Judgment (A Poem)

Judgment

When the Son of Man shall come in glory, and all his angels with him,

Then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:

And before him shall be gathered all nations:

And he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats.

And he shall set the sheep on his right hand,

But the goats on the left, because of the smell.

Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand,

‘Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you

From the foundation of the world:

For I was an hungred, and ye spake to me of fasting:

I was thirsty, and ye gave me ascetical lectures:

I was a stranger, and ye told me how to get home:

Naked, and ye reminded me of the sanctity of property:

I was sick, and ye forbad me to be a tedium to my neighbor:

I was in prison, and ye were just judges and noble juries.’

Then the righteous shall answer him, saying,

‘Yea, Lord, all this and more we know,

For verily, inasmuch as we have done unto the least of these thy brethren,

We have stored up our love only for thee.’

Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand,

‘Depart from me, into the Consuming Fire prepared for you:

For I was an hungred, and ye spoiled me:

I was thirsty, and ye plied me with wine:

I was a stranger, and ye took no heed to your state in life:

Naked, and ye coddled me:

Sick, and in prison, and ye rewarded my errors.’

Then shall they also answer him, saying,

‘I knew thee, that thou art a hard man.’

And these shall go away into the Consuming Fire:

But the righteous into all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them.

The Banquet

The Pope has laid a princely feast

Upon the Church’s board:

In files each cardinal, bishop, priest—

The chosen of the Lord.

No expense spared, each place is set

With cups of gold and gem,

Napkins of silk as black as jet,

White plates of porcelain.

The joint is carved, the wine is poured

(But the fish would not fry);

Bishop with bishop firm concord

Holds, over roasted thigh.

Their charities have got them fame,

As promised in the Law.

A Virgin in a silvered frame

Smiles blind at their foie gras.

They their vexatious Church affairs

Delicately discuss:

How laws oppress, tithes are impaired,

And how the laymen fuss.

Their programs they accept and bless,

Their institutes exalt,

Sitting serene as stone grotesques

Or statues made of salt.

The Pope rises, and calls a toast:

‘The Body and the Blood.’

The college nods. The white-clad ghost

Imbibes the scarlet flood.

The tipsiest are talkative,

The sober ones are mute:

All eye each other, secretive,

While the maid serves the fruit.

Little is left of their repast

Below the Mother mild:

They licked the rib-cage bright as brass,

The rib-cage of a child.

A Wicked Priest

The President [of a witches’ Sabbath] was occasionally the local leader, but usually he was more; and if he were not more, yet he was felt as more … He was called the Devil; he was adored as the Devil; and, metaphysically, he may have been the Devil. —Charles Williams, Witchcraft

Father John has a generous bent:

his tipping is thirty percent;

he smiles at waiters

in cassock and gaiters,

showing teeth that are white and unshent.

Father John has a heart and a mind

for the needs of the lame and the blind.

When his eloquent voice

stirs the heart to a choice,

it is ever to service mankind.

Father John is a scholarly man:

all his sermons are preached to a plan,

to excite true devotion

and harness emotion

and save any soul that he can.

Father John is austerely correct

to discountenance schism and sect,

to adhere to the GIRM

in each rubric and term,

and the name of the Church to protect.

Father John has a most modest air.

He submits to his bishop with care,

And to laity too

When their judgment is true.

To his purity, none can compare.

Father John says the loveliest Mass:

his reverence none can surpass;

and when he confects,

his reflection he checks

in the chalice as if in a glass.

Three Poems

I recently began working on a series of autobigraphical, free-verse poems, dealing with my Reformed, or Calvinist, upbringing. My plan is to write one for each of the five points of the famous TULIP acrostic (which represents the distinctively Reformed doctrines of Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and Perseverance of the Saints; we won't stop to explore their meaning here, but this Wiki article gives a fairly good theological and historical summary), plus at least one introductory poem and at least one concluding poem. I don't have the whole thing mapped out, but I have the first three poems written, and I thought I'd share them here. I may still alter them further, I don't know.

It should be, but isn't, unnecessary to add that I'm writing about my personal experience of Reformed theology. I am not talking about anybody else in the world.

Trigger warning: spiritual and sexual abuse.

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The Garden

When I was a child I walked in the garden in the cool of the day.

