Christopher Macintosh

As I watch the television coverage of the horrifying devastation and suffering in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, I hear repeated by many people interviewed a recuring theme: gratitude to God for sparing them. I am paraphrasing, but several times, I have heard people say that if it weren’t for God’s grace, they would have died; that if it weren’t for God’s help, their home would have been destroyed; that had God not intervened, they would have lost their family.

I am profoundly confused and disturbed by such comments. Before I go further, I must say that I have great respect for those who are sincere in their faith and I mean no disrespect to them. A number of my friends are people of faith and I certainly do not mean anything insulting to them or to their brothers and sisters in faith when I ask, Why?

In every great moment of trauma, whether it is a natural disaster, a crime, an act of war, personal illness, or financial difficulty, one often hears comments to the effect that were it not for God, it could have been worse. However, my question is this. If God is all-powerful and all-merciful, if one thanks God for not allowing the disaster, illness, crime, etc., from becoming worse, why show gratitude? If God had the power to show mercy and spare some, why did he permit it in the first place?

Did God cause the disaster, illness, crime, etc.? If not, did he, indeed, have the power to make it less severe? If God had the power to make it less severe, why did he permit it at all? What kind of God permits the Holocaust? What kind of God allows a mother to watch the BTK killer disembowel her son? What kind of God permits horrors, agonies, the unspeakable to occur? And, why ask him in his infinite mercy to spare some or to give strength to survive the catastrophe he has either caused or allowed to occur?

And, why should I want to worship and venerate such a God? Why should I honor a God who would throw me into the pits of Hell for not believing in him, a God so egotistical that he would punish for eternity someone who chooses not to believe or to follow?

Why would anyone want to believe in such a foul power?

I shake my head in wonder when I hear the emotional and pseudo-intellectual gymnastics believers endure as they attempt to explain the inexplicable. God works in mysterious ways. We must just accept and have faith. Why?

Can someone please tell me why?

The big political news this summer, I believe, is the passage of the USA Patriot Act extension in the US House of Representatives. Making fourteen of the act’s sixteen provisions permanent, the bill was originally passed in the emotional days following the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. The renewal of the act comes in the aftermath of the twin attacks in London, first on July 7 and again on July 21.

The act is a gross over-reaction to the threat of terror and gives the terrorists exactly what they want, an over-reaction and a sense of fear among the people and their “leaders.” The restrictions on civil liberties are completely unnecessary. The report of the 9/11 Commission showed that the FBI and various other Federal and state law enforcement and intelligence agencies had all the information they needed to stop the 9/11 attacks. The only problem was a lack of communication between and within agencies and field offices; that and childish competition and turf-protection between agencies and field offices. Remedy that and the country has all the tools necessary to defeat terrorism with out running the Bill of Rights through the shredder.

We were promised in 2001 that the restrictions on privacy and personal freedom imposed by the mis-named Patriot Act would be temporary and would come up for periodic review. At the time, opponents of the act who warned that this was not true were attacked as disloyal and emotional. We now see they were correct. The bill will be permanent.

We can only hope the President’s new nominee to the Supreme Court, John Roberts, is the traditional kind of libertarian conservative who opposes government intrusion on personal freedom and not one of the new conservatives who seem to love expanding government power over the individual. We hope that he also understands that a society which values security more than freedom gets neither.

And, deserves neither.

One night, when I was fourteen, I was standing in the kitchen of our house as my mother cowered at the table and my step-father stood in the doorway from the dining room yelling, “I’m not gonna have any God-damned queers in my family.” It was the spring of 1972 and my “sin,” the catalyst for this incident, was my having watched an ABC Movie of the Week entitled That Certain Summer, in which a teenage boy played by Scott Jacoby learns that his father, played by Hal Holbrook, is gay and living with a partner played by Martin Sheen. The movie showed the pain the revelation causes the boy and his attempts to understand and deal with it. I was just coming to terms, that spring, with the fact that I was turned on by the boys in the showers in gym class and not by the naked women in the Playboys I had removed from the neighbors’ trash cans. In watching the movie, I saw that there were gay men out there who didn’t commit suicide, who didn’t lurk in alleys, and who didn’t go to prison. I saw that there might be hope for me.

Until my step-father’s outburst of loathing and disgust.

Two hours later, I was seated on the toilet in the bathroom holding my Boy Scout knife to my wrist, desperately trying to work up the courage to end the pain and the “perversion.” Were it not for the insistent knocking on the door by my younger brother, I might very well have done so.

