Mepkin Abbey, Moncks Corner, South Carolina 14.3.92: Silver Water, Twisted Oaks

Today is the anniversary of Simpson’s death, 5 P.M., 1991. I picked the violet folded into the journal at this page at Mepkin Abbey today, partly in remembrance of him, partly as a token of my prayer to find a way for myself. The two intents intersect: I trust Simpson prays for me, and I ask that he do so, to find a way through the selva oscura in which I find myself now at Belmont Abbey.

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Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Spirituality, Judaism, Consciousness (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1990):

“The commandments concerning relationships between one human being and another always take precedence over spiritual awareness. Not because one is more important than the other, but because people are the only path we have” (p. 37).

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Day’s end at Mepkin. Lazy thing that I am, I won’t go to compline; Steve will. Vespers just ended. A glorious sunset as we left the church. Night falls fast here. I wonder why? The vicinity of the coast? But over the river beneath the monastery, light lingers on, silvers the water. And above the silver, rose, salmon, faint yellow, amber gray as the sun goes down. All this made more weirdly beautiful by the tortured trees. Hugo played havoc—an expression that trivializes what the storm did—with the trees around here. The live oaks just butchered. The tall trunks denuded of branches, bent, twisted, look like nothing so much as trees in Texas as you go west of San Antonio. They’ve lost the grace of Southern sub-tropical trees, have that hard-bitten look of trees that must fight the desert wind.

Against all this backdrop, I try very ineffectually to recollect myself, pray, think. . . . I don’t know what it all means, but circles in circles in circles. I had just ordered (ILL at the college library) a biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and am reading it now with great delight. This morning, Steve gave me a volume of Hopkins’ poems as a memento of the anniversary of Simpson’s death. And this evening, Abbot Anthony gave Steve and me a letter in which Hopkins’s poem re: the Virgin Mary is included.

More circles: Anthony recalls our visit in 1974. The novice master Aelred was a novice with Placid at Belmont. So Belmont links to our past and our religious journey. Somehow it’s all tied together, and Simpson is in there as one who suffered incredibly and could not help himself, who delights to help now in a way he felt he couldn’t in life. But I see little of what all this means, not as I see the bar in my life so clearly.

It has to do with my vocation as a theologian, with being gay, a poet, one who tries to speak in solidarity with the poor. But I don’t see a burning bush, no clouds open and voices speak from heaven, no thunderclaps. I feel bereft in this sense: I feel commissioned, gifted with a place in which to live that commission, but barred from doing so—by the church itself. This leads to paralysis and hopelessness. Where is an angel or some spiritual guide to help me see my way through the woods?

Belmont, North Carolina 8.10.93: Blue Herons and Cane Thickets

A few days ago, Steve and I walked down to try to catch a glimpse of the blue heron, which seems to have returned from it summering place. Steve had seen it on its stick in the slough off South Fork river, which (the slough) people call a lake. Hence the name of our community, Lakewood.

It wasn’t on the stick where it often perches, so we went across the bridge to look on the other side, where a number of sandhill cranes live among the cattails and other vegetation on what’s the marshier side of the bridge.

As we walked down to the cane thicket, we heard an ark-ark—loud—that we’d never heard before. Steve then said he saw the heron fly off to the top of a tree; it was he (she) who had made the noise. It must nest (with young?) on that side, and sit on the other to fish during the daytime.

New York City 25.11. and 28.11.1994: No More Secret Deaths and Gay Pilgrimage

En route to New York City to see “Angels in America.” Since first hearing of the play, seeing a documentary re: its staging, and reading about it, I’ve wanted to see it. A kind of gay pilgrimage . . . . I’m really attracted by the theme—a gay fantasia on American history, its appeal to Ernst Bloch, the Southern background of its author. However, reading the play was something of a disappointment—i.e., I found nothing of Bloch in it, really.

Now, I’m wondering why I even wanted to make this trip. Two days of cooking and cleaning for Thanksgiving, and I’m exhausted. All the old gnawing, relentless questions and hungers—about the Belmont Abbey experience, and above all about what to do next, where to go. I feel so irrevocably defeated. I try to see it otherwise, to feel otherwise, but how can I—no job, and no one interested in me, apparently.

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Just ready to take off from La Guardia. A stimulating, but exhausting, evening after we went to the matinee of part 2 of “Angels,” “Perestroika.” Afterwards, we went to the apartment of Chuck’s friend Jeff L., who lives with his lover Moïses K., a Venezuelan of Jewish descent, on the upper west side.

We were to have dinner with them and Amanda, a woman with whom Jeff works at their “nighttime” job. She has a “daytime” job at a toy-maker’s, he at Estée Lauder.

But the evening got very late, and as we were to go back to Queen’s—an hour’s train ride—and would have awakened Mr. B., we stayed at Jeff’s and Moïses’s and got practically no sleep—stayed up talking.

