This Gay, Liberal, Atheist, Canadian’s Sermon on Grace and Compassion is the Best I’ve Heard in Awhile

Following is a guest post from blogger David Roddis on the tension between Evangelicals and the gay community. I asked him to post today because I love his writing, and because most of us in the Christian world refuse to listen to people like David. Listen, and enjoy.

“Pivot Chord”

In Zen Buddhism there’s a parable of being in a boat. All around you is the circle of water, and you believe that’s all the water there is. But it’s not, it’s merely the water that is visible to you. The water extends further than you can imagine in all directions, beyond the horizon, and becomes the ocean; the ocean looks entirely different than what you are now seeing, believing you see everything.
What you see as complete is incomplete. There is no moment when this is not true. At any moment, believing that what I see is complete is a delusion.
~
Mark invited me to guest author for this blog, and my first thought, after being flattered, was: Why on earth would anyone here be interested in my thoughts and opinions?

This is partly my natural diffidence. I have been at certain odd times in my life the sort of guy who writes a one-man show, complete with original songs, takes it to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, then spends the entire day of the opening praying nobody will turn up.

It’s not that I don’t have interesting and engaging thoughts and opinions—I do, and for proof I could recount any number of white nights, alone in my apartment, regaling myself with interesting and engaging thoughts and opinions by the cartload, until it becomes, frankly, de trop.

You know that must be true, because —why would I lie?

And I’m old, pushing sixty-four, though studiously avoiding the Tilley hat and wrap-around sunglasses, and once you know my age, and because you are good people, you’ll automatically pay me a little bit more attention. Skeptical, at first, but certainly polite.

Americans aren’t throwing around the respect like it was oxygen. I get that. You didn’t dump all that tea in the harbor to pay respect where it isn’t due, after all.
But now that my world is composed of “Young People” and me—in fact, I think of all of you as “millennials,” it saves time—you may just allow that I’ve had a few close calls, fallen in and out of love, lost a few people dear to me, made countless mistakes, done my share of laughing, crying and dancing; also hanging out in those cheap joints, doing that thing you do with less clothes on, and, ta-da! I’m still here to talk about it. That’s not, as they say, nothing.

So feel free to make with the slightly forced and polite but in the end reasonably sincere respect.

I’m Canadian, and what we don’t know about polite could be laser-engraved on the head of a pin, with room left over for a couple of dancing angels and the Lord’s Prayer, in a display font. If someone punches us in the nose, we say, “I’m sorry, Madam, it appears that you wanted to fully and rapidly extend your right arm while clenching your fist —and I’m just guessing, here, but did my nose get in your way? My sincere condolences!”

I once bumped into a phone booth, apologized to the phone booth, and no one batted an eye.

Revolving doors defeat us. It’s just one big, hot, Canadian mess, all of us standing around chirping, “After you!” “No, after you, eh?” and so forth, which is why we wear so many layers and always make sure we have a light snack handy—a sandwich and maybe some vegetable soup in a Thermos flask—because you never know when the next Canadian Stand-Off will rumble in like the polar vortex and play havoc with your statutory lunch break.

We do things a little differently. Our political system goes like this: First check if there’s a Person Called Trudeau (PCT) hanging around. Then, find out what party he’s in—probably the Liberal Party, formerly exactly the same as the “Progressive Conservatives,” dressed in nicer suits, but times have changed. Now you must be careful to check: “Remind me, are the Liberals the ones with the human rights or….?” And your friend goes, “Yes, but then there’s the deficit.” And you go, “Hmmmmm, tough one….”

Anyway, if there’s a PCT, then you must vote for the PCT, and then right afterwards be instantly disappointed at his every move. Who does that PCT think he is, anyway, goldarn it? Putting on airs! That—tall poppy!

