Archive Home Page Just a little extension to the connections that I explored in my earlier letter.
I think that one of the reasons that people like to visit these monuments and memorials (and cathedrals and temples even when they are of a different faith) is that there is probably a sense that they are walking in a field of mythology. Joseph Campell expressed this sentiment as the reason that he repeatedly was drawn to the Chartes Cathedral outside Paris.
On the relationship of Christianity to Gay people. There are probably less than a dozen passages in the Bible dealing with the issue of homosexuality, yet it is an area of constant preoccupation by religion in this Country. Why? There is a deeper reason. Even if one is able to get past all the bad translations and discard the context and original historical and cultural meanings of the injunctions and still conclude that homosexuality is a sin, why is it such a major obsession? In the larger context of the playing out of suffering, there is a reason.
No child in this nation grows up with out hearing the story of Washington and the cherry tree. Washington (the father again) who cut down the cherry tree says "I cannot tell a lie" (a story of facing up to truth and accepting responsibility) and in response to that realization are the Cherry trees, once again surrounding the water of life near the man of freedom (symbolic of the man of unconditional love and compassion), as if to say, that's OK, here is a gift from others, here are score upon score of trees to replace the one that lays fallen.
A gift from the people from the land of the "rising sun", and the only people in the world to, in twin pillars of fire, be delivered into death on a massive scale at the temperatures of the sun. The B29 that delivered that death to Hiroshima was named after the mother of the pilot, "Enola Gay". Sometimes in patterns of synchronicity only fully known to God, ordinary things become significant and this many be the case here, for Enola Gay is, when the first word is reversed, read to be "A lone Gay".
Gilgamesh
And three times the AIDS quilt has been displayed on the mall surrounding the phallus, once to the east, once to the north, and the last time, to the west towards the man sitting on the throne. This unique symbol of the loss of so many who died of AIDS, who paid the ultimate price in the trampling out of another vintage where the grapes of wrath were stored. And by their sacrifices, and by their love, paved the road to the south, to the tidal basin, and it's cherry trees, and it's promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and to the man who waits there.
Not only symbolic of Christ, but on this level of the symbology, Enkidu.
"O camerado close! O you and me at last, and us two only.
O a word to clear one's path ahead endlessly!
O something ecstatic and undemonstrable! O music wild!
O now I triumph - and you shall also;
O hand in hand - O wholesome pleasure - O one more desirer and lover!
O to haste firm holding - to haste, haste one with me."