Old Acquaintance

Seventh Day of Christmas/New Year's Eve

 “'You like to tell true stories, don't you?' he asked, and I answered, 'Yes, I like to tell stories that are true.'
Then he asked, 'After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it? Only then will you understand what happened and why. It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.'” [Norman MacLean, A River Runs Through It]

The novella I just completed and want to start sending around soon has part of its genesis in the above lines from Norman MacLean. Another part was from an NPR story about memory and its inaccuracies. Between misremembering things and the hope of understanding by telling it with made up people sent me down the road to write this novella I'm calling, simply, Cora. 

That it is based heavily on where I grew up and my own mother, anyone who knows me or our family will recognize. But as I wrote, it was interesting how Cora became not my mother and her life not my mother's life. Parallels, yes, absolutely and obviously, but by the time I got to the end of it, Cora was someone else. 

Because memory did not have all the answers to the life I wanted to explore. Memory, as important to us all as it is, could not give me a full life and more a full inner life. 

Memory was still important, though. Memory is always important. the Bible is full of commands to remember this and that. The prophets addressed God with "remember your promises to us" and God responded with "remember what I've done for you." 

To be held in the memory of God is to live forever. 

And so I remembered what I could and made up a lot to create something else. A fiction to be sure, but one that, I think, offered me some understanding and maybe offers the readers some understanding (if I did anything right at all). 

We don't create out of nothing. We may claim God does that, but we can't claim that for ourselves. Sometimes the creation is closer to actual events, sometimes there is more invention, but even when we try for the truly alien, as a sci-fi writer might, it starts somewhere in our experience. 

I don't know if I agree completely with the MacLean quote, but I know it sent me on a particular creation, one that is very close to me, so close that I worry that it will not interest anyone else. And insofar as it exercised my memory and pulled me into directions I didn't predict, I can't say that it's completely false.

Imagining Resurrection

 While we are in the season of Incarnation, the part of the Jesus story that further confirms the goodness of our body is resurrection. It's not just good for the time we live this life, but there's the promise/hope of something carrying into eternity. 

What we know from the gospel stories about the resurrected Jesus is that he was not confined by laws of physics. Jesus would appear in locked rooms, dissolve at being recognized, solid enough to be touched and eat fish. 

For years now, I've thought of the resurrected body as having properties akin to sound. Sound is not solid and passes through walls, but you can also feel it. Loud sounds or sounds at particular frequencies can shake or break more solid objects. 

I've more recently started wondering about the phenomenon of stage presence. Last post, I spoke about projecting voice (breath) to the back of a theater, but we've probably all had the experience of someone who enters a stage and fills the room with presence, before any word is spoke. We call it stage presence, but I've wondered if it isn't also a spiritual things, a way that foreshadows our resurrection, when we'll be able to enter rooms or be present across distances.

Earlier in the pandemic, I took a few Gaga classes online. Gaga is a movement practice that was developed by dancer/choreographer Ohad Naharin. He developed it, in part, to reclaim the joy and pleasure of movement, which can be lost when it becomes your job. Anyway, as I took the class, I was pleased and encouraged to hear the leader say something like, "now project your movement and body beyond the walls." In words that I hadn't used, he was stating some of the things I've been saying about practicing stage presence. Indeed, my version of that practice is called "practicing resurrection." It's not just my absurd idea. It's also something other people think about (without the Jesus language). 

Because there's a lot of absurd religious ideas here and there, I feel compelled to say I don't think of this as literal or even scientific. It's an image I've worked with as a performer. It's imagination. And I think imagination makes a difference. An actor who can imagine the emotional state of the character embodies the character in a way that is not accomplished by an actor of less imagination. Imagining the way our presence fills an auditorium surely affects our state presence. 

Like the vocal projection I wrote about yesterday, I've also shifted in my thinking about stage presence as a gift upon the performer, but more a gift of the performer on the audience. It's a sharing of the person, physical and spiritual. It might be used to say "look at me!" but it's also a way to love the audience. 

A Word Given Breath

 The Fifth Day of Christmas (the first day of the season without another feast on top of it!)

In the beginning . . . 

In Genesis, we hear the story of creation, which was accomplished by no other means than "God said." It's the vibration and shaping of breath, remembering that in the main biblical languages, both Hebrew and Greek, use words for breath that can just as well mean spirit.

In the Gospel According to John, we hear how the Word was in the beginning, being with God and being God. It's poetic language and I find it evocative. Jesus is the Word spoken and through him, all things were created.

I think of what actors and singers and other vocal artists do as shaping their spirit, sharing their spirit with us by shaping it and projecting it into the world. Performers train their voice, shape their breath into their expression, their art. As a sometimes performer, I've always been loud, able to project to the back row in most theater settings. In my younger days, I considered it something to get me noticed. "Look at me! Look at me!" As I've aged and thought differently about any gift that I have, I've tried to look at my vocal projection as a gift to the audience. Less of a gift bestowed upon me, more a gift for whatever I'm up to in the moment, whether entertainment or enlightenment. 

In this season of Incarnation, I give thanks for my own flesh, a part of the creation spoken into being "in the beginning."

Innocent Bystanders

 Today, the 4th Day of Christmas and the Feast of the Holy Innocents, when we remember that, according to the Gospel of Matthew, King Herod murdered all the boys of a certain age in hopes of killing this newborn king of the Jews. 

Aside--It is a little gruesome to have a feast day remembering murdered children, no? 

