Whose Voice?

Notes and Confessions Lent 2022

 I recall the first time I read something by Maya Angelou. It was in 7th or 8th grade. I was struck by her description of an elderly Black woman's skin, purple black and delicate like a ripe plum. (That's how I remember it, anyway.) Now, 40-some years later, I wonder if that was the first time I'd read a black writer in class. 

I stopped blogging some years ago in part because I wondered about my voice being necessary. I'd become very aware of the dominance of white voices in every medium. My stumbling attempts at talking about race,well, stumbled. 

If I play the gay card for having an under-represented voice, well, how far does that take me? Of the gay voices that you know, how many are white? On top of that, as I age, just being gay is not that interesting, not when there are other, I'll say queerer voices to be heard? I'm that gay writer that has been told by gay editors that my work wasn't gay enough for their publication or press. My gay card has a low credit limit.

Does the world really need another Christian writer? 

And yet I have this urge to write. I've been writing more again, recently, and it gives me joy. I'm maybe even publishing a wee bit more, but it's not what some would call a career. Still, I'm a writer. As I often have said, I'd stop it if I could. 

Some years ago, someone read a piece I wrote and they remarked something like, "I hear your quiet gentle voice in your writing." My first reaction was, "no one wants a quiet gentle voice! How do I market that?" But it's true, I realized, and I've leaned into it. Most of my attempts at writing "edgy" or . . . more loudly has mostly come out flat and hollow. (Can something be flat and hollow? Let's assume it can.) I'm a quiet person with a quiet voice. 

But does that help anyone? 

More importantly, does it make room for other, less represented voices? 

Maybe it does, since it's not loud. And maybe for those who want a quieter voice, here I am. 

Anyway, this is why I stopped blogging a couple of years ago. Another gay white guy of a certain age blogging "insights" . . . yawn.

This is what I've really wanted to write about this lent, but look at it. It's kind of whiny and, well, white.

I'm writing because I have the urge, maybe even a need. Dare I call it a vocation? 

That's one of the confessions I wanted to make this lent. I have this need to write and I see no need for another white voice in the cacophony of voices. 

Maybe there will be need for my voice when I'm dead. 

Values

 Notes and Confessions Lent 2022

I had a conversation with my spiritual director today. It took quite a few digressions, but one is staying with me into the bedtime hour. 

What do I value? I asserted that our values were important and that we had to cultivate them, but then I also admitted that with advances in science of personality, we learn more and more that things like what kind of flora (and fauna?) we have growing in our gut can affect our mood and personality. We've long talked about chemical imbalances in our brains causing depression or manic episodes.How much free will do we have? How much can I choose what I value?

Do I have the bug to write because I have a literal, however microscopic, bug in my gut? 

All interesting questions and I have neither the training nor the desire to get trained for evaluating these things. I know some tendencies that I have and I know I work against them. My tendency to judge has been tempered, I believe, by my readings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. I still have an initial impulse to judge, but I also have a secondary impulse to analyze it. Is the impulse to judge my nature and my impulse to analyze it and temper it my choice? Are both impulses completely some animal response that I have no control over whatsoever?

There are aspects of me that I know I have no control over. My sexuality is high on that list. What I do with that sexuality, though, is a result of my values about humanity. My sexuality may push me to treat men as objects of desire and little more. The values I cultivate around how I want to treat people tempers that push. 

In our conversation today, my SD and I talked about the animal brain response to danger, the self-defense impulse, fight or flight. I suggested that maybe my decision to not carry guns is a means to adhere to my value of human life when I know I have a (often disguised) impulse to lash out at people. 

And so on. 

As we talked, I admitted that my values are not always the value of the culture I live in, and I hope that some of these values are shaped by my lifelong investigation and study in the Jesus event (to use seminary language). A couple of times today, the SD asked, "How do you think Jesus would see this?" and I finally had to say that's not a question I've ever asked myself, that it felt presumptuous to even speculate on the mind of Jesus. I did say I sometimes look at people and situations and ask, "how do I love in this situation?" He asked if there was a difference.

I said, "too-may-toe, too-mah-toe." And we laughed. 

But these questions---what do I value? How do I love in response to this or that? I suppose even what would Jesus do? They shape us beyond our animal brain, I think. I hope. 

It's an ongoing question and maybe not one I can answer. This is one of those blog posts where I'm for sure asking more questions than I can hope to answer.

