The Water Is Black

You words.

Is this a safe place

to be a human being? you words. 

the hope is that your words will leave your mouth like a devil spirit

and haunt the mind of your friend, and you will live in his 

head for a moment, and be the same, and he will open his eyes in surprise

and say ‘me too.’  And you will say 

‘see, I saw me in you.’ 

My Dear Wormwood,

I received your letter this morning and I must say I am not the least bit pleased. You brag and gloat that you got the face of the world’s largest youth movement to go mad. To tear off his clothes and cry out to the Enemy in the streets for all the world to see. You list the lies you whispered in his ear as if it was some brilliant chess move. I understand that you think this is a huge victory, but I’m afraid you are terribly wrong. You fool. You have ruined everything. You had a perfect opportunity to inflate his pride, to make him believe it was indeed his voice and vision that woke the world up to love and justice. You could have coached him to be eloquent and poised, and in so doing, trick the world into giving him the credit. These millions of disgustingly idealistic and optimistic young people could have believed that this man is the author of these virtues. You could have distracted them completely from the very ideas of love and justice. You could have distracted them completely from The Enemy and His work in the individual hearts and minds of young people. You could have made them think ‘I’ll never be that smart, that creative, that loving, that handsome, that true, so I might as well do nothing.’ 

But now, oh, what have you done? You’ve ruined the work that was started. You not only robbed us of the power of pride over the man, but now you’ve robbed us of the youth who look to him. I already see my fears coming true. The youth are now looking beyond the madness, beyond the man. They are looking at the ideas. They are looking at the Enemy. They are seeing their own flaws and calling them to the surface. They are loving the man behind the madness and seeing themselves in him. They are cleaving to the Enemy and singing songs of strength, brotherhood, and victory over evil. They are doing the most dangerous thing of all: they are giving grace and holding strong to the principles of love and justice. They now have no idol. They now have no icon. They only have the very things you were supposed to distract them from: the core message. I’m afraid all might be lost. 

I am convening an emergency meeting of devils and demons this very evening to do damage control. Our only hope is to empower the rumors and lies and convince these humans that mistakes and madness poison the message. It is a weak defense, I know, but it may be all you’ve left us with. 

With deep regret that I did not train you well enough, 

your devastated uncle, 

Screwtape. 

(this is from a conversation I had with Tom Shadyac, who used the example above to paint the truth of all of this) 

We are half a soul

There is a hungry ox

the kind you see that never lifts its head

but only feeds on the endless rolling hills of grass,

never full, but only stepping every few bites for fresher leaves

of grass. That is me. I am looking to be filled by something like grass

but not grass.          I am looking for the other half of my soul.

I am looking.. but ashamed of looking, because I might

even be ashamed of being an ox, thinking instead

that I am a man, a tamer of beasts. 

Certainty

There is no certainty in hunger or thirst, I can tell you vaguely that it comes from my stomach or chest or throat, a ghost of a feeling that draws me to food. There is no certainty in sex. The hunger to touch and hold and smother is hard to place, it is found in no one place, but pulls me. Insatiably. Strangely. There is no certainty in personality. My grandmother was Meme until her brain was broken by a blood vessel, and then her body was a cage for a soul, I suppose. But she sang notes like a baby when she would be bathed, and I didn’t know if she was singing as Meme or as an animal responding to cold water. But my mind and my hope kept Meme in there, and believed she was trapped in her body, but listening to my holding her, helping teach her to walk again. I swear she even said ‘thank you’ to me when we were walking on Christmas day. But I don’t know if she said it, or if nonsense said it. I believe it was her, pushing through.

 

This fluid wandering feels honest to me, and gives me a skeptical squint at the claims of religious certainty. But God knows I crave a rock to sit on, but who has seen a rock that isn’t painted gray and propped up by wooden legs just beyond view? 

jj. 

Written to/for Danny Ramos last week.

The Slave

Like a man who may not believe

but goes to church on sunday

for something familiar,

Like the fox who eats

no meat,

I will deconstruct the

temple, the instinct of worship,

and I will take apart

the world and sit in dark empty space

and I will be small and maybe alone but no not gone

and I will be no closer to the answer

And so the hymns still have the power

and I am the servant.

This is profound to me.

(from Brian McLaren’s blog)

Here’s the Q:

How are you? In serious gentleness and fairness, let me say at the start, I’m not in your camp. I’m also not going to be venomous in my attacks…
[I am involved] with a ministry to the gays and lesbians; led by a couple of brothers who have found victory in Christ over their own battle with homosexuality. I pray for them regularly. They, indeed, are my heros!
I met one of them the other day and asked “should I quit interceding for you?”. Of course he said “no” and then told me what to pray for. He, with deep shaking tenderness and concern said, “The church is softening its position on homosexuality”. I’ve thought about this deeply and here’s what’s coming to my troubled mind.
Isn’t this the ultimate act of betrayal? A couple of gentle warriors for Christ have come through to victory; and now the very institution that should be backing them up is turning her back on them…..
How can this be? I believe this should make us weep with Jesus and cause us to repent deeply… Troubled and in prayer,

