Spirituality and the Gay Experience

For this sixth installment of The Wild Reed’s special “Gay Pride 2010” series, I share an excerpt from theologian Daniel Helminiak’s insightful (though unfortunately out-of-print) book, Sex and the Sacred: Gay Identity and Spiritual Growth.

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Spiritual experience is at the core of homosexual experience. Considerations of coming out and of homosexual love suggest what I mean. Other facets of the homosexual experience could elaborate the point as well: the frequent development of deep, opposite-sex friendships in the gay and lesbian community; acceptance of all people despite social stereotypes; the homosexual experience of loneliness and rejection from earliest childhood; the need to express generativity apart from having children. And let us not forget the compassion, service, sense of humor, and heroic commitment that are so characteristic of the gay community and that are being publicly demonstrated in the face of the AIDS epidemic.

How many aspects of the gay experience demand delving into yourself and finding inner strength! Religions call this virtue. How much being gay demands personal integration and self-found wisdom! Religions call this spiritual growth.

Of course, I have been presenting an optimistic picture. If budding spirituality lies at the core of the gay experience, that spiritual dimension is often obscured and lost. What could be a profoundly spiritual experience often turns out to be defensive, angry, and desperate, or stylish, superficial, and cynical, or else sheepish, obsequious, and self-effacing. The reasons are many.

Organized religion simplistically and consistently misdefines the spiritual. Understandably, then, gay people often fail to recognize the spiritual dimension of their experience, so they often abort the spiritual dimension of their gay experience. The profoundly holy experience of coming out in painful honesty and responsible self-esteem gets sidetracked. Spirituality gets lost in a secret and murky subculture, in the blare of pounding rhythms, in the stupor of alcohol and drugs, in the fantasy of seductive bodies and irresponsible sex acts. The sacred longings for deep love and honest sharing get channeled into superficial and sham amusements.

What a crime! For survival’s sake spiritually sensitive and gentle people must deaden themselves to the music of their souls because the religions are blind to the very essence of the spiritual that they are supposed to foster.

Nonetheless and despite it all, the fact remains: Spiritual experience lies at the heart of the gay and lesbian experience. We need only to recognize and name it as such.

This understanding of spirituality is free from the domination and distortion of religious institutions. The key to the spiritual lies in the human heart. Buried there is a passion for honesty and love, for wholeness and integrity, for the lofty, the noble, and the worthwhile. Buried in the human heart is a passion to encompass the universe.

Being gay makes you grapple with your heart and touch its spiritual core. When you give that core the lead, the whole of your gay experience becomes a genuine spiritual experience. You walk on a path of open-ended growth, a path of constant self-transcendence.


For more of Daniel Helminiak at The Wild Reed, see:
The Non-Negotiables of Human Sex
In the Garden of Spirituality: Daniel Helminiak

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Gay People and the Spiritual Life
The Challenge to Become Ourselves
The Gifts of Homosexuality
Somewhere In Between
Sex as Mystery, Sex as Light
Getting It Right

For previous posts in The Wild Reed’s special “Gay Pride 2010” series, see:
Standing Strong
Growing Strong
Jesus and Homosexuality
It Is Not Good To Be Alone
The Bisexual: “Living Consciously and Consistently in the Place Where the Twain Meet”

For 2009’s “Gay Pride” series, see:
A Mother’s Request to President Obama: Full Equality for My Gay Son
Marriage Equality in Massachusetts: Five Years On
It Shouldn’t Matter. Except It Does
Gay Pride as a Christian Event
Not Just Another Political Special Interest Group
Can You Hear Me, Yet, My Friend?
A Catholic Presence at Gay Pride
Worldwide Gay Pride

Photo of the Day

An anti-gay preacher meets some loving opposition at the Twin Cities Gay Pride Festival - Saturday, June 26, 2010.

For more photos (and commentary) from Gay Pride 2010, click here.


Image: Michael J. Bayly.

Recommended Off-site Link:
Evangelist at Pride Festival is Taken in Stride - Abby Simons (Star Tribune, June 26, 2010).

LGBT Catholics Celebrate Being "Wonderfully Made"

In joy! Oh, in joy do we gather!
Knowing we are all the image of God.

Be strong! Oh, be stronger than hatred,
knowing we are the image of God.

We stand! Oh, we stand and we celebrate,
knowing we are the image of God.

"The Image of God"
Bret Hesla

A small but spirited group of Catholics gathered last night at the House of the Beloved Disciple in South Minneapolis for a "Catholic Mass in Celebration of Our LGBT Brothers and Sisters."

