Heavenly Politics

 

 

 

I don't even know how to talk about today's issue.  Essentially, while in Conversation, I have been lead to do certain things.  Last night, circumstances lead me to memorize the 23rd Psalm and repeat it many times until certain vexations ended.  I'm glad I did it, though it took some time before I entered a contemplative trance, and in the meantime, it hurt a LOT.

 

But today's issue goes well beyond my personal comfort.  Yesterday afternoon, I woke from a dream in which I was a hermit living at the base of a vast space antenna.  The dream ended when I was visited bhy Chris Jeffries and many old friends from Annex Theatre.  When I woke up, I said gladly:  friends!  And the response to this was that friends and lovers were acceptable, but drugs were not.  It seemed, and still seems, a pretty good arrangement to me.

 

But today, while out on a walk, I was reviewing yesterday's conversations, and this time was told that friends were acceptable in my new role, but lovers were not.  I struggled with this for a while and finally decided that I could live with it, that I've been celibate for so long that it's become a fairly comfortable habit for me.  But later today, after writing some email, I climbed upstairs to my bedroom where I was playing EWTN, the Catholic radio station.  And, hardly shocking to me at this point, the voice on the call-in show was asking about the Catholic stand on homosexuality.

 

Well.

 

This is hardly shocking either, as EWTN is a deeply conservative ministry, and the radio apologist spooled out the usual nonsense about how gender complementarity is the only way relationships can work --real typical Bronze Age "Ug, me Tarzan" sexual politics.

 

And when I asked about this, I was given an answer which basically confirmed this.  Well,I squirmed and squirmed and complained and whined.  That can't possibly be God's stand on the issue, I said.  I'm gay, I was born gay, and I'm happy to be this way.  I fought my battles to come to terms with my gay identity in what was, back in the 80's, still a controversial stance.

 

Now, for various reasons, I have repeatedly been shown certain images.  One of these is of Abraham Lincoln.  Another of these is Martin Luther King.  And the third of these, more a memory than an image, is of myself in situations when I have been, to put it charitably a bit of a coward.

 

So, in much the same way I had done on earlier occasions, I balked.  This could not possibly be the truth as God saw it.  And then I realized that the issue is a little more coplicated than that.  Because Christ explicitly gave to Peter and his successors the prerogative of binding and loosing in Heaven and Earth.  And so it has occurred to me that I need to work towards the day when the Holy Father looses gay identity and gay sexuality in Heaven.  Because, having been a coward before, I am choosing to make a stand on this.  Dr. King did it in America, the great Mahatma in India and I, a blind overweight Catholic in America, mean to do it here. 

 

I don't know how to start, though.  The truth is that I'm quite comfortable with celibacy at this point.  People speak of sexual freedom in terms of what they permit themselves to do.  But there also comes an even greater freedom when you've trained yourself to be free of most sexual hunger.  It can be a ravening wolf, a monster whose fleshthirst is never slaked. So I'm not even sure that the stand is primarily for myself.  But nobody and nothing which is good tells me whom I may and may not love. 

Another Demiurgical Flimflam

 

 

Last night, there was another argument, and this time it was very clear that someone, someone not very nice, was trying to bamboozle me.    I was praying about some trouble I'm having right now with what could charitably be called impure thoughts.  These thoughts horrify and disgust me and I prayed that the Lord should cleanse my mind.  And then I had the thought that maybe I would have to lose my mind, that God would have to cut it up, make me a simpleton so that I could be clean enough to enter the Kingdom.    Terrible, right?

 

Immediately, there was an answer:  yes, this could very well be the case.  I was terrified and also furious.  How could this be?  The Lord has blessed me with a first rate mind, and one of the sins I mean to confess to Father Ryan is that I haven't used it nearly enough to its full potential:  I've been, in some ways, a dilettante, at least until my more recent history.  I begged and begged.  Could this be true?  YES, I'M AFRAID  SO was the sense of the response.

 

Well.  I was suddenly snapped out of my funk by the Holy Spirit.  This was the Adversary talking.  The Lord has better plans for your salvation than the destruction of your mind.  I was so relieved and felt like an idiot.  Now I know why the Church authorities put you through such a wringer when they want to find out to whom you've really been talking to.

Easter Mass 2010

 

This Easter, I went to Mass for the first time in many months.  Though there were some squirmy feelings as I adjusted to a little church with which I am not too familiar,I experienced homecoming joy when I turned and saw the priest coming down the aisle toward the altar. 

 

"Ah," I thought, "there are still a few people in the world whose job it is to safeguard the sacred.  I do not just live in a world of corn flakes and diet pills."

