More Commentary on German Theologians' Petition for Reform

 

Paul Hockenos has now published a discussion of the German theologians' reform petition to the Vatican at National Catholic Reporter.  Hockenos's report stresses something I've mentioned in the comments section of Bilgrimage recently: namely, that the response of the German Catholic bishops to the theologians' statement stresses the obligation of church officials to be in dialogue with the laity and with theologians, and the value of such dialogue for the church as a whole.

Fissures Developing in Catholic Restorationist Project: Survey of Recent Stories

 

Lots of interesting analysis in recent days that indicates the growing fractures in the project of restorationist Catholicism dear to the hearts of the last two popes, John Paul II and Benedict.  Restorationist Catholicism wants to "reform the reform" of Vatican II, to turn the clock back in key respects to a pre-Vatican II mentality and pre-Vatican II practice.  In short, it wants to stop in their tracks the reforms implemented by all the bishops of the Catholic church at its last ecumenical council, Vatican II.  

"Maurice" (1987) and the Gay Journey to the 21st Century

An e-friend and I were discussing the 1987 Merchant-Ivory film “Maurice” recently. For those who may not have seen this movie or read the E.M. Forster novel on which it’s based, it’s a loosely autobiographical gay love story that Forster wrote in the World War I period, but which he never published. Maurice was published posthumously in 1971.

Maurice touches on themes central to Forster’s fiction, including the furtive code within which those living unacceptable sexual relationships had to function in post-Victorian Britain, the lethal hypocrisy that the English class system expected of its upper and middling ranks, and the appeal that working-class men had for closeted gay men of the upper classes who perceived the lower-class approach to sexuality as franker than that of their class.

I get to see "Maurice" at least once a year (and then, usually several times) because an elderly friend who visits us yearly adores “Maurice” and insists on our renting it for him when he’s with us. I suspect that some of the themes in the novel are autobiographical for our friend. He was born just as Forster was writing “Maurice,” grew up in an aristocratic Polish family which expected him to go a-soldiering and forced him to go to Paris and take a law degree before he entered the army, though his inclinations were strongly towards art.

After he finished school, he joined the Polish army and found himself captured by the Germans during the second war. He led a fascinating life after this, which took him to Italy, where he was able to fulfill his boyhood dream of studying art, and where, I gather from many stories he tells, he found working-class Italian young men very alluring—and so he began his life of gay sexual encounters while he lived a strictly closeted, and devoutly Catholic, life.

Somehow, our friend has managed to keep all this together—the strong, right-leaning and rigidly “orthodox” Catholicism, the free-wheeling gay life, the aristocratic presuppositions and expectations, the closet. And he finds his experience mirrored back to him in the story Forster tells, and can’t get enough of the movie, watching it over and over when he’s with us.

When I mentioned to my e-friend Janet in a recent email that I expected to be watching “Maurice” again with our visiting friend, she wrote back to say that she remembered watching the movie with her lesbian daughter when the daughter was a teen, and this was the first time she and her family had ever seen a gay character in a movie. Janet adds, “How things have changed. That is no longer considered bold and isn't THAT good?!”

Janet’s absolutely right. A world of things has changed since 1987, and anytime I watch “Maurice” again, I, too, think about those changes.

I have a sharply incised memory of my first time seeing this film. I had begun teaching theology at Xavier University in New Orleans two years earlier, as I completed my dissertation. When I took that job, as far as Steve and I knew, the start of our vocational lives would definitively separate us, and we would perhaps have to go our own ways professionally and otherwise, since the chances of our both getting teaching positions in the same place were small.

Then, to our surprise, a year later, Steve found a job at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans, and we were able to resume our life together while teaching theology at two different Catholic institutions in New Orleans. We were—it goes without saying—closeted, as we had been in graduate school

There was no other option, not one about which we had the slightest clue. As far as we knew, not another soul in school with us was gay or trying to determine his or her sexual orientation. And it wasn’t that sex was a taboo topic, in our Catholic theological school. It’s that gay sex was specifically taboo as a topic of conversation.

We knew of priests studying theology with us, who were conducting more or less open affairs with laywomen or nuns, as they pursued their degrees. Quite a few of our lay classmates led fairly free-wheeling sexual lives—but free-wheeling heterosexual lives—and no one raised any eyebrows about this. In fact, in some respects, their candor and their flaunted heterosexuality earned them brownie points with our professors, some of whom were themselves involved in the free-wheeling activities with their students, and who were capable of withering insinuations about those assumed to be queer.

But of gay sexual lives or gay sexual encounters: nary a whisper. Total silence. In which Steve and I colluded. I can remember, really, only two occasions in some six years of study in which anyone ever even mentioned the topic. One was when a friend of mine, a brilliant theologian whom I much admired, who was a married man, recounted a story from his early married days, in which he and others came to know that one of their friends was gay because the friend sought to commit suicide when the man he loved jilted him.

My friend told this story without sympathy for his friend who turned out to be gay, and the coterie of fellow students to whom he told the story received it without sympathy. The point of the story was that gays were that way—hyper-emotive, fragile, pitiful creatures who could be counted on to go over the edge when those they imagined they loved did the right thing and scorned them. This was hardly an atmosphere conducive to coming out of the closet—as the other tidbit I recall from those years, the retching sounds another friend made when someone mentioned homosexuality, further suggests.

There were no gay people—not myself, not Steve (though we had been living together intimately for some thirteen years by the time I left graduate school to take a job), not anyone else, including a handful of classmates who have now come out of the closet, but in those years, never breathed a word about their sexual orientations or natures to anyone. There were no gay role models, no gay stories to be told—insofar as I knew—in that post-Vatican II Catholic theological environment which had successfully incorporated the idea of sexual freedom for heterosexual people, including even vowed religious ones or ordained clerical ones. And where married heterosexual students used birth control as a matter of course, though the ethical norms that prohibit artificial contraception are precisely the same, in Catholicism, as those prohibiting homosexual acts.

And so to “Maurice,” a scant two years after I finished my graduate studies—and a year after Steve and I reunited in New Orleans, both of us teaching theology, both of us closeted. Because we knew no other option. And because we knew that coming out of the closet would spell the end of the professional vocational lives we had just begun. And because we were, fatuously and unbelievably, still lying to ourselves even at that late date, telling ourselves stories about the “phase” we had been going through, which would one day end and free us to marry a woman.

When “Maurice” arrived in New Orleans soon after its release, we were, of course, eager to see it. In my year alone in New Orleans, I had seen—for the first time in my life—two films, both on television, featuring gay characters. Both were AIDS-themed.

One of these was “An Early Frost,” in which a young gay man played by Aidan Quinn is forced to come out to his mother because he was HIV+. The other was a biography of Rock Hudson that explored the open secret of his life—his gayness—which was definitively revealed when the public discovered he had AIDS.

I remember weeping—heavily, constantly—through both films, but in particular through the Hudson movie. What hit me especially hard in his story was his recognition that the secret—the open secret—he had so closely guarded, and for which he had sacrificed so much, was farcical. His life was already an open book to millions of people. His AIDS only made public what many people already knew—and so the tragedy of those years of hiding and shame and pretense, when he could have been living with dignity and some self-respect, if he had only realized how transparent the walls of the closet in which he lived actually were.

How could I not identify with that story, living as I did in my own transparent closet—in a relationship of over fifteen years (by this date), with the same man, both of us all the while pretending to be lifelong bachelors disappointed in love? It is important—crucially so—that people living as we had lived for so long find stories that fit their lives and echo their experiences. It was important that we discover we were far from the only gay persons in the world.

