On Being Blog

Photo of the author's mother with one of her former students. (Photo courtesy of A.E. Lefton)

"...these girls are the rightful heiresses of the bygone women who wore beautiful, heavy crowns." ~Rainer Maria Rilke

What is a woman? And what "beautiful, heavy crowns" are worn by the girls and women of today?

I have heard and read the answers — such beautiful, contradictory answers — given mostly by men. The three answers I think are closest to the truth were written by men who speak in the language of poetry and the sacred: Rainer Maria Rilke, Walt Whitman, and Teilhard de Chardin.

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke writes of the evolution of womankind into those "girls and women whose name will no longer signify merely an opposite of the masculine, but something in itself, something that makes one think, not of any complement and limit, but only of life and existence: the feminine human being."

Teilhard de Chardin, in his essay "The Eternal Feminine," speaks in the voice of Inspiration, the female counterpart of Creation:

"I open the door to the whole heart of creation. I, the Gateway of the Earth, the Initiation."

Similarly, in "I Sing the Body Electric" Whitman addresses women as the doorway to both physical and spiritual worlds:

Be not ashamed, women—your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit of the rest;
You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.

When I read these words, the pain of finding one's voice, identity, and confidence are stripped away and the essence of womanhood shines out. Yet even in these writings, which represent the very pinnacle of male descriptions of the female, there is a lack.

There is a lack because, for all its intense beauty, their prose is abstract, elevated, mystical, and not, at the same time, paired with that very particularity and red-bloodedness that gives history its long succession of "great men." Their women are the essence of life itself, yes. But they are not living.

To strike a balance between the social and political necessity of writing real women back into history, and the spiritual reality of the "feminine human being," is something I hope new generations of writers, male and female, will attempt. I believe women will hold our heads higher, despite the heaviness of our crowns, once we begin to see ourselves the way Rilke and Whitman saw us — but grounded in the good earth of our own lives.

In one sense, there is no clear answer to the question, What is a woman? Or rather, there are as many answers as there are women in the worlds of today, yesterday, and tomorrow. At the same time, I feel there is some urgency to answer this question now, or at least to provide the foundation for an answer, because of all the pretend, impossible, and dangerous "answers" media and society are offering our daughters as truth.

If we live in a fractured world, then women reflect the most broken part of it — the most vulnerable, shattered lives. At the same time, women hold the seed of unity, like a sliver of broken mirror that cannot help but reflect a whole, unbroken landscape.

I feel these twin forces at work in myself. It is as if I were both the crushed mirror lying in the street, and also the woman who leans over to see her own jagged reflection multiplied — her own identity and power multiplied because she is no longer afraid of the worst. She has experienced the worst, and though it did indeed kill her, it also sewed her back up with the waters of life thrumming deep inside her veins.

Isis and Osiris. That is what women are. We carry the burden of the old world cut into pieces inside us. And yet we are healers — self-healers too. Lizards who can sever their own limbs, and starfish who can grow new ones.

And I only allow myself to speak in the same abstract, elevated, slightly mystical manner as the three great men I mentioned earlier for one reason, which is this:

If you ask me, I can tell you, in as much detail as you need, exactly and specifically:
how I carried the broken world,
how it killed me,
and how I am learning — slowly, halting —
to sing myself back to life.

For my mother, Jacqueline Táhirih Lefton, 1951—2010

A.E. Lefton is a poet, journalist, and educator currently living in Budapest, Hungary. She is a programs manager at the Romedia Foundation, which works to change perceptions of Europe's Roma people through film, advocacy, and education. You can read more of her thoughts on education and social justice on her blog FireWired.

Fans watch TobyMac perform live at Winter Wonder Slam. (Photo by Susan Lloyd / Flickr, cc by nc-sa 2.0)

Commenting on "Christian Pop," if one is not at home in it, is precarious and will doubtless reveal how out of it the commentator is. So I wander in with a sense of mission. If "public religion" is the field of our notice, overlooking "trendy hip-hop, dubstep, funk, and synch pop beats" would be to miss some very public expressions. Allison Stewart pointed to the music styles just mentioned when commenting on rapper TobyMac, whose album "Eye On It" was only the third "Christian" product ever to have debuted as No. 1 on Billboard's "top ten" charts.

