A Reader Responds: But Is God Gay?

In response to Elliott Darrow's poem "God Is Gay," which I posted (in video format) yesterday, Barbara makes a good point: 

God-Talk and the Public Square After Sandy Hook: Where Are the Catholic Bishops?

Bishop William Lori and Confreres, Religious Liberty Hearing, Feb. 2012

With a bow to Sr. Maureen Fiedler at National Catholic Reporter, Frank Cocozzelli asks yesterday in a powerful essay at Talk to Action, "Who knew that the Catholic bishops support gun control?" Frank wonders why so few Catholics and so few American citizens know anything about the position taken by the U.S. bishops, when they are on record calling for strict controls on the sale and use of firearms. He wonders if the quid pro quo arrangement the bishops have made with the political right to gain its support on culture-war issues now makes them so completely captive to "movement conservatism" that they have effectively muzzled themselves on issues like gun control.

God-Talk and the American Public Square: Responses to Sandy Hook Massacre

One of the noteworthy aftershock effects of the unthinkable massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, has been to cast a spotlight on a national conversation that never quite vanishes from the American public square, but which becomes subliminal in non-crisis moments. What kind of God does the nation with the soul of a church worship? Who is He? Or should it be, Who is She?

In Remembrance: The Anniversary of a Mother's Death

Today's the 11th anniversary of my mother's death.  She died four days after 9/11 in 2001.  

From the Blogs: The Grace of Queer Theory and Queer Theology

Sr. Teresa Forcades, OSB

At his Queering the Church blog, Terry Weldon presents excerpts from an interview at Iglesia Descalza with Catalan Benedictine sister Teresa Forcades, who observes,

From the Blogs: Finding God on the Margins and in Exile, as a Catholic Woman

Cynthia-Marie O'Brien at Killing the Buddha writing as a Catholic woman alienated from the church but keenly searching for encounter with the living God, about her experience of finding God on the margins:

Elizabeth Johnson (and Karl Rahner) on the Value of Atheism for Christians

Last December, I posted here a few remarks about the death of Christopher Hitchens in which I stated, 

Cardinal Brandmüller on German Catholics' Calls for Reform as "Insult to Jesus Christ"

Cardinal Walter Brandmüller

In the German paper Spiegel, Frank Hornig, Anna Loll, Ulrich Schwarz, and Peter Wensierski report that when Bundestag President Norbert Lammert and Education Minister Annette Schavan recently sent a letter to German bishops along with other reform-minded Catholics calling for open dialogue about the requirement that priests be celibate, Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, a close associate of Pope Benedict, responded by saying that the letter was "an insult to Jesus Christ."

Haiti, the Push for Theological Answers, and Liberation Theology's Correction of Christian Necrophilia

Paula Cooey has published  a thought-provoking article at Religion Dispatches about the push for theological questions following the Haitian earthquakes.  As she notes, in the wake of massive tragedies like what has happened in Haiti, people begin to ask theological questions—theodicy questions.  Questions about where God is as millions of people suffer.

And people of faith sometimes respond to those questions with answers—with answers that are altogether too glib.  Answers that implicitly make God responsible for the massive suffering that causes us to question where God is, as people suffer . . . .  Job’s-comforter answers, which explain it all to us, when silence and solidarity with those who are suffering would be a far more adequate theological response than cheap, falsely explanatory answers.

When God's Face is Hidden: Reflections on Religion and Public Life in the Wake of the Haitian Calamity

Maybe it’s because we’re in the dark of the moon, when spirits are often depressed. I don’t know.

What I do know is that I find myself mourning today, and at times like that, I hesitate to write much on this blog. I don’t want my low spirits to pull down the spirits of others.

Certainly there’s much to mourn about, as we look at the grim pictures and read the grim stories from Haiti. For a people already so impoverished, so susceptible to hardship caused by both natural and human factors, to undergo this cataclysmic event: it’s hard to understand. And to stomach.

Constantly, in the past two days, the faces of the Haitian students I’ve known and Haitian co-workers with whom I’ve worked scroll across my mind. I wonder about their families—and about them, since I haven’t been in touch with any of these wonderful folks in several years.

My mourning is also pointed, today, in another specifically religious direction (I say “another,” because the appalling, unmerited suffering of millions of desperately poor people raises profound questions about where God is in the world as people suffer). This is one of those periods when the statements and actions of some people of faith have so disgusted me that I find myself wanting distance from faith communities altogether.

