Jerry Prevo on my TV. June 21 Father's Day sermon at the Anchorage Baptist Temple: lots of damning things to say about homosexuals. As usual.

I’m not sure this is it in final, but as I just told a friend, poetry is nothing if not full of variants.  (As I’m sure all the poets of the Bible full well knew.) So, call this version 1 if you like; I’ll see if there are any others.

No Questions, Questions

The man, smug in his pulpit,
has no questions.
He never has questions
except the rhetorical
question always followed
by his ready knowing answer read
from the book at his right hand:
the book at the right hand of God,
the book — the right hand of the judge
who judges the quick and the dead
to damn whoever fits
the words of his ready
answers read from that book.

I have questions…
What makes one so certain?
How does one live inside a closed book
behind closed doors in a windowless room
surrounded by a great great wall
blocking off all the horizons,
everything known, counted, familiar?
How does one live on a flat, flat Earth,
a horizonless planet where nothing new
ever walks, is seen, is encountered?
How does one breathe there?
How does one breathe where there are only
two kinds of people, the damned and the damning? —
and the smug man in his pulpit smiles,
knowing himself as the latter,
casting the former to flames,
smiling to serve such a God
who made things this way.

Somewhere beyond a horizon
on a round Earth set among stars
crafted by illimitable god,
I catch my breath.

Melissa S. Green
Tuesday, 23 June 2009
Anchorage, AK

My first brand-spanking new poem in awhile. Inspired by — hard to guess, innit? Same place, same circumstances, same ideologues — just a different year — as what drew “Sermon” out of me in 1992. Most of this was written yesterday on People Mover bus #36 during the long construction-interfered-with journey from UAA to the Loussac Library. Tip o’ the nib to James P. Carse whose The Religious Case Against Belief has been a necessary friend these past months.

Related posts:

1. Sermon (a poem)
2. Does Anyone Beat Your Heart for You (poem)
3. Religion v. belief

Christianist is a term I first heard from Atlantic Monthly blogger Andrew Sullivan — a useful term that to me conveys not Christiantity as religion, but rather Christianity as political ideology.  Sullivan, who is gay, Catholic, & conservative — but not a “war of values” social conservative — does not feel any more represented by the religious right than my friend Dianne O’Connell of Immanuel Presbyterian Church does; in an essay written for Time magazine, Sullivan writes, “let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism.”

Hence, a handy term to distinguish the politics of Jerry Prevo & his followers & allies — the ideological contemporaries & descendants of the Moral Majority — from other forms of Christianity found in Alaska, the U.S., & the world.

Related posts:

1. The new Carrie Prejean?
2. Religion v. belief
3. Debbie Ossiander & the Christianist filibuster

The Religious Case Against Belief by James P. Carse (New York: Penguin, 2008)

Friday before last, on my way down for coffee, I spotted a book on the new books shelf of the UAA/APU Consortium Library whose title caught my interest: The Religious Case Against Belief.  Its author, James P. Carse, is a professor emeritus of religion at New York University, where he spent 30 years directing its religious studies program.

I checked it out & spent a good part of the next morning waiting for my tire changeover at Johnson Tires & fighting my muzziness (I’d been up into the early morning hours finishing my post on same-sex marriage) to read it, & actually getting a lot out of it despite my sleepiness.

Later in the day, a friend of mine came to visited my blog & made a comment on a post I’d written way back in 2006 called “The god thing.” It was interesting coincidence — or perhaps, as I said in my reply to her comment, “perhaps the intervention of Dice the spirit of luck, or so I call her in my eternally forthcoming novel Mistress of Woodland” — that my friend should find that post to comment on just when I’d found this book, which in part discusses what I was saying in that post, and in part what my friend was critical of in organized religion. As she stated:

I don’t believe in any religion on the planet. (Jim Jones and his mass murder/suicide of men, women and children Guyana in 1975 was my wake-up call.) As far as I’m concerned, if the leader has a human body/mind that person can be wrong, wrong wrong…about anything. No flipping way I’m going to follow them.

So far, I’ve found in Carse a pretty good explication of what turns both my friend & I away from organized religion.  My main difficulty (at least on the muzzy, sleep-deprived mind I had last Saturday) is that Carse uses terminology in a way that is unfamiliar to me (despite my B.A. in Religion): e.g., he uses the terms religion where I would more likely use the terms spirituality, & belief or belief system where I would more likely say organized religion or religious ideology.

But same diff.  By Carse’s light, belief system is the kind of horror we’re used to having to put up with from the hardcore “true believer” types who’d like to kill people for differing with them, & who are so hardwire-tied to their belief systems that they’d die for them.  And they do both.

