Chatting with Debbie Blue 6 comments

By Peggy Rosenthal

Debbie Blue’s startling, engaging sermons in the current issue of Image (#61) invite a response, a conversation. I mean, when you read something like “The first thing the first humans do, after they’ve been banished from the Garden of Eden, is make a baby.... The baby is born, it breathes, it kills” or “There could hardly be anything more shocking than the doctrine of the incarnation,” you don’t just sit passively or doze off. You jump up to chime in “wow, yes and...” or “whew, okay but....”

So this post is my chiming in, my chatting with Debbie’s sermons. To that first quote above, I chime in with a verse from Lucille Clifton’s poem-sequence “some jesus” (in Good Woman). The verse is called “cain” (yes, no caps in Clifton):

the land of nod
is a desert
on my head   i
plant tears
every morning
my brother
don’t rise up

Debbie talks about Cain being banished by God to a wandering, fugitive life (Gen. 4:16), and Clifton concurs in the importance of this detail: “Nod,” the land to which Cain has been banished, means “wandering.” But neither Debbie nor Clifton banish Cain from their hearts; both urge their imaginations to get compassionately inside the being of this murderer. In Clifton’s stanza, what’s beautifully heartbreaking is that lonely little “i” at the end of the line. Hanging there helplessly, it becomes an image for the isolation that Cain has brought on himself by his violence.

And this violence—Clifton and Debbie both imply—is humankind’s first sin. They share a radical re-reading of the Genesis story: sin entered the world not with Adam and Eve’s disobedience but with Cain’s murder of his brother. All I can say to this is a mournful Amen. Isn’t the violence we all carry within us our truly original sin? How can one watch the daily news and not sadly concur? “i / plant tears / every morning / my brother / don’t rise up.”

Which segues to the other line of Debbie’s sermons that I quoted at the start of this post: “There could hardly be anything more shocking than the doctrine of the incarnation.” That God would join the likes of Cain—the likes of us all—in our very flesh is indeed “shocking.” Our Muslim and Jewish sisters and brothers are understandably “shocked” by the incarnation; and if we Christians aren’t, it’s because we’re not paying attention.

Debbie helps us attend. She goes on to draw out the implications of Jesus’ fleshliness in explicit, fleshy detail. When Jesus breathes on his disciples in John’s Gospel, she writes, “he breathes hot moist vapor, trace gases, ammonia, acetone, methanol, into their mouths, over their tongues, through the gullet, windpipe, lungs, diaphragm.” And when Jesus then says “Receive the holy spirit,” Debbie glosses “Take it. Into your nose.”

I’ve been mighty grateful of late for this incarnating of the Holy Spirit. We think of the incarnation as applying solely to the second person of the Trinity, but what Debbie is suggesting—and what I’ve been experiencing—is that the Holy Spirit takes life deep within our wounded flesh as well. For we are all wounded. We are murderers with Cain, and we are victims of deep, stabbing wounds with Christ.

Living with illness that stabs at my psyche as much as at my flesh, I’ve been clinging these days to the words of Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche communities for people with developmental disabilities, as quoted by Stanley Hauerwas in The Christian Century (12/8/08). Woundedness is “inherent in the human condition,” says Vanier, and “what we have to do is walk with it instead of fleeing from it. We cannot accept it until we discover that we are loved by God just as we are, and that the Holy Spirit, in a mysterious way, is living at the center of the wound.”

“Take it,” Debbie has said. Take deep into your core the Holy Spirit that Jesus has breathed into you. “If the spirit lives,” she goes on, “It lives in our bodies, in our hands and words, in our gullets, our throat.”

Sermons that invite dialogue indeed. As all sermons should, observes the former head of the Dominicans (the Order of Preachers), Timothy Radcliffe, O.P., in America (4/13/09). In fact, he notes, “the word ‘homily’ comes from a Greek word meaning ‘to converse.’” So “dialogue is not an alternative to preaching; it is preaching.” A refreshing reminder, and how refreshing that Debbie Blue puts this dialogic preaching into practice. How refreshing to be preached with instead of preached at.