The Daily Dose

My readers might be surprised that I often draft The (who knows if it will ever live up to its name) Daily Dose of the Good (And Not So Good) Words by hand, with a fountain pen. Writing longhand is a sensual, sometimes mystical, experience for me. Sometimes it is close to a religious rite. Ideas flow as my hand slides the instrument across the page. My wand makes a magic of letters strung together into words strung together into sentences; sentences that have strung up a little bit of meaning.

The nib of my fountain pen is broken, and I cannot get into the groove. To misquote a Bo Carter blues song, “my pen won’t write no more.” I had to switch from the frustrating fountain pen to a pencil, and while I know it is good to not caught in ruts; that I should be able to work some magic with any number of instruments, I must admit that it isn’t quite the same. I want my pen to work. I want my words to flow.

The broken nib of my pen makes me think of George Alan Rekers, the anti-gay ex-gay gay scholar and “activist” recently caught traveling with a “Rent Boy.” In true Southern Hyperbole round-about storytelling style, I won’t come back to the image of the broken nib until (much, much) later on. Many of you know the details of the story: Rekers goes on a trip with a “Rent Boy,” claims that he hired “Lucien” to carry his luggage and when Lucien comes clean about what he was hired to handle- “the long stroke” is not in the porter handbook, though we could argue that Lucien is a type of pullman- Rekers is caught with his “liar, liar, pants on fire” down.

I encourage any readers who are not up on male escort services to give the Rent Boy website a peek. I think there can be no doubt that Rent Boys are expert baggage handlers.

Though jealousy may be a sin, I’m jealous as hell. I want some Rent Boys to join my ever growing (I wish) Army of Alter(ed) Boys. Why should preachers who are against hot bi and homosexual men get to hire them?

Let us pray.

(On your knees).

Please god-that-we-may-or-may-not-believe in, pretty please with sugar on top, send a sugar daddy or momma (or multiples in any combination) Bishop Bishop’s way so she may hire hotties to carry the metaphorical luggage of Bishop Bishop’s Mission to save the whole wide world and little old you.

Perhaps, I should pull an Oral . . . Roberts and claim that god will suck me (excuse me while I fan myself) up to heaven if y’all don’t give me enough money to hire a couple of Rent Boys to go on tour with me. Operators are standing by. (Seriously, y’all give me enough money, I’ll finally go on a super-fantabulous revival tour, and I promise- cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my . . .- I’ll hire some Rent Boys).

But enough about me, back to Rekers. With a slew of abbreviations for academic degrees behind his name, Rekers is a co-Founder, with the infamous James “Focus on the Family” Dobson, of the Family Research Council, an organization known to be pro-beat-your-children-to-prove-you’re-the-boss-and-‘cause-god-gets-off-on-it and against anything and everything about homosexuals getting married, having/adopting children, having rights, breathing.

Rekers also is an officer of NARTH (National Association of Research & Therapy on Homosexuality), which has a gay old time trying to turn the gay into the ex-gay and trying to take the Les out of Bos. He has testified in court against gay adoption in Florida, against gay Boy Scout leaders and published lots of articles about how to correct “gender disturbance” using what some have called aversion therapy.

Rekers is up to his armpits in that famous river in Eygpt, the one that you can, without a doubt, step into twice, denial. Rekers is quotes in a Salon.com article saying,

If you talk with my travel assistant that the story called “Lucien,” you will find I spent a great deal of time sharing scientific information on the desirability of abandoning homosexual intercourse, and I shared the Gospel of Jesus Christ with him in great detail.

Of course the old saw “Jesus spent time with sinners” is, in this case, more of the plaintive whine “Jesus made me do it.” It is easy to be angry about the hypocrisy of this man who has done so much harm. It is easy to mock him as Stephen Colbert did, which, truth be told, I found laugh aloud funny. And I think that the George Rekers Luggage Carriers, Inc. Facebook Fanpage is genius.

