Noel: music and images for Christmas

 

 

Whom we call Mary, will we ever know?

We have turned the girl bearing down in a freezing barn

hiding her bastard child in terror of death

to someone carved of soap, made cloud or heaven.

Poor Mary. We have robbed you of you.

 

 

 

 

This edifice, this war! This junkyard of faith!

Like molten lead in water

this phosphorescent upflash

of livid flame

 

 

 

 

 

We have this idea we're married to

that men came,

three, though we don't know that,

that they had money and power, though we don't know that,

That they knelt and adored

but we don't know that either

the story has hung itself around us

like crepe paper

 

 

 

 

 

This is Jesus, though hidden.

Jesu ben Yusef

circumcized, a Jew.

We cannot look at him, do not look upon him,

You will burn your eyes.

We know no good has ever come from Nazareth.

 

 

 

 

This is what we find on the sidewalk

Don't go there   don't go outside

Go inside the church and stay there

 

 

 

 

 

 

Portal: walk along the street

where Jesus was, where Jesus was.

Who was Jesus, what, an idea?

A reigning prince, a pretender?
I think he was a dream

a wish, a desire, a scramble for meaning

in the small square hole of our lives.

 

 

 

 

 

For all that, there lives a desperate sort of grace

and we must reach for it

or not go on.

Stay out of our church, go in this one,

be run out of that one,

find the True Church, the one true religion

 inside your own brain.

 

 

 

 

 

For all that, there is this repeating, not endless, just seeming so,

for surely it will end

before we know it.

Will the end be the same,

faith or unfaith,

knowing or not knowing?

Why must hope be born again

at the very desolation of the year

and customs dragged out

dusted off

as if they make a difference to the world?

 

 

 

 

Like chess-pieces, we hold and handle

the smooth turquoise, the cracked cool finish

in a need to comprehend the vast mystery

in

the dailiness and boredom

 

the ascendance

the rhapsody of light

the scent of winter trees

sounds of owls

we live for this, die for it

this stubborn insistence of wonder

this god with a human heart

What does God look like? I'll tell you.

Why do I have such awful thoughts?

Why do I have such awful thoughts on a Monday morning?

I’ve been writing a sort of informal ongoing series of posts about my complete disillusionment with organized religion.  After years of struggle and spiritual anguish, I had to cut the ties, drop out. Too many things were eating at me. There was not one single person I could talk to, and some of my very best friends were being told to leave. Run out of town. So who would be left?

So I left, but this was after a very long period of being. . . what? One day, years ago, I wrote in my journal a single word: Disaffected. It seemed to sum it all up. Whatever “affected” means, and it can mean many things beyond the obvious.

It can relate to “affect” (NOT the same as “effect”, you Philistines of non-grammar!), which is in a larger sense just a reference to emotion, particularly the expression of emotion. But then there are words like “affection”, and we all know what that means.

I wonder if I am doomed to enact and re-enact the rejections of my youth. I wrote a post called You’ll Never Get Out of the Playground which had a surprising number of views, at least for me - more than 100 overnight (and counting: I think it’s 200 now). This was about a middle-aged woman who was disaffected with the social media scene, feeling profoundly out of step. I wonder why anyone was interested, why anyone bothered. Being out of step? Does anyone feel this except me, I wonder?

I won’t tell you what happened on the playground, or in high school, and what happened later on in my church after 15 years of meaningful, if frustrating involvement and contribution (including financial: people used to visit us in our homes and subtly, or not-so-subtly, guilt-trip us into giving more than we really could afford). The thing is, in a church setting you are at the mercy of leadership, which is apparently chosen. Then why did we “choose” a leader who turned out to be jaw-droppingly destructive and wildly inappropriate? Does a group of people necessarily know what is good for them?

But this isn’t the bummer, the spiritual shadow that goes in and out with me. Maybe it’s early conditioning, I don’t know. My beliefs are such a ragbag, or a fluctuating tide, or something. They change and shift. They don’t get “better” and I don’t “evolve”, like I am supposed to: in fact sometimes I think I am devolving or even deteriorating.

