All Together, Now

I made a statement recently that is both monstrous and true: I no longer believe in the future. It’s an awful thing for me to admit, being an optimist and romantic. Well, it sounds awful. The other side, the shiny, crowned head, is the fact I have not lost my faith. I’ve merely refocused it on a belief that resides in tension with one which cleaves to the future. In that tension is a struggle between the immediacy of the moment (thought, erroneously, to be fleeting) and the scintillating glimmer of that distant and uncharted land: the Future. The Future, until now, has always won. One day, we will do many great things, like take the vacation of a lifetime, or learn another language, or perhaps take up some demanding athletic pursuit. One day, we will have our fifteen minutes (but we want to lose ten pounds, first). One day, our consort will arrive, all dressed in fancy hosiery.

But as chaos descends and entropy sets in, the Future is not looking so hospitable to flights of whimsy. It’s just not looking very hospitable to much of anything at all. Oil is spewing left, right and centre, corporations grasp after human rights, in order to control the political processes of the principal continuing democracy in the world, police run riot in Canada, the USA and anywhere else police seem to be found and there are more refugees in the entire world, than in my country. Somewhere on the earth’s increasingly hostile surface, roam a staggering 35 million human souls; more than all the people in Canada. We are not talking about North American homelessness, which is a separate army of disenfranchisement, misery, neglect and public apathy. We are talking about innocent human beings, picking up what little there is left of their lives and walking until they drop to escape the barbarism of the human animal, when it smells money, land, resources (power).

Ugliness roils, like in that dream some time ago, in which the sky opened and a tornado touched the ocean. The water seeped up through the carpet in my third floor apartment, as I looked down at my feet and awoke, forcing my eyes open. The Boschian gremlins caper madly, their faces distorted with malice, around and around, looking drunk with it. They stab the air, bellowing “USA! USA!”, leaping in the air, as their bellies ululate, threateningly. I wish it was so simple as forcing my eyes open in the instance of these most objectionable, leering gremlins. I am not alone.

As the Gulf of Mexico, its people and its eco-systems become the front line in the war that is before us, it’s evident it is not unique. Oil disasters abound. China, the Gulf, Michigan, Nigeria (but only for a decade, as we slept off our Big Mac Attacks). Every day it seems, the fangs of the Captains of Greed become longer; more prominent. They are yellow and foul, dank with excess and obsession. Every day, the people look upon it, transmogrifying from the friendly, suited, middle-aged (and yet, still virile) Mr. Cleaver of Industry, into a Beast with many heads, many fangs and tentacles that both suck and strangle. The Boogie man cometh. He is right out of the closet and there is no more denying that Mr. Cleaver of Industry is not quite as nice as he seems. He is the alien among us. He is the thief, lurking in the garden, waiting to break into our homes (and steal our pension funds). He is the smiling con man, shaking your hand with one of his, while cocking a pistol, behind his back. We now, officially, have the motherfucker’s number.

Right now, this very minute, people all over the world are sitting up a little straighter and cocking their heads to one side. Somewhere, somebody is waking up with a bad, bad hangover. The true face of Mr. Cleaver, sneering from the depths of the Gulf of Mexico, paddling in a river in Michigan, lounging in a cabana in Nigeria (as he counts his money, piling it up in monuments to himself and his pathology) has been seen by those who are not in the habit of looking very closely, if at all. They have recognized, in him, the alien beast of so many horror films. They have seen, with their own eyes, all those evils long written off, that they once passionately knew were real. They have remembered, now. One by one, the lights are coming on, even as they begin to go out.

The interesting days we live in are the dung in which the lotus grows. They’re the stable in which a refugee baby is once born, in Bethlehem. They’re Moses found in the rushes and standing on the mountain top. They’re shattering our most beloved illusions about what the world is and how it works. A shattering apart is a trauma. None of us has really seen the world in anything like the turmoil it is now in. It frightens and it hurts (our children, the lies). We have slept as others have lived this and we have carried on, creating these conditions by our unconscious acceptance of our accustomed privilege. As others, who had little or nothing, were exploited and their countries destroyed by the Captains of Greed, we inflated, obscenely. Our vehicles, commensurately, accommodated our physical abundance. We wanted fries with that and we wanted them served to us while sitting in our large vehicles, tanks brimming with the most addictive of substances on the planet. That world is dying. It crumbles around us and chokes us with its fumes. It eats at us, as we ask ourselves what we were thinking. It’s now our commission to fight the war others have been fighting for far too long, as hope is born in the recognition of the enemy and in solidarity with all peoples of the earth. We now understand we share their fate and lives: The truth, for once.

To begin to truly apprehend the horror of these days and to recognize our complicity (whether expressed and maliciously intended, or not)in arriving at this ignoble station, is to encounter our own shadow. As in the baptismal ceremony, wherein the catechumen descends into the waters of death, to be reborn, ascending; day will follow night, as the lights come on all over the world. Light is one. Light is now. Light is what we are, together. There's nothing more to fear.

Babylon

To be honest, it’s never before occurred to me to visit Las Vegas. Images of cheesy lounge singers and feather-bottomed chorus girls dance before my eyes when I think of that town...and Elvis in his polyester bell bottoms and aviator shades. I’m not a gambler (not even slots), so why bother?

