I Can Hear God Laughing Now

Teacher / Poet #45

I Can Hear God Laughing Now

“I actually think that writing–in fact art as a whole–is on a continuum. The same way that gender is on a continuum, sexuality is on a continuum, and people stop on that continuum wherever it makes them comfortable. For me, I write everything from poetry to fiction, nonfiction, and critical essays. I do a lot of editorial stuff. I do screenplays. I’m comfortable along the spectrum because part of it has to do with identity. I am Chris primarily and a writer secondarily, so I don’t have any strong positions to hold about form or genre, which makes it easier for me to flow along that spectrum.”

-Chris Abani, “World Literature Today” 2018 Interview with Rob Roensch and Mary B. Gray

Chris Abani, in the paragraph above, was responding to a pretty standard writer-interview question, “As an author who writes both poetry and fiction, what does your poetry offer to readers that your prose cannot/does not and vice versa? And what do you think is the role of the poet versus the role of the prose writer?” Abani’s answer hits on something profound: “I am Chris, primarily, and a writer secondarily.”

How this simple statement both impresses and challenges. How important it has been in my own life to identify with the roles I inhabit–teacher or poet (two identities I write a lot about here)--and how often I get caught up in sketching out the contours of those roles in minute detail.

But what if I began more basically?

I’m Zach primarily.

It’s uncomfortable putting the words out there that baldly. I mean there really is nothing left to hide, just the bare four letters of my name. Or seven–Z-A-C-H-A-R-Y–if you want to get more precise. For that’s the name my parents gave me. And here I am in this world, a strange and unique creation (as are you, dear reader) unable on my own to fathom my purpose for being here. I consult the sacred texts of the traditions I was born into, and some that I was not born into. I pray. I meditate. I teach. I write. I do the dishes. I change the diapers. And will continue to do these things with as much presence and care as I possibly can.

But Abani is right: I can do these things and at the same time hold lightly to them.

For instance. It’s been important for me these past two years since my son was born to inhabit this role, father. I don’t want to diminish this desire of mine, this search. But also, with each passing day of fatherhood, the clearer it becomes to me that the boy Cristina bore and that I am privileged to call our son has a life all his own, apart from us. Sure, Isaac has genes from me and genes from Cristina. We are responsible for him. We love him. We take care of him. But he is not ours. And God willing, I hope he will one day no longer require our care-taking. That he will one day leave our home. And then the specific ways I have sketched out my particular definition of the role of father will of course have to totally change.

Who am I kidding? Even now, the role of fatherhood I am inhabiting–it’s a weird word, inhabiting, I know, maybe I need another one?–is changing every day, as our son changes and grows.

I want things to be fixed and stable and going into eternity: same bed time, same snack time, same longing murmur of daddee-daddee before he goes down. But even these, if I look back six months ago, were different. Unrecognizable. (What? Words???)

I am Zach primarily, and a father secondarily. And the heavenly father I am supposedly trying to imitate (“Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect”) is protean, out of my grasp. In spite of a life spent poring over translations of the Old and New testaments of the Bible, I know less about who God is now than I thought I did as a boy or young man.

A friend of mine, Fathe Marc Boulos, a priest in the Orthodox tradition, comes over weekly on my day off from school to study the Gospel of Mark and chat about life (I dropped to part-time as a teacher since Isaac was born, an accommodation to fatherhood). Like Chris Abani, but from a different angle, Father Marc’s writing and teaching cuts against the grain of our contemporary (Western) conceptions of identity.

Father Marc calls himself “an anachronism.” By that I take it to mean that his life is consciously and intentionally modeled after the prophets of scripture–those in the Old and New Testaments. (Sidebar: when I first met Father Marc, I’d already heard a good deal of his podcast, The Bible As Literature and read his two books. I told him I thought he had a “Pauline” voice and tone. “No,” he corrected me. “Ezekelian.”)

Ultimately, the prophetic role–which I think Father Marc would agree with me is not a stable role, only one he can enter into and out of by God’s will and grace–disturbs and unsettles all of our human conceptions of identity. It casts us back on the name our parents gave us. Into the dust we were before we came from our mother’s womb.

This unsettling and scattering is scary stuff. It also feels essential in order to live a life with any kind of integrity in relationship to God and neighbor. That is: I know the words, I listen to them with the ears that I have, and then I try to act accordingly. Submitting to a wisdom that is certainly not my own. (As surely as my son is not my own.)

This stance, though, runs against the grain of much of my (formal) education, which has instructed me in the importance of systems and structures and rubrics for measuring one’s growth and achievement.

In that Chris Abani interview I quoted above, he begins unsettling his writerly identity by inviting us the readers to unsettle our gender and sexual identities. They’re a continuum, Abani asserts.

If you know me and my own background in the Roman Catholic Church, you would know just how challenging those words are. And while those more progressively schooled in gender and sexuality in the west may celebrate the fluidity Abani names here, they don’t embody that fluidity in the way Abani does in his work and interactions. No, they, and I, orient ourselves around “where we are” on the continuum, naming it, quantifying it, finding the exact right words or combination of words to describe it. In contrast, Abani acknowledges this fluidity as a reality, then moves on.

