Illegal

A while back, a relative asked about my upcoming marriage, "Isn't that illegal?"

Aside from revealing some of the foundational differences between her perspective on sexuality and mine, it also made me think about the meaning of "illegal" anyway. Then last week I read an article about immigration and deportation in ColorLines magazine (http://colorlines.com/article.php?ID=618).

The introduction mentions that Obama has begun calling undocumented residents in the US as "illegal." It called up that memory again, of my "illegal" relationship.

What exactly is illegal about undocumented workers and their families in the US? It's not the work they do, that supports daily life for the rest of us. It's not their spending money to meet their needs, which supports the economy. It's not even their physical, human existence in our communities. What's illegal is their existence without the stamp of approval from the administration that acts on behalf of this country. To me, it's the same for LGBT people. It's not our participation in the daily life of this country. It's not our love for each other. What's illegal is that we exist without the stamp of approval from our fellow community members.

Yes, we should work to find ways that all people who live here can be documented - for their protection and access to the benefits of living as part of our society. But the answer is not to withhold approval. That doesn't make anyone go away. It just makes them go underground. Which, let me say, benefits those who do get the stamp of approval. My share of the benefits of living in the US get divided by fewer people because the undocumented people don't get to share them. I get to benefit from their work across the spectrum of employment - from lower prices that result from unfairly (and illegally) low wages and substandard working conditions.

In the same way, straight people (those who participate in socially acceptable relationships) get access to a wide spectrum of images and supports for their relationships, while those of us "illegals" get messages that our relationships aren't "real" or "correct," and that our struggles to experience love and relationships are inherently flawed. The result is that when we experience relationship struggles, it's because we're deviant. When hetero folks experience relationships struggles, it's because they're relationship struggles.

I'm sure there are flaws in the ways I'm comparing undocumented residents and workers in the US with undocumented relationships and sexuality. But I also think there are some important similarities that create common causes for support for each other.

When, Why, and How I Realized I'm Gay and Chose to Accept It

I recently received an email from a relative who asked when, why, how, etc. I became gay. This is my answer, and I wanted to post it because it relates to what I want to write about in my next post.

--------

"So here's my answer to your question of when, why, how, etc. I realized that I'm gay and chose to accept it:
In college I was exposed to many different perspectives, and to an environment where we could engage with each other about them. This was different from my experience growing up in a place where there was one right perspective and many wrong ones, even if people disagreed on what the right and wrong perspectives were. In college I met people (mostly straight people, and a few gay ones) who articulated perspectives that shared my values but not my rules. I came to see that the way I believed in God as a child (a God who made rules that I could not understand and could not live up to, and who punished and shamed me because I could not meet those impossibly high ideals) was not the God that I experienced every day in my life (a God who affirms my worth as a human being, who takes great pleasure and joy in Creation, and who asks me first to love my neighbor, myself, and the earth - and to understand my life values and ethics from that perspective). In the middle of this, I realized that I was attracted to some men as well as some women. I came to understand that I can engage my desire for love & intimacy (and my desires for creativity, joy, relationships, learning, etc.) by measuring my actions with my values - asking how my choices reflect and increase the love, joy, and grace that are divine gifts given to everyone who chooses to accept them. Like anyone learning and growing into emotional maturity, I had some relationships that met my values, and others that didn't. I had friends and mentors who helped me sift through my choices, actions, and experiences.

These values and life experiences are what led me to commit to a relationship with my partner and accept my sexuality as it is. This relationship continues to provide a foundation for my work in the world, addressing conditions that hurt others, stifle joy, and increase hatred & distrust rather than love - and helping provide an example for others in engaging with deep love, compassion, and joy in existence. Our relationship is a gift that increases love and joy in the world and does not hurt others in the process.
How did you come to engage and accept your desire for love, intimacy, and companionship in your relationship?"

fear ---> moral outrage

So last night we went to see Inglorious Basterds. Aside from being visually stunning quite often, surprisingly funny at times, interestingly written, very precisely timed for suspense and maximum impact, and well-acted by a number of people in it -- I never want to see another Quentin Tarantino movie again. I can't handle it. Not surprising - I don't do well with lots of graphic violence. It also raised some uncomfortable issues about justification and entitlement to revenge. And in this case, quite a parallel process, poetic justice kind of revenge, given the historical context it refers to. Questions I can't answer, which is a great thing.

But therewas a scene closer to the end that triggered something inside me. It was visceral terror - I thought I was going to throw up, I was trembling, and my hands and arms felt tingly. It was very physical, and I'm not entirely sure why. I stayed in my seat until the end (which I'm glad about, because I didn't want that scene to be the last I saw). I left the theater quickly and crossed the street. I intensely did not want to see any of my fellow theater-goers except my partner, and I didn't want to hear anyone making any comments about it. I felt disgusted, horrified, and deeply disturbed. And moved very quickly into moral condemnation. I did not want to know of anyone who found the film entertaining. I did not want to hear anyone say they liked it. I precluded my partner's comments about whether or not he liked it, and consumed our world with my experience of fear and moral condemnation.

This morning, I'm much more settled, but left with better awareness of this move from visceral fear to moral outrage and condemnation. I think it says a lot about human experience and how we've come to understand morality and fear. What triggers and justifies moral tirades - at a deeper level than simple discomfort with what is unfamiliar? When moral outrage spurts up somewhere, maybe now I'm better equipped to look for the bodily fears behind it. I don't have anything more to say about it right now...but there it is.

'reality'

I haven't been writing because I fell down a deep hole called "two part-time jobs with small nonprofit agencies." I will emerge eventually, but probably not for a couple more weeks.

In the meantime, I wanted to write about a person I saw during the part of one of my jobs where I meet with HIV+ people who are eligible for some of the services we offer. I met with a person who was quite religious in conversation and very cautious about personal details. They revealed that they had once been almost dead from 'cancer' and that a very close 'loved one' had died recently. The usually language of partner, lover, boyfriend, AIDS, gay, and all of that was completely absent, except for the times when I referred to my own life & experiences.

As I pondered my pastoral diagnosis (this is not part of my job explicitly, but it's behind many of the things I do), I considered what goals I might identify for this person. Primarily I thought about what it means to 'face reality.' The reality for this (as least partially homosexual) person is that they have HIV and their partner died from it. The reality is that they don't receive certain helpful services because they don't wish at this point to publicly identify with the diagnosis. But that's not the only reality.

It's also a reality that their family (from what I gather) is not particularly accepting of same-sex desire, nor of HIV status. Their religious community isn't either. And perhaps most importantly, this person is not particularly comfortable with the labels I just described. Instead, they have found ways to talk around this cancer, the burden of grief of watching friends and a lover die from it - and knowing that they also have the diagnosis.

I think about the many ways I find to talk around certain things in my life - what things I let slide under assumptions, and what kind of language I use to frame my life, depending on the audience. How important is it to make someone agree with my version of reality?

I guess at this point it seems more important to support their survival. If they refuse to get treatment, for example, or if they seem too isolated and depressed, then I might find ways to help them get access to treatment and social support. But who am I to mess with the structure of their self-understanding? Maybe as I get to know this person (who was delightful & interesting to talk to, and who gave me a hug when I left), my perspective will change. But in the meantime, I'm struck with my own impulse to "make" them describe their reality in terms I would use - rather than let them structure it in ways that work for them.

"those people" who make "those choices"

It's been a few weeks since I sent a letter to my extended family, confirming the rumors that I am gay and that I'm getting married. It was a prelude to sending save-the-date cards, and eventually our wedding invitations. A relative had suggested that it might be better to send a letter before the cards, since I hadn't really talked with most of them directly about my sexuality.

To be honest, I expected mostly silence. That's part of the culture where I come from: controversial or potentially divisive issues are met first with silence (perhaps in the hope that they'll go away or resolve themselves on their own - a reaction that crosses over into physical ailments like cancer, I might add). I had hoped, against my experience growing up, that a few might, like one member of my family, say "I'm glad you're happy" or even "I'm excited to meet your partner." I didn't ask for a response, and I provided my contact information explicitly for dialogue, but not for condemnation.

