This has been moving week for us, Brad and me. I keep thinking it must be sort of traumatic but in fact, it hasn’t been too bad. Oddly, after 28 years in Philadelphia and 12 years in our last home, picking up and moving to Milwaukee has been sort of like an escape, on the one hand, and a new beginning, on the other. I suppose we are escaping from the prison of habit and lethargy and inertia; a life that has been above all else regular and regulated. Work, meals, concerts, grocery-shopping, put the garbage out, bring in the recycling bin, call the police when the neighbors have a rock band at 5 in the morning, and on and on and on. And I suppose we both are a little bit excited about having a new home (with fewer stairs and more bathrooms), with a lawn and a big garage and a driveway (instead of graffiti on the garage door and shoppers from New Jersey parked so we can’t get the car out) and a fresh breeze from Lake Michigan (instead of the oppressive heat and humidity of a fetid Philadelphia summer). As you see I am barely able to find any emotional terms to use as descriptors …. (Or, as I now would say to my students: “that was a joke you know” ….)
The trip was kind of fun. The movers took our stuff in just under a day and a half, and we spent a night in a Philadelphia hotel so we could take off fresh and rested. We drove all of a day and stopped halfway, in Youngstown Ohio. We checked into a hotel and checked out three restaurants Brad had dug up on the web. We had a good meal in a pretty nice place and then slept the night while thunderstorms roared overhead. The second day was similar for the most part. There was little traffic and the weather was mostly okay. I do suffer stress from trying to keep the car moving at a steady pace even though the traffic around me is moving about 25 miles per hour faster than any posted speed limit. The righteous me is always at battle with the masculine me—wanting to maintain a legal speed and simultaneously haul off at the fastest pace my sport-equipped Jetta will go. Near the end of the trip we encountered a band of thunderstorms and tornadoes in Western Indiana, and it was occasionally hard to keep the car on the road in the wind. And then beyond that we encountered Chicago expressway traffic which was even worse. And then we were here in Milwaukee. This week the furniture will arrive, I will teach a class, we will settle in and start creating a new regularity I suppose.
Before I looked at this week’s scripture I had a metaphor about Exodus in my head. Every Holy Saturday after the Easter Vigil we come home to eat in a hurry and wind up watching that cheesy movie about Moses with Charlton Heston. The best part is when they all head out for the exodus, with their goats and chickens and grandmas and pots and pans and music from a symphony orchestra. So in a way I feel a little bit like the extras in that scene, all of my stuff en route to a new and indescribable beginning.
But then I saw that story in Acts 16:14-34 about Paul and his disciples. They were in a new place, but settling into their routine. It says they were going for prayer. They ran into a local, a woman possessed by serpentine spirits who was making a good living fortune-telling, and she knew at once they were God’s disciples. She rather made a nuisance of herself, and Paul called the demon out of her. Now, this is a quintessential tourist story for everyone who travels. Just because you think you know what you are seeing doesn’t mean you really understand! He healed the woman and chased away the spirit but cost her her job and her bosses their livelihood. They sued Paul and his disciples, had them stripped, flogged, and jailed. Whew! What a welcome to a new place!
But then in the night our friends prayed and sang. What else would they do? It was, in fact, all that they knew to do to restore any semblance of reality, of regularity. And their prayer and song was so intense that God shook the foundations and released them from their shackles. The final part of the story is where the jailers discover them still there and miraculously embrace Jesus Christ and the Gospel of salvation.
Well Brad and I haven’t met any fortune tellers, but we did encounter three distinctly different cultures in two days as we traveled west. We don’t know what we might have left behind, we hope we didn’t do any harm. And we certainly do feel a bit jostled around. But mostly we feel released and saved, released from the captivity of our former lives and now launched, peacefully and with grace we hope, into a new life with new fellow travelers. We will see.
About the only funny thing that happened was in that restaurant in Ohio, where the waitress started by asking whether we wanted separate checks. We both just laughed. But of course, she probably sees few gay couples out for dinner. It’s just another sign of how hidden we are in culture even when we think we are being outrageously out. Marriage equality took a leap this week with the addition of two new states to the roster—Rhode Island and Delaware. We hope someday culture will recognize two men sitting side by side rather than across from each other, each wearing wedding bands, as a married couple out for dinner.
*7 Easter (Acts 16:16-34; Psalm 97 Dominus regnavit; Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21; John 17:20-26)
©2013 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved
Dimensions of Reality: glbt Christian spirituality 