Something prompted me to tell them our story, and they were taken with it. Moïses said it should be a play, and asked me to write it. I have no talent in that area, I feel quite sure.

“Angels”: wonderful. Exhilarating. Uplifting. Autobiographical. The line in the epilogue—“We refused to die secret deaths any more”—knocked me off my feet. That Blochian emphasis on “a kind of painful progress” in the world, on the forward-spinning of things . . . .

How to translate that insight, the refusal to die a secret death anymore, into action at Belmont Abbey College? To die a secret death makes it so easy for them. It facilitates everything—their lies, their secrets, their silences.

If this experience was a pilgrimage, then what must I take home from it? How am I a different person as a result of my pilgrimage? I feel so tired, so ignoble, yet Moïses and Amanda think otherwise: they spoke of Steve’s and my life as a heroic love story, a beautiful one . . . . I wish I were able to see things that way.

Chicago 21.11.1994: Rachel Weeping and Christic Misfits

Here at AAR, as always, I compare myself with my classmates, most of whom—almost all of whom—are tenured and secure. They write and study in relative peace. . . . None has endured the egregiously punitive behavior of Belmont Abbey. . . .

What is prayer, that yields no sense of connection to a listening ear? What can prayer be, as one screams over and over into the dark, and no help comes?

Steve pointed this out to me: as we sat talking today, a woman in a motorized wheelchair whizzed past. She was apparently totally paralyzed, able to operate the machine with only a single finger. Her head lolled back on the wheelchair’s headrest. She was smiling.

She was also wheeling recklessly, at high speed, through a maze of tables and chairs. She seemed to enjoy doing this, even to relish a bit the fright she gave others.

Steve saw the scene as Flannery O’Connoresque. He spoke of the woman as a christic misfit, who inhabits a salvific space.

I don’t know any long what such language means. At one time, I would have resonated with such pious discourse. Now, I don’t want to hear it. If it means that she’s already all broken, and so has nothing to fear as she rides fearlessly and smiling down the hallway—if that’s salvific grace—then I have to ask why God must go to such extremes, to save.

If this rhetoric means that we’re all essentially broken, and must find signs of transcendence amidst our brokenness, then I just don’t want to hear that bourgeois existential garbage. It’s just not true—most of the straight men who are legion at AAR are far from broken, except in some evanescent, hopelessly subjective sense. They’re atop, astride, the world. This existential rhetoric is a sentimental gloss on bourgeois, patriarchal capitalism, something that intends for us to prescind from critique and hope piously that we’ll all be as fortunate as those who have, ostensibly, “made it” by sheer dint of hard work and chutzpah.

Without liberation, with seeing my oppressors routed and their oppression overturned, I don’t know how to believe. I don’t know how to pray, except to beg—Who? What?—for liberation from my oppression.

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A whirlwind tour of the Impressionist, post-Impressionist, and modern wings of the Chicago Art Institute. Writing now in retrospect . . . .

The painting that reached out and grabbed me was a recently acquired Chagall. It’s a crucifixion of the Jewish Jesus, with scenes of German soldiers et al. despoiling synagogues, desecrating Jewish cemeteries, burning Jewish houses. Rachel and the patriarchs hover behind and above the cross, mourning. Jesus wears various insignia that identify him as Jewish.

Why did this grab me? The obvious religious themes, of course, their subversive-critical application, the theme of dispossession that keeps luring my heart so (why? the flight to spirit and from soul, à la Thomas Moore?).

And there’s Chagall himself—the bittersweet and yet dionysiac vision, and specifically, this vision applied to village life, folk life. Even in the cows and byres, peasants with clumsy hobnail boots fly. Beside the Chagall stained windows in the museum, a plaque with Chagall saying that he prefers a life into which surprise always intrudes. The joyousness (and deep sympathy) of this vision.

What sustains it? What theology lies at its roots? I need to read Chagall’s account of his childhood, which I have at home.

The van Goghs stood out for me, too. Even in the early “serene” phase, such incipient sadness. In the light, the air, the pitiless sky, there’s often that unmitigated loneliness of an Edward Hopper urban landscape.

It doesn’t escape my attention that I’m drawn, filing to the magnet, by the tragic, by dispossession, early death, talent unrealized. Why? Am I the perpetual adolescent, nurturing dreams of tragic-romantic self-torture, in order to escape adult male responsibility? To a great extent, social and ecclesial structures make gay men unfulfilled adolescents. We need desperately to rebel vs. the stifling images of male sobriety and success foisted on us by straight men. But we also need to do this as those who’ve achieved belonging in the world of straight men.