The cold dense shadow that chills my sunniest day is wondering about death. I often have strong feelings that departed people are very near me, even physically. I know where they are in the room, and they seem to speak, though not exactly in words. They convey pure meaning, somehow. This could be imagination. The problem with being a writer is that you must flex your imagination again and again, constantly, like a bicep, until it becomes so monstrous your whole arm is disabled.

But what if it isn’t? What if this is a strange gift? I try not to close the door on it. Yet it seems to say, if there is any truth in it at all, that we don’t just disappear when we die. That something of us lives on. If you’re to believe mediums (media?), the soul lives on in much the same form, so that the departed person is recognizable even visually. Thus the Long Island Medium with her fake blonde hair, fake talent, and voice as grating as Fran Drescher in The Nanny.

So OK. What is the other option? We just disappear, we die like a tree, we become soil, or not even that. We “are not”, we are “no more”. We are “departed”. To where, nobody says.

Imagine there’s no heaven. It’s easy if you try. No hell below us. Above us only sky. This was John Lennon’s vision of Utopia. I’ve heard that as far as spiritual contact is concerned, John Lennon is damn hard to find.

But there’s another possibility, and this one just makes my guts quail as if there’s a big frog jumping around in there.

It’s based on a very old model, so I didn’t make this one up.

What if every wrong deed, every bad mistake, every unkindness, every slight to others, every bit of ungenerosity, every theft, every verbal slap, every sense of glee at someone else’s misfortune (sometimes known as schadenfreude), every cheat of every kind, was carefully kept track of, never erased, never forgotten? What if all of it has been strung together in a chain, and how long is your chain anyway? Is it “ponderous”, like the chain of Ebenezer Scrooge? What if all your nasty little deeds, most of them kept secret, were laid end-to-end, bald and visible to some awful judging Force that doesn’t let you get away with anything?

What if?

This model annihilates that all-loving, all-caring God that everyone quacks about. I just don’t feel that sense of God any more and wonder if I didn’t make it up just to make my life more bearable. But if I don’t believe, does my non-belief negate God? Does God only love believers, those who go to church and are pious and either never make mistakes and unkindnesses, or repent for them so mightily it’s as if they never occurred at all?

What a horrible thought.

The only meaningful God – and I really doubt any such being exists – is a God that does not know how to do anything BUT love, a God who IS love like Jesus was, if Jesus ever existed (which I now doubt: but look what we did to him anyway). This God doesn’t play favourites, doesn’t lay sins end to end like some poisonous necklace of doom. But if this God really does exist, why don’t I feel it any more?

Why did despair drive out the glory, the power, the honour, the trumpet-blasting  blah-blah-blah I used to sing about in those endless dreary hymns with 39 verses? You could blow the dust off this God. It had no vitality. It was conventional and tame. After a while I felt so lonely in my growing unbelief that I just couldn’t stand it any more.

So have I been driven out? Cast out of Eden with those other sinners (who shall remain nameless)? Am I alone after all, a huddled mass of confusion and fear?

Every time I find myself starting to pray, I cut it off. Come on, stupid, don’t.  It won’t get you anywhere. What does prayer accomplish anyway? What is it for? It’s asking God to change things, to change the way things are now. If God is a God who makes reality, how stupid is that? Aren’t things “the way they’re supposed to be”, as so many people like to put it? So why pray at all?

Pray for mercy? I can’t see how that works, either. A big hand doesn’t suddenly come down out of the sky. In fact, nothing does. Nothing changes. Pray for healing? Why? Will a big nurse suddenly. . . OK, you get the idea.

Pray “for” someone? If people knew what other people were praying for, they might be pretty surprised. “Oh God, please make Frank less of an asshole so he won’t bug me so much.” OK, that’s extreme. How about, “Oh God, please reconcile Karen and Rob and make their marriage whole again.” In fact, Karen and Rob’s divorce might be totally liberating for both of them, freeing them from a relationship that went dead years ago. Joe might want to die from that tumour, because he’s lonely and no one from his church comes around any more because he’s difficult and besides, he has stopped praying and believing.

So stay away.

And if two people compete with each other, praying for completely opposite things, which one will God listen to? Who will win? The political ramifications of this are frightening to contemplate.

So I can’t figure out prayer. It somehow has a Wizard of Oz quality to it. “Please sir. . . I am Dorothy, the small and meek.” And you know what happened there.