This year, though, summer came ever so reluctantly to Vancouver. Each day I awakened to the same leaden skies, with temperatures as low as 12° Centigrade some mornings, despairing of ever wearing sandals on my feet again. One such grey, damp evening, right before the Canada Day long weekend, I decided I’d had enough. Where could I go to escape the oppressive cloud cover forecast to plague the long weekend? Not Vallarta...thunder and lightning. Not Hawaii (see Vallarta). So I checked out the five day forecast for Vegas and there they were: five little sun symbols, all in a row, accompanied by temperatures of 100° Fahrenheit and above. My mind was made up.

That’s how I ended up going to Las Vegas. It’s possible I may go again, I suppose, but not very likely. The planets may align in such a way as to compel me to escape from the sodden rain forest, yet again. I can accept that this may happen. I kind of hope not, though. I have discovered that Las Vegas is none other than Babylon itself; the very asshole of the Beast and not for the reasons the TV preachers tell you, either. Las Vegas is America’s subconscious. It’s the truth under the thundering sermons and all those imperative Family Values. It is Babylon in the desert; corporate culture laid bare for all to see, if you can see past the lights, the feathers, the bread and the games.

It’s not the gambling, so much, that disturbs. It’s not the drinking (I like to shoot a few back, myself). It’s not the roving packs of early onset alcoholic 20-somethings that stagger about amidst the twinkly lights, or their apparent self-obsession. It’s not even the 24 hour hum of lights that never go out, the roar of Harleys parading the strip as a salve to middle age, or the cackles of the Boschian hordes, celebrating a pile of nickels. There is so much more about Vegas that chills my blood.

Consider that to walk down the Strip, one has to pass dozens and dozens of sparsely compensated men and women, handing out business cards promoting legal prostitution. They wear t-shirts emblazoned with the words “GIRLS TO YOU IN 20 MINUTES” and a 1-800 number. It occurred to me, as I refused card after card offered to me by these people, that many of them might be undocumented. No matter. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Piping hot to your hotel! Fresh chicken, chow mein, sweet n’ sour pork. Girls. Girls. Girls. Fast food to you...in twenty minutes. Just girls, like me. Dumb girls to be consumed and discarded, a wrapper lying in the gutter the only remembrance of the moment another man bought them. Bodies are for sin and this is Sin City.

There were both men and women engaged in the activity. I wonder how much they were paid by the pimps (known to some as businessmen) to commodify women in the streets of Las Vegas. Probably not much in this America where cheap labour is sought out via cross-border solicitation, but no documentation provided. Where people are bid “come”, with one hand and “get out”, with the other.

But the pimping doesn’t even begin to stop there. It continues, poolside. Overheard:

Thirtyish woman: “So, are you gonna fuck Nicole?”

Early twenties male: “What about you?”

Thirtyish woman: “I have a boyfriend. I don’t do that.” (But she will pimp for her pal).

Eyes are razor like, examining the bodies of others. A couple spends the afternoon seeking out a third (a woman, of course), languidly eyeing up possibles. I fall under their gaze and look away, sliced open and exposed to their lascivious hungers; bored with each other to the point of self-destruction. Flesh is cheap here. It’s a fabric, not human, not with blood. We wear it, we tan it, we give it away to someone we don’t know just for the hell of it. We have another drink and put another nickel in the slot machine. Next. Back at the casino, the hunt for satiation continues. Buffet-fattened males in toupees prowl listlessly among the slot machines and roulette wheels, cradling condensation-speckled cocktails, leering after the procession of skirts, booze-addled. A cocktail waitress with a Rose-Marie bow in her hair moves among them, navigating as a ship would around icebergs; wary and vigilant.

People come to Vegas to gamble and gorge. While I know of no actual, functioning Vomitorium in the city, surely there should rightfully be one. There should a place of purging, facilitating an ever-escalating bacchanal of excess in this, the symbolic terminus of Western Civilization’s decline. Imagine all the wandering packs of revellers, barfing into a trough with abandon, only to lurch out into the night for yet another round of gamblin’ n’ gorgin’. I suppose this might be putting too fine a point on it, though, for people come here to forget the banality of their everyday lives. They come to burst open the puritanical shell of propriety they wear to be “nice” and “good”. They come to get their nasty on. Why vomit up all that money you’ve spent to get unconscious? Why vomit up all that fine booze, all that groaning buffet? A waste, to be sure. One doesn’t want to see the evidence of one’s grievous excess swimming in a puddle of vomit, whirling down a drain with that of one’s fellows. Better to hold it in; to toxify, good and proper, than to see it. Turn off your inner voice and keep swilling. Tomorrow, Western Civilization will still be in decline. The day after, perhaps submerged in a sea of tar balls and dead oceans; the corpses removed under cover of night.

I went to Vegas, too. I went for the weather and came home with food poisoning from some room service scampi. That is where I have chosen to locate the source of my nausea. In two and one half hours, I vomited once, twice, a third time. In the great tradition of the privileged (for I count myself among that select group), I went where the weather suited my clothes. I burned across the sky in an airplane, belching fossil fuels, to a city where the lights are never turned off. I descended into the belly of the Beast; the great, leering pimp at the Terminus of Western Civilization and beheld its ugliness: an alien creature, disguised as a facsimile of a grinning, Pagan god. But it was not Bacchus I met there. It was Mammon, it was Mot, it was Ahriman: greed, death and evil. I now know what was keeping me away.

What happens in Vegas is supposed to stay there. It is supposed to be buried under the sands of the desert, concealed and forgotten, as the sinners of Sin City return to their jobs, their wives, their husbands, their children and their properly industrious and upright lives. But I confess. As the waters of chaos close in, all around us, Las Vegas is already a remembrance on the way to a forgetful death, under the sands of the desert, at the foot of those painted hills. I close my eyes and picture it, submerged, people on horseback marvelling at the decadence of the late 21st Century and wondering how it was that such a society could have lasted as long as it did.

