May Day March: Si, se puede!

I marched with 20,000 marchers in Orlando yesterday in the day without immigrants. It was the largest march in Orlando history. It was matched by similar marches in Homestead (agricultural district south of Miami), Sarasota, Deland (small city just north of here) and Pensacola. It was an incredible day, bright sunshine, blue skies, warm temperatures and a sea of brown faces clad in white tee-shirts. There were young men and women holding American flags, mothers pushing strollers, children holding parents' hands, elderly people, construction workers, bank tellers, union officials, and a gaggle of us Gringo marchers there to support their efforts. I arrived home three hours later sunburned, exhausted but exhilarated as I listened to the evening news and was informed that I was one of over a million Americans who had been in the streets for justice this May Day.

A few observations:

• The largest single group of marchers here in Orlando, as measured by crowd response to questions about places of origin from the organizers over the PA system, was from Puerto Rico. In other words, US citizens. While the local CBS affiliate initially reported that the streets were filled with "illegal aliens," (which brought a chuckle from this fifth generation Floridian who's Gringo to the bone), in fact the majority were at least documented if not citizens.
• The announcements were tri-lingual - Spanish, English and Haitian Creole. What was most interesting was hearing the chants glide effortlessly from one language to another - "Si, se puede! Yes, we can!" These are people whose ability to learn and grow expose their detractors' resistance to do the same. The presence of such diverse cultures has made this place a desirable place to live for those of us who are not so fearful that we must surround ourselves with like-minded, like-situated and like-appearing peoples.
• The presence of religion took two forms: 1. fundamentalist Protestant sects passing out Spanish editions of their comic book style tracts and holding banners which seemed to equate one's immigration status with sinfulness and the need to repent, 2. Roman Catholic religious orders and Catholic Workers who have a presence among the farmworkers here. Noticeably missing: all mainline Protestant churches, including those who have "Hispanic ministry" like the Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida. So much for putting one's money - and one's official presence - where one's mouth is.
• The smugness of the counter-demonstrators provided a stark contrast to the exuberant passion of the marchers:

1. "This is my country! Go home!" Translation: Somehow I have come to speak for the whole country which I presume to be mine to speak for. It's all about me.
2. "My mother was a legal alien. What's your problem?" Translation: I got mine, screw you.
3. "What's that? I can't understand you?" Translation: I'm a monolingual philistine (and to whose surprise the crowd immediately translated their chant - "Yes, we can!").
4. My response to the counter-demonstrators whose tiny flags were dwarfed by the sea of American flags among the marchers: "Shame on you!"
   

I had questioned my motives for going to the march debating with myself the night before whether I should even go. I'm not an immigrant though I'm clearly the descendant of immigrants, some of whom faced major discrimination when they came (Irish, German). I'm not Latino or Haitian though many of my students are and I teach Latin American Humanities. Was I presuming to be the great white liberal, doing something good for some poor souls whom I presume need my help and from whom I will demand to be duly appreciated? But within moments of arriving at the T.D. Waterhouse Center, where million dollar NBA players are watched from corporate skyboxes flowing with champagne and the people filling the parking lot clean their toilets and stock their bars, I knew why I was there.

Justice and dignity were the two main words I saw over and over. Protestations against unjust characterizations of immigrants as criminals and terrorists screamed from some of the signs. Demands that the value of the work immigrants provide be recognized was featured in other signs (Who built your house?). These are all themes I recognize implicitly. As a gay man who has lost jobs, been denied jobs and been treated with less than human dignity because of his sexual orientation, I understand these concerns immediately, personally and viscerally. But more importantly, as a man who has spent his life working for justice and human dignity from special ed classrooms of public schools to courtrooms of juvenile justice as public defender to observing cease-fires and elections in Central America, this is simply one more chapter in a story that is much larger than me. I thought back to previous marches down the streets of Orlando in which I had participated to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr. and the ongoing struggle for African-American civil rights and to several Gay Pride parades in which I had marched or stood curbside with banners which proudly - but debatably - read "The Episcopal Church Welcomes You." Yesterday's march was just the latest chapter but undoubtedly not the last.

Justice. Dignity. Human rights. Seeing the image of G-d on every human face and throughout the good creation. Those are concerns worth fighting for. They are, in the words of Princeton ethicist Cornell West, causes larger than oneself worth devoting one's life to.

For those who watched with dismay or perhaps even fear as the streets of America were swollen with a mere fraction of its immigrant population: This is your wake up call. The sleeping giant has awoken. They now have your attention. But this is just the beginning.

