Taking a Chance on G-d

John McNeill, theologian, author, therapist, priest

By chance, in 1986 – on my first, short, visit to Amsterdam – I discovered a book that changed my life.

John McNeill’s The Church and the Homosexual, originally published in 1976, was my first encounter with an alternative interpretation of supposed biblical prohibitions on homosexuality.  His writings had a profound effect on me.

John, now a former Jesuit, is one of the subjects of Silver Stars, Seán Millar and Brokentalker’s dramatized song cycle about Irish and Irish American older gay men.  I was privileged to meet John when he attended the New York production of Silver Stars in January last year.  Of such coincidence is life made!

John, himself, paid a very high price for his enlightened views; initially, by being silenced by the Vatican; and, finally – when he could no longer maintain that silence – by being expelled from his Jesuit order. His calling to minister to gay Catholics and to help them discover viable ways of living their lives within the Church, was unacceptable to Church authorities.

DignityUSA, whose New York branch John co-founded in 1972, has designated this April John McNeill month.

Brendan Fay, documentary film maker [The Saint of 9/11, about Fr Mychal Judge, a Franciscan chaplain to the New York Fire Department, who died at the World Trade Center], is currently finalising his latest work, Taking a Chance on God, the story of the life and work of John McNeill.  The documentary is scheduled to be premiered in Rome on June 10th during Euro-Pride.

The film needs a final round of funding to be ready in time for Rome.  KickStarter, a novel and easy to use all-or-nothing crowdfunding tool, is an important part of this.  All donations, big and small, are welcome.  Do it!

Archive Post: e-mail to the Ugandan Honorary Consul in Ireland

Here’s an e-mail I sent early last year that I thought might be worthy of putting on my blog. While the offending legislation [which even provided for the death penalty in certain situations] by now may have gone underground – though we can never be certain of that – it is another indication of what people in other parts of our world are up against.  This has a connection with my previous post on Ugandan Bishop Christopher Senyonjo’s visit to Ireland.

To: Mrs Sylvia Katete Gavigan

Subject: We lay our future in thy hand…

Excellency

I am very sad to see the corner Uganda has backed itself into – apparently under the influence of well-meaning but misguided Christians including some from abroad – as regards the well-being of those in your country who happen, unfortunately, to be homosexual.

One of the great hallmarks of successful countries and cities is their embrace of difference. Where acceptance is the norm, a creative dynamic comes into play and the economy can flourish.  I believe that some of Ireland’s economic success, before the current economic crisis, is attributable to the advances made on the equality front, both in law and in Irish society in general – despite the sad reluctance of our churches on the sexuality front.

I recognise that African culture is radically different from European culture, and that Ugandan culture and Irish culture are different again from each of these in their own way and from one another.  To use that as an excuse for marginalising further people who are already marginalised in both our countries, is akin to wanting to reintroduce slavery

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,700 times in 2010. That’s about 4 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 43 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 132 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 71mb. That’s about 3 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was November 3rd with 45 views. The most popular post that day was Steve Fulmer’s reflections on the 70s in Portland.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, mail.live.com, mail.yahoo.com, obama-scandal-exposed.co.cc, and android-vs-ipad.co.cc.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for jose carreras, mary griffith, healing simon’s wife’s mother, healing of peter’s mother-in-law, and josé carreras.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Steve Fulmer’s reflections on the 70s in Portland October 2010

2

Silver Stars media coverage June 2010
1 comment

3

Dramatis personae: Who’s Who in Silver Stars? June 2010

4

Archive post: Lavender bus: douze points! August 2010

5

Multifarious final gathering August 2010

Fr John’s House Mass

Fr John is a very dear friend.  He is one of the many Catholic priests who have been falsely accused of child sex abuse.  While he has been acquitted in the criminal courts, simply as there was no case to answer, the due process under canon law for his reinstatement as a practising priest is taking its time and its further toll – not least financially, as his priestly income ceased totally while his case was under investigation.  For many months now Fr John has not been at liberty to celebrate Mass in public.  He is thoroughly blessed in his being able to see this horrendous experience as being something that can help him to be a better priest.

