Saturday, November 16, 2024

The Gay Faith of Anthony Oliveira, Once More

The fabulous author of Dayspring, as interviewed by Anthony Milton in Toronto Life:

You've written a gay love story about Christ and other biblical figures. Some people may get riled up about that. 

It's funny to imagine people being mad about any deptiction of a Christ who is loving. If there's anything worth saving about Christianity--and maybe there isn't--it's the idea that God was once a human being, and therefore there's nothing about us that is unworthy of love....

I want people to read this and say, "This is the Christ that I knew existed but that everyone has been hiding from me."

Sunday, November 10, 2024

The Queerest Book in the Bible

She's the foreign widow of a man who died, along with all the other men his family, as an economic refugee from his own country to hers. Only her mother-in-law, also widowed, is left. Once the famine back home is over, the mother-in-law will take her chances on returning to the town of her birth, hoping not to starve in destitution.  

But there's nothing left for the two women who married the deceased sons. One of the daughters-in-law does what's most likely to assure her own survival: she returns to her own family. But the other daughter-in-law refuses to leave the side of the older woman.

"Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people," says Ruth to her mother-in-law Naomi.


She braves the hostility of a country that has nothing but contempt for the place from which she comes. They arrive in Bethlehem and start scavenging for food. A wealthy landowner connected to Naomi by blood sees Ruth at the Iron Age equivalent of the food bank and turns out to be a decent mensch. Naomi and Ruth together hatch a plan that involves his seduction. (Yes, his seduction--I'm not going further into it now.) He marries Ruth, and she births a son.


Who turns out, the last verses of the book of Ruth tell us, to be the grandfather of King David. King David, the anointed of the Lord. King David, the offspring of a mixed bloodline: his great-grandmother an undesirable resident alien. King David, the ancestor of another well-known guy, who by ordinary appearances was the out-of-wedlock son of a pregnant teenager, who was married as well by another decent mensch. 


Christian nationalists: put that on your plate and eat it. Steven Miller, to the head of the line, please.


But the story isn't just about welcoming the stranger--an impulse that was voted down by the American public this last Tuesday. It's also about the chosen bond between two women, which is stronger than any other in the story. When Ruth bears her son, the women of Bethlehem declare that "a son has been born to Naomi." Boaz is a sweet guy, but he's basically the donor dad in a queer family of choice.


Christian nationalists: put that on your plate too. Ron DeSantis, to the head of the line, please.


Wednesday, November 6, 2024

Saturday, November 2, 2024

The Handmaid's Tale, Coming Soon To You

This morning, the Editorial Board of the New York Times posted the following to the paper's webpage. 

"You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump's corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: it's his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he's re-elected, the G.O.P. won't restrain him. 

"Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents, He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote."

What needs to be added here, on a blog about queer men's journey toward a freer, fuller life: he will empower every right-wing Christian nationalist who praises him as God's Anointed. What he did to women's control of their own bodies by appointing three right-wing hacks to the Supreme Court, he will do as well to sexual and erotic freedom, with vindictive heartlessness. 

So once again: for your own sake, for freedom's sake, for all our sakes. VOTE.


The Golden Calf, courtesy of the progressive Christian group Faithful America


Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Richard Rohr: A Loving Voice

One holy man who came to visit me recently put it this way, "We must listen to what is supporting us. We must listen to what is encouraging us. We must listen to what is urging us. We must listen to what is alive in us." I personally was so trained not to trust those voices that I think I often did not hear the voice of God speaking to me or what Abraham Lincoln called the "better angels of our nature." Yes, a narcissistic person can and will misuse such advice, but a genuine God lover will flourish inside such a dialogue. 

We must learn how to recognize the positive flow and to distinguish it from the negative resistance within ourselves. It can take years, if not a lifetime. If a voice comes from accusation and leads to accusation, it is quite simply the voice of the "Accuser," which is the literal meaning of the biblical word "Satan." Shaming, accusing, or blaming is simply not how God talks, but sadly, it is too often how we talk--to ourselves and to one another. God is supremely nonviolent; I've heard that from the saints and mystics that I have read and met and heard about. That many holy people cannot be wrong.


Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Believe (New York, Convergent, 2019, 2021), pp. 88-89. Adapted in the Center for Action and Contemplation's daily meditation, October 21, 2024.

Monday, October 14, 2024

Two Days of Embodied Joy

Twenty-two years ago, a Body Electric workshop changed my life for good.

One spring weekend in 2002, "Celebrating the Body Erotic" worked its indelible magic on my body, heart, and soul. Twenty-two men met one another as nervous strangers at 8:45 on Saturday morning. By 7 Sunday night, we were a band united and transformed in "the dear love of comrades," as Walt Whitman might well have put it.


I learned to breathe as though making friends with my lungs for the first time. I leaned to touch myself with a level of pleasure and unashamed abandon that I wish had been available to me--as it should have been--at my adolescent awakening over thirty years earlier. I learned to share those gifts with the men with whom I'd embarked on this two-day adventure. With astonishing speed and ease, we built for each other  a space of safety and unconditional acceptance, where we could all flourish. We reached out to each other with delight and respect. I experienced, with a shattering intensity, the presence of the Sacred in my own body, and in the bodies of the other men who bared their souls and flesh. It left me weeping tears of joy, at the oddest and most upredictable moments, for weeks afterwards.