Stewart, in an interview: "The lines between Christian and secular music are so porous now—do you think the distinction even matters?" Answer: "I think the walls are coming down between genres of music in general, and especially Christian music."

The rapper's responses are cogent, modest, and to the point, as he delineates lines between the "vulgar" and "clean versions." I won't pursue this further, lest my ignorance and unfamiliarity be paraded vulgarly. We move on now to comment on the "porous" lines between Christian and secular music or most anything else in the arts line.

I was drawn to this topic while researching for a forthcoming lecture before Chicago Chorale's March 24 Passion According to Saint John by Bach. Whenever I am called, or freed, to wander in the fields of classical sacred music, I find that sooner or later — usually sooner, now — the subject of how "Christian and secular music" inter-relate comes up.

I've been hearing Bach for over 80 years, having been child sat near my father's organ bench while mother was in the small town church choir. And I've been reading musicologists, theologians, and other Bach scholars for three fourths of those years, again and again pondering the lines and distinctions. Sections and strains from Bach's sacred cantatas can sound much like his Coffee Cantata and its kin, until one hears the words. What makes the music religious, Christian, or sacred, and what is "secular?"

Rather than deal with such questions musicologically, I'll turn in the few lines ahead to the questions of esthetics-politics-and-culture. Try as I might, I can't be moved by hip-hop, dubstep, funk, and synth pop beats labeled Christian. And I have to admit that my kind doesn't even try very hard. Yet as in so many areas, the porousness of the line between Christian or religious and secular is welcomed. True confession: of course, sacred and secular lines are blurred or sounds blended in the fields of folk music, and many of us classics-lovers are at home with it, as are composers of choice. A step further: Where is the line between Christian and secular in jazz, and should we worry about it? I am in the company of those, dwarfed by Christian pop adherents, who cherish jazz by Mary Lou Williams, Dave Brubeck, or close-to-home-and-almost-in-the family Andy Tecson, who for years have rendered the old line porous.

What many of us are learning is that some of the choices are simply matters of taste, however rationalized. And those of us who pay attention to how religion or specific faiths like the Christian might best be furthered, fostered, and delighted in musically are learning tolerance. But, wait a minute: what's that I hear? Bach! A-a-a-a-a-a-h.

Martin E. Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at The University of Chicago. He’s the author of many books, including Pilgrims in Their Own Land and Modern American Religion.

This essay is reprinted from Sightings from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Riverside police officers embrace following the committal ceremony of officer Michael Crain at Riverside National Cemetery on February 13, 2013 in Riverside, California. Officer Crain was allegedly killed by ex LAPD officer Chris Dorner on February 7, 2013. (Photo by Jonathan Alcorn/Getty Images)

In the wake of former LAPD officer Christopher Dorner's recent crimes, media attention to his manifesto, "Last Resort," has focused on Mr. Dorner's description of racism within that police department and on the disturbing madness of his comments. While "racism" and "rambling" are words often tagged to his manifesto, religion, too, is present here, offering an essential vocabulary for Mr. Dorner's justifications of his crimes.

"I lived a good life and though not a religious man I always stuck to my own personal code of ethics, ethos and always stuck to my shoreline and true North," he writes. While "No one grows up and wants to be a cop killer," Mr. Dorner insists that his experiences as a police officer viscerally and intuitively "disgusted" him. "I saw some of the most vile things humans can inflict on others" he says of his fellow LAPD officers, people whom he calls "dirtbags" for their gallows humor at crime scenes, or for equating overtime pay with their presence at such scenes. Mr. Dorner argues that no one needs an articulated system of ethics to know that such actions are wrong. Yet Mr. Dorner also mentions Christianity, even while denying association with the religion himself. "I'm not a ... Christian," he writes, though even "that old book, made of fiction and limited non-fiction, called the Bible," can be held up as a model of ethics. At the very least, it cannot be used, Mr. Dorner argues, to justify racist behavior.