And we have no rules about term limits. You could vote for the same PCT, election after election, until the Trudeau kids had their own kids and Sophie-Grégoire went all Lesbian and ran off with Céline Dion and the Cirque de soleil, and the person who makes lunch for the Trudeaus retired and wrote their tell-all insider story, and it wouldn’t matter. You could have Justin in office, basically, forever. And seeing as they buried Queen Elizabeth decades ago, and what you see now is just a doddering papier-mâché puppet, this means she’d still be our Head of State. Hey-presto—fully up to speed on Constitutional Monarchy.

What else? I live in Toronto, Canada’s largest city, which is on Lake Ontario. If you hurled a rock directly across the middle of the lake, the rock would land in Rochester, New York.

So that’s Toronto. Moving along!

Then there’s Québec. Their slogan is “Je me souviens,” which means: “I remember.” And when they say they souviens, hoo-boy, do they mean they souviens! Québec was ruled by the iron fist of the Catholic Church from the very beginning through the 1950s, at which point they wearied of the abuse and the backwardness and the hypocrisy and the misogyny—you know, “Catholic Outreach”—and then came the Quiet Revolution, la Révolution tranquille.

At first this simply meant that Québecoise (that’s the women) could legally leave the house during daylight and were entitled to take a day off after the tenth kid, I think that’s right, and a definite improvement. But sure as God made little green apples and Charles de Gaulle, it soon meant the Front de libération du Québec, a Marxist-Leninist separatist group, and their subsequent terrorism, bombs, murder and a failed attempt at a coup d’état.

Oh, those French Canadians! Not a flicker of humor in an ice-castle full of them!
That whole FLQ terrorist episode happened in the early seventies, and it was serious stuff. The current PCT’s dad, Pierre Trudeau—yes they are kind of like the Kennedys, well done, guys!—invoked the War Measures Act, which put Canada in a state of war-time martial law. Troops in the streets, all civil rights suspended, detention without cause, search and seizure, the whole kit and kaboodle.

This brings us to Pierre’s most famous quote. In the midst of this crisis, with Canada under siege and two government officials taken hostage (one of whom would eventually be murdered), he was asked by a CBC reporter, “How far are you willing to go with this?” and Pierre, clearly peeved, pirouetted on his heel and snapped, “Just watch me.”

Now, this does not, admittedly, have the noble ring of, say, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” It’s not quite cracking that glass ceiling of, maybe, the Gettysburg Address. But it’s what we’ve got.

This is the pinnacle of Canadian temperament, our sharp-intake-of-breath moment. “Just watch me.” I invite you to try it out, should a suitable opportunity arise, and see if it doesn’t fill you with snippy, ineffectual Canadian-style defiance:

PARTNER ONE: Just how far are you willing to go with this leftover tuna casserole thing?
PARTNER TWO: Just watch me.
Whoa, you guys! Settle down!

Some people, probably conservatives, started a rumor that “Just watch me” wasn’t even his original idea, that he stole the quote from Gypsy Rose Lee. That’s a filthy lie. Her quote is, “Let me entertain you.”

At any rate, ever since the FLQ, Québec has gone quite passive-aggressive. She teases, acts the coquette: “Maybe je stay, pffffft! Maybe je go!” Québec bats her eyes, lifts her petticoats so we see more than the usual amount of ankle, then exclaims, “Oooh la la!” in a way that’s flirty and very Moulin rouge, but still makes you wonder.

I’ve left out all the Maritime provinces, British Columbia and the prairies, the Yukon and Nunavut, but that’s par for the course for someone from Toronto. I already bent over with my pants down so I could shine my sun on them, what more do you want, people?

Now, this is all very well, but quite obviously I’ve been putting off the moment when I admit that my initial hesitation had to do with common ground, or more specifically, my inability to find some. This is when I reveal myself as not just a Canadian, but a gay, nearly senior, liberal, snowflakey, radical left-winger Canadian who loves his country for all its faults and who is unabashedly atheist.

