It is almost the day of Christ's birth and the world is unfit for His coming yet never needed him more. Tonight, tonight I watched West Side Story and spent most of the two hours weeping.The story is just as relevant today as when Shakespeare first penned its predessesor, Romeo and Juliet.
As Christmas Day approaces the Christian Religious Right rants and raves yet again with hatred. They do not know this is what they are wrailing with, they do not glimpse that hate is their tool. I believe they feel certain that they are protecting their faith. But Christianity needs no protection for it is real, genuine, beyond the grasp of any human end. And so, as I watched a film in which hatred triumphs over love and death is all about I see the world in which I now live memorialized in technicolor and song begging for change from the depths of the writers hearts.
Perhaps I don't make myself clear. The hatred and fear of other faiths and beliefs has led a group of Fundamentalist Christians to use this moment of Our Lord's birth to spew forth the simple fact that they have no understanding of the feast they are celebrarting. The issue, for them, is the increasing lack of the greeting 'Merry Christmas' in our commercial world. One group has even compared the loss of the use of this greeting in a commercial multicultural world as the beginning of a new Nazi regime in America. It is not so.
Merry Christmas is a Christian greeting which may hold no meaning and perhaps even offend those of other beliefs. There is no wrong or evil in understanding and respecting our brothers and sisters differences by choosing to say instead 'Seasons Greetings' or 'Happy Holidays'. Several other faiths celebrate different feasts at this time of year. It is simply good manners - manners and respect for customs that Jesus Himself understood and gave credence to, for He admonished His Mother for asking Him to stray from decorum at the wedding feast at Cannan and he understood the Roman Centurions request not to enter the warriors home, yet still cured his son while praising such faith; He only once strayed from the respect of others and that was in a just rage overturning the money changers tables who insulted the sanctity of His Father's House. Yet, here we are two thousand years later and the issue of import in this country is the fear that somhow our Christian faith can be stamped out by respecting others. I can only believe that Jesus must be weeping, too. I'm certain that He is little concerned with whether a Wal-Mart greeter utters 'Happy Holidays' instead of 'Merry Christmas'. The world of sales is not of much import to our Lord.
Courtesy is a blessing, not an abomination. We are not asked to withhold our greeting of Merry Christmas from those we love for to share it especially with those whom we know to be of our own faith enhances not diminishes its meaning. Why do we wish to make others ashamed of their beliefs, their cultures? Jesus would not do so, He crossed those barriers as with the woman at the well. That is His example to us, how can we do less?
Yet we do less and we use his birth not to celebrate the coming of our Saviour but to politicize God and generate fear in our country of foreigners and their religions. Just as the Puerto Ricans and the Polish feared and hated each other in West Side Story.
A place for us. A place for everyone. Love conquers all these fears and doubts. Jesus conquers them and He does so with His defenselessness as a newborn babe that relies on OUR protection; how do we forget this, how can we?
It is personal, I know. A place for us.A place for Love. Somewhere, someday. Please God. A place for my fundamentalist brother and sister whetther, Christian or Muslim, Buddist or Jew.. A place for those of the same sex to love without fear, for my dear Mark and me. A place for Jews and Palestinians to extend a hand of friendship and not a bomb or gunshot. A place for and Iraqi and an American to live together in peace without Jhiad and premetive strikes. Does such a world have a possibility? I weep with hope that it is so.
And so in my home I will wish Merry Christmas to my family and to those whom share my belief and love of Jesus - and to those whom I do not know I shall proffer a non-demoninational greeting of the season so that I may respect that their love of God may be expressed in different words.
If I do so, will those of good heart of other beliefs not do the same for me - and you?
Tonight, tonight!