Mr. Dorner's stance on Christianity (rejection of the institutional church, its theology and history, coupled with respect for a basic ethical teaching advanced by Jesus) parallels stances in two popular African American religious movements, the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam. As a city cop, Mr. Dorner would surely have been exposed to these religions. A reference in his manifesto to the pun between "Justice" and "Just us" (also popular in Moorish Science and Nation of Islam circles where the pun has specific religious meanings, notably as a secret teaching regarding Jesus and the nature of salvation) stands as evidence of such religious influence. Like Mr. Dorner, Moors reject the hypocrisy of Christianity but hold that Jesus was himself a dark-skinned Moor and that his gospel was offered as a redeeming ethical message for the pale-faced "European" nations. Along similar lines, Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad portrayed Jesus as an Islamic ethical thinker when he composed his own gospel.

Photo of Moorish Science Temple by TheeErin / Flickr, cc by-nd 2.0

Mr. Dorner also shares, with these two religions, a strong sense of the importance of one's name. The Nation of Islam rejects "slave names" while, for Moors, "the name means everything" and declaring one's correct name leads to benefits both political and metaphysical. "Name" is a central concept in Mr. Dorner's manifesto. To justify his rampage, he claims that he was driven by an ethical desire to "clear" his "name." "A man is nothing without his name," he declares, highlighting the connection between his desire to redeem his reputation and his history of enduring "racial derogatory terms spoken to me." When, as a child, he first experiences racism, his "response was swift;" he immediately punched and kicked a fellow student in the elementary schoolyard. This was the first in a long string of attempts "at obtaining my name back," leading to military service and appeals via internal review boards and the courts.

Yet Mr. Dorner doesn't use "name" only as a synonym for reputation; his rhetoric of naming is also a rhetoric of blood. Mr. Dorner wants a "name" untainted by racism and in keeping with what he insists is his blood inheritance of upstanding, ethical knowledge, and behavior. This notion has religious resonance as well. The sense that ancestry equals destiny and names affect one's recognition of that ancestry and destiny is also central to Moorish Science and nation of Islam.

The rationalizations passing off fury as "righteous" and the conceptualizations and categorizations that demarcate a worldview: these are the basic data of the study of religion. In the Mr. Dorner case we see a man advancing arguments for an inherited ethical sense "in my DNA," insisting on the value and importance of "name" in the face of a racist society, and arguing that his murderous acts should be remembered as a morally-justified attempt to restore balance to a corrupt police department. These claims, however horrifying their results, deserve careful consideration and contextualization. Christopher Dorner did not come to his worldview in a vacuum. He borrowed from, and relied upon, themes and concepts from religion in order to explain his motivations.

Spencer Dew is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Broyles Research Chair at Centenary College of Louisiana as well as an instructor in the BA program of the Chicago Police Department. He is completing a book on the origins of the Moorish Science Temple of America.

This essay is reprinted with permission of Sightings from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

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The flow of Geshe Thupten Jinpa's thoughts is an exercise in listening. He is articulate, his words intentional; he is soft-spoken, his ideas rich in their complexity. To trace the stream of of this former monastic's life and thought is a discipline in itself. To sketchnote Krista's conversation with the Dalai Lama's principal English translator requires many of the same qualities that Mr. Jinpa embodies: attention, compassion, focus, humility, action. No small feat.

Doug Neill picks up on the visual metaphor of reincarnation being like a "stream that Buddhists would argue gets carried over from life after life." He gives you a visual path to understanding Mr. Jinpa's statement that meditation is not simply "someone sitting quietly, emptying their mind."

I'd ask you to have these sketchnotes open while you listen to this show. Print it out, if you like, and follow along. Then let us know how you found these sketchnotes helpful, what you picked up on because of them. And, tell us what ideas or phrases you were surprised not to see included in these visual notes.