Transformative Journeys and Finding the Thread: Blogging as Empires Decline

Dear Friends,

I appreciate the encouragement of those of you who’ve contacted me to ask why I haven’t been writing here. I apologize for my absence. I’m not sure if I can explain even to myself my reluctance to write this week.

Here’s a stab at an explanation. When I was a child, two books that profoundly influenced me were George MacDonald’s fairy tales-cum-mystical fantasies The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie. As I grew up and began to read a bit about MacDonald’s theology—and also learned that many others, including C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, had been similarly influenced by MacDonald—I came to see that what enthralled me in MacDonald’s work were several images for the spiritual life embedded in these fairy tales, which framed my imagination about spirituality even before I began to understand the significance of those images.

One is MacDonald’s famous image of a bath of burning roses maintained by a divine mother figure that rejuvenates those immersed in it. Another is less obvious, but equally compelling. It’s the image of the thread that runs through all the subterraneous tunnels the characters in the novels have to navigate, in order to lead them to safety and light.

I don’t remember if MacDonald describes the thread that the princess and Curdie must find and to which they must cling as a bright thread. In my child’s imagination, however, it was definitely a shining thread, a golden one that led them to safety because it alone gleamed in the darkness they had to traverse to find their way out of danger.

And that image of the bright and shining thread became for me, as I grew up, an image of what I needed to seek constantly in my life, no matter what twists and turns were around the corner—of what I needed to seek constantly in order to stay on the path.

Lately, I feel I’ve lost sight of the thread. I feel bewildered, in the etymological sense of the word: in the wilderness, and daunted by it, without a clear indicator of where to place my foot in order to find safety and a path.

When I began this blog, I thought I was on the path. I thought that I was following the shining thread. Lately, though, I begin to wonder if I have somehow lost sight of what allured me, as I began to share my journey with others through this blog.

Here’s how I feel, frankly: the world is full of that bright thread I’m describing. It runs through all cultures and in all religious and philosophical traditions. I sense that I am picking up traces of the thread when my contact with others, with new ideas, with books I haven’t yet read, with religious symbols, somehow pulls me beyond myself, onto a journey of meaningful encounter that moves me beyond the narrow, selfish confines of my own experience.

For me, the path has to have a moral trajectory, in order to make sense. I have to feel a moral tug ahead of me in order to move forward with any certainty that I am on the right path. Spirituality is, for me, bound up with moral force, with the clarity of ideas and symbols that not only communicate meaning to me, but change the way I see things and behave. That’s what I mean by morality, and by moral force.

Lately, I have begun to feel that much that I write about, much that I read everyday, simply does not have those threads running through it which tell me I am on the right path. The ugly political-religious debates of this summer, with the town-hall meetings and the mean-spirited attacks by members of my own religious community on proposals to extend access to health care, have had a cumulative effect on my spirit. I am beyond weary, listening to the hate speech pour forth, the attacks on immigrants, the mendacious distortions about health care reform even by religious people.

I have had enough of hate and meanness and lies. Above all, I think, I have had my fill of hearing lies.

I feel lately as though I am surrounded by lies. And those most apt to be lying are the ones shouting louder than anyone else that they alone have the truth and that everyone else is a liar. I feel lately that the American political sphere—and to a great extent American religious life—is coming to resemble very precisely Augustine’s description of the city of man, in his classic work City of God.

Augustine thought that, without grace, human life and human communities descend to the state of the latrocinium. Without grace, societies become dens of thieves and robbers. The bright and shining thread of moral force does not run through such societies, because it cannot do so. They have chosen to debase language, thought, communitarian life to such an extent that it is impossible to know where truth lies or to hear redemptive insight within the babble of meaningless talk intended to mask the rapacity of the rich and powerful and to present that rapacity as noble and religiously upright.

I suppose I am saying that I do not feel enlivened by—and I do not find hope in—much of what passes as political discussion in my culture these days, and in the religious underpinnings of that discussion. In fact, I find the opposite. I feel dispirited and downhearted when I entertain that discussion. I feel the need to look elsewhere for the bright threads that, throughout my life, have pointed me to authenticity as I journey.

And so I find myself wondering where to turn now, what to do. As I approach 60 (that birthday is just around the corner for me), I have the kinds of questions Erik Erikson tells us many of us face as we reach the final period of our life. I have questions about how best to contribute, how most effectively and generatively to use the time I have left.

I have questions about how to find that bright, shining thread at this point in my life, and to assist others in finding it, through what I write and what I do. That was what got me going, when I began this blog, and that vision has sustained me as I have written faithfully here for many months now.

Where these questions are leading me, I don't really know. If this blog is simply one more commentary on contemporary religious and political matters, particularly in the American context, then I doubt that it contributes a great deal. Blogs like that are a dime a dozen. We’re glutted with commentary.

And, ultimately, all the commentary doesn’t seem to make a great deal of difference. It doesn’t stop the lies from pouring forth. It doesn’t stop the rich and powerful from lording it over the weak and defenseless. It doesn’t stop the systemic distortion of truth used by the powerful to disguise the inequities in the world in which we live. It doesn’t shame religious leaders who abuse religious ideas and religious language to cater to the rich and powerful and demean the poor and defenseless. It doesn’t stop them from such shameful abuse of religion.

Granted, I may be asking questions like this with an acuity not everyone feels because of certain features of my life journey that are unique to me. As I’ve noted, I’m on the verge of a significant birthday, and that passage evokes these reflections. I’m also an out-of-work and failed theologian who has to ask such questions with a certain urgency because I do not have the support networks that other academics (or many other professional people my age) have.

But I may also be asking questions that are part of the zeitgeist we are all confronting now, as the declining American empire goes into overdrive to try to keep at bay a process of decline that is inevitable—unless we are willing to entertain the kinds of moral questions that an empire in decline has to entertain, if it wishes to move gracefully to the new, post-imperial stage of its existence.

But declining empires never do ask such moral questions. That is, in fact, precisely why they decline in the first place. They decline because they believe they can prescind from all the moral concerns essential to the maintenance of a viable human community—concerns about finding and speaking truth, concerns about curbing the inevitable tendency of the rich to abuse the poor, concerns about the tendency of religious groups in decaying empires to put their central symbols and ideas to the service of propping up power centers rather than calling them to moral accountability.

Meanwhile, folks have to go on living, as best we can, while things fall apart. And I'm trying to find a way to do that, these days, as I look once again for the bright and shining thread that set me on the path of blogging here.

