insta-wade

Six Kinds of Sky

2010-04-21T09:46:00.001-07:00

Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short Fiction by Luis Alberto Urrea

This collection reminds me that one of my favorite genres is farce. When it's done well, farce makes you laugh at the situations without turning away from the hard realities it describes. This book does that - makes me laugh and almost cry at the same time. While I don't know much about the realities of Mexican-US border life, I suspect that the underlying realities that Urrea describes are actually as stark and unjust, even if the actual people are not as broadly drawn, as slapstick, as he writes them. His descriptions of American missionaries are perfect! I'll be reading more of his books. View all my reviews >>

The Good Dance: Dakar/Brooklyn

2010-04-04T12:08:00.000-07:00

Review for The Good Dance: Dakar/Brooklyn

Reggie Wilson & Andrea Ouamba / Fist & Heel Performance Group and Compagnie 1er Temps

April 3, 2010 at YBCA

Most collaborations I see are all about the love of working together. Artists share compliments and tributes with each other in a general lovefest. Dakar/Brooklyn was something much more complicated and beautiful. While it was obvious the two choreographers and the two companies worked well together – and had tremendous respect, and trust for each other – this work showed a more complicated view of collaboration.

The dances were full of conflict, frustration, and even violence. Imitation, correction, disjunction, domination, and even lynching figured into the piece – even as beautiy, grace, lyricism, and intimate collaboration also threaded through the series of dances. Witness the direct and muscular challenges between dancers of all sizes, the almost fighting that happened at some points – and at the same time, other moments in which couples and trios of dancers climbed, held, swung, and morphed their bodies together into singular creatures.

Given that these artists are portraying not only their own collaboration, but a complicated history of continental African and disaporic (especially American) African people. This tone was apparent from the beginning dance, a single dancer looking back and trying to imitate a series of singles and couples dancing together. Her own movements were more graceful in comparison with the crispness of those she imitated. Yet she showed her frustration in trying to adapt her own style and body in imitation of the others.

This show was not beautiful in the traditional sense, but more beautiful in the variety of bodies, styles, and combinations. The water bottles glistened magically in a rather obscure reference to…the Mississippi and Congo Rivers, concerns about potable water, the waves and floods of influence, or the work of building up and tearing down?

The wide-open set, spare and harshly lit to the point that flying sweat and dust were visibly part of the mix, added to this feeling of a spacious ground for the complicated nature of collaboration. Reggie Wilson’s role as a sort of fatherly narrator and caretaker added an interesting and welcome addition to highlight the often-hidden role of the choreographer. Andreya Ouamba’s role was made more subtle, but no less powerful, by not identifying himself until near the end, when he walked among the sprawled bodies of the dancers, speaking in another language – and dance the final, almost-awkward duet with Mr. Wilson.

As someone unfamiliar with the language of dance, as well as possessing little knowledge about the African diaspora, I found the piece to be uncomfortable in a good way. Rather than a feel-good back-to-Africa piece, this one portrayed how histories of separation, violence, romanticism, paternalism, slavery, and co-optation leave a legacy on bodies and movement. One of the poignant references throughout all the pieces portrayed dancers lynching each other and lynching themselves. Toward the end, dancers donned gauzy costumes that seemed to reference the American Southern gentry, a surprisingly emotional reference to the cultural histories that hang around all of us – sometimes hampering movement and sometimes providing a strange enhancement to the performance.

On the evening I was there, the audience seemed to not know what to do with the performance. It was certainly uncomfortable for me as a progressive white person to see the embodied truths portrayed directly in front of my eyes – the effects of history and culture on bodies, and the difficulties as well as possibilities inherent in partnership. And perhaps more difficult – the imperfect relations between the many peoples in Africa and their disasporic kin.

Ode to the Muse, in the voice of my ancestors

2010-02-16T07:55:00.000-08:00

I will make you a useful painting.
It will keep you warm at night.
It will dry your dishes, dust your table,
And praise God, it will
Not be too prideful.
It will not be extravagant
Or brightly colored or adorned.
People will not admire it -
Or at least I will not
Acknowledge their praise.
I will make it in tiny pieces,
After all my duties are done,
A few minutes while boiling
The potatoes, rocking the baby,
And praising God, I will
Not be too happy painting it.
Useful - putting food on the table,
Teaching my kids, planting crops,
I will first use the paint to
Paint my neighbor's barns
And use the leftovers
If there are any,
For my useful painting.

(part of The Artist's Way exercises, 11 Jan 2010)

Wedding 3: magnolias

2010-02-14T10:16:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I spent a little time walking through the SF Botanical Garden and the Conservatory of Flowers. I sat under a magnolia tree - all sharp edges and sticks, no leaves, and a ton of buds as big as my fist, and big white and pink flowers, the size of my open hand. It felt embarrassing, obscene, ridiculous. It felt unnecessary, that these big, pretty flowers would be blooming on a tree with no leaves. It seemed impractical.

And then I realized that beauty is practical. Without knowing a ton about botanical science, I know that the flowers are a means of survival for the trees. Not that there is only one definition of beauty, but that it is profoundly important to have beauty, joy, and love. I wondered if I was deluding myself, or being silly, trying to scratch out a life lesson from a magnolia tree.

The truth is, I am being silly and ridiculous and deluded. I could also say that the tree was bred to be like that, that in nature the tree wouldn't have so many crazy blooms, and that the flowers drained energy from the tree, and that the water used to keep it alive might be better used to improve life somewhere that they're suffering a drought. I could say that it's just a tree, and not a religious lesson or a philosophical treatise.

But that's also deluded and silly. So I get my choice of what to be deluded about. I get to choose the connections I see between things in the world. That's one of the miracles of consciousness - I get to make connections out of the chaos of life. Maybe I'm wrong sometimes, but I get that choice, and I get to create the measuring stick to decide when I'm right or wrong. I get to say, for example, that I'm right when the produce of the connections is joy, love, and healing. I get to say that the magnolia tree teaches me something deep about the importance of joy and beauty and God.

Wedding 2

2010-02-08T19:43:00.000-08:00

So maybe I won't be doing quite so much blogging as I thought. Every time I think of doing it, it feels like a task instead of something to look forward to. And I have quite enough tasks, thank you. It's funny how planning a wedding is a lot like another part-time job. A little more fun, a little better payoff - but I don't get paid for this. And I already work 40 hours a week plus commute.

Who knows how often I'll write. I'm also doing The Artist Way by Julia Cameron. It's a 12 week 'creative recovery' program that helps jumpstart my creative outlets, with a spiritual bent that coincides nicely with what I'm getting from the East Bay Church of Religious Science. I'm enjoying it so far, thought it shoves my face in a lot of things that I like to use as excuses for not being more creative and authentic, or as interesting as I actually am.

Today, in one of the exercises, I came across this idea that I've sort of held onto without realizing it. One of the exercises had me list 5 reasons I can't really believe in a supportive God (ie the God or force in the universe that created me uniquely, loves me, wants me to succeed, exults in my creativity, and is the source of abundance and joy). One of the things I wrote was "The God of my childhood keeps beating up this loving, gender-less movement that is a loving God. The loving God just seems like a weakling."

Ahem, can I get an amen about the monotheistic religious roots of violence? Remember Prof. Kuan's lessons about the ancient vision of God in Genesis and Exodus?

This relates also to those relatives' negative reactions I wrote about earlier. Their disapproval, their refusal to acknowledge (even if not agreeing with) that my relationship with my partner is a source of joy (not to mention a multiplication of love and a fertile soil for the good work we both do in the world) - that refusal is a slap in the face of that ever-loving, joyful God I believe in. There's a stubborn, brutish insistence that there is One Right Way, and that Way is vengeful, jealous, manipulative - the distant father-figure God, whose approval you always seek and never actually achieve.

But honestly, are fear and hatred, condemnation and joy-killing actually stronger than love, joy, creativity, passion, and the diversity of creation? I weighed it out in my mind. After all (as the film A Single Man pointed out) fear is a strong motivator. It causes us to buy toothpaste and breath spray, to assent to policies that hurt us or our neighbors. Fear breeds a certain kind of allegiance - if not loyalty. Hatred and condemnation, along with determined joy-squelching, do work well in psychological manipulation. It reduces people to mute livestock - who don't show their true colors, their authenticity, and who don't really live real lives. That's powerful.

But isn't love powerful, too? Love multiplies, builds goodwill, and feeds joy. Then again, so does fear. Fear infects. It builds acquiescence, and feeds uniformity. Like fascism.

I guess in the end, I'm not sure if love is more powerful. It is for me. Whatever feeds joy must be more powerful than whatever feeds acquiescence and conformity. Love spreads out like a growing plant. Fear pulls in toward itself like the sea building a tsnuami. So I guess that's why I'm getting married, or how I want to orient my life. I need to remind myself how to choose love and joy, and how to resist fear by acts of creativity, using the unique gifts that equip me to do the job.

wedding 1

2010-01-25T09:30:00.000-08:00

After watching half of Julie & Julia, as you might expect I am not only inspired to cook, but also to blog. This happens at the same time as we come upon 50 days til our wedding. Since the Prop 8 challenge trial is happening right now, and since I'm overwhelmed by the responses we've received for our wedding, I want to share a little of the journey we're on. It will help me sort through my thoughts & emotions a little bit.

Yesterday was a marathon of shopping - to the point that I was cranky at the end. But the end result is my partner looks stunning, and I think I'll look nice too. We need a few alterations, but we're on track for clothing.

A significant number of relatives have responded negatively to the invitation. I'll explore that later. A more significant number of friends have responded so positively that it makes me cry in gratitude. We are receiving so much help and support - and I'm reminded that we're surrounded by people who are happy to celebrate with us (and commiserate with the tough things). What a wonderful place to be.

We're well on our way to mapping out the ceremony and the chapel design - as well as building our potluck reception (so many friends who are excellent cooks!).

I'm excited to see what happens when all of these elements - friends, family, food, spirit, joy, and most of all love - come together on the vernal equinox!

Illegal

2009-11-07T15:04:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-07T15:01:00.000-08:00

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

2009-09-19T09:32:00.000-07:00

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'

2009-09-12T15:01:00.000-07:00

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"

2009-08-17T10:09:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-26T16:40:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-07-22T08:32:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-21T11:24:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-09T15:11:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-07-04T09:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-03T21:21:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-21T09:02:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-20T09:36:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-06-10T19:36:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-08T07:52:00.001-07:00

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)

2009-05-07T17:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-26T12:05:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-17T13:51:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-16T16:27:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-14T14:22:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-13T13:25:00.000-07:00

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"

2009-04-13T12:49:00.000-07:00

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...?