This historicity of the event is in question. Herod did a lot of cruel things and many are recorded by historians, but nothing is known of this massacre. The defense to this fact is that of all the many terrible things Herod did, this didn't warrant recording. One estimation has the number of boys of the same age in Bethlehem, given the overall population of the town at the time, would have been around a dozen. Imagine being so terrible that killing 12 children falls off the radar.

Anyway, with that out of the way, my reflection on this story goes to the ways that something like a dozen toddlers were murdered while Jesus got away to Egypt. The theodicy of the story would ask why a dozen families couldn't have also had a convincing dream to get out of town. Some might say that these dozen boys were the cost of Jesus staying alive to become savior. 

And following that thought, I'm left with how the good fortune of some comes at terrible cost of others. In modern terms, we often have the benefit of cheap goods because of abusively cheap labor (sometimes by children, to keep to the theme) in far away places. 

Pushing a little bit further, I'm more and more aware of how most of the comforts I enjoy may come at the cost of racist policies, international military interventions, and other political maneuvers that crush people I will never know. 

The holy innocents definitely have modern day parallels. It is an old and current story of power preserving power by violent and oppressive means. 

In fact, it's such a pervasive real-life story, that I wonder if we need to do it in fiction anymore. To some extent, it's so pervasive that even  when a story is not about that overtly, it can still permeate the subtext. I've started investigating, interrogating my own fiction and what lies behind or under some of the characters' lives, things they didn't earn, things that they don't even see. 

I've been saying for years that we need to find new stories to tell. I think that's part of my job as a writer---and I fail at it miserably, but it's there in the back of my head. How can I as a writer reveal another possible world? 

I haven't found a way to tell those stories and I even begin to suspect that I will not find a way to do it in my lifetime. In a recent post, I've said artists can reflect the world as it is and as it could be. I am still in the first category. I don't think it's a wrong or useless category. 

But it's in my mind that I'd like to find my way into the second.

Beauty and Danger

 Today was the Feast Day of John the Evangelist--whoever they were. 

It's a day to celebrate and honor the writer of the Gospel According to John. We know very little about the person, but we have the text. It has a mixed history. 

It is the most poetic and mystical of the four canonical gospels. The opening is famous for it's imagery and it's cosmic proposal that the Word always existed and became incarnate in Jesus, in whom dwells light and life. It is beautiful. 

This gospel presents Jesus as a self-award, in-control Son of God, in stark contrast to the occasionally afraid Jesus of Mark's gospel. In Mark, Jesus prays for the "this cup" (his suffering and death) to be taken from him. In John's gospel, Jesus says confidently, "Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?" It is the most triumphant Jesus. Which is probably why it gets published individually and used as an evangelism tract. Mark is much shorter, but when you're selling the religion, you probably want to put forward the more marketable version of your guy. 

But the history of the gospel is also heavy. While opening with an echo of Hebrew scripture ("In the beginning"), it also talks about "the Jews" as if the main hero of the tale wasn't also a Jew. There might be some reasons for this, among them being that this gospel was recorded after the Christian sect was breaking away from it's Jewish roots. The Temple was destroyed by this time and Christianity was no longer being seen as a subset of emerging, post-Temple Judaism. This might be all well and good except for some really terrible things. 

It was the Gospel of John that was quoted by people who persecuted and killed Jews on the basis of being "Christ-killers." This is clearly the fault of the people throughout history who read scripture and instead of finding hope and salvation looked for reasons to abuse and kill other humans. I do not believe the writer of John's gospel intended to lead to the Holocaust. 

And yet, here is the consequence of separating Jesus from his people. Putting in Jesus' mouth critical words about "the Jews" led to later readers murdering millions of people. 

We should not read those passages in John lightly. We should not dismiss the consequences of what was written. 

To create a literary work like the Gospel of John in a particular place and time may not be immediately dangerous, but for it to be read outside that place and time creates danger. The beauty of the imagery gets twisted and bloody. 

And this is a weight on me. It is a weight on me as a Christian, for sure. I would not want to lose the beauty that is in John, but neither can I comfortably read some passages anymore. 

Even more, as someone who puts some effort in writing literary works, I feel the weight of my words potentially taking off in directions I would never intend. I realize my lack of control over this. I recognize that any evil done, however small, is the responsibility of the person who commits the evil.

Still, I feel the weight. The responsibility of creating anything is that others bring their own lenses to the work. I want to be open to interpretation. I want no evil to come from it. 

This awareness is part of my paralysis in this pandemic year, because it is not only a pandemic year but a year of heightened racial tensions. As a white person in a society that favors white people, I feel the uncertainty that I can see anything outside of my own privileged way of seeing. Being gay gives me a lens through which I get glimpses, but despite similarities I know it's a different set of biases that I face. 

However beautiful something I create may be, I know I will have blind spots for the potential danger. 

I don't have a solution for this problem, but it's where I end up as I reflect upon the Feast of John the Evangelist.

Creativity and Martyrdom

 The Feast of Stephen follows the Day of the Nativity like some sort of reminder that you, o human, are dust and to dust you shall return. 

I think there's always a wee bit of lent in every season. 

If you read the account of Stephen's martyrdom in the Acts of the Apostles, there's a part of me that can't help but say he was asking for it. He was abrasive, accusatory (which in the biblical languages can be read as satanic), and just not very smart in how he shared the Gospel. 

But I wasn't there. I don't know how it really went down. I kind of hate how it leads some of us moderns into a martyr complex, how some of us want to get some adverse affect (though maybe not a full on martyrdom) for our witness to Jesus so that we can claim favor. It seems like a poor use of scripture, honestly. But maybe it wasn't as abrasive and boastful as I read it. I hope there was some humility in Stephen's proclamation. 