"Charity in Truth": Some Preliminary Reflections on Benedict's Encyclical

In case readers are wondering, I’m not ignoring the pope’s recent encyclical Caritas in veritate. I was out of the country when it came out, and without a reliable internet connection as I traveled.

So I didn’t begin reading it in earnest until my return to the U.S. last week, when I was able to download a copy of it. Since I happened to be in Germany at the time, I did read interesting summaries and analysis of it in the German press when it appeared, summaries far more intellectually challenging than anything I have yet to read in the American press.

I should be perfectly honest and state from the outset—as a preface to anything I might later write about the encyclical—that encyclicals just don’t do it for me. I read them; I study them and have taught them. I value what they have to say, within certain limits that have everything to do with the historical conditioning of any church document.

Like many American theologians, I have wondered about the obliviousness of most American Catholics to the venerable social teaching of the Catholic church, as this has been articulated in encyclicals and pastoral letters. I have been amazed, in particular, by the refusal of those American Catholics who have set themselves up as the chief guardians of orthodoxy in recent decades to listen to this social teaching, at the same time that they loudly profess themselves to be more Catholic and more Roman than the rest of us.

But encyclicals just don’t do it for me. If I’m seeking spiritual enrichment—and I often am, when I turn to a theological text, more than I’m seeking intellectual stimulation—I’d far rather read Meister Eckhart or Teresa of Avila, Johann Baptist Metz or John Dominic Crossan, or for that matter, Audre Lorde or Mary Oliver. And the gospels.

Encyclicals don’t convey transformative truth to me, and that’s the kind of truth I hunger for when I read theological or spiritual texts (or politically transformative ones or soul-changing literary works). And that presents something of a problem for anyone reading a text that calls itself “Charity in Truth,” with its many self-conscious echoes of John Paul II’s encyclical “Splendor of Truth.”

I’m finding Caritas in veritate particularly hard slogging, because the text is, frankly, such a mess. It’s a compendium of just about every theological aperçu Benedict has had, in a long, distinguished career as a theologian and Vatican official. As a compendium, it never moves in a straight, clean line, but moves in circles, back and forth, engaging over and over some of the movements and tendencies in church and society that have preoccupied Benedict for decades now.

It’s a rough beast slouching somewhere to be born, then—and I do not intend to belittle the document in making that observation, but to note the hermeneutical problems that anyone who tries to take the document seriously will encounter from the outset, if she or he reads it with due attention, particularly to the manifold context(s) it’s seeking to engage.

It’s a valuable document, because it sets the record straight about an issue that many American Catholics (and the mainstream American media) simply refused to face during the pontificate of John Paul II: this is the critique of unbridled capitalism that runs very strongly through the thinking of John Paul II and his successor. It is simplistic and dishonest to reduce the work of these complex thinkers to a single anti-modern, anti-communist reflex. The American media sought consistently to do that with John Paul, and got away with it, because the text of the pope’s defeat of communism which dominated American media discourse about John Paul II, a text that consciously and deliberately obliterates his critique of capitalism, outshone any other aspect of his papal reign.

With Benedict, it’s going to be harder to ignore the critique of unbridled capitalism, for a variety of reasons. One is historical: the neo-conservative moment has been eclipsed by something else now struggling to be born in Western history, something rightly critical of the excesses of a “conservatism” that was not ever conservative at all, but which basked in warm, fuzzy, hypnotic and totally false nostalgia while it enabled one of the most a-traditional, anti-conservative periods of ruthless economic rapacity in world history.

Another reason I think Benedict’s critique of unbridled capitalism will receive more of a hearing than John Paul II’s similar critique did is that Benedict has, unfortunately, failed to dazzle people either inside or outside the church, as the charismatic John Paul II dazzled. And that lack of dazzle may well work to Benedict’s advantage, when it comes to this encyclical.

Let’s face it: there hasn’t been much of a narrative line to Benedict’s papacy, thus far, other than one of constant resistance to this and that. Fairly or unfairly, the media have been adroit about depicting Benedict as a constant naysayer, and, for whatever reason, he and the coterie of Vatican advisors with whom he’s chosen to surround himself have not been conspicuously successful at countering that media narrative. Indeed, they’ve acted again and again in ways that lend credence to this simplistic narrative.

So when Benedict does say something that’s not merely no and again no, and when he says it substantively and brilliantly, I believe people are inclined to listen. They want to find some hook on which to hang this papacy, which otherwise has the feel of an interim papacy everyone's merely enduring until a dazzling successor to John Paul II comes along. I suspect that Caritas in veritate may well turn out to be that hook, the defining moment of Benedict’s papacy.

One other very surface, top-of-the-head impression—and I reserve the right to change my mind about this as I read further in the text: it strikes me that Benedict’s choice to focus on the theme of love in truth is an indirect but quite deliberate attempt to correct an impulse in the church that he himself played a huge role in setting into motion. This is the impulse represented by John Paul II’s Veritatis splendor —or, more precisely, by how “Splendor of Truth” came to be used and read in many Catholic circles, notably in the United States.

I remember when Veritatis splendor came out. I remember the effect it had on the life of the church, in theological circles, on my own life. I have blogged about that. As I noted in a previous posting about this topic, in the latter part of the 1980s, I was asked by a graduate program in lay ministry at a Catholic university to write a textbook in ethics for this program.

The program was the Institute for Ministry at my alma mater, Loyola of New Orleans. I wrote an introduction to Catholic ethical theory for this program in the late 1980s, and when it was finished, was told by LIM’s director that he had sent it to bishops across the nation, and had gotten glowing reports about it back from almost all dioceses.

When Veritatis splendor came out, however, this introduction to Catholic ethics, which had just been reviewed by bishops across the nation and found to be solid and orthodox, suddenly became problematic. I was asked to re-write the text, incorporating huge chunks of Veritatis splendor as much as possible.

I did so. I labored hard on the revision. This request came just after a Catholic college in North Carolina has just given me a one-year terminal contract, while refusing to disclose why I was being given a terminal contract after I had just had an extremely positive annual evaluation. When that college's leaders lied to me after I appealed for the reason for my terminal contract and when the abbot of the monastery that owned the college colluded in the stone-walling, I resigned.

So I needed the money I would make by revising this ethics text, frankly. And I needed even more desperately some assurance that I still had a place somewhere in the church, that my vocation as a theologian still counted for somebody somewhere in the Catholic church.

