Masters of Universes

by Ryan Harper

          It was a regularly televised conversion. Adam holds aloft the mystical Power Sword and exclaims, “by the power of Grayskull….” The sword draws fire from heaven, and it enters Adam—blowing his clothes off and transforming him into He-Man. Before the scene ends, the bare-chested hero lowers the sword, holds it horizontally, and finishes the sentence in a reverberating voice: “…I have the power!” The conversion was always sudden, and it was usually late.

I watched He-Man and the Masters of the Universe religiously as a boy. It was one in a series of after-school cartoons that provided the content for my young imagination: G.I. Joe, Transformers, Voltron, Thundercats. My parents and grandparents furnished me with the action figures, even Mattel’s playset masterpiece, Castle Grayskull. In addition to playing with the toys, I started dramatizing He-Man episodes. After constructing a passable replica of the Power Sword using my erector set, I—Adam, He-Man’s Clark Kent—would run wildly around the house, as if I were being chased by He-Man’s arch nemesis Skeletor and his henchmen. Then, finally cornered by the imaginary adversaries, I would stop, settle myself, and rehearse the moment when Adam put away his old self: By the power of Grayskull…quickly dropping the sword, removing my shirt, picking up the sword again…I have the power! Shit was about to get real.

My mother stayed at home during my formative years, so she bore witness to this spectacle. One day, after hearing me perform this incantation the fourth or fifth time, she took me aside and gently informed me that she did not want me saying those words. She then smiled as she suggested what she obviously regarded as a plausible alternative: “Why don’t you say, ‘by the power of Jesus?’”

I knew enough to tilt my head and nod reflectively, as if her suggestion seemed plausible to me. It was not. I was embarrassed, horrified, and a little bewildered at her proposal.

This was not because I did not believe in the power of Jesus. I was a good young evangelical. I already had been “saved”—prayed the “sinner’s prayer” and accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior. I spent most of my weekends traveling to revivals and church homecomings, singing and playing drums in my family’s southern gospel singing group. Rather, I felt uneasy about my mother’s suggestion because, it seemed obvious to me, He-Man’s world, Eternia, did not include Jesus as a character. Eternia was make-believe. A different set of powers and principalities were in play there—“good” and “evil” forces that I recognized as having analogues in the real world, but fictional forces nonetheless. To introduce Jesus into the drama—who was made and remade real for me at every weekend Pentecostal revival, every dinner conversation, every moment lived in a region in which even the profane citizens lived inside the broad shadow of the evangelical cross—would have been like introducing my grandpa or my dentist. Giving Jesus an explicit role in Eternia, I thought, made him less real.

My mother did not share my view towards fictional realms of play. She had a radically holistic view of the Gospel’s reach. For her, the spirit of Christ was at work in even the seemingly innocuous, recreational aspects of life—including the imagination and its products. Naming Jesus in Eternia was simply identifying he who had been active, anonymously, the whole time, like Paul revealing to the Athenians the true identity of their unknown god. We were conservative evangelical Christians—not fundamentalists, who shunned all worldly entertainments, whose households would not have contained Mattel’s Castle Grayskull. As such, we did what believers had been doing since Constantine, if not Paul: we converted the accoutrements of paganism into Christian icons. My mother responded to my dabbling in the black arts of Grayskull by transforming Grayskull into Golgotha.

Of course, the transformation only was worth undertaking if the paganism in question had some usable features. It certainly was important for a young evangelical male to have manly heroes. He-Man became a mass-market sensation in the early 1980s, which Reagan had wrested from Carter. For most evangelicals, a warrior of dubious religiosity seemed preferable to a pious but soft patriarch. A year before my He-Man controversy, I requested a Cabbage Patch Kid for Christmas. My father, who refused to let me have a “girl’s toy,” compromised and selected for me a doll from the feline section of the Cabbage Patch—a “Koosa” whom I named Prince, after a secular musician about whom I knew nothing, on whom I could lavish a fictive love more akin to a pet owner’s than a mother’s. No one in my family had the equipment to understand that the bob-haired, hot-pants-wearing hero of Grayskull and his various life partners (characters with names like Man-At-Arms, Man-E-Faces, and…sweet Jesus…Ram-Man) undermined evangelical gender norms much more seriously (and, I now see, much more hilariously) than did Xavier Roberts’s homely creations. Having supplied me with the action figures and the playset, my parents obviously thought that, with a slight rewrite, the man from Eternia was a serviceable evangelical hero for a boy.

But as soon as my mother suggested her rewrite, by the power of Jesus, it was clear to me that I would no longer play He-Man out loud in the house. The prospect of saying “by the power of Jesus” inside Eternia, even when I was playing alone there, sent an embarrassed shudder through me—that sort of shame over an unrealized iteration that occurs when you think some horrible thought during a job interview and realize how easy it would be to open your mouth and let the thought pass into a world in which it does not belong, thus spoiling entire realms of possibilities, irreparably. I disassembled my Power Sword and summoned Prince from my shelf.

I was miffed at having to reroute my playtime, but I never harbored resentment toward my mother. She and I have gone over this episode in my adulthood, and she now laughs at her excessive, if well-meaning, parental policing. I am now the age my mother was when the episode occurred. It occurs to me how easily my late-thirties self—now equipped with one graduate degree in theological studies, one more in religious studies—could offer a much richer, more systematic, and consequently more joy-killing gloss on He-Man than she did. She taught me well. Was not Adam’s animated transformation, with Grayskull in the background, suggestive of the efficacy of Christ’s sacrifice on Golgotha, available to all who would call on its power? Was not Adam transformed by the power of Golgotha into the new Adam? Was not He-Man’s turning of the Power Sword from its vertical to its horizontal position emblematic of justification and sanctification: a Christian is made well by power from above, and then is called to use that power to lead a holy life “horizontally,” in this world? Was not Adam’s decision to share his superhero identity only with a select few akin to the Gospel of Mark’s Jesus, who instructed his few open-eyed followers to tell no one he was the Messiah? Imagine a boy being subject to such a parental disquisition!

