Or Forever Hold Your Peace
(c) Melina Magdalena 2009
I’m writing today from within the eye of the needle.
What is a needle? A needle is a tool. I use needles for sewing, for knitting, for mending, for weaving. I have used a needle to apply paint to a tiny surface. I have used a needle to prise a splinter out of my daughter’s foot, to scrape grime from beneath my fingernails. When I was ten or eleven a doctor used a needle to stich my lip in three places where I had bitten through it during a somersault on Kathryn Turner’s trampoline. After giving birth to my son, two surgeons stitched me up down below because I had torn myself badly in my haste and inexperience.
When I contemplate needles, the point of the needle comes immediately to mind. However, the last few weeks has also brought the eye of the needle to my attention, when I was able to assist three dear friends with threading their needles for sewing projects, including the chuppah we created for our Promise Making Ceremony and Celebration.
That’s another nice metaphor; gentler than pushing someone’s barrow for them. Used without literality, I am sure I have helped many other people to thread their needles so that they could get on with whatever projects their life journeys had laid out before them. I know many people help me to thread my needles, too. The magic of this metaphor lies in the possibilities not only of what might be done with that thread once it’s in the needle, but what kind of thread it is in the first place. I could for example, use a golden thread to sew a silver lining to the clouds that beckon on the horizon, for example.
I’m wondering what a needle has to do with gaining access to heaven.
To a micro-being, the eye of a needle must seem vast. Poking the point of a needle around in a Petri dish teeming with micro-organisms must be the equivalent of dropping bombs on fragile human communities. It wreaks death and destruction. This hardly evokes an image of heaven to my mind.
To a human being, whether she is rich or poor or somewhere in between, the eye of a needle is tiny.
In any case, we none of us gain access to heaven through the eye of a needle (Mark 10:22-25). A needle binds two pieces of fabric together, allows us to make things of function and beauty. It’s not a means for gaining access to heaven, and I will always prefer the concept of using the tools we humans have at our disposal, to create heaven on earth. It’s that old Tikkun Olam again.
I’m wondering about the meaning of life.
It’s a frequent preoccupation of mine, but I have reached my own conclusions and beliefs. They are not incompatible with those of some mainstream religious – at least where they are concerned with the implications for how I choose to live my everyday life.
I believe that life goes on before, during and after. I believe there is much more to Life than what we conventionally acknowledge – perhaps there are many more kinds of life which are distant from the narrow focus that human beings on this planet choose to include within the concept.
As to the belief that my actions today will determine my future – I have seen this enacted time after time within my present, so I do not discount the idea. However, I don’t have a strong or rigid idea of where “I” will “go” after “death”. I do not believe that my life journey is leading me either to the door of heaven or to the gates of hell.
Many people do believe this of course. They purport to know with maximum efficiency and minimum effort, just what rituals and choices they must make in order to determine their eventual destination. And this leads me to a whole set of other questions.
For people with such beliefs, just how does a person gain entrance to heaven? Apart from the gauzy gaudy idea of a reward for hard work and difficult choices, what purpose does heaven serve, in the life of a person here on earth?
Does one gain entrance to that heaven by hurting … judging … rejecting … through bigotry … building walls to separate … burning bridges to enlarge an already existing divide … directly condemning … explicitly refusing to affirm other people’s endeavours?
Is the quality of being saved more about belonging to a special chosen group of people, or is it more about the moment of salvation, which propels one’s feet upon a journey to seek commonality and to foster inclusion amongst those whose eyes remain closed to the possibility that they themselves are valued and loved, as members of the human family?
What people can be so arrogant as to assume that their feet alone keep to that true path, whilst simultaneously claiming that it is their mission to serve? How can they live lives of questioning, judgment and rejection; blinded to the fact that in doing so, they project their arrogant, parsimonious and uncaring attitudes onto everyone who is different, and on those who had believed that they were loved?
What kind of life is it, to be ever blinkered by the shadow of heaven hovering above, beckoning one away from temptation, removing from one’s gaze, every possibility that might lead one from the path?
I’m wondering about the rigidity of people’s beliefs when they encounter the truth about the nature of homosexuality and same-sex unions.
In the lead up to our ceremony, more and more people began to refer to it as our “wedding”. At the beginning, I was uncomfortable with the idea that we were going to “get married” – I preferred to mask reality behind the euphemism of making promises to one another. It felt good to be defiant in the face of the legal and religious opposition to our union. This awkward position between a so-called lifestyle choice that is too often linked with promiscuity, and a social convention of mandated coupledom was certainly a queer position for us to take.
I grew to accept that what we were doing was the same as what other couples choose to do – to seal our bond by openly and publicly stating our intentions to nurture one another within a life long partnership. I also grew much more comfortable with the idea that we were getting married, and I felt excited that we were having a wedding to ceremoniously celebrate this deed.