I have received two responses. One clearly stated that their values do not support my marriage, and the other carefully drew. The common thread among both was a curious distancing of "the issue." Neither mentioned homosexuality, or even sexuality at all. It was like they were discussing not me, but a vague unnamed issue. They spoke of "people who make the decisions you speak of" and "the actions you describe." That was a surprise.

I'm not clear if it was politeness or evasion. Perhaps it was an attempt to frame things differently. We were not talking anymore about my relationship, but about decisions and actions that I take. It's a subtle difference, but it's at the heart of a lot of the religious back-and-forth about sexuality. It's important for opponents of gayness to frame it as a "lifestyle" or a choice. I realized that this enables condemnation of what people "choose to do," while ignoring underlying circumstances. The underlying circumstance for me is that I do not choose who I am attracted to. I adamantly emphasize that I choose to act on those attractions, sometimes, in the framework of a loving relationship with my partner [and I do not condemn those who act on their attractions in other, consensual ways - or who choose not to act on them, based on their values].

It's been interesting to read these letters and consider how personal relationships are impacted by political and religious perspectives and language. I doubt if it is easy for most of my relatives to grapple with values that may seem to be in conflict: a religious perspective that places sexuality itself in a suspect category of desires and bodily pleasure, and a religious perspective that values family and community [and its underlying diversity]. What is the breaking point where a person rejects another person from family and community for their difference? And what does that person choose to ignore or silence rather than reject? And what, among the great, glorious diversity of creation, does that person embrace?

not the problem

Today someone asked me whether or not I thought my parents were to blame for my being gay.

First off: No. My parents did not make me gay (or prevent me from becoming heterosexual).

Second off, the question presumes that being gay is somehow maladjusted. That somehow, they did something "wrong" (were 'absent,' or 'spoiled' their child, for example) and their child ended up with this 'disorder.' The truth is that my sexuality is not disordered, but just a fact of my life, like having brown hair and ten toes. So the premise of the theory is wrong to start with.

Third, the question presumes that because being gay is a problem, someone must be guilty. This is what makes me the most angry. The theory is a recipe for endless tortured guilt on the part of parents. They can't go back and correct anything, and they can't move beyond the terrible thing they might have done to result in this horrible condition (which is, by my reckoning, a loving, committed relationship in which my partner and I are building a household and a family together, and a base from which we do good things in the world). My parents did the best they could raising me and my siblings - they made some mistakes and did a lot of things right - and I dare anyone to say they made me gay, or my siblings heterosexual, by their parenting skills!

Fourth, there are plenty of examples of kids who grew up with absent fathers and/or mothers who babied their sons in which the children turned out to be heterosexual. Just as there are many gay people who had loving, present fathers and mothers who were strict with them. My partner, in fact, was spoiled by his father, and his mother was very strict with him.

Fifth, here's what impact my parents did have on my relationship: They helped (along with an entire community and extended family of people) form my values. They raised me to think independently, to value loving relationships, and not to let myself be hurt by others. They taught me to be generous with others, careful with my money, and to care about those who are vulnerable. They taught me to deeply consider my spirituality and values. They taught me to be practical but fed my imagination, to be strong but to express my emotions. They taught me to cook, to study, and to be committed to my partner. They taught me to be tough, and to endure in difficult times. I am grateful for these things, and if you want to blame them for that, go ahead.

My friend Miak posted this link on his facebook page: Homophobia is Not Just Another Point of View, and it makes an important point. The post is about NYU Law School hiring a visiting faculty member from Singapore, who is an expert on constitutional law, human rights, and the UN convention to end all discrimination against women, but who is publicly and actively homophobic. To her credit, she's pithy, if mistaken, about it: "Diversity is not an excuse for perversity," and comparing anal sex to trying to drink with a straw up your nose. (Let's pretend for the moment that straight people don't also have anal sex, and let's not try to pick through what she's trying to say about the purpose of sex with this metaphor.) I was struck by one student's defense that anti-gay laws are the only point where she "lets her religion cloud her rationality," because she's actually got a lot of good things to say about constitutional law and human rights. The blogger linked above clears through a lot of my kneejerk responses. Of course a wide variety of perspectives should be engaged in law school. Of course a person's anti-homosexual stance shouldn't cloud other gifts and wisdom she has to offer. But can I trust someone who wants to impose her brand of morality on the whole system, while still upholding constitutional law and human rights? Does human rights become a pissing contest for whose moral view trumps the others? It's not okay to discriminate against women even if your religion says so, but it's okay to discriminate against gays because my religion says so.

This blogger cuts through that. Homophobia is not "just another viewpoint among many." It has serious consequences (see, for example, the article the other day on the severe rate of HIV infections among gay men across Africa, tied directly to homophobia and mistreatment.) It also muddies the question about morality in a diverse system. What ties people together in a nation? There are values and perspectives that can do so, or at least the dialogue about them can do so. But when it becomes the values of one God or one moral system that erases all others, that's a problem. And, most importantly, as the blogger points out, everyone is entitled to their beliefs, but with that entitlement comes the right to engage with others about them, especially in disagreement. It's not that this visiting professor shouldn't come to NYU, but that she can't pretend to be a victim because others are questioning her authority and viewpoint, based on her outspoken and emphatic homophobia. If she puts herself out in a particular point of view, she can't insulate herself from those who wish to engage with her about it.

And I take this to heart, considering my own points of view, and when I feel the need to insulate or strike back with a personal insult when someone disagrees with me. I get the urge, but I also think it's important to engage with it rather than run away.

in the wrong line of work

Yesterday after a rather frustrating day of job searches in which everyone wanted at couple of years' experience in the field (which wasn't my own), my browser did something that blanked out the online job history I had just completed for a job. That's when I stopped for the day.

Sometimes job hunting makes me

feel like a goldfish in a sushi bar.

I'm a fish,

But nobody wants to put me in sushi.

I might be golden,

And have fluttery fins,

But my body of experience is

too small,

To fit into the pretty little rolls

Chef Craigslist is dishing up today.

But today is a new day,

And someone once sang that

to a goldfish,

The little plastic castle is a

surprise every time.

here's what made me cry this week

Thanks to my Queering the Use of the Bible class, I was given this:

Tiramisu Wedding Cake

by Kathy Skaggs (a really wonderful Kentucky? poet who is a friend of the professor's)

We called him nathan

the Old Testament name for gift

patiently slicing each layer of wedding cake into thirds

our family's best gift to the future.

Her father named her Vrushali

wife of Vedic Lord Karna

grating organic semi-sweet chocolate he tells us

"I found the recipe on the internet and Nathan does the rest."

And here they are

and here we are

manicured pedicured starched pressed

peeled layered laminated

fluffed and blow-dried.

A wedding cake awaits us

assembled through one hundred and four painstaking steps

from cream cheese Kahlua espresso

whipping cream chocolate fresh berries

and much much more.

We celebrate their wedding

in Sanskrit and English

with Beethoven punch and wine

poetry promises candles and flowers

mingled with our joy

and the most elaborate wedding cake

the world has ever seen.

We have driven and flown here

from New Jersey Florida and Texas

India Russia and central Kentucky

cross country across town across the state and around the world

from southern hillsides downtown streets and suburban cul-de-sacs

a community assembled

as painstakingly as a tiramisu wedding cake.

We have given them sheets and food processors

cards flowers hugs

good wishes and a crystal punch bowl

but these are not the real gifts.

The real gifts began before today

and continue long after the honeymoon.

We have given them history and hope

advice and comfort

we have lent them our money our ear and our truck

we have laughed with them and cried with them.

Today is just a symbol a moment

today we will rejoice we'll laugh and dance

and disassemble wedding cake.

Tomorrow the real work begins

the real gift of friendship and marriage continues

as we depart to our homes and our workplaces

to math conferences and Al-Anon meetings

unpacking and repacking and working off wedding cake

we take this responsibility with us:

It takes a whole community to support a marriage.

(from The Poet Laureate of People Who Hate Poetry - by Kathy Skaggs, Time Barn Books, Nashville, 2007).

outsmarted again by my mother-in-law!

Today, as I was making pancakes as my mother-in-law prepared to move back home. This involved cleaning and showing me all the six different brooms, brushes, vacuums, etc that she used to clean the floor and carpets (she loves to clean, which I try very hard to understand but often fail). I asked if it was really useful to keep so many different cleaning tools.

