The blood of my ancestors pulses within the walls of this church, their bones alive within the soil upon which it sits. A church built by the hands of Texas farmers, hands that knew hard work, loss, and prayer. This is the church where my mother’s father spent a childhood swinging from oak trees, where my father’s mother taught Sunday School in sunlit classrooms, and where my parents were married beneath a solid oak pulpit. I was known by this church before I was born.

They whisper, my ancestors do. Haunting judgement. The day of my grandfather’s funeral, I could not hear them – the tongues of fire. I sang from the old hymnals of my childhood, and our voices echoed through the Oak Grove Southern Baptist Church. This is the story of my family, this is the song of my heritage

Small town children inherit a religious matrix shot through with a heritage of ancestral memories. Fear and need forged a lineage of interconnection required for communal survival. Faith and community intertwine until one becomes indistinguishable from the other. In a design such as this, one is never alone, so long as the boundaries are maintained. If you tread into territories too unknown, territories beyond creed, the spirits of the past become the demons of the present, and they speak with tongues of fire.  Tongues of fire leave life-long blisters.

Who first determined hell was hot? Is not a cold glare its own condemnation; the slightest gaze from the gorgon Medusa turns all life to stone? The flames of fire may lash out, but the cold rigidity is what kills. Ice arrows penetrate the heart with frigid rejection even as you fall from grace. Hell may be hot, but dogma knows its way around cold. A door slammed in your face, a dial tone where there was once a voice, the piercing glare of silent disapproval. All this for seeking my own truth?

I stepped beyond the fundamentals of doctrine, into a chasm of unknowns. A terrifying realm with no answers. The rigid dogma of Protestant fundamentalism may chill, but there is a solidness to that which is frozen, a firm ground upon which one can stand when the chasm of unknowns is too uncertain to bear. Absolutes keep the unknowns at bay.

Perhaps this is how fundamentalism was forged; in a furnace of fear fueled by unknowns. When the ethos of the Enlightenment placed imagination under the solidifying gaze of Medusa, the Bible under the microscope of scholars. The truth of soul juxtaposed against the truth of intellect, a confusion of symbol and sign that fractured the foundation of Christian identity with freezing scrutiny. The need to prove, rising above the need to experience, turned Saint Theresa of Avila’s fiery spear of ecstasy into a frozen dagger of defense. The Bible became “the Sword of Lord,” a self-righteous battle cry of theological certainty. Clean lines of creed clearly drawn, God’s merciless presence at the draw of the sword. Solidified ideals create formidable warriors.

My name is written in stone at the head of my grandfather’s grave. We all are; my family, solidified forever. Grannie decided we all need to be there, in death. A silent permanence of place; a date and a dash waiting for the final numbers. No space for growth or change, the fluidity of a life well lived. We are all frozen in 1997. This is my story, and the end is written.

ATHENA, THE GREEK GODDESS OF WAR, bears the head of Medusa upon her breastplate. Wars are waged with Medusa’s stone-cold stare, a solid battle ground for Athena’s strategic art. War necessitates clarity. History reveals that Protestant fundamentalism formed with each battle of defense. With severing certainty, “the Sword of the Lord” was held at the throat of the enemy throughout the American Revolution, the Civil War, and an all-too-liberal secular modernity. Fear encased in stone cold steel slashed wounds that flow to this day. Each battle its own loss. Certainties appear less certain amidst such suffering. Fear seeps into the crevices of creed when angst is left unanswered. Yet, having lost so much, each new idea threatened more loss, and the Bible Belt tightened all the more; all doubt and fear repressed into the realm of unknowns. Martin Luther’s hammer nailing the Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church was akin to the hammer that carved the fundamental ideals of the conservative Protestant church onto tablets of cold hard stone. The polysemic Christian narrative was distilled into a single, systematic dogma, rigid and contrary to the tolerance and compassion at the heart of the gospels. Church leaders became frigid warriors, defending boundaries of ideological certainty from the fearful threat of emerging unknowns.

Fear is hot; chaotic, like the sinuous serpents on Medusa’s head. Dogma is fueled by it. Beneath a cold calm shell of certainty is a fiery chaotic abyss of unknowns. In the eye of perfection, the other is this abyss, our fear is a threat of their invasion. I listened as stone sculptures roared eschatological nightmares from solid oak pulpits, creating chaos to justify defense. I heard them. Whispered warnings harboring fear in the night:

         “You shall not…”

         “You must not…”

         “You can not….”

The devil is in the details, for fear permeates every shadow with its silent threat:

         “You will be judged.”

Abide. Abide and listen. The ancestors are speaking:

         “How dare you question?”

         “We lost everything.”

         “‘This is your story, this is your song.’”

Hauntings. I am never alone. I belong to their memories. Ancestral tongues of fire telling the tales of wounding, the anguish of displacement, the struggle for survival, the lament of loss. They are screaming that boundaries protect. These ideals are solid ground, clarity and belonging in a tumultuous post-modern society uncertain of its own ground. Be careful, do not forget who you are, what you have come from. Hear us and do not forget. Do not trade one extreme for another.        

Perseus has the cunning to slay Medusa. Athena bestows him with a shield burnished so perfectly that Perseus can see his own reflection in its sheen. This mirror-like surface is how he subverts Medusa’s stone stare and severs the serpentine-locked head. Her frigid glare holds no power in reflection, attesting that self-reflection holds a power all its own. Wielding a sword requires courage, but so does looking within. Staring into the tongues of fire thaws the frozen heart. The soul awakens as the wounds of ancestral memories become the pathways to an inner experience. To bear witness to these wounds, to hear the cries of the past, holds a space for healing and wholeness. A heritage willingly borne, though the pen in the hand tremors with more to be written.

Could the world hold more possibility than fear? Could faith be big enough to step into unknowns? Must we always be told what to believe; could we perchance experience belief? The soul has no script, the end is never written in stone. Imagination is kindled in the flame of unknowns and the dogma begins to dance. Boundaries blur in playful exploration finding a faith unbounded by fear, and God great enough to hold all.

As Perseus’ shield-mirror subverts Medusa’s stone vision, the mercurial mirror of experience resists solidification. Identity reflected from within; fluid emergence from the realm of imagination. Solidified ice in the heat of self-reflection transmutes to fluid water. Shall we not lay down our sword and shield by the riverside?

ON THE DAY I WAS BAPTIZED, I CHOKED. As the preacher immersed my head, the waters flowed into my lungs, permeating the boundaries of breath. The pneuma of life extinguished in my own rebirth. A silencing; a listening. Then, it felt oppressive, the water silenced me. Now, I can read the metaphor, the water asked me to listen. I heard the tongues of fire, looked into their dogmatic ice, and listened to their pleas. I saw through them and found myself floating in the ubiquitous flux, the amniotic waters of life. Water works in this way; breaking boundaries and their semblance of solidity, flowing into fissures that fracture solid stone. Fire and ice, polarized contradictions juxtaposed, forcing an act of fluid imagination. Transcendence is in the tensions, just as Pegasus emerges from the decapitated body of Medusa. A paradoxical creature who juxtaposes land and air, dense stone and feathery flight. Pegasus is a symbol of the creative energy of life, each hoof strike to the earth releases a flowing spring; a fluid inspiration. Water from rock inspires; a breath of life that lives within the fiery tongues of fear and frozen ideals. Could experience turn ice arrows into flaming spears of ecstasy? Could tongues of fire intertwine with the fluidity of emergence? If the flight of imagination is born of stone, could not all paradox offer such transcendence? A divine stallion with wings; an unimaginable image imagined.