I Never Will Marry

I have for some time now been obsessed with the institution of marriage. Anyone who has heard my concept album The Color Suite and read the accompanying chapbook of poems and stories likely came away with with their head spinning from all the images of golden rings lost and found, husbands and wives in delicate dances, marital bliss eclipsed by marital darkness. I have found multivalent uses for the marriage metaphor in my quest to heal the masculine and feminine archetypes within myself, and to deepen my relationship with God. Nonetheless, I have also been quite preoccuppied with literal, everyday marriages: how they work, how they fail, and whether or not I might ever have the opportunity to make a go at one. Regardless of my rapidly shifting expectations and conceptions about marraige, I never doubted that the institution of marriage would play a central role in my life.

Until about a month ago. I can't remember when or why exactly the thought came over me, but suddenly I started saying to myself: "Maybe I don't want to get married after all." In my personal psycho-symbolic world, this is something akin to blasphemy. Which is perhaps why it was such a delicious thought to have.

And this isn't like my past phases of "giving up" on my romantic career in a fit of melancholy—of deciding to become a nun so that at least I don't come across as some kind of lonely failure at the age of 50. No, this time I really think I might rather not get married. After all, I have a lot of other things to do: move to Bolivia as a missionary, do comparative anthropological fieldwork on immigration in Brazil and the U.S., write a practical guidebook on spiritual disciplines and social change, give workshops about sexual morality from a non-heteronormative non-repressive perspective, become fluent in at least three more languages, and develop a new musical genre based on on Andean Folkloric music and Motown Soul.

Aside from not knowing how I'll fit conjugal life into my rather busy schedule for the next 40 years, I have started to wonder if my mythological desire to get married is not altogether shaped by that age-old trope of a woman defining herself by her relationship with a man. I certainly wouldn't be the first to observe that our culture encourages women to define themselves by relationships, and men to define themselves by worldly achievements. If such a strict binary can even be drawn between these two aspects of life. But I don't think there's anything wrong with defining yourself by your relationships; humans are naturally relational creatures. The problem is defining yourself primarily by just one relationship, and expecting that to fulfill the majority of your relational needs. It has, of course, previously occurred to me that it might not be the healthiest thing to define myself primarily by one other person. But sometime in mid-January the idea started to creep from my head down into my heart. I could actually imagine feeling happier if I spread my energy between friends, colleagues and the people I serve without having to reserve a big chunk of it for a spousal unit.

Just days afters this feeling started creeping into my heart, I stumbled across this article by Kate Bolick that seemed to confirm all my suspicions about the relative superfluousness of marriage. The premise of her article sounded like some fem-journalism fluff to me: the fact that educated female professionals now significantly outnumber educated male professionals, leaving a severe shortage of suitable mates for the modern cosmopolitan woman. Which I could care less about, because I would marry the garbage truck driver if he maintained a sincere spiritual practice, acted out of sound social justice convictions, and knew how to dance the night away. But as I read further about the rising phenomenon of the "single lady," I realized Bolick was in fact challenging modern notions about marriage itself. For example, she points out that

the complexities of modern life, and the fragility of the institution of marriage, have inspired an unprecedented glorification of coupling... This marriage myth—“matrimania,” DePaulo calls it—proclaims that the only route to happiness is finding and keeping one all-purpose, all-important partner who can meet our every emotional and social need. Those who don’t have this are pitied. Those who don’t want it are seen as threatening. Singlism, therefore, “serves to maintain cultural beliefs about marriage by derogating those whose lives challenge those beliefs.”

Apparently, before the 19th century, when marriage was more about consolidating property and wealth than finding an ideal mate to fulfill all your needs, people focused more on neighbors, friends and other family members for their emotional needs. Same-sex friendships often took on the same sort of intensity we normally reserve for "significant others." As the marriage bond became increasingly romanticized, people neglected these other social bonds to focus on the spousal relationship. Yet overall happiness seems to be greater when one maintains a flexible, diverse social network. What if, for example, I could be just as happy calling up my friend Louis when I need a massage, or making Valentine's Day cards for my friend Amy when I wanted to express my uniquely romantic vision of the world to someone who will understand?

