I FOUND IT ALONE AND BEING FORSAKEN

How do we live in the world, the world being what it is? The prme message of The Kingdom of the Wicked is that question concerning the Cross and those who first saw the Resurrection and wondered what exactly they were supposed to do with it. A world where a son of God rises from the dead is still the world where  hundreds of Christians are burned in the Circus and where life if common with injustice where people are more right than wrong and goodness more defeated than triumphant. Th prime question of Christianity has been mistated, how can evil happen in a world controlled by an all powerful all loving God. The question is , how does one live in such a world? How does one respond to it?  

There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all exaltation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself. It sees to the end of all temptations. As it bears no evil in itself, so it conceives none in thought to any other. If it be betrayed, it bears it, for its ground and spring is the mercies and forgiveness of God. Its crown is meekness, its life is everlasting love unfeigned; it takes its kingdom with entreaty and not with contention, and keeps it by lowliness of mind. In God alone it can rejoice, though none else regard it, or can own its life. It is conceived in sorrow, and brought forth without any to pity it; nor doth it murmur at grief and oppression. It never rejoiceth but through sufferings; for with the world's joy it is murdered. I found it alone, being forsaken. I have fellowship therein with them who lived in dens and desolate places of the earth, who through death obtained this resurrection and eternal holy life.

-James Naylor 1660

This is not a spirit of weariness, despair or indifference, the three things which, along with blindness, keep people who would be good from being good.

VAGUELY HELLISH THE NEXT DAY

The good thing about reviving the blog is I get to revisit myself, look at my life, reassess things. We tell ourselves an often tragic tale where we are the stars, remember how mistreated we were, how we were not loved enough, how nothing was enough, how no one appreciated our particular brand of genius. We forget the free and amazing love so often given. I think of what a good friend I was, how I was always there for those who needed me, never of how shabby I could be, short of temper, tired, distant, unseeing. I think of what a especially good lover I was, dedicated, untiring, and forget how tiring and mad I could be.

This last twenty-four hours, any twenty four hour cycle where I break my natural rhythm and go into work at a school, but especially a school I don't particularly like, has been tiresome, but not as tiresome as the end of it where, to my surprise--all the shit that hits you is shit you never quite predicted--I find a lawsuit from a credit card company and then that two of my futures sub appointments have been cancelled. I go to the message board and quickly pick up something new, something much more desired, for tomorrow than the one that cancelled me, but though the news of the lawsuit leaves me stoical, this thing almost undoes me.

As soon as I have picked up the new assignment, poof! It vanishes as well. What the hell. I get the phone call telling me what is going on and that I will be in this other position tomorrow and then, because I am so tired, I fall asleep. This whole early part off the night has been an uneasy resting, firstly because I was waiting for the new assignment to be posted, and then because I was waiting to talk about this new misfortune. Sometimes the only cure is talking.

Today I worked with a woman who cried the whole day. She said she just wanted to be happy again. I didn't feel smug at all because I somehow suspected misfortune was in my future, and now I wish I was the type of creature who cried more. It feels good to feel something besides this constipated sadness touched by fury, anger, worry perhaps. I do not know. I haven't unpacked my feelings. Feelings are in me like a rar file. They take a long time to come out. It may take the whole night. We may have to work the whole night and not feel alright until morning, and then get up and feel vaguely hellish the next day.

IN THE MORE MERCIFUL MOMENTS

In the more merciful moments, God speaks. I hear him speaking so clearly..

You can go home again. In fact, you must. The road simply won't be as easy as many think, and when you get there, it may not look like it used to.

In these more merciful moments I followed me senses and went to visit a friend who had been distant and strange for a time who finally told me about all that had been going on. The more merciful moments are when I sit on the steps of the Freemason Temple smoking a cigarette at ten at night, watching the cars roll by. In the more merciful moments I sit in prayer and remember the beauty of life.

Reassembling these abandoned blog pages is like reassembling the scattered parts of myself, a work of prayer almost. I realize the strong place of eroticism in my life. It isn't just titillation but exploration and a refusal of shame, a refusal of the ways of the world which always encourage shame and make us deny our first feelings.

BEAUTY AGAIN

Now that I m writing Witch's Blood again, I am going back through the old post, ging to the very first post to see how I have grown, how have I changed? Is there a consistency to me or am I am I a wholly different person? I think back then I wrote intentionally conversationally, but also like a teacher a preacher, here to deliver a lesson of good news, end on a good point, declare that there was a good point and of course this made lots of sense. I was a Christian then, and the Faith is all about the good news. One is sort of bound to make good news of life.

That isn't a bad thing. Just as often I have been, almost fashionably, about despair, about the bleakness, about sarcasm, French ennui and existentialism, and this makes sense too, for I was taking apart the sections of my life and now assuming, but rather examining what existed, what was true and what was not.

Now, I need to talk to you. I really need to learn how to talk to you again and not merely write to myself. There was a time I did that, posting things I never expected to be read in places it would be strange to read them.Now is the time for us to all have something to truly say and ears that really listen. Now is the time to remember how to speak.

What does strike me when I read this old me, this younger more Christian me, is the beauty I saw in a life that, looking back, was difficult and often painful. And I think I saw this beauty truly. Maybe i made some of it up, but in making it up, it was so. This was in the days before I left the Church, and it all became too much, so much became too much, things I can never go back to. But when I was there I saw a beauty and maybe I can learn not from churches, but from that younger self, to see beauty again.

DON'T STOP

Can it be seven whole years since the last time I wrote in this, my first blog, the blog that showed me the way, that united me with friends all over the world when I didn't have a damned thing to say. I was almost fresh out of college then, never having had a lover or finished a novel or gone to graduate school, having tasted pain, but not like the pain I would taste.  And now, here I am a bit away from forty hoping someone will read me, and I will have something to say again, hoping to develop the links I lost.

I come back looking for so many people. Some of you I've found but the post stop years ago. In this life it is one thing after another, and there are people who have walked beside me marching on. I hope they didn't stop. I hope that just because your blog stopped, you didn't stop writing. I hope that because things weren't easy or downright difficult that you kept on. Please, please don't stop.

Tonight I am calling to you. I am hoping, praying, weaving a spell really, that somehow you dear ones I have lost will know i am back again and we will keep up in this work of writing.

I guess after I came out or came into my queer life, I was so quick to have it and so in need to turn inward and find myself, that my blog post went from being queerer and queerer to flat out weird, and then I looked, and the links to all those I had been linked to were gone, my blog little more than a private and slightly mad journal. There is a whole other blog, perhaps appealing to some, where I had a tribute page with pictures, to all the men I had slept with, or as many as had their pictures up. What in the world?

Ah, but what in the world is this, as a queer person I was developing a queer ethic and that ethic will be for a queer and select audience. I imagine that page will stay up. i imagine some things will find their way onto both pages.

Writers, all artists, are looking for friends, and we are looking for them in unusual places. We are banking on finding them in books and in graves, in letters long ago written and ghosts who gather at our altars, all over the world. I hope that if you are reading you will come with me and be my friend on this adventure.