Like It or Not, Gay Equality is Coming to a Church Near You

It looks like the whole conflict over gay marriage and equality in the Episcopal Church and in the larger Anglican Communion is about to be mooted in the USA by the actions of state legislatures and courts.

Despite protests that the argument is ultimately about Scripture and Authority, it really is about gays and lesbians and if they have a place as full partners, equals, within religious communities. Are they unspeakable willful perversions of the Natural Order, or are they full citizens in the City of God? That's what the argument is really about.
The widening gap between the Christian proclamation of universal love, and institutional segregation of lgbts (and others) threatens to erode the moral authority of Christian institutions in the larger community. The general public and state institutions seem more and more willing to repeal remaining legal sanctions against same sex orientation. As this process continues, ecclesiastical policies of discrimination will look more and more archaic and morally repugnant.

All churches, including all the gay-hostile ones, will be facing a growing and unprecedented pastoral need from their rank and file. Not only will there be openly gay and partnered members of their churches, there will be members with family and friends who are lgbt. This must be dealt with, preferably with love and acceptance. I hope the days when churches would excommunicate family members for sticking up for their gay relatives are coming to an end, though I know that is too optimistic.

Even more, the gay issue, and whether to be open and accepting, will be a growing issue in the ranks of ecclesiastical hierarchies, especially the Roman Catholic Church.

Secularism is the fastest growing religious affiliation in the USA.  They can cry about liberal media and cultural decay all they want, but Christian institutions know that they have only themselves to blame.  That gap between the proclamation and the policy, and the long identification of the Christian religion with right wing politics, has alienated people in droves, decent people whose moral sense is offended by the gap between Christian message and practice.  The situation gets worse as the churches get smaller.  Reasonable healthy people begin to stay away or leave, and the fanatics remain and become more powerful and more fanatic. 

It is an old trope of the right wing religious that the mainline churches like the Episcopal Church are declining in membership.  In fact, churches and denominations across the board are declining, with the Southern Baptists and Roman Catholics suffering some of  the steepest drops (the New York Archdiocese closed 2 parishes next door to my Episcopal church, and reopened them as missions; those churches would have been closed entirely but for continuing immigration).

The idea that's dangled in front of us by fundamentalist and atheist apologists alike, that the only choice we really have is between them, reminds me of the idea that dominated the 1930s that the only real choice was between Hitler or Stalin.  That idea should be rejected on its face for the false dichotomy that it is.  Someone, whether their membership is declining or not, should be around to remind people that the Gospel is supposed to be good news.  That it is not identified with any particular politics or regime whether right or left.  That it is about hope for everyone, and not just for a self-selected few.  The church is supposed to be universal and Christians are supposed to be a priestly people showing God's love for all.  The Church is not supposed to be a Divine Country Club of the elect.  The Good News is not supposed to be a harsh judgment passed upon humankind because it failed a test that it could never hope to pass.  The really Good News is all that is required for our salvation has already been accomplished on our behalf by God Himself.  That salvation is freely given to us, and to all, without any preconditions or small print in any contract.  We will see salvation because God loves us, and only because God loves us.  Our deaths and the catastrophes of our history are not our end.  That's the Good News for humankind.  Someone has to be around to bear witness to that, even if all humankind votes with their feet and marches off to join either the fundamentalists or the atheists.

A Night At the Chinese Revolutionary Opera

Here's the opening of that 1964 musical classic, The East Is Red:




I have a Sino-American friend (more American than Sino) who loves this movie. After 45 years, most of official China would like to forget this thing, but it apparently has a new life in China among the young and hip as a camp classic.
My friend saw an all drag version of the opening fan dance in a gay bar in Chengdu about 5 years ago. Supposedly, it is very popular with young gay men in China.

As totalitarian spectacles go, this one is really well done. Even the camera work in this thing is marvelous. I must admit that I really enjoy the hybrid Chinese-Western music, especially in that scene with the mother and her daughter (apparently forced into prostitution). But then I would enjoy that sort of thing.

My, how things have changed! The same regime that produced this deeply nationalist anti-Western spectacle now owns trainloads of American Treasury Bonds. The regime now embraces ruthless capitalism with the same cruel enthusiasm that it once embraced ruthless communism. I think the regime's primary agenda is to stay in power by any means necessary, as so many aspiring Chinese liberals found out the hard way 20 years ago this year in Tien An Men Square (which appears briefly at the opening of this movie).