Did I pull back the curtain somehow, to reveal the little man pulling levers in a desperate sweat? Should I pay any attention to those strange luminescent figures in my room late at night? What is the mystery? I had an experience years ago of looking God right in the eye, of having a tiny glimpse for a billionth of a second through an aperture that opened, then closed again. I don’t know why this happened and I had a welter of feelings about it:

A sense I shouldn’t be seeing this, that it was a mistake.

A feeling I should take off my sandals because I was on holy ground.

A sense of "Me? Are you sure? You must have the wrong person."

A sense I had opened a door and saw my mother standing there naked and slammed it shut.

An absolute, soul-shattering awe.

A sense I was seeing everything: everything ever created, from the beginning of what we call Time (which is an illusion) and on into the infinite Future. This is beyond my powers to describe.

It was as if every question I had ever asked, every question I asked in the present, every question I would ask in the future, and in fact every question I could possibly ask, ever, in all the realms of possibility, along with questions I could never ask because I didn’t know what they were, had been answered in a single stroke.

This all happened under very deep hypnosis conducted by a friend who was not a trained hypnotist. The purpose was to restore my sleep after a bad bout of insomnia that had gone on for months, resistant to any drug.

I suppose I should have guessed I wasn't really under hypnosis, but something far more profound and dangerous. It was years later, taking an anthropology course, that I learned about trance, the altered state of consciousness that allows shamans to pierce their cheeks without pain or walk over glowing coals.

Did I somehow get there without knowing it? I had heard over and over again that in hypnosis, you can come out of it any time you want to. I couldn't. My "consciousness" was so far above my corporeal being that it wasn't visible from the ground. It was on the right-hand side in a specific place, not just in my head, and the "whatever" was in front of me, an aperture almost like a  strange-looking gate.

At some point I saw myself, my physical being, inert on the couch far below. I had been "under" for more than an hour, one of the many idiotic things my friend did. He was trying to bring me out of it and couldn't. He was trying everything. I was shit-scared. I wanted to come back and couldn't.

Finally there was a sense not of falling but of being sucked back, though instead of feeling disappointed (gee, heaven was so nice!), I only felt relief. But something was wrong.

"You look. . ."

"What?"

"No, don't look in the mirror."

But I did. I was grey as stone. Blue-grey, and cold all over. I wonder now if I really had been near death, and what would have happened if the life force hadn't decided to take me back. I did not sleep that night, and the next day my brain was on fire, to the point that I could hear it searing and popping inside my skull.

My Divine Encounter. I suppose a fundamentalist would say it was the devil or something. I’d say there was no sense of a Being or Presence, but there was – and, surprise, it wasn’t a being of Love at all.  In fact it was completely indifferent. Which is the opposite of love (not hate, but “not-love”).

If the Universe is indifferent, if God is indifferent. . . or was it a projection of the tragedy of my mother, a Being so indifferent she did not even list my name in her obituary, as if it would be better if I had never existed at all?

Officially, I have been wiped off the record, and that does get to a person after a while. How can you worship God if you don’t really exist?

But I did notice something else. There was some sense of a slightly ironic sense of humor, of a sort of indulgence, and a sense of “someone or something” touching or stroking my right cheek. But it was like a child finding a ladybug. Funny little thing. Look what I’ve created. Pssshhhhhewwwwww.

I don’t know if writing about this experience is a mistake or not. It disturbs me and I still do not understand it. Easy to say, “oh, you were tired, it was just a bad dream,” or “oh well, that wasn’t really God.” I was completely convinced I was witnessing Ultimate Reality, and it was totally disillusioning and terrified me beyond words.

If Jesus loves the little children, then I guess I am still an abused child huddled in the corner, waiting for some grace that never arrives. I suppose it will always be that way. If my sins are strung out in space like some spiky ugly necklace, I am done for.

If it’s some other way, I do wish I could find out about it now, in some manner that is understandable to me. I am not getting any younger.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

OK, I'll get off this topic now

No, this ain't the Playboy mansion (or a bath house somewhere in deepest Arkansas): it's Ted Haggard and his hapless family having a nice hot soak. Don't know where he got the funds for his own hot tub, given his supposedly impoverished state.

