Bestemmia

Since we are both (at best) irregular Catholics, The Boyo and I share a common language. Which he, especially, sometimes uses for creative blasphemy, in Italian, bestemmia. Being Calabrese, that's practically a given. Mediterranean Catholicism has a gift for sacrilegious talk that Northern Catholics can’t even imagine. It has made for a lot of laughter between us, as well as the single most creative, appreciative and blasphemous compliment I have ever received (and which I will not print here).

There were two reasons why, after a lifetime of intense engagement, I gave up the practice of the Faith (although never really my connection to it; that's practically in my DNA). The first was my acceptance of the incompatibility between an unrepentantly homosexual life and an integral Catholic life. That was excruciating, but I saw no other way.

The second was the problem of Job. During the awful years of the AIDS epidemic, 1983-1996, I was very involved. I acted as a volunteer "buddy" to a young man with AIDS, giving him someone safe to talk with, to go with to the doctor and, eventually, to the funeral home to pick out his coffin. In those days, folks with AIDS did not live long and I only knew him for six or eight months, but they were intense days. And when he died, I found myself strapped with an overwhelming sense of injustice. It seemed to suck the faith out of me. How could a God who was in any sense good and powerful allow that kind of misery and suffering? Not original, but it hit me hard. It became personal.

That did not make me an atheist. I have corners of my soul where it feels as if there is no God, but I cannot maintain that kind of dogmatic certainty for long. I find atheism, especially militant atheism, both adolescent and boring. And I see no evidence that an atheistic society –one that denies that it lives within a larger sacred order-- can survive, much less pass itself on to another generation. I am a congenitally religious man, even if not pious or observant. I wrestled with God for years, still do.

One of the helps I encountered was in the ancient and fuzzy heresy of Gnosticism. Gnosticism is an underground stream in the Western tradition and takes many different forms. It is a religious response to the enduring problem of monotheism: the existence of evil and suffering in a world created by a good, all-powerful and all-knowing God.

Gnosticism speaks in myth, in image, ritual and symbol. It is drawn to the play of opposites. And it seeks salvation from the exile, bondage and illusion of a fallen world not through faith or works, but through a kind of consciousness called gnosis, the Greek word for knowledge.

Gnosticism holds to a kind of splitting in the Divine: there is a primordial Godhead outside this world (and deep inside of us) and another lesser godhead which created the world of matter, time and death that we know. In our deepest selves, we are a spark of the original Divine, although we find ourselves by the fall of creation trapped inside the system of pain and injustice that constitutes so much of this world. It did not solve my dilemma, but it alleviated the pain. It did not require either faith or good works, but instead a kind of awakening, an awareness, a revealed intuitive knowing.

From the 2nd century Valentinian Gnostic, Theodotus:

What sets us free

is the Knowing

of

who we were and who we have become,

where we were and where we have been thrown,

where we are fast heading,

wherefrom we are rescued,

what is birth,

and what is rebirth.

Two images of Gnosticism: one in words, and seriously beautiful; another, unintentional, in moving images and pretty well beyond fabulous.

Nowadays I live with what is at least a paradox, that there is a deep transcendent serenity in God and that He is also as savage and wild as the cosmos He has created.

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