Monday, February 26, 2007

I WAS GOING TO GET TO THAT...

Paul poses a couple of the pertinent questions:

Is the six-month waiting period over?
And how do you feel about that?


and then adds, bless him:
I think it’s just great
that you spent the weekend with a friend.


Let me try dealing with Paul's comments in some kind of order, and then tackle the bigger issue they allude to, which I have been meaning to address for a while. It gets us back to religion, so the allergic may want to skip this post...

First, here is a problem.

I have had more to drink than I should. After 50, I have found that the first glass calls out to the second, the second calls out to the third; beyond that I tend to curl up and go to sleep. But I am on glass #3 and so beyond caring what happens. [In fact, I recently told several people that I had fallen for a guy who couldn't ever really be "mine." I even went into more detail with one person, who is now studiously avoiding mentioning what I told her. I love tact, I often wish I had some myself...]

Some of this has to do with the Silver Fox, and some of it doesn't. What does have to do with him is the fact that I am in a tail-spin over the simple fact that I am not going to see him for a month or two. Not to put too fine a point on it, it's driving me nuts. What doesn't have to do with him, or at least not directly with him, is that I am coming to terms with my limitations as a human being, one of which is my complete inability to live unless I love someone and hope for love in return, no matter how hopelessly or dementedly. And since I basically was operating on my reptile brain alone in even thinking about this guy, I should know that love should have nothing to do with it. And won't, in all likelihood, at least not on his part. And yet, for me, that is just how it plays out. I have never done the deed with anyone without eventually finding that some hook had lodged deep inside. Too many hooks and your heart gets torn to shreds, but that is another story. These days I am definitely taking it one hook at a time...

So, Paul:

the six-month waiting period was actually over on New Year's Eve. [The year-long period flew out the window around the time I realized that if it didn't, I might.] I went to the dance on New Year's Eve committed to the proposition that if I was propositioned, I would roll over and play alive. As it happened, it was not a gay-heavy event, and the only person to pay the least attention to me had such bad breath that I couldn't contemplate doing anything. [Sometimes my guardian angel works overtime. I have spent the last six months finding myself attracted to the least likely and least likeable people; let's just say that the reptile brain is in high gear and everything else seems to be phoning it in.] New Year's was a milestone, but not an event.

So here I am, eight or ten months out, depending on how you count, and desperate to connect. With someone. And along comes this invitation from the Silver Fox to come out for dinner, a party, probably the night, maybe the weekend. Well, it turned out to be less than twenty-four hours, but who's counting? [ME, that's who.] I was ready for just about anything, including finding out that I had in fact misunderstood everything and was being invited for purely... social reasons. I didn't think so, but as I have said so often,

what the hell do I know?


I will leave the veil over the actual events of Friday and Saturday of recent memory, but the long and short of it is that while I went hoping if not expecting to get my rocks off, or his rocks off, or something, I got tangled in my own inability to get anything off without getting my emotions involved.

Call it the Revenge of the Inner GIRL. Or whatever else makes sense to you. Here I am sitting far from pretty, without even the immediate hope of the piece of the Silver Fox that I might have on a [monthly? annual?] basis, as he is "off to his love with a boxing glove, ten thousand miles away." I am not complaining, exactly, after all, when I threw myself at his head, he caught me and gave me twenty hours of his attentions, which did me a world of good. Just being held was enough to make me want to run screaming into the street to announce the end of the world.

So, yes, the six-month waiting period is indeed, ahem, "over."

How do I feel about it?

Hmmmmmmmm. Well, I wish I could have held out for a year, because I think I would have been in less turmoil by then -- and perhaps less likely to fall like a ton of bricks for the nearest pair of EARS -- but I couldn't. That's just the way it was.

I make a rotten widow. So what else is new?
I'm rotten at a bunch of other things as well...

And I am delighted to have had at least one day with a guy who treated me well no matter how close to the edge I may have appeared to him. Yes, he made it clear when it was my turn to move on, and let the next guy have his turn, but you know what? I knew that when I walked in, so I can't hold it against him. He could have turned me out when I arrived. Instead he was generous and hospitable and... hot.

What happened to that veil I was talking about?
Never mind.
The problem is the hook.
And I am just stuck with that one.

You would think I would be somewhat wiser at 54 than I am -- so would I. But the fact is that with the upheaval in my life over the last year, I am lucky to be alive. I am, as I have said somewhere before, half 54 and half 14, which makes a highly combustible mixture. It doesn't seem fair to have to start over again in high school at an age when most people are lining up their retirement plans, but who said life was going to be fair?

You would think that I would not go mooning around after people who are conspicuous in their, um, degree of "activitiy," and their complete lack of self-consciousness about it. I can't even begin to make sense of the contrast between my situation [having spent the last thirty years sleeping with one person], and his [having spent the same time period sleeping with practically everyone else]. And yet... he is the one person who seems to have responded to my response to him. It's true he's committed to someone else which makes my position so tangential as to hardly deserve geometric description.

And yet... it's all I have, so it has to mean something to me.
Lord 'elp me.

Does that answer your question?

Oh: I think it’s just great that you spent the weekend with a friend.

Hmmmmmmm. I guess it's pretty clear by now that the Silver Fox is many things, but a "friend" is not one of them. It is quite possible that he may turn out to be the Devil -- and yes, I do believe that he exists -- and he may yet turn out to be the door through whom I find an entry into my new life. [I can live in hope, can't I?] And he may just be a distraction. He certainly is that, God knows. Especially right now...