How could we fail to see “Maurice” as soon as possible when it came out in 1987, then? When a friend of ours with whom I taught at Xavier—who also happened to be HIV+, though he had told few people other than Steve and me at this point—invited us to see the movie, we quickly accepted.

But we knew as we did so that this could be a dangerous act, something so innocuous and simple as going to a movie. With a closeted gay man whose gayness was something of an open secret on the campus of the Catholic university at which I was teaching. In a very Catholic city whose Catholic community was, in some ways, an overgrown, gossipy small town, where it was particularly dangerous for someone teaching in a seminary—as Steve was—to be seen at such a movie. A gay movie.

We went. We were enchanted. We saw ourselves in the film, something that almost never happened in movies at that time, and we felt our love affirmed. And then the movie ended, and whom should I see standing in the back of the theater than someone who taught in my own theology department at Xavier. With her husband, also a theologian who taught at another Catholic university in New Orleans.

There was no avoiding the encounter. My colleague had planted herself at the exit door of the theater in order to force me to see her—to force me to see see that she had seen me. That she knew. And that she would use that knowledge, now out in the open, so to speak, to her advantage.

I knew already that this colleague was deeply homophobic while she professed to be tolerant and inclusive. She was an ex-nun, her husband an ex-priest. The community of those teaching theology in Catholic universities in New Orleans was dominated—as it was elsewhere in the nation at that time—by married former priests and nuns, many of whom had left the priesthood and religious life during Vatican II, often to marry, with theology degrees in hand paid for by the church.

I did not find—I have not found—this community at all welcoming of gay people. There is a constant undercurrent within this professional theological community, which now dominates many theology departments in Catholic universities, which maintains that “normal” people were systematically driven out of the priesthood and religious life during and after Vatican II, as the church gave preference to and winked at the growing presence of gays in the seminary, in rectories, and in convents.

My colleague was among those who believed, and who stated, this. She did so frequently and vocally. She maintained that the hierarchy has an animus against married layfolks, and that gays have it easy within the church, because so many bishops are, she thinks, closeted gay men.

Though Steve and I had scraped very hard to find money to put ourselves through graduate school, working at any job we could find to make ends meet as we studied, and though her education and that of her husband had been paid for by the church, she believed that she and her husband were placed at a disadvantage by the church, while doors opened for gay folks. Though she and her husband found immediate employment—and in the same city—at Catholic universities, when they left the priesthood and religious life and married, and though Steve and I had no such certainty of finding jobs together, and almost certainly would not have been hired had it been known we were a couple and/or gay, she persisted in believing that the church treats gay folks with conspicuous favoritism.

That’s my memory of seeing “Maurice.” Looking back, it seems ludicrous that going to a movie with the man I loved, in the company of another closeted gay man, should have been a dangerous act, an open declaration of something the schools at which we taught would not countenance.

And yet it was precisely that, and the way in which my colleague in the theology department at Xavier used her knowledge that I had been at this movie proved precisely that. In a year or so, Steve found himself out of a job when he was unilaterally denied tenure by his seminary’s rector, though faculty and students had voted for him to be tenured. When he applied for an opening at Xavier, the colleague who had seen us together at “Maurice,” and who was convinced in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary that gay men are privileged in the church, blocked Steve’s attempt to get that job, precipitating our move to another place, where we found ourselves both booted again in the course of a few years—and where we, thanks be to God, finally dispensed with the dysfunctional closet game.

And so perhaps that homophobic colleague was a vehicle of grace for us? Perhaps. I surely would not want to be closeted any longer, not for all the world and its pomp and ceremonies, nor would I want to be teaching at a school at which I was expected to remain in the closet.

But some of the hard knocks, the assault on my faith, the attacks on my human dignity, the loss of jobs with no explanation when we have both worked exceptionally hard within Catholic institutions that claim to respect human rights? Those I would gladly have foregone. Except that without them, I probably would not be telling this story now.

On Centrism: American Catholic Centrism as Apologia for Powerful

Paul Krugman has a good commentary in today's New York Times about President Obama's continuing conviction that he needs to make decisions keeping the Republican minority in mind, in order to preserve the "center." Krugman's piece is entitled "The Destructive Center" (www.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/opinion/09krugman.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink).

Krugman argues that, while claiming to serve centrist needs, the Republican minority (and those willing to collude with it) have managed to cripple the financial stimulus package. As he notes, the cuts that "centrists" forced the president to make in his stimulus package fall disproportionately on those who are in most need of assistance in this time of financial crisis, and benefit those who have created the crisis in the first place.

I'm interested in Krugman's argument because it parallels one I have been pushing on this blog re: American Catholic centrists. Underlying the philosophy of liberal centrism is a belief in the need for balance. Following the election of Mr. Obama, I noted centrist Catholic supporters of Obama, members of the knowledge class at the center of the American church, noting their fear that the balance had been destroyed in our government with the election of Obama. These commentators were calling for the continued alliance of Catholics, even those who support the new president, with countervailing movements in the Republican party--to maintain balance.

This centrist strategy in both religion and politics strikes me as insupportable for a number of reasons. There's, first of all, the strange presupposition that good government is all about maintaining balance. The notion that government is about balance first and foremost is only one among several options of our founding documents. It's a Madisonian federalist assumption, one driven by fear of "mob" rule if democracy is allowed to do its work without fetters. Jefferson thought differently about democracy and its potential.

It's interesting to see the center of the American Catholic knowledge class largely determined by Madisonian federalist and not Jeffersonian populist assumptions about "balance" and the "center."

It also strikes me as worth noting that the center shifts. It is not a rigid, predetermined compass point. It changes as the balance it serves moves to the left or the right.

We have lived through a long moment in our culture in which the center has shifted decisively to the right. In defending the center, "centrists" are actually defending political and religious ideas that were once considered unthinkably to the right of center. The fundamental conservatism of centrist American Catholic thinkers today is never quite out on the table for discussion. And yet it sorely needs such analysis, particularly if some of the most serious rifts in the American church are to be addressed with any honesty and any real healing.

I'm fundamentally suspicious of centrist claims because of their inherent tendency to side with power, with the powers that be at any given time. In my view, religion has built into its very center an anti-authoritarian impulse that constantly subjects the powers that be at any moment of history to critique.

When we bow to the right in the name of preserving centrist balance, what we really do is abdicate our responsbility to critique those who have the most power in church and society, and who use that power to serve their own ends rather than for the good of the whole. Centrism mutes some of the most important voices within the Christian community, and, in doing so, vitiates the church's prophetic witness within the social and economic sphere.

Ultimately, I think that what may concern me most about this centrist pattern of thinking is its ability to elide over all those placed outside the circle of social belonging by those in whose hands power lies. As I keep repeating on this blog, I am profoundly disturbed by the ability of many of my centrist brothers and sisters in the American Catholic church to defend a papacy that has dispossessed so many Catholics of their place in the church.

How is it possible to continue talking with any credibility about love, healing, unity, compassion, justice, inclusion, and catholicity while we simply ignore large numbers of people dispossessed by the consensus we are defending? This question cannot be allowed to go away, because human beings with real human lives should never be allowed to vanish . . . .

Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

Steve and I went to the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival with friends on Saturday, and saw an outstanding film that continues to haunt me. As the subtitle of “Faubourg Tremé” indicates, it’s an exploration of the untold story of black New Orleans (www.tremedoc.com).

