LGBTQ Magazine
"Every Life Is Different Because You Passed This Way and Touched History": Easter Meditation Points
Posted on the 20 April 2014
Good Friday sets the stage for Easter: to complete the bouquet of meditative pieces I gathered for you on Good Friday, here's an Easter offering from things I've read over the years, notes jotted in my journals (with a common thread of reflecting on the word "life" and its manifold meanings):Julia Esquival, "Three Songs for My Mother," in Threatened with Resurrection, trans. Maria Elena Avecedo, et al. (Elgin, Ill.: Brethren, 1982):They wanted to silence the voices of love, but the words of the resurrected, repeated in a thousand echoes on the infinite horizon, tirelessly hammered upon their minute brain.Irish poet Eavan Boland, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (NY: W.W. Norton, 1995), commenting on the revolutionary effects that follow when women are at last permitted to speak in their own voices:It was what happens with any tradition when previously mute images within it come to awkward and vivid life, when the icons return to haunt the icon makers (pp. 196-7). Mary Gordon, Reading Jesus: A Writer’s Encounter with the Gospels (NY: Pantheon, 2009):The rich man’s sin is not only a failure to share his wealth, but equally important, a failure of attention. What he has done in his past life, where he is going after he leaves Lazarus, are of no concern to Jesus. He doesn’t seem like the worst person in the world: He’s not cruel or dishonest or hypocritical. He just doesn’t see (p. 26).   Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality (NY: Pantheon, 1985), trans. Robert Hurley:There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all (pp. 8-9). Alan Jones, The Soul’s Journey: Exploring the Spiritual Life with Dante as Guide (San Francisco: Harper, 1995):There is an irreducible "impossibility" to life that cannot be explained away and that can be rendered only in story form. Many people still believe that they get to know things by thinking. But we don’t know anything about the meaning of things and how they are connected by mere thought. Narratives connect (p. 59). Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible (NY: HarperCollins, 1999):Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history . . . . Everyone is complicit (p. 538).Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost (NY: HarperCollins, 2006):To be alive is to have a story to tell. To be alive is precisely to be the hero, the center of a life story. When you can be nothing more than a minor character in somebody else’s tale, it means that you are truly dead (p. 434).Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul (NY: HarperCollins, 1992):"Soul" is not a thing, but a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves. It has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart, and personal substance (p. 5).  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, 47.1:For He brought things into being in order that His goodness might be communicated to creatures, and be and because His goodness could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, He produced many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another.Henry David Thoreau, Maine Woods, Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature, — Daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense!  Contact!  Contact!  Who are we? Where are we? (p. 93).Karen Armstrong, Spiral Staircase (NY: Random House, 2004):The events of September 11 were a dark epiphany, a terrible revelation of what life is like if we do not recognize the sacredness of all human beings, even our enemies.  Maybe the only revelation we can hope for now is an experience of absence and emptiness.  We have seen too much religious certainty recently (p. 303).Rumi, "Under the Hill," in The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems, trans. Coleman Barks (NY: Harper, 2002):The blessed grow externally old, and inwardly young. They live the resurrection. Why should they care about the plots, the hatred and heroism, of the world? Their deep core is the love of a soul guide. God lives there  (p. 162). The Cloud of Unknowing:I implore, therefore, that you give yourself with a full desire to this meek stirring of love which is in your heart, and follow it. It will be your guide in this life and it will bring you happiness in the next. It is the substance of all good living, and without it no good work can be begun or ended.Gregory of Nyssa, The Perfect Christian:Here, in my judgment, we find Christian perfection: when we share in the realities behind the varied names which spell out the concrete meaning of the name ‘Christ,’ and when we bear witness to this power in our thought, speech, and way of life.Erik Erikson, Dimensions of a New Identity (NY: Norton, 1974):I must add that as a principle [generativity] corresponds to what in Hinduism is called the maintenance of the world, that middle period of the life cycle when existence permits you and demands you to consider death as peripheral and to balance its certainty with the only happiness that is lasting: to increase, by whatever is yours to give, the good will and the higher order in your sector of the world.  That, to me, can be the only adult meaning of that strange word happiness (p. 103).Carol Gilligan, "Adolescent Development Reconsidered," in Gilligan et al., Mapping the Moral Domain (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988):To see self-sufficiency as the hallmark of maturity conveys a view of adult life that is at odds with the human condition, a view that cannot sustain the kinds of long-term commitments and involvements with other people that are necessary for raising and educating a child or for citizenship in a democratic society (p. xii).   Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (NY: Random House, 1979):Whitman was a maternal man — a person who cares for and protects life — and the hospitals afforded him a chance to live out his maternalism, his "manly tenderness" (p. 269). Vincent van Gogh in a letter to his brother Theo from Antwerp, Feb. 1886: Vincent writes about how the last days of Turgenev and Daudet cut him to the heart—how they walked together "sensitive, delicate, intelligent like women." "Those fellows, they die the way women die. No fixed idea about God, no abstractions, always on the firm ground of life itself, and only attached to that. I repeat—like women who have loved much, hurt by life . . . ."Fenton Johnson, Geography of the Heart (NY: Scribner, 1996):At the American Hospital the nurses would not allow me to watch or help as they cleaned Larry after his death. I would not want to see him, they told me, in this state. And I acceded — did I have a choice? They had his body, on which I had no legal claim. While I waited I thought, I who have bathed his sores, wiped sweat from his forehead, embraced him in I who have in some small way risked my life to shepherd him to this death—I know his body as
I want to know it once more, in the time of his death, but I’m denied this.  I am, after all, only his friend (p. 192). Mary Oliver, Winter Hours (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999):This is called happiness. This is called: stay away from me with your inches, and your savings accounts, and your plums in a jar. Your definitive anything. And if life is so various, so shifting, what could we possibly say of death, that black leaf, that has in it any believable finality? (p. 78). Oscar Romero two weeks before his death, to the editor of the Mexican newspaper Excelsior:I need to say that as a Christian I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will rise again in the people of El Salvador. The video is one I've shared before, I think, a quintessential Easter video (for me):
Violeta Parra's beautiful poem "Gracias a la Vida" at a concert in Xanten, Germany, in June 1988. A happy Easter to all readers who keep such holy days, a happy Sunday to all of you.
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remember meYou Don’t Get To Make Out At Baseball Games Just Because You’re Gay | John Hawkins' Right Wing News
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There’s no need for the Mariners to apologize ,
Most of the time, a kiss is just a kiss in the stands at Seattle Mariners games. The crowd hardly even pays attention when fans smooch.
But then last week, a lesbian complained that an usher at Safeco Field asked her to stop kissing her date because it was making another fan uncomfortable.
The incident has exploded on local TV, on talk radio and in the blogosphere and has touched off a debate over public displays of affection in generally gay-friendly Seattle.
“Certain individuals have not yet caught up. Those people see a gay or lesbian couple and they stare or say something,” said Josh Friedes of Equal Rights Washington. “This is one of the challenges of being gay. Everyday things can become sources of trauma.”
As the Mariners played the Boston Red Sox on May 26, Sirbrina Guerrero and her date were approached in the third inning by an usher who told them their kissing was inappropriate, Guerrero said.
The usher, Guerrero said, told them he had received a complaint from a woman nearby who said that there were kids in the crowd of nearly 36,000 and that parents would have to explain why two women were kissing.
“I was really just shocked,” Guerrero said. “Seattle is so gay-friendly. There was a couple like seven rows ahead making out. We were just showing affection.”
On Monday, Mariners spokeswoman Rebecca Hale said that the club is investigating but that the usher was responding to a complaint of two women “making out” and “groping” in the stands.
“We have a strict non-discrimination policy at the Seattle Mariners and at Safeco Field, and when we do enforce the code of conduct it is based on behavior, not on the identity of those involved,” Hale said.
The code of conduct announced before each game specifically mentions public displays of affection that are “not appropriate in a public, family setting.” Hale said those standards are based on what a “reasonable person” would find inappropriate.
Guerrero denied she and her date were groping each other, saying that along with eating garlic fries, they were giving each other brief kisses.
First of all, public displays of affection make some people uncomfortable and that’s why it was entirely appropriate for the Mariners not to allow that behavior at their games. If people don’t like that, they can pick out a better make-out spot than in the stands of a Mariner’s game — and honestly, just about everywhere is a better make-out spot than in the stands of a Mariners’ game.
Now, the article complains that there were other people in the crowd making out who got away with it. That may be true, but so what? If you get a speeding ticket, is it invalidated because someone else got away with speeding on the same highway?
Of course, there’s a little he-said/she-said issue going on: The Mariners say the gay couple was making out and groping while the women say they were just giving each other a little kiss here and there — so what?
They were told the rules up front, they were arguably breaking the rules just by kissing, and it’s the Mariners ballpark.
If they don’t like that, then they should go spend their money elsewhere instead of trying to turn the whole thing into a “gay rights” issue.
PS: Given the exhibitionism, whininess, and urge to offend people that’s so common in the gay community today, the next home game will probably be a nightmare. For example, don’t be surprised if two gay guys start having sex in front of a group of 3rd graders at the next Mariners’ game because they believe it strikes some sort of blow for gay rights.
John Hawkins
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