266. vilipend

Story time.

My sophomore year in college, the choir went on one of its many tours around the Midwest, including Vermillion, South Dakota, which (among other things) is home to the National Music Museum at the University of South Dakota.

No, that’s not true. The National Music Museum and the University of South Dakota are really the only things Vermillion has going for it, and I say that as one who spent a good chunk of his childhood in a small, Central Plains town that was also home to an institution of higher learning.

Sorry, people of Vermillion.

Anyway, at one point during the tour of the various collections we entered the keyboard room, and this is where our story begins.

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First, some background.

As some readers may know, I play the piano. At one point I could’ve been called a pianist. I started lessons at age eight, and by age eleven was studying pretty seriously.

Like, hours of practice a day seriously.

Now, I just play the piano.

Unlike most kids who take piano lessons, I decided to specialize in what’s known as period (or historically informed) performance. I read books on 16th and 17th century keyboard and embellishment technique, checked out journals from the library, studied recordings to absorb stylistic mannerisms, mastered skills like finger pedaling and use of ornaments like mordants, appoggiaturas, and doppelt-cadences.

For birthdays, I asked for recordings of pieces by Mozart, Bach, Purcell, Tallis, Josquin, and Monteverdi.

(I did discover 20th century music around age sixteen, but that’s another story.)

Basically, if it was written before 1800, I wasn’t interested.

One of the instruments I always wanted to play was one with a Janissary pedal, a reference to Turkish military bands that Europeans went mad for in the mid 18th century. This is referenced in the film version of Amadeus when Katherina Cavalieri tells Salieri her hairdresser says that “everything this year is going to be Turkish!”

These bands featured lots of percussion–including bells and drums. Piano builders catered to this craze with a pedal that activated a drum, bells, cymbal, and/or triangle built directly into the piano itself.

One of the pieces written for this device is the third movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11, better known as the Rondo alla Turca.

Fast-forward to 2003 during my sophomore year, on a tour of the National Music Museum. As we entered the keyboard room, our tour guide began to talk about some of the pianos featured there… including the one in the picture at the top of the page.

Which happens to include a Janissary pedal.

The tour guide played a few of the pianos to demonstrate the differences in sound quality and timbre between them. Then she got to our piano. Now, I’d only ever heard a recording of the Janissary pedal on the radio, but never in person.

So when our tour guide played through that movement of the Mozart rondo, when she got to the A major section and activated the pedal, I inadvertently let out a sound that was a combination of a shriek of elation and squeak of surprise. It wasn’t an effeminate sound, per se. It was too feral and wild for that. But it did catch everyone off guard. Every head in the room whipped around and I must’ve turned numerous shades of red.

I’ve often reflected on this moment, especially in the years since coming out. Much is made of the differences in mannerism and expression between gay and heterosexual men. One moment when I became acutely aware of such differences was when listening to an episode of This American Life when I was almost fourteen years old titled Sissies. In one segment, an excerpt from an advice book for young men written in 1942 was read aloud:

Here’s a list of gestures commonly associated with women and another list commonly associated with men… Feminine gesture: hand on hip. Masculine gesture: hands folded over chest or clasped in back… Feminine gesture: looking at people from the corner of eyes. Masculine gesture: direct look; entire head turned toward person… How do you laugh? Are your laughs pitched high like a woman’s? Lower the pitch. Develop a masculine laugh… Roar. Bellow. Do anything but giggle.

This was one of those landmark moments when I realized that to be effeminate (i.e., faggot) was something negative and shameful. It was when I began to scrutinize my own behavior, looking at myself how I imagined the world might be seeing me.

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To this day, there is little about gay culture and lifestyle today that I identify with–and by “culture” and “lifestyle,” I mean perceived culture and lifestyle as defined and reinforced through shows like Will & Grace, Modern Family, Glee, and in places like gayborhoods and gay urban meccas like Los Angeles and New York City where trends develop and are exported from. Things like speech and vocal patterns, clothing, mannerisms, preferences, and the like become community tokens of belonging, powerful totems of identity in a world that is often unkind to those who do not conform to heteronormative values.

But I’ve realized that for me, this goes much deeper. It’s not that I wasn’t socialized as a gay man.

It’s that I wasn’t really socialized, period.

That moment wasn’t an expression of my “queer” self. It was the unfiltered delight of someone who never learned what is a socially appropriate expression of delight.