Friday, December 16, 2005
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
An Open Letter to My Father
Dear Dad,
I read the letter on the pastoral care of homosexual persons as soon as Ratzinger published it, as well as the new document/instruction about gay seminarians and priests - I always read both sides. And I've read what the L'Observator Romano has had to say as well as listening to (one too many) homilies by right-wing priests and bishops. I've read all the Churches teaching about homosexuals and find it arrogant, ill informed, deliberately attempting to confuse homosexuals with pedophiles, and most disturbingly the deliberately unloving and un-Christ like alienation of an entire group of the Faithful in a most politically advantageous position for the Church. If the Inquisition's devices, teachings and motives had been defended by the teaching of infallibility they would just as easily have been horrifically defended by the Church (In fact if you 'Google" for 'Spanish Inquisition' these days you will find more neo-conservatives defending the Inquisition (much as neo-nazis defend the purity of the Third Reich) even denying that torture took place (just as some GOP senators say gays were not massacred by the Nazis and that it is an invention of the liberal left.
I suppose my error is to hope, when I feel particularly despondent about my Church abandoning me and my gay brothers and sisters to civil discrimination and abuse and weep at the tacit approval given by the Church leaders in their silence for the violence of both the tongue and the 'sword' (translate: ropes, pick-up bumpers, piles of burning tires, Wyoming fences, baseball bats, hangings, home evictions, job firings, refusal to end attacks on gay youth in our schools, pension and SS benefit refusals, hospital visitation refusals, inheritance refusals, job firings, associations with the destruction of the WTC to hurricanes in New Orleans and Florida, the destruction of the Sacrament of Marriage and the family (I find heterosexuals have been doing just fine on destroying marriage and the family quite on their own!) and all of the other absurd and revolting justifications given to the attempt to push us out of sight and deny us civil rights, even by desecrating our Constitution, and now no place in the Church even if you play by the Church's rules all very nauseating, vile, repulsive and very, very sinful. This Pope and this hierarchy will have a great deal to answer for before God. Silence equals death, and the Church's play at politics in the West against equality for us, (while, incidentally, denying equality for the poor in the third world and calling priests and religious there guilty of liberation theology and forbidding political activism) a severe case of 'having your cake and eating it too'.
Under this pope and under his influence during the last pope's papacy a shrill high cry of Hate masked as a holy song of Truth has filled the Basilica of St. Peter's and is reverberating throughout the world Church. John Paul the Second has undermined the work of John XXIII with Ratzinger at his side spewing forth venomous false piety from the side of his evil mouth.
St. Joan of Arc faced a corrupt Church as have many other great saints throughout the ages. Perhaps we will be sacrificed now as these saints have been, as the Jews were by the Church to Hitler, as so many innocents were upon the rack for four centuries in Europe. The pope lightly slaps the hand of Gorge Bush for an unjust war in Iraq while underwriting his re-election in the United States with pastoral letters on how to vote. Now the inquisition continues with a fancy renaming of the Office of the Inquisition and a new set of 'heretics' to martyr. I have been frightened and silenced by the Church too long and when I see evil at work must now speak out about it. Ratzinger has in his search for power in and of the world brought the money changers to the temple steps and I have every belief and hope that Jesus will overturn the tables and scatter the hate-mongers and their hypocrisy.
Until He does I will obey the teachings of not being able to receive Him in Holy Communion, of weekly Mass, of confession and all the beliefs I have been taught lovingly, most especially these two: that the Church is the People of God, (even us fags), and that God is Love, first and foremost. I pray for the pope that he may remember not the Nazi teachings of His youth nor continue to depend upon his mecurical need for a closed box of rules without love or compassion for ALL of Christ's (and therefore his) flock and that, perhaps even this Christmas remember Christ's admonition to those who would not work on the sabbath to save a man's life (the paraplegic): for his silence has justified our brutal murders worldwide. This pope forgets in his splendid halls and robes the struggle of those who must live under constant attack in the world, including even Mark and me in America - or should I say especially America as it is rewritten by Bush, his money grubbing cronies and the Saudi Royals - much less the millions in Africa, China and India dying of AIDS while condoms are condemned - or youths being hung, imprisoned and/or physically mutilated in the Middle and Far East for having been given by God the gift of their homosexuality.
America must be a democracy and in doing so must serve all faiths and all citizens - she cannot be a protestant Christian country any longer and fulfill the Constitution. Every judge is an 'activist' whether liberal or conservative. It is their job to be so and interpret the laws of our great country for the present society in which she finds herself.
