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, laddies and gentlewomen, I must admit I feel put upon. Now there are millions of people in the world that have it much worse than I do; but when I feel put upon reflecting on how much more shit some poor schmuck has to swallow does not make me feel better. It just adds guilt to an already un-fun little head space.

Things have been a wee bit difficult at the headquarters for my mission to save the whole wide world and little old you. I am torn- figuratively and literally. I literally have a torn calf muscle, which is keeping me on my backside in bed, which you’d think with my proclivities could be a lot of fun, but unfortunately isn’t. And I figuratively feel torn about what to say and do next. What is the next step to spread The Good (and Not So Good) Words to even more people even further away from me?

Things have plateaued. This is normal for anything building up from the grassroots, but it can be more than a little frustrating. It stirs up all my doubts about this project. This is when I return to Alain Badiou, the French philosopher, and remind myself that the best thing that he said was to “keep going.”

‘Keep going!’ Keep going even when you have lost the thread, when you no longer feel ‘caught up’ in the process, when the event itself has become obscure, when its name is lost, or when it seems that it may have named a mistake, if not a simulacrum!” Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

Y’all might think I harp on this but reminding yourself to keep going becomes very important when you do not have the certainty of conviction to prop you up. I do not know much for certain, even though I sometimes act and speak as if I do. It is easy for me to fall down into a puddle and slide off the path, even though it is a path I have chosen. My bossy as all get out voice and mannerisms belie it, but, in my heart of hearts, I am a true doubter. This means that I often get lost in a fog of my own dithering and doubting. Though sometimes, it is hard to distinguish real doubt from doubts trumped up by my reluctant, passive aggressive, don’t want to do much of nothing side to get out of working on something that may just not turn out the way I want it to.

It is not easy for me to stay the course. I have too many questions. I drop my bread crumbs down to mark a trail. I forge ahead. I secretly send birds questing to eat my trail. I cannot be sure of anything except perhaps where I am right now.

I find first person conversion narratives (doesn’t matter what faith) fascinating because they are about people connecting to something they believe in. I earnestly tried to be follow several different faith practices. But just when I started to think I could be part of this, whatever this was at the time, I found I could not let go of my doubts. I often appreciated other people’s devotion but could not devote myself. I was not called to be a follower of those faiths, even though I heard the faint echo of the reverberation of the call’s sounding for other.

I keep going because I believe- at least a little bit, some of the time- the world needs more preachers like me. More people to say that things are uncertain. More preachers to declare there are a million million shades of grey. More gurus to admit that there is no a clear cut set of four/seven/twelve steps/principles/laws that if followed will magically make everything all right. More people of the cloth to warn us that anyone who tells you there is One Answer is the worst sort of snake oil salesman. More religious figures to say, “I don’t know for certain. I’m making my best guess and seeing where that leads.”

Those of us who doubt, we just have to pick a path- knowing it is imperfect, knowing we will encounter contradictions while walking it, knowing that others will shake their heads and tell us we are going the wrong way. We say to ourselves, “Let’s try this.” Our faith is not in the particular path but in the walking of it. We have to move, one way or the other. We will be forced to move, if we do not choose. (Let’s not go into how our choices often are much more limited, more prescribed, then we would like to believe). Sometimes, it is useful to pretend that the path we chose is the “right” path, even if by that we mean the right for right now path.

When this mini-dark night of the soul is over, I will remain a doubting Thomas, but this time I am not letting my doubts- some useful, some worthless- completely derail me. I stay on track. I stay the course. I keep going. To spread The Good (and Not So Good) Words far and wide is my calling; the right for right now path I keep on keeping on.

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.

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.