So, with a sincere Valentine's Day spirit, I have decided to share my adaptation of an old traditional. I wrote new verses to update the hopelessly disempowering tale of a woman who threw herself into the sea to avoid having to marry anyone else after her fiancé died. I feel that I have much better—and more romantic—reasons why I (Maybe) Never Will Marry.

I never will marry

I'll be no man's wife

I intend to live single

All the days of my life

I've got a good friend

She loves me more than a man could

And we write love letters

To all the creatures in the woods

They say, "Do not fear friends

We've got our ears to your hearts

We won't leave you lonely

Till death do us part"

(Chorus)

This grove of deep shadows

Will be my own bed

I've learned to grow cabbages

I can sell by the head

I must paint flowers

And hold church for the squirrels

My tasks here are many

And my time is short in this world

(Chorus)

I'll cast my fair body

Into the hot thick of life

I'll get my hands dirty

But I'll be no man's wife

The World Turned Inside Out

Upon returning to Candler, I dreamt that the entire area had been colonized by aliens. The invaders were brutally oppressive. They replaced all the familiar things—the elegant white buildings and tree-lined streets of Southern suburbia—with a metallic, boxy city. We were rigidly controlled through violence and terror tactics. We knew we would be killed in cold blood if we stepped out of line.

We had been on a roll. We had been in the middle of our seminary education, developing big dreams and sharp minds for transforming the world, but we had to let all our half-finished work go now, with no knowledge of whether we would get to take it back up again. Now we lived by a strict daily regimen in a barracks and worked as conscripted labor in factories. Data factories. Doing manual labor of the mind.

Our only source of release was at the carnivals that they had built for us. We were permitted to go out on certain evenings and ride the Ferris wheels or those swinging arms that turn you upside down or the Tilt-A-Whirl, until we spun out into oblivion. I was surprised that they were generous enough to provide the carnivals, but it also made me wonder if our imprisonment was just as much through subtler manipulations as it was through direct force. Their idea, perhaps, was to take up our only free time with mind-numbing entertainment.

We were shuffling through the hallways on our way to lunch one day when I witnessed an infrequent spontaneous exchange between two of my friends. M., a deeply spiritual, gay black man asked N., a sugary-feminine conservative white girl, how she was doing.

"I wish you wouldn't ask me that," N. responded with her usual sing-songy cheer. "You know they don't let us speak our own mind in this hell-hole. Everything is controlled. I would get in trouble for being honest."

How did she get away with being so honest about not being able to be honest? Weren't they watching on cameras? Was she deliberately pushing the limits to see what she could get away with?

Maybe this is what gave me the courage to carry out my escape plan. My pregnant wife had managed to flee in the midst of the takeover, and I knew that she was living now in the house of a beloved professor couple who had always invited students over for creative dinner parties and stimulating dialogue. They had been killed in the conquest, but their house remained a haven of sorts, tucked deep in the forest, up in the hills, across the river from the alien city. I somehow knew she was hiding there, and I decided to try to reunite with her.

I slipped away as everyone else was heading out to the carnival. It was strangely easy. I made my way across the river and through the jungle-like forest until I reached the house. With each step deeper into the forest I breathed with relief. High above the river, I looked back and could see the alien city, its boxy metal buildings interspersed with patches of flashy, multicolored carnival rides. They looked beautiful, tragic and menacing all at once.

When I got to the professors' house, I found my wife and my two-year-old child there. I was not a man, but I had a wife who was such a part of my soul that she bore me a child. She greeted me with innocent bravery and the long, soft brown hair of a princess. She had kept the light in me alive out in the wilderness. My little boy was as beautiful as my articulate, Hallelujah-singing nephew with his deep dimples and his perfect arching eyebrows. Maybe from here we could escape to a different part of the world and live free.

I woke up the next morning to another day of class in carpeted, windowless rooms with roller chairs and straight rows of polyurethane tables that face towards a sleek, digitally-equipped podium. Our Methodist History professor, amidst the barrage of names, dates and institutional church decisions, discussed the curious case of a certain Bishop James O. Andrew and an enslaved woman named Catherine "Kitty" Boyd.

