Nameless

Dear Eugene,

I read somewhere in the news now that Meghan Markle has the hoopla of the royal wedding behind her she can finally focus on doing feminism again.  I take that to mean she can now devote herself to saving women from men, from the ways of the world, or frankly just from themselves.

I don't know her and even less about feminism.  If I do there should be an exponential reduction in my cynicism in relation to my knowing.

One thing I do know though: If there really is something called feminism, whoever that is a real fighter for it is a nameless face that we shall never find on the front page, a face that is most likely haggard and ugly, one that no respectable cause would want to enlist as its advocate cover girl and neither would she allow a simple -ism to circumscribe her call, her vocation, her very life.


To say my life is now settled into a certain favorable, congenial pattern conducive to my activism is to say I am a lost cause to all causes already.  The more we get the harder it is to let go.

Nobody gets it all with the aim to lose it all; we only come to slowly, haltingly, reluctantly accept our maturing into truth as about discovering and responding to our ever-growing capacity to die to falsehood.  We ascend to our call by descending into some sort of hell.  We die to truly live.

To begin with a grandstanding on a laden, tainted, disputed -ism is to set oneself up to fail and fall.  Soon enough one can fight for nothing but her own celebrity, against nothing but her own notoriety.  It is just an elaborate way to say one will soon need to devote every breath to save his own face and cover his precious rear.

The world is naturally skeptical, cynical about the church and churchgoing folks, especially any religious practitioner.  You, the Pastor with a capital P.

I don't blame them.  Anything with a flashing slogan is usually a bogus hack job.  Bob Dylan also has a "gospel period" and I found the words of this truth-teller most dubious when he let the world give him the title of a prophet in all caps.

Whenever I met a pastor I asked myself the same question: Will he/she still be pastoral to his/her very core if one day the title is no longer there, taken away, voluntarily or by force?  The truth is usually painfully obvious.

You know what, Eugene, if  I am a homosexual, the last thing I would join is a "pride parade."  I would ask all the sponsors, politicians and big corporations, Where were you before it becomes fashionable--profitable!!!--to fight for this worthless little me?  Where were you when it hurts the most?

You were never there.

Yours, Alex

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