I found this quote on a site about Haggard. I hereby respectfully share it with you, because frankly it made my hair stand on end. This is after his wife spoke passionately to a crowd of still-loyal followers.

"I was actually looking forward to hearing from him too, but he turned out to be a total train wreck. Still very bitter and angry at his old church. Maybe he’s a little justified there, but then he tried to crack a joke. Jets were flying over the arena we were in so he made this brilliant crack: “I hope those aren’t angry Muslims coming to fly those planes into this building.” No exaggeration, that’s a direct quote.
He followed that up with this great pearl of wisdom. When they asked him what advice he’d give a pastor struggling with sin, he said: “I would tell them to find a licensed therapist…..because they are legally bound by law to keep your secrets, that way if you ever run for governor or become famous they can’t use it against you and blackmail you.”

No mention of God or faith or prayer anywhere. But Haggard doesn't know how to spell the word: it always comes out "prey".

Ted. . . Fred. . . Fraud

It amazes me how quickly spare change can morph into wooden nickels.

Case in point. About a month ago, a homeless guy named Ted Williams (probably not his real name) "went viral" on YouTube for standing on a streetcorner in camouflage holding a piece of cardboard. On the video, this scruffy wraith spoke with a rich booming announcer's voice, and soon everyone in the nation was throwing job offers at him: advertising voiceovers, sportscasting, Disney characters (well, maybe). They did this to show the world how swell THEY were, not how swell they thought Ted was.

Everything moved so quickly, in a kind of blur. The story devolved from day to day: Ted not showing up for appointments. Ted acting strangely, speaking incoherently. Ted being taken in by police for an "altercation" with his daughter. Ted being lambasted on Dr. Phil for blowing all the opportunities life was throwing at him.

Just give the guy a job, and it'll all work out, won't it? His addiction, his criminal past, his nine alienated children by many different mothers, his current crack-whore girl friend, all these problems will melt away and he'll show up for work in the morning smiling, shaven and wearing a suit.

Right now his handlers are claiming we shouldn't worry that he bailed on expensive, paid-for rehab to hustle on the streets of Columbus again. He's receiving "outpatient" therapy, no doubt at a local watering hole.

It's tempting to blame Ted for all this. OK, I DO blame Ted for all this! But the bozos who thought they could immediately change entrenched, life-threatening behavior and a criminal past by throwing money at it were beyond naive. Where have they been hiding all these years?

So now I can't help but bring another Ted into the mishmosh, Ted Haggard, the not-gay pastor, who's now saying he's not bisexual but would be if he were 21 years old.

I don't get it. I don't get that he is now admitting he paid a gay hooker to masturbate him while high on crystal meth (not to mention his solitary activities while watching gay porn), but still hedges on admitting he's gay. Or even bisexual.

I don't know of any straight men who do this, or who even want to do this. I think he's dancing around a subject which obviously makes him profoundly uncomfortable. I think he's trying to save his face and his ass at the same time.

I think he's a fraud.

His new little barn church makes me wonder, too. I watched that TLC program in which he threw the doors of his crude sanctuary open to the wretched sinners of the earth. The darker the sin, the more he wanted you. This church was for really ba-a-a-a-a-ad people, sort of like Pastor Ted (who still isn't gay. Or bisexual. Though he would be if he was 21.)

Then I found a curious newspaper article from two years ago, saying Pastor Haggard had just opened up a new church in his barn. So he did this twice?

Or once more for the cameras?

These two Teds have certain things in common. They're both grandstanders who have learned how to fake sincerity. Both have traded on their wretchedness and on the public's fascination with the fallen.

Can they be redeemed? Well, what the hell does that mean? The man who once led a multimillion-dollar religious empire is now diving for spare change. The guy who chose the name of a famous ballplayer for his nom du guerre has slipped back into the poisonous stream of hustling for dope and dodging for dimes.

We love stories about how the mighty have fallen and been rescued by the grace of God and a wad of cash. But what do we do when these paragons of redemption fall on their asses again?

Sarah McLachlan and the good saint of Assisi

Make me an instrument

It has come home to me once again that life can be overwhelmingly difficult, even crushing. I see, looking back, that I have a certain tendency to be, uh, er, critical. Or negative. Or not celebratory enough. I need to correct this, but I don't know if I will.

