FAMOUS LAST [GOOD] WORDS...

Fenton Johnson writes:

After eight children my parents had run out of ideas for names, so they gave me over for naming to the monks at the nearby Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani, the rural Kentucky abbey where Thomas Merton wrote. In the 1950's, the Trappists more rigidly observed the rule of silence and mortification of the flesh. They spoke only at prayer or in emergency; they slept on pallets in unheated rooms; they fasteed on not much more than bread and water throughout Lend and on all Fridays.

My father, a maintenance worker at a local distillery, delivered to the monastery the bourbon the monks used in the fruitcakes they baked and sold to raise money. The monks appreciated my father’s studied casualness in counting the bottles; for his part, my father preferred their company to the responsibilities of parenting his sprawling brood.

Within months of their acquaintance, some of those monks became regulars at our dining table. Through various sebterfuges they slipped from the abbey to make their ways to our house, managing to arrive just before supper. They got pork chops, we got fried baloney, but still as children we adored their company. For the most part they were educated men, Yankees from impossibly exotic places (Cleveland, Detroit, Trenton), who stayed late into the evening drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, watching football on television, and talking, talking, talking.

Brother A. was fond of a fake grass skirt someone had sent my mother from Hawaii. When the moon was right and the whiskey flowing, he donned the skirt and some hot pink plastic leis, then hoisted my mother to the tabletop and climbed up after. There she sang "Hard-Hearted Hannah"("the vamp of Savannah, G-A!"), while Brother A. swayed his hips and waved dis hands in mock hula. Later he launched into Broadway tunes, warbling in falsetto with his arms thrown around one or more of his brother monks.

Brother Fintan, my namesake, was a baker who made elaborate cakes for each of my birthdays until I was five, around which time he left the monastery for never-explained reasons. Years later he returned for a New Year’s visit, accompanied by a handsome young man.

I was sixteen years old. I’d understood since earliest consciousness my own attraction to men, but in this I thought myself alone. Growing up gay in an isolated hill town, I had never encountered so much as a hint that others might share my particular landscape in the geography of desire. I understood this as the defining fact of my life: the utter invisibility of any resonant construct of passionate adult love. As a gay teenager, I found nowhere a model for the love that most profoundly elevates; the love that so often fuels art; the love that finally underscores our notion of God itself, love whose nurturing and dissemination forms (along with familial and platonic love) the literal and spiritual heart of contemporary religion.

As far as I was concerned, passionate love was something other people felt. In my quiet way, I considered the books I’d read,. the television shows and commercials I’d seen, my classmates’ vocal heterosexuality, the models offered by my religion. I concluded that I was an aberration, one of a kind, an emotional eunuch with a heart of stone. Then Fintan and his companion appeared.

My family received them with their customary hospitality and enthusiasm and food and drink. more monks arrived to visit their old companion—there was dancing on the table; we trotted out the skirt and leis for Brother A., now in need of a stool to climb to the tabletop but otherwise as sinuous and campy as ever. Afterwards I listened for the customary post-party gossip. Had Fintan arrived with a woman, the household would have been abuzz: Who is she? Might they get married? Had he brought a mere friend, therewould have been idle chatter: Nice man. Needs a haircut. But: nothing. My namesake and his companion might never have sat at our table.

In my small town among garrulous Southerners, only one subject invoked a silence so vast and deliberate. That night I went to bed understanding that Fintan and his companion were lovers. Which meant that I was perhaps not the freak of nature I had until then believed myself to be; I was not alone.

I find something poignant and fiercely right in my owing, to my namesake and (in a manner of speaking) to the Church, my discovery that this essential fact of myself—my sexuality; more than that, my capacity for passionate love—had a correspondent in the outside world; maybe even a name.

Those who survived adolescence: Consider what it might mean at sixteen years old, suddenly to be snatched into the light, the rabbit jerked from the dark hat of profound lonelinesss into an understanding that one is not alone; that one might love and be loved, in fact, in the ways that one’s heart, soul, and body have already imagined... For any foreseeable future, organized Chirstianity will continue to to provide most American children with what moral instruction they receive, and to shape American social policy, morality, and lives. It will continue to provide the majority of Americans, regardless of their sexual orientation, their most readily available institutional expression of spirituality.

If nothing else, realism demands that gays and lesbians engage it actively, if not in the churches at least in secular forums. And that requires not sit-down, shout-down activism—however necessary and effective that has been and continues to be in other struggles—but informed, enlightened discourse from open gays and lesbians who invoke the past only and always in the spirit of forgiveness. for we cannot make peace with ourselves unless we make peace with our pasts, and we cannot make peace with our pasts unless we forgive (without forgetting) what religion has done to us.