Not Dawkins-level, screaming at everyone atheist, but that’s about as much cushioning as I can do. I’ve tried using “humanist,” because I like to be something rather than not-something; a believer in the human spirit instead of a non-believer in the Holy Spirit. It flickers on and off.

And you are, many of you, good, friendly, welcoming-but-not-tolerating-fools-type Americans, passionate, a little dramatic at times but loyal to a fault, and many of you are also evangelical Christians, who are, and correct me if I’m wrong, here, a little stressed.

A little stressed that the American Dream no longer means what it used to mean, stressed that your values are under attack—good values like life, liberty and, not happiness but the pursuit of happiness—a little stressed that you no longer seem to be masters of your own domain.

You’re a lot like Québec separatists, in fact, and if you don’t believe me, check this out:

“Now or never! Masters in our own house!” says this poster from 1970s Québec.
Does that not ring true? Masters in your own house. That’s all you want, yet everywhere this simple desire, which is really the desire to be left alone, seems under attack.

I get that. And I get that you have been—we have all been—lied to, lied to by bald-faced liars who run the corporations that are the de facto rulers, the rulers of the rulers we voted for in our respective countries; lied to by the politicians who promise anything to get into power; lied to and surveilled and spied upon until actual rational, intelligent people not unlike you or I form Facebook groups claiming the earth is actually flat and it’s all a conspiracy.

I get how people can believe the world is flat, because what have we not been lied to about? They said the wealth would trickle down, and it didn’t, and they said they had our interests at heart, and they had only their own. After a while, being lied to, day in, day out, makes a person crazy.

When you think about it, we’ve all been gaslighted on an epic scale.
America has been a kind of monolithic culture, so it stands to reason that the assumption has been that your values are European values, and your religion is Christianity and the color is play by the rules. This is not a criticism; the world has turned upside down. America has been the shining city on the hill, and now a bunch of people are rattling around your borders who want what you’ve got.

And not just people: desperate people.

You have something that I don’t have: you have the comfort of your religion. That is something eternal and rock solid, and you can take comfort in the beliefs you have in common with other Christians, beliefs that date back two millennia. Belief in the redeeming power of Christ’s sacrifice, certainty that the awesome sacrifice he made brought us back to God.

Christians believe in Original Sin, which is not just bad thoughts or actions, but eternal separation from God. Sin is the pain of that separation, pain that humans and God suffer equally.

That’s how I understand sin. We weren’t content to be with God, we were arrogant and restless, we had to find out for ourselves. So we ripped out God’s heart and found ourselves alone in the wilderness we had created.

To be separate from God is to be in the place called hell, and it doesn’t have to be a physical place. Buddhists suggest that when you are filled with anger that boils over, when you’re filled with hatred, or ravenous hungers and desires, you are at that moment in hell.

You have these spiritual truths to sustain you. I was brought up Anglican, which is the church Henry VIII started when the Pope wouldn’t annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon due to its non-consummation, because Henry was, and it’s hard to sugar-coat this, lying. He fired the Pope and made himself head of the church. That’s why Anglicans never mention “the Lord” or “God.” It’s considered at least irrelevant, definitely confusing, and probably in poor taste. So I was at a disadvantage right from the start.

But you are mostly evangelical Christians, which means that you want to spread the word. You want everyone to know this good news and share in Christ’s redemption. Perhaps that’s where the frustration sets in, because there is going to be a brick wall that you hit where your desire to spread the word, your passionate belief, is blindsided by someone else’s polite refusal, blank stare or cry of outrage.

This bumping up against each other place is where we learn interesting things about freedom and rights, and what the difference might be between those two concepts, in a democratic —a pluralistically democratic—society. Freedom and rights don’t occur in a vacuum to one set of people only and they are not absolute. One must be weighed against the other.

How we decide which freedom, which right, is to prevail at any moment is the crux of every head-butting impasse, and there are potentially myriad instances in a day. But even if you don’t agree with me, if you believe some freedoms are absolute and there’s no debate possible, that’s when we must keep talking.