Homeschooled until my junior year in high school, I grew up in an insular world within an insular world. In those years when most people learn what’s cool/uncool, how to read social signals and express yourself in acceptable ways, I was learning what it meant to be an outsider in a world dominated by Satan. While other kids were running to get to class before the bell, I was doing my own thing.

Sure, I missed out on the various traumas of middle and junior high school. I also missed out on the growth opportunities that time affords.

 

72. blessing

This morning I was listening to This American Life from 29 July, a show in two acts about thugs and various kinds of thuggery. In the first act, a man in Egypt is subjected to the nightmare of beatings, torture, false imprisonment and then charged with being a thug, all because he wasn’t going along with the military coup before and during the ousting of Hosni Mubarak.

In the second act, a social worker fights to redeem a young man who enters the criminal justice system who she is determined to save and believes in against all evidence to the contrary. As the story goes, he is eventually connected to a horrific murder, goes to prison, escapes, and kills two more people before he is finally caught and sentence to death row. Through it all, the woman maintains his innocence—until he finally confesses to the murder he was originally accused of, as well as another murder that he was never suspected of, because “he found God . . . and needed to atone for what he’d done.”

Later on, she goes to visit him in the maximum security prison where he will eventually face execution. He began to change, the story went, one day while flipping through the trial documents.

He looked at the photo of his victim, the girl he killed, alive and beautiful. Then he held it side-by-side with her autopsy photo and thought, I did that. He pauses and puts a hand over his face, as if he’s collecting himself enough to continue. But watching Kenneth relive this is like watching a bad play. The words are disconnected from his gestures. He makes a show of weeping, lowering his eyes, shaking his head, and covering his face with his arms. When he looks up again, I don’t see any tears.

The crime for which he went to prison involved robbing two female university students, then later kidnapping them, taking them out into the middle of nowhere and shooting both of them. One girl died; another survived and managed to get to help. “He went back, he said, let them beg for their lives, and shot them, over and over.”

Then the victims of his prison break. A farmer, the one with the truck, was trying to run away when Kenneth gunned him down. And finally, this. After the car chase in Missouri, state troopers made Kenneth walk over and look at the lifeless body of the delivery driver, thinking Kenneth would be remorseful. Instead, Kenneth says all he saw was the man who got in the way of his escape, and he spit on the body.

In one of the earlier episodes of the fourth season of Torchwood: Miracle Day, a child molester and murderer (Bill Pullman in a fantastic change of role for him) is executed by lethal injection, but due to The Blessing (the event by which everyone in the world stops dying) occurring just before his execution is carried out, he survives and is released since he cannot be tried or executed for the same crime twice. In the second episode, he is confronted during a TV interview à la 60 Minutes with the image of the girl he brutally killed. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he says, weeping, tears welling up in his eyes.

“What good is ‘sorry,’ Mr Danes?” the interviewer scoffs. “Is it going to do anything for Mrs Cabina every morning when she wakes up?”

What is it about “finding God” that is supposed to engender sympathy or forgiveness for even the most savage of criminals? As if praying a prayer erases a multitude of wrongs – if not on earth then in heaven. This is one of my primary objections to Christianity: that you could savagely murder a room full of people and then have a pang of conscience, ask for God’s forgiveness, be rightly executed for your crime, and go straight to heaven to be with Jesus for all eternity without a blemish on your soul. Because Jesus paid it all.

Quick primer in atonement theology. There are two main schools of thought here:

• The Christus Victor, or ransom, theory: Humanity is enslaved to Satan on account of the Fall, wherein Adam and Eve imputed Original Sin to all their descendants. The best analogy here is in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where Edmund betrays his brother and sisters to the White Witch (the Satan figure in Narnia) and becomes her slave since every traitor is her lawful prey. To save him from death, Aslan (the Christ figure) dies in his place, but because of the Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time, “when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table [i.e., the Cross] would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.”
• The Penal substitution, or satisfaction, theory: Same premise as Christus victor; but here, God is the Righteous Judge and humanity is the Wretched Criminal. “Sin” is the inexorable debt to be repaid to God for Man’s rebellion against him, and Man is automatically found guilty by God, the only perfect being in existence; and so he is condemned to be separated from God for all eternity in Hell (e.g., life in prison). But Jesus, the perfect sinless Son of God (don’t get me started on trinitarian theology), is sent to serve that sentence and is born the God-man and executed, thus fulfilling the conditions of the sentence. And God declares the debt as having been paid in full.