It’s this kind of ideological attachment to belief systems — to religious & other putatively all-explaining ideologies, which claim to have all the answers, & to hold the blueprints of the heavens, as it were— that are responsible for most of the wars in the world. And those belief systems are not, by Carse’s light, truly religion, because true religion does not presume to hold all the answers; true religions recognizes the unknowable.  Carse is, in essence, calling for religion to toss out the belief systems — the ideologies that are the true destructive forces which lead people into violence, murder, war.

And now that I’m getting accustomed to his terminology, I’m in full agreement with him.

As I wrote in my post “The god thing” –

Any time science learns how to “explain,” answers a question, it gives rise to umpteen further question: there is no end to them because we, just tiny motes of what-god-is, can’t fit any more into our understanding than what we can fit into our thoughts, our speech, our books. As my calculus tutor used to explain, no system can contain a metasystem. No matter how much we understand, there will always be Mystery beyond that. Which is why, I think, people who are wise are also people with humility: however much they know, they are aware how very little that really is.

Somehow, for me, using that word god keeps me mindful about all that. But I don’t think one must use that word to be conscious of it.

As I wrote in my poem “Sermon” –

God cannot be enclosed in a book
or in the miser’s soul
which portions out justice in dribbles
and rations out love in crumbs,
then wonders why we starve.

I’m still reading this book. I’m finding Carse’s analysis very useful for looking at some of the bad stuff going on in the world, both in the larger world of international politics — Israel & Palestine, Iraq, the “War on Terror” — & in the world closer to home, as our local “true believers” continue to wield the weapon of their willful ignorance, willful misuse of language, & false witness to maintain an unjust status quo.

Related posts:

1. No Questions, Questions (poem)
2. The god thing
3. Christianist, defined

Support Equality Works!

It’s Sunday, a day of sermons. Tales have it that Rev. Jerry Prevo will be delivering one of his predictable diatribes against homosexuality from his pulpit at the Anchorage Baptist Temple (broadcast live at 11:00 AM on KCFT-TV — cable channel 19, broadcast channel 35). In counterpoint, this week’s sermon at 2:00 PM at MCC Anchorage will be on “Homosexuality, Christianity & the Clobber Scriptures” used by conservative Christian churches (like ABT) to promote anti-gay messages. I heard yesterday that the Rev. Howard Bess, a longtime ally of LGBT Alaskans & author of Pastor, I Am Gay, will be delivering a guest sermon at Immanuel Presbyterian Church.

My own sermon is below — a poem written in December 1992 in response to the hatred & bigotry propounded by Rev. Prevo & like-minded preachers during the 1992-1993 battle inside and outside the Anchorage Assembly chambers over the same issue facing us today: whether lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transfolk in Anchorage will be afforded equal protection under the law from discrimination on the basis of a fundamental part of our fabric as human beings: our sexual orientations and gender identities.

(With thanks to Stephen Mitchell, whose translation of The Book of Job helped me to find the words.)

Sermon

I

I take as my text the Book of Job –
for are we not like him, innocent,
suffering, crying out for justice?
are we not like him, each of us
surrounded by these righteous,
these pious friends who so love us,
who console us with false accusations,
who comfort us with lies?

Hear them — Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar –
High in their pulpits they proclaim the good news:

Admit your guilt and repent your sin
the merciful Lord God will welcome you in.

What’s your complaint? you got fired from your job?
The good Lord will cast you to fires of damnation.
Your landlord has served you notice of eviction?
The Lord will evict you from heavens’s salvation.
Beat to death in the street? God signed the death warrant.
Infected with AIDS? The Almighty’s decree.
Discrimination — if it happens, which we won’t admit –
is admonishment of your culpability.
God in his compassion has served you fair warning
and if God’s indisposed, well, we’re God’s grand jury.

But admit your guilt and repent your sin
the merciful Lord God will welcome you in.

We’re a large church, but we’re a friendly church.

II

Is there anything so innocent
as the child you were at birth?
tiny and wrinkled
from between your mother’s legs
you cried — I am here! I am alive! –
such was your first yell — joy of birth!

Were you a sinner then?
Was it sin to cry for your mother’s breasts?
were you damned by your desire
for the warmth of your father’s arms?

Years grew you.
Your ears heard the lessons
of your elders who taught you
the rules to live by:
how you took them to heart.
How you chastised yourself
when you stepped out of bounds
in body, in mind.
How you took them to heart

as alone in your bed
you lay in the quiet.
You stared at your fear,
your eyes searched the night.
Your mind search your soul –

–
– such were your tears, pressed into your pillow.
Such were your muffled sobs — grief of damnation

III

Be honest — which of you chose it?
Which of you when first you learned
you were queer — faggot! lezzie! homo! –
accepted that label with joy — celebration?

Which of you did not deny it?
Which of us did not seek to hide it?
Some hide it still — some are yet there.
Who knows silence better than we?
How we take it to heart.