I’m trying to think through what so captivated me at a visceral level in this documentary. Part of it is that we once lived in Tremé. We bought a house there in 1986 and lived in it until our move to North Carolina in 1991. The house was an 1884 shotgun that had been partially renovated by its previous owners. We (as in Steve) completed the renovation process, turning it into a single dwelling that a colleague at Xavier once characterized as an paramount example of “simple elegance.”

But there’s more to why “Faubourg Tremé” so powerfully grabbed me. We have not been back to New Orleans since Katrina. I have not wanted to go back. We know from Steve’s cousin that our house is now “gone.” The shell of it stands, but it appears to be unrecoverable after the flooding.

In fact, it had already been cannibalized before the flood, we’d been told: the beautiful finials on the wrought-iron fence forged for the 1884 world’s fair were stolen, the shutters on the house (many of which we’d replaced, buying them from vendors of antique architectural details) were also carted off. Apparently the people to whom we sold the house defaulted on loans and lost it to the bank, and it was empty and boarded up even before the hurricane.

Both the sadness of that house, which for generations sheltered prosperous middle-class black Créole families, and the destruction caused by Katrina, have deterred me from returning. My bond with the city runs deep, so deep that I had a series of dreams about the flooding of New Orleans prior to Katrina. Pictures I saw on the news when the city flooded were familiar to me: they replicate what I had seen saw in those prescient montages of a horror that baffled me, as I saw it dreamt about it in several memorable dreams prior to the hurricane.

Indeed, the few vivid future-foreseeing dreams I have ever had in my life have almost always centered on New Orleans and its environs. My soul is linked to that magical, mystical place near the mouth of the Mississippi.

I went to college there, after all. My parents honeymooned in New Orleans, and we spent many vacations in the city as I grew up. I can remember my parents taking us to the booth of a cartoon artist outside St. Louis Cathedral on one vacation. I must have been about twelve at the time.

They did not like how the artist fussed over me. He told them that I was not, well, I can’t avoid saying it, though it sounds immodest (I want to write truth on this blog): he told them I wasn’t ordinary.

They didn’t like hearing that. I can remember my mother doing that Southern-lady freeze-out thing, drawing herself up stiffly and looking down her nose at the artist as if he were not quite her sort of people. My father grumbled, something about paying the artist to do sketches of his children and not prophesy.

At some level, I knew even at that early age that what caused the reaction was, in part, their parental fear that a gay man might recognize something in me and take advantage of it. But it was more than that: he told them—he instructed them—to pay attention to my needs for intellectual and emotional nourishment.

They did not like that. They did not intend to comply. Children should not be made to feel special, should not be fussed over—especially not a boy who refused to embrace “the” male role.

The artist drew little symbolic tokens in each of our ears. For my brother Simpson, there were dollar signs. And the prophecy turned out to be accurate. As alcoholism took his life, my mother spent a fortune trying to keep him alive, most everything she had saved for her old age. What she didn’t spend, he carted off when she was away from the house and sold to buy liquor.

Philip had a tic-tac-toe game in his ear. I’m not sure if even he knows why the artist chose to mark him with that token. Perhaps it was a recognition that, as the youngest of three rambunctious boys, Philip had to learn early on to evade, hide, outsmart, in order to survive.

In my ear, the artist put crosses.

New Orleans is the lodestone of my spiritual life. Not only was I educated there, it was in New Orleans that I met Steve. He had dropped out of St. John University in Minnesota to hitchhike south, with a vague plan to make his way to a mission in Mexico where a Benedictine relative of his was pastor.

We met at a prayer meeting sponsored by Loyola campus ministry. We soon moved in together, and have been together ever since. I persuaded Steve to return to school and complete his degree in philosophy. He did so at Loyola.

So it was in New Orleans that we began to come to terms with being gay, a long, drawn-out process that took many years and was not complete until we lived in the Tremé house. It was in New Orleans that I went to confession and had a priest hiss at me so loudly other penitents could hear, as he told me I had committed the sin that draws God’s wrath down on the world.

It was at the Jesuit church on Baronne St. in New Orleans that a priest who had taught me math at Loyola tried to spot me through the confessional grate, as he warned me that if I didn’t repent, a bus could run me down when I was not in a state of grace and send me directly to hell.

It was also in New Orleans that a Jesuit chaplain told me that God does not bully or lust to damn us, and that sexuality is a gift of God to bring us into communion with God and others. It was there that the pastor of our parish church told me in confession that he had just spent some time hearing confessions in the Rio Grande valley of Texas, and heard many German farmers tell him of sleeping with Mexican women whom they coerced into relationships. They did not feel guilty for a sin that broke their marriage vows (or for the coercion), the priest said. Why was I so weighed down by guilt at my transgressions?

New Orleans kept drawing me back. As I’ve noted previously on this blog, when I was finishing my dissertation, I was offered a good job at a prestigious “white” university, and a much more modestly paid (and demanding) position at Xavier University, an historically black university.

The choice was obvious to me: my life journey, my struggle to understand and address the racism inculcated in me from the time I was tiny, my commitment as a theologian to give voice to those on the margins, my history as a white Southerner whose ancestors owned slaves: all of these pointed me to Xavier. Xavier was a calling, an opportunity to serve. It was a place to learn, to continue learning even as I taught.

This vocational decision—this blessing of being called to serve—was confirmed when, the following year, Steve was offered a job at the Catholic seminary in New Orleans. That was what led to our buying the house in Tremé in 1986. I was 36 at the time, Steve 35. We had never been homeowners.

In fact, we didn’t have the resources to buy a house, after years of graduate studies and work in a “poor ministry” sponsored by Loyola’s chaplain’s office, which paid us only our living expenses. Steve’s aunts, Benedictine sisters, had inherited some money from their parents’ estate, which their community generously allowed them to lend to family members. They loaned us the down-payment for the house.

At the time we moved there, Tremé was well over 90% African American. Historically, it had always, from its beginnings at the end of the 18th century, been a majority black neighborhood, dominated by Créole free people of color, many of them descended from white men and their mixed-blood mistresses in the New Orleans system of plaçage, which encouraged young French and Spanish men to choose a mistress of color prior to marriage.

By the time we moved into Tremé, the Créole population had largely dispersed to suburbs on the east side of New Orleans. The neighborhood was in deep trouble by the 1980s, full of crime and drugs. In the years we lived there, we came home twice to find our house ransacked. In the second robbery, the vandals broke a hole through the floorboards and entered the house that way.

We had a beer bottle thrown through our window at night, our car windows smashed. I was once writing at my desk facing the street and looked out to see an elderly neighbor being held up at gunpoint. A teen was shot and killed half a block from our house; the teens who shot him wanted his tennis shoes. Our neighbors, a Créole Catholic family, lost their son first to drugs and then to a gunshot wound in a drug deal.

The house across from us was a crack house. It was owned by a white gay man who lived outside the neighborhood. When almost every house in the block was robbed after the occupants of that house moved in, the police told us that everywhere the group settled, this happened. We, all of us in the block, contacted the owner. He laughed. As long as he was paid his rent, what did he care?

Our neighbors on one side were also a gay couple, equally disdainful. They lived as though in a fortress, interacting with no one, walking each Sunday to Mass at the parish church a few blocks away. They were the meanest, stingiest human beings I have ever had the misfortune to live beside.

Even with all the struggles, we suffered when we finally decided to leave that house of simple elegance. What tipped the scales was my brother’s death in 1991. I could see as though it were a fortune written in capital letters on a wall that I would soon end up needing to provide care for my mother. I knew that doing this in a troubled marginal neighborhood would be doubly difficult.