I confess that I built Babylon, with my own hands.

My letter to Landrieu, Serpas, Jones, Fielkow and Clarkson

If you're reading this, I encourage you to write to:

Mitch Landrieu's FB page: His friends might as well see what you have to say.

Serpas: NOPDChief@cityofno.com

Roger Jones: rjjones@cityofno.com

Arnie Fielkow: afielkow@cityofno.com

Jackie Clarkson: jbclarkson@cityofno.com

Join the FB site: Don't Stop the Music! Let New Orleans Street Musicians Play. Lend your support to the musicians and culture of New Orleans, the most unique city in North America.

(The image is from the FB page. Thanks to Lisa Palumbo for not killing me for slapping it on my blog).

I am writing to you from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, as a great admirer of your city and its culture. I preach the gospel of the City of New Orleans wherever I go, extolling the virtues of your people, their culture, their hospitality and most of all, their music.

I am deeply saddened to hear that the City has seen fit to attempt to cordone off public space from the exercise of true and authentic New Orleans music. As I have walked the streets of the French Quarter over the past year (over three unique visits), I have been delighted, time and time again, to find musicians playing in the streets, making some of the most beautiful music you can hear, anywhere. This is what New Orleans is known for, primarily. The fact that your airport is named for Louis Armstrong, a principle figure among the many internationally known, loved and admired musicians your city has given the world, bears witness to the primacy of music in the ever-bubbling, hyperproductive cultural cauldron that is New Orleans.

I am not about to offer expressions of respect to any of you, or kowtow, or beg. I am not about to tell you I understand that the poor, set upon residents of the French Quarter need their rest, so I "get it". I'm just going to tell you that this is one of the most hamhanded, ridiculously inept pieces of bad judgement I have ever seen perpetrated by any public institution, at any level of government, in any country (and I lived in Italy). Simply: people come from all over the world to see and hear the music New Orleans has blessed the world with. Personally, I had wanted to see TBC play on the very corner the NOPD harased them at, during my last visit. It was with horror that I read, during my visit, that Brandon Franklin had been murdered, which explained TBC's absence from the corner they've been playing at for almost a decade. Now, to add insult to injury, Chief Serpas' officers walk up to these young men, still in mourning and ask them to sign acknowledgements of their understanding of some arcane by-law that hasn't seen the light of day in so long, it's utterly without meaning. The protestations of Chief Serpas' commitment to upholding the letter of the law as strictly as possible rings as hollow as Justices Roberts' and Alitos' hollow claims to "constructionism". It's a stupid law from the 1950s. Nobody needs quiet at 8 pm and, if they do, they should not be living in the French Quarter. I'm sure you'll agree it's a wrongheaded place to park if you go to bed at 8 pm. The insensitiviy only adds to the absurdity of the entire situation and only makes the lot of you look even more out of touch with the community you have been commissioned to serve and simple reality than you already do.

Here's some reality for you: I spend about $2.2-2.5K each visit. I plan to visit again very soon, in order to spend more money in your fine city. You'd be very well advised to understand that there are many others like me and they are signing the petitions, commenting on the internet and madder than hornets about this nonsense. They are not on your side, either. If you do the math, it's clear my measly little chunk of change is not about to make any dents in anything. I'm just one of the "little people" BP's PR robo-suit was talking about. Now multiply me by a few thousand today, a few more thousand next week and on and on, exponentially. That could happen, should this misguided enterprise not be immediately abandoned. Now, we are talking about one hell of a lot of money. I know New Orleans needs it and I'm not about to say that I won't be coming down there anymore. The thing is, all these people like me have plenty of resources and plenty of connections. None of you is smelling too much like a rose at the moment, I'm sure you'll admit. It could smell worse. It could smell a whole lot worse. This story has legs and you would do well to remember that, as you consider how this business will play out.

There is much to do in your city. There are many challenges that require your attention. Gun violence, for one thing, is rampant. People need jobs. People need housing. Children need schools. One thing that is not a problem, at all, is street music. These shadowy "residents of the French Quarter", appear to be just that: shadows. I don't know who you think you're doing a favour for, or who you think you're appeasing. The fact remains that the negative response this endeavour has elicited, from quarters as far flung as Australia, Switzerland and Canada, should be your very first clue. We don't even live there, yet we feel compelled to approach you with our outrage in the hope that you will back down for the sake of the musicians and the people who love them. The thing is, people who live there mostly feel the same as we do, from what I can tell. That's a thought for you to ponder, as you work on behalf of the people and not for a handful of NIMBYs that live in the noisiest neighbourhood going, yet somehow believe they should hear nothing but the the distant strains of cover bands out of the open doors of Bourbon Street bars, after 8 pm.

As public servants, you have sorely strained your relations with the people who pay you and with those of us who support the city, its cultural traditions and its people. I strongly recommend you find a materially more equitable way to do things. This has made you look like a pack of neophytes, oblivious to the needs and desires of your constituents and employers (the people) and the culture which you are, as public servants, enjoined to preseve and uphold. There is no other explanation for such a hamfisted display of institutional puffery and intimidation. You need to think again, because this is not going down the way you want it to.

