Becoming the Mandala

 Twelve men gathered around a twelve-petalled lotus

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.