Mic and Dim

I have been missing A Mic and Dim Lights lately. So I bring a few of them back, for you and for me. Enjoye.

Spiritual Autobiography

An assignment I did for class...

To My Future Children:

The imagination is a paradoxical thing: endless and somewhat limited. Endless in that we can conceive of anything and everything and limited in that our imaginations often fail to affect reality in all the helpful ways we think it should. The problem with humanity, once eloquently stated to me by my Professor of Christian History Randi Walker, is that we can imagine perfection yet our personhood is such that we cannot ever attain it. And this, my ones to come, is the story of my experience with(in)/of/for God. Theology and faith are like the imagination, paradoxical things: endless and frustratingly limited.

I wanted to write to you about “the question of God” being central in all my endeavors, yet this nomenclature doesn’t fulfill the communicative task at hand. Although theological questioning colors a majority of my personal religiosity, it does not constitute my faith entirely. My father, a minister, theologian, and institutional skeptic encouraged me from infancy to question everything. My mother on the other hand, when realizing what an extremist, intellectually inexhaustible child she had produced, encouraged me to live a life of balance. These encouragements to question and balance have been at odds with each other from day one. I am much better at the former; hence when I say “the question of God” doesn’t fulfill the communicative task at hand it is because much of my energy has also been spent trying (and failing) to decelerate the questioning process in a pursuit of balance. I believe this quieting of the mind falls under the category of faithful action, contemplativeness, or spiritual discipline. It is a somewhat problematic distinction, this ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’ thing, though I must admit in theory and praxis I have not been able to overcome or integrate it. Perhaps you will be the first in a lineage of Type A personalities to do so. May it be so, dear God.

The communicative task at hand is (near) complete with the concept of ‘orientation.’ That is: I have been theologically and faithfully oriented from the womb. Though I have no conscious recollection of my experience in the womb, I bring forth this metaphor to hammer home two points: 1) I believe the cosmos are situated in the womb of God therefore I could never have been dis-oriented from her; 2) I cannot imagine my life without the questions, pursuits, doubts, relations and language of religion/theology. The metaphor serves to illustrate this constitutive element of my identity. And speaking of metaphor, I want to pass on to you one of the most important things I have ever read, that strikes me as Truth (if any such capitalizing or pronouncements are permissible by the time you are born).
This comes to you from Adrienne Rich, one who often prophecies to my little helpless heart when the confines of language threaten to annihilate the planet and those trying to describe it with their stupid religions:

Of course, like the consciousness behind it, behind any art, a poem can be deep or shallow, visionary or glib, prescient or stuck in an already lagging trendiness. What’s pushing the grammar and syntax, the sounds, the images—is it the constriction of literalism, fundamentalism, professionalism—a stunted language? Or is it the great muscle of metaphor, drawing strength from resemblance in difference? The great muscle of the unconstricted throat? I’d like to suggest this: If there’s a line to be drawn, it’s not so much between secularism and belief as between those for whom language has metaphoric density and those for whom it is merely formulaic—to be used for repression, manipulation, empty certitudes to ensure obedience. And such a line can also be drawn between ideologically obedient hack verse and an engaged poetics that endures the weight of the unknown, the untracked, the unrealized, along with its urgencies for and against.

I have found the “muscle of metaphor” to be essential in the religious quest. This quest is one that depends on and deepens as a result of non-narrow communication. If one is talking about God or attempting to deconstruct the idolatrous gods of our culture, the biggest mistake is to employ literal language. I hope you come to know and be a part of the poetic enterprise; it will certainly enliven your time here on earth. May it be so, dear God.

There is a place where God cannot be known, a place where humans cannot even understand what they “know,” and a place where the limits of language obstruct humans from saying what they mean and meaning what they say. As a theologian, this is the place that I yearn to visit. As a worshipper, this is the place I praise for its majesty. As a person, this place reveals my finitude and serves as the great equalizer between me and my human family. I suppose this place is the “unknown, untracked, unrealized” that Rich writes about. Perhaps it’s the space that swims and swirls “for us”: a pool of messy and neat, soft and rigid, birthing and dying all the time. Perhaps it’s the great ontological enabler, our God. Who knows.

This is less autobiographical than I had anticipated, but to know your mother, is to know her thoughts about the great mystery. So in a sense, this is my autobiography. Just know that every move I have made, relationship I have formed, prayer I have said, fit I have thrown, atheism I have adopted, music I have played, body I have touched, or career path I have chosen, it was because that thing kept my orientation in tact.

And so I end as I began: with paradox. The more I pursue theology/religion, the less I grasp. The questions usually get me off balance. The balance, when it comes, often leads to new insights which bring about more questions. I have no answers and very little balance, only metaphors, paradoxes, and infinite hope that as Adrienne Rich says, I am on the side of the line that is capable of “enduring the weight of the unknown.” May it be so, dear God.