I am outraged at Rev. Pat Robertson’s statement that the Haitian people brought this disaster on themselves by making a pact with the devil. What can one say in the face of such ugly misuse of religious and moral norms? And how can this man, with his history of constant ugly misuse of religious belief to attack one vulnerable group after another, continue to have a platform in our society?

What does it say about us, that people promoting such “religious” viewpoints not only have free rein to do so, but have significant influence on our political system—and a richly funded pulpit from which to spew their venom?

I’ve had it, frankly, with the hate. And with the lies. Lies that the decision of five Catholic members of the Supreme Court yesterday to squelch broadcasts of the prop 8 trial is designed to cover over, when it comes to gay people and gay lives.

What does it say about the role of the Catholic church in promoting discrimination and violence against gay people around the world, when these highly placed Catholics, whose judicial decisions affect the lives of millions of citizens, take such a stand against transparency in a significant public debate? And in our courtrooms?

And against free, open exchange of ideas and information in this national public debate? The stand taken by Scalia, Alito, Roberts, Kennedy, and Thomas is yet another indicator of the intent of powerful right-wing interest groups in the American Catholic church (and well-represented in its hierarchy)to circumvent the democratic process and impose the religious and moral viewpoints of a single religious group on the whole nation.

If our moral positions are so reasonable, so obviously compelling, why do we not permit free, unfettered, well-informed debate about them? Why do we persistently do everything possible to work behind the scenes to assure that our positions are imposed on others in a process that does not permit public dialogue?

The New York Times gets it exactly right today, when its editorial on the SCOTUS decision says,

The trial that started on Monday in San Francisco over the constitutionality of California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage could have been a moment for the entire nation to witness a calm, deliberative debate on a vitally important issue in the era of instant communications. Instead, the United States Supreme Court made it a sad example of the quashing of public discourse by blocking the televising of the nonjury trial.

In this Supreme Court decision, we see the worst face of Catholicism in the U.S., the theocratic, wheeling-and-dealing, ethically compromised and sold-out-to-power face of American Catholicism. The face of a church from which people are fleeing in droves, because it does not show the face of Christ to the world, or to its own members.

More religious bigotry and stupidity are on display, too, in a video clip of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show now making the rounds of the internet. I’m particularly outdone by the statements of the last New Jersey resident interviewed in this clip, who argues without a tad of irony that, as an African-American woman, she values her rights . . . and so she has the right to deny rights to gay citizens of New Jersey! Because she believes those citizens ought not to have rights. And what she believes ought to dictate what the political process does. Because she believes it.

This is the same person whose deliriously happy response to the decision of the New Jersey legislature to turn down same-sex marriage was captured in this video clip, which shows her shouting hallelujah at the top of her lungs after the vote results were announced.

We have a lot of work to do in the U.S. to educate people about religion and politics, and the healthy intersection of the two. There are days, I freely admit, when I wonder if it’s possible to overcome the invincible ignorance that postures as religious belief everywhere in this nation with the soul of a church.

Meanwhile, I take crumbs of hope where I can find them. For me this week, one of those crumbs has come from reading about the courage of Miep Gies, the Dutch woman who died Monday, who took great risks to help hide Anne Frank and her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

As I wrote on this blog repeatedly throughout December, it seems important to me that we keep looking for clear, unambiguous examples of heroic virtue to inspire us, as we work to build a more humane society. At its best, before the canonization process was politicized beyond recognition (and before the saint-making process depended on the ability of those promoting the cause of a saint to pay huge sums of money), this is what the Catholic notion of the communion of the saints was all about.

It was about finding a rich array of models of holiness in a richly diverse religious tradition, to provide role models for the many kinds of people bound together in the communion of the church. In my own life, I’ve long ago decided that my personal canon of the saints can and should include non-Catholics, non-Christians, non-believers.

For a number of years, I created an eccentric personal iconostasis with pictures of the saints to whom I looked for guidance and solace. The iconostasis had pictures of official Catholic holy figures like Our Lady of Guadalupe and Edith Stein.

But it also had pictures of other people who are unlikely ever to be canonized, but whose heroic virtue and compassion have touched my life in a redemptive way: several nuns I’ve had the privilege of knowing, whose lives were poured out in service to those to whom they ministered; a brilliant gay priest who fought to make his religious community more tolerant of its gay members, and who died far too young; my alcoholic brother, who died at the age of 39, and who gave his last dollar, a dollar he was saving to buy more liquor, to a woman begging door to door the night before he died.

