For people wondering why I'm upset -- I got five strikingly similar e-mails yesterday, part of the handful that arrive everytime I have a new poem up from Seal up the Thunder. Here's one from someone who, if his header at golden.net can be believed, is local.
You think you are a profit but you are not. You are a false profit. The Bible says "The prophets prophesy lies in my name: I sent them not, neither have I commanded them, neither spake unto them: they prophesy unto you a false vision and divination, and a thing of nought, and the deceit of their heart." This is you. The Bible doesn't need to be recovered like you say. It is HERE for everyone. My God is not a God of Monsters like you say. Maybe your God is but mine isn't. My God will send you his sword like he promised. Because you lead people astray.
I don't usually post private e-mails without the writer's permission, but in this case I make an exception. I also forwarded it to the provider, who can decide if it qualifies at threatening.
________________
Update: thanks, feeling better, you can stop comforting me (or in the case of Resurgere, snarking at me in a comforting way). This quotation from Dear St. Thomas More found at Next Reformation helps: "God help me always to seek truth; and protect me from the company of those who have found it."
I still think there must be a mailing list, you know, all those people with the training to defend their faith, sharing resources and using the power of the internet to find people to defend it from. I mean, how many people can you reasonably expect to offend with a poetry blog? Surely not several a poem? (I'm trying to work my way up to an even dozen.)
Also -- the Biblical quotation from my dear reader above is from Jeremiah. Mention of old J always makes me laugh -- I think of his name on the poster at work that lists notable people with mental illness. Turns out Jeremiah was depressed and hypomanic, and a little benzodiazepine would probably have fixed him right up.
(And all Job needed was some neosporsin and maybe Effexor...)
Huh? Leading people astray? Because you simply state what most people think at one time or another? That's not being blasphemous, that's being real. And human. This person should read David's psalms sometime and see how much HE complained often--but he kept his faith. I don't see you losing any faith at all.
Greg Gick
Definitely threatening and somewhat hate mongering. Maybe the writer can be charged? The writer certainly isn't a Christian. True Christians just don't say things like this; they definitely DO NOT invoke doom and the sword on poets. If the writer doesn't like your poems may I suggest he/she stop visiting your page!
Be strong, love. It would be a shame to let a minute minority ruin things for the rest of us. Your blog is much admired by a lot of people, and I think it's good for you and for getting your name out there.
As the song goes, don't let the bastards get you down.
I was going to say what Pat and Eeksy-Peeksy said in the previous post! My religious father would enjoy taking in the missionaries, giving them lemonade, and then finding the flawed logic in their arguments.
In this case if one does not realize that God is a god of monsters, as well as angels, then one has to question all of Genesis. Where did mosquitos come from, those tiny little blood-sucking monsters?
The Bible says a lot of things, but I'd like to think that sure, that's writer's God will send you a sword, as a matter of fact that writer's god already has. It's the way your words and writing pierce people to their very hearts and find themselves thinking and feeling more. You have the sword, but it's in your hand. It is sad that the email writer was too blind, and too far from God to see that.
Erin--I don't think you ever believed a poetry blog wouldn't offend someone. If it didn't, it wouldn't be poetry--it would be versification.
Love, P
Pat: I expect to offend or discomfit some readers --especially with my devotional writings and my erotic stuff (which by and large doesn't get posted here). But to get so many letters? I have a hard time believing that, say, one in fifteen of my regular readers is a Christian with no sense of humour and little sense of grammar. *
Hence the great mailing list conspiracy theory, about which you've now heard the last.
________
*To be fair, most of the letters I get are more articulate and less poisonous than this one.
Out of curiosity, do you know who made "the poster at work that lists notable people with mental illness"?
My dad, who works with the Canadian Mental Health Association, was working on a similar poster a year or so ago.
Congrats on the publication of Ghost Maps!
Matt, I'm not sure. The hospital has a number of posters along this line, and the CMHA certainly made some of them.
I wrote a comment on this and then it got eaten and I gave up because I didn't have time to rewrite it, and I forgot all about it until now.
Anyway, I find your poems honest and thought-provoking, and no more "heretical" than the book of Job, or Psalm 88, or a discouraged and jail-bound John the Baptist sending his disciples to ask Jesus, "Are you the Messiah or should we look for another?" What I especially love about the last one is that the Lord Jesus never rebuked John or spoke ill
of him for doubting -- he graciously reassured him with evidences, and then he turned around to the crowd and praised John as the greatest prophet ever born of woman.
There's a difference between blasphemous skepticism and cynicism about God's character and sincere struggling to comprehend His "unsearchable ways", and in your poems I see the latter, not the former.