Get used to the idea that your nation is a nation of immigrants. And here's a poorly kept secret for those of you who are history challenged: we always have been. Immigration laws, which didn't come into existence until after WWI, have always been based in the fears of the WASP majority that they were losing dominance of this country. It's why the first immigration laws were passed in the wake of the wave of eastern and southern European immigrants who brought their own languages other than English which lasted exactly one generation and their own religions (Roman Catholicism, Judaism) which didn't ever go away.

Immigration laws always exist in geo-political contexts. That's why the more recent laws allowed the collateral damage (translation: human victims) of our foreign policy mistakes in Cuba and southeast Asia to flee across our borders while making the path of more recent victims of that policy from El Salvador and Guatemala (where we sided with the right wing victors) difficult if not impossible to traverse. Immigration laws are the essence of social construction - they exist at the will of the power majority and often tyrannize the less powerful minorities within their power. They are the manifestations of the deepest fears of the power holders, using human beings to mark social boundaries of power, privilege and status. Indeed, national borders themselves are classic examples of social constructions. Point to the line between Arizona and Mexico from space. Or from that vantage point, explain why the tiny Rio Grande is a border while the more logical choice of the Mississippi is not.

While an orderly pattern of immigration is undoubtedly needed if for no other reasons than to prevent infrastructure collapse if not to prevent terrorist attacks, we need to constantly remember that immigration policy exists in a specific context. If we want to understand immigration patterns and why they occur as they do, we must be willing to look at the larger picture in which immigration occurs. That context includes ourselves and lives of privilege we lead in America. I am not opposed to someone objecting to uncontrolled immigration and porous borders so long as they do not speak with their mouths full of immigrant produced food sitting in homes that immigrant labor built and maintain and whose cheap labor made all of it affordable. But what I am not willing to take seriously - even for one second - is a confused notion that somehow a human being can be reduced to an immigration status. Regardless of how we may see them, no human being is illegal. And if we are not willing to see that, there are many, many more marchers ready to come to our streets to make that lesson clear. "Si, se puede." Yes, we can.

One last thought. Cultural diversity spurs creativity and syncretic generativity. The immigration struggles in America offer Americans an opportunity to become a stronger people, a better nation. The immigrants are here. They have come seeking the same dreams of prosperity Americans enjoy, the dreams beamed around the world via satellite and piped into every home able to afford a TV. Immigrants have fueled a standard of living unsurpassed in history, albeit one built on the backs of near-slave labor. Among the slogans repeated over and over in the march yesterday was this one: "El pueblo, unido, jamas seran vencido." A united people can never be defeated. Abraham Lincoln recognized this truth in his use of Jesus' words that "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

Can we Americans learn to embrace the other who lives within our borders, to see them as fully human, to afford them the dignity such recognition requires, and only then to talk about immigration? I suspect our ability to do so will determine whether this great house we have built will continue to stand or fall from internal dissension. Yesterday's march gives me hope. The immigrants have spoken. Now the ball is in our court.


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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
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People of Faith Who Produced a Book

Back in October, the American Anglican Council published yet another of its blustery self-aggrandizing statements about being the "real" Episcopal Church as opposed to us queer-loving, revisionist, heretical Episcopalians who are slowly but surely moving past the homophobic past of our tradition to join the 21st CE. The AAC article entitled "American Anglican Council Condemns Via Media’s Planned Coup of Biblically Faithful Dioceses" spoke of churches being "faithful" to the Bible, a concept I find increasingly nonsensical and foreign to my understanding of what it means to be a Christian generally.

In the past few weeks I've been reading Robert Price's Deconstructing Jesus as well as Bart Ehrman's The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. Both make the point, repeatedly and convincingly, that the Bible reflects the winners in the internecine struggles of the early church, faint echoes of the losing traditions remaining within the Bible the winners eventually sculpted to fit their developing theology as well as in time capsules from the dissenters such as the Nag Hamadi scrolls of Egypt's once flourishing Thomasine community.

What has struck me in response to these scholars whose biblical scholarship and attentiveness to detail (I think one must have a bit of propensity for anal retentiveness to be a biblical scholar) have proven both overwhelming as well as compelling is that any notion of Christians being a "people of the book" is at best an overstatement, at worst an ahistorical naïve assertion. The reality is that Christians - regardless of their understandings of what that self-designation means - aren't people of a book. At best we are people shaped by a book of our own making at the same time we are the heirs of the people who produced that book. The book is one of the many products of the faith community. At most what we are is people of a faith tradition whose many artifacts include a book which has reflexively and dialectically impacted the self-understanding of that tradition (per Peter Berger's Sacred Canopy).