Harvey Milk’s picture was on my iconostasis, as was Gandhi’s. So was my great-uncle’s picture, a saintly, humble, sweet old man who lived with his mother up to her death, never married, and earned the undying love of a passel of great-nieces and great-nephews by playing with us as if he were a child himself, on his annual visits from family to family.

I no longer have that iconostasis, but a version of it is still in my heart. Miep Gies’s picture will now adorn it. Pat Robertson’s won’t.

But I’ll pray for him, and if he ever happens to read this blog, I hope he’ll pray for me, too.

An Earth Day Meditation: On the Furry Mind of God

This Earth Day meditation is a day late. But since the topic doesn't cease to be topical, I want to post today, in celebration of Earth Day yesterday, the following entry from my journal of 5.1.1994. I'm dedicating this entry to a new-found friend, Daisy, at the Fur-licity blog site:

Last night as I lay on the futon, Arabella* crept up next me, as she's wont to do, as if she's an unnoticeable wraith approaching and not a lumbering mass of overgrown puppy flesh. She lies beside me with her long nose ensconced in the crook of my arm and demands--absolutely demands--that I pet her with my other hand. The minute I cease, her snout begins a ceaseless interrogation, pushing my arm and hands to make me start again. As I pet, she lies like a sybarite, eyes half closed in an eschaton of pleasure.

What I thought of was this: if dogs are made in God's image, as humans are, then God is furry and canine, as well as anthropic. It's a hard idea to express; I glimpse it more than see it. It's that, in order for God to make, God must be like what She makes. God doesn't make by imperious edict and fiat, but by birthing out of her own womb what is simultaneously of herself, stamped in her image, and not herself. God lends flesh and substance to everything she births. So dogs are made in God's image, and we see the face of God in their faces.

I ought perhaps to add that one idea that brought me to this thought was a notion that struck me earlier in the day. As I watched the three dogs, I became aware that they know in ways that more or less elude us. It's not that their "reason" is subrational, subhuman: it's in some ways deeper and more profound, less complexified and so more intent, less troubled, than that of humans. Dogs know, I'm convinced, with a profound intuitive awareness.

How else can one explain their nobility at times of crisis, the way they serve and protect humans, giving their own lives at times to save that of their human companion? Dogs can be kenotic as Jesus was.

*An 85-pound golden retriever, all blond hair and smiles, as confident as any beauty-pageantist of her ability to beguile with good looks and charm, who was then 3 years old.

God's Oracles in 2009: White Men Rule (Again)!

The Deity (aka the Old White Man in the Clouds™, aka God) has been mighty busy of late. Goda'mighty busy. Talking to His appointed oracles in the world, doncha know. To white men. Men like Himself, which is, after all, how we happen to know He is Himself and not Herself.

As 2009 arrived, the Old Gent was, of course, intent as he always is to give His first hearing of the new year time to the Reverend Robertson in Virginia Beach, Virginia (http://video.google.com/videosearch?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=s&hl=en&q=pat%20robertson%20predictions&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wv#). God spends quite a bit of his time in conferences with Pat at any moment in the year. But new year’s is a special time.

It’s a season in which the Deity chooses to open the secrets of the future™ to Rev. Robertson. Unfortunately for us, who would prefer to hear God’s word straight from the horse’s mouth with no interpretive screens, it appears that in these audiences with his Virginia oracle, God assumes the role of a doddering old gentleman—perhaps under the rubric of becoming all things to all men?—since Rev. Robertson’s usual mode of delivering his new year’s predictions requires him to issue disclaimers like, “If I heard correctly,” or, “If I understood right.”

Evidently when the Most High conferences with Reverend Robertson, He speaks in those maddening disconnected elliptical utterances so favored by the reminiscing elderly who are not quite there—in the same room with the rest of us. That befits the Deity, of course. One has to listen carefully, join the dots, and make inferences that are not directly spelled out in the meandering pronouncements.

And evidently Reverend Robertson does not always hear precisely, since he has made spectacularly off new year’s predictions in the past, including the submersion of the Pacific northwest by a tsunami due to that region’s tolerance of the gays. This year’s predictions are perhaps safer and more probable: recession, rising oil prices, wars and rumors of war.