She replied, "You see, it's like your cooking. You are whisking the egg whites with a whisk, but couldn't you just use a fork?" I looked around at my bowls and whisks and spatulas and spoons and measuring cups, and I realized all their jobs could be done with a spoon, fork, knife, and cup.

Outsmarted by Mama again!

privacy

My partner and I have been talking about privacy and confidentiality when it comes to online stuff. How much do you share about your personal life, and how much do you consider your online "persona" when you post things? Do you think about who else may be seeing it, and unintended consequences?

My partner is a much more private person, where I am less concerned about that. The way I grew up, secrets and "privacy" ended up being prisons where I couldn't talk about my experience and reach out to others for help. So when I hear about privacy boundaries, I want to push on them. Why is it important to be private? I want to know.

At the same time, I am definitely guilty of saying too much, of revealing too much on my blog or on facebook, which I assume only friends and family read - but anyone can, searching on google.

So where's the line? As my friend Erica has said, usually you find a boundary when you stumble over it.

I'm curious what other people think about how they write about personal things online.

violence & responsibility

Last night we learned that a friend of ours got attacked by some gay men who had heard a rumor that he had transitioned. Our friend is healing well, which we're grateful for.

Obviously this made me feel disturbed and angry. I'm still mulling over my thoughts and responses - but I have a few things to say about it already.

What is it with men that we need to do violence against each other anyway? I struggle to understand how this rumor could lead someone to violence anyway. It reminds me how much violence is related to fear of the unknown and a need to prove oneself by dominating or denying someone else. We teach this as a culture, from our foreign policy down to our voting, and even sometimes our "sex" lives. I use sex in quotation marks because the intimate, vulnerable act of sex is the opposite of an act of violation. I'm reminded that men sometimes say women are "emotional" or "too carried away by emotion," but what do you call it when a man lets his emotions of anger or fear lead him to violence? And what possible gain is it, to commit violence like this, when it simply leads to more fear and anger? Where does this cycle stop?

What makes me even more livid is that it was gay men who did it. Gay men, who know that even in the Bay Area we are at risk for violence against us for not fitting the dominant mold of masculinity. Over and over, James Baldwin's analysis rings in my head: there are two categories of response to oppression. The first is to strive to get back into the norm, and the second is to find common cause with others who are oppressed. Too often, I think gay people, especially those of us who can "fit in" pretty well, take the first option. If we can just widen the circle a little bit, we think, we'll be okay - safe, happy, and smiled upon. The underbelly of this is that it continues to stand on the same principles of exclusion and violence. I learned early in my feminist education, and in my own life experience, that this simply doesn't work.

Gay men who seek to be included back into the fold of normative masculinity are cutting their nose off to spite their face. If we strive only to "be just like you [hetero men]" we lose. We sacrifice, if not a part of ourselves, then a part of who "we" are in a larger sense.

Even more, I have criticism for the gay men who buy into the norm of masculinity. These are the guys who idolize big muscles, big penises and overt, even violence, masculinity. I use idolize very consciously - meaning those who make a god or a savior of these things. It's not the attraction to these traits that I see as the problem, but the unconscious results. The implication is that a man who doesn't have a specific size and shape of anatomy is somehow not "really" a man. That kind of thinking is just a breath away from the implication that a man who has sex with a man is not "really" a man. That kind of violence is a violence against oneself as well as against other people. We have to create a culture where this isn't the kneejerk response to someone who doesn't fit our idea of what someone is "supposed" to be.

I don't know what happened in that attack - who these gay men were, or what their motivations were. But I do know that I am implicated here. When I reinforce the idea that some men are more "men" that others, based on arbitrary traits like that, I do violence against myself and others. When I try to be just like the norm, or try to stretch the norm just enough so I can fit in again, I commit violence against myself and other people. It has to stop somewhere. So let's make it stop here.

Food, Inc., Foreign Policy, and Kansas

Last week my partner and I went to see the documentary Food, Inc., about the industrialized food system and how it's hurting people, the planet, the poor, and the economy itself.

Much of the film was revealing for him, who had seen it a few days earlier at a childhood obesity prevention conference. Hardly any of it was new information for me, having grown up in an agricultural small town in Kansas, with a father who managed an agricultural coop and a mother who worked in a nursing home kitchen. We were not hippie people, but we had a big garden and raised & butchered chickens every year - along with the occasional lambs and pigs, which we drove (in our '54 Chevy pickup) to the slaughterhouse. My mom refused to buy supermarket meats because they just didn't taste good. I was too young to remember the Farm Crisis of the 80s, but financial ruin always hovered on the edge of most people's vision. Talking about the weather wasn't small talk because the economy depended on the weather system that provided good crops or bad. I remember my dad shaking his head over the idea of farm subsidies that paid us per acre NOT to plant. I remember when I realized that good crops didn't necessarily mean good money because more crops flooding the market translated into lower price per bushel. I remember countless times when my mom worried about the overspray from the fields drifting into our garden. We learned to read labels because my dad was allergic to corn - and almost everything had corn syrup in it.

Living in California, I hear more and more from my mom about this or that person with cancer. Young people with brain tumors. Mothers with pancreatic cancer. Breast Cancer, ovarian cancer, prostate cancer. When my Grammy died, I angrily asked why no one draws the connection between pesticides and cancer that disfigured her face so her glasses didn't sit right when she was lying there in the casket. No on has an answer because we all depend on those chemicals.

Frankly, the industrial food system is much worse now than then. Visiting my dad in Iowa, I asked why farmers used genetically modified crops and a pesticide that killed EVERYTHING but the seed containing a certain gene. Didn't that scare them? He drove me past fields of even, perfectly green rows, and then fields that were uneven (signaling less yield when harvesting) and weeds here and there. That's all the argument you need, he said, even in Central and South American countries that outlaw GMOs - because the farmers see neighboring countries with perfect fields, and the illegal market grows.

Growing up, I didn't make the connections between that and foreign policy, or with the e.coli outbreaks at fast food restaurants (where we rarely ate anyway, because it was unhealthy, and not really that tasty compared to home cooking).

I learned more about this in college. I saw the commodities market in the Midwest (and, for example, among coffee farmers in Ethiopia) where equality among producers meant exploitation on the part of the buyers.

I'm also reading a book about the violence of a belief system that sees one's own nation as "God's chosen people" over all others. I read about false capitalism based on large corporations that can leverage their assets to put small ones out of business (remember, the free market depends on equality or small distinctions between companies). I read about structural adjustment programs in industrializing countries, in which aid money is tied to "helpful" economic policies that put the countries further into debt (ie, forcing farmers to grow commodity crops like corn, tobacco, and coffee, instead of food crops that feed the region). In the film, they talked about how farmers in Mexico, encouraged to grow corn for the international market, went out of business because small farmers everywhere tried to sell their corn, ensuring lots of corn for low prices. These farmers then come north to work at industrial food factories, where they are picked off and deported by immigration enforcement. Attention: these farmers are punished, but the corporations that hire them run smoothly, neither threatened by the immigration enforcement officers nor by work stoppage due to worker deportation. Odd.

And by the way: cheap food, usually manufactured with nutrient-low ingredients, adjusts people's palates to salt and fat instead of flavor. There's also a piece about economic markets in low-income areas (West Oakland, for example) where there are plenty of liquor stores and fast food joints - but astonishingly few grocery stores that sell fresh produce. Thus people with less income (often due to economic policies that exploit their labor and pay low wages) get diabetes, obesity, and poor health. Considering that, don't forget the racist dynamics of how that happens.

Anyway, this film is worth seeing - and worth weighing your values around the environment, fair worker policies, and the food system. It's not always possible to live perfectly, but it's always possible to live better and make better choices. In college, one of my best friends Sam and I used to talk about the knee-jerk anti-corporate mentality. He points out that corporations have the money to pay good wages, set labor standards, pay good health benefits, and a host of other really helpful things. The key is not to dismantle them, but to reinforce human values in their actions. I like the cooperative system where small entities can organize to leverage their power and negotiate on a slightly better playing field with multinational buyers. But it's complicated.

I think I've written enough here for today. Check out the movie and learn a little more from places like The People's Grocery in West Oakland.

the exchange of ideas: a cactus and a jellyfish walk into a bar...