The experience of receiving the terminal contract just as Veritatis splendor was coming down the pike, and of being asked to revise an introduction to ethics that I had written only a few years ago, because it was suddenly problematic in light of Veritatis splendor, was a watershed experience for me as a theologian. In fact, after these experiences, I never again found any place at all in the Catholic church to follow my vocation as a theologian. Nor did Steve.

One door after another began to shut—to slam—in our faces, and we found ourselves on the outside looking in, first as theologians and then as Catholics. Loyola's Institute for Ministry chose not to hire me to teach in its program any longer, though I had previously been an academic advisor to the program, had written one of its textbooks, and, exceedingly hurtful, was an alumnus of Loyola.

The message that Steve and I began receiving persistently from every Catholic institution with which we came into contact at this moment of our vocational lives, the message that we were not welcome anywhere, had everything in the world to do with Veritatis splendor, and with its rubric of truth.

Truth as weapon. Truth as a sword to cleave the faithful from the unfaithful, to drive the unwashed and impure out of the community of the washed and pure. Whatever John Paul II (and Ratzinger) intended with this encyclical, the practical effect for many Catholics—for many Catholic theologians, particularly those writing about ethical issues—was devastating. This encyclical was used as a blunt instrument to bludgeon people into submission, and if we failed to submit, to drive us out of communion.

I did revise my ethics text, but it appeared that even my alma mater now found my work as a theologian—my Catholicity itself—lacking. To the best of my knowledge, the revised text was ditched and not used in the program after I labored hard to produce it. As I labored for months at the revisions, I found that one chapter alone, the chapter on sexual ethics, was suddenly problematic above all—an ironic finding, when I had been assured only four or five years ago that the text had passed the muster of almost all bishops in the country, as a sound and faithful introduction to Catholic ethics.

And the sticking point now, with the promulgation of Veritatis splendor was, above all, the question of homosexuality. I revised. I labored. I dumped huge sections of Veritatis splendor into the revised text. But nothing sufficed. Though I had written the previous text as theologians normally write texts nowadays, depending on the community of my peers to help me evaluate and critique the text, this time around, I was appointed a censor, a Jesuit whose field was not even moral theology.

Every chapter in my revised text pleased him, except the chapter on sexual morality—and the section of that chapter that could not receive his imprimatur was the chapter on homosexuality. Every time I tried to produce a revision to this chapter that sought to hold in tension the venerable Catholic teaching about the primacy of conscience and the magisterium’s condemnation of homosexual acts, I received page after page of single-spaced notes that essentially commanded me to do what in conscience I could not do: write a chapter which told students the Catholic church condemns homosexuality, and leave it at that. No nonsense about conscience, and no hermeneutical questions about the scriptures that forbid homosexuality.

The point I want to make with this story is simple: John Paul II’s teaching about truth, behind which Ratzinger stood always in the background, has translated, in American Catholicism, into something that is not adequately Catholic. It has translated into witch hunts and the reduction of a fine, complex, ancient tradition, particularly in the area of ethics, into an anti-intellectual set of formulas that are used not to provoke thought or to invite discourse designed to help us fathom and internalize the tradition. These simplistic, anti-intellectual formulas are not intended to help us immerse ourselves in the transformative Truth Who is God. They are intended to separate the saved from the unsaved.

The truth we’ve ended up with is not transformative at all. It’s nothing like the biblical notion of truth—of God as the ultimate truth, Whom we must encounter in transformative love, and with Whom we must grapple in the darkness of faith. It has no adequately Catholic sense that religious truth operates on a complex variety of levels, and that not every formula is equally central to the life of faith. It completely overlooks the hierarchy of truths, placing all "truths" in the church at the same level, trying to impose all of them on everyone, as if all are revealed, infallible truth necessary for salvation.

The notion of truth that has come to prevail in American Catholicism following Spendor veritatis is formulaic, simplistic, catechetical in the worst, most mindless, sense of that term. It convinces no one. It cannot convince, because it is not designed, as religious truth must be, to reach the heart. It betrays the tradition. It is a weapon used to make the church less, rather than more, catholic.

And I believe Benedict now sees this, and wants to address what happened when he and John Paul II put that particular weapon into the hands of uneducated bishops and layfolks who welcomed the weapon to mount a vicious purge in the church, a purge all about trying to force everyone possible to dance to their political and ideological tunes. I think the pope is now trying to reconnect what ought never to have been separated, if we want to call ourselves Catholic and orthodox: love and truth.

And I suspect that this move comes too late, for many of us . . . .

Thought for the Day: Audre Lorde on Courage to Tell Truth

And I wonder what I may be risking as I become more and more committed to telling whatever truth comes across my eyes my tongue my pen—no matter how difficult—the world as I see it, people as I feel them.

Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1988) (pp. 51-2).

Thought for the Day: Ongoing Struggle to Find and Tell Truth as Heart of Artistic Endeavor

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), p. 409.

Approaching Holy Stories: The Harlequin and the Burning Nandina

Steve tells me that I talk in my sleep. He goes to sleep hours after I do most nights. As a result, he gets to hear me babble one nonsense question after another, issue imperatives in fluent gibberish that seem to have shreds of sense about them, but which fracture the logic of our everyday lives.

I have no idea what I’ve said to him until the next morning, when he reports the utterances to me. He has to write them down to remember them. Last night, though, I had the rare experience of actually hearing myself sleep-talk. We had gone to sleep with Flora, the mother corgi, between us, Valentine and Crispen, her half-corgi pups, in their usual spots at our feet. Flora is not a cuddler. She normally spends a few minutes with us and then heads for her pallet at the foot of the bed or on the footstool off the bed.

It’s a corgi thing, apparently. Her predecessor Braselton aka Brassie did the same. They’re sweet dogs (well, Brassie was peculiar though lovable), but not gushy with their affection. They want you to be clear about who is really doing whom a favor, in this symbiotic human-canine relationship.

For reasons unbeknownst to us, Flora decided to grace us with her presence into the night last night. Until the sleep-talking incident. Which went like this, as well as I can recall it:

Me: Steve. C. is next to me with his head raised, watching F. She’s on the pillow.

Steve: Nmmhn.

Me: Steve. Are you awake?

Steve: No. Are you?

And here’s the strange part. Though I “heard” that conversation clearly, and can remember it word for word, I wasn’t awake—not, that is, until Steve asked me if I were awake.

At which point I shot awake with a vengeance, puzzled that “I” could have been talking in my sleep, have been aware of doing so, have heard what I said—and still have been asleep. A disturbing recognition, since it undercuts our—my—pretensions to control, my oh-so-assured sense that there’s a me inside, who knows, chooses, acts. Who controls.