When a Catholic college in North Carolina announced two jobs in its theology department, and when, even more miraculously, the college told Steve and me that our applications were far and away the best they had gotten from some hundred applicants and they wanted to hire us, we left. The community there was more like the one in which my mother had grown up. I knew she’d find it easier to live there than in Tremé as her mind slipped away.

Homophobia definitely played a role in all of this—a big one. Part of that journey to self-acceptance—the spiritual journey on which New Orleans placed us—was learning how vicious and how entrenched homophobia was in the academy.

When I went to New Orleans to apply for the job at Xavier, a priest in the seminary who had taught me when I took classes there prior to heading to Toronto to do the Ph.D. did all he could to out me to the Xavier hiring committee, in the nastiest way possible. This was a priest who, whenever a gay rights ordinance came before the city council, would beg the archbishop to be permitted to go and speak against it. He touted himself as the archbishop’s personal theologian.

When the seminary rector unilaterally denied Steve tenure (ignoring the recommendation of faculty and students), homophobia played a key role, we knew and were told. Later, when a permanent position opened at Xavier and one of my colleagues blocked Steve’s hire, I came face to face with homophobia all over again. This was a former nun married to a former priest. They had both had their educations paid for by the church, while Steve and I struggled extremely hard as lay students to scrape together funds to get through graduate school. When she left the convent and he the priesthood, doors opened immediately for both to get jobs at Catholic universities.

Despite this, my colleague was fond of saying the church persecuted married people like her and her husband while it protected and defended gays. When Steve was ditched by the seminary and applied for an opening at Xavier, she made certain he would not get the job—precipitating our need to move if we could find jobs outside New Orleans.

“Faubourg Tremé” provided me with a context in which to understand these spiritual struggles. The documentary does an outstanding job of uncovering the rich black history of the neighborhood—its association with Plessy v. Ferguson, its importance as one of the largest and first free black communities in the nation, its seminal role in the development of jazz. The film shows how the citizens of Tremé have repeatedly worked against the odds to build lives (and a marvelous culture) full of dignity, self-respect, intelligence, and creativity.

In the final analysis, watching “Faubourg Tremé” moved me because the film encapsulated key aspects of my own spiritual journey: the struggle against the odds for dignity; the call to give voice to those on the margins and to learn from marginal communities. The decisive and painful homophobic experiences through which Steve and I lived in New Orleans did not go away as we left New Orleans for first North Carolina, then Little Rock, then Florida.

In fact, we encountered them in a particularly brutal way all over again in an African-American churched community in Florida, and the film opened unhealed wounds we both have after those experiences. We certainly never expected the journey to be easy, both when we came out of the closet and also when we committed ourselves to work in marginal communities.

We also did not expect the cruelty practiced against us by an African-American Christian leader at a university in Florida. We did not expect to be repaid for years of gifts and sacrificial work at HBCUs, as well as loyalty to and sacrifice for that leader, with the deceptive byzantine maneuvers this African-American leader, who had previously called us friends and who knew how to hurt in the deepest way possible, used against us—the way in which she assaulted our dignity at the soul-shattering level only a former friend can touch, if she or he chooses to assault you.

Curiously enough, though, even when the film opened wounds I still bear from those experiences, watching “Faubourg Tremé” restores my faith in the African-American community that has called me to itself throughout my spiritual journey. Even when some tender part of me now wants to repudiate an entire community after the cruel treatment we experienced in Florida, I refuse to do so, and the film helps me to understand why.

After our experiences in Florida, I struggle as I struggled when our house was broken into in New Orleans by African-American neighbors, and after African-American teens broke our car windows and threw a beer bottle through our window. It would be so easy to give up, to pass judgment on an entire group of people on the basis of the shoddy behavior of a few—just as it would be easy for someone observing the behavior of our gay neighbors in Tremé or the gay man who owned the crack house across the street to conclude that all gay people are debased.

But observing the dignity, the creativity, the humanity of the citizens of Tremé—through monumental historic struggles that have gone on for centuries—reaffirms my belief in the rightness of keeping on keeping on. If a people who have been beaten, lynched, lied to and lied about, deprived of basic rights, can continue to struggle for dignity, who am I to give up? Even when members of a group that contains such magnificent representatives of humanity happen to be the ones oppressing me and assaulting my dignity, I refuse to allow those experiences to deter me from seeking solidarity with that group as it continues to struggle for freedom.

What African Americans have learned as they have sojourned in this land and sought to craft decent lives under the most inhumane conditions imaginable has the potential to teach all of us about the amazing resilience of the human spirit. This is what makes "Faubourg Tremé" such an important documentary to watch, such a valuable contribution to the study of our nation's history.

The Economic Crisis: Hard Come, Easy Go (2)

And as I prepare to stitch the next piece into this narrative, I realize that something that happened over the lunch hour today offers a diversionary piece that absolutely must be sewn in here, because it’s not really a diversion at all. It’s more of a narrative frame (to shift metaphors wildly) within which I need to set everything that follows.

Steve picked me up for lunch after I had posted my initial blog statement earlier today. He wanted to go to a Mexican restaurant he likes, and where he’s liked in return.

And what’s not to like? He speaks Spanish with the staff, smiles, tips generously. He knows how to joke, while I sit in stifled self-conscious silence, though I can speak passable restaurant Spanish. He has a heart for working people, and his heart shows. He’s from Minnesota, for goodness’ sake. And as everyone knows, it’s impossible to dislike anyone from Minnesota.

We were escorted today into a kind of backroom where, I felt, we were being given a seat of honor. Alongside us was a table of about twenty Hispanic working men, a cena-style arrangement in which ten or so men sat across from ten others, at a long, narrow, rectangular table.

For the purposes of this narrative about our current national economy—and Steve’s and my place in it—it was important that I see this group of working men today. It was crucial.

Here I am, preparing to go on at length about how being openly gay can affect one’s economic status in professional life, particularly when that professional life unfolds in a church context. And yet, my economic circumstances are in no way comparable to those of the men beside whom I ate lunch today.

I know it. I have eyes to see. These men work harder than I have ever worked a day in my entire life. And they have less to show for their work than I do. I can see the frayed clothes, the sun-darkened skin, even, in some cases, the fatigue of a morning’s labor.

In saying this, I don’t mean to demean or to caricature a group of people I don’t know personally. What I do want to do, however, is to insert into my narrative an important recognition—one that’s important for me to remember, first and foremost—and one that frames everything I am going to say in my subsequent autobiographical statements.

This recognition is that, despite my insistence that my perspective on the national economy is unique in some respects, due to my experiences as an openly gay theologian, the outcome of what I have experienced in my professional life links me to millions of other Americans. Who struggle to make ends meet. Who are, like me, without health coverage, and who worry about not having easy access to adequate healthcare. Who worry about dwindling savings.

Or who, as I suspect is the case with the men beside whom I ate lunch, can only dream of having savings about which to worry. Almost all the Mexicans and Central Americans whom I know in this area, or about whose lives I have more than passing knowledge, send as much as possible of their weekly paycheck home, to help their families get by. To help them prepare to come here eventually.

The troubled circumstances of our current economy affect millions of people who have no choice except to live at the margins, eking out a living on a paycheck that barely covers the week’s or month’s expenses, unable to put savings aside. And the downturn in the economy affects those millions of Americans disproportionately. It is on their backs that the wealth raked in by a minority at the top rests: that wealth is due to their labor.

