BODY Chapter 10.1

Later Sunday June 16^th 8:30pm

So it is with Charles. So

it will always be.

The slim dark

trails behind me like

Faust’s poodle

startling the Yachts

east

of The Invisible Bridge

only while watching

from Bay’s edge

at Crissy’s Field

Have they seen me (

smoking the ukuleles

at the Pan-Pacific

in1915)? Where is

the Palace of Machinery? who screwed

Lombard Street?

onto Russian Hill? (What’s buried

behind Maybeck’s Palace

under the Marina? Who is

Joseph Strauss?

                                      Roshi D

A Rabbi, a Priest & the Dalai Lama walk into a bar … that was what they called themselves from the first. Or RPD. It was their crew. They decided to come after 8pm Sunday to talk. But now they were often more than three. Now, the group included as many as six: usually the rabbi, the priest, the Zen bishop, the mullah, the protestant preacher, and the witch.

            David entered the the Holy Ghost Bar at peace. He was completely naked before my mine enemies. These were his friends, his comforters. The inept Ecumenical catastrophe that sought the undoing of everything ortho if anyone had the time to look and if the distracted nature of the conspirators did not seem to make every plot a false start? Already someone was talking like the noisy but impotent communists who sat in coffee shops in North Beach eating cannolis, drinking espresso, quoting Gramsci, and plotting red-hot revolution. They told history from the subaltern's pov, below even the now hegemonic agreeable liberalism of Clinton and Zinn, Bless him. Because history is unfortunately, most often an unloaded gun. For one hour or two this vacation from sanity stirred the hearts of these closet radicals, talking politics and red-hot treason. Then they could go back to the rectory to begin another week of poverty, chastity, and obedience, or some version of it.

I have heard theologians say, Rabbi Sam pronounced, that hell is a place where god is not. How can god not be somewhere? He is absconditus, Martha said. He can choose to be nowhere as well as somewhere. Charles continued, Then where is god now? So is Bashar evil or just a criminal for killing his own people, 10,000 I’ve heard. His wife is like an American or something. Mike quietly said. She is British and Syrian, Asma. His wife was educated in England. Rabbi Sam continued. Now she is besieged by her flabbergasted friends. How can you live with this monster? But to her it is just politics. Mike quietly added, And she is pregnant besides. Rabbi Sam continued. This is not evil incarnate; it is just the quite ordinary murder banquet of politics, the banality of brutality of real politics. Her friends are clueless; they have no idea living in comfort—and I am sure, upper-class British comfort—they have no idea what Syria is like. They have no idea what Surrey is like. But it begs us to decide if evil can be political. We know that politics can be evil, but can evil of hatred be represented in the back and forth of political decison-making or is it just evil?  Can we have a political party for evil or hatred?

          Fr. Sobrino, S. J., suddenly intervened.  As Cuadra said about the mango trees that are so Nicaraguan, you know about them, don’t you? They are harvested for firewood, but they propagate again ... every time we make love. Ha-ha-ha. Fr Sobrino then gave his somewhat naughty but familiar laugh. Of course evil has its political party and good has its own as well. Look at the the Nazis. Lok at Gandhi's party. Evil has its corporations and its banks too. Evil is doing pretty well these days, harvesting the kindling. Walmart, and our very own Gap, Factories collapse in Bangladesh killing over a thousand people and the corporations not only claim innocence but they claim that they are full of virtue. It is evil to be so callous.

            But evil, Martha said, is not a government, it is not a party, it is not even a corporation. It is something that must be considered from a theological point of view. Evil is the reason that we have political parties. We do not start a politics because we have beautiful ideas but because we want to stop something that we call evil, to hunt it down and to kill it, to punish evil. Sometimes what we hunt is evil, like the Nazis, but sometimes our dreadful and prejudiced common sense decides to fight something that we have named evil. This sense is nonsense and it is not at all common. It is the exclusive domain of a few, an elite who have power.
           Martha was rolling. But she bumped here into Sam. The Nazis had a party, said Sam, and they were elected and that is politics. The people cast ballots for them. Democracy failed. It elected evil. Martha leapt back into the conversation. And you can say that about Syria too or North Korea where they have elections. But what do they mean? Martha tried to recover her momentum. You are splitting hairs, Sam said. To vote against the government in North Korea you have to step into a special booth and from there you fall into the abyss.  It is the message of the modern world that democracy is not what it once may have been. The old expression it is the worst form of government except for everything else. Martha was back at it. A fascist said that. Sobrino roared.

