alias Bruce.

The problem with the Catholic Church isn't Catholics. It's the Catholic Church.

ITEM: At her mother's funeral last week, in front of all of the mourners in the cathedral, the daughter stood before the priest to take communion. The priest looked at her, covered the wafers with his hand, and told he could not give her the body and blood of Christ because her lifestyle is a sin in the eyes of God. See, her partner of 20 years, who was standing beside her, is a woman. They're lesbians. So this bigot dressed up as a man of God devastated her and her entire family in their hour of deepest grief. And he then, without warning, skipped the burial. His name, because he deserves for it to be printed here, is Rev. Marcel Guarnizo of St. John Neumann Catholic Church in Gaithersburg, MD. If there is any justice in the Universe, he will come back in the next life as a gay man. Not that we have any way of knowing his orientation now.

ITEM: After a years-long struggle, Maryland finally legalized gay marriage this week. Amid the battle, a top public figure declared that churches should never have to grant marriage rights to gays. Who was this? Why, Edwin O'Brien, the former Archbishop of Baltimore, who was recently promoted to The Vatican.

ITEM: In one of the largest Catholic churches in my hometown of Rochester, NY, a large number of parishioners broke away when the established parish, backed by threats from the Archdiocese bosses, forbade recognition of gay unions or of women taking charge in the pulpit. The breakaway church is now a large and thriving Catholic congregation – Spiritus Christi Church – that celebrates gay unions, has a strong woman reverend in the pulpit, and runs a slew of health and service programs in neighborhoods and in prisons. (Pop quiz: which church – the Archdiocese-approved sanctuary of bigotry or the rebel house of open-hearted love – do you think Jesus would prefer?)

I have an old friend who was raised Catholic and whose mother was devout in her faith and her dedication to her congregation. One of the things I learned from watching her, as I have also observed in every other religion I have personally witnessed, is that the most corrupt, destructive, and amoral force in religion is generally the bosses and the operatives, not the parishioners. Name the issue affecting Catholicism, for example – divorce, contraception, gay rights, abortion – and polls show that rank-and-file Catholics are light-years ahead of the robed and brutally hypocritical executives who run the corporation. Which is why ordinary Catholics are among those supporting the gay rights law that Baltimore's Catholic CEO promises to torpedo.

Like leaders of other global enterprises, church rulers are resolutely bringing up the rear when it comes to matters of societal morality.

Memo to gay marriage opponents:

Go ahead and waste your precious years on this earth fighting gay marriage if you want to. Poison yourself with meanness. Suffer in fear. Bring discredit and shame upon the God you claim to follow. Bash your head against the thickening foundation of gay rights until you've beaten yourself senseless. It's your life to waste. 

Allowing gay marriage is going to be the law of the land. You cannot stop it, and you're in hysterics because you know you cannot stop it.

Last week my state, Maryland, became the eighth – with many more to follow – to legalize the right of gays to marry. The meanest of the mean, like you and the Cardinal of Baltimore, now promise to give voters the opportunity to re-lower themselves into the dark ages via a referendum on repeal. Ultimately it won't matter. No matter the number of state referenda to repeal or not, no matter the outcome of the inevitable ruling by the current Supreme Court, in the end, no matter how long it takes, as with slavery and denial of women's voting rights, the irrefutable movement for plain fairness in marriage will prevail, both in jurisprudence and in practice, in Washington and in your town.

There is not a damned thing you can do about this. So go ahead and choose to piss away the gift of your own humanity if you like. It's your life.

I'm interested in losers.

I think they are more interesting than winners.

Well, no, I don't mean exactly that. Because winners are interesting in unexpected ways, too. Winning, you realize, rarely turns out to be what the winner expects it to be.

But what I mean about losers is that they are so unexplored and under-exposed. A team or a candidate or a contestant wins The Big Prize and we learn all about their long struggle, their inspirational grandmother, their hard personal choices, their personal daily routine for getting up in the morning and making green tea or oatmeal and doing their Winning Work. Winners want to talk about being winners and reporters want to report about winners and readers and viewers want to know about winners. For a few days or months or years apiece, anyway.

But losers don't always want to talk about losing, and when they do we don't hear enough about it. And we should, because I think it tells us a lot more than winners do.

For one thing, one of the hidden truths about winners is that they were losers, sometimes for a very long time, before they were winners. They tried and lost, tried and lost, again and again, while nobody was watching. They were invisible to nearly all of us while they scuffled along, disheveled and disreputable, and for years and years they kept on doing what they did, in the shadows, for reasons that I'm betting would excite us and teach us a ton if we only knew. That is, before they were suddenly pronounced "winners" by TV hosts and media columnists.