But what he really is, is the current face of my dilemma: how to find a way to discover myself, and come through that to an understanding of what I am in fact called to do in this life, now that I am not spending half my time denying half of me. There is not that much time left, in the scheme of things, and yet, there is "all the time in the world." The life we are given is quite literally "all the time in the world," all the time we have in the world. So, I try with hesitating, halting baby steps to rediscover myself in the time that is left to me. I hope to do it without making a mess out of any more people's lives than I already have.

[What on earth possessed me to tell my 80-year-old mother that I thought I had fallen for someone? This was on the second glass, by the way, so I should be able to remember what I said, but it's already getting fuzzy.]

Well, here's what I know: I don't know much, and my task in the time that remains is to find out who I am and what I am meant to do in the little postage-stamp-sized corner of the world that is now mine. To which you are all cordially invited...

After which, there remains only THE BIG QUESTION:

This is where it gets sticky. I talked big several months ago about many things. My experience of the last several months has been sufficiently humbling that I am disinclined to talk big about much of anything any more. But there are some Big Issues that seem to be lying around within reach, so here goes.

I have arrived at the point where I absolutely believe that in order to follow my guru's precepts about the law of liberty, I have to do something of which I am only too painfully aware he mightily disapproved. It has taken a long time for me to reach this point, so I have developed a new understanding for people who wrestle with what their church has taught them for more years than my guru has on me. But my old nemesis Immanuel Kant said that spiritual maturity comes when no book substitutes for thought, no priest substitutes for conscience, and no doctor's diet substitutes for your body's choices. And I am slowly getting there...

That is the message of the Exodus, and I apologize to those who either are just plain sick and tired of religious discussion and those who can't quite see why I keep coming back to the story of Israel when I claim to be a Christian [to which latter group I can only say, "Snap out of it"].

We do not have a hope in hell of understanding Christ if we don't see him in some sort of relationship to Moses and Elijah. Isn't that what the transfiguration is all about? The disciples finally get it. It's about that relationship -- he is the new Moses, the new Elijah. The law and the prophets: not in scripture, but in the flesh. And if you don't understand the significance for the ancient world of the law and the prophets, sit down and read those 750-odd pages, including the really odd ones.

But back to the wilderness. I talked big a while ago about going off into the wilderness, and expecting to wander there for some time. Well, as with so many other things, there is a world and a half of difference between knowing something and doing it. I am now doing it.

I am living on strange stuff that falls from heaven. I have had to give up the dream of returning to the life that offered comfort and security, because the price, while I would never describe it as "slavery," was simply too high.

I had to live in freedom.
And that means leaving home, going out where no sane person would go and finding there the value of freedom, because you find out what the price of freedom is. The price of freedom is giving up preconceptions. My other guru used to say that the hallmark of our time was the experience of suffering without preconceptions, or rather, suffering without even a hope of understanding. I have felt this engraved in my flesh over the last eight months, nine months, ten months, coming up on a year.

I sent out a Christmas letter somewhat belatedly in which I tried to make some of this clear without dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's. And I have been floored by the responses I have gotten. Yes, some of my friends have failed to say anything, and that has hurt. But some of them have written the most moving replies, because I can see them wrestling with their own preconceptions, trying to balance their own beliefs with their affection for me. It is profoundly humbling, and profoundly moving. This is what reality looks like.

One of the stupidest conventions of our American belief system is that everything going "great" is simply normal. Sorry. Everything going "great" is the exception, as anyone who has progressed beyond the pablum of Sunday School and the sillier pretensions of "education" can attest. Christ had to go to the cross to make this simple truth immediately apparent, and people have been looking the other way ever since. Real life is found in the suffering of individuals and groups, in the inevitable clash of freedom and necessity, as one historian put it.

Freedom and necessity.
Those are the poles of the dilemma on whose horns we are caught, on which I am caught

So I come back to my initial statement [well, it was close to the beginning of this section, at least]:

I find myself in the odd situation of having to go against the most explicit, visceral statements of the people who made my life of faith possible, in order to live out the truth of what they taught me. That is what freedom means.
Freedom means leaving every comforting thing behind.

The more homophobic of my gurus called for adult education that started from the premise that our dreams have been shattered, that built on the shared experience of the shattering of those dreams to enable true human contact between people who might never otherwise talk to each other, which would make education "adult" in the true sense.

Yes, it's true that I have written about matters more "adult" in its absurd colloquial sense over the last few months. But that does not mean that I have lost sight of what makes me, and every other living thing on the planet, tick. The higher life explains the lower; we are the plants who root in heaven and who grow into the world below. Any other conception of human life is nonsense.

Which is not to say that we will ever all agree. We are each given a particular view of the world by our upbringing, our education, and, if we are lucky, by our efforts first to free ourselves of both, and then our eventual reconciliation with and willingness to accept the inheritance of both. But the way out and back is the way of death and suffering; the way out and the way back both lead through the wilderness.

With which I will close by saying that I wish all of you the best in the wilderness you may find yourselves in. It is not a pretty place, and there is no guarantee that you will ever get out of it into a land of milk of honey, although that is the promise. You just have to believe that that is indeed a promise if not to you, then to your "children."

May He whose ways are boundless mystery bless you all and keep you all and make his countenance to shine upon you all.
.

1 comment:

  1. The absolute essence of this post for this Catholic boy inside me is this

    I find myself in the odd situation of having to go against the most explicit, visceral statements of the people who made my life of faith possible, in order to live out the truth of what they taught me. That is what freedom means. Freedom means leaving every comforting thing behind. .

    Profound. Bless you MCT.

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