Yours truly,

JW

Vancouver, BC Canada

I'd Crawl to New Orleans

I'd crawl to New Orleans. Hyperbolic, but expressive of my deep affection for a city that is revelatory to the senses in a way no other is. Woven into her fabric is some kind of passion that seeps up out of the ground and rains down out of the sky. It bubbles on the mouths of the people. It slinks between the wrought iron balustrades and cloaks the night in deep, indigo velvet. It’s the sound of brass, pumping out of the cracks in the sidewalk, like a heartbeat in the earth. The sousaphone’s call beats the air as a thousand feet move, in response. Humidity, thick and dense with it all, clings. The scent of subtropical sidewalks drenched with rain, ascends; vanquishes heat by transforming it into respite. Again, the sun blazes forth. Steam rises from peaked roofs and the mute pastels, chameleon like, are transfigured. This ambient passion creates a revolution in anyone who approaches this city with even the tiniest crack in the heart. In it rushes and one is lost.




One is lost to the great Mississippi, churning, or placid, the leaves of the oak trees graciously dappling the ground with shade, neutral ground the domain of Dog. Of all the beauty in this city, though, none is so beguiling as that of the people that live here, for they are the source of the passion. As a way of life, these people create New Orleans as the mystical jewel it is, on a daily basis. Their faces reflect history and defy it at the same time. From their mouths comes honey that nestles into the ears. They sound the trumpet. They beat the drum. They smile at you like they mean it, because they do. Without these beautiful people, their faith and resilience, there would be no New Orleans. It’s through them that God has broken into a bend in the Mississippi River and shone forth.




Inspired talent grows wild in the streets. Everywhere, enthralled at the sheer magnitude of it. Running through it all is the familiar thread that joins the disparate communities of the city together, which is pure New Orleans. Tiny rooms filled with as many bodies as possible. Bands that cook with a fire so hot, you feel you’ll cease to exist if you don’t dance, right now. Children with trombones bigger than they are, tapping on Bourbon and blowing your mind, second lining like they learned it in a past life and never forgot. A woman blowing a clarinet rises slowly from a kitchen chair in the middle of the street, eyes shut and the air fills with her passion.

The man is almost angelic in appearance, small; fine-boned. He stands and takes the mic and hearts expand with the sweetest sound that can be heard by the human ear. Through his throat, out his mouth and into the ether it flows, warm and resonant, nurturing all hurt into wakeful joy. The stage throbs under the weight of the band, as the smoky air bristles with trombones and the clarion call of the trumpets provokes us to leap as one. Somebody screams. Beer flows. Smoke, bourbon, sweat, love, crazy passion and you want to stay lost.

RIP Dr. Dorothy Height: The Torch is Passed

Dr. Dorothy Height was laid to rest today in a manner befitting a hero. The Celebration of her life, a life that did so much to “make more perfect the union”, in the words of the President, took place at the National Cathedral. All over America, by order of the President, flags flew at half staff. A soldier in the struggle for the full inclusion of all Americans, Dorothy Height’s departure from our midst was marked by an appropriate level of ceremony, gravity and communal recognition for her lifelong contributions to the betterment of the United States. With all due respect, Dr. Height’s timing could not have been more ideal.

In 2008, I travelled to Memphis, Tennessee to participate in the 40th Anniversary memorial of the martyrdom of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The media descended on the city in great numbers. In the midst of the Presidential primaries, Hilary Clinton and John McCain were in attendance, while the future President was not. John McCain chose this solemn occasion to apologize for not having supported the institution of Martin Luther King Jr. day. He was booed by most, but vociferously forgiven by at least one woman. He left the stage to chants of “No justice, no peace”. Most of the people assembled for the day knew exactly where John McCain stood, in reality; apology or no apology. The truth is that he later voted not to fund the holiday, which says more about how sorry he was about his original opposition to it than any words that came out of his mouth on April 04, 2008. In a majority Black city, on such a day as that, it is a wonder he even felt worthy to show his face to its citizens, much less attempt to mouth mea culpas in confrontation of his voting record, in the midst of the Primaries.

Most striking about that rainy day in April, was the attendance. A morning march through intemperate spring weather was understandably small. The evening rally and march were materially larger, yet still not to the point I was moved by the sheer numbers. I had expected many, many thousands of people. I had expected people of all ethnicities. Even though the rains of the morning abated long enough for the march to make its way to the Lorraine Hotel in relative dryness and comfort, I remained unimpressed by the turnout. Forty years on from one of the darkest days in American history, it seemed there were very few people marching by my side that were not identifiably Black. Those that were of other ethnicities were, overwhelmingly and strikingly, not white. All the Tavis Smileys, Jesse Jacksons, Al Sharptons and King progeny in the world could not shake loose in me the sinking feeling that America (including Black America) had somehow consigned the Civil Rights Era to the distant past; a relic of history. On reflection, it would seem America believed these struggles to have concluded long ago, Barack Obama’s post-racial America a shining reality redressing the old pain; the dogs set on children, the people falling in heaps as they marched across bridges, the bodies dug out of swamps, the noose and the hood.

But we know so much better than that.