The AAC polemic was published in the local Diocese of Central Florida Via Media listserv, a group who seeks to prevent the secession of the diocese into the clutches of the fundamentalist Anglican churches of Africa who will be more than happy to take American money in return for validating American homophobia. I attach my own polemic in response to theirs, polemics, after all, meaning words of war. As with all polemics, asbestos wear is strongly suggested:

In our discussions of what a symbol means, I sometimes point toward the flag we have been required to display in our classrooms at UCF and say "Some people argue against flag burning by saying that people died for that flag. If that's really the case, I say people who would die for a piece of cloth ought to. We need to weed out the gene pool of people like that." I then quickly add, "But that's not really what they mean, is it?" From there we are able to discuss how symbols point beyond themselves to something incapable of being reduced to words.

I feel similarly when I hear people talking about being faithful to a book, even a book as important to us as the Christian Bible. If people want to leave the Episcopal Church because it isn't faithful to a book, let them. We need to weed out the ecclesial gene pool of limited, rigid faiths like those.

The Bible is an artifact. It is the product of a faith community and reflects that community's experience of the divine. Clearly it also has a dialectical impact on that experience - our experiences are impacted by its contents and the understandings thereof. But, the notion that a church has to somehow be faithful to one of its own products is analogous to Levis-Strauss saying it must be faithful to the original designs in their blue jeans. It loses sight of the cause/effect, creator/created relationship.

I believe an approach to scripture which evidences a hermeneutic (a means of reading and understanding) of generosity is valuable. The men and women of our faith's history made good faith attempts to render their experience of the divine as best they could given the nderstandings of reality they held at the time. We should appreciate their work and their vision by reading and considering it as generously - and as critically - as possible.

Being faithful to scripture means being willing to read it with an accounting for what we know about the universe today, and with a spirit of gratitude for the G-d from whom all being springs. We do not honor that G-d by engaging in intellectual dishonesty and thus defiling the gift of critical reason. And we do not evince a true generosity toward our forebears by requiring the artifacts of their faith to bind us to worldviews and cosmologies that they themselves would not hold were they living in our world today. While I believe we must show our forebears the respect and gratitude they are due, we do not do that by providing them with an absolute veto over our faith understandings today. They had the first words on these subjects, albeit important words, but not the final word. That remains our responsibility, even when we attempt to avoid it through cop-out attempts like being "biblically faithful."

Harry Coverston,Orlando

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

• If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
• Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
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Next Year, I Want a Merry Christmas


On Christmas morning, I found myself driving up the Florida Turnpike toward Ocala and my sister's house where I would be the chef for the day's Christmas dinner. The car was loaded with groceries filling the car with hints of vegetables, fruits and cheeses, promises of wine and deserts. On the car's radio, the St. Olaf's choirs sang Christmas music, much of it music I had myself sung in days gone by in Cathedral choirs. As I looked out across the fog-draped rolling hills of Lake County, I found myself weeping, my mind racing to many happy Christmas Pasts, returning again and again to the dull pain of Christmas Present. And I heard myself exclaim, "Next year, I want a Merry Christmas."

It's not that I don't have much to be grateful for. I have a wonderful, loving partner of 31 years, a beautiful man who grows more beautiful as he ages, a man who understands me better than anyone else and who loves me anyway. We have a house full of animal babies to love, a beagle of 17 years (10-12 is the life expectancy of a beagle), an incredibly affectionate dachshund and two very beautiful cats who periodically deign to be loved and for whose benefit our household is maintained. We have a rental house that is safe, warm and in our own neighborhood as we await our house's reconstruction to be completed. And I work with people I admire and respect, people who share my own curiosity about life and who value intelligent, sometimes impassioned discussion about things that matter. My entire immediate family lives within a hour an a half of me and I live in a beautiful, vibrant city evolving into something potentially dynamic, a city whose oak-lined brick streets and lakes are the home of many memories and many friends from my life-long love affair with Orlando.

All things considered, I am a fortunate man. And I consider myself blessed, not in any smug, self-serving manner that sees G-d as having blessed me (with the accompanying implication that I somehow am G-d's chosen) but simply the realization that my fortune is at least in part due to nothing I have done or could have done to procure it. This in a world where the vast majority of its people live in nowhere close to the comfort level I experience daily.