2009-04-10T11:11:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-07T06:45:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-06T21:56:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-31T14:00:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-03-20T10:22:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-16T21:27:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-03-08T21:47:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-01T09:50:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-20T10:52:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-18T16:38:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-08T12:08:00.001-08:00

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

2009-02-05T19:33:00.001-08:00

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

2009-01-30T10:45:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-29T19:40:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-29T19:37:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-27T09:18:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-22T18:16:00.001-08:00

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

2009-01-05T12:34:00.000-08:00

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.

the consequences of something simple

2008-12-29T11:24:00.000-08:00

Last night my partner and I had dinner with a couple friends who have been heavily involved with grassroots organizing around same-sex marriage. We talked about an uptick in being called faggots on the street (often by teens and kids, and only once by someone who had an obvious mental illness), which we've noticed since the election. Our friends verified that not only is there anecdotal evidence of this (and also in the news from a brutal rape of a Latina lesbian in Richmond), but studies have shown that when issues like same-sex marriage and other nondiscrimination laws are in the news, LGBT people have increased stress levels and more interpersonal conflict. Both friends described how some straight men have responded to their visible lesbianism by forcefully making out with their girlfriends (at a traffic light and at the ice cream store, for example)
During our trip to Florida, we were often in places (city streets in the daytime, the grocery store, the mall) where we didn't know who was around, and what their opinion or potential violent reaction might be. It isn't new to be intensely aware of our surroundings like this, but in this new place, we were more cautious about holding hands (which we usually do) or other signs of affection. We noticed an increase in a feeling of distance between us as a couple, and more minor irritability with each other. That was just for 10 days. It got me thinking about the subtle consequences of this. When a couple is told their relationship is unconstitutional, or they are afraid to show affection in public, their relationship has consequences. It may be more unstable, and it may feel less real, even to the individuals who are a part of it. [Which is not to say that same-sex couples, or anyone else, must be monogamously paired for life, but we all deserve to have it as an option] Also, when a vote comes down like Prop 8 against same-sex marriage, a (hopefully unintended) side effect is an increase in harassment and violence. I believe there are studies on this, but I haven't looked into it. It reminds me of some parallels in my work against sexual violence. Women are often more vigilant about their surroundings, to avoid harassment and assault from men, for example. And there are solidly researched correlations between attitudes & social constructions that demean women and the acceptance of violence against women. As I stressed with many of the fraternity men I worked with, even if you would never condone a violent act against women, when you participate in something that sends the message that women are less human in some way (telling sexist jokes, for example), the implicit message for those who are prone to violence is that you (laughing at a sexist joke) condone violent behavior.
Back to the issue of same-sex marriage: I don't necessarily have a problem with those who disagree with it (even though I do think they're wrong). I do have a problem, however, with anything nonviolent (ie relationships) that requires reinforcement through violence (ie anti-gay violence to reinforce heterosexual pairing). Isn't that what fascism was about? I challenge all same-sex marriage opponents to construct an argument that doesn't lead to or condone violence.

you can be the president - I'd rather be the pope

2008-12-23T11:15:00.000-08:00

I'm listening to Prince's song "Pope" in honor of a new story I read on BBC. I actually don't know what the song has to do with the pope, but I like the sentiment. I have to say, it doesn't really bug me that much that he says we need to "save humanity" from "destructive" homosexual behavior and gender blurring. This is, after all, the Pope - who wouldn't allow women to enter the priesthood, for example. This is, after all, a church that has officially been built on a philosophy of separation, distinction, and duality - in which soul is better than body, man is better than woman, procreation is better than recreation. Don't get me wrong: I appreciate the philosophical and intellectual rigor that the church brings to its faith. I also appreciate a church that makes such grand pronouncements and displays concern for the well-being of humanity. I also appreciate a church so huge that the range of diversity in human practice belies the official dogma it tries to maintain.
What I find disturbing about the whole thing is the manipulation of language about creation. You only have too look around you to see the diversity of creation. It simply can't be divided into categories of 2s, in which one is better than the other. Despite what the Pope says, people who transition gender and people who create same-sex relationships (or other "non-normative" relationships) are participating in the diversity of creation. While it's true that humanity sometimes needs to be saved from itself (greed, for example, or tendencies toward violence instead of love), the Pope gets it wrong when he says that this is "auto-emancipation" from creation. Embracing love, embracing justice, embracing ethics that provide for the basic needs of all humanity - this is embracing creation. It's embracing and celebrating the joy of survival, the gift of life in a diverse and beautiful existence. It celebrates the power of joy and love in the face of an existence that is also frightening and violence - embracing the vulnerability that we share. As a Christian, I am glad to see the Pope speaking in favor of the environment, and trying to place humanity within that framework - but also as a Christian, I'm compelled to disagree with his assessment. We have inherited rich traditions that draw on the influences of other rich traditions, and it is a lie to claim that creation can be boiled down neatly into a strict and exclusive distinction between man and woman. I'm reading a book by my theology professor, Mayra Rivera, and one of her points is that our bodies are an integral part of creation, and we cannot set them apart. Our genders, our creativity, our love, our care - are all part of that creation. Some fit into categories of men and women - and many blur distinctions - across culture and across bodies. That doesn't seem destructive to me - but it does seem destructive to try to force everyone to fit into a single framework of being.

appropriation

2008-12-05T20:58:00.000-08:00

This evening in my white anti-racist covenant group, we watched a documentary called "White Shamans and Plastic Medicine Men." I was a film by Native Voices Public Television, a Montana-based project. It was an examination of white people who practice versions of Native American spiritual practices - like vision quests, drum circles, medicine wheels, etc. It was a mix of interviews of these white people and of Native Americans. The Native Americans basically said that their religions are historical/cultural/lifestyles and cannot be borrowed or broken and sold into pieces (at least not if they will maintain their spiritual integrity and power). One must life in it, inherit ancestral memory, be raised in it, if one can practice it truly. One must be chosen by the religion to be a shaman.
It brought up a few interesting questions: who "owns" a religion or spiritual practice? what is cultural appropriation as compared to shifting culture? what can be said of the real, felt spiritual experiences these white people have when they take Native American practices out of context? Why do these people feel "hurt" when confronted with questions about cultural appropriation - as opposed to be grateful for a new perspective on a spiritual tradition they claim to respect? Where is the "line" about what's acceptable use of cultural stuff that isn't my own, and what's cultural appropriation? Why do some people feed their spiritual need by taking from other traditions instead of exploring their own?
I don't know...

Actually, that's not what I want to write about at all. What I want to write about is why someone insists on yelling "faggots" in downtown Berkeley while we walk down the street and hold hands. This person yelled it twice when we passed him, again when we went back to the car because my partner forgot something. And a third time when we passed him again, yelled "what the fuck?" and yelled "faggots" again at us. From his seat on a bench on the sidewalk - this was not a crazy person. It was a strange experience. We didn't feel threatened, and we didn't feel like it was worth responding. But there was still that twinge, that urge to duck and hide, as if it's shameful. We are lucky we live in a place where we didn't feel a particular threat, and we mostly felt sorry for this high schooler who obviously had some anger or some kind of issue that needed to be worked out.
It's funny to accumulate experiences of hateful words being thrown at us. Strange to be reminded that we're "supposed" to be ashamed. Lucky that we feel mostly safe together.
Hm...what was it my mom used to say when I got teased in school? "They're just jealous."
Maybe that's what I should think - he's jealous he doesn't get to love and be loved like we do.

humility - a quick note

2008-12-04T11:04:00.000-08:00

Since I signed up for Facebook to stay connected with friends who've moved away, I've had a trickle of contacts from former friends and classmates from my high school. This raises a certain fear of me, because my experience going back has often been that I don't fit in or make sense where I grew up. But so many of the people who've contacted me have responded with joy at hearing what I've been up to - and quite a few have congratulated my partner and I on our engagement. Reconnecting with old friends, I realize that even though we're in different parts of the country (and maybe with different worldviews, I don't know), we all want a lot of the same thing: to love and be loved, to have a happy family, to do something worthwhile. It's humbling to see and read them expressing joy and exasperation about their kids and their relationships, just like I feel (or would feel, if/when I have kids). It's humbling to be reminded that a lot of the distance between me and them is imposed by me. I get so caught up in the differences (and pain caused by rejection based on those differences) that I forget to look for similarities.

buying the philosophical roots

2008-12-04T10:11:00.000-08:00

Today in my "Christ, Krishna, Buddha" class, we talked about how Christianity - the theological project of interpreting, understanding, and experiencing God through (the canonical writings about) Jesus's life and ministry, in the context of the Hebrew Scriptures - about how all of that is founded on Western, Greek philosophical understanding of the world. In other words, roughly speaking, there are abstract ideals, and there is one true answer to a question, which can be arrived at be reasoning. Without that, you can't really understand where the patristic (early founders of the Christian church) are coming from. It wasn't only Constantine's political interest in arriving at a manageable empire and religous unification that created Christianity - it was more fundamental notion that there is a right answer that must be found. The early Christians were a bold bunch, fighting out what the reality of God was about. The professor raised the question: can you call yourself a Christian unless you buy this philosophical foundation? Can I discard everything in Christianity that came before (or selectively discard what I don't like) and just go on? Do you have to engage what came before? The Pope calls this a theology of continuity, as opposed to a theology of rupture. It raises another question about experience: Can I just use my experience to filter through what makes sense, and discard the rest? Because experience also has philosophical foundations - we experience everything through a framework, whether it acknowledges only one truth or multiple ones. The issue for me is that the foundation of "one truth" just doesn't work for me. I tried that (I grew up with it), and it required stretching my reality to the breaking point just to fit. At the point of tension, I went to college and learned rudimentary postmodern theory. It worked for me, because it questioned the singularity of truth. And now I can't go back. I think this is why I have a difficult time swallowing some aspects of Christianity. But then I'm not comfortable just trashing them, because they're there for a reason. Someone found truth in them. I realize that my professor's perspective isn't the only one out there. It also reminds me that, unlike my friend EJoye, I don't often love or feel moved by my tradition. It more often feels like it's something reaching out for me, but I'm not there - while I'm reaching out for something, but it's not there, either. Two trajectories crossed without touching.

EJoye also says embracing Christianity is like embracing one's dysfunctional family. I'll buy that, with a side of her quote from Maya Angelou: "becoming a Christian is a life-long endeavor."

It also brings up the Buddhist-Christian engagement of Ultimate Emptiness and Ultimate Fullness - which seem like kind of the same thing, built on very different philosophical foundations. That's for another post, I guess - because I've got four papers nipping at my heels. Actually they're biting my calves. And drawing blood.

rights & religion (yes, again)

2008-12-01T18:10:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading an article about African-American civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s as a religious movement. It describes the religious overtones at many of the rallies, as well as the role of churches, preachers, and prayer meetings. Most vividly, it suggests that a person could not face police dogs, clubs, firehoses, spit, and hatred from fellow human beings without a sense of spiritual purpose or millenial vision. Something about this tugs on my brain as I think about movements for gay rights and economic justice. The context is very different today: the establishment, the religious & heterosexual mass that makes up the anti-gay rights movement, has learned a lot from civil rights struggles and Vietnam War protests, just as much as those who struggle for justice have learned. But I wonder if there's something to that: have gay people lost touch (or never had touch) with a millenial vision or a spiritual purpose? I'm also reading about ways of remembering sexual experimentation and gay rights in the 1970s in relation to shame and the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. A number of older gay writers who lived through those decades sound surprisingly bitter and disillusioned. I wonder how much AIDS came to be seen, by gay people ourselves, as some sort of spiritual punishment. I wonder if religious conservatives succeeded in triggering shame about ourselves to the point that we do not have spiritual purpose or millenial vision when we seek justice. What enables us to face hatred? Or, in the context of the Bay Area, what enables us to gather as a community here against "those out there" who see us as second-class citizens?
I think the same can be said of economic justice movements - the framework of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and "if you don't make it, then somehow you didn't deserve to" (both significant threads behind the dismantling of welfare and social service programs - couple with the visual elements of runaway addiction and mental illness (with little social support for addressing it systemically) to create a sense of shame among homeless and poor people. I'm not sure about this - it's only speculation.
And in the same way, I wonder how a sense of racial justice, especially in the context of gay rights, economics, and shame, plays out in a similar way. Have we as a society numbed ourselves out of millenial hope for a better world here and now with an eschatological hope for heaven as the reward for those who are good?
Again, this is only speculation, but I wonder what role spirituality and moral, visionary hope really plays in the work I'm trying to be a part of.

gay Christian family values

2008-11-29T18:07:00.000-08:00

My friend Laura Engelken posted this in MySpace, and I wanted to quote her on this. There's a lot of talk around my school about the role of dialogue and resistance : How much do I have to talk with someone else in order to "get" them to "tolerate" my sexuality and relationship? How much should I just live my life and surround myself with people who embrace and accept me as long as I'm honest, ethical, and consensual with my sexuality? How much do I need to be around people who "disapprove" of what is life-giving for me?
Anyway, here's Laura's response to an article in the New York Times:

Mr. Blow,

Thank you for your op-ed piece in the Times, "Gay Marriage and a Moral Minority." http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/opinion/29blow.html I appreciate that before you address how to connect with one portion of the electorate (i.e., black women), you name the fallacy that blacks "tipped the balance" on Prop 8. This racist blame game is but another way we effectively "divide and conquer" the oppressed to maintain the status quo.

However, I disagree with the assumed strategy behind your statement:
"Second, don’t debate the Bible. You can’t win. Religious faith is not defined by logic, it defies it. Instead, decouple the legal right from the religious rite, and emphasize the idea of acceptance without endorsement."

