Pilgrim

City

Obscure Nachos

It happens to us all every so often, I am sure: the nachos, which always seemed so straightforward, so crispily salty and tasty, suddenly become obscure.



You push the basket away, whether from surfeit or some generalized dysgeusia and look around. There's grease on your fingers, crumbs in your lap; you stare in disbelief at the failed appetizer. Would some salsa help ? Una cerveza ? You look around: the waiter has disappeared.



So you get up and head out into the street. There is precedent to this going forth but you can't quite recall the details. No matter. You are looking for something, but what ? Wontons ? Papadum ? Saltines ?



The street is, of course, dark and empty and vaguely familiar, like the memory of a street in a dream. You sit on a bench under a streetlight and wait. The light flickers out.



What, then, are you waiting for ? A bus ? Godot ?



It strikes you that the essential element of waiting, time, is absent. So much for the "waiting for" question. What else is gone ? Air ? Gravity ? But you are breathing, and your buttocks have not floated free from the slats of the bench.



And you are hungry. Odd, after all those nachos.



After awhile you get up from the bench and head down the sidewalk. A bus roars past, covered in bright signage. You get a fleeting glimpse of words -- GRAB, HELP -- before the night swallows it up like a nacho. You decide to take a nap. As you curl up in a shadowy doorway, head to cement, you recall a song, something about doors and gates, something about lifting up their heads. It never made much sense to you, and makes even less sense now.



There is something about sense that has never made much sense to you, you recall as sleep overtakes you, overwhelms you.



When you awaken you have not dreamed and it is not morning. There is no question of toast.



Nonetheless, you clear your throat and try to make a sound.



What comes out startles you. You clamp your hand over your mouth. It is too late. There it is, at your feet squirming like a slug or a larva, naked and obscene and lily-white. It looks up at you with a look that can only be described as imploring.



You flee.



Running, you wonder: is this allergy ? nightmare ? retribution ? an unsolicited phone call from the chimney sweep d'antan ?



You have no idea. Which is refreshing. You run faster. You are running, in fact, like the wind. In fact, you like the wind ! And you would like to swear something, anything, on a stack of burning Bibles.



But not until you've had breakfast.



You stop, not in the least out of breath, and look around. Across the street see a faded sign: Taqueria. It looks oddly familiar. Have you come full circle ?



You see a familiar waiter in the window. The solicitous one who always forgives you when you stiff him.



You cross the street. This time the nachos will be light, crispy. This time you will leave a big tip.

UNSUB

Last night I wandered into the living room as a KFC ad was winding down. The message on the screen read

UNTHINK
TASTE THE UNSUB SIDE
OF KFC

I read it again. It had been a long week. I was tired, generally annoyed at the whole world, and suddenly this. I sat down on the couch and read it a third time. Was I having a stroke ? It made no sense, in a vaguely Orwellian way. The words gave way to an image of a box of repulsive looking poultry parts, then the Red Sox. I turned to DK.

What did that mean ?

Huh ? What ?

My husband is better at filtering out the fowl effluvia of pop culture than I am.

That ad -- "unthink taste the unsub side of kfc" -- what does that even mean ? Is it some kind of text message speak ?

He shrugged.

Well I concluded, That ad is definitely not targeted at my demographic. They have written me off. They have given up on selling me their repulsive poultry parts.

Oh, no they haven't. They want you to buy their chicken !



It was an eerie replay of what had actually been bothering me for the past few days. This week the Episcopal Church General Convention is convening. The General Convention is the legislative body of the church. It is bicameral, with a House of Bishops and a House of Deputies consisting of clergy and laity. It meets every three years. During the last convention, after prophetically electing a woman Presiding Bishop, the House of Bishops came up with a last-minute shocker,the notorious B033, a resolution pledging a moratorium on electing Bishops whose "manner of life" might be troubling to the Anglican Communion. "Manner of Life" is a euphemism of overwhelming and obfuscating delicacy. It means, of course, "partnered and gay like Bishop Gene." Sadly, it passed. And did the Orthodox Anglicans love us more ? No. And did the Orthodox Episcopalians forgo schismatic moves. No again.

So the Convention, among a multitude of other important issues, is grappling with this. So far there seems to be a glimmer of hope that convention will somehow undo the folly of B033 and move toward what seems so obvious to many of us: full participation of all baptised people in all the sacraments, marriage and holy orders included.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori gave an opening speech that has caused some consternation (read, snarky apoplexies) in the usual predictable quarters. The one unpredictable quarter of consternation ? Yours truly. Read this with the eyes of the woman in the Boulevard Noir

The crisis of this moment has several parts, and like Episcopalians, particularly ones in Mississippi, they're all related. The overarching connection in all of these crises has to do with the great Western heresy - that we can be saved as individuals, that any of use alone can be in right relationship with God. It's caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of all being. That heresy is one reason for the theme of this Convention.