For forty years, the Body Electric School has offered a precious, life-giving vessel of deep erotic wisdom, a source of healing and growth, self-discovery and community. Its mission began amidst the physical, psychological, and spiritual trauma of the AIDS crisis. In the mid-1980's, founder Joseph Kramer extended a lifeline to men struggling to affirm the wholeness of their erotic selves in the face of that threat. Over the years, its programming has widened in scope to include workshops open to multiple genders and orientations--while continuing to offer single-gender workshops that provide safe space for men who need to do the work of erotic, emotional, and spiritual self-realization with one another.


The School's centre of gravity has always been in the US, and its presence in Canada limited by comparison. Celebrating the Body Erotic was last offered in Toronto in 2016. Happily, it will return there this fall, the weekend of November 22-24


If you've never experienced the work of Body Electric, or if you're ready to return, and if you live within traveling distance, you couldn't spend a weekend in better service to your one wild and precious life.

Sunday, October 13, 2024

Our Only Holiness



Photograph by Andrew Graham

"Our only holiness is by participation and surrender to the Body of Love, and not by any private performance."

--Richard Rohr

Saturday, October 5, 2024

The Moon Sings to the Stream


Philip Gladstone, "The Twenty"


I am the unity on high,

I am the multiple in the pond.

looking up to me from the stream

my image, my double.


I am the truth on high,

I am the fabrication in the pond

looking up to me from the stream

my image, in its fated deception.


Above--I am enwrapped in silence,

whispering, singing, in the pond.

On high I am divine,

in the stream, I am the prayer.


--Leah Goldberg (1911-1970)

Thursday, October 3, 2024

5785

 


LISTEN!

What do you hear?

A wake-up call at dawn?

An animal in pain?

An air-raid siren?

The cry of an injured child?

The wail of a mourner?

The sound of the world being born?

Thursday, September 26, 2024

Saturday, September 21, 2024

Desire is a Horse


"Desire is a horse that wants to take you on a journey to spirit."

--Malidoma Somé, quoted by Don Shewey, in Daddy Lover God: A Sacred Intimate Journey

Friday, September 13, 2024

Reparative Fantasy

 




Echo and Narcissus. John William Waterhouse, 1903

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool




Stuck in the past. Or caught in the future's web of illusions.


Sometimes erotic fantasy becomes a retreat from the reality of the here and now. I've seen this happen to others. I've seen it happen to myself.


But not always.


Every fantasy begins with a longing for something unfulfilled.


Somewhere behind the longing lies grief, for something that never was.


The longing is a desire to heal a wound. To close a gap in the self.


The snare comes with imagining, "If I could only have this, I'd be complete. I'd be healed."


Facing that the wound can't be undone, only transformed, would mean giving up all hope for a better past.


Or put differently:  admitting that the wound can't be undone is a step toward forgiving the past for being what it was. And more importantly, for what it still is, within us.


Can fantasy turn around to look more directly, with wisdom and compassion,  at the wound that's it's struggling to repair? Can my fantasy then help me recognize that the longed-for object it conjures is somehow already active within my own psyche? That along with the wound, there's grown a strength that I can carry forward in my life?


Can fantasy thus help repair the soul after all?


Saturday, September 7, 2024

You Gotta Love David Sedaris

In this week's New Yorker, on his audience with the Pope.

Yes, the Pope.

"My feeling is that if you want a church that is a hundred per cent gay-friendly, go join one--there are plenty to be had--or start your own. 'Yes, but I want Our Lady of Sorrows to celebrate Pride Month,' I can hear someone whining.


"It's like going to Burger King and demanding a Big Mac. If you want a Big Mac, go across the street to McDonald's. Jesus."




Saturday, August 31, 2024

Bating Your Prayer, Praying Your Bate

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Sunday, August 25, 2024

Sympathy for the Devil

Feeling empathy for J.D. Vance this morning has left me feeling a little freaked out.


The New York Times website today posted a profile of how he converted to conservative Catholicism in his mid-30's. It's a religious world-view I couldn't be much more at odds with. I've rubbed shoulders with enough of its proponents over the years--eager young intellectuals in grad school convinced that Thomas Aquinas more or less said it all, and what he didn't say can be extrapolated from his writings--to know just how dangerously repressive and exclusionary a world view it is. I've listened to the juggernauts of Catholic Truth steam rolling over the lived experience of others in conversation because, well, Correct Faith is Correct Faith, everyone else's feelings and experiences be damned. More or less literally.


But I can also relate to the younger Vance's longing for certainty in reaction to the chaotic upbringing he described in his memoir. I can understand the pull of an ancient faith and its dramatic rituals, for someone who's experienced precious little stability in his previous life, and who desperately craves solid ground on which to stand. God knows, I've been there myself, before my karma ran over my dogma.