Sponsored by Dignity Twin Cities and the Catholic Pastoral Committee on Sexual Minorities, the Mass was intentionally planned to acknowledge and celebrate the presence of God in the lives and relationships of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals and families. Needless to say, given the official stance of the Church's clerical leadership on such matters, last night's Mass was not an official Archdiocesan event.



The readings for the day could not have been more perfect for the theme of this Mass of celebration of and with LGBT Catholics, as they all spoke of being called to fully embrace who God created us to be, and the power and strength that comes from truthfully and joyfully claiming who we are as LGBT persons and the living of lives of integrity based on this truth.

Hear me, O coastlands,
listen, O distant peoples.
God called me from birth,
from my mother’s womb he gave me my name.
. . . You are my servant, he said to me,
Israel, through whom I show my glory. . .

- Excerpted from Isaiah 49:1-6

My friend Kathleen (pictured above and at right with fellow musician Jeanne) led the Responsorial Psalm (Ps 139:1b-3, 13-14ab, 14c-15).

I praise you, for I am wonderfully made.

O God, you have probed me, you know me:
you know when I sit and when I stand;
you understand my thoughts from afar.
My journeys and my rest you scrutinize,
with all my ways you are familiar.

I praise you, for I am wonderfully made.

Truly you have formed my inmost being;
you knit me in my mother’s womb.
I give you thanks that I am awesomely, wonderfully made;
wonderful are your works.

I praise you for I am wonderfully made.

My soul also you knew full well;
nor was my frame unknown to you
When I was made in secret,
when I was fashioned in the depths of the earth.

I praise you for I am wonderfully made.

In the Gospel reading (Luke 1:57-66, 80), the act of naming can be seen as a metaphor for insistent and truthful claiming. Within the Roman Catholic Church, LGBT people must consistently claim the truth that they are made in the image of God, and that their relationships have the potential of being both sexually and sacramentally experienced and expressed. We claim this in the face of a clerical caste system that ascribes labels and names of untruth to our lives and relationships. In so doing we name ourselves as "wonderfully made" in the image of our all-loving God.

And so we speak, like John the Baptist's father Zechariah, "blessing God" for our recognition and full embodiment of the sacred gift of our lives as beloved LGBT persons of God.

. . . When they came on the eighth day to circumcise the child, they were going to call him Zechariah after his father, but his mother said in reply, “No. He will be called John.” But they answered her, “There is no one among your relatives who has this name.” So they made signs, asking his father what he wished him to be called. He asked for a tablet and wrote, “John is his name,” and all were amazed. Immediately his mouth was opened, his tongue freed, and he spoke blessing God.

- Excerpted from Luke 1:57-66, 80

My prayer is that all LGBT people may trust God's love of diversity and God's presence within the totality of their beings, and joyfully and gratefully accept the unique gift of who they are. And I pray, too, for members of the Church's clerical leadership: that they may open themselves to the loving presence of God in the lives and relationships of LGBT persons, and to the challenging yet liberating idea that our Church's teachings can and should be shaped by the findings of science and the lived experiences of LGBT individuals, couples, and families.



Left: Standing at right with Brian McNeill, president of Dignity Twin Cites. As I'm sure most visitors to The Wild Reed would know, I have served since 2003 as the executive coordinator of the Catholic Pastoral Committee on Sexual Minorities (CPCSM).







Above and below: After the Mass we gathered for refreshments and to hear Northfield author R.W. “Obie” Holmen discuss and read from A Wretched Man: A Novel of the Apostle Paul, his compelling and controversial book that, among other things, offers a gay perspective on Paul.

Rev. Jeffrey Bütz, Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies and Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University, notes the following of Obie's novel:

A Wretched Man is a stunning fictional account of the early church that reads like real-life. While a work of fiction, this just may be the most authentically historical novel ever written about the lives of the apostles.

Above: Standing at right with (from left) Art Stoeberl of Dignity Twin Cities, Obie Holman, and Dignity Twin Cities president Brian McNeill.

Obie maintains an insightful blogsite called Spirit of a Liberal, one that's included in The Wild Reed's blogroll. We're also both contributors to the "collaborative progressive catholic blogging site" known as The Open Tabernacle. Although we've corresponded by e-mail in the past, last night was the first time we actually met. And I must say it was a pleasure and an honor to finally meet him and his wife, and to hear him speak about and read from his wonderfully descriptive and entertaining novel.

Come! Live in the light!
Shine with the joy and the love of our God.
We are called to be light for the kingdom,
to live in the freedom of the city of God

We are called to act with justice.
We are called to love tenderly.
We are called to serve one another;
to walk humbly with God.