I have not abandoned organized Christianity (though it has abandoned me) because I understand the power of religion to ennoble and elevate to a degree perhaps greater than that offered by any secular institution. I understand and appreciate its democratic appeal to our interior seat of mystery, which it touches and for which it offers expression. I want access to this experience for my people—I want it for all people.

In 1990 I helped my lover through his death from AIDS. From our first meeting I knew that he was HIV-positive; not long after our meeting I learned that I was (as I remain) HIV-negative. The disparity of our situations was the source of great anguish, much of it centering around the possibility, however remote, that he might infect me. Among my friends and family many never understood and still do not understand how I could have subjected myself to such risk; one straight friend accused me of having a "romantic death-wish."

I can only answer that I was in love. I had been uplifted, transformed. Had I refused this love—the most profound yet given to me—I would be a vastly poorer man. nI think of Chekhov’s wife, the famous Russian actress Olga Knipper, who chose to live with him and marry him when it was clear he was dying of tuberculosis, a disease more contagious than AIDS and at that time both more mysterious and nearly as fatal.

In caring for my lover I came to understand the tautological relationship between God and love. My lover’s love for me and mine for him made me into something better, braver more noble than I had imagined myself capable of being. I was touched by the literal hand of God, for this is what love is, in a way as real as I expect to encounter in this life. I may be forgiven some impatience with those who would ascribe to that sacred experience anything less than spiritual dimensions of the highest sort—the domain, in a word, of religion...

Why do I suppose that gay men and lesbians may have some special access to understanding the nature and importance of love? Because no one knows the value of something better than those who have struggled to achieve it. Denied love from without, our challenge has been to create it from within. This is no easy task, and is not accomplished by the simple declaration of the wish that it come true. Like all struggles of any significance, the fight for the right to love and be loved is ongoing and omnipresent, and manifests itself in every act of every day. Our reward is, or may be, a fuller understanding and appreciation of what others so often take for granted.

The monks of my childhood are almost all gone now, drawn away by marriage, secular careers, other religious orders, death. But their presence remains with me and my family, evidence of the rippling effect of human goodness; the best argument for virtue that I know.

My sister sends a black and white photograph taken on my fourth birthday. In it I’m seated before a vast cake made in the shape of the head of Mickey Mouse. Rendered with painstaking verisimilitude in vanilla and chocolate icing, Mickey Mouse is nearly as large as I. Chin resting on one fist, I preside over it with the contemplative air of a young mystic. Along with the photo my sister sends a saucer-sized medallion made from wheat paste, the centerpiece of my first birthday cake, which had survived the depredations of time and insects. On it there’s painted in pale blue and ochres an elaborate Virgin and Child, one of Christianity’s most potent symbols of love.

These works of culinary art came from the hand of Brother Fintan. They are evidence of his greatness of heart, the boundlessness of his love, large enough to encompass me and my immense family and the young man whom he brought to tthe Kentucky hills to meet us that New Year’s Eve.

Gays and lesbians, brothers and sisters, are finding our ways to spirituality; we are making communities across America and around the world. That we would do so sooner and more effectively with the assistance of organized Christianity I do not doubt, but we live in the here and now, we do not have time for the women and (mostly ) men of Rome and the various Protestant denominations to pen their hearts to the community of love. I write in celebration of what I see hapening in meetings and community actions and hospices and service organizations and yes, churches. I write in celebration of the spirituality I see explored and expressed in its multiplicity of ways, in a community to which I am proud to belong. I open my arms to it and through it to the world, an act of faith in life and in love.

In Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonnus, Oedipus speaks to his daughters:

I know it was hard, my children—and yet one word
Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
That word is: love.

Over two thousand years later, Oscar Wilde wrote, "God's law is only love."

Religion's proper concern is the preservation and propagation of love, which is to say the manifestation of God in our time.


Fenton Johnson was born ninth of nine children into an Appalachian whiskey-making family with a strong storytelling tradition. He is the author of two novels, Crossing the River (1989) and Scissors, Paper, Rock (1993), as well as Geography of the Heart: A Memoir (1996). He is the recipient of a number of literary awards, and is a regular contributor to Harper's Magazine. Johnson's short fiction, essays, and features have been widely published and anthologized. He is on the faculty of the creative writing program at the University of Arizona, where he has completed his latest book: Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). To read the prologue to Geography of the Heart: A Memoir, go online to amazon.com, where this and other books can be purchased in paperback.
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