It's Always About Mortality

 Notes and Confessions Lent 2022

I had a little health moment today. I'm not going to go into it because it will sound scarier to other people than it was to me. Enough to say it's a recurring health thing and I know what to do about it, and it passes. I also have a call into my doctor to debrief. 

Over 20 years ago, now, I had a friend who was dying. They lived a few hours away from me at the time, and so when I went to go see him and his wife, it was an overnight visit.

One of the last visits, if not the last one, I got there while he was on the phone with someone. I was hanging with his wife in their kitchen when I overheard him say, "No, don't come visit anymore, I don't have the energy for it and you'll need that money to come for the funeral." 

I turned to his wife and asked, "Did I push my way into this visit?" She shook her head and said it was all right. When he got off the phone I asked him again, "Are you sure it's okay I'm here? 

He said no, it was fine I was there. The person he was talking to wasn't okay with him dying, would get anxious when he showed signs of dying (he had awful coughing fits, for one) and then he'd try to suppress all his signs of dying, which only made him miserable. "But you," he said to me, "let me be sick. I don't have to hold back around you. You're okay with me dying and so I enjoy your visit." 

That sounds like I'm bragging on myself, but in my corner, I'd been through seminary and already trained in the art of being a "non-anxious presence." Nonetheless, I took it as one of the highest compliments I've ever received. 

I think a lot about him and that visit whenever I have some health issue. With all sincere appreciation for all the help I received when I had a huge surgery in 2013, I really prefer to be sick alone. I feel, with my friend, a need to be "not sick" around others. I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable, I don't want to make anyone anxious, I don't want anyone feeling like they need to do anything. The vast majority of people (admit it, possibly you) are not okay with sick people. We want to help, we want to make better, we want to not experience illness, even when it's not our own. It is, understandably, too much a reminder of our collective fragility. Mortality. 

We're going to die. I don't like it.  I do not look forward to it. I will be the sort to "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." Probably. If confronted with the inevitable, I'm also likely to surrender to it. I can't see the future. 

I'm not particularly afraid of it, and so when I have something that I know is not imminently life threatening, I keep it to myself. I'll deal with, consult my physicians, and if it does turn into something "more" then I'll tell the people who need to know. And with some I'll have to act healthier than with others, but I"ll do my best to remind myself of the love involved. 

And in the event that this is too much of a Debbie Downer (hey, it is lent), I'll finish by saying this. At lunch, I wrote a monologue for the play I'm working on and the character told me something I didn't know about him before and that's so super exciting. That's been happening a lot lately with this play. I hope it doesn't get out of hand, but I keep thinking, "I'm really close to having a full draft of this thing" and then I go, "There's still so much to learn and reveal here!" 

To answer a question posed by Barbara Brown Taylor, this play is what is saving me today. Despite occasional "health moments" I have so much reason to live and everyday I find something that is saving me. I'm okay with dying and maybe there will eventually come a day when peace with death will save me. But not today. Thanks be to God, not today.

That Kind

 Notes & Confessions/Lent 2022

Some years ago, I tried to develop a performance piece that went something like this. 

I wanted a group of physically/visually diverse people and a microphone.The performers would circulate to the microphone and say a sentence that followed this format:

I'm a ______, but not that kind of ______. 

It might be as simple as: I'm a man, but not that kind of man. Various kinds of identifiers would be used, gender, sexuality, race, nationality, family member (father, mother, sister, brother, etc.) but I also wanted some unexpected, absurd identifiers. I remember one being "I'm an anesthesiologist, but not that kind of anesthesiologist." 

This never got beyond a couple of workshop trials. It seemed to be a little opaque to most people, though one workshop participant finally said something like, "It's almost as if you're playing with stereotypes or expectations." 

DING! DING! DING! Hold the calls, we have a winner! (Do anesthesiologists have stereotypes?)

But anyway, I never found the right setting for this, much less the right cast of performers. 

It's somewhat related to the notion of someone being a "real ______" or "not a real ______." Like t-shirts that proclaim, "Real men eat tofu" or someone pointing to certain churches and saying, "those aren't real Christians." 

I've been all over this kind of thinking. I can fully say "I'm a Christian, but not that kind of a Christian," or "I'm a white guy but not that kind of white guy," or "I'm a gay man but not that kind of gay man." 

Except, of course, when I am. 

Because whether I'm a "real man" or a "real Christian" or a "real writer," I can think of traits of all those that I'd like to be but am not. To paraphrase St. Paul, the kind of Christian I'd like to be, I am not and the kind of Christian I don't want to be, I am. Sometimes. Often. 