I know several situations in which people have suffered an almost incomprehensible grief, in particular a mother whose small daughter died on Christmas Eve two years ago, her snow-covered sled hit by a truck turning a blind corner. My granddaughter was her best friend, and she still talks about her, misses her terribly.

Jesus, God, are you there? I did used to believe, quite fervently, but since I left the church, I don't know. I don't believe there is a God who gets us out of trouble. No Big Guy in the Sky, no lucky rabbit's foot. Faith is not a lottery, and God doesn't give us the things we ask for just because he's nice like Santa, or loves us, or thinks we deserve special favor. In fact, there may be nothing there that helps us, independent of other people and their goodness, or the strength implanted deep down in our own hearts.

Is that, then, what we call God? I don't know. I look out my window today, and I see cedars tossed angrily, shivering as if traumatized. Then they are still again. I need to go out in it so I can order flowers for my daughter's mother-in-law, who has just had successful heart surgery and is recovering by leaps and bounds. (God - ?) I need to look for Christmas presents for my four dear ones, my little grandkids, without whom I - well, let's not finish that thought. And I haven't even started, can't get started because I haven't the heart.

I can't get going. We have this dim understanding, maybe. Or else we don't need it, I don't know. I can't leave life alone, I pick it apart. It's no use, of course. The good is the good, but there is a dangerous estrangement in my own family that I fear will blow us apart at some point. It has happened before, in that other family I grew up in, and I know it is never repaired.

If I let this particular weight press all the life out of me, it would be difficult to continue at all. I know I am blessed, tremendously blessed, compared to others - but how can we compare, when everyone's life is so complex? No one knows what is going on in the mind of another. This is called existential loneliness, and it is built into the species. But I am convinced some people feel it far more than others.

I was looking for an image a few nights ago when my daughter updated me on the mother who lost her child at Christmas. Since then, she has suffered several wrenching twists. Even though I officially don't believe in prayer because God let me down so badly, I lit a candle in my computer room and turned out the lights. The effect was eerie, a glowing screen and a guttering candle. I wanted something to focus on, googled up the name of the little girl who died, and came up with multiple images of a Catholic saint. Small children wore crowns made of holly and candles and walked in solemn processions down the aisles of huge churches.

Somehow this led to St. Francis and his famous prayer, "Make me an instrument of thy peace. . . "

St. Francis, batty as a loon, may have been on to something. Today he'd be put on antipsychotics and resocialized, though he might still end up under a bridge. Still his prayer persists, that is, if he wrote it at all. Truth is so slippery, so humanly influenced. We make things the way we want, or need, or desperately desire them to be. Truth gets lost, we get lost, and we grab. Still, we grab.

Polygluts: or, More, More Mormons!

OK, then. You gotta ask yourself, when watching this is about as appealing as eating 19 pounds of Kraft Dinner with no ketchup, why it is that I keep going back to TLC's latest domestic sideshow, Sister Wives.

I guess I just have a mind for the appalling.

Please don't stare (because it's oh, so very intimate), but this guy Kody Brown the groovy long-haired polygamist crawls from bedroom to bedroom every night, or at least gets to choose whom he "cohabits" with, while the other wives lie there tatting or something.

Not content with his three starter wives (named Wynkin, Blynkinn and Nodde), he's decided to mix it up a little and do an add-on: someone a little younger, a little thinner, and certainly more fertile.

In other words, he wants more more more of those Mormons! Can't get enough of them. Though they look like ordinary women in most ways, his original wives must have extraordinary tolerance (or just be really stupid) to live this way year after year, their horde of interchangeable/interrelated savages (I mean, kids) running all over the place like kissing cousins from the backwoods of Appallachia.

I know a little bit about Mormonism. A little bit. I apologize to any real Mormons out there, because I'm drawing upon experiences from a holiday ten years ago. We went to Utah to see Bryce Canyon and other breath-arresting, God-drenched natural sights of Brigham Young country, and for the most part we had a great time.

We actually tasted the waters of the Great Salt Lake - mighty salty, hmmmmm! - and realized that those horrible little wigglies in the water, the only things that could live in anything that densely saline, were sea monkeys. Good thing my order never arrived back in 1962.