So this afternoon I happened to run into my friend EJoye, and we both had a little time on our hands. The universe moves, and creation laughs when this kind of stuff happens.

Part of what we talked about was the notion that worldview is based on the life we live. I see the world in a certain way because that's how I experienced and interpreted it. Different visions (theologies, political systems, etc) make sense if you look at how the person has lived and interpreted life. This is a basic part of systemic thinking. This issue becomes a pimple when we have to make a decision that will affect other people's lives (ie voting on same-sex marriage, or acting within global realities after the Soviet Union dissolves). Then ideas or worldviews come to "compete" in the decisionmaking process. I come to my worldview partly because of the happenstance of my experience and partly because of systems that help me sort and assign value to my experience. Just because someone else has a different worldview doesn't mean we're both wrong. One of us should not dominate (though I might argue that the marginalized worldviews - like those who experience racist oppression, for example - deserve special listening and attention). And one of us is not automatically "wrong" because our experience is different. As humans, we do (especially those of us who have power and benefit from the privilege of non-marginalization) have a responsibility to take in and consider deeply the experiences of others - but it's not a matter of finding the "right" or "true" one, because all of them are true in the system of meaning they occur in. That doesn't mean they must be followed slavishly, or they are not subject to change. But truth and reality exist in multiplicity: people do things for a reason (even if it's not our reasoning!). But then...

EJoye & I both take it for granted that the free market and militarism are not successfully working metaphors when it comes to human relationships. In other words, I didn't meet my partner and then do battle against other options in my life in order to stay in a relationship with him. I didn't quantify my aptitude and ability to trust, measured against the competing demands of time, labor, and productivity in order to make a rational economic decision to exchange trust and friendship with EJoye.

And this part of our conversation came down, for me, into the failure of metaphors for an exchange of ideas. We can talk about "competing" or "battling" political ideologies. That's at the heart of the two-party political system of governing this country. The two "sides" battle for the hearts and minds of voters and then it's assumed that the democratically elected side that "wins" is the best one. Differently (but equally wrong as a metaphor), when it comes to worldviews, we don't trade and make decisions based on rational value and competing "supply" and "demand" of ideas, desires, needs, wants, and solutions. Yet these are both ways that administration (national, state, local, business, nonprofit, family, etc) often assign value and make decisions.

It's about time for a new metaphor for the exchange of ideas. And frankly I don't know what it is. Any thoughts?

I often turn to the ecosystem for metaphors of spirituality, but I don't find anything helpful there. Except perhaps biodiversity. Reality for a saguaro cactus in the desert is significantly different than reality for a giant jellyfish off the coast of Japan. Their ways of survival are rather different. But this metaphor breaks down when it comes to the moment when the jellyfish and the saguaro meet up. Hm...

return

so in all the busy-ness of graduating and recovery, I took off the month of May.

I've actually got a lot to say (and this morning, shoveling granola in my mouth after going to the gym, not so much time to say it all).

Here's a list of the things I want to write about as I try to take up my practice of weekly writing again. It's a reminder for me as much as anything else.

- Rosemary Radford Ruether's book "America, Amerikka" about how the ancient Israelite notion of chosenness affected European and American history - Manifest Destiny, the annexation of Mexico (aka Texas, California, and the American Southwest) and Puerto Rico, the annihilation of Native Americans, the Cold War fight against communism, etc. My friend Emily gave it to me for graduation, and I'm about halfway through. I also just finished "Down at the Cross," an essay by James Baldwin about race relations in the 1960s where he picks up on a lot of the same themes from a very different angle.

- finding a space where I don't have to defend myself or certain relatives as we struggle to maintain a relationship in the middle of theological disagreement.

- planet God.

- and was it really a mistake to send an image of myself in the mail - what's gossip really about, anyway?

that's it. I hope to write more later - I've been carrying this stuff around for a while.

State of Play (spoiler alert)

I've been mulling over the movie State of Play since we saw it last weekend. There's something about newsroom dramas that hook me. Even when it's got some rather threadbare stock characters: the grizzled old-timer, the slick internet newbie, and the sarcastic and tough boss (yay Helen Mirren!!). Maybe it's because we just finished watching the 5th season of The Wire. But anyway, add in the political game of an upcoming senator pushing hearings against a big mean corporation and a deepening murder mystery - The film really felt like a classic, like comfortable slippers (and I don't even wear slippers). Until the last 10 minutes. Then it took a nosedive into...dumbness, is the only word I can think of. Sure the "big bad corporation" was a little thin to me. I liked that...

SPOILER ALERT

....that the corporation wasn't as bad as it seemed. But at the same time, they turned to a really silly end that undercut its classic feel. Maybe I'm overly sensitive, but the insane murderous veteran not only made the whole thing feel hollow (the way it pointed to big powers-that-be but then...oops, after all, it was just a corrupt politician and a crazy guy after all!). It also made it nasty. The trauma suffered by veterans is real. The so-called mental illness is real - a adaptation to war that doesn't translate well back home. So not only was the ending of this movie pointlessly overcomplicated, but it also presented yet more fodder for discrimination and mistrust. It fed the same mentality that created a generation of homeless Vietnam vets, and is currently feeding the next generation of OEF/OIF homeless and traumatized vets.

That's my soapbox for today.

On Reading EJoye's Ordination Paper

I just finished reading my friend EJoye's ordination paper, in which she writes about her faith and understanding of history of the United Church of Christ. I am grateful for the gift she had given in writing it, and all I can figure out in response is a meditation on words as boxes - gifts and containers. I cannot capture my emotional and physical and intellectual responses here. You had to be there.

On Reading EJoye’s Ordination Paper

 

If words are boxes,

they contain the uncontainable.

They capture a piece

of what’s all around us

within rigid walls

of inescapable meaning.

 

If words are boxes,

they can be opened

like gifts –

Releasing a piece

of what’s all around us

to breathe with us.

 

If words are boxes,

they can be passed around,

turned over and shaken,

squeezed and pinched,

delighted in

as gifts to and from each other.

 

If words are boxes,

they can cross the globe

like parcel post.

They can be rubbed

like Aladdin’s lamp.

They can be cracked

like eggshells or codes.

They can be sliced open

like surgery or hotdog packages

They can be opened

like Pandora’s box,

releasing wonder and horror,

cruelty and hope.

They can be the way

we can capture and enforce

the violence of existence.

or the way we capture and share

the magic of existence.

a note about God and marriage

I was having a conversation with a prospective student this morning, which sort of solidified my thinking about same-sex marriage being a non-issue in religion.

If God is a God of love, what would be the reason for establishing arbitrary rules about who can and cannot marry each other?
[By arbitrary, I mean, what's the basis for opposing same-sex marriage except that "it's in the Bible"? (by now I hope you know that the Bible has nothing to say about LGBT people, because homosexuality as we understand it - as well as marriage as we understand it - did not exist in Biblical times).
We have to approach sacred texts critically because that's the only way to show proper respect. Ask questions and seek answers, isn't that the point? For those things that literalists use as proof that God doesn't like gays, we need to ask why they are there. If we don't, we risk using the text for our own purpose, and doing violence to its meaning and intent.]

And..If God is not a God of love, what would be the reason for monotheism?

Well, you could ask that last question anyway, but for the purpose of this argument, I hope you get what I mean.

broken open again

Last night we watched Dangerous Living: Coming Out in the Developing World. It was particularly poignant to witness the impact of colonial rule. (The British imported laws against homosexual acts, along with their particular anti-gay language and approach to homosexuality, as well as to gender. Leave it to people more expert than me to describe the history of colonial rule and its impact on culture and society.) It was also very sad to hear about the violence and fear tactics used to silence gay and lesbian people in places like Namibia, Sudan, Honduras, Egypt, India, the Philippines, etc. Often to the point that leaders had to emigrate unwillingly to the US, Canada, and elsewhere. Watching these things, and listening to my partner share his thoughts, I was again reminded of my misguided desire to erase difference by trying to force hope, or by believing I understand more than I actually do. If you've seen Trembling Before G-d, there are similarities. In the first film, it was a forced choice between sexuality and nationality (both of which are intimately tied together). Choose sexuality, and face violence and exile. Choose nationality and face violence, deadly secrecy, and real paranoia. In the second film, the forced choice was sexuality and spirituality (which are also intimately tied together). Choose sexuality, and face exile and separation from the divine as you understand it in ritual and community. Choose spirituality, and face excruciating guilt and separation from the divine in human relationships and touch.