It is easy to be angry; it is easy to mock. I have done both. I’d like to suggest that we also let ourselves see and feel the heartbreak of his fucked to hell life.

The Family Research Council, motivated by the unsurprisingly unChristian desire to not be associated with anyone “tainted,” promptly put up a message disavowing any connection between Rekers and the Family Research Council. And NARTH, while not as cold blooded as Family Research Council, is awkwardly shifting away from the splash that Rekers has made “falling on the baggage carrier.” As of May 11th, Rekers has resigned from NARTH.

I imagine that right now, in between spates of self-righteous sputtering of denial, he feels lonely and ashamed.

Part of me grieves for how twisted up with hate and confusion Rekers must be. He has put a nib on his life that won’t let his ink flow. The ink still is there but all he gets from his pen are ugly scratches and jagged words. He marks up his life page, he marks up our collective pages with poor penmanship.

But he is not solely responsible for the broken nib on his pen. There were/are forces beyond his control that screwed on that broken nib and make it difficult for him choose a new one. He is a 61 year old Southern Baptist. When has it been safe for him to be who he is?

I am not absolving him of responsibility, but I think it is important to remember just how fucked up we still are about anyone who does not follow the straight and narrow. I knew people, back in the early 1990’s, who tried to commit suicide when they realized they were gay. Many young people, because life unfortunately isn’t an Ugly Betty dramedy, don’t have a Marc St. James in their life to help them accept who they are. And considering how many LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning) youth still try to commit suicide, too often successfully, specifically because they are afraid of what it means to be LGBTQ, perhaps we can, for a moment, be sad that the combination of a cruel culture, a lack of supporting allies and something in his personality meant Rekers hated himself enough to write that hate in big bold letters on other people’s lives.

George Alan Rekers cannot flow.

I mourn for the man he could have been. I mourn for the man he will not be. Perhaps he will find some redemption. Perhaps he will realize that his pen doesn’t write, that his ink doesn’t flow, that it is time to put a new nib on his pen.

Replacing his broken nib would not erase all the marks against him. It cannot erase all the harmful marks he has made. We write our lives with indelible ink. We cannot erase our pasts, but we can make new sentences for ourselves. If he chose to fix his pen, if he chose a new nib, it might set an example for other young men and women poised to take up pens with broken nibs with which to write their lives.

He could help write a new story for all of us. I doubt that he will, but I pray that his does.

Please god that I may or may not believe, please let George Alan Rekers accept who he is, in all his horrible and wonderful complexity. Give him and us a new, never completely clean slate to write on. Help him repair the awful damage he has done to others. Heal the awful damage done to him. Give him the strength to take off the broken nib, to put a new nib on his pen. Let him right his life. Please let his life flow.

Amen.

Awomen.

Pretty please with sugar on top?

Today, The Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words will not be profound, long or involved. There is no moral to the story. No heart warming snippet. No peeks into the inner workings of my mission to save the whole wide world and little old you.

Nope, just a brief little blip to leave you with a quandary. In the past few Daily Doses, I kept salting my prose with catch phrases and cliches with and/or about salt. I am not sure why salt keeps coming up in such un-salient ways, but some thing are, and will remain, a mystery to me and by extension, to you.

All this salty (only on my punning tongue) language made me think of Lot’s saline statue of a wife.

What I want to know, is if they couldn’t look back, for fear of becoming pillars of salt, how did they know for sure that she did? I’m not really in search of an answer, if I was I’d go look it up in the bible to make sure I was remember the passage about her passage into a pillar correctly, but every once of while I entertain myself with these sorts of scenes.

Did they know for sure that she was a pillar of salt? What if she had fallen, twisting her ankle and laid in a heap praying for someone to notice her distress and come back to help her up? Or when she looked back was she even with one of her daughters, who watched her mother’s transformation out of the corner of her eye? Perhaps an invisible wave of salt air blew across all of them as she was transformed, leaving a residue on their skins and at the corners of their mouths, like they had been for a swim in the ocean.