"We Are Called"
Text: Micah 6:8
Tune: David Haas

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
250+ People Attend Catholic LGBT Pride Prayer Service in Minneapolis
300+ People Vigil at the Cathedral in Solidarity with LGBT Catholics
Why We Gathered
The Many Manifestations of God's Loving Embrace
Celebrating Our Sanctifying Truth
Truth-Telling: The Greatest of Sins in a Dysfunctional Church
To Whom the Future of the Catholic Church Belongs
Choosing To Stay
Knowing What To Do, Knowing Why To Stay
Getting It Right

The Bisexual: "Living Consciously and Continually in the Place Where the Twain Meet"

For this fifth installment of The Wild Reed’s special “Gay Pride 2010” series, I share one of the best commentaries I’ve ever read on the issue of bisexuality. It’s written by Debra Kolodny and appears in the special “Queer Spirituality and Politics” issue of Tikkun magazine.

I have a number of good friends who identify as bisexual, and I’ve observed the dismissiveness and scorn that they often encounter from both the straight world and the gay community. As Kolodny notes in her well-written and insightful piece: “[the] ability to seemingly choose the sex of [their] partner has made bisexuals the scapegoats of people who fear abundant possibility.”

The part of Kolodny’s article that most resonates with me is when she writes:

With people of all orientations, serendipity, fate, hormones, emotions, and spirit interact in a wildly unpredictable dance resulting in attraction, courtship, and partnering. None of us feels particularly in control of any of these factors!

Indeed! But, oh, how wonderful it is to be caught up in that dance!

Anyway, following is Kolodny article in its entirety. Enjoy.

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Bisexuality – Theology and Politics

By Debra Kolodny

Tikkun
July/August 2010

Regardless of the structure, rituals, and principles of our path, and whatever the Divine name to whom we offer our prayers, bisexual and transgender people of faith live consciously and continually in the place where the twain meet.

Blessed with the capacity for our intimate relationships to transcend the socially constructed boundary of gender identity (masculine/feminine) as well as the biologically constructed boundary of sex (male/female), bisexual people embody and can therefore integrate and constructively deploy powerful theological insights that take others years to cultivate through practice.

Living fully into our destiny as b’tzelem Elohim (created in the image of a G!d who exists beyond and includes all gender identities, and who intimately and passionately loves every human regardless of gender identity) grants us access during everyday consciousness to the spiritual truth that souls are not bounded by mundane matters such as genitalia. As a result of this deep knowing, which many spiritual traditions hold as a goal of daily meditation and prayer, qualities like boundless compassion and appreciation of universal truths in the face of chaos, complexity, and even violence can be cultivated with greater ease. This, of course, can lead to a life of devoted service to people quite different from oneself or of mediating and healing conflict, helping transform unhealthy or even dangerous patterns in families, organizations, or nation states.

Despite these positive possibilities, our ability to seemingly choose the sex of our partner has made bisexuals the scapegoats of people who fear abundant possibility. Sadly, even the most tolerant and welcoming heterosexual ally has been known to challenge the decision to be in a same-sex relationship, knowing that as bisexual people we are capable of partnering with someone of another gender. Ironically, this is the height of homophobia! Failing to see worth in every soul-to-soul partnering, this position explicitly declares that if you can “help it,” loving someone of the same gender is not valid, is not holy, is not defendable.

The unfortunate framing of the lesbian and gay civil rights movement fed this paradigm and unwittingly fostered a degree of biphobia that still resonates in political, social, and spiritual contexts. Throughout the 1990s, the movement argued that sexual orientation was immutable – it could not change – and therefore was subject to the highest possible protection against discrimination. The immutability argument was chosen because it had been successful in securing and protecting rights based on race and gender under the fourteenth Amendment in decades past. In addition, the 1986 Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld a Georgia sodomy law, seemed to have closed the door on using constitutional privacy arguments to end discrimination based on sexual orientation.

An unfortunate side effect of the “immutability” argument was that it opened the door for the sentiment that if gay people could be straight they certainly would be, they just couldn’t help it – thereby seeing sexual orientations as similar to congenital illness. And of course, it lifted bisexuality up as the sacrificial lamb in the struggle, for bisexuals seemed to be able to choose, and if they can choose, they should, and they should choose to be heterosexual or suffer the consequences.

But does the red herring of choice really hold up under scrutiny?

With people of all orientations, serendipity, fate, hormones, emotions, and spirit interact in a wildly unpredictable dance resulting in attraction, courtship, and partnering. None of us feels particularly in control of any of these factors! We meet and fall in love with those who catch our eye, make our heart rate quicken, share our interests, make us laugh, smell right, “get” our quirks, and most often, whose culturally deemed level of attractiveness is about the same as our own. Is that exercising choice or accepting that fate/Spirit/God or luck operate through our attractions and we respond with delight and appreciation when it does?