Oh, and while we're at it - if you choose nationality or religion, then you face scorn from the privileged gays and lesbians who have faith in an unquestioned culture of outness (not that I'm against outness, but the call to "come out wherever you are" must take into account the complexity of human relationships, community, and life choices). On the other side, if you choose sexuality, you're expected to be grateful that the US or that some other church or denomination has accepted you, under false assumptions that we in the US or liberal religion are somehow more advanced or enlightened.

Here is where I return to the context thing: Such profound separation and disconnect are not in my experience. Sure, I could point to similar experiences or pathways to empathy. But there is value in allowing the difference to stand - untrampled by my efforts to "fix" it.

This morning at Care Through Touch, one of my massage clients was telling me about his experience being homeless, and how it has created a separation in his spirituality - without a sense of home, he has difficulty finding a private space for worship and prayer. Rather than trying to close the gap, I tried to sit with his experience, in acceptance of the toll it has taken, and the depth of despair and height of hope he expressed for change.

It was a religious moment - not the kind where you see God, or you start crying or light comes down and impregnates you, but the kind that works like poetry, unfolding a glimpse of the mystery and magic that has always been there. It is marveling at the human spirit's ability to mold horrible experiences into stories of survival without hiding the anger, fear, and sadness.

If that makes any sense. It was one of those days.

postscript on context

Today I had a brief conversation with my professor, which helped shift my logjam. The question of articulating a context other than one's own is about why a person is looking at the 'other' context. In my example, I was complexifying my judgment about the bishops. The skill in seeing a context other than one's own is about standing back - not seeing difference as a problem. It's about, as she said, seeing the ancient Israelite culture as the alien culture that it is - and the Bible is forever mysterious because of it. We do not know what they were writing because we do not know their world. Which doesn't mean there is nothing sacred that can be gleaned, but it changes the patterns of light that we shed on the worlds of Bible - and what it sheds on our own world. It's about acknowledging the difficulties inherent in relationships bridging difference. It's about not trying to create a false closeness based in false similarity (her critique of CPE interactions where both chaplain and patient are placed in a common context that hides their unique social and home, etc situations).

And when she described this, I felt a welling up emotion - maybe the joy of recognition - because at heart it's about preserving the delicate mystery of diversity, letting the biosphere exist without smashing it with the heavy machinery of false intimacy and self-centeredness. It's about letting my (white liberal Christian) anxiety sit there and transform into something else eventually, when I cannot insert myself everywhere. It's about the hope for human community contained in Sampson's "Unconditional Kindness to Strangers" and [I've said this about 20 million times before] Judith Butler's "Precarious Existence." It's about escaping the need to be connected by more than shared vulnerability.

for an 11-year-old who committed suicide

One of my favorite bloggers, fem.men.ist, wrote this tribute for an 11-year-old kid who committed suicide. Within the tribute is a confession and a call to action - to change the ways we interact in the world. That's religion in a nutshell. Amen.

http://fem-men-ist.blogspot.com/2009/04/to-11-year-old-carl-joseph-walker.html

"a context other than one's own"

Today I got feedback from my Senior Synthesis Paper - an attempt to distill all of my 4 years of learning into a response to a case study about United Methodist pastors risking their ordination status to preside over same-sex marriages in California (in the UMC, it is not allowed to be "a self-avowed, practicing homosexual" clergyperson, nor is it allowed to preside over same-sex marriages).
My feedback was accurate, though a bit disheartening. It certainly reflects the areas where I have developed: my vision for a better world, my ability to articulate that vision in theological, Biblical, and traditional language that comes from my historical and current religious perspectives (Christian & Religious Science), and a stronger grounding in my perspective. But I also do not have a well-developed sense of spiritual practice, nor am I able to articulate an understanding of others' contexts without reference to my own. This last one is a particular conundrum for me.
On the one hand: I live in an individualistic society, and I understand myself with my experience at the center (which is not to say that I am the center of THE world, but I experience myself at the center of MY world). I have learned, in many ways, including CPE, to reflect on what others' experience touches upon in myself -- as a way of empathy. Further, I learned how my experience limits how I can see - so this practice was a way to enlarge my perspective, and at the same time maintain awareness of the limits of that perspective. As a result of my training (and I realized this as I wrote my paper), I cannot imagine a way of discussing someone else's experience without (explicit or implicit) reference to my own.
On the other hand: I am a formation of my communities. I learned from them how to categorize and place values in the world. I see myself as intimately interconnected with all other life in the universe (as in, we co-exist, and without each other, we could not be -- sometimes in ways that are mutually supportive, and sometimes in ways that are destructive . . . and thus mutually destructive, even if the short-term gains seem to be on one side). In this way, there is no context other than (our) own.

I worked hard in this paper to understand the contexts of Methodist bishops charged with enforcing their church's law, whether or not they personally agreed with it. And in doing so - complexifying my own judgment against them - I came to see how their contexts diverged and intersected with my own. I understood their context a little better, but not without reference to my own. In fact, how could I have anything to say if I didn't have reference to my own?
This touches on some of my own limits. I used to believe (because it worked for me) that social justice is about linking personal experiences of being oppressed with experiences of being the oppressor, and then uniting under a common goal to fight for a better world for all. This is profoundly upended by racist actions and organizing among white LGBT people.
It also exposes the fact that I don't have a systematic way of understanding my relationship to the world. I understand the dangers of the me-centered universe, but have yet to figure out how to shift that any more than I already have, in recognizing the threads that connect me (hamstring me, trap me in a web, and precisely place me like a marionette) in the sweep of existence. Spirituality is at the same time as vague (and gassy) as a nebulous and as precise as a GPS device. It can be elemental and atmospheric while also supremely helpful in showing me where I am and helping me navigate where I want to go.

PS - The larger theme of my paper was a plea to move from marriage morality to sexual ethics. My argument is that spiritual traditions open pathways to understanding values about ourselves and our existence. Marriage morality puts a cap on that by declaring what is and is not within the bounds of acceptance. Sexual ethics opens it up to questions about how we treat each other, and how we promote intimate and romantic habits & attitudes that tie into larger values of humanity and relationships. The focus is on values rather than rules - without losing the exactness of the spiritual & theological grounds we stand on. Try it out.

a scary truth...?

Yesterday I joined Care Through Touch for our annual Holy Thursday foot massage service - where a whole bunch of people (most of them priests, nuns, and monks in a sabbatical program at one of the GTU's Catholic schools) who fan out across a bunch of our service sites and provide foot massage and clean socks to homeless and low-income people. I was a supervisor, and I ended up sitting in the drop-in center waiting room and chatting with a couple folks who hang out there. One of the people - a white woman in her late 40s who is homeless due to leaving a long-term, heavily abusive marriage - was telling me about her difficult journey. She seemed to sum it up by saying, "You know, I never would have expected myself to be here, to lose everything. But I've found wonderful things: I'm reconnecting with my body through massage, I'm making friendships... Having everything stripped away like this, I'm rediscovering what's important to me. I'm realizing that I must rely on human relationships to survive. None of the rest of it matters." This reminds me of what Mama has told me: where she grew up, your "retirement account" is your family - you help them in their need, and they will help you in yours. As I talked with this woman, I reflected on this rather scary truth. In fact, it's a dangerous truth. One of the many ways to find meaning in suffering is to realize the survival of the human spirit in the face of unspeakable suffering. Another way is to realize the power of relationships and many tiny acts of caring for each other. The danger is in assuming it takes that kind of suffering to come to this realization. Or to assume that everyone will reach the same conclusion. Someone could also reach this stage in the woman's life and say "You can rely on no one but yourself." In fact that's probably a necessary survival story for at least a while, in dangerous situations. And frankly, I would say most homeless folks - while many do survive solely through their interdependence with each other -  would not reach this conclusion. More often, I have heard about how the system eats you up, and even with hard work it is difficult to keep permanent employment when you are also struggling with finding safe housing and affordable meals. And that's without struggling with shame/guilt/anger over past mistakes, mental illnesses and/or addictions.