Or was she in the lead, and did she, Orpheus like, look back to make sure her loved ones really and truly were following? Did she hear one of her daughters stumble and instinctively look back? Did Lot and his daughters watch her turning turn her? This is my favorite re-visioning. It makes her story tragic instead of god-told-you-so-and-you-did-not-listen-so-look-what-you-made-god-do-to-you-stupid.

I leave you with this image: her turning turned her into a pillar of millions of dried out tears.

Now some of my faithful readers might think an off the cuff Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words about Kaddish lacks a necessary sense of gravity. But the truth of the matter is that some things are so awe-ful that even dump truck load of words cannot capture them.

Death by suicide is one of those awful things that words cannot capture.

You throw out the words in a game similar to 52 card pick up. The words falter and fail and fall. You get down on your hands and knees, searching, praying for some meaning. Sometimes the only meaning to be found is that this game is for keeps, and you lose again and again and again. You are at a loss for words. You thought you knew which game you were playing, but the rules shift as you play. You have no choice, you must play the hand dealt. You pick up the cards and hand them back to the dealer. It may be a long while before the cards come back into play. You can be sure that sooner or later you will be dealt another hand of “ashes, ashes, we all fall down.”

And once again your words will falter and fail and fall.

And once more you will get down on your hands and knees, searching, praying for meaning.

And once more you find that this game is for keeps.

And once more you lose again and again and again.

And once more you are at a loss for words.

And once more you thought you knew the game.

And once more the rules change.

And once more you have no choice, you must play this hand.

And once more you pick up the cards and hand them to the dealer.

And once more you wait for the next round of “ashes, ashes, we all fall down.”

I will leave explanations of what it means to say Kaddish to those more qualified. It is enough to know that it is a ritual of words to say when words fail. Today an email dealt me back into the game of grief. This particular multi-round game started last October when a loved one shot and killed himself. Not having a minyan handy (and technicalities like not being Jewish), meant saying Kaddish was not an option. I turned to Sumi Jo’s rendition of Maurice Ravel’s Kaddish, the first song of his Deux melodies hebraiques. While not strictly the Mourners’ Kaddish, it carries enough of its phrases that it served my needs.

l’ella min kol birkhata

I wept.

v’shirata tushb’chata v’nechemata

I pick up the cards. I hand them back to the dealer.

da’amiran b’al’ma

I wait for the next hand of “ashes, ashes, we all fall down.”

v’imru amen

In which Bishop Bishop continues to ruminate in a somewhat more serious and somber vein.

“I am a (wo)man of constant sorrow
I’ve seen trouble all my day”
Man of Constant Sorrow, traditional American folk song

This Good Friday, many Christians honor the Passion of Jesus, not that horrible excuse of a movie by Mel Gibson, but the story of Jesus’ trial, flogging, crucifixion and entombment. The story of the passion- passion meaning suffering, not passion meaning full of hot sexy feelings, it is important to be clear- of Jesus when mixed with verses from The Songs of the Suffering Servant from the Book of Isaiah gives rise to the image of Jesus as the Man of Sorrows.

Now there have been centuries of debate between Jews and Christians about whether the passages in Isaiah refer to the Jewish Nation or Jesus as well as various other quibbles to establish whose Truth will be confirmed in these here scriptures. Since the God I may or may not believe does not speak or prophesy, I can enjoy all possible interpretations without getting my theological knickers in a twist. Regardless of who thinks they own the meanings of Isaiah, I have to admit it is one of my favorite book of the Bible (Jewish and/or Christian). It is full of beautiful words exhorting us to seek justice.

This image of the Suffering Servant, the Wo/man of Sorrows is potent. The Wo/man of Sorrows, to paraphrase Isaiah 50:6:

offers my back to those who beat me,
my cheeks to those who pull out my hairs;
I do not hide my face
from mocking and spitting

S/he does not suffer just for the sake suffering. S/he does not suffer because of capricious fate. S/he suffers as s/he works to bring justice to the world. S/he is suffers as s/he serves. S/he is the wo/man of constant sorrows; her service means she sees trouble all her days. S/he in the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr’s I see the Promised Land develops “a kind of dangerous unselfishness.”