Things are quite different when the Deity communes with another of his favored earthly embodiments, news commentator Mr. Tucker Carlson (http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/01/when-tucker-car.html). In contrast to the maddeningly evasive way in which He reveals Himself to Mr. Robertson, when contacting Mr. Carlson, God speaks out loud and very, very clearly. Perhaps He even shouts, as His representatives on television and radio are wont to do. Thinking as He does so that Flannery O’Connor had it right, when she observed famously that if one wishes to reach the deaf, ONE SHOUTS. All things to all men, depending on what said men happen to need . . . . To the doddering, one becomes doddering; to the stolid, stolid.

Not only is God speaking to His divinely appointed spokesmen: he’s also showing his face to specially favored recipients of divine self-revelation. Quarterback Kurt Warner has favored us with a picture of God in this new year: “the old man,” “gray hair,” “long beard,” according to Warner (http://vodpod.com/watch/1275009-qb-kurt-warner-draws-his-god). Unfortunately, when Mr. Warner recently drew God the Father, he ended up inadvertently sketching Jesus instead—entirely understandable, given that Jesus is the “young man” and God the Father the “old man,” as Mr. Warner brightly informs us.

Why men, one wonders? Why white men? Why white men whose primary interest in religion seems to be in finding a God who looks, talks, thinks, and acts suspiciously like them, one asks as one ponders the surprisingly various yet predictably patriarchal ways in which God reveals Himself to his favored representatives in the world? To pastors and football players and television gurus—to those most likely to speak for God, since they are, as well all know, most like God, His best buddies and primary defenders in a world hellbent on going to the multicultural, gender-bending dogs.

To ask these questions is perhaps to answer them.

And thank God that Stephen Colbert is getting in on the act, with his new “Yahweh or No Way” segment: www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/215452/january-08-2009/yahweh-or-no-way---roland-burris. With all due respect, Mr. God, would you plea'sir spend more time talking to Mr. Colbert and a tad bit less communing with Rev. Robertson, Rev. Huckabee, Pope Benedict, and Rev. Warner in the coming year?

Some of us find You a little more believable, Sir, when Stephen Colbert speaks on your behalf.

"Caring Communiy" + Silence about Gays?!: I Think Not

Some of my earliest sharp memories date from when I was three years old. We lived at the time in Mississippi—Columbus, Mississippi. I remember playing, of course, the unspecific and yet finely etched memories any child has of a sunny day, a scent of magnolia on the air, the thatch of white cumulus clouds so low one had only to reach a bit higher to pull away a wisp from them.

I remember going with my brother Simpson to the drainage grate near our house, at a corner of the street, to shout down inside at the muddy devil that lived in it. It was our duty to remind him periodically that he had no claim on anyone in the neighborhood. We taunted him, threatened him with punishment if he disturbed us, knowing as we did so that he could at any moment pull us down to live with him forever. The thrill of the forbidden overlaid with pious rectitude: a very adult experience . . . .

I remember, too, a day on which I canvassed the neighborhood for a banana. My needs were specific: a banana, and only a banana. I recall going to the house of a neighbor who offered me a slice of bread instead—and the frustration, the pique, the downright rage that any adult could possibly think a piece of Wonder bread would satisfy a child’s hunger for a ripe banana.

I can vividly bring back to mind a scene in the kitchen of a neighbor, Sallie Mock, a nurse, whose children (she said) counted the very peas on their plates to be sure one had no more than the other. She had just bought a set of the new Melmac dishes coming on the market then. To show my mother how indestructible they were, she took one from the kitchen table and flung it across the room. It hit the wall with a clatter, fell to the floor unbroken. And I was enthralled—at the sheer daring of the act, at the thought that one could fling dishes across the room with impunity, at the flash of recognition that an adult could gloriously misbehave. With one insouciant gesture, she had me in her camp for life, an acolyte who would follow her to the ends of the earth.

Why these memories (and there are others: a day of being locked into my bedroom for some bad deed long forgotten, where I had to watch through the slats of the Venetian blinds as the ice cream truck arrived and my brother ran with friends to buy a cone; an incident in which an older child did not see me as I stood in the street and ran me down with a bike)? Why these and not others?

And why now? Why drag them out of the murky bottoms of memory? Now, as I near 60, broken down, promise evaporated, a sorry failed lump of humanity?