As tensions about slavery were building in the US in the mid-nineteenth century, northern Methodists took Bishop Andrew to ecclesiastical trial for his slave ownership, in an attempt to assert anti-slavery values as the norm of the church. The way Professor D. explained it to us, Bishop Andrew had inherited a slave named Kitty from his late wife. Professor D. painted the Bishop as ever the reluctant slave owner, caught between Georgia law (which would not let him free slaves), Kitty's own wishes (which were not to be sent off to Liberia through the American Colonization Society), and the insistence of northern church representatives that his slave ownership delegitimized his position as Bishop. Though Bishop Andrew was supposedly prepared to resign, the trial caused the split of the Methodists into two churches, North and South. The American Civil War ensued. As for Miss Kitty, the story goes that Bishop Andrew built her a nice little cabin on his property in Oxford, Georgia and allowed her to marry, raise children, and live the rest of her days "as in freedom."

Professor D. admitted that one scholar had made a convincing argument that Bishop Andrew had a "sexual relationship" with Miss Kitty. In my subsequent internet sleuthing, I found that Mark Auslander's work reveals a contradictory story to the one our professor decided to tell us. Auslander researched the way present-day blacks and whites in the town of Oxford recall and enact their mythology about Bishop Andrew, Miss Kitty, and the institution of slavery itself. He found that the whites of the town had co-opted all the physical memorials to Miss Kitty. They lead historical re-enactment tours of her cottage that imagine Kitty as the pinnacle of old-fashioned domesticity and maternal neighborliness. They care for her memorial in the Andrew family plot of the cemetery, as she was given the "honor" of being the only black person buried in the white section. In essence, whites uphold the story of Kitty's benevolent treatment and loyalty to her master as a way to weave "a deeply nostalgic narrative of tranquil antebellum race relations." Meanwhile, African-American residents of Oxford wince as they drive by "Kitty's Cottage," remembering Kitty as the coerced lover of Bishop Andrew, who had three children by her that he refused to recognize. They consider her to have been denied the basic elements of freedom throughout her life. They do not see race relations that allow one human being to legally own another as tranquil or benevolent. From a precursory skim of Auslander's website, I discovered that Bishop Andrew in fact owned many other slaves acquired from different sources, seriously calling into question the "accidental" nature of his slaveholding status. Why didn't Professor D. mention any of this in class?

Because maybe that would be a little too much critical thinking for the gray-green carpet to absorb. Maybe it's no coincidence that Oxford, Georgia was the original seat of Emory University, and Bishop James O. Andrew served as the first chairman of its Board of Trustees. Nor a coincidence that I had a dream about being enslaved by aliens at Emory the morning prior to learning about Bishop Andrew's sordid little "accident." Emory likes to market its academics as being on the cutting edge of progressive thought. And I know it has its enclaves. But on a whole it is just like any other university system: pitting you against hierarchical, alienating pedagogical models based on a competitive capitalist meritocracy, which reward conformity and maintenance of the status quo, as long as you innovate just enough to make it seem like you are doing something good for society. In this context, we spend much of our time absorbing and regurgitating information in efficient, boxy classrooms while our professors bring in carnival sideshows of YouTube videos and pop culture references to keep us entertained and appeased. It is a modern-day, white-collar form of slavery that sustains and is sustained by the slave labor of lower class jobs in this country and across the globe. Because we are too busy at the data factory and the YouTube carnival to notice that there is a forest within all of us waiting to be born.

Between Two Cities

Lately I have been thinking a lot about duality. We Christians traditionally believe in another realm beyond the one we can see, touch and taste, and that this is where our true home lies. That we are just pilgrims in the world of sensory experience. Augustine, that ardent and tormented saint whose sexuality was a perennial barrier to his communion with God, calls these two realities the City of God and the City of Man. In mainstream America, Augustine's dualistic assessment of humankind is unpopular. Even many Christians, not to mention the agnostics, atheists, Buddhist practitioners and "spiritual-but-not-religious," cringe upon reading:

I classify the human race into two branches: the one consists of those who live by human standards, the other of those who live according to God's will.... By two cities I mean to say two societies of human beings, one of which is predestined to reign with God for all eternity, the other doomed to undergo eternal punishment with the Devil (Ch 5.1).