This summer, a teenage boy in Tennessee named Zack Stark caused a great stir when he wrote in his blog of his homosexuality and his parents’ determination to “cure” it by sending him to a Christian “ex-gay” re-education camp called Refuge, run by a ministry called “Love in Action.” There was outrage at the techniques used by the group and protests both on the Internet and in front of the group’s headquarters. The State of Tennessee even invistigated the camp over allegations of abuse and practicing therapy without proper certification. Zack has now returned home from the re-education camp and his latest blog entry, as quoted by The Washington Blade, indicates that there has been some “progress” made by the re-programmers at Love in Action. It is understandable. The boy is sixteen and under great stress caused by parents who cannot accept a son who is not what they want.

I understand the feelings of shame, the sense of alienation at not being what your family wants. An older family-member had occasionally touched me inappropriately when I was young and later, seeing the turmoil and emotional violence in my family after my mother’s remarriage, had asked that I live with him and his wife. My mother refused and told me that, had she agreed to it, I would have been “ruined.” I wasn’t completely certain what she meant by the term “ruined,” but had a fairly good idea that it had something to do with being “queer,” which I knew I was. So, I endured the rest of my adolescence knowing that, in my mother’s eyes, I was ruined.

Larry Evans was the founder of “Love in Action” in 1973. However, after seeing the wreckage “reparative therapy” leaves in its wake, the destroyed lives, the self-hatred, the suicides, he has now denounced it and declared it to be dangerous and wrong.

More than a third of teenage suicides are by gay youth. Do they kill themselves because of their homosexuality or because of the alienation, the rejection, the abuse they endure at the hands of unaccepting families and closed-minded bigots? There is little evidence to suggest much of a success rate in programs such as “Love in Action,” which some of their organizers admit, even as they use fear of the “homosexual agenda” in their fund-raising; but there is voluminous evidence to show the harm such programs do in creating feelings of shame and failure in the victims they target.

I have only the greatest respect and sympathy for Zach, a beautiful young man, as you can see from the picture above, who deserves all the peace and joy life can give. I hope he finds love and self-acceptance, no matter what path he chooses once he is of age to make decisions for himself. And, I hope that advocates either for “reparative therapy” or against leave the boy alone and let him deal with his life. He’s been under terrible stress and deserves support and love.

The picture above is part of a map of Mars drawn by the Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli in the 1870’s. It shows the famous oceans and canals of Mars, which many believed were evidence of an advanced civilization on the Red Planet. His observations served as the basis for H. G. Wells’ famous novel, The War of the Worlds, as well as many other works of fiction. In fact, many astronomers were firmly convinced for decades, by Shiaparelli’s observations and their own, that Mars had canals and had, at least once, harbored a great civilization.

The problem was, Shiaparelli never said there were canals on Mars.

The astronomer wrote that he had observed canali, an Italian word that could be translated into English as “canals,” but which is more properly translated as “channels,” something completely different and which sheds an entirely new light on the subject.

Of course, since the first photographs from the Mariner 4 space probe in 1965, we have known that Mars is not the lush world of oceans and channels that once it had been thought to be. Instead, it is a cold and barren, dusty and windblown world of Moon-like craters and vast plains, occasionally marred by a few huge, deep canyons that once had served as conduits of water, though not for billions of years.

The point is that, even in contemporary times, a simple mistranslation of one word, led generations of scientists and writers to believe, indeed to base their life’s work on, the premise that Mars had canals and, thus, evidence of advanced intelligent life. The mistranslation of one word.

I am a freethinker and, thus, probably not the best person to discuss issues of faith. However, I find it amazing that fundamentalist Christians are so eager to believe the Bible is the inspired word of God and factually and dogmatically infallible when one must consider that many of the events described in both the Old and New Testaments were written of decades or even centuries after they allegedly took place. Many of the documents that Christians now call the Bible were gathered together and debated in various councils and conventions during the early centuries of the church. Some gospels were dismissed, others were accepted, based on the political conditions existing in the Roman Empire and the church at the time. And, the translations of some documents from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek, into later forms of those languages or into Latin could contain misinterpretations of words and phrases with far greater consequences than those of the astronomers who relied on the erroneous translations of Shiaparelli’s work.

John Shelby Spong, the former Episcopal bishop of Newark, New Jersey, writes in his book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1991), that part of the popular interpretation of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is based on the translation of one word which could be translated in seven different ways. (More on this in a later post).

Even if one does believe in a great and benevolent power guiding the universe, is it not too much to believe that human error in translating documents over centuries could occur, that stories passed down from one generation to the next by word-of-mouth could be changed and altered by the time they are placed on paper or papyrus? Even if one does believe in the basic foundations of Judaism and Christianity, is it not just a bit too much to believe that every single word of the Bible is absolutely and undeniably correct?

If not, may I offer you a deed to some canals I have for sale on Mars.

