|
ZerosRequiem
|
read my profile
sign my guestbook
Name: Joel
Birthday: 1/26/1986
Gender: Male
Interests: I am: a techno remix of Wagner's "Ring Cycle"; a subterranean seed-pod epidemiac; a citizen of Neon Chinatown; a Rivergreenway Conquistador; a blooming depression junkie and language lover; too wild, too rude, and bold of voice; an emergency flare; Venus as a boy.
Expertise: See above.
Occupation: Student
Industry: Other
Message: message me
AIM:  ZerosRequiem
Member Since:
2/7/2005
 True
|
|
| Three weeks from today, I'll be in Addis Ababa. Hopefully, I'll have made some friends in my volunteer group, and we'll start our adventure together. The land, the trees, and the people will different, but the sky will be the same. I think it'll be rainy season when I get there. I'll bring some presents for my host family; I hope they'll like them. I'll have more practice reading Amharic, as it'll be all around me. Maybe I'll end up in an Amharic-speaking area, so I'll get practice speaking it too.
The weather is lovely today, and Ethiopia is something to be excited about. 
| | |
| Desiree, it might interest you to know that the last stop I made in Muncie this weekend was to visit Lenore. I smoked a cigarette and watched her, and I reminded her of the time Kate and I came on Valentine's Day, when it was all snowy and we all drank vodka together and played with Houdini. I don't know if anyone lives there, so I kept thinking someone would come out and ask what I was doing there, standing and watching. I even took a picture of her. The last thing I did before I left Muncie was walk up the sidewalk, kiss my fingers, touch her porch, and tell her goodbye.
| | |
| A comment on my recent post, "Covert Damage," which was posted on the Revelife website:
"The conflict is there because of what your magic book says. It really does say that; it says gay people are evil and disgusting and should be murdered. (It also says "Love your neighbor", but that's because it contradicts itself in multiple places.)
"There is really only one solution to this conflict. It is the one solution you can't bear to accept. You see the problem as insoluble because you refuse to take the one path that is available to you: STOP BEING CHRISTIAN.
"Stop identifying with a book full of hateful lies. Stop going to a place every week where they read to you from it and tell you it is the best thing ever. Stop trying to reconcile the parts that say "love" and the parts that say "kill infidels", because it simply can't be done. The book is defective; throw it away.
"Go ahead and believe in God if you want; it's silly, but there are worse things you could do. But every time you go beyond that belief and say "I'm Christian"; every time you specifically identify yourself with the Bible, with churches and institutions of murder and hatred---you are part of the problem.
You can shout until you are blue in the face that Christianity is all about love and acceptance: it isn't. It has never been. It has always been about some people better than others, this one magic book being the best thing ever and everyone else's ideas being evil and wrong. It has always been about hating people who are different from you, and believing in things that are absurd.
"STOP BEING CHRISTIAN. And then the problem will suddenly disappear; you will no longer feel that you are supposed to believe in lies and hate people for no apparent reason.
"But like I said, you aren't going to listen. Because the one path available to you is the one path you consistently refuse to take."
I was at some friends' house in Muncie when I read this. I read it to them, and the first advice I got from them was to blast the writer out of the water. I would have liked to, maybe a few years ago, but I've learned about the futility of the flame war to change anyone's minds. I told my friends I'd take my laptop to their kitchen, work on my response, and then tell them what I wrote. I did so, and here's what I came up with:
"if this response is directed at someone else, then my apologies for misdirecting what i'm about to say. "nothing about what you've just posted adds in anyway to the dialogue surrounding the tension so many of us feel. you've been able to come to a point at which you could logically look at a book, the religion that it's part of, and the God it describes and decide it's not for you. you've got no stock in this religious system because you're not part of it, and that's fine for you. but let me venture to point out the great irony in how you've handled your advice to me: the language and tone both reflect the tactics of the religious right. you've told me i refuse to take the one path that is available to me, and you've suggested that it's the one solution i "can't bear to accept." you've essentially told me that, even though you only know me based on what i've written, you know my heart and can prescribe what's good for it. "perhaps i've failed in what i've written, because when i write about the intersection of my own faith and sexuality, my objective is to pull myself out of the popular narratives surrounding that intersection, tell my own story, and hopefully humanize myself in the eyes of a greater group of people who don't know me. i've been dehumanized on the side of religious people who call my feelings a "lifestyle," and i've been dehumanized on the side of non-religious people who ask why i continue to be "part of the problem." "but i am not, as you suggest, "part of the problem." you see the problem as the failure of a religion you may know little about to accept people who fall outside of that religion. i don't know your history, but i worry about anyone who claims knowledge about christianity but draws the phrase "kill the infidels" from it. the problem that i see, however, is the failure of people with differing opinions to find each others' humanity and find it sacred enough to learn to see from each others' points of view, even if they ultimately disagree. "i suggest that you're no different from the fundamentalists you seem to see as intolerant. you have a worldview that works for you, and you think that it's an easy worldview for anyone to just pick up, no matter where they've come from or what's important to them. "i apologize if i didn't come any closer to achieving my goals in writing, but i am not and will not be part of your narrative. anyone can be a fundamentalist; anyone can be intolerant. it doesn't matter which deities you do or don't worship. now grant me my humanity and i'll grant you yours."
