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.
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