+Z’ev

Today’s assigned readings:

Deuteronomy 26:1-11, 2 Corinthians 8:16-24, Luke 18:9-14

A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.
Deuteronomy 26:5b-10a

In Hebrew, the name of Egypt is “Mitzrayim”. It means “Narrow Place”. Which of us - humans created in God’s image - can not point to a Narrow Place in our past and say “God brought me through that”?

I have two narrow places that come to mind - actually the same one, twice.

When I was a practising pagan, working for the Episcopal Church Centre in NYC, I was very aware that my personal spiritaul practices might not be so well accepted at work. Mind you, not by my coworkers, but rather by those out in the “larger church” who might also dislike me for being gay. At the time where this came to the tightest squeeze, I was working on my own - with no supervisor because of a round of layoffs. I had some duties, working with churches in Asia, the Pacific and the Middle East, and I had some duties that I’d picked up around the office that I enjoyed very much: meeting guests at the Airport, and being a tour guide around Manhattan. I was always very careful to hide my own personal life on these occasions. I was simply being a good host. As the internet came into the foreground, things changed: most folks at work didn’t even know how to use their word processing software. As the Episcopal Church’s participation in ECUNET began to grow, somehow I ended up spending a lot of my time online. In some ways, for a short time, I became the unofficial presence of 815 on ECUNET. I managed to get into some serious trouble (two other stories for another time!) but I also managed to do some good: helping form networks of people where none were previously.

During that online process I also felt a need to hide who I was. As far as many were concerned, I was just another run-of-the-mill Anglican Pew Sitter who happened to work at that NYC Cat House That’s Ruining Our Church™. Really I was a gay pagan facilitating Christian Internet community and I was really worried that if anyone found out that Gay Pagans worked at 815, all hell would break loose.

And so I stayed closeted - in a gay sense, and a pagan sense: in the broom closet.

After doing that all for about 2 years, maybe 3, what I found was that the longer I did that the more narrow-minded I felt. I explained to my (Wiccan) elders that as I compressed my mind into a tiny box I felt was needed for job security, my mind began to conform to the tiny box.

And I really didn’t like that.

The longer I came off as a heterosexual white Christian male, sucking up to other such, the more I hated things. The more I hated things the less loving I became. Eventually I got to a place where I was crying on my way to work and drinking rather a lot after work. And hating myself a lot all the time. One does a lot of things in that state that one might later regret.

I created an online persona, my “cousin”, Sean Mc Ritchie. He joined Ecunet. I let him voice all the things I couldn’t say - pagan things, gay things. We even “talked” to each other in the public forums.

When I left the Church Centre, and left NYC… I stopped crying. I stopped fighting. And Sean died. That was ten years ago this past April. You’d think I’d learned my lesson, but no…

The same cycle of events happened over the last five years of my journey through Orthodoxy. Substitute “liberal Episcopalian” for “pagan”. I tried fitting in the appointed box: and I became the person I hated most.

The final clue - and I can be REALLY dense, I’m sorry - the final clue was when I created a blog for Sean to talk about things. How dense can I get? At least I recognised the problem when he showed up!

There was my Mitzrayim. Sadly, the same one: I went there, twice. The problem for me, at every turn, is what Jesus cites in today’s Gospel: I can be a Pharisee about just about anything: look at me, how holy I am. That leads quickly to the Narrow Place from which God has to come and free one.

As we say at liturgy, “Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast!”

The rest is also true… I find it overly interesting that, as I’m working out my salvation with fear and trembling, the land flowing with milk and honey should, twice now, be the place from which a lot of my friends are fleeing.