The trees, gravid with fruit, hung branches low against the sky,

Offering, encouraging;

The flowers clustered close along the moss-soft paths,

Roses, lilies, clove blossoms, irises,

Nectar and incense over smooth stones.

There are footprints left on the path,

Mingled with strange, polished markings, curved or coiled,

And insubstantial or mutating shapes,

As if in imitation of those feet.

Keening, crying,

A cockerel calls the alarum.

Depraved

His feet among the tulips, his hands brush the roses and the lilies.

‘This is love,’ he says, laying his fingers on my throat,

Forcing me down to bow.

‘I know it hurts, I know it’s harsh,

I know it feels nothing like any loves you know,

But you have to trust me,’

As I writhe and gasp and my eyes blur:

‘This is what real love is.’

The thorns scrape on my skin

And I cannot feel my knees or my wrists.

‘This is love. Stop crying.’

Elect

I am fifteen and I know much of metaphysics.

I know the subtleties of Scripture, and there is nothing in Saint Paul

That for me is hard to be understood.

Hold a prism before the mystery’s light,

And I shall define the sevenfold color of being:

Sovereignty, holiness, truth, omniscience, justice, power, and mercy.

All things are in his will and are his will,

From the starlit glories of the galactic pillars,

To the dirty bathroom where someone tasted salt

On the head of a twenty-year-old cock.

It was not me

Because there is no me:

There is only the will of my God.

Five Quick Takes

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I got back from a five-day visit to the Adirondacks this past weekend. It was gorgeous, it always is, but I cannot say I’m sorry to be back in the land of air conditioning and cell phone reception. The insects were especially bad this year: I brought a canister of Off and so did several other people, and I’m still covered in bites from deerflies and mosquitoes.

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The McCarrick scandal, especially when set beside the corruption and incompetence of the Archdiocese of Baltimore—the squalid matter of The Keepers, though hopefully the worst of it, is yet only a part of it—it’s all stuff I am unfilially glad I’ve escaped by being incardinated into the Ordinariate back in 2013. But all the same, I am perfectly sure that the reason the Ordinariate has not been rocked by any scandals of that magnitude is that we’ve only existed for six years. We are as full of people as any other diocese, and we will necessarily bring all the same human problems with us into the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church.

The first evangelist was a prostitute1; the first Pope was an apostate; the mind behind most of the New Testament was a judicial murderer. I worry about anyone whose faith is at all grounded in the misguided belief that Catholics are generally better than other people. They’ll have to face a harsh morning, and so much the harsher if they hit the snooze button.

This is not to deny the magnificent witness of the saints. Our Lord the Spirit has made quite ordinary human beings into miracles of wisdom, joy, self-mastery, courage, and compassion, and several of them (Joan of Arc, Thomas More, John of the Cross, Mother Teresa) were instrumental in my own conversion, as ruthlessly intellectual as I told myself it was. But there is a very great difference between observing, in an individual life, the diagrammatized exposition of the Glory, and attributing the Glory to the diagram. You might just as well suppose that a good novel must necessarily have been written on a nice computer.

1I am aware that there is debate over whether St Mary Magdalene was the same person as the (euphemistically so called) ‘sinful woman’ of Luke 7. I personally think that they were the same person, for a few reasons; but whether I’m correct or not, the popular accusation that this was a smear campaign against the Magdalene is patently ridiculous from a Christian perspective. There is no past that could constitute a smear campaign. Even if there were, all of the Apostles would still have to be ranked lower than she on the social hierarchy.

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I am nearly always reading something by Charles Williams, and last week, one of the few books I brought with me into the mountains was a single-volume copy of Taliessin Through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars, his two enchanting books of Arthurian poetry. In both, Williams writes on multiple allegorical levels—the first author, perhaps, to successfully bend Dante’s bow in six hundred years. Thus the Byzantine Empire (more exactly, the Roman Empire as seated at Byzantium; Williams’ picture is deliberately anachronistic in several respects) is itself at one level of interpretation; but at another level it is the human body, and at another it is all human society, and at another still it is the kingdom of heaven.

What I find so fascinating about this is, it’s such a tightly constructed allegory that it’s almost self-exploiting. There were many more poems that Williams intended to write, before his untimely death in 1945, and between the poems as written, his uncompleted work The Figure of Arthur, and C. S. Lewis’ commentary on both, it’s possible to plausibly reconstruct substantial areas of the mythos that Williams never had an opportunity to touch on. As I’ve often wanted to write an adaptation of the Matter of Britain, this is really exciting for me.