 

The priest is good and brings his own dry sense of humor to the altar. Also, the older gentleman sitting next to me very kindly  oriented me so that I was properly situated when it came time to receive the Host. In truth, I probably didn't need this help, but I'm sometimes anxious in situations like this, where lots of sighted folks are running through a familiar routine and I have to squint through everything.  I didn't get in anybody's way or choke on the Host or something, so it all turned out all right.

 

All right.  Ha!  I received the Host.  It was imperfectly done, as I rate myself for form in this matter, but my hunger and gratitude for it were authentic.  And where else does one find authenticity in 21st century America?

  

Finally, the fine older man and his wife drove me the several blocks to the house when Mass was over.  They told me about their plans to spend Easter with their grandchildren and I fell in love with them.

Grace

 

My history with blindness, madness and AIDS is worthy of Oprah.  In 1998, I came down with a slight case of the Plague.  At the time I was boarding at the house of a saintly woman named Betty Jane Narver, and it is for that reason that I am alive today.  She organized a healthcare team around me, fed me, made sure I went to medical appointments, took my temperature and generally kept me from drifting away.  I owe her and all of those people a debt I can never repay.  Betty Jane herself died about ten years ago, and I still grieve for her.

 

But my healing didn't have a straight trajectory.  I was grateful to have survived AIDS, but when the reality of blindness finally sank in, I was furious with God.  There were a number of months where I raged and boxed with him.  And in one of these sessions, occasions of great despair and rage, I vomited up the worst blasphemy I could devise.  I didn't even really believe in God at that moment, and as much as anything, I was cursing him for not existing, cursing him for my abandonment.  and what I said was this:

 

"God, when I die, I'm going to come up there, you motherfucker.  And I'm going to slash your motherfucking throat and kick your dead body into the Atlantic ocean.  Then I will sell 'God is Dead' T shirts from a stand in your left nostril."

 

I mean, I was REALLY angry, as angry as a human being can be without murdering someone.

 

And God answered.

It wasn't a voice in my head or sparkly lightsor anything like that.  I've come to understand that what I had is something which Catholics call a heart locution, in which God or Christ speaks to you directly, silently, in your heart.  I actually felt it there, like a flower blooming in my chest.  And what God simply said was:

 

YES

 

It wasn't quite "Yes, you're right!" or even "Yes, I'm so sorry!"  It was much deeper than that.  What the Divine YES unfolded into was something like:  Yes, your suffering is profound, and your rage is appropriate.  And it is holy, because it has turned your attention towards me, without cleverness or evasion.

 

And he was right, of course.  Because up until then, I had been one evasive, clever cat.  Not long after that, I was baptised in the Catholic Church. That was an adventure, and it helped me through my rage and social withdrawal.  And I met some interesting people, especially Father Michael Ryan, of Saint James Cathedral.  Father Ryan is the kind of funny, humane priest they try to pull off on  television religious dramas but always get wrong, too smarmy or something.

 

Anyway, there were several years of going to Mass and working through the truth of my blindness. It was, as I like to say, one hard damned uphill slog in the rain.  I spent some time in loony bins, I slashed my wrists, I just wanted so much not to have to carry the load I had to carry.  But gradually, very, very gradually over these years, I found hope and healing.  And a lot of the credit goes to the authorship of books, which I attribute to Divine inspiration.  I guess that sounds really self-aggrandizing or something, but I think of it as exactly the opposite.  What I mean is that the Source of all creative work is God / Goddess / Christ --however you name it-- and that doing anything creative, if it is not to bbe a vain endeavor does and must involve that Source. 

 

Besides God, I attribute my healing to two things.   The first is the stalwart friendship of Kevin haggerty,Mary Beaudin, Chris Jeffries and Ed Hawkins. The second is the authorship of the book I told you about, THE APOCALYPSE HILTON.  Through that novel,I was able to work through my bitterness about my high school experience, which had left me pretty scarred.  Now, I realize that everyone at Steilacoom High School was just trying to make it through their own personal trench war, but back then I thought of SHS as a fiendish mousetrap set up exclusively for the torture and humiliationof William L. Houts.

Since writing that book, my life has been getting better and better.  Not materially so much as spiritually.  I have great hopes for a successful literary career.  I embrace people I once loathed.  I thank God for everything which has happened to me

I used to play a certain kind of computer game addictively, in an attempt to blot out my suffering.  Now, I still enjoy games of this sort, but my energy is mainly focused upon writing the current novel.  ON most days, I get up around 6am, check Facebook, get my coffee and write for somewhere between five and eight hours.  Usually I get a page or two, but I have some extremely fertile days in which I write as many as four or five.  At the completion of each paragraph I have a little ticker tape parade at my desk and give thanks to High G, as I call my Collaborator. Then, around one or two, I knock off, walk up the hill and get a bowl of pho.  It's a good life, and I have reason to think that it's going to become a great one.