More importantly, it is spiritually unsupportable to make lack of choice the criterion for social acceptance or legal rights. Even if choice did come into play, why should chosen attractions between consenting adults be less honored than other choices that are legally protected? The Constitution protects our rights to practice religion freely and to associate freely. Are we genetically Christian or Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, Pagan, Taoist, Bahai? Sometimes we stay in the path our our bloodline, but often we don’t. We play out our spiritual proclivities in the environments we feel called to, welcomed by, at home in. Sometimes faith is challenged and we leave. Religious conversion is accepted as appropriate and in some faiths, like many streams of Christianity, it is a critical component of the faith to bring in converts. Clearly we can accept, protect, and respect a core aspect of one’s identity when one isn’t “born that way.”

Thankfully, time bore out this truth in the legal arena. The privacy argument in Bowers v. Hardwick was ultimately redeemed in 2003 when the Court overruled its 1986 decision in Lawrence v. Texas. Stating that “Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today,” the court created a legal opening for a spiritual truth: love and love-making between consenting adult souls honors the soul’s boundlessness and therefore its holiness.

Indigenous traditions have long known this, identifying a role of the highest spiritual order for the person who loves someone of the same gender. Called gatekeepers by the Dagara of West Africa and berdache or Two Spirit by many Native Americans, these people were born into a special destiny, often shamans and revered leaders. May we catch up with these cultures, speedily and in our day.


Recommended Off-site Links:
Bisexuality and the Case Against Dualism – Stephanie Fairyington (Gay and Lesbian Review, July-August 2005).
Was Jesus Bi? – Mike Szymanski (Examiner.com, April 12, 2010).

For previous posts in The Wild Reed’s special “Gay Pride 2010” series, see:
Standing Strong
Growing Strong
Jesus and Homosexuality
It Is Not Good To Be Alone

For 2009’s “Gay Pride” series, see:
A Mother’s Request to President Obama: Full Equality for My Gay Son
Marriage Equality in Massachusetts: Five Years On
It Shouldn’t Matter. Except It Does
Gay Pride as a Christian Event
Not Just Another Political Special Interest Group
Can You Hear Me, Yet, My Friend?
A Catholic Presence at Gay Pride
Worldwide Gay Pride

See also the previous Wild Reed post:
Dan Furmansky: Why We Have Pride
Putting a Human Face on the "T" of "GLBT"
Living Lives of Principle

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Summer Rain

I captured these beautiful images yesterday afternoon in my garden after a gentle summer rain.









See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Spring Blooms
A Perfect Day
September Garden
Rainy October Afternoon
A Snowy December

Images: Michael J. Bayly.

Quote of the Day

There is no doubt that in the Middle Ages and subsequently up to twenty years ago, there was in the Church a centralization of powers. . . . A far greater failure of the Church’s mission can be identified much closer to home. Western Europe is increasingly post-Christian. With the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, [Roman] Catholicism increasingly lost the intellectual class. With the industrial revolution, it increasingly lost the workers. With the rise of democracy and the emergence of the modern secular state, it lost any privileged political position and has become increasingly irrelevant to the middle class. The seeds of this failure were laid in the increasingly sect-like characteristics of the [Roman] Catholic Church itself. Its hostility to the changes taking place in the modern world presented the Western world with too stark an option, of either [Roman] Catholic Christianity or modernity. A failure to recognize the more positive aspects of modernity and to embrace these has left the Church increasingly out in the cold. . . . For John Paul’s new evangelization to work, the Church first must get its internal house in order. As long as Europeans – or anyone else – perceive the Church as an oppressor of women, gays, and dissidents, it is unlikely to generate much sympathetic attention.

– John W. O’Malley
Vatican II: Did Anything Happen?
Pp. 168-9

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Truth About "Spirit of Vatican II" Finally Revealed!
Reading the Documents of Vatican II (Part 1)
Reading the Documents of Vatican II (Part 2)
Reading the Documents of Vatican II (Part 3)
A Church That Can and Cannot Change
Understanding the Old Catholic Church (Part 1)
Understanding the Old Catholic Church (Part 2)
Understanding the Old Catholic Church (Part 3)

In the Garden of Spirituality - Parker Palmer

“We are not on earth to guard a museum,
but to cultivate a flowering garden of life.”