I’m not sure, really. Perhaps because they are not merely a part of me: they are me, and “me” seems to vanish more and more, in the eyes of those who claim the right to define others, to allocate salaries and healthcare benefits, to withhold these essentials of human existence from the unworthy.

Remembering in such a world is an act of self-assertion—a necessary act, a defiant one, a claim that one’s human life does count in the final analysis, even if no one wishes to agree. To a great extent, memories—specific memories, our own memories—constitute us, make us unique. Holding onto our memories, asserting our right to remember, is an act of defiant self-assertion against those who claim the right to obliterate us.

Specifically, for those of us who are gay and who refuse to deny ourselves, remembering is a way of combating the silence of the churches. Memory and silence will always constitute opposite poles of the spectrum of human possibility. When we head into silence—the kind of silence in which memory is obliterated—we head to death.

Throughout history, the churches have been capable of atrocious cruelty towards gay persons (and women, people of color, “heretics” and non-believers, Jews, the earth). And yet, in the final analysis, I think no manifestation of homophobic hatred is quite so cruel as the churches’ contemporary silence about gay people—not, you understand, the respectful silence of moral deliberation, the kind that refuses to judge, but silence used as a weapon, to obliterate others.

As social norms mandate increasing acceptance of LGBT persons and our claims to full humanity and full personhood, churches are now growing silent. As society moves towards inclusion, churches are slowly abandoning their former open disdain and their former statements of non-acceptance of gay people.

For silence. A silence that lasts even in the face of increasing claims of churches to want to create “caring communities.” An ominous silence that, when measured against the claim to care, can mean only this: the claim of churches to be interested in creating “caring communities,” while these same churches remain silent about the rightful claims of LGBT persons to justice, means that the churches have simply disappeared gay persons from their midst.

They have wiped us from the list of those who have any claim to justice—who have any claim to life, since those who do not exist for a community that proclaims an ethos of universal care cannot exist at all. Social existence is not just an extension of existence: it is existence. To be human is to exist in a complex network of social connections.

By denying the presence of gay persons in the human community, along with our claims to just treatment, even as they trumpet their concern to form “caring communities,” churches erase gay people from the face of the earth. They accomplish, within the context of a mendacious ethic of “care,” what not even the most right-wing political thinkers have sought to do but have not yet accomplished: the elimination of gay human beings from the human community.

Ultimately, there is no cruelty greater than to proclaim that one “cares”—that the community one represents “cares”—while one simply ignores the presence of an invisibilized group of people in one’s midst. While one ignores the claims of that group to just treatment. While one proceeds as if no such claims exist, as if those making the claims are ghosts without any substance, whose voices cannot reach the ears of the living. While one refuses to admit guilt for one’s own complicity in acts of injustice towards the group one wishes to invisibilize.

The stance I am describing here is not a stance of the churches at their worst today: it is a stance of the churches at their best. It is the typical stance of the liberal church, of the church of self-professed “care,” the church intent on creating “caring communities” in the world.

It is the church intent on proclaiming itself inclusive—as long as the community to be included is female or black or poor or anything but a sexual minority. It is the church determined to place itself on the side of justice—as long as the one asking for justice is not gay. It is the church proud of its ability to create inclusive spaces for dialogue—as long as those asking for a voice in the conversation are not LGBT.

This is the best the churches of Main Street USA have to offer gay people today. And it is a shameful, utterly cruel best. It is a best that simply ignores the humanity of gay persons and our claims to be treated justly because we are human and our humanity is equal to that of other human beings.

It is a church that undercuts its claims to mediate God to the world. It is a church that fails not merely in some incidental aspect of its mission, but in its core proclamation to the world. It is a church that fails, quite simply, to be church.

I have grown so sick of this church—so sick in my heart and soul from attending to its words and watching its representatives for any sign of salvific care for me and my sisters and brothers—that, God help me, I find it almost impossible to hear the name of God anymore without wanting to run away.

God? This monolith of silence that can be counted on to stand with those in its community who abuse gay human beings, this community represents God? Has the right to speak about God? This monolith of silence that protects those who abuse gay human beings and participates in campaigns of vilification of demeaned and expelled gay human beings mounted by those abusers?

I am struggling these days. I am struggling with the very thought of God. In a world in which the rapacious and the arrogant and those whose tongues drip poisonous lies can be counted on to claim the mantle of the Christian God, I find myself profoundly alienated from the very thought of that God. In a world in which church members will not call to accountability those in their midst who continue to lacerate gay persons, I do not want to hear churches talk to me about God.