It can take decades to wear the inhuman edges off some people's pivotal religious experiences. If it ever happens at all. As the gifted comic novelist Stephen McCauley quips in Alternatives to Sex, "I'm sure there's a place for religious conviction, but on the whole, freedom of religion pales in importance next to freedom from it." 


Somewhere inside the carapace of Vance's militant, masculinist version of virtue, of his hostility and inflammatory, antifeminist, homophobic and transphobic rhetoric, there's a desire to belong, to find meaning in life, to connect to something larger and more authentic than the self-absorbed preoccupations of American materialism. And then somewhere along the way, that desire took a hateful wrong turn.


I don't know exactly what I'm feeling toward Vance. Not forgiveness, exactly, for the choice he made to sell his soul to the narcissistic huckster, serial abuser, and aspiring dictator to whom he is now running mate. But awareness of something at the core of his life that isn't erased by the shitty choices he's making.


Maybe it's my own edges that are getting worn down.

 

Friday, August 23, 2024

Infinite Needs, Finite Lifetime

 "Humans can create infinite needs. The market dominates us, and it robs us of our lives. Humanity needs to work less, have more free time, and be more grounded. Why so much garbage? Why do you have to change your car? Change the refrigerator? There is only one life and it ends. You have to give meaning to it. Fight for happiness, not just for wealth."

--Pepe Mujica, former president of Uruguay, as quoted in The New York Times

Wednesday, August 21, 2024

What is Essential

"Know that a person needs to cross a very, very narrow bridge, and what is essential is that one should not be overcome by fear."

--Rabbi Nachman of Bratislav

Friday, August 2, 2024

L'dor V'dor

 From generation to generation...



Friday, July 19, 2024

Becoming the Mandala

 Twelve men gathered around a twelve-petalled lotus




Friday, July 12, 2024

In Praise of Dayspring


"I get asked sometimes in interviews, 'Are you Christian?' And I'm like, 'You tell me. Here's the book I wrote.... Here's the answer I came up with.... I don't know how much of this I believe, but I'm still squatting in the ruins of it'."


Anthony Oliveira is as brilliant, funny, and moving in his interview on Matt Baume's podcast The Sewers of Paris as he is in his recently published Dayspring (Strange Light, 2023)

Is the book a novel? Its multiple subtitles--a poem in themselves--suggest something far more genre-bending: 


the disciple whom he loved

neaniskos

notes toward a revelation

the young man in white

a chapbook

a theophany

a gospel

a great blasphemy

against the heretic cerinthus

a breviary

a hymnal

a memoir

a work of plagiarism

an account of the word made flesh


A joyously, unapologetically queer retelling of the Christian Gospels, it oscillates between the first century and the twenty-first, between Palestine and Portuguese Toronto, between the Old Testament love story of David and Jonathan and the life of Teresa of Avila, between lyrical evocation and word-for-word extracts from Calvin, Julian of Norwich, and a panoply of others--sometimes with attribution, sometimes without. 


More often than not, the turn of the page offers a new freestanding fragment: a poem, generally with minimal punctuation and language piled up to defy ordinary prose syntax; paraphrase of sayings of Jesus, printed in red and laid out on just a few lines with staggered margins; a monologue of the never-directly-named Beloved reminiscing to the narrator about childhood miracles performed as pranks; occasionally a longer excursus of several pages, retelling at greater length an episode familiar from the Gospels, but with surprising turns.


At one point in Baume's interview, Oliveira says he intended the book as "a magpie assemblage" of what is most queer, most unapologetically enfleshed, in the Christian tradition--"a resource" and "an anthology of texts" to support the survival of the presence of same-sex desire--as incontrovertible as it is suppressed--at the heart of Christianity. "So much of history is about corroding the places we pretty visibly were," he observes (at about 34:00 in the podcast).


Oliveira doesn't wear his erudition on this sleeve, but it's there on every page--digested into raucous but loving, devout humour and poignant longing, as when he pokes fun at "matt" for his love of prophecy, deconstructing the Gospel of Matthew's account of Palm Sunday with its absurdly doubled donkey ("on an ass, and on a colt, the foal of an ass"). His Ph.D. in seventeenth-century literature only begins to explain his implicit but constantly evident knowledge of biblical scholarship and the history of Christian theology. But the book requires of the reader no prior conversance with most of the references submerged in its obliquely told story of finding God in sex, and sex in God.


"I don't know when I lost my sense of shame," Oliveira laughingly tells Baume--the line that gives the podcast episode its title. "I've forbidden my mother to read it." Yet he petitioned the Catholic Archbishop of Toronto to grant the book official approval, not once but three times--a triple denial that Oliveira gleefully points out has its own biblical parallel.


When the never-directly-named Jesus of Dayspring denounces the hypocrites, Pharisees, and whitewashed sepulchres of the Gospels. it's abundantly clear that he's talking about the powerbrokers of present-day homophobic Christian institutions: the media personality pastors of American "prosperity gospel" megachurches, the functionaries of churchly hierarchies. Oliveira isn't pleading for a place at the Christian table for gay spirituality. He's shamelessly asserting that the whole damn banquet is queer.