“I am Chris first.” He is first a person in the world with a name he did not choose. Then, he chooses to do certain (lifegiving) things in the world with his time. But he does not define himself as a person by those things he does. The best way I can say it is that he is extremely relaxed about all of it.

Meanwhile, I fret and worry over my identity as a teacher and a poet and a father. It’s laughable how much time it occupies in my head space. And I’m trying to use that ‘laughable’ as gently as possible, reader.

I even imagine I can hear God laughing now, through Isaac, who daily lives up to his name. It’s better than any song I’ve heard, this laugh. Brings me home to who, and whose, I am.

In a first draft of this essay I started with the title “Against Identifying With My Identity.” And as I moved through the writing of the piece, reflecting on the material, I saw the helpfulness of that stance. But as I thought longer and wrote more, I realized that antagonism (“against”) can drop away, too. That that resistance can be a barrier, too. And is certainly not relaxed in the way Abani’s stance is, for instance.

Consider this simple saying from a desert father, about a young monk trying to learn wisdom from an older one: “Abba Poemen said to Abba Joseph: Tell me how I can become a monk. And he replied: If you want to find rest here, say in every occasion, who am I? and do not judge anyone.”

Say in every occasion, who am I?

I’ve written in another essay on this platform about the practice of silence and stillness. Of centering prayer. It is a practice that strips me down. That requires a confrontation with that basic question the wise desert father gave the young would-be monk, who am I? I have found in my own life that when I take the time to sit in silence with that question, the “identities” I’ve constructed for myself (and have spent time reflecting on in many of these pages) tend to fall away. Tendencies and attitudes and tears and shame and boredom replace them. And then there is the breath going in and out. And my sense of being an embodied human being. My own hands can even feel strange and out of place resting on my legs!

So, yes, there is a kind of relaxed sense that pervades me. But there is also a sense of smallness, of inner laughter at my own self and sense of self. Without a practice and a discipline of stripping that self down, I inevitably revert back to ‘identifying with my identities.’

My prayer, my intention is to honor that commitment I made when the pandemic broke something in me, the time when I was hospitalized for a few days in May of 2020 and things felt like they were hanging in the balance, and aside from breath and body, I really didn’t have strong opinions about who I was. That was a time when this practice took hold of me. (And I use that phrasing intentionally; certainly I did not take hold of it.)

So when I go to prayer and silence, I remember that moment, not in my head, but in my breath and my bones and my blood.

All this is true. And that same time, I cannot help but notice (as I hope you have too, reader) how much the I and me and my pervade the above paragraphs, and the whole of this essay itself.

Brother Gregory Mayers writes in his book Listen to the Desert (which I cited above) words that have uncomfortable application to what I’m doing here:

“The greatest danger in any spiritual practice is that it turns into an exercise in self-meditation. How am I doing now? Boy, that was a wonderful experience! Wow, what a bummer, I hope that never happens again. Now I’m really getting the hang of it! What a fascinating insight into God: I must be really special to see this way! We all do these and many other kinds of commentating on ourselves under the guise of spiritual awareness. My teacher, Father Willigis Jäger, said that his job was to frustrate me. And he did a good job, just like a good golf pro who frustrates the players swing ruts that defeat your game. The purpose of contemplation is neither to improve our morals or ethics, nor to perfect our personality to win friends and influence people, nor any kind of self-improvement or self-aggrandizing goal. The “purpose” of contemplation is to lose our self: ‘He who saves his life loses it, while he who loses his life for my sake discovers who he really is.’”

Nothing about what Willigis Father Jäger or his student Brother Gregory Mayers has said is going to make you popular or loved. It’s not going to give you more friends or greater self-esteem. But it will reveal to you the truth of who you are. That, friends, is wisdom. That is a great gift.

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Notes

-I’ve linked Chris Abani’s writer interview after the quote at the top of this essay. But readers interested in following up or digging deeper on his thinking on identity should check out his conversation with poet Pádraig Ó Tuama from a Seattle Arts & Lecture presentation earlier this year. It features beautiful new poems Abani wrote for his recently deceased brother from the collection Smoking the Bible.

-I’ve mentioned Father Marc Boulos a number of times on this Substack and am deeply grateful for his friendship. If you’re intrigued by what I’ve written about him here, I highly recommend his podcast, The Bible As Literature, or his recent book, Dark Sayings: Diary of An American Priest.

-And, in case you were wondering, yes, Brother Gregory Mayers’ Listen to the Desert IS now available from our new publishing company, One Subject Press. Check out more details here and peruse more of our excellent titles.

-Finally, a follow-up from last issue’s essay: poet and nurse Kayla Knoll, who is also the current assistant poetry editor at Hamline MFA program’s Water~Stone Review, has started a petition to save the program and the literary journal. Please do consider supporting here!