MemberGuyinGHo

A little too perfect

Recently I heard a piece on my local public radio station that really steamed my beans. I want to share it with you as well as my response because it expresses a species of spiritual arrogance that we sometimes encounter (and are guilty of) in recovery.

“God these people annoy me.” By Chris S_

It was too perfect. There I was, sitting at a light in the People’s Republic of Mount Airy, looking at a bumper sticker. On a green Volvo, no less. The sticker read: “The last time we mixed religion and politics, they burned people at the stake.” How could I not take that as a sign from God?

You see, I’d been mulling a commentary on secular liberals, and how annoyed I get at the arrogant, wrong-headed take they seek to impose on all discussions of church and state. I’d just read a piece about Harvard University, where some faculty fought to banish all study of religion, as unworthy of such a great temple to Reason.

You want to know where that Tea Party anger comes from? It comes in part from decades of listening to ill-informed secular snobs lecture the rest of us about what benighted superstition our religious faith is. Back to that clueless bumper sticker. Let me rewrite it in ways that have a greater basis in American history:

“The last time we mixed religion and politics, we got Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”

Or: “One time when we mixed religion and politics, we got Abraham Lincoln.”

Or Harriet Beecher Stowe. Or Dorothy Day. Or Sister Mary Scullion.

Religion has done just as much to bring moral courage and a passion for social justice to a nasty, selfish public square as it has to screw things up. Haters love to cherry-pick from history. How many wars really were caused by religion, vs. being mayhem where good ol’ human bloodlust merely used religion as a cover?

Human reason gets held up as the enlightened counterweight to superstitious, intolerant faith. Did you happen to notice that when reason got its chance to run the show in the 20th century, the results were less than spectacular?

“The last time we mixed faith in reason and politics, we got Pol Pot. And the Cultural Revolution. And the Gulag.”

Sound harsh? No worse than the glib, faith-bashing gibes about the 30 Years War that believers such as myself have had to endure for years. Ignorant? At Harvard, some people apparently think that one can be an educated person without having read St. Thomas Aquinas, Cardinal John Henry Newman, or theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

Now, THAT is ignorance. And I, for one, am sick of tolerating such highly degreed bigotry in silence.

Broadcast 2/21

My response:

Mr. S_:

Like many listeners I too was distressed by your “These people annoy me” commentary, not because I disagree with its message but because of its tone. It seems to me that you are guilty of the same self-satisfied glibness that you decry in “secular liberals.”

Lost in the sarcasm and populist rhetoric is the fact that religious dogma creates very real suffering for groups and individuals in our society. Both secularists and religious people wrongly caricature those who disagree with their positions. The real problem here is not religious conviction or the lack of it, but intolerance and demagoguery – found on both sides of the political and religious divide.

Your piece conflates secular-liberalism with secularism proper. The latter can be defined as indifference or opposition to religion. The former is resistance to orthodoxy or authoritarian principles particularly in public discourse or politics.

When secular liberals raise concerns about mixing politics and religion, they are usually criticizing the misappropriation of faith in contexts where reason is the better approach (as in social and political policies or where people of goodwill might take disparate approaches to faith-based arguments).

Taking a bumper-sticker or random group of educators as a cipher for a vast nuanced body of ideas that includes David Hume, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maynard Keynes and others is deliberate hyperbole.

While I might disagree with your argument or the reasoning behind it, as a liberal I take issue with my peers who question your right to say it, for free public discourse is an esteemed principle of liberalism. In our society you and I may have different beliefs. I defend your right to express and practice your religious beliefs as you see fit, but I become less sanguine when you seek to impose those beliefs on me through policy or inflammatory rhetoric (hate speech).

Like you, I agree that without faith we would not have the Bach Cantatas or Michelangelo’s Pieta. The heavy-handed denunciation of faith is just as myopic as its imposition on unbelievers. Faith plays an extremely important role in many of our lives: it gives us meaning, inspiration, moral courage, but it also has a shadow side that can justify chauvinism and bigotry.

What I am saying is that both faith and reason have their place in our lives and in our society, but there is a difference. Faith is by nature a closed system. There is no evidence gathering or testing of hypotheses in religion. Science on the other hand is a self-reflexive system that questions its assumptions, results and conclusions.