At some level, I suppose what I am about to say may sound a little like a spoiled child voicing a sense of entitlement. But, having one's basic levels of Maslow's hierarchy met is not enough for the self-actualized human being. And, indeed, not all of the basic levels of the hierarchy are, in fact, secured in my life at this turn of the year into 2006 CE.

The first thing I see each morning as I look out my front window is my own home, still standing in ruins 16 months after Hurricane Charley dropped three tons of our stately old oak tree through the house and into the neighbor's house. Stripped down to the studs of its roof and its walls, windows missing or leaning against walls awaiting replacement in new concrete lined (and hurricane code meeting) spaces, even the flooring itself missing, it is a sad sight. While we entertain visions of a beautiful new home with cathedral ceilings and windows, new tile floors, gleaming stainless steel kitchen appliances, and a new deck and fencing to replace that lost in the storm, that vision has been so slow to materialize that we have both wondered at times if it will ever really happen. Our contractor has proven almost inept at managing his contracts, his lucre often overpowering his judgment on how much work he can actually accomplish, his skills in meeting schedules almost pathologically poor. To change contractors now probably would mean at least 3 months longer wait.

Our insurance moneys for rent and storage space expire March 1. There is much uncertainty about our home, whether and when we may be able to reclaim it. Next year, I want a Merry Christmas, in New Coverleigh, our reclaimed and resurrected home.

My mother was not able to be with us Christmas Day. She is in a rehab center in Ocala where she is learning to walk again after a broken hip. While we took her Christmas dinner, it just wasn't the same. St. Marge has overcome so much in her life - loss of her mother, being farmed out to relatives, tubular pregnancy, cancer, pancreatitis, stroke. Every new event knocks her for a loop. At 79 pounds soaking wet, she is a lean, mean feisty machine. But I wonder which new knock may be more than even a saint can handle. In the meantime, I just want my Mother to come home. And I want her to be at the party when we reopen our new home. Next year, I want a Merry Christmas.

The situation at my job became steadily more chaotic as the end of the year approached. Increasingly pressed to demonstrate with empirical evidence that our students are learning in our classes, we've spent more and more time on the Leave No Child's Behind approach I call Pavlovian Learning - data regurgitated upon command, comprehension, context and understanding of its significance optional. Then came news that the Gordon Rule, the 6000 word minimum writing requirement was to be abolished for our humanities courses. Up to now, we've had a club to hold over students' heads to require them to learn to write at college level and to complete written assignments in our classes. With that gone, students will be able to assert with impunity that courses which require writing assignments demand too much. And, of course, the consumer is always right, right?

There is more. With the requirement to grade all the writing gone, the university can now pump our already overflowing classes (45 per section) to 75 a section. The days of me knowing my students are probably gone. The days of talking head lecturing have arrived. (I have more to say about this but it will have to wait for another post.) If this were not enough, the text book publisher has dropped a new edition on us mid-year without notice (I found out when my students said their texts weren't being taken back for refunds because a new edition would be replacing it) and the webct on-line operations I spent a summer term learning (and the next summer struggling to improvise the flakey program) are about to undergo radical change as well. In short, there are few aspects of my job that are stable and predictable at this point. Time will tell how well I deal with those changes. Next year, I pray for a Merry Christmas.

This year my dear cousin, Ansel, lost his battle with self-medication. His bright, zany, compassionate voice no longer rings on the other end of my voice mail, often through the haze of self-induced alcoholic stupor. I miss him. His 49 years on this plane were far too few. Next year, I want a Merry Christmas.

This year I have held my breath as our aging beagle has become increasingly gaunt and teetery. Charlie Beagle will not be with us much longer. I also came home last April to my beloved dachshund nearly paralyzed in the back from a ruptured disc. Some $3000+ surgery (and several sleepless nights) later, Julian is his unabashedly joyful self once more, albeit a 10 year old dachshund with a back that must be guarded from jumping onto and off furniture. I doubt Charlie will be with us another Christmas. However merry it may be, it will be all the less so with his absence. Nonetheless, next year, I still want a Merry Christmas.

I write this missive on the eve of a new year. As I watched the sun setting into pools of grey and tan this night amidst skeletal swamp maples awaiting the burst of new growth and scarlet blossoms just weeks away now, I was only too happy to let go of what has largely been a very trying and painful 2005. I am a creature of hope, an optimist by nature, always looking for new births and new starts. I have great hopes for this coming year - a return to our home after nearly two years exile, a mother recovering from debilitating health crises, a return to equilibrium in whatever form it might be able to take these days of scarce dollars and empty empirical approaches to "accountability" in higher education. I savor each moment with my teetery, nearly deaf and blind hound dog, knowing soon I shall have to let go of my beloved companion. Even so, I await 2006 with hope, a guarded optimism and a goal: Next year, I want a Merry Christmas.