But I return to the truth that this woman told me: In the end, for me too, it is the relationships and interdependence that keeps me alive. But I'm afraid to tell this story, because it can be easy to conclude that homeless people are somehow more noble for their suffering, or that the degradation of poverty is somehow "good for you."

standing on different assumptions

Most people already know this from my facebook, but I want to write more about what I was trying to do. A little over a week ago in my preaching class, I chose one of the troubling texts - the story about the creation of Eve out of Adam's rib. This text is used not only to tell me as a gay guy that I'm unnatural, but also to tell women that they're subordinate to men (and nature is subordinate to men), and that marriage is the only truly blessed relationship. I don't agree with any of those things, and I wanted to see what would come out of it for me - both in inspiration of the spirit and in wisdom of feminist preachers & teachers. I also wanted to give a sermon about same-sex marriage that wasn't about defending or reasoning, but that was grounded in different assumptions. I didn't want to apologize, or defend my decision to get married to my partner, but rather to stop assuming there might be a problem in the first place. People have said, "But you're gay, how could you be a Christian?" That's like saying, "But you're a woman, how could you be a Christian?"

So I can't say I overwhelmingly succeeded, but in the course of reading, studying, and conversing about the text, what emerged was a more fundamental notion about what it means to be human. I always read sacred texts for their revelation about what my ancestors believed were core truths about human existence, and that's what I discovered. The power of the Adam & Eve creation myth is not in its ordering of gender, or its supposed declaration about "natural" heterosexual marriage [in fact, nothing about the story says that God married them to each other in the first place]. Rather, it's a more fundamental declaration of how much we need each other. Adam and Eve (two very different people, sharing a bone of humanity, a small something similar amidst their differences) help each other enflesh their reality. The story starts with Adam naming and categorizing everything - owning and objectifying it all - and Eve comes around and helps him see the world through her eyes, too. I called it 'relational reality,' which is maybe not the best preaching word, but it works. The story is about helpers and partners in life - not just partners in marriage, but a whole host of relationships with friends, family, and strangers, whom we depend on to survive and make our world 3-dimensional. In the sermon, I chose to talk less about my partner and more about my mother-in-law, because she is also a partner in my life. She is part of our household, and she helps me see the world differently because of her different experiences.

In doing so, I wanted to sidestep apologies or reasons that same-sex marriage was okay, in favor of re-reading a text used against it to discover a deeper truth, and to use my upcoming marriage to illustrate it unapologetically.

I like this method, and I hope to do it more.

tired/normal

Last weekend, we went to the Asian Art Museum with some friends who just moved to the Bay Area from PA. I knew them when I was in New Hampshire, and it was wonderful to see them again and introduce them to my fiance.

At the same time, it was bittersweet, because being with them reminded me of my life in NH. Not that I want to go back, but I remembered the free time I had. Sitting on the balcony of the museum, sharing lunch, I felt suddenly tired. No, that's not it - I suddenly realized how tired I was. And how normal it felt. Not long ago, when I asked a professor how he was doing, he said that after a while "busy" feels normal, and it becomes the new "fine." It's just an artificially high bar. Another colleague told me that she complained to her partner one weekend, "I don't know what's going on. I feel slow, but not tired, and I don't want to take a nap, but I don't want to move very fast." Her partner congratulated her: "This is what is commonly known as relaxing."

Oh.

When did it stop being a problem that I am always plucking things to do from the multiple tasks and deadlines hanging over my head? When did it stop being a problem that I didn't sit down when I came home unless it was to do homework? It's not that I'm complaining, but it's been an odd week of realizations. Maybe my deadline-pushing habits and get-it-all-in-at-the-last-minute flurries (and the fact that I schedule time with friends at least a few weeks in advance) are not a sign of a new laziness and flakiness on my part, but a symptom of simply having too many deadlines.

Luckily, I'm pushing up to the end of my degree program, and once I have a job (instead of classes, homework, 20-or-so hours of work-study, and a weekly volunteer gig), things will settle down. I'll again be in a position to structure my time with a little more breathing room.

It's funny what passes for normal if you just get used to it.

drifting toward love

I just finished a book called Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay, and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York, by Kai Wright. This just a great read - engaging us in the lives and stories of queer kids of color (mostly guys) from the poorer parts of New York just trying to get by. The author clearly has a lot of respect for his subjects, describing their considerable strengths and skills along with the mistakes they make. But it also takes time to show us the social history of the areas - the racist real estate practices and government policies that drove people of color and immigrants into substandard housing, for example, and the impacts of gentrification of areas like the Christopher Street piers. Wright also provides some amazing examples of community organizing that we all could look to for inspiration.

I think most importantly for me is also the strong critique served to white LGBT people. This has increasingly been on my radar screen as I get educated on racism and classism among white gay folks. In this book we get embarrassing images of white men fetishizing young guys of color, and white yuppie gays who embrace the precocious queer kid from central Brooklyn when he comes to their art parties, and the rich folks on Christopher Street who see queer kids of color as a noisy menace. Perhaps most striking is the image of walking from New York's gay pride parade down to the piers and noticing the shift in skin tone as well as policing practices.

I guess by now I've lost my starry-eyed notion that queer/LG communities might be a place for greater liberation from racism (and sexism, for that matter), but instead too often I find that white gay people use their marginalization like a badge or a shield to guard against accusations of blatant racism that occur. In this book, we see the flipside of that - kids who are tossed out of their houses or schools - or kids that are kept stuck inside their houses with few visible role models or places to embrace or explore their sexualities and their meaning. Wright provides some important analysis also on the "risk" models of sexuality and HIV education, and on the role of family and community ties for many queer folks of color. I just finished a job application last night that has me thinking about what it means to be "family," in the sense of mutually supportive, loving, multigenerational connections. As gay folks, we have a great connection to the word through the historic use of family as a euphemism for gay. Maybe we should exploit those meanings. There are many glimpses of it in this book.

Kai Wright has another great article at ColorLines.com, on same-sex marriage and race: "A Fragile Union." And another interesting article about Lorraine Hansberry from TheRoot.com. I'm not really sure what the answer to all of this is, but it's certainly not to keep doing what we're doing. As my friend Emily said recently, Obama's presidency is a great time to keep bringing up race - rather than seeing it as an arrival point, this is a jumping-off point for us (white people) in the US to keep looking at race - how far we've come, but more important - where we need to go.

One of the most significant comments of my life.

I posted this on facebook last night, but since some of the people mentioned in it aren’t on facebook, and just maybe they read my blog sometimes, I wanted to post it here:

Many of you know that once a week, I work with an organization called Care Through Touch Institute (CTI), where I do chair massage and acupressure with homeless and low-income folks in San Francisco (in the Tenderloin, for those who know the area).

Tonight my supervisor shared a compliment, which keeps making me cry. I think it's a real tribute to many of the people in my life (many of the women, particularly) who helped shaped me into the person I am. I'm tagging some of the most significant people in my facebook note. My mom and sister and nieces aren't on facebook, but they should know their part in giving me some of the first reasons to care about feminism, before I realized how liberating it is for me as a guy, too. Carol Spangler (who saved my life in high school) should be mentioned here. And of course I want to mention my fiance who supports me in doing work that touches my heart. There are a lot of people who have crossed their paths with mine, who I don't even know by name, too.

I substituted a few weeks ago at a drop-in center whose clients are primarily from a nearby women's shelter. Many of the women there have had some really tough life situations, and a lot have suffered horrible abuse at the hands of men. One of them in particular talked with me about how afraid she was to consider even being in a room with, let alone be touched by, a man - but she wanted to push herself that day, to try to trust me.
My supervisor told me tonight that several of the women told her how comfortable they felt with me, and that I gave them a gift, being a man, giving them a few moments of relaxation and massage.