We know that in the wake of the Fair Housing Act, myriad ways were found to circumvent it. We know about the block busting, the redlining, the mortgage scams, the blood relative ordinances. We know that in the wake of the Civil Rights Act, the same is true: that wherever a racist can stand in the way of those he wishes really were less than himself, he will do so and we know that he did just that in voting precincts across the United States in the 2000 election (most notably, in Florida). We know that the racist will find language to cloak his intent. He will say “communist, nazi, socialist, arrogant” instead of “that old favourite”. We know he will celebrate the Confederacy, regardless of the fact it was a seditious force that almost ruined the nascent United States for the sake of maintaining the most evil estate of slavery. We know he will stop you in Arizona (and possibly seven other states, following on from that misguided piece of politicking) for your papers if your skin is brown. We know he will never be satisfied until he is dead. He will peck at those he wishes to oppress for the sake of his own pretension to some kind of superiority. We know, but we forget. Maybe we just get so used to his noise; accustomed to his chicanery, that we shrug our shoulders in resignation.

The problem with resignation is simply that the societal cancer of racism will continue to eat away at the fabric of American society until there is nothing left. It will set America’s cities ablaze, or drown them. It will eat America’s young. It will take lives, dignity, self-respect and potential and trample it with wilful violence, until it is legislated into submission. That lesson has already been lived and learned, for we saw it unfold in the 1960s. I still remember the faces of the people screaming at youths sitting at lunch counters, the snarling dogs, with their teeth bared at vulnerable flesh. I can superimpose them, in my mind, on the faces of those who have taken up the building drumbeat of hate enveloping the United States today, on the day Dorothy Height was laid to rest.

On this day, President Obama has most pointedly drawn America into a renewed discussion of the era Dr. Height represents, as more than some distant time. He has made it real to millions of young people, who may never have heard of Dr. Height. He has reignited the flame of heroism in the service of one’s nation (true patriotism), which is rooted in the deepest love of one’s fellow citizens and in the thirst for a justice which encompasses them all. President Obama has lifted up a servant of the people who did not rest until it she could physically do no more than just that, by placing her at the centre of the national discourse at a time in which it has grown as bitter as wormwood.

This message is one that will resonate in the coming days, months and years, as America faces itself on the battle field, once again. Once again, the old demons come for the nation’s soul, waving placards and uttering speech that has not been heard in the public square for decades. President Obama has taken the occasion of the passing of a soldier to show forth the power of her struggles and the efficacy of service. In addition, he has made it clear to those who seek to dredge up the evils of the past as the potential virtues of the present that this will not stand, on his watch. Flags fly at half staff for heroes. Lives of heroes are celebrated in Cathedrals, where Presidents eulogize them. Today, the past has broken into the life of an America that has sought to bury it without much of a headstone. It is as stalwart and poignant a battle cry as I have ever heard.

Rest In Peace, blessed sister. Your torch is still lit and it has been passed.

Censored by the Church: The Vatican, Closeted Clergy and Paedophilia

I'm prefacing this piece, because of its age. I wrote this while still a member of the Anglican Church, for our parish newsletter. Our newsletter was our pride. At the time the following article was written, it had been named one of the top twelve parish newsletters in the Anglican Church. The critical nature of the piece was not new to our parish. I had written dozens of similar articles, some directed at the Anglican Church, some at the Roman Catholic Church and some, just at the Church, generally. These articles had been welcomed, enjoyed and widely debated in my parish. At the time of publication, though, the Editor got cold feet and declined to print my thoughts. A second parish (also in the Anglo-Catholic tradition) also so declined. The article was deemed too inflammatory due to strained relations between old guard parishioners and those of us who were welcoming change.





As the Vatican comes under increasing scrutiny for its sheltering and enabling of paedophiles, though, I am throwing this piece to the four winds of the internet and hoping it will rattle the gates of not only that particular Hell, but others like it. Now that the shit is hitting the fan, maybe some of it will serve as fertilizer for new growth in the Church: a decrepit and increasingly irrelevant Institution.

In Thought, Word and Deed

“If the word has the potency to revive and make us free,
it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.”

-Ralph Ellison

A young man walks into a bar in New Bedford, Connecticut. He asks, his face inscrutable; dead:

“This a gay bar?”

So, the bartender says, “Yeah, that’s right.”

So then the young man plunges a hatchet into the guy next to him, and that’s not all. He shoots him and then he shoots two other guys. Then Jacob Robida flees into the night, leaving the injured to bleed and the uninjured to their shock. When police catch up with the eighteen year old, he shoots his female companion at point blank range and then, himself. That’s the end of the story. It’s the terminus of what started out as a thought, evolved into a word (or a collection of words), exchanged or overheard; maybe read. Next a recoiling in the mind, as thought collected on thought and gathered together into a complex of revulsion. Physical symptoms: a welling up in the visceral depths of the body, tightness in the throat, abdominal spasms. A sneer. More words. Finally, the act of violence explodes and blood is spilled. Three people injured. Two dead. There is no mystery here, but people will consider the images on television of the police cars and the dingy sign over the door of the innocuous little bar and ask:

“How do these things happen? What’s the matter with people? Are they out of their minds?”

Simply: thoughts become words and words become acts. The punch line of a joke turns into a scar that will never heal. Just as the larva of a ladybug moves into the stage of pupation, growing ripe and fat on the leaf of a tree, emerging finally as the familiar red and black insect we’re all so fond of, violence has a life cycle. It is not begotten in a cylinder of glass, springing into the world fully formed. It develops in the same deliberate way the pleasant ladybug does. That’s what’s the matter with people. They are not out of their minds. They are only living out the imperative of a race that loves nothing more than a scapegoat. A scapegoat is a vacation from the reality of our human nature. The projection of our most base and foul inner gremlins, the scapegoat is something to lash out at with pointed sticks and spit on. We send this miserable creature out into the wilderness to the demon, Azazel, just as the ancient Israelites did, but it keeps coming back. Head down, snorting and huffing, it charges at us with its great, curled horns. How we hate and fear it. We make the ritual of its banishment as painful, humiliating and public as possible, hoping the damnable thing will finally die out there, leaving a whitened pile of bones, picked clean by vultures, bleached in the relentless desert sun. It never happens. Just when we think it’s gone forever, those familiar hoof beats break our self-satisfied silence. It’s back. The sweat stands out on our brows as we plan the next ritual, collecting pointy sticks in a big, menacing pile and saliva in the back of our throats.