Happy New Years, everyone!

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
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Saving the World? We do it all the time!

A member of another list made a comment about saving the world, a topic painfully familiar to me and no doubt to others. Here is the comment followed by my response to it. I'm putting it on my blog so others may consider it but perhaps more importantly, so I can remind myself when I'm feeling particularly useless and my life efforts of little value that what each of us contributes to saving the world, tikkun olam, is essential.

I used to think I could change the world -- that didn't last long. But being able to save a dog from a death sentence somehow justified my existence. since then, they've done so much more to save me . . .


Of course we can change the world. Everything we do has an impact on it. Generosity toward animals challenges cultural values of materialism (which sees animals as things to be used and discarded) and anthropocentrism (human beings as the focus of the universe). Displaying compassion toward other living things teaches a living lesson about the value of compassion. As the existentialists teach us, we live in an often irrational universe yet we are called to make rational choices which have consequences not only for our own lives but for the entire world. It is an enormous responsibility.

I, too, become discouraged with the direction the world is currently taking, particularly in our corner of it here in the US. I want to be able to fix humanity, to stop our warring, deepen our superficiality, broaden our community, open our eyes to the wonder of an incredibly beautiful universe beginning with the forest in the path of the next freeway construction or with my neighbor whose language and culture I do not share. There are days I grieve over the mediocrity for which we are willing to settle. And there are days when I burn with anger at the hateful and destructive ways we treat each other and our good creation.

One of the ideas the medieval church emphasized was the notion of vocation, calling. The middle ages saw the universe as static, thus the place where one found him/herself was where G-d intended for them to be. Martin Luther expanded that notion to value every place on the social ladder one might fall. If one's calling was to shovel manure in the stables, such work was necessary for a functioning society and thus glorified G_d as much as the monk whose vocation it was to pray in the local abbey. (This was one of poor Martin's more noble moments!)

With the rise of the Enlightenment period and the Romantic response to it, the notion of the individual came sharply into focus. No more were roles assigned to human beings, we were called to find our own paths, to follow our own yearnings, to discern and live into our own callings to become fully human.

No one of us is responsible for the whole world and no one of us is capable of fixing it. But each of us is called to a little corner of that repair, the concept of tikkun olam found in Jewish thought. Each of us is responsible for our part. You rescue animals. Others adopts unwanted children. And the rest of us engage our own vocations when we are being responsible.

All of our callings are essential to the whole. None of us is dispensable.

I am only one, but still one.I can’t do everything, but I can do something.Just because I can’t do everything doesn’t mean I won't do the something I can do
Edward Hale, (1822–1909).
Author, The Man without a Country.


Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world: indeed it's the only thing that ever has!
Margaret Mead (1901 - 1978)
US anthropologist & popularizer of anthropology

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value simply do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
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The Broken Hearts of Brokeback Mountain

In years past, I have spent many a Saturday morning in local parks by the side of lakes, Book of Common Prayer and lections in hand, meditating on my Franciscan vocation and its implications for my life. I cherish the memories of those times when living under a Third Order Rule of Life was so important to me even as I struggle with what today I experience as the onus of that rule in my midlife.

This past Saturday, I awoke with the realization that the lake again called me. But this time my life was not demanding the Daily Office. Rather, it was calling me to examine a ragged edged hole in my soul that had arisen seemingly out of the blue in the advent of a new film due out in December. And so, amidst the unlikely combination of brazen male hustlers, yuppie joggers glistening with sweat and a couple getting married by the lakeshore, I found a hollow of a cypress tree on the banks of Lake Eola in our downtown park where I perched myself for a couple of hours of reading, meditating and weeping.

Brokeback Mountain is an adaptation of a short story by Annie Proulx from a collection in Close Range: Wyoming Stories. While I do not doubt this movie will end up being superficially billed as "the gay cowboy movie," it is much more than that. As a woman Episcopal priest from Wyoming said on an internet list on which the book was discussed, "It's a love story." It is, indeed, that. And as such, it should prove to be universally relevant to anyone who will actually go see the film. But it is also much, much more than a mere love story.

