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Sunday
Our church’s Director of Christian Formation, Jeannie Babb, addressed our weekly Sunday Forum last week about how she uses poetry as a tool for healing ministry in jail and at a long-term residence for women recovering from commercial sexual exploitation and addiction. In the course of her talk, Jeannie read us poems that women had written as they sought to come to terms with their past and negotiate their futures.
For privacy reasons, we can’t share the poems here, but I can report that they moved us deeply as they captured both what it’s like to feel trapped and to experience hope. Many were expressions of deep gratitude.
Jeannie, who has an STM degree (Master of Sacred Theology) from Sewanee’s School of Theology (class of ’13), wrote her thesis on violence against women in scripture and martyrology.
To set the tone for her talk, Jeannie shared one of her own poems, which we came to realize describes many of the ways that the women she works with use poetry.
Jelly God
By Jeannie Babb
I am thankful for the invisible
jellylike grace
that surrounds and supports me
when God has no face,
and for the sky that quietly
swallows my shouts
and forgets them more eloquently
than I bellow them out.
And when I fall I’m thankful
that it hurts when I land,
to know the ground was solid
where I made my stand.
By Jeannie Babb, Director of Christian Formation at St. Mark and St. Paul, Sewanee Tn
Sometimes poetry is just a prayer.
Sometimes it’s a sermon.
What else can poetry be?
–an instruction
–a declaration
–a petition
–a judgment
Sometimes the purpose of poetry is to give voice to collective pain and hope.
What else might it be?
–an invitation|
–a realignment
Poet Bobby LeFebre recently described his designation as Colorado’s Poet Laureate as
more than a title; it was a calling, a duty, and a privilege. The poet, when effective, is not merely a writer of words, but a cultural worker—a healer who uses the alchemy of language to mend the broken and bind the wounds of our collective spirit. The poet is a conductor and conduit of a world that begs us to see and celebrate our profound relationship to it. We are more than literature; we are cultural translators, humble prophets, communal visionaries. We are stewards and servants of humanity and emotion, dreamers and realists inseparably entwined.
But what about poetry as a medium for healing? We do that every Sunday morning, at least. In our prayers, in the Psalms and the Prophets, in many of the Old and New Testament readings,
Poetry is self-help. It’s hard to write poetry and not grow, emotionally and spiritually. Recovery groups like AA use poetry as well. We all know the serenity prayer. Well, it’s actually part of a poem attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr:
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change.
Courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardship as the pathway to peace.
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
trusting that He will make all things
right if I surrender to His will;
that I may be reasonably happy
in this life,
and supremely happy with Him
forever in the next.
I have been using poetry with women in recovery for many years, most recently in a class that I teach at Rahab’s Rest in Chattanooga, which is a long-term residential program for women who are survivors of commercial sexual exploitation. Rahab’s Rest is a ministry of Love’s Arm Outreach, a non-profit agency that also provides street outreach and jail outreach, a crisis hotline, jail ministry and other programs to exploited women.
Poetry is artifice, from which we get the word art. In other words, it is not reality but a representation of it. If an artist paints your portrait, that portrait is not you but an interpretation of you. This means that poets, without revealing anything, can still be dangerously open and raw. The words are both a mirror to reveal ourselves and a medium to hide behind.
When someone writes a story or book, the first question the world wants to know is often, “Is it true?” But having delivered many different poems in a wide variety of places, I can report that nobody asks you if it’s true. Somehow, poetry does not carry the same burden of reality as prose. All poetry is true, in the sense that a dream is true. For this reason, poetry is an especially poignant vehicle for reflecting on, sharing, and healing from trauma.
Here is a poem I’ve read with my students at Rahab’s Rest:
i have been a thousand different women
By Emory Hall
make peace
with all the women
you once were.
lay flowers
at their feet.
offer them incense
and honey
and forgiveness.
honor them
and give them your silence.
listen.
bless them
and let them be.
for they are the bones
of the temple
you sit in now.
for they are
the rivers
of wisdom
leading you toward
the sea.
In the recovery context, some poems work better than others. As regards my students, they generally haven’t attended college and many were on the street before they completed high school. Some were already pregnant or in jail or both.
I wonder what words or pictures come in your mind when I say that my students are victims of sex trafficking or commercial sexual exploitation, what we used to call prostitutes. I wonder what you think they look like. How old are these women in your mind? What color are they? Are they hometown girls or from far away? Whatever you imagine is probably not wrong, just incomplete.
