the rix mix

RIPPING THE TEMPLE CURTAIN
I try to be around people of diverse views. Three of my friends are strong conservatives, all own houses in New Jersey, all have modest incomes, two are women & Christians - a Catholic & a Presbyterian. One has participated in jazz history & has read more great literature than anyone I have known. I kid them about their opinions, sometimes strongly, but avoid falling into hot political arguments. We're all traditionalists. They test my beliefs & attitudes.

My four oldest friends, on the other hand, are men, artists, beyond or outside liberalism. Three are poets who also write fine prose, one a visual artist comfortable with painting, photography & computer graphics. Three are married & have families, the fourth is the guy who brought me into radio. Two are still wilderness hikers, another is experienced enough to do that anytime he wants. All four love & understand music. All are excellently educated. None live close to me. Two I've rarely even seen in person.

Add into that a number of WFMU staffers who know much more than I do about certain kinds of music I happen to love, whose knowledge & insight are trustworthy. One can hold contrary opinions, so long as the facts are correct.

***

I consider myself a progressive traditionalist. That is, I generally desire the transformation of established institutions rather than hope for their demise. To take one example: Gay Methodists expect full participation, not a United LGBT-ist Church. It doesn't seem so radical to me to want your Christian marriages blessed, to teach Sunday School, sing in choirs, organize Bible Study groups, pig out at Strawberry Festivals & Potluck Suppers, let your kids have the pulpit on Children's Day, rent a tent cabin in Ocean Grove, & freely preach the Gospel of Jesus. Jumping through theological hoops & living with the hurtful falsehoods in United Methodist Doctrine comes no more naturally to gays than to many thousands of other Methodists. The reason Methodism is so resistant to change is because it is comfortably traditionalist. The denomination is also feeling very old & not very wise. One accustomed to mainstream Protestantism would be at home with the worship service in a Metropolitan Church, which is probably not the one you can walk to on Sunday.

***

I've arrived at beliefs intellectually, dispassionately, only to have them force fed to my heart through actual events. While a beloved WFMU staffer was dying, I had to hear, on Thanksgiving no less, that AIDS was a punishment from God. Magnify the shock of that statement many times over & one surmises what gays have lived with every day for two decades. & whenever it seems to be over, another Matthew Shepherd is murdered.

Every commuter's immaculate SUV reminds me that our lust for oil beyond all reason still drives America's perception of the world abroad as it destroys our own. We undermine whole societies by amorally exporting American mass culture as if we were sending just another ship loaded with corporate farm corn. Since we created the demand, I'm not inclined to blame the hapless, unprepared Third World consumer. & all of this, to the discerning eye, also occurs in one's hometown, wherever open space is ruined to build a Walmart next to a K Mart. We can't even stop ourselves. We're drowning in redundancy.

***

We used to fear the left wing imposing national health care on us, making slave laborers of rich orthodontists. Now, enemies even more reactionary than our own government are terrorizing us. Go figure! Get thee to a seraglio.

***
As one's verities change - hopefully keep changing - so does one respond differently to prevarications, evasions & blind prejudice. "Why am I listening to this bullcrap you put out just because some authority figure thirty years ago told you it's true?" When I asked why the continents looked like a jigsaw puzzle & Africa fit into South America, adults gave me all sorts of ridiculous explanations, hardly an "I don't know." Plate tectonics came as a great relief. Yet there are millions of otherwise sane Americans who actually read & write & refuse to feel the Earth moving beneath them, rather than appreciating the miracles of the Hawaiian Islands & Horseshoe Crabs. The Eastern world was hip to this long before we were, even if they didn't get the details right. Judaic-based history began 6000 years ago, as the last of the ice melted. Flying dragons were around millions of years before that, surviving as fear & flee brain stem neurons. Time is the Divine Presence saying, "We are becoming together." Don't be so square. Christian eternity is time all at once rather than time infinitely repeating itself. Is a God who possesses time in any particular hurry?

***

In a secular society one ought to seriously question, even suspend if not put aside altogether, Leviticus Code morality & examine instead the uses of virtue. What we do, more than what we think, affects lives & situations that are invisible to us. Family can be a small sandbox in a fenced in backyard. Seawater is the world blood. God is like a color - a metaphor no two people can be sure points to the same thing. God blind. Color blind. Call a pencil a "crayon" & watch the Temple Curtain rip. Obvious.

***