I am uncertain how I first became aware of the impending movie. I'm guessing someone mentioned it on one of the many internet lists on which I participate. A short google search later and I had located the trailer for the film, produced by the famous Ang Lee of Hidden Dragon, Crouching Tiger fame. On the very first viewing of the trailer, I dissolved into a mass of blithering, salty tears. Like a singed moth drawn to flame, I found myself watching the trailer over and over during the ensuing week with the same result each time. I felt a sense of dark sadness settling over me. It was that sadness, and the puzzlement as to what power this story seemed to hold over me that awoke me last Saturday morning and drove me into the park, my new copy of Close Range in one hand, my Starbucks grande in the other.

The characters in Lee's film are well chosen for the parts, as it turns out. Heath Ledger does a good job of portraying the detached, silent partner brutalized by his father and then orphaned at 14 when his parents went off the only curve on the highway to town. Jake Gyllenhaal's casting as the more optimistic, sensitive would-be rodeo star appears perfect, his sensitive face able to catch the pain and the ecstasy of this story magnificently. They are beautiful young men, no doubt far more beautiful than the men whose true story they bring to the screen. But their portrayals, courageous in a Hollywood still marked by homophobia and fear of the religious right, will also no doubt allow audiences to enter into the story itself with all of its subplots in a way that perhaps less attractive though more realistic casting might have provided.

So what is the power Brokeback Mountain holds over me? Why did I erupt into not just weeping but deep sobbing as I watched the trailer over the last week, now almost afraid to see the whole movie for fear of embarrassing myself in public? Someone on the list suggested I read the short story and perhaps it would help me see the "inner processes" for which Proulx is apparently famous. That prediction proved accurate.

In Proulx's story, several themes emerge. First, neither of the men feel they have much value in the world, not to others but, most of all, not to themselves. Ennis, the orphaned cowboy whose dreams of graduating high school died in ninth grade with the broke down truck that constituted the totality of his parents' legacy to him, seeks a sense of value from living into conventional expectations. He seeks out manual labor odd jobs, marries a woman he doesn't love, becoming a father of two girls. Jack, the product of a rigid patriarchal family complete with its demanding, stern "stud duck" patriarch, sought value in a short-lived and ill-fated rodeo career and a loveless marriage to a moderately wealthy heiress. Neither had found what they were looking for - until they found each other.

It's funny how radically your life can change when you suddenly encounter your very soul in the face - and heart - of another. For the first time in your life, you can dare to believe in yourself, believe you have value, believe you have a right - and maybe even a reason - to live. And when you find that key, when you've had that life-altering conversion experience, you cannot go back. And you cannot let go.

The result is an intense, white hot love born of desperation. It's not just an everyday, ordinary "falling in love." What's at stake here is your very being. In a life where there is nothing else, to lose that love is to lose everything. And so the young men explode into each other's arms, not knowing what to call what they felt, not knowing how to deal with this volatile commodity they experience in each other's presence, but knowing that while they couldn't let go, the very fact of their love for each other meant their lives were in danger.

That's the third theme that Proulx develops so well. These are men who are vulnerable, threatened by a world that not only does not value them, it is unlikely to countenance what they value most. And so it is not surprising that this story will not have a happy ending.

As I put down Proulx's book Saturday, wiping my cheeks and rubbing my reddened eyes, I knew why this story had caught me. I have known only too well the feelings of doubting my value as a human being, of wondering if I had a right - much less a reason - to live. My wrists bear the evidence of those doubts, scars self-inflicted by razor blades and knives over many years of self-loathing. I also know the mercurial feeling of having someone come into my life who suddenly caused me to feel I could be valuable and the simultaneous despair of knowing that love could never be borne to fruition.

But what my meditation with Brokeback Mountain helped me to recognize this past weekend was how vulnerable I had been so many times in my life and how frightened I had been in the face of that danger. I was taken back to my first two years teaching in Inverness, Florida, beginning in 1976 (about the same time this story was occurring). I was fresh out of college (though not yet out of the closet), idealistically determined to save a world not at all interested in being saved. Almost immediately I committed the Socratic sin of causing the children of the city to question conventional authority in the name of wisdom and the hemlock came quickly and surely.

I could rarely admit to myself then how frightened I really was. The late night phone calls with deathly silence on the other end, the verbal homophobic assaults by former students in the grocery stores, the mud splattered all over me at the local beach, the nights when the pick up trucks would stop in front of my house with shotguns pointed out the windows, the days I would come home to broken beer bottles and citrus fruit smashed in my driveway in attempts to injure my dogs on the screen porch, events long repressed and forgotten came flooding back. I had truly been frightened. And I will be eternally in my father's debt for recognizing the grave situation I faced but couldn't admit to and coming to my house with his truck, insisting I load my stuff and leave at the end of the second school year. I don't know what he had heard. But I do know he probably saved my life.