I believe the queer movement continues to avoid addressing religious faith at its peril. I say this as a lesbian Christian who spent my faith formative years in fundamentalist communities but now identify as a progressive Christian. As such, I know first hand the futility of debating the Bible with those who view their understanding of Christianity and scripture as infallable and universal. However, it is essential for those of us who understand the Bible as communicating a message of God's love, liberating power and justice -- a message both amplified and muted by the cultural contexts of its writing, development, interpretation and application -- to reclaim Christianity in the public sphere. We must shatter the ethnocentrism masquerading as divinely-ordained truth.

When individuals cast their ballot, they vote their values. I heartily agree with you that we must continue to articulate the difference between religious and civil marriage; I believe it is one key way we ensure our constitutional democracy does not become a theocracy. But if Christians, and other progressive people of faith, allow public discourse to equate "faithfulness" with heterosexism and an obligation to enforce this preferential world view -- we fail to question or challenge those who believe their values are superordinate and prescriptive to all. By not proclaiming our religious values in the public sphere - which are but one voice shaping those of the wider community - progressive people of faith allow false dualisms to claim sole authority and threaten the civil rights of any dissenting minority.

We each have our particular communities of accountability and influence. One of yours is the black community and one of mine is the Christian. Neither of these communities is monolithic - nor are we as individuals. My prayer is that as each of us continues writing, speaking and acting - we participate in our nation's progression toward more fully embracing this vast diversity rather than fearing it.

Quantum of Solace

2008-11-17T19:46:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the 2nd anniversary and my first date with my partner. We celebrated by going out to the Golden Lotus (where we had our first date) and catching Quantum of Solace at the Grand Lake Theater. Here's my review.
This film was a triumph of style and mood, to the point that I didn't really notice that I wasn't following the storyline. The opening titles were some of the best I've seen since The Inside Man. In fact, maybe the best opening titles I've seen - except for the rather annoying silhouettes of women that spun around in circles. With Judi Dench as M (a great casting decision), I want to move a little further away from such sexist objectification of women, please. Speaking of which, wasn't it amazing how Camille's high heels never came off during the whole airfight and parachute jump? Anyway, the visual style - a sort of mix between classic 60's hip Bond and future tech - made me want to buy white pants again. The choice of Jack White and Alicia Keys for the theme was also brilliant, fitting the style mix of hip classic and funky contemporary. Best song since Tina Turner's Goldeneye. I liked the wash of color in the settings - the whites and blacks, the tans and desert tones. The fight scenes were ballet - beautiful and funny at the same time. I picked up on some of the wry commentary on international politics - eg the British Foreign Secretary telling M "that's innuendo and supposition, and the British government doesn't make foreign policy on innuendo and indecision" (subtext: that's why Tony Blair joined Bush in invading Iraq- those supposed weapons of mass destruction). The subtle commentary about the US's involvement in Bolivia, Haiti, and other economically depressed areas. I liked the angle on 'the world's most precious commodity.' I also appreciated the portrayal of the two US CIA agents.
That's what I thought. It was great.
Now back to homework.

religion and fear

2008-11-11T21:06:00.000-08:00

Tonight I participated in a group project that dealt with sexuality in congregational leadership. We tried to emphasize both personal reflection and leadership skills in approaching the topic with groups and communities. We tried to encompass a broad range of topics, from violence and repression to morality to education. Jay Johnson, the program coordinator at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry, provided a response and his own perspective.
One of my concerns throughout this topic, and in my life, is how to talk about sex without invoking fear - fear of violence, fear from past experience, fear of God's wrath, fear of vulnerability, fear of physical risk (pregnancy, STDs, etc). Jay responded by pointing out that religion itself addresses fear: with hope and faith. Part of Christianity itself is about the impossibly hopeful, the extraordinarily faithful, and the boundlessly loving. Through that, we have courage to face our own vulnerability and model what it means to face death and fear - and maybe more than that, to face life itself. Sex is never safe, and neither is life. Maybe that's a way to start a deep theological reflection about God and sex.

here's my question of the day

2008-11-09T16:09:00.000-08:00

I'm obviously preoccupied by a few things lately. Our church service at East Bay Church of Religious Science was packed and celebratory about the Obama presidency. The sermon reminded us about the power of hope that the duty we all have to live out our potential as human beings. At the end, Rev E compared the Prop 8 vote to childbirth: if you push too hard, you can hurt yourself and the baby. It's time will come, and you will push, and the birth will be easier, she said. It was the right proportion of celebration (and we sang God Bless America, which made a lot of eyes tear up), hope, and exhortation to continue moving.

But here's the new question I have:
What message did Prop 8 send to single-parent families? The implication is that they, too, are illegitimate, not good enough. That makes me sad, too. As my friend Emily wrote on her blog, to the children of gay & lesbian parents in the church in Riverside, CA where she was a youth pastor: "Family is not created by a man and a woman. Family is created by love, period."

About the NAACP

2008-11-09T16:01:00.000-08:00

I forgot to say why I posted that excerpt from the NAACP. I think Alice Huffman made a succinct and incisive distinction between church and state, between morality and legality. I want to keep this in mind as I continue to ponder the intersection between religions (which are political systems) and politics (which are values-based moral systems founded on often-unspoken tenets of faith).

from the California NAACP

2008-11-07T09:53:00.000-08:00

Here is an excerpt from the California NAACP's statement in support of same-sex marriage. The statement was about a resolution where the California chapter supported the national organization to mobilize in favor of same-sex marriage. I think this statement also deals very well with the issue of religious/moral view vs. legal concerns.

"According to the 2000 Census, there are over 600,000 same sex couples in the United States of which, 85,000 include at least one African American partner. Of that number more than 3,000 Black couples in the Los Angeles area and another 2,100 in the San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose area self-identified as same-sex unmarried partners. These people are working, buying homes, paying taxes and, yes, raising families. Many have served their country in the military, and work in their communities as volunteers. I do know that many of the gay people I’ve spoken to are also loving parents and law abiding citizens.
The question of religion beliefs is also raised frequently. There is a separation between civil law and religious doctrine. Religious doctrine is sacred and cannot be legislated. AB 19 makes that point because no clergy is required to perform same sex marriages. Justices of the Peace, judges, legislators, ship captains and others in the secular world will perform civil marriages for gay couples.
While our freedom from slavery was a moral issue we did not win it on moral grounds but on legal interpretation of the US Constitution. The VII Amendment of the Constitution clearly states “To enforce the constitutional right to vote, to confer jurisdiction upon the district courts of the United States to provide injunctive relief against discrimination in public accommodations ….” It was not about the immorality of institutionalized discrimination and the denial of basic civil rights, but because these acts violated the United States Constitution, thus the term “Civil Rights."
by Alice Huffman, from "Why We Support AB 19, The Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act

quick note about amendments

2008-11-06T11:12:00.000-08:00

Proposition 8 has also illuminated a pretty messed up California Constitution process. I know that in the national Constitution, it takes a 2/3 majority of states to approve a Constitutional Amendment (remember the Equal Rights Amendment battle for women's constitutional equality, anyone?). While I'm sad that amendment never passed (though it seems that quite a few laws have been put in place to ensure a lot of those rights), this seems like a rather healthy way of amending a founding document of the nation.
California's amendment process, however, seems a little crazy. To get something on the ballot, one must collect signatures of 8% of the total number of voters in the last governor's election. And to put an amendment to the Constitution, the amendment must be approved by a simple majority of voters. Which means, as in the case of Prop 8, that an amendment - an addition to the founding document of the state of California - needs approval by slightly more than half of the population (represented by those who vote, which is not necessarily representative in the true sense). So in other words, the California Constitution has at least one amendment that nearly half of the voters of California disagree with. Don't we need a higher standard than that? This is not just a law, but the founding framework of what can be made into law.

Andrew Sullivan / blaming people of color

2008-11-06T10:55:00.000-08:00

My partner got a forward from a friend, which started a war on email. It was an essay by Andrew Sullivan (a libertarian conservative, Roman Catholic gay political columnist who is thoughtful and sharp, but I find him to be way off on many social issues) in which he partly blames the "turnout of Obama voters" for throwing off the Prop 8 election.
Very quickly, part of the aftermath of the Proposition 8 is being framed as Blacks (and people of color) against gays. As I've said before, this is a distraction from the true culprits. I don't deny that some people of color are conservative, and many are religious. Sometimes those things intersect with being gay. But also, many many white people are conservative and religious. Why is it that they are not blame, but only those darn Black people who came out to vote for Obama. In the Bay Area, I've seen a number of prominent Black religious leaders speak against Prop 8. The NAACP came out against it (along with Samuel L. Jackson and Magic Johnson, for those of you who vest your authority in actors and sports figures). Last of all, many of the photos of "Yes on 8" celebrants look like white people to me. The Latter-Day Saints Church, a prominent supporter of the amendment, is largely a white church. I just want to say again that we need to get over this tired cliche of race vs. sexuality - and eventually get over sexuality vs. religion, too. Though that's more complicated.
Anyway, I'm basically just angry that already it's falling out like that. White privilege regularly turns white gay people against people of color, which is maddening.

election reactions / daring to hope

2008-11-05T11:05:00.000-08:00

Here are a few reactions to the election:

1. I realized I didn't dare to pin my hopes on Obama becoming president. I didn't trust white people in particular to follow through with voting - the Bradley effect. Bigger than that, I didn't want to pin my hopes that the Bush continuity would be halted by an Obama win. So when it happened - early - and by suprise after Virginia's delegates were in, I was in a sort of elated shock. Was it really happening? And McCain's gracious but a little rambling speech was good to see (compare the crowd of his supporters to the Obama crowd, for example, and the way he seemed to be implying 'this one's for the African-Americans' as if it's not the nation itself who wins by Obama's politics). And yes, I cried during Obama's acceptance speech.

3. I realized that I have four years of prayer and worry ahead, in my concern for Obama's life. I don't trust white supremacists to react nonviolently to something like this - though I do expect the rest of us to point out how wrong they would be, and to protect everyone we love from hatred.

4. I also realized, watching the Obama family on stage, that I'm very excited about Michelle Obama as First Lady. Smart, strong, articulate, tough, independent, stylish...I'm excited to see what her agenda will be, too.

5. I also didn't quite dare to hope, given my familiarity with anti-gay sentiments, that same-sex marriage would really be allowed. Though this morning I felt a little like someone had come into my house and taken our couch, saying "you don't deserve this."

6. I felt reality this morning, after dancing in the streets of Oakland last night. The reality of anti-gay sentiment among many people, especially when it's whipped up by the Yes on 8 campaign's tactics. I feel a little chastened by the reminder, like I was too audacious to think that people wouldn't buy the rhetoric - that prop 8 would mean teachers had to teach about gay marriage (as if the amendment was about an educational curriculum) or that same-sex marriage has a negative impact on heterosexual marriage. Explain to me how my love and commitment to my partner does anything to mess up the love and commitment of my sister and her husband. I don't get it. Their marriage doesn't impact mine, except as I look to their example of 2 people who are in happy and successful married partnership. I feel like I've been put in my place for "daring" to assume that my relationship was not a subject for voter approval. I'm left where I was before the Supreme Court decision - still engaged and planning to marry my partner - but also thinking more carefully about where we can take vacations in California. Where will we face hatred for holding hands in public?