- Pope John XXIII

I’ve been praying lately for clarity around my vocation, my calling, my path through this life. I shared this prayer with my good friend Joan last night and, as always, she offered encouragement and affirmation. She also shared with me Parker J. Palmer’s 2000 book Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. I’m finding it very helpful, and so thought I’d share an excerpt from it for this latest installment of The Wild Reed’s ongoing series of reflections on religion and spirituality.

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I first learned about vocation growing up in church. I value much about the religious tradition in which I was raised: its humility about its own convictions, its respect for the world’s diversity, its concern for justice. But the idea of “vocation” I picked up in those circles created distortion until I grew strong enough to discard it. I mean the idea that vocation, or calling, comes from a voice external to ourselves, a voice of moral demand that asks us to become someone we are not yet – someone different, someone better, someone just beyond our reach.

That concept of vocation is rooted in a deep distrust of selfhood, in the belief that the sinful self will always be “selfish” unless corrected by external forces of virtue. It is a notion that made me feel inadequate to the task of living my own life, creating guilt about the distance between who I was and who I was supposed to be, leaving me exhausted as I labored to close the gap.

Today I understand vocation quite differently – not as a goal to be achieved but as a gift to be received. Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice “out there” calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice “in here” calling me to be the person I born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.

It is a strange gift, this birthright gift of self. Accepting it turns out to be even more demanding than attempting to become someone else! I have sometimes responded to that demand by ignoring the gift, or hiding it, or fleeing from it, or squandering it – and I think I am not alone. There is a Hasidic tale that reveals, with amazing brevity, both the universal tendency to want to be someone else and the ultimate importance of becoming one’s self: Rabbi Zusya, when he was an old man, said, “In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”

. . . We arrive in this world with birthright gifts – then we spend the first half of our lives abandoning them or letting others disabuse us of them. As young people, we are surrounded by expectations that may have little to do with who we really are, expectations held by people who are not trying to discern our selfhood but to fit us into slots. In families, schools, workplaces, and religious communities, we are trained away from true self toward images of acceptability; under social pressures like racism, sexism our original shape is deformed beyond recognition; and we ourselves, driven by fear, too often betray true self to gain the approval of others.

We are disabused of original giftedness in the first half of our lives. Then – if we are awake, aware, and able to admit our loss – we spend the second half trying to recover and reclaim the gift we once possessed.

. . . We find our callings by claiming authentic selfhood, by being who we are, by swelling in the world as Zusya rather than straining to be Moses. The deepest vocational question is not “What ought I to do with my life?” It is the more elemental and demanding “Who am I? What is my nature?”

. . . Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic selfhood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks – we will also find our path of authentic service in the world. True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as “the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”

Contrary to the conventions of our thinly moralistic culture, this emphasis on gladness and selfhood is not selfish. The Quaker teacher Douglas Steele was fond of saying that the ancient human question “Who am I?” leads inevitably to the equally important question “Whose am I?” - for there is no selfhood outside of relationship. We must ask the question of selfhood and answer it as honestly as we can, no matter where it takes us. Only as we do so can we discover the community of our lives.

As I learn more about the seed of true self that was planted when I was born, I also learn more about the ecosystem in which I was planted - the network of communal relationships in which I am called to live responsively, accountably, and joyfully with beings of every sort. Only when I know both seed and system, self and community, can I embody the great commandment to love both my neighbor and myself.


Others highlighted in The Wild Reed’s “In the Garden of Spirituality” series include:
Zainab Salbi, Daniel Helminiak, Rod Cameron, Paul Collins, Joan Chittister, Toby Johnson, Joan Timmerman, Uta Ranke-Heinemanm, Caroline Jones, Ron Rolheiser, James C. Howell, Paul Coelho, Doris Lessing, Michael Morwood, Kenneth Stokes, Dody Donnelly, Adrian Smith , Henri Nouwen, Diarmuid Ó Murchú, Patrick Carroll, Jesse Lava, Geoffrey Robinson, Joyce Rupp, Debbie Blue, Rosanne Cash, Elizabeth Johnson, Eckhart Tolle, James B. Nelson, Jeanette Blonigen Clancy, and Mark Hathaway

Opening image: Michael J. Bayly.

Photo of the Day

Image: Michael J. Bayly

A Scientific Look at Vampire Mythology

I’m having some friends over tomorrow night to watch the first two episodes of season three of True Blood (which my friend David kindly recorded for me on DVD).

For some “intellectual preparation” for our getting reacquainted with HBO’s popular vampire saga, my friend Brian shared a truly fascinating, if rather morbid, article from The Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s written by Michael Sims, editor of the recently released Dracula’s Guest: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories.