I would not state these cases to my child because I no longer think such matters are all that important. But I do think some matters are just that important. I may no longer be an evangelical, but I retain my old evangelical disposition to read, interpret, and criticize all aspects of my culture. I retain that sense that whatsoever all of us do (and take in) constitutes us as moral beings—even, perhaps especially, the quotidian endeavors. I am a writer. I still believe words possess concrete and concretizing power; I might believe this more expansively, if less metaphysically, than I did as a child. I’d like to think that growing up in an evangelical universe equipped me to detect hard-to-see patterns of injustice in the world and its various tongues. I can imagine harboring my own misgivings over a child watching a show like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe—the thirty-minute toy advertisement, the Anglo-Saxon heroes pitted against animalian or dark-skinned villains, the equation of muscle with virtue. How much more obnoxious would I be than my mother was, in my attempt to route the fantasies of a life under my charge?

          I hope I would not be obnoxious. But I hope I would care, as my mother did, about how inner and outer worlds converge. I hope I am sensible to what arrives in a life, to how a life arrives, to the processes of arrival.

Or perhaps I am still an evangelical. For all their Damascus Road rhetoric—their altar calls, their singular born-again moments, their rejoicing at the tales of sudden deathbed conversions—evangelicals do not play fast and loose with dramatic denouement. I was brought up to understand the sanctified life as a long slog. My evangelicalism had an Emersonian edge: the soul becomes. My favorite boyhood cartoons, animated at the height of American mass consumerism, the age of immediate fulfillment and quick, short-term gains, suggested the opposite. Although his individual might was never enough to vanquish his foes, Lion-O, protagonist of The Thundercats, always summoned the rest of the Thundercats when he was cornered, late in the game, with great fanfare and sudden success. Although individually the heroic robotic lions in Voltron were never a match for their antagonist du jour, the lions only merged, to form the super-robot Voltron, in the episode’s final minutes—again, with great fanfare and success. It was the same with Adam, who typically conjured Grayskull’s power when the enemy was right at the gate. I suspect that if you did the tally, you’d find that Adam spent a lot more time as Adam than he did as He-Man in those cartoons.

On some level, the arc of those stories must have grated against my mother’s sensibilities, even as she found usable features in them. In imagination and in reality, there is something profane about coming intentionally late to the fullness of your power, about thinking you can postpone the achievement of your higher self until a sudden, final moment. By the power of Grayskull—my mother was right—I would be raised better.  

Ryan Harper is a visiting assistant professor in New York University’s Religious Studies Program. Some of his recent poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming at Kestrel, Mississippi Review, Appalachian Heritage, Berkeley Poetry Review, Killing the Buddha, Urban Farmhouse Press, and elsewhere. Ryan’s ethnography of contemporary southern gospel music will appear via the University Press of Mississippi in late 2016 and his poetry chapbook Memphis Left at Cairo is available through Finishing Line Press. He lives in New York City.

Unhitching

by Jason Bruner

It isn’t that faith doesn’t exist for me now; it’s just that most of it was left behind in the places I tried to take it.  

By age ten, my select cadre of heroes was decidedly masculine and eclectic: Ponch and Jon from “CHiPs”, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo from Star Wars, Dale Murphy of the Atlanta Braves, and Jim Elliot, an American missionary who was killed in a South American rain forest. I was so struck by the story of Jim Elliot that I wrote a fifth grade book report on a devotional account of his short life. I opened my report with a quotation evocative enough to lodge itself firmly in my young psyche: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” I admired, even envied, his clarity and conviction.

Jim Elliot, a Wheaton graduate with the distinctive wholesomeness of mid-century Americana, traveled to the Ecuadorian jungle in the mid-1950s, along with four other young white evangelical missionaries. One of them, a prodigious pilot, managed to land a plane on the sandy bank of a meandering river in an attempt to reach the “Auca Indians” (most modern anthropologists refer to them as the Huaorani). Shortly after landing, they were stabbed with spears, making Elliot in particular a household name among American evangelicals. Not technically a saint, Elliot came as close as we had to sainthood and was welcomed into the pantheon of White Missionary Heroes.

The White Missionary Hero had to forego the comforts of Western civilization and brave the forces of darkness in order to bring dark-skinned people the Word of God. This was the duty of the true Christian—the one who was really “on fire”: to sacrifice his life to bring light to the darkness. This was a faith and a masculinity defined by atonement, measured by sacrifice. Dating, sports, and “secular” music were steps along the way to being speared in a jungle.  

I could be that bold. Or, at least, I should. I would give it a shot.  

---

Gabi was 7 and lived in a Mexican border town. She was smart and somehow quietly effusive and, as I was soon to discover, creative. I’d come with a church group to bring the Good News to Mexico, but I’d run out of things to say, and my silence reflected just how little I knew of her world.

Gabi was frequently by my side for the few days we were there, even when we had nothing to talk about. We sat on a rough pew that wobbled on an uneven concrete floor. To break the uncomfortable silence, I asked Gabi about her favorite Bible story. We were leading a Vacation Bible School program at the church in her barrio, after all. 

She paused for a few seconds and then launched into an animated telling of her favorite parable: “Habia una vez…” (Once upon a time…)

She had different voices ready for each of the characters, which changed with her posture as the drama unfolded. I got a little lost, more because of my limited horizons than the storyteller’s skill.

