petard.us

Monday night, at the GLBT support group I attend, two of the people there were talking about some salacious poems disguised as religion, something about a dark night and sneaking out to a lover. They seemed to think that the talk of God was a disguise and implied that the poet was gay.

I immediately identified this as St John of the Cross and tried to talk about the circumstances of those poems and about mysticism. They were having none of that. They felt that the erotic tone did not fit with religion. I told them Mark might be sending me an actual relic of St John of the Cross.

So now I am reflecting on the erotic and religion. There is nothing wrong with the combination. If we were created in God’s image, male and female, sexual beings, then our sexualities are in the image of God’s sexuality.

I was also remembering my directee. After months of going back and forth, in which I said little more than, “did you hear you said should again?” she talked about a spiritual experience that she shouldn’t have had. “Why, Brother Robert,” she said, “it was almost . . . erotic.” And I said, “What’s wrong with that?” Then I was able to help her accept the experience as a gift from God, and to appropriate it.

There has been a discussion in the Magdalen list of contemporary church songs that people hated. One main complaint was that they are just love songs with the name of the beloved changed to the name of God. then someone cited the old hymn that I grew up with, “I Come to the Garden Alone,” and disliking it for the dame reasons. As a child I loved loved loved that song. It spoke to me of my personal experience of Jesus. He was my friend who loved me, when no one else did. And I did come to him in a private space, a kind of rose garden. If this was erotic, it was pre-pubescent eros.
These songs, sentimental or amorous, are part of the Christian mystical tradition. We should criticize them on the basis of taste, for sure, but not the theology.

And for damned sure, we should not let the anti-erotic bias of some religion hinder us from the love of God.

I see psychogeography primarily in the effect of a place or places on my psyche/spirit.

I am acutely aware of my need for exercise. I keep thinking I should just go for a walk a lot. But I find there is no place to walk to. This in spite of there being sidewalks and lots of housing developments. Why don’t I want to walk, or even bike, there? I think it is the spiritual burden that suburban geography loads down on me. I remember biking once through some housing in Durham NC; it seemed like a necropolis to me. The houses were all like monuments and there were no people present. Both scary and depressing. I didn’t want to be there. And I still don’t.

I didn’t find this kind of oppression in my urban walking. There was variety, there were people, there were things taking place. I once made Tom Shaw angry with me by remarking that what we saw in walks in “nature,” I saw in urban walks, looking in shop windows, looking at the great variety of things going on. He rejected the very idea. I guess he found the urban landscape as rebarbative as I find the suburban.

The other meaning of “no place to walk to” is that there is no destination to go. I like walking here when I have some place to go, some errand to run, some purpose in mind. In a city, I could take just random walks, exploring. Here there is nothing, no one, to explore except my purposive activities.

For me at least, a suburban drive is impossible.

I was listening to the news or something when I heard something called the first ever of such and such a thing. So what if it is the first? Why is firstness important or significant? How does this privilege it? What is the privilege accorded? Does priority privilege something and why? Is this like the firstborn, like primogeniture? Isn’t it an inherent inequality? How can we change this?

What other privileges does the hegemonic ideology award and how may we judge them?

On Fri April 18 2008 6:10 pm, Ginga Wilder wrote:
> How did your meeting with the bishop go?

I don’t think there was a problem. Getting licensed is kind
of a bureaucratic thing, so we talked about the process.
And I tended to talk about my current situation, being
carless. This severely limits where I can go to be useful.
After finding a parish and starting to do things there, the
interim felt that I could be more useful if I were
licensed.

There are things I wish I had said. I am a good to great
preacher. I have lots of experience as a spiritual
director.I have led group and individual retreats. I am good
at doing liturgy. I am a good scholar and teacher. I can
get across the meaning of scriptures and theology simply
and clearly. I have successful experience as a group
leader.

If there were deacon’s school here I would love to teach New
Testament, I would love to lead a group in studying the
Greek of the Christian Scriptures, clergy or lay. I would
be good at helping them with the Greek because I myself was
trained to do this.

I may even have acquired some wisdom. Certainly I have no
illusions about the holiness of the church. I know
too many stories and incidents and I am still in the
church.

As you can see, I was led after the meeting to assess my
strength and talents.

I think I will copy this to the Bishop.

At a meeting of a focus group in our parish’s work on a profile, one of the people asked for less political preaching. But the Risen Lord–the one with the wounds–the same Lord as the one who lived and ministered among us. So the politics of the Risen one are not different from, are the same as, those of that Galilean rabble rouser who got it in the end but wouldn’t stay dead.

So how do we not stay dead? We look at what Jesus said and did in the context of his own world and culture. He would not have been charged and executed if he had not been political Our culture separates the religious and political, his did not. So what we see as religious may have been political as well. I frequently think that, according to the laws of his day, he was justly executed.

But God raised him from the dead, declaring him truly innocent. That constitutes God’s judgement on the laws that condemned him.

