Colossians 3:12-17: On the Wedding of Megan & Matt

"There is no them 
there is just us"
Dr. Bob Utley

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A Friend on the Road

Sitting back at St. Vincent's de Paul Church in Chicago, I took in the music around me as in the opening hymn of the service I received the line, "Love is the trust of a friend on the road" (Love is the Touch, Alison Robertson and Lori True). Looking back down the aisle, I watched as one of my best friends walked down a road that led to an altar where her groom stood, ready to continue the way beside her. On this mid October day, as the weather was ripe for travel, I celebrated the wedding of true sister in spirit as the beautiful couple knit together a community around the message of love, simplicity, and interdependency. It was a day that marked as sacramental the truth that existence implicates us in the lives of one another and offers signs to admit our dependency on the caritas of others and our responsibility to those who turn to us for care.

The message of collective strength was evident in the details of the Mass, evidencing the experience of a couple trained in ministry and bride who counts St Thomas Aquinas among her ex-boyfriends. While Megan and Matt now make their home in Minnesota, the couple had traveled back to a Chicago parish named in honor of a Saint dedicated to the Poor and Marginalized. It was an intimate service with small intentional touches that turned attention away from the dresses and flowers so that the pearls of the community, its people, would receive the emphasis. Friends and family sat together from different times and places in the life of the couple, not familiar with every person who sat beside them, yet able within the course of the pithy ceremony and reception to have a moment to touch upon the lives of each person present. This was not an audience for a grand spectacle, but a close collection of fellow-travelers called to walk together on the road ahead.

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Colossians 3:12-17

After the scripture had been read, Father Christopher Robinson, C.M.,  went about unpacking the texts the couple had selected and articulating (when his voice was not choked up speaking of his friend and former colleague) a prayer for love and unity. Indeed, among the passages chosen for the service there were some surprises and spoke to the personal and relational needs of this newly knitted family. In particular, the second reading, Colossians 3:12-17, stood out as a curious but fitting replacement for Corinthians 13:4 ("Love is patient, love is kind..."). In this letter, written in the first century A.D. from prison, St Paul addresses a group of parishes in Asia Minor, "clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you" (Colossians 3:12-13). Fr. Chris noted how in this scripture, as in the others, a high theological Love and Unity are replaced by an image of caritas and community that have a distinctly human edge to them. This is a congregation struggling to hold together and trust one another on a long and difficult road. 

"There is no 'them" to blame in this text, a commentator on this passage explains, "there is just 'us'" ("A Call to Forgiveness and Unity" by Bob Utley). The modern sense of individual pride and responsibility is not present in this community, although it experiences its own divisions. What it knows is hardship, pain, and fear that causes people to become hardened to one another. It is an understandable reaction. The emotional and social person puts on armor to deal with the "tough love" of a world that seems to threaten them from without. The unity here is not the surrender of the self to this exterior but the surrender of a sense of interiority and exteriority. Don't cloth yourself in armor, but compassion (the word in English from the roots meaning "together" + "energy"). This does not deny the hardship, pain, and fear, but rather shares it and makes it a concern not of the weary person but the strength of the collective. The later lines of the letter, addressing the community to love as Christ is loved reflects the sense of togetherness that Dr. Utley terms, "The beloved has a beloved. The singular has a plural."  The love and unity of Colossians is not the one in the many or the many in the one, but the one with the many and the many with the one.

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Love is Tough

"Love is the trust of a friend on the road," said the opening hymn, and that is not a statement of sentiment but an expression of a mode of ethical relation. It is a responsibility that is at once a joy. This is not the "tough love" of the world but the vulnerability to admit that "love is tough." It is the harder decision not to be hard but admit our contingency and dependency. We need one another and without one another we will not make it far down the road. Put another way, our life is in our collective hands and our power is in each other. Love is tough (i.e. difficult) and love is tough (i.e. strong). In this sense, the simplicity in the adornment of the wedding was a call to be socially naked and present. The service was beautiful because what it brought together was allowed to shine and not buried under flowers, lights, and laser-shows. The community was called to look at itself in bare terms and say, "this is who I am, trust me. I will walk with you on this road, my strength is your strength."

The wedding of Megan and Matt was a chance to come together to celebrate the couple and the community that love sustains. After the ceremony was a reception where I got to talk with the couple as they took an opportunity to get off their feet for a moment. During this time, in between quick mouthfuls of yummy cupcake and pizza, they affirmed what they hoped people took away from the day. Matt said that he wanted to share their definition of love with their friends and family - not tough love but love which is tough. Megan said that she wanted to celebrate vulnerability - not clothed in dresses and gestures that draw distinctions between people but in the clothing of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Certainly, in addition to a full belly, new friends, and a complimentary glass to commemorate the day, we all left traveling on the road carrying the weight of each other, a feat made possible by the collective strength of one another.

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Congratulations Megan and Matt!

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Chicago Pride Parade: Towards a Queer Materialism

"Action is not done under the full control of consciousness; 

action should be felt as a node, a knot, and a conglomerate 

of many surprising sets of agencies"

Bruno Latour

Pandora's Hope

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Today is Chicago Pride Parade and as I see everyone with their various "queer costumes," most of which are designed primarily to inspire arousal through the exaggeration or exposure of their bodies. As I contemplate what it means to be queer today, I am struct by the ironic paradox queer theory and queer culture finds itself in.

