Abraham, Isaac, Jacob

This morning at meditation, I am reminded of the injunction in the Zohar to, always upon rising and at the beginning of prayer, contemplate the three Patriarchs, the innovators of prayer: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. These there personify the qualities of love, judgement and beauty. To ground oneself in these three things: love, judgment, beauty is a powerful thing. I am all to eager to contemplate the trinity of ease, pleasure and self aggrandizement

Fold

And some time in the middle of praying and candlelighting the bitterness that was always there is lifted, the division I always felt is healed. I look around. These are all mine. All of this has a claim on me. I do not resist it. These people are as much mine as anyone else. There is no sentiment here, but a wonderful discovery. Like it or not, and i often don't. I am a Catholic. I was the first of my friends to loudly and decisively leave the church. Most of them ho hum about it, thinking about not going, not knowing how they feel. The truth is that Catholicism, or, for that matter, Anglicanism, anything ism has little to do with isms and everything to do with the people around you. Are you tied to them, or not. It is hard for any two people to get along. Three's a great challenge. Anything more than five and you've got a mess on your hands. But churches are hundreds and thousans and millions depending upon how you define church, and they exist for not just a year, but centuries, millenia. To feel the tie of two thousand years, to love the people around you despite everything, is to enter into the true mystery and lose all anger.

Fold

Something happened in those three days, the Triduum. Something happened amidst the candles ,the incense, the ritual. Not just the rituals in the Catholic Church, but in my Anglican one, and in my house, on my own. Something happened this Lent.

I became a Catholic again.

I thought that my issues with the church were only about a couple of years old, but I realize I have been bitter my whole life, and now, suddenly, the bitterness is lifted and these people are my people. That is really what religion is about. And so, with a great deal of trepidation, I admit to being Catholic again.

This does not mean that I will

1. become a Conservative
2. attend the Catholic parish anymore than I did in the past

or

3. pretend that the church isn't just as mysoginistic, homophobic and behind the times in its doctrines as it always was.

What it does mean is that:

1. religion is more than what's on the page of the cathechism and
2. Faith is not cerebral or logical.

What it does mean is that

I am not bitter.

Sacred

The tub is cleaned. I am about to make the bath with the salts and milk, with herbs and
incense. This is a bath of purification.

Today we don’t eat. Eatings not always necessary. The normal way isn’t always
necessary. Sometimes it muddles the mind. It is the Eve of Purim, it is Maundy Thursday.
It is the beginning of the Full Moon. Which am I celebrating? I don’t know. Silence.
Silence and peace. This is not a fast. Yom Kippur. Eat nothing, drink nothing. That is
fasting. Today we drink tea, water, juices. It is a day of purification. Cleanse my will, my
mind, my heart, my flesh. Prepare me. What am I here for? I don’t always know as I pour
the water. Maybe it doesn’t matter that I know. Maybe it only matters that I am here.

Feet

I did see you Sunday, in the palm procession. you looked like a mouse, or a rabbit, with those huge eyes and that sort of woebegone expression. You look like a Charles Dickens character. I always want to give you a bowl of soup or something. I didn't speak to you or touch you. I chose to ignore you. I had forgotten the one reason we are in this world is to love. We ought to show love at every opportunity. Every moment we have. Me, I thought, nothing has ever come of me showing love in this place. Everytime I put my hand out, my wrist is slapped.

The choir is singing before all of us as we go into the church. My God, it is too cold out here. It's snowing. Too cold for this.

And I am thinking, "Why should I do anything? Why should I even acknowledge him?" He looks as if he needs it, but if I don't do something, someone will. My God, my God, when will I learn. It isn't my responsibility to make everyone happy. This once... I will not do anything. Nothing I've ever done, especially for you, has ever lead anywhere.

Today I read in Sharon Cameron's book:

"Observe the impatience of your mind. Your mind wants to get ahead of where it is. Let me put it to you (plainly)... there is no destination to speak of.." Sister Dassaniya... said, "If you keep your attention on your feet, you can't be conceited."

Reading Left 2

By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and hunger. I write to record what other erase when I speak.
(Anzaldua 169)


There was Joyce and then Nicole and then others. My life couldn't be protected for very long. Friends never seem to let me be protected from anything. Everyone always wants to come out to me, and so there it is, for me to deal with, and how I feel and how the Church feels. The Church has already told me what is right and what is wrong. All of the Christendom that I grew up with told me. The Bible says so, we've been told. I know right from wrong. If my mind knows then why doesn't my heart care? When Nicole and Jennifer are in a fight, why do I want the fight to resolve? Why do I think what they have is wholesome? Why do I want them to have a happy ending. I need to know there is another way. I don't want it for myself, but I want to know that it exists, that it is valid, that the walls that were set around us are put up by men and not by God. The world I was brought up in was full of a goodness tinged with bigotry. Good girls like good boys. But the world I live in is becoming one where good girls like good girls and I like being left alone and seeing my friends happy. I read a book, to read if there is another world, a truer one, a place with more options.

He looked at me with his mouth open and his dark eyes very big... I laughed and grabbed his head... But this time when I touched him something happened in him, and in me which made this touch different form any touch either of us had ever known... Joey raised his head, and we kissed.
(Baldwin, 14)


To be straight and especially religious and straight, to read Giovanni's Room is to leave behind one sort of innocence and enter another. The moment I consent to read past chapter one, without reservations, without headshakes, without drawing a line between myself and the sexuality of the character is the moment I at least in part consent to be gay for the duration of the book, to hear a voice not heard before. Here I am in the course of two days, reading the most passionate love story I've ever read.
And then, in the end, Giovanni is dead. Giovanni is Baldwin's first overtly gay character but not the last. Whatever innovation the Black and bisexual Baldwin might have flouted, the one he never flouts is that having engaged in the heady world of homosexuality, someone must pay, someone must die. There must be a tragedy.
I look in on the window of the party.
Jennifer and Nicole are still fighting.
I need another way.