          Anyway, Martha continued, they create a politics based on what they call evil. They create a movement or a tide against something that could be good or evil. The terms have nothing to do with what humans can ever know, and god absconditus is not telling evidently. The preacher who protests military funerals with signs that say God Hates Fags and God hates the soldiers for fighting for Fags. Well, he is not a politics. He is a disease. You do not fight a disease by debating it. You have to kill it, cut it out, or cure it. You can decide which. But it cannot be allowed to be a politics as if you can listen to it. Listen to the cancer. No. This is what disgusts me with liberals: Every thing is discussable. But no! there are things that cannot be calmly discussed. Some one must say this must not be so. Evil is like hunger. It causes cooking. Politics is cooking not hunger. Evil causes politics. And so we are central to this issue. Theologians, some of you, anti-theologians and anti-christs some of us. But all in the field of this battle.

David interrupted, even though a personal interruption always seemed awkward in that group, which studiously seemed to avoid the truly personal crises. But David was looking for some kind of release and truth, confession had its potency. I may have put my job in jeopardy. He said. I may be losing it this week. The Board is calling me to answer some charges. Unfortunately the charges are true. David seemed o collapse into a chair. Something has happened to me this last few months.

            What can we do? Asked Mike. He was the Imam at a Islamic Center in Daly City. Not much David said. Nothing really. I just wanted to tell you. I needed to tell you. I have to stop drinking too. Mike looked at him and shrugged. Mike never drank alcohol at the Holy Ghost Bar. He came for the conversation with people his age and his temperament, a talking that could be dangerous but never threatening. David announced, I have decided to tell them that I am retiring. Do you have a pension or anything? Megan the Methodist asked. I am gay! David answered. The group was silent. So am I! Megan said in her usual sprightly way. David smiled and continued. I lived with a man for twenty years without telling the Board or anyone really, not even you. I lived with the man who owned this bar, Arthur. He is gone now. Megan said. Would the Board care? David smiled. Probably not about being gay. David responded. Probably not. But I did not tell them. I lied in a way. I kept the relationship a secret from people. Now I am bothered. It is affecting me. Maybe I am old. David ended with a sigh of exasperation.

            So Rabbi Sam said. You have to decide whether or not to fight this, to fight for your job or to surrender to the forces of authority. It is an easy choice. The struggle must go on.

            Mike then began with less bluster. I have controversy in my congregation, a new one it seems every week. The storms have been raging with Syrian civil wars, Turkey now, and Egypt, Shia attacks on Sunni and the other way round and what not. I think that every time I open my mouth some young zealot, reading Qutb for the first time, will take my head off or some old traditionalist will slap me down in public for my liberal tendencies or some person who wants there to be no controversy whatsoever will blame me for even mentioning issues. That is the dominant opinion, the way of silence and studied ignorance of the issues. No one wants to talk about it if it is going to threaten their peaceful and prosperous life and it does. It can bring down cultures, civilizations—in Egypt right now, in Syria. But it can also bring down families and individuals. We are never far from the phone and our families overseas. The people in my congregation are trembling with the suspense of what empire will fall next and they are secretly hoping that some others will crumble. It is dangerous to take sides. So my job is at risk. What else is at risk? My community? My conscience? My soul?  Yes my family. That is what it so often comes down to. How will I feed them if I lose what is a very exclusive profession. You do not get a second chance in our line of work.

 Unless you are a pedophile in the Vatican! said the Fr Sobrino. Well, I have no patrons to protect me, few of us have. Mike said. We exist at the behest of our flock. It is a fragile life. You should be happy you have been doing it for ... what is it? Forty years? That’s a lifetime. You should say I have done a good job. Tell the Board, if you want to end this…. Well, it is not a death sentence. I will go on.

            What is it that bothers you so much? Megan was always, the question asker. The men were always the question answerers.  David turned his eyes to hers. It is that I betrayed Arthur. It has been overwhelming to me that I did not live with him out loud. I was somehow intent on not being put in that box or something. My desire to transcend it was poisonous not only to my love for Arthur but to my own practice. I thought that I was preserving my claim on the principles of being a monk, of being ascetic in this way, of denying intimacy in exchange for the purity of transcendence. Surprisingly, Not only was I not preserving my zen mind, I was somehow planting the seeds of my own failure as a monk. I was living outside the truth. It is a mystery to me now—and with all the talk of gay marriage and supreme courts and all that. It has become a kind of fever for me the last few months, Now, it is coming to the final decision and I am sick with it. Arthur died almost ten years ago, but he is with me everyday. I spend half my time trying to avoid bumping into him as I move through the world. The hungry ghosts.