As a teenager, I had a pretty encyclical knowledge of the Bible, but I was having trouble placing this one. She was talking a lot about animals. Noah and the flood? I kept hearing tortuga. And conejo. They were … racing? And the conejo was … having lunch with a friend?

To this day, Gabi gave what is easily the best telling of the tortoise and the hare that I’ve ever heard.

Well, she is probably from a Catholic family, I thought at the time. I bet they don’t even read the Bible.

---

A few years later, I sat on the makeshift second deck of a motorized canoe, floating in the middle of the Milky Way. The Amazon was so wide and still that the white heavenly dust stopped only briefly at the thin forest horizon before circling back underneath us to be churned up by the outboard motor. This ring lit our way hour after hour after hour.

We were a few days’ travel from electricity, and our tiny engine was determined to push us through the humid darkness that kept everything else in its place. As missionaries, we came to tell these people how to get out of the darkness—from the things that held them there—and move into the light.

We had no idea where we were.

Back in Georgia, our mission had been clear. We felt a calling to be missionaries, a calling to the Amazon. We were placed with a team and sent through training where we learned trust falls and how to walk through obstacle courses when muddy. One of the leaders, a preacher, with his impassioned face clay-red, went hoarse yelling about how, as Christians, we needed to be like “a big Nalgene water bottle that splashed water on everyone when it was shaken.” The love of Jesus sprinkled upon the heathens.

They said that the Amazon would be an adventure in testing our faith. An adventure in bringing light to a dark place.

Or, maybe, just an adventure.

The thin canopy of the horizon grew thicker as the black Amazonian lake slowly narrowed itself into a serpentine tributary, the jungle increasingly interrupting the starry ring.

“Get your bags together. We’re almost there,” called a voice near the motor. We brought a lot of stuff.

I looked up as we came around a final bend in the river and saw a new light, then another, then a whole line of lights, flickering along the river. Not the clear white of the Milky Way but the soft dancing yellow of candles in glassless windows, moving with the silent current, welcoming the Americanos.

As I watched the candlelit shore, I drank from my Nalgene bottle, filled with iodine-infused river water. What did I really have to “shake out” onto these people—the Uraina? I had nothing to bring. Light was already here, reflected in the quiet, eternal darkness of their own water.

I realized they didn’t need a white missionary hero. The sacrifices I’d made—adopting a new diet, enduring the heat, braving the piranhas—only measured my faith; they didn’t impart it. So I went home to Georgia.

---

I stood at the northwest corner of the city square in Matamoros, Mexico on Wednesday afternoon, August 4th, 2004. There was a single trashcan and a couple of benches, and that’s exactly where I left it behind: the wooden popsicle stick from the ice cream bar I had just finished, along with faith, evangelicalism, whatever else that I’d been tentatively hanging on to. But I had known this was coming.

Six weeks prior, I arrived at a mission camp in northern Mexico, a base for American evangelical youth groups to have week-long mission trips.

My first morning in Mexico, I stood at the back of the short worship and prayer service with some of the adult chaperones. The worship leader asked everyone to pair up and pray for the other person. Next to me stood a pastor from one of the church groups. We introduced ourselves and began our generic intercessions. The worship leader called for everyone’s attention, but my prayer partner had something he needed to tell me: “This hasn’t really ever happened before, but I had a vision while we were praying.”

“Oh?”

“You were in a tractor, out in a big field. You were doing work, driving the tractor through crops. But it was like there was just a wagon attached to the tractor. It was the wrong thing. So nothing was happening. You were working but with the wrong tools. I don’t know you. I don’t know what it means, but I thought I should tell you.”

  

I puzzled over the prophetic riddle as I watched the sunburnt Christian soldiers load into worn fifteen-passenger vans, which then funneled into a clunky convoy that dispatched them to their ministry sites: orphanages, churches, soccer fields. My prophet and his group left the next day. This schedule would become my rhythm for the six weeks that followed, minus additional personal prophecies.

---

The Mexican border town—its poverty, heat, dust, hope, and desperation—had made him want to be more like Jesus. And that was the problem.

I watched as mud dripped off her face and onto her shirt—stains of a misguided act of faith. Her: the Mexican woman who had trouble seeing. Cataracts, probably. Her need inspired him to act. Him: an American youth pastor.

Because one time Jesus saw a blind man and made mud and smeared it on the blind man’s eyes and he could see. It was a divinely-proven formula, scientific in a way. Of course, he didn’t have the saliva of the God-Man, which was an ingredient in the biblical precedent. We mumbled prayers as he made do with a decent substitute: the purified water in his bottle. He prayed and smeared the mud over her blurred vision. He prayed again. Rinsed it off—only the mud, not the cataracts. The mud dripped onto her white blouse. We watched disappointment wash over them both, though for different reasons. His miracle was deferred; her laundry wouldn’t be.

The poverty, the desperation, the heat—they make it hard to think straight. The youth minister was bewildered. He really had expected a different outcome, and he was now left with the task of locating where the formula broke down. Was it his insufficient faith? Hers?

I don’t know if he ever considered that the problem was the premise of the encounter itself—the certainty of our goodness, of our helpfulness, of our beneficence. 

---

By the end of my time in Mexico, the square in Matamoros was one of my favorite places to visit. It had abundant shade that beckoned folks to relax and rest, making it an ideal target for visiting evangelicals looking to share the Good News.

Our small group of adults broke into pairs, each with a translator, and planned to reconvene at the northwest corner of the square in ninety minutes. I went to the ice cream shop on the west side of the square, then struck up a conversation with a man whose perceptive critiques of American religion and foreign policy eventually surpassed my ability to keep up. Both of us were frustrated: me for reaching the limits of my linguistic capabilities, him for the obstinacy of yet another gringo who was defending things he didn’t understand.