What awareness of dreaming does for us, I think, is show us that there are others inside us. Others who do the controlling. And who are beyond “our” control.

There’s that capering harlequin self who inducts us into dreamscapes. His job is to outwit us, to outwit the self that wants to maintain the illusion of control. She or he has to do that subversive thing when the controlling ego self goes to sleep, in order to get us to see what we actually saw in waking (in “real”) life, but whose significance we didn’t catch.

Dreams force us to take another look at what we see with our waking eyes, and yet don’t see enough. The way he twisted his ring as he assured me of his love for me. The frozen, disdainful way she held herself away from the table as she told us she values our work. The mottled snake skin that covered half of her face as she lied to me, her face turning yellow with envy under the mottled snake covering.

The sly, capering harlequin dream master inside all of us exposes us, whittles away our pretensions, whisks the covers away. And forces us to see. To become aware. To choose awareness over unawareness.

Dreams are, it seems to me, another form of awareness. One that moves at a tangent to “real”-life awareness. One that takes the same material we encounter and process in our everyday lives, but whose significance we don’t adequately sift while awake, since that material often comprises recognitions we do not wish to entertain, and which would disrupt our "normal" lives with their revelatory import, if we let them inside our minds as we go about our business.

And somewhere inside these recognitions is, it seems to me, a key that unlocks the significance of holy stories. Holy stories are far less like descriptions of the flat realities we encounter everyday, and far more like the dreamscape to which the harlequin leads us when our ego-minds switch off.

Holy stories do not describe what is scientifically true. The do not say what is factually verifiable. Instead, they subvert the assurances of our everyday perspectives on the world. They force us to recognize what is going on all around us, but what we refuse to see, because our ego selves want to remain encased in a hard shell of illusory control.

To the extent that we approach holy stories—and religion in general—with the presupposition that holy stories and religion are all about reinforcing our dominion over the world, we will be disappointed. To the extent that we expect holy stories to mirror our need for control, to make us comfortable in a world of which we fatuously imagine we are the master, we will find ourselves perplexed. We will remain an outsider to the real significance of holy stories and of faith.

To the extent that we are willing to slip, fall, slide down the tunnel of dream vision into a landscape simultaneously familiar and totally alien, where we exercise no mastery at all, we will begin to understand what holy stories are all about. The mind is a terrible thing to lose. But it’s only in losing it—in losing its pretensions to understand and control—that we will begin to approach the holy burning at the heart of the holy story. Which peeks out at us everywhere in daily life, but whose fiery presence in the nandina we cannot acknowledge until we let ego sleep, because, well, fire burns.

The Flaw in the Pottery: God's Entry Point

With this blog, it’s a daily challenge to stay focused. My focus is wide, and as a result, the blog seems to draw a disparate group of readers—for which I’m glad. As the list of topics I’m pursuing here (the list is on my profile page) indicates, I talk about spirituality and social activism, the religious right’s absurd pretense to own God, the injustice churches practice towards LGBT persons, bullying of LGBT youth in schools, and building a more humane society. I’m happy to talk with anyone and everybody about these and other topics.

The challenge I have in staying focused doesn’t have to do with the disparate topics I’m pursuing. It has to do with my commitment—to myself first of all, and then to readers—to focus on the truth. It’s so easy to get nudged away from that place inside ourselves from which any truth worth claiming springs. It’s easy to get drawn away from transformative truth, which is the only kind of truth worth writing about.

It’s easy to get disconnected. For a number of years, I meditated daily on one of my favorite phrases from E.M. Forster, his call to readers in Howard’s End to connect. To make myself hear that call, I painted Forster’s saying, “Only connect,” on the wall of my office, where I could see it scrolling like a rainbow above my computer every time I raised my eyes from the screen.

To me, the significance of the phrase has to do with inner life: we must connect inside ourselves. We must connect to ourselves. In a world of competing voices, each of which lays claim to our loyalty, we have to struggle to hear our own unique voice—which is, in the language of faith communities, the voice of God speaking in the depths of our conscience.

It’s not easy. It’s much easier to disconnect, to stop listening, to let the babble of voices all around us flow over us and lull us into complacency. In some ways, nothing in life is harder than listening to our own depths, connecting to them, living from them, speaking, writing, loving, ministering from them. But it’s worth the pain: the truth we offer others when we retain a vital connection to the voice that speaks truth in our own depths is uniquely powerful.

And we are lost when we stop connecting to our own depths, when we let other voices overpower the voice of conscience inside ourselves. Nothing has more claim on us than that voice of authenticity inside us—that is, we should never let anything establish a greater claim on us than the voice speaking in our depths.

I say all this in part as a challenge to myself as I undertake a new project, one that grows out of this blog. For some time now, I’ve been encouraged by a number of friends to turn several stories from my own experience into books. These are stories that have fallen into my hands by “accident,” and which others consider it important for me to tell. They are stories that connect to my own life.

I have resisted the encouragement to write about these stories. I have not made time in my life to write. I’m frankly afraid to write—in the concentrated, depth-connecting way a book demands.

And yet, it seems I have no choice. The encouragement just doesn’t go away. In fact, the more I blog and the more others read this blog, the more the encouragement pours in. And there’s that inconvenient, nagging voice inside that tells me I have to listen, since the persistent call of others for us to do something surely lays claim to our attention.

So this is an important week for me, because one day this week, I’ll spend time with someone who has some crucial pieces of information about one of the two stories about which I am being urged to write. In fascinating ways, all kinds of pieces of the puzzle keep emerging and falling into place, to make it possible—well, to make it imperative—that I pursue this story and see if I can find a voice to tell it. Doors have opened, beyond my imagining or control, and I seem to have no choice except to make my way through them.

I will be grateful to readers for holding me in the light as I set forth on this journey.

Speaking of readers, of the disparate group of folks who continue to nudge me to think and write, I have been remiss in not noting the support of Jason and Amanda Gignac, both of whom have mentioned this blog on their own wonderful blogs in the past several weeks. My list of e-friends has links to Jason’s blog “Moored at Sea,” which discussed one of my postings a few weeks ago, and to Amanda’s blog “The Ramblings of a Hopeful Artist.” Amanda recently mentioned Bilgrimage in a family blog she maintains, “Gignacery.”

As best as I remember, Amanda and Jason got connected to my blog discussion when I happened to mention Emily Dickinson in a previous posting. I have found their feedback challenging and refreshing. When I taught, one of the things that I valued most about the teaching experience was being forced to listen to what students thought I had said, to hear my own words from an entirely different perspective.