Here’s the R:

First, let me thank you for the tone of your note. Sadly, it’s rare, I think, that folks any one of the many sides in this issue can ask a question or share a story like yours without implying insult and disdain for those “in other camps.” So your gentleness and fairness are already a gift to readers of this blog. Thank you.
I think I should try to do two things in response. First, without delegitimizing your concern in any way, I should try to make it clear that the same compassion you have towards your two brothers motivates many of us to be concerned for the many brothers and sisters in our lives who are gay and have tried all available paths to “victory,” and have concluded that for them, that promise of victory is a false promise that betrays them. In other words, I’m grateful for your compassion, and I’m quite confident that if you knew on a deep level a wider array of gay people, that compassion would force you to be concerned both for those who seem capable of sustained and authentic change (like your two friends) and those who do not.
And then second, I want to validate your concern based on my experience as a pastor and propose a way to be more compassionate to all lgbt people, and not only one segment.
We all come to this issue with many assumptions. Some of those assumptions aren’t even apparent to us. When we surface the assumptions, we can at least discover where our deeper disagreements lie.
Many people share the assumption that their are two (or three) kinds of people: straight and gay (and bisexual). I used to believe this, but my experience as a pastor forced me to change that assumption. Now I believe that inborn human sexuality could be more accurately understood as lying along a continuum.
(This is horribly oversimplified still. And I’m aware that our understanding of sexual identity and orientation is highly contested - not just in religious spheres, but also in the social and biological sciences. I imagine that decades from now, people will look back on all our current understandings as terribly limited and unenlightened. But at the same time, we can only be where we are, doing our best to understand and speak the truth, which is always “the truth as we now see it.” Also, I’m aware that there are a number of studies that provide a range of percentages for where people might like on any continuum of sexual orientation, so the numbers I’m about to propose are obviously only approximations or hunches based on a variety of scientific data. The words “about” and “or so” are important.)
If we picture people lying along a continuum rather than being lumped together in three distinct bins, I think that most of us - say about 80-90% - cluster towards the heterosexual end of the continuum. Then, another 5-10% or so are spread across the middle. Then, another 5-10% or so are clustered closer to the homosexual end.
For many if not most of us in the 80-90%, homosexual attraction rarely or never crosses our mind. We feel ourselves sexually attracted to the opposite sex exclusively, and our affiliations with people of the same sex are consistently non-sexual. For people at the opposite end of the spectrum, the opposite is the case. What we share in common is a deep sense of orientation, and to go against it would feel unnatural, unpleasant, even repulsive. Even if people in these categories could be habituated to tolerate and even derive pleasure from sexual behavior that goes against their orientation, that wouldn’t remove the deeper orientation that they experience as being innate and unchangeable.
Many of those in the middle of the spectrum might be classified as bisexual. Their attractions are not clearly defined in terms of gender; personal attraction is what matters, regardless of gender. (There’s another whole category we might call asexual - who experience little or no clear sexual desire - and they are often ignored or misunderstood in all the polarized debates.)
And then there are people who are naturally among the 90% who have been subjected to sexual and/or emotional abuse of some sort, or who through any number of environmental factors (chemical? parenting? nobody yet knows the mechanisms of such a process, if it exists) feel they have been brought into a state of sexual confusion or disorientation. Some people deny the existence of this category, but in my experience as a pastor, I met people who would say this accurately describes their experience, and I believe them.
My suspicion is that “ex-gay ministries” offer some help in the area of behavior-modification to people in these last two categories - bisexual people and victims of abuse. And perhaps that would describe your two friends. (By the way, people in the strongly homosexual orientation may, at a young age, manifest certain behaviors that molesting adults recognize and steer themselves towards, so just because a gay person experienced abuse as a child doesn’t mean that their orientation was originally heterosexual before the abuse.)
All that’s to say that I think ex-gay ministries, for all their good intentions, do real harm to authentically gay people by making a faulty moral diagnosis of their orientation (which I wrote about under “the authority question” and “the sex question” in A New Kind of Christianity), by raising false hopes about the possibilities of change, and by employing techniques that in the end only intensify their feelings of failure when “victory” either never comes or doesn’t stick. But at the same time, I do not doubt that there are innately heterosexual people whose sexual identity has been damaged, or bisexual people who want to live as heterosexuals, and for them, ex-gay ministries may provide help - even though I think their moral diagnostics (including their way of using the Bible) are faulty. Perhaps one could also add to this group innately gay people who would rather live in lifelong sexual tension than be forced to leave a conservative religious community in whose belonging they find rewards that compensate for their sexual frustration. And perhaps one could also add to this group innately gay people who have married heterosexually and who, for love of spouse and children, feel they have a moral obligation to maintain a heterosexual marriage even though it requires them to go against their natural “hard-wiring,” so to speak.
But I must add an experience I’ve had that would not in any way negate your experience with these two good friends in your ministry, but that deserves to be taken as seriously. I’ve met several people in this category over the years, but let me share one memory … sitting in a fast-food restaurant with a woman whose husband had been an Evangelical pastor for most of their marriage. As she shared her story, I felt as never before the agony of another kind of betrayal no less real than the one your two friends now feel.
Before she met him, her husband knew himself to be gay, and like many good Evangelical Christians, he believed it was sinful and so he struggled against it with all his determination and spiritual fervor. Leaders in his Christian college fellowship counseled him and prayed with him, and helped him achieve what they believed to be “victory” over homosexuality. As a result, a victorious “ex-gay,” he went to seminary to prepare for the pastorate. There he met and married this woman.
The only problem was the victory was only on the level of stopping homosexual behaviors. No matter how he tried to “perform” sexually in their marriage, the wife knew that he wasn’t truly attracted to her as a woman. They had a son, and everything appeared outwardly to be victorious, but inwardly, they were both in deep pain.
I can’t forget her emotion and conviction as she said to me, “Can you imagine what it was like, every day of my marriage for over twenty years, to know that the man I loved was faithful to me in the sense that he didn’t run out and have affairs, but that he found me sexually uninteresting and even, truth be told, repulsive? Believe me, it was horrible beyond words for what it did to me, what it did to him, what it did to our son to grow up in this kind of superficially-functional but deeply-fraudulent marriage.”
Add to this the necessity of keeping up the appearance of a happy Christian pastor’s family … and gradually her husband sank into depression, had to leave the ministry, and eventually, they divorced. As you can imagine, there were tears falling at our table as people ate their fast food around us.
“My life, my potential for a good marriage, was stolen by a religious system that forced my ex-husband, whom I love and respect to this day, and for whom I have nothing but compassion, to deny what he was and pretend he was something he was not. Never forget, as you speak out about this issue, about all the people like me and my son who are unacknowledged casualties of this system.”
Now I should add that I know other stories where marriages like this have worked quite well, including among close friends who I know well enough to know they aren’t just putting up a front. So I can only conclude (I may be wrong, but I’m simply telling you the truth as I now see it) that the men in question were towards the middle of the spectrum to start with, rather than over on the exclusively homosexual side.
So, I wish there were a way for Christian communities to accept and support brothers like the two you work with who wish to reorient sexually, without creating nightmares like the one I learned about that day in the fast-food restaurant. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that some churches and ministries will help people at some points on the continuum, and some will help people at other points on the continuum. It would be nice if each could do so without condemning the others. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
I want to affirm once more your compassion for the two men you work with. And I hope readers of this blog will also hold them in compassion - and you, as well, as you share their struggle. As I explain in my newest book, Naked Spirituality, the practice of compassion is one of the most important spiritual practices … learning to (as you said) “weep with Jesus” and so feel with God, embracing your two friends, the woman whose story I shared, and everyone wherever they are on this or any continuum, holding them with the tenderness and empathy in which God, who knows every story in intimate detail, holds so profoundly every human being, and every living creature.
So thanks again for sharing your story and your question. I hear it, and I feel it, and I won’t forget it. And I hope you can hear this story as well. May we all keep listening and practicing true compassion, for without compassion there is no true righteousness or holiness.