As Ennis del Mar said in the story, "If this thing gets hold of us in the wrong place it could kill us." I've been in that wrong place and know Ennis' observation - born of his own experience of a fatal gay bashing his father forced him to observe up close - to be true. Living in the valley of the shadow of death can be debilitating. It can mark you for life. Denial of the fear, necessary to continue functioning and often accomplished through the consumption of more than ample amounts of pain and fear numbing alcohol, cannot last forever. And so it's not surprising that Brokeback Mountain evoked weeping, weeping for innocence lost, weeping for remembrances of vulnerability and desperate loves. This film touches places deep in the soul. For that Ang Lee is to be thanked.

Unlike Jack Twist, I have survived. And unlike Ennis, I have begun to find a way to overcome my sense of being without value, a work still in progress here at midlife. In many ways, I have been fortunate, finding a beautiful, gentle partner who could love me when I could not love myself, who stayed with me through the desperation that drove me to self-destructive behaviors and who has helped me find a modicum of stability and serenity, albeit a stability still vulnerable in an erratically sometimes just, sometimes frighteningly homophobic world.

I would like to believe that Ang Lee's film will win the Oscars it is touted as meriting. I'd like to think that people will be able to see the universal themes lying in the depths of this love story, so poignant in the scene where Ennis, visiting Jack's parents after his untimely end, discovers his own blood spattered shirt still hanging in Jack's closet, Jack's own shirt tucked securely inside it. I want to believe Americans can prove less superficial than the predictable "gay cowboy" reductionism already used to describe the film suggests. Time will tell. And perhaps by December I will be ready to face my dragon, allow the ragged edges of my soul to be prodded once again and see the film. As Ennis del Mar said, "If you can't fix it, you've got to stand it."

In the meantime, if you want to see the trailer that spawned this long, rambling introspection, I invite you to do so at:

http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/brokebackmountain.html

Warning: The best advice I got from those who discussed the trailer on the list was simply this: Bring plenty of tissue.

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
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A Lament for a Drowning City

[Written as a post to an internet list on Tuesday, Aug. 28]

This has been an incredibly painful 48 hours for my partner and I. As we watch the television reports from the Gulf Coast, out of the corner of our eyes we can see our own blue-tarped, hurricane shattered home still awaiting rebuilding. At times I feel an incredible sense of empathy for and identification with those who have lost everything. At other times I feel a weird sort of survivor's guilt, knowing that what we survived is so much less in magnitude than that which the Gulf Coast just endured.

The one time I have found myself weeping uncontrollably was footage of the man in Mississippi who said the water caused his house to break in half and pulled his wife from his arms and swept her away. "I've lost everything. I don't know what I'll do,"he said, his dazed grandchildren in hand. It was one of the few times I've ever seen a television reporter weep along with the interviewee. And yet, what more appropriate a response? Even now there are tears streaming down my cheeks as I type this.

This is a very bad time for our country and our people. I don't think folks realize how serious this really is. We're talking months of a million people living as refugees and a rather doubtful possibility of their having homes to return to. (Water does terrible things to homes after a short time and this water is to the roof in most places). We're talking about poor, urban people of color being spread out into a state of WASPs ill-prepared to shelter them. We're talking about tension and rage when the shock wears off. We're talking about a national guard ill-prepared to meet the demands this situation has created because of their being squandered in the ill-conceived invasion of Iraq. And we're talking about a staggered economy whose oil supply has just been hobbled.

Bear in mind that the Great Depression of 1928 might have been immediately set off by the stock market crash but it was largely precipitated by the crash of the real estate boom in Florida with two killer hurricanes in 1924 and 1926. Also bear in mind that hurricanes are nature's means of dispersing and distributing ocean heat. What happens when global warming makes the oceans warmer?

It is a very tense sleep I lapse into this night,full of visions of people on rooftops surrounded by coffee-colored floodwaters full of floating red ant colonies, snakes and alligators; of shattered casinos hundreds of feet from their ocean front moorings draped across what's left of major highways; and of that haunting mournful cry of that poor old man in Mississippi: "I've lost everything. I don't know what I'm going to do."

I believe Jesus weeps this night accompanied by all the saints and angels. The very heart of G_d is compassion and it bleeds this night for the Gulf Coast.