| | |
| Here's what I saw today that got this post going:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR9gyloyOjM&feature=share
On the drive to Niagara Falls last Saturday, Jen, Morgan, and I had been talking about gender, sexuality, and religion, as we sometimes have when we've been together. Jen is an avid atheist and social worker with a grad degree in gender studies, and Morgan would describe himself as an "atheist-leaning agnostic." I love talking with them, because they're both so intelligent. I told her about my coming out, and then my brother's; she's curious about how two boys from a devout Evangelical family end up coming out, one then becoming atheist. I told her it's difficult to answer people's questions of, "How are your parents dealing with it?" The assumed response will be one of two: "We don't talk to each other anymore," or "They're really great. They actually just joined a local PFLAG group and are coming with us to Pride this year."
But neither one is true. My parents certainly aren't PFLAG members and I can't imagine they ever would be, and they certainly wouldn't attend a pride festival with us, not Fort Wayne's, and certainly not in Chicago, where my brother lives. On the other hand, they've never given us any indication that we'd be disowned. The best way I can describe it is that we're all kind of learning together, in our own ways. We operate in a precarious space, as any loving family with traditionally Christian roots in our situation would.
"We lucked out," I told Jen. "My parents never threw either of us out of the house."
"That's really sad," she said, as we continued down the highway.
"Why's that?" I asked.
"It's sad that that's lucky."
I thought about other non-straight friends I have who came from religious families. Some don't have good relationships with their parents, and some don't have relationships with them at all. One in particular stands to be disowned and forgotten if his parents ever found out. I still remember the two girls in my youth group who were a couple for a short time, and hearing about the meeting they had with their parents and the youth pastor, and the other youth group members enlisted as spies to make sure they never did anything.
Side note, I remember a night when that same youth pastor had us split into groups and write down ideas for Wednesday nights on calendars. I wrote down "America's Love Affair with the Gay Man" as a suggestion, thinking about the recent debut of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and other representations of queer people beginning to show up in the media. When it actually came to that night, the youth pastor told us that we probably didn't know much about homosexuality, so he wasn't going to invite a discussion. Instead, he'd just talk. I don't remember the specifics of what he said, just that it was what you'd expect from a conservative Evangelical church leader, but I do remember his tone. It wasn't quite angry, though there was a hard edge to it. A kind of aggressive calling out of something he was frustrated with, the way he might be frustrated with any other sin or injustice.
I realized that Jen meant it was sad that my brother and I maintaining good ties with our family in spite of our comings out would be considered lucky, and not just the standard.
Many stories I could tell, so many stories. And what I want you to understand about the stories is that most of them were not black-and-white, overtly what-an-injustice experiences when they happened. In fact, I'm sure I've mentioned before on this blog that I'd forgotten some of them happened for years, until they crept back into my view and asked me what I'd do with them. I still don't know, because what I see isn't easy for me to classify. I don't have memories of physical abuse from people who thought I or anyone else was an abomination, and I was never told that I, specifically, was going to hell.
Maybe covert damage is the thing we should really worried about, now that so much discussion of bullying and discrimination is going on. We can see when one student punches another, and if we don't see that, we can see the bruises. We can see scratch marks from a razor blade and sores from one's pinching fingers. But it's more difficult to interrogate and understand the parts of our cultures that have created a larger mythology around the abomination of queer sexuality. It's been difficult for me to understand the formation of the mythology in me, and I can imagine it'd be even more difficult to call it out if I were more firmly on the side of traditional Biblical sexuality. I can tell you what I've told you before, about the youth pastor's lesson on homosexuality, or my other teachers in school, the proctology reports and sex partner averages in their lessons (in religion classes, no less), the links between queer sex and demonic possession I've heard more recently in my parents' church, the destruction of the ELCA church steeple in Minnesota, Hurricane Katrina... and the small things too, my friend joking and saying to me in high school, "Did you hear they're going to expel all the gay students?", to which I responded, "Oh no, Ben, but where will you go to school?", because the best way to fight against 'gay' as an insult is to throw it back, because 'gay' is the worst insult, because to be gay is to be an insult. The small things, the gay slurs I heard starting in third grade, the jeers and accusations of which male students I'd slept with when I was in fifth grade even though I didn't know how gay sex worked back then, and my own queer sexuality growing concurrently like a weed, something I couldn't identify and couldn't stop, all those small things, and--
--and Jesus led me like a lamb to the slaughter, I thought, asking me to lie down, my back to the cool stone of the altar, my jugular vein exposed to the priest's blade, just like Him.
--and I was implicit in my own oppression because that was the way I learned to view the world too.