Why do I need another way, Dean?
Until you are free, I am not free. Don't you see that?

Reading Left: Part One

After working through college as a church sacristan, Dean applied to remain employed by this Catholic church at this Catholic university. Knowing the university and the Church's policy on homosexuality, he has simply opted to keep his sexual preference and his boyfriend to himself. I know Dean. Dean is not Dean's real name. He has everything to do with many of the literacy events in my young and slightly leftist life.



1.

Dean, let me reconstruct your face before I begin this. The reconstruction is a hard one, for one moment I look in your eyes and there is a sadness, another joy, and then there is the pride that is nearly as bad as the sycophancy. How to say the things I want to say to you. There's never been time. You see me in a church when you see me at all. My world is books. From the Bible to the Advocate the words I read have changed me, and as I change, so does what I read. This is the circle of literacy that makes the words from my mouth and the words out of my pen those of a leftist and a liberal.
Being born Black, Hispanic, Third World, female, gay or anything else that would be perceived as a minority, as something disenfranchised, does not make one an activist. That is my problem with you. I would expect that it would, that I am outraged and loud and longing because I am Black. Maybe not. Maybe it is because I am me. And I expect you to shout because you are what you are, because you showed me once and then never brought it up again. Does this make me naive or you weak? Or is there something in the middle?
I am holding to what Harold Washington said when he was mayor of Chicago, that Black people must be fairer than fair. That after a history of enforced bondage, rape, killings and misuse we, fortunately or not, have lost the right to carry this vengeance on anyone else. Because we've seen much misfortune, we are obliged to see it in others and stand up against it, as if it were our own. And so I could very well be a fool to think that I am angrier than you, though I open my mouth and say things out loud, and you sit on your hands and take it all in.

Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.
(Catechism, 566)

I am angry when I write this and angry with you for sucking it up and plastering yourself to a wall. There used to be so much color in you, and now it is gone. Sometimes there is such a rage in me I think I will explode. But maybe my out loud rage is better. Maybe it's safer than what smolders in you, beneath quiet eyes.

The act of writing is the act of making soul, alchemy. It is the quest for the self, for the center of the self, which we women of color have come to think of as the "other"-the dark, the feminine. Didn't we start writing to recognize this other within us? We knew we were different, set apart, exiled from what is considered "normal" white-right. And as we internalized this, exiled we came to see the alien within us and too often, as a result, we split apart from ourselves and each other. Forever after we have been in search of that self, the "other" and each other.

(Anzaldua 169)


That is why I write, but that is why I speak as well. Why I act. I know you've made the trade off, to shut your mouth and have a very little. The church job is so comforting to you, what the Church says is good to you for the most part. When I say a thing I see how it shocks you. You're not the first to open your mouth and gape, to wonder why I didn't play the game, why I will not shut my mouth.

Andrew's End

I got an e-mail. Actually, about six of us got an e-mail from Andrew at Andrew's Life officially saying that his blog had come to an end.

Well, here is Witch's Blood, still alive, and often written in sporadically. There was a time when I needed to post and I needed comments everyday, and there was a marvelous community of bloggers right here, at WB. Now is a time when I post once a week, and usually don't get comments. New people don't come very often, or if they do, they don't come again. And while we're being honest, I generally don't read other people's blogs very often.

Blogs and books have lives. They exist in different incarnations in different places. Sometimes many people are reading, and then again sometimes no one is. Sometimes all emotion is written into them, and then sometimes very little is written for a long time. But the way a blog does differ from a book is that it is never finished. This is never it. Witch's Blood today is what it is today, this article, this moment. And what it will be tomorrow. I can't often say.

Saturday i i

You have come back home
in this new skin things change now
and this house is new

tear down these rafters
knock down the walls and the floor
only you remain

The major problem this week was writing, that I had finished working on something and didn't know. I have been trying to lengthen Colossus of Rhodes, but I think it's done now for the most part. It will be the shortest thing I've ever written. Things are always changing. My writing style is changing. It's like I am always changing without asking my permission.

Saturday

I haven't written here all week. I've been writing other places, for other things. But the week was wonderful, the week was sacred.

The room still smells of incense after Shabbos prayers. Everyone here is purified. All minds are clear. The week comes to an end in holy peace.

Saint James is having a bookstore sale. The bookstore has been shut for a while. So I bought two rosaries, one of blue glass that was only five dollars, the one I'd always wanted, black beads, that was only one buck. It was a day of sales. At the incense shop a box of Nag Champa which ought to be at least-- on a good day-- six or seven dollars is there for two. The woman at the counter slips one of my bills back to me.

On the bus I take out the bag a sniff the incense. It is rich and deep. The boy across from me, black hair, black rimmed spectacles says, "What kind is that?" I pass it to him.

"That's the only kind you get. That's the good stuff he says."

I've seen him before, I think, last week he was going on a protest rally when the President came.

Monday

I’m not ready for class tonight. I’m so tired. I want to go right to sleep. I know that being
in class will wake me up, though.

This is a different type of tired. When I got out of bed I didn’t know if I could do all the
things I needed to do, wanted to do. This is a pleased weariness of a day fulfilled.

I thought there was so much I would have to write, but I have written all day after the last few weeks when I would just write about writing.