Mark 1:1-3

This is the first post in a project I am undertaking to revisit the gospel text. I am doing this in my current post-modern, queer-oriented, critical of colonialism and capitalism grounding, having been thoroughly disillusioned with the complicity of the church in past and present power structures, as well as the church's sexual and gender role agenda. 

I don't think I'm going to pull a C.S. Lewis here and flee what some may consider my contemporary paganism. However, I do think that the scripture is beautiful story and parable, and also an account of people embracing an ethical stance despite its self-damaging potential. I cannot shake that there is something good about a guy who gave himself up entirely for his friends, and loved his enemies, and raised an army of people willing to do what was right even when it wasn't easy. 

In that sense, the gospel has a hold of me, and like any good, giving, and game lover, I am compelled to take a hold of it and use my whole body, brain and emotions to give it what it is looking for, a good verbal fucking. And let me say that most of my lovers leave happy. >wink<   Read ahead here.

Mark 1
1The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
2It is written in Isaiah the prophet:
"I will send my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way"—
3"a voice of one calling in the desert,
'Prepare the way for the Lord,
make straight paths for him.' "

So "gospel" is supposed to mean good news, which might be a western-applied interpretation, but one that I am willing to go with for a bit, if only to queer it. It seems to make sense to read the gospel accounts in the genre of journalism. Archaic, strangely expressed journalism that is reporting on such un-empirical/objective subjects as your soul and universal moral conduct, but what I mean is that we can use our newspaper reading skills here for most of the account. Which is what I think they are saying when they call it "news". Often quotations and events in the gospel accounts are not followed by explanations, which means that the reader is left to interpret. The biblical reader uses the interpretations they are trained to and accustomed to. 

"Gospel" hear stings a bit if you read it as "a grand narrative/ethical system designed to make you feel guilty and bring you into a rigid community". So I'm not going to think of it that way, I will set that aside. (assuming lover's best intentions, not killing the mood here)  I'm going to start out by saying that this is a story which will bring me to a better place by reading it. I know, I know, the eternal optimist. But what do you say to yourself when you read a headline in the paper? That the headline signifies a metanarrative with consequences for your life that you have to defend yourself against? Maybe a meta-something is implied by every headline, but I'm not sure if the "gospel" could change the way that I feel about myself for the worse, or lead me down a bad path. Even if it does talk about my soul. 

I think there is something unchangeable about my soul, and the gospel may comment upon the truth of things I know already (and perhaps things I know deep down but have not found the words for yet). Heaven and hell don't exist on my spiritual geography. Expressed soul and un-expressed soul are places I have occupied, and I must say that I would want to end up in a place of more-expressed-soul, thank you very much. If this piece of journalistic literature can teach me something about the expression of human souls, bring it on.

Then there is this quote from the Hebrew Bible, from Isaiah, who from reading more of the account about him in 2 Kings, was a tripped out probably bipolar prophet who sulked, was angry at people, had extravagant visions of God and angels which rival any pagan myth, occasionally performed the freak miracle, and wrote in ways that confuse himself and God all the time. Actually, the first person shifts in the book of Isaiah are the best defense of post-modernism that I know, check it out. But here I think it is an interesting reference, from an interesting prophet. 

We think at first that this messenger is Jesus, we learn later that it is John. However, the impression sticks with me (poetically) especially when we learn how Jesus is part of God and is therefore part of the plot in some mystical way from the beginning, and especially because I believe that people are responsible for inspiring/eliciting others' response to them in ways they aren't always explicit about and John's ministry was partly caused by Jesus from the get-go. Gay men recognize each other from early early ages sometimes, and like the future-lovers/truthmakers we are, the account of fetal John flipping around in Elizabeth's belly reminds me deep down of the boys I flipped around for as a child recognizing a common spirit (see Luke 1:41, sorry that was a different-gospel-digression). 

Anyhow, I don't know where I would be without gay men having gone before to set social norms aright for me, so it makes sense that there is some sort of generation of inspiration-making here, that God would send a messenger out beforehand to carve a little nook for the seed to snuggle into and germinate within (yes, that is a reference to the mustard-seed parable, which I constantly think about as it seems so related to procreative properties of all of the things that we do and, well, semen is on my mind occasionally as well). 