I am grateful to the many people who have helped to form me. You all have helped me to become the guy who was allowed (who was given the gift) to be in the room with these women. Thank you. I am humbled by the thought of how many people inspired me, had patience with me, taught me from their own wisdom and experience, and nurtured me to be the best person I can be.

gotta love Oakland

Today I came across a new cookbook called Vegan Soul Kitchen, by Bryant Terry. it's a vegan interpretation on soul food that sounds pretty good. Reminds me a bit of Brown Sugar Kitchen's Tanya Holland, who wrote New Soul Cooking, which features healthy, local, seasonal versions of traditional soul food. Growing up on a farm, helping my mom butcher chickens and tend the garden, I'll probably never go vegan entirely, but I'm intrigued by the efforts to match my eating with my values. After all, home-raised and butchered chickens are a far cry from the mass produced variety. I got to checking out Bryant Terry and found yet another Oakland guy who is totally cool and making connections between things like food culture, structural racism, and urban politics. It reminds me yet again why I love this city. There's a whole culture of organizations doing great work around here. I don't know if the Oakland Men's Project is still operable, but I used some of their stuff when I was doing anti-sexism/anti-sexual-violence work.

And then I went with a group of folks to Allen Temple Baptist Church in one of the poorer areas of Oakland. It was an amazing service with great music and message - but most remarkable was how much we felt welcomed and accepted despite obviously not belonging to the regular congregation. Not to mention that Allen Temple does some awesome social service work.

Dunno, I'm just feeling the love for Oakland these days.

The Watchmen and the 80s.

Today we saw The Watchmen in Orinda. My first reaction is that it was just like I expected. Apart from the fact that I wonder if bodies really hit things that loudly (and if they had the volume inexplicably turned too loud for my approaching-30-year-old ears), it was basically just what I expected from a film that very faithfully follows the look and feel of the graphic novel. The violence that made me avert my eyes more times than I can count, but I knew that going in - the filmmakers reproduced images I recognized, as gruesome as they were in the novel.

The only question I had - and this hadn't occurred to me before - was "where was AIDS?" In this alternative world of 1985 where Richard Nixon was still president and half-naked blue men wander the cosmos, I wouldn't normally ask the question. But several cemetery shots featured an angel very closely matching the angel statue in Angels in America. I suppose in the landscape of impending nuclear doom, maybe AIDS didn't make the radar in the same way. It was a curious omission that might have enhanced the dramatic feel of the film. They did, after all, alter Sally Jupiter's (that's Laurel "Silk Spectre"'s mother) hairdo to look more realistic than the novel.

Maybe I'm being nitpicky, but it was almost as if the filmmakers wanted me to ask. Or maybe I'm overly sensitized to angels statues. I don't know if the film was particularly good or bad, but it was impressively faithful to the novel, which was kind of cool.

One last thing: during the flashback scene where Mr. Manhattan remembers how he first appeared in the lunchroom of the lab, a woman in her 60s sitting behind us whispered loudly to her companion "There's the blue penis!"

vicky cristina barcelona

Woody Allen has done it again - another funny movie with a very sour view of humanity. Or at least a sour view of wealthy white jetsetting New York elite humanity. Despite the breezy and yellow-hued feel of this film, it has an undercurrent of pessimism about the way people make choices that lead them (knowingly) to doom. I might be overstating it a little bit, but when I see some of his latest films (Match Point most clearly comes to mind, but also Cassandra's Dream), I see a few innocent people caught up in the tragic circumstances of someone else's bad choices, but even more people caught up in their own bad choices when they have the ability to knowingly make the right ones. Allen makes fun of conformist society elites and the "creative drifter" type who is just the other side of the same coin - a person who lives a romantic ideal that tries to be the opposite of conformity but is actually its own kind of unsatisfactory conformity.

Despite my own fuzzy sense of positive outlook on everything, I immensely enjoy these films and probably get some kind of delight in making fun of these poor characters who seem to have everything but happiness.

more on violence, race, and public opinion

The Huffington Post has a blog by Baratunde Thurston about research into racist associations between Black people and apes in particular, and the links to police violence and public opinion. Worth checking out.

monkeys, assassination , and race

hm. i guess we aren't in a post-racial society after all.
this morning my boss clued me in to a New York Post cartoon that had police shooting a monkey and saying 'they'll have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill.'

Gawker has some good coverage if you want to see it. But first, ask yourself what was so funny about this? Is it the centuries of racist epithets and "scientific" research comparing Black people to apes? Is it the implicit reference to assassinating the President (a very real fear that I share with others)? Is it the reference to police shooting an unarmed person on the street? Is it the idea that police shootings are funny?

Even giving the cartoonist a huge benefit of the doubt (which I think is generous), possibly he's not familiar with the history of racist depictions of Black people. At the very least, he should acknowledge his mistake. Sounds like the Post is getting its share of complaints. Once again, it's our chance to speak out against ignorance and to call ourselves to account for not learning our history and not learning how our words, no matter how unintentional, can hurt others.

salvation and aging white men: Gran Torino and The Wrestler

Last night we saw Gran Torino, and last weekend, we saw The Wrestler. Seeing both movies put me in mind of something I read back when I did my Women's Studies final project on feminism and film. According to one feminist critic, the late 1970s began to see a shift in masculinity in a post-Vietnam US context (see the aging WWII generation and the stars of the 1950s), and the 1980s and Reagan saw a re-enforcement and re-writing of masculinity - in international politics as well as film (see the Rambo films as exhibit A). I look at our context now: Our sense of ourselves as a nation has shifted with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Our economic system may be reminding us of the 1970s downturn as well. I don't know much about the Carter administration, so I can't say much about the comparisons with Carter & Obama. And then I see the two white men, aging, in these films. For these two men, the world is changing rapidly, and something keeps them stuck. I saw both title characters struggling with the burdens of their past and the losses associated with aging and the specter of irrelevance.

[Here I may give away a few points about the films, just so you know]
In Gran Torino, I was noticed by the metaphor of Thao locked in a basement, and Sue unlocking the door. The person with the key represented literally the same role that she played metaphorically for Mr. Kowalski. In The Wrestler, I see a similar interplay, with Cassidy, who represented the possibility of unlocking the cage that kept Randy locked in his performance persona. In both cases, these women represented parallel processes for the main characters: Sue, as the translator between old and new worlds - and Cassidy in the tension between her performance on the job and her private life. I think there are lessons for us as the audience to learn about where to turn as we seek answers about how to live in a changing world.
I think there's a lot to be mined in these two movies (and also in Brokeback Mountain, which I insist is not a movie about homosexuality, but a movie about men and intimate friendship - I honestly don't think Heath Ledger's character was gay, so much as just lonely and vulnerable, but anyway...). I think there's a lot to be mined about the structures of masculinity that keep men isolated and at a loss when confronted with their own vulnerability. I think it works both ways - by demonstrating how some aspects of masculinity increase isolation, but at the same time how these characters can maintain their manhood while also admitting vulnerability and relaxing some of their rigidity in relationships with others.

I'm hoping that even if there's not a lot of explicit talk about this stuff, films can still seep into our collective imaginations and behaviors. I think it's an interesting time (economically, politically, culturally) to see the shifting shape of white manhood (and to some extent, all manhood) in the US. This may be a little disjointed, because I'm still mulling it over.

And P.S. - My viewing of Gran Torino was influenced by the presence of two obnoxious white college-age [likely drunk] men who sat in the back of the theater and made homophobic & sexist comments and who cheered at Mr. Kowalski's racist comments. They missed what I think is the larger point of the film - and to me, represent the flipside, what the 80s became in some senses. Also, I thought that toward the end of the film, the reference to crucifixion was annoying and tired as a metaphor. Also, the depiction of the young priest just out of seminary was pretty accurate. Those of us in seminary ought to take some valuable lessons about our levels of (im)maturity in religious leadership.

from Kentucky

Here's a poem/meditation that I was working on during my trip to Kentucky. I think it's the best distillation I can do, but it leaves out so much.

Untitled (Kentucky and California)

What if a miner coughed every time I switched on a light?
Or three drops of coal ash sludge oozed out of the electrical
socket every time I turned on my computer?
What if I lost one increment of hearing every time I judged
“those people” as uneducated because of the accent in their voice?
Then I might begin to know the cost of living in my world.

Or would I learn that a cough is the sound of a light switching on,
And learn to live with poison and cancer?
Would I simply adjust to hearing no voice but my own?

The cloth was started before we are born.
The future is woven before we can see the pattern.
God is somehow embroidered here and there,
And the answer to our prayers is the touch of thread across thread.

