How Wide a Space to Cross: Good Friday, 2010

Last night one of our regular contributors sent me a link to a new book about Saint Paul, that proselytizer so many Christians love to hate (your blogger included). Written by Quaker theologian and poet, Sarah Ruden, this promises to be a revolutionary look at him in his time and place. More on that later.

In addition to her theology, Ruden has written other things, including translations of classical works (Virgil, Aristophanes) and books of her own poetry.

Here is an example from the latter. It is most appropriate for Good Friday.

Villanelle of the Hidden Life

For years, I sought to walk a godly pace,
Not sensing all things rushing into God.
But now I run, I run as in a race.

There was a stream, but one I could not trace
While I was wading dust as thick as blood
And shouting that I walked a godly pace.

There was a sun, but one I did not face,
Nor see the hills pursue it in a crowd.
I did not hear it panting in its race.

But everyone who turns to seek His grace
Becomes a restless horse the faint breeze prods
And instigates beyond a godly pace.

I could not be left lonely by the chase
Toward Him. The ground was moving in a flood,
And all things sang and hurtled in the race.

And through that storm I saw how wide a space
I had to cross. I heard each slow step’s thud.
For years, I sought to walk a godly pace,
But now I run, I run as in a race.


A villanelle, as a poetic form, is famously difficult to write. At least it is to me though members of my family don’t seem to have had much trouble. Villanelles began life as Italian or Spanish dance songs, but once transmogrified into English in the 1850s, they assumed a more restrained form, as you can see here.

The most famous villanelle, at least in our time, is Dylan Thomas’ poem to his father: “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”. You can see the poem and hear it read by Thomas here.

In Ruden’s poem, notice the very Pauline theme of running a race. Methinks that is intentional, though the book on Saint Paul and the poem about her own spiritual journey(s) were written at quite different times.

As for Professor Ruden’s book about Paul, here is a starred review from Amazon concerning her approach to the horrendously degraded culture of Paul’s time:

Her project enables her to call the standard repertoire of Pauline characterizations seriously into question.

Paul’s cross-references show us a Greek and Roman world of great brutality, given to pleasures carried to damaging and even fatal extremes. Nor was there any notion of inhumane punishment; hence, crucifixion, to which only commoners and slaves were subjected.

Homosexuality was basically anal rape of adolescent boys, the more painful the better for the socially superior rapists. Women of high status were veiled, while unveiled women were treated as prostitutes and criminals. Slaves were so unequal to masters that they might have been a different, inferior species.

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The nonviolent love and community that Christianity preached radically differed from such exploitative, status-based norms, and Paul’s preaching, perceived as being against homosexuality and higher status for non-ruling-class women and slaves, looks very different when contrasted with those Greco-Roman norms as reported by writers from Aristophanes to Apuleius.

Judiciously citing her own behavior to bring certain points home to contemporary readers, Ruden is winningly intimate as well as impressively scholarly in this superb book.

It is intriguing to consider a theologian (she is at Yale Divinity School at the moment) using her own life to make her case for a revision of Paul's mission. Given the spare simplicity of her poetry (deceptively simple here, since she uses a precise, intricate form), one is intrigued to see how she might entwine her own biography with Pauline theology. Perhaps she uses her time spent in Africa to compare with Paul’s world?

The book, Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time, sounds beautifully subversive if you read the reviews (there are three) of regular folks’ reactions to the book. One of them even compares the situation back in Paul’s time to what prevails today, and talks about Phyllis Chesler’s position as a writer in the current feminist/literary culture:

[The bracketed comments are mine throughout, but not the parentheses]

Too few among us read of the horrors of prisons under despots and of the sexual mores of “shame” cultures (in which it matters more what you are accused of than what you have done--contrast “guilt” culture, in which the individual is expected to answer to a trained conscience). These were common in the Greco-Roman world, according to Ruden…

Some of these things just cannot be aired on the news during family hours. Others run so counter to the popular newsroom narratives that they never see the light of day. Illustration: A few years ago Phyllis Chesler, a liberal, even radical, feminist (Women and Madness: Revised and Updated) lost her column on a left-wing blog for supporting military and political action against barbarians who do such things. [Note: “barbarians” = Islam. Don’t know why this person won’t name the evil. Ms. Chesler certainly doesn’t hesitate to do so.]

She now appears on a right-wing blog, because that is the only place that will publish her [the writer is referring to Pajamas Media . I always wondered how Phyllis ended up there. Now we know]. If [IF?? IF??] the horrors she [who “she” - Chesler? Ruden?] reports happen today, they could have happened back then, and given what we can see of the mores of a society that required “imperfect” infants to be left for wild animals and required that a son’s public virtue be protected in public by a slave, they almost certainly did.

The reviewer has some valid points to make, but the refusal to name Islam for the present day “barbarian” culture he or she describes is disheartening, to put it mildly. Mark Steyn’s dystopian view of our p.c. silence is most certainly exemplified by what this person refuses to say.

I recommend your perusal of that Amazon page.

I also recommend looking at Sarah Ruden’s page(s).

For me, I am going to have to rethink my position on Paul (obviously I'll have to get the book through interlibrary loan. That is, if the library remains open long enough to do so). I realize it was not my own thinking at all, but the "received wisdom" of leftist theology professors so many years ago.

It is what we don't know that we don't know which can be our desolation. Ignorance is not bliss. Each day we find out a little more; each day we recognize the extent of our not knowing and the harm that has befallen us as a result. Ignorance is evil, but where to begin to remedy our state?

With that question ends Good Friday, 2010.