There is a voice (text/text authority) in the desert. The desert seems to me to be a morally neutral geography. There is no city, no custom there that isn't blown over and assaulted by sun and sand. It is the eternal loneliness, the endless 360 degree horizon that is our current crisis of knowledge. There is no authority in the desert but what you force for yourself, no landmark even, simply what knowledge or instinct you carry within you. And here God is saying through a prophet that there will be a road, not an authority in the desert, but a way to get to where you are going-- and straight, not turning around yourself and wasting away. Suddenly, on this morally neutral ground, there is a purpose. A telos as the Greek is, a direction of a sort, often applied to ethical direction (in Russian t'elo is the word for body, a linguistic bridge that has certainly been inspirational for me, see b'ez avtora). 

And on this word, this last gendering of God, let me claim that whatever divinity is out there they is not gendered, but transcends gender as the being-that-was-before-gender, the being-whose-idea-was-gender, so let's read (shamelessly revisionist to help past-misled-male authors-more-misogynist-than-they-could-fathom) to "make the ways straight for her/him/it/both/allgendered."  I like that. God is allgendered.  My body and mind would be happy making ways in barren lands for that.  (Am I just catering to my own pleasure here?  Would I destroy something I do not like but may be ethical to protect in the process of this task?  I'm not sure, but if anything good news is about liberation, so let's start speculating what kind of liberation it is about.  God is coming to Earth to free us, right?)  

Credo Credo

When I am standing in church and singing in harmony with an organ and a choir and all the congregation, ages zero to angels infinity, I hear a heavenly host booming beneath all the voices, minds, heads and everybody’s body with a dance beat. (drop a beat, can you hear it too?)

And I start swaying my hips as much as you can crowded into those pews and I watch the angels dance, flailing limbs from pliant supple centers, funky seraphim frolicking on ancient sound waves. Laudeum! Miserere Cordisss!

Worship is illogical joy, inexplicable salvation, unknowable creation in our incarnation, our incarnate chili con carne (snaps Gene), our hips and lips and everything below and in between. And of course the words flowing through our minds are crucial, but worship is the abstract making contact, worship is Logos with legs, worship is the breast a child rests her head upon when straining her tiny muscles to try and see the big beautiful created world is too much strain to bear.

And I think that those muscles for us “develop-ed” peoples are located in the carne in our cranium, a concentration of nervous neurons that gets too much scrutiny when the rest of you is allowed to rest, rest, and rest some more. And there is no mistake that football is played on Sunday, because we need a break, a Sabbath for our cranial cake, a communion for the body we might mistake as a cadaver if they didn’t make us stand up to sing.

Back in the day when bread was hard to come by, those little wafers sunk down in you and when Christ hit your belly you felt it in your bones. Allelujah! Amazing Grace- a free meal from a communal plate. But today we’re all eating too much already, so why don’t we burn a few in the pews? Get a little workout with our take out salvation. Maybe it will remind us how real worship is. If He could wake up Lazarus, I’m sure he could show the frozen chosen a two-step and a little thrust, to help us understand the blessings he has bestowed upon us, so don’t fuss, bust a move and soak up forgiveness.

Credo Credo
I believe God loves each one of us.
I believe She doesn’t care what side you fall on with this issue or that.
I believe She put a bitch and a saint in each of us,
And I can’t wait until the saints come marching in—
O how I long to be in that number
When all of our bitches wake up and turn, turn o man, from our bitchy ways…
I have a righteous complaint about the inequality and injustice reigning in our better intentions
And I have logs in more than just my eyes, mind you
Which means that you do too
So don’t bitch at me and I won’t bitch back
Until the spirit moves in and puts us forward on an attack against the bad forces at work in each of our lives.

It’s more like a rhythm that a singular direction
So keep remixing your inquiry
Move in and out, stay on your feet
And don’t stay still and expect the music to stop
Because if there is one thing that God’s angels love
It is the beat they drop…

So might as well roll with it
And grow with it
And feel it in your bones
Because when it comes your time,
That will be your only heartbeat
And until that time it shouldn’t have to be foreign territory
Step in to the land God has laid out for you
Step, step, left right left, right (hop) right (hop)
And turn to the left (jump)

Credo Credo
Make your belief physical

I've been struck by the importance of giving things up.  It makes me want to change the look of this blog even, and all my nifty gadgets etc.  But rather I need to give up my conception of the importance or ability of this blog.  I guess I began it to lift myself out of something.  I guess it is clear to me now, in the typical circular logic of spiritual revelation, that that "something" lifted me out of myself.  

It is amazing how much inspiration will flow through you when you give up forms which are limiting to you. 

That is the substance of the good things written about here, and the words that inspire us in blogs below and the religious history of the judeo-christian, muslim, and other spiritual texts.  

Some times just giving up the capital "G" for god will bring us to a new place of inspiration and revelation.  