That is why when it comes time for my triple bypass surgery I am headed to a doctor who understands the mechanics of anatomy and physiology, not a religious philosopher steeped in moral doctrine. I suggest you do the same.

By the way, I suspect that there are many intelligent non-westerners who would object to your criterion of having read St. Thomas Aquinas, Cardinal John Henry Newman, or Reinhold Niebuhr in order to qualify as erudite.

When faith usurps reason in the public arena however, it is no mere abstraction to be debated lightly. It has real and specific consequences that affect our lives: “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the murder of Matthew Sheppard, or Uganda’s shameful anti-homosexual bill are a sampling of the baleful results.

The real enemy of our democracy (and justice in general) is when dogma is deployed to justify imposition of the will of one group against another. Invoking Tea Party ire is a particularly grievous tactic. The Tea Partiers have no right to their allegations of discrimination and moral outrage.

Cries of victimization have been an overused ploy of Christians since the KKK; that it has been adopted by right wing conservatives is especially chilling to those who really have faced discrimination in employment, housing and civil liberties.

Religious assumptions not only reflect our individual biases, they also help create them.

I have a very talented friend who works in a hospital. Raised in a loving Christian home he has felt compelled to deny his sexuality. As an adult he leads a very lonely life – few things give him joy and he is tormented by guilt.

Recently he entered therapy with a counselor who claims to be able to change his sexual orientation, though such therapy has been repudiated by every major professional body. My friend continues such therapy despite the fact that there is not a shred of evidence that it can succeed (and much evidence that it does harm). His therapist has been ethically lax in apprising him of this and never posits that he might be able to lead a fulfilled life as a gay man and a Christian.

Evidence suggests that if my friend never comes to accept his sexual orientation, he will lead a life truncated by depression, self-hatred or even suicide.

This is the true human cost of unquestioned religious dogma: dividing society, separating parents from children, and isolating a man from his best self.

I appreciate your comments.

Guy

4 comments - First published on: 26/02/2010

Snowbound

There is a tipping point beyond which frothy curds of gleaming snow accumulate into something dense, dreary and tiresome. Too much of a pleasant thing is well . . . too much.

Broloburg is sitting under mounds of snow – 28 inches last weekend; 18-20 this week – it clogs streets and chokes sewers with grey slush. Our street corners have become minor seas forged at great peril and there is always the chance that a wayward vehicle will skid over a curb rendering some bundle of humanity into road-kill.

Last weekend I was unable to complete a retreat because of the blizzard. This was a “Sabbaton” (literally a Sabbath-thing) exploring Jewish approaches to spirituality for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and the transgendered. It was an admittedly esoteric topic, although I did have some wholesome reasons for attending.

But let’s get the not-so-wholesome ones out of the way first. Now that I’ve outgrown the bars (sort of) meeting people outside of my social circle has become a great challenge. I rely on this kind of event to expand my social network. So I am often on the lookout for a partner at these sorts of gatherings, even when that’s not the overt agenda.

When it comes to romantic dependency, I am a work in progress. There was a time when I would have latched onto someone at a retreat like this and made his life unbearable with moping, complaining and envy. Now I am able to attend such a retreat with more reasonable expectations. I may not meet my soul-mate, but by opening myself to connections with one or two others without a hidden agenda, the experience is usually more satisfying than not.

My more wholesome reason for attending the conference is that I am sincerely seeking ways to improve “conscious contact.” Matthew’s cogent criticism of the American ‘hard sell’ approach to spirituality reminds me to tread lightly here. I do accept the 12-step approach to recovery, but not without hesitation.

Like many of you, when I first came to the fellowship, the G-d language set my teeth on edge. This was the last straw: after admitting powerlessness and “insanity,” attending a 90 in 90, seeking a sponsor, it was still necessary to turn my will and my life over to the care of a God of my understanding. I had not thought of God in many years, much less nurtured a relationship with Him.

The story of Bill’s ‘white light’ experience in Townes Hospital left me cold. I secretly rejoiced to learn that Dr. Silkworth had chastised him early on for proselytizing too much about spirituality.

To me Bob Smith seemed the model of 12-step recovery. Dr. Bob’s spirituality manifested itself in helping thousands of alcoholics (and drug addicts) get well. Though he had a more traditional religious upbringing than Bill, Bob seemed content letting God reside “on high” while we mortals down below grappled with the more mundane pursuits of recovery.