Actually: there is one last thing I want to say. I love you already, even before you are 'materialized'/born/here/alive. This is, without a doubt, the greatest illumination of faith and hope I can bring you. This world is an ugly place a lot of the time. People get hurt and then they get angry and punish people for their hurt. Then those people get angry and punish other people for their hurt. The cycle is on-going, some might say 'hopelessly' so. There are acts of horrific violence and violation that testify to this worldly ugliness every minute of the day. And yet...I still want you to 'be here,' to know the smell of morning time, the breath of the ocean on your skin, the secrets of standing alone after you've hiked a hillside, the give-it-as-you-go spirit of compassion, the grief of love lost, the beauty of your bodies...all these things. I have faith and hope, for you, for everyone but especially for you, that forgiveness and grace somehow infiltrate this world in ways that make life worth loving.

Sin

I saw your face for the first time this past friday
though you've been frequenting my cupboards for weeks.
Reluctant to admit the scratching sounds might in fact be creaturely,
the covers-over-my-head method sufficed in denial, in the dark, night after
night as your nails went deeper into the wood, your teeth deeper into
the excess bags of pasta on my wooden shelves from ikea.
But when you decided to traverse from the kitchen through
the hallway, past the front door, under the bookshelves, to the
big brown leather chair--five feet away from my bed--you sealed your fate.

Or perhaps my fear sealed your fate.

The nearness of you, the possibility that you might, for whatever reason
come at me, hurt me and leave me sleepless for years
(which has happened before with other creatures of a somewhat anthropocentric nature)
was too much for me to fathom.

I bought the poison the next day.

The Longs Drug Store, on Rose & Vine, had 4 options, technologies (?), tools available for a killing plot such as this. I stood on aisle 3 for what
seemed like an eternity, considering things like
poison or snap?
how long will it take?
is it big enough?
will you suffer too much?
do the remains remain?
and finally decided to go with the little turquoise pebbles that
you'd unknowingly eat up like candy before
they caused your intestines to malfunction. i thought:
maybe this way I won't have to see the body after it dies;
perhaps you'll just crawl outside and pass away,
out of sight, though certainly not out of mind.
You came out of your hole at 10:30pm that night,
ate the entire tray before morning.

The package said the process could take anywhere from 4-6 days.

Night #2, post-operation-poison, you began crying out from the cupboards.
I started crying too. What had I done? You were just hungry.
I called Lincoln who said "Grab your baseball bat, go in there and put him out of his misery. It's the right thing to do. You can't just let him suffer."
I hung up the phone and cried harder when I realized I could never
bash your skull in: I just don't have it in me.

Today I got a huge rat snap trap, one that will surely
take you out the minute you step on it, which I hope might lessen
the amount of suffering I originally prescribed.
By my hand you are going to die; the least I can do is make it faster.

The reason I am writing to you tonight is not artistic, but apologetic.
I am sorry I couldn't come up with a more creative way for us to part ways.
I am sorry someone fucked me a up a long time ago, in the middle of the night, in ways that are now affecting you. Han?
I am sorry that life has become so boundaried: human/animal, home/nature: that your little body was seen as such a threat.
I hope there is a heaven for you, and yet I know, such a "heaven" exists to absolve my guilt and nothing further.
So I guess what I am saying is, I hope you can forgive me, or that something can because I feel so god-fucking-awful.

I was there.

Power to the Peaceful
Golden Gate Park
September 8, 2007
Indigo Girls & Michael Franti & Amy Goodman

...um yes.
so fun
enlivening
hippie-fied
all prototypical bay area elements in one place, mixing like potion
swirling like a whirlpool in the ocean
of g*d
re-minding us of the power of doin what you love
and lovin what you do, like music and dancin in daylight
and moonshine and feelin fine
even though the wars wage and famines plague
because celebration is part of liberation
and showing up in solidarity is fighting the good fight.

i was there, in the grass, on the field
with my peeps through the san francisco streets
hoping to lose my desperation and sense of separation
hoping to see purposes of passion put us in positions
of resistance and assistance.
i was there in 2007
like my mom was there in 1969 because the love of justice
runs through ancestral lines
and won't die so long as try
to keep it alive.

"There is a whole lot of meaningless sufffering." --Wade Meyer

"You're love birds, I can tell" she said
as we hobbled slowly on the sidewalk
twenty minutes after tiny specs of my cervix
were divorced from me by the speculum-looking-scissors
that had been resting on the table next to the
other sterile tools: big swabs, littler swabs, iodine bottles full
of iodine, acedic acid, the actual speculum, and of course
the blue dressing covering the cold metallic tray table without
which none of these objects would be propped.
(These objects are enough, by themselves, to give you a heart attack
before the doctor even asks you to "scoot down.")

"I can tell by the way you walk" she said
completely oblivious to the residue of pain
living between my thighs that slowed my pace down at least
forty percent and had me grabbing Wade's arm
for stability all the way to the bank, to the parking garage,
to the car, oblivious to how long I had been "open" at someone
elses command, subsequently stretched, raw, exposed, in pain
and "closed again" with no one to scream at because this is all
done in the name of Health Care.

"Yeah we are" i answered her
laughing at how things can be true and not true at the same time
because though he's gay and I am Lincoln's
a love so complimentary, enduring, and free-flying
certainly deserved her analogy of birds.