Sometimes admitting that our truth is not the only truth will do that.  

Likewise, sacrificing everything you have to a particular rule of life or religious doctrine contains life-giving form-destruction.  Single-minded service/Orthodoxy is a form of zen as it continually requires the giving up of our other, naturally occurring desires.  

poverty

"They began to choose things over people and safety over life, and soon they spent all their time protecting what they had, without realizing that now, forgoing experience, they had nothing to give."

see: http://www.haleyhouse.org/community.htm

Freedom Beckons

There's this rebellion in me against the ways of this world.
Freedom beckons,
and I find myself leaving the warm morning blanket for an adventure-
Peace to be found, at the end of a night in a strange land, I awake anew.
Here and there I see the world
talk in two voices and wonder whither is this soul of mine?
Whither to, and whether why should be lifted to that question, lest this moment fall apart.

(I just found this poem, with the title "Was on Facebook." I wrote it two years ago for my facebook profile and then forgot about it. What an adventure it has been!)

Pride Week Weep

So I’m terrified that I will not contribute to society through my poetry or academics, I’m scared that I am and will be totally useless. That nobody will notice me or work on things with me, that whatever latent talent I have will not be discovered or put to use. Because I’m a burnt-out student and I hate being a student but it’s all I’ve ever done. It is my claim to fame, the justification of my life as a leech on society, my excess which I feel every time I realize we are being kept comfortable here with blood-oil borne out of the conflicts of elsewheres. I hate this system that I am the creme-de-la-creme of. Fuck it. I want out. I don’t want to do well in it, but that seems to be the impetus everyone else is operating under. So, what do I do from here? I want to be a punk artist or something like that. I hate my life and everything I have worked for so hard so far. Fuck this shit.

I need a new lifestyle.

Christianity is wrong about some things. My faith is deeply, deeply shaken, most of it has slipped away and I am left here questioning most everything. I have no more comfort in a faith. I have a faith in people. But that is a whole lifestyle change. That is a whole lifestyle change. I am no longer who I thought I would be for eternity. I am no longer the golden boy, the one soaring above life’s problems. There is no longer any motivation in that imagery for me now. I have fallen and I like the feeling of the ground. I like rolling in the pine needles and loam, I am grateful to sprawl here unnoticed and unashamed. “I am your gay worst nightmare,” I want to say.

“I am so grateful that you’re still seeking God,” he said, one man who is praying for me now. That makes me angry now. I am seeking some semblance of my former self, I am trying to fit the pieces back together. You didn’t know me then and you don’t know me now.

God seems to be dead. But maybe it is just our naivety that is passing, burning away in its Icarusian passion.

I actually really want to be a man-whore and sleep around and drink and smoke and dance dirty. I want these things on deep and soaringly spiritual levels. I’m going to do these things I’m sure. And You and your parents aren’t going to save me from them. What does that mean about who I am? I am not your golden boy after all. I do not have that worth any more. What worth do I have, then? What other accomplishments can I point to here? There isn’t much I guess. I don’t have many events to plug at C&G meetings. I am only this transforming force. Where is my discipline and form? I am dancing with my boundaries all day, I am totally stretched out and I am not a master of it and won’t be for a very long time. Crazy. Time to sleep—

Morning. Collis café.
I am in mourning of my former self. Good mourning America. Roll in your ashes. Deal with your shit. Feel that sadness, stop running from it. Cruise your soon-to-be-lover and fuck him. Fuck him hard.

Here, in this eating area are the queers and my Christian brothers.

I feel shame. What do I share with these people now? I have to remember that I am in good company. Good company, people who question their faith. It helps to type and not look right at the crazy words I am writing.

I have moved on. I am looking at a time of new friendships, fast lovers, new relationships, new rhythms. Maturity, really. I am mourning my golden boy boyhood. My Christian fantasy. I am in mourning. I should paint my nails black, this part of me has died, my body mind and soul are new. And they are just coming into the light, just drying their wings really, so I’m just sitting here feeling the warmth, knowing that the inevitable will happen and one day I will fly and procreate. But not now. I’m just drying out.