For anyone who interacts with thoughtful and engaged younger folks, dialogue is a constant experience of having one’s feet put to the fire—and that’s a good experience for someone who thinks he’s the teacher and the one to whom he’s speaking is the taught. It’s seldom that way. In fact, it’s usually the other way around.

I’m thinking of this today after I spent over an hour last night chatting online with one of my nephews. We are much alike—prone to give ourselves to passionately to a smorgasbord of causes, prone to promote our passionate causes vociferously, quick to think others haven’t heard us clearly enough.

When I learned recently that my nephew had been bamboozled (what, me impose my worldview on someone else? Never!) into choosing a third-party candidate in the coming elections, I went on the warpath. Politely, you understand, in that sly way Southerners always do within the family circle.

I began to bombard his brother, who’s away at school with him, with articles about how the party that wants to neutralize student votes in the coming federal election is funding the campaign to seduce college students into voting for the third-party candidate. I asked said brother to convey the information to my nephew, in a way that wouldn’t make him feel I was attacking him.

We saw each other this past weekend, my nephew and I, and, in retrospect, the encounter had a certain tension attached to it. The gathering was a celebration of sorts of my aunt’s 80th birthday. My oldest nephew also had three friends from grade school visiting him, one Indian and the other two Korean, and the youngest two nephews had one of their African-American friends with them, so it was both a birthday party and a United Nations gathering with a number of folks I had never met. Talking to new folks across cultural boundary lines requires skill. It also requires energy.

By the time the youngest nephew arrived at the dinner table, I was talked out. I am a Meyers-Briggs INFJ who feels totally at sea in any large gathering—too many people to attend to carefully, too many signals and too much information pouring in through my intuitive-feeling filters. I often withdraw into a kind of shell and let the extraverts and sensates, who don’t have to contend with all that emotional and intuitive “stuff” pouring in, carry the day.

Steve’s a sensate, by the way, and a thinker, though we share the introvert and judging characteristics. It’s interesting to compare our takes after a gathering. I’m always amazed that so much that seems crystal clear to me—so much that has flowed into my psyche through the intuitive-feeling side—just goes right over his head: who’s fighting with whom; who’s unhappy and why they are unhappy; why X said that zingy thing to Y, etc. On the other hand, he sees thing—sensate things—that are right in front of me and which I completely miss, because I’m too busy fine-tuning the feeling and intuitive channels on my receiver.

My hour or so of talking online to my nephew last night was instructive. I needed this reminder that young people see things we older ones miss, and that young folks can perceive our distraction as a sign of disinterest in them. It was important that I have this discussion—which got heated on the political front as well as the interpersonal one—on the very day I blogged about the need of churches to reach out to searching youth.

Those younger folks keep us older ones honest. The process of ministry and the process of educating are two-way streets, in which the minister must be ready to become the ministered to, and the teacher must be willing to be the taught. Churches engaging in youth ministry ignore these dynamics at their peril.

As I thank readers who seem to come to this blog from a number of disparate paths, I also want to thank Julie Arms for her comments on yesterday’s “Camp Out” posting. I appreciate the information that there are United Methodist readers circulating my postings. I had suspected this might be the case.

I’m also aware of some ELCA readers, whose interest in the blog I appreciate as well. Knowing that people within the faith communities don’t find my critique of the churches unredeemingly harsh, and knowing that I am somehow tying into a theological dialogue within various communities of faith, keeps me thinking and writing.

Last week, I had another reminder of the significance of continuing to speak about the issues I enumerated at the start of this posting, when a mother of a boy bullied in a high school, who is reading this blog, contacted me to ask for support. And—if I needed further confirmation of the importance of this project—today when I opened my email, I found an invitation to support the Trevor Project, a national project dedicated to combating suicide of gay teens (see www.thetrevorproject.org/home2.aspx).

Since this is one of those “to speak of many things” postings, I want to add some notes on a number of stories that have come to my attention recently. This past Sunday, a Catholic priest at the Newman Center on the University of California campus at Fresno, preached a courageous homily about the initiative to withdraw from gay Californians the right to marry—Proposition 8.

I first read about Fr. Geoffrey Farrow’s homily—in fact, I read the homily itself—on Pam’s House Blend blog yesterday morning (www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=7392). Since that time, I’ve noticed links to the story on a number of other blogs, including www.afterelton.com/blog/brianjuergens/catholic-priest-comes-out-against-proposition-8-comes-out-gay?&comment=55467, www.towleroad.com/2008/10/fresno-priest-c.html, and the “Deep Something” blog of my e-friend John Masters at http://deep.mastersfamily.org/2008-10-06/courage-in-the-face-of-hate. These postings link to an ABC news report of the story at http://abclocal.go.com/kfsn/story?section=news/local&id=6431105.

Geoffrey Farrow’s homily focuses on the choice of the Catholic bishops of California to support the proposition to withdraw marriage rights from gays. Not only have the bishops made such a choice, they are also encouraging all priests in California parishes to read pastoral letters supporting the bishops’ decision. It was an act of courage for Fr. Farrow to announce publicly that his conscience forbids him to support the bishops’ political initiative against the human rights of gay citizens.

In his ABC interview (in which he also made public his own gay sexual orientation), Fr. Farrow notes that we have an ultimate obligation to listen to and obey our conscience, since we will one day die and will then be asked by the Lord whether we lived in fidelity to our consciences. It is highly likely that Geoffrey Farrow will be severely punished by the church for following his conscience in this matter; in fact, news reports indicate he had already cleared his belongings out of his rectory yesterday and was staying with friends.

I happen to be reading Scott Pomfret’s Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (NY: Arcade, 2008) as this news breaks. Interestingly enough, just after reading about Geoffrey Farrow’s homily, I came across a passage in Pomfret’s book that lists seven American priests who have come out publicly as gay men in the period 1987-2006 (pp. 88-89). As Pomfret notes, many gay priests refuse to come out publicly since, “For many, coming out costs them dearly” (p. 89).

In a church in which a significant proportion of priests are gay, priests are expected to support and actually preach in favor of political initiatives that cause misery to gay human beings. That same church quickly retaliates against a priest who states publicly that he is gay (or a woman who is ordained), while shielding priests who repeatedly molest minors.

Something is rotten here, clearly. It is an act of astonishing cruelty for an institution that proclaims that every human being has fundamental rights and fundamental worth in the eyes of God to require its ministers to violate their consciences (and their own personhood) to pursue morally ambiguous—if not outright evil—political goals.

