Prayer Request

I don't really know this person, have never personally met him.  I don't even know if he's a Christian, or what.  I do, however, know what it's like to watch someone devoured by pancreatic cancer.

David is being tested for pancreatic cancer.  I haven't told him I'm praying for him, and I haven't asked;  my father died of pancreatic cancer, and it is a horrible, horrible way to go, so I don't care whether he wants my prayers or not.  He has a wife, children and grandchildren, and is loved by people that I love - that's all the permission I need.

*UPDATE*

My brother, Jeff, the middle son, has cancer of the bladder and needs surgery. 

Please remember both David and Jeff in your prayers.

Confessional

This will probably get my gay card revoked, but . . .

. . I don't like Gay Pride parades and all the hoopla around them.

Sorry.

I can accept that it's "just you, Mark" who feels this way.  I find them embarrassing, frankly.

I understand the whole psychology behind them - that this is a way to subvert the oppressive order, a way to rebel against repression - I really do get that.  I think it's great street theater, and I do enjoy the pretty, pretty lads who wander around in underwear and little else. 

But, it's just not me and not something I find in the slightest uplifting. 

I'm not street theater.  I'm not !faaaabulous!  I'm not a pretty boy with a great, tight little body.  I'm not a sex machine that's going to put every other interest aside to build myself into the type of physique that's going to interest that pretty little boy with the tight body.  You know what, I have a lot more going on than sex, and I get enough of objectification of gays from the church "discussing the gay issue" all the time.  To me, Gay Pride is unhealthy.  I remember how miserable and depressed I was in my 20's, figuring I'd never be with anyone because I didn't look like these body builders and porn stars, who are basically the same people riding the floats in the big Pride Parades.  It was an impossible goal for me to reach, even then, and I put it right up there with the sort of image forced onto women by the mass media right up til this day.  It's the public face of "gay" that doesn't help us, either with others or ourselves - I have to wonder if I only fall for pretty young men because I'm just that shallow, or because that's all I have held up before me!  For me, Gay Pride is like a black man taking pride in a minstrel show. 

You know, I'm just a guy.  That's all.  Where's that parade?  The closest we get is nerdy little Marshall in United States of Tara and even he is an attractively-nerdy teenager, paired with a little bleach-blonde sex hound who teaches him to cruise parks for sex and puts down the one gay man with character in the show because he's "fat and old!"  It makes me feel like I have no real stake in what happens to gays, I'm not part of the gay community.  It's just not healthy, to my mind.  

At Last, Someone Found and Put This Part Up

Yes, yes, I know . . . it's childish, simplistic, ridiculously-dated, outrageously stylized and presentational.

Yet, I still find it moving, somehow.




And, yes, James, that's where Fr. Bullion and I got that!  :D


And, I also listened to Ambrosian chant for the first time - how incredibly Eastern, yet in Latin and in Milan!

The Mirror Crack'd

Sometimes, one gets the rare chance to see what one would've been like with just a few differences. 

This story at Mimi's gave me one of those rare opportunities.

I was absolutely gobsmacked.  Dumbfounded.  The story - and, like Mimi, I suggest reading the entire seven-part entry at Box Turtle - was me with a different family.  Just a few differences, and I could be the one who finally gave up.  I was fortunate.  Kirk's story profoundly mirrors mine, right down to the coping mechanisms, including an inanimate-object "playmate." 

My parents were open and tolerant for the time.  I remember my one conversation with both my parents, as a child, about why gay people were gay (we lived in Miami, then, so, yeah, I knew what gay was) and my parents, both born-and-bred Southern Baptists, told me that some people believed they were sinful, some believed they were sick, but my parents believed that, while some might be sick, most were what God had made them to be.  Playing at being a girl - as I suspect more boys do than would like or, perhaps, consciously can remember - my father caught me and simply said, "Son, go play in your room."  I remember father and mother both expressing open contempt for Anita Bryant and her crusading, though I didn't know what her crusade was about.  I didn't grow up hearing hate and fear and destroy where gays were concerned.  I was fortunate. 

I grew up, like Kirk, with an internalized notion that gay was something curable, or, like my depression, a mental disorder simply to be borne stoically.  Unlike Kirk, my parents made it possible for me to question and outgrow that belief, to find out for myself.  They were not victims of a Rekers, so neither did I become so. 

Kirk's story shows those complex turns accidents (?) of birth and place can make - it is a tragedy, in the classical sense, with an innocent child as the central victim, and plenty of blame all around.  Oh, yes, Rekers is the central Iago in this, but there was hubris, blindness and selfishness in every adult involved.  Some admitted the errors, though too late.  And, I can tell you from the similarities, despite the fortunate differences, never doubt the damage the good ol' peers did, the fellow kids so casually cruel and blundering. 

For once, at least for this time, I feel privileged.

Great Joy!

This past Sunday, Pentecost Sunday, our priest, Jay, and his wife, Alison, had their new daughter, Ella, baptized at St. Patrick's!