The ages of my students span several decades. Some are mothers, usually from a young age. Many of them have given up children, lost children, or had them taken from them. Many of them are now grandmothers.
When we talk about recovery, that includes recovery from substance abuse. It’s a chicken-and-egg sort of question: is one exploited because of addiction or does one become addicted because of exploitation? Answer: it goes both ways. The real “egg” here is the sexual abuse of children.
Right now, there’s a lot of focus on sex trafficking (and especially child sex trafficking) in popular culture, but people have a lot of misconceptions. Some suburban moms think their child is going to be abducted out of the shopping cart at Target. That’s not what’s happening—if it were, it would be all over the news.
The truth is much more insidious. Victims of child sexual abuse are typically harmed in their own homes, by a family member or someone close to the family. Women who are being commercially exploited were usually groomed from the time they were very young and then trafficked by family members, neighbors, or boyfriends. By the time they reach adulthood, they are deeply traumatized, suffering from substance abuse disorders and other mental health conditions. They have been conditioned to accept sexual abuse and exploitation.
Another misconception is that these women “just need Jesus.” The truth is that many already embrace him. The women I meet at Rahab’s Rest and the women I meet in jail have a very deep faith in God. I’ve yet to meet a survivor who says that God has let her down. Now, she may tell you that people have let her down, although in most cases she’ll blame herself. But as far as God goes, residents at Rahab’s Rest and women I meet in jail are often grateful to God and to those who have reached out to them. This comes through in their poetry.
One day during class I asked the women at Rahab’s Rest if they would like to write some poems for me to take to the jail. Because we wanted the poems to be from all the students and be fully anonymous, I had them each write a line of a poem and then pass the page on to someone else, who wrote a second line, and so on.
The next Saturday I laid the poems in the tray that goes through the metal detector, and the chaplain led me across the yard through all the locked gates and heavy doors to a classroom. Always, it seems, it’s a different classroom because parts of the jail are undergoing renovation.
When the women came to the room, they were dragging chains. The chaplain explained that, because of the classroom location, they could only attend Bible class if they wore shackles. She gently reminded them to take small steps so they wouldn’t trip, and one older woman was stifling a cry with every step because the cuffs were digging into her tendons.
I was humbled, realizing how badly they wanted to be there. If they had to drag chains to hear a message of God’s love, they would do so. I told them about the poems that had been written specifically for them and passed them around, having the women read them out loud.
“Dope was the love of my life,” one inmate read, and then clutched the paper to her chest. “It’s me,” she said, “this poem is about me.” She continued reading, with tears streaming down her face, as the poem pivoted from despair to a message of hope.
The women I work with in jail are, again, all ages. Most of them grew up in the area. In some cases, their grandmothers prayed for them and took them to church. Given their deep faith, I find myself wondering whether agnosticism and atheism is a sign of privilege. These women don’t have that luxury. Given that they often lack education, generational wealth, mental health and in many cases physical health, prayer is all they have.
Their conditions are often very treatable, but instead of treatment they encounter punishment and a cycle of poverty, exploitation, and substances.
One day I asked Chaplain Jones about the most common factor leading to incarceration in Hamilton County. I expected her to point to substance abuse but instead she said, “lack of affordable housing.” People are becoming newly-homeless at an alarming rate in Chattanooga.
Often they live in their car, at least at first. One of my students wrote about the grace of still having that one single possession when one has lost everything else. She wrote how her car “held” her and helped quiet “the voices of addiction.” In that space, she could hear a still, small voice that gave her just enough hope to make the phone call that led her to Love’s Arm, where she has experienced safety, clarity, and sobriety.
While I had permission to read the students’ poetry aloud, I asked Robin not to include them in his blog since they are “unpublished.” Recently my students had the idea to write a poetry chapbook compiling their works. They hope their poems will find their way to people who need that kind of hope.
Recently, Love’s Arm opened a second house, this one to provide acute rather than long-term assistance. Josephine’s House provides a safe place for bringing women directly off the street and assisting them with active addiction. The goal is to provide safety as well as some immediate medical and mental health care so residents can find that clarity of mind our poet mentioned. After that, they can decide what step they are ready to take. The women at Rahab’s Rest have enthusiastically pitched in to prepare Josephine’s House.
One of them even wrote a poem to welcome new residents.
Note: For more information of Love’s Arm, see lovesarmoutreach.org. You may watch Jeannie’s presentation, along with readings of poems written by the women she works with, at https://www.facebook.com/100064290295310/videos/1365868824305224.