gramma

Ten things about the retreat I am on right now, at the Sisters of St John the Divine.

1. Library is full of the sort of things that my English working class g grandmother loved, and the sort of casual anglophillia her daughter picked up.
2. Reading the chapter master, in Edmund White’s My Lives, with its discussion of porn, bdsm, sublimation, and obsession—while looking at a mid 50s copy of that William Holman Hunt painting, both of us sitting in the middle of a sitting room with floral couches, embroidered chairs, and kitty themed coasters. Because of where I am, I carefully annotate how White’s lovesickness matches my lovesickness.
3. talking to Graydon, about queerness, and the church; he using the word gay and me worried about all the things I’m worried about, the discretion, the embodied sexuality, the problematic nature of how polite the Anglican church is, learning slowly, in my addled way, who gets fed and who gets none, & I didn’t point this out to him, but I was genuinely concerned that staying in the church was a moral evil. That it was no longer morally neutral. But Graydon, in his quiet and encouraging way, sat me down and we hashed it out. He claims that there is no one in the Canadian church right now, writing or thinking about queer sexuality as a comprehensive, explicit, and separate entity, and that entity as positive. That in this talk of marriage, and the bureaucratic/ecclesial language of same gendered blessings, something (I was going to say essential but I am not sure that anything essential) needs to be said about the tangled weave of desire, of bodies, of sexuality, of power, and of occasionally love.
4. Talking to Jesse over the baseball game about all of this, he points out that in this room, among the 12 of us, there are 3 gay men. Where are the lesbians? Where are those who are transgendered? Jesse is straight, and WASPish, he describes himself as wonder bread, but I think he’s right, there is a core of gay men in the Anglican and Catholic Churches, but are they gay men who view the world to rough to live with/in?
5. Graydon talked about how he came out because he was working with people who were courageously dying in the middle of the plague years and he felt a moral obligation to be public. He talked about how being a chaplain meant that he avoided the politics of the parish.
6. This is not like Kentucky, I have only prayed once, and I have not gone outside. I don’t talk very much, meals are silent, and I spend much time in my room, reading.
7. It is a small place, and it reminds me of hospices and hospitals. Maybe that is because most of the nuns are in their 70s. I don’t mind this. The food is good, people are kind, and there is a smart and wry loveliness about them. I have a napkin ring that is mine for the weekend, and I get it stuck at the back of the cubby it takes two nuns to retrieve it, and one gently chastises me for it. I don’t have any shame in asking them for help, and I don’t feel guilt at the chastisement.
8. Everyone else brought work; I have essays to write and reading to do. I am behind on much of my work. I was going to go on a tech fast, but that did not last longer then a day, but my phone and my lap t op and my work books a re at home. I should feel guilty about this, but I don’t.
9. I still feel uncomfortable with much of the discourse that happens here. I am unconvinced that God is talking to people. I think that she is mostly silent. I am disheartened at how little people think about the political implications of what they are saying. I am bothered about the use of the word Holy Land instead of Israel.
10. I see the nuns, and I see this new crowd of people, and I think to myself—in a decade will this exist. Is my role in the next decade to work as someone who ushers the ending of the church, and after that decade to keep the memory somewhere in between my shoulders? If I do that, will it calcify and harden fat over flesh over bone, into a hump?