Growth

It makes me feel nasty and conflicted to wish I’d bought more things just to prolong the opening of presents on Christmas morning. Things no one needs, like DVDs of movies that were just decent.

It is this casual desire for an overflowing pile under the Christ-mas tree, like the plume of a rocket that blinds you in its brightness, noise, and atomic bomb shaped cloud spreading in slow-motion, that fuels the economy of growth.

The more they can have us think that way, of perceived-manufactured/in/a/board/room needs, the more presents we buy, the more things are created, the more jobs created, the more americans we can have employed, the happier the president is, the happier america is with the president, the more kids we can afford to have, the more taxes we can ingest, the more farms we can subsidize, the more dominion over creation just like God promised. Conflicted, because it is such a joy to see your mother feel loved with presents and the thoughtfulness of her children.

and it seems to me that growth is terrifying, and obviously terrifying, and yet every smart economist speaks only of growth. Maybe they must mean smart growth, that starts to exchange breadth for depth… growth in quality of life for the individual, not just the population of the suburbs and the strength of track-housing-development. Maybe.

that said, the spirit of Christ-mas is a beautiful thing. I love beautiful things. I relish it. but I think of Tolstoy,

‘What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.’  

The world as it is, all beautiful things on this planet have a shadow. The ocean is a killer. The rose is red with blood. The shadow we are called to fight and shake, if at least perceive.

Family, today

Stories

There is nothing we’ve imagined

that is not just a reordering of what we’ve seen.

No place or creature is original to the mind of man. 

But the mind of man is an original of the place it woke up to. 

Your thoughts are the mechanics of the arrangement of your

memories of senses,

in play with the longings inborn, waiting to haunt a body of thoughts. 

And so, we get our stories.