Supposedly Zhou Enlai commissioned this spectacle as part of the effort to blunt rising the anger with the regime in the years following the catastrophic failure of The Great Leap Forward and the resulting famine. As sycophantic toward The Great Helmsman as this movie is, it's hard to believe that The Cultural Revolution was still 2 years in the future. In 1966, Mao would brilliantly (and cynically) exploit the popular anger and disillusionment as a way to eliminate all his old comrades (and potential rivals) by unleashing a tidal wave of chaos.

If you want to sing along with the opening song, here are the words.

Enough to Make You Run Screaming Out of Church

Especially when bishops start acting like thugs.  Colin Coward of Changing Attitude gets threatened by a Nigerian bishop at the ACC conference in Jamaica.  His Grace demanded that Colin turn over his camera.  Colin refused, and the offending picture is posted on the CA blog link.  I think Colin got too close to the man behind the curtain holding the money.

And Jamaica is already a very gay UNfriendly country to begin with.  

The End of the Semester Tsunami

It's that time of the year when I carefully study the wisdom of hundreds of freshmen and sophomores in an avalanche of grading. It officially begins Wednesday.
Blogging may be light (unless I feel the urgent need to flee from all those student papers on Frida Kahlo, The Brooklyn Bridge, and the Pyramids of Egypt, if only for a moment).

A month of uninterrupted work in my studio beckons on the other side of the pile. Maybe I can finally finish something there. I have 3 paintings waiting in various states of unfinish. I've only been able to work on them sporadically during the year. I have 3 more paintings on the drawing board which I would very much like to get started.

Sooner, rather than later, I'd like to call my photographer in to take some slides. Then I'd like to use this blog to do some overdue self-promotion and publicity.

What Really Matters, and What Is Always There in the End

In the midst of all the anxiety over Prop H8 in California and over the Anglican Consultive Council meeting in Jamaica trying to figure out a way to hold the Communion together; or to transform it into a bargain basement Rome/Geneva funded by right wing American sugar daddies, let's not lose sight of what really matters. On top of everything is the global economic meltdown, and we're all worried about our jobs and our pensions. Let's try to remember and focus on what it's all about, and not let our disappointments turn into despair.  William Blake had a lot of disappointments in his life, and did he give up in despair?  Apparently not.

Here is the Gershwin Brothers' last song together. George died the year after he finished the tune, and Ira wrote the words after his brother's death. Here it is sung magnificently by the Chairman of the Board.



Churches, Governments, Corporations, and all other political institutions will always break our hearts.
But, Sinatra and Jesus never fail us.

Blake's Jerusalem; One Last Picture

Albion Worshiping Christ

William Blake's "Perfectly Mad Poem, Jerusalem"

That's how one detractor described William Blake's most ambitious prophetic book, Jerusalem, The Emanations of the Giant Albion*. And at first glance we are inclined to agree. It's an impossibly complicated mess of a book with all of Blake's tangled personal mythology in it. It looks like the work of a mad obsessive.
That is exactly how it appeared to Blake's contemporaries, who largely ignored him. On those rare occasions when he got public notice, it was always hostile.

William Blake meant a lot to me as a teenager. I didn't play well with others back in my adolescence, and had few real friends until toward the end of my high school days (when I found all the other misfits). I read Blake's poetry and collected reproductions of his art in those days. I left a cheap copy of his illustrations to Job behind in class one day, only to return to find students and my English teacher (!) going through it and laughing at how freaky it looked. Blake's struggle was mine.
Even more than that, Blake showed me a way to embrace life and imagination that seemed so much more authentic than the enforced conventionalism I grew up in. Blake pointed a way forward and outward into a much larger and more wonderful world than my neighbors cared to think about.

And now, Blake means so much to me again. Blake was in his 50s when he made Jerusalem, and so am I now. As an adult, I can appreciate the hard experience that generated his visions. I know the historic context of his work better now, and it appears even more astonishing an accomplishment 35 years later. I admire his greatness as an artist; an extraordinary thing for a hidebound reactionary classicist to admit.

Jerusalem is probably my favorite work of his. It's a long tangled allegory about England during the Napoleonic Wars and at the beginnings of industrial capitalism. It's a profound and mystical love of country and a passionate protest against its reactionism and corruption. It's a meditation on faith versus piety, love versus legalism set against the very legalistic state Anglicanism of his day. It's a meditation on art and poetry and their beginnings in erotic and spiritual longing, and on their fulfillment in love.

