Christians and Writers and Queers, Oh My!

What Are You Going To Do?

2009-04-06T19:44:00.000-07:00

Rating: GT
Mark 1:9-15

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased."
And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.
Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news."

Mark’s gospel account reads like a report. This passage is 6 sentences. Seriously. And it covers John baptizing people in the Jordan, Jesus coming to him for baptism, the voice of God claiming Jesus as God’s son, the 40 days in the desert, the temptation by Satan, and the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. 6 sentences. Bam.

Mark is not fooling around. He is getting the information down.

To me, Mark’s account conveys a sense of urgency, a need for information. This is not “come sit by the fire and let me tell you the most amazing story…”
Someone wants to know what the hell happened here?
I imagine Mark’s account to be a response to that urgency. It’s dense; it’s telegraphic; it’s just the facts, ma’am.

Someone wants to know, What the hell happened here?
and Mark starts out by saying, chapter 1 verse 1:
“Beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ”--
That’s verse 1. It only takes him 8 verses to get to “Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.”
Mark is telling this story as fast as he can.
Do you get the sense that there’s no time to waste?

What happened here?

It’s a good question for us at the beginning of Holy Week.

Now is the acceptable time, Paul tells us in his second letter to the Corinthians. No more waiting. There is good work to do and there is no time to waste. Right now.

So let’s talk about reconciliation. Let’s look at what happened here, and what it is we think we’re doing here, today. Right now. The hard stuff. Let’s talk about the hard stuff.

I want to talk about where all this is heading. The season of Lent leading to Holy Week leading to Easter.
Every year, we spend 40 days, excluding Sundays, preparing to remember the betrayal of Jesus by his friends. His arrest and crucifixion and death. The burial. The confusion and chaos. The empty tomb.

What I always want to know is,
How did this happen? How did they let it— how is it that things went this far?
Was it necessary? Was it necessary for our salvation that Jesus died in this horrific way, at the hands of human beings? Why?
Why?
Who requires? What kind of God requires that level of agony and degradation? What kind of God requires that human beings torture and destroy the innocent as a condition for granting salvation to the lost?

Why did Christ have to die?
Because Jesus was human. And we tied him to a couple of wooden planks, drove metal spikes through his wrists and ankles, and set him upright until he drowned in his own pleural fluid, that’s why.
When you do that to a human, he dies.

It really is, I have come to believe, truly as simple as that.
Why did Jesus die? Because we killed him. That’s all. That’s why.

I say “we,” because even though you and I were not physically and temporally present, we are connected to those who were. We are connected through our shared capacity, in our very worst moments—not all the time, and not exclusively, but in perhaps only the one or two moments in our lives when we are not at all the persons we want to be—our capacity to engage in acts of destruction, acts of which we are later so deeply ashamed that we lock them away and cannot bear to think of them.

It is not my intention to “make” anyone feel ashamed or guilty, or to take on guilt or shame for someone else’s actions. It’s not necessary, because I don’t think I’ve ever met a person past the age of 8 or 9 who was not familiar with shame. There’s already too much pain and shame in the world. What I want to suggest is that each of us look with some compassion at those moments of shame that already exist in our own lives,
and recognize that this is just the way it is for us: this is the human condition--we are not always at our best.
We are not always the people we would like to be. Sometimes we fall down hard. All of us.

Only compassion allows me to look at those moments of my life. Without compassion, I can’t do it. I cannot. I cannot hold that shame unless I realize that this is the hand we are all dealt. None of us gets it right all the time, and we really are all in the same terrifying, open, and very leaky boat.

When I can do that, when I can find the compassion that enables me to look at my own life, then I can engage the story of Good Friday. It doesn’t matter that I wasn’t there and didn’t do it,
once I realize and face the fact that
if I had been there, I could have done it. If I were at my worst.
If I felt threatened enough,
if I felt betrayed and terrified and angry and helpless enough,
I could have done all of it. I could have sold Jesus out for the “greater good”,
I could have denied knowing him in an attempt to control and contain the damage,
I could have fallen asleep in the garden and run away from the soldiers.

I could have washed my hands of my responsibility for enacting justice.
I could have just followed orders.
I could have done as I was told.
I could have acquiesced to the authority of those in power
and abdicated my agency to stand up and speak out.

Not all the time. Not even most of the time, maybe.
But in my very worst moments, those few moments in my life when I have been least myself,
when I have been the most alienated from my own heart and soul and mind,
when I have felt most helpless and most isolated—
then, yes, I could have. Caught at exactly the wrong moment—
I could have done it.

God does not require Jesus’ death on the cross as recompense for our badness.
We are the ones who require it—-simply by being capable, in our worst moments, of such atrocities.

The good news of the crucifixion is that it is something that each of us, at our worst, is capable of doing. Jesus dying on the cross is the manifestation of our very worst.
We have, quite literally, done our worst--

and God still lives;
God is still God, and God’s love for us is unchanged.
We have done our worst. We have done our worst. Christ has died.
And Christ is risen.
And Christ is coming, again. And again. And again and again and again.

Christ had to die because we are capable of killing him.
It’s as simple and as horrifying and as bewildering and as heartrending as that.
Jesus died because we are capable of killing him.

Because the fact that we are capable of killing him
is why Jesus came to us in the first place.
God knows that we are in such bad shape
that our eventual response to the presence of God’s Incarnate Word among us
will be to nail him to a cross until he can no longer breathe and his heart stops beating. Jesus dying on the cross is the physical enactment of our absolute need to be rescued.
That, right there, is what God moves to save us from—-not by intervening and preventing us from doing it: because we’d still be just as capable of it, we’d still be just as broken.
God saves us by being God, by staying with us through all of it and by being God,
the same God who told Moses, “I am that I am.”
Jesus’ death was not “necessary”; it was simply inevitable.
As inevitable as God being God and raising Jesus from the dead.
Because God is still God: Creator, Spirit, Word, one God.
Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ is coming again.
We have done our worst; and even our worst cannot separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. [Romans 8:37-39]
That, my brothers and sisters, is good news. That is the good news that our brother Mark is telling us with such urgency and determination. That’s the story that he is telling as fast as he can.
That is what is happening here. Today. This day.

No matter what we have done or not done, no matter whom we have hurt or failed—-
God is still God.
And we are loved relentlessly.
We can begin again. We can come up out of the water and see the heavens open
and the Spirit descending upon us
and hear the voice of God naming us as beloved children

We can begin again. Right now.
Now is the acceptable time.
There is good work to do and there is no time to waste.
You are loved relentlessly—-relentlessly loved,
Beloved and cherished. Right now.

What are you going to do about it?

yours in the struggle,
Max

Top Books: an honor system meme

2008-11-27T12:19:00.000-08:00

Rating: Safe For All Audiences

From punkmonk at Sandals At The Gate , who blogs almost as infrequently as I do, but is SO worth visiting—really good stuff:

What we have below is a list of the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing users. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Miserables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Tagging Kirstin, Swan, Blue Wren, and Byzigenous Buddhapalian.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Currency

2008-10-22T10:40:00.000-07:00

Rating: GT
Matthew 22:15-22
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10

Then he said to them, "Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's." When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.

Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s. The reign of the emperor is transitory. So, give to the emperor the things that are transitory. The last 4 weeks have certainly demonstrated just how transitory are the things we give to the government, and to the stock market, and to the bank… here today, gone tomorrow, transitory.

So… what are “the things that are God’s” ? You know what really bugs me about this story, what really gets under my skin? It’s not so much that the Herodians and the Pharisees’ disciples set out with a trick question for Jesus. That’s not nice, but I understand it. It’s a very human thing to do. Trying to trap an opponent with a no-win question is something we see a lot of; it’s something that I freely confess that I’ve done, from time to time, and I’m not proud of it, but I get it and I’m in no position to judge. What irritates me is that once Jesus gives his answer, they go away. I’m left here saying, “wait, wait! Make him explain that last part!”

Really. The first part is so clearly laid out. Jesus says, "Whose head is this, and whose title?" They answered, "The emperor's." Then he says, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s.” Great. He’s holding the coin. Very clear. Good.

Give to God the things that are God’s. OK, yes, absolutely… but… what does that mean? Can’t we get a little visual aid for this? It seems pretty important.

I am so profoundly grateful that I am not alone in this whole trying-to-be-a-Christian thing. Community and conversation: I do not know where I’d be without them. My brothers Paul and Timothy have some words of instruction, in their letter to the church in Thessalonia, in which they point out that community’s

• work of faith
• labor of love
• steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ

Hope. Labor. Work.
These are the things that are God’s. Our hope, our labor, and our work.
Where does your hope reside? Is your hope in Jesus Christ, or in someone else? Is it mostly in Jesus, with a little hope set aside in a hedge fund, just in case? Where does your hope reside?

Is your labor made of love, or of something else? Is your labor creative, or is it fearful? Is it in the service of life? Is your labor an expression of the right here, right now reign of God?

Hope + labor = work of faith.

Faith is work. I’m going to talk plain, brothers and sisters. Faith is work. Faith is what we do. Faith is getting out of bed in the morning and doing the work that is given us to do, and lying down again at the end of the day, and going to sleep so we can get up and do it all again tomorrow.
Our lives are a work of faith, made up of labor and hope.

As we go through this week, let’s ask ourselves: Where is my hope? What is my labor made of? Our lives are a work of faith. To whom is that work given? To a transitory emperor? or to God?

Give to God the things that are God’s.

Our hope, and our labor, and the resulting work of faith: Whose name, and title, and image are on the currency of your life?

Your hope. Your labor. Your life.

Choose.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Debate Prep

2008-10-03T08:46:00.001-07:00

Rating: TFPC
And for those of you who enjoyed last night's debate...
OK, even if you didn't:

yours in the struggle,
Max

Sarah Palin Trapped

2008-10-03T08:41:00.000-07:00

Rating: TFPC
Check it out:

yours in the struggle,
Max

Workers, Ministers, Prophets

2008-08-21T10:36:00.000-07:00

Rating: GT
Matthew 9:35-10:23

Jesus is giving his disciples instructions; and they’re very clear and explicit and concrete. He tells them to do six things:

1. proclaim the good news, `The kingdom of heaven has come near.'
2. Cure the sick,
3. raise the dead,
4. cleanse the lepers,
5. cast out demons.

He’s also very specific about the scope of this project: this particular mission trip is “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” That’s your focus. He tells them exactly where to go and then tells them how to go: “You received without payment; give without payment. Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff; for laborers deserve their food.”

I have said it before and I’ll say it again: to engage with the living God is to become vulnerable. Following the commandments of Christ means experiencing passion: choosing to be affected, at the deepest possible level, by our fellow human beings.
All mission and ministry is born in that place of vulnerability and passion.
There may be actions that are commendable and noble even, but without passion they are not missional.
Service without joy is not ministry, it’s just drudgery.
And while it may be possible to experience contentment or satisfaction from noble acts of service, joy is only born out of a place of vulnerability.

The disciples are to set out on a mission trip to the lost sheep of the house of Israel with no money and no spare clothes and no luggage and no staff to lean on or fend off stray dogs with, which pretty much means that they are going to be vulnerable at every step to all the circumstances of their journey.

So the parameters that Jesus sets up here are very well-structured in terms of action that is missional and ministerial.

Which is good, because some of the things he’s charged them to do are not exactly easy: I’m thinking here of casting out demons and raising the dead… and curing the sick and cleansing lepers are not party tricks either. These are big orders.

And… Jesus has told them that they will be given power to do these things. He’s very reassuring on that point. And given everything that Jesus himself has done up to now, I think I’d believe him. His credibility is very high right now.
So while these marching orders are definitely big deal, big time, there’s every reason for the disciples to have confidence that this thing is doable. And it’s exciting! Mission is exciting. There is good work to do, and there is no time to waste.

But there is something else.
And it is really hard.
Because there are six things Jesus tells them to do.

If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.

Man, I don’t know. And I’ve wrestled and wrestled with this.
It is just hard
And --I can’t find my way around the hardness of it.

Jesus tells them, sometimes it is not going to work. Some people are not going to take what you have to give and when that happens, here is what you have to do.

The sixth thing Jesus commands them to do is to walk away.

And that is—that might be really too hard. I’m not sure I can bear hearing Jesus command me to walk away. Everything in me screams that it’s just not right and he can’t ask me to do that.

But that’s what the words say; they’re very clear and not at all equivocal. And I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.

There’s nothing here to make us feel any better about it. Jesus doesn’t say, “Look, just work with people who can hear you, but don’t worry about it if they can’t, because it’ll be OK, you’ll see.”

That’s not what he says. He doesn’t say anything about what it means
and he doesn’t reassure us by talking about eventualities.
He just lays it out there: there will be times when your current reality is that
it’s not going to be OK. He says really clearly: it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.
Pain and suffering and tragedy and what I am telling you to do is
walk
away.

Where is the good news in that?

I’m not playing when I say this is hard.
I have staked my life on the conviction that God is Love
and that the way for me to grow and live into my true nature as a physical expression of that Love
is to be found in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who is the Incarnate Word of God--who is Love

and this commandment to walk away is --
I’m not feeling the love
I can’t reconcile that.

I don’t know.
Maybe
Maybe there’s good news in just being honest
In speaking this plain unvarnished hard hard truth that there is
pain
and suffering
and tragedy
that you and I cannot do anything about
maybe there’s good news in just having that said, straight out
and acknowledged
sometimes it’s not going to be OK and there’s not anything we can do about it.

There’s a prayer that was written by Archbishop Oscar Romero.
Romero was assassinated in El Salvador in 1980, while he was at the altar saying Eucharist.

in one part of this prayer he says

We cannot do everything,
and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well.

We cannot do everything.
In order to do something
we have to leave that which we cannot do
undone.
There’s no way to get to the next town where there is work to do,
to proclaim and cure and cleanse and raise and cast out the demon
without walking away from the undone thing

And Jesus knows this and he’s not lying to us about it
There’s no bait and switch here
Jesus knows that when you and I go forth in mission, passionate and vulnerable,
living into our baptismal covenant to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves, and respecting the dignity of every human being
that we will encounter tragedies and injustices and atrocities that you and I can do nothing about.
And Jesus knows how hard that is
that there’s no way for it not to be
there’s no way around the hardness of it
not if we’re doing ministry: not if we have chosen to become vulnerable, and passionate
Jesus knows this; that’s why he tells us.
So that we know we’re not alone.
We are not alone. And that is
good news. Doesn’t feel good. But it is good.

because the work of proclaiming and curing and cleansing and raising
and casting out the demon
still needs doing.
There is good work to do, and there is no time to waste. And we are not alone.

Romero’s prayer goes on:

We may never see the end results,
but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders;
ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.

Workers. Ministers. Prophets.
You. Yes, you. And I. Look around you. That person right there is a worker, and a minister. And a prophet. So are you.
As a worker, you get to choose whether or not you will do the work.
As a minister, you get to choose whether or not you will minister to the person God has placed in front of you.
As a prophet, you get to choose whether or not you will speak truth to power.

And if that sounds scary to you, well, yes, that sounds about right. Jesus promises us that at times it will be scary, and hard, and painful beyond belief.
And that we will not ever, ever
be alone.

Workers. Ministers. Prophets.

Choose.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Guys, This Is Why Your Girlfriends Keep Buying You Suspenders—It’s Not To Make You Look Gay

2008-08-02T10:38:00.000-07:00

Rating: Despite flippant title, this is kind of heavy. Proceed with care.

Daddy unlocks his buckle
with hard unyielding fingers
steadily draws the supple sword from its silent sheath
whence it shall not return unblooded.

Voiceless black leather is beaten sobbing
against unforgiving flesh
with a memory like an elephant’s.
My impotence savages my anger
and the unwanted bastard child rage
is conceived within my body.
I will feed it my blood
the air from my lungs
the water I drink
bearing it viable in the dark
in hours and years of dry labor

and it cries
it cries
it cries

like a baby on an airplane
as heads are turned
and newspapers snapped
exasperated air huffed out of
lungs constricted by relinquished autonomy
and smiling flight attendants
can’t she do anything with
that
brat?

it cries
it cries
it cries

yours in the struggle,
Max

This Post Deleted Because I Was Wrong

2008-07-04T13:00:00.000-07:00

I had the facts wrong. I was mistaken. I apologize.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Pastoral Education: Whiffing

2008-07-04T07:58:00.000-07:00

Rating: SL, GT

I am striking out all over.

One is on neutropenic precautions and the nurse must be consulted before I can enter the room. She is on the phone. I cannot get her attention.

One is simply not in her room. The other patient in the room is sleeping.

One zips by me in a wheelchair as I am washing my hands. She turns the corner and is gone, in the direction of another patient’s room, a friend who has also asked for a visit.

One is awake but with his doctor, who is speaking with him in clear, unhurried tones. The patient has a trach tube and cannot answer, but his eyes are fixed with rapt attention on the doctor’s face.

One is with the nurse, who seems to be multi-tasking the patient’s many needs.

I return to check on the patient who was not in her room. I ask a nurse if she knows whether the patient has gone into surgery and am told, yes, she has.

The nurse of the patient on neutropenic precautions is still on the phone, or on the phone again. I try to get in her eye-line without listening to what she is saying.

I have washed my hands five times and have nothing at all to show for it.