Richard Dawkins responded to the theology of atonement, how Abraham and Isaac prefigures the Crucifixion, and Original Sin in an interview with Howard Conder this past March. Dawkins said: “The idea that God could only forgive our sins by having his Son tortured to death as a scapegoat is, surely from an objective point of view, a deeply unpleasant idea. If God wanted to forgive us our sins, why didn’t he just forgive them?

“If there’s something I can’t stand about Christianity, it’s this obnoxious doctrine of Original Sin, which I think is actually a hideous, and demeaning and a vengeful doctrine. It’s the idea that one can be absolved; that a sin by somebody else has to be paid for by a different person, which is a horrible idea.

“It would be persuasive if the judge said, you’re forgiven. That would be great. That would the kind of thing one could empathize with. But that’s not what he said. He said, ‘Okay, we’re going to hang somebody else for your crime’.

“I think it’s a horrible idea that – given that the judge is all-powerful; given that the judge has the power to forgive if he wants to – the only way he can do it is to sacrifice his son. I mean, what an incredibly unpleasant way to do it, given that you have the power to forgive, that you are all-powerful!”

So what’s so wrong with a murderer (or anyone else for that matter—liar, adulterer, thief, homosexual, or whatever else you call a “sin”) being forgiven and getting off scot-free? Or with Jesus paying your sin-debt for you? It’s precisely that—you get off scot-free. And let’s say that the people you killed weren’t Christians. Let’s say you tortured them—horribly—before you then murdered them, had that pang of conscience later after you realized what you did, prayed “the prayer” and were “saved.” The problem is that you sent however many into an eternity in hell (because they weren’t “saved”) while you yourself skip out of jail into a blissful eternity in heaven and Jesus pays the $200.

What kind of a theology is this? To borrow from Julia Sweeney Letting Go of God, it would be as though Hitler had a “come to Jesus” moment right before he died. According to atonement theology, if he was truly sincere, no one would sit him down and say, “You fucked up, buddy! Now you’re going to spend an eternity in hell!” Quite the opposite. His sin of having murdered millions of people (among other things) would be expunged, paid for on the Cross by Jesus.

Supposing an inmate who suffocated in the gas chambers of Auschwitz ran into the man responsible for their death in heaven? Or Susie Cabina running into Oswald Danes who raped and murdered her as a 12-year-old? Or Cecil Boren or Dominique Hurd meeting Kenneth Williams (the kid from the This American Life story earlier)? Or conversely, any of them going to hell and learning that their murderer had been pardoned by God?

Now, it may be fair to say that I just don’t like this arrangement because I don’t think it’s just. God sees all sins as equal, and if a sinner truly repents, who are we to begrudge God for granting pardon since we are just as guilty as the murderer? Does that make me the Unmerciful Servant whose debt the king forgave? Or a grumbling vineyard worker who resented the owner for paying those who showed up at the last shift the same as those who had worked all day? Possibly—to both.

However, as to the question of whether a murderer who “found God” should be worthy of our forgiveness, I say the only person who can truly forgive the wrong is the victim him or herself.

In Tony Kushner’s play Perestroika, Ethel Rosenberg returns to haunt Roy Cohn, who effectively killed her by pulling strings with the presiding judge to get a death sentence. As Roy lies dying of AIDS, Ethel stands at his bedside.

I decided to come here so I could see could I forgive you. You who I have hated so terribly I have born my hatred for you up into the heavens and made a needle-sharp little star in the sky out of it. It’s the star of Ethel Rosenberg’s Hatred, and it burns every year for one night only, June Nineteen. It burns acid green.

I came to forgive but all I can do is take pleasure in your misery. Hoping I’d get to see you die more terrible than I did. And you are, ’cause you’re dying in shit, Roy, defeated. And you could kill me, but you couldn’t ever defeat me. You never won. And when you die all anyone will say is: Better he had never lived at all.

In the scene that follows, Roy feigns reverting to a childlike state, calling for his mother, begging her to sing to him. At first, Ethel is bitter, angry, and refuses, but finally relents when he persists. She sings him an old Yiddish song, “Shteit a bocher.” Then, once she thinks he’s dead and turns to go, he suddenly sits up and exclaims, “I can’t believe you fell for that ma stuff, I just wanted to see if I could finally, finally make Ethel Rosenberg sing! I WIN!” After which he actually dies.