The desert fathers and mothers always emphasized humility. 

One abba or another said we should always keep death before us, lest we become complacent. If that isn't a hard way to live, I don't know what is. 

I have to say, though, I get complacent. I say I have this calling on me as a writer and performer and I am in a place of no urgency about it. Except for when I am. It comes in spurts. But as I wrote in the last post, this has not been a year of great creativity. 

There is a myth of the artist as martyr. Here, I think of myth not as an untrue story but as a story that reveals some deeper truth. Myth as revealing archetype and pattern. And the true thing is that art making costs. If we do anything true, those who'd rather not see it recoil from us. Which isn't what we generally get in the art game for, to be honest. There's a part of "look at me, look at what I made" too often so close to the surface. That's not humility.

The humble artist answers the call to create, to reveal the world. The revelation may be as the world is, or it may be as the world could be. I think both are valid. Both have a prophetic aspect to it. Both have an aspect of bearing witness to the world, about the world. 

This martyr's feast day, the second day of Christmas, has me thinking about the ways following Jesus has cost me (and hasn't), how following the creative call has cost me (and hasn't). The ways I've died and thew ways I've found life. I'm thinking about the humility to create. 

The abbas and ammas would tell us humility is the way to love. I wonder on this martyr's day if I have the love to show the world what it is and what it could be.

Creator/Created/Create

 I write stories and make performances and sometimes interpret others' stories into performances. I find it one way the Imago Dei is alive in me. 

I'm typing this at 1:00am on Christmas Day (the First Day of Christmas) 2020. It's been a mess of a year and I, like many creatives around me, have felt paralyzed by this year. Not everyone. Some have found it a rich time of creation and I haven't been completely idle. But I have felt . . . paralyzed. 

As I reflect, once again, on the Christmas story, I'm reminded of how we teach and sometimes believe that God took on flesh like ours, a sack of blood and bones that experiences pain and ecstasy, experiences death and decay after some period of growth of life. 

In this bit of life I've been given, I've tried (and succeeded and failed) to take ideas and give them some manner of flesh, whether the flesh of words on paper or the flesh of my own flesh on stage/display. It's been hit and miss. I've loved it all Well, most.

I wonder if God the Creator loves all or just most. We teach and sometimes believe God loves all. I can't help but think that there are moments when God has been a little disappointed in me and my output, as I am sometimes disappointed by my creations. Maybe I'm projecting. Maybe God loves better than I do. I hope God loves better than I do. 

Tonight, we tell the story that the Creator became Created. Maybe we as Imago Dei have some capacity to create---love, abundance (not the kind associated with money), a beloved community.

Good Friday in a Sad Time

I've been thinking about how it's a season without festivals. Religious festivals remain on the calendar but we strain to make them festive. Arts festivals are canceled outright. Conferences and symposia are not always festive, but some can take on the air of celebration---but not this year.

I'm writing on Good Friday. It's nearly impossible to feel it. There is already so much grief and fear, reliving the Passion of Christ seems redundant at best or sadness porn at worst. Golgotha seems too far away or else too near and might even be seen as a mockery of what we're experiencing. We know what happens on the first day of the week, a recovery that we Christians hope for but know won't come so soon.

Some politicians, like my senior senator, want to emphasize the numbers of recovery, the percentage who do not die, which is a nice attempt at keeping positive. He's not exactly wrong, this virus isn't a death sentence, but for those who die, being in that minority isn't much of a comfort. But politicians don't often seem to be in the business of comfort these days.

Last weekend, I walked to the neighborhood CVS. On the way, I saw a woman looking up and down the street then looking at her phone. She saw me coming and stepped off the sidewalk to let me pass and I smiled and nodded as I made an arc around her. I few steps past her, I saw a car in a driveway with a woman waving from it. I looked back to the woman I'd passed and we immediately switched roles. I stepped off the sidewalk and she made an arc around me. I followed several steps behind until she stopped and talked/yelled to the car. "Let me go get my mask and gloves and I'll be right back!" The other woman said/yelled, "Okay, I'll be right here!" I decided to cross the street there (no traffic at that moment). Uber or Lyft, I decided was the story. I pondered my lack of mask or gloves.

At the CVS, I gathered up a few things and went to the cash register. The cashier was a friendly guy, jovial even. He made small talk easily, and even when chatting about the pandemic, it sounded like casual small talk. He ended each transaction, including mine, with "Stay sane and safe."

Mask and gloves. Sane and safe. It was the last day I left my apartment without a mask, makeshift as it is. I don't have any gloves, though. Those are harder to do makeshift. I need to make a run tomorrow, maybe I'll look for something then.

I feel ridiculous in my mask. Or absurdly dangerous. I look like a bandit from the old west. They say I'm protecting others, more than I'm protecting myself. Fair enough. How would one know if one is asymptomatic or not? I don't have symptoms, but it seems "asymptomatic" only really fits if you should have symptoms.

I end up playing word games. Is it surreal or absurd? Either/or/both/neither.

Jesus was crucified "today." Out of the hundreds (thousands?) of people crucified by the Romans, The overwhelming majority stayed dead (so far). By my conservative estimate (I could find little data on numbers crucified, though one site says "thousands upon thousands," seems like internet hyperbole), somewhere between .1 to .02 percent of people crucified by the Romans resurrected.

Other causes of death have an even lower percentage.

The odds, it seems, are against us. But what is hope without impossible odds?