7. I am already tired of the trope that "people of color are specifically motivated to vote for Obama, and are also mostly homophobic, so of course Prop 8 won." I don't have time now, but I want to compare maps of the Prop 8 vote and demographics. It appears to me that the middle counties of California voted in Prop 8, and as far as I know, those are counties with larger white populations. "People of color hate gays" is a cynical manipulation - because some people of color are gay, first of all. I think on deeper analysis, something could be said about the tendency of white Europeans (as colonists) to project characteristics on "natives" that they feel too "civilised" to admit they have. Sexuality being one way it's been done.
Okay, enough for now.

referendum on who is my friend

2008-11-03T16:38:00.000-08:00

I can't help but feel that Prop 8 has become a sort of referendum on who is my friend.
Obviously, on the surface, that's not what it's about at all, but the implicit message is right there. At the interfaith service against Prop 8, one of the families who gave testimonies said, "When I see a 'No on 8' sign, I know a friend has been here." And in reverse, when I see a "Yes on 8" sign, I feel a little scared. I think "here is someone who doesn't see me." I start wondering about the cars with "Yes on 8" bumperstickers while I'm riding my bike, i wonder if they'd hit me if they knew I was getting married to a man - if they would see me as the same kind of human as they are. It's all there all the time, the people who hate my sexuality and the people who don't care, but this election is bringing it out. It feels like not a referendum about a constitutional amendment but an exercise in subtle homophobia. People who may not have such a strong opinion in favor of heterosexual marriage can find - in the cause against same-sex marriage - a way to vote in their fear/hatred of homosexuality. I guess it's not so different from racism: the subtle racism and cultural conditioning are always there, but when something like an election between a white and a multiracial candidate can come across as a vote for or against the ability of people of color to be President (and aside from people with real disagreements with Obama's politics, I think there is a subsection of voters who are just vaguely uncomfortable with a President of color, or with their perceptions of his suitability). So my feelings are probably not entirely different from a person of color who walks in the world and wonders who is friendly and who believes they are stupid or lazy or whatever stereotype.
It's also a reality check. This is the Bay Area after all, a place where same-sex marriage is conceivable, compared with may places where it is not. It's a reality check that there are many who dislike my sexuality and will go to lengths to make that dislike concrete in the legal system (and some who will go so far as to commit violence - physical, verbal, and otherwise - to make their point clear). I do know that if Prop 8 passes, I will feel more unsafe doing my everyday things - more unsafe walking around, getting groceries, going to a movie with my partner, holding his hand. It's funny how it's not "just" an election on so many levels. It's gut-personal, and the anxiety levels are skyrocketing.

Muslim is the new gay

2008-11-02T09:45:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I attended a "No on 8" church service. (Prop 8, as I'm sure you've heard, is a California constitutional amendment saying "marriage is only between a man and a woman" - and whether or not someone believes homosexuality is acceptable, I think it should be unacceptable in a democracy to write something like that into the constitution. Not only is it a removal of rights (instead of constitutional amendments to expand rights, which is more democractic), but it puts a moral code - one that does not represent the diversity of moral codes that exist among the citizens of California - into law. It's the opposite of what democracy is about).
At any rate, just after the service, I worked on some readings for my "Remembering" class. The topic was 9/11 and cultural and social (theological, liturgical, ritual) acts of memorializing, remembering, and telling the story of what happened. It occurred to me, relating my memory of the ways we talked about it in 2001 and continue to refer to it in some national narratives today, that "Muslim" is the new "gay." By that I mean that Muslim is the new epithet to say that someone or something is bad, even though the literal meaning of the word is untrue -- Barack Obama being the most famous example of this. Just like when people used to (and still do) say "that's so gay" when they mean something is unfair, uncool, or stupid. And what about the people who are gay and Muslim?
Okay, so it's not a perfect analogy, but I think it still applies. Why is it that Islam somehow has come to connote untrustworthiness? Part of it is the mistaken notion of "clash of civilizations," that somehow Islam in the Middle East is completely different from Western Christianity (when in fact they originate in the same place). And part of it is the perceived difference between white and brown (though Arab and Euro are both considered Caucasian in the outdated racial classification systems used by the US Census - and in fact Caucasian comes form the Caucasus mountains which are in western Asia, making the whole thing a bit more laughable). And I don't know this for sure, but probably some of it is retained from black-white racial struggle, which involved Black American Muslims and Afro-centric Black Power movements that rejected Christianity as the religion of slave-owners and oppressors.
But here's a reality check: Muslims are part of America. As Colin Powell pointed out so well, Muslims (along with Christians, atheists, Jews, pagans, gays, and more) enlist in the Army. We also built this country together, as citizens and immigrants and laborers and store owners. I'm tired of the division. My challenge is now to do something about it.
I remember the first time I really sat down and talked with a Muslim person (I think I blogged about it - a Black American Muslim veteran at a homeless shelter). I learned that the interweaving of his spirituality and life were not so different from mine. It's overdue time to get real and stop writing off categories of people negatively (including, for me, evangelicals and conservatives). Yesterday at the interfaith "no on 8" service, Jana Drakka (a Buddhist monk whom I greatly admire) quoted Thich Nhat Hanh's "Call Me By My True Names." He points out that "I" am all of us. It is an illusion, a mistake, an act of violence, to separate completely into "us" and "them."

home to me

2008-10-26T21:51:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, we took Mama (my mother-in-law) to the airport, back to Florida after an unsuccessful year of trying to find steady work that pays enough to be able to survive living in the Bay Area. It was sad to say goodbye to someone that I've grown close to, someone who has become a member of my family (or, actually, to whom I've become a member of her family). And today after a church service that emphasized how much abundance and blessing we receive as human beings, we had a fantastic brunch with my friends Emily & James. Then I started reflecting on a few difficult conversations I've had lately, with and about relatives and ancestors, the complications of family relationships. Some days are just a little deeper than others. I came home and listened to "Home to Me" by Josh Kelley (and a version from Noah's Arc, by Patrik-Ian).
Sometimes I can't believe how lucky I am to be creating a home and a family with my partner. I think this photo, taken by our friend Mateo, sums it up. The funny thing is that before the photo, we were arguing about something - and even though we were mad at each other about whatever-it-was, we had commitment, trust, and love to relax in each other's arms and work it out. Given some of my past crazy relationship habits, even after 2 years sometimes I still can't believe we've got something so good.

privilege & silence / guilt as a spiritual practice

2008-10-20T21:49:00.000-07:00

Today, PSR's Dismantling Racism Coordinator asked me to attend a session with our Board of Trustees, where a white anti-racism trainer (Francie Kendall) led them through an exercise to build awareness about white privilege at our school. I had attended the trainer's session with students a couple weeks ago, and it was eye-opening in some ways, and in other ways it confirmed things I already knew. At the student conversation, I noticed how easy it is for white people to talk about everything else besides racism (so several talked about physical access to buildings, for example, instead of talking about how racism gets built into the structures and creates "structured blindness" to oppression). I didn't say anything then, and I promised myself I'd say something the next time it came up. At the Trustees' meeting, I remained silent again, even when I noticed that explicit mention of race barely happened - many participants simply referred to it without name, or talked about "unwelcoming" or "power" without drawing the connections to racial justice. It was an example of Francie Kendall's concept of structured blindness or structured sidestepping the issue at hand. And again I said nothing - I disappointed myself. Debriefing with my partner and later with Emily, I know that I'm in a learning process, and that next time I will have more motivation to practice sharing what I observe (and know to be true). As Emily pointed out, guilt works to my advantage in this case, because it motivates me to action.
It reminds me of my work talking about male privilege and sexism. It's hard to "develop a backbone" (thanks to Megan Dowdell by way of Emily), and it usually happens in little ways. Guilt also works to motivate in a larger sense - just I was motivated by my concern that I could be seen as a potential rapist or sexual assaulter to a woman who doesn't know me, I could also be a potential harasser and white supremacist (or insulting white liberal do-gooder!) to a person of color who doesn't know me (and, frankly, to a lot of white people who are looking for allies in white supremacy or white liberal do-gooding). So it's my responsibility to change the tide. My creative writing teacher in college (a Black woman poet) wrote a poem called "Unlearning Not to Speak" about trying to overcome the cultural messages that kept her silent. Corresponding to her learning, I had to Learn Not to Speak. And now I have to learn how to speak again, with my new consciousness. And to ask others to hold me accountable to doing this.
Will you join me?

detachment and suffering

2008-10-18T13:40:00.000-07:00

In my religious searching, I've often stumbled on the concept of detachment as the goal of spiritual practice. I hear about this in some strands of Buddhism, and it's especially pronounced in the Bhagavad Gita. The Bhagavad Gita teaches two spiritual paths: one of personal devotion to the God Krishna, and one of pursuit of the eternal Brahman/spirit of the cosmos. Both teach a practice (yoga, in the broad sense. not in the solely physical practice as often understood in the US) of transcendence of passions and detachment from outcomes (both positive & negative). I think this formulation of ancient Indian religion was also part of the background of Buddhism. Certain aspects of Buddhism also teach this detachment. I've been reflecting a lot on my resistance to detachment. While a reduction of suffering is a noble and necessary goal - and a practice of contemplative detachment & presence is a good way to get at reduction of suffering - detachment seems like a peculiar way to live in the world. I've been told by many people that it isn't detachment as distance. Not like the goal is to be unaffected by anyone else, but rather to understand that there is something beyond the daily good and bad of life, beyond the ebb and flow of passions. I get that, and maybe I'm just stuck on the word detachment. My answer to suffering isn't detachment but engagement. It's to go deeper in relationships, in presence with others - in a sense, to attach more. I think it has a lot to do with cultural message of white manhood (where there's often a favorable emphasis on detachment, reduction of emotional response, and boldness in the face of difficult and potentially hurtful situations). Coming from that, the answer isn't further detachment but closer connection. Obviously, the goal isn't to be swept away by suffering, or to be rendered useless by the overwhelming nature of suffering in the world. So an element of touching the larger canvas of the universe (God, Brahman, ?Nirvana?) is important. I think part of the issue is how we understand transcendence, too. My theology professor, Mayra Rivera, has just published a book called "The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God" where she argues that "God is not within human grasp but always within human touch." It's about "transcendence within," which I think is what I'm trying to get at. I guess I have to read the book, eh?

update on 8

2008-10-17T16:45:00.001-07:00

Today in the mail, I got a "Cops Voter Guide," which has an image of a police offers on the front. After getting pissed off about a few things on it, I noticed that it doesn't seem to be affiliated with any actual police officers. And most of the endorsements are paid for.
Be that as it may, this little postcard says to vote yes on 8 0 "Restore traditional marriage. Cops know children raised by a married mother and father have the best chance for success. Prop 8 strengthens traditional marriage." First of all, why should I trust a cop to tell me about marriage? How does he or she have any more authority than anyone else? Second of all, my partner and I have quite a traditional relationship. We don't want to wake up when the alarm goes off. We deal with budgets and car issues. I make dinner and he cleans up the dishes. We share taking out the recycling and trash. We call each other at lunchtime and talk about each other's day. We go to bed early a lot. I challenge you to find how our home wouldn't be a good place to raise successful children. Let's not kid ourselves - the success of children rests not on the marriage status of the parents but on the quality of parenting, and support systems like financial, educational, social...

you may be interested to know, my relationship does not lead to incest

2008-10-16T20:03:00.000-07:00

We are connecting with Our Family Coalition, an organization that advocates for and assists LGBT families in the Bay Area. They put out a resource guide to LGBT-family-friendly services. They recently sent a rescindment of their endorsement of a local pediatrician because she signed a "Yes on 8" argument in the mass-mailed California Voter Guide. [Prop 8 is a proposed amendment to the California constitution that says "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."]. OFC sent a letter to this doctor, and here are excerpts of her reply (and my response):

"I am hoping that my gay/lesbian families -who I so appreciate and enjoy caring for - will realize that there is a difference between allowing gays/lesbians to form families and adopt children without terming this a marriage. Because of the judges' ruling, there would be no religious exclusion allowed - churches may be forced to marry couples in disagreement with their church doctrine. I am also concerned that this ruling actually opens the door to other relationships (such as polygamy, incest) that may not be in the best interest of children."
"I trust you have seen the love and care that I have demonstrated to you, as I have to all my families without regard for who constitutes the family. I have always attempted to keep my public policy concerns separated from the medical care I provide."