Braunschweig 23.7.1998: Inge's Rescue and Little Red

More Mareile stories. It seems that after the war she and her family were hungry. They had prayed for the Americans, father than the Russians, to liberate them. When the troops came, they instructed families to pull down their black-out shades as the troops came through Königslutter. Mareile peeked out of the corner of a shade and saw black soldiers in a truck—the first black people she had ever seen. Later, she and her brothers went to the barracks and begged for food, saying, “I have hunger.” When her mother found out they’d begged, she was furious. The black soldiers called Mareile “little red.” She liked their friendliness.

Care packages of food and clothes came from America. Mareile’s family were virtually the only Catholics in town who weren’t refugees from the east. The priest refused to give them food and clothes, reserving these for refugees. Because the family were truly hungry, Mareile’s mother begged. At this, the priest said they could have a package, if the mother came by night so no one would see her. It was full of glorious food, things unattainable in Germany: raisins, white flour, chocolate (Mareile claps her hands and her eyes dance as she tells this).

There were no shoes to be bought. If one bartered an item of one’s own at some exchange center, one could obtain shoes, etc. All Mareile had to barter was her doll. She did so, for shoes. Each day she’d go to the shop to visit Inge, looking for her in the display window. One day, Inge was gone. That Christmas, Mareile received her as a gift. A friend of her mother’s had bought her, to keep for Mareile. Mareile still has Inge—as Maria says, “Inge still lives.”

Because the family’s house had been bombed (in one night, 20,000 people died in Braunschweig), all their clothes were destroyed. When Mareile’s father returned from the war, he had nothing to wear. A neighbor’s husband had been in the SS. She gave one of his uniforms of black wool to Mareile’s father: the best material in der Welt, Mareile says. Her mother turned the uniform inside out, and it became a new suit for the father, with tailoring. Mareile received a new coat from a care package, all gray wool and too small. Her mother sewed brown fabric onto the sleeves and hem, to lengthen the coat. Mareile wore it for years—ganz schick!

Mareile’s father was a judge in Braunschweig. As Hitler rose to power, the father didn’t want to serve a state ruled by Hitler. He moved the family to Königslutter, resigning his job. People told him he was crazy to forfeit his career.

And more on yesterday: after the tour of Königslutter, Mareile drove us back to Mascherode by way of the Elmwald, from which the chalky stone for the Königslutter cathedral was mined. She told us that after the war, people would forage for mushrooms and fireweood in the forest. She and Walter spent many days hiking there.

It is a beautiful forest, with a mix of conifers and deciduous trees. After we passed through it, we entered very attractive farmland, with rolling hills of cattle and horses—something like Virginia. In the flatter land near Braunschweig, as one descends from the mountains in which the Elmwald is found, sugar beets and grain grow, along with asparagus. Mareile tells us that this sandy and peaty soil is the most fertile in Germany. Here great-grandfather came here in the 19th century, from Thuringia, to seek work in the Braunschweig factories. Catholic families in southern Germany migrated in this period, as the many children overtaxed the farms, causing the land to be divided and divided again. Unlike the Protestant proletariat, though, the Catholic workers avoided some dehumanizing aspects of industrialization, Mariele thinks, since the church kept community and spiritual life alive for them.

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Like so much about the war in Europe, what Belmont Abbey did just ever quite make sense. If I tell myself they abused so many people because they were financially insecure, then I remember the wealth the monks have. If I say they persecuted people, then I have to ask how the rest of the faculty stood by passively as this was done. No answer is ever sufficient, just as with attempts to explain or understand what went on in Germany from 1920 to 1945.

Is it better, then, to live in the questions, than to have the answers? Am I nobler and deeper for being perplexed? Or is my refusal to forget, to settle for life-as-it-is, a sign of some dis-ease, some craving for a security life never affords anyone, inside myself?

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Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark (London: Vintage, 1997):

“Much of it must have been ornament, people making strange little alliances in their heads between things they had heard or read about, seeking to assert themselves in those endless conversations, implying they were in the know, there was much else they could tell but . . . ." (pp. 182-3).

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Mareile again: We didn’t know what was happening to the Jews. We knew they’d been sent away, yes, but often one by one, so no one noticed. My parents said that it only began to be clear to them, what was happening, shortly before the war.

Then, after the war, our school was forced to watch films showing in detail what had been done. I cried and cried. After that, whenever I had any pain, I told myself, It can’t be as bad as what the Jews suffered. When I had dental work done, I didn’t have an anaesthetic, because no pain I experienced could be as bad as theirs.

Belmont, North Carolina 11.1.94: None So Blind as Those That See

And back in Belmont. As the crossed-out absurdity* indicates, jet-lagged to the max. We got up at 4:15 A.M., which didn’t help matters, and are now sitting in front of the fire.

Maybe it’s good that this travel journal held a few pages to complete after our return—a chance to stitch together the experience of the trip with the life I go on living, we go on living.