GTUBS / PSR begins to address the Oscar Grant murder

GTU Black Seminarians is circulating a statement, and PSR has finally started a forum to begin to address the role of religious leaders in relation to the Oscar Grant murder. Here it is:

http://www.psr.edu/questions/what-role-seminary-or-local-church-when-incident-such-oscar-grant-slaying-occurs#comment-221

[PS - read EJoye's comments in reply to my previous post as well.]

Starting to muse about the Oscar Grant murder

Today I was involved in multiple conversations about how my school, PSR will respond to the Oscar Grand shooting. I hope they will -- as religious leaders, we must engage in events that happen in our communities (especially after the wonderful precedent they set by publishing a statement officially against Prop 8!).

Here's the state of my thoughts today.
Stuff like this continues to happen. No matter what happened in the actual event - whether it was racially motivated or not - it falls into a long-standing trend of white officers shooting unarmed Black men. It matters that the officer was white and the murdered man was black, unarmed, and vulnerable. While I don't condone violence, and find it sad that protests that turn violent unfairly impact poor communities, I get why people are angry and upset in Oakland.
Stuff like this will continue to happen as long as we live in a society where racism is ignored by those of us in power & privilege. I was at a reception the other day, and I did something that was thoughtless and a little bit rude to a Black man. Reflecting on it later, I realize that if he doesn't know me (or even if he does), he probably wonders what kind of racist stereotypes I have of him. Just like Officer Mehserle, I was the racist of that moment, no matter what my intentions were. This is the same as the way I am a potential rapist in the eyes of women who don't know me, especially when I walk to school on deserted streets or at dusk. Because some men rape, and because some white people are violently racist, I am potentially a violent, racist rapist. If the justice & fairness issue alone doesn't motivate me, this should. It feels a little like luck of the draw. The impact of Officer Mehserle's actions make him the bearer not only of the responsibility of what he did, but the bearer of responsibility for all those officers who shot unarmed Black men and were acquitted or slapped on the wrist. Who knows but that something I do unintentionally has a racist or sexist impact? Until we change the system, this kind of stuff will happen. As white people, we are at risk until we educate ourselves, talk with each other, and change the way our world runs.
I see a lot of parallels in what I used to teach about sexism: if I don't stand up as a man among men who make sexist jokes, I contribute to a culture that implies permission to sexually assault a woman. if I don't stand up as a white guy among white folks who enact, benefit from, and ignore racism, I contribute to a culture that implies permission to assault, murder, exploit, etc people of color.
Let's see, what's the theological angle on this? I certainly believe God's desire is for justice. According to the tradition, God became human -- and what did Jesus do? Did he go out hang out with all the governors and religious leaders? Did he ask servants to feed him grapes while he wrote the sermon on the mount? Did he go find sinners, handcuff them, and shoot them? Actually, I think he served others. He spoke about kindness and brought people back from alienation. Anyone else want to weigh in on this?

Don't Go Hating the Vagina Monologues

The Clare Boothe Luce Project is spreading lies about the Vagina Monologues. I saw my first production in 1999, and it transformed the way I understood the impacts of violence against women and girls. I was moved to tears and to laughter, and sometimes made uncomfortable by women speaking in their own voices about their own bodies and their place in the world. It opened my eyes and transformed how I understood my mom's and my sister's and my friends' lives - and even my own. My friend Anna, a Methodist pastor in Iowa, wrote a response because some of her parishioners brought it to her attention. Read about it here:
http://akbsviapositiva.blogspot.com/

research assistantship / voices

Yesterday I got asked to help do some research for a faculty member this semester. So you might be reading more about the following topics:
- The role of ritual in pastoral care and healing (for a pastoral care class in the fall)
- The role of religion and spirituality in theories of violence and nonviolence (for a long-term research project)

This stuff falls pretty well into my areas of interest (the spiritual care and healing aspects, and the roles of religion in violence and in social movements).


In the meantime, I'm also looking forward to a getaway to LA soon, to see my college friend Erica Brookhyser sing with the LA Opera. I know nothing about the world of opera, but it holds some kind of glamorous appeal in my head, and I'm proud to be connected to someone with such a rich, warm, and stunning voice. Come to think of it, I have lots of friends with rich, stunning voices - whether in sound, poetry, prose, or opinion. That's kinda cool.

back from Kentucky and a few thoughts

I got back from Kentucky late on Tuesday night. It was a great trip with a lot to work through on issues of healthcare, economics, and religion. It was also hard for my partner and me to be away from each other for so long. I find that I function better when I have our relationship to connect me.
Here are a few other thoughts that come to mind as I work through what I learned:
- Surprisingly, the situation was not far from what I grew up with. I recognized how people understood community and family, and I related to the economics of the rural areas (despite the difference between agricultural/small industrial Kansas and coal-mining/tobacco-farming Kentucky). I also recognized the stereotypes from outside (and of outside). Last of all, I was reminded that I myself am part of the brain drain. I left Kansas to get away, got educated, and never returned. Some variation on a theme of exile, but not exactly. I recognize the need, and somewhere inside me, the desire, to return to where I came from - if nothing else, to represent a different point of view. It motivates me to find something more solid in my commitment to a community here in the Bay Area.
- I was struck by the fact that most healthcare access and poverty alleviation programs were run by women. The theory is that there is a strong matriarchy of grannies - older women who know a lot, organize, and get things done. We met some amazing women doing amazing work.
- Not only were these women organized and sharp, but often ventured on their own to address poverty - dragging their reluctant churches with them only later. It reminded me of my own convictions about the purpose of religion: to care for each other. Religion, in the end, is nothing if it doesn't connect people together. Sure personal spirituality is a component, but nurturing the person is a component of a bigger sense of caring for each other.

I guess that's it for the moment. I got reconnected with a friend from college who is studying rural sociology, who gave me a lot to think about in relation to stereotyping and "metrocentricity," the idea that perspectives, analysis, and values presume that the city is the standard by which everything is judged. Reminds me of feminist criticism of medical studies that hold men as the standard against which women are measured. Hm.

crash / kentucky

I'm finishing up some loose ends and packing before I head to a class on Faith Health and Economics in Appalachia - so my blog will probably be silent for a few days. But before I get too busy, I wanted to try to keep my weekly commitment to writing.

Last night we watched the movie Crash. Aside from the drama of so much happening to so few people in two days' time, much of what the film depicted seemed to highlight the attitudes and experiences of ordinary people living in the US. While the action may have been heightened, the attitudes were recognizable to me. I was particularly struck by the illusions that the characters operated under - or maybe I'd call them delusions about themselves and prejudiced stereotypes they had about others. The police officer played by Ryan Phillipe for example, saw himself as a 'good guy' savior type, and he reacted angrily when he wasn't given the accolades he believed he deserved. Or the auto thief played by Chris Bridges/Ludacris, who gets oppression on a theoretical level but doesn't necessarily see his own place in the mix - and who 'liberates' refugees without really grasping how to do so effectively. I was also deeply struck by the way pain was passed around - I wanted to draw a diagram of how bad treatment by one gets translated into badly treating someone else - a classic cycle of violence where victimhood and perpetration feed each other. Of course I particularly noticed the attitudes, language, and reasoning of the white characters - who seemed to acknowledge racism and injustice with one side of their mouths but twisting the logic and reality of oppression into token opportunities for advancement without restructuring the social frameworks and attitudes that lead to it. Like my friend Emily said yesterday - a particular brand of amnesia that white people use to forget about our history of racism. Last of all, I was thinking about salvation and redemption: it was a hard question, and I think the larger message is that the universe randomly assigns opportunities and dead ends. But individually, there were moments (of high drama, yes) that seemed to catalyze new realizations - but I wondered how much the were realizations rather than new illusions. Sandra Bullock's character, for example, realizes "I am angry all the time," and then sees her housekeeper as "my only real friend," re-caricature-ing but not liberating her relationship with her employee. In relation to this, I consider the theme: maybe we just crash into each other seeking human touch and human interaction. The message I took was that even when we crash into each other - unless it is violent enough to knock us into a new sense of the world - we fail to touch because our illusions (about ourselves and each other) bounce off each other like beach balls. Even religion and ideology (as tokens and words) cannot fully disrupt the cycle. It leaves me wondering what can.