Love’s Perfect Circle

It seems we are all having an “interesting year.” I guess, at least, it so far isn’t as interesting as 2020 was and for that we can give thanks. We seem to reel from climate crisis to climate crisis. How can a hurricane that makes landfall in New Orleans do more damage in New York City days later? But it does. Human resistance to change necessary for survival is a problem as old as the human species, older no doubt. All around us people are suffering from a pandemic that has raged now for much too long. Continued suffering all around creates a complex backdrop for a new kind of normalcy of isolation. Like people of centuries past we now live in our homes and rely on our own resources for social interaction among those in our “pods,” we create our own meals and some of us even grow our own food. All because the virus is too dangerous to defy. There is a duality to the suffering too, because at once we see the needless suffering of people dying from a virus they did not need to contract and at the same time a society reeling (there’s that word again) from the muck of a pandemic economy adjusting by fits and starts to supply chain interruptions and continued shifts in the social fabric as we seek new ways to work around a deadly threat. All of this taking place with the knowledge—shake heads here—that there is a solution, a vaccine, if only everyone would get it the virus would have no place to hide. If only our space age society could shift away from carbon emissions maybe climate crises could abate or at least slow down their relentless drumbeat.

Yesterday I went out in the car to run a simple errand. It was a crisp late summer day, warm and sunny, clear blue skies. Music on the radio was programmed especially for the anniversary of September 11, 2001. Ironically the weather was a perfect match for that same morning. I was in Philadelphia then, not so far from the epicenter of the tragedy and it was a similarly stunningly beautiful day. As I drove along yesterday my favorite radio station queued up the Duruflé Requiem (Maurice Duruflé, Requiem, op. 9 (1947)). I was enraptured at once. I turned up the volume again and again as I drove. I began to shiver and tear up as the music proceeded along its emotionally bittersweet trajectory. As the Sanctus reached a climactic point I came around a corner and there was one of those only in Oregon moments—right in front of me square in the center of my field of vision was Mount Hood, majestic and blessed. I gasped, as I often do at the sight of it. As the music proceeded and I drove along, now on quiet residential streets, my soul devolved into a reverie about the first time I ever heard this Requiem, during the second year of the AIDS pandemic, that other life-changing, earth-shattering crisis that my generation lived through. The full effect of those days flooded into my memory, not just my friends who vanished into thin air, the friends of friends who came to dinner one night and died a week later, but also eventually the too-many-to-count patients with AIDS who were my congregation as a hospital chaplain. I walked among them and held their hands and prayed with them and their loved-ones. Of course, it was the gay chaplain who was the only one willing to go into the ward where they were at that time warehoused. In paradisum indeed. I remember preaching on World AIDS Day that year that it gave new meaning to the phrase in the Te deum laudamus “the white robed army of martyrs praise you!” (Canticle 21 Book of Common Prayer) as I envisioned my beloved gaggle in their hospital gowns. It was another time when needless suffering nearly overwhelmed us and forced changes that would have been unimaginable beforehand.

Oh well. It is true, if maybe too easy, that times of challenge strengthen us, that love is a perfect circle always building up and surrounding us, especially in times of need. Our love comes from God’s love, which is the eternal nourishment we receive along with the power to sustain it from the building up of our love. It is in this that we see how love must be the “rule,” the “measure,” the “directions.”

God’s love cries out everywhere we look. The guy at the car wash smiles at me as he directs me in and the smile eases my day, the fish monger looks me in the eye and asks how I’ve been, the majesty of the mountains are there when you need a glimpse of God. God’s love—wisdom as it is called in Proverbs (1:20-33)—cries out “in the street, in the square … at the busiest corner.” We don’t always notice. We are too easily turned inward when what God needs of us is to be always focused outward building up love. James (3:1) reminds us that we must resist the urge to think of ourselves as teachers, insisting on our way instead of walking in God’s love. Instead we are called to focus on the impact of what we do, on the reflections of our words in the faces around us.

God’s love is timeless and eternal. The universe of creation is the product of the power of love. Creation is timeless and eternal because creation is the product of love. Time does not exist (Psalm 19:2) “one day tells its tale to another, and one night imparts knowledge to another.” All time is just the continuum of love, another sign of love’s perfect circle.

The power of the message of the Messiah (Mark 8:29) is that the Messiah is the king of the end times. We need to learn that the end times are not some day in the future, but rather times that occur each moment in our hearts. Now is the end time if you cut yourself off from the power of love. Now is the end time if you insist on your own way. The king, the Messiah, is here to teach us how to walk in love.

Yes, it is a cross to bear, because we can only accomplish perfect love clumsily, in action, by becoming completely vulnerable, by constantly trying, by completing that perfect circle. And love is especially ours as God’s LGBTQ heirs, created in God’s own image, eternally by God’s love, as people whose identity is love.

Proper 19 Year B 2021 RCL (Proverbs 1:20-33; Psalm 19; James 3:1-12; Mark 8:27-38)

©2021 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Sinews*

This lesson from Ezekiel is the lesson about the valley of dry bones. We hear it each year at the Easter Vigil. Every time I hear this lesson, and I do mean every time, I just think of the thousands of bright young men full of life who were struck down by AIDS, and of their haunting wasted faces. The rattling of bones, the faces with no sinews, the promise that God would open their graves and breathe life into them again—well, we’ll see. But for those of us who are gay and have lived through these three decades of AIDS, we have been living in this Valley of Dry Bones. And if you think that isn’t a pretty picture you’re right. I do not apologize for the millions of my happy gay brothers who were struck by a virus that could have been easily controlled if evil forces had not been given power to prevent treatment.

But God will place us on God’s own soil…. That Gospel about Lazarus is the traditional Gospel for “National Coming Out Day”—and not just because at the end Jesus shouts “Lazarus, come out”—but rather, because it is about how the closet is a tomb, and life, the alternative, needs spiritual sustenance. Did you notice that Mary and Martha wept? But Jesus, who wept first, then invoked the Spirit. And the Spirit is life. It really is that simple.

I remember before I came out. I was dead inside, filled with fear where the life should have been; I had no possibility, no hope. Every man I met who was attractive was just a temptation, because, because I was gay, there was no hope I could have a relationship with him. But, once I was out, the world of relationship with men was wide open for me. And connections with men, with humans, with the universe, were wide open to me.  I remember in those early days, that whenever I met an attractive straight man I would try to scare him just a bit by carrying on about how gay I was. I actually still do that sometimes, because I don’t want him to think I’m just going to go sit in the closet about my sexuality. I once was told by a married straight man that it was okay (with him) for me to be a gay priest so long as I didn’t need to talk about it. My response was “every time you take your wife and son to dinner, you trumpet your virility and your sexuality.” Why shouldn’t I?

Well, some of that goes to heterosexism, which is still so rampant it makes me ill. But some of it has to do with what Paul calls setting the mind on the Spirit instead of the flesh. It is much too simplistic to accept the judgment of frauds who will tell you Paul means not to have sex; that is not the point at all. The point Paul is making is that we have to learn to know the difference between what really connects us to God, and that which just makes us bigger and stronger than everybody else.

Which brings us back to how to put sinews on those fleshy bones. Love God. Love yourself. Love one another. That’s about it.

5 Lent (Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8:6-11; John 11:1-45)

©The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.