Christ in the Rubble

"The majesty of the Incarnation lies in its solidarity with the marginalized."

--Rev. Munther Isaac, pastor of the Lutheran Church of Bethlehem

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juCkshyqGN8

Keith Haring: Art is for Everybody

 "The public has a right to art.

"The public is being ignored by most of contemporary artists.

"The public needs art and it is the responsibility of a "self-proclaimed artist" to realize the public needs art and not to make bourgeois art for the few and ignore the masses.

"Art is for everybody. To think that they (the public) do not appreciate art because they don't understand and therefore become alienated from [sic] may mean that the artist is the one who doesn't understand or appreciate art and is thriving in the "self-proclaimed knowledge of art" that is actually bullshit.

"Art can be a positive influence towards a society of individuals.

"Art can be a destructive element and an aid to the take-over of the "mass-identity" society.

"Art must be considered by the artists as well as the public.

"The public will not, however, say what they want for fear of being un-educated or not understanding art. Therefore the responsibility rests..."

Keith Haring, journal page, October 1978

He was a geeky kid from small-town Pennsylviania who spent his early teen years in the Jesus Movement. At the age of twenty, he moved to New York to study art. 

He was cerebral, radically embodied, and hypersexual, all at the same time. He was, quite literally, a fucking saint.

He died of AIDS in 1990 at the age of 31. His last work was an altarpiece, two versions of which are now in Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.

Right now, his work is on show at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. I was lucky enough to be there when multiple school groups were coming through, in waves of excitement rolling off the kids from an alternative arts-based high school, and occasional shrieks of amazement at the unabashedly sexual imagery scattered through the exhibition. (Like they'd never seen such things on restroom walls and the back covers of textbooks--but, I'm figuring, never expected to see in a Temple of Culture.) The noisiest and most joyful gallery visit I'll ever experience.

Eros and Time

Photo by Andrew Graham

Last week, I was blessed by a moment of unforeseeably deep connection. A few hours of blissful erotic communion, beyond anything I could reasonably expect: an opening of two discreet selves into a Third revealed between us. Without any certainty that anything like it can or will happen again. The man I shared it with lives an ocean away. When we met for coffee a few days later, just before he finished his short professional trip, we acknowledged that we may never see each other face to face again. What happened was for me (and I believe for him as well) too profound not to speak of this honestly.

It's bittersweet, holding onto the faith that experiences like the one he and I shared are just as valid, just as real, in light of their passing away. A reminder that all of life is in fact like that, and our attempts to slow or halt the flow of time are what's illusory. Longing is the foundational condition of our life. Memory is the great storehouse of the psyche where those treasures are still held. The place where sadness and joy come together to reveal a core truth of our existence.

Anne Carson would tell us this. The Buddha would tell us this. St. Augustine would tell us this. But most importantly, our own experience can tell us this.

The Task

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief.

Do justly, now.

Love mercy, now.

Walk humbly, now.

You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

--The Talmud

Once Again, the Queer Spirituality Podcast

A while back, I sat down with Julian Crossan-Hill to talk about the transformative power of authentic ritual, and about the deep connection that some of us feel between our erotic and spiritual lives. You can access our conversation as Episode 22 of the Queer Spirituality Podcast. Julian's series is profiled below in the post of September 20.

Some of the takeaways of our talk:

Queer spirituality is about finding the extradordinary in the middle of our ordinary life. It's not a separate dimension of our lives, but an integral part of our existience. When we embrace our queerness, we can tap more fully into what's already present in our lives that connects with the divine.

We're hardwired to be happiest when we're grateful.

What we do in and with our bodies we do with our souls. We build our spiritual life out of physical acts and gestures, out of interactions with physical objects and with each other.

(A word about words here: I acknowledge that the word "queer" doesn't work for everyone. For some of us, it still evokes the trauma of a taunt that was hurled at us for years, sometimes with physical along with verbal violence. 

If those negative connotations are a stumbling block, I apologize. Julian uses it as a way of embracing what's outside the mainstream of cultural and sexual expectations. He's affirming what sets us in the margins of heteronormative expectation--what therefore allows us a perspective that's not only authentic for us, but a resource for the rest of the world, to move the needle toward a freer, fuller life. It has the advantage of encompassing, in one syllable, shorthand for a wide range of sexual diversities, from full-on Kinsey-6 gayness, through bisexuality, polyamory, solosexuality, ace life on the gray scale, trans life, gender-fluidity, and more. 

It's less cumbersome than an endless alphabet of possibilities, and less self-parodic than QUILTBAG (Queer, Undecided, Intersex, Lesbian, Trans, Bisexual, Asexual, Gay).

The Phony Grail of Masculine Identity

In my own life, and in the lives of men I talk to, I encounter again and again how powerfully we desire a natural solidarity with other men. We want to find our tribe. We want to find them because we experience ourselves as being somehow in exile from a core identity. We long for home, for refuge, or whatever other metaphor expresses what we feel we lost, or were shut out from, or never had. Often, it started with a sense that our fathers weren't there for us in the ways we needed them to be. Or that we were excluded somehow from the ordinary world of other boys. 