So far, my association with confirmed cases of covid-19 is no closer than 2 degrees of separation. That's confirmed cases. There is also the supposed case that is recovered, but never got bad enough to warrant testing--that one would be one degree. What are the odds that I'll get through this (first wave) without a confirmed case of someone I know personally? They have a 90-something percent chance of survival. If 100 people I know become confirmed cases, how will the 2, 3, 4 (depending on the news story) get chosen for not surviving? The odd thing about odds is that for or against you, if you die, you die. That the odds were for you doesn't really help at that point.

These are odd Good Friday thoughts. I'm sure there's no inspiration or edification in them. There was a time that I spend hours in a church on Friday afternoon. I wish I could have done that today.

I live in hope to be able to do it another year. I live in hope that there will be festivals again.

Life Apart

"When things get back to normal . . . "

I admire the optimism of people who foresee a return to what was before Covid-19. I don't share it. It's not that I lack optimism so much as I lack the certainty that one day we'll all return to work in our offices and it'll be like before. My optimism is in what the new thing might be. I don't have any particular vision for that, but I have hopes for it. Where my optimism fails is in the fear for any troubles between now and that new normal.

But meanwhile . . .

I'm surprised by some things. Numbly amused by others. Quite possibly oblivious to much. I'm surprised by the ways I miss moving freely in the world. I've less surprisingly slipped into this solitude with some ease---I've known for decades I have the potential for hermit status---but I'm surprised by how casually I once took going to a grocery store, how securely and confidently I picked up different items, reading labels until I found something I wanted to buy. How casually I brushed by someone in an aisle. How easily I waited in line, not bothered by the person in front or behind bumping into me, not worrying about the cashier and all their interactions.

I'm amused, occasionally annoyed, by people who complain of being bored. I don's have this problem. I experience boredom when I have tasks that don't engage me and yet have to get done, but I'm not one to feel like there's nothing to do. If anything, I'm more likely to be paralyzed by too many choices for what to do next. And perhaps this its own kind of pathology.

I've wondered that, this far into the age of mass media, that I don't, that we the church doesn't, have a stronger theology of broadcast worship. I don't belong to a tradition that enthusiastically embraced "TV ministries." There have been exceptions, the radio program here and there, the morality plays in stop-motion animation of Davey and Goliath, but not a great deal of energy for worship over the airwaves. How does one worship electronically?

Now that we've been forced into a situation where that is the required means, I find I have feelings about it.

No conclusions but definitely feelings.

And those feelings might be unpacked at some point. What I'm reminded of, these days, is of the slim book, Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Written while he was teaching at an underground seminary in Nazi Germany, he opens with the premise that gathering as a body of believers, as a congregation, in the physical presence of other Christians, is never a given and better understood as a privilege. He notes the Christian in prison, or separated by illness (relatable), or by work in a foreign land where there are no other Christians. In those situations, and others imaginable, the Christian must find comfort, strength, and life in Scripture, prayer, and in faith itself.

In our hyper-connected and yet hyper-separated contemporary world, I'm not sure we're equipped for this. I feel I am not. Hence my surprise at not having a better theology of broadcast worship.

The first two weeks of Facebook live worship, my church tried doing the Eucharist  over the internet. Not meaning to limit how God may choose to work, I found issues with the notion. It felt too much like the TV preacher holding his hands out to the camera, "healing" those in his TV audience.

Bonhoeffer also notes that we are given physical bodies, flesh for gathering. The body is where we experience everything. It is the site of our pains and pleasures and while our physical eyes see the physical TV screen, there is a qualitative difference in the presence. Some would argue that the "magic" of the Eucharist is in the words spoken over the elements---even if the elements are in front of my computer screen, not in front of the physical presider of the sacrament. And it is fair to ask, if the Holy Spirit cannot work in that way, does the Holy Spirit work at all?

But I begin to feel the "magic" of the Eucharist is in warm flesh and blood, in the same room, breathing together the same air (a dangerous thing, we've learned, but we've always known breathing together--"con spirare"--conspiracy--had danger in it). Whether in a group of thousands---a privilege indeed---or in a private sharing of bread and wine with the homebound--a different type of privilege, no less sacred--we become one body by bodies' presence.

Which is not to say that connections maintained over the world via electronic means are irrelevant. Absolutely not. It is a privilege to live in this modern age and have these means. And as definitions of "community" have shifted with the advent of social media, so may our definitions of "epiclesis." As I say, I don't wish to limit how God may choose to work. And this is why I've not entered into the arguments online about this. I have stated my misgivings and left it at that, but I have no strong, solid, final conviction about it.

Only that when "things get back to normal," whatever the new normal will be, there will be changed things, a lot of things. Or so I predict.

I expect the church, communities, my own self, to be among them.

Everywhere

Tonight, a small group from my church gathered via Zoom to discuss more of the book, How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. To start, our priest asked everyone to offer one word for how we felt. I wasn't ready and she asked me to go first. The only word that came to mind was "everywhere."

I feel everywhere today. All over the place.

Maybe that suggests something more panicky or anxious. I'm not really there, but I find myself cycling through a few emotions daily. Angry. Amused. Hopeful. Sad. Puzzled. And maybe a little anxious, though I don't think I ever quite rise to the level of panic.

I do wipe down groceries with a disinfectant wipe when I bring them into my apartment. Tonight I went on a walk and I carried one those wipes with me. I have to go out a gate to leave my complex and I used the wipe to turn the doorknob on the gate. Then I used it to come back in. I used it to touch the crosswalk button at an intersection.