Jerusalem contains images combining sexual and spiritual longing, like the one above. Blake advocated free love, but fortunately for Catherine Blake, he never practiced it.

He equated erotic longing and artistic creation very literally in the illustration above. Los, Blake's personification of spiritual exploration and artistic creation, sits by his forge that billows flame and smoke throughout the page, listening to a bat-winged spirit. He holds his hammer in an almost ridiculously phallic pose. His chain operated bellows echoes the form of the spirit's bat wings, perhaps indicating Los' kinship with him.

There are striking images of torment like the one above. My Canadian friend who lives in London, Ian, hates Blake. He thinks that Blake was nothing more than a repressed homosexual using all that spirituality to cloak his own desires. There may be some truth to that, but I'm not sure it's a reason to dismiss Blake out of hand. I think there is a lot of homoeroticism in Blake's work, but it's small potatoes compared to the homoeroticism in the work of his great French contemporary, Gericault. Blake may have had some very ambivalent passions for his younger brother Robert, but that's nothing compared to Gericault painting his 19 year old studio assistant Jamar swooning in nude abandon in the lower left corner of the Raft of the Medusa, and then making a pass at him.

There are marvelous illustrations like these of encounters with Christ and with God the Father where the fires of spiritual passion and sexual desire are completely merged.

In the last illustration set against a fiery backdrop, God embraces a soul of indeterminate gender. I think the gender ambivalence is deliberate on Blake's part. It is a passionate joyous embrace.

I love the use of color in this book, especially the reds, blacks, and blues incorporated into a beautiful overall golden tonality. The text is printed in gold color with an occasional blue wash to set it off. The incorporation of the human figure into a strong rhythmic background suggesting energy is something he adapted from both medieval art and from Michelangelo.

For all of Blake's insistent medievalism, this book is thoroughly modern. It is so very personal and idiosyncratic, a masterpiece for an age of self-consciousness.

Blake is very out of fashion today. That earnest visionary idiosyncrasy is so much at odds with our disillusioned and (worse) disenchanted little age. I thought about that when I visited St. Paul's in London. I saw a memorial bust of Blake in the crypt down among the tombs of the artists. I couldn't help but think how displeased he would be with the tribute. He hated St. Paul's. He would have agreed with Byron when he called St. Paul's just so much commerce piled high. And yet in fairness to Christopher Wren, St. Paul's today looks as richly spiritual and out of place as anything imagined by Blake. It looks like the Celestial Jerusalem compared to the arrogant soul-less towers of the financial companies of the City. Those same towers dominate almost every city center on earth today.

Blake was out of fashion in his own day. Britain of the Napoleonic era was as disillusioned and disenchanted a place as any today. People buried their disappointment and sorrow in either reaction or commerce (just like today, only we would add dazzling and distracting entertainment). Blake accepted none of it, and paid a very high price. While he was working on Jerusalem, he was arrested and tried for sedition, a capital offense. He was acquitted, but the experience must have been as deeply frightening as it was enraging. He was under police surveillance for his political views most of his life. He was born poor and lived in poverty all of his life. He was a marginal character, attracting wide admiration only in his old age. He had a small group of nonconformist young admirers including artists like Samuel Palmer and John Linnell. More establishment figures like Benjamin West, the second president of the Royal Academy, also admired Blake's work. Blake was one of the very few British cultural rebels who didn't end his life a conservative apologist and pillar of the Establishment.

William Vaughn, the great art historian, in his short biography of William Blake ruefully noted that Blake is the hero and the model of the legions of marginalized visionaries and talents out there. Careerists like Damien Hirst are the models for fame and fortune in a consumer culture such as ours. Art is nothing but a high end luxury item and status trophy these days. It's old role of finding and creating meaning is now obsolete in an age that discarded the whole idea of meaning long ago. Like other celebrity stylists, artists must constantly surprise and reinvent themselves to keep the attention of a too easily bored public. At best, contemporary art offers some weak unfocused protests that look high minded and irrelevant compared to real protest gestures. It's hard to be anything but passive when you don't really believe in much.

I count myself among those marginalized legions who love Blake, and I don't apologize.

*NOTE, the famous Blake poem and hymn "Jerusalem" is from another one of his prophetic books, Milton, not this book, Jerusalem.