I prefer my memories. At least, I know they are true. And in them, I find more salvation—by far—than I do in almost any church today.

The Arkansas Shooting and God Talk

I don’t know what happened yesterday in Little Rock. Of course, I know the bare bones of the story: two men are now dead, after a scenario of senseless violence that is attracting worldwide attention because one of the two was a leader of the local Democratic party.

But the whys and wherefores are as murky to me as to anyone else, and it would be presumptuous (not to mention, opportunistic) of me to try to comment on motives for a crime that no one appears yet to know—or may ever know. From some local coverage of the story, which focuses on the fact that the alleged shooter, Timothy Johnson, lived alone and had never been married, I begin to have that sinking-stomach feeling that the media may spin this story as one of those predictable, worn-out fables about lonely “single” men going around the bend and ending up on a shooting spree.

(A fable because simply repeating these facts never explains why it is that some lonely single men go on shooting sprays. A worn-out fable, because it toys with gay-baiting without ever stating the subtext explicitly, and tales that toy with the truth without seeking to engage it are always worn out even before they begin. And a worn-out fable because it doesn’t ever seek to explain why it is that men, far more than women—and men of a certain political cast of mind—tend to take guns and shoot others in mindless killing sprees.)

Still, I can understand why, when the news broke, some people immediately began to ask about the Democratic aspect of the story: why was the state Democratic party chair targeted? Some media and blog accounts I’ve read suggest Arkansas is a Republican state, and appear to imagine us as a wild and wooly frontier on which conservatives pick off liberals at will, while law officials wink at the sport.

From Mark Twain through H.L. Mencken to the mainstream media coverage of the Clinton era, what people are willing to imagine about Arkansas baffles many of us who live here. Having seen first-hand and up-close the byzantine political life of Louisiana, and the buttoned-down, semi-fascist, “family-friendly” political life of the Queen City of the New South, Charlotte, North Carolina, I’m here to tell you that Arkansas politics doesn’t hold a candle to that of some other Southern states, when it comes to eye-gouging and dirty tricks.

That’s not saying much, of course. We have a long road to walk before becoming more educated, civilized, and truly democratic. But we’re hardly unique in that respect. Half of the citizens of this nation, after all, voted for the intellectually and morally challenged current occupant of the White House.

I think for anyone seeking to get to the bottom of what happened in my city yesterday, the political question does have to be pursued carefully. It can’t be entirely accidental that the target was a Democratic party official, can it? And (again, this is pure speculation based on no evidence as to the gunman's real motives), it does perhaps deserve notice that Johnson lived in the part of the state that is most solidly Republican—in Searcy, in fact, a church-dominated town that has, in recent years, run a bookstore out of business because it sold sexually explicit (read: gay) lovemaking manuals, among many other books.

And in the part of the state that is far more white than black, in the half of the state in which some communities expelled their African-American populations in the Jim Crow era, in the half of the state in which racism may well be more intractable and taken for granted than in the half that was once plantation country . . . . For what it’s worth, the same area of the state that historically leans Republican and is overwhelmingly white is the half of the state dominated by dry counties, in which one cannot legally buy liquor.

People commenting on yesterday’s shooting immediately wondered about connections between it and the equally mysterious shooting some weeks ago in Knoxville. There, it took days for the mainstream media to take note of facts that got immediate exposure on citizen-maintained blogs: e.g., the fact that the gunman entered the church shouting slurs about liberals; the fact that the church had recently put up a sign welcoming gays, etc. When we sense that the mainstream media do not dig for the story behind the story, that they provide us with sanitized versions of stories designed to disguise the real motives of shooters who take their cue from hate groups and right-wing talk-radio gurus, we naturally feel compelled to dig. For truth, since no one can make wise political decisions on the basis of misinformation and lies . . . .

(As an aside—and, again, as a corrective to the myth-makers who have never visited our state, but are confident their depiction of it as inhabited by inbred troglodytes is accurate—another tidbit re: the Knoxville shootings that never got any play in the national mainstream media was that the church member who interposed himself between the gunman and the folks in the church, Greg McKendry, was an Arkansan. McKendry gave his life to save others in the church from being shot. The local free paper, Arkansas Times, reported this piece of information—see www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2008/07/arkansas_connection_in_church.aspx).