Ubuntu. That word doesn't have any "I"s in it. The I only emerges as we connect - and that is really what the word means: I am because we are, and I can only become a whole person in relationship with others. There is no "I" without "you," and in our context, you and I are known only as we reflect the image of the one who created us. Some of you will hear a resonance with Martin Buber's I and Thou and recognize a harmony. You will not be wrong.
...

This IS a gospel announcement that our journey is meant to be toward Jerusalem, rather than sunning ourselves in the sands of the Negev or floating in the Dead Sea. This IS a reminder that we’re supposed to travel light – no extra sandals or tunics or lunch bags. Our mission is to keep traveling, bearing the good news of Jesus and working to transform the world. This crisis is an opportunity to refocus on what is most essential. When we have done that, we WILL go on our way rejoicing.

The decision-making we face here is an opportunity to choose the direction of our journey into God’s mission. Will we turn our faces toward Jerusalem, or will we wander back out into the desert? How will we engage God’s reconciling mission – in sharing the good news, healing the world, and caring for all of God’s creation? How will we discover anew that we ARE in relationship with all that God has created, and that we’re meant to be stewards of the whole?



So there is apparently a second "manner of life" that is troubling: that of the loner, the introvert, the shy person, the person who, constitutionally, runs screaming from processes and concepts like "public narrative," indaba, ubuntu, the person who will never, however many times she does it, get used to passing the peace.

I defy you to deny that such a person, a person whose secret motto might well be "hell is other people," could feel excluded by the Presiding Bishop's depiction of salvation much in the same way that I felt excluded by KFC's gnomic homily -- they're not even speaking in a language I understand. Could it be that the both the Chicken Corporation AND the Body of Christ have written me off as a lost cause ?



And it's odd, too, because I don't disagree with the Presiding Bishop. Salvation has a corporate, here-and-now context; we are all, in church and in the world, part of one another, as we out live Christ's gospel of love and forgiveness in the smallest to the largest arenas.



But aren't we also, in a very real sense, alone with God ? If God loves us, God doesn't love us in the abstract, as a population or a demographic. God loves us intimately and individually for who we are, gay or straight, shy or gregarious. I don't think this is individualist, or idolatrous or that it puts the self in the place of God, or is incompatible self-emptying and service. The only caricaturing that is going on here is the Presiding Bishop's. One can have ubuntu and indaba without explicit talk of God. One can serve humanity in the most Christ-like, devoted and selfless manner and be a flaming atheist. So, then, what sets the Church apart ? What does the Church have to offer that secular service does not ?

Some of us have crept into the back door of the church reeling with the existential nausea of the Boulevard Noir, finding in it a fledgling vocabulary of assent and a possibility of replacing existential and ontologic despair with celebration. And finding, at the cruciform intersection of being and nothingness, God in Christ.



It is not desert or Jerusalem, it is desert and Jerusalem.

For some of us it's mostly desert -- not as the Presiding Bishop somewhat snidely depicts as a "sunning" and floating" pleasure trip, but the particular ground of our own particular, if peculiar, mission.

Outer Darkness

When, in Matthew, I encounter the phrase outer darkness I am transported, in my imagination, to an imaginary street in an imaginary town: the Boulevard Noir of Jean-Paul Sartre's Bouville.

I didn't remember until tonight, revisiting the book and the street, that it was so aptly named: Black Boulevard.

Our existential hero, Roquentin, is killing time on a cold night. He heads for the outskirts,

I cross the Rue Paradis he says. I put my right foot in a puddle of water, my sock is soaked through; my walk begins.

Roquentin, an historian, has been afflicted with nausea -- the world has come to disgust him, the world of objects, the world of people and their bourgeois preoccupations, dramas and deceptions. The world overwhelms him with its sheer pre-verbal is-ness. The utter facticity of being makes him vertginous. He has bouts of visceral dislocation and disorientation that paralyze him. He walks the uninhabited Boulevard Noir, between the windowless backsides of buildings, where one gaslight barely illuminates the utter dilapidation. Torn posters on a fence offer inscrutable fragments of words; sounds barely penetrate the bleakness. He walks until

...I no longer feel myself; I am won over by the purity surrounding me; nothing is alive, the wind whistles, the straight lines flee in the night. The Boulevard Noir does not have the indecent look of bourgeois streets, offering their regrets to passersby...No one even commits any murders there; want of assassins and victims. The Boulevard Noir is inhuman. Like a mineral. Like a triangle...The Nausea has stayed down there, in the yellow light. I am happy: this cold is so pure, this night is so pure: am I not myself a wave of icy air ?