Towards the end of the play, Ethel returns in a final gesture of forgiveness to help Louis say Kaddish over Roy. They end with the blessing, “Oseh sholom bimromov, hu ya-aseh sholom olenu v’al col Yisroel v’imru omain. You sonofabitch.” The Hebrew translates to, “He who makes peace in His heights, may He make peace upon us and upon all Israel; and say, ‘Amen’.”

So in the end, I’m conflicted. On the one hand, a God who pardons the unpardonable and allows his son to be tortured to death for our sins is utterly offensive. On the other hand, what are the limits of forgiveness in light of eternity? What is the extent of forgiveness? And what is the extent of retribution?

Many friends of mine say that the criminal justice system should be restorative instead of merely punitive—that the purpose should be to eventually restore an individual to right standing in society (provided that there is no danger posed to society). But to what extent can a debt be considered “paid”? Does such a person deserve to walk free, or receive our collective forgiveness?

63. pastiche

This post was inspired by an episode of This American Life where some of their frequent contributors offered their own take on William Carlos Williams’ famous poem, “This Is Just To Say” (in particular, Kenneth Koch’s “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams,” which can be read here). I’m feeling rather down and lonely tonight, and this is the way it came out. These seem like inevitable conversations I will have, if they ever happen at all.

This Is Just To Say…

1.
I ruined your evening by smashing your picture today.
I am sorry but I felt unlikable and it made sense.
One way or another you will leave.

2.
You asked me to drop the gunnysack I drag around.
It is heavy but I am angry at it so I said no.
Your eyes were terribly sad.

3.
I wanted to tell you I loved you in the garden
but the words came out covered in thorns
and they cut you and I ran away

4.
I yelled at you for not calling on the 4th of July
and you said that we met the month after
but by then I was deaf and blind and in the car

58. truth

Where does our story begin today?

It begins with me waking up at 6am with my best friend at the Hotel Minneapolis, where I stayed the night because I was in no state to drive. She’s been staying in Rochester with her dad for the next few weeks and came up to Minneapolis with another friend of her’s from Iowa. She just left her husband and decided to get some room to breathe, decompress and put some distance between her and her husband. So the three of us had dinner last night and then crashed in their room.

The sad thing is that they’ve been married eleven years, and have tried to do everything to make things work. Even sadder is the fact that up until last week, when she left, he thought things were at least starting to get better, though the truth was that she was the one doing all the work and the changing, and was emotionally drained from trying to keep him happy. She hadn’t realized how unhappy she was or how bad things had gotten until another friend of her’s asked point blank why she was still with her husband. So, last Wednesday, we spent most of the day while he was at work packing up her things and moving her out.

The hardest thing about ending a relationship is often the fear of letting go of the idea of what it was, of losing everything that was good about it, and of that part of your identity dying, especially if the relationship lasted several years. Like, eleven years.

Or twenty.

In my last entry, I described the awfulness that ensued on my birthday that led to the loss of a good friend and my faith in God. Frankly, the whole business with Seth was only the final blow that knocked me off the fence and into facing the truth of my situation, which is that I’d basically been holding into a faith for the sake of being with him. He and some other friends are in the process of starting a church geared towards those who have been hurt or rejected by the Church, including GLBT Christians and those who are interested in the Christian faith but haven’t been afforded a place in the community. But the result of that conversation on my birthday made me realize that I haven’t been a Christian for a long time—possibly ever.

Driving back to my house this morning, I realized that this whole thing has felt like the death of a twenty-year-long relationship. At the age of eight I began to identify as a Christian, and since then the church has been my community. My whole identity has been wrapped up in the reality of God, of theology, and of a Judeo-Christian morality and ethic. My decisions have been made based on whether what I’m doing is the will of God, or whether a given activity or project would glorify God. It took me nearly ten years to finally come out because of what the Bible taught about homosexuality. So to turn around after nearly twenty years of living with this feels like the end of a marriage that hasn’t been working for a long time, and the children are all out of the house now and we’re trying to find a reason to stay together.

This honestly wasn’t a huge surprise. As early as 2006 I was beginning to question the validity of the Bible, whether it was true and if it mattered whether it’s true (and if it wasn’t true, what that meant), and really wasn’t finding satisfactory answers to these questions in my Christian community. In fact, quite the opposite. “Down that dangerous road lies emptiness and misery,” was the general response. So I shut up because it was easier than enduring the looks and the remonstrations about “enduring to the end” and “praying for faith.” When I came out, I started with the Bible and seeing what it really had to say about gays, because what God had to say about this was important and I wasn’t satisfied with the idea that I was broken or that God had given me these desires only to bury them. That’s a whole other post, but what I found wasn’t assuring, though not in the way I feared. I realized what a malleable and flimsy thing translation was, and how every Biblical translator has an agenda that works its way into the text. So how could I really believe anything that it had to say?

