We had lunch today at our favorite seafood place: Eaves Brothers. It's been around since before Shannon was a kid (that’s well over 50 years), and a few years ago they added restaurant space to their long- and well-established fish market. It's a simple place where you order at a cash register, get a number and someone brings your food out. Everything else is up to you.
The food, likewise, is simple but excellent. They have the best grilled salmon I've ever eaten.
While we were there, I noticed that something new had popped up next door. I thought it was some sort of gift shop, but couldn't see through the dark windows into the interior. Then I noticed something about a liturgy posted on one of the doors.
Being naturally curious (I think that's why I get along with cats so well, by the way), I looked them up to see who or what they are. This is what I found: http://mosaicaustin.org/.
I skimmed the site and didn't have a clue what they were about. It's typical of alternative religious organizations in Austin. I won't use the word "church" because I'm not sure they rise to that standard.
The ones that are inclusive are flaky. When it comes to religion and spirituality, flaky's not an option for me.
And the ones that aren't flaky are not inclusive, no matter what lip service they pay to being so. I always end up feeling like the bastard child at a family re-union who is tolerated but never taken seriously. They pat themselves on the back for not throwing me out the front door, but that's about it. I'm the bastard they congratulate themselves for being tolerant, while never bothering to go beyond that.
Tolerance doesn't equal acceptance. Not today, not ever.
I hope that doesn't sound too bitter. I'm actually beyond bitterness and further into acceptance of them they they are of me. Above all I'm practical. If they don't want me, then I'm not wasting my time.
I would say that the Church should have nothing to do with politics, but when I look back at the civil rights movement, which was happening all around me when I was a kid, I can't say so definitively. The Church was often the primary forum for civil rights leaders. And often their primary source of support, both spiritual and financial. And we have a national holiday for a preacher, for heaven's sake.
The Church takes baby steps, a friend of mine told me recently. I would like it to take big strides, make bold moves, but I'm not holding my breath. I would love to see it take the lead in addressing issues like social justice, equality for all people and environmental preservation and restoration. We are the stewards of the Earth and our brothers' keepers, after all.
While they can't ignore their own back yards, I would like them to realize that the concept of "back yard" is largely irrelevant today.
Whether it's Zimbabwe in chaos, an epidemic of cholera, famine in Darfur or the polar ice-caps melting and floating out to sea, we have a collective moral obligation to address those issues. Women in Afghanistan have been forced back into burkas and have been publicly stoned to death for going out in public without a male relative while the "police" looked on. Gay men as young as 16 are routinely hanged in Iran as "enemies of the state."
Not to mention the epidemic of homeless people living in their cars. There's a couple that I've seen in our neighborhood (an affluent one) a number of times that I'm pretty sure are living in their car with 3 cats and two dogs.
It's too much for one person, or even two, to fix or even address. We give money when we can to causes that will make a difference in our backyard, but our resources are limited. My hope is that the Church will begin to address the ones we can't. It's the only institution large enough and pervasive enough internationally to do so.
The will to do so in a unified way is not there yet. People argue too much about who's going to heaven and who's going to hell to even see horror staring them in the face.
And to be honest, none of any of this has to do with politics: it has to do with basic human rights and social justice. Finding room for "other".
Being "other" created empathy for all oppressed and suffering people in me. And I have things good by comparison to a lot of people.
Still, there's a cloud of "other-ness" that follows me everywhere I go, even though it's probably the very least important thing about me. I'm a person, not a sexual orientation.
Shylock in The Merchant of Venice summed it up nicely:
I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example?
That's me. It's a poetic passage from a deeply cynical play where Shylock was the "other". That's how I feel just about every day.
And to be honest, I'd rather the Church rush to embrace causes like massacres, torture and poverty before they come to help me. Those causes need the help more than I do.
While I think that some sort of legal status should be granted to gay people, we have bigger problems facing us, and not as gay people or straight people. Just as people. I can wait, but I’m not sure others can. Not the ones dying in Africa or Asia or anywhere.
I guess I have no choice but to wait for the Church to catch up with me.
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