I think knowing a story from childhood or any story for a really long time means you can forget its power or potency.
Let us consider the Watered down Bible stories from Sunday school or Veggie Tales ( I love you Veggie Tales).
Le us consider the parables and retellings that have shaped much of civilization as we know it and the ones wielded to defend or deny the policy that shapes our lives. The ones some legislators want to be taught in school in a very specific way. The ones some English teachers want only taught to older students more capable of understanding their literary beauty and cultural importance.
Like stories of American greatness and historical triumph, they can seem inevitable, and tame, with the endings that now fail to shock or cause reflection.
Familiarity invites intimacy. There is a closeness I feel to Aslan from Narnia and the much greater God of my childhood because of this very thing.
But that tendency to think I know all of what the story is saying from my vantage point is one we all have within us.
It is the one that might make us miss what we are truly wrestling with as neighbors existing in a political and social context we cannot escape.
Poetry tilts us and tells us the truth so slant we might catch it this time. Emily Dickens told us so 1800s.
As soft as we might see the arts as a form of social change, compared to weapons and policy and might, it can give us the eyes to see each other anew and change what is and what seems so solid.
I would like to include this poem and the way it was read in this dispatch from the On Being team and poet J. Estanislao Lopez.
When writer Rachel Held Evans walked among us, she used her writing and community to remember the people power forgot. She created for herself a time to remember the unnamed women who met unspeakable violence in the Bible. It was an example to many as to how to pause and think of everyone in a story.
To ask ourselves what the vantage point of privilege leaves out, and remember that just because pain is unnamed or memorialized does not make it or the people it touches less valuable.
J. Estanislao Lopez writes from the vantage point of one of the women who Rachel Held Evans memorialized and who Professor Phyliss Trible would place in her literary feminist readings of the Bible in her work on what she called the Texts of Terror.
This is a woman who is named by her proximity to the man who supposedly sacrificed her to my God. I find this, like I find the killings of others in this country by men claiming my God, disgusting. The ending never changes. The story of violence to satisfy male pride and God is so very old.
Jephthath’s daughter comes out of the house to greet her father after battle. Jephthath had vowed to God that he would sacrifice the first thing that walked out of his home if God gave him the battle victory. He wins, he comes home, he witnesses his daughter coming out to him, and he weeps. The story is short. The daughter seems wise. The text does not explicitly state if she is indeed sacrificed.
But often this story and others like it are seen as if God mandated this. As if the father, by being the father and being in power and by winning, was right.
Do we not do this with our American battles and victories of war and politics and debate stages?
This poem offers a way of seeing the story as if the daughter (and us) can speak back to those things. As if the foolishness done and spoken, the pride and short-sightedness, the offering of another’s life for your gain, is questionable.
There are so many stories about who deserves what and why. We call them laws. We call them policy. We call them the American Way.
And thankfully, there are always poets who say, consider the grasshopper. Consider the value of the things before you. Consider the things money and power can forget but not ultimately defeat. Consider what is possible when you know you are loved and worthy, and so is everyone else.
This orientation to each other is far from being weak and sentimental. It argues that our real capacity to value, prioritize, and order the world can not only apply to other things or better things but also protect them.
And maybe, like the imagined Jephthah’s daughter, it starts with first believing that you matter. That all our endings are not yet written. This, in my Christian tradition, is what we call resurrection. It is a knowing, that not even the worst or darkest thing we have faced has to be the final word.
For the poets, who present to us words as alternative endings if we are brave enough to hope for them, we give thanks.
Alternate Ending: The Escape of Jephthah’s Daughter
Written by J. Estanislao Lopez
Read by Pádraig Ó Tuama
Seeing my father tear his clothes at the sight of me,
each seam of cloth unspindling to reveal his bare,
flexing chest as he wailed a heartfelt regret,
I could no longer take him seriously. God,
I realized, played favorites and favored fools.
Who did he think would walk through the door
to greet him? The irony!—I could hear the future
exclaim. And a virgin sacrifice, at that!
But I’m no archetype. I fled to the mountains,
promising return, but what is a promise if not
an exchange of ideas about ourselves, subject
to evolving circumstances? If my nation burns, so be it.
Many will be grateful. And there’s no lack of men
eager to sing of how they suffered greatly and prevailed.