Following is an excerpt from Sim's article, "All the Dead Are Vampires: A Natural-Historical Look at Our Love-Hate Relationship with Dead People."

________________________________________

As I worked on the introduction to the anthology, I merged the two main topics I write about: natural history and Victorian literature. I tried to look at vampires from a scientific point of view. After all, where did we get this fear that, once the sun goes down, the ghoulish undead climb out of their coffins and come back for the rest of us? It didn't emerge out of thin air.

The vampire story as we know it was born in the early 19th century, as the wicked love child of rural folklore and urban decadence. But in writing these depraved tales, Byron and Polidori and company were refining the raw ore of peasant superstition. And the peasant brain had simply been doing what the human brain does best: sorting information into explanatory narratives.

I found lots of reports of vampires from Europe — from urban France, rural Russia, the islands of Greece, the mountains of Romania. Along the way, I was reminded of something I already knew but hadn't thought of as relevant in this context: During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, dead bodies were a common sight. Plague and countless other illnesses ravaged every community. Corpses of the executed and tortured were displayed in public as warnings, even left hanging as they decomposed.

Few bodies seemed to rest peacefully even in the ground. Often people in the 18th century had an opportunity not only to see corpses but also to glimpse them again after they were buried. Urban cemeteries were densely overcrowded, sometimes with the dead stacked several graves deep, causing horrific spillage during floods or earthquakes. More corpses than the ground could accommodate resulted in the stench of decay and the constant risk of disease. Grave desecration was also common; a thriving trade in illicit cadavers for medical students joined a vicious rivalry between competing religious groups. After Louis XIV abolished the convent at Port-Royal des Champs as a hotbed of Jansenist heresy, drunken locals dug up nuns' bodies from the cemetery and fed them to their dogs. Corpses of executed heretics were dragged through the streets, then reburied in too-small graves by breaking the body into small pieces.

I found in older vampire stories that often the person who returns as a vampire was irreligious during life — irreverent, scornful of the infallibility of the church or the need for communion, for example. People worried especially about those who had been excommunicated and denied burial in a church-approved cemetery. If your soul didn't sleep peacefully in the arms of the Lord, what might it be up to?

In his 1746 compendium, The Phantom World, Augustin Calmet explored those questions. In a section headed "Do the excommunicated rot in the earth?," he examined the common fear that the body of a heretic does not decompose but instead lingers in the earth, profaning the laws of God in death as it did in life, polluting the ground with its sinfulness and disease. Unlikely comrades, such as natural philosophers and village priests, found themselves allied in an antipollution movement, lobbying for the segregation of cemeteries to rural areas beyond dense centers of population — where their rotting inhabitants could inflict less harm on the living.
The scholar Marie-Hélène Huet sums up the subtext of many early vampire accounts: “All the dead are vampires, poisoning the air, the blood, the life of the living, contaminating their body and their soul, robbing them of their sanity.”

As I continued digging into the literature, I wondered: If ordinary people were encountering the corpses of the recently dead or even long-dead friends and relatives, what were they actually seeing that they misinterpreted and then wove into a vampire mythology? Not surprisingly, no one understood the process of decay within a subterranean chamber. They had no forensic body farm at which to chart a corpse's fade from nauseating stink to cautionary bones.

Any variation from "normal" in the grave provoked fear, yet there isn't really much of a norm in the process of decay under different circumstances. Some coffins protect their residents better than others. Lime helps preserve a body, as do clay soil and low humidity. Graves in different climates and latitudes vary, depending upon air temperature and humidity, soil composition, and insects, not to mention those invisible sanitation workers who turn us all back into the dust from which we came—and of course in the 18th century, no one knew that such creatures existed.

Many natural changes after death were judged to be evidence that the late lamented had turned into a bloodsucker. Like hair, fingernails don't actually continue to grow after death, but as fingers decompose, the skin shrinks, making the nails look abnormally long and clawlike. You begin to look as if you're turning into a predatory animal. Dead skin, after sloughing off its top layer, can look flushed and alive as if with fresh blood. Damp soil's chemicals can produce in the skin a waxy secretion, sometimes brownish or even white, from fat and protein — adipocere, "grave wax." In one eyewitness account from the 18th century, a vampire is even found—further proof of his vile nature — to have a certain region of his anatomy in a posthumous state of excitement. The genitals often inflate during the process of decomposition.

And what about the blood reported around the mouths of resurrected corpses? That too has a natural explanation. Without the heart as a pump to keep it circulating, blood follows the path of least resistance. Many bodies were buried face down, resulting in blood pooling in the face and leaving it looking flushed. Sometimes blood also gets lifted mouthward by gases from decomposition. Vampire stories recognize that death is messy.