Moreover, losers who never end up winning have a lifetime of that kind of story. Decades and decades of sacrifice and failure and delusion and hope and screaming fights in the kitchen and quiet -- or crazed -- acceptance. If they don't give up, anyway. And even if they do finally give up and let it all go, that in itself is a hell of a tale to be told.

I'm thinking about all of this because my town, Baltimore, is still in shock from watching the Ravens miss a chance to go to the Super Bowl this year after kicker Billy Cundiff missed a 32-yard field goal with 11 seconds left against the New England Patriots. For you non-footballers, translate 32 yards as "a kick you can make with your eyes closed." A newspaper photo showed Cundiff, moments after his life-altering miss, walking toward the sideline, head down, body deflated, the picture of numb defeat. News coverage in the following days had him saying all the true and expected things: he couldn't explain it, he had no excuses.

But that photo of Cundiff raised all the other questions for me: What happened when he and his wife put their kids to bed after that awful day and shut the door to their own bedroom and were alone together with that moment? How does he weave that reality of public failure and humiliation, the worst nightmare of his entire career as an athlete, into the fabric of what is meaningful in his life? How does he see himself? What does he need from his life partner and his friends? How, if at all, does it change who he becomes and what he builds? How does he carry it, use it, release it, feel it? How will it affect the next year, 10 years, entire remainder of his life?

That's what I want to know.

 

So How Are Your Holidays?

What I love about holidays is that they can be rituals for celebrating the things that really matter to us. The rituals can be handed down or they can be ours to make, and of course they can celebrate anything: birth, religion, kin, love, sacrifice, the life of someone who has died, giving gifts, paying tribute, the fiery rush of igniting starry little flash-rockets in your back yard in July.

What I don't love about holidays is what I think a lot of us could do without: the pressure to feel good and to act happy when we are not, and when in fact holidays can bring up the very stuff about which we are saddest. And then there is the hard fact of the way some holidays plaster smiles and giddy anthems over human outrages: brutal conquest, land grabs, genocide, bloody crusades for assorted Gods, broken treaties, store stampedes in pursuit of plastic junk.

But to me that is no excuse for Grinchdom. For me, part of a soul's job is to rip the wrapping from a gift to receive core truths -- instead of allowing someone else's packaging to rule what you receive and what you do with it. Even though I do not believe Jesus was the son of God, I celebrate the qualities of Christmas that have to do with generosity and family and love. Even though I will fight all of my life against the legacy of the theft and ruin of this land by lying, genocidal self-deluders, I celebrate the aspects of Thanksgiving that provide a ritual in my extended family for our feasting on shared ancestry and crazy fun and caring toward others and lots and lots of corn pudding. I recently traded emails with a friend who has seen some well-meaning people strip their lives of most holidays for the sake of alleged political beliefs, and we both agreed that such single-minded excavation strikes us as fruitless and joyless.

So I hope that this season, whatever it means for you, brings you baskets of fruit and big handfuls of joy alongside whatever honest sadness comes up. And I hope that the holidays help to fire you up for making the world better -- by warming the parts of you that feel what is good and right.

Eye-Openers.

In searching for something else, I ran across this article about differences between European and Native American attitudes toward children at the time of the European conquest of North America. It provides food for thought about what has made modern capitalism, with its lack of soulful purpose and its machined inhumanity, possible. Here is an excerpt:

European observers were shocked by the differences between their child-rearing customs and those of the Indian peoples of the Eastern woodlands. There were certain superficial similarities. Native peoples, like Europeans, surrounded pregnancy with rituals to ensure the newborn's health, and practiced rites following a childbirth that Europeans regarded as perversions of baptism and CIRCUMCISION (such as rubbing an infant in bear's fat and piercing the newborn's tongue, nose, or ears). The differences in child rearing were especially striking. Girls were not expected to spin, weave, or knit, as they were in Europe, and boys were not expected to farm. Nor were children subjected to corporal punishment, since this was believed to produce timidity and submissiveness.

Maturation among Indians was much more enmeshed in religious and communal rituals than among Europeans. For boys, there were ceremonies to mark one's first tooth, killing of one's first large game, and a vision quest, in which boys went alone into the wilderness to find a guardian spirit. Many girls were secluded at the time of first menstruation. Among certain Southeastern tribes, there was a ceremony called huskinaw through which boys and girls shed their childish identity and assumed adult status.