Well… shit.
Shit shit shit.

Walking outside, past the outpatient clinic and the mammogram screening offices to the street where I can light up, I suddenly realize that all those things that are frustrating the hell out of me are the exact things I pray for when someone I love is hospitalized. What’s wrong with this picture?

What is wrong with me?

So.

So thank you, God, for doctors who take professional pride in their work; who take time to speak at length with someone who cannot speak in return.

Thank you for nurses so attentive to their patients that even when not directly caring for their patients, they are speaking about them to doctors and loved ones, so intently that it is hard for the chaplain to get their attention.

Thank you for the miraculous blessing of sleep, which is so very hard to come by here, for people whose bodies are traumatized by injury or illness or disease or dysfunction.

Thank you for everyone who has a friend in this place that can sometimes seem so friendless to so many.

Thank you for the surgery that was not delayed by incoming traumas. Thank you for everyone who was kept safe and not in need of emergency surgery.

Thank you for the opportunity to wash my hands
five times
with nothing to show for it.

Amen.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Pastoral Education; or, This Program is Kicking My Ass

2008-07-04T07:35:00.000-07:00

Rating: SL

“God has shown you, O child of earth,
what is right and true in accordance with God’s Word:
to work for justice while judging no one,
with compassion for all,
always remembering that you were born
a vessel of the Divine.”

Seriously?
Gracious God, Conductor of the Universe, what were You thinking???

Reflective listening is not complicated. Basically, you just repeat the last thing the other person said, or you pick out what seems to be the main thing the person said--you know, if s/he's on a talking jag, just pick one phrase--and repeat that back to him/her. It's really just intentional selective echolalia, because you don't actually have to understand what the person meant... you just reflect it back and see what comes out next. It's not rocket science.

So when someone is speaking to me of being deeply betrayed by another, of the pain and anger of being abandoned, it should not be tricky for me to repeat back the words, "and I have such hatred in my heart. I hate [xxxx]."

Yet I cannot. I cannot do it. And I tried, y'all.
Could not make the words come out of my mouth.
But how else is this person, this child of God whom I am here to serve, supposed to expel the pain? How else, except to get it out? And if I can't bear to even repeat the words, how can I possibly help him/her get it out and let it go?

Issues, much???
oh, perhaps.

Edge of the Map

Still moments, soft places.
Little instances of connection.
God of love, hear my prayer.

Infection burst and opened,
to pierce the yielding air with blood and pus
remnants of the dead and the dying
falling and rotting
in the fields of a war buried long ago

I am afraid of the thing I can’t take back.

Beauty is only skin deep
Ugly goes clear to the bone
Anger comes and goes unimpeded by bonds of affection and affinity
and grows only in the presence of love
buds and blossoms and fades and falls
making the soil richer, darker,
more life-giving

But hatred demands loyalty and longevity and commitment
Perseverance
Like La Cosa Nostra
or a tattoo on my
soft place
Once in, never out

Beyond here there be dragons.
Be afraid.
Be very very afraid.

yours in the struggle,
Max

morning

2008-03-23T00:00:00.000-07:00

Rating: GT

Sir can you tell me where they've taken him
For I cannot see the path he walks
and now they've come and taken his body
can you tell me where he's gone

Mary
Mary
Mary
go tell them
I am alive

the stones are sharp beneath her slippered feet
the sun drags itself up from the hills
her eyes are clouded as the horizon
a stanger stands by the tomb

Mary
Mary
Mary
go tell them
I am alive

oh
the rising sun
oh
the moved stone
oh
the beating heart

Mary
Mary
Mary
go tell them
I am alive

"Just Up And Healed Me! Without So Much As A 'By-Your-Leave'!"

2008-03-22T13:13:00.000-07:00

Rating: vicarious GT

If you haven't already, check this out over at Sarcastic Lutheran:
Lazarus And The Valley Of Dry Bones

talk about being Called Out.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Dayenu

2008-03-22T11:53:00.000-07:00

Rating: GT

When I Die And Go To Heaven, I'll Be Hendrickson's Gin

2007-12-13T20:09:00.000-08:00

Rating: I Really Have No Idea

Your Score: Juniper Berries

You scored 100% intoxication, 50% hotness, 75% complexity, and 75% craziness!

You are Juniper Berries! You're a drunk. No, really. Cool it with the hooch. Just kidding. You're really good at adding flavour to boring old life. You can be astringent at times, but once the harshness passes, you're quite relaxing. And you smell good, too.

Link: The Which Spice Are You Test written by jodiesattva on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

yours in the struggle,
Max

Thanksgiving Leftovers: A Little Meme To Go With That 14th Turkey Sandwich

2007-11-24T15:13:00.000-08:00

Rating: GT, QT

From John at SmuloSpace:

Write down five things that you're thankful for.

Tag five friends who you'd like to see participate in this meme.
(Optional) Include a link to the original at SmuloSpace in your post, and then visit the post yourself and place a link to your completed meme in the comments section so John can keep track of the thankfulness running around the blogosphere.

I've already done some giving of thanks in comments on other blogs, so I'm sorry if some of this reads like Thanksgiving leftovers, but as my mama used to say, it's a crying shame to waste good things. So here it is, My 5 Things I'm Thankful For:

Alive, alive-o!!! L is alive. Tomorrow, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, is the One-Year Anniversary of the first (!) time one of L's doctors told me that they'd never seen anything like this and he frankly didn't know why L wasn't dead yet.
L is alive and eating and cracking jokes and laughing that gorgeous ass off, and it is the most beautiful thing I've ever ever seen.

S !!! The movable feast that is the annual AAR/SBL conference was held this year in a place only a couple of hours away from where we're spending Thanksgiving, so S gave a paper (Queering the Queer and the Queerness and Why God Loves Us, or something like that), made the rounds of professional squabble-and-squeaks, and then hightailed it over here for the holiday. The last time we laid eyes on each other was dropping me off at the airport after we moved the House of S to the middle of the midwest. I give thanks and praise to the God of Love for S, who continues to make me believe in things I'm afraid to believe in.

Coffee, without which the 5:30 am two-hour drive of S to the airport this morning might have ended in tragedy.

Grace unlooked-for: the online community, the idea of which I snorted and sneered about for so long before I actually jumped into it; the insight of others that illuminates my struggle; the glorious full moon on this morning's early drive through the desert; the great good humor and total forgiveness shown by L's mother when I snored SO LOUD for SO LONG I actually drove her out of her own bed in the night.

The 2007 beaujolais nouveau. Open it up and let it sit out on the counter overnight. Oh, my my my my.

Now tagging Kirstin,
Swandive,
Blue Wren,
wild and precious,
and Garnabus.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Failing Better

2007-11-24T14:16:00.000-08:00

Rating: GRH (new rating)

Samuel Beckett tells us,
"Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

There's a lovely and moving piece by Rumi that has cropped up a couple of times in my wanderings of the last few days--most recently over at Barefoot and Laughing--that is, I know, much more intentional and courageous in its tenacious embrace of eyes-wide-open hope.

I'm not there yet.
I hope to be, one day--I hope for the willingness to hope for the will to live that kind of hope.
One day.

For now, I give thanks for St Sammy ("a prophet for the rest of us") and his stumpy grumpy grimy covered-in-rainsoaked-redolent-wormy-earth way with words.

Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Grief Makes Me Cranky

2007-08-27T16:15:00.000-07:00

Rating: B

S has moved away to the midwest.
Father Rob Roy Rhudy has moved away to heaven.
This is my last week at this job. and yes, it's because I found an actual job that pays an actual salary and I'm just thrilled about it, but this project that I'm trying desperately to put to bed is just about Done.

And I know that the people around me are grieving, too, and that their grief is making them a little less reasonable than usual, and I am so unreasonable as to expect them to at least understand this about themselves and cop to it and stop taking it out on the blameless.

A round of compassion for the house!

I miss S.
I miss Father Rob.

This makes me quite cross.

Grief makes me cranky.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Yet Even

2007-08-23T17:49:00.000-07:00

Rating: B, GT

All of us go down to the dust.
Yet even at the grave we make our song:
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
~The Book of Common Prayer

The sun shines hot and bright and mindless and
Father Rob is dead.
It is not to be understood.

I know
Yes I know I know
we all knew he had cancer
yes I know that thank you
I know he was in pain
and wore out
and my his our Redeemer lives
and we are still the Body of Christ and Rob still belongs to us
and we belong to him
and God is good [all the time] and the
good news is still
good when it doesn't feel good

the wind blows where it will and you I we
do not know where it comes from or where it is going
and Father Rob is dead
and it is not to be understood

kyrie eleison
Christe eleison
kyrie eleison

yours in the struggle,
Max

Update

2007-08-23T08:17:00.000-07:00

Rating: ????

What is the sound of
One hand beating my brains out?
Thump. Ow! Thump. Quit it.

yours in the struggle,
Max

This Post Kept for the Comments (formerly, "Water")

2007-07-08T15:32:00.001-07:00

This post was originally a link to a site at which viewers could vote on which projects would be supported by a big grant from American Express. That project is long over, and the link is now defunct.
However--
I am leaving this post up because of the comments, which have nothing to do with the post. Someone left a comment in response to a comment I made on An Inch At A Time (you'll find the link in my comment) on the subject of the presidential appointment and congressional confirmation of the Surgeon General, and I think what was said is important enough that I don't want to delete it.
It saddens me that "anonymous" did not return to the discussion after his/her original post.
The rest of you are cordially invited to weigh in, with this proviso: Do not be unnecessarily mean to each other. Or to me. We can disagree, vehemently, passionately, but try to remember we all came into this world naked and helpless and vulnerable. Just like the Baby Jesus. So play fair.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Queer Mermaid

2007-07-07T14:02:00.000-07:00

Rating: QT

You Are a Mermaid

You are a total daydreamer, and people tend to think you're flakier than you actually are.
While your head is often in the clouds, you'll always come back to earth to help someone in need.
Beyond being a caring person, you are also very intelligent and rational.
You understand the connections of the universe better than almost anyone else.

OK, but I'm not giving up my voice for some dumb-as-a-box-of-packing-peanuts pretty boy.

I'm not sure I actually understand the connections of the universe, but exploring them is pretty much what gets me up in the morning. Or afternoon, as the case may be.

Everything else is freakishly accurate. This may be the best personality quiz I've taken since the Sesame Street quiz told me I was Big Bird.

Anyone else tried this one?

yours in the struggle,
Max

Queer Ass Pain Gun

2007-07-04T09:23:00.000-07:00

Rating: See below

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:
queer (8x) ass (3x) pain (2x) gun (1x)

Thanks to wild and precious for this bit of blogolicious fun.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Five Things I Dig About Jesus

2007-07-04T08:12:00.000-07:00

Rating: GT, QGT

Brought to you by the letter Q and Kirsten. Check out the originator, where you can see a bazillion other responses if you want. Wander around the blog while you're there--lots of interesting stuff.
Only five? Randomly selected out of the many things I dig, and in no particular order:

Jesus gets really cranky sometimes.

human

Jesus doesn't write people off just because they get it wrong sometimes.

Jesus doesn't write people off just because they're right.

stand

Matthew 15:22-28

Mark 7:25-30

Jesus is funny.

Put your finger here...

that's

Jesus is both an impeccable host and a gracious guest.

He always shows up

love

The rules are that I now must tag 5 other people, but everyone I know who would do this meme has already done this meme. Maybe I should tag some people who would normally never do this meme. Hmmmmm. Have to ponder the relative obnoxiousness of doing that to someone.

How about this: if you're a person who normally would not, in your usual day-to-day life, consider doing this meme, then you are tagged. Leave a comment with a link to your site, or just play in the comments. Or both.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Call of the Blue Wren

2007-05-25T12:29:00.000-07:00

Rating: TFPC
Been tagged by Blue Wren. Also by Swandive, but I just got to this one first. Frankly, it was easier. So here goes.

1. What's in your pocket?
Not telling; you have to guess, and if you can't guess right, you have to show me the way out.

2. Is the pork ready?
If you have to ask, the answer is "No."

3. Have you ever had to rock to and fro to make your poopie go?
I think this question is on the MMPI. [Wren, sweet pea, what in the name of Sigmund Freud did you DO to that child? Play A Clockwork Orange throughout her toilet training?]

4. Do you like onions?
Do I what like onions?

5. So, how big is it?
I've never measured.

6. Budweiser or real beer?
Budweiser? Budweiser?! You Budweis her, you brought her.

7. What do you feel about your nose?
Dry skin, oil, and the occasional stray booger.

8. Children: Baked or broiled?
Those big turkey fryers are just the right size.

9. Do you like it when I do this?
Well... since you asked... no, I don't really. But I still like you, even when you do this.

10. Do you like the sound of chickens?
No, I prefer the thigh.

11. Would Beyonce clip her own toenails?
Would she, could she, on a boat?
Would she, could she, with a goat?

12. Do you like pork?
Do I what like pork?

13. If the butter is soft, does the bus arrive on time?
Colander.

14. When do you get up?
When I absolutely must. Except when I don't.

15. How did you survive childhood?
Guerrilla tactics, mainly.

16. What do you do before bed?
Rock to and fro to make my poopie go.

17. What are your hidden charges?
Well, if I told you, they wouldn't be hidden, would they? sheesh...

18. Who's behind you?
I try not to look.

19. Why don't people go to the bathroom on TV?
Because pee would short out the wiring and poop would just roll off onto the floor.

20. What's a soylent green popsicle?
I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.

21. What does it taste like?
I don't think a soylent green popsicle has taste buds.

22. Why doesn't Consumer Reports rate hookers?
Because the first five guys they sent out still haven't come back.

23. Does George Bush replace the toilet paper tube?
Absolutely not. The toilet paper tube is an indispensable bit of modern technology.

Well, there you have it. I am tagging Kirstin, Swandive, and Mad Hare. You may now curse my name.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Are You Not The Messiah?

2007-04-13T20:59:00.000-07:00

Rating: GT, QGT

One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
[Luke 23: 39-43]

Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!
Jesus never answers him. Luke has the other criminal tearing into him and then Jesus responds to his request with, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise,” but that first guy gets nothing. Maybe because he was being derisive. But then I start to wonder, who decided that the first man was deriding him? Maybe he was seriously crying out to Jesus for help.

So then I notice there’s a footnote on this word “deriding” and I’m all, Oh good, there’s some kind of alternative reading here, and I look down at the bottom of the page and it says, Or blaspheming. And when I look at the Greek, the word is eblaspheme. Well, yikes. That seems pretty harsh. Compare “Save yourself and us!” with “Remember me when you come into your kingdom,”—aren’t they basically saying the same thing? They’re both requests for salvation.
Sure, the second guy phrased it a lot more nicely, and I can see that it’s better to have some humility and respect when speaking to God Incarnate, but come on. It’s not hard to imagine that the first guy, nailed to a cross, was perhaps not at his shiny bright best, and his social skills may have suffered. And I’m not saying that’s OK, but… as Chris Rock says, “I ain’t saying he shoulda done it… but I understand.”

I understand because I am vividly aware of times in my own life when I am not at my shiny bright best and my conversation with God resembles a rant more than a prayer.

Some years ago my mother fell outside her home and hit her head on the concrete, sustaining a brain injury from which she never really recovered. She spent the next couple of years safety-belted into a wheelchair, in a slow but very steady mental and physical decline.
Which brings us to a Saturday in February of 2001. I was working as a stage manager and the show I was with was in its final weekend of performance. In between the matinee and evening shows, I picked up a voicemail message from one of my sisters saying that Mom had stopped eating and they were pretty sure she was getting ready to go. My first recognizable feeling was gratitude. The show was closing the next day so I would be free to fly to down there on Monday. My second recognizable feeling was resentment. I had accepted that Mom was dying. I believed that she was ready and that she would continue to grow in love and service, finally free of the limitations of her damaged body and brain, rejoicing in the presence of God.
I resented how long and difficult her dying was made. I had been struggling with this resentment for the better part of two years.

It was hard to imagine that God had not forsaken my mother, that Christ was not asleep with his head on a cushion while the water rose over the gunwales in my mother’s storm-wracked and very leaky boat. And I wanted him to WAKE UP. “Master, master, we are perishing!” That’s what the disciples said. And Jesus rebuked them for it. But first he calmed the storm and made them safe. In response to their anguish.

Master, master, she is perishing!
I have faith. I believe you can make her well, make her whole. And whether that means healing her body and her brain in this world or releasing her from it and taking her home, it’s up to you, your will be done. Just…do your will.
Are you not the Messiah? Save her. Save us.

Like the first man in today’s gospel reading, I received no answer.

Why? Why do you not help her? Why are you just hanging there on the cross? Save her. Save us.
I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be disrespectful. I’m not trying to put you to the test. I just… I don’t understand. I believe you can help her and I don’t understand why you’re not.

What I can see now is that when I was saying, “your will be done,” what that meant to me was, “pick one of these two options—physical healing or physical death—because that’s what salvation looks like to me in this situation—I can’t imagine salvation looking like what I see in front of me right now.” I wanted a salvation I could recognize, something I could visualize and wrap my head around. I suspect that what the first criminal meant by “Save yourself and us!” was “get us down off these crosses,” and who can blame him for wanting that? The problem is not in what he wanted. The problem is in the demand that does not allow for something greater, something beyond the moment, something that only the mind of God could conceive. Of course I did not want my mom to suffer. But I forgot that God’s mind is larger than mine.

Sure, it sounds kind of stupid when I just say it like that, but think about it. It’s hard to have faith in something without picturing what it looks like. It’s very hard to be certain of something that is utterly beyond your ability to imagine it. And in the midst of my mom’s suffering, I just wanted it to stop. I wanted her down off that cross because her cross was all I could see.

I think it’s appallingly easy to fall into this trap of dictating the terms of our salvation, without even realizing it. It’s really hard not to. Let me trot out an example for you:

I believe, firmly, that in Christ God reconciled all things to God’s self, and that whatever our differences in this life, we will finally experience the kin_dom of God. I believe that ultimately, I will be reconciled with ++Peter Akinola, that the love of God will triumph over all and we will be joined together in Christ.
… But the truth is that in this, my picture of heaven, Peter Akinola has come round to my way of thinking. I don’t require that he recant or apologize. I just believe that in heaven the scales will fall from everyone’s eyes and one of the things that will mean for Peter Akinola is that he’ll finally understand that I am a child of God, created in God’s image, just as he is, and it will no longer cause him pain to embrace a sibling in Christ who happens to have been queer in earthly life.
I can’t help it, that’s what reconciliation and heaven and the kin_dom of God looks like to me.
And I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with wanting that—except that it’s such a slippery slope from having that vision
to limiting salvation to something that looks like that.
Limiting salvation to something that looks like what I envision. So when I don’t see that thing that looks like what I want, I can slide right into feeling abandoned, that God isn’t active or doesn’t care. That Jesus has just given up and is hanging there on the cross waiting to die because he’s had it with us and is ready to just get out, and maybe that’s why he has nothing to say to the man who says, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!”

I’m sorry. God, I’m so sorry. I just…
I don’t understand. I’m trying.

But…I just don’t.

Because it’s hard to hear a brother in Christ say that I am an abomination and that my very presence here is rending the fabric of the Communion and then to believe in a reconciliation that doesn’t involve him changing his mind.
It’s hard to look at a strong, smart, vibrant, hilarious woman strapped in a wheelchair trying to pick a bouquet of the flowers that are part of the pattern in her dress, and understand that as anything to do with salvation.
It’s hard to look at a man tied to a wooden cross, with metal spikes driven through wrists and ankles, and see that as active engagement in the work of saving the world.

Ursula K. LeGuin says that "truth is a matter of the imagination." [For more on the relationship between truth and faith and imagination, see Put Your Finger Here, Part 1.] It’s not so far, for me, from "imagining” something to “believing” in it, or at least, believing in the possibility. Imagining, believing in the possibility that God could actually be in our midst, right now, that God could look like a scruffy carpenter who forgives sin and heals wounds and calms storms and tells us not to be afraid and who overcomes death. So when I don’t understand and faith eludes me, I imagine. I think of this gospel story, and I imagine what it might be like if I did understand, if I did have faith that salvation could look like this.
And something starts to unfold itself in my imagination, a part of this story that is not reported in any gospel account I’ve ever heard or read, a part of the story I hear told only in the deepest recesses of my own heart. I imagine a man crying out in anger born of unendurable pain and terror: Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!
I imagine Christ turning his eyes to him with a look of love and infinite compassion. I imagine Jesus saying to him, like a mother to her child,
“Shhhh…shhhhh…
I am.
I am.”

yours in the struggle,
Max

Speaking Up, Speaking Out

2007-03-27T20:37:00.000-07:00

Rating: GT
Drop whatever you're doing and go here.
I am so profoundly grateful for, and moved by, this man's witness.
Thanks to MadPriest for bringing this to our attention.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Rivers In The Desert

2007-03-24T13:21:00.000-07:00

Rating: GT, QT, GRG
From RevGalBlogPal's Friday Five:

I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. Isaiah 43:19, NRSV

"name five practices, activities, people or _____ (feel free to fill in something I may be forgetting) that for you are rivers in the desert."

My Wrestling Team. A group of people from my faith community who wrestle with me, in both senses of the phrase--supporting me and challenging me--in the long, strange trip of vocational discernment. Every time we gather--I mean, every single time--I leave more energized than I arrived. It is a singular experience for an introvert who enjoys people tremendously but nearly always finds spending time in a group to be an energy-expenditure (like playing a sport, fun and rewarding and exhausting) rather than an energy-refill.

Sleep. I have taken, as my Lenten discipline, going to bed at 10:30 every night except Friday. I did not take on this discipline lightly. I have not been able to keep it perfectly. There is always so much to do. Yet the practice of humility involved in submitting to my body's need for sleep (no, Max, you're not SuperQueer, made of stronger stuff and with greater responsibilities than the rest of the world), and embracing the idea that the world will get on perfectly well without me for 8 hours every night, continues to be as restorative a river to my soul as the REM sleep is to my poor queer body and brain.

S. More than a friend, never a lover, S is my comrade, my cosmic fraternal twin, my Queer-Fencing-Partner, the person I would call if I woke up in a strange hotel room with an unconscious Republican and no memory of how I got there. Gumby to my Pokey, Ernie to my Bert, Tom to my Huck. Water in the dry place, shelter in the storm, and the alleluia at the edge of the grave.

Stars, and the black sky in between. ...and the rest is silence.

Always, L. L is the Big River, the daily incarnation of the joy that C.S. Lewis describes as the heart-rending longing for the almost-remembered realm of heaven. L is my home, the home I longed for my whole life but didn't know existed until our lives joined together. Inspiration, comfort, challenge, relentless telling-of-truth and hosing-of-bullshit, passion, courage, perseverance, and faith--these are the furnishings of the home that is L. Also the best damn pair of legs on the planet.

yours in the struggle,
Max

PS Just after posting this, I wandered over to BlueWren and read this post, which I now commend to you all.
peace,
Max

Musings on a Candy Wrapper

2007-03-24T11:46:00.000-07:00

Rating: GT
Thanks to Swandive for the meme. Here goes:

"listen with your heart"
candy wisdom sweet and dark
lasts about as long

listen with my heart?
that righteous resolution
melts in midday sun

listen with your heart
necessitates exposure
beware betrayal

listen with my heart
risk deep and mortal wounding
it's too much to ask

listen with your heart
abandon all defense to
sound of sheer silence

listen with your heart
the Word is being spoken
do not interrupt

yours in the struggle,
Max

Trouble In Paradise

2007-03-16T16:28:00.000-07:00

Rating: TFPC
Check out David Borowitz's

I Won't Back Gingrich, Says Satan

and try not to urinate where you sit.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Wandering Around The Ass End Of The Wilderness

2007-03-14T20:49:00.000-07:00

Rating: GT, SL, V (biblical, but still, violent)

3rd Sunday in Lent 2007 [Revised Common Lectionary]
Exodus 3:1-15
Psalm 63:1-8
1 Corinthians 10:1-13
Luke 13:1-9

Baruch a-ta adonai elohenu
Blessed are you O Lord our God
Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer
For you have been my helper,
And under the shadow of your wings I will rejoice.

Questions.
I have a lot of questions.
None of them are answered by these stories.

It’s not surprising; these are stories, and reflections on stories—human responses to stories. The Bible is not a manual about how to program your universal remote, although it can be just as confusing and difficult to understand, and then your wife or husband or roommate or lover comes in and watches you, and then finally takes it away from you and tells you you’re doing it wrong, and then your kids come in and roll their eyes at your total dumbness, and then there’s the screaming fights and the past grievances that come to mind, and pretty soon everyone’s too mad to watch television anyway and no one wants to even be in the same room with one another.
OK, maybe there are some similarities.

We started out today wandering about with a shepherd in what was–literally translated—the ass end of the wilderness; and we ended up digging in the dirt and spreading poo around the base of a fruitless fig tree.

Some days it’s not so hard to understand why the world thinks we’re crazy.

Moses saw something happening that he knew could not be happening. He continued to see it. Which allowed him then to hear God speaking to him. Moses accepted that the information he received by means of his physical senses and the concept of its impossibility supplied by his reason were both true. It is impossible. It is happening. I think we must reclaim Moses' ability to apprehend the truth that exists in apparent contradiction, to believe that the fire and the bush are both present, that the bush is not consumed by the fire, and that the laws of physics are still in operation, all at the same time.

Moses had to make a conscious decision in order for this to happen. It’s given to us in slow, painstaking detail: Moses sees the bush burning and that it is not burned. Then comes the decision: “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.”

I must turn aside.
Turn.
Aside.
Stop what I’m doing.
Change direction.
Drop my Day Runner with today’s agenda and To Do List.
Turn aside.
Look
At this great sight
See
Why
The bush is not burned up.

It’s a decision. It is deliberate.
Moses is able to see the burning-not-burned bush because he decides to.

And that’s when it happens.

God calls Moses by name, initiating relationship.
God tells Moses the history of that relationship, claiming the relationship between the Israelites and God.
God expresses to Moses the nature of that relationship, identifying with the enslaved and suffering.
God reveals the Divine Name naming who God is.

God initiates by calling Moses by name. Not “Hey you,” not “Mortal,” but by his name, given him by the Egyptian woman who rescued him pulled him from the river when he was a baby, and raised him as her own

God claims relationship with Moses: Hello there, young Moses. I knew your father. I’m the one your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather Jacob, and his father Isaac, and his father Abraham, used to talk to.

God identifies with Israel: "Indeed, I know their sufferings," God says. The Hebrew word used here is yada’, meaning "know" in the active, transitive sense: it is the same verb as in “and Abraham knew his wife Sarah.” God claims intimate relationship with Israel; God enacts God’s choice to be in relationship with, to be vulnerable with, to be wounded and suffer with Israel.

God Names God’s self to Moses: the first revelation of the Divine Name.

The Hebrew proper name of God is related to the word
hayah – the closest equivalent in English is “to be,” but that doesn’t give us quite the complete idea, because Hebrew and English are such different languages.
“I am who I am” in English is passive – the Hebrew verb is active and dynamic: “I will be what I will be,” or “I will cause to be what I will cause to be.”
“I have been and caused to be, and am being and causing to be, what I will continue being and causing to be”
“I am be – ing”
“Say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you…”

Moses has asked God what he should say to the Israelites when they ask him the name of this God that spoke to him. Which is interesting, because up to this point God has been called any number of titles—El, Elohim, El Shaddai, Adonai—but has never given out a proper name as God’s own. The name God tells Moses is not a name any of them will have heard before, so how is that going to shore up Moses’ claim, give him any legitimacy?
Here's the thing: God has already given Moses the claim to legitimacy by saying to him, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”

Moses may still be stuck on the question, but God is not. God, active and dynamic, reveals the Divine Name to Moses, which has never happened before.
God is doing a New Thing. Not in order to prove something to someone else, but in relationship to Moses— and through Moses, to all of Israel—God reveals God’s name and nature and being.

And all because Moses chose to turn aside, to see this great sight.

1300 years later – give or take – Jesus is responding to what people around him are saying about some horrific deaths that have just taken place.

Why are you talking about these events as if these victims are somehow different than you? Do you imagine that you must be a better person than they were, because nothing this horrible has happened to you yet? Here’s a newsflash: everybody dies. Including you. This attempt to convince yourself that you’re safe, that nothing like that could happen to you, that you are somehow different, is delusional.

If you want things to be different,
You have to do things differently.

You must repent—turn aside and see this great sight. Turn aside and look at this sight that you’ve never seen before: this bush engulfed in flames, burning yet unburned; this man who touches lepers and is not defiled; who serves God by healing the sick and wounded on the Sabbath. Turn aside and look.

If we want things to be different, we have to do things differently. It’s been three years with that fig tree and there are no figs to be had. It’s time to try something else.

If we want things to be different, we have to do things differently. We have to turn aside. We have to choose to turn aside before we know how it will turn out.

But the good news—the good news is
There’s an aside to turn to.
There is a great sight to see.
There is the voice of God calling us, and when we stop to listen, we shall not listen in vain.

The good news is, Jesus has already done a new thing.

The good news is, the Holy Spirit is already doing a new thing.

The good news is
God is already
And always
Be-ing
Who God will be and causes to be
God
God who has been and continues being
Our Helper
And under the shadow of whose wings, brothers and sisters,
I am convinced
We shall rejoice.

yours in the struggle,
Max

People's Front of Judea! NO, Judean People's Front!

2007-02-16T20:11:00.000-08:00

Rating: ES

For those of us with far too many blogs to read and comment upon to read all this overblown crap in its entirety, Dave Walker has boiled down the whole Really Big Important [cue ominous music] Anglican Primates' First Annual Barbecue and Ass-Kicking in Dar Es Salaam. Click here to see the whole thing. It's worth it.

yours in the struggle,
Max

And Now For Something Completely Different...

2007-02-12T19:38:00.000-08:00

Rating: ES, QT

Found this at MadPriest's blog:

Am I hallucinating, or is there a pair of hands protruding from this man's buttocks?

Now that's what I call queer news.

yours in the struggle,
Max

New Absolute Favorite

2007-02-12T19:04:00.000-08:00

Rating: TFPC

This is the T-shirt I've been waiting for my whole life:

Brought to you by cafepress.

yours in the struggle,
Max

So Much For The Kinder, Gentler...

2007-01-28T02:25:00.000-08:00

Rating: I have no fucking idea. Really. Oh, wait... SL, I guess. At least for the rating.

My Fortune Cookie told me:
On Wednesday, you will be unable to make an omlette without breaking any legs.
Get a cookie from Miss Fortune

OK then--watch out. You has been warned.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Bible?!? Are You Effing KIDDING Me???

2007-01-24T23:24:00.000-08:00

Rating: GT

A few years ago, my orientation to biblical scholarship was as an interested onlooker; I enjoyed the idea of biblical scholarship and was excited about the prospect of devoting time and energy to doing some of it myself. I believed it to be a useful and necessary tool for Christians who are struggling to live into their faith, and that therefore Scripture must be read in context so that its true meaning could be grasped and applied to the differing contexts of our own lives. I believed further that everything in Scripture is relevant to us and God is always good and loving if one reads it correctly.

It was my experience that the interpretations that came from biblical scholarship, whether referred to as such or as “literal reading,” were often misused for personal reasons. Some people, especially the conservative right, but also people on the liberal left and others who are off the chart altogether, like to distort Scripture to support their own agenda of oppressing people they don’t like and maintaining their own image of superiority and power over everyone else. Growing up as a middle-class white kid in the Texas Bible Belt I heard Scripture quoted as justification for censorship, subjugation of women, physical abuse of children, beating and murder of gay men, rape and murder of lesbians, racial genocide, exploitation of native peoples, assassination of medical professionals providing abortions and reproductive services to women, atrocities against Jews, and the active opposition of AIDS research and education.

In response, I became hypersensitive to the danger of elitism in the reading of the Bible and the interpretation, “literal” or otherwise, of God’s Word. Elitism thrives in and perpetuates an atmosphere of secrecy: These Are Mysteries You Can’t Possibly Understand, So We’ll Just Tell You What To Believe. As a survivor of sexual abuse, I had developed a strong personal reaction against the secrecy in which abuse thrives. I learned that truth is powerful and destructive to the status quo and therefore feared by those who perpetrate abuse. My desire to engage in biblical scholarship had everything to do with my desire to claim the Bible as mine, not theirs.

I chose to read the stories of war, such as the Book of Joshua, as pure allegory in which the enemies of the Israelites were not actual human beings, but figurative representations of Danger: sometimes physical danger, but more often psychological or spiritual danger. This made it OK to rout it out completely and subject every embodiment of it to the ban. This required a good bit of doublethink on my part, as I knew that there was some historical evidence for at least some of the military conflicts described, but anyway it was so long ago and people’s moral and ethical ontologies were so different then that for our purposes today they might as well be folktales…so we’ll just treat them as such. I think being, as I said earlier, a middle-class white kid from a so-called "good family" made it the path of least resistance to just turn a blind eye to the fact that these are stories of genocide. Oh my, that’s distressing. Let me see if I can’t find some big words to comfort myself with. And maybe I’ll just happen to casually mention my collection of “Sweet Honey In The Rock” CDs.

Now, on the other side of some formal study of the Hebrew Bible, I see the Book of Joshua very differently. I now read this story as descriptive of exactly the way in which we torture and murder and exploit and destroy our fellow human beings in the name of God, today, right now. Now, today, in this moment, on this blog, I lift up this book and say, Do you see? Look, look at what we are doing. This is not someone else. This is me and you, right now. We have enacted the ban on Afghanistan, on Iraq. We have enacted the ban on the homeless. We have enacted the ban on every man, woman and child infected with HIV. Are we saved? Are we the "new Israel," supposing ourselves somehow different or better or closer to God than the "old Israel"? Do we imagine that we are getting it right where our spiritual forebears did not? Because we are behaving exactly like this. Only we've gotten a lot better at it.

This story is our birthright. It holds up a mirror and shines a big spotlight, not on who we ought to be, but on who we have been and who we still are. For this reason, the Bible—all of it—has to be available to all of us, not just a few specialized academics and not just those with the chutzpah to claim they read it “literally.” The Bible must be laid out for everyone, delved into and pulled apart and discussed in depth by as many people as possible.

Does this mean there will be a lot of mistakes, a lot of trouble, a lot of disagreement and tension? You bet it does. Is it efficient? Not even a little bit. So what? The most efficient thing we have learned to do is annihilate life. Mercy is not efficient and life is not free of tension. If we are ever to stop choosing death, if we are ever to begin to choose life, we must annihilate the fortress in which we have imprisoned the sacred. We must relinquish the notion that God is under our control and needs our protection from the misunderstanding of people with whom we disagree.

This is what I would write and teach and preach and shout on the street corner until they haul me away. This is what the intentional, deep, brain-wracking study of scripture has done for me. This is how my life has been irrevocably changed. For good. I hope-I pray-for good.

yours in the struggle,
Max

So Here's What Happened (the Condensed Version):

2006-12-27T01:18:00.000-08:00

Rating: SL

My beloved partner, L, got a staph infection that got into the bloodstream. The staph toured around for a time and then decided to move into the epidural space (that's the space between the spinal cord and the vertabrae surrounding the spinal cord) and settle down. It was so happy there that it invited some relatives, had some kids, added rooms onto the house (in medical terms, the house it builds and lives in is an "absess") and well, you know, once that happens, there goes the neighborhood.

So L had surgery on Nov 27 to remove the absess, and is on IV antibiotics to kill the staph that's still "on the road" in the bloodstream. The surgery went very very well. They got the whole thing out, the neurosurgeon is brilliant, the Infectious Disease doctor is fantastic.

After eight unbelievably fucking horrific days in ICU (more on that later) L is recovering faster than they expected.

Then, after a few days in a regular hospital room, L realizes that the left arm isn't working the way it should, and there's still a lot of pain. They do another MRI, and find that some of the staph that was still on tour in the bloodstream had moved into the recently cleared-out epidural space and had begun building again. This time, however, the nasty little buggers have not gotten nearly as far along, so the absess is much smaller than the first one. So they give the antibiotics a few more days to see if they can break it down. Nope. They have to go back in and get it.

The good news is that for this second surgery, L is actually much healthier than for the first: no longer sick as a dog and running a fever of 103. Now, there's no fever and the antibiotics are already on board and L is just much much stronger. So it sucks about having to have surgery again, but it's really really good that they found it much earlier this time, and L is in much better shape.

The second surgery goes brilliantly. L is recovering much, much faster this time! Only spent about 14 hours in ICU and is now back in a regular room, walking around, eating food that has NOT been pre-chewed, and generally looking unbelievably good for someone who just had neurosurgery.

And yesterday--Christmas Day!--L was discharged from the hospital. Still has antibiotics administered every 8 hours by IV, but here's where L's medical training comes in VERY handy...
the medicine and other necessary supplies are delivered to the house, and L has a PICC line (basically, an IV line that just stays in all the time) so L is able to actually push the meds and the saline flush and the heperin flush -just needs help getting the tubing rolled up and stashed in the stretchy webbing that keeps it out of the way in between doses. How much am I loving modern technology????? A LOT!!!!!!!!!

Seriously, we are so profoundly grateful. It is a joyous Christmas season. Thanks and praise be to God! We are most richly blessed.

We are also, through this experience, made more acutely aware than ever of the evil running rampant through this world. The evil of pride that obscures one's professionalism, the callousness that allows people to view pain as justified, the petty competition that is perfectly willing to make a patient's body the battlefield in a turf war, the need to WIN, at any cost, that makes one willing to look another person in the face and tell a bold-faced lie, to denigrate the dignity of another human being, and to violate the rights of both patient and partner.

But I digress... more, as I said, on those points later.

Right now, I am happy. Grateful and relieved and, as we face the long road of recovery and healing from wounds of both body and soul, profoundly joyful. Tidings of comfort and joy, indeed.

Oh my yes, God is good.

yours in the struggle,
Max

I Has Been Tagged

2006-12-18T23:59:00.000-08:00

Rating: SL
I was tagged by swandive, who said she missed me (how sweet is that?), so here goes. More on the reason behind The Long Blog Silence later.

Post 5 things you may not know about me:

I have three (3) kidneys. Yes, it's true: queer even in my mother's womb. All three are fully functioning.

I am ass-terrified of spiders. Seriously. I have to close my eyes and plug my ears during the Giant Spider Scenes in Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, and my gorgeous and brilliant and brave and mighty partner L has to do all the spider-slayage in our household.

I was kicked out of nursery school (which is what they used to call it in The Olden Days) for singing "I'm A Little Teapot" the way my older sisters taught it to me, which was the only way I knew this song and had no idea there were any other lyrics: I'm a little teapot, short and stout/ Here is my handle, here is my spout/ When you tip me over, here me shout/ Sock it to me baby, let it all hang out! Hardly seems like something to get a teacher's knickers in a twist, but I guess for a 65-year-old lady in 1968 it was just too much to be borne. It was years before I realized I'd been kicked out; there was just a long discussion between the teacher and my mother, and then I didn't have to go back anymore, which frankly suited me just fine.

I am still--to this day--wretchedly, horribly, gut-wrenchingly ashamed of having punched Douglas Miller in the stomach for absolutely no good reason when we were in the fifth grade. I mean it. It fucking haunts me. But it serves a purpose, because it takes me over when I'm tempted (and I often am) to be meaner to someone than they probably deserve.

I absolutely love--love love love--country & western dancing. I am all about the boot-scootin'.

So there it is. I am now tagging Kirstin, Blue Wren, Matt, Dave, and Pascale Soleil.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Veteran's Day

2006-11-11T18:32:00.000-08:00

Rating: SL, GRG
Thanks to BlueWren for inspiring me to post this.

Life with my dad was not what you’d call a picnic—unless we’re talking about the one when you were about four years old and you sat down in a fire-ant bed. But we learned some important things from that experience: first, that there are situations which call for drastic and immediate action, such as jumping into the tub fully clothed and opening the taps to full; and second, to always, ALWAYS, watch your ass.

My dad knew the importance of these two principles; I think he tried hard to teach his children these things in ways that would be less traumatic than, say, leaving your family and friends and new bride at the age of 19 to go to Europe with the American Infantry in WWII. He said to me once that “sometimes you wish you could bore a hole in a kid’s head and just pour a little wisdom in, so they wouldn’t have to go through what you went through.” And then his eyes kind of squinted up and he got that little half a smile, and he said, “But you can’t. But that doesn’t stop you from wishing you could.”

Dad loved his children fiercely. I think it hurt him that he could not often find a way to express that love in ways that we could understand, at least when we were small. But I believe that that pain never banked the intensity of the fire of his love for us. I learned from Dad the value, the necessity, of continuing to love someone fiercely even in those times—maybe especially in those times—when you cannot bear to speak to them, nor they to you.

I remember when my brother came back home and told Dad he wanted to go back to school. Dad and I were alone in the house and he just started talking about it. I listened, kind of wide-eyed, as Dad looked at me, then looked away and started blinking rapidly, cleared his throat, and said, “Man, I’m proud of that boy.” Dad had an idea of what it took for this particular son to do that, and the admiration he felt brought tears to his eyes, though of course he would have eaten a bug before he’d let them fall in front of me.

He knew what it was like for a boy to not get on so well with this father. It’s funny to me think that Dad—I think—felt a lot like the prodigal son himself. It’s funny because I know that going to school on the GI bill, going on to get a Master’s degree, raising 5 children, serving on the Vestry and being a lay reader at church is not what I normally equate with a Prodigal-Son-type itinerary. But for Dad, none of this could change the fact that this was not the life his father had in mind for him. Dad was profoundly proud of his son’s grit, and, I think, deeply moved by his ability to make the first move, to stand at the door and knock.

I try to imagine what it took for Dad to marry our mother against his father’s will; to sacrifice not only two years of his life in defense of his country, but the first two years of his marriage; to sacrifice his image of the boy he was and his dreams of the man he wanted to be; to sacrifice the ability to sleep peacefully through the night. Dad had nightmares, I believe, every night of his life after he came back from Europe, and while he expressed his distaste for snow and for standing in lines, I never heard him express bitterness or regret or blame for his service in the Army. Mostly he just didn’t like to talk about it.

When I turned 18, Dad took me to lunch and somewhere between ordering and the arrival of food, looked at me and asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I had not studied for this pop quiz, so I made a joke or two and then asked him how he decided what to do with his life. He said when he got out of the Army, he wanted to be able to support a family, and he wanted to do something that would make a little corner of the world a little bit better than he found it. Sanitary engineering seemed like a feasible way to do both things.

Then he said to me, “Find what you love to do, and do it. Because if you love it, you’ll be good at it.”

I was so completely surprised by this entire conversation that I was hardly able to string together a coherent sentence for the rest of the meal.

Usually, Dad loved surprising people. Nothing cracked him up like seeing the look of shock on someone’s face when he shattered their preconceptions, or when they realized he’d been pulling their leg for the last 20 minutes. Playing cards with my dad always started with him saying, with the most puzzled of expressions, “How do you play this game?” and ended with him totally ransacking everyone. Dad was funny. His sense of humor was subtle and relentless. Dad gave me the gift of finding the funny in the darkest of situations. It’s a double-edged gift, for sure, but one worth keeping.

In the last couple of years, I find myself noticing the good traits in myself and my brothers and sisters that come from each of my parents. When a friend calls at 10:30 at night and says “I can’t be alone in my house right now” and I say “Get on over here” and check the fridge and how many clean sheets we have, that’s Mom. When I’m at work and I choose, at the risk of extreme unpopularity, to do the hard thing that’s right instead of the easy thing that’s not, that’s Dad. They are with me. And because they are with me, they are with you.

I thank God for Dad’s life here on earth. I thank God for the amazing, incomprehensible gift of the resurrection. I thank God that his child and servant Ray is whole, and home, able to love his children fiercely without having to figure out how to show it, able to sleep without nightmares and rejoice without regret. I thank God.

yours in the struggle,
Max

The King Of Israel Tore His Clothes

2006-11-11T16:42:00.000-08:00

Rating: SL, GT
Psalm 77
2 Kings 5:1-19

I think of God, I am restless, I ponder, and my spirit faints.
You will not let my eyelids close; I am troubled and I cannot speak.
I consider the days of old; I remember the years long past;
I commune with my heart in the night; I ponder and search my mind.
…
Has [the Lord’s] loving-kindness come to an end for ever? has his promise failed forevermore?

I have wept, and shouted, and screamed aloud at God to WAKE UP!! What are you THINKING?? Either get off your Divine Ass or explain to me what you’re doing, RIGHT NOW. Please. Are you paying any attention at all?

My anger and pain comes from my conviction that God IS paying attention. Why, then? Why? I recognize that I have done things and left things undone that create my own circumstances, but what did my parents ever do to deserve what happened to them? And even if they “deserved” it for something in their pasts, what happened to mercy? Where’s the grace? This can’t have been for the good of their souls, the amendment of their lives; they’re going to die this way. So let them die. What sick Being would desire their fruitless torment?

Oh, I remember it well, the righteous wrath I felt, the grief, the sense of abandonment and betrayal of my parents, two flawed, wounded, courageous people who kept on keeping on with service and work and humor and love, in weather rough and smooth. God, I know you’re there; WAKE UP!!! Don’t you care?

⁶[Naaman] brought the letter [from the king of Aram] to the king of Israel, which read, “When this letter reaches you, know that I have sent to you my servant Naaman, that you may cure him of his leprosy.” ⁷When the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes and said, “Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me.” ⁸But when Elisha the man of God heard that the king of Israel had torn his clothes, he sent a message to the king, “Why have you torn your clothes? Let him come to me, that he may learn that there is a prophet in Israel.”

The king of Israel rent his clothes, because he could not do what the king of Aram asked of him. His arrogance was thinking that he had to do everything himself; his mistake was in forgetting that he was a king. The letter was sent not to him personally, but to the king of Israel, who is more than the individual. He need not despair. All citizenry, from goatherd to general, was encompassed in his kingship. And the prophet spoke.

Well. I’m not a king. But I often rend things in frustration at being asked to do what I cannot do. Eleanor Roosevelt said, “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do things you think you cannot.” Which is all good—but some things I really CANNOT do. OK, I admit that sometimes I mostly just think I can’t, or I just really, really don’t want to. But it’s bitterly frustrating to be held responsible for something that is simply not in my power.

And then, then we come to the thing I think I cannot do, the thing I fear to do. The thing I dread. Asking for help. Ideologically, I approve of asking for help. I think asking for help means accessing resources, plugging into available power, a strong, smart, healthy, positive, constructive act.

But what if I ask for help and no help is forthcoming? What if it just reveals my weakness to the ones I thought would help, and what if they exploit that? What if my best interests are of no interest to them, as has happened? What then?

What happens then is an experience of betrayal as damaging as the originating circumstance. We’re not talking momentary disappointment; we’re talking about long-term, catastrophic change, the kind that can require daily energy for the rest of my life in order to heal. This isn’t the touchy-feely pink-and-yellow-tinted 70s crap about “let yourself be vulnerable, take off your mask, only through taking risk can you grow, yadda yadda blah blah blah.” No matter what saccharine psycho-babble people spout, asking for help is exposing oneself to judgment and betrayal.

Has [the Lord’s] loving-kindness come to an end for ever? has his promise failed forevermore?

I hope it has not. I pray it has not. And so I shout at God. I make an offering of my righteous wrath, my grief, my utter failure to understand and to see God’s hand at work. Sometimes it is all I have to give. I try to make peace with my brother before I offer my gift, such as it is, and when I cannot, I offer that failure to God as well. I depend upon the grace of God to make all sufficient. Sometimes it is all I can do.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Talk-Back Time!

2006-10-22T16:31:00.000-07:00

Rating: SL

Yes, it's been a while. I am guilty of Blog Slackage. But really, this business of having to work for a living like everyone else in the world is really cramping my blog. Plus designing and teaching a new class, and working on the page proofs for the publication of "Put Your Finger Here," and writing a sermon (yes, boys and girls, there's a church out there that lets me loose in the pulpit--be afraid, be very afraid...), and, you know, occasionally doing laundry and bathing and generally trying to avoid coming home to find that my partner has put all my shit out in the driveway. Can I have a little cheese to go with this whine?

In and throughout all of that--maybe because of all of that--I find I have a fast-growing hankering in my queer heart to hear from you whom StatCounter swears are reading this. What I'm currently burning to know is this:

What is your best (or one pretty good) memory of organized religion? Define the terms however you like.

AND

What is your worst (or one pretty awful) memory of organized religion? Anything goes here. You don't have to defend or justify your experience. Just write.

As much or as little as you want to share about either, or both. A terse sentence apiece, or paragraphs of stream-of-consciousness sense-memories. Or anything in between. I'm really, really interested in this topic.

If for any reason you can't bring yourself to post a reply in the comments, I invite you to email me. Just click on the link in the Profile box in the right-hand sidebar. Your privacy will be respected.

Thanks. And big love going out to you all.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Anoint!

2006-10-08T15:26:00.000-07:00

Rating: GT

Go, right now, and read The Woman With The Alabaster Jar. Seriously.
It's not long, but it's huge.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Safeguarding God's Children: CRF

2006-10-08T08:03:00.000-07:00

Rating: SL, TFPC

For those of you without misspent youths, "CRF" stands for "cutting room floor," a term used by actors when they list on their resumes movies in which they appeared in scenes that were edited out before the movie was released.

So here is the Rejected Sexual Abuse Prevention haiku:

Remember this rule:
When probing a person's soul
Do not use your dick.

I really can't think what the editors found so objectionable. If you can explain it to me, please post a comment and let me know.

yours in the struggle,
Max

"Put Your Finger Here" Part 2

2006-10-07T13:59:00.000-07:00

Rating: QGT

Related post: "Put Your Finger Here" Part 1

Lo, the Metanoia: Turning Around

Norman Jewison's film of the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar draws upon the Gospel according to John for its depiction of Caiaphus and the priests of the Sanhedrin:

Priest
He's just another scripture thumping hack from Galilee!
Caiaphus
The difference is they call him King, the difference frightens me!
...Put yourself in my place
I can hardly step aside
Cannot let my hands be tied
I am law and order⁹
...

No one in his/her right mind would try to pass off Tim Rice as a biblical scholar; neither will I. Still, I will postulate that the libretto and production of Jesus Christ Superstar reflects some common, even classical, understanding of the passion story.

The fear of "difference" Caiaphus articulates is a fear that is both external and internal. He fears the "difference" of Jesus, who is external to him; but he also fears being "different" than he has been. Quite frankly, he identifies as a top who has always been a top: he "cannot let [his] hands be tied." Jesus is not only a threat to his political power: for Caiaphus, Jesus represents his submissive side, the part of him that is vulnerable--perhaps even wants--to be tied, to give over, to experience passion, and it is deeply terrifying to him precisely because it is so powerful.

Foucault writes of "[t]he omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere."¹⁰ It is this understanding of power that finally makes sense of the synoptic Gospel stories of Jesus beginning his ministry by receiving baptism from John (Matthew 3:13-17, Mark 1:9-11, Luke 3:21-23); his encounter with the hemorrhagic woman (Matthew 9:20-22, Mark 5:25-34, Luke 8:43-48), in which Jesus knows "that power had gone out from" him, and then tells the woman, "Daughter, your faith has made you well"¹¹; and the Syrophoenician/Canaanite woman, who teaches Christ compassion (Matthew 15:22-28, Mark 7:25-30).

This paper has been accepted for publication in Theology and Sexuality and the final (edited, revised and typeset) version of this paper will be published in Theology and Sexuality, Volume 13 Issue 2, January 2007 by Sage Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. © Sage Publications Ltd, 2007.

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Jesus' deeds of power--the kerygma--take place almost without exception within the realm of the human body and its functions. Those signs that do not involve the body directly are not deemed miraculous in the text until they participate in bodily functions: the miracle at the wedding in Cana (John 2:1-11) is revealed after the water-turned-to-wine is tasted (John 2:7-10); the feeding of the five thousand (John 6:1-14) is perceived after everyone has eaten his/her fill.

Ingrid Rosa Kitzberger makes an argument for "the essential message of the [Fourth] Gospel that the Word became flesh, was incarnated, and can therefore 'only' be experienced in concrete reality."¹² Concrete reality--whether created or constructed--demands that Jesus' body participate in the imperative--whether divine or social--of sexual differentiation subject to gendering. But participation does not necessarily mean acquiescence. Resistance is not only an option for participation in power discourse; it is an essential component of it. Without resistance there is no power.¹³ Indeed, the kerygma may be seen as a series of acts of resistance pointing to the reign of God by altering the power constructs within which they were performed. Worldly powers are not negated by these acts; rather, these worldly powers are transformed as they participate in the very events that resist them.

The worldly power of the Roman Empire expressed certain characteristics of an essential "masculinity" whose chief attributes are solidity, immutability, and impenetrability: for example, a fixed location--Rome--as the center of power; a fixed hierarchical structure; penetration of territory and conquest of peoples. By way of contrast, essential "femininity" was marked by fluidity, mutability, and receptivity. Women, in this taxonomy, are changeable, penetrable, and mobile. The dynamic of power as it flows through women is flexible and adaptable; that flexibility and adaptability is feminine power. Because it is so, woman's power is not tied to a particular place; rather, she accesses whatever power she may engage from wherever she happens to be.

Imperial colonialism--be it Roman, British, Statesian, or otherwise--is dependant upon a fixed center from which it goes forth to conquer. When the seat of power is penetrated--in other words, when the empire's "essential masculinity" is violated--expansion halts and control over colonized territories weakens as forces are drawn back to the center in order to rescue the seat of power. Empires expand and contract; empires rise and fall; but they do not move.

In the Gospel accounts, Jesus' deeds of power were accomplished in many places and under a variety of circumstances. Like the power of women, the power that Jesus accessed appears to be--as Foucault might say--everywhere and nowhere, not residing in a place from which it issues, but flowing through acts of human will in response to the need of the moment. Jesus' public displays of that power, like the public display of women's power, tended to transgress both civil and religious hierarchy. Jesus' transgression, like female transgression, threatens not just those individuals in positions of localized power, but the very structure and center of the hierarchy itself which is founded upon the impossibility of such transgression.

According to Anne Carson, "Female transgression begins in social fact... Woman is a mobile unit in a society that practices patrilocal marriage (which Greek society is generally agreed to have done), and man is not. From birth the male citizen has a fixed place in the oikos ('household') and polis ('city-state'), but the female moves."¹⁴ From the beginning of his ministry as recounted in the Fourth Gospel, Jesus' mobility aligns him more with the feminine than the masculine in the common worldview of the Greek society to which the narrative is addressed.

Could the geographic mobility we see in Jesus' ministry function as a beginning expression of Jesus' gender mobility? Consider this: In Making Sex, Thomas Laqueur makes the point that according to Aristotle, human genitalia--being essentially the same in both male and female--are secondary sexual characteristics.¹⁵ In other words, one's essential femininity tends to cause the genitals to be physically expressed in a particular way, while another's essential masculinity tends to cause the genitals be expressed in another way.

Jesus, in the gospel accounts, is a "man"--one whose essential masculinity is expressed in his body--who acts and is acted upon in ways that are increasingly expressive of femininity in the ancient Greek ontology described by Carson and Laqueur. In addition to the synoptic examples cited above, Jesus' submission to crucifixion by a male-identified empire can be seen as the ultimate act of gender mobility. In this context, it is possible to understand the crucifixion as an act of rape, in that it is constituted of a series of violent penetrations of the body to which the victim submits but does not consent.

Rebecca Ann Parker writes,

To say that Jesus' executioners did what was historically necessary for salvation is to say that state terrorism is a good thing, that torture and murder are the will of God. It is to say that those who loved and missed Jesus, those who did not want him to die, were wrong, that enemies who cared nothing for him were right. We believe there is no ethical way to hold that the Romans did the right thing. We will not say we are grateful or glad that someone was tortured and murdered on our behalf.¹⁶

In Brock and Parker's Proverbs of Ashes, we see the salvific event as one that occurs in history and therefore within a specific context; otherwise it is not salvation, but merely a folktale, an urban legend, a pot of gold at the end of a vanishing rainbow. Salvation is not easy, and submission does not equal consent in the perpetration of crucifixion any more than in the perpetration of rape. Both are horrible, hateful, death-dealing, abusive, terrible and terrifying acts of the human will. The crucifixion of Christ is the pure embodiment of everything in humanity that requires salvation.

As previously stated, submission in ancient Greek society is the "natural" expression of femininity. Given Aristotle's contention, as interpreted by Laqueur, that genitalia are only secondary results of one's essential masculinity or femininity, we may speculate that it is possible that submission trumps the penis as signifier of the subject's sex. We may further speculate that these constructions would have influenced, at least subliminally, the early Greek Jesus-believing communities in their perception of the crucifixion event.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Notes:
⁹Tim Rice, Jesus Christ Superstar by Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice.
¹⁰Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I, 93.
¹¹The words in quotes are identical in both Mark and Luke; Matthew lacks reference to "power [going] out from him" and reports Jesus saying, "Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well."
¹²Ingrid Rosa Kitzberger, "'How Can This Be?' (John 3:9): A Feminist-Theological Re-Reading of the Gospel of John," in "What Is John?" Volume II: Literary and Social Readings of the Fourth Gospel, ed. Fernando F. Segovia (Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1998), 39.
¹³Foucault, 95.
¹⁴Anne Carson, "Putting Her in Her Place: Woman, Dirt, and Desire," in Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, ed. David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 135-136.
¹⁵Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990, 28-29. Laqueur writes that Aristotle "insisted that the distinguishing characteristic of maleness was immaterial... What we would take to be ideologically charged social constructions of gender--that males are active and females passive, males contribute the form and females the matter to generation--were for Aristotle indubitable facts, 'natural' truths. What we would take to be the basic facts of sexual difference, on the other hand...were for Aristotle contingent and philosophically not very interesting observations about particular species under certain conditions."
¹⁶Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, Proverbs of Ashes. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003, 49.

Return of the Queer, Oh My

2006-10-07T11:01:00.000-07:00

Rating: SL

So I was out of the country for a short while, but now I'm back. And while I was out, I had a short short short piece published online in the Wittenburg Door Insider Newsletter. Click the link and look for "Safeguarding God's Children For Dummies."

My grateful thanks to the editors, even though they edited one of the haiku to the point that it is no longer haiku. But as I am, as you know, dear reader, no champion of orthodoxy myself, I have no grounds for complaint.

There were actually four haiku in the original submission; apparently they decided to pass on one of them, I can't think why. Look for the Rejected Sexual Abuse Prevention Haiku in an upcoming post.

Despite this isolated and unprecedented display of squeamishness, The Wittenburg Door continues to be one of the funniest things out there. The print magazine is definitely worth the subscription price.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Finding The Funny

2006-09-24T18:04:00.000-07:00

Rating: SL

Brevity is the soul of wit. This is the hands-down wittiest blog I've come across.
Really. Go right now. See for yourself What Fresh Hell Is This?
Beverage-out-the-nose, piss-your-pants funny.

yours in the struggle,
Max

And Speaking of Dogs and Vomit...

2006-09-23T01:41:00.000-07:00

Rating: GT

Anyone who has spent a certain amount of time around dogs understands at least the first half of the Proverb that lives just under the title of this blog. It's a pretty convincing argument for the accuracy of the observational powers of the writers. There's a lot of this sort of thing in that text: a statement of an easily observable phenomenon followed by a perhaps less observable, but somehow convincing, simile or conclusion or directive.

The Book of Proverbs is grounded in an ontology that says that a + b = c. If someone is a and does b then c will always result. Take away b and you only have a which will never amount to c. Take away a and you only have b which, again, will never amount to c. For example: 20:1 “Wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler, and whoever is led astray by it is not wise.” Also 20:4 “The lazy person does not plow in season; harvest comes, and there is nothing to be found.” Even more plain, 20:20-22: “If you curse father or mother, your lamp will go out in utter darkness. / An estate quickly acquired in the beginning will not be blessed in the end. / Do not say, ‘I will repay evil’; wait for the LORD, and he will help you.”¹

These passages, and many others, are simple arithmetic.² They may be as true as 1 + 1 = 2; but the attempt to subject the living universe to arithmetic rule is magic. There is very little difference between the principle that says that speaking certain words in a certain order will produce a specific phenomenal effect and the principle that says taking certain actions and refraining from others will produce predictable circumstance. The Book of Proverbs as a whole, including those passages which go beyond the simple form cited above, “slowly sorts out who is entitled to what. The wise and righteous are entitled to security and happiness; the wicked and the foolish are entitled to poverty and misery.”³ It says to the reader/hearer, Do this and not that; be that and not this; then you will have a good life. As concluded in A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament, “The community works so long as this calculus of what each may expect and each must bear is generally accepted by all.”⁴

If the community is to continue to function, then when it observes poverty and misery, it may not come to any conclusion other than that the sufferer is or has been wicked and foolish. To do otherwise would be to reject the “calculus” that forms the framework of their communal life. The arithmetic, or, at best, geometrical principles of the Book of Proverbs offer no choice in the matter; I disagree with the analysis that the friends of Job, as they give voice to these principles, “go one step further [and] invert the calculus.”⁵ They do not invert the calculus; they, in fact, apply the calculus meticulously.

The Book of Job stands as a rejection of this calculus. It is grounded in an ontology that says humans are not in control of circumstance. The universe is so vast and the unknown factors so outnumber the known (“Where is the way to the dwelling of light, and where is the place of darkness, that you may take it to its territory and that you may discern the paths to its home?” [Job 38:19-20]) that it is never possible to predict with certitude what will result from our actions. This model of the world is in direct opposition to the “safe, settled world”⁶ that is constructed in the Book of Proverbs.

The Book of Job is chaos theory. It is not by accident, I suggest, that the “playwright”⁷ depicts God as a whirlwind (38:1). Chaos theory says we cannot predict outcomes; we cannot control external circumstance; and we will certainly never know all the permutations of the ramifications of our actions. Only God knows these things; we are not around long enough nor do we have the omniscience to see the fractal patterns undulating and unfolding. So God says to Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?...Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and cause the dawn to know its place?” (38:4, 12).

When we arrive at the end of Job’s story, what we are left with is the fundamental truth that the only thing, the only thing, over which we have any control at all is our own choices. We are free to choose. Our choices are important, they matter, not because we have any ability to affect external circumstances, but because it is by our choices that we define who we are. What we discover along with Job is that we are not defined by our circumstances, be they good or ill. We are defined by the choices we make within those circumstances.

Job, in the end, is defined by the choice he makes, over and over again, to seek God (19:23-27, 28:20-28, 30:20, 31:35-37). Job seeks God relentlessly, with tenacity and defiance and fury and pain. He seeks God with everything that he is. In the end, no persecutor, no circumstance, no calamity, no friend, no satan, nothing and no one is able to make Job do anything, or refrain from anything. He is free.

What this freedom demands of Job and of us is brutal honesty. Because we define ourselves by our choices, our abdication of the responsibility for who we are in attempting to blame someone or something outside ourselves is always a lie. What freedom offers us, if we choose it, is the possibility of redemption.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Click here for the notes

Notes
¹All scriptural citations are from the New Revised Standard Version.
²Arithmetic, not mathematics. The relation between higher mathematics, theoretical physics, chaos theory, the universe, and the Divine is another subject altogether...and needs addressing by someone smarter--not to mention better at math--than I.
³Bruce C. Birch, Walter Brueggemann, Terence E. Fretheim, and David L. Petersen, eds., A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999), 383.
⁴Ibid.
⁵Birch, et al, 397.
⁶Birch, et al, 382.
⁷Birch, et al, 394.

Never On Friday Five

2006-09-16T13:10:00.000-07:00

Rating: SL

Brought to you, as always, by RevGalBlogPals.

1. Tell us about a time you met someone famous.
My first job out of undergrad and I'm waiting tables in a low-priced Mexican restaurant in Austin, working lunches because I have rehearsals at night. It's a weekday, post-lunch-rush, maybe 2:00, pretty slow, and a couple comes in requesting seating in the smoking section. They look like they just got up. The young woman orders margaritas for them both. The man keeps his head down, studying the menu like there's going to be a quiz. I put in their drink order, and the bartender looks over at them and says, "That's Bruce Springsteen." "Oh, bullshit," I laugh. I take them their drinks, the young woman orders double fajitas, I put in the order, and the bartender says again, "That's Bruce Springsteen." "Oh stop it, I'm not falling for it," I say, grinning. "No, that's Bruce Springsteen. Look," he says. So I look. The man's head is up for the first time since they came in. Holy shit. It's Bruce Springsteen. Wearing shorts and a Christopher Cross t-shirt. And the young woman with her hair in a scrunchie, wearing faded capris and an enormous knotted t-shirt and running shoes is Julianne Phillips.
Just so you know, we were all very, very cool about it. No one squealed until after they left.

2. Tell us about a celebrity you'd like to meet.
Ursula K. Le Guin. The woman has a direct line to the cosmos. Every time I reread something of hers it teaches me something completely new to me.

3. Tell us about someone great who's *not* famous that you think everyone oughta have a chance to meet.
Steve Darden, Navajo medicine man, former judge, teacher, speaker, and truly amazing person. Someone who is making a difference in the world.

4. Do you have any autographs of famous people?
I have an autographed Michelle Shocked CD. Also copies of War and Remembrance and The Will To Live On inscribed by the author, Herman Wouk.

5. If you were to become famous, what would you want to become famous for?
Curing AIDS. Or cancer. See The Final Frontier for why that's never going to happen--I believe some competency in organic chemistry, as well as the ability to, you know, do math beyond the eighth-grade level, is probably required.

Bonus: Whose 15 minutes of fame was up long, long ago?
Skeevy E-Harmony Guy. Just too revolting for color TV.

yours in the struggle,
Max

"Put Your Finger Here" Part 1 (Repost)

2006-09-14T23:56:00.000-07:00

Rating: QGT

Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her. ...
Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” (John 20:17-18, 27)¹

Resurrection—the reversal of death—may be the ultimate act of queering. Belief in physical resurrection is so extreme that it borders on the truly mad. As one Episcopal priest put it, “Resurrection? In this body? That doesn’t sound like Good News to me!”

How can resurrection be “good news”? Why would a physically resurrected Christ say “do not hold on to me”? What kind of Messiah tells a disciple “Put your finger here”?

In his work treating the book of Jonah, Elie Wiesel observes, “The Zohar says explicitly that Jonah died of fear—but came back to life. It was Jonah’s most painful experience; he says so himself.”² The idea that redemption is frightening and resurrection painful may be foreign to many Christians, but it is part of the Jewish understanding of resurrection in which Christian faith is rooted. Whatever our modern beliefs about resurrection, the Jesus of the Gospel accounts is a Jew. His human experience of resurrection is that of a Jew experiencing resurrection. It is reasonable—if anything connected to the serious discussion of resurrection can be so termed—to at least entertain the notion that Jesus’ human experience of resurrection was both frightening and painful.

Mainstream Christianity is accustomed to perceiving the crucifixion as the locus of any pain and/or fear that Jesus may have experienced, while assuming that the resurrection was unrelentingly joyous. Challenging these perceptions may well prove to be likewise full of both pain and fear; but let us not be deterred. Let us gird up our loins and venture forth into the Queer Minefield, utilizing some of the current theories about bodies, including theories of gender and sexuality, as a map to the resurrection story as told in John 20:17-27.

This paper has been accepted for publication in Theology and Sexuality and the final (edited, revised and typeset) version of this paper will be published in Theology and Sexuality, Volume 13 Issue 2, January 2007 by Sage Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. © Sage Publications Ltd, 2007.”

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John 18:38: ‘What is truth?’
In 1969—the year I turned five years old, long before Judith Butler was causing male-identified persons throughout academia to clutch their penises in sudden terror—Ursula K. LeGuin published a strange and dark and beautiful novel entitled The Left Hand of Darkness that starts out like this:

I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.
The story is not all mine, nor told by me alone. Indeed I am not sure whose story it is; you can judge better. But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them is false, and it is all one story.³

LeGuin—a self-avowed atheist⁴—provides, in these initial paragraphs of a fictitious narrative, the most useful perspective on reading the Bible that I have come across in three years of seminary. If we can begin to apprehend that “imagination” and “faith” are twins, that “making believe” and “believing” represent a single zygote divided so that each takes on its own life, then we can begin to grasp the implications for us of LeGuin’s apparently outrageous claim. Most of us have been taught that “truth” and “imagination” are mutually exclusive categories. Yet in order to place a fact or a story or a scientific principle in the “truth” category, we first have to believe it.

Belief starts by being made. “Make believe” is something we all know how to do, even if it has been decades since we engaged in its practice. Scientists do this all the time; they just do not call it “make believe.” Instead, they call “postulation,” which sounds much more impressive. Much of what we know about the physical universe started out as postulation, as imagining—making believe—and seeing where it led.

In similar fashion, we tend to construct an oppositional binary of the “corporeal” and the “mystical”; yet the most sensual reports we have of individuals’ encounters with Christ come from Christians whom our own tradition defines as mystics. If truth is a matter of the imagination, perhaps the corporeal is a manifestation of the mystical.

In her Preface to the 1999 edition of Gender Trouble, Judith Butler writes, “The anticipation of an authoritative disclosure of meaning is the means by which that authority is attributed and installed: the anticipation conjures its object.” Butler goes on to speak of “a similar expectation concerning gender, that it operates as an interior essence that might be disclosed, an expectation that ends up producing the very phenomenon that it anticipates.”⁵

The idea that a belief can produce a reality, that some prophecies really are self-fulfilling, that the human psyche can actually create the preconditions that support its own perceptions, is a notion with a long and rich history in both Judaism and Christianity. Theurgy plays a significant role in Jewish mysticism tradition. In his Introduction to The Essential Kabbalah, Daniel Matt writes that to Moses, “God reveals the divine name, ‘I am that I am,’ intimating what eventually becomes a mystical refrain: God cannot be defined.”⁶ Furthermore, the divine name “I am that I am” intimates that God cannot be other than God is. Because God cannot be other than God is, theurgy—“forcing God’s hand”—is possible. Moshe Idel addresses the question this way, in his explication of an anonymous medieval Kabbalist: “Just as man will cleave to God in an intellectual manner, so will he cleave to man….[T]he reciprocity is regarded as automatic—no longer the response of a higher personality to the deeds of man, as in the Midrash, but a spiritual mechanism…”⁷

Working from the bottom up: B can only result from A; only God can emanate A; but by practicing B, Idel’s “spiritual mechanism” is activated, theurgically compelling A to have happened—meaning, by definition, that God has emanated A. The reciprocity to which Idel refers is explored by Michel Foucault when he writes that power, rather than being held, actually flows: power is a dynamic and a discourse.⁸ This turning around, upside down, inside out, reversal and reciprocity of power runs throughout the Gospel accounts, leading to the crucifixion and culminating in the resurrection.

yours in the struggle,
Max

1. All scriptural quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised
Standard Version.
2. Elie Wiesel, Five Biblical Portraits. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1981,142.
3. Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace Books (trade
paperback edition), 2000, 1.
4. LeGuin, Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, xv. “I talk about the gods; I
am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say.
I am telling the truth.”
5. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New
York: Routledge, 1999, xiv.
6. Daniel C. Matt, The Essential Kabbalah. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1998, 3.
7. Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1988, 174.
8. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. New York:
Vintage Books (Random House, Inc.), 1990, 92-95.

Friday Five, on Saturday Morning

2006-09-09T10:07:00.000-07:00

Rating: SL, QT, GRG

Brought to you by the letter Q and RevGalBlogPals:
Name five things you enjoyed this week.

OK, here goes.

Rosie O'Donnell on The View.
Ms. O'Donnell is infusing that show with a level of energy that is pure joy to watch. And it's not just her--Barbara, Joy, and Elizabeth are showing more vim and vigor than I've seen from them in a long time. Rosie is moderating the discussion beautifully, making sure everyone is heard, and keeping things moving at a brisk clip. And as you know, I'm an enormous fan of the Queer Stirring of the Stew.

TiVo.
Oh yes. Never do I watch shitty TV in which I have no interest just because I'm exhausted and need to veg for a bit. Now I veg in front of stuff I actually want to watch. Like the item mentioned above. Plus, I get to fast-forward through those hateful E-Harmony commercials. Is that guy beyond skeevy, or what? Yechhhhh. Heebie-jeebie time. (But I freely admit that I stop and go back for the Citibank identity theft commercials. They crack me up.)

Coffee. It's what's for breakfast.

The animals (3 cats and a dog) who reside in my home. They make me laugh every day. Our small girl cat, Greta Garbo, has completely made the dog her bitch. He freezes anytime she so much as looks in his direction. Yes, it's true: the dog is pussy-whipped.

And the greatest of these is love... My partner, who after ten years is still sexy, brilliant, surprising, challenging, beverage-out-the-nose funny, and the One True Love Of My Life. I'm the luckiest queer in the world.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Uber Allis

2006-08-31T18:07:00.000-07:00

Rating: SL, V

Update: For a shot of moral courage, read Phobic Nation over at Shakespeare's Sister. Preach, girl!

Associated Press
Updated: 11:32 a.m. PT Aug 31, 2006

SALT LAKE CITY - President Bush on Thursday predicted victory in the war on terror at a time of increasing public anxiety at home, likening the struggle against Islamic fundamentalism with the fight against Nazis and communists.

With just over two months until Election Day, Bush said opponents of the war in Iraq who are calling for a plan to bring home troops would create a disaster in the Middle East.

"Many of these folks are sincere and they're patriotic but they could be -- they could not be more wrong," the president said. "If America were to pull out before Iraq could defend itself, the consequences would be absolutely predictable, and absolutely disastrous. We would be handing Iraq over to our worst enemies -- Saddam's former henchmen, armed groups with ties to Iran, and al-Qaida terrorists from all over the world who would suddenly have a base of operations far more valuable than Afghanistan under the Taliban." (You can read the whole story here.)

What?????????

We're over there helping Iraq to defend itself? From what? Invasion? wait a minute... I know that there was some large wealthy superpower nation invading Iraq... who was it? ... wait, don't tell me...

Oh! Right! That would be the United States of America! Well, golly, I'm glad President Bush is committed to defending Iraq against them. That's an incredibly powerful military force. Iraq can't possibly defend itself alone against the U.S. Wow. I guess the people really did know what they were doing when they elected Mr. Bush president of... wait. What country is Mr. Bush president of? wait, don't tell me... I know this one...

Oh! Right! That would be the United States of America.

Read whole post

If America were to pull out before Iraq could defend itself...

I was in downtown Washington, DC on September 11, 2001. I was working in an office that dealt with national and international events. The televisions that were always tuned to the news were playing in people's offices. I saw the smoke from the Pentagon billowing past our eighth-story windows. With about 200 or so other employees, I watched on an enormous movie screen in the lecture hall as the second tower fell.

When they finally sent us home, Dupont Circle looked like an anthill that some marauding giant had stepped in. I walked two miles before I could board a bus that would take me home, because it had been reported that there was a bomb somewhere in the Metro subway system. Much later, this rumor proved false, as well as the one about a car bomb being driven into the OEOB. But we didn't know that then. We didn't know if our friends in New York City were hurt or dead, we didn't know how many were hurt or killed at the Pentagon. We didn't know what would happen next, where the next attack would land, if this was just the point of the knife that would eviscerate us.

I am more horrified today than I was then.

How is it possible that my president--and he is my president, regardless of the fact that I voted for the other guy--my president, weeks before the five-year anniversary of that day, can stand up before God and everyone and say such a thing? The terrorist attacks on this country did not come from Iraq, yet we have been told over and over again that our invasion of Iraq is the front line of the war on terrorism. We have been told over and over again that Iraq is a critical threat to our very lives, that they have or might have or could have weapons of mass destruction, that Iraq could annihilate our entire way of life.

Mr. President, if Iran is incapable of even defending itself against enemies, how the bloody hell could they have ever posed an invasion-necessitating threat to the greatest military power on the planet? If they do not have the military power and the devastating weapons--which some of your people are still insisting really were there and probably still are, since we never managed to find them--to wage a war, what the hell were we doing when we invaded Iraq in the first place?

I don't know. I don't know what will happen next, how many more American men and women will be maimed and killed, how much more of our liberty will be curtailed, how much devastation to our way of life we will suffer. But this time, the unpredictable power from which these horrors issue is my own government. The lies are coming from men and women whose salaries I pay, in whose hands the collective "we" have placed the power to determine the future of this nation.

I shit you not, dear reader, I am scared. My whole defiant "refuse to be terrorized" 'tude is losing altitude fast. I cannot rid my brain of the image of an ambitious and driven paperhanger from Vienna who preached patriotism, national pride, and hard work, who led a frightened and bewildered nation from despair to a desperate kind of bravado, who implemented bold plans to strengthen national security by curtailing personal liberty and weeding out citizens whose ethnic background, political beliefs, and alternative lifestyles marked them as potential internal risks, who took the fight "there" so to make the people safe "here" and commanded the invasion and occupation of one country after another, all in the name of strength, security, and safety. It is less and less difficult for me to imagine how it all happened. And I am well and truly scared.

Almighty God, we humbly beseech you that we may always prove ourselves a people mindful of your favor and glad to do your will. Bless our land with honorable industry, sound learning, and pure manners. Save us from violence, discord and confusion; from pride and arrogance, and from every evil way. Defend our liberties, and fashion into one united people the multitudes brought here out of many kindreds and tongues. Endue with the spirit of wisdom those to whom in your Name we entrust the authority of government, that there may be justice and peace at home, and that, through obedience to your law, we may show forth your praise among the nations of the earth. In the time of prosperity, fill our hearts with thankfulness, and in the day of trouble, suffer not our trust in you to fail; all which we ask through your Son our savior Jesus Christ. [Book of Common Prayer, p. 820]

O God, the Father and Mother of all, whose holy Child commanded us to love our enemies: Lead them and us from prejudice to truth; deliver them and us from hatred, cruelty, and revenge; and in your good time enable us all to stand reconciled before you; through your Word made flesh, our savior Jesus Christ. [Book of Common Prayer, p. 816]

Amen.

yours in the struggle,
Max

The Results Are In

2006-08-31T12:52:00.000-07:00

Rating: SL, QT

You Are Big Bird

Talented, smart, and friendly... you're also one of the sanest people around.

You are usually feeling: Happy. From riding a unicycle to writing poetry, you have plenty of hobbies to keep you busy.

You are famous for: Being a friend to everyone. Even the grumpiest person gets along with you.

How you live your life: Joyfully. "Super. Duper. Flooper."

The Sesame Street Personality Quiz

Well! I am a complete and total disdainer of the personality profile. I fart in the general direction of Myers-Briggs alphabet soup. And don't even get me started on the ludicrosity of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (aka MMPI), which in my opinion reveals much more about the truly freaked-up crazy-ass childhoods of the people who wrote that so-called "measure" than it ever can about anyone subjected to it.

But I bow before the truly astonishing accuracy of the Sesame Street Personality Quiz. Big Bird is absolutely the most gender-ambiguous resident of Sesame Street. Plus, just last night I dreamed I was riding a unicycle. I was also naked, which even in the dream was fairly disturbing to me...but hey--the only clothing Big Bird ever wears is that long neck scarf. And I did have a backpack in the dream, which is not the same as a neck scarf, but they're both accessories.

I swear I took the quiz honestly and this is the one and only result.

Big Bird! How utterly divine.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Meanwhile, In Another Part Of The Forest

2006-08-31T12:31:00.000-07:00

Rating: GT

Chuck at CrossLeft has a terrific piece on the use/misuse of Scripture as proof-text entitled Insert Bible Verse Here. Check it out.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Beer and Cookies

2006-08-31T03:17:00.000-07:00

Rating: GT

Related posts: Milk and Cookies, Fully Human

"Hey! What Happened To My Beer?": Women's Enlightenment, Men's Romanticism, and the Ramifications of Giving A Mouse A Cookie in Nineteenth-Century America

The conversation was miles beyond Jo's comprehension, but she enjoyed it, though Kant and Hegel were unknown gods, the Subjective and Objective unintelligible terms; and the only thing 'evolved from her inner consciousness,' was a bad headache after it was all over. It dawned upon her gradually that ... religion was in a fair way to be reasoned into nothingness, and intellect was to be the only God. .... [B]ut she was fascinated, just then, by the freedom of Speculative Philosophy...trying to find out what the wise gentlemen intended to rely upon after they had annihilated all the old beliefs....
[Mr. Bhaer] bore it as long as he could; but when he was appealed to for an opinion, he blazed up with honest indignation, and defended religion with all the eloquence of truth.... Somehow, as he talked, the world got right again to Jo; the old beliefs, that had lasted so long, seemed better than the new; God was not a blind force, and immortality was not a pretty fable, but a blessed fact. She felt as if she had solid ground under her feet again; and when Mr. Bhaer paused, out-talked, but not one whit convinced, Jo wanted to clap her hands and thank him.¹

What in the world are Kant and Hegel doing in a nineteenth-century "girls' book"?² American women writers of fiction like Augusta Jane Evans, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Louisa May Alcott captured an enormous shift in the role of women in private and public life in the nineteenth century. Within the emerging American ethos of independence, hard work and self-sacrifice, in which burgeoning industrialization placed a high priority on efficiency and economy of effort, women, recently released from the label of "potentially disorderly and dangerous,"³ and fueled by the rise of individualism and the fall of dogma as expressed by philosophers and theologians such as Kant, Hegel, and Emerson, by the last decades of the nineteenth century were rolling up their sleeves, eliminating the middleman, and getting much, much more directly involved in bringing their moral vision to the forefront of American life.

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Little Women was first published in 1868, Good Wives in 1869. Nearly a century before, Immanuel Kant was urging people to think for themselves, to throw off the mental and therefore spiritual tyranny of "the guardians," to question everything and embrace true intellectual and religious freedom.⁴ Ralph Waldo Emerson was a minister who, like Kant, called upon people to think for themselves; in an address to the Harvard Divinity School graduating class of 1838, he urged the "newborn bard[s] of the Holy Ghost" to "cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity," to throw off the tyranny of the ossified institution of Christian dogma, and to experience themselves as incarnations of God,⁵ an end which one could imagine might have caused Herr Kant to experience an aneurysm. Wiser folk than I have observed that the trouble with encouraging people to think for themselves is that some few individuals will actually take it into their heads to do it, and of course one century's rebel is the next century's authority. Kant's insistence that individuals think for themselves opened the door for Emerson's insistence that individuals experience God for themselves, which in turn pried open the floodgate for women who believed it was high time to take what Elizabeth Fox-Genovese describes as their "special responsibility to uphold and spread Christian belief and to live a model Christian life,"⁶ into the larger world.

Alcott's father Bronson was a Transcendentalist who was deeply admired by Emerson. As a small child, Louisa May along with her parents and older sister participated in an experiment in collective living called "Fruitlands," at which Emerson was a frequent visitor.⁷ Emerson's ideas are reflected in Alcott's novels in a number of remarkable ways: There is a great deal of personal piety and discussion of God's providence, and some few brief mentions of specific saints (St. Martin of Tours, for example), but no reference to Jesus as the Son of God, or to the Holy Ghost; the four girls receive books for Christmas in the opening chapter described as "that beautiful old story of the best life ever lived," but the words "Jesus" and "Christ" never appear; and although the character of Mr. March is a minister, there is no mention anywhere of anyone in the family ever going to church.⁸ Emerson's Romanticism seems clearly apparent in the episode related above, with Mr. Bhaer riding valiantly into battle in which "[h]e had a hard fight, for the wise men argued well; but he didn't know when he was beaten, and stood to his colours like a man."⁹ Oh my. Be still my heart.

The marriage of Jo, the quintessential all-American girl,¹⁰ to Mr. Bhaer, the German absent-minded professor with a heart of gold, may reflect a desire to marry off American independence and pragmatism to European tradition and scholarship: if America is the red balloon, Europe is the string. Without Europe, America drifts away into the ozone; without America, Europe just lies there in an incomprehensible tangle on the floor. One of the many interesting possibilities this presents is that, in Alcott's model, pragmatism and scholarship are opposites which, for the good of the species, must be brought together in mutual cooperation. Also interesting is that in this model, pragmatism is the feminine half of the partnership.¹¹ Yet the character of Mr. Bhaer as initially introduced and developed is the champion of those things which in the latter half of the nineteenth century, according to Fox-Genovese, had come to be seen as the eminent domain of women, namely religion, morality, and children.¹² Alcott's "perfect man" for Jo, it seems, is essentially a nineteenth-century woman.

It could be suggested that Alcott assigns these qualities to a man in order to give them legitimacy and retain the image of dominant male/submissive female; it may be more likely, on the other hand, that she was indulging in some fantasy fulfillment in which a man takes responsibility for his own religious and moral life instead of always relying on a woman to provide it. Little Women and Good Wives are rife with examples of women's obligation to do exactly that. Alcott reflects this dichotomy in an exchange between Jo and her much more "society"-savvy sister Amy, in which Jo declares,

"But I think girls ought to show when they disapprove of young men; and how can they do it except by their manners? Preaching does not do any good, as I know to my sorrow, as I've had Teddy [Laurie] to manage; but there are many little ways in which I can influence him without a word, and I say we ought to do it to others if we can."

Amy responds that

"...If we were belles, or women of wealth and position, we might do something, perhaps..."

but concludes that such a scheme

"wouldn't have a particle of effect, and we should only be considered odd and puritanical."
"So we are to countenance things and people which we detest, merely because we are not belles and millionaires, are we? That's a nice sort of morality."
"I can't argue about it, I only know that it's the way of the world; and people who set themselves against it only get laughed at for their pains. I don't like reformers, and I hope you will never try to be one."
"I do like them, and I shall be one if I can; for in spite of the laughing, the world would never get on without them. We can't agree about that, for you belong to the old set, and I to the new: you will get on the best, but I shall have the liveliest time of it. I should rather enjoy the brickbats and hooting, I think."¹³

Notwithstanding, Alcott's subsequent refusal to marry Jo to Laurie¹⁴ in preference for a man who can carry his own water, thank you very much, speaks of what may have been a growing impatience with the "special responsibility" that allowed boys and men to do as they liked and saddled girls and women with the task of policing not only themselves but everyone else. Certain "reformers" who endured a great deal of "brickbats and hooting" had already expressed their own dissatisfaction with the double standard: in the "Declaration of Sentiments" from the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848--the year Alcott turned sixteen, twenty years before the publication of Little Women--the authors wrote of man, "He has created a false public sentiment by giving the world a different code of morals for men and women..."¹⁵

The subversive quality of these episodes in Alcott's fiction is striking. Jo's endorsement of "reformers" is as clear a call to action as Samuel Clemens's depiction of Huck's moral struggle which ends in his declaration of willingness to suffer hell rather than treat Jim as less than fully human; yet Alcott's is tucked safely away in a "girls' book," amidst object lessons about duty and family and womanly virtues, where it may whisper in the ears of the world's "little women" until they are grown enough to take up the challenge.

At the time Alcott was writing, women's sphere of influence was still generally understood to be restricted to the home, and possibly to the "many little ways [women] can influence [men] without a word," but how long can one expect to make one group of people responsible for everyone's private behavior and still expect that group to remain submissive in terms of the public transmission of religion? Women were responsible for leading their husbands and children to church, where the women were then obliged to keep their mouths shut because they were morally culpable for the Fall. Into this logic gap leapt women like Frances Willard, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Did someone say "dangerous and disorderly"? Disordering patriarchal society and endangering the status quo were these women's bread and butter. It is ironic that their ideological lineage can be traced straight back to Immanuel Kant, who eight years after the American Declaration of Independence claimed that "the freedom of mind of the people" could not possibly occur in a republic, because the "greater degree of civil freedom...places inescapable limitations upon it; a lower degree of civil freedom, on the contrary, provides the mind with room for each man to extend himself to his full capacity."¹⁶ Kant advocated "man's release from self-incurred tutelage" and saw as its chief obstacle "That the step to competence is held [to] be very dangerous by the far greater portion of mankind (and by the entire fair sex)" but that this obstacle could be overcome by means of leadership by example (the mode of leadership, a century later, deemed suitable for women): "For there will always be some independent thinkers...who...will disseminate the spirit of the rational appreciation of both their own worth and every man's vocation of thinking for himself."¹⁷

Emerson made the same claims to the right and even obligation of self-determination in the realm of the spiritual that Kant made in the realm of the intellectual, and Henry David Thoreau's ongoing paean to civil disobedience, although interminably irritating to Emerson,¹⁸ forged a mighty link between the practical (i.e., that which is practiced) and the romantic. Enter the women, who were expected to lead by example, to "disseminate the spirit" of morality and Christianity; but once released, the genie of women's direct influence was not going back in the bottle. Willard, Stanton and Mott rejected the notion that women needed men to oversee the overt expression of their religious lives in church, an attitude succinctly summarized in Sojourner Truth's declaration that Christ came "[f]rom God and a woman! Man had nothin' to do wid Him."¹⁹

It is significant that Alcott references but never quite articulates the "old beliefs, that had lasted so long..." A woman could get away with writing fiction--especially fiction for children, and most especially for girl children--but articulation of doctrine was not "women's work." By barring women from the exercise of their moral and religious vision in terms of what Catherine Albanese calls "extraordinary" religion--"beyond the boundaries of the everyday world"--church authorities left women with only one field in which to work: that of "ordinary" religion,²⁰ wherein lies the realm of politics and social reform. Lucretia Mott, speaking to a gathering of women in 1854 (the year before Alcott's first book, Flower Fables, was published), had taken up Emerson's call and made it something personal to herself and to her audience: "We have been so long pinning our faith on other people's sleeves that we ought to begin examining these things daily for ourselves.... How many women are there now immolated upon the shrine of superstition and priestcraft...in the assumption that man only has a right to the pulpit.... We too often bind ourselves by authorities rather than by the truth."²¹ Thirty-five years later, Frances Willard, writing in 1889, gave to this personalized call arms and legs and teeth:

It is men who have taken the simple, loving, tender Gospel of the New Testament, so suited to be the proclamation of a woman's lips, and translated it in terms of sacerdotalism, dogma, and martyrdom. It is men who have given us the dead letter rather than the living Gospel.... Men preach a creed; women will declare a life.... The Greek bishop who said, "My creed is faultless, with my life you have nothing to do," condensed into a sentence two thousand years of priestly dogma. Men reason in the abstract, women in the concrete.²²

And Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1895, "Others say it is not politic to rouse religious opposition. This much-lauded policy is but another word for cowardice.... For so far-reaching and momentous a reform as [woman's] complete independence, an entire revolution in all existing institutions is inevitable."²³ Whoa there! Them's fightin' words, missy!

Fighting words, indeed. After the Civil War, many women seeking to enact a moral vision founded in their own faith experience tackled what they perceived as the chief threat to social stability: alcoholic beverages. The consumption of alcohol was perceived as a great threat to the morality of their brothers, sons, and husbands; and drunken men were a great threat to the safety of women and children. Fox-Genovese notes that the Women's Christian Temperance Union grew to around 200,000 members in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and that "over time [many members] came to believe that their cause required them to defend women's right to participate in politics in order to accomplish their goals."²⁴ One might imagine that the enactment of Prohibition in 1919 made more than one man wish that his father had just let the women preach in church; as Kant noted, "so harmful is it to implant prejudices, for they later take vengeance on their cultivators or on their descendants."

Those implanted prejudices continued to bear their nasty poisonous fruit throughout the following century, and the descendants of their cultivators continued to wrestle with the effects. Following in the footsteps of F.D. Maurice in England, as well as the American reformers of the nineteenth century, Walter Rauschenbusch articulated a theology of Christian social justice, picking up where the previous generation had left off, "summon[ing] Christian men singly and collectively to put their hands to the plough and not to look back till public morality shall be at least as much Christianized as private morality now is."²⁵ It sounds terrific; it is terrific--until some maniac gets his psychotic hands on it and produces the horrors of Laramie...not to mention Auschwitz. The work goes on.

The work goes on, because the one constant in organized "extraordinary" religion, expressed in the institutional church, is that it is relentlessly human. It would appear that the human tendency to huddle and exclude is not going away anytime soon. One denomination says, yes, by all means women can teach Sunday School, but only to children under sixteen. Another, at another time, says, yes, black and brown folk can be ordained, but only for black and brown congregations. Still another says, yes, we can ordain women, but they should all be associate rectors and deal mostly with youth ministry and Christian Education; yes, gays and lesbians can be full (i.e., pledging) members of the church, and yes, our catechism says the ministers of the church are "lay people, bishops, priests, and deacons," so technically yes, they can be ministers, but only as lay people; so all right, if you want a heterosexual woman bishop in your diocese, we can't stop you, but she's not coming into our diocese. Within the same denomination, another group says, well, okay, gays and lesbians can be ordained as deacons and priests, but not as bishops ... The work goes on.

Give a mouse a cookie... well, you know. (And if you're joining us for the first time and have no earthly idea what the hell I'm talking about, check out Milk and Cookies.)
The work goes on.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Notes
1 Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women and Good Wives. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 313-314.
2 Thwaite, Ann (citing Alcott's personal journal). Introduction to Little Women and Good Wives, xv.
3 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. "Religion and Women in America" in World Religions in America: An Introduction, ed. Jacob Neusner (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 226.
4 Kant, Immanuel. "What Is Enlightenment?" in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (MacMillan, 1990).
5 Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Divinity School Address. Harvard Divinity School, July 15, 1838.
6 Fox-Genovese, 224.
7 Sears, Clara Endicott. Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands. Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, Inc., 1975, 5-8.
8 Meg's wedding takes place outdoors, performed by Mr. March; Amy and Laurie are married at the American consulate in Paris; and after the emotionally torturous episode of Beth's last days has left the reader sobbing through an entire case of Kleenex, the author relents and spares us the agony of a funeral.
9 Alcott, 314.
10 Jo longs to visit Europe but never manages to get there; Amy gets to go instead because she's a much nicer girl. Amy winds up marrying the boy next door; Jo never leaves the northeastern United States, but she marries the European genius. Hmmmm...
11 See Sears for a description of Alcott's childhood experience of Fruitlands, in which Mrs. Alcott is clearly the pragmatic partner. The parallel to the fictional "Plumfield" of Good Wives (the boarding school-cum-farming collective started and run by Jo and Mr. Bhaer after their marriage) is pretty apparent.
12 Fox-Genovese, 223-226.
13 Alcott, 264.
14 Thwaite, xviii. Quoting Alcott, "I won't marry Jo and Laurie to please anyone."
15 From History of Woman Suffrage vol. 1, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Cage, in Wogaman and Strong (eds.), Readings in Christian Ethics, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 219.
16 Kant, 88-89.
17 Kant, 83-84.
18 Madden, Edward H. Civil Disobedience and Moral Law in Nineteenth Century American Philosophy. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968, 90-98.
19 Truth, Sojourner. Ain't I A Woman? From Wogaman and Strong, 224.
20 Albanese, Catherine. America: Religions and Religion. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1992, 98.
21 Mott, Lucretia, in History of Woman Suffrage vol. 1, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Cage, in Wogaman and Strong, 221-222.
22 Willard, Frances E. Woman in the Pulpit in Wogaman and Strong, 227.
23 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. The Woman's Bible: Comments on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, in Wogaman and Strong, 229.
24 Fox-Genovese, 230-231.
25 Rauschenbusch, Walter. Christianity and the Social Crisis, in Wogaman and Strong, 235.

Viral Haiku

2006-08-24T11:54:00.000-07:00

Rating: SL, V, B (also way gross)

snort snort hawk gack spit
this cold sucks stagnant pondscum
cough choke hawk gack spit

all life is precious
viruses part of God's world
wish God had asked me

hatred is evil
murderous--but i don't care
die, virus! die! DIE!!

mountains of kleenex
colors not found in nature
that was in my lungs?????

important meeting
halfway there, wracked by coughing
peed my pants. went home.

antibiotics
make me tired and flatulent
"wonder drug," my ass

yours in the struggle,
Max

Hitchin' a Free Ride on The Salty Vicar's Coattails

2006-08-20T16:12:00.000-07:00

Rating: (see below)
I have a wretched cold (in August, fa cryin' out loud!) and a very naughty dog to deal with, so this post is complete Freeloading Off Someone Else's Blog. And mustering the chutzpah to assign a rating to the postings of My Betters is just more than I can handle at the moment.
Please, I beg you, read this post from The Salty Vicar.
I laughed so hard I just about coughed up a lung.

yours in the struggle,
Max

NB, if I were to assign a rating, I'd have to invent an entirely new category. Something along the lines of Pure Genius Satire.

Milk and Cookies

2006-08-19T13:45:00.000-07:00

Rating: General Audiences

Related Post: Fully Human

If you give a mouse a cookie, she’s going to want a glass of milk.

And oh! the shock, the outrage, the sense of betrayal, when the mouse dares to reach for a glass of milk. We never agreed to that! This is how you repay our generosity? Wait! …what if that’s MY milk you’re drinking? Well, no, I’m not drinking it now, but I might want to later…maybe…

You may be able to deny the mouse her milk for a while, but eventually she’s going to get some because that’s what goes with cookies. She may sneak it or buy it or take it by force or just harass you until you fall down from sheer exhaustion and she can scurry over your prone body to it, but she will have her milk. The only question is, how much are you willing to give up in order to delay the inevitable? How much are you willing to spend on locking up the milk or incarcerating the mouse? How much blood are you willing to spill, how many lives are you willing to destroy, how much milk are you willing to lose in the battle?

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So we keep at it. We reason, we argue, we march. We work by direct action and subversion and education and the daily demolition of embedded assumptions. We find strength in numbers, in the stories of those who have gone before and in the hope we tend, like a garden, for our children.

At best, we get slow but steady change, a stirring of the stew, the chance to live through the legendary Chinese curse of “interesting times”; at worst we get Laramie and Kent State and Auschwitz and Wounded Knee, and the resumption of the ancient determined litany of “Never forget” and “Never again.”

Ursula K. LeGuin, whose subversiveness seems safely tucked away in books categorized as “fantasy” and “science fiction,” tells us this:

Freedom is a heavy load, a strange and terrible burden for the soul to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made; and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward toward the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it. (The Tombs of Atuan)

It is a dangerous undertaking, this enterprise of the enfranchisement of the human race, this proposition that Christ calls us to treat everyone as a neighbor, a friend, a brother, a sister. It means giving up the comfort and safety of being “inside” while those who are “less than” are “outside.” It means letting go of the whole idea of “inside” and “outside,” of self-definition by exclusion, of the categories that are so nicely sliced and packaged and handed to us like so many Oscar Meyer Lunchables. It means taking responsibility for ourselves. Danger, danger, Will Robinson!

I leave you with these words from people much, much smarter than I:

“Actually…the danger is not so great, for by falling a few times they would finally learn to walk alone.” --Immanuel Kant

“So what if your coat is torn, and you get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again; you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.” -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do things you think you cannot.” -- Eleanor Roosevelt

yours in the struggle,
Max

"I Do Not Know This Man"

2006-08-17T16:14:00.000-07:00

Rating: GT

Mark 14:66-71

"I do not know this man you are talking about."

I believe I may have said these words when I was in graduate school, taking an oral final exam for some history class or other. If I did not actually speak them aloud I was certainly shrieking them silently to myself. The experience was excruciating. I had studied REALLY HARD for this exam, and it wasn't all last minute cramming either. I enjoyed that class, I was engaged with the material, I knew this stuff. And I choked in the clutch.

Peter had spent three years learning from Jesus and we know he had a much better grasp of the material than his performance here indicates. We know this because earlier in the story, in the 8th chapter of this gospel account, Mark tells us that Jesus turned to his disciples and asked them, "But you, who do you say that I am?" and Peter answered him saying, "You are the Christ." Yet in that unexpected final exam in the courtyard, Peter choked in the clutch. And when he heard the cock crow for the second time, Peter broke down and wept.

Well. Peter got it wrong. He just got it wrong. That's the human condition, right? That's the experience that cuts across every conceivable line of class, race, age, sex, nationality, education, sexual orientation, political affiliation, Meyers-Briggs personality type....every human being who makes it past toddlerhood knows the horror of Getting It Wrong. It's a nightmare. Looking for the Single Unifying Principle of the human experience? Getting it wrong. Not Knowing that which You Should Know.

"I do not know this man you are talking about."

What if... What if these words were not a denial but a confession?
What if, standing in that courtyard with Jesus inside being slandered and mocked and spat on and beaten, standing in this cold, dark place surrounded by strangers and utterly powerless to do anything... What if, for Peter, standing there, in that moment, those words were true? and he was paralyzed by the devastating inescapable revelation that he did not know who Jesus was. That he had never known. At all. Ever.

Peter broke down and wept? You think?

It is an unspeakably terrible thing to realize that you do not know the One on whom you have based your entire life. To have all of your spiritual formation, all of your journey on the path toward God, all of your soul's life ripped away so you're left with nothing.

That unspeakably terrible moment was the beginning of Peter's ministry.

I want to take a moment to say that again, because I've been wrestling with this for a long time and it's still a challenge for me to get my head around, yet I am convinced of its importance for us: That unspeakably terrible moment was the beginning of Peter's ministry.

"In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind [Hebrew, ruah] from God swept over the face of the waters." (Genesis 1)
In that moment, Peter's soul became a formless void. His soul became tohu va bohu, a place of no place and no time, no past and no comprehension, over which the spirit of God moved. Peter became the chaos out of which God calls forth light.

A while back, I got onto a chaos theory kick. It's the one about a butterfly flapping its wings in Malaysia which stirs up tiny air currents that 5 or 50 or 100 years later result in a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Basically it says that the entire universe is all interconnected throughout all time and space, and so there are processes-"chaotic" processes-for which we cannot predict outcomes. As I understand it (and if you're a physicist or mathematician reading this, tearing your hair out because I've gotten it COMPLETELY WRONG [see above re: The Human Condition], please post a comment and enlighten me), the defining principle of "chaos" is "that which cannot be reliably predicted through any analysis of all known factors." Chaotic processes are unpredictable, not because they are random, but because we cannot possibly know all the factors throughout the universe that may be in play at any given moment. Chaos theory is curiously well-organized and I find it oddly comforting.

However. Theory and practice are two completely different animals. The reality of chaos fills me and surrounds me and drowns me in a fear that goes way, way beyond any emotion or feeling of being afraid of something or anxious about anything. I do not experience the reality of chaos as "good news."

But here's the thing: my experience is real but it does not define reality. And chaos, however I feel about it, is what is in the beginning. That beginning is possible for each of us at the heart of Who We Are: the ones who get it wrong. The possibility of Beginning, of becoming the tohu va bohu out of which God calls forth life-that is good news.

The fact that this story-of what I imagine to be the worst moment of Peter's life up to that point-comes down through the centuries to speak a word of hope and possibility to me, blows my mind. The idea that through the power of The Word, the most abject human failure is transformed into something that speaks to me right this minute about God's infinite grace and boundless creativity-that is good news.

So. I try to follow my Lord and Savior and from time to time I find myself standing in the courtyard. It's cold and it's dark and it's utterly futile. There are only strangers around me and ultimately all I am able to realize is that after all of this-after everything-I do not know who God is.
And in the heart of that chaos is The Beginning.
The beginning in which dwells The Word.
The beginning that allows me to stand here in the full flower of my humanity, knowing that every word I speak or write could be completely and totally wrong, but trusting in the One who made me, the One who redeems my life and who sanctifies my efforts which always, always fall short, trusting in that One to make all sufficient.

If one definition of a miracle is an event that inspires or strengthens faith, then Peter's story is miraculous because it instills in me the faith by which I am able to respond to God's call to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ-regardless of how awkward or ignorant or wrong or even ashamed I might sometimes feel. Peter's story awakens and renews my faith in The Word, through whom all things were made, who is incarnate in a carpenter from Nazareth and in the bread we break together when we gather in his Name.

The Word will not be silenced. Not by fear, not by shame, not by anything devised by the mind of humankind. The Word will not be silenced.
How's that for good news?

yours in the struggle,
Max

We Are Now Approaching Terminal Velocity

2006-08-14T16:07:00.000-07:00

Rating: ? no idea. so sue me.
Oh, golly. The Dopeler effect (see earlier post "Duck and Cover!" for definition and provenance) continues to red-shift the international terror index.

Mostly it just wears me out to even try to write about it. It's not the constant threat of terrorism that is draining the life force out of me, it's horrorism. As in, "Oh--the horror!" Like Lily Tomlin, I used to be cynical, but I just couldn't keep up.

Happily, there are others out there to shoulder the burden. Check out rhetorically speaking. This writer makes my queer heart go pit-a-pat.

Refuse to be terrorized.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Utterly Fabulous: The Ten Best Queer Books Ever

2006-08-12T19:59:00.000-07:00

Rating: QT

The Bible, by God (et al)

DI-n't

queer

The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin

Gender Trouble, by Judith Butler

have

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Gifted By Otherness, by L. William Countryman and M. R. Ritley

Way past "tolerance" or "acceptance." We're here (in the Church), we're queer (in the Church), thanks be to God! Countryman and Ritley articulate, in clear and well-written prose, the importance of GLBTI Christians to the Christian community. We have gifts that the Church cannot afford to lose. Let the people say, "AMEN!"

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore

Hilarious and surprisingly moving when you least expect it. Very queer--again, not so much in sexual terms--in the way it blasts the life-breath (aka, ruah, for you Hebrew geeks) into the Jesus story. Truly. I laughed out loud and and felt closer to God.

The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver

Multiple narrators, one of whom tends to write in palindromes. Yipes stripes!

Dancing With God, by Jay Emerson Johnson

Queer-God-Talk at its finest. If God-talk makes you want to puke, go to a bookstore that lets you sit and read books that you have no intention of purchasing. Read the first ten pages. I dare you.

Epistemology of the Closet, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Same caveat as for Judith Butler, although Sedgwick is also funny.

A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, by Ursula K. LeGuin

Queer is as queer does. This collection of short stories queers everything. Physics, colonialism, mountain-climbing, marriage, time...you name it, she queers it. If Judith Butler leaves you cold, just read these stories. You'll never be stumped by the term "performativity" again.

A Player To Be Named Later

Cop-out? Me? Never. Just keeping my Queer Options open. If you have a candidate, let me know.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Duck And Cover!

2006-08-12T10:45:00.000-07:00

Rating: ES

The Washington Post's Style Invitational asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

My very favorite?

Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

This effect is the one that my right-wing ultra-conservative brothers and sisters in Christ seem to count on the most as they continue to publicly flog their various agendae.

Build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border to stem the tide of Mexicans currently flooding our job market? Great!
Who do you think is going to build it, Einstein? The DAR?

Strengthen heterosexual marriages by amending the U.S. Constitution to prevent gay people from ever being able to marry one another? Terrific!
Umm... wasn't the divorce rate up over 50% before any state allowed gay marriage? Do you imagine that all the married people in the country are just dying to bust out gay all over?

Let's get all the gay people out of the Church!
OK... hope you're not too attached to having music or flowers or being able to ever find anything in the sacristy...

We need religion back in the public schools!
You have to be certified to teach math or history or English, but let's not have any standards at all when it comes to what your kids are learning about God from the football coach.

The Dopeler Effect: Working to make America strong, scared, and stupid. Because every global village needs a bully.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Pastoring A Congregation: 10 Commandments

2006-07-29T15:19:00.000-07:00

Rating: TFPC, ES

You are right. No exceptions.

Do not neglect your duty, in every situation, to tell a story about your time in seminary.

Never, ever allow yourself or others to become amused at your own expense. Remember at all times your obligation to regard yourself, your beliefs, your words, and your actions with deadly seriousness.

Be sure, when preaching, to aim low enough. Remember, they're not as smart as you are.

It's your parish. You are responsible for keeping your people under control. See item 1.

Stack the board/vestry with people as much like yourself as possible. You don't have time to waste on a bunch of back-chat.

And speaking of the board/vestry--they work for you, you don't work for them. After all, you're the one getting paid--obviously, you're more important.

Make a daily discipline of pondering your authority. See item 1.

Do not laugh or look sheepish if you pass gas in church. Glare at the acolyte instead.

Humor your altar guild. They are misinformed, maladjusted, miserly, and miserable, but they are also lunatics who will poison you without turning a blue hair.

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This is a joke. This is only a joke. If this were an actual set of commandments from the Almighty, your keyboard would burst into flames yet your connection speed would be unaffected.

The Final Frontier

2006-07-29T11:23:00.000-07:00

Rating: GRG, B*

My cousin and I, ca 1969. I really really really wanted to be an astronaut.

The fact that my eyesight began to seriously suck at about age 8 was the first clue that perhaps this was not to be.

As my sister--as well as the cousin pictured here, which I think is just mean--have pointed out to me, my complete failure to grasp even the rudiments of calculus as an undergrad confirms that it was for the best that I chose a different life path.

But we sure look ready for the final frontier here, don't we?

*I'm just so proud to have created a post that merits both a "B" rating and a "GRG" rating.

"All That Would Do Me Harm"

2006-07-23T16:12:00.000-07:00

Rating: GT, ES
Today I am grateful for both Sir Thomas More and John Prine.

John Prine is just an amazing singer and songwriter and storyteller. John Prine wrote "Angel From Montgomery," made famous by the great great Bonnie Raitt. If you're not familiar with the rest of his work, get your hands on one of his CDs right now. Seriously. This post will still be here. I defy anyone to listen to "Dear Abby" and not feel better about your own life, to listen to "In Spite of Ourselves" and not grin at your significant other, no matter how close you were to killing him/her five minutes ago.
But the John Prine nugget o' wisdom I'm rubbing in my palm today is this:

Father, forgive us for what we must do
You forgive us, we'll forgive you
We'll forgive each other 'til we both turn blue
Then we'll whistle and go fishing in heaven
("Fish and Whistle," Bruised Orange, 1978)

If you're horrified by the arrogant presumption of even daring to speak of base humanity extending forgiveness to the Almighty, then I politely request that you climb down off your high horse for just a couple of minutes in order to listen briefly to lowly little me.

I don't think God is need of our forgiveness. I do know that I, for one, am in desperate need of relinquishing the resentment I hold about the fact that God doesn't seem to arrange things the way I would most like. Yes, I'm fully aware that I am not equipped to run the universe, but that doesn't prevent me from wanting what I want and getting mad when it doesn't happen that way. What's more, I am fully aware of the foolishness of this exercise, but that awareness has yet to reform the constitution of my psyche. God doesn't need me to forgive God--I need me to forgive God. And I am confident that the One who made me, the One who loves me, the One who saves and redeems me, will forgive me this as well.

OK--that wasn't so long, was it? Feel free to mount your tall steed again, if you are so inclined.

Sir Thomas More composed this prayer about forgiveness:

Almighty God, have mercy on ______,
and on all that bear me evil will and would do me harm,
and on their faults and mine together.
By such easy, tender, merciful means as your own infinite wisdom can best devise;
vouchsafe to amend and redress and make us saved souls in heaven together.
Where we may ever live and love together with you and your blessed saints.

I have a long list of names with which I fill in the blank. Archbishop Peter Akinola. Osama bin Laden. Pat Robertson. The colleague I offended. The former boss who felt threatened by my attempts to help.
All those brothers and sisters, fellow children of God, of whom I am terribly, terribly afraid.

Whom do you fear?

yours in the struggle,
Max

Fully Human

2006-07-22T15:51:00.000-07:00

Rating: GT, QT

Related Post: Milk and Cookies

While the disciples were telling how they had seen Jesus risen from the dead, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, "Peace be with you." They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. (Luke 24:36b-37)

What is it about this story that is so important?
We see almost the exact same story in the Gospel according to John:

Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe." Thomas answered him, "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:26b-28)

In both of these stories,
Jesus is fully human
and he is unrelenting in his demonstration
from pointing out the wounds in his body
to asking for something to eat
and then eating it.
Fully human.

Why is that so important?
Why is it important for us?

The issue of “full humanity” is front and center for us today.
Full humanity is front and center for us as citizens of the world.
Full humanity is front and center for us as residents of the United States.
Full humanity is front and center for us as Christians, as Episcopalians, as members of this diocese who are
engaging in discernment about God’s will for us
in the upcoming election of the bishop who will be our pastor, our shepherd,
as we journey together through this world.

Oh yes
the issue of what it means to be fully human
of who is considered
fully human
is most urgently important.

Give a mouse a cookie, and it’s going to want a glass of milk.
Start ordaining women, next thing they’ll want to be rectors and vicars.
Baptize a small child, tell her that she is sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever, and pretty soon she’ll expect you to treat her that way.
Affirm LGBT people as full members of the body of Christ,
and next thing you know, they’ll want to actually live out their baptismal covenant and be ministers of the church—
ministers of the church being defined as
“lay people, bishops, priests, and deacons.”[1]

Give a mouse a cookie, and it’s going to want a glass of milk.

The issue here is not the mouse’s greed or ingratitude or lack of understanding. Of course it wants a glass of milk. Who doesn’t want a glass of milk to go with a cookie?
The issue here is the sheer lunacy
of thinking that there is such a thing as
partial inclusion.

People are either fully human or they are not;
it is neither logical nor practical to act as if it is possible
for a designated group of people to be fully human but only at certain times, or in certain places, or in reference to certain topics.
It makes no sense; besides, it never works.

But there is a level on which
I can sympathize with those in this world
in this country
in the church
in this diocese
those of my brothers and sisters in Christ
who want to count some of us as partly human, partly Christian
perhaps a half-sister in Christ? a stepbrother in Christ?
I can sympathize with how hard it is to change
because I do the same thing right back at them.
It is hard to treat someone as fully human
when I am afraid
of that person.

And I am afraid. For myself, for the people I love and who love me.
I am afraid for this parish and for this diocese
and for the Episcopal Church.
I am afraid, and so I begin to count
those whom I blame for my fear
as less than
fully human.

Did you know that any two human beings
“have the vast majority of their DNA sequence in common”? Genetic fingerprinting—the way in which DNA is used as evidence in court—is all based on a tiny percentage of our DNA.[2]
The overwhelming majority of our DNA
is exactly the same.
We actually are
all related to one another…

People are either fully human or they are not.
Today’s Gospel reading places the issue of full humanity
right at the heart of who Jesus is
and who we are
and the substance of our relationship with the Incarnate Word of God.
The substance—the material, the matter—of our relationship with Jesus is DNA.
The meaning of that relationship
is that
humanity is not a burden to be overcome—
humanity is a destiny to be fulfilled.

Humanity is a destiny to be fulfilled—that is the meaning of our relationship with the risen Christ.

We embody that relationship and move into our destiny as humans every time we participate in the Eucharist, as Christ is known to us in the breaking of the bread. When we recognize
that the living Jesus is present
in the body of the person next to us
and that that presence is permanent,
it is there in every one, every moment, every day.

The purpose of the sacrament
is to teach us to recognize that presence here and now,
in order that we may learn to recognize Jesus’ presence out there,
in the world, every day, in every one.

To recognize Jesus
who was and is fully human.
To recognize Jesus in ourselves,
who are also fully human.
To recognize Jesus in one another
as fully human.

Be known to us, Lord Jesus, in the breaking of the bread;
in our eating and drinking;
in our breathing in and out.
Be known to us, Lord Jesus, in the touch of hands and the meeting of eyes;
in those we love and in those we fear.
Be known to us, Lord Jesus, in those who fear us
and in those who walk beside us.
Be know to us, Lord Jesus,
opening our eyes to behold you in all your redeeming work.[3]
Amen.

[1] The Book of Common Prayer, “An Outline of the Faith, commonly called the Catechism” (New York: Church Publishing Incorporated, 1986), 855.
[2] Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_DNA
[3] paraphrase, Collect for Third Sunday of Easter, BCP 224.

yours in the struggle,
Max

Prophetic Speech: Jonah

2006-07-22T12:51:00.000-07:00

Rating: SL, TFPC, ES, GT, B

“This Is Not The Life I Ordered”

Let me tell you something: it is close and hot and stinky in the belly of a big fish. You might not think it would be hot, but it is. And loud. And so dark you cannot find your own ass with both hands. The other thing you cannot find is any spot to lay down and rest for a minute; there is some freaky shit in there. Man, a big fish will eat anything. In the words of Shakespeare, it is “most foul.”

Yes I know about Shakespeare, I am a prophet OK, get off me.

I am telling you I spent 3 days in the nasty-ass digestive tract of a fish and all you can think of to say is How do you know about Shakespeare, fuck you, shut up.

And getting puked up is no picnic either. You are in there with shit a starving dog wouldn’t touch and you are what gets rejected? Nice.

And by the way, your wardrobe does not survive the experience with any grace at all.

So now I am dragging my sleep-deprived, raggedy ass up in Ninevah and just try getting a room when you’re covered in whale vomit. I am so tired of hearing y’all go on about poor Mary had to give birth to Jesus in a stable ‘cause wouldn’t nobody give them a room, boo hoo.

Yes I know about Jesus, I am a prophet OK, get off me.

Enough with the chronology bullshit, what does the word co-eternal mean to you, fuck you, shut up.

So I’m all Yo, in forty days Ninevah shall be overthrown, and when I turn around they are playing dress-up with the livestock. Why would anyone put sackcloth on a pig? He’s already eating garbage and sleeping in shit, sackcloth and ashes is an upgrade, dumbass.

I did not tell you to put clothes on the barnyard animals.

Let me tell you something: there is nothing a big fish won’t eat and there is nothing so stupid that some asshole somewhere won’t think it sounds like a good idea. Sackcloth. On a pig.

Now after all this shit, what do you think God does?

Nothing.

Excuse me? What did I come here for? We could not have sent a note?

So now I am sleep-deprived, homeless, still covered in whale vomit, and a guy who puts sackcloth on a pig thinks I’m a lunatic.

Why do I let You talk me into this shit?

Yes I know You’re God, I am a prophet OK, get off me.

Y’all think this is funny? Yeah, when it happens to somebody else, fuck you, shut up.

I’m going back to Puke Beach, pick up some driftwood, build me a little lean-to, and sit my tired ass down and not move. God can do whatever God wants, I did not ask to come here, bunch of shit-crazy people, forty days, forty days and oh never mind, hahahahahahaha, meanwhile I’m over here with fish juice in my sinuses and my ass flapping in the breeze, another jam-packed day of wall-to-wall fun, brought to you by God Almighty, the Deity who put a foreskin on the penis just to make you cut it off.
Oooo, too bad, Jonah, that was not the prophecy we were looking for, but we have some lovely parting gifts for you, what do we have for Jonah, Bob? It’s a castor-oil plant! Yes, soon you’ll be luxuriating under your very own shade provided by this lovely little tree, and if you’re feeling a bit bloated, it will take care of that for you too! Castor oil, the gift that keeps on giving.

OK, that at least was a good idea. The people here may be ignorant as dirt—Shakespeare again, don’t start, nnn-NNN—but the animals at least are not my problem. Everything on four legs has the sense not to eat a castor-oil plant.

Yes I know a worm has no legs, I’m a prophet OK, and sometimes I cannot think of every fucking thing, so get off me. Fuck you, shut up.

I’m going to feed this worm to a big fish and watch the whale shit fly, that’s what I’m going to do.