The Catholic Church must remember Charity is her first concern and all else is secondary, for this is the teaching of Jesus in the New Testament, which REPLACES the Old Testament. When She returns to the humility of Francis of Assisi and abandons her new quest for influence and power in this world her flock will return, Those of us in the first world who benefit from education can no longer say the world is flat and the sun and planets revolve around us or that God is incapable of instituting evolution; nor can we say any group of men and women created by God are by their nature, given by God, "intrinsically disordered" or "morally evil" simply by this 'accident' of birth. If we do we might as well say again that slavery is justified because the black man is by nature inferior to the white. Homosexuality is my gift from God while it is my Cross, but like all Crosses this one is only a Cross because of other men's ignorance and fear.
Love,
Donnie
I read the letter on the pastoral care of homosexual persons as soon as Ratzinger published it, as well as the new document/instruction about gay seminarians and priests - I always read both sides. And I've read what the L'Observator Romano has had to say as well as listening to (one too many) homilies by right-wing priests and bishops. I've read all the Churches teaching about homosexuals and find it arrogant, ill informed, deliberately attempting to confuse homosexuals with pedophiles, and most disturbingly the deliberately unloving and un-Christ like alienation of an entire group of the Faithful in a most politically advantageous position for the Church. If the Inquisition's devices, teachings and motives had been defended by the teaching of infallibility they would just as easily have been horrifically defended by the Church (In fact if you 'Google" for 'Spanish Inquisition' these days you will find more neo-conservatives defending the Inquisition (much as neo-nazis defend the purity of the Third Reich) even denying that torture took place (just as some GOP senators say gays were not massacred by the Nazis and that it is an invention of the liberal left.
I suppose my error is to hope, when I feel particularly despondent about my Church abandoning me and my gay brothers and sisters to civil discrimination and abuse and weep at the tacit approval given by the Church leaders in their silence for the violence of both the tongue and the 'sword' (translate: ropes, pick-up bumpers, piles of burning tires, Wyoming fences, baseball bats, hangings, home evictions, job firings, refusal to end attacks on gay youth in our schools, pension and SS benefit refusals, hospital visitation refusals, inheritance refusals, job firings, associations with the destruction of the WTC to hurricanes in New Orleans and Florida, the destruction of the Sacrament of Marriage and the family (I find heterosexuals have been doing just fine on destroying marriage and the family quite on their own!) and all of the other absurd and revolting justifications given to the attempt to push us out of sight and deny us civil rights, even by desecrating our Constitution, and now no place in the Church even if you play by the Church's rules all very nauseating, vile, repulsive and very, very sinful. This Pope and this hierarchy will have a great deal to answer for before God. Silence equals death, and the Church's play at politics in the West against equality for us, (while, incidentally, denying equality for the poor in the third world and calling priests and religious there guilty of liberation theology and forbidding political activism) a severe case of 'having your cake and eating it too'.
Under this pope and under his influence during the last pope's papacy a shrill high cry of Hate masked as a holy song of Truth has filled the Basilica of St. Peter's and is reverberating throughout the world Church. John Paul the Second has undermined the work of John XXIII with Ratzinger at his side spewing forth venomous false piety from the side of his evil mouth.
St. Joan of Arc faced a corrupt Church as have many other great saints throughout the ages. Perhaps we will be sacrificed now as these saints have been, as the Jews were by the Church to Hitler, as so many innocents were upon the rack for four centuries in Europe. The pope lightly slaps the hand of Gorge Bush for an unjust war in Iraq while underwriting his re-election in the United States with pastoral letters on how to vote. Now the inquisition continues with a fancy renaming of the Office of the Inquisition and a new set of 'heretics' to martyr. I have been frightened and silenced by the Church too long and when I see evil at work must now speak out about it. Ratzinger has in his search for power in and of the world brought the money changers to the temple steps and I have every belief and hope that Jesus will overturn the tables and scatter the hate-mongers and their hypocrisy.