Jay is on Facebook, but I don't feel comfortable publishing any pics of wife and kid that aren't on a more "public" public space - but, trust me, that is one beautiful baby (of course, she had a good start!)

AdSense Has Me InSensed

The background is found here:

The Bastards!


and here:

At Least I Tried

Now, whatever your feelings about MadPriest - love him, hate him, leave him alone - I think you'd have to admit this all sounds pretty dodgy on Google's part. 

DISCLAIMER:  I am, in NO way accusing Google of criminal behavior.  I'm neither law enforcement nor an officer of the court. 

That disclaimer disclaimed, it sounds pretty fly-by-night, to me, and, before anyone else hard-up tries it, you should be aware.  I don't know how you feel about a situation in which someone makes a profit from using your intellectual property as ad space, then suddenly and without explanation terminates that agreement and withholds your agreed-to commission with no appeal other than to the one doing the terminating, but it sounds pretty lousy to me.

Google AdSense:  Just Say NO!

I'm Not Begging for Me, This Time!

I really don't think anyone but James and I read this blog, anymore.  I'm thinking of making it public again, but the previously-mentioned yutz does tend to make a spectacle of itself.  Still, briefly public for this cause is not too onerous a sacrifice for me. 

For those who don't know, there is a (relatively) recent but respectable monastic tradition in the Episcopal Church.  Most who frequent the liberal/progressive blogosphere know Prior Aelred or Father John-Julian, not to mention author, bon vivant and general man-of-the-cloth-about-town Tobias Haller, but there are also Franciscans, a small group of Dominicans, various Benedictine houses, and our own answer to Jesuits - the Society of St. John the Evangelist, or SSJE. 

Known early on as "The Cowley Fathers," they acquired a reputation in the states for being "Trappists at home and Jesuits abroad."  To learn more of them as they are now - and they are, perhaps, a bit more approachable and milder than such a description might suggest - you can visit http://ssje.org/.

Their main house is in Cambridge, MA, a few blocks from Harvard.  They maintain a rural house, as well, as their main ministry now is in retreats and spiritual direction.  Cowley Press was once theirs, but became too large for a modest number of brothers to maintain.  Their house in Cambridge is beautiful;  a classical abbey in the middle of Boston.

Given the difficulties of an aging physical plant (built in the '20's), the brothers started a very successful capital campaign, which has only (once you see the extent of the renovations, you'll understand "only") $500,000 left to go.  The hitch they've run into is in a sagging concrete floor which has broken the sewer lines, already old and corroded, below the basement.  The house was already vacated, but, of course, replacing the lines is expensive.  My brother and sister-in-law had to do similar last year, and it costs. 

Now, you don't know the brothers, like as not.  I can't tell you that their needs outweigh any others, or that the loss of their ministry will directly impact TEC at large.  I can tell you that they helped and supported me through a very rough time, as I explored a vocation and they helped me realize I did not - at least at that time - have one.  They neither deserted nor forgot me after that, and Brother Curtis has always been generous with his time.  I can tell you that Bp. Shaw of Massachusetts is an SSJE brother, and that formed a great deal of his priestly and episcopal ethos.  I can tell you that I believe the loss of that house and its ministry in Cambridge, though Emery House in the country would be likely to continue, would be a great loss to Boston and to our church as a whole. 

Go to their website, and there is contact information and archived copies of their magazine (and info on vocations, hinthint), and please, use the much wider range of contacts than mine that you have, to help finish this campaign successfully. 

They're good guys.



The House in Winter, looking from Memorial (?) Drive on the river.



The Chapel, looking back from the baldichinoed altar to the gate that used to separate brothers from visitors

The refectory.  Guests eat with the brothers here.

Walkway up to the guesthouse door.

RE: Heatwave

Could Camping have been right?  Is this the beginning of Tribulations lasting til October?

The Refrain

I keep coming up against the fact of my bitterness and jadedness.

I remember being able to be enchanted - absolutely enchanted - by things as simple as the light of a summer evening, soft mist as fireflies began to twinkle over a tall-grassed field by a stream.  I remember wading in the stream, imagining myself on an adventure with Frodo or Bilbo or Jack Driscoll or Indiana Jones.  Traipsing through pines and following the railroad tracks, just happy to see what I haven't seen. 

Now, I worry about and resent snakes in the field, pollution in the stream, water moccasins, oncoming trains, the heat and humidity of the summer evening.   The slant of a sunset or lights playing against the night no longer are noticed.  The things I see that look like the places I imagined from books or the offscreen in movies I think of as cynically staged or something I can't possess, so who cares?

There's a difference between seeing how things are managed, and how the world really is - the former sees the dull reality of man's ongoing mismanagement of everyone and everything and gives up, the latter sees that reality, but knows the potential beyond.

I seem to have lost the ability to see the potential.  I still see the kindness Katzie and I received, that miracle, but it seems like part of a dying, fairytale world.  I've become a bitter old man, prematurely aged. 

And it's too damn hot.  Maybe, this year, the ol' body'll just give up and be done with it.  If this is all the outlook I have left, it certainly won't be a loss!