English colonists regarded children as "adults-in-training." They recognized that children differed from adults in their mental, moral, and physical capabilities, and drew a distinction between childhood, an intermediate stage they called youth, and adulthood. But they did not rigidly segregate children by age. Size and physical strength were more important than chronological age in defining a young person's roles and responsibilities. Parents wanted children to speak, read, reason, and contribute to their family's economic well-being as soon as possible.

Infancy was regarded as a state of deficiency. Unable to speak or stand, infants lacked two essential attributes of full humanity. Parents discouraged infants from crawling, and placed them in "walking stools," similar to modern walkers. To ensure proper adult posture, young girls wore leather corsets and parents placed rods along the spines of very young children of both sexes. The colonists rarely swaddled their infants, and not surprisingly some youngsters fell into fireplaces or wells.

It goes on from there. I suggest reading it in its entirety. But you get the idea. The momentum toward today's treatment of 11-year-olds as consumer decision-makers was set early. The culture we now live in continues to pay dearly for its careless, randomized view of life trajectory, as if each of our 70-year episodes of life on earth is a mechanically-jangled course in material competency, or, alternatively, employment in servitude toward an autocratic afterlife CEO.

As it happens, I am now reading Of Water and the Spirit, a memoir of traditional West African ritual initiation by Malidoma Patrice Somé. It's some story, and it illuminates the point that consumer life unanchored in participatory meaning is one hell of a horrible way to starve.

But, like I said, I found the article about childhood while looking for something else. I was seeking information I remembered having seen about sleep patterns for a friend who awakens inexplicably in the middle of the night. And I found it: in the form of a New York Times op-ed by Virginia Tech professor A. Roger Ekirch. His basic premise, which I have also seen elsewhere, is that our idea of a continuous, unbroken, peaceful night's sleep is a recent one. Historically, insect bites, cold, and other unavoidable discomforts have made sleep a more normally fragmented proposition. In European colonial America, for instance, the nightly habit of a "first sleep" and a "second sleep," separated by a period of wee-hours wakeful activity, was commonly accepted.

So if you're awake and perky -- as I am at the moment -- sometime after 3 in the morning, there may be more reason for it than you know. In my case, my siblings and I had night-owl parents. But that simply begs the question of where they got it.

In any case, Ekirch's article might give you some things to ponder late at night. Me, I'm now going to bed. It's time for my First Sleep.

The Beat Goes On.

NEW YORK – This one goes as far back as the banning of the drum: the time when fledgling New World importers of African slaves deduced that banning their captives' use of drums would effectively cut out their hearts and their tongues.

A few centuries later, a mostly-white gentry in search of grand and affordable Manhattan real estate finds itself in a head-on collision with a proud, defiant and loud black drumming tradition in Harlem.

According to a story in Sunday's New York Times, this new drum war started a few years back when prosperous Gotham professionals, driven uptown by astronomical real estate prices, began buying $1 million co-ops in a new luxury building across the street from Marcus Garvey Park, home to a regular circle of African and Caribbean drummers since 1969. For decades every Sunday, weather permitting, a few dozen drummers and dancers (pictured above) have congregated to make a joyful noise. This failed to make headlines during the years when the neighborhood was drug- and crime-ridden and when the drummers' presence provided, in fact, a one-day window during which the littered and dangerous park could be used by kids and families. But now that the park is a groomed gem and the neighborhood is desirable, some of the new luxury co-op residents are making distinctly un-joyful sounds – some of them flagrantly racist – about the Sunday drum soundtrack that permeates their apartments.

Most of the complaints, the Times story suggests, are queasily resentful, as in I understand that we're new here and these folks need their drumming thing, but do I have to listen to it my entire Sunday til 10 pm? But at least one email that circulated among co-op residents asked, "Why don't we just get nooses for every one of those low-lifes and hang them from a tree? They're used to that kind of treatment anyway!"

Like I said, this goes back to the bloody beginning: the guilty rage of white privilege, the defensive rage of black suppression. We black American men – ex-slaves, whether we like it or not – want our damn drums back. Wealthy American whites – beneficiaries of slavery, whether they like it or not – want to have what they want without paying dues for what has been done unto black communities over the years. "The market" is no more a solution to this in 2008 than it was in 1808. In a society of truly balanced economic and cultural power, this entire defiant-ex-slave-versus-sheltered-ex-slaver dynamic would go away, replaced by simple consideration among societal equals, neither of whom would have anything to prove or to deny.