When I was 13 years old, my parents sent me on a coming of age quest. So I left suburban Massachusetts and was sent into the New Hampshire wilderness. I encountered there the woodland spirit-force of Uncle Otter, who led his energetic charges through our individual valleys and up onto a new mountaintop. We chose spirit names. I was Owl. (The first sentence I ever uttered, I am told was, "Owl flies.") There were other spirit names for each of the boys, and we made masks which showed our spirit. We reflected as we swam, and celebrated flying through the air into the water. We made a sweat lodge, a hot-house which we made ourselves from fresh saplings bent over in a frame, and heated with stones laid on sections of a once towering tall-standing, deeply-rooted one over a fire lit by fear-fire-fire-fear. Our old selves sweat and discharged their accumulated poisonous contents and we were born anew, naked in the cool air. We learned about honor. We learned from elders ways of navigating through life's stages. We heard how our elders had overcome their fears and built their lives. Uncle Otter and his adopted-son Wren modeled for us the correct living of the archetypes king, soldier, fool, magician and lover. We spent a night in solitude, with only the flicker of light in the leaves above us reminding us that the circle of men was still strong. At the end, we received our Excaliburs, and as we ventured forward we knew that we had many battles to fight.

there's a story behind bluejays which I have a hard time telling right now. But if you know it, and there are some who do, imagine sitting with me in a Gender Sexuality Xyz meeting, and watching as the Quaker campus minister stitches a finger puppet for her five year old child who she is raising with her female partner. As she adds the wings, the crest and the beak, it becomes clear that the light-blue felt is meant to be a 'jay.

_God is a Dj_ by P!nk

Verse 1:
I've been the girl with her skirt pulled high
Been the outcast never running with mascara eyes
Now I see the world as a candy store
With a cigarette smile, saying things you can't ignore
Like mummy I love you
Daddy I hate you
Brother I need you
Lover, hey, "Fuck you"
I can see everything here with my third eye
Like the blue in the sky

Chorus:
If God is a DJ
Life is a dance floor
Love is the rhythm
You are the music
If God is a DJ
Life is a dance floor
You get what you're given
It's all how you use it...

Verse 2:
I've been the girl - middle finger in the air
Unaffected by rumors, the truth: i don't care
So open your mouth and stick out your tongue
You might as well let go you can't take back what you've done
So find a new lifestyle
A reason to smile
Look for Nirvana
Under the strobe lights
Sequins and sex dreams
You whisper to me
There's no reason to cry...

Chorus

Bridge
You take what you get and you get what you give
I say don't run from yourself, man, that's no way to live
I've got a record in my bag you should give it a spin
Lift your hands in the air so that life can begin

I have healthy, unlustful masturbation when I meditate on my seed as Abraham's seed, and see it being planted in the ground to grow a garden, a new paradise for the next generation.  It is good, I find, to avoid masturbation when it is simply playing on loneliness and latent needs and attractions.  Relief can be found in other ways, like a glass of cold, watered down OJ.  

If you can't place yourself among the chosen people, don't beat it.  I'm not sure that's the most Godly attitude, but how will we ever really know?

 

A vision I had of Jesus Christ while in tantric yoga breathing meditation in which I felt energy like none before, like spring rapids of fire on my arms, through-chest, back... back to Jesus.  

He, as men recline, was cast upon a coming of age wilderness, deserted, alone.  As one arm propped his upper carriage he, in wide-eyed wonder (or was it horror?) witnessed an erection.

An ejaculation.

touched by angel? (witnessed, was not creating, that is the Father's job, is it not?)

Here am I, quaking as I am, asking myself, is this a calculated, liberalizing demonic possession? Or Divine Truth?

Jesus, being led to orgasm by a host of angels who are invisible beside his humanity.  Laudeum.

I think that the sensation one feels in church with a congregation surrounding you, swaying in their hearts, minds and feet to a Truth that you can no longer believe must be a little like what it feels like to get high.  I mean I've never smoked pot, but one of my friends told me it's like you get really huge and float out of your body, watching yourself and your surroundings.  They say it helps you think about things, those incessant noises in your head grow quiet and deeper truths work their way to the surface.

That's probably why I keep coming back.  It's free and totally legal, and if anything you leave smelling like floral perfume, quiche and coffee instead of that acrid-type of smoke that so signifies a punk.  I love that feeling, coming off cloud-9 from heavenly worship, stepping into the flow and satisfying your munchies on chunks of bread that your bro says is someone's dead body that gives you life, and washing it down with the contents of little plastic cups that inspire you to consider the laws of cohesion and how they might be affected by the solutes of grape juice as opposed to pure water or wine with alcohol.  That shit is fucked up.  I read the scripture, and hear it repeated again and again the stories of how Christ could get you high on wonderment, on logic-defying miracles, on healing power as you stand and wait your turn for the healing touch to come your way, sweating slightly in the hot desert air, and feeling your head spin because you're just a little dehydrated, waiting your turn for that sensation which quenches something deep down and washes you clean of anxiety and anticipation.  Yo, Hey-sus, hit me up with that shit!  Halle-lu-jah!