Dear Dr. ---,
I understand that you provide adequate care for your clients, no matter what their family status. I also believe that you truly appreciate your customers. I do question your ability to keep public policy concerns separate from the medical care you provide. How can you provide an adequately caring environment when you seem to believe that the parents of some of your clients are less legitimate than others--that their families are somehow not quite real.
But that aside, I have two bigger disagreements. First of all, no one forces a church to marry anyone. The church, like any provider of a service, has the right to refuse to provide service. And frankly, I support the church's right to discriminate in this case. I would challenge the church on theological and Biblical grounds, but it's really no skin off my back if your church doesn't approve of my relationship within its walls and authority. But that doesn't give your church a right to enforce its beliefs in a civil context, especially when there is no single religious or Christian view on same-sex marriages.
But let me tell you what really steams me: You imply that my right to marry my partner somehow paves the way for incest. You don't know me. But if you did, you'd see that nothing about my loving, consensual, caring relationship connects with incest. In fact, if I take your argument seriously, incest would be legal under the proposed amendment--as long as the couple is a man and a woman. Given the long battle of recognition of same-sex relationships in the US, I'm surprised that you think it's plausible that same-sex marriage somehow is "closer" to incest. I don't have the statistics on me, but I believe that most incest is committed by heterosexual men. I do know at least one kid who grew up in a polyamorous household, and she's actually one of the better adjusted women I've met. You do realize that in our Christian Bible, polygamy was quite common in ancient Hebrew cultures. And aside from Jacob and Esau's quarrels and King David's sons' craziness, I don't recall any kids being seriously messed up by polyamory. And actually I think in both their cases, the conflict was more about land, money, and acension to the throne. Maybe we should create a constitutional amendment unrecognizing inheritance. Sorry, I'm being silly.
I think I can see your logic, even if I don't agree with it: somehow same-sex relationships are somehow more sinful or "wrong" than heterosexual relationships, and it is some kind of slippery slope from there to incest. That's really twisted thinking. Like assuming that if we admit women into the medical field, then somehow that's a slippery slope to letting children and animals become doctors.
I do appreciate your willingness to go public with your opinions, and I hope you are equally willing to hear from some of the gay and lesbian parents of your clients.
Sincerely,
Wade

email response to fear

2008-10-12T16:28:00.000-07:00

My brother sent me three emails: One that galvanizes prayer warriors against Obama's election, appealing to concerns that he is Muslim, that the US will be taken over by "Arabs," and that he hates Christians and white people. One says that Fox News will be airing a documentary about how terrible Obama is. And one is about a tourist who contrasts "polluted" "Arab-run" Egypt with "clean" Israel. Though I'm not clear why I bothered, this is my reply to him:

Actually, my deep and profound prayer is that hatred, fear, and ignorance are conquered by God's abiding and transformative love. My fervent prayer is that we as Christians recognize our God-given duty to be radically loving, radically welcoming, and impossibly hopeful in creating justice and mutual respect for the world we live in. My hope is that God's spirit of love can transform the fear I read in the emails you sent.

Regarding the pollution in Egypt, it is actually the Christian nations in Europe and America that created pollution in the form of combustion engines, fossil fuel-burning electric plants, and disposable products (that get thrown away and blown around as trash). The pollution described in your email already exists in the US--and you're right, it is scary.

Our land is sorely in need of healing, this is true. And my sorrow is that a political election is fueling fear instead of hope. It is exploiting economic concerns and fear of difference (racial fear, fear of those who have a different religion, fear about loss of security) by providing information without proof, instead of providing solutions and hope.

I have read some of Jeremiah Wright's sermons and watched some interviews. I think he speaks prophetically about very real injustices that exist in our country. Like ancient Hebrew prophets under the Babylonian empire and like Jesus' ministry under the Roman empire, Wright calls out for justice for those who have been oppressed. We as Christians (including Barack Obama, who is decidedly NOT a Muslim) are in a position to heal injustice - not create further wounds and more fear.

love,
Wade

For your consideration, I also included an essay written by my friend EJoye, one of the greatest ministers-in-training I know. She reflects many of the hopes I have for the future in an essay she wrote for Clergy for Obama:
[Find this on EJoye's blog]

spirit rock

2008-10-12T15:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon, a couple friends invited us to an afternoon retreat at Spirit Rock (a Buddhist retreat community/center in Marin) for a celebration of LGBT couples, love, and marriage. It was attended by all kinds of couple of different ages, orientations, and anniversaries, as well as some single people. When they asked us to meditate on our purpose for being there, this thought crystallized for me:
My relationship with my partner has profound healing power. This is why I changed my perspective from not wanting to have anything to do with marriage into seeking a commitment and marriage with him. This healing power is visible not only in the way he helped me heal after my bike accident, but in the soothing of some of my deepest scars of fear, anger, and hurt.

On a spiritual level, relationships can be inherently healing in the way people can connect with each other, when people can see each other fully as flawed and fabulous. And just as easily, relationships can be profoundly hurtful if they are blind to human reality, if they ignore or diminish the fabulous, or if they expect perfection. In a recent white anti-racist group I attended, the leader referred to this: Relationships are the only thing that can heal injustices, through sharing the spark of awareness and vision and through organizing to counteract systems of structured injustice.

I think I needed to write that, because there's a lot of scary negative going on in my inbox (thanks to my brother) and a deep struggle going on in my friend EJoye (see her blog for more).

conservative Christian sexual crises

2008-10-12T13:28:00.000-07:00

Today I talked with my mom about some relatives going through a family crisis. The father, a leader in his church, has had a private practice for a long time, and recently the oldest sons, along with a few other unnamed clients, were part of an investigation that revoked the father's license due to sexual assault during some treatment sessions, when the son was a child. In public statements, the son emphasized that he acted out of love and hope that his father can get help. You can imagine the fallout, the guilt, shame, family divisions, anger, counter-accusations, acrimony...
This is a family I grew up with. The oldest son was my age, and I remember him stealing my bubble gum and letting me shoot tin cans with his bb gun. This is also a very conservative, evangelical Christian family. It reminds me of other sexual crises among conservative evangelical Christians. I have a knee-jerk reaction when I hear those stories: I gloat that these supposed morally pure folks are being exposed for the repression that undergirds their hatred. When I heard about this, I had the knee-jerk reaction, but I also reacted to the sorrow and trauma, the awfulness that lies in the aftermath of the father's actions and the investigation later. It's a different side of the public shame and humiliation.
It leaves me with a lot to think about in my knee-jerk reactions and how I hear about moral crusades, sexual repression, and shame.

It may also effect my response to recent emails sent by my brother & sister-in-law, which sound the moral conservative Christian alarms they're sounding about "if Obama takes over the presidency!" They pray against him (and somehow link a friend's trip to Egypt to fear that "Arabs will take over the US" and create noise, trash, and air pollution).
My prayer is that hatred and ignorance are transformed by love, and that Christians recognize our religious duty to be radically loving, radically welcoming, and hopeful in creating justice, mutuality, and respect for the global & multispiritual community we exist in.

more on christian arrogance

2008-10-09T17:33:00.000-07:00

Today I was listening to the UpFront Radio podcast by New American Media (who promotes and covers news & reporting by people of color). One of the August podcasts features an interview of Parvez Sharma, the filmmaker who made "A Jihad for Love," about gay and lesbian Muslims. In it, he said, "I'm a little bit tired of well-meaning, angst-ridden liberals always wanting to jump on the 'save Iran from itself' bandwagon." He's referring to white/Western gay rights people who try to push an agenda of asylum or Westernization for same-sex loving people. He calls this the "It's not right unless there's a pride parade" mentality. I think this is a gay version of Christian arrogance, put forth by well-meaning people.

Emily also brought up an important point in her comment to my last posting: the impossibility of living up to ideals. I think I came across as arrogant myself, as if I've arrived at the 'correct' viewpoint, and I am pristine in loving my enemies and all that. That's not the case. It's more a matter of trying to figure out what it means to love and be civil in the face of profound disagreement and possibly even harm. The last time my mom said, "...but I still love you," I had to stop and ask, "what does that even mean?" I had to ask myself that. What does it mean to be angry at my mom, but to still love her. What does it mean for her to love me and not accept a significant part of my life (not to mention that my partner is part of makes me loveable and who supports my love for her). My mom is advanced over many conservative Christian parents of LGBT children, in her unwillingness to kick me out of her life, to break communications entirely (and I guess I am advanced in maintaining a relationship with her). But what does it mean to love me without accepting that I'm gay? What does it mean to love her without accepting her anti-gay stance as theologically accurate in a broad sense? I refuse for our "love" to be abstract--it has to take concrete form somehow. Mom and I agreed that love took the form of still calling each other once a week.
The other side of maintaining civility and space for people I disagree with is knowing how to bow out when I can't maintain civility. There has to be room for people to say "I can't have this conversation" because it's too painful or triggering. Right? I don't know. I found out that Parvez Sharma has a blog at ajihadforlove.blogspot.com I'm hoping that reading more in his blog, about his interactions with anti-gay Muslims can illuminate what it means to do this kind of spiritual work: insisting on the correctness of his perspective while engaging with those who are different. One of his posts talks about the leader of a Muslim Students Association who says Islam and homosexuality cannot be reconciled, but who thanks Parvez for humanizing Islam. Dialogue continues in that kind of environment. I don't know, I'm starting to ramble.

on christian arrogance

2008-10-08T09:57:00.000-07:00

here is an essay i'm working on for Logos, the student newsletter of PSR. i'd appreciate comments if anyone has them:

Recently a prospective student asked me about an incident in a class he visited. Introducing himself, he mentioned that he was also looking at Fuller. Someone made a sarcastic comment and the class laughed. The prospective student laughed, too, he said, “but I don’t really know why. I haven’t seen much difference between the schools so far.”
Talking about this later, Joellynn Monahan (my boss, the Admissions Counselor at PSR) told me about a sermon she heard that demonized fundamentalists using the same “fundamental” framework the sermon was supposedly resisting. Afterward, in the community prayer, she prayed, “May we be saved from fundamentalisms in our own progressive theologies and ideologies.” May we be saved, indeed, from our own progressive arrogance. For those of us who are former Christian conservatives, may we remember the possibility of movement, deepening, and expansion of spirituality. For those who are spiritually progressive, may we remember who our God is. The God I used to believe in had limits, exclusion, and a sense of security. My perspective has changed, but I continue to fight that way of relating to God: as if there are limits on who can experience love, grace, and acceptance. In a recent class on post-colonial theory, someone asked, “Can you have an identity without excluding an ‘other’?” My answer (for now) is “No, there are boundaries between what is and what isn’t – but you can have an identity without committing violence against an ‘other’ who is outside your identity.” To me, progressive faiths, in their many manifestations, derive power from our experience of freedom, love, acceptance, and a living, ongoing revelation of spiritual knowledge that isn't confined to a single book, time period, or authoritative interpreter. My hope is that our faiths will not be weakened by hatred or by vilifying those we disagree with.
My mom and I are dealing with her fundamental objection to my gayness, her faith-based inability to accept the legitimacy of my deeply loving and joyful relationship with my partner – and my inability to see how homosexuality is sinful, my insistence that my relationship is acceptable to God and humanity. Our conversations are painful and awkward, but in our own ways of faith, we both believe that God is still speaking to us in this. Despite radically different theologies, we are committed by our faith to respecting each other’s spiritual journey and to a (sometimes desperate) attempt to maintain a loving relationship. There was a time when I condemned gays to hell, and a time when I switched the language and not the theology – condemning anti-gay Christians and conservative fundamentalists to hell. Now, through my ongoing spiritual journey, in conversation with my mom, I am learning to let go of spiritual arrogance, to find room in my faith for spiritual pathways that work for others even if they don’t work for me.
If we want to heal the wounds of violent exclusion in ourselves and in the world, we must allow our own and others’ wounds to speak anger, pain, and justice without eternal condemnation and further destruction—to be healers instead of perpetrators of further violence.
This difficult work requires patience, forgiveness, faith in possibilities, and boundless, irrational hope. To me, that’s part of what Christianity is about.

a condition for people like me

2008-10-08T08:30:00.001-07:00

Last night I learned about a condition where the risk factor is being a skinny white male--they actually said I fit the textbook description. I know, I know, you're thinking racism, sexism, that kind of thing. Those are true, also (though I don't know how skinny factors into that). Actually this time I'm talking about "bleb disease," which can lead to spontaneous pneumothorax. Which is what happened Saturday, though I didn't get it checked out until yesterday. I went to a clinic to check out a chest pain I'd been having, and they discovered that I had a slightly collapsed lung--so they sent me to the ER. Judging from symptoms I described from Saturday, it was probably more severely collapsed but I was able to recover. Judging from symptoms I've had in the past, since 6th grade, it's probably happened before but I never saw a doctor about it. Which means, according to the doctor, I probably have this bleb disease thing (not glamorous-sounding, I know, but quite descriptive). The thing is, very simply, a few of the little air sacs in my lungs are probably enlarged and weakened for unknown reasons, sort of like a blister only filled with are (those are blebs). And for equally unknown reasons, these blebs occasionally burst, allowing air to seep from the lung into the lining that surrounds the lungs. Depending on air pressure, it can cause the lung not to inflate properly. If you've seen the move Three Kings, you know what I'm talking about, though with a bullet wound it's obviously a lot more serious. Luckily for me, the air pressure wasn't a problem on Saturday, and I have a healthy set of lungs--so my lung recovered fairly well.
At any rate, I have some more appointments today, but things are fine. I'm thinking of starting a club of unfortunately-named illnesses. We have a friend who was diagnosed with sagging brain syndrome, which is actually a very serious condition, despite the funny-sounding name. Any other ideas about unfortunately-named illnesses? Post them in comments.

happy birthday

2008-10-05T12:48:00.000-07:00

It feels funny to say I'm 29. To me, 29 is the age of older siblings and cousins. It signifies settledness, a steady job, kids, that kind of thing. Part of the problem is culture--the culture I grew up in doesn't match the culture I choose to live in. My supervisor at the Center for Women & Gender told me that at 28, you start to feel more settled in yourself. This is true. I feel like myself, standing on my feet, and not so subject to the drama of adolescence and college. But at the same time, I feel funny still in grad school, like I'm not as evolved as I should be. I have to get over those expectations.