And, while one would like to imagine that such cruelty is confined to one particular church, my experience in United Methodist institutions has led me to see that the special kind of cruelty the churches reserve for gay individuals is hardly restricted to the Catholic church: it is apparent in many churches, where people who proclaim themselves to be followers of Jesus do not think twice about humiliating and violating the rights of gay human beings in ways designed to scar us decisively, who are the objects of this behavior. What was done to Steve and me at one of these institutions, by a good Methodist leader, was designed to hurt and to humiliate. And it did hurt and humiliate. And not one of the Methodist leaders sitting on the board of that institution has ever raised his or her voice against the injustice done to us.

Since I’ve mentioned Scott Pomfret’s book about growing up gay and Catholic, I want to close with a brief notice of one of the important themes of his book. Throughout the memoir, Pomfret draws on a theme of native American spirituality: he notes that native American potters often deliberately introduce a flaw into their pots, since it is through the flaw that creative energy enters the world.

Pomfret’s story focuses on the assortment of misfits with whom he has been associated as a gay Catholic who has sought to retain some connection to a church that bashes him: people who seem to belong nowhere, who find a place nowhere other than in the church. It is among these believers, with their conspicuous flaws, that he finds grace and welcome.

Among those who aren’t flawed—or those of us who like to believe we have no flaws—not so much . . . .

Peas and Tea: People of the Lie and the Dissolution of Civic Virtue

“I’m making tea.”

“Peas? Why on earth do we need peas? I’m making quiche.”

“Not peas. Tea. I’m making tea.”

“I said we don’t need peas. Quiche will be plenty. With salad. I don’t want to be any trouble.”

Cooking with my aunt. Every storm that blows through now seems to cause some problem for her: downed trees in her yard with loss of power in the last spate of tornadoes in Little Rock; or just plain loss of power, which happened this weekend as Ike raked the city Saturday night, downing trees and causing power outages in many places. As did my aunt, Steve’s brother Joe also lost power.

So we had a post-hurricane party yesterday, cooking up things that were defrosting in both of their freezers. During which I realized that my aunt, though she can bake a mean sausage and cheese quiche, is not hearing as well as she used to. The problem is compounded by the fact that she lives alone and, like many elderly people who are alone much of the day and don’t hear well, talks over other people as they talk, making ludicrous tangles of conversation.

One thing that’s not waning as she approaches 80, though, is her sharp people sense. She can size someone up in a heartbeat, with unfailing instinct for solidity of character, or the lack thereof. Few people pass the test, I’m sorry to say. Not many people, in my aunt’s view, reach the sterling mark: tell the truth and shame the devil; tell the truth in season and out of season, even when it costs to speak truth; put loyalty to family and friends above your own life; guard your honor and that of those you love; give freely to those in need and don’t count the cost; show particular concern for those most trampled on in society.

Listening to my aunt, I realize how ingrained those ground rules of ethical behavior are in me, simply because they’re the ground rules with which I was raised—my family’s core values. We are far from paragons of virtue: we can excoriate each other wickedly with our tongues; we never met a grudge that we didn’t want to invite home and fatten up; we have too little patience, especially with people who lack manners. To our lasting discredit, we once expelled a cousin who became pregnant in high school, with painful consequences that go on right to this day. Her father, my mother’s brother, threatened to shoot himself when the news broke, raging through the house brandishing a pistol shouting, “My mother and all my sisters were virtuous women. You have ruined our honor!”

But truth counts with us. Lie to us, and it’s over. In her time cooking and eating with us yesterday (and with Steve’s brother and mine, and my nephew Luke), she spent much of the afternoon grieving the loss of a man who has mown her yard for decades now. She liked this man. She has recommended him to others, has helped him grow his business.

But he made the mistake of lying to her recently. About something inconsequential. Apparently not realizing that any lie is consequential to my aunt. Tell the truth and shame the devil; tell the truth in season and out of season, even when it hurts to proclaim the truth. She will not put up with a lie. Or with a liar. It’s now over. She has a new yard man, who doesn’t do her yard nearly as well as her former friend did.

But one can’t have one’s lawn mown by a liar. It’s as simple as that, as stark as that, as plain as that. Let a lie pass unheeded, and who knows what will happen next?

I wonder what the body politic would be like if my aunt’s no-lies-period ethic held sway there. And to wonder that is to ask why it’s so important, anyway, to tell the truth—why it’s so important to have leaders who are truth tellers.

After all, our society has grown accustomed to the lie. Hasn’t it? Haven't we? The political circuses of the last several elections have been, in one sense, a long training for all of us—a training in which we’ve been carefully tutored to swallow larger and larger lies, and to pretend we can’t tell the difference anymore.

It’s all he-said, she-said. The media are adroit about playing one side against the other, as if both sides are equally capable of equivocation and mendacity. As if the truth is not plain, and plainly to be seen. And it's not in the middle. Some people lie. Others don't.

And we’re supposed to go along. We’re supposed to turn off something inside us—our consciences, perhaps?—that can clearly distinguish truth from fiction, the lie from the honest statement. We’ve supposed to conclude that politics is, after all, a dirty Machiavellian scorched-earth game in which the better liar inevitably wins. And should therefore be lauded for her or his skill in playing the game. And should therefore be recognized as a born leader capable of leading a nation, or a corporation, or a university.

I’m not comfortable with these conclusions. I tend to be very much like my aunt. Lie to me, and I'm done with you. I'll interact with you. But I won't trust you. And I surely will not esteem you, or support your leadership, if you're a leader lying to me.

And here’s why, I think: let people lie to you, and you open the door for any and all violations of ethical decency, in how they treat you and others. Let leaders lie, openly, shamelessly, without challenging their distortion of truth, and you contribute to the destruction of civic society, whose existence depends on maintenance of fragile bonds of trust founded in the belief that people are being honest with each other and are committed to seeking the truth together.

Let leaders lie, and be prepared to be led into ethical never-never land. Where wars can be pursued (where people can be killed) on the basis of the grand lie. Where good people can be muzzled, vilified, hounded out of the public eye, robbed of their sterling reputations, because their very existence is a reproach to those who want to lie boldly. Where wealth snatched through rapacious greed can masquerade as honorable acquisition, and the poor can be blamed for being poor, can be told that they do not have initiative or intelligence or God on their side.