What does it mean to make conscious contact in our contemporary world of science and skepticism?

Many of us know what it feels like to make contact self-consciously – it’s acutely painful. Who can forget those first eye-opening encounters with the truth: the doctor who mentioned something about liver damage, or the nurse who treated the abscess, the friend who stopped calling, the child to whom we apologised again and again? These truths are painful to hear because they cut through the haze of denial and deception that follows us like the moon follows an automobile during a midnight journey.

It was self-conscious contact that I felt during my initial forays into the recovering community and that’s what I initially felt with my fellow retreatants. Yes the purpose of the collation was to bond with other GLBT Jews but my mind was set for ferreting out distinctions (and making comparisons): everyone there seemed younger, smarter, a greater success and more at ease with themselves.

This is one of those things that make it harder for lesbians and gay men to connect. There is so much uncertainty to our interactions – how do I know if someone is interested in me as a friend, sexually or in the special way of wanting to date.

Typically I react to this ambiguity by taking myself out of the running: I’m too old for him I think, he’d never be interested in me. I no longer even reach out to attractive men in the rooms, and feel horrible when they assume I’m just unfriendly. This approach has the advantage of safety but it doesn’t make me happy, nor do I learn anything. It feeds into fear and almost certainly results in missed opportunities.

So as I sat in small group with five other retreatants, these thoughts spinning through my brain, I felt utterly miserable. I wanted to flee, but could not. The retreat had convened during a record-breaking blizzard. No public transit was running and it was hazardous to go outside. I tried to talk myself out of these defeatist thoughts; reminding myself that I was there for conscious contact.

Contact with what I couldn’t say, but I do know what it feels like to be centered, connected, and serene. In some ways what I contact matters less to me than the way it happens. The conscious part of the phase is what makes it important.

When actively using drugs I was a master of legerdemain. Chaos and crisis were my best friends. Usually I was the sole person fooled by these elaborate snow-jobs. I might occasionally succeed at pulling the wool over someone else’s eyes, but my own bloodshot orbs were always blinkered

Gradually it dawned on me that what I sought was connection; for me conscious contact was being part of a community. This was something I had missed as a child growing up in the anonymous suburbs of New Jersey. I can remember looking at pictures of my parents, aunts and grand-parents taken in the towns in which they were raised: Camden, Bridgeton, Vineland, Northeast Philadelphia. They were always group shots and they usually seemed happy: smiling people sitting on stoops, examining a new car (with tail fins) or celebrating an anniversary. Those sepia photographs of days gone by – they meant community to me.

And here I sat among this group of spiritually like-minded gay and lesbian Jews feeling very much alone. Why, when we had so much in common, did we not instantly become community? Perhaps community requires more than commonality.

In reality I share very little experience with lesbians and gays half my age. My sense of spiritual feeling, like my degree of ritual observance, is a function of interest and reflections uniquely my own. So is it impossible to bridge the gap? How does one create community out of seeming random souls?

Building a community, like recovery itself, is a stepwise process requiring shared experiences, sensibilities and aspirations. It takes effort! Besides sharing a meal and a service together there had been few opportunities for self disclosure – for building trust – before snow blew us off course.

Another retreat, an AA/Alanon roundup, proved enlightening. I had a wonderful time there. True I knew more people, but there is something about my fellow recovering addicts and alcoholics that I just love. We can form community in the blink of an eye, because we are open, honest and act responsibility. This was the conscious contact I had been seeking. Here is where I belong.

9 comments - First published on: 19/02/2010

The Waking

So far this sleepy season has been a winter of discontent. As the economy sputters, Haitian misery continues, an outraged electorate grows distrustful of government, two wars spiral into chaos and an Iranian regime commits itself equally to repression and the bomb, there is scant cause for hope.

As a person in recovery, I can not afford to indulge such negative thoughts for long, lest they drive me back to the final common solution of every drug addict: using again.

A few weeks ago I claimed to be able to weather the setbacks and petty annoyances of life with a philosophical outlook and a healthy dose of patience. This week I have become the most impatient of souls.

I’ve met a guy I care for and feel a bit strung out. Romance and fantasy and are potent mood changers for me: I am drawn to their drama and chaos. It feels a little like a run.