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If I weren’t so tired of hearing it, it’d crack me up that so many Christians are so firmly convinced LGBT people are locked inside identity-label-cages. Talk to us! We’re not! Or just watch this adorable vlogger on the subject.

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I’m trying to get back into the habit of saying a daily rosary, and I did hit on a great trick: I can’t go on Facebook until I’ve said my rosary. I’ve been applying that rule for two or three weeks, and so far I’ve only forgotten once!

What’s harder is being present in the prayers. Not, I don’t think, because they’re formulas: I do as poorly if not worse when I try to pray spontaneously. But attending mentally to a person who is not present to my senses, even artificially as an e-mail or a social media post or something, is difficult. Everything reminds me of something, which means there’s a lot of noise in my brain. Probably I should learn some concentration techniques, or mind-clearing techniques or whatever. And, obviously, pray about it.

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La Estrella del Mar, or, Mother of Exiles

Trucks rumble—the hustle and the hum

Of gears gas engine exhaust choke POTHOLE and there’s a cut on the forehead,

Red over the white frightened eyes in the dark.

She bends down over POTHOLE her baby

And she knows what’s coming next but it hasn’t happened yet,

So she cradles and coos and tries not to think

About the kennel they’ll put her son in

With the chainlink door and the concrete floor and the ugly foil blanket made for an alien.

And the dry road south is all sand sand sand POTHOLE sand,

Back down to Sinaloa, the land of the rattlesnake,

Sand in the hair the mouth the eyes, like an itching thirsting disease.

Turn your bodies against the drums, boys:

It’s the I.C.E., it’s the Committee of Public Saftey,

It’s Herod and he means it this time.

The trucks aren’t full of people.

They’re full of MS13 monsters like her,

They’re full of sluts who wouldn’t get an abortion like her,

They’re full of cost-benefit ratios like her,

They’re full of huddled masses like her,

They’re full of not our problems like her.

But her eyes are two thousand years old

And the message of the angel still shines out of them

The mystery the plea the glory the warning

That this is an ikon of the all-consuming Fire.

What will you do when that Fire falls on you?

Turn your bodies against the drums, boys:

It’s the I.C.E., it’s the Committee of Public Safety,

It’s Herod and he means it this time.

So pick up your ploughshares and your pruning hooks,

This is no time for passivity, it’s time for pacifisticuffs:

If what you want is peace then go be peace’s power,

Lift up your voice, your open hands toward that White Tower

And cover it with brown sand.

Hate burns white-hot—don’t be fooled by its easy appeal:

Love is brown like earth and wood and dried blood and Jewish skin

And the eyes of the baby that immigrant woman is holding for the last time.

Call on the mountains to fall on us, the hills to hide us,

For their earth is full of love

And perhaps thus we shall learn to love our brother.

Turn your bodies against the drums, boys:

It’s the I.C.E., it’s the Committee of Public Safety,

It’s Herod and he too will die.