Where “Christians” become known primarily for those they hate and oppose, and where the fundamental core of Judaeo-Christian belief and ethics—a belief in practical compassion as the goal of all religious observance—can be absolutely cast aside as malicious prejudice represents itself (and successfully so) as the only accurate incarnation of the values of synagogue and church. Where the only religion regarded as authentic by the liars in whose hands the reins of control rest is the religion that blesses their rapacity, their dishonesty, their cruelty towards those who oppose them and those at the bottom of society.

I know. I've seen the process up-close, first-hand, in some universities at which I have worked, where leaders were people of the lie and surrounded themselves with people of the lie. Where they did all they could to disempower truth tellers.

It doesn’t take much study of history to see what happens when lies prevail—and are allowed to prevail—in any social context, whether a corporation, a university, or a nation. Nor does it take much study to learn what happens when those lied to not only learn to like being lied to, but learn to dislike having the truth told to them.

Let people of the lie prevail, and expect the dissolution of the bonds that hold together a civil society. Let them rule the land, and expect the decline of the land.

It’s as simple as that. And this is why, in the last analysis, my aunt felt she had no choice except to let her yard man go. Do business with someone who lies to you and overlook the lie, and who knows what might happen next.

The Journalist's Mission: To Discover Hidden Truth

I like Bill Moyers. Have always liked him. He strikes me as one of those rare voices of unalloyed integrity in American journalism, voices increasingly rare in an age of sound-bytes and commercial control of the media.

For that reason, I was delighted to learn early in April that Bill Moyers was awarded this year’s Ridenhour Courage prize to honor his commitment to costly truth-telling in journalism. Today’s Alternet website publishes Bill Moyers’ acceptance speech when he received the Ridenhour award on 3 April.

Some noteworthy comments from his speech:

We journalists are of course obliged to cover the news, but our deeper mission is to uncover the news that powerful people would prefer to keep hidden.

And yes, I believe journalism has a mission.

But I also tell them [i.e., youth considering a journalistic vocation] there is something more important than journalism, and that is the truth. They aren't necessarily one and the same because the truth is often obscured in the news.

Journalists have a mission. That mission is to seek and tell the truth at all cost, even when the powerful of the world try to silence your voice—as they will certainly seek to do.

As do the citizen journalists of Japan, about whom I blogged yesterday, Bill Moyers believes that “you will learn more about who wins and who loses in the real business of politics, which is governance, from the public interest truth-tellers of Washington than you will from an established press tethered to official sources . . . and from whistleblowers of all sorts who never went to journalism school, never flashed a press pass, and never attended a gridiron dinner.”

My view of what journalism is meant to be and can be at its best will forever be shaped by the memory of how one of my statewide daily newspapers, the Arkansas Gazette, met the challenge of the Central High integration crisis in 1957.

When Governor Faubus sought to close the school rather than allow it to be integrated, and President Eisenhower sent federal troops to assure that integration took place, any media outlet in Arkansas that defended integration paid a high price. The prevailing cultural climate of overwhelming racism assured that even the most moderate statement in favor of integration would be received as inflammatory—as beyond the pale.

It took courage to speak truth to power in that cultural climate. Though today business and church leaders of my state would like to take credit for having resisted ugly racism in the past, the truth is clear for anyone who cares to read our history: most white churches and almost all business leaders resisted integration, defended segregation, and justified our culture of racism.

It is easy to repent in retrospect, when we pay no price for doing so. It’s easy to cast ourselves in the role of the merciful when it costs us nothing to be merciful—nothing by way of taking sides in the battle of justice against injustice.

In that battle, the Arkansas Gazette did take sides: against the governor, against the business leaders of our state and most church leaders, against racism, hatred, and segregation. This statewide newspaper paid a price for choosing the path of costly grace. They lost subscribers. They were lambasted on all sides by powerful citizens of our state.

But they gave witness to the real craft and calling of journalism in an exemplary and unforgettable way. When newspapers in the South were poked, prodded, and pulled to tell stories that we all knew—stories of endemic oppression of people of color across our part of the United States—and when they had the courage to publish pictures of incidents we had all seen, we Southerners, of African Americans being turned away from lunch counters because of the color of their skin, the cultural tide began to shift in the whole nation.

It took courage to tell these stories, to print these pictures. It took courage to give a voice to an outside group—African Americans—who had previously been marginalized, objectified, denied a voice or any integrity at all by mainstream culture and the mainstream media. Those journalists who exhibited the rare courage demanded by the times will always be remembered as exemplars of their vocation. The others, the many, many apologists for the status quo—their names and faces have begun to fade into the history of the past century.

Why bring all of this up now, as Bill Moyers receives the Ridenhour prize? In the first place, I do so because what Moyers says in his acceptance speech echoes a point I have been stressing in this blog, in posting after posting.

This is that the truth is not just out there to be plucked like a ripe apple from a tree. It is not out there to be received in a handout of official soundbytes at a press-club luncheon.

The truth has to be sought, struggled for. In a climate in which the powerful always try to keep inconvenient truth hidden, in which the powerful can easily distort the truth and manipulate our consciousness such that we believe untruth, finding and telling the truth involves us in a battle. Those who seek and wish to tell truth are always engaged in an ongoing battle against lies, distortions, and manipulations designed to justify the cruelty and injustice of the status quo.

There are, of course, many aspects of the truth that we must battle today to discover—if we care about the truth at all; if we want to leave a better world for the next generation; if we want to build a healthier democracy in which more people have voice and access to power and privilege; if we wish to bind up wounds inflicted by the unjust. It is a battle to discover and publicize the American government’s use and approval of torture. It takes courage to pursue that shocking story, when so many powerful interest groups collude to keep the contours of the story hidden.

It is a battle to know what is happening in the war in Iraq, when we are not even allowed to see photographs of those who come home in coffins and body bags. It is an ongoing struggle to find out the truth about all those who are benefiting economically from this war. The channels through which money flows in our society are murky and hidden, particularly when the money is dirty. Anyone who tries to trace those channels will quickly find herself up against some powerful and ruthless interest groups who will use every dirty tactic in the book to keep the truth from coming out.

All these stories need to be told. On this blog, I keep maintaining that another story which also demands a hearing is the story of how our culture (and churches) treat gay and lesbian persons.

Because I grew up in the American South during the Civil Rights movement, I am always critically aware of the numerous, clear parallels between what was previously done to African Americans by my people, and what is done today to gay and lesbian persons. Just as African Americans and African-American stories could not obtain a hearing in the mainstream media, stories of the real, everyday lives of gay and lesbian persons are shut out of the media today. The mainstream media relegates “gay stories” to “the gay media,” thus assuring the continued marginalization of gay people and our stories, and assuring that our lives and stories remain hidden from people in the mainstream.

