We each have our story. Our fathers abandoned us for a life
elsewhere. Or were explosive, abusive drunks. Or were quiet, emotionally
crippled drunks. Or told us to stop acting like goddam pansies. Or were
themselves so shamed by their own bodies and desires they couldn't reassure us
about our own. Or furtively imposed
their own same-sex attractions on us. Or told us we were going straight to hell
if we went on experimenting with the boy next door. Or...
My own story isn't representative of anyone but me. My
father was an obsessive-compulsive binge drinker, a hollowed-out emotional
wreck who destroyed himself before he'd made it to 64. It's been fifty years
since he died (on Mother's Day, for God's sake) when I was 8. I've spent my
whole adult life piecing together a fragmentary, indirect, conflicted
relationship with him.
So it was a huge grace when the week before last I
experienced a flood of compassion for him unlike anything that's ever come
alive in me before. During a journalling
exercise at a weeklong intensive program, I revisited the usual litany of ways
he failed me. And then: thanks to a constellation of circumstances I won't
rehearse here, I suddenly thought, my poor father, and spent the next fifteen
minutes quietly sobbing. And knew what I had to do. I needed to say Kaddish.
Non-Jew that I am.
If you're not Jewish or familiar with Jewish practice, Kaddish
is the prayer you say in memory of one you mourn, and especially in memory of
parents. The most observant say it every
day for a year, and then annually on the Yahrzeit--the anniversary of the
death. The odd thing is, the Mourner's Kaddish never mentions the deceased. It
glorifies God, prays for the speedy arrival of God's kingdom, and voices hope
that peace from above will descend on us and on all. This peculiar disconnect
between the content of the prayer and the emotionally charged intention with
which it's spoken is a source of discomfort to many who fulfill their
responsibility to recite it: they feel denied the chance to remember one they
loved in all his or her individuality.
But oddly, in keeping the deceased out of it, the prayer can
become a container big enough for the conflicted feelings you may have toward the
dead. You don't have to wax warm and fuzzy toward the person you're mourning.
You're not obliged to feel any one thing as opposed to something else. Instead,
you speak this on behalf of the dead in the presence of the Holy. The deceased
is representative of humanity. You're saying it for him. You're saying it for
yourself. You're saying it for all humankind. If what's really going through
your head as you pray is that the deceased was an empty emotional shell, or an
abusive creep who made your life hell when your were five, there's room for
that, and you don't have to fake the saccharine greeting-card sentiments that
characterize (for instance, in my own experience) so many Midwestern Protestant
funerals.
That unexpected space to feel whatever you're feeling can
become fertile ground for the post-mortem healing of relationships. If you say
Kaddish repeatedly, you'll experience it differently every time you do so. Your
feelings will change over time, from one day to the next, from one month to the
next, from one year to the next.
All this to unpack my intuitive flash, in the moment that I softened
towards a man I can most of the time feel very little towards at all, who died just
over half a century ago. This last week, I've continued to chew on why a nice Lutheran boy from the Midwest would
with unhesitating instinct borrow a Jewish prayer to mourn his father. Saying
it linked me to my partner in his Judaism, as well as to the leader of the
workshop--a man who over the last several years has given me more of what one
would hope to get from a father than probably anyone else in my life.
And then there's the very fact that in borrowing somebody
else's tradition, we can set aside toxic associations that our own spiritual
heritage has often accrued for us as queer men. We take what we need, in ways
that might not always win the approval of the keepers of the tradition(s) we
pilfer. But it's not that I can imagine my appropriation of the prayer
offending some simply because I don't have a right to it by heritage.
It's that I recited it in front of a five-foot Phallus in a flowering
meadow. Standing before this sign of linkage between my spiritual and erotic
life as a gay man, laying hands and forehead on it at the end of the prayer, I
contemplated my father's woundedness as a share in the wounds all men sustain. In
the midst of a circle that represented the infinitely fertile womb of the
Mother Goddess, I meditated on the sexuality that links my father to me in a
continuum with the embodied, desirous experience of all men--a message I
desperately needed to absorb from him as a boy but never could. And then found
myself giving thanks for the miracle of his orgasm that made my life possible.
I expect to go on doing the work of repairing my
relationship to my father for the rest of my life. Praying a very queer Kaddish
for my father, and on behalf of my
father, changes nothing of that, and changes everything.
GLORIFIED AND SANCTIFIED BE THE HOLY ONE'S GREAT NAME, THROUGHOUT
THE WORLD CREATED ACCORDING TO THE
DIVINE WILL. ESTABLISHED BE GOD'S KINGDOM IN YOUR LIFETIME AND DURING YOUR DAYS,
AND WITHIN THE LIFE OF ALL HUMANKIND, SPEEDILY AND SOON, AND LET US SAY, AMEN.
MAY GOD'S GREAT NAME BE BLESSED FOREVER AND TO ALL ETERNITY.
BLESSED AND PRAISED, GLORIFIED AND EXALTED, EXTOLLED AND
HONORED, ADORED AND LAUDED BE THE NAME OF THE HOLY ONE, BLESSED BE THAT ONE
BEYOND ALL BLESSINGS AND HYMNS, PRAISES AND CONSOLATIONS THAT ARE EVER SPOKEN
IN THE WORLD, AND LET US SAY, AMEN.
MAY THERE BE ABUNDANT PEACE FROM HEAVEN AND LIFE FOR US AND
FOR ALL MEN, AND LET US SAY AMEN.MAY GOD WHO CREATES PEACE IN THE CELESTIAL HEIGHTS CREATE PEACE FOR US AND FOR ALL THE WORLD, AND LET US SAY, AMEN.
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