Sunday Morn

In a booklet by the founder of the Salvation Army, paraphrasing
Always follow the light, it is your salvation on a path through the dark woods. But it must be your own light-- the one who carries it is close to you, only illuminating what is around your feet. You will know the light when it comes to you. The light is in the Bible, your community, your heart.
This has been my experience lately, coming out, not being afraid of the dark, following the light.

Writing is my service. I learn in anthropology about nations that words become eternal, poems make groups of people who speak the same language into entire nations, and in repeating the words like the seasons, nation-states become as natural in their manufacture as the sun and the rain.
I am afraid sometimes of fitting my writing into some style, some box, a box that is not mine so I do not know its boundaries really. Here I am still, in my light-- sitting, traveling, recording, truths of a sort.

What have you learned, O man-- sitting there on the wall in Hanover-town? Removed from our daily stresses, our confined struggles- What by silence have you discerned from our incessant chatter? What by removing yourself have you gained?

The poet's word is greater than the poet herself, and must be celebrated by its due worth, must be seen as poet creation with flesh, soul, mind implicated in its deliverance, its trajectory to hearts and minds.

The poet writes. The people listen. All are served, all should be heard.

How can we create a habit-in-community so that poet-creation would transcend our daily troubles, carry us the daily bread of a communion beyond ourself, with real flesh implicated. Of course, never too much, never ego-fear inflating, never losing sight, ignoring the unseen, the unheard or the human in this quest.

pre-Carnival Winter 2008

O what a comment on humanity's condition- buckets forged elsewhere in some mechanized plasticity, shoveled to fill with snow, are sent up a rickety ramp with electric motor slightly whirring, they fill the form of a masterpiece to melt.
And with such joy this fills us, with such vigor do we work and are warm in the cold air. On a bleak winter day, buckets progress still.

A little unassuming mural of Dartmouth.

The sun is setting on one of the first spring days—it’s playing tricks in the clear air and our little college seems without blemish. The library tower, Old Dartmouth Hall, the red chapel steeple and the central buildings of administration blaze their image on the pure blue sky. Even the pools of mud on the lawn glisten with some foreign grace. Planted underneath lie the seeds of so many thoughts- meditations on semi-truths and anxieties produced by the wonder of things we have never fully known. It is finals time, a breath, the eye of the storm.

The clouds above this place greet us freshly and give the impression that they are tied to the setting, echoing elevated granite reliefs on brick buildings. Lift us all higher, we supplicate in silence, let us all throw back the rays of distant truths; facades glimmer with unassailable, crystalline veracity. Beauty and honor we wish we could claim for ourselves is only in a title associating us with this place, now adorned in dusky radiance.

Peradventure this setting sun will someday come to alight on us and we can reflect its grace on our own company. But even then we’ll just be a figure, a quiet afternoon in the midst of the storm. Recall, in striving, that they erected these edifices only to surface a semblance of society in this wild land. Our imitation is as fresh as the reflections on these puddles, as original as today's sunset.

O Dartmouth, tame the savages we know ourselves to be and give us the hope that this sun will rise again.

Spring, 2006

B'ez Avtora

There is no author
No citation necessary
for this observation in obliquity
a crystalline cartography of a human thought

I could sign here
Sincerely,

With place and year
but there is no fear
That I will be absorbed in ether sphere
for my thoughts have come Queer

Not of mine or other
but in Trinity
These are Father, Mother
A generalized truth
Ours expressed
Birthed by union
but possessed by none

and to none accountable-
Even the pen-holder is
Unanswerable for the life of
the words for we.

And in Nothing-Creation
And in Death-Resurrection
A quartet of timely timelessness
Creative tone enthrowned.

My flesh is yours
A meal meager munched,
Sweet signified as such.

These friends create my
Satellite world vision
Sputniks, reflect creation
They move and my pen slips

I wrote “Stop the Fall” once
Could Adam-original possess
The agency to deliver this
Fecund degradation
Without a feminist?
Eve was a dike, and
By lifting her veil
We now, forever? will
Know a bit of binary
To aid our quest forthward.

Penetrating the seed, even,
We now light a fire
To guard the way back
And place historical figures-
Kant, Marx, Malcolm X as
Angels-with-spears which burn
If but our neurons-in-skull
Our entire telo-s

B.
And by timely timelessness
On appointment, scratch
thee, ashen soil.
Create thee a community-
By necessity.

Once tasked with naming creation
Now it is our procreation
which lyric labels instates