Category: Christian faith

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Happy Easter!

Apart from having a lively discussion with Hubby after church (and over a lamb curry) about the propriety of clapping in worship, I’m not feeling gung-ho about discussing Easter theologically. I’ve done that before and shall again. I suppose I was expecting too much of worship and the iffy sermon left me underfed, even as I strained to hear every word. Should have complained I about the sound system? Like the Borscht Belt vacationer of yore who complained: “The food was terrible! And such small portions!”

So at the Peace, I decided to sublimate my jackass-ish impulses into responding to “Good morning! Happy Easter!” with a mumbled “!المسيح قام” (“He is risen!” and about a quarter of my Arabic vocabulary.) The high points were running into both a certain blogger and an alumnus of my college debating society and being able to worship with Hubby at all.

This year, too, I appreciate more secular or popular traditions. I’d post a picture of the butter lamb I made but the camera is wonky. So in its place, may I present “Peep Show” — the winners of a Washington Post contents of diorama featuring Marshmallow Peeps. Some a quite good, some very gay, a couple are both.


المسيح قام!

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Good Friday fasting and pluralism

As I mentioned yesterday, I was going to scale back my eating on xerophagic lines: bread, water, fruit and simply prepared vegetables.

So far so good. My staple has been raisin bagels — which remind me in composition of the hot cross bun, too — with a little almond butter. (Fat and protein to keep from spiking out on carbohydrate.) So I went to the bakery, a chain Hubby and I call “Awbuhpuh” and got some. I was thus thinking, in line:

  • This baked good is associated with Jews, but since this is Passover and they’re leaven, observant Jews won’t be having them. (Some people would have a problem with a raisin bagel, Passover or not.)
  • Their circular shape suggests eternity, a suitably religious concept.
  • Oh, and the guy who sold them. His name was Muhammad.

“Where cross the crowded ways of life” indeed!

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Will the ex-gay crowd help one day?

I listened to an interesting 2005 half-hour documentary about gay history from Radio Netherlands entitled “Pride and Prejudice.” (I got this as a MP3 podcast feed but I’m not sure how I got it.) It reviewed the state of gay (male, mostly) self-worth and self-identity from the Victorian era to the pre-Liberation (post-1969) period in as good terms as one can in thirty minutes. I was glad to hear the real live voices of older gay men who had tales to tell.

Recall that homosexuality was classed a disease, that this was seen as progress from its status as sin, and that some medical professionals tried to treat or cure it. As the documentary reported, there were gay men, even ones who lived relatively open lives, who sought a cure. (This comes out in the 1970 film, The Boys in the Band, which inspired how this blog is ironically named.) An interesting tidbit is how psychological texts with records of well-adjusted gay men became best sellers, even if the research was predicated on an insult that many of the readers understood but excused. So rare were the voices that described their lives. And as we know, with a few irregular holdouts, the medical and psychological professions have come around. In short, it’s society that has the problem.

Consider the ex-gay movement. From what I’ve read recently, it seems to know it will not make bona fide heterosexuals from its victims. At best, it tries to eliminate the practical and mental sin that separates gays from God — as they see it — and some of the participants, missing that closeness with God, will “take the cure” on its own terms. But I’ve known a lot of gay people who live faithful lives with a real, vibrant and healthy nearness to God.

In time, I can imagine the ex-gay cause splintering into a continuation of its current, ill-fated mission; a movement of deliberately celebate gay Evangelical men (perhaps living in a supportive community); and an ex-ex-gay movement that tries to cultivate gay relationships on a tight reading of scripture (I don’t see modern gays described in the commonly-recapitulated biblical injunctions) a mutually-accountable mode of sexual ethics and a lively spiritual practice.

It may be wishful thinking to hope the ex-gay-ers might morph into something wholesome, but God has a habit of leaving no follower unshaken.