On one side we have the misconception that "queer" as the performance of identity means that we are who we say we are: all are appearances and we are the puppeteers of our own little shows. Here we find the recent single by "Weird Al" Yankovic entitled "Perform this Way" is the exemplary model of queer identity. On the other side we have the misconception of Lady Gaga that we are "Born this Way": all is genetic and we are puppets in the theatre of God or Nature (you get to chose your transcendent signifier it seems). 

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This is where the semi-nudity gets me. Do we "Perform this Way" or are we "Born" with it? The answer of course came to me from Bruno Latour's observation on Networks. We find ourselves wrapped in strings of chromosomes, hormones, clothes, costumes, schools, slums, social media, etc, etc, etc and we perform those identities materially as they perform us. That is only if we accept that we are stuck in a paradox of mediation, that "queerness" is far more material and thus "far more social" as Mr. Latour would say, than linguistics, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, or even pop/political culture wants to allow.

And thus, Queer popular culture has become very self involved. For decades since the "we're here, we're queer" got unfurled it seems as though LGBTQA-tcetera politics has been trying to sway public opinion by making its presence known, by carving out an "identity" with all the lovely stereotypes that come along and thus be recognized as a player in the game (in the midst of trying to change the game). And thus from the contradictions of having to become "normalized" in order to be set free to be not-normative. Queer culture has become very self involved out a hope of being recognized and as a result has lost sight of itself. It has allowed itself, like Weird Al's and Lady Gaga's songs exemplify, to become broken into polar positions.

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This is one tangled knot, but as Mr. Latour would suggest, this may still be a useful arrangement for us: this whole "nature versus nurture" debate. Now this discourse has changed for the most part but with the positions remaining relatively the same. In academics we recently called this "essentialism versus performativity."

And the poles remain, if we insist on either, because both of these abstract qualities are present in the real experience of things. We do not chose (fully) who we are attracted to or what gender identity (if any) we feel most comfortable as at a given time. Nor can we say that either sexuality or gender exist (fully) without our performing them. Between this divide we find ourselves and our performative materiality/contingency.

I would not claim, in fact I would contest that for the most part queer theory scholars have not been oblivious to the "contingency" of our performances due to material/circumstantial forces. This is evident, for instance in Judith Butler's analysis of drag in Gender Trouble wherein she notes that sex is already gender and that she is as opposed to a social constructionist model of identity as she is to essentialism. Likewise we see this point clarified and explored further in her study of transgendered persons in Undoing Gender; whereof I borrowed the emphasis on "contingency."

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What I would say is that as the "post-modern" identity machine, of which the ironic label of "queer" is an exemplary child, has concentrated primarily on the linguistic-psychological-performance facet of queerness it has despite its best efforts reinforced a nature v. social divide by bracketing off the prior as an unreachable "referent" or by turning it into a "Real" which we just shove "out there" and forget about or ridicule. Queer culture is very self involved, but cannot be surprised that it is it often narcissistic when its psychoanalytic ancestors have been so emphatic on the denial of mediation, holding such an emphatic skepticism of all "outside" the mind/language; while admitting the theoretical necessity of a material outside to allow the mind to function and a material/social world to tell US what words/ideas are and mean.

That is to say, we were on our way to doing that until more "thing" theorists and discourses started pocking their heads in and bringing the "Thing" back out of the abstract prison of capitalization. Those net-working, object, rhizomey people, such as Latour, noticed that as handy as dialectics can be to explain things in its own way, it leaves out or discounts so much "stuff" which is relevant to our discourse. "Pseudo-objects" or other such paradoxical hybrids open up a new opportunity for queer theorists to tackle issues of queer bodies and lives in a way which admits that we are performed as much as we perform our identities. Can we already begin to hear the echoes bouncing between Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's "becoming" and Butler's "performing", or between "molecularity" and "drag"?

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Queer Materialism is already in the midst of things with us, and if we can let go more of our "modern" dualistic desire to keep things apart (especially from us humans) then we will discover much more to be proud of, much more we can become, many more voices which need performance space. Can we not hear the B in LGBTQA-ctetera speaking louder than before when we play more with the schizophrenic multiplicity of desire/sexuality? The T will be able to strut its stuff all the prouder when we admit that although the genetic machine is different than the hormone-clothing-surgical machine, they already work together for every person to continually create what we know as gender. The often forgotten P (for poly-amorous) can have more space to get around if we recognize the multiplicity of bodies, organic and inorganic, which the rave dance of sex involves (i.e. do we not treat our family and friends as erogenous zones for our enjoyment/probing of our mate's body when we first introduce them? Need all our sexual organs be attached to OUR bodies?). The list and the acronym goes on...

and so does the journey. I will refrain from the road metaphor for reasons I have stated, but I do think it is apt to say that queer theory and queer materialism can proudly say with JRR Tolkien "not all who wander are lost" and in exploring our own twisted maps anew we may continue to find them, and ourselves, perpetual wonders.

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"So who is pulling the strings? 

Well, the puppets do 

in addition to their puppeteers”

Bruno Latour

Reassembling the Social

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