#joseph prever

[hours]

“Depression was my first experience of life-in-death, but for every human, disorientation and loss and heartbreak and unrequited affection are simply, sooner or later, par for the course. These things are very bad, but without poetry and Scripture, they would be intolerable. Psalm 130, the Book of Job, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot — not only were they my companions in grief and rejoicing, but they even taught me how to grieve and rejoice.

In Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea books, magic consists in knowing the true names of things. For us humans, poetry is our magic, and images are a kind of true name: a truer kind, actually, than names that are only made of sounds. If we want to contain the darkness, we need images of the darkness, lest the darkness be all.

Images give us a way into beauty, too, not just a way to keep the darkness at bay. Whenever I feel myself most in danger of losing sight of my first love, I turn in my mind to the images I have known since childhood, those great mines of life to which I was introduced and given membership before I knew how life could burn and glow: to — God bless you, George MacDonald — the fire of roses, the Wise Woman, and the country whence the shadows fall.”

— Joseph Prever, Reading: Deep Calls to Deep

[hours]

“My mother told us that it was worthwhile to memorize poetry and scripture even if we didn't understand what we were memorizing. The idea was to populate our minds with these words and phrases — the valley of the shadow of death, and wine and milk without money and without cost, and the deer that pants for running streams, and deep calls to deep — so that, when they were needed, they'd come more readily to hand.

She was right. Now when I flail out into the darkness I can come back with thy waves have all gone over me; or I can grin at a bleak December and shout cold and chill, bless the Lord! or go out stargazing in rural New Hampshire and whisper look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

I still remember the moment when the simple phrase ‘born again’ suddenly, for the first time in my life, meant something palpable. It was like a flood of molten metal. Would the experience have been the same without the phrase to express it? Where might that metal have overflowed without a vessel to contain it — or would it simply have been lost?

For that matter, which came first, the experience or the phrase? Did the phrase only express what I felt, or did it, like a kind of Sacrament, help to bring into being that which it signified, ex opere operato?”

— Joseph Prever, Reading: Deep Calls to Deep

[thatquestion]

“Is it hard to be gay and Catholic? Yes, because like everybody, I sometimes want things that are not good for me. The Church doesn't let me have those things, not because she's mean, but because she's a good mother. If my son or daughter wanted to eat sand I'd tell them: that's not what eating is for; it won't nourish you; it will hurt you. Maybe my daughter has some kind of condition that makes her like sand better than food, but I still wouldn't let her eat it. Actually, if she was young or stubborn enough, I might not be able to reason with her — I might just have to make a rule against eating sand. Even if she thought I was mean.

So the Church doesn't oppose gay marriage because it's wrong; she opposes it because it's impossible, just as impossible as living on sand. The Church believes, and I believe, in a universe that means something, and in a God who made the universe — made men and women, designed sex and marriage from the ground up. In that universe, gay marriage doesn't make sense. It doesn't fit with the rest of the picture, and we're not about to throw out the rest of the picture.

If you don't believe in these things, if you believe that men and women and sex and marriage are pretty much whatever we say they are, then okay: we don't have much left to talk about. That's not the world I live in.

So, yes, it's hard to be gay and Catholic — it's hard to be anything and Catholic — because I don't always get to do what I want. Show me a religion where you always get to do what you want and I'll show you a pretty shabby, lazy religion. Something not worth living or dying for, or even getting up in the morning for.”

— Steve Gershom, “Gay, Catholic, and Doing Fine”

[thatquestion]

“I don't believe that ‘gay’ is a valid category, the way ‘male’ and ‘female’ are. I used to think being gay meant being a different kind of person altogether—like a third gender. These days I think that it's something I have, not something I am.

The surprising thing is that gay men are gay because they are masculine, not because they are feminine. What I mean is this: men, gay and straight, want to know they're real men. If something stops them from believing that, then they'll go looking for that manhood for the rest of their lives.

Some men look for it by finding a man who will give them acceptance and affection—or at least sex. These are the men we call ‘gay.’ Some men look for it by sleeping with a lot of women and picking a lot of fights. These are the men we call, well, ‘jerks.’ But both of them are the way they are, and want the things they want, because of the specifically masculine traits they started out with.

The best way to sum it up is something a very good priest once said to me in confession. He said, ‘You're not a homosexual. You're a man.’”

— Steve Gershom, ‘I'm a Man’ (interview by Simcha Fisher)

[discourseoflove]

“I know this isn't a satisfactory answer. I don't think any words could be. I try to make my life a satisfactory answer, to this question [of gay marriage] and to others: What are people for? What is love, and what does it look like? How do we get past our own selfishness so we can love God and our neighbors and ourselves?

It's a work in progress.”

— Steve Gershom, “Gay, Catholic, and Doing Fine”

[hours]

excerpts:

“My mother told us that it was worthwhile to memorize poetry and scripture even if we didn't understand what we were memorizing. The idea was to populate our minds with these words and phrases — the valley of the shadow of death, and wine and milk without money and without cost, and the deer that pants for running streams, and deep calls to deep — so that, when they were needed, they'd come more readily to hand.

She was right. Now when I flail out into the darkness I can come back with thy waves have all gone over me; or I can grin at a bleak December and shout cold and chill, bless the Lord! or go out stargazing in rural New Hampshire and whisper look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

I still remember the moment when the simple phrase ‘born again’ suddenly, for the first time in my life, meant something palpable. It was like a flood of molten metal. Would the experience have been the same without the phrase to express it? Where might that metal have overflowed without a vessel to contain it — or would it simply have been lost?

For that matter, which came first, the experience or the phrase? Did the phrase only express what I felt, or did it, like a kind of Sacrament, help to bring into being that which it signified, ex opere operato?”

———————

“Depression was my first experience of life-in-death, but for every human, disorientation and loss and heartbreak and unrequited affection are simply, sooner or later, par for the course. These things are very bad, but without poetry and Scripture, they would be intolerable. Psalm 130, the Book of Job, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot — not only were they my companions in grief and rejoicing, but they even taught me how to grieve and rejoice.

In Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea books, magic consists in knowing the true names of things. For us humans, poetry is our magic, and images are a kind of true name: a truer kind, actually, than names that are only made of sounds. If we want to contain the darkness, we need images of the darkness, lest the darkness be all.

Images give us a way into beauty, too, not just a way to keep the darkness at bay. Whenever I feel myself most in danger of losing sight of my first love, I turn in my mind to the images I have known since childhood, those great mines of life to which I was introduced and given membership before I knew how life could burn and glow: to — God bless you, George MacDonald — the fire of roses, the Wise Woman, and the country whence the shadows fall.”