At any rate, I really just wanted to write about my birthday celebration. I made cupcakes using my partner's favorite vegan chocolate cake recipe. Mama bought a pie and sparking blueberry juice, so we had a toast when I got home from work on Friday. Mama and Papa gave me some nice gifts, including slippers and a salad spinner. My partner got me tickets to MacB, a hip hop version of MacBeth at the African-American Shakespeare company, and he took me out to dinner at La Taza de Cafe. The dinner was really good--a couple of Cuban tapas and slow-roasted, garlic studded pork with rice, beans, and maduros. They also have great cocktails, and the flamenco show was very nice. MacB was better in concept than reality--the show tried to take on too much, though some of the individual details were kind of brilliant, setting the story in a Bay Area record company, adding funny contemporary touches to Shakespeare's dialogue, and setting a bunch of the soliliquies as raps (most of which worked). The opening to the second half of the show with the witches ("Bubble bubble toil & trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble") was particularly smart, with three Destiny's Child-esque women singing the incantation. It was cool to see, anyway, and it was a wonderful birthday present. Last of all, he made me a 29th birthday CD combining very sweet love songs, great nostalgic R&B, and a few tracks by New Kids on the Block (including one from the new album). Thank you, baby!!

hope & privilege

2008-10-05T10:43:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to wonder if hope and optimism are a luxury, based on some level of privilege that comes from having basic needs met. I see a family member struggling after years of no job or inadequate jobs. I hear increasing negativity and cynicism in her voice, and her attempt to control it by thinking and planning. I feel helpless to do anything. Part of it is my own sense of hope and positivity--a better sense of myself and the possibilities for the future. I wonder if hope itself is a luxury that not everyone can afford.

I notice myself distancing from this sense of helplessness, as if it's a sort of personal failure on my part. I don't want to do that, but I don't know what answers I have.
Luckily, I have to read the Bhagavad Gita for a class, so maybe I'll learn a little something.

structure & regulation

2008-09-28T15:51:00.001-07:00

This week I am thinking about the economic meltdown, my work in the accreditation office, and urban planning. The thing that ties all of this together is the importance of a careful framework of structure and regulation. As I read the requirements written by the accrediting bodies--which encompass everything from teaching philosophy, employment policy, campus environment, and budget, endowment, and physical resources--I realize the importance of regulation and review. When I read about the mortgage meltdown and the failure of banks, I remember the importance of regulation and oversight. When I do my work with Care Through Touch, when I see the tourists and shoppers get on and off at Powell street, one Bart stop away from Civic Center and the Tenderloin, I think about about the role of urban planning, public transportation, and the link between tourist and business hotels just a few blocks from strip clubs and open drug deals. I think about the implicit structures that regulate this business, and the role of economic regulation in judging who is in dire need for help and who is allowed to drop out of the bottom of the economic system.
We cannot rely on the good nature of people to act responsibly. We cannot allow the free market to just work itself out humanely. We cannot rely on the profit motive to create sound economic policy. We cannot rely on the good intentions of my school's board and administration. We cannot rely on our elected officials to be responsible without our monitoring. This is not to say that individuals (and the board and administration or Congressional representatives) are bad people. In fact, the accreditation report is basically a report on how the school is monitoring itself and trying to improve areas of deficit and difficulty. But it's important to have the regulatory/accreditation structure in place--just in case someone decides to act a little crazy. It's just that power is funny, greed-profit is funny. It messes with people.
That's why it's important to have laws and regulation, to set humane policies in place, and to monitor our government. It's just a little extra insurance.

Hell & punishment

2008-09-23T13:59:00.000-07:00

Last week in my "Hell" class, the professor, Holger Zellentin from the Center for Jewish Studies, raised an important point: the reliance of imperialism on dual punishments: in this life and in hell. We weren't able to fully discuss it, but it got me thinking. We have read Egyptian accounts of the underworld, including punishments, and Zoroastrian/ancient Persian accounts of the afterlife, including a rather astounding and exhausting lists of diabolical tortures for various "sins." Prof. Zellentin raised the question about ethical systems that are communicated through fantasies of violence and the interconnected nature of pious purity and really crazy forms of physical torture and degradation. Reading the descriptions of hell in the Arda Viraf, I realized that I have a profound lack of imagination for inflicting pain.
I don't know. My thoughts aren't very well-formed yet, but this idea of imperialism and torture are interesting.
In that framework, it's easier to see how pious conservative Christianity becomes obsessed with the punishments of hell and the torture of Jesus in the cross. It's another creation of dichotomy, in which the "good" relies on the "bad' to define itself. A desire to change that belief system brings with it a shift in self-understanding.

ridiculous hopefulness

2008-09-19T17:40:00.000-07:00

Today I was struck with a fit of outlandish hopefulness. I spent my morning indexing an accreditation report for my school (a job I have, helping prepare for an upcoming accreditation review by the Western Association of Schools & Colleges and by the Association of Theological Schools). The report is quite honest about flaws in curriculum and administration, but the vision of the school and the curriculum is inspiring. It will take time to get where it wants to be, but it's the sort of institution I want to be a part of (despite my struggles and my criticisms of the place). It takes religion and spirituality very seriously but also situates it within the larger context of waning religious involvement in the US and waning theological education for many of those in evangelical Christian ministry (one of growing parts of religion in the US and world).

Then, I happened to be listening to music with the newest version of iTunes, which contains a simultaneously great and annoying little widget called Genius, which suggests songs and playlists similar to whatever song I might be listening to. Out of idle curiosity, I checked out the "countdown" to John Legend's next album, Evolver. I listened to "If You're Out There," and I almost started crying. It's a call to...something, to leadership, to peace, to change. I would call it a minor religious experience, because it got me in touch with a profound, unfounded hopefulness that I've been feeling lately, with Prop 8, with the election, with the life I am building with my partner. It reminds me of what I can do, even if it's minor, to change my world. Yes, there's echoes of Obamamania in the song, and yes I am jaded/cautious to put hope in what a mainstream Democratic candidate can actually accomplish. But I am also joyously hopeful about the opportunity to see someone different in the white house -- someone who is fundamentally different from what came before (despite the fact that he's a mainstream main-party candidate) by his visible existence. I hope "If You're Out There" is a soundtrack anthem for the next decade or so. And "Greenlight (Afroganic Mix) is also a great song off the upcoming album.

shame

2008-09-19T17:35:00.000-07:00

I started reading "Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality" by Patrick Moore. He apparently asserts that a culture of sexual exploration/creativity is linked to a larger sense of creativity (in the artistic, cultural, intellectual, political, etc senses) by analyzing gay men's culture in the 1970s ant 80s. He seems to be claiming that AIDS created an individual and cultural sense of shame that dampened creativity and continues to haunt lgbt/queer culture and HIV education. The author makes the assertion that HIV prevention needs more sex, not less sex - because it's connected to joy and reclamation of sexuality. He is not calling for a return to mindless sexual hedonism, but pointing out what died with the legions of people who died from AIDS in this time period. He suggests that we honor their memory without binding ourselves in a straitjacket (chastity belt?) of shame. He also seems to be suggesting that race was more integrated into sexuality during this time and that the resulting shame affects young men of color most of all because it seems to imply that gay sexuality is something to be hidden, or at least quiet, about -- while young gay men of color have the highest rate of contracting HIV in the US.
Clearly, I haven't read the book yet, so I'm reserving judgment. Moore addresses some of the gender imbalances of his book -- for example, he mentions the gender split between gay men and gay women at the time, healed largely by lesbian, bi, and straight women who provided caretaking and activism during the crisis of AIDS. It provokes the question: what were lesbian women doing while gay men were going to baths and sex clubs? I suspect they were doing a lot of the same, but I haven't heard that history yet. My greatest sense of excitement is that Moore seems to be embracing the broadness of sexuality - from normative to bizarre, from monogamous to wildly promiscuous - without passing judgment on what is safe and sane. I like this, because it's what I believe fervently in. I was never very good at promiscuity, and I am very excited and happy about monogamy for myself. And my brief exposure to SM didn't find a niche with me. Yet I insist on the value of promiscuity for those who want to, and on embracing leather and SM as a wonderful part of larger sexual culture. It will be interesting to see how this book lays out the argument for understanding history and envisioning a future beyond shame. After all, shame is the biggest force that shaped my sexuality, and it will take a lifetime to recover.

why i hate and love religion

2008-09-14T15:00:00.001-07:00

I just got off the phone with my mom--we talk every week or so. And ever now and then, as I did today, I have to bring up the vast gulf between us, created by her disagreement with my gayness and my disagreement with her position about that.
The ridiculous thing is that she must choose between her love for God (as she sees Him) and her love for her son. Just as I must choose between my love for my mother and my love for myself. She and I are essentially in the same position. We have to choose between our commitment to some kind of meaningful family relationship and our commitment to living out our ideals and life experiences. It's too easy to say that being gay for me trumps her faith--but for her, faith is life, and her experience of God is as real as my experience of love with my partner. I hate the fact that religion has separated belief and life to the extent that lived experience is somehow hedged by a belief structure instead of the other way around. I love religion in that it gives me language to talk about this.
I don't have a handle on it either, but I am trying to live through the lessons of experience--allowing that to inform my beliefs about the world and spirituality. For me, it's about trying to live a conversation among elements of my life; my belief in what's right; and the religious symbolism I that I inherit, discover, and make up.
I hate the fact that I understand where my mom is coming from (after all, I came from there, too!). It makes it too hard to condemn her (to hell or ignorance, or exile from my life). At the same time, it's hard to know what I'm still doing with the relationship. I asked her what it means to love her son in this context--and I have to ask myself the same question, what does it mean to love my mom in this context?
Part of the answer involves grieving for the aspects of our relationship that are lost, along with my relationship to the community and extended family that I came from. Part of the answer also asks me to return to my belief in the importance of family relationships while reconfiguring my understanding of what it means to be a family (with my blood kin and with the family I am creating and living in).

two thoughts for a Sunday morning

2008-09-07T10:44:00.001-07:00

This morning as I read BBC News and my Christology textbook, two thoughts keep bobbing to the surface:
1. The federal bailout of mortgage firms Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae: I believe I recall an interview on Marketplace (Public Radio International) that said it's an open secret that these public-private partnerships are effectively a socialized banking system. WIth the full take-over, we now have government-run mortgage banks. This is a peculiar move for a Republican administration that is supposedly dedicated to small government and a free market. Don't get me wrong--I support the bail-out to reduce financial crisis on national and individual levels--but it seems like a funny inconsistency between ideology and practice. I hope it puts to rest the peculiar mistrust of socialism (the idea that some things must be administered by the state instead of the free market -- agencies such as police, fire, defense, roads...).
2. My Christology (the study of Jesus as the Christ figure in Christianity) textbook presents a pretty traditional view. There's a lot of talk about how Jesus represented a new relationship between God and humanity. It seems like a funny inconsistency, to claim that Jesus changed everything, and Jesus is the only thing that has and ever will change everything. You have to open to the possibility that change will happen, and then close quickly to the idea that change could ever happen. Well, and you also have to buy the Bible texts as historically accurate and "true." I don't buy the "new relationship" thing, because I believe religion is always involves looking in the rearview mirror and interpreting previous texts and traditions in light of current situations (just like the early Christians, and some today, look in the rearview mirror and interpret Hebrew Bible texts as if they automatically point to Jesus--a strange assumption, given the contexts of the writing.