Just as anyone who challenged the prevailing cultural racism of the past, so today, anyone within mainstream culture who speaks out courageously on behalf of gay and lesbian human beings will pay a price. Church leaders who spoke out in the midst of the civil rights struggle lost donations; their church Sunday collections suffered. They received midnight visits and calls from rich members of their congregation who told them to cool it, to stop preaching a social gospel and concentrate instead on the “real” gospel of individual redemption.

Those midnight calls and visits continue today, when any mainstream church leader—especially in the American South—dares to raise her voice against oppression of gay and lesbian human beings. The threats to withhold donations go on today, just as they did in the past.

Grace is as costly today for churches that witness to Jesus’s redeeming mercy for all human beings by combating ugly injustice against some human beings, gay and lesbian ones, as it was in the past, if churches witnessed to Jesus’s redeeming mercy for all human beings by combating ugly injustice against people of color. It is just as difficult today to find, claim, and speak forth the truth about the real lives of gay human beings, in a church context, as it was for the churches of the past to find, claim, and speak forth the truth about the real lives of people of color.

The distortion of information, the machines that churn out a positive sewer of lies on a daily basis, is just as powerful today, regarding gay and lesbian human beings in our culture, as it was in the past, regarding African-American persons. Today, when I read what a Peter LaBarbera or an Elaine Donnelly or a Sally Kern says about me, about people I know, I can think only of the lurid flyers with which some kind Christian groups papered my high school in Arkansas in the late 1960s, when we finally integrated.

The flyers showed African-American men, lips accentuated, skin made as black as night, dancing with blond Southern girls. The text accompanying the pictures asked if this is what we really wanted Christian civilization, the civilization we had struggled so hard to build in the South, to come to.

Just as the LaBarberas, Donnellys, and Kerns of the world ask us today: is this what you really want Christian civilization to come to? Dirty, disease-ridden homosexuals showering with the flower of American manhood in military showers? Infectious, promiscuous homosexuals teaching your children, preying on them, converting them to their unhealthy lifestyle?

The tactics have not changed. The attempt to spread misinformation has not changed. The lies remain virtually the same, though the picture accompanying the lurid flyers telling us to fear forces that will cause the decay of Christian civilization shift, as it becomes convenient to target a different group: Jews, Muslims, people of color, women, gays.

And the price of seeking and speaking truth remains the same. Challenge the dissemination of misinformation, ask people to think, to talk respectfully with each other, to provide evidence for their “facts,” and you will meet fierce opposition.

You will be subject to slander, exclusion, misrepresentation. Your integrity will be questioned. You will be called a liar, even by those spreading ludicrous lies about you. You will be called a liar even when you value telling the truth far above precious jewels, and have a lifelong history of being a truth-teller.

This is the price any of us who are gay and lesbian, and who try to speak truth to power, pay. Sadly, we often pay that price right within the church context, right within Christian communities, within the churches where some of us continue to try to find a spiritual home and a welcoming Christian family.

If this is how those of us who are gay and lesbian are treated by many of our fellow Christians, if we ask for respectful dialogue based on truth and not on lies, is it any wonder that anyone who walks along with us pays a similar price? It takes courage to speak the truth, when many forces collude to keep the truth at bay.

For Christians who wish to be in solidarity today with gay and lesbian human beings, learning and speaking the truth about the real human lives of gay persons will continue to demand costly grace. My hat is off to you: thank you for your courage, your decency, your humanity.

When You Go on a Pilgrimage....

"Most pilgrims don't know why they're walking....Over the centuries the material trappings [of pilgrimages] have changed, but the concept of paring life down to its basic form has remained. When you go on pilgrimage, you put yourself on the margins of society. You escape its rules, but by the same token you put yourself at the mercy of a rather lawless frontier" (Jane Christmas, What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim [Vancouver: Greystone, 2007], 41).

For me, starting to journal in blog form definitely is pilgrimage. Same itchy uncertainty one has in setting forth on a journey into the unknown, with a horizon of hope in the distance. And when journaling turns into blogging, there's the added sense of self-exposure, with all the risks attendant on disclosing oneself to others.

Journaling is old hat to me. I've done it since I was in high school. When I review my journals over the 40 years that I've been keeping them, I'm amazed at the constancy of the preoccupations in them: God; how to talk about God in a world full of pain; the interface of religion and culture/politics; family and shifting definitions of family; how to claim identity, when aspects of one's identity seem shameful or tarnished (I'm both Southern and gay); dreams.

When I'm the only audience for my journal's soul-searching (well, when I and that unrelenting observer self who lives in the depths of the soul), I have a certain assurance about what it means to journal. The pilgrimage of conventional journaling at least follows a well-trodden road.

But blogging as a way of journaling? Perhaps that's as insane as setting out into the wildnerness on pilgrimage, putting oneself on the margins of society with a group of fellow travelers searching together for a goal that seems totally opaque to others.

Who's the audience for a journal-cum-blog? It seems extraordinarily solipsistic to think that anyone would want to read one's private meanderings on a regular basis.

What motivates me to want to try at least to share is twofold. First, there's the hope (a constant one running through my whole life journey) of finding fellow pilgrims, others moved by dreams, goals, and horizons similar to the ones that draw me forward.

And second, there's the increasing sense, as one moves through midlife, that it's important to leave something behind. To say something that counts. As Audre Lorde faced the terminal cancer that eventually took her life, she wrote, "I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and to share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigating pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk through the rain."

Yes. I understand that sense, the need to find transformative truth (for myself, for others) and to speak it, even when I pay a cost for doing so. To share it.

One of the reasons I've created links for this blog, to sites of fellow pilgrims as well as to news sites I visit frequently, is to point others to places in which I find truth that is not ordinarily discussed, printed, and shared. Many of the links are to sites that the mainstream media would quickly identify as "gay" sites.

I resist labeling them with that label, because in my view, though they are definitely gay information sites and are proud to claim the label, they are also sites to hear overlooked truths that need to find their way into the "mainstream." They are sites that insist on talking about what we don't want to talk about, but need to talk about, if we're to be a whole and humane society. They insist on delving into truth that promises social transformation and social healing, if it can be incorporated into our social (and ecclesial) structures.

To find that kind of truth, we--I--have to go on pilgrimage, away from safe and secure places, to places where such truth resides, even if it's in rocky pockets of hidden-away cliffs or at the bottom of the sea.