The pairs of gringos returned to the corner. I asked one man what he’d done. With the confident calculus of an evangelical abroad, he responded: “We got five and it looks like that group’s working on three. How many did y’all get?”

“Zero,” I responded, and realized I was proud of it.

So I unhitched my wagon on the northwest corner of the Matamoros city square and went home.

---

I never told Gabi that her story wasn’t from the Bible. Maybe she knew and was testing me—the guy who thought he knew enough to spend a week parsing right from wrong in a Mexican border town he couldn’t even find on a map. Maybe she just had a more inclusive canon.  

So I sat there, not knowing how to respond to the tale of the tortoise and the hare. Thankfully, she simply returned the question I had originally asked her. I couldn’t think of the Spanish word for “prodigal,” so I just went straight into the story, which my mediocre Spanish only allowed me to tell in a faltering present tense: “There is a father who has two sons. One son says to his father, ‘I want my all money.’ The father it gives to him and son leaves. The son goes to a country really far and now has no money and is very poor. He thinks about his house and his father. He says, ‘I go to my father because there I have food.’ The father sees his son and says, ‘This is my son. We have a party.’”  

All of the characters had the same voice in my version—a distinctly American voice. Gabi was intrigued and confused, but certainly not entertained, much less transformed. So I tried to drive home the point: “God is the father and we leave and do sins. But God loves us.” She preferred her story, perhaps realizing that I had told mine more for my sake than hers.

---

Jim Elliot had gone to a far country. I imagine his father thought of his son’s missionary career in Ecuador as a sacrifice, even before he was killed. It was too far off for his father to see him again—at least for a long time. But there would be no return. His son’s blood was spilled into a remote Ecuadorian river not so different than the thin Amazonian tributary I puttered up in a motorized canoe many decades later.

But after floating in that same beautiful darkness, mine isn’t the heroic line of the sacrifice. Mine is the defeated arc of the prodigal. Somewhere between northern Mexican border towns and the Peruvian Amazon lie the certainty and clarity that propelled me to the far country in the first place. Sometimes, the better news is that the tortoise wins. Sometimes, our water only gets other people dirty. Sometimes, the darkness is more beautiful than the lights we carried. Because, you see, the prodigal loses it all—the things he brought, perhaps even his faith—but he holds onto his life. That’s the difference between sacrifices and prodigals: prodigals come home.

Jason Bruner is an assistant professor on the religious studies faculty at Arizona State University in Tempe, where he lives with his wife, daughter, and cat. He has published scholarly articles on Christian missions, British imperialism, and the history of Christianity in East Africa. His writing has also appeared in Religion & Politics, Marginalia Review of Books, Religion Dispatches, and Notches: (Re)marks on the History of Sexuality.

Violations

by Jenn Gilgan

     When atrocities of ISIS destroying priceless ruins became news last March, I felt incensed. On the heels of brutal murders, the terrorist group obliterated their culture’s past. Their excuse: destroying idols that were false gods. They justified their actions through their faith—Mohammed is the only prophet to the only God, Allah. They manipulated the beautiful words of their prophet into ugly acts of brutality and greed. The antiquities were pre-Islam, and so, in their view, unholy.

    Each video clip of a sledge hammer smashing carved stone to dust felt like a blow to my head, shaking loose memories of a trip my parents and I took to Iraq in Spring 1978, our second year of living in Beirut, Lebanon. Truthfully, I do not remember much from that trip; I was only twelve. My brain repressed what should have been the interesting parts: the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, mosques with golden domes. I vaguely recall these sites; photographs and the awful scenes on the news help to pry loose my memories.

          One detail of that fated trip I vividly recall is my dad’s severe case of Montezuma’s Revenge. Not because he was so sick, but because of events I could not escape as he commandeered the back of the taxi, our primary mode of transportation. Iraq was not the hubbub of tourism, even pre-Gulf War, so bus tours were nonexistent. Mom sat in the back with Dad, attempting to provide some comfort from the heat, the nausea, the bumpy roads, a nasty combination for my ailing dad.

Even more vividly, in my visceral memory, I recall sitting up front with the Iraqi taxi driver and a Lebanese gentleman, Sami, an important client of my father’s employer, an international bank. He had volunteered to accompany us as a translator since we did not speak Arabic beyond the basic pleasantries. This man had wealth and prestige. He had a handsome face, light brown hair and bright blue eyes. He was tall and athletic, a descendent of the fair Phoenicians. He also had, as I was to discover, an eye and a roaming hand for young girls.

I was not raped, but over our week-long trip, I was violated multiple times in the front of the taxi. He found ways to grope the training-bra sized bumps on my chest or to massage between my upper thighs. He deftly hid these acts by unfolding the over-sized paper map across our legs. Not knowing how else to behave, I sat still, frozen like an ancient statue. Internally, though, a chaotic battle raged: my mind screamed NO, STOP, but my hormones were curious, tempting me to let go and enjoy the scary, strange, thrilling sensations. At night I promised myself I would refuse his next attempt; each day I fell mute, cowering to his position of power—both over me and over my dad’s career. My unconscious must have understood the adult dynamics and politics.

Over three decades later, I have wondered why I couldn’t get past these memories. Why have they haunted me? Why must I remember that my first sexual contact was uninvited and confusing? While I felt ashamed that my twelve-year old body craved learning more of the strange internal warmth that flooded my body, my adult brain could intelligently articulate that he was at fault. That he was the creep. That underneath his handsome visage, he must have had a serious flaw in his psyche to prey on a twelve-year old who had hardly begun to blossom.