I have to say, as a passionate participant in an outdoor Washington, D.C. drum circle myself, the Garvey Park 10 p.m. stopping time sounds problematic to me. The circle I play in ends at 9, and if I lived across the street I'd consider that plenty late. If you have infants or young kids, you want them asleep by 7 or 8. If you want quiet in your own living space, you're unquestionably going to often feel crowded, annoyed, or pounded – depending on your mood – by eight hours of nonstop ensemble drumming every Sunday.

At the same time, it is the drummers who guarded the park and who helped to usher the neighborhood into its now-improved fortunes in the first place. Further, the well-heeled newbies who recently bought into the block knew what they were getting into, or could have if they'd checked.

What we have here in the drum battle on Manhattan Island is a new furor over old and unsettled matters of racial and social justice.

And that's the name of that tune.

Thanks to David for the tip.

What Race-Blindness Looks Like.

There was an interesting piece in the May 27 New York Times about a new report from a nonprofit adoption advocacy group saying that a federal law promoting race-blind adoptions harms children of color.

According to the Times story:

"The report, based on an examination of the law’s impact over a decade, said that minority children adopted into white households face special challenges and that white parents need preparation and training for what might lie ahead. But it found that social workers and state agencies fear litigation and stiff penalties under the law for even discussing race with adopting couples. As a result, families often do not get the counseling they need. It also found that states have ignored an aspect of the law that requires diligent recruitment of black parents.

"The report recommends that the law — the Multiethnic Placement Act, which covers agencies receiving federal dollars and promotes a color-blind approach — be amended to permit agencies to consider race and culture as one of many factors when selecting parents for children from foster care.

"The report was issued by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a nonprofit adoption advocacy and research organization based in New York. Several child welfare organizations — including the Child Welfare League of America, the Adoption Exchange Association, the National Association of Black Social Workers, Voice for Adoption and the Foster Care Alumni of America — have endorsed the report.

"The report points out that transracial adoption itself does not produce psychological or other social problems in children, but that these children often face major challenges as the only person of color in an all-white environment, trying to cope with being different. 'The idea of being color-blind is great, and we’d all like to get there,' said Adam Pertman, executive director of the Adoption Institute. 'But the reality is that we live in a very race-conscious society, and that needs to be addressed. We can’t simply pretend that the problem doesn’t exist and leave it up to the child to cope.'"

Behind this issue -- in addition to the selective use of 'race-blind' policy as a conservative vote-attractor -- is a long-running battle over whether children of color are better served by being adopted by any qualified family that wants them or by a family judged to be able to support their cultural needs -- which often means a family of color or a white family that is particularly well-prepared for the issues of raising a child of color.

On one side is the argument that children of color, who sit for years in agencies waiting for permanent homes (the Times story reports that black children are 15 percent of all kids but nearly a third of children in foster care), need to be placed in loving families. Right now. Period. We know that most white potential adoptive families want white children, and will often take foreign-born white or Asian children over American-born black ones. (For a brilliantly absurd portrait of this preference, listen to the "Babies Buying Babies" segment of the "Matchmakers" episode of the NPR program This American Life that aired on January 18, 2008.) And so, the argument goes, why should the already-long wait suffered by eligible black children be made even longer by filtering prospective parents by race?

On the other side is the position that children of color are often harmed by being adopted by families who, despite their love for the child, are clueless as to how to nurture the child's ethnic self-image or how to prepare the child to deal with racism. (Every time I see a wild-haired black child whose non-black parents obviously have no idea how to comb or care for black hair, I can't help but ask myself, "What else don't they know about what this child needs?")

Both arguments make some sense. But what we need to look at, I think, is why so many American children of color are in this position in the first place. Why are public agencies overflowing with children of color? Why is there the perceived need for a fire sale on black kids? Why is there an incentive for many adoptive white families, beaten down by the waiting period for white children, to take a child of color about whose cultural background they have little interest and even less knowledge? I've nothing but respect for adoptive white families who passionately embrace, with loving determination, the cultural responsibilities that come with adopting, say, a black child. But let's not forget why American children of color are in such ample supply for adoption. It has to do with persistent family-crushing poverty and drug problems in communities of color, and with our country's non-race-blind policies on drug crime and public school support and joblessness. I'd love to see as much federal passion for creating racial justice along these lines as I see for creating "race-blind" adoption rules.