We’ll see what develops, as the Timothy Johnson story unfolds. Meanwhile, I’m sure that, with many others today, I’m pondering the big issues, issues like what to make of inexplicable tragedy—a question that constantly niggles at the hearts and minds of anyone who professes faith in some kind of divine purpose or scheme of things.

All the more so when a tragedy happens close at hand: Steve and I had gone out to lunch, and had the misfortune of having another car back into us as we drove home, just as the shooting took place. Having no idea what was going on just a few miles south and east of us, we waited and waited for the police to come and write a report on the fender-bender, wondering why this was taking so long, only to discover when we got home that the capitol area had been on a kind of lock-down at the very time when we were fuming about the lack of police solicitude for accident-stuck drivers.

A lot of the blog talk I’ve overheard since the shootings is God-talk. I have to confess that this talk leaves me cold. What leaves me cold, specifically, is the implication that God somehow pulls the strings of events like this—that the same God who one day protects an airplane full of folks from crashing the following day permits another airplane full of people to crash.

My thinking about where God is when tragedies like the Gwatney shooting occur may depart from orthodoxy. I no longer know what the “orthodox” teaching about God’s role at times of tragedy is; I have to admit, I no longer care a lot, either, about checking out the orthodoxy manual before I engage my brain. The exemplars of orthodoxy have, for some time now, underwhelmed me, as they make their case for orthodoxy. When people claim to own truth, it is hard not to place their own lives beside the truth they own, as exemplars of the truth they profess. And then the gap between what is lived and what is professed is large, who can help asking about the virtue of what is professed?

Steve has had a big influence on my thinking about events such as the Holocaust. Because his family roots run from America entirely back to Germany, he feels the historic burden of the German people following the Holocaust. His grandparents all spoke German as their first language, and he was one of the last children baptized in the German-speaking Catholic parish of his community before it was consolidated with the French parish.

Whenever I am tempted too quickly and too easily to see God’s hand, either for woe or weal, in the horrible things that happen routinely to people (including ourselves), Steve is quick to ask me where God was as his cousins murdered 8 million Jews, as well as countless Gypsies, gay people, the mentally and physically challenged, Slavs, etc. Steve is more hesitant to bring G-d into the picture, when atrocities happen.

Because he struggles with this issue—reads constantly about it, tries to make sense of historic evil—I struggle, too. With him, I think I have gradually come to the conclusion that the only sane way to view G-d’s connection to tragedy is to see G-d as one who suffers through tragedy with us—as one who is as baffled by inexplicable atrocities as we are baffled.

However, because I need to know that there’s meaning to it all, purpose in my own very broken life (as well as the possibility of triumphing over the obstacles that human ugliness have placed in my life), I’d like to think—I challenge myself to keep believing—that G-d’s involvement in the suffering of the world is redemptive involvement. Somehow, the purpose G-d is weaving in history is a purpose that is woven through God’s own presence in the web of history, including the warp and woof of history’s groaning.

I have come to see G-d less as the puppet master on high pulling the strings, than the loving presence at the heart of it all, wooing the world beyond tragedy, suffering, pain, towards transformation. How can I do otherwise, when the image I see on the face of the puppet master is always the image of the men who rule us, who have painted their face there to reinforce their claim to mastery of the entire cosmos?

It is they who make it so difficult for many of us to believe in G-d at all, since the G-d they have made in their image is as unattractive as they themselves are—neither redemptive nor loving, but cruel, capricious, and controlling. When we can plainly see that they write the rules to serve their own ends, and that they can break the rules again and again, causing horrible torment to those “beneath” them, how can we drag G-d—their God—into the picture?

No, I can no longer see G-d there at all, in the midst of the rulers of the world. If G-d’s face is anywhere in the world, I tend to think it’s to be seen in the African baby crying as it dies of marasmus, in the teen girl raped by soldiers who have just taken control of her village, in the gay man bashed within an inch of his life in a dark alleyway.

And that G-d, the G-d whose face shines darkly amidst the least among us, is a G-d who suffers, who cries, who begs for justice along with those in whom her face shines forth. That G-d implicates me, since justice does not fall down from heaven. It is claimed at painful cost by those who believe in the depths of their souls that nothing else has such an ultimate claim on us, and who find that, in the struggle, that we are not alone: when we band together to make the world a better place, a place in which more people will have access to the basic goods of the world, we encounter in the struggle together an energy that transcends us—an energy that many of us name as divine.

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.