After years of journaling, counseling, and eventually confessing to my mom about Sami’s pedophilia, I thought I had moved past the rage and disgust of those memories. Until recently. Watching the antiquities long associated with the vacation of violation smash to the ground in plumes of dust released an unexpected rage in me.

Many of the antiquities that ISIS has destroyed are those that my twelve-year-old self visited. I was hardly impressed by history or ruins when I was a kid. The trip was my parents’ idea. I had wanted to see the pyramids in Egypt, but since that was the time of Camp David, Egypt would not have been a safe destination for

American tourists. Instead, we went to Iraq, not yet a danger zone for Americans. As a typical twelve-year-old, I rolled my eyes at yet another tour of crumbling ruins (in my mind the Sphinx or pyramids or the land of Cleopatra were not crumbling, and so much cooler to explore). My parents had a history of taking my brother and me on educational trips: the Parthenon, Athena’s Temple, a Grecian Olympic stadium. We had visited Byblos or Baalbeck or both in the mountains and fertile valleys of Lebanon. Before living overseas, my parents took us to what counted as American ruins: Mystic Seaport, Washington Irving’s home in Sleepy Hollow, the Newport mansions, and the Hudson River Valley robber baron castles. In 1978, I considered this trip just another educational tour my parents imposed on me.

So, if I didn’t care then about the immensity of the history before me, why suddenly did I want to rip out the throats of those thoughtless, careless scalawags on the news? Because I had more than just seen the ruins. My cellular memory had never let go of the sights, the sounds, the sands of Iraq. The ruins were me, and I the ruins. Now, via the sights and sounds of technology, I saw the terrorist attacks against their own history as akin to the personal affront I experienced.

On the surface, the antiquities are ruined beyond repair. No master archeologist will be able to repair the pieces to their previous state. On a deeper, longer-lasting level, I’m reminded of the classroom lesson about bullying: have students take a clean sheet of paper and then crumple it into a ball. No matter how they try, students cannot “fix” the paper back to its original pristine smoothness. Harsh words and actions make the same lasting impression on people as the creases in the paper. I had been bullied in one of the worst ways, and so were the impressive statues of Tikrit and Mosul. No amount of counseling, confessions, or apologies could smooth the scars inflicted on me or the stone statues.  My scars were emotional. The statues’ scars historical.

More universally, those statues and my childhood innocence represent a higher state of understanding than either my personal terrorist or the ISIS terrorists can appreciate. Terrorism on any level is not an act of intelligence. That is not to say that the perpetrator in my story or the ISIS men are not intelligent. I know for a fact that my molester was incredibly intelligent. But, his actions were selfish and uncaring and lacked wisdom. The same holds true for the recent actions of ISIS: There is no sense, no caring, no wisdom in destroying priceless artifacts.

The author and her mother, 1978

I have a photograph of my mother and me in front of one of the statues that guarded a town. It towered over us, its face kind and gentle. The face and beard of a man, the body of a horse, wings of an eagle, and cloven feet of a goat. In Tikrit maybe. I don’t remember. That is what I have repressed. That is the knowledge I have lost forever because something frightening and unexplainable took precedence in my memory. I hate that man for all that he robbed from me: my innocence, a chance not to fear intimacy, and my chance to remember extraordinary history on an extraordinary trip. I hate the terrorists for what they are robbing from the world: the foundation of great civilizations and creativity and genius and tolerance. So few have had the opportunity to visit those sacred lands because of the constant upheaval in the Middle East, and now, many of the reasons to visit any of the historic sites—Babylon, Bybolos, Jerusalem, Petra, Palmyra, Cairo—have either been smashed beyond recognition or have become too perilous to visit. The world should not allow anyone or anything terrifying to obliterate our collective memory of our beginnings. Whether you connect to the Middle East through genetics, religion—this includes Christianity and Judaism—or not at all, those ruins once governed fertile and prosperous lands. Trade routes from east and west crossed the Tigris-Euphrates valley. Your genealogical tree likely has someone who once walked that fertile valley. This is not a land to fear. It is a land to rejoice and celebrate.

Today, Iraq may seem like a wasteland to many. Desert sands. Bombed out. Citizens turned refugees. At its heart, though, is a vibrant, caring, god-fearing culture, whether that god be God or Allah, or even Yahweh, Buddha, or Vishnu. Yet, hate and prejudice prevail despite each religion’s teaching to love and tolerate our brothers and sisters of every land. We are all human. Shakespeare’s Shylock cries out, “If you prick me, do I not bleed?” We all bleed. We all laugh. We all cry. We all need safety and protection and love. If we do not unite to protect that which needs protecting—our heritage, our children, our future—then we risk a chasm in the web of humanity.

The terrorism occurring across the Middle East parallels my personal turmoil. My story is one of many, and the religious terrorists are only one story of mass hatred. The ISIS terrorists hide under the beauty of Islam’s Koran. The words meant to inspire the beauty of compassion, faith, loyalty, and love have been misused to justify hate crimes and murder. They are a larger, scarier rendition of the handsome man who abused the trust of a young girl.

Jenn Gilgan aspires to inspire. She lives in Tampa, FL where she teaches high school English. Her writing draws on her experiences from when she lived in Beirut, Lebanon as a child and London, England as an adult. When not inundated with teaching and grading, she enjoys exploring the world through her cameras and researching ideas for both lesson plans and novels. “Violations” is her first published piece; she is currently drafting and re-drafting a YA novel influenced equally by her love of Celtic mythology and her life in Lebanon.