I never thought I'd see the day that I'd be the type of person to not touch things. In fact, I'm realizing how tactile I am. I do like to touch objects, to feel textures. I also have a tendency to shoulder my way through doors, almost full body contact to get into a room. I think I knew that, but I feel it much more urgently now. I'm not doing those things. It feels a little bit like it's not me moving through the world.

I meant to note two emails in my last blog entry. On Friday afternoon, within 2 hours of each other, I first got an email from the apartment complex stating that someone in the complex has tested positive for covid-19. Then I got an email from the president of the university where I work, stating someone in the university community had contracted it. I had never assumed it was far away, but it did feel extra close to get both of those emails so close together.

The tree pollen is terrible in Houston right now. My eyes have been watering and itching all week. I'm about out of eye drops. I'm a wee bit phlegmy from the pollen, and I remind myself all day that the symptom to watch for is a dry cough. Phlegmy is the opposite of a dry cough.

I think too much about the pandemic, but it's hard not to think about it when you haven't been to your office in over a week but you're still working. It's hard not to think about it when you go for a walk but are vigilant to not let anyone get too close to you. It's hard not to think about it when everything  about the current moment is a little bit off due to it. It. It is everywhere.

Like my emotions.

It's not terrible. I'm good alone for long periods of time. I'm okay working unsupervised But as I've sometimes said, I'm an introvert, not a misanthrope. I actually enjoy sitting in a coffee shop or restaurant, alone at my table, surrounded by people. I don't need to interact with them, but I enjoy them.

My Facebook feed is also everywhere. I have my atheist friends who occasionally ridicule religion of the sort that claims the power of God over the caronavirus. This, followed by someone posting a call to prayer. I'm always surround by God and reminders of God. I spend all day surrounded by my library, filled with God-books. I see challenges to trust God in this crisis. I see someone post about Psalm 91 as reason to not be afraid and keep living life as normal. I responded to one, "you mean the same Psalm that the devil uses to temp Jesus to do something foolish?" Trust in God, trust that God is present, a comfort and  hope, but also doing my best not to put God to the test.

That's where I am in the "God and coronavirus" conversation. I'm willing to stay indoors or carry a disinfectant wipe when I go out, because I'm not interested in putting God to the test.

Pandemic Dispatch from a One-Bedroom Apartment

There are moments you remember all your life. Or so sang Yentl.

This past week is one to remember. Some of us will. I think this is the week that a lot of us really caught on how long this Covid-19 pandemic might last, how long it will disrupt our lives. I worry that not enough people have caught on. Right now, I hear neighbors having a party. I don't know how many people, but more than could possibly keep 6 feet distance from each other. I hope they're sure of their status.

They closed the play I was performing in. We only got in 2 of our scheduled 9 performances. It was a blow to all of us, even if we knew it to be the right decision. I knew it to be the right decision. Still, I shed a few tears over it. It was a fun show with a great cast and age appropriate for some young friends who don't often get to see me perform. I was looking forward to them seeing it. I wanted a lot more people to see it. If I'd come to believe that we were in for a long haul with this virus, this made it concrete for me.

I went into work on Monday, but they sent us home in the afternoon. We would be working at home for the next two weeks. I think that's now expanded, but I can't remember right now if they've given an estimated end date for this. I don't particularly like working at home. I like to keep a separation between that life and my home life, but it's actually been okay so far. Some big events with work have been postponed, which will make some things easier at this moment. Other things remain hard. A lot of my work can be done from here, not all of it can. Some just won't be done for now.

Wednesday night, I had a Zoom meeting with a book group that my church is conducting for lent. How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibrim X. Kendi. We're having good discussion around the book, but I was also surprisingly relieved to see faces on my screen. We didn't have Sunday worship last week and we won't again tomorrow morning and so on for the foreseeable future. There is a group of us that usually goes out to lunch after church on Sunday and based on my reaction to the book group I asked some of that group if they wanted to try having a Zoom liunch meeting tomorrow. We're giving it a go.

I've been thinking a lot about community the last few months, how I'm often on the edge of my communities and yes indisputably a part of them. My introvert ways doesn't make me antsy during this time of voluntary sequestering, but I also know I care about a number of people in my own aloof way. I've noticed a number of people on Facebook that I haven't noticed recently. It's being a place for people to interact. I'm always active on Facebook---its the perfect social interaction for an introvert---but I see more outgoing people seeking the interaction there now. How is this shaping my communities, the edges, the centers? We'll see.

I exchanged emails with my spiritual director today. He and his husband were on a cross-country trip that is getting cut short. He detailed their trip back home, how they had reservations at bed and breakfast stops, where they have arrangements so they never have to meet the owners. I hope they make the journey back home safely and virus-free. I'm impressed with their plan.

Strange days. Of course, I think about God. Pray in my own undisciplined way. I'm reminded of the prayer from Abba Macarius of the desert, the one that got me through my pancreas health scare 7 years ago: O Lord, as you will and as you know, have mercy on me. Help me." I pray it in the plural now. It works for me when I don't know what to pray for. Realistically, I mean. I can pray for all kinds of miracles, but that's not the sort of faith I have. I can pray for the virus to disappear, but I know that won't happen in some biblical story way. Praying for mercy? I can do that.

 This afternoon, spurred by a grad school classmate who mentioned a song that I found online and danced to in my kitchen, I turned on my camera and went live on Facebook for a one-song dance party. That felt good. I don't know for sure if anyone danced along. I had encouraging comments and it seemed to be fun for the viewers so maybe I'll do it again. So many in the dance community right now are offering online classes. I'm just offering a party. I think it might be 4 minutes spent well.