It's probably my decades-long identification with Roquentin that lies behind my affinity with the biblical phrase "outer darkness." It appears in one of the odder parables. A prominent man throws a wedding feast, and sends out servants with special invitations. The recipients decline the invitations AND kill the servants: they have much better things to do, thank you. Outraged, the prominant man invites everyone -- "good and bad" -- to the feast. And they all oblige, showing up, partying down. The host notes one guest, however, that has not dressed for the occasion. He confronts the guest -- How did you get in without a wedding garment ? --



then has his servants bind him hand and foot and cast him into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth. The parable concludes: For many are called and few are chosen.



That's a harsh trajectory: what begins as a generous universalism ends up as a Calvinist manifesto.



But lets back up a little. Let's wander a bit from the canon. Many were indeed called. The banquet hall was filled with guests indiscriminately collected from "the thoroughfares," streets undoubtedly like the well-lit bourgeois streets of downtown Bouville. Guests both good and bad: no works righteousness afoot here, no siree ! Who can resist the call of free food ? So, yes: many were called. But who -- what few -- was "chosen," and for what ?



You can see where I'm headed with this. It was the one ill-clad, unprepared guest who was "chosen." And for what ?



The outer darkness. The Boulevard Noir.



Many guests, some good, some bad, were invited to the feast. Everyone ate, and ate free. Gratis. It's grace, then, for one and all, for good and bad. If what we call "God" is infinite, more-immense-than-can-be-conceived, wholly Other and the Ground-of-All, it seems ill-advised to issue Him an eyeshade and a ledger and assign Him the mean task of a neo-Scroogian book-keeping. If there is grace, it's for everyone -- like air to humans, like water to fish. Otherwise, God is reduced to Santa, keeping his list, checking it twice, doling out hellish coal lumps to the naughty, heavenly bicycles to the nice.



So what about that chosen guest -- surprised by grace, unprepared, incredulous, not dressed for the occasion -- who finds himself out the back door of the banquet hall and in the icy mud and darkness of the Boulevard Noir ?



There is, I propose, a special grace in the Boulevard Noir. It's not for everyone; it may just be for those unlucky few born with the neurological substrate gives a tendency to nausea. They are neither better nor worse than the banquet-goers, simply different.

To enter Black Boulevard, one crosses -- and most deliberately avoids -- the happy throngs of Paradise Street. If anything will bring on an attack of nausea, it's a happy throng. The first step of the walk is a painful baptism: a foot immersed in icewater that soaks clear to the skin. The path continues through a darkness that is inhuman, cold and pure -- pure as a "mineral" or a "triangle," pure as being Itself; pure, even, as being's Ground. The endpoint is spirit: one becomes "a wave of icy air." It is a weirdly trinitarian grace; it is a grace that meets the nauseated where they are, in the throes of it, in the narrow, haunted solitudes of facticity and thrown-ness.

There, Roquentin can say, and we can say with him I am happy.



Who knows what manner of gift will flow from that initial grace, the grace whose song is --

Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there:
if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.
If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me;
even the night shall be light about me.
Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day:
the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.

Lesbian Jesus

So there's this new Anglican entity in the US, ACNA, schismed off the "apostate" Episcopal Church for the usual unholy trinity of reasons -- biblical inerrancy, misogyny and homophobia. One of its clerical supporters, in interview, has uttered a mind boggling and illuminating bit of theologizing.



Per reporter Julia Duin, via Episcopal Cafe, Integrity and others:

I asked (Bishop Wantland) if he wanted the ACNA to eventually outlaw ordaining women entirely.

"Of course. That's our mission," he said. "Christ is the bridegroom and the church is the bride. The priest at the altar is an icon of Christ. What image is that if the person at the altar is a woman? It's a lesbian relationship."



So, then, I am moved to ask: why not lesbian Jesus ?

If "in Christ," as Paul states in Galatians, there is no slave or free, no Jew or Greek, no male or female, then how can we apply a more literal, anthropomorphic reading to the Holy Trinity itself, which is, after all, a complex sign and metaphor for the inexpressibly mysterious Ground of Being ?



It's enough to make this Trinitarian Universalist into a Unitarian Universalist. Or a Zen Buddhist.

If Christ's malehood remains paramount, operational and unsubsumed within the Trinity, if Christ is not emblem and event of the ongoing colloquoy of divine and human but simply some guy-in-the-sky still dressed in his earthly particulars and accidents, then I am in the wrong pew.



But I don't think I am.

Christ is where divinity and humanity intersect. Christ happened -- scandalously and particularly -- to be a man. He might just as well have been incarnated as a lesbian, the particularity of the event would still be scandalous, and the ultimate salvific implication and apotheosis just as radical and profound.



Some days I just want to seize folks by their lapels and shake them, crying

For the love of God, man, be more apophatic !



Christ's humanity includes and transcends the whole marvelous, God-given, light-infused spectrum of gender -- and race, and ability, and class, and ethnicity.



Bishop Wantland, oddly enough, has charged us with a most excellent koan --



Lesbian Jesus.

To your zafus, brothers and sisters in Christ !