A few months ago while temping I listened to the This American Life episode “Godless America,” in which Julia Sweeney tells the story of her journey from being a committed Catholic to atheism, which is an excerpt from her show “Letting Go of God.” I’d heard the This American Life story a while ago, and at the time felt rather superior to her story. I went to a Christian liberal arts college; had a degree in Biblical and theological studies; studied and discussed theology; and had been going to church all my life and had even studied other worldviews in depth and was convinced in the rightness of Christianity. It offered all the answers to life’s persistent questions. Atheism was the ultimate cop-out, a failure to deal with layers of complexity, rejecting God rather than face the questions.

But if I had to be honest, in that smugness was also fear—fear that maybe there was something to her experience and what she was saying. I’d grown up my whole life with God, with Him being there, listening to and watching over me, and the idea of Not-God was, well, unsettling. It meant turning my back on everything I’d ever believed and been taught by my family, in my many years of Christian education, and by the Church. It meant that everything in life is just coincidence; that we’re here by chance and there’s no one minding the store. It meant that everyone at my church was essentially believing a myth; that there was no one looking out for or listening to people unjustly thrown in prison, or being tortured, or suffering. Worse, it also meant that this is all there is—that there is no afterlife, no Eternal Life, no salvation.

So on my birthday, Seth rebuffing me for the final time was the last straw. Since there wasn’t a future with him, there was no reason to call myself a Christian anymore since I was staying in it for him, which is a terrible reason to do anything. I felt like Anna Kendrick’s character in Up In The Air, having relocated her entire life to Omaha for a guy who ultimately dumps her by text message, and feeling completely adrift; or like George Clooney’s character in the same film, thinking he’d finally found the woman of his dreams and that this new vision of his life was actually going to work, and showing up at her door to surprise her—only to discover that she was married, with children.

One of the big things I’ve lost since leaving the church is the community. For as long as I can remember, the church has provided a central locus that gave shape and direction to my life, from the AWANA program as a kid, to youth group as a teenager, to adult choir and orchestra in church, to weddings, funerals and everything in between. It was a way to commemorate and ritualize the important moments in life, like chapter breaks in a novel that organize an otherwise an uninterrupted and nebulous blur of days and years and shifting memories. There really isn’t another community that offers that kind of stability—but that isn’t a good reason to accept an entire belief system, is it?

A few days ago I did some searching on agnostic groups that might exist in my area, and came across another site that I’d heard about, again, on This American Life—Meetup.com, a site that exists to bring together different groups of people interested in the same things. There was a group called “Former Fundamentalists” that met for coffee on Sunday mornings, so I decided to check it out this morning. That ended up not happening as I got completely lost due to some poor directions and ended up giving up and going to Caribou instead to write about this whole misadventure.

While driving over to find the little coffee shop, I started thinking about this new direction in my life. I’m always suspicious about my own motives, and have been questioning whether I’m choosing agnosticism for the right reasons—and mainly whether it’s because of Seth, the guy I’ve been foolishly in love with for the last year. After all, it’s equally absurd to reject a belief system because a man done you wrong as it is to stay in it for him. There, in my living room, getting ready to go out and meet up with these fellow agnostics and former fundamentalists, I had to admit to myself that, yes, I had decided to reject Christianity because of him; that I was angry at him, and am still angry at the institution of the church itself; and that I hadn’t found a church that was both accepting of gays and lesbians and also rigorous and uncompromising in its approach to faith and theology.

There’s also the fact that I really liked the church that Seth and my friends were putting together, and was really excited that it might be a place I could finally belong to. However, he was to be the senior pastor, and seeing as I still have and probably always will have feelings for him, I could never go there while he’s a mainstay. Seeing him hurts too much. But that’s life. An added bonus is that my dating pool is that much bigger for dating other agnostics and “nones” (as they’re called).

Sometimes it’s the right move to leave a relationship if it’s abusive or unhealthy, or if it was disingenuous to begin with. But what if you realize that you were the problem to begin with, or even that maybe you’ve been letting other voices alter and shade your perceptions of that relationship, making it appear worse than it ever was?

Le sigh. The pursuit of truth is neither an easy nor a comfortable road.