Counter Winds and Cross-eyed Casters

by Julie Whitlow

Mosul, Tikrit, Fallujah, Baghdad, Ramadi—the names roll off of my tongue for no other reason than these were flashpoints of the second Iraq war—an ongoing conflict based on centuries of the banging drums of distrust beating out war marches against enemies, perhaps imagined, perhaps real. Soldiers draped in the flag of my country had officially been killing or being killed by Iraqis for eleven years when eight scholars from the warzone arrived at my university in Salem, Massachusetts, a town chastised for its long-ago intolerance and famed for reversing course. The scholars were on a mission of understanding and shared learning, and my small role was as volunteer mentor to one of the female scholars whom I will call Jameela. Because we were not allowed to take their pictures or publish their names due to potential threats against their lives by those who saw their trip to the US as traitorous, she needs to remain anonymous. When a story and photo about the group published in our neighboring town’s paper—the Marblehead Reporter—prompted a call from the State Department, it was clear that the fear of repercussion was real.

          Jameela and I had weekly conversations about language and writing in Arabic and English. The scholars spent weekends on cultural excursions and experienced Boston’s Freedom Trail, the Museum of Fine Arts, and MIT. They seemed eager and at ease, despite devastating news from home about beheadings by ISIS and bombings in Baghdad. As time went on, the distrust within the group became visible, an offshoot of the ancient tribal factions that each represented: Sunni, Shia, Arab, Kurd, male, female. Reasons that lead to persecution, violence, and human discord became reduced to small, sobering distinctions and the awareness that, despite everything that makes us similar, it is the atomic alignment of culture and history that grow into deep insurmountable divisions. Via my encounters with Jameela, frustrating distinctions seemed obvious only through mundane interactions.

Toward the end of her stay, I decided that a good host should invite Jameela over, perhaps for a meal, a breaking of bread between new friends as an idealistic handshake of peace. However, my doubts about the likelihood of being able to prepare a meal that would meet the halal code that dictates the foods permissible for Muslims impair my ability to cook. Jameela had expressed an interest in having some local fish and I mentioned lobster as an interesting regional delicacy. Jameela agreed and reasoned that since lobsters had shells they were probably an acceptable meal. The night before our luncheon, though, Jameela emailed that she actually couldn’t eat a lobster because of the chance that it wouldn’t be killed humanely. Jameela assured me that fish would be okay, depending on its size, scales, and spine. It became clear that a restaurant lunch would be more prudent than a meal at home.

          I guessed that a restaurant called Finz would likely serve enough varieties of fish options for Jameela to eat. In order to get in the home visit, I would then bring her over for coffee. So, I picked her up at the campus residence hall and we proceed to Finz.

          I was used to most of the female scholars wearing a hijab, the fabric folded over the head, fastened under the chin, and covered by a longer scarf. This day was particularly warm and humid but, as our outing was not routine, Jameela wore additional beautiful brocaded layers of over-garments woven with golden thread and extending almost to the floor. I was touched that she thought of our outing as so special but felt bad that she was sweltering in the summer heat. As we walked from the parking area, droplets lined her smooth forehead and upper lip and she revealed her shock over the girls on the street in shorts and tank tops. How can they walk around with no clothes?

            At Finz, I cringed as we were shown through the bar to reach our table near the water. I tried to ignore the barstools and glistening bottles of liquor packing the shelves, wondering if Jameela realized that we were surrounded by alcohol, another taboo of Islam. When the water that we requested arrived, Jameela wiped the rim of her glass with her napkin and removed the ice. I attempted to explain the menu and its variety of fish that could be ordered grilled, fried, or baked: salmon, sole, haddock, scrod. Jameela wanted assurance that the fish wouldn’t be fried in a beer batter like it was at a restaurant they went to in Rhode Island. It was such a shame that we went hungry that day. She produced her iPhone to determine which of the fish had the acceptable number of scales and a demonstrable spine.

          Together we perused pictures of various fish before and after scale removal on the tiny screen of her phone and Jameela finally decided on the salmon. When her plate arrived, she seemed surprised that the spine and scales had, in fact, been removed and discarded. I ate my haddock taco while most of Jameela’s fish went back to the kitchen. When we finished, we headed over to my house for tea.

          Our conversation resumed around issues related to her studies and teaching. I learned that her husband is also a professor. She has two sons, thirteen and nine, who are rarely allowed to leave home except to go to school: We can’t let them out. We would worry too much. The older one is angry. He thinks we are too protective. He just studies and looks at his iPad. He wants only to go around with other boys… But they are fine. They are happy.

          Jameela knew that I have two daughters but I began to dread questions about my family. How could I possibly tell this elegant and lovely woman who frets over the kinds of scales her lunch once had that I am married to a woman, that I have a wife. I started preparing the tea (necessary to digest fish, I learn) while avoiding having to explain that my children have two mothers. I steered Jameela away from the family photos displayed around the house and was relieved when my children started distracting our delighted guest with a book on Chinglish, that funny blend of Chinese and English.

          When I arrived with the tea and handmade multicolored macaroons from the nearby French bakery, we talked a bit more about life in Baghdad. Jameela took a sip or two of the Earl Grey. I got a sense that she didn’t really like it and she didn’t try the cookies, even the one cut to look like a seagull with wings painted in gray and white sugar.

          The girls and I ate the cookies and I offered a walk around my neighborhood. Built as a summer community in the late 19^th century, rows of former summer “cottages” line the streets. Architectural traits range from Victorian to New England eclectic. Some have signs tacked above the door that have probably labeled these houses for decades: The Anchorage, Edgewater, Rendezvous, Fidder’s Green. Why does a house need a name?  I took a guess that the original owners probably had another “real” house and this was a kind of getaway, a summer house. Or, it may be tradition, like naming a boat, I said. Jameela looked at me quizzically. Do you think we are crazy? As the one attempting to explain why my neighbors’ houses have funny names, I assured her: no.