Another Paraphrase from Isaiah, Isaiah 42, verses 3, 4, 6 and 7:

A bruised reed s/he will not break
and a smoldering wick s/he will not snuff out.
In faithfulness s/he will bring forth justice;

s/he will not falter or be discouraged
til s/he establishes justice on earth.

I, that cannot be name, have called you in righteousness;
I will take hold of your hand.
I will keep you and will make you
to be a covenant for the people
and a light for all,

to open the eyes that are blind,
to free captives from prison
and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.

Are you a wo/man of sorrow? Are you the suffering servant? These are good questions to ask ourselves in the Passover/Easter season. I don’t think we can or should try to be a wo/man of constant sorrow, but sometimes we need to don the sackcloth of the suffering servant. To bring some small bit of justice to our world, we need to be the bruised reeds that do not break, the smoldering wicks that are not snuffed out.

This is my wish for this Good Friday: regardless of our individual beliefs about the facts, or lack thereof, surrounding the story of the Passion of Jesus, that we can find some inspiration in the image of the Man of Sorrows suffering in service. Perhaps in this season of renewal, liberation and rebirth, in this season celebrating freedom, we can revitalize our commitments to serve our world. Perhaps we can sing some of the verses of Isaiah’s song becoming, however briefly, Servants of Suffering, Wo/men of Sorrow.

“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kippah”>kippah and gives just enough of a D’var Torah to renew her almost but not quite a Jew membership.

Many still lie groaning, digesting the second huge Pesach (Passover for my goyim followers not down with the Yiddishkeit) feast in a row. Chad gadya (one little goat) nags them over and over and over again, unless they are in the not to be envied position of having the chorus of Dayeinu stuck on endless loop in their minds.

It would have been enough for us. It would have been sufficient.

That is the gist of what dayeinu means.

Each verse of the song trots out another grand thing God did for the Hebrews when S/he brought them out of Egypt to wander for 40 years on the way to the Promised Land, and then the verse offers up something God could have left undone. Though we know according to the story of Exodus that S/he didn’t leave these things undone, S/he could have. S/he didn’t even though S/he could have. And so at the end of each verse, everyone sings the ridiculously long, repetitive, fast and upbeat dayeinu break down. Lots and lots of da-da-yei-nu’s. Probably hundreds before the last note is sung.

Over and over again, people sing “It would have been enough for us. It would have been sufficient.”

I don’t think the story of Passover is true to history just as I don’t think that the story of resurrection of Jesus is based on facts. But like Jesus rising from the dead, God’s Exodus miracles tell us a truth full story. There are truths here that we can use, even if we don’t (can’t) believe in some monotheistic god.

By saying over and over again, that it would have been enough, the singers are counting the chickens that have hatched in the previous verse not focusing on the eggs still incubating in the next verse. (The chicken comes before the egg? Hmm.) Each thing that goes right in our lives is in some ways a miracle. Regardless of what may or may not come after that thing going right, and whether or not that thing going right was caused by some Right (rite), right then it can be enough. It is sufficient, in a satori moment sort of way.

It is not that we should spend all our time counting our blessings; there are only so many times we can sing “dayeinu” before going bat shit crazy. It is not that everything is a blessing. But, sometimes, there is something to be said for focusing on what we did get, what did work, what is good, how we may be blessed. Our lives are enriched by being present to its gifts without worrying about uncertain futures, certain to contain joy and pain, but otherwise unknowable.

Dayeinu. It would be have be enough for us. It is enough for us. Right here, right now. Enough.

Sometimes I long to pull an Oral Roberts, to claim that Jesus is going to suck me up to heaven if I don’t get mega-millions donated to me, I mean to my mission to save the whole wide world and little old you, within in the next month.