And, in the case of workers coming to this country from south of the border, largely unacknowledged labor. This is labor we need, all of us. It oils the machinery of big cities and small towns across the nation. This is labor we cannot do without, even as we decry “immigrants” and “illegal aliens” who are taking away “our” jobs (jobs we do not want and would not have if they were offered to us).

I’m doubly sensitive to these recognitions this week because I have spent the last two days working (or "working" might be more accurate) in a home office that looks out on the back yard of our neighbor to the north. When Ike passed through last weekend, a huge oak tree fell in her yard, crushing her back porch and the truck of a friend, and taking out the power lines running to her house.

The local energy company could not restore the power until the tree had been removed. Two days ago, a crew of some eight or ten Latinos arrived early in the day to begin the removal process. I spent two days listening to them work—non-stop. They sawed up the tree, cut it into manageable hunks, loaded the hunks into a truck bed, and hauled them off, a long day’s work in which the same process had to be repeated the next day.

The work went on from daylight to dark. I never saw these working men take a break either day except at lunch. They sometimes sang as they worked, at other times shouted and joked, warning each other of possible danger as they handled the huge chunks of wood.

And now the yard is quiet. The tree’s gone, neatly divided and hauled away. I have no doubt the men who did the work have moved on to a similar project somewhere else in the city. I also have no doubt that they are not paid nearly what they are worth for the work they do skillfully and quickly.

For me. For all of us.

I want to remember that work as I continue with my narrative about Steve’s and my experiences as gay theologians. Our experience surely does have elements of uniqueness, and to the extent that many people do not know or think about such stories, it constitutes a story that needs to be heard.

But the result of the experience—the constant dispossession, the labor taken for granted and unrewarded, the inability to achieve economic security: nothing about this experience is unique. It is the lot of millions of Americans, perhaps of the majority of working people in this nation. I want to bind these words upon my heart as I resume the interrupted narrative of our interrupted vocational lives.

With a final note that—at least to my convoluted narrative sense—binds this “diversionary” piece back to the main narrative line. I want to point out that it’s Steve who has heightened my awareness of the price working people pay in our country.

Steve grew up doing hard work on a farm. Between college and high school, he earned money for college by working on a crew that built silos across Minnesota, the Dakotas, into Montana. At St. John’s in Collegeville, where he began college, he paid his tuition and room and board by digging graves in the monastic cemetery, lighting fires on the ground to be dug when it had become so deeply frozen that digging was otherwise impossible.

Steve spent the winter break of his first year at school working with a company running power lines to reservations of native people in northern Minnesota. When I first met him in New Orleans, he was working—again, to try to make his way through college, now Loyola—to weld and install wrought-iron balconies on apartment buildings being put up along Lake Pontchartrain. He has worked hard all of his life, and understands something of what those who work with their hands feel.

Long-term relationships, when they work (and God knows they don't always work), involve give and take in which the better angels of our partners’ nature sometimes overshadow our own souls. And that’s as true for gay marriages as for straight ones. It’s something I need to say, as I resume my story of how it happens that we approach retirement wondering what the future holds for us economically, even apart from the impending depression—though we have, to our way of seeing things, worked as hard as we can at the jobs we've been given to do.

Rachel Maddow and Pat Buchanan: Hateful Speech Translates to Hatreful Acts

Back after the long weekend, during which Steve and I spent welcome days with our dogs in the Ozarks, walking, reading, and watching and listening to waterfalls. The butterflies were beautiful. They’re different at different seasons, and always abundant in the little valley where we look for them beside a creek.

On this trip, a dark blue-black one with radiant iridescent blue spots along the lower part of the wings, and orange spots at the wingtips. Along with these, though congregated in separate locations, were a small brilliant orange butterfly with black markings.

And today the remnants of Gustav are with us, raking the state with constant rain and high winds. A day to read, write, listen to music, nurse chigger bites, and be glad that one is fortunate enough to be inside, to have an inside to which to go.

And to the news: today’s Alternet news site has excellent commentary by George Lakoff on some underlying reasons for the failure of progressive political thinkers to reach many American voters where they live and move and have their being. Lakoff notes that radical right-wing activists have been adroit about spinning narratives that engage the emotional-cognitive lives of mainstream voters (www.alternet.org/election08/97193/lakoff%3A_palin_appeals_to_voter_emotions_--_dems_beware).

Where we in the reality-based community who fight for progressive causes emphasize facts, those on the right have been spinning stories—and, in this way, they have succeeded in defining the conversation such that brute facts outside the confines of their narrative frames, no matter how convincing those facts are, fail to reach people’s hearts and souls. Lakoff challenges those of us who want to keep democracy alive at this precarious moment in our history to learn to tell stories and to find metaphors to engage people’s minds and hearts:

Our job is to bring external realities together with the reality of the political mind. Don't ignore the cognitive dimension. It is through cultural narratives, metaphors, and frames that we understand and express our ideals.

Lakoff’s reflections remind me of why I began this blog. I’m spending much of each day blogging because I’m convinced that many stories that don’t get a hearing in the mainstream media deserve a hearing. They have to be told. There’s no way we can understand our experience as a nation unless we hear the suppressed narratives that mainstream news outlets won’t touch, because the truths these narratives contain are inconvenient for those who have spun the dominant narrative.

Narratives from the margins provide facts that challenge the claim of mainstream perspectives to have the final word on what it means to live in America at this point in its history. The stories from the margins unravel the dominant narratives imposed on us from above. They force us to begin thinking differently about who we are, what we have done in the past, and our potential as a nation. They also seduce us into reverie and reflection, just when we think we’ve found a new meta-narrative that explains everything and includes everyone.

They catch us up in our quest for total explanation because they remind us of inconvenient bits of our history we hope to forget, to sweep under the rug when these bits of history become problematic. To a great extent, the political and religious right are trying to do this now with their recent history vis-à-vis their gay brothers and sisters.

As the cultural tide turns in favor of gay rights—as polls indicate younger Americans of all political affiliations rejecting homophobia—the political and religious right are trying to make us forget what they have done to their gay brothers and sisters in recent decades. Those on the right are trying to change the subject, to discover a new all-encompassing meta-narrative that will engage the passion of American voters while sweeping away inconvenient memories of the price we have paid for previous dominant narratives of racism and homophobia.

Clearly, that new meta-narrative will focus on brown people who (in our imagination as it is manipulated by those trying to control the conversation) invade our borders—illegal immigrants, Muslims, the people who planned 9/11. This may be the last federal election cycle in which we see the religious and political right trying one more desperate time to engage the visceral fears of the voting public by waving the gay flag as a warning sign, now that a shift is underway to demonizing narratives about threatening invasive brown outsiders.

Because the cynicism underlying the political use of human beings—gay, brown, Muslim, whatever group is in the sights of the right at any particular time—is so breathtakingly calculating and has been so destructive, I am glad that there are those among us who won’t allow those who have used and demeaned some of their brothers and sisters to forget.

Like Rachel Maddow. Choosing to make her a major political commentator is one of the smartest moves I’ve seen a mainstream news outlet make lately. I was particularly delighted with her comments to Pat Buchanan last Monday (25August) as MSNBC commentators dissected Michelle Obama’s speech to the Democratic National Convention.

In her inimitable nice but honest-to-God way, Rachel Maddow put Pat Buchanan on the hook, right before God and everybody. And let him squirm just a little bit. And he did and said nothing—could not do or say anything without admitting the truth of her damaging charges against him.