The new Bishop of Rome has ascended to the throne of Peter at a time when its foundations are being shaken by wave upon wave of scandal. In the United States, even Cardinals have not been immune to this seismic rattling. Bernard Cardinal Law enjoyed a feather soft landing (after blowing across the ocean from embattled Boston), alighting as archpriest of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, arguably one of the most coveted placements in the Roman Church. The fact that he was, upon his resignation, ensconced in this prestigious post by the late John Paul II, has enraged American victims of priestly sexual abuse, as they argue Law was instrumental in the sheltering of criminally abusive clergy in his Archdiocese. As these victims watched, Cardinal Law was presented at the centre of the ecclesiastical pageantry accompanying the laying to rest of one Bishop of Rome and the enthronement of another. Cardinal Law, from the white hot centre of this scandal, floated safely to earth, alighting in the velvet coziness of the Roman Curia to preside at one of nine Papal Funeral Masses, televised around the world.

But somebody, surely, must be blamed? There must be justice, but if the Byzantine structures of ecclesiastical power are to be defended, the piper won’t be paid by anyone in a red cassock. Better a scapegoat than a Cardinal.

Once a seismic engineer, always a seismic engineer, for that was the vocation the new Bishop of Rome practiced as John Paul II’s doctrinal enforcer. As the ground wiggled and tectonic plates creaked, the Pope formerly known as Cardinal Ratzinger busily measured how best to mitigate the damage. The foundations may have oscillated as the earth moved under them, but the Church of Rome was not to be moved on Josephum’s unwavering watch. Now enthroned, the vigilant engineer is no less attentive. So, in November of 2005, the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education published the “Instruction Concerning the Criteria for the Discernment of Vocations with regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in view of their Admission to the Seminary and to Holy Orders”. As daunting a title as any to issue from the labyrinthine halls of the Vatican, this document should be cause for great alarm among the Faithful. Many of these Faithful will be neither surprised nor particularly moved by the Instruction’s attack on homosexuals. It’s all been said before: “intrinsically immoral”, “contrary to natural law”, “objectively disordered”. These dusty old chestnuts have been rolled out from under the hulking cupola of San Pietro many times before, as the current Bishop of Rome girded it against the terrible rumblings roiling beneath. They are nothing new. What is new (and unheard of) is under Section 3: Discernment by the Church Concerning the Suitability of Candidates:

“The spiritual director has the obligation to evaluate all the qualities of the candidate’s personality and to make sure that he does not present disturbances of a sexual nature, which are incompatible with the priesthood. If a candidate practices homosexuality or presents deep-seated homosexual tendencies, his spiritual director as well as his confessor have the duty to dissuade him in conscience from proceeding towards ordination.”

The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that “…some priests are shocked by (this) easily overlooked clause”, and further that “These priests said this would turn the confessional and spiritual counseling sessions…into…tool(s) for weeding out gays from seminaries”. As the ground thunders, priests are shuffled from parish to parish and Cardinals are shuffled clear across the ocean. The scapegoat paws the ground, snorting and huffing as an angry crowd gathers, sticks in hand and phlegm in windpipe. Even at the expense of a Sacrament of the Church, the scapegoat will be driven out into the arms of Azazel, beaten and spat upon to atone for the sins of others. Unfortunately for our seismic engineer, measuring and mitigating in his pristine, white frock and Prada loafers, other eyes are watching and they are just as vigilant. Fr. Bob Hoatson, a New Jersey priest, has been paying close attention.

In a suit against Cardinal Edward Egan and “nine other Catholic officials and institutions”, reports the Village Voice, Hoatson claims “…a pattern of retaliation and harassment that began after (he) alleged a cover-up of clergy abuse…and started helping victims”. Hoatson further “…alleges that Egan is ‘actively homosexual’, and that he has ‘personal knowledge of this’”. The suit goes on to identify two other clergy in the region; Bishop of Albany, Howard Hubbard, and Archbishop of Newark, John Meyers, as “actively gay”. Fr. Hoatson’s problem is not with the “…consensual, adult private sexual behaviour” of these episcopal leaders. What bothers him to the point that he will risk everything (he was placed on a leave of absence prohibiting him from “publicly presenting himself as a priest”, only four days after filing suit) is that these leaders have shielded pedophiles for fear of being exposed as homosexuals. Fr. Hoatson’s lawsuit states that the closeted sexuality of these Princes of the Church “…has compromised defendants’ ability to supervise and control predators”. As a result, Fr. Hoatson has been “…gotten rid of because (he is) trying to get rid of the cycle of sexual disorder in the church”. Only four days after filing this lawsuit, Fr. Hoatson was functionally defrocked. Cardinal Law, who resigned under compulsion of a no confidence motion filed by 50 priests, now presides comfortably and prestigiously over one of the most important seats in the Roman Church. After shuffling predators like Paul Shanley and John Geoghan around his Archdiocese in an effort to shield them, he repented only of a “…failure to keep proper records”.