The “experience of the trip”—shorthand for what? Lots of disparate experiences, and none of them so earth-shattering that they lifted me out of the ordinary.

In fact, maybe the trip is directing my attention to something re: the life I’ve been living for a long time—i.e., that it’s monochromatic, fear-encapsulated, emotionally bottomed-out.

I’m not sure, exactly, that I walk the arid plain of depression. It feels more like walking one step at a time, with no signposts, because there is no other way. Have to go on living, and the only way to live is to live, one day and one step at a time.

And that’s how the trip to Germany was—one step at a time, many of them in places I wouldn’t have chosen. The grace of the ordinary is the phrase that leaps to mind now.

The rare ordinariness of friendship: how strange to have made the friendship of W. and K., R. and C., and perhaps now of M. and W. That totally unanticipated chain of events that brings people together, even across the globe. How extraordinarily kind all of them were to us, so that now our lives have boundaries permeable to former strangers, and even across time and space, our dreams and sorrows—even our material resources; they were so generous to us—flow together.

That recognition is, I suppose, the core of the trip experience. I have friends in many places, and they’re truly a gift to me. Even in the arid, dark place in which I walk—especially in this place—I must not forget this.

I come home a bit soul-rested, then, but also afraid. I’m afraid of so many things—of losing my sense of gratitude for all I’ve been given, of being crushed under routine and drudgery, of not seeing any point to my life here and now, of losing focus and becoming scattered, of sudden death, of losing Steve and not being able to cope, of continuing to live with Steve as we now live (so often quarrelsome or in stunned silence), of not seeing any doors open.

I’m also afraid of attempting to make changes in my life—losing weight, maintaining a daily schedule, reading more, studying German—that will help me onto the peach and health I’ve experienced on this trip. I know myself so well, how readily I relapse and then bitterly reproach myself for failing to live up to my goals.

At the bottom of it all—letting go. A journey is always letting go, of routine, certain comforts, one’s protective walls, obsessions and work, control of one’s schedule and environment. And since life itself is a journey to the ultimate letting go that faces us all, whether we want it or not, the puzzle is that we ever imagine we can live any other way except the way of letting go.

Ordinary grace and letting go—two phrases that run through my head over and over today, as I face resumption of my “old” life, and look back on the trip. The mystics say that life is full of grace. I’m yet to be convinced, but I do see grace at work in some rather “ordinary” ways in my life. The mystics also say that our failure to see is linked to our failure to let go.

For me, the problem is knowing how to let go. When we came to North Carolina, it seemed very important to have a comfortable house in a middle-class neighborhood. It seemed so because so much of our lives up that point had been a relinquishment we had not chosen, and one whose privations gradually ate into our sense of self-worth. We had begun to feel we deserved the crumbs from the table (the crumbs alone), and the kicks with which our generous benefactors dispensed the crumbs.

To face losing this house, the life we lead here, is very hard, then. It’s facing the resumption of that old life in which we had to accept that this is what queers must expect, since queers don’t count.

Maybe we ought to look at what has happened as a certain freeing from expectations that continue to be too small, however. The cliché—it’s a big world. To be in Germany is to see that in manifold ways. In such a big world, there’s surely a place for us, and that place may be more deeply satisfying and rich than any we’ve yet dreamt of.

That’s the point of letting go in mystical writing, I reckon—to learn to see that one’s preoccupations have been so misplaced, so focused on what is less rewarding and enriching. The life responsive to grace is not a life of dull self-obliteration, but of receptivity, celebration, grateful sharing of one’s blessings with others.

This is what’s hard for me. I haven’t learned to dance a certain dance, in which joy and sorrow, rage and resurrection, can interplay in my life. I don’t know how to be both light-handed and aware of my riches, to celebrate life in the midst of pain. Which is to say that I’m not the supple wild artist I’d like to be—an artist any saint is—but a dull, plodding, plebian creature who only dabbles in the creative and spiritual life.

In the last analysis, to be more than that, we have to let go even (especially?) of our hard-won virtues. These count as little in God’s eyes as our vices—perhaps less, because they have the greater potential to be hindrances to the life of grateful receptivity.

None so blind as those who see. One of the gifts of a trip such as that we’ve just taken is that one learns how very illusory one’s pretense to see clearly has been. The problem is not so much faulty vision; it’s locking into limited vision, as if that’s all there is. The world’s a big place. There are all kinds of people out there, all kinds of possibility, all kinds of ways of seeing, construing the world, thinking about it.

And now I must listen, to prepare myself for whatever immersion in that wide world will beckon me, when it’s time for me to be called to the next decisive step on my journey. To learn to listen well—there’s a focus of attention not unworthy of my thought, my life, in these days after the trip.

* I had inadvertently written Toronto, where we went to graduate school.