Though I haven’t used chemicals, I don’t feel exactly sober either. Acting willfully, I am orchestrating schemes to meet esoteric and childish needs. Gone is the patient dedication to love and service; ancient fears and complaints have settled in for the season.

Perhaps I have gotten too cocky in celebrating freedom from depression. No sooner had I set the words down on paper, but I was feeling differently. This myopic world of feeling and time resists augury! Anything worth describing changes, mutating beyond recognition. We each lead double lives: there is the life we live and the life we see projected in the theater of our minds. We are, in a sense, sleep-walking.

Christian is a sweet, smart, 41 year old with a complexion of peaches and cream and eyes so warm and deep, I wish I could bathe in them. Gangly and a bit naive, uncharitable people might describe him as a nerd, but he has none of the bitterness or cynicism that characterises so many of us socially-challenged folks.

I met Chris online through a site for HIV+ men looking for partners. We are compatible in age, education and values. Raised by a family of conservative Christians, being gay is a conflict for Chris. His father has said he’s ashamed of him. His mother is convinced he’s going to hell. Despite these circumstances, he remains close to them and committed to his church.

Understandably Chris has emerged from the closet with hesitation. One of his first same sex forays – a brief intense affair that ended abruptly – has been hard for him to overcome. Though they broke up in June, the wound is still fresh: I can tell that Chris feels abandoned and worse, abandonable.

I would love to have a meaningful relationship with Chris, but instead of happy, this excitement makes me anxious. I am acutely sensitive to his inattentiveness, even though it’s easily explained by the mountain of stress he’s under.

In my head, I’m thinking: What if he doesn’t like me? What if I’m over-reaching? What if he can’t get over his ex? What if I never have another partner? What if? The old obsessions are provisioned and ready to march.

This is the kind of anxiety that sends skillful action out the window. Suddenly I’m no longer paying attention to Chris, but wondering how he feels about me. In this state I’m no help to him. It’s impossible to stay open-hearted and malleable when acting from a place of fear.

I don’t like feeling this way. It’s like backsliding in my recovery. But at least I can call myself out on it. A wise friend in the rooms says we’re all a little crazy, but only some of us are aware of it!

In a meeting, another friend who just celebrated a year, complained of not making enough progress: “I feel like I’m whacking moles,” he said “every time I get rid of one, another pops up in its place.” How many of us can relate to that!

Terrified of feeling uncomfortable, my rodent-mind seeks another obsession or compulsion. Maybe it’s sex or food or shopping or gambling (or Chris) never just living, observing and being still. It’s like changing deck chairs on the Titanic. After the meeting I told him what my previous sponsor used to say – it’s kind of a blessing – “may you have a long slow recovery.”

Shortly after that I was reminded of this poem by the late American poet (he died from this disease), Theodore Roethke.

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

For an amazing setting of this poem, sung by Kurt Elling click here

After narrating what is happening in life; it is no longer happening. Once the words are found and composed on paper, the mind has moved on to something else. But human minds can notice this; we can “wake to sleep.”

Maybe this is a clue to the healing power of the self-help programmes: the feeling shared becoming an object of reflection. We turn it over in our minds; examining it from several vantages, trying to discover what it has to teach.

There is no magic to this practice, but there is a touch of mystery: the inexplicable process by which words transform feeling into action.

Chris may or may not be for me. I can live with either outcome. A life in recovery teaches me to “take my waking slow,” and to, “learn by going where I have to go.”

4 comments - First published on: 05/02/2010

A Single Man

I first encountered Christopher Isherwood’s ‘A Single Man’ in my senior year of college, but it was not on any syllabus. Back then I had the irresponsible habit of rebelling against assignments I was meant to review for finals by indulging in any extracurricular reading I fancied.

‘A Single Man’ was the third book by Isherwood I had read, and it moved me the most by far. ‘The Berlin Stories’ and ‘Christopher and His Kind’ were enjoyable reads – but they didn’t pitch me headlong into the subterranean world of the heart the way George Falconer’s loss of his lover Jim had.

Identifying with George’s loneliness, I thought of our mutual isolation as somehow noble or stoic; but really we were both in the closet. Too frightened of my sexuality to allow myself to love another man, George had the sort of relationship I wanted, but he paid for it by remaining invisible. Closets may feel safe, but they erect barriers difficult to breach.