Many would ask: How can it be fair to separate the human race into two branches, when we are all such a mix of good and evil? When those who do evil have so often been wounded by circumstance? When the very definition of "evil" is relative? When some "evils" seem predicated on maintaining control over others, and some "evils" deny the pleasures our bodies and hearts were designed to experience? Some might insist that they would rather live in the City of Humans if the City of God thunders with such judgment.

But if we examine the qualities that Augustine assigns to the two realms, we might appreciate the freight behind his severe eschatological pronouncement. Some of Augustine's descriptions of the earthly city sound just like fashionable social justice advocates of today: "Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale?" (Ch. 4.4). He asserts that those rulers who belong to the heavenly kingdom, in contrast, "are not inflated with pride, but remember that they are but men...more than their earthly kingdom, they love that realm where they do not fear to share the kingship...they grant pardon not to allow impunity to wrong-doing but in hope of amendment of the wrong-doer" (Ch. 5.24). The point is that we must orient ourselves toward a transcendent standard of justice and goodness, rather than letting our own perceptions, desires and goals—short-sighted and destructive as they inevitably will be—guide our lives. Yes, humans often achieve some measure of concrete beauty and fulfillment through their "love of self." Yet Augustine reminds us that even in the in the "grandeur of empire... The only joy to be attained had the fragile brilliance of glass, a joy outweighed by the fear that it may be shattered in a moment" (Ch. 4.3). The Buddhist initiates on their meditation cushions, trying to understand what it means to detach from desire and be present to the moment, could relate.

Augustine recognizes that we cannot hope to distinguish between the two cities during this life; they are inextricably mingled. But I have to wonder, with my much more ambiguous beliefs about salvation and eternity, whether these two realms are also inextricably mixed within each individual. Can the macrocosm contain what the microcosm does not? Perhaps those who seem most damned to perish in the City of Humans are really just pieces of those who seem most heavenly. Then not a single one of us could be excluded from building the City of God; we all depend on each other to realize salvation, whether we are weak or steadfast, pious or reckless.

At an evening church service in the gritty heart of Atlanta, down the street from an outreach center for the homeless, I sit down next to a tall, willow-thin man who just got out of jail three days ago. It is his first time at the church, but he somehow ends up serving communion. For all I could tell, he inadvertently volunteered himself by rushing so eagerly up front after the officiant invited everyone to the table. A five-year-old girl in a wheelchair who also has willow-thin limbs serves me the bread, and the ex-convict serves me the wine. They both blurt out their lines awkwardly—"The body of Christ," "The cup of salvation,"—as if they are not quite sure what they mean. But are any of us sure? After all, communion is by definition a Holy Mystery.

At a sleepy bar on a weeknight in the hipster district of Little Five Points, I watch a girl dance across the empty floor in spandex and sneakers. She moves to the DJ's funk music with striking elegance. Her head is turned down and her shaggy hair hangs in her eyes as her body slithers like a snake and spins effortlessly. She is not trying to impress anyone around her. She seems rather to be dancing for someone invisible and intangible hovering above her. She might be high on drugs. Then, drugs have always been a way people seek transcendent truth, albeit a blind and destructive one as typically used today, outside the containers of ritual and tradition. Whether she realizes it or not, she is trying to dwell in the City of God.

These stories from an everyday city reflect my ambiguous relationship to the two cosmic Cities. I struggle to discern what truly constitutes a spiritual path, and how to know if I am on it. My bouts of apathetic depression, during which I am prone to forget God entirely, sometimes lead me back to humble reliance on the sustenance of spiritual community. Conversely, my proclaimed passion for doing the work of the Lord tends to get tangled up with my childish drive for affirmation from others. I find myself, as ever, caught in the margins. Which city do I live in? Do I have to chose?

I climbed under my covers one night and prayed for God to illuminate the meaning of the two cities in my life. What I got was a story about a karaoke bar and a church service. I was attending an epic talent show and fundraiser at a church. I was laden with a sense of responsibility for the event, though my role seemed to be nothing more than walking around from person to person and looking busy. My extended family was all there, and lots of shiny-faced church members.

But I really wanted to be in a bar across from the church where a good friend of mine was hosting karaoke. He was a dedicated Christian who greatly outpaced me in his passion to serve the marginalized; he was also a prolific smoker, drinker, reveler and self-absorbed navel-gazer. I had decided that I was in love with him. I was willing to stay up scandalously late so that I could go over to his karaoke night after the church event ended. He had said he wanted my support. And I wanted to impress him with my own self-absorbed charms as I belted out smoky Aretha Franklin songs.