I rather like the image of Jesus sucking me up, but that is the sort of comment that will have me writhing in the hell of some dang uptight-no-sense-of-humor-Christian. Ooh, I rather like that image as well, Jesus sucking me up followed by my writhing in some Christian. If hell and Jesus exist, and if Jesus is made in the image of your average fire and brimstone preacher, then I’m going there for sure. Betcha bottom dollar, I will have hell to pay.

I digress. As I was saying, sometimes I want pull an Oral Roberts. But while it is true that more money would help me spread the Good (and Not So Good) Words to a larger cross section of the whole wide world, and that someday, I’d like to cobble together a way for the faithful to donate some cold hard cash in the form of 0’s and 1’s flashing from their online bank accounts to my, I mean my mission’s, online bank account, it also is true that I dream of Oral’s trick when all the nifty things I could do on the cheap to spread the Good (and Not So Good) Words just ain’t getting done because life is full of too many things I think I need to do.

I fantasize about millions from heaven when I feel tired and cranky and overwhelmed by all the tedious little to do’s to do to make this particular dream come true. I envisage telling y’all that the god I may or may not believe in wants y’all to send me enough money to fill up my bathtub (ooh, that is another enticing image, me in a bathtub full of money that y’all have all touched), not because I need that much money to do what I’ve got to do, but because I want it to be easier than it is. I do not want to have to work so hard to find the time and energy to do the work that this extravagant (e)missionary movement requires. Of course, more money would help, but it cannot take away all the real world vexations stirred up when I attempt to (wo)manifest my dreams in a world constrained by material conditions.

There are times to shake the money tree. We should shake the shit out of all those corporate capitalists and politicians; we should make sure to spend our money to pay for education and health care and housing and the other basic necessities that ensure that all of us can contribute to our economy, not spend every damn dime bailing out the folks that fucked it all to hell. We should organize and unionize and agitate to make sure folks get paid a living wage.

My challenge to y’all, in this time of real economic trials and tribulations, in a time when some are paying a very high price for the sins of our financial fathers, my challenge to y’all is to suss out the difference between the money that you/we really need to live, hell the money you/we need to thrive, and the money you/we hunger for because y/our daydreams of millions from heaven magically taking all y/our troubles away. It won’t. It can’t.

Today, you’re getting a super short and sweet dose of the good (and not so good) words. This morning, I was reading Sin, and Its Indulgences, on the New York Time’s Room for Debate page. Looks like the Catholic Church is reviving indulgences.

For those of you who may not be up on your religious history and/or know next to nothing about Catholic theology, I’ll fill you in a bit. Indulgences are given for good deeds and are supposed to help cancel out some of the time you’d have to stew in Purgatory before getting to waltz through pearly gates and spending the rest of eternity with Jesus and the angels and God the Father and the Holy Spirit and the rest of the Do Good Gang. The assumption is that very few folks are good enough to go straight to heaven. It is kind of like spiritual insurance. You’re betting you’ll need the coverage.

I will say that as long as the Catholic Church isn’t selling them the way they used to way back in the day, then I don’t see too much harm in the practice. If one believes in Catholic conceptions of sin, which obviously I don’t, then it might be a very comforting sort of ritual. There does seem to be some valid criticism that this is part of the Pope Benedict XVI’s creepy tendency to resurrect the skeletons of old timey Catholic rituals, superstitions, Holocaust denying priests. Some would suggest that Catholics would be better off if all those things/people stayed dead and buried.

All this made me think I that maybe I should start me some sort of indulgences program. I could I start haw. . .anding out indulgences. The idea of all those sinners down on their knees asking for an indulgence from me is just way too exciting. This could end being a cornerstone of my mission to save the whole wide world and little old you. And it could bring in the big bucks, which means I could reach even more people with the good (and not so good) words.

Of course, if folks came to me for indulgences, they probably would end up going out and sinning some more- since I think we are all saved by a soupcon of sinning, now and again.