To read Michael Sim’s “All the Dead Are Vampires” in its entirety, click here.


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Blood, Sex, Magic: Welcome to the World of True Blood
This Bites
London Calling

Image: Stephen Moyer as vampire Bill Compton in True Blood.

It Is Not Good To Be Alone

That’s the number one reason, according to author and columnist Jay Michaelson, for why gay rights is a religious issue.

In his article in the special “Queer Spirituality and Politics” issue of Tikkun magazine, Michaelson lists ten reasons for why “religious people should not be for gay rights despite their religious’ teachings [but] because of them.” Accordingly, other reasons he lists include “God Loves Us and Does Not Want Us to Harm Ourselves,” “Compassion is Holy,” “Justice is Holy,” “Evolution of Religious Doctrine is Healthy,” and “Sexual Diversity Is a Beautiful Part of God’s Creation.”

I share today, as Part 4 of The Wild Reed’s special “Gay Pride 2010” series, Michaelson’s explanation for why “It Is Not Good To Be Alone” is at the top of his list of reasons for why gay rights is a religious issue.

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Opponents of same-sex marriage remind us that in Genesis, “it’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” But “Adam and Eve” is the solution to a problem: the existential crisis of aloneness. In fact, after the long series of good things God sees during the creation process, Adam’s aloneness is the first thing that is not good (Gen. 2:18). It is the first natural condition which, the Bible tells us, is not to be left as is. Love, togetherness, mutual support – these are the essential qualities of the partnership God creates.

Religious and spiritual people, then, are faced with a fundamental religious imperative to heal loneliness where we find it and to insist on the importance of human relationship in so doing. What is different today is that, unlike five thousand, five hundred, or fifty years ago, we now understand that sexual orientation is either genetically determined or determined so early in development as to be an essential, unchangeable aspect of the human soul. Thus, for millions of people around the world, to remedy this first, fundamental flaw of the human condition requires a same-sex relationship.

Of course, sexual orientation is a spectrum, not a binary, and for bisexuals and some others, there may be mutability. But a few bisexual experiences do not undermine a great many homosexual and heterosexual ones. For many people, the only way toward healing the split recognized in Genesis 2:18 is in a loving, same-sex relationship. Indeed, this is no doubt one reason that so many opponents of gay rights have insisted that sexual orientation must be changeable: because if it isn’t, then the traditional, homophobic interpretation of Scripture cannot be maintained. Of course, that is exactly my point.




For previous posts in The Wild Reed’s special “Gay Pride 2010” series, see:
Standing Strong
Growing Strong
Jesus and Homosexuality

For 2009’s “Gay Pride” series, see:
A Mother’s Request to President Obama: Full Equality for My Gay Son
Marriage Equality in Massachusetts: Five Years On
It Shouldn’t Matter. Except It Does
Gay Pride as a Christian Event
Not Just Another Political Special Interest Group
Can You Hear Me, Yet, My Friend?
A Catholic Presence at Gay Pride
Worldwide Gay Pride

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Dan Furmansky: Why We Have Pride
The Many Forms of Courage (Part III)
Making Love, Giving Life
Dew[y]-Kissed
Cherish

Interiors XV

Images: Michael J. Bayly.

Jesus and Homosexuality

On our way to Duluth yesterday, my friend Phil and I discussed a number of the articles in the latest issue of Tikkun magazine. The theme of this particular issue is “Queer Spirituality and Politics,” and some of the articles that address this theme include “Why Gay Rights is a Religious Issue” by Jay Michaelson, “Islam and Homosexuality” by Parvez Sharma, “Queerness in the Contemporary Goddess Movement” by Starhawk, “The Uganda Controversy: Solidarity Vs. Imperialism in LGBT Organizing” by Emi Koyama, “Bisexuality – Theology and Politics” by Debra Kolodny, and “Two Spirit Activism: Mending the Sacred Hoop” by Richard (Anguksuar) LaFortune. Yes, it's definitely a must-read issue of an indispensible magazine - a magazine refreshingly progressive, both spiritually and politically. Tikkun, after all, is a Hebrew word that means "to mend, repair, and transform the world."

All the more appropriate, then, that for this third installment of The Wild Reed's special “Gay Pride 2010” series I share an excerpt from an article by Jay Bakker (son of televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker) featured in Tikkun’s insightful “Queer Spirituality and Politics” issue.

Bakker begins his piece by admitting that for many in his faith tradition he is a “walking contradiction”: a Southern-bred evangelical Christian pastor and a gay ally. Yet he’s adamant that “it is precisely because” of his Christian faith that he is “compelled to stand up for my gay brothers and sisters in Christ.”