It was a privilege recently when he celebrated Mass with us in the apartment where I am staying while in Portland.  This was one of several special spiritual experiences during my stay here.

The gospel for the day [Luke 23] was more than apt:

39 One of the criminals hanging there abused him: ‘Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us as well.’

40 But the other spoke up and rebuked him. ‘Have you no fear of God at all?’ he said. ‘You got the same sentence as he did,

41 but in our case we deserved it: we are paying for what we did. But this man has done nothing wrong.’

Fr John had us reflect on a short extract adapted from Jesus’ Plan for a New World by Richard Rohr, OFM:

The opposite of faith is not intellectual doubt, because faith is not localized primarily in the mind. The opposite of faith, according to a number of Jesus’ statements is anxiety. If you are fear-based

Film review: Off and Running

Avery Klein-Cloud with the rest of her family

Almost by chance, I was recently invited to a viewing of Off and Running, a very fine documentary film about a Jewish lesbian couple who adopted several children, including Avery, a black girl, the main subject of the documentary.  No doubt a very loving family, it took me a while to work out the underlying “issue” in the family.   As I best grasped it, the adoptive parents shared fully their culture with their children, but they overlooked the birth culture of the children to the extent that at least in one instance it caused huge difficulties.  They couldn’t grasp its importance for their daughter when she needed to find out who she was – and not simply as regards possible contact with birth parents which they were fine with.  Transracial and transnational adoptions – more and more the norm nowadays – have additional demands above those in traditional adoptions. I never considered this previously.

The screening was organised by Adoption Mosaic, a Portland, OR, based innovative education, practice and support service for the whole child adoption community.

Here’s an interesting blog I came across on a related subject:

National Adoption Month: 10 Common Misconceptions about Adoption

November is National Adoption Month in the United States, and although the main purpose of the month is to encourage adoption of children in foster care, all things adoption seem to make the Internet rounds each November. This seems as good a time as any to clear up some of the most common misconceptions people outside of adoption tend to have about it.

Steve Fulmer’s reflections on the 70s in Portland

Steve Fulmer from way back then

I got a glimpse of Portland, OR, gay history and culture in the 70s last weekend.  The Gay & Lesbian Archives of the Pacific Northwest hosted another in its living history series, this latest entitled: OUR STORIES: “Finding Our Voice – the 1970s”.  The evening was hosted at Portland’s Q Center.  One of the many interesting things that I heard was that the gay rights movement may not have got its initial impetus so much from the civil rights movement as from the anti-war movement.

Featured speakers included Larry Copeland, Cindy Cumfer, Jean DeMaster, Steve Fulmer, Kristan Knapp, George Nicola, Susie Shepherd, and John Wilkinson.  Steve was the founding president in 1980 of Portland Gay Men’s Chorus and it is his remarks that I have zoned in on for this blog post.

As an aside, something about the evening reminded me of a visit I made to Salem in the summer of last year to visit friends, a gay couple and their son.  As they brought me on a walking tour of the city centre we met a woman with her three grandchildren.  I was quite touched to hear that the children had four grandmothers as they were born to the son of one lesbian couple and the daughter of another couple who fell in love and married – remarkable of the moment, but probably not so for very much longer.  The children’s parents were most probably born in the 70s.

This is what Steve had to say:

My primary contributions to the sexual minority community probably came in the 80′s and 90′s

PGMC adult cabaret sold out

PGMC's annual adult cabaret

My first performance with Portland Gay Men’s Chorus will be tomorrow evening.  It’s annual adult cabaret, this year entitled Burlesque!, is already sold out.  PGMC is one of the few arts organisations in Oregon doing well in the current economic climate.  Ticket sales for all its concerts have been increasing steadily over the past five years.  Its ABBA/Queen concert last spring was sold out several weeks in advance and a third performance was put on which also sold out.  Following on that success, next spring’s concert has a Mowtown theme.
 