This is not the blogging I expected to do during lent. Nothing is as I expected this lent. I'm looking at weeks ahead without the Eucharist. I'm looking toward an Easter celebration that will be celebrated at a safe distance. For now, I'm good in my one-bedroom apartment with my one cat. Solitude of this sort doesn't worry me, and yet I feel the grief of cancelled plays, of missed Eucharists, of interrupted trips, of postponed celebrations, of news stories, of so much anxiety. There is this grief and there will be more grief before this is over.

It's going to be a lot. We may as well dance some, too. That's all I've got.

Loving You's the Right Thing to Do

But how? Right now? How do you love in the time of social distancing?

Coronavirus is on everyone's mind this moment. I try to stop thinking about it but it sneaks back in. What am I doing? Is it the right thing to do?

Thursday evening, I stopped at a grocery store on my way home from work. Of course, it was packed. I have my annoyances with any crowds, but that was all I thought of it until i got into the checkout line. "What are we doing?" I thought to myself. We've cancelled so many events, but here we are, brushing by each other down crowded aisles. Did we all really need something right then? I was low on a few things, but I could have gone home without absolutely needing anything that evening. And it was a grocery store in the affluent Galleria area of Houston---were any of these people back from recent trips anywhere "hot"?

This very morning, we opened a show, a play. The theater, one of the few who haven't cancelled performances, listed all the predictions they are taking and then left it up to the audience members if they wanted to come see us. I don't know if anyone in the cast had misgivings---we have been having a great deal of fun with the production, and we were ready to share it with an audience. Furthermore, it is nothing but fun, nothing but loud, boisterous silliness that in a way, I'm sure, was a respite to the small audience we had. (And they all responsibly sat with distance between them.) I felt good about offering that respite.

And ever since, I've wondered if we did the right thing. There are moments in the show when we, the cast, are all in very close proximity to one another. At one moment, the thought sneaked in---should we be doing this? 

Where have my cast mates been? Where have I been? Am I incubating anything from my grocery run that I've now passed on to the cast?

How can we know? I suppose if any of us come down with fever and a dry cough. That's when we'll know.

I despise how I'm thinking about this. I'm generally not a germophobe. I wash my hands regularly and otherwise try to practice good hygiene, but I'm usually not this conscious of the possibility of a germ. I'll eat a dropped M&M off the floor but should I be touching this table in a public place?

My church has cancelled services for two weeks. Tomorrow morning, I'll get up pray virtually, online, at a safe social distance with whoever else logs into my church's live stream. It will not be the same. I will miss singing in a congregation, the singing that I always call "breathing together."

Should we be breathing together?

Some of my atheist friends are mocking the notion of prayer and I will admit to not knowing how to pray right now. Other than not in close proximity. I don't belong to a brand of Christianity that wants to say we're protected from a virus "in Jesus' name." I know we're not. The rain falls on the just and unjust. But how then should we pray?

Love is the answer, it's the how of it that is getting to me. It's a question I used to ask in church committee meetings. "How do we love our community right now?"

Lord have mercy, but it is the farthest thing from clear to me right now.

What I'm Talking About When I Talk About Losing My Voice

Racism. I'm talking about Racism.

I'm talking about how I could read James Baldwin and appreciate, accept, believe his point of view and not see my own place in it.

I'm talking about reading Liberation Theology and thinking I was in some way on "their" side while very much ensconced in and benefiting from the legacy of imperialism and colonialism. (I nearly wrote "the colonial past"--as if it were over. Telling.)

I'm talking about hearing Black friends and colleagues talk about their lived experience and believing that they had some how moved on from it. How admirable to see your father stopped and abused by police to rise and to where you are now.

I was concerned, sympathetic, even empathetic to a degree. And I hadn't a clue.

To the extent one can wake up from that place of privileged sympathy, I have started to wake up. I can't say I'm "woke." I can't say I've earned that. But I've started to see, at least a little bit.

I was treating current and ongoing inequities like one might read about a far off land. A tourist's view of India, perhaps--the riches and the poverty--and see it as an interesting place to visit. Except I am living among the riches and poverty of my own nation and seeing myself somehow detached from it all.

It's been paralyzing. What do I have to say about any of this? Maybe I don't. Do I tell my white stories, not too different from other white stories, as if my particular brand of gay (I get to claim one oppressed label!) experience was of any interest among the many gay white stories already in circulation?

I write because I'm a writer. I've continued writing. I don't think I can stop. But I read back on it and it is hollow. Unnecessary. Familiar and without revelation.


That's what I'm talking about when I talk about losing my voice.

Certainty/Not

In my 20s, I was certain about so much, particularly God-stuff. I had many declarative sentences about what God wanted and such things. It was the 80s and brand of certainty was "in" thanks to the Reagan era.

Even in my 20s, though, I couldn't commit to that more evangelical/fundamentalist way of thinking. I always held back a little bit, mostly around tactics. I have an example.

I was definitely "pro-life" at the time (a term I dislike now, since I still like to think I'm pro-life, I just don't believe abortion is murder anymore). I had been to a meeting of some sort, some Christian group (that wasn't Lutheran Campus Ministry, where I was very active, even though they seemed a little soft on some issues), and abortion had been the topic. Someone from an organization that presented itself as offering help to women with unwanted pregnancies told us of the tactics used to lure these women into their "clinic" where they then did their best to convince them to carry the pregnancy to term. It was either a "Crisis Pregnancy Center" or something very like it. The advertising for these centers made them sound like they might offer abortions, or at least have information about them. It struck me as very deceptive. I recall writing in my journal something like, "how do you lead someone to the Way, Truth, and Life with lies?"

