55. A PROPHETIC VOICE FOR THE ENDTIMES

From the Archives

(March 2005) Someone has been placing the Midnight Call: The Prophetic Voice for the Endtimes magazine in our employee lounge and every time I see it I am tempted to put a queer magazine out beside it. Instead, I take it to my office and read the crazy stuff.

Confession: I also watch the crazy preachers sometimes and pore over my mother’s southern Baptist mission magazines—they want to convert Mormons—because religion, particularly religious extremism, fascinates me.

In fact, since I was paying my own way, I decided to go for all the practical degrees—you know: writing, studio art, women’s studies—and spent considerable time comparing the second-wave feminist movement to the religious new right movement from 1962—or whenever Betty Freidan’s book came out—to 1988.

This is the period when Orrin Hatch was trying to legislate female submission with the Family Rights Act (which legally defined men as heads of the home); when religious groups were trying to change domestic violence laws because men should be able to do whatever they damn wel want with their so-called property; when Jerry Falwell actually showed up with busloads of protestors at the trial of a man who put his toddlers on an iron heating grate because God (he said) told him to send them back to the gates of Hell.

(One of them died BTW and the other was severely burned)

Unfuck!ngbelievable.

So anyway, I’ll probably read the latest magazine issue tonight and have lots to report later, but here’s a peek at the back ad:

One of the Most Threatening Dangers to Evangelical Christian Churches Today Is Freemasonry!

(gee, i thought it was queers. quick! somebody call Fred Phelps)

The urgency of this subject lies in the fact that many governing positions in today’s evangelical churches are being filled by those who practice Freemasonry—quite possibly including the pastor of your church!

Lodge members emphatically deny that Freemasonry is a religion; however, it is only logical to conclude that any group or institution that does the following must be considered a religious group:

• meets on a regular basis
• uses altars
• prays to a deity
• holds rituals
• baptizes
• meets in temples
• has deacons
• serves communion
• operates according to a generally agreed-upon doctrine

How much of Freemasonry has infiltrated our churches? Why are Masons allowed to retain their positions of leadership in our churches? Why is Freemasonry touted as a harmless fraternal organization when its roots are steeped in mysticism, magic and murder?

These are just a few of the many questions author Keith Harris answers in The Masonic/Christian Conflict Explained. We must take this issue seriously if we intend to take back our churches from unbelievers.

This got me to thinking about those athletic temples we place on our universities and those Gatorade baths that winning coaches receive (baptism?) and my pals who watch basketball games together and how some of them have all these weird rituals (such as rubbing a particular cup that she was holding when someone made a miracle shot), and so on and now I think that maybe college basketball is a religion.

If it is, I wanna be a deacon. I wanna write our pledge of allegiance too!

51. HOW SHALL I TOUCH YOU UNLESS IT IS EVERYWHERE?

From the Archives

(March 2005) Here is the beautiful final section of “The Gardens,” the concluding poem in Mary Oliver’s American Primitive (1983).

You gleam
as you lie back
breathing like something
taken from water,
a sea creature, except
for your two human legs
which tremble
and open
into the dark country
I keep dreaming of. How
shall I touch you
unless it is
everywhere?
I begin here and there,
finding you,
the heart within you,
and the animal,
and the voice; I ask
over and over
for your whereabouts, trekking
wherever you take me,
the boughs of your body
leading deeper into the trees,
over the white fields,
the rivers of bone,
the shouting,
the answering, the rousing,
great run toward the interior,
the unseen, the unknowable
center.

How shall I touch you unless it is everywhere? It really is a blasphemy to write prose after those lines but here I go typing away.

I have been bent over my table working at the computer all day, but just stopped to cook up a skillet of spinach in garlic and olive oil with a healthy serving of lemon zest atop it. I edited 192 freelance pages today and my brain is crispy-fried and throbbing and in desperate need of poetry, connection. It is also spilling over with ideas and insights and ponderings from this academic poetry criticism that I'm working on though, which is wonderful and satisfying.

So I'm quitting work now, while my back still bends. Will do karate catas to stretch out/move, then lie on the sofa in my big-ass HRC T-shirt and black bikini underwear to watch basketball tournament games.

And oh goodie. I have half a bottle of red wine that I intend to drink during the games. Red seal ale would be a better choice, but oh well.