A Review of Marla Taviano’s Poetry
Like the comfort the Psalms once provided, Marla Taviano's poetry gave me the language I needed to help navigate my experience on the other side of spiritual abuse.
When I was a kid in church, I spent every day reading the Bible—a little bit each morning, from start to finish, so that by the time I was an adult, I’d read through the entire volume several times. I’d pushed through the dull genealogies and violent tales and confusing prophecies because I’d been taught every word was equally important.
My favorite book of the Bible was the Psalms, which are written as songs, or poetry. I found this part of the scriptures to be comforting. I felt like I could access my emotions by reading the Psalms in a way I didn’t feel reading the rest of the Bible. The psalmists explored their pain and suffering, joy and hope, despair. Not all of the poems have happy endings or resolutions. That felt real to me in a world where it felt like Christians were supposed to smile and be joyful all the time.
Going through a faith change in the aftermath of spiritual abuse has meant I don’t read the Bible anymore. In many ways, it has become painful, and I no longer find comfort there. But I’ve carried with me a love of poetry that helps me understand myself and my life. What was once true for the Psalms can be true for all kinds of poetry: words that let us feel, help us access our emotions, give voice to our inner selves. Poetry can create space for sorrow and rage, the feeling of freedom, the grief of loss--all things that we often experience in faith deconstruction.
Those in the “exvangelical” community may be familiar with the writer, reader, and poet Marla Taviano, who once wrote books on marriage and parenting in the evangelical space. Marla’s latest projects have focused on deconstructing harmful beliefs through poetry, and it’s lovely to see a writer be vulnerable and honest about what this process can feel like.
Marla’s first poetry book, unbelieve: poems on the journey to becoming a heretic, feels like a reckoning with an evangelical past, the dismantling of racism, sexism, and homophobia in the church. Each page feels raw with the very real emotion of recognizing our complicity within toxic systems and working to leave them behind as we move forward with compassion and a new perspective. Often, the voice of the poetry is humorous, giving us room to laugh in the pain of deconstruction.
This is one of my favorites:
looking back I see it
my writing was so predictable, mass-produced
on a Bible belt in an evangelical jargon factory
like Campbell’s Christian-Os heated in a pan
and served in a translucent Tupperware bowl
like canned French green beans and Cream of
Christian mixed in a Corningware dish
like magenta jellied Christianity Sauce
Plopped on a ceramic Christmas tree plate
in a perfect cylindrical shape right
down to the identical uniform ridges
And Marla doesn’t shy away from calling out hypocrisy. I particularly love her freedom with language that would once have been policed in the church:
my first clue
should have been
when all you
wanted to talk about
was Jesus’ death
and didn’t give a
shit about his life
Marla’s latest collection, jaded: a poetic reckoning with white evangelical christian indoctrination, digs even deeper in addressing the harm the church has caused, with sections of poems focusing on white supremacy, colonization, Christian nationalism, and purity culture.
If you follow Marla on social media, you know she is a prolific reader, and that shows especially true in this collection as she points to other writers, like Wilda Gafney, Richard Rohr, and Danté Stewart, responding to their wisdom in a way that shows her learning process. She pulls no punches and isn’t afraid of using irreverence to voice all the emotions of liberation: frustration, anger, relief.
Those who have survived spiritual abuse may find this type of poetry healing. So often we were told that our hearts were deceitful, that our feelings were bad. We pushed down our emotions and our inner voice to survive. But now that we’re out, it can be a huge relief to explore those feelings and find words for what we’ve been through. I’m sure many survivors may find this poem resonant with their experience of leaving an abusive situation:
how to get away with spiritual abuse
when someone wakes up
and walks away from
your toxicity
just tell those who stayed,
Marla is listening
to the devil
works like a charm
It’s my belief that when we’ve survived spiritual abuse or left a toxic religious system, we need to allow ourselves to feel all of our emotions. It can be uncomfortable; we might feel ashamed for our feelings because of what we were taught to believe about ourselves. But learning to recognize my emotions, allowing myself to feel them, and processing through them in a healthy way have all been necessary to my own healing. Art is such a beautiful way to do this, and I think Marla Taviano’s poetry might be just what spiritual abuse survivors in the evangelical church need in this moment.
*Poems are used with permission from Marla Taviano.
Cait West is a member of Tears of Eden’s Editorial Board. She focuses on writing about the patriarchal movement and how patriarchy influences Spiritual Abuse. Find her at caitwest.com and on Instagram and Twitter at @caitwestwrites.