Maddow spoke about her reaction to Pat Buchanan’s saber-rattling culture wars speech to the Republican National Convention in 1992. As a young 19-year old who had just come out of the closet, she reacted to what the DNC and the RNC of that year did in personal terms. And how else could she have reacted? How else can anyone react to political speeches, except in terms of her or his own personal experience? Those speeches—the kind Pat Buchanan gave—had a personal impact on her own life and on the lives of people she knew and loved.

Rachel Maddow told Pat Buchanan that when he rattled his saber in 1992 and called for America to declare a culture war on those promoting “homosexual rights,” she felt as if her country were declaring war on her. By contrast, when she watched and listened to the Clintons, she felt drawn to them and their platform because she had the strong sense "they don't want an America that doesn't want me in it." As she told the chastened and silent Mr. Buchanan, "I felt like these people don’t hate me and would respect me if we met."

Indeed. Words make a world of difference. Especially when they are used like stones to hurl at someone—and when that someone is either you yourself or someone you love. Pat Buchanan may not like to be reminded of this today—I have no doubt at all he’d like to forget this—but his words in 1992 had real-life effects on real, living, breathing human beings.

Like Steve. And like me. Listening to Rachel Maddow brought back snippets of my own narrative that I have a responsibility to remember and pass on, because this is a tiny piece of what happened in America in 1992—of what some Americans did to other Americans in that year, as a result of Pat Buchanan’s call for a culture war against gay Americans. Of what some Christian and some Catholic Americans did to other Christian and other Catholic Americans who just happened to be gay.

When Mr. Buchanan (have I mentioned he’s a Catholic?) gave his culture wars speech at the RNC in the fall of 1992, we had just begun our second year of teaching at a small Catholic college in North Carolina. The college could have been anywhere USA—that is, any small Catholic college in the USA owned by a religious community. This one happened to be a Benedictine college.

Well, not quite anywhere. It was and is a college with a reputation for being on the far-right fringes of American Catholicism, and one decidedly in the pocket of the politico-religious right. We knew only bits and pieces of its reputation at the time we were hired to teach theology there—both of us.

What we knew troubled us, but as gay theologians living in a coupled but non-public relationship, we did not have the same freedom of choice in selecting jobs that our straight colleagues had. When the offer of two jobs at the same institution came along in the year after Steve had been denied tenure unilaterally by the rector of the seminary at which he had taught for some six years, we took the offer, cautiously but hopefully, believing the promises made to us by the school’s administration.

I will never forget that 1992 convention and Pat Buchanan’s culture war speech. I have no choice except to remember, because it is now part of my personal history. The small Benedictine college was very different from Xavier University, at which I had taught happily the first seven years of my career, and where I was offered tenure, turning down the offer to take the job in North Carolina.

For one thing, Xavier is owned by a community of religious women. The macho game playing and macho posturing that dominated the life of the male-owned Catholic college simply were not a part of the culture of Xavier.

Xavier is also an HBCU, and the kind of right-wing politics I was to encounter at the Benedictine school in North Carolina was just not in evidence at Xavier. Many faculty, both white and black, had no patience for neo-conservative political and religious thinking. They knew very well what it translates into, in the lives of African Americans.

The climate at the Benedictine college was night-and-day different from that at Xavier. At the Benedictine college, being a “liberal” was considered an oddity, a betrayal of what the school stood for—of the Catholicism that Patrick McHenry, a graduate of this college who now sits in Congress, has called purer and truer than that of other areas of the country.

A vicious, nasty Catholicism, I soon found—one where radical conservative activists on the faculty did not think twice about stuffing my campus mailbox with hate mail, and where I was severely punished for protesting this hazing and trying to get to the bottom of it and stop it.

And things only got worse—and decidedly so—with the 1992 RNC. That culture-war speech? Those hateful words uttered by the Catholic neoconservative icon Pat Buchanan? They energized the right-wing faculty at this small college. During the convention, as the anti-gay rhetoric spewed forth, the delight of the faculty—of the male faculty, I should day, for the most part—was tangible in the faculty lounge. It was very similar to the tangible gloating delight the same faculty exhibited when Clarence Thomas was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice and Anita Hill slapped down.

I had never met anything like this. I didn’t know places like this existed in American Catholicism. (I now know better, of course, and I’ve met versions of the same thing on Methodist campuses, where it’s better disguised as treacly “Christian” piety.) It was so . . . ugly. Downright ugly.

During all the time of the convention, when some monks would come daily to the faculty lounge to smoke with and high-five the other old boys as they gloated about how the Republicans were holding the family values line, only one person ever spoke to me about the convention. And about how it might be affecting Steve and me—who were clearly a couple, but also playing the Catholic don’t ask, don’t tell game, because we knew no other options if we were to keep our jobs and continue to function as theologians.

This was a monk who eventually left the monastery, a monk who was himself gay and who was struggling to claim and honor his identity. He left in part due to what the monastery and the college did to Steve and me at the end of that academic year.

As I’ve previously noted, the college gave me a one-year terminal contract and refused to provide any reason for the contract. The college also refused to place my final semester’s evaluation in writing—for understandable reasons, since I had been given a glowing oral evaluation the week before I was given the terminal contract. How to put the two together, and avoid litigation (which really was not an option, as the college’s administrators and monks knew, because 1] NC is a right-to-work state where people can be fired for no reason at all, and 2] NC has no laws protecting the rights of gay persons or gay employees)?

I could go on at length with details of this story. For the purposes of this reminiscence, I want only to note that Rachel Maddow is absolutely correct to try to call Pat Buchanan to accountability for the words—the shameful, anti-Christian words—he spoke in 1992 at the RNC.

Those words had real-life effects on real-life people. For Steve and me, they helped energize a movement within the American Catholic church that has made it almost impossible for gay Catholics to feel welcome today in our churches. The words signaled the start of a culture war within the American church itself, which has had quite a few casualties—gay people hounded out of jobs, gay people whose vocations have been thwarted and whose gifts have been rejected insofar as we have not chosen to remain self-denying, self-hating, and closeted.

Not long after Steve and I left the college in question, the abbot of the monastery took over the leadership of the college and mounted what many gay people living in the region saw as an outright purge of gay folks. He fired some seven or eight “single” faculty and staff members for specious reasons. I have a copy of a letter a local gay person who graduated from the college sent to a monk in the monastery that owns the college, protesting this purge (and identifying it as such), and stating his intent to move from the Catholic church as a result of what he saw the abbot doing.

The abbot justified his actions to the media as an attempt to re-establish Catholic identity in the college, as more lay faculty were hired and vocations to the monastery dwindled. How we who were gay and closeted at the college represented any kind of threat to the Catholic identity of the college was never clearly explained.

For Steve and me, these events were the beginning of the end for our careers as theologians. From that time until now, we have been persistently blackballed by any Catholic institution to which we apply for work. We spent several years living hand to mouth, and it’s impossible to read and write—that is, to do theological work—when you live hand to mouth, struggling to make ends meet, worrying about lack of medical insurance. These were years in which we were also caring for my mother, who was suffering from severe dementia, at home—a time in which we were least prepared to deal with the upheavals in our life the Catholic monastery and college caused when it ran us off.

So yes, Pat, Rachel is right: words make the world of difference in people’s lives. When people throw out words as weapons, those weapons do find targets. And they’re almost certain to wound the targets they find—the flesh and blood and psyches of those they find, when the targets are human beings.

Your words, uttered so casually, gave heart those looking for more reason to marginalize and hate in the name of Christ. In doing so, they had real effects on our real lives. And on many lives. Some of those lives cannot now be recovered, since the people to whom they belonged are no longer with us.