For many of us, it's hard-wired that as men-loving men we paradoxically desire what we already are. Some of us experience this as a foundational condition of our erotic (and spiritual) worlds. (Daniel Mendelsohn writes eloquently of this paradox in The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity.)

Then comes the seduction. We want to resolve the confusion over what it is we're seeking. We want to know that what we're looking for is really out there. That it has substance, solidity, a stable core that we can seek and maybe will eventually find. We get taken in by facile language about "archetypes" and core mythic structures. 

We transfer our desire for the concrete experience of community with other men onto an imaginary realm of How It Really Is--some Core Truth about what it is to be male, to be masculine, to be a man, to be among men. And then we focus our efforts on getting more deeply in touch with that Truth, as though attaining it will finally answer the longings of our hearts.

But will it? Really?

Consider the Seven of Cups: 

In this Tarot card, we see a male figure from behind, in silhouette, and thus devoid of distinguishing individual characteristics. He's confronted (as are we along with him) not with one Holy Grail as the goal of his quest, but with seven grails filled with the tokens of a whole range of possible outcomes: a perfect relationship, stability, wealth, success, a poisonous basilisk, a serpent that might represent danger but might also represent wisdom--and a glowing velied figure with hands extended.

OK, the smart money is on that last cup. The one that doesn't entirely and unambiguously reveal its contents. The one that leaves room for uncertainty. 

In any case, if the silhouetted figure is paralyzed, he's paralyzed by his own agonized compulsion to get it right. To nail it down. 

If we're uncertain about "authentic" masculine identity, it's because masculine identity is not one stable thing. Supposing that it is can easily lead us into restrictive dead ends--some of them exclusionary, some of them misogynistic, some of them simply self-punishing and counterproductive. We don't need to go off to get in touch with our inner King, our inner Warrior, our inner Whatever. We just need to hang with each other in the here and now, as we are, as butch or as nelly, as macho or as gender-fluid, as we may be. 

At some point, we need to affirm that we are already what we long to be. That we are already the older and wiser men we always wanted to meet. 

Between the Worlds

 Photos by Andrew Graham

The Thinning Veil

Sometimes, making love with my partner, I have an odd sense of the two of us being in a roomful of men.

When I say odd, I mean it's not exactly the fantasy of sharing him with others, and sharing others with him, that's coming forward for me. Nothing odd about that: to be clear, the prospect turns my crank, and if it suited him as well--which it doesn't--we could explore it.

Partly, it's the enduring presence of his former partner--in his life and by extension in mine. Bob died over twenty ago. His books still line the shelves that cover whole walls of our summer house--many of them inscribed to him by their authors, some of them annotated in his hand. I still find postcards addressed to him when I pull a novel out. His photographs hang everywhere. Years after his death, we finally poured his ashes into the bay, floating in a kayak together with Bob's first high school lover and lifelong friend, reading Whitman to each other in a light drizzle and watching a white heron fly low over the water toward an island at the mouth of the creek. Early on, only half jokingly, I came to say that I was in a three-way relationship, and that sometimes one of us being dead made it less challenging, sometimes more so.

Partly, it's the long, ongoing repair and reinvention of my friendship with my own former partner, now long coupled up again himself, and the nostalgia of remembering the house I bought with him, and then finally sold eleven years ago, and the garden we created together before we separated. There are times I can't escape the awareness, never entirely comfortable, that I'm still in love with him too. It took me years to admit that to myself.

Partly, it's the wider awareness of the other men I've let into my heart, and into my pants, over the years--some of whom I dated; some who became soulmates on the short, intense roller-coaster rides of workshops; some whose names I only learned while we were having sex, or never learned at all, and never saw again. Objects that represent them sit on my altar: the icon G. gave me on my fiftieth birthday; the crystal pendant cross S. brought me on a visit twenty years ago; the natural phallus of stone, ground smooth by millennia in a creek bed, that A. found walking with his dogs and saved for me; W.'s tuning fork.

Partly, it's my partner's erotic history, more active and varied than my own--and how my nose is now and then pressed to the glass with envy about that.

In the shadow of all these, it's something else as well, something more. It's a sense that when we're in bed together, though we're two isolated individuals, we're also part of something larger, something more general. Something that embraces the other men who dwell within us: those who've slipped away, carried elsewhere on the diverging currents of our lives; even those who've passed beyond the veil of death-- "these waves of dying friends" that the late poet Michael Lynch so movingly commemorated in the early years of the AIDS crisis.