So that's where my certainty ended. At deceptive tactics. It's happened with more liberal or progressive organizations since. There are talking points to make the argument, and then there are aspects that are true but not mentioned because they aren't helpful to the agenda.

Whichever organizations, left or right politically, I cannot stand deception to sell a point. I'm not keen on bait and switch.

And that makes me a terrible activist. Activists require no little certainty in the cause. It's why I'm terrible at a political campaign. Campaigners have to have certainty that their candidate is the best option.

Twitter is full of certain people, some of them valued friends. The space allowed requires direct speech, blunt words. To get to the point, you need to be pointed. I admit, even when I agree with what's being said. I want to argue because the bluntness invites argument.

I also envy the certainty. I miss that feeling of being sure. I admire and am even thankful for activists, and still that assured posture is not one I can pull off.

This is confession. I'm not sure (there it is again!) if I need to change my ways or let my failures be signs to step away. I'm definitely not offering myself as a role model.

There are things that I feel strongly about, of course. Racism is sin. Billionaires shouldn't exist. Donald Trump is a terrible president. I don't see a reason to back away from any of these statements.


I'm the guy who finds most truth in ambiguity, even when I have strong feelings about some things. I believe that if racism is bad, then what I want to do is help convert racists to antiracists. Shouting at them doesn't seem a great tactic. If I believe billionaires shouldn't exist, I want a system that requires businesses to pay workers what they earn for the corporations, not pay some figurehead for managing a company of low wage earners. I don't see shaming them for their wealth to be a great agent for change. (Not that shame can't be or has never been an agent for change---but see, there I go again.) These are not easy slogans for the activist signs. They don't make great chants at the rallies.

On my best days, I accept that I am who I am and try to live my life in peace and love with all people. On my worst days, I want that certainty, that assured feeling back. I'm uncertain what to do about any of this.

Humility and Western Culture

Most people know the Desert Fathers and Mothers are spiritual heroes of mine. Outside of the Bible, the collected sayings and stories are my sacred texts.

Central to their teaching was humility. It was the way to God and to service to those around us. Theirs was a sometimes harsh humility. Some of the sayings (not only on humility) need to be tempered with modern psychology and viewed with some slight understanding of the ancient world.

It is hard to practice humility in the modern world, particularly this western world of European descent. There is nothing humble about "exploring" and colonizing much of the world. We inherit this hubris in many forms.

And then try to practice humility while also answering a call to creative endeavors. It's all about self-promotion if you're to get noticed. I'd like to think the work would draw attention, but I've found that to be untrue or at least undependable.

Sometimes, when I'm trying to practice humility, I'm accused of low self-esteem. Sometimes I maybe believe it is low self-esteem. Other times, I'm so full of myself at any little accomplishment that I'm reminded how much I need to practice this virtue. The voices of the culture tell you to believe you're amazing and unconquerable. Humility says to count everyone as better than yourself, not out of self-hate but out of service.

Humility is hard.

Back in college I took an anthropology course in ethnographic film. I had no idea what I was signing up for but needed a class to fill out my schedule and as a theater major, I saw the word "film" in the title and thought it might have something to do with my other studies. I was wrong on that count but one thing has stuck with me all these years. That's a book called The Dobe !Kung by Richard B. Lee. The appendix, "Eating Christmas in the Kalahari," tells the story of the author's parting gift to the !Kung, a large bull to be slaughtered for Christmas feasting. They treat the gift with contempt and derision until the day of the slaughter. Then they all laughed at him and ate their fill. He was puzzled, expecting praise and thanks as he was. He came to find out they were practicing a sort of humility that they practiced among themselves. They taught this sort of nearly ritualized derision of accomplishments as a way to keep themselves from arrogance. The author realized his arrogance and wondered how he'd missed this aspect of their culture until they used it on him. One !Kung man told the anthropologist, "you never asked."

And I recall thinking at the time that it was a way to practice a sort of Christianity without Christianity. It struck me as a terribly moral way to live together, no one bragging on their own traits, no one putting up with bragging in another.

That they were African desert people from the southern part of the continent did not keep me from comparing their way to the African monks of the northern African desert.

And I'm left with these African teachers giving me a hard way to be in this western culture. And because it's hard and I'm often lazy and weak, I have not learned their lessons.

I think of Abba Macarius who encountered a demon in the desert. The demon said, "I can best you in everything you practice, Macarius, save for one thing and it gives me great torment." Macarius asked, "What is that?" The demon replied, "You fast--I don't eat at all. You keep vigil--I never sleep. But the thing I can not best you at is your humility. Because of it, I am not able to overpower you."

And so, I return to trying to understand and practice the simple word, humility. I have demons that overpower me.  If the western culture of my inheritance sees low self-esteem, these demons see the arrogance not two steps away. Expecting praise for a gift is just another kind of economic transaction and no longer a gift.

Heroes

History has weight.

I sometimes see complaints about historical (or contemporary) fiction in LGBTQ groups on Facebook. The sad story, the impossible love, the violent end to romance—these are too prevalent in LGBTQ fiction. Where do we get to be the heroes? Where do we get to see happy endings for us?

It’s a fair question but I’m left with a counter question: How real do you want the fiction to be? Could Oscar Wilde’s story have been much different than it was? How do you write his happy ending unless you’re doing speculative fiction/alternative history?

