Re: Hey Didaskalos
Submitted by Didaskalos on September 14 1999 at 00:51:33
In reply to Hey Didaskalos Submitted by Mark on September 13 1999 at 19:54:11
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Dear Mark. I also have a math credential & will proabably use it to eke out a full day's work when I am done student teaching in January. One of the beauties of the Prestbyterian Church is our tremendous detachment; our need to study and have committees before we respond. So I felt fairly sure that there would be no immediate, ill-considered response. (Though I heard one muttered remark, in my day, you know, people like that, we locked 'em in the attic!) Michael Meade came and spoke at a college book store where I was working about five years ago. He spoke on the Water of Life, a men's movement book like Iron John and Fire in the Belly. He laid out a challenge for his audience: find and help the boys who are struggling with the spiritual burdens that fall on them at the time of their first wet dreams. Talk with them about the stuff that nobody talks about. He said that it was a major time of spiritual transformation for boys. This hit head solidly for me; my first wet dreams had been of,, oh,,,, Knights in Shining Armor,,, who said they would be my FRIEND forever. So, dreaming of guys, and being attracted to them, and reading the burgeoning "gay pride" rhetoric" of the 70's, I assumed there was no point in fighting my attraction to men. It was the dreams that clinched it for me when I was in 6th grade; how could you fight something that is going on WITHIN you? Nobody in my church said anything about being hungry for role models - which is certainly what I was. At a recent Trauma and Sexuality conference I attended, during a session on how to help "gay" kids in the church, I was quite explicit: You have to tell them that they might have dreams that give them ideas about the WOMAN God wants them to be with, and they might have dreams about the kind of MAN God wants them to be. And in either case boys need to have a place to talk and figure these things out. So if I have a disturbing dream about a boy, the sort of thing that leaves me sweaty and shaking in the morning, with angelic voices singing in my ears about the glory of little boys and the men who take care of them in fulfillment of God's plan, and common ugly, rude voices grunting the accusatory bourgeoise song of "appropriateness" and "boundaries" and "morally unfit to be a teacher" then I share it with my Bible Study group. It's a burden to them, no question; but it's a burden to me far more so, and I don't think God intends for me to bear it alone. So I just keep asking God, Why, What is the big wonderful picture that you made me to fit into, into which all my loneliness & longings are met? On the one hand I love reading about all the non-Christian traditions of special tribal figures who were beyond gender and got to initiate the little boys into the tribal traditions; on the other, I don't really see any of that in the Bible. So I am in this ambiguous place of being part of my church's life, but not totally accepted, trusted to work with youth, but within boundaries, authorized to tell stories, IF they are Biblical, and just generally going through life as a dance between the very rigid and traditional forms of accepted behaviour in the Presbyterian Church, and the world of "different" thinking and behaviour that I am also a part of. Poetry, the vocation Christ gave me, is a garden for which I must draw water from all the rivers of Hell: Pedophilia Schizophrenia Manic-Depressive Necromancy Epilepsy What's really helped to win acceptance at my church is defining my pedophilia in CULTURAL terms. I do the Greek thing, passing on the values and the stories to the little boys, I always jump at the chance to act out Bible stories, wearing the moldy costumes from our church's closet, probably made in the 1950's. I always seize the high ground in debate: what value are our boys going to learn from this decision? In closing, I want to put a new thread question: Thanks for asking, Mark! Didaskalos |