This is life or death. The point at which you most want to stop talking and working this out, to throw up your hands in utter exasperation and cry “Liberals!” and where I want to do the same but with “Conservatives!” is the point where we absolutely must keep talking.

I’m going to call this Roddis’s Law because it just occurred to me and the guy it first occurs to gets first shot at the naming.

How we decide what right or freedom gets precedence can be one of two things, I postulate: What is best for me / my group; or What is best for society as a whole, society being everyone that we bump up against, whether or not we like them.

Here’s a rather trivial example: The guy who refused to bake the wedding cake for the gay couple’s wedding. The court ruled very narrowly that he had the right to refuse on that occasion. I don’t like that decision, and I think it’s wrong mostly because it unintentionally seems to de-legitimize equal marriage. But far more clever legal minds than mine pondered this important cake question and ruled for the baker, narrowly, for this one occasion.

I’m a big boy of sixty-four and I will live with it. Seriously, are we going to stand beside the guy with a gun to his head, “Bake the cake, dude!”?

Meanwhile, at the reception:
“This cake tastes weird, and I’m getting a headache.”
“It’s Resentment Cake with Intolerance Icing, garnished with sprinkles of pure Homophobia.”
“Ahhh, nice! Have you choked down a piece yet?”

I don’t aspire to this. Who am I to say he can’t express his disapproval? And was this battle worth it? Do we have a baker more sympathetic to equal marriage? Is there a way both sides can express their disapproval without this being so difficult and bearing so negatively on society? I don’t know the answer.

But it was still worth making the point, because more people are talking about it and working it out. The bigger issue, at least in Canada, is resolved, and cake doesn’t even come into it.

~

One thing I haven’t told you about myself is that I trained, early in my life, as a classical musician. I was going to be a concert pianist. I ended up being a piano teacher who played some concerts now and again, and I haven’t played a piano in years, but music, especially Beethoven’s music, is like my blood and my oxygen.

There’s a concept in music called modulation. If everything’s always in the same key it would get rather boring, so we need a way to make a transition from one key to another, a way of smoothing the path.

That’s what modulation is. You approach a chord as though in the original key but follow the chord as though it had been in the new key. It’s the musical equivalent of that special effect with the revolving doors, where you enter in your t-shirt and jeans, and leave two seconds later in a business suit.

All you need to do is find the pivot chord.

And our pivot chord, yours and mine, is called “compassion,” in my world, and in yours, “grace.” This is a palindrome, it reads both ways. I can enter your world with my calling card of compassion; you can enter mine with grace. This is our spiritual modulation.

Grace means to be granted the forgiveness that we don’t deserve, the unconditional love that we didn’t earn. Grace means we will never give up on each other, that we’ll keep talking, working things out, because we’re it. There’s no one else but you and me.

Compassion means to feel with, to feel that men and women and children cross deserts because they are a family, and to think, this could have been us. We all know what family means. We all know what it is to love someone, to be afraid for our children, to have our hearts broken, to want our lives to have meant more than a churning of foam.

There is no one in the world, in the whole family of humanity, who doesn’t feel these things.

~

You sit in the boat, contemplating the circle of water.  Then sensei – or God – strikes you on the shoulder.

You’ve awakened with a sharp intake of breath; you return to ordinary life with new clarity. You view the weed that pokes up through the concrete with the same astonishment as the rose from your garden; you see the wretched poor at your door as your own mother, father, child.  You realize that everything you experience is calling for your full attention, that there is nothing to be despised.

A famous Zen phrase puts it more bluntly: “There’s no place in the world where you can spit.”

 

David Roddis is a Canadian writer and artist. He is the creator of the blog  “A Slow, Painful Death Would Be Too Good For You (and Other Observations),” and has been serving up his snarky yet lovable personal essays and political satire since 2014.  He has just published a collection of his work under the same title, available online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other fine retailers.  He lives and creates in Toronto, Canada.