I am queer, western canadian, disabled. I have autism and depression.
For most of my early life I grew up LDS, I spent almost a decade as a
catholic, two years wandering around liturgically minded non-catholic
churches, and for the last 10 minutes or so I am Anglican.

Each of those identites, is an outsider, I am white and occasionally,
I am male, so that I have known privlege, and engaging myself in this
church, is a way of extending my privelge. For the longest time—i used
agricultrual metaphors of snipping to describe how I felt about my
place in these contexts; I felt like the coyote no longer in the
wilderness, at the edge of the a field, picking off the calves of lazy
farmers, that old trickster, who is fed so that he does as little
damage as possible; in this church, in t hese clothes, reading these
texts, making this choice...and you know self identyfing with the
coyote and not with the farmer is an edgy choice, but I have come from
the wilderness, and come from the desert, and now I need to know where
I belong.

Sam Cooke, the soul singer, wrote this song called a change is gonna
come, I heard it a week ago, when I was thinkign about what I was
going to do with the three texts tht we have heard, what I was going
to say on Sunday, and I was at Yorkville, next to Roots, and this
song came on, and so I leaned on the doorway in the cool air
conditioning, while people came and went, I waited for the song to be
over, and I thought.

Here are the first lines of the song:
I was born by the river
In a little tent, and o
just like that river
I've been running ever since

I am not african american, and it is not the mid 60s, and I didn't die
like Cooke did, but that verse, in a song that I love, but which I
have not thought about for months, reflected where I was and where I
wanted to be. I was born on the NSR, to Cooke's Mississippi, and the
tent is obviously allegorical, but I have been running, shuffling,
desperate and unhappy—and the song continues, it talks about movie
theatres, about going downtown, about the banailty of the every day,
and he talks about the change for good that is going to come, and not
the change that he makes, but the way he sings it, it sounds like the
has done all he could and that is waiting for the change to come
externally, that he is willing to let go;

I have also been baptised, at least twice---I spent most of my early
life as a mormon, and continue to think like a mormon, study mormonas,
act like a mormon, the patterns and the desires of Smith, the clawing
towards a flawed and ultimately failed utopia have infected me, I
moved from the LDS to the catholics because I desisred structure and
liturgy, and in the midst of it's injustice, I was called to the
church of Day, of Berrigans, the tension between the long history,
the history of the rivers and tents—and the current practice, what
Cooke calls when he talks about going downtown was present, heavily
and weighting, a lead bib, a millstone around my neck,

(Kentucky Story)

on the ride home from that monastary, (and this story has become much
more public then it was in previous years, I was convinced that I
would never return to the church, would never be xian again, and here
I am, making another commitment, making another set of moral and
social comprimises. But the river is wide, the church is wide, and so
we cross it, and if we are blessed, a change is gonna come, a change
that allows for the potential of seeing god in the absensces, in the
brokeness, where he allows those who are chosen and those who choose
to be one and the same.



The voice that I will have, the voice that is found in my becoming
anglican, is discordant—it is not the smoothness or the exhaustion, it
is the prickly, the outside, I am still the coyote, I am still the
person whose sole mystic expereince was one of negaiton and absence,
which makes these three readings, the three discussions with tradition
and text, especially difficult.

They are readings of exclusion and inclusion, of desire and the
exhausting of that desire...they are difficult texts, texts of
improrpiety, excess, admonishment, theatrics, and frustration. But
they end in welcoming.

Jezebel, the first reading, the tradition and the culture has told us
what we should think of Jezebel, she is insatiable, she is difficult,
she cannot be contained, she has no loyalty---the OT reading that we
are given, with its tissue of long dead nations, and geopolitical
strangeness foregrounds the idea of Jezebel as a liar, a theif,
complicit in the murdering of another, if not guitly of murderrr
herelf—can I admit something heretical, something difficult? I am fond
of Jezebel, I admire her, because she is a coyote, because she
realised that no one would do anything for her, because she realised
that the tribe of Israel was against her, and in that desire to be
secure, at least economically---it is not in my capacity to forgive
her, it is not in my skill set to allow her understanding, but at
least allegorically, at least symbollically, I am closer to that
difficult woman, that woman skiled at guiile, who used everything in
her power to maintain her staus, as limited and as broken as it could
be.

It is too easy to compare Jezebel with the Woman in the gospel—the
woman who might be one of the surfiet of marys, but who is not
named—Jezebel has authority, gravitias, wily skill—and so she becomes
a named person, a named person enamoured of her own power and her own
desires. We can understand control and we can understand committing
acts of transgression, of violence, to maitnain our turf, our
otherness—the coyote eats the fatted calf, because he is hungry, and
because the calf is not under control, and the farmer kills the coyote
to further this protection, and authority transfers, on the blood of
each—like a thick line of red in the snow, like entrails on the
grass...

But the woman in the gospel, that sacred woman, that holy woman, she
frightens me, and being here, talking to you, in these clothes, a week
after corpus christi, admitting that my skills are not enough, that my
isolation will not protect me, that I need a community, that I need
the bodies—the ideas, the souls, the minds, but esp. The bodies of
believers, together.

Jezebel held her own will, her own desire, and her own skills to have
her own land—she is a tale of control, there is a despration, an
eroticism, an untold joy, and a masking sorrow in the woman who cleans
the feet of Christ, an excess---but there is also a loss of self, a
grounding away from then desires of herself, for the desires of
christ, whose eventual sacrifice gave birth/ripped open the tissue of
the world.

I always think of that gesture, the jars of oil, the funerary as
erotic act, the connecton b/w death and life, as an almost camp
gesture, as a out of control means to an end that is still fogged
over, it is not an act of someone who has ever known the coyote, it is
not the wary and cagey hope of Sam Cooke, it is the gesture of someone
who escapes from what is proper and right: “If this man were a
prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is
touching him—that she is a sinner.”

We live in the world, and in this living, Christ is miasmic, his body
is our body, and the service we construct for each other lacks this
excess—it should lack this excess, and so we move forward, we move
forward together, in the mirror of the woman, like the river of Cooke'
we go on running, and like how the river runs, and like how we move, a
change is gonna come

This is the change for me, this change in the agreeing to be loved by
you, and for you to love me, for my excesses and my strangeness to not
be absorbed, but to be listend to—seperate the sheep from the goats,
and I am neither a sheep or a goat; and I am no longer willing or able
to be sperated...this is my public decleration—a declaration that
someone who is queer, in all senses of that word, who is crazy, who is
ambigious about the nature of god, about Christ, seeks to make public
that he will work through the ambuguity, the realtionality no longer
alone, but in the context of Christ Jesus, and Christ Jesus seen in
the history, in the traditions, in the words and the ideas of
Anglicanism: This commitment is found in the epistle: But if I build
up again the very things that I once tore down, then I demonstrate
that I am a transgressor. 19For through the law I died to the law, so
that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; 20and it
is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the
life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who
loved me and gave himself for me.

But it is also found in the words of Judith Butler: The point is not
to stay marginal, but to participate in whatever network of marginal
zones is spawned from other disciplinary centers and which, together,
constitute a multiple displacement of those authorities.” Will you be
my marginal zone; can my disciplinary centre by Canterbury—because I
am convinced that the church is polysemic, and strange, and beautiful,
difficult, holy, self defeating, and redeemed through the body of
Christ; I am convinced that I want to be part of it's strangeness, I
desire not its wholeness but the wonderful fracturing and coming
together, the attempts at completeness, and the realizing that though
we are the body of Christ, we will never be whole: