Birthdays: Mark Doty and My Brother

Three Lindsey Brothers and Father, 1953, Columbus, Mississippi

Today is Mark Doty's birthday.  It also happens to be my brother's birthday, and I note in this piece about Doty at Box Turtle Bulletin that my brother and Doty were born on the same day in the same year.  Doty's Heaven's Coast, chronicling his partner Wally Roberts's long battle with and eventual death from AIDS, was one of the more moving narratives I read during the acute years of the AIDS crisis, as many of us lost friends and family members with a regularity that made the heart beat lead, day following after day.  (The other, and perhaps my favorite, memoir in the same vein that sticks particularly in my mind is Fenton Johnson's Geography of the Heart).

Politics, Pictures: 1,000 Words

I shouldn't say it.  But I will.  

Because I have to get it out my head.  And sometimes uttering thoughts exorcises them.

Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: "What They Could Pray For"

Ben McPartland reports at the France 24 website that the French Catholic hierarchy is reviving an old custom of having French Catholics offer a "Prayer for France" on 15 August, the feast of the Assumption.*  The impetus for reviving this ancient monarchial custom?  

Pepper-Spraying Everything: Know Your Meme

Much of what I'm posting right now will be old news to those who were online in the past two weeks, while I was traveling and deliberately fasting from blogging.  But in case any Bilgrimage readers missed this delightful tidbit by Abby Zimet at Common Dreams a week ago, I thought I'd point to it today.  It's called "Pepper Spray Cop Out."

More Signposts for Exiled Believers, More Reflections on the Mike and Cathy Club

More signposts for me from people who speak to my soul as I flounder in the wilderness, crying out to God, asking how to sustain a spiritual life--any kind of spiritual life at all--when the church that has been foundational to my spiritual life betrays its originating vision (and its founder) in its ugly, unrelenting attacks on gay and lesbian human beings (on me) at this point in history:

Marilynne Robinson on the Emancipation Movement: Chick-fil-A Supporters in Historical Context

Last week, as Steve and I drove north from Missouri into Iowa on Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day and as we spotted long lines of cars at Chick-fil-A in Independence, I happened to be reading Marilynne Robinson’s essay “Who Was Oberlin?” (in When I Was a Child I Read Books [NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012]).  Marilynne Robinson, who teaches at an Iowa university and who set her Pulitzer-winning novel Gilead, with its rich historical resonances remembering the bitter struggle to eradicate American slavery and, ultimately, establish equality for people of color, in Iowa . . . .

Eating, Drinking, and Living in Exile: Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day and American Catholic Identity

As I flounder in the wilderness, words that are signposts for me (I choose the word "flounder" instead of "wander" deliberately: "wander" doesn't begin to touch the depths of spiritual alienation I feel in response to my Catholic church at this point in time):