Searching, seeking the root of our anguish –
how many of our sisters, our brothers
swallowed some pills, or took a mighty leap
to lie broken and crushed on the pavement?
How many of us climbed into a bottle
or crucified ourselves on a needle
or lost ourselves in an endless tangle
with the bodies of others such as we?
ecstasy! of orgasm — but after,
as we lay together side by side
in the tangle of sheets we wrestled amongst –
we wrestled alone with our dread
in the silent prisons of each heart, each head.

IV

But listen: you’ve heard of the patience of Job?
He was not so patient. Nor should we be.

How many of us looked to heaven to plead –
to shout — which of us demanded –

Yo, God!
Who’dja make the bet with this time?
Some bet. A sure thing.

Do you get your omnipotent jollies
from fate — create a creature
who by nature is unable
to adhere to your commands
without lying, without denying
what you created us to be?
I must abandon my integrity
or you abandon me?
Do you laugh to see us wriggle
with predestined misery?
Who then is righteous, who the sinner,
oh Lord God Almighty?

If this be heresy, if I blaspheme,
then teach a clear lesson, Lord God Supreme.
Cut short the suspense. Loose your thunderbolt.
Fry me where I stand and end my revolt.

Till then, this gospel I give:
curse God — and live.

V

But no — we curse not God,
but this false image of God they’ve made:
a warped, twisted abridgment

stuffed into a book, a Sunday sermon,
their cramped and distorted souls.

Can God be contracted –
compressed — compacted –
and still be God? Can you
hold in the palm of your hand
the width of the cold winter sky? Can you
forge the evening star into a ring
to adorn your little finger? Can you
play the harp of the northern lights? –
each touch of God’s fingers recolors the strings
in hues none of us has imagined.
Can you hide the summer sun
under a bushel basket? — Listen:
blind can lead blind, but the sun will still shine.

God cannot be enclosed in a book
or in the miser’s soul
which portions out justice in dribbles
and rations out love in crumbs,
then wonders why we starve.

God is too wide and vast and long
and knows us for what we are
as is known the sky, the river, the rocks,
as is knows each creature that breathes.

God is too wide, too vast, too long
and knows us as we are.

[December 29, 1992]

Related posts:

1. No Questions, Questions (poem)
2. Does Anyone Beat Your Heart for You (poem)
3. The noise begins

Or at least I use the word “god” — what’s that all about? This is what I wrote there.

Though I believe in god, I think the way I believe in it is pretty much on par with what many self-defined atheists & agnostics say. god (lower case g) isn’t to me some transcendent Boss of Bosses: my definition is, god = the universe & everything in it, whether we understand it or not. god is one with all that is, has been, will be, not separate or “superior” to us. We’re all just part of it. Is there an afterlife? Beats me. Will we be judged? I doubt it — except in the moment-to-moment of life when we’re judged by ourselves & each other. If justice comes from god, it comes not from some Big Guy in the Sky, but from ourselves & how we treat ourselves & one another.

I’ve got the same issues with organized religion that many atheists & agnostics do. Maybe the only difference between their fundamental perspective & mine is that they see the wonder & incredibleness of the universe & world & all that’s in it & don’t feel need to call that anything in particular, whereas I apply the name “god” to it. But with a lower-case g because god is as common as rock, as common as a molecule of oxygen, as common as anything.

Why is it that I want to use that word? What does it do for me? I guess because in part it points toward the mystery. god is common, just really the fabric of the universe, but it’s also mystery… we don’t know whether we call ourselves atheists or agnostics or Christians or Jews or Muslims or Buddhists or any of the other “ist” & “ism” names how all this works. Any time science learns how to “explain,” answers a question, it gives rise to umpteen further question: there is no end to them because we, just tiny motes of what-god-is, can’t fit any more into our understanding than what we can fit into our thoughts, our speech, our books. As my calculus tutor used to explain, no system can contain a metasystem. No matter how much we understand, there will always be Mystery beyond that. Which is why, I think, people who are wise are also people with humility: however much they know, they are aware how very little that really is.

Somehow, for me, using that word god keeps me mindful about all that. But I don’t think one must use that word to be conscious of it.

I believe that there are as many paths as there are people to follow them — whether “religious” or not. But I often find people who say being so “accepting” of other people’s different paths that they let them get away with all manner of evil. “They were only following their path.” “All perspectives are equally valid.” Bullshit.

The fundamental judgment I make of people, including myself, is not whether they follow a particular religion, or any religion at all, but whether the things they do & say cause harm. The most simple, most profound, & most succint statement of ethics & spirit that I’ve ever heard came from the neopagan movement: Harming none, do as you will. But if doing your will causes harm, then damn right I’m gonna judge you for it. And feel that your path sucks the big one. And maybe hate you for it too.

Related posts:

1. Religion v. belief
2. A brief spiritual history
3. Christianist, defined