 July 8, 2006 I'm so worn out. I've had an eventful, even-- GET THIS-- an interesting day. But I'm going to bed. Sorry for the huge gaps in my diary. Maybe the muses will start being more frequent visitors soon. July 9, 2006 Well, the only thing I want to report is a funny little inspiration I had during mass today. The whole event and its context are immensely complex, though at first one might not judge them so. I'm too lazy to relate all the stuff too deep for words, all the interminable background information,and everything else. Let's just say that receiving communion is for me a spiritually agonizing ordeal and that whenever that part of mass comes around my confusion reaches fever pitch. Perhaps to distract myself with a trifling personal vanity, I engaged in a little memory game I play sometimes: reciting all the Church Latin that I know in my head-- Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, Iesus Hominum Salvator, ex opere operato, etc, etc. And as I was approaching the altar, at once tortured by the impending decision to take the Eucharist or not, while also distracting myself with ecclesiatical jargon I've picked up here and there-- a small breeze of inspiration came. Deus non sum dignus, I prattled in my mind. And I was immediately reminded that Oscar Wilde replied, when in Rome, to an invitation to a papal blessing with the same phrase: non sum dignus-- I AM NOT WORTHY. Oscar apparently later changed his mind about papal blessings and regularly attended public audiences given by Pope Leo (XIII?). He even credited the blessings with curing him of a serious variety of food poisoning he had obtained. Deus non sum dignus, but only say the word and I shall be healed (as the biblical quote is completed in English). And so with both contrition and hope I approached a little wafer that usually makes me tremble far more than any of the loud and blustering phenomena of our world. I kept saying to myself, non sum dignus, non sum dignus, and I ate the the flesh and drank the blood of Jesus Christ. I was not worthy, and still am not, but I hope that I shall be healed. Thank you so much, Oscar, for whispering in my ear. July 12, 2006 Gee folks, about all I have to say today is that I went hiking pretty far up a canyon and saw a real,live, wild bear! There was some commotion in the bushes about 50 feet ahead and I saw this stocky, small-sized, dark-haired bear start running away. I was so scared/thrilled that I ran back to my friend (who caught a short glimpse of the bear as well) and started shouting "I saw a bear, I saw a bear!". I kept on slapping my friend on his back and almost hugged him, I was so excited. In conclusion, you can see some pretty wild stuff right in the L.A. region just as long as you are willing to get off the beaten track. We were in Bear Creek Canyon, so apparently its name is apt. July 19, 2006 From a Pastor’s Heart: The Southern Baptist Convention is sadly slouching into the boiling hellfire swamp of blasphemy. Liberals, modernists, Masonists, women, Catholic sympathizers and Jimmy Carter! A ghastly lot of religious weaklings being led so easily into a perfumed, soothing mirage of peace and harmony. No, friends; this is not the peace of Christ! Not the peace of our Lord and Savior, the Great and Holy King Jesus. Athlete of pain. Prince of contradiction and consternation, hellfire, judgment, bloody sacrifice, victory, glorious Return, revenge, and salvation of the random few. Oh sweet Jesus, save our Church from the fags, the finery, the worldly puke of wide open minds and uncertainty. I open my narrow heart to thee, great God. I have no need of Hebrew or Greek. Give me what is plain. The fare of my father and his father, chapter and verse. You bring the sword of judgment. Divide! Tear apart this babbling rainbow of fools, the human race. Tear apart the Churches, oh God. Revelation’s sword is from your mouth. You speak judgment. You speak devastation. No bible cross reference can refute that! No effeminate, slithering scholarship will lull the righteous into “enlightenment”. Gather your elect as you stir the creation with a righteous storm. Let them be damned who claim to know you in strange and esoteric ways. Let them be damned too who never even heard your name. What right has anyone to Heaven in the first place? What right claims you but a blind and steely blatant confession, a surrender to the Unknown Conqueror?. Purge the Church, Lord, of false Christians. Gather in those elect gone astray, and loosing the floodgates of chaos, make way for the savage lightning that shall rend the sky from East to West. Come Lord Jesus! Come Lord Jesus! God is so much more than love, and its time the world should know it. Okay, don't freak. Nobody really wrote that load of crap. That's just my (semi-stream of consciousness) attempt to sound like an insane Baptist preacher who thinks his denomination is sinking into liberalism. It was inspired by an actual Baptist dude on the internet who believes the SBC is going down a slippery slope of modernist heresy. His prose, of course, isn't even half way as bizarre as mine. Honestly, though, it was kind of fun to write. Maybe I should start my own series of Catholic "Left Behind" novels. I guess the catch would be that there would be no Rapture and everybody would be left behind. The movie would also star, instead of Kirk Cameron, Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger. Apart from these ideas, I don't have much else sketched out. Perhaps during the tribulation all the unraptured children could be given the consolation of having Benedict XVI distribute gifts to them from a flying pope-mobile. Our current pope has indeed taken to wearing snowy-white ermine on occasion, so saying he looks like Santa Claus is actually a relatively nice way of putting things. The alternative would be to question why his fashion sense is borderline gay. Anyway, is there anyone I haven't offended yet? Oh yeah-- our President and his administration is an ensemble of extremely powerful criminals and should be put on trial-- soon. Democrats barely believe in anything: which paralyzes us. Republicans espouse a bundle of smug contradictions, reeking of hypocrisy, and they continually manage to fool a nation whose TV viewership continues to rise, along with interest in Brad Pitt's baby and Paris Hilton's exemplification of simple living. As for myself, the sweet and tender egomaniac who I am remains clinging on to semi-sanity. I have made good friends with an evangelical Protestant guy my age, and despite what my satiric poke at Baptist hellfire might suggest about my feelings toward Protestants, you could say my new association might even be called inspiring. Hell is oneself, unable to relate to other people, to the outside world, and to God. Redemption, I guess, doesn't always come from people who help us relax into our compulsively inhabited comfort zones. My friend is at once the same as and different from me. A blessing. To take off on one more political/religious tangent: the power players in the Middle East need to seriously mellow out. "He who says he loves God, but hates his brother is a liar." I'm a decadent, Catholic queer, but in my humble opinion its usually not a good idea to murder people in God's name. My Church, along with so many other religions and ideological structures, has murdered in the name of right. We've come to regret it. July 20, 2006 And the avenging angel said at Brian's judgment: "Ignorance is no excuse. Depart from your Creator into the outer darkness." But then Christ interrupted his angelic servant: "Don't mind what the accusing spirit says. Forgive him, Father, for he knew not wht he did. The life of humans is dreadful and half-insane. I endured the ugliness they showed to me, so that they might know the greater strength of my love, of its invincible beauty." July 21, 2006 Tomorrow is the big hiking expedition I've been planning for my friends and I. It will have it's surprises, it's stresses and strains. But things should work out. It has occurred to me that life is a fascinating, deep and labyrinthine painting. But it's signature, it's very seal is death. Only on the other side shall we know what everything has meant. Heavy shit, huh? Have a nice evening. July 25, 2006 I'm so lazy about writing my journal. I'll just say that the hiking event came and went with pretty fair success. Not everyone can climb up a small waterfall on one of the hottest fricken days of the year. Hoorah for us. Saw "Bridge On the River Kwai" on the big screen last night (at a theatre which shows the classics). Great movie, I think. Tomorrow I'll be having a go with Ritalin for the first time in quite a while. I'm rather sensitive to stimulants, so this should be interesting. What else, what else? I just watched "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" with Mom. I was pleased to see a tough, highly individualistic gay detective played by Val Kilmer. I don't have anything against interior decorators, but we queer folk can be more versatile than stereotypes suggest.
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