My novella, Cary and John, is somewhat historical in that the letters between the men are written in the early 1970s, but there is also a contemporary part, the narrative between the daughters of the men. They are not, to put it mildly, queer activists. When I first started shopping the manuscript around, one gay publisher responded in part, and I quote, “. . . too much page time was given to the daughters, whose homophobia overwhelmed the narrative and was not moderated even at the end.”

I could argue about the subtle shift that I think the daughters make by the end of the book, but I admit it is subtle and little bit the point. That moment when the shift begins was what I was most interested in writing about. I gave the titular characters as happy an ending as I could, given their circumstances, but without expanding the scope of the book drastically, any more than a subtle shift was all the daughters earned. Yes, I could have expanded the scope of the book, but that wasn’t the story I had to tell.

Certainly, LGBTQ folk are not alone in this. I hear similar frustration from other communities. Why are so many books about American Black experience centered on slavery? Can Native fiction writers escape the weight of lost land and residential schools? Obviously, there are very good books by Black and Native authors that do not center those experiences, but the weight of being racialized in a way that resulted in those atrocities are still in the background. How can they not be?

And I begin to ask, myself only until now, what if our desire to see ourselves as the hero of stories really just wanted to be part of the empire story? To read a biography of any U.S. president will center on his presidency and whether or not he was a good leader or not. Even if he’s assessed as less than heroic, he became president “because,” not “in spite of.” A biography of Wilde will focus on his literary accomplishments, but it’s a bit “in spite of” him being gay. Would Harvey Milk’s political accomplishments be noticed at all if he’d not been assassinated? Are there happy endings for Rudolf Nureyev, Liberace, Rock Hudson? Are what we want when we pine for happy endings, are we wanting to be more powerful, more traditionally successful, dying of less politicized causes?

This may be why a some BIPOC fiction has turned to futurism. It’s a way of envisioning a future where the previously oppressed can unambiguously end up a hero with a happy ending. It’s envisioning the redemption and reversal of a long history of injustice. There’s something sad as well as victorious in a movie like Black Panther, where we have to invent a place that remained untouched by European colonization. It’s an attempt at “what could be” as well as “what might have been.”

Jesus died a death of political and religious intrigue. His hero story is upside down, a nobody who should have disappeared into the history of other nobodies executed by the state. Whether you’re a Christian who believes in a literal resurrection or a Christian or atheist or other religious who sees the resurrection story as a myth like the story of Zeus becoming the supreme god of the Greek pantheon, the power of the story continues on in the lives of millions of Christians, but it is not a hero story in any classical sense of the word.

I confess I want gay heroes. I want gay heroes who have happy endings. But I’m beginning to check my desire, to see if it’s because I want to take part in the overarching stories of power and imperialism. I take part in those stories daily as a white man, an inheritor of the comfort and position afforded me by European colonialism. If there are heroes for me, perhaps it is in the community that some slaughtered saint left behind.

Exhausted, Anxious, and Checking Twitter

I listen to the Makers & Mystics podcast and a recent interview was with John Eldredge, a writer I used to stock on the shelves at Barnes & Noble, but I’ve never read any of them. On the podcast, he talks about pausing for beauty, pausing from social media and distraction, pausing for our own mental health. He talked about having a hard time reading anything longer than a blog post. He talked about having trouble focusing on his family members

I heard a diagnosis for my own condition. I, too, have had trouble reading books. I’m often at a table with friends and feel the pull of my phone and all the other people inside of it.

He said we can’t take the constant trauma of the world that constant connectivity brings us. I had just told the story, the evening before listening to the podcast, of my summer as a hospital chaplain and how I could not leave the people at the hospital, how they followed me home and weighed on me. I carry the trauma of the national politics in my joints. The world wars, military, economic, and political, have my anxiety up high all the time.

And I want to push back. Yes, even in my lifetime, we didn’t get constant news updates as we do today. We got news on TV twice, maybe 3 times a day, in an hour or shorter bites. We got the newspaper once a day. Outside of that, we lived our lives and maybe what we’d seen or read weighed on us, but so did our immediate company, our immediate work. And before my lifetime, there was a time without TV, a time without radio. News from beyond our communities might have come only once a day or once a week or a couple times a month. The powerful worked their machinations in relative silence, unseen day to day. Was that better or worse?

The deal is, the speed of the world allows the powerful to make their power moves with more speed, too. Two centuries ago, their power grabs also moved at a slower pace. Today, it feels like they have so many more opportunities to create poverty and despair as they create their own wealth. They have many more tools to hide, distract from, cover-up the nefarious intentions.

I could disconnect, live only in my immediate community and be crushed by the bull dozer I never saw coming. Or I can stay connected and see the bull dozer coming and still be crushed, the last hours lived in fear and anxiety as I was powerless to divert its course. Or maybe I could divert its course. Or get out of its way. Those last bits are what keeps me connected and anxious. It’s circular and exhausting. 

“Is it possible to learn how to care and yet not care?” Joni Mitchell asked that question in her Zen-influenced song, “Moon at the Window.” Can I care and not die of anxiety? Maybe that’s my question. Eldredge talked about detachment, a very Zen idea. To care, to pray, to turn over to God, to let go.

I wish I had some quick tips for stepping away from this. "Five Easy Prayers for Immediate Peace." And even as I type this, I'm thinking of people currently way more anxious about the the coronavirus outbreak than I am. Maybe we pick our anxieties.

I want to offer an answer. I want to end on a helpful note but I remind myself, this lenten blogging is more confession than instruction. I leave it here today. I'm an anxious, distractable mess. And I try to pause for beauty, too. It's a lot. I'm exhausted. And you?