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EDIT: Notes on the Text
Title. La Estrella del Mar. This is the Spanish form of the Latin title Stella Maris, 'Star of the Sea.' This title (derived from a fanciful etymology of the name Miriam or Mary) has been used for the Blessed Virgin Mary since at least the early Middle Ages, and has particular reference to the guiding stars used by sailors.
Mother of Exiles. This is an alternate name for the Statue of Liberty, believed to have been coined by Emma Lazarus in her famous sonnet, The New Colossus.
l.10. Sinaloa. The state of Sinaloa lies on the Pacific coast of Mexico, and is the principal center of the infamous Sinaloa Cartel, considered the single most powerful drug trafficking organization in the world by US intelligence. Cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines are among their chief wares.
land of the rattlesnake. The Mexican flag and seal feature a rattlesnake being throttled by an eagle, in reference to an ancient Aztec legend. Though its bite is seldom fatal if treated promptly, the rattlesnake is the leading cause of snakebite injuries in the US, and ranges throughout the Americas.
l. 13. the Committee of Public Safety. This Orwellian title belonged to one of the institutions of the French Revolution, and oversaw the Reign of Terror in 1793-94.
l. 14. Herod. Cf. Matthew 2.1-18.
l. 16. MS13. Also known as Mara Salvatrucha, this extensive gang operates mostly in North and Central America, partly under the auspices of the Sinaloa Cartel. It is known for a multitude of crimes, including murder, human trafficking, and child prostitution. Most MS13 members are Salvadoran; the gang was originally founded to protect emigrants from El Salvador who had come to the US after the Central American civil wars of the 1980s.
l. 19. huddled masses. Cf. The New Colossus ll. 10ff.
ll. 21-22. But her eyes ... out of them. Cf. Luke 1.26-35.
l. 24. all-consuming Fire. Cf. Hebrews 12.28-29.
l. 25. What will you ... falls on you? Cf. Matthew 21.42-44; Acts 2.1-4, 15-21, 38.
l. 29. your ploughshares and your pruning hooks. Cf. Isaiah 2.1-5.
l. 32. White Tower. A mashing together of White House and Trump Tower.
l. 35. wood and dried blood and Jewish skin. In reference to the Crucifixion.
l. 37. Call on the ... to hide us. Cf. Revelation 6.12-17.
l. 42. he too will die. Cf. Matthew 2.19-20.

Whitsunday Eve

Whitsunday Eve: spirits, awake;
The hells beneath their masters shake;
For unmade Love-in-Light descends
On those their Maker called his friends,
To laurel them with stranger fire
Than priest or Levite could ensire.
From Babylon by riven tongue
Across the earth all men were flung
By the one Word, to curb their pride:
Now Zion meets a changing tide,
A living water-wave of speech,
Of strangers singing, each to each,
In words that only angels knew
Until these minds, uplifted, flew
On silver Dove-wings. Lips of gold
(As Hebrew prophets darkly told,
Before they knew or heard the laud
Goyim would offer to their God)
Proclaim the holy, trinal Breath,
He who woke Lazarus from death
At the Word of the Father: now
He makes the whole creation bow,
Entering in a lovelier light
Than yet had graced man's ghostly sight.
The rushing fire-wind-water sound
Makes all the infant Church resound;
Who once on Sinai fell with fear
Rains down in power and glory here --
Our Lord the Spirit, sacrament
Of God's own being. Heaven is rent
With cries of pure seraphic joy
That hell has no power to destroy;
For lo, the Church receives her birth
And call, to be upon the earth
Her Savior's Body, he her soul,
That his life may suffuse the whole
Creation by her agency;
For this was his great mystery,
His being we should share by grace
For that he shared our fleshly race;
His Spirit this great secret plumbs
And triumphs that his kingdom comes.

"Christ's Body, Christ's Wounds"

Now every time that I look at myself 

“I thought I told you, this world is not for you”

The room is on fire as she’s fixing her hair

“You sound so angry, just calm down, you found me”

I said please don’t slow me down if I’m going too fast
—Julian Casablancas, “Reptilia,” Room on Fire

Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged.
—St Paul the Apostle, Letter to the Colossians

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About a year and a half ago, Fr Mike Schmitz, who’s pretty much a bundle of boyish energy in a Roman collar, gave a talk at Steubenville about same-sex attraction. I’m going to critique it in certain ways, but I want first to say that it is head and shoulders above the majority of orthodox Catholic sources I’ve ever encountered on the subject. For instance, he opens by boldly rejecting the idea that Catholics should tolerate gay people, because tolerance is something you do at others, and gay people belong in the Church just like straight people; he says repeatedly that “It’s not about Them, it’s about Us.” He (occasionally) uses the word gay, without going into hysterics about possible cultural implications. He even goes as far as to distinguish within same-sex relationships between the illicit sexual element, if there is one, and the love that is not only permissible but beautiful, without immediately emptying it by wittering about scandal.

One of the shortcomings of the talk—if a natural one, as he’s primarily a Catholic explaining Catholic doctrine to Catholics, rather than a Catholic defending Catholic doctrine to non-Catholics—is that, though drawing an important connection between the nature of a thing, its purpose, and how it is used, Fr Schmitz fails to give a satisfying template for how to determine the natures and purposes of things and for determining which uses are legitimate. [1] He addresses the fear of loneliness with his characteristic goofiness, which unfortunately suggests an absence of empathy rather than its presence: his style here clashes with his substance. More seriously, Fr Schmitz also presents a much sunnier picture of the Church than most people actually experience; he fails to address the fact that pious Catholics and clergy (which is what most people mean by the Church, consciously or not) hurt an awful lot of people by their sins, by bad advice, even by well-meaning deeds and words insensitively offered. A little ironically, the only kind of homophobia he speaks about is internalized homophobia.

