The Land of Unlikeness

I was on a ferry a few weeks ago, from Drvenic, Croatia to the island of Hvar. It was late in the afternoon, with a phosphorescent Mediterranean haze hanging over the rugged dry mountains and over the stellar blue Adriatic. Dalmatia. On the boat there was this little girl, maybe 9 or 10 years old, leaning over the railing and singing her heart out to the sea. I couldn’t hear her over the motor, but I could see her arms spread out, spread something like a mother’s arms for a son lost at sea, or maybe a lover’s arms for the one that got away, or maybe both once. Something like Aphrodite and the BVM combined. If you spend some time in Croatia it starts to make sense. I saw marked men and lonely ladies everywhere. We went to mass in a tiny little town, and I never saw so many men in a European catholic church. Usually it’s just the old ladies. And unlike in most western euro catholic churches, they sang. Seriously sang, in this kind of chanting, soulful Slavic work-song way, sang loud and serious and strong. On the island I kept seeing altars to the BVM that had the shell that you see Aphrodite perched on in that one pre-Raphaelite painting, the coquille St-Jacques. It’s the shell the pilgrims wear in Spain, I know, but it’s Aphrodite’s too. This is where Sophia keeps coming in, coming on. It’s this mash-up of eros and agape, sacred and profane. She’s the song in the country church on the hill and the beats in the nightclub where the hot Slavic girls get down. It’s Madonna—yeah, the “Hard Candy” one, and it’s the one in Medjugorge, too. Then, on the other side of the Mediterranean, there was this insane altar to the BVM in Cadaques, stuffed with cherubs and berserk gold embossing. Earlier in the day I saw a purse for sale in a boutique that said “voodoo coming.” This is the secret kingdom. Sophia in the synchronicities. You have to think of the church as invisible. Because “church” is a dirty word. It’s the slimy preacher and the crooked priest. It’s the catholic priests in Croatia goading the youngsters to join fascist gangs. It’s the bloodlusty ethnic pride, the homophobia, and the holy rollers. It´s the Spanish inquisition, the butchers. Say church and that’s where people go. How can this word, cursed, become another blessing? Catholic anglicanism is the Christendom of the imagination. It’s a utopian project. It’s a church that never was and never really has been. You can’t find it in the phone book or even on the web. And you definitely can’t find it in the newspapers. I read in the UK´s Guardian the other day about the alternative conservatives: GAFCON. It´s a conservative gaffe, all right. Read the signs. It’s time for Anglicans to come clean. We’re the church of the drunks, the homos, the dandys, the dreamers. We pray like Warhol made paintings. Because we like images. Repeat for the pleasure. Liturgy is sex. We’re pagans. If we knew how to do it, we’d dream of grace like Burroughs dreams of sex or Crowley dreams of magic. Instead we remember Tolkein and Lewis, and scrabble over JK Rowling. It´s time for Anglicanism to meet American literature, and science fiction, and graphic novels, even if only in a dream. Or in a wilderness. Like Castenada meeting Don Juan. The future is voodoo. It’s an altar to a feral Christ composed of toxic waste, computer chips, and gothic fetish objects. It´s Philip K. Dick. It’s magical realism where Abraham works at 7-11 and Cain is the local drug lord, Job works on Wall Street and Mary Magdalene is a New York DJ. The tide of Christendom flows toward a conservative third world, toward homophobia, racism, and a new dark ages of conservative gruel. They say it’s the West’s fault, for being materialistic, for being licentious, for being relativistic. But I say the imaginative excess of the West (and the pre-imperial paganism it protects) is the seed that will be planted in the imagination of a hundred Africans who will, in the 22^nd century, re-discover Orson Welles, Marylin Manson, and George Clinton as Dr Funkenstein on hard drives buried in caves. They’ll think they’ve found another Nag Hammadi. They will see these men, these polysexual polyamorous believers, as science fiction saints, hermetic trickster angels lingering on the edge of familiar and familial lines of racial and class vendetta, in a fraternal future on the horizon of every unforgiven ancestral grudge, saying, to an undeniable beat, “Come. The Spirit and the Bride say come.” What’s coming is a total transfiguration of how we imagine the interplay between eros and agape. One small part of this is it’s time for a complete overhaul of homoeroticism, homosexuality, polyamrous relationships, the works. A proposal: any form of sex can only be judged by the kinds of relationships it produces. A priest—a very straight priest—once said to me “sex is about relationships.” That’s all he ever said to me about sex. It’s brilliant. The church has already secretly known this, and known that even celibacy—especially gay celibacy—has engendered incredible forms of new relationships based on the Sophianic potential for spiritual invention and human transformation. How long do we have to wait for the closeted gay genius of Auden and the gay achievements of untold numbers of devoted monks and faithful priests to be acknowledged for the acts of faith they were? How long before we are willing to deal with the logistics of the utopia of love they demanded, and make good on the dream of a world without fear and hate, a redeemed world? The Holy Spirit saw to it that countless gay lives were protected in monasteries, even as closeted and silenced, rather than simply destroyed by provincial hatreds. Now the cloisters are Berlin, New York, San Francisco, these ¨hotbeds of Western relativism, materialism, and decadence.¨ But the body of Christ is a utopian body, a body of vision: the substance is the vision. And every vision is eroticagape. Mary has come back and Sophia with her. But we are still waiting for Magdalene. For Maudlin, for Gay. The other night I was riding a bike around Paris and went past Magdalene’s church. It’s right down the street from the main French government buildings, and at the end of a little row that has all the high fashion boutiques—Chanel, Gucci, Fendi, etc. They’re like little acolytes for MM. Somehow weirdly and appropriately this church has a neoclassical façade, with severe Doric columns, makes the building feel like a mausoleum. I kind of hate it, but that’s sort of the point. Magdaelene, for the moment, is dead and buried, frozen into the only place her monstrous ambiguity can be processed, deep in the architecture of imperial constraint. In the frieze on the top of the façade is a Christ with open arms, not on the cross, just standing there. On his right are all the “good” kids—virginal types, virtuous types, saints, Peter and Paul, some angels. On his left are all the crooks and losers he partied with. Magdalene is on his left, on her knees, reaching up to him. He’s not ignoring her, he has one hand open to her, but he definitely has his eyes straight ahead. There’s so much tension and anguish and suspense here. The ones on the right are kind of pouty and bored and seem to wish JC would just forget about the whores and the street fighting men. The other side is all caught up in the heat of the moment, riding waves of passion or anger or fear. It’s like watching a bomb go off in slow motion, with Christ at the center as some kind of cosmic fuse. I guess the point of all this comes down to the thing that got me with the Spanish altars. The way there really isn’t any interplay between figure and ground, it’s just this explosion of figures, this coincidence of contraries, what the hermeticists called the conjunctium oppositorum. If you see the altar at Santa Maria in Cadaques, it’s just this explosion of angels and faces and crazy baroque gold-leaf embellishment. That’s where I see the voodoo, at least poetically, in Christianity. In the polyphony and even the cacophony of saints and sinners and spirits. Voodoo coming. Happy Feast of Mary Magdalene—today, July 22, 2008. Build her an altar and send up some love. Readings for her feast day:

AM Psalm 116; Zephenia 3:14-20; Mark 15:14-20
PM Psalm 30, 149; Exodus 15: 19-21; 2 Corinthians 1:3-7

You can almost hear her voice coming through Paul’s here… If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken; for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.