          We walked past a pale blue house with a stack of lobster traps in the yard. It has a fishing rod mounted over the door that is nailed above two oars and a sign that reads “Cross-Eyed Casters.” What does that mean? I pantomimed the cast of a fishing rod, and explained that being cross-eyed means that your eyes don’t line up right, that the nerves and the brain aren’t communicating with the eye muscles. Oh, yes, we have that word in Arabic. Cross-eyes are like crossed minds. They can’t see the world around them clearly.  I focused on the literal, agreeing that being cross-eyed probably makes fishing difficult. I left out the part that the cross-eyed reference may very possibly have something to do with this particular fisherman often being intoxicated. It seemed imprudent to explain that part.
          We continued our walk down the street to see the ocean. We met a grey-haired male neighbor who shrugged in dismay when Jameela refused his handshake. She started to complain of the heat in the late summer sun. I apologized for the walk as her heavy clothes began to smell after weeks of wear and lack of laundering.

          We got home and I prepared to drive Jameela back to campus. As I gathered my keys, Jameela presented me with a fancy gold and silver ring in a velvet box that I accepted graciously but inwardly cringed at its opulence. I drove her back to the residence halls and Jameela seemed genuinely happy: Why didn’t we do this sooner? My own frustrations with the day were, thankfully, not obvious, but, I was glad that the day had ended and I could return to the comfort of the familiar.

          A week or so later, before the scholars were set to leave, I decided to assemble a little package for Jameela to take back to her sons. She had mentioned that they liked to read in English, so I went to Harrison’s, famed purveyors of comic books and pop culture, to see if I could find some appropriate reading material for two boys forbidden to go outside of their home for fear of getting hit by an explosive device. I started down the rows of shelves, trying to gauge how the overwhelming number of comics could be narrowed for the interests of two Iraqi boys whom I would never meet. Scissor Sisters seemed inappropriate just given the title. Would the swords and sabers of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles be offensive?  Surely, the cleavage of the new Betty and Veronica would be in violation of some kind of rules related to nudity. Wonder Woman is even worse—all cleavage and thighs. The Simpsons cover showed the children hitting adults on the head with bats and Garbage Pail Kids displayed kids with their rear ends exposed. They all seemed to model taboos that I perceive a foundation of Iraqi aesthetics.

I continued down the aisles, mentally deconstructing both the bedrocks and counter-culture of America via the comic books on the shelves, trying to look at them with the eyes of the mother of the Iraqi pre-teens that I envisioned: Japanese anime punks, Sound of the Devil, and Southern Bastards were beyond my experiences but clearly in the realm of the offensive. Did Archie and Betty have pre-marital sex?  Could Batman and Robin be seen as gay? My insecurities mounting, I was about to abandon the plan.

          As I was about to walk away from this gesture of cross-cultural generosity, I re-examined the row of classics. Popeye and Peanuts would have to do. Popeye was on the cover with an open can of spinach, exclaiming, “I yam what I yam.” It seemed innocent enough, a sailor with a good diet would certainly charm Jameela’s sons. And how could I go wrong with Peanuts: the meek and nervous Charlie Brown navigating life’s lessons through his side-kicks, the bossy Lucy, loyal Linus with his security blanket, the endearing slob, Pigpen, and the ever-supportive Peppermint Patty. The boys could learn so much about the actual insecurities of Americans and practice their English at the same time.  

          At an arranged time on the Friday before the scholars were leaving, I packed the books along with some archetypal favorite candies of my own kids--Sour Patch Kids and Nerds—and went to the dorms where Jameela was staying. She had also asked me for ten signed letters of recommendation about her efforts as a scholar while in the U.S. that she could present to her superiors at the university in Baghdad, and I had complied with gracious exaggeration of what we had been able to accomplish together. I went to the reception area, called her room, texted her, all to no avail. Finally, one of her Iraqi colleagues, Noora, came down and told me that Jameela had gone to the mosque in a nearby town with some of the others—for one last round of prayer. Was it a prayer for her kids? For a safe journey? For war to end? I would never understand, wrapped in my cloak of the secular and rational. Annoyed, I gave the package to Noora who promised to pass it on.

I never saw Jameela again, but she sent along a note with a leather wallet embossed with the hanging gardens of Babylon, wonder of the ancient world, and a blue glass pendant of the evil eye, a talisman used to ward against evil by numerous factions across the Middle East who are in the throes of hurling missiles at each other. I took it as an honor that Jameela wished me safe from harm, but felt more aware than ever of the discrepancies of human behavior—the kindness of individuals and the killing by tribes. There was a short note in the wallet: Thank you for your time and teaching and for the gifts. I really like Popeye and Peanuts. Popeye the sailor man is strong and smart. And Peanuts shows us the American mind. I will take them all to Baghdad and teach my boys America. I would love to stay longer but winds blow counter to what the ship wants.

          When Jameela returned to Baghdad, she posted pictures on Facebook of black smoke billowing in the direction that she had come from. I wondered about those boys. Were they finally able to go outside and play? Or would they become part of the conflict, careening blindly through the haze, holding on to their protective charms, hoping that the evil eye would not blind them?

Julie Whitlow teaches in the English Department at Salem State University and coordinates the graduate programs in teaching English to speakers of other languages. She has been a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco and a Fulbright scholar in Nicaragua, experiences that made her realize mutual human understanding is elusive and worthy of exploration.

God's Vagabond

by Tom Darin Liskey

If you compared Buddy Burch’s Christian ministry to the high-flying evangelism so prevalent in America these days, you’d probably conclude that his was a flop. Burch and his wife Lydia rarely had a head count topping more than ten in the storefront church he pastored near a brake repair shop in Waveland, Mississippi. 