These identifies all come prejudged by someone. As much as I want to be "the good kind," I know even when I meet my own definition of what that might be, it will not be someone else's definition of it. 

And if this does anything for me, I hope it makes me humble enough to NOT say, "I'm not that kind." 

That's the kind I'd like to be.

Writing about God

I thought I was ready for this lenten discipline. I made lists of topics. I had things to say. 

I may have been wrong. Or maybe this stuttering start is what I want to write about. 

For someone who was trained in a seminary to talk about God, I've become increasingly reticent to do so. It's not that I believe less in God, it's that I listen better (I hope) to people who have been hurt by God-talk. 

To be honest, I have experienced some of that hurt, too. However these things are measured (cosmically, I suppose), my hurt did not outweigh the good I found in my faith. And even as I type that, I hesitate to tell specifics. They are experiences that I know other people have not had. This is a puzzlement to me. I don't have an explanation. I know they happened to me within certain contexts, following certain exposures to people and books and . . . put on the cosmic scale, they outweigh the hurt.

So, let me start by saying that I acknowledge the hurt some of you have felt. I would not want to add to that hurt. I know that I have in the past---not even that distant past. I'm lucky to have a friend who told me what I was doing in one case. How many other times do I do it? 

I never mean to. But everyone has a set of contexts, exposure to certain people, maybe books in their lives. I can't always know what I'm doing when I start to speak because I can't always know all that history. I can never know all that history. 

But I say this with as much innocence and good intention as I can muster (can one muster innocence?): I love God. I believe I've met (is that even the right word?) God in what some literature calls mystical experiences. 

Even that much, that little, may have prickly needles in it for someone. 

I guess if I'm going to write about God and adjacent topics, I do so with the knowledge of this possibility and with the stated hope that I might somehow find some salve for the hurt as well. 

This is not everything I think I know about God, but I believe in a God of salve for the hurt.

Notes and Confessions

 Ash Wednesday, 2022

Last Thursday, I was driving into work, listening to NPR and stories of the invasion by Russia into Ukraine. On the road up ahead, I saw a squirrel thrashing about, hit, dying. Just before passing by helplessly, I saw that there a piece of the squirrel a few inches from the majority of the body. I burst into tears. 

When I got to work, as I walked from the parking lot, I came across a mother duck with ten tiny ducklings. These waddling fuzzballs could not have been too long out of the eggs. I took a few seconds of video and a couple of pictures. I teared up. It was beauty in stark contrast to the radio and dying squirrel. 

 

 

Later that day, at my desk, I looked over to Facebook and someone had posted a short video In the foreground was a hand and you could hear a human whistle. Suddenly, from trees on the horizon, flew half a dozen or more small birds, vibrantly bright yellow with orange heads. The video had Chinese writing on it, so I'm left to assume these are birds in China. Because I was in my office, I didn't burst into tears, but I nearly did. It was as if it was too much beauty.

I was feeling fragile.

It's been a hard couple of years and, for me, it's been harder coming out of quarantine than going in, so the last nine months or so have been the hardest of all for me. Pay attention to the news and the maneuverings of people with more power than sense, and it quickly becomes overwhelming. 

If it's the kind of overwhelm that doesn't break me---as I do not feel in danger of actually being broken---it is an overwhelm that makes me susceptible to being broken by beauty. By hope. It's the kind of overwhelm that can't quite take beauty and hope. It would be easier to not let the beauty in. 

I hold onto the possibility that it is a beauty that will not break so much as break open. The overwhelm threatens to encrust me with a hardness that leaves no response to beauty, that doesn't allow for hope. 

There's where I begin this lent. 

+ + +

I gave up blogging a couple of years ago, for a few reasons, which I may or may not address in the days ahead. For a good while, I had trouble writing at all. That's been turning around the last couple of months and as I've long known that the more I write, the more I write. I've found the urge to blog again. 

What better time than lent? 

"Notes and Confessions" is the title I'm giving this series of lenten posts. I don't promise to post daily, but I have things bubbling up that are maybe not fully formed enough to but anywhere else, and yet they feel like they belong in a public exercise. They're likely to be mostly questions, anyway.

Maybe I'm just feeling some exhibitionist tendencies, but the discipline I'm choosing this year is a public fragility.

Whether you look on or avert your eyes is your business.