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In condemning homosexuality, evangelicals [and other Christians – including Roman Catholics!] hide behind the defense that they’re just “keeping it real.” It’s not their fault that they come off like callous jerks. They didn’t make up the rules. It’s God’s Law, His will. “Look it up,” they say. “It’s right there in the Bible. Right there in black and white . . .”

My response: we need to look to the Red. You know how, in many Bibles, Jesus’ words are printed in red type so that they can be more easily distinguished from the rest? Well, when we’re confronted with an issue as bitter and divisive as this – an issue that is literally tearing apart Christian families, congregations, and entire denominations in two – we’ve got to look to Jesus for answers. We’ve got to look beyond the black and white. We’ve got to look to the Red.

A friend of mine has a T-shirt that frames the issue nicely. The front of the T-shirt reads: “What did Jesus say about homosexuality? Answer on back.” But when you turn around, the back is blank.

That’s right: Jesus cared so much about homosexuality that he mentioned it exactly zero times. He thought it so central to his message of love, so fundamental to his mission of redeeming the world, that he never touched on the issue in the course of his entire public ministry. Yet, somehow, this single issue (and our response to it) has come to define Christianity in many people’s minds.

. . . When we make people feel unwelcome in our faith community because of who they are and how they love, we miss the true meaning of Christianity. We get lost in the black and white. We place false limits on God’s bigheartedness when we organize rallies against gay civil and religious rights. We violate God’s Grace and the principle of unconditional acceptance when we persist in the ill-founded idea that gays could – or should – deny their orientation [and/or its expression] in order to belong to our churches.


For previous posts in The Wild Reed’s special “Gay Pride 2010” series, see:
Standing Strong
Growing Strong

For 2009’s “Gay Pride” series, see:
A Mother’s Request to President Obama: Full Equality for My Gay Son
Marriage Equality in Massachusetts: Five Years On
It Shouldn’t Matter. Except It Does
Gay Pride as a Christian Event
Not Just Another Political Special Interest Group
Can You Hear Me, Yet, My Friend?
A Catholic Presence at Gay Pride
Worldwide Gay Pride

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Our Limitations, Not God’s
A Christian Case for Same-Sex Marriage
Bishop Spong: "Homosexuality is Not Unnatural
Jesus and the Centurion (Part 1)
Jesus and the Centurion (Part 2)
Song of Songs: The Bible's Gay Love Poem
Gay People and the Spiritual Life
The Gifts of Homosexuality

Opening image: Robert Powell as Jesus in Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth.

Sunday in Duluth

For quite some time now I've had the rather strange idea of one year wintering in the northern Minnesota port city of Duluth. The operative word is "strange." I mean, I've generally only ever visited Duluth in the summer, and so can only imagine that it's a rather inhospitable place in the dead of winter.

Yet still, there's something about its no-nonsense maritime atmosphere that makes me think it would be something special to hunker down and make it through an icy, frigid winter there - like some iced-in freighter defying the northern darkness and its chilling-to-the-bone winds.

Yet as these photos attest, my latest visit to Duluth took place nowhere near winter. Rather, I visited the city today with my friends Phil and Noelle - and, of course, my sweet boy Quinn - on a beautiful spring day - the last day of spring, in fact. The rationale for our visit? Nothing more than to get out of the Twin Cities for a day and enjoy each other's company while taking in the unique sights of Minnesota's fourth largest city.

Warned of construction work on Minnesota's Highway 35, we opted to travel to Duluth via the more scenic Wisconsin 35 route, passing through charmingly named towns such as Luck, Frederic, Dairyland, and Moose Junction on our way to Superior, just across the state line from Duluth.



Our first stop was the Park Point Recreation Area, a long sand dune between Lake Superior and Duluth Harbor. The Area's website notes that:

The dense hardwood-pine forests, red and white pine forests, and sand dune beach habitats offer excellent opportunity for birding. Along with songbirds, look for common terns, and the occasional peregrine falcon. A public beach, a beach house with concessions, a short paved trail, picnic pavilions, playgrounds, recreational fields, and sand volleyball courts are all a part of the experience.

I certainly noticed the trees . . .



But actually think the most popular attraction this day was Quinn . . .




Back in Duluth proper, I posed with Phil and Quinn while perched (rather uncomfortably) on some kind of moose throne (left).




We then visited the city's famed Aerial Lift Bridge (above) and one of the lighthouses of Duluth Harbor (below).








See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Northwoods
Trempealeau
Climbing Barn Bluff
Mississippi Adventure
Road Trip to St. Louis