on his wife's ranch in Nebraska, and sometimes play against our notions of home on the range:

• Psalm 28.11 makes him wonder if we're like the sheep who daily experience his tender care, yet flee from him when he approaches.
• To understand the importance of the blood of the covenant in Exodus 24.8, we should experience what it's like to slaughter a lamb; it "makes us squirm" to read about it and it's nothing like the neat white packages of meat we get at the butcher's.
• "Blessed are the righteous" (Mt. 5.6) moves Peterson to question the image of the righteous lone cowboy, as most ranch work is done in teams. Righteousness is not about being right, he tells us, but "working with others so that all succeed."
• A lesson about fertilizer enhances the lines about "lilies of the field" (Mt.6.28), as he demonstrates that "scarce is enough."
• Finally, he gives us the welcome scene of young lambs' first vaccination. It's traumatic for them, but their mothers are there at the end of the process for a joyful reunion. Peterson relates the lambs to the apostles at Ascension Day: "Only when reunited did [the suffering] make sense."

Reading Psalm 38.10, "The brightness of eyes is gone from me," Peterson responds with the story of his son's horrific experience in Iraq. The soldier came back "angry, anxious, a shell of himself." Peterson offers no resolution to this story.

Comforted by the notion that God's forgiveness is based not on earning forgiveness but on being the one who forgives, Peterson asks a question that might illuminate a relationship: Is it harder for you to apologize or to forgive?

June: Silence and Communication Priest Brendan O'Sullivan-Hale, who lives in Indianapolis with his husband and "an undisclosed number of cats," finds a lot to write about on what's expressed, and what's left unexpressed:

• Psalm 56.8 expresses grief such as he felt when his mother died. No one tried to talk him out of it. While he just "went through the motions" of faith, the church "believed on my behalf," he writes, until he could re-connect to our God "so intimately connected with sorrow."
• When reconciliation seems impossible, don't talk about the cause of disagreement, at least not until you've acknowledged that none of us does better than to "see through a glass darkly"
• Between the lines of Compline, the prayer book's bedtime service, O'Sulivan-Hale sees prayers and readings that prepare us for death. The Song of Simeon especially shows gratitude at the end of life.
• Nostalgia for Egypt in Numbers 11.4-5 moves the writer to allow that it's not a bad thing to be "nourished" by good memories while the bad ones "lose their power." He adds, "anticipation" is "nostalgia's productive cousin."
• Why say "I love you" or speak praise to God when it's all been said before? We need to say it to "recalibrate" the relationship to a loved one, and to God.
• The inability to comprehend God is a theme in Job, and Paul admits that he has to use metaphors and analogies "in human terms" to explain God (Romans 6.19). Our writer says, that's what Jesus does for us: beyond words, he expresses our relationship with God in human terms.
• Good advice when worries keep you up at night: Instead of expressing all your worries, pray for all the people you can think of who are up working at the same hour. [I wrote from gratitude for Those Who Work or Watch This Night (01/2020) and a few days later I did indeed create a prayer service for the sleepless, Can't Sleep? Pray This.]

If I one day forget what the time of pandemic was like, this writer gets it on a visceral, personal level in a meditation on Romans 2.1, "In passing judgment on another, you condemn yourself." O'Sullivan-Hale writes that he thinks of himself as non-judgmental, but COVID "unleashed a wave of judgment in my life." For example,

I judged people wearing masks incorrectly at the grocery store. I judged people eating in restaurants. I judged churches that put too little effort into online worship and those that put in too much. I judged people who kept wiping down surfaces constantly even after the science showed surfaces were a low risk for transmission. And I know for a fact people were judging me too. [The] cycle of recriminations is exhausting and emotionally draining. God desires that we choose a different way.

Finally, the writer draws our attention to a detail in Matthew 21.6-7 where there was probably something lost in translation from an ancient prophecy. To prepare Jesus's entry to Jerusalem, disciples put a single blanket over the flanks of both a colt and a donkey. A medieval rendition of the scene has Jesus awkwardly riding side-saddle, and still one of the animals has to be drawn disproportionately small to make it work. So? For O'Sullivan-Hale, the oddness of it unlocks imagination -- I would say, like a good image in poetry -- and brings the Scripture to new life for an open-minded reader.

July: Lectionary Connections Eva Suarez, Associate Rector at St. James in Manhattan, particularly enjoys asking "why is this in the lectionary?" and "why are these readings lumped together?" I, too.

Some passages seem so violent or harsh.

• Citing Psalm 140.10, Suarez writes simply, "Ouch." But if we're going to truly pray for our enemies, she tells us, it's honest to start with any of the numerous passages of Scripture that call on God to smite them down.
• The exclusion of the foolish maidens has given Suarez problems, but she concludes that the problem is not in their failure to plan, but their leaving to get more oil, missing the arrival of the bridegroom. They lack faith in the bounty of the bridegroom and they overestimate the importance of their to-do list.
• Those poor goats in Matthew 25.40 cause Suarez to look beyond the barnyard to the essential truth that the King's sole criterion for inclusion is the flock's compassion.
• Ecclesiastes is a "challenging" book, but one of her favorites, Suarez writes. "It makes a sacred space for our ambivalence and disillusionment -- the kind of feelings we might be ashamed to bring to God in prayer is right there on the page."

Other passages convey something more in juxtaposition.

• "Earth is full of your love" (Psalm 119.64) is paired with Jesus's being spat upon and slapped (Mt. 26). Suarez doesn't buy the idea that Jesus was taking punishment that God would inflict on us, since God teaches us how to forgive those who trespass against us. Rather, she ties the two scriptures together: God "loved us enough [to] go wherever humanity led him...our companion through anything and everything."
• Scriptures of welcoming and acceptance (Ps 50, Rom 15.7, Joshua 9.3-21 Mt. 26.69-75) remind Suarez how to handle panhandlers on the streets of New York: "Give them what they ask for." It's none of our business what they do with our change.
• She points out that the Continental Congress passed a law against praying for the King or Parliament on the same day as it passed the Declaration; but we don't get to congratulate ourselves if we pray for our enemies. It's just what's expected. In the readings set for July 4 (Ps 145, Dt 10.17-21, Heb 11.8-16, Mt. 5.43-48), she sees concern for community, justice, impartiality, love of enemies, care for the sojourner and the widow.
• Relating "I am the vine, you are the branches" to Paul's image of grafting the Gentiles onto the olive vine of Israel, Suarez points out Rahab's name in Jesus's geneology -- a woman, sex-worker, foreigner -- "grafted" into our faith's "family tree."

On St. James Day, Suarez tells how the brothers John and James get a nickname, "Sons of Thunder," for their assertiveness. I'd assumed "Thunder" was a family name, but her reading looks right to me now. She asks a fun and thought-provoking question, "What nickname would Jesus give to you?"