Michael Mendola, of Dignity New York (part of an international network of LGBT Roman Catholics) claims that many gay priests have maintained a “…veil of silence” in the matter of bishops’ sex lives due to their fear of “jeopardiz(ing) their relationships with the dioceses”. Yet he warns they are “…tired of the way the Vatican has pinned blame for the clergy-abuse crisis on homosexuals and the way far-right Catholic groups have tried to purge the church of gays”, using this crisis as an altar for their pile of pointy sticks. They can only be encouraged by the fact that the Diocese of Albany was so anxious to answer allegations by Fr. Hoatson against Bishop Hubbard, that they spent $2.2 million USD to engage the services of former federal prosecutor Mary Jo White to produce a White Paper in the matter. The Paper in question took White only four months to produce and fully exonerated Bp. Hubbard of engaging in “…sexual relationships with several men, including a teenage street hustler and three diocesan priests”. The problem is, Fr. Hoatson won’t go away. Pricey White Paper, allegations of “malingering” and functional dismissal; none of these have dissuaded Fr. Hoatson from his belief that he has been called to address the Roman Catholic Church’s entrenched hypocrisy in matters sexual. As stated above, Fr. Hoatson is unmoved by what people do in the privacy of their bedrooms. What concerns him is that the church, in its efforts to maintain the unnatural novelty of priestly celibacy and in its anxiety to squash any evidence that it is not strictly maintained, has created a culture of secrecy, dysfunction and fear from which has emerged a monstrous complex of pedophilia that it can no longer shield from a watching world.

As this monstrosity emerges into the light of day, with the help of people like Fr. Hoatson, the scapegoat makes its miserable way to the blistering desert, into the waiting arms of Azazel. With every Instruction from the Vatican, every pronouncement from the Bishop of Rome, each denial and obfuscation, another blow falls on its back, matted with the spit of people projecting their own worst fears, not about others, but about themselves. And lest we Anglicans think ourselves above the brandishing of pointy sticks, I submit the recent public endorsement of the Nigerian government’s attack on the civil rights of its gay citizens by Archbishop Peter Akinola. It is now against the law for Nigerian gays to assemble, speak in public places or in any media, or to petition the government in any way. Further, Nigeria’s law states that any person involved in the“…sustenance, procession or meetings, publicity and public show of same sex amorous relationship directly or indirectly” is subject to five years’ imprisonment. By speaking in favour of this legislation, which violates Articles 18 – 20 of the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights, Akinola has, in the words of John Bryson Chane, Bishop of Washington, underwritten “…institutionalized bigotry”. Lest we forget, he has also abdicated from the Newry Primates’ Statement, which condemns the “victimization or diminishment of (gay people)” as “anathema”. The Inclusive Church organization has written to the Archbishop of Canterbury to request that Akinola be censured for “…encouraging the State to engage in active persecution of gay people and those who speak for them”. The letter, sent February 21 has yet to receive an official response.

Jacob Robida was not born in a test tube. He was born of a woman, after the manner of human flesh, just like the rest of us. He was not intrinsically immoral, any more than you or I. Any one of us can have a thought, hear a word, commit an act. We can also think that thought, speak that word and provoke that act. This is the horrible dilemma of being human. We are created well. We become sick in an environment of abundant, free-floating thoughts and words capable of mestastasizing, as they fix to some of us; or even most of us. The problem is that Jacob Robida heard a word that resonated within his troubled soul. We all hear things at different frequencies it seems, depending on where the ripped and tattered parts of our interior lives are most raw. For Jacob Robida, that word was a panacaea for hurt, of whatever kind; a salve for disappointment, real or perceived. That word, born out of a thought somewhere, rolled around and around, bouncing off and adhering to other words, irritating old wounds, embedding itself in the fissures of a spirit that couldn’t make sense of all the confusion; the complexities of this life. Jacob Robida took his pointed stick and beat the horned beast of his own tortured humanity. He spit on it, looked at what he’d done and ran away, into the night. But that beast is only on its knees, because it just won’t die. Long after Jacob Robida’s name has been forgotten as another casualty of this uncertain and angry world, the scapegoat will still be standing at the margins, head down, pawing at the dust, challenging us to hit it again and again. What will this Church answer when it beholds, finally, that circlet of thorns on its horned head?

Good Friday

I don’t know what’s good about a day on which a man who told the truth was marched up a hill and nailed to a cross, but we call it Good Friday. On this day, over two thousand years ago, a Jewish Holy Man from the colonial backwater of the Galilee was murdered by the Roman Empire. He was not the only Jew this occupying force left to die, nailed to a wooden cross, his body surrendering to prolonged torture over several days. Thousands of Jews were murdered in this way. Rabbi Hillel recounts finding several of his friends so impaled. One had already succumbed. The other two, he was able to free. We don’t know their names, or how it is they ended up on the wrong side of Rome. We do know this, though: that truth is never welcomed into the presence of hegemonic power. Of all the Jews to be crucified by the vicious Roman Empire, it is the story of Jesus that has come to us as Holy Writ. This one Jew of thousands is the One we remember each year, on this day. We remember him in the pews of churches, singing sad hymnody; our praying hands before us in contrition. Christians look into themselves and find the part of them that hammered those nails into him; that pierced his side with a spear. They feel unworthy. They repent. They go home and wait for the Resurrection.