In those days (the ‘80s) gay men were no longer culturally invisible; rather they had burst on the scene with a kind of scarlet letter attached, the lurid stigma of AIDS. Post-sexual-revolution scorn for gay men changed to a sentiment of fear or violent aversion virtually overnight.

Craving inclusion, I was drawn to the aesthetic notion that a great gay novel must treat sexuality as merely incidental. The universals of human experience, I contended, were what mattered most: learning, loving, dying, being alone, supporting oneself, being together, becoming family and creating community had significance regardless of sexual orientation, gender or any similar differentiating factor.

A Single Man was a representative work: anyone could identify with George’s suffering at losing the man he loved.

Young people seeing Colin Firth’s excellent George in the film version of “A Single Man.” might get caught up in the heartbreaking sentiment surrounding his bereavement. The movie ‘works’ on that level as well, humanising what is so often demonised in public discourse. But if you really want to learn about George, you have to wonder why he is suicidal? What is it about George that makes him so peculiarly vulnerable to despair?

Yes, he’s lost his spouse and losing such a man is bound to be a cataclysmic disruption, but many people experience similar losses without choosing to end their lives. Do we really believe that George is so fragile? He’s lived through the great depression and World War II – surely he has known significant loss before. Also the movie goes to great lengths to show him unflappable over the Cuban Missile Crisis and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

To my mind, George’s grief is complicated by isolation and self-imposed silence. It’s possible that as a heterosexual couple he and Jim might have died separately, but it seems unlikely that he would be informed of his partner’s death in such an unsympathetic manner, have no say in the disposition of his lover’s remains, or be forced to grieve without the support of friends or colleagues.

Without Jim, George is like each of us coming into sobriety. He is physically exhausted, psychologically defeated, alienated socially and spiritually bankrupt.

The recurrent visual image of the film is of a man adrift in water. The viewer can not tell if he is drowning or enjoying a solitary bathe. When we discover George, he is derelict. His moorings lost without Jim, he is literally drowning in grief.

Like George, I came to recovery a ruined man: sick in body and spirit, addled, without a clue as to how I would rebuild a decent life. I trusted no one. My addiction had burned through the patient good-will of family and friends. Paranoid, angry, I felt radically alone.

AA’s injunction to help the new-comer saved my life. People introduced themselves and invited me to join in fellowship. I remember being spooked by the steps and unable to concentrate on the readings, but a smile and kind word began to restore some semblance of hope.

At first gay meetings felt more comfortable to me: I did not have to guard my pronouns and assumed (often incorrectly) that the people in those meetings had had similar experiences to my own.

Some of my sponsees do not seem to like the gay meetings and I can see why. They find them cliquish and ageist. Nothing cuts the vulnerable like another man’s scorn. The inviolable principles of our program: common purpose, loving-kindness, service and anonymity are repeatedly violated. There are just as many closets in gay meetings as in any other, we are just more hurt and face greater barriers to self-acceptance. Yet I still feel I can share more openly in meetings with other gay men.

In the end, each of us gay or straight, male or female, addicted or on the way, has to step out of the closet if we are to grow. How else can we determine if they’re providing protection or merely barriers? Humbled, we see that we are all single men (and women) distinguished by our experiences, our joys and sorrows and our perceptions of the world.

George Falconer does not have the luxury of a twelve step fellowship to lead him out of the closet. He remains bereft until the encounter with Kenny. George isn’t merely seeking a sexual partner (he refuses the advances of the Italian man in the parking lot); what he wants is real human contact, the kind that can make a life of random moments suddenly cohere.

When Kenny enters George’s house — the house that Jim designed — he gains admission to George’s soul. Kenny breaks through the carefully preserved mask of composure that hides George’s darker motives.

It is 1962, seven years before Stonewall riots, but there is something redemptive in their encounter. They are alone, together, at peace.

As the scene fades on the now smiling George, we hear him say:

A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity.
When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I
can feel rather than think…
And things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh.
I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like
everything they fade. I have lived my live on these
moments.
They pull me back to the present
and I realize that everything is
exactly the way it was meant to be.

6 comments - First published on: 27/01/2010