I can tell you these things, and many people who read this will sympathize. They'll have their own stories, or stories from friends and family members, or they'll at least be able to read what I write and acknowledge right off the bat that yes, this is a problem. But some of my readers will rest on their idea that Christians have a responsibility to keep each other from sin. They'll certainly feel sorry about what has happened, but that won't change their opinion that each queer person is called to lay down their torches, leave their lives of sin, and follow Jesus into celibacy or heterosexual marriage. They may even imagine that they themselves have been asked to carry similar burdens, having gone through celibate periods of their own and not allowed to cheat in their marriages, because to them, queer sexuality is only physical, though heterosexuality has been framed as holistic, affecting one's body, emotions, mind and spirit. They may read this, feel some sympathy for me and other queer people, but they will not accede to this heavy mythology, this covert damage. I don't think their Jesus ever asked them to do that.
This is the sad reality of that low standard of treatment of queer people, that I can count myself lucky, after all the things I've been through, that I still have a family. I can still view myself as lucky, even unresolved as I am about whether I'm worthy of the love people in heterosexual relationships give each other freely, or whether I'm just being stubborn and will some day be judged and punished because I was unable or unwilling to erase myself, eradicate myself, obey to the point of destruction, all things for Jesus and His kingdom and His glory, poured out like a drink offering, evaporating in the desert.
I'm lucky because my damage is covert.
| | |
| A month from two days ago.
There's so much to do before then. Actually, it needs to be done two or three days before that, but a month from two days ago is the general answer I'm giving when someone asks when I'm going to Ethiopia. Two days in Arlington, Virginia, ten days in Addis Ababa, and then a few months of training in one of a handful of smaller towns or villages, and then service for a few years.
I printed out a map of Ethiopia to see where the training towns are. They're all near Assela, which looks like it's maybe sixty miles from Addis. I also looked to see what countries are near Ethiopia: Sudan, Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti, and Eritrea border it, and it's also relatively close to Uganda, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia.
A month from two days ago.
There was a period when I found out I was leaving in June where I hated telling people when I was going. Everyone either looked sad or worried. This wasn't the biggest problem, though; the biggest problem for me was that, being a person who likes to talk through things with friends, I suddenly found I couldn't do that without making someone sad. And then the problem compounded, because when I'd tell people everyone I knew was sad about it, they would just tell me that it's because people care about me and will miss me, which I guess is somehow supposed to make me feel better about seeing so many people I care about feeling down about something?
And then I remember telling some friends before prayer about the experience of people asking certain questions based on what country you're going to. When I was moving to Korea, the question was, "North or south?" For Ethiopia, it's, "What are you going to eat?", sometimes with the accompanying remark about my weight, which you know I always love. Sometimes I'll also get the question about whether the Ethiopian language is "one of those clicking languages." (For the record, it's not called 'Ethiopian,' it's called 'Amharic,' but I don't blame people for not knowing that, and it's not really one of those clicking languages.) I also told these friends about the assumptions people make that I'll still be able to Skype back home, and how I'm having a hard time with this huge change coming up, knowing how misunderstood it is. The prayer request that got relayed to God asked him to help me have grace for people. Grace. As though I'm so certain of what's about to happen to me that I don't have an actual emotional stake in what gets said to me. I thought what I was asking for was some kind of support, or maybe a sense of being held by something bigger, because, you guys? Lately I feel really, really small. I feel small and I don't know how to talk to others about it without them feeling small and lost too.
When I was in Toronto, I thought about how a friend told me it's awfully suspicious that I went to this Orthodox church and then got placed in Ethiopia. I liked that she called it "suspicious"; we both have the understanding that God may lead people in specific directions, but not always. So I went to this Orthodox church, met some Ethiopians, got my placement in Ethiopia, visited friends in Toronto who live next to an Ethiopian neighborhood, and will soon visit my brother who also lives near an Ethiopian neighborhood in Chicago. I thought, "Ethiopia has been creeping up on me." But then I wondered if I'd feel the same way if I were being sent to Lesotho, say, or Zambia. I thought then that the world is creeping up on me, has been creeping up on me since I was young. I've taken special notice of Ethiopia the last few months the way I took special notice of, well, everywhere when I was a kid.
The big thing holding me is the world, I suppose. And I'm just a few weeks away from getting onto a few planes that will pick me up and spit me out into the world's embrace.
I wish I had a word for the special mix of exhilaration and fearful solitude I feel. On one hand I sense there are millions of miles between me and 4 June, my orientation date, and then 6 June, the date of my flight, and on the other, I dare not wish those days to come too quickly, for fear that I squander what I have here. Just the same, part of me cannot wait to be in a situation where I feel physically remote and independent again.
This is the kind of thing eating at my mind on days when I don't want to go buy cigarettes. You know I smoked a whole pack of cigarettes yesterday? Even I felt like that was a little unbelievable. You smoke one when you haven't had them in a day or so, and you can feel the buzz, but after that, the puffs each barely make a wave to your balance.
| | |
|