All that unworthiness and penitence are focussed on the death of this one Man: hoi anthropos (the Human One). He is isolated, somehow, from the rest of us, up there on that Cross in silent rebuke. Christians accept their part in this death. They acknowledge that their own sins were those for which Jesus was killed. Yet, this acknowledgement is part of a cosmic bargain in the mind of a Christian. From Jesus, comes forgiveness. From the Christian, comes agreement to believe that Jesus rose from his tomb and again walked among us. The cosmic bargain is set in an abstraction, so individualized that its resonance is lost in evanescence. The truth about Jesus is certainly that he stands in all our places. The truth about Christians is that they don’t see Him in others, or they would put down their hammers and spears and truly take up that Cross. The truth about the cosmic bargain is that it represents a child’s eye view of what the Passion of Jesus actually means to the Human Family he came to save from its own violence and evil.
The Passion Narrative reveals a humanity is all its glory and muck. Here are the sneering soldiers, playing dice for Jesus’ cloak. There, a woman wipes Jesus’ face. The people scream for his blood and spit on him, their scapegoat. A man helps Jesus bear his Cross. Soldiers beat him half to death and offer him vinegar to drink. A man offers up his own tomb for the broken body to be buried in. We are the good, the bad, the ugly, the thoughtful, the loving and the irredeemably cruel and stupid. That is what it is to be human. This One Man came to show us what it costs when we choose our cruelty and stupidity and ugliness over our most noble impulses. A man hanging on a cross in the desert is a picture of what we are when we lose ourselves to violence and hatred. That is the message of the Passion. Jesus did not endure what He did to satisfy our voracious self-love and egotistical need to be eternal. Rather, Jesus endured what He did to teach us to reject the base impulses that propel us into the void of chaos and to choose, in their stead, those impulses which lead us to the fullness of our humanity. Jesus, the Human One, came to show us what God is like and that God lives in all of us.

On April 4, we’ll remember another, more recent crucifixion; that of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He too, knew what was coming for him. Just as Jesus knew he was about to die, Dr. King was visited by the pall before it fell over him. His was not a lingering death, suspended on a cross. His death was expeditious, but it was for our sins that he also died. It was for our stupidity, violence and ever-agitating evil that Dr. King fell that day, almost two thousand years after Jesus came to teach us that this was the way of chaos and descent and not the way of humanity.

Still, the chaos closes in. No matter how many Dr. Kings, Metger Evers, Malcolm Xs, Viola Liuzzos or Mahatma Gandhis die, human beings will not listen to the voice of Jesus. They will not read His Passion in any other context than that of their own exaltation: salvation and eternality; the great Platonic satisfaction of the almighty human ego. Christians, today, walk into churches and kill doctors for doing their legally-mandated jobs. They drive cars into women’s health clinics. They blow up buildings and daycare centres, filled with other humans. They spit on legislators they don’t agree with and call them names that abjectify their personhood. They threaten. They lie. They hammer. They pierce. Christians carry guns with pride, sneering and spitting like vipers. They support government initiatives to criminalize those of minority sexualities, which impose death and prison sentences. They rape children and hide behind their clerical robes. They deny and wallow in self-pity and claim the light of day shining on their evil is some kind of persecution. Meanwhile, a million hammers pound a million nails into a million bodies, all over the world and Christ still hangs from His Cross in silent rebuke.

Jesus did not die to make of us eternal realities. Jesus died to point the way to a humanity that models the love of God. When God formed the mud doll, taking earth and Divine Breath to create this bundle of instability we are, God intended that we were to be the hands of Divine Love in this world. That’s really what that old story means. The Divine Breath in us means that we bear God into the world, just as Jesus did, for He, too, was fully human, animated by the same Divine Breath. Irenaeus called Him the “Human Being fully alive”. In that incarnation, Jesus stands as our exemplar of fully-actualized humanity. He is the paragon of what being human can actually look like: loving, just, truthful, fearless, bold and confrontational in the face of what enslaves us...especially that murky corner of us that glorifies engulfing chaos, murder, hatred and bigotry.

A Christianity that will not look at itself cannot hold its head up. The Body of Christ is riddled with disease. It hates and scapegoats. It lies and dissembles. Public Christianity has become a source of ridicule and derision. It brings no light, no hope, no peace. Lately, some Christians even want to write a Bible to suit their own vile bigotry. So deeply invested are these supposed followers of Christ in their own hubris, that they are willing to defile Holy Scripture by tailoring it to their own petty prejudices. So heinously vainglorious are these alleged Christians, they spit on the very justice Jesus embodied. In His broken, bloodied Body, all these ersatz Christians see is an opportunity for their own, highly-personalized and ever-so-special salvations. They do not see their neighbour, certainly. They do not see the spit upon, the poor, those left in the margins by greed, bigotry, war and social exclusion. They can’t see their own reflections in the eyes of the mob screaming “Crucify Him!”, nor do they feel the weight of the hammers in their hands. They see only the Disneyfied Jesus, beckoning them to a glorious eternity, just for them and those they agree with. It never occurs to them that they are the evil engulfing God’s world, because that would compel them to true repentance.

It’s Good Friday and once again, we look at the Cross and think back two thousand years, to this One Man we beat into a pulp and then nailed to a cross of wood. He falls all around us, once, twice, a third time. We spit in His face. He gets up and we hit Him, again. In Africa, we beat him senseless. In the Vatican, we leer at His suffering. In America, we yell “nigger” and “faggot” at Him.

Look upon Him who you have pierced. Put your fingers in His wounds and know the truth. Jesus died for your sins, and only once. Why must you continue to mutilate Him in the bodies, minds and souls of His People?