Like young Matthew Shepard, who was beaten to a pulp and then hung on a fence to die. I’m not accusing you directly, Pat, of causing his death. But I am saying—and I want you to hear this, as a fellow Catholic—that the words you uttered in 1992 had an ugly, toxic effect on our culture at large, and increased the proportion of hatred of gay people in our culture.

And it is from those cultural toxins that events like the killing of Matthew Shepard bubble up.

What will you as a Christian, as a Catholic, do now about those words you uttered 16 years ago, Pat? What will all the Christians, all the Catholics, who listened with glee to the family-values rhetoric in 1992, and who acted on that hate rhetoric, do now, I wonder?

The words may now be past for you, and you may want to repudiate them. But the wounds they inflicted still trouble our lives. Now as you try to distance yourselves from the words you once spoke, to pretend you did not speak them or mean them, what will you do about the lives that remain crippled due to the words you no longer want to own?

Christianity teaches us that we remain responsible for the effect of our words on others, even when time has passed. We remain responsible because, at the end of our lives, we must own our words and the effect they have had on others.

It is easy to disown words we have spoken in the heat of the moment. It is so much harder to bind up the wounds those wounds inflict, especially when the wounds go deep and linger for many years.

And yet there is no other option for people of faith, is there? Not if we believe, as people of faith around the world do, that we must give some final accounting for our lives, for the increase of love (or of hate) we have set in motion in the world through our lives.

History, Hope, Gospel: Politics in America Today

What’s that you say? Silence?

Well, yes, it does sometimes seem preferable—to talking that is just clamor, ships hooting at each other as they pass in the fog. Yes, that’s how I’ve been feeling lately, as Holy Week gets underway and what passes for discussion and debate in my nation’s political process becomes ever more clamorous hooting.

“And I say, ‘Oh for the wings of a dove to fly away and find rest.’ ” That line from psalm 55 has been constantly in my mind this week, as Good Friday and Easter approach.

And then there were the stuffed peppers. No, not at all—not any kind of Easter tradition I know about. But there they were, in the Kroger bins last Saturday, bags and bags of wizened smallish bell peppers, culled out from amidst the large, heavy, unwrinkled ones, marked down to a very modest price.

Given the cost of peppers these days, how could I pass them up? What’s a kitchen without a ready supply of bell peppers—for spaghetti sauces and chilis, Spanish omelets and creole dishes, lentil soups and baked beans, pepper slaw and stuffed squash, salade Niçoise and ratatouille . . . .

Naturally, then, when Penny and Philip invited us for Easter dinner, I proposed stuffed peppers. I had the peppers, and something about stuffed peppers as a counterpoint to ham, potato salad, deviled eggs, and ambrosia seems meet and right—piquant green tang to enliven traditional pastel Easter food.

Then there were those dratted pecans, local, organic ones, no less, that have been eyeing me reproachfully from the sideboard in the dining room ever since Christmas. Anything not eaten from the Christmas dessert table inevitably stays there, from Christmas day forward. On St. Pat’s day, as I rummaged in the sideboard for a bottle of Irish whiskey to make Irish coffee, I was surprised to find two tins of those stodgy molasses cookies I made this Christmas, which no one much liked unless they were dunked in coffee.

No, no better with age. In fact, the opposite. Even drier and mustier tasting. From Christmas to Easter, I haven’t wanted to look at a nut, a spice, a bar of baking chocolate, a dried fruit. My fast—at least from certain foods—begins far earlier than Lent (and in Lent, I never fast, anyway, or at least, not from food).

So. It was time to crack those pecans or discard them, and who can throw food away with a good conscience? Hence the vegetarian stuffed peppers that will now be my contribution to Easter dinner: basmati rice mixed with grated parmesan, coarsely chopped pecans, eggs to bind the forcemeat, a few spoons of tomato paste, and a mix of finely chopped celery, onion, parsley, and garlic sautéed in olive oil with touches of cinnamon and marjoram for seasoning. All done, mixed, stuffed into the peppers, baked and stored for re-heating on Sunday morning.

And I just haven’t felt like blogging. What’s there to say that hasn’t been said to death? And more to the point: what’s there to say that will really change anything? In a political process dominated by the gotcha politics of the religious right, what really can be said? When the parameters of conversation are so constructed that one must always be answering an accusation either overt or implied, never moving towards a hope-engendered vision of social life that comprises many more options than those permitted by the status quo, words become swords. Nothing more, nothing less.

Not instruments to forge new, more humane visions of how we might live together, but swords to lop off each other’s limbs, heads, hopes.

I grow weary of such political “discourse.” I sometimes wonder if the readers of this blog from places outside the U.S.—my statistics counter tells me there are such readers—can even begin to appreciate how narrow, claustrophobic, and ultimately devoid of hope our political conversations in the U.S. have become in the past few decades, under the controlling impulse of the right, and, in particular, of the religious right.

One doesn’t have to be a majority to control a conversation, and thus the future of a relationship or of a social contract. All one has to be able to do is shout no loudly enough to keep the conversation forever stalemated—to keep hope at bay. He who says no ultimately controls any relationship.

And saying no—stopping the conversation, keeping hope at bay—has been the raison d’etre of American conservatism for a number of decades now. As one of the chief spokespersons and ideological founders of neo-conservatism, William F. Buckley, once said, the quintessential neo-conservative impulse is “standing astride history, yelling ‘stop!’ ”

Neo-conservatism is not about building. It’s not about moving forward. It’s not about enlivening imagination. It’s not about spinning new ideas for better, more humane arrangements for communitarian life. It’s not about hope. It’s not even about respect for tradition and the past, since any such respect inevitably spots in previous human social arrangements ample reason for new social experiments that will carry forward the suppressed hopes of the past.

Neo-conservatism is about saying no. As Buckely himself said in response to Pope John XXIII’s brilliant encyclical of hope, Mater et magistra: Mater si, magistra no!

No, no, and no again: to change, to hope, to any social arrangement in which I and my tribe will not prevail. No to any vision of the future that will include others in a way that challenges my own dominance—as a white male, as a straight white man from the upper echelons of American society.

Neo-conservatism is about trying to stop history, because history inevitably means Something Else, and I do not want to imagine anything else, not in a world in which I am the primal link in the socio-economic chain, the pinnacle of social evolution. History is over and done with, as far as I am concerned. The most I will permit in the political and economic sphere is the kind of tinkering that keeps drastic change at bay, by balancing competing interest groups. As a neo-conservative, I am perfectly willing to work with liberals (since neo-conservatism is itself a variant of classic liberal ideology) to keep the status quo in place. If that means handing a crumb to this group here while denying the claims of that group there—all in the name of balancing interest groups and claims to justice—I’m happy to cooperate.

Just don’t expect me to entertain any nonsense about imagining other social arrangements in which conflict would be less omnipresent because more folks had access to the basic stuff of human existence. Don’t clatter on about human rights and justice. I’m not listening, not even if Jesus himself should walk through the door and announce the reign of God, or if the church claims that this was Jesus’s mission: mater si, magistra no!

A political landscape dominated by those whose only and ultimate word to history is no quickly becomes scorched earth. We in the U.S. occupy such a political landscape today. This landscape is the deliberate construction of the naysayers of the right—and the religious right—for several decades now. It is a landscape deliberately constructed to make hope (and history) impossible.