I guess the real point is that someday I'll have to either accept the traditions I was born in, problems and all, and find a way to sift through, interpret, and be comfortable--or I'll have to leave it behind as no longer worthy of being passed on.

new movie - looking forward to it!

2008-09-06T10:14:00.000-07:00

They recently released the trailer for Milk, Gus Van Sant's new film about Harvey Milk.
Here's the trailer: Apple Trailers: Milk

ritual, habit, reality

2008-09-06T09:33:00.001-07:00

Today I'm reading about ritual and body memory. One of the authors writes about how cognitive science reinforces the role of ritual in structuring our memories, emotions, thoughts, and habits - our worldview and ethical stance. She writes about how ritual (actions that are consciously set apart for a special function, whether overtly religious or not) creates neural pathways and habits that, over time, structure how we interact and think about the world. I don't think ritual HAS to be "set apart for a special function" in order to structure our worldview--because all of our habits can activate memory and evoke emotional and cognitive responses. It reminds me of how important it is to be conscious about the habits I form. I think about how my partner can get cranky if he doesn't get out of the house and move every day--his habits of exercise create a positive mood, and a period of inactivity probably also remind him of negative experiences where he could get out of the house. I also think about my mother-in-law's morning greeting. Every morning she kisses us on both cheeks (this also happens whenever we come home at any time of day) and asks how we slept. At first, this annoyed me because it disrupted my trajectory: I was reading, or making breakfast, or lost in my thoughts--and telling her how I slept (which was almost always "fine, and you?" seemed like an unnecessarily disruption. But I began to realize that these greetings reinforce a way of relationship. It prioritizes our relationship, and our concern for each other, above whatever else I might be doing. So I engage in this habit, which still can feel disruptive at times, because it highlights my personal (and spiritual) value that relationships are more important than whatever I am reading or making or doing. Last of all, I think of what I've heard about the Republican National Convention (and also the Democratic one, but less so). It's what so many preachers know so well: repeating phrases and images can make them into reality for many people. If you say it often enough, even an untruth can become an unconscious association/neural pathway. If you question patriotism or experience or ideological stance often enough--the question will arise whenever the candidates name comes up, no matter how unquestionable that person's patriotism, experience, or stance actually is. Particularly in the context of a ritual such as a convention (I might consider it sort of like a religious tent revival or church service that reinforces shared images, ideologies, and ethics of engaging with the world).
It reminds me that I want to continue sifting through my life to find the important habits that I can "set apart" to reinforce and create habits out of the ways I want to engage in the world.

classes

2008-09-05T18:19:00.000-07:00

So I finally got my sched figured out, and I think I'm satisfied. One of classes I was most looking forward to, "The Quest for Spirituality in America," got cancelled. I replaced it with "Remembering," a theological and liturgical look at remembering and forgetting (individual and cultural/social levels). I'm also taking "Christ, Krishna, Buddha," a look at central figures in three of the world's religions. I also found out at the last minute the I had to take "Organizational Leadership," which I'm trying to muster excitement about, because it deals with group and systems theory. I was also enrolled in a class on the history and theology of the United Church of Christ, but at the last minute I switched it out in order to take "A Short History of Hell." Emily said I need to blog about that--trading in a church history class for a class on hell. Hm.
The professor opened with the cartoon "Not Without My Handbag" -- by Aardman Animation. Check it out on Youtube!
Should work out all right--though next semester I'm stuck with three required courses that I've been putting off a bit....
The upshot is that next semester there's also a class dealing with the role of Christianity in the Bay Area LGBT community since WWII.

beginning is ending is familiar

2008-09-02T21:13:00.000-07:00

Today was my first day of classes -- begun this afternoon with a glorious bike ride to classes -- no traffic, no early mornings, no backache...and no singing in the car to myself. As usual with beginnings, something went wrong with my bike (last year, somebody stole the back wheel and the seat). This year the top fell off my speedometer, and my sunglasses broke in my bag. It was okay.
I saw some old friends I didn't expect to see, and I felt like a new student at the same time.
I also had the old familiar questions: am I religious enough for this place? am I the right kind of religious? Luckily I also had the familiar corrections. It doesn't matter what kind of religious I am, or what quantity. What matters is what I want to learn, and what relationship I have to my own sense of spirituality. Blah blah blah. It was a good day back, even if it wasn't exactly perfect.

backpacking / survival

2008-08-28T07:44:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, my partner and I went on a backpacking trip to Lassen Volcanic National Park (in Lassen National Forest). Lassen is an old growth forest, and there was a fire in a area in 2004. Plus it's a relatively dry climate. So we got to see a lot of destruction, decay, and regeneration. Some areas were pretty bleak, with just the jagged, blackened hulks of trees and a lot of sandy ash on the ground--but a lot of areas had selective burns--only the driest of trees burned while the greener living trees kept right on living. Before we left, we went to a ranger talk about some of the trees. My new favorite tree is the Lodgepole Pine. It has two types of cones--one of which is covered with thick wax that only activates in the presence of a lot of heat--namely a forest fire. The Lodgepole is one of the first trees to repopulate an area after a fire, and its bark is relatively thin because it doesn't need to withstand fire. The other part I noticed about the tree skeletons is that some trees seemed to have grown in a twist, as if under the bark, the tree was rotating itself, ending up like a candy cane, while others grew straight up and down. I was curious about how the different growth patterns helped support the tree's strength in growing tall and withstanding wind.
I'm fascinated by all this, and it reminds me of talking with my mother-in-law about the role of community and individuality in people's lives. Where she grew up, extended families function as retirement accounts, where those who can make money share it with those who are struggling. We also talked about the falseness of the American image of individuality and self-reliance--people do not get where they're at by their own effort--it depends a lot on how our families raised us, what opportunities and supports we had when we couldn't take care of ourselves. It has a lot to do with privilege and how much we trust that we'll be taken care of. How we grow, and what grows around us, does a lot to determine how we survive tough times.
The other thing I think about is survival beyond the individual. The Lodgepole Pine says "Even if I don't survive, *we* survive." As we hiked, I tried to think of the human equivalent of a pinecone covered in wax. Being the religious sorta person I am, I think about sacred texts that have been passed down for generations. Our myths and stories contain wisdom that's not always easy to see on the surface, and hopefully some of that wisdom helps us survive even beyond individual survival.
Which of course leads into my rant that reading a religious story (or any mythical story, even many movie plots) solely on the surface means that we miss the deeper wisdom. Stories tell us who we are, and the stories we tell shape us just as much as we shape the stories. It makes me crazy when people read the Bible, for example, as if it's literally true. Why not read it the way we read about Greek and Roman Gods? They don't exist in a literal way, but they also have some interesting truths about humanity. And not just ancient stories, but many modern storytellers (James Baldwin, Dorothy Allison....) participate in this process too.
So at the end of the day, maybe it's just me, but I like those connections. We can learn a few things from an old-growth forest.

It's a Family Thing

2008-08-16T09:31:00.000-07:00

August 21, 6-8pm
First Congregational Church of Oakland - 2501 Harrison at 27th in Oakland (across from Oakland Whole Foods)
Join African-American clergy, community leaders, elected officials, and legal scholars on a panel and conversation about the freedom to marry for the African-American LGBT community.

U People / Shirts & Skins

2008-08-16T09:02:00.000-07:00

Friday evening, we went to the second night of the Oakland International Black LGBT Film Festival.
We watched a short about two women meeting after car trouble on a deserted highway, a documentary about the making of a Hanifah Walidah music video , and two episodes from an upcoming LOGO show .

U People (the documentary) and Shirts & Skins (the TV show) were an interesting double feature. Both took place, mostly, in a house, and both had people sharing their lives and experiences, talking from the heart, and laughter, anger, and tears. But the result was strikingly different. U People, a gathering of Black women making a video and talking about their lives, was incredibly rich, with a wide range of perspectives and experiences. They spoke from their hearts about their own lives, educating and supporting each other--and we in the audience got the privilege to hear it. It was naturally political (as opposed to intentionally structured to evoke a response), diverse in perspective, entirely approachable and unapologetic, and had really great clothes and music. What more could you ask for?
Shirts & Skins was a docu...I mean reality show about the SF Rockdogs--a gay men's basketball team with a history of gold medals at the Gay Games, who fell apart after the 2006. The show brings old and new players together in a house as they prepare and fundraise for the next Gay Games. It's a great premise, bringing different ages, race/ethnicities, and perspectives of gay men together to play basketball and share their lives. And, honestly, it's an engaging story that touches on important stuff like being out or not, family conflicts, religion and homosexuality, and the difficulties of being gay in sports. And John Amaechi, a gay former NBA player, costars as a mentor. But the frustrating thing is the reality TV. After two episodes, the high drama is stoked, and the reality show roles are being fulfilled: the identified patient, the earnest one, the playboy, the exasperated caretaking parent (a white guy who refers to them all as "my boys," an embarrassingly and infuriatingly ignorant thing for a white man to say about a Black man)...it gets a little too TV when I want something a little more real. The Rockdogs are interesting enough as a team, the motivation to be role models to young gay people who want to play sports is a beautiful thing, and the story of a team trying to mend itself back together is engaging enough--we don't need the reality TV overlay that makes everything emotionally frenetic and artificially full of drama.
Then again, my partner said he liked watching Real World when he was 16, and that's exactly the demographic of young people who ought to see talented, out gay people playing great sports.

it is finished

2008-08-16T08:49:00.000-07:00

Friday was my last day of the chaplain residency. CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education, the method of learning used in chaplain education) was transformative, frustrating, liberating... I may have more to say later, but all I can say now is that I am done saying goodbye for a while (2 weeks' worth of "closure" exercises and opportunities wears me out, when I'm used to maybe a days' worth). AND I don't want to learn another damn thing about myself for two solid weeks. A year of intensive introspection is difficult, even for someone like me, who was born gazing at my navel).

My partner and Mama were very sweet. She cooked me a special dinner to celebrate my graduation on Thursday, and he brought me flowers and chocolate and had a nice little celebration Friday after work.

great news!

2008-07-30T19:45:00.000-07:00

I got good news today. My first published poem will be coming out within the next year! I submitted a poem to the journal Chaplaincy Today, and it will be published in the fall/winter or spring/summer issue!

professional identity

2008-07-26T11:12:00.001-07:00

I'm nearing the end of my CPE experience, and it's time to start consolidating my learning. One of the things I've been working on is professional identity. I've gone from very rigid, judgmental notions of professional masking to something more flexible and personal.

My supervisor calls it the flow between principles and narratives. And I've been to both extremes. I've been to the place of rigidity where principles hold above all else--but this leaves me an isolated shell. I don't show up with my own personality and experiences, and I end up holding colleagues and patients at an unhealthy distance. And I've been to a place where all that matters is story and feeling. It's a reaction, to defy principles with personal stories, where if someone feels uncomfortable or put out, trash the principles. This results in betrayal of internal values, too much information, and self-centeredness. This was my reaction against the church and society of my childhood--when personal experience and principles didn't match up, but the pressure to maintain the image of conformity created rot on the inside. Now I'm somewhere in the middle, trying to figure out my internal principles and values and how they interact with my professional self, which is not the same as my social and private selves, but not entirely distinct from them. It's about bringing my whole self to work without violating my own and others' boundaries.

This work in CPE has challenged me in that, because I have to develop skills in reading when to reveal aspects of my story and experience while maintaining focus on the job (or patient, as the case may be). My supervisor challenges me to consider this particularly around sexuality. There are times to reveal and times to hide my sexuality, and I need to maintain boundaries around how I talk about my intimate and romantic life. Yet I don't want to leave my sexuality behind--that amounts to closeting, and I've seen plenty of examples of the long-term damage that does. I am maintaining it better--I talk with colleagues about my relationship with my partner, but I don't share intimate details of course. I rarely do with patients, but there have been a few times when patients want to talk about relationships and it resonates to share select lessons and experiences. I do not hide my sexuality at work, even in a place where I am legally but not always socially protected (reminds me of Bishop Tutu quoting Martin Luther King Jr.: "I cannot legislate you to love me, but I can legislate you to not lynch me."), but I also don't discuss it with everyone. My identity at work is not primarily as a gay person, though it obviously contributes to my perspective and experience.