I can't describe more precisely what I sometimes sense so strongly within/behind/beneath/beyond the experience of being with this particular man. But whatever it is, it flies in the face of the romantic cult of the couple as a self-sufficient unit. It's radically opposed to the notion that we find one person who somehow completes us, so that anything else becomes an admission of emotional failure and defeat. Queer cultural theorists like Michael Warner and Eric Rofes long argued that the focus on same-sex marriage rights flattened and suppressed the richness of this broader web of emotional, erotic, and spiritual connection. I can't help but agree.

Strangely, I'm reminded of what Plato said about (gay) love in the Symposium: that we start by loving an individual, progress by loving many individuals, and end (ideally) by loving what we find embodied in them all. That's one of the few things I can take away from Plato at this point in my life without vehement disagreement.

And perhaps even more strangely--I connect what I'm feeling to this moment in the year--Hallowe'en, All Souls, the Day of the Dead, Samhain--when the curtain between what's present and what's vanished from our daylight lives is pulled aside, and we're in communion with the dead--and by extension, with the otherwise departed, and with the alternative worlds of our unrealized longings. If Bob's ever in bed with my partner and me, surely it's now. I'm glad for the thought he's there. Along with all those others, alive and dead and alive, across town or across oceans, at the far-flung corners of my life and my husband's, the men of our queer tribe, who nestle and nuzzle around us.

The Day of Atonement, 5784

 "... we are called to judge ourselves with love; to love ourselves, and also to face the truth about our shortcomings and grave misdeeds. In our self-scrutiny we strive to emulate the true positive essence within ourselves. In our truth we cannot be fooled by evasions, or excuses. Tradition bids us to approach this day with both solemnity and joy, knowing that we will contemplate matters of life and death; and tradition reminds us, as well, that we celebrate the world's creation and our own moral rebirth."

--adapted from the Mishkan Hanefesh

The Queer Spirituality Podcast

Over the last month, it's been an ongoing pleasure to explore the Queer Spirituality podcast, hosted by Julian Crosson-Hill. Julian is a ritualist, queer spiritual guide, and life coach living out his calling in the heartland of western Ohio/eastern Indiana where he and I both started out.

He takes as his theme "the radical idea that queerness is a gift that is celebrated by the Divine." He explores the special role that queer people are meant to play in the coming spiritual awakening. And through the lives and stories of queer people, his podcast explores the many way of approaching the divine and how the sacred reveals itself in everyday action.

What I love about the episodes I've listened to is the strong conviction he shares with his guests that we have to make it up as we go along--that as badly served as we've been as GBTQ men by pretty much every mainstream religious tradition, we have to decide for ourselves what remains important to us from our respective upbringings, and what we have to discard. And then comes the real work, the adventure, and the fun. We have to assemble what we need for our own journeys from whatever lies to hand: borrowing respectfully (yes--and sometimes playfully, and subversively) from traditions that we don't find toxic precisely because we didn't experience repression within them. In short (in my words, not his) we practice a kind of radical drag of the soul.

Slow Down, Already

"But at a deeper level, the entire journey is one in which we are called over and over again to surrender to a self-transforming process not of our own making. Each time we give ourselves over to our contemplative practices, whatever they might be, we find ourselves, once again, one with the communal mystery in which there is no separate self."

James Finlay, The Contemplative Heart, p. 207.

*****

Listen Up, Y'all

"Listen up, y'all," says Shekhinah
who looks today like a teacher
in corduroy dress and sedate boots.

"Let the smartphone rest a bit,
or learn how to hear My voice
coming through its speaker.

Let your love for Me well up
like unexpected tears. Everyone serves
something: give your life to Me.

Let the channel of your heart open
and My abundance will pour through.
But if you prefer profit, if you pretend --

if you're not real with Me
your life will feel hollow
and your heart be embittered.

I won't punish you; I won't need to.
Your hollowness will be punishment enough,
and the world will suffer for it.

So let My words twine around your arm,
and shine like a headlamp
between your eyes to light your way.

Teach them to everyone you meet.
Write them at the end of your emails
and on your business cards.

Then you'll remember how to live
with the flow of all that is holy --
you'll have heaven right here on earth."

Rabbi Rachel Barenblat

https://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/2016/02/listen-up-yall.html

Reverence at Dusk

 Jesus. Shiva. Ganesha. The spirits of the Four Directions. Shekinah. The Mystery is One.

Reverence at Mid-Day

O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden

For Conrad Alexandrowicz

That afternoon, in the crypt,

I saw them coming 

over the rise, weapons 

at the ready. Only for me,

I thought at first. Then turned

aware that He 

was even more vulnerable. 

Naked. Hanging. Nailed. 

The only choice

to shield His body, knowing

the bullets might 

lodge in me, or else

passing through would knit 

us wound to wound.

Nothing for it,

then, but climbing up

to entwine Him,

as consort to

my Boddhisattva.

His erection in extremis 

miraculous, a pledge of Life's 

Longing for Itself. 

He, turned outward 

toward the death squad. I, 

facing Him. Unable 

to welcome them 

with open arms except 

by way of the embrace.

By welcoming Forgiveness

Itself deep

into my body.