Souled Out

People talk about God as though doing so is easy, self-evident.

I talk about God that way.

But here’s the problem. To communicate with humans, God must reveal Godself to us in a way that we can understand, receive, appropriate.

Which means that any language about a God who reveals Godself to us in this way is inevitably tinged (tainted?) with human discourse, human insights, human words. It can’t be otherwise.

All talk about God has dirty human fingerprints smudged all over it. Dirty not because being human is sordid. Dirty because being dirty is the human condition. As Wendell Berry says, humans are earth lifted up a little while.

We seldom advert to the fact that all of our God-talk is smudged with human fingerprints.

It behooves us to do so. We’d have far fewer pretensions, in the name of God, far fewer sweeping claims to represent God, if we kept in mind the limitations of all of our God-talk.

The other horn of the dilemma re: language about God is that God truly is beyond all we can say—beyond human ken. Human discourse about God should always reserve, someplace within it, the recognition that God is actually beyond speech.

But a God who is totally Other, who is not as we are—whose very definition is alterity—cannot reveal Godself to us in any way that makes sense, unless God does so by adverting to human categories of reception.

Speech claiming to represent, capture, speak for God, must always subvert itself, if it is faithful to its origination point outside human ken.

Maybe those mystics are right, who say that cessation of human chatter as we near God is the wisest path.

In a way, it’s the same with trying to talk about oneself. The human heart is deep beyond all understanding—beyond even our own understanding. We try to grasp “our”selves—in dreams, for example (and perhaps preeminently)—and “the” self slips, slides, eludes all grasp.

For me, blogging about my pilgrimage thus becomes well-nigh impossible. It is so because I inevitably have to talk about myself, about my life experiences, the insights derived from those experiences.

I have made a covenant with myself to speak as Audre Lorde decided to speak when she faced her incurable cancer: with fearless willingness to say as I see.

I fail daily at keeping covenant. I’m not sure I can ever reach the depths Lorde reached.

If I did, the truths I tell would be something like Emily Dickinson’s definition of how we know when we have encountered a good poem: it takes the top of our heads off. Transformative truth, truth that makes a difference, is that kind of truth. We know we have met it, that it has come inside our doors, when we have that experience in its presence.

I do not live with such truth. I do not meet it. I seldom find it.

Writing about myself is ultimately boring, because I am a bore.

One truth about myself is that I am a failure. I don’t want to face or tell that truth.

I’m reaching old age and do not even have a job, gainful employment. I don’t have health coverage because I’m not employed and live in the U.S. I can’t afford that coverage.

Hence I don’t take good care of myself, of my health.

And yet I can’t blame any external factors for my unwillingness to exert myself and do a better job of caring for myself. I’m lazy. I’m tired. I have turned out, in the end, to be what I’ve been told I am: an old queer who can’t hold down a job.

This sounds self-indulgent. It is self-indulgent. On the other hand, it’s how I feel at a deep level these days, as both Steve and I struggle to recover from what happened to us last year in Florida—to find any kind of work possible, but also work we can actually do. My mother used to speak of how even digging ditches is good work if done honorably. (I have no idea why ditch-digging was her symbol of the lowliest labor possible for a man—a relic of the mythological Ur-memory of her Irish mother, perhaps?)

I don’t think I would be a good ditch-digger. I’m rather old and broken down, and wasn’t much of a dab hand at manual labor even in my better days.

I want to own my own responsibility for all my failings. Commitment to my covenant of telling unvarnished truth in this blog demands that I do so.

At the same time (again, the slipperiness of trying to find an angle to understand self and speak about what we so glibly call ourselves), as E.J. Dionne points out throughout his new book Souled Out, there’s no way to talk about family values without talking about the harm done to human families—the ravages to human psyches and lives—produced by unemployment and lack of health coverage.

One feels worthless. One feels worthless perhaps because one is worthless. But that feeling of worthlessness is definitely compounded when one is able to work and cannot find work commensurate with one’s abilities. One feels worthless when one is consistently shuffled to the bottom of the deck in the workplace, and the reason seems to be clear: one’s humanity is judged less deserving of full recognition than that of one’s “normal” peers.

Perhaps the cruelest thing my boss-friend at my last job did to me was to give my enemies cause to rejoice over me. Now they can say so easily that the fault is not with a system that relegates gay human beings to subhuman status. The fault is with Lindsey himself.

I say that this was cruel for my friend to do because she knew our stories intimately. We had shared them with her. She knew the damage she was doing to us, when she discarded us. Before firing me, she told me, unbidden, “I do not throw people away.” Which suggested to me that the recognition that she was doing so in our case was definitely in her heart and mind as she deliberated about what she was about to do . . . .

Enough of this plaintive meditation. It is framed by concern about a family member who is direly ill. These post-Easter days have been hard enough because of that alone. And talking and thinking about myself is grotesque, when people face serious illness.

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An addendum, four hours after I "penned" the above: I've just read on Towleroad blog that NPR reported yesterday the Justice Department is investigating the possibility that U.S. Attorney Leslie Hagen was fired because of rumors she is a lesbian. The firing happened as the Department became ever more politicized under Attorney General Gonzales.

Thankfully, Hagen at least had written evaluations of her work prior to her firing. These were all outstanding. Given these, the question is why she was fired after Gonzales's senior counsel Monica Goodling took a particular interest in her work. Insiders privy to conversations that occurred with Goodling state that the rumors of Hagen's supposed sexual orientation came up in conversations with Goodling prior to Hagen's firing.

It does happen. Still. It's shameful. But it happens.

It ruins lives. But it happens.

And the churches are silent. The churches actually egg it on. The churches undermine the solidity of gay relationships and gay families and then accuse gay human beings of unable to form solid relationships and healthy families.

It's grotesque. It's very hard to live one's way through, around, with any dignity.

It's particularly hard for any of us who still retain some shred of affiliation to the spiritual and social justice goals of the churches.

Towleroad links to the following NPR story: www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89288713.