The odyssey that led me from confident, even cocky, schoolboy with a bright future to middle age and seeking to rebuild my life has been rocky and circuitous and can serve as a lesson that self-esteem cannot be built upon the whims and opinions of others. The psychologist Nathaniel Branden, in The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, (New York: Bantam, 1994), writes that self-esteem is the belief that one is capable of meeting life’s challenges and deserving of life’s rewards. Mic Hunter, in Abused Boys: The Neglected Victims of Sexual Abuse, (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1991), describes how abuse can destroy self-esteem in children and adolescents. I was a happy and academically successful child until the death of my father and the four dreadful years thereafter. Surviving sexual, physical, and emotional abuse both at home and at school, by my late adolescence, I had lost both the hope that I might have a successful life and the belief that I deserved it. I sank into a miasma of self-destruction in college from which I have begun to escape only in my forties.

My recovery began with a spiritually-based program and fellowship, but my first steps were difficult and saw many setbacks. I tried to accept the concept of a Higher Power upon whom I could rely for my recovery, but my doubts about faith and religion repeatedly scuttled my early efforts. Following the program’s advice to “fake it ’till you make it,” I pretended for years to believe; yet I continued to relapse into my chemical abuse.

In college, I read a number of works by the writer and philosopher Ayn Rand, including The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and two collections of essays on her philosphy of “rational self-interest,” For the New Intellectual, (New York: New American Library, 1964), and Philosophy: Who Needs It, (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982). Though I have some problems with her philosophy and many of her followers, I re-read some of her work during my early recovery and, surprisingly, it was the third essay in that second book, “The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” which proved to be the key to opening my eyes and giving me the strength to begin a true and healthy recovery from chemical abuse.

Even as an adolescent considering the Episcopal ministry, I knew underneath my attempts at belief that there was no God and that people turn to the irrationality of religion because of their own weaknesses and fears. However, Rand explains why one of the foundations of spiritually-based recovery programs, the so-called “Serenity Prayer,” is, despite its form as a prayer, a rather rational tool to use in recovery. Written by Reinhold Neibuhr, an evangelical Congregationalist thinker and writer, it reads

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Reading this essay opened my eyes to the profoundly comforting idea that recovery could work without a belief in God and that I could achieve recovery on my own. When trapped in addiction, one often tries to change those things that are not within one’s power to change; one often lacks the courage to change those things that must be changed; and, often, one fails to understand the difference. It was after reading that essay, (which I have criminally simplified here), that I began to realize that I could not rely on superstition and wishful thinking to achieve recovery. It was my own effort and rationality that was going to do it; and it has.

My life is not perfect and I still have great difficulties and challenges. However, I remain clean and sober and I am seeing some success with my writing. Life is good, even when it isn’t.

Several years ago, a friend gave me a present, a book entitled Jeb and Dash: A Diary of Gay Life 1918-1945, (ed. Ina Russell. Boston: Farber & Farber, 1993), chronicling the life of the psuedonymous Jeb Alexander, a gay man living in Washington, D.C. during the first half of the Twentieth Century. Beginning when he was only twelve years-old, Jeb wrote in his diary almost every day of his life, until a year before his death in 1965. It is a remarkable achievement and a fascinating look not only at life in general during the period chosen by the editor, his niece, to highlight, but at gay life as well. It is one of my treasured possessions.

There is an entry I found particularly moving, which the editor uses as an epigraph, from Saturday, 14 April 1923:

“It occured to me today with something of a shock how horrible it would be for this diary of mine to be pawed over and read unsympathetically after I am dead, by those incapable of understanding, who would be filled with disgust and astonishment and think of me as a poor demented wretch, a neurotic or a madman who was better off dead. And then the thought of the one thing even more dreadful and terrible than that- for my diary never to be read by the one person who would or could understand.

“For I do want it to be read- there is no use concealing the fact- by somebody who is like me, who would understand.”

I have attempted numerous journals in my life, begining with a diary in the fourth grade that lasted all of three days. I have numerous spiral notebooks filled with the whining and moaning of a self-pitying wastrel and since the advent of the computer, I have dozens of floppy disks chronicling my some sometimes confused and convoluted attempts at recovery and growth. Yet, I often wondered for whom I wrote. Was it only for me to read in my later years as I would look back on my self-destruction or my recovery? Perhaps, I wrote for friends or family, a thought I found comforting until I realized their only interest would be to see what dirty secrets I revealed or what nasty comments I might write about them. At one point, in the midst of my twenty-something alcoholic grandiosity, I considered the possibility that scholars in the future might find my life illuminating. Then, I read Jed Alexander’s diary and his moving entry wondering whether that certain someone who might understand and benefit from his diary would ever find it.

As I near the end of my forties, I have begun to build a life and find some success with my writing. The world of blogging has opened new possibilities for writers and non-writers to have their thoughts and their lives preserved and it is my hope that others who read this blog will find something with which they can agree, something to make them think, something to make them act, something to make them remember someone named Christopher who wanted to make a mark with his writing and leave something of himself behind.