Although I had felt a little unhappy that “my” guest list was so much shorter than my beloved’s and that the distance most would need to travel precluded their attendance, the irresistible urge to be part of our wedding drew people from my circle into our lives with an ever strengthening undertow, the closer we came to January 17, 2009. It was so affirming for me that so many of my invited friends and family members made the effort to attend. I felt surrounded by their well wishes, love and support.
I’m wondering why someone who refused to make a square for our chuppah, and refused to give an rsvp to our promise making ceremony, on the basis that she believed that what we are doing is against god, might still choose to attend.
My beloved and I are the kind of serious people who practise liturgy often in our daily lives. We took a long time and expended a lot of energy in writing our promises, and in working out the logistics and specifics of our ceremony. This was important to us.
We wanted, for example, to welcome everyone who came to be part of our day. We specifically wanted to rejoice in what we were choosing whilst affirming the choices that others have made and the places they find themselves in that are different from ours. We have both spent large portions of our adult lives as single people. We know that this can often feel like a contested and defensive position. We know that people move in and out of partnerships and likewise feel ousted from the norm because of these circumstances. We know both first and second-hand how it feels to live under siege because we are in a minority. In a world where we as a lesbian couple are not always welcome and free, we wished to extend an open-handed welcome to others.
We had worked from the assumption that those who had chosen to be present had their reasons for their presence. Equally, we reasoned that people who chose not to attend had reasons for their non-participation.
It never occurred to me that people might choose to attend and stand in open judgment as witness to what they label as being “against God”. I can only ask what they hoped to achieve in so doing. Was their God paying attention at the time? Did they receive extra Brownie points in their favour? Or was it their intent to cause harm to the people who had invited them to be part of our special day?
I wonder whether they can understand that the fact they were invited points to the value we place on our relationship with them; the esteem in which we hold them; and our hope that this may be reciprocated. Certainly from my side, I chose not to invite people who have attacked me in the past, just because they happen to be family members.
I’m wondering about the motivations of someone who would place responsibility for attending our ceremony on those who invited her, rather than being accountable for her own uncomfortable feelings. If we hadn’t wanted her to attend, than surely we would not have issued an invitation?
I get, that it’s not pleasant to be the bearer of unwelcome news. I get the moral courage that it takes to stand against something that seems to be receiving overwhelming support from all other quarters. This ought to be obvious to anyone who changes his or her vantage point from that of rigidly religious righteousness to that of renegade.
It is my contention that people who fail to act upon that moral courage, as we did, for example, in celebrating our union and inviting our friends and family to be part of the occasion, can’t really claim to possess that moral courage.
It pisses me off that the rigid religious fail to acknowledge the effects of their actions and beliefs upon those they judge. They either fail to recognise that their choices are hurtful, or act in full knowledge that their actions will cause pain and distress. They fail utterly to stand in the shoes of someone else, and are incapable of contemplating how hard it is for others to stand up and be counted in the face of their implacable hatred and homophobia. This seems blatantly hypocritical and prideful, when the message they speak from the other side of their mouths is a message of love and acceptance.
The commonalities between our two positions are clear to me. Both of us feel we must defend our positions in the face of hostile or indifferent opposition. Both of us feel that it is only by digging in our heels and refusing to bend that we are being true to what we believe about ourselves. The difference lies in whether we choose to interact with and embrace our antagonist, or whether we hold ourselves separate and aloof in disapproving judgment.
I never imagined someone might offer to turn her back at any portion of the ceremony that she could not bring herself to affirm. Such rigid judgmentalism had no place in my thinking about our day.
I’m wondering why someone would explicitly choose his view of morality over his relationship with a person he had known all of his life.
On the one hand the stance this person chose shows integrity of the upright, courageous kind.
Never mind the fact that as the unknown member of this couple, I was automatically placed under suspicion and judged to be of dubious character and reputation before I had even met any of these people – I am used to being cast in that role. Yes, it hurts. And no – I felt no compunction to overdo my niceness and prove them wrong. I was quite willing to crawl into my shell and give nothing away.
I wonder how much it cost him, to make this stand, and to hammer in this point of contention, dismantling with hard intent, every point of connection that had previously existed between him and my dearly beloved?
I think this was perhaps the easier moral position to take. Facing the situation openly and honestly would have taken a different kind of courage, and would have been less destructive. He was not even willing to test the waters and seeing whether indeed any connection of value remained between them.
There was no specific place in our ceremony, where we demanded that those present affirm our relationship. We never asked for anyone who disapproved to make his or her disapproval known. Ours was a rewriting, a reframing and a refashioning of a traditional wedding ceremony. As women standing openly and proudly outside the laws of our religions and our country, we felt no compunction and little desire to adhere to traditions and forms that hold no meaning for us. We chose to develop a ceremony whose every facet would hold meaning for us.
I’m wondering whether any of them got it at all on the day, at the park, amongst the crowds of rejoicers.