I also think about my sexual self in a broad sense--as relational and sensual. In my work, how do I notice, create, and maintain relationship? How do I notice the significance of bodily experiences and senses? And I would say that the most important way my sexuality shows up at work is in that dynamic I talked about--between narrative and principle. I have experienced the disconnect between social principles (girls are for dating and boys are for being friends with, for example, or families always stay together) and personal experience (I fell in love and made friends with both boys and girls, for example, and my family was decidedly not together, for very good reasons)--and so I have a sensitivity to when others experience that. It contributes to how I interact with principles and personal stories, as well as to how I form and maintain my own values about humanity.

movie alert

2008-07-19T20:00:00.001-07:00

I just found out that The Watchmen will be adapted into a movie, released March 6, 2009.
Here's the trailer on Apple.com:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/watchmen/high.html

I'm not into graphic novels as a rule, but I picked this one up after a newspaper article and some friends recommendations. It's a really interesting story, and I hope they make it well. The visuals look pretty faithful to the novel. If you don't know what it is, it's an alternate history that supposes there was a band of superheroes (without supernatural powers) in the 40s, and another group who took over from them in the 60s. Then a freak nuclear accident produced a truly supernatural hero who kind of put the others out of business. This guy won Vietnam (which gets Nixon re-elected multiple times) and is part of the US's Cold War plan against the Soviet Union, but then the public turned against crime-fighting superheroes, and they were outlawed. A few still remained practicing, but a lot more jaded. And then some stuff happens that brings some of them out of hiding again in the mid-80s. The backstories of the characters probably won't get a lot of attention, but it's really worth reading. It's also a pretty dark view of humanity and the world, but I'm not one to complain about that too much.
Anyway, I thought that was kind of exciting.

healing

2008-07-10T10:51:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I received my first visitor--my friend Emily came to keep me company while my partner was at work. It was nice to catch up, and I finally felt presentable enough to see people. The scrapes on my nose and forehead are almost healed. The upper lip and chin still look a little rough, by my beard has grown long enough to hide it, mostly. I seem to have some numbness on my lower lip and chin--probably nerve damage. I've also been seeing a chiropractor for my headaches, and he tells me that my top-most vertebrae (C1 and C2, which connect to my skull) are slightly knocked out of place. It's a big relief to get adjusted. I still don't sleep all that well at night, partly due to headaches and partly due to a bunch of canker sores in my mouth. Even my uvula has a canker sore on it, and it's swollen to double its size...yuck.
At any rate, I'm looking and feeling a lot better, but still sleeping a ton.
Thanks to everyone for the good thoughts and healing energy!

If you want to read a slightly gruesome account of my injuries, read below. Otherwise, don't read further.

I think I landed first just below my nose, which pushed it up and dragged my top lip down, creating a tear running across the bottom of my nose and down almost to my lip. It didn't completely sever my lip. My lower lip was dragged down and back, tearing it away from the gumline down to a nerve that runs along the bottom of my chin. This was kind of cool: the surgeon said he had just finished sewing up a surgical incision that looked really similar...so in other words, I effectively ripped my lip--with surgical precision--down to expose a nerve, without actually damaging that nerve! I also managed to pack that incision with large amounts of sand, gravel, and dirt. I also tore my chin open in about an inch-long upside-down U-shape. I scraped most of the skin off the center of my nose, running up to my forehead, and one of the nosepieces twisted up and gouged a chunk out of between my eyebrows.
I also got a variety of scrapes on my elbows and knees, and a fair amount of gravel embedded in my right hand.
And--remarkably--for going 15-20 mph (I think), that's really all that happened.

faceplant fix-up recipes

2008-07-06T19:07:00.000-07:00

Since so many people have been sweet to me with my injuries, I wanted to post a couple recipes that were helpful for me. So if you get face injuries and have to drink through a straw, here are some helpful recipes. Or even if you decide to go on a liquid diet, they work too!

Ensure-type drinks make great stomach-fillers for when you have to get up to take vicodin and antibiotics in the middle of the night.
Matt & Claire bought some really great smoothies, including one that had some kind of fancy probiotic stuff that was really tasty.
Kefir is also really good for straw drinking.

Sport bottles (like the kind you use on your bike) make great alternatives for drinking when your lips are too swollen to fit together and suck on a straw.

Here are two house-made recipes that are pretty marvelous:

Potato-Leek Soup:
4 leeks, rinsed well -- cut the dark green off the top, then cut lengthwise into quarters and chop into bits
2 shallots peeled and chopped
4 russet potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
3 Tablespoons unsalted butter
1 Tablespoon unbleached all-purpose flour
4 cups low-sodium chicken or vegetable broth
1 bay leaf
1 cup (or more) milk
salt and pepper

- In a big pot over medium heat, melt the butter and sautee the leeks and shallots until tender, about 15 minutes.
- Sprinkle flour over it and cook until flour is absorbed, about 2 minutes
- Increase to high heat and gradually whisk in the broth. Add potatoes and bay leaf, cover, and bring to a boil
- Decrease heat to medium-low and simmer until the potatoes are tender and mushy.
- Let it sit and cool for a bit, then remove the bay leaf and blend it all (use a hand blender in the pot or use your kitchen blender, but be careful because it's hot and it splatters). Add salt, pepper, and milk until it's tasty, smooth, and easy to drink through a straw.

Mama's fruit shake
1/2 avocado (peeled)
handful of blueberries (washed well)
2 apricots (washed well, unpeeled)
1 mango (washed well, unpeeled)
rice milk

- Blend it all together until it's smooth. Add protein powder for more nutrition.

Fix-Me-Up Fresh Juice
15 carrots, washed well
3 beets washed and peeled
5 celeries washed well
2 apples, cored

- Get a juicer, or find a friend with one
- Chop them into pieces small enough to fit in your juicer
- Juice it together and mix it up.

Those are a few of the foods that are speeding me on the road to recovery.
Enjoy!

ouch

2008-07-05T20:20:00.001-07:00

This has been a bit of a crazy weekend.
To start with, I gave a ride to a rather crazy woman whom I thought was friends with my mother-in-law. The flagged us down as I drove Mama home, and they knew each other from riding the bus. The lady said she needed to get to Jack London Square and her father just called to say he was visiting her. As we were driving, it became apparent that the father was flying in at midnight (and I didn't get to make the connection between that and her need to go to Jack London Square before she got out to, apparently, try to find a friend while I waited--and then disappeared. I don't know what I almost got messed up in, but it was strange.
Then yesterday morning I was biking with a group of friends, trying out a friend's road bike. I was approaching an uphill and having trouble shifting the gears when I hit some sandy gravel, panic-braked, and tossed myself over the handlebars. I landed on my face. Fortunately I was wearing a helmet and I landed in the gravel and not on the pavement or the very nearby curb. Luckily a police officer was driving by just afterward, and there were other friends around to help. My partner was able to ride in the ambulance and be with me for the grueling 5-hour ER procedures that involved lots of local anesthetic shots on my face, lengthy rinsing of the sand & gravel out of my mouth and wounds, and the 4 sets of stitches in and around my mouth. The doctors and nurses were very friendly, and I was grateful that he was rightfully included as my partner. I am so lucky to have my fiance around, to take care of me, rub my feet, make smoothies and soup and fetch me water. I'm not able to talk well yet, and I'm quite swollen and crusty. It remains to be seen if my nose is fractured, and my jaw seems a little lopsided. We'll see.
If you want to see a photo of us after the ER, let me know.
I also want to thank our friends Matt & Claire, who went out of their way to make sure the bikes and cars got sorted out, and who made a special grocery run for smoothies and foods to keep my strength and healing. Send some special energy to Matt, also, who probably saw the whole thing go down--and I know it wasn't pretty.

So that's the update.
My partner was so brave, sitting with me as I bled out of my mouth, watching the cleaning and stitching (it wasn't pretty, I'm sure), and holding my hand and rubbing my feet while I dealt with the pain.
And even with my ugly, scraped up, oozing face, he still looks at me with love...it's beautiful.

thanks to James Baldwin

2008-06-09T11:30:00.000-07:00

I am reading Just Above My Head by James Baldwin. His novels are intense, and this is the best I've read. He writes so sharply, almost viciously, about the inner thoughts and experiences of his characters--in this case, a Black family in New York in the 1940s-60s. I don't know, I can't quite describe it, but his descriptions of his characters' inner lives is amazing. He is unsparing about the state of racial dynamics in the US, and it makes me wonder how much as really changed on the larger level. That's all, I just wanted to recommend it.

PS: Here's where I got the recommendation to read the book, from an article by Kai Wright about his father. (Kai Wright, incidentally, is the author of the book Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay, and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York which I hope to read soon.)
Equanimity Under Duress
This is good stuff, about fathers & sons, about race & sexuality, about personal stories and experiences.

body

2008-06-09T11:13:00.001-07:00

Today I am home with a little health complication that is only serious enough to keep me from working too far away from a bathroom.

It reminds me that over the past few months I've noticed my body is just tired more often, and my mood is a little crankier. Plus I have all these little bruises, scrapes, and cuts from minor accidents where I hit my head while getting into a car or off the bus, or I scrape my finger while grating cheese or chopping onions. It reminds me that I stopped seeing my chiropractor because I couldn't afford it, and I no longer do Tai Chi with Emily, and I sort of cut out a lot of the body stuff I used to do (aside from exercise, which is helpful, but not the same thing). I wonder if anybody has suggestions about what they do to keep in touch and aware of their bodies.

read this

2008-06-09T11:03:00.000-07:00

Safaricom, a Kenyan mobile phone service just did an initial public offering (IPO) of stocks, and the BBC's story (but more the responses from readers) seems to encapsulate the complicated nature of market economics on a global scale. It reminds us to ask the question: who really benefits? The answer isn't clear. The whole global mobile phone business is an interesting thing because of the solutions it offers for remote areas that don't have land-line infrastructures (BBC also did a recent article about tele-banking for mobile phones that undercuts a lot of the complications of in-person banking).
Safaricom: Your Views

Memorial Day, part ii

2008-06-01T21:28:00.000-07:00

So I've been thinking about my Memorial Day post about homeless veterans. Thinking so much that last night I dreamt that a friend from high school lectured me about it. I keep thinking about my parents-in-law: They are freedom fighters, who put their lives at risk in order to promote democracy in Kenya. They were driven away from their home because of their work and their commitment to democracy. They are as much veterans as the men and women I work with.
It's tricky. Because of my work, veterans hold a special place in my heart. At the same time, I question how much I ennoble them above others. True: they put themselves at risk to protect our country (once again, I set ideology aside because I'm not convinced that military action is always so protective of our country). True: some of them were forced into situations where they made terribly difficult moral/ethical decisions in split seconds (some of these are labeled heroic and others had unfortunate consequences that veterans still deal with 50 years later). True: veterans joined the military for all sorts of reasons, some volunteered out of duty or patriotic obligation; some joined because of the draft; some joined to pay for college; and some because they wanted to get out of their homes. It is also true that these are everyday citizens, many of whom were placed in extraordinary circumstances. Veterans deserve our gratitude for the sacrifices they signed up to make. We have what we have in this country because some put their lives on the line with the idea that they were protecting us from a threat to this way of life (set aside the fact that I would like to see a lot of improvements to the way of life in this country). At the same time, we have what we have in this country because everybody who lives here put ourselves on the line to make it what it is. Some exploited people and resources, and some dedicated their lives to service and betterment. All of us dedicate ourselves to just trying to get by the best way we know how. So who deserves to be homeless?
I'll tell you: The people who fucked up the system in such a way that homelessness became inevitable. No, that's not true (my nicer side tells me). Nobody deserves to be homeless, and we have to figure out how to use our incredible wealth as a country to help our own citizens as well as the rest of the world (a lot of whom were exploited to make us rich).
You know, since I started working with veterans, I've noticed an increase in patriotism. I often ask myself if I'm somehow being chauvinistic about the country I was born in. I actually think I'd be as patriotic about wherever my home is, because I live here, and I care about my neighbors. And my neighbors include the whole planet.