Until He does I will obey the teachings of not being able to receive Him in Holy Communion, of weekly Mass, of confession and all the beliefs I have been taught lovingly, most especially these two: that the Church is the People of God, (even us fags), and that God is Love, first and foremost. I pray for the pope that he may remember not the Nazi teachings of His youth nor continue to depend upon his mecurical need for a closed box of rules without love or compassion for ALL of Christ's (and therefore his) flock and that, perhaps even this Christmas remember Christ's admonition to those who would not work on the sabbath to save a man's life (the paraplegic): for his silence has justified our brutal murders worldwide. This pope forgets in his splendid halls and robes the struggle of those who must live under constant attack in the world, including even Mark and me in America - or should I say especially America as it is rewritten by Bush, his money grubbing cronies and the Saudi Royals - much less the millions in Africa, China and India dying of AIDS while condoms are condemned - or youths being hung, imprisoned and/or physically mutilated in the Middle and Far East for having been given by God the gift of their homosexuality.
America must be a democracy and in doing so must serve all faiths and all citizens - she cannot be a protestant Christian country any longer and fulfill the Constitution. Every judge is an 'activist' whether liberal or conservative. It is their job to be so and interpret the laws of our great country for the present society in which she finds herself.
The Catholic Church must remember Charity is her first concern and all else is secondary, for this is the teaching of Jesus in the New Testament, which REPLACES the Old Testament. When She returns to the humility of Francis of Assisi and abandons her new quest for influence and power in this world her flock will return, Those of us in the first world who benefit from education can no longer say the world is flat and the sun and planets revolve around us or that God is incapable of instituting evolution; nor can we say any group of men and women created by God are by their nature, given by God, "intrinsically disordered" or "morally evil" simply by this 'accident' of birth. If we do we might as well say again that slavery is justified because the black man is by nature inferior to the white. Homosexuality is my gift from God while it is my Cross, but like all Crosses this one is only a Cross because of other men's ignorance and fear.
Love,
Donnie
Monday, December 05, 2005
Friday, December 02, 2005
World AIDS Day
World Aids Day has just passed and what have I done to help? Well, not very much. Battling this disease for fifteen years has taken a toll. The last few days when I should have liked to be connected with my brothers ans sisters whom are PWAs I've found it is a challnege, sometimes beyond my coping skills, to just take the medications every time they are required. I suppose this is a product, at least in part, for a soft upbringing in the West. So much is just given to us in the industrialized world and we forget what poverty, true poverty, is really like. A beautiful film titled Yesterday was shown on HBO the last few days. It is about a small bu beautiful African family and the struggle of a mother, dying of AIDS, to fight the stigma f her also infected and dying husband, her strength in seeking help against odds to insure her daughter's survival, which make booking an appointment here in NYC with an AIDS specialist (not a simple task) seem as if it were of no consequence or difficulty at all - and perhaps it isn't.Perhaps I add the burdens it seems to entail myself.
Not entirely. It is an upward fight to receive medical care in the United States, especially on an income which is insufficent for independance from charities and welfare in order to stay alive. Mark has taught me that one must fight the system, which is in place to allow those whom are a burden, to die. So, with his great help, we have done so for nearly two decades, beating the odds time and time again. yet, I can only feel ashamed of my worry and sckeptasism when i see how so much of the world has literaly no way to win against this disease. A disease which is managable if one has access to medication and the medical community. I am angry when i see people, such as the African family illustrated in the film, die wastefully and uselessly for a manageable disease. yet, how does one efect change?
Mark and I fight, and it is a fight, to maintain our health; secure the medications which are unafordable to us, as well as the treatment at hospital and with our doctors. Sometimes it seems almost strongarm techniques are needed to survive, for to be pleasently quiet and humble in demeanor will insure one's death. All of this costs tens of thousands of dollars for us yearly. Without ADAP and APLA and like organizations fighting constantly for our benefit no personal strategy or effort upon our part would have kept either of us living to date. So, you must fight for the funding and for the access. It takes so much time. It is no wonder so many of my gay friends give up and die. And with this a fact in the West, imagine how futile it must seem to a young mother in Africa or India, nations we send even less help than we do to care for or own though these countries have hundred thousands of such PWAs.
As Asdvent continues it becomes simply a duty to prepare for Christams with a solemnity, stillness and fall of gentle tears, begging with hope to the coming Child, that inHis Love and Mercy he will open the hearts and coffers of the world to save each precious life.