These are symptomatic of a broader and more serious flaw, typical of devout young Catholics: naïvety. [2] A natural fault, an excusable one, but one that’s still capable of doing immense damage when people are naïve and don’t realize it. (Incidentally, the only people I can think of who are naturally naïve and do realize it are children, which may give a new layer of meaning to the command to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as little children.) It nearly killed me and my ex-boyfriend. There may be a way to get past being naïve without having your heart broken and bleeding; but I don’t know what it is. The only thing I know is that naïvety has to be broken, in each person.

I recently had a poem published in a collection assembled by Eve Tushnet, titled Christ’s Body, Christ’s Wounds: Staying Catholic When You’ve Been Hurt in the Church. This collection is precisely about the destruction of naïvety, via the nastier side of actual Catholic practice that Fr Schmitz fails to speak to: refused vocations, contempt for disabilities, molestation, homophobia, heresy, backbiting, financial corruption, cold-shouldering large families. All things that Catholic doctrine rightly disclaims, and that Catholic people most certainly do anyway—even if they call it “concerns about your Marian devotion” or “such a small percentage of the congregation,” “a matter we’re pursuing with the utmost attention” or “I don’t think you’re considering the possible scandal of your behavior,” “an outdated approach to penance” or “sharing an urgent prayer request,” “We prefer not to discuss why Father So-and-so was removed” or “It just isn’t respectful to the liturgy when they make so much noise.” Pretending that this stuff doesn’t happen is coöperating in spiritual abuse.

And no, that doesn’t mean that you have to believe every accusation and complaint, in advance of all evidence; but it does mean that you can’t reflexively dismiss such things without investigating them. Certainly not if you work in a pastoral capacity. It is a shepherd’s job to protect the sheep from wolves, and when the lambs start bleating for help, the shepherd’s instinct should not be to tell them to shut up. Nor should it be to assume that he already knows what they need. It should be to go find out.

I can’t really speak to the experiences of others (hence the importance of a book like Christ’s Body, Christ’s Wounds with its variety of testimony), but the Church’s pastoral failure in this regard is blatant in the case of the LGBT community. The scandalously milk-and-water profession of sympathy from our national bishops’ conference after the Pulse massacre, which happened just two months before Fr Schmitz gave this talk (and which he also failed to mention), is just one example of the mass refusal of Catholic clergy to deal seriously with homophobic behavior, whether among her members or in the world at large. Rehearsals of her teaching that gay people should be treated with “respect, compassion, and sensitivity” are appropriate, but without effective action they ring completely hollow. Even if the argument that they don’t want to give scandal by seeming to approve of homosexuality weren’t despicable—which it is—it would still be flat-out wrong, because if you embrace Catholic teaching then you need to embrace respect and sensitivity towards LGBT people just as much as we need to embrace chastity; and if you’re worried about credibility, proving by your actions that you care about gay people is a lot more convincing than vociferously avoiding any appearance of sympathy.

I know I write about this topic a lot. Some of my readers are probably bored of hearing about it. I’m not totally thrilled myself. But I write about it because we, the gay community, don’t get days off. We don’t get to not think about it. And while I’m still a Catholic because I’m stubborn as a mule, I know Catholics who’ve abandoned churchgoing, or even their faith as such, because they couldn’t face going back to a mother that keeps hitting them and then lying about it.

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[1] This doesn’t necessarily mean he’s wrong, nor that such a template couldn’t be constructed; it just means that his analysis isn’t complete for every purpose.
[2] I specifically say naïvety and not innocence—a lovely word which we have spoilt. Innocence means, primarily, an absence (or more positive refusal) of corruption. Naïvety, on the other hand, connotes an immature simplicity of mind, a failure to draw fine distinctions between and within good and evil, or to recognize the importance of doing so. Either can exist without the other, though cynical people (who are usually naïve, however negative) habitually identify them.