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Of Butterflies, Sacraments and Thin Places

In the months that have passed since Hurricane Charlie devastated my home in Orlando last August, I have worked out my grief in the manner I have always dealt with major life crises: I went to the garden to touch the earth and be touched there by the divine. Besides my home, which was heavily damaged and is just now beginning to be reconstructed these long months later, the biggest loss was the 120 year old majestic oak tree which dominated our corner lot and had been the focal point of our once leafy neighborhood. It was that oak, whom we had named Laurel for the type of oak it was, which crashed through the roof of my house and across the fence into our neighbor's home as well.

The resilience of the subtropical garden I had grown over the seven years of living in our home was striking. Almost immediately the orchid trees crushed by falling trees
and the maple sawed off to allow the equipment into our yard to haul away the fallen trees began to send up shoots which now 10 months later are some 10-15 feet tall, well on their way to becoming trees once again. The lilies salvaged from beds savaged by limbs and saw dust have arisen and bloomed along with the orchid trees, a colorful act of defiance against the destructive forces of nature.

Ironically, while my home still stands damaged, blue tarped roof awaiting the builders who will remove and replace the crushed roof and walls and water damaged hardwood floors, the garden has made a miraculous recovery, once again lush enough that the house is difficult to see from the street. As I have moved around my garden, watering, fertilizing, pruning, talking to my plant children, calling them back to life, I realized more deeply than ever that this garden is a very special place.

In the very rich tradition of Celtic Christianity whose heritage my family shares, there is an understanding known as the "thin place." These were places where people felt most strongly connected with God’s presence. The early Celts believed it was in these places that the seen and unseen worlds were most closely connected and inhabitants of both worlds can momentarily touch the other. Increasingly, I see my garden as a thin place. And in the past 10 months, it has taught me a very poignant lesson about the sacramental manner in which human beings experience the divine.

Oddly enough, it is my Baptist raised-turned Methodist mother who taught me so much about sacramental theology. It was she who engrained in me the notion of the image of G_d, not in so many words, but rather in her ways of relating to people, her insistence that poverty did not disguise the humanity of people all around us in the rural community where we lived. It is Mom who taught me about the great joy of laughing. I think I hear G_d in her laughter. Sometimes I hear her laugh coming from my own lips.

My mother loves butterflies. Whenever I see one in my garden I always say "Hello, Mother!" And I smile. It's kind of like what Alice Walker said about passing the color purple and not paying one's respect: "It pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it..." Sacraments are about inward and spiritual graces encountered in outward and visible signs. My mother's laugh and the butterflies allow me to experience her presence even when she is not physically present. And I suspect that will become even stronger once she is gone.

It's not surprising that so many butterflies are in my garden. I have intentionally planted flowers which draw them - penta, lantana, milkweed, firebush, golden dew drop. And draw them they do! Hundreds of them. Birds, too. And squirrels. And maybe when the remaining, hurricane ravaged trees begin to grow back from the storm, the screech owls, bald eagle and raccoons will return to this green island in the midst of a city of nearly 2 million.

So many of my plants have come from places all over the world - the four o'clocks from Cuba, the maples from northern California, the daylilies from the mountains of North Carolina, the golden rain tree from Israel. And there are the plants given me by friends and family: the rose of Sharon from my beloved African-American nanny, Henrietta, the hibiscus from my Wiccan friend Luci, the jacaranda from the yard in San Jose of my friend, Deidre, now a Sister of Providence.

My garden is a sacrament of those not present yet whose memories and loving presence are visible in the green leaves and colorful blooms they bear and felt in my heart as I greet them. It is indeed a thin place where the presence of G-d is so palpable for me that the divine is as close as the wind blowing through the palms or in the song of the mockingbird in whose tune I still hear the voice of my now long gone six-toed orange tabby, Ratzinger.

Dorothy Frances Gurney once captured the notion of the thin place of the sacramental garden in her poem, "Garden Thoughts." A plaque with her poem will soon return to my garden once the repairmen have finished their work on my home. Gurney's poem reads:

The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth,
One is nearer God's heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth.

Indeed.

On the science fiction channel, there is a strange advertisement of a beautiful young woman dressed in a flowing formal gown. She could well be my mother in her younger years. She was beautiful. I see why my Dad fell head over heels and remained with her these 56 years. Toward the end of the ad, a butterfly lands on the woman's hand and she turns to reach out to it as it flies away. As she does, her entire body dissolves into a flurry of butterflies scattering into the wind.

One day, my butterfly loving mother will do that, too. Probably sooner than I wish. But I will have the sacrament of the butterfly and her laughter the rest of my life. She will be there, along with G-d, amidst the trees, flowers and the butterflies. And for that I will be eternally grateful.

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
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