The church event dragged on as if it were its own revelrous party. As 2:00 AM came and went, I was texting back and forth with my friend—texting on a cell phone! A sure sign that I had let go of all my moral principles!—and apologizing that I wasn't there yet. Could I stay up until 3:00? 3:30? Would this be a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit? The talent show finally finished and I hurried across the courtyard outside. Inside the bar, they were already taking down the speakers and the rest of the karaoke equipment. My friend was nowhere in sight. But what kind of bar was this? It had pews and a big stage just like in a church. My family members and shiny-faced church members were there as well. Balding men in polo shirts were carrying the sound system and smiling their fatherly Christian smiles. Even the smallest children didn't seem worried about going to sleep at an ungodly hour.

"Where did the karaoke host go?" I asked someone.

"Oh, he hasn't left yet," they assured me. "He's just changing in the bedrooms."

The bedrooms, of course. I lived in this bar with my family. We slept in the bedrooms in back. Somehow it had become impossible to separate wholesome havens of family values from seedy karaoke bars, or to disentangle working like a bee in the Body of Christ from falling in love with charismatic bastards. The darkness around us is thick and rich, and we may have to learn to make something out of it rather than trying to float above it. We are just pilgrims here, but we are also trying to come on up to the house. We are trying to make a real home for ourselves out of our fragmented insights into the heavenly city. If we do not practice home-making in this life, how will we recognize our home in the next?

The Awkward God-Bearer

On Sunday I visited the Episcopalians. The high liturgy mixed with a sleepy small church atmosphere was immensely comforting to me. The people were only vaguely welcoming, as if daydreaming about lunch. The service provided ample opportunities for kneeling, bowing, turning, and crossing ourselves. We chanted the Psalm, which always makes me feel like I am wrenching an epic lament from the depths of my soul, even when the words are something as historically contextual as: "You who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth before Ephraim and Benjamin and Mannessah."

But my favorite part was the woman who preached. She was a retired priest, a round-faced and ruddy-cheeked woman with absolutely no sense of decorum. Her meandering, train-of-thought sermon started with going to the Hubble 3D movie at Imax with her grandson and applying Jesus' command to "Keep awake" to intergalactic discovery, and ended with embracing our imperfections and recognizing that God gave us all something beautiful to share in the world. She made out-of-place jokes that no one laughed at, but clearly she thought they were funny. She launched into the Eucharist by saying, "OK everybody, I'm gonna try and sing this thing." She proceeded to butcher the traditional musical setting of the Eucharist with an ear-splitting lack of tune. I have rarely seen someone so transparently flawed, and so at peace with it.

I left with my poised little walk, my gracious smile, my scarf wrapped loosely—my clumsy attempts to seem like I've figured out how to live life—and I thought, "Praise the Lord. If I ever learn how to stop trying so hard to be a certain way, maybe I will make space in my life to get to know God."

During my first semester at seminary, I have lost many of my illusions of control over how people view me. My intellectual prowess and my artistic talents seem to have abandoned me. My social graces are not faring so well either. Some people make me nervous because I think they don't like me. Other people make me nervous because I like them too much.

Maybe God is trying to empty me of all my former gifts so that I can receive something new. The Spirit seems to move easiest in hollowed-out bodies. I suppose it is appropriate that this Advent season, I am left with nothing more than to wait for God to become incarnate in me.

Yesterday I played Mary in a liturgical drama at chapel. The birth of Jesus was foretold by a homeless, impatient angel Gabriel holding a cardboard sign on the street, and Mary was a stressed-out young professional in the throes of wedding planning. I assumed it would just come across as a funny, light-hearted piece. People didn't laugh as much as I thought they would, and I shrugged and figured it was due to my poor acting skills, along with everything else I'm bad at. I have little experience with acting. I could do nothing more than make Mary awkward, uncertain and girlish, like me.