For tomorrow’s show, I am a member of the cabaret ensemble, a small chamber choir of the chorus.  Preparations have been at a far more intense level than the more laid-back approach at home in Ireland: with four major shows each year, this is hardly surprising.  My favourite of our songs has us singing ‘My Favorite Things’ in a way Mary Poppins – I hope – wouldn’t approve of!  Suffice it to say, our costumes would do great justice to any gay pride march.  Our showpiece is ‘Big Pretender’, a parody on ‘Big Spender’ which sends up several anti-gay politicians and others who were caught in flagrante delicto in recent times and were pilloried by the US media for their hypocrisy.  This piece concludes with the punchline: ‘… no more happy endings for you!’ 

Let the fun and games begin!

Thai anti-poverty strategies

Here’s an unusual piece of economic development strategy that may not be quite as offbeat as first appears:

Thailand’s Mechai Viravaidya, aka Mr Condom, shows how child mortality reduction and family planning programmes were two fundamentally important first steps in his country’s recent economic success.  He gives an amusing presentation about a very serious subject which will certainly have its righteous critics.  For me, to be honest, it is truly heartening to see something like this being made to work, despite all the difficulties surrounding it.  Our world needs more practical and effective people like him.

Archive post: How Shall We Sing the Lord’s Song…

 

"Coming Out", Glen O'Brien (Editor)

 

This piece was originally published in Coming Out: Irish Gay Experiences, edited by Glen O’Brien [Currach Press, 2003]

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

by Carl McManus

I like doing jigsaw puzzles.  This has been a favourite hobby throughout my life.  There is one jigsaw puzzle, though, that has taken me more than thirty years to solve.  Only in very recent times did I even realise just how many pieces there were – all of them there from the time I was a young man.  This jigsaw, however, isn’t the usual kind.  The pieces represent dozens of individual incidents and signals that, if they were all put together, would have left me in no doubt about my sexuality.  I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, put them together.  I don’t think it was denial so much as rejection: I did not want to be gay!  After all, the rulebook said it was a sin.  My homophobia was comprehensive.

The rulebook also said ‘self-abuse’ was a sin.  And, God love me, it was there that I got stuck.  I remember in my late teens screwing up my courage to go and talk to a priest, and the furthest we were able to get was to talk very reluctantly about my problems with masturbation.  I remember going to confession twice and three times a week to purge my never-ending guilt.  Only when I met my counselling priest (a guest at a Reach meeting) ‘half a lifetime’ later was I able to forgive the ‘earlier’ priest for not being able to read my mind.  By then I was married, and I had already come out painfully to my wife Mary.

The impetus for my coming out to Mary was my need to stop living a lie

Sell! Sell! Sell!

Portland Gay Men’s Chorus is already publicising its 2010/2011 Flashback! season [its 31st!] with 2 major publicity events this coming weekend.   Jet-lagged and all as I will be, I had previously volunteered to man a publicity stand on Friday morning next, and I still hope to follow through on my commitment, despite arriving in Portland almost a week later than originally planned.  This first event is the Komen Health Expo.  [My new US bank card sponsors Susan G Komen for the Cure.]

PGMC's 2nd LGBT community publicity event

The BIG publicity event will be on Sunday afternoon when PGMC, Portland Lesbian Choir, Portland Gay Symphonic Band, and Confluence LGBT choir, perform on Pioneer Square in the heart of downtown Portland. This is the 2nd Gay Fair on the Square organised by PGMC with many local LGBT organizations participating.  I won’t get to sing with the chorus (this time), though they again have me on publicity stand duty for part of the afternoon.

There’s no rest – even though I’m not in the least bit wicked!!