Unlike the financially well-oiled megachurch-malls dotting the country, the members of Burch’s mixed congregation, mainly poor blacks and whites, had to dig deep in their pocketbooks for a Sunday offering. More often than not, the loose change and crumpled dollar bills these salt-of-the-earth kind of believers tossed in barely covered the bottom of a collection plate. 

Yet Burch was not into that hard sell religion of pledges and fund raising. He just didn’t believe that it was his job to admonish people over money. Burch had realized long ago that the people who came to his small church gave what they could, and he’d always trusted God for the rest. That was no stretch for a couple well into their sixties living off a fixed-income and disability. 

The Sunday offerings were usually enough to cover the light bill and other expenses, and Burch never drew a salary from the funds. To help make ends meet, he would park his pickup on the side of the road to sell firewood from the tailgate.  

There was one irony never lost on Burch where he served as a pastor in the tiny Gulf Coast community he called home. Before “getting saved” as a young man, Burch was an unreconstructed racist who believed whole heartedly in segregation. That is until the night God spoke to him. And he would tell you, he didn’t like what God had to say. 

Burch was at a revival when a preacher from Jamaica took the pulpit. The way Burch described it, he sat in the pew of that little church fuming like a smokestack on a fast-moving locomotive. He just didn’t think it was right for a man of color to be preaching to white folks, God or no God. 

He only stayed seated because his Cherokee wife urged him too. She liked to hear the preacher’s message delivered with a soft Caribbean lilt. 

Once the preaching was over, Burch stood up to bolt from that church. That is until God whispered in his ear. It was the first time he heard God speak to him. But there was no great revelation or epiphany; no answer to life’s biggest question. What God uttered was a simple command: “Hug my son.” 

Burch stood there in the aisle of that church, dead in his tracks. He tried to shake it off, but the command came again. Firm, but simple: “Hug my son.” 

Burch turned around and looked at the revival preacher. His voice was shaky. 

“Sir, I don’t know you, but I need to hug you,” he recounted later.  

That’s what he did. He embraced the preacher from Jamaica. And what had been until then an impregnable edifice of race-hate crumbled like dust. 

Burch was never a freedom rider during the civil rights movement, yet while the fight to dismantle segregation in the South raged, Burch found himself drawing in African American churchgoers to his services like never before. At one point Burch received threats for preaching in black churches. Was Burch color blind? No, but there was love. A love so compelling that it was tangible. He’d shrug off any hint of praise for doing what he did by taking the message of Christ to black churches. 

“I went where God said to go,” he said once. 

~

I had met the Burch family through my mom when I was about four or five. My mother played piano in a Southern Gospel group, and she crossed paths with Lydia Burch in the small world of roving tent evangelists. The two women became fast friends early on, and Lydia would often spend a week or two with us in the summers. Buddy, when he wasn’t pastoring, would come up with her. I ended up going to college in Mississippi, and I drew close to the Burches at a time when the world around me—and inside me—was opening up.

This was the South and I, like most of my classmates, grew up in church. I saw some of my friends’ faith eroding as they pondered scientific theory, but the history and literature that I devoured blasted away the old dust of religion I had grown up with, revealing a new bedrock of belief.

I didn’t find the answers to life I was looking for in the dusty fossils of Darwinism or in political theory. My mind was feasting on Faulkner and O’Conner. I saw faith revealed in Rembrandt's hues, in Johnny Cash’s lyrics, and in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's writing. For the first time in my life I began to see the grain beneath the varnish. The more I saw, the more I wanted to scratch that lacquer away. The arts opened my eyes. Faith became my iris.

My college, the University of Southern Mississippi, was only an hour’s drive north from the Burch household. I’d often drive down to visit them on the weekends with the excuse of doing laundry. What I really wanted to do was talk to Buddy and his wife. When I came down for a visit, sometimes Buddy would load lanterns and gigs in his truck and we’d fish for flounder in the tidal shoals of the Mississippi Sound. 

But most of the time Buddy and Lydia and I would sit at their kitchen table while I waited on laundry. I chain smoked and talked about my dreams and my hopes. Instead of browbeating me for my lofty, if not footloose ambitions to see the world and write, they encouraged me. 

“Follow your dreams, son,” Buddy Burch would always tell me. “Money will follow.” 

Once, when I was facing a steep learning curve in my college courses and I was close to dropping out, Buddy Burch prodded me on with this advice: “An education is something they can never take away from you.”

Some may have frowned on the stark content of my writing, but they were proud of me for following the muse. 

“Truth,” Lydia would tell me. “Speak in truth.” 

I knew book-smart believers brushed Buddy and Lydia aside as backwoods bible-thumpers. True enough, Burch and his wife were foot-washing Christians who could barely pronounce the jumbled consonants of Biblical Hebrew, but the Word of God to him was sacred, and he treated it as such. He savored every tittle of scripture as if it were a wonderful and redolent vintage, something miraculous.

Later in life, as a journalist in South America and in other parts of the world, I met presidents, ministers of state, economic leaders, and the executives of some of the world’s largest companies. And yet, for someone who never made it past middle school in the hardscrabble South, Buddy Burch always loomed large in my mind and heart as a wise man.

Even more importantly, Burch and Lydia showed me something pretty wonderful. That an extraordinary God is often seen in the most ordinary people. Because in the end that’s what they were, ordinary and imperfect people who had the capacity to love God’s vagabonds.

Tom Darin Liskey spent nearly a decade working as a journalist in Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil. He is a graduate of the University of Southern Mississippi. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the Crime Factory, Driftwood Press, Mount Island, The Burnside Writers Collective, Sassafras Literary Magazine, Hirschworth and Biostories, among others. His photographs have been published in Roadside Fiction, Iron Gall Press, Blue Hour Magazine and Midwestern Gothic. He lives in Texas.