We went on a bus tour of Salt Lake City with two jolly Mormon tour guides, one of them serving his missionary time to fulfill the requirements of his faith. But these two guys weren't stuffy at all. They joshed about Brigham Young and polygamy, and claimed that the extremely wide streets of the city were built to accomodate Brigham when he went for a walk with all his wives.

When we visited the Mormon Museum, however, it was a completely different story. As complete as it was in tracing the history of a people and a faith, there was not one mention of polygamy anywhere. God knows I tried to find it, but it wasn't there. So, officially, that must mean that it never happened.

Fast-forward about ten years, and here we are in polyglut land, everything on display except the sex act (and maybe that will be next. How much of the upcoming wedding night will they show, I wonder?). This program is completely bizarre in that nothing anybody says ever matches their facial expression. "Oh, the more the merrier (marry-her?)," Blinkie says at one point, her face a study in repressed grief.

Robyn, the skinny, new, young wife-to-be (who's closer in age to the eldest daughters than the other three wives: ewwwwwwwww!), is the greatest actress of them all. She's. . . so. . . sorry. . . for. . . hurting. . . anyone, but. . . (but that doesn't stop her from yanking their husband away from them by the short hairs).

Closeups show her hand repeatedly shooting up to cover her mouth, her eyes squinching up, the other wives pasting on a look of concern. But there are no tears. Never any tears.

Why? Because Robyn isn't crying. She isn't crying because she doesn't give a shit about them. Not only has she landed a quarter-share in Kody the shaggy-haired reality star and his sexual equipment: she's getting her own house!

Yes. The other three have self-contained apartments within the massive family mansion (which must be paid for by some kind of ill-gotten gains, crackmongering or Ponzi schemes or something). But there's just no room left for Robyn anywhere, dad-burn it, so she has to live down the street. Down the street in a house. Down the street in a brand new house.

Her house.

I won't ask whose name the mortgage is in (or did they pay for it in unmarked bills?).
This new arrangement, even creepier than the former one, means that Kody will soon be strolling down the avenue, maybe with one of his 17 dogs, to pay her a conjugal visit every - what'll it be, fourth night? How will he - you know - "keep it up", do you think? (Blue pills, anyone?)

A bigger problem is how he will he manage the smoldering rage of the "Keep Sweet Three" and the fake histrionics of Robyn the dry crier. In the painful group discussions which abound in this show, Kody sits there scowling, his arm draped around his current favorite, listening to the suppressed anguish he has created with his own selfish, depraved choices, acting for all the world as if he has nothing to do with it, or at least has no power to stop it.

The truth is, he just has no desire to stop it. He does this because he can. He freely admits he's wounding his ever-faithful polygals, but in his typical heartless sociopathic manner he just keeps on smilin' and gosh-darn-in' and walking around like the swaggering prick he is, oozing entitlement and toxic power.

It gets even more offensive, if that's possible. He's going to marry a DIVORCED woman, for God's sake! Since when does a fundamentalist Mormon woman have the right to do that? One can only imagine the furious secret discussions, the hissings and wads of kleenex that have transpired from this particular choice. Nobody has dared to drag the nasty fact out into the light (yet), but it points up the staggering inequity in this unholy alliance. For those first three, divorce has never been an option: there is no way out of this marriage except death. After all, you can't divorce someone you aren't married to.

For all his modern-day-sensitive-guy posturing, Kody Brown is a self-centred, arrogant, narcissistic little creep who claims to have "fallen in love three times" (no, four: he left out himself). In truth, he's a master manipulator, not to mention a petty criminal, a bigamist who simply doesn't care what his wives are going through so long as he gets his "needs" met (and no doubt each wife has a specialty that she must call up whenever he wants it).

"Kody is my soul-mate," Robyn giggles while getting herself prettied up for another session of "courtship" with a thrice-married man (with Kody once more moaning about how hard it is to remember how to do this). The fact that he kisses her when he proposes provokes disbelief among the other three: you're not supposed to kiss 'til you get married! But after that, apparently, anything goes.

For him, that is. So long as he still has the strength left to walk down the street.