To my surprise, several people came and told me afterwards how deeply my portrayal of Mary had touched them. One fellow student told me that it had brought tears to her eyes when I said, "I am the servant of the Lord." I had said it like a question rather than a statement. I realized then that I really had been playing myself, in a way. I identify more with Mary than I ever have this Advent. She was just a young girl, given an enormous and illogical task from God. To have a baby when she was a virgin. To bear God in her womb.

How on earth does one do such a thing? Certainly not of her own initiative. That is why God has brought down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. Only God can fill me with the good things that I need to do the beautiful. Only God can empty me out enough that I recognize my need. So that I can become bumbling, inadequate, and unapologetically authentic.

When the chuño blooms

Today I thank God for vivid dreams that re-enchant my life with resonances to the mythological narrative that has been unfolding in my soul all along.

After the Thanksgiving dinner at Candler School of Theology, I sit down outside the festivities with a jar of Bolivian chuño to share with my childhood best friend. She gets up to leave and I remain alone. But then at just right the moment, the person who makes my heart speed up walks past and smiles at me. I offer to let him try some of my chuño.

"Thanks," he says. "What is this made out of?"

I jump up and walk along beside him to tell him the story of chuño. We walk outside of the Candler building and into the yard of the farm where I was born.

"After the potato harvest in the cold months of the altiplano," I tell him, "they pick out all the potatoes that won't sell at the market—if they have bad spots, say, or they are too small—and then they spread them out on the bare ground and let them freeze overnight."

He gestures to the old metal swing set by the chicken coop and suggests we sit down to swing and eat our chuño there.

I don't make it to the part about how the hot altiplano sun cuts through the icy potatoes each morning, and they stomp on them in their bare feet for several days in a row until they get all the moisture out. I become distracted, because I have never tasted chuño so delicious. It is salty, meaty and dense, but it melts in my mouth.

Instead I explain to him the magical properties of chuño. "It's worth eating this right now, even though we are full, because it's like this compact morsel of energy and nutrition. It absorbs all these vitamins and minerals from the dirt as they stomp it. It's as good as eating a peice of steak, and it fills you with all this energy and inspiration."

"Yes, I think I can feel it!" he says. Then he asks me if I've read any Reinhold Niebuhr. He always has some theologian to recommend. He pontificates for awhile on the relevance of Niebuhr's work to our lives, but I am not listening. I am looking over at the black walnut tree by the sandbox and remembering how we used to climb it as children.

When my attention returns, he has finished his discourse and I have nothing to say but, "Yeah, I should read some Niebuhr." I could argue with this person who makes my heart speed up about how sharing the substance of chuño, which connects us to each other and to the feet that stomped it and the earth that enriched it, is a more profound revelation of God's truth in this moment than thousands of years of theological tradition. When we share chuño, we are prophets. But maybe I'll save that argument for waking life.

"We should probably go catch the North DeKalb bus," he says, and hops off his swing.

"Yes, let's go," I agree, and try to stuff my remaining chuño back into the jar. Whenever I take it out, it seems to expand exponentially, like the loaves and fishes multiplying to feed the five thousand. Chuño works its own miracles.

But I do get it back in, and then follow after the person who makes my heart speed up, across the barnyard of my childhood to the shuttle bus stop of Emory University.

When I wake up, I am grateful for longing. I remember my deep longing for Bolivia, where I found a new home for my soul. And I remember this song:

"Don't say that you've forgotten the land where you were born

They say you're returning / You will return / As the river flows to the lake

They say you're returning / You will return / When the chuño blooms"

Another new beginning

The title of this blog is the Spanish translation of the hymn “Amazing Grace.” I like the Spanish better, because in my life, grace comes not so often in amazing glory as in sublime, subtle, almost imperceptible movements that I must be paying close attention to catch. These movements are what Mary Oliver described after observing an owl's flight in which "everything trembles and then settles from mere incidence into the lush of meaning." This summer, I moved through a foggy, vague depression in the wake of finishing the Biggest Thing I Ever Done (my 300-page undergraduate thesis). One of the primary themes of this time for me was the nagging suspicion that I am not living my life very consciously. That I have not been doing so for a long time. Yet I also knew that perhaps the only reason I developed this nagging suspicion is that I am, in some small and painful way, starting to become more conscious. My challenge as I begin seminary, then, is to learn to pay attention. To really pay attention to each moment. From this, and only this, will grace emerge.