Not entirely. It is an upward fight to receive medical care in the United States, especially on an income which is insufficent for independance from charities and welfare in order to stay alive. Mark has taught me that one must fight the system, which is in place to allow those whom are a burden, to die. So, with his great help, we have done so for nearly two decades, beating the odds time and time again. yet, I can only feel ashamed of my worry and sckeptasism when i see how so much of the world has literaly no way to win against this disease. A disease which is managable if one has access to medication and the medical community. I am angry when i see people, such as the African family illustrated in the film, die wastefully and uselessly for a manageable disease. yet, how does one efect change?
Mark and I fight, and it is a fight, to maintain our health; secure the medications which are unafordable to us, as well as the treatment at hospital and with our doctors. Sometimes it seems almost strongarm techniques are needed to survive, for to be pleasently quiet and humble in demeanor will insure one's death. All of this costs tens of thousands of dollars for us yearly. Without ADAP and APLA and like organizations fighting constantly for our benefit no personal strategy or effort upon our part would have kept either of us living to date. So, you must fight for the funding and for the access. It takes so much time. It is no wonder so many of my gay friends give up and die. And with this a fact in the West, imagine how futile it must seem to a young mother in Africa or India, nations we send even less help than we do to care for or own though these countries have hundred thousands of such PWAs.
As Asdvent continues it becomes simply a duty to prepare for Christams with a solemnity, stillness and fall of gentle tears, begging with hope to the coming Child, that inHis Love and Mercy he will open the hearts and coffers of the world to save each precious life.
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Tig Tig Come Home
Miss Mint's longtime companion, as well as mine and Mark's, has had an extended stay in Phoenix with Miss Joy... BUT, it is time for the baby to return to us. He will feel I've abandoned him soon, if not already, and Mint pines as well for the rascal. Our family id incomplete! Tell me you'll be home for Christmas, je t'aime, mon ami. Noel!Tuesday, November 29, 2005
The Ghost of Christmas Past
As Advent begins and we begin our preparation for Christmas I am deeply depressed, yes, probably as always. Depression is a miserable illness and sometimes I think the only way to meet the challendge of it is to take the risk of talking about it, as I do know.Advent is supposed to be a deep quiet time of joyful anticipation. It is not in our home. Each year at this time the issue of money comes up with mark and we start arguments about how little the other one loves us and bring up years of injury. It is a heart killing time, and it cause us both such incredible pain. I don't know how to fix the wretched wounds which scars are ransacked with seeming glee by each of us for a little cheap satisfaction at seeing the emotinal blood flow again. Dear, lord, let this year be the end of these battles, end the heartache and the fighting; help me, and help Mark, to see what it was we loved in each other, or give us the steel grace to move onwards towards lives of love apart.
Dearest Christ Child, seek for me the humility and the gentleness and the love that seems swept away once again. Love of myself and love of my dear Mark.