Declining empires always end up occupying such landscapes before their final demise, with court theologians to advise the emperor about how to negotiate the process of decline, so that he remains, as long as possible, at the top of the heap. The leaders of the religious right, churches that have not decisively distanced themselves from the religious right in this period (and few have): these are all part of the process of decay, of decline, of last-gasp imperialism, of the glozening lies of court theologians.

Insofar as our churches have implicated themselves in the social arrangements of declining imperialism—arrangements in which spying on citizens becomes routine, in which growing inequities between rich and poor become not shocking but taken for granted, in which the practice of torture of innocent people meets with shrugs, in which police and civil authorities are permitted to taser even school children, in which unjust war and carnage of despised Others is not merely justified but celebrated in our media—insofar as our churches accept these social arrangements, and never raise their voice against them, they lose the right to proclaim the gospel.

They have stopped doing so. The gospel is good news. The very center of the gospel is hope. Hope for history: the gospel is about a vision of human existence in which history is always possible, always mandated, because hope has not yet had its day. Hope has not yet been fulfilled. There is more to be done. History cannot be stopped, from a gospel-oriented standpoint, because there is more to hope for.

I have been heartsick this week as I have watched the mainstream media and many liberal Democrats participate in the pillorying of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama. I am heartsick for a quite specific reason: there is a shocking, clear, undeniable double standard in how we have chosen to treat this African-American preacher of the gospel, and how we choose to treat the court theologians.

Who are everywhere, but whose influence is never acknowledged or discussed by the mainstream media. The Alternet blog today carries a posting from Cenk Uygur at Huffington Post on the double standard the media applies to Rev. Wright and to the white preachers who are the court theologians of our declining empire—see www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/80253.

As Uygur notes, Rudy Giuliani’s priest has been accused in grand jury proceedings of having abused children and covered over the abuse of other children, but no one has ever asked Mr. Giuliani to denounce his pastor or disavow any relationship to him. Mitch Romney belongs to a church that, into Romney’s thirties, actively discriminated against people of color. Romney never disavowed his church then or now. The media have not hounded him to make statements about the racism of his church.

John McCain has accepted the endorsement of Jerry Falwell, who blamed the 9/11 attacks on America’s purported acceptance of gays, feminists, and liberals. Is Mr. McCain being savaged by the media for accepting this endorsement, or asked to address the warped theological views of Rev. Falwell?

Brent Childers of Faith in America released an open letter this week about Mr. Obama’s speech re: his relationship to Rev. Wright. The letter is at http://faithinamerica.info/blog/religious-wright-a-stomach-virus-for-the-religious-right.

As it notes,

How many talking heads are made sick when the Religious Right, day after day, condemns America for its anti-discrimination laws for gay and lesbian Americans or its policy on abortion?

Week after week, right-wing religious organizations work to shore up the Republican Party base and use America’s pulpits to condemn not only America but good, decent patriotic Americans. It’s not just religious leaders spreading a message of religion-based bigotry. Many elected officials and candidates are doing the same.

No one sought to give any context that Wright’s words were spoken from an interpretation of Holy Scripture. Poor presentation of the story, indeed. Even less context.

A nation where corporate greed holds sway over hard-working Americans? A nation that goes to war under false pretense? A nation in which political forces cater to prejudice and racial division? A nation in which gay and lesbian teenagers are being sacrificed on the alter of religion-based bigotry.

Would Wright’s God frown on such practices?

What hope is there for a nation in which hope itself is held at bay by the court theologians, by the preachers that advise (and support and excuse) the powerful of the land? What hope is there for a nation in which hope itself has become a dirty word, a taunt in the mouths of those left and right who want to stop history?

Not much, I think, until someone, somewhere, begins to expose the treachery and lies of the court theologians. Not much, until churches that really want to proclaim the good news openly, decisively repudiate the treachery and lies of the religious right.

We will, in coming weeks, see more and more treachery and lying. The ultimate intent of those engaging in these underhanded political games is to stand astride history and shout, “stop!”

The only hope to stop the games is for those with connections to faith communities to call for an end to the political games, to the treachery and lying, to the attempt to stop history by saying no rather than yes (which is God’s word to the created world). For the faith communities that claim to speak in the name of Jesus, hope lies in remembering that the crucified one was not the success all court theologians claim to be.

He was, instead, a dismal failure, hung to die upon an instrument of torture reserved for the lowest, most powerless of criminals in his society.

His resurrection is premised on his death, on his failure, on his humiliating death. The failure and death are, in fact, the precondition for the resurrection. Anyone who preaches otherwise—who preaches the bizarre "gospel of success" of which the court theologians are so enamored, who allies the Christian church with wealth and power—departs from the very warp and woof of the gospel, the good news that it is in dying that we rise.

What’s that you say? Well, you did ask. And I did tell.

Court Theologians and the Novum

Thinking this afternoon as I slogged on the treadmill, matching steps to the dialogue on Ellen's show, about those theologians Walter Brueggemann calls "court theologians." Brueggmann characterizes the theologians who persecuted and sought to silence the prophets of Judaism court theologians. Court theologians excuse and assist those who wield unjust power over others. They're the hired guns of the powers that be.

They exist in every age.

For those who are LGBT, as with all those who live on the margins, the voice that keeps luring us forward is not the voice that justifies what presently exists, but the the voice that sketches what Brueggemann and other theologians call the novum. These are the theologians who point us to a horizon of hope as the goal of history, a horizon continuous with this world and what happens in it. These are the theologians who urge us to build a more just, inclusive, humane world here and now, because we can glimpse the outlines of such a world in our dreams of the future.

Jesus stood in that prophetic tradition. And following in his footsteps and those of the prophets have been witnesses upon witnesses, pointing to the novum, calling us to live in hope, building a better world, collaborating with anyone else who catches this vision, whether that person be friend or foe, believer or infidel. Francis of Assisi was such a prophetic figure: he went, after all, into a mosque to pray. And he found God there.

I, think today, though, especially of Julian of Norwich, who speaks so tenderly of Mother Jesus: "The mother may give her child to suck her milk, but our precious Mother Jesus, he may feed us with himself, and does full courteously and full tenderly," says Julian.

In speaking of God's maternal concern for us, Julian transcends the medieval period and becomes prophetically pertinent to Christianity today--at a moment in which some forces within the Christian churches seek to make an idol out of maleness, to propose that the revelation that God as male is part and parcel of the unchangeable revelation of Jewish and Christian faith.

Julian's present pertinence was evident when the current Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church of the U.S. used Julian's phrase "Mother Jesus" several years ago. When Katharine Jefferts Schori quoted Julian, she was immediately attacked by . . . traditionalists. She was attacked by the same people who have been telling the churches that they are the sole, unilateral guardians of The Tradition.

Suddenly, a quite traditional citation from a woman who has been declared Blessed by the Roman Catholic church became controversial, a feminist warping of the scriptures that has a political agenda attached to it. Suddenly, the same traditionalists who have been safeguarding (so they claim) the very jot and tittle of every verse in scripture and tradition began to engage in acrobatic exegetical exercises to explain what Julian "really" meant when she spoke of Jesus as the Divine Mother.

The tradition holds far more options than the court theologians would like us to believe. Some of those options continue to point us towards a novum that is more just and inclusive than the status quo for which court theologians are prepared to fight tooth and nail. The voices we on the margins listen for today are not those seeking to preserve the world as it is for those they are hired to serve. The voices we seek to hear point us towards a novum much richer with promise of justice than the present in which we live--and those voices often speak surprisingly out of a bible and tradition that the court theologians and their masters have done all in their power to tame and sanitize.