And invites us to look at our own laws, convictions, and executions in the light of God’s judgement.

That’s what the Resurrection means.

If I were able, I would love to be free to devote myself just to reading and writing, to study of the Scriptures and theology. I recently read _The Ideas of the Fall and Original Sin_ by NP Williams. It makes me want to go back and read a lot of the Father, especially the Greek ones. (And repudiate Augustine but that’s another issue) Also made me greedy for that wonderful $350 book, GWH Lampe’s Patristic Greek Dictionary. Ah, greed, but it’s good greed. I would love to have the time to study at length.

I would also like to have the time to be involved thoroughly in a parish. I have been teaching an adult Sunday School class, currently on the Catechism. I was teaching Galatians, and I might follow the Catechism with some on moral/ethical reason. (Hidden agenda, Scripture, Tradition and Reason )

I would like to be ministering. I have long experience with doing spiritual direction. It almost does more for me than for the directee; it reveals me to myself in very healing ways.

I would like to have the time to expand one piece of ministry I am already doing. I hang out in IRC channels and talk to people, listen, suppport, advise, etc. Todays prayer request for Pearl is an example, I just spend time with her online, listening and being supportive. I am online with her now. Her fear seems to have settled down a bit; she seems less anxious. I would love to be able to hang out and be there for people a much more of the time. Given that it’ IRC I chat with a lot of confused young people. Given the channels I hang out in, they are young gay men mostly. And many not in good shape. Like the 16 yo autistic transgendered person. He can be social online if not in the flesh. And he has a place to talk about wanting to be female rather than male.

The other weekend I noticed that I had been forgetting to take my depression meds off and on, and now had not taken then for several days. I thought maybe my body/mind was trying to tell me something. What a change. I felt happier somehow. I have accomplished doing some things for myself that i had been dragging my feet about for a while. Procrastination my old friend.

I have an appointment with the local Bishop about being licensed. I found that the new aquatics center has opened, fifteen minute by bike, so I have been swimming. Pray that I continue. I have been making notes about what I have been thinking, and then writing emails and blog entries. OK I am duplicating but www.petard.us/blog, it won’t be all duplicated. I have taken some other big steps to get my life straight. I may even find a way to collect social security benefits. Oh yes, I am now officially old; I can now be a curmudgeon. And I am starting back to the Daily Offices I think; pray for my perseverance.

It may not be all good. I find myself very irritable now that I am out from under the meds. I am much more aware of my anger. I try to read on the bus and all the other people on cell phones and populating Great Nattering On with loud conversation from different parts of the bus are really pissing me off. As is the television on one bus line, full of advertising, telling me how to get straight with the IRS and my credit card debt. All the while I am trying to read and pray. Oh and I think my impatience has shown up in some of my posts. If I am being abrasive, I’m sorry. But I am saying what I think, which is a Good Thing. And a lot of the anger is righteous anger. I had a confessor once who stopped me when I was confessing anger and asked me to see what was righteous anger, which is no sin. Bless you, Mother Julia Gatta.

This guy wants evidence. How refreshing. He’s someone we can actually imagine emulating. Don’t just tell me, he says, show me.

Don’t we want evidence for everything around us. It’s our scientific worldview. We expect to see evidence we can rely on before we take on new jobs, new responsibilities, new ideas. In evidence we trust. But do we bring it to our church, our faith, our prayer? If we pray and don’t ask for results, what’s the point. “Ask and it shall be given”

Are we afraid to ask God, “Where’s the beef?” God might answer, and that’s pretty scary. Jesus certainly did. “Here, stick your finger in this!”

Follow this Doubting Thomas.

And what of those “who have not seen and yet believe?” What evidence have they, we, seen. I guess we just have to be that evidence. Like Doubting Thomas.

I think I am a Luddite. Not to IT, Information Technology, but to Entertainment Technology. I don’t watch any television, I don’t get to movies. And the television on the MARTA buses here in Atlanta bothers me. After all I am trying to read and learn on the bus. My hunger is to be informed, not entertained, to understand what is going on, not be be distracted from it or anaesthetized to it.

What’s more, all th entertainment comes with advertisements. those need smashing. They tell me what to need, what to want. I am perfectly able to discern that for myself. Their voice insidiously tries to convince me that I don’t, that I am a child, that I need to eat from their tree of knowing what is good and what is not. “you are not good,” they say, “unless your eat of our fruit, our product.” Damnation!

_Solstice_ by Ulises Silva is an apocalypse, very bloody and
violent, about all the evil we humans are doing, about a
threat to rub out all humans, to cleanse the world. As
such, it is also a meditation on the source of evil and
its redemption. It is connected as well to the philosophy
of language and language mysticism. It depicts writing that
effects what it describes.

Enjoyment might not be the right word but I did appreciate
reading it. I do recommend it. I guess its genre is science
fiction/fantasy.