Awakened

 

For the second or third time, I fear.  The mercies first came about seven years ago.  It was very clear to me then that I was being Awakened.  But it’s so unexpected.  Despite the fact that this is what I want more than anything, I couldn’t believe it.  I had done things and had experiences which I knew to be directed by Heaven.  But I have a history of bipolar-affective disorder, which was poorly medicated at the time.  Also, I had friends and family telling me in one way or another that God doesn’t talk to you.  And after a while, having had several visits to the loony bin, I came to believe them.  And the mercies, ignored by me, gradually faded away.  This happened about three times over the last eight years or so.

 

This time, though, the Call was unmistakeable, accompanied as it is by an internal current, like the gentle flow of electricityor water.This time, happily, I’m properly medicated and know that I’m in my right mind, that the mercies aren’t just some weird atmospheric anomaly.  And they arethe touch of a Personality, and I am becoming increasingly certainas to who that is. 

 

I’m not so gullible, that I immediately swallowed the Kool Aid.  When the mercies first came, there was a discussion about a certain cup I had purchased from Edge of the Circle Bookstore, an occult supply shop on Pike Street.  It’s a beautiful, ceramic coffee mug with a large pentacle on it.  I was strongly advised not to drink from it.  Well, I balked.  I’m not going to lay in bed in my own room in my mother’s house and have some ethereal goblin tell me what cups I can and can’t use.  So I said no deal.  You can take your AC current and your pretty mental pictures and get out.  I’ve long suspected that there is a minor demon or godling oppressing this house, and I thought this might be one of its little demands.  I’ve dealt with spirits, fairies and demons before and what they all have in common is that they want to tell you what to do. And they all pretend to be the Great Gazoo.  Well, despite the fact that such critters usually don’t supply you with internal current, I told the beastie to scram.  The beastie scrammed, all right, and the current went away with it.  I was a little sad, but if this was some little glamour I didn’t want any part of it anyway.

 

I went to sleep then, and when I woke up, the current had been restored.  So it was decided, I would converse with the Personality as if it were God, but keep a healthy dose of skepticism on hand, so as not to be bullied more later on.

 

But there was one issue besides the cup which was also discussed.  And that is the subject of prayer and miraculous healing.  Feeling the current in my arms and hands, I naturally placed my hands on my eyes and began to pray for the healing of my vision.  I was warned not to do this, and there was a sense that healing myself is not appropriate for me now.  Somehow, I found this convincing where the cup thing had been merely annoying.  It was the first discussion, an argument really, which lead me to think that I am in fact in communion with the Real Deal, not some demiurgical prankster.  I can only explain that there was a seriousness to it, something which spoke of prerogatives granted and prerogatives not granted.

There was a Voice there, and it had to be respected  --at the very least!

  

Since then, I have been in almost constant communion with that Presence, which I will refer to from now on as High G.  Why?  Because I feel abashed at the idea of saying the real Name.

 

And, too, I want to talk to Father Ryan about all of this.  Despite the fact that I just received a weeping mercy, as if to cry  “Oh ye of little faith!” it has become too large to keep under my hat.  This is something which belongs to my religious community as much as it belongs to me personally, and that community is the parish of Saint James Cathedra

Things are moving along quickly.  Through images and appropriate mercies, I am urged to do or read or consider certain things.  And I have to say that the general aura, after several days of this, doesn’t strike me as diabolical.  There is a mixture of moral authority and a respect for my basic temperament, history, foibles and even sense of humor.  For instance, when I stated aloud that I thought the house was haunted by some minor Demiurge, High G sent an image of Shaggy and Scooby Doo.  How do I know that I didn’tsummon up the image from my own consciousness, the way any schizophrenic might?  Because it’s very clear that I’m not dealing with some pathology here.  The image was sudden and unexpected and it arrived from Somewhere Else.

 

Finally, High G isn’t just making jokes and sending pretty pictures.  He is putting me through a constant examination of my behavior, motives and especially my failures.  When I found that I had some buried racist material in my consciousness, I was lead to write an email to a black friend to beg his forgiveness.  The following day, cowardly tendencies and behavior of mine were pointed out, not cruelly, but with an unielding force, as if to say:  pay attention to this, redress this, it could ruin you.

 

Even as I write this, High G, through his mercies, instructs me, guides me, reassures me.  It was High G who suggested that I use a blog for journal keeping, after I had spent part of the morning looking for accessible journal software. 

 

Christ is Here, Now.