Monday, November 28, 2005
Saturday, November 26, 2005
Thursday, November 24, 2005
Gratitude
I am American, and being so have grown up with today, Thanksgiving Day. As a child and teenager it really meant food, wonderful food, which to my family was rare and special. My parents, on a slim margin with four children, did not fund our weekday meals with bounty, though we never were hungry. So, you can imagine the FEAST of a day where food ruled and there was bounty enough to go back to for DAYS. I was truly thankful for the food I felt deprived of the rest of the year - and so in my waistline it showed. I binge ate, sneaked food and otherwise sent my body reeling in and out of shock far into adulthood. It is only, in fact, in the last few years that I have managed to eat normally most of the time. Though give me stress and give me ice cream, and pints of it! The way one starts eating in life is not easily changed! I'm really off track here though, the point of my post today is to say that along with how I eat has changed over these past three years so my reasons for celebrating Thanksgiving have altered dramatically. Today, the twenty-fourth day of November, 2005, I will have a lovely dinner at a small restaurant in New York's Midtown, and the one pumpkin pie attests to the fact we are not food centered today. So, what has changed and why? Six years of the GOP and Mr. Bush shredding our countries honor and dignity, pre-emptive war, a never ending 'war' on terror, (we cannot be eternally at war; terrorism, however horrible, is simply now a fact of life for America now as well as the rest of the world), devestation to thirty years of pro-enviorenment legislation - and most terrifying of all a new Supreme Court which appears set to limit severely our American right to privacy. Our government seems to insist it has a right to be in our beds, whether at home or in hospice and all points in between. The Patriot Act and Homeland Security have slashed and discarded Habeus Corpus and even America citizens must fear reprisal for speaking out against this administartion's actions. Though these Republicans state they are defending America's values they viscerate the Constitution with the religious rights' activism and propose to ammend this sacred document with the first segregation of American citizens from full participation in civil rights, my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, since the abolition of slavery and equality for our African American citizens. Incredible evil afoot, indeed: far less in Iraq than here at home. Our separation of Church and State at risk as never before, 51% of our population supporting a president who allows torture of our prisoners and attempts to justify such action. A Christian majority which has forgotton Christ's words, relying rather on the Old Testamnet and their pick and choose of its passages to attack selectively those who disagree with them, including our Muslim and Jewish brothers and sisters. I am hardly thankful for any of this today! What am I thankful for today? Well, the possibility of change in our country, God willing, but something more personal. I'm thankful for my lovely daughter, Joy Belin, who has been incredible in her support of her Father and me through these last two years of illness and finacial crisis. Her maturity and love, her lack of complaints and her positive verbal and even financial help are so meaningful to me. I am grateful for my husband, partner and love, Mark, who has been my support and the other part of me for almost eighteen years now. His ability to ride the storms of our many trials, not least of all my depression, and certainly his broken back are inspirations to me and teach me more about honor and faithfulness than anything I've known . I love and thank them both. Lastly, I thank our dear Lord for His blessing of a new chance to rebuild our lives here in New York. It is difficult, I find, to move once again and start over. I am aging and dramatic change holds far less charm and excitement than it often has before, but I am firmly and honestly grateful for this great gift. It is said that man needs love and work. We have both again. Happy Thanksgiving, one and all!
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Sunday, November 20, 2005
Monday, November 14, 2005
Bacchus Teased by Putti
This new acquisition by the Metropolitan is a splendor of the Baroque in marble.
Saturday, November 12, 2005
Friday, November 11, 2005
Grecian Burial Wreath
Thinnly hand hammered gold leaves and hand made wire, 22k. Bury me in this, please!
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Sunday, November 06, 2005
Friday, November 04, 2005
Thursday, November 03, 2005
Midtown East
Well at last a residence - temporary still (it's a furnished monthly) but it has great amenities and will be more than adequate for the time being. Oh, I suppose that sounds ungrateful and in some ways I suppose it is, but it's still suitcase living, without my own furniture, art, sculpture, paints, china, silver, etc. All the components of what a signature style and self expression is about.Mkaing a home. It cannot be home here in a physical sense and it's left me feeling unsettled, ungrounded. Should we change our mail, insurance, health providers? I don't think so. Not yet. We've only just left West Hollywood - HOME - and it's on a' see as we go' basis, month to month, like a nihtmare holiday that has no end.
Mark has his work to distract him from the homeless feeling, and I'm glad for him. He's being productive and he has a purpose. I'm just left in a limbo of 'hanger on' or 'dutiful spouse' without direction, enthusiasim, aspiration or merit. I've been a house husband and parent for so many years; at this age how does one begin again? I guess I'll find out, one way or another. But California is sure looking better and better to me. See the photos - that's my old home; books, design, personal and intimate. Here in new York we've just got an upscale sterile hotel.
Mark has his work to distract him from the homeless feeling, and I'm glad for him. He's being productive and he has a purpose. I'm just left in a limbo of 'hanger on' or 'dutiful spouse' without direction, enthusiasim, aspiration or merit. I've been a house husband and parent for so many years; at this age how does one begin again? I guess I'll find out, one way or another. But California is sure looking better and better to me. See the photos - that's my old home; books, design, personal and intimate. Here in new York we've just got an upscale sterile hotel.
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