After I started practicing law in Birmingham, in 1973, I sometimes dropped by The Plaza bar and music hall just off Highland Avenue on Birmingham’s Southside. I met a group of people who came there every Wednesday, or maybe it was Thursday night. One proved very interesting. A talented actress, active in historical preservation, Linda sang in the choir of a very old-line Christian church on the south side of Birmingham, and she preferred women to men.
I included her in a email blast that contained the Maybe getting old brings wisdom, maybe just getting old, but the internet offers a chance at a very long if not everlasting life post at this blogspot. She replied, and then it went back and forth.
Hello, Sloan-- This latest of yours with Henry Miller's musing about age is really fine, and I'm glad to have a reason to get in touch with you again. I was very outdone with you lately, as you surely understood. But I've thought about you and hoped you were okay.
Having only read Tropic of Cancer surreptitiously on a train coming back from New York in my high school years, I'm not a Miller scholar. He was an important person in Anais Nin's life too, but one volume of her diary was more than enough for me. His thoughts on getting older are just right, though, I think-- except I take exception to his quote from Picasso about growing up at 60 and then it's too late. It had better not be too late, because I date my own arrival at grown-upness even later than that, and on it goes. I'm very fortunate.
It sounds as if you're reaching a peaceful plateau too, and I'm very happy for you.LindaSloanHi, Linda -
Thanks.
Hope you are doing well and the situation in your church improved.
I never read Miller before bumping into Eric Rittenberry’s Newsletter, but I did read Catcher in the Rye riding a train from Minneapolis to Memphis in the summer of 1963, to see my college girlfriend and meet my future in-laws: her parents and brothers and sister and their dog.
Some peaceful in my life, but mostly not. Much of the not is various distresses in my body, but plenty going on around me aggravates.
I was in my 45th year when my bell got rung in a way I actually heard it, but did not remotely understand it. Then came lots more bell rings.
LindaThe situation at my church is interesting. We can discuss. Do you still live in the same place?sloanYes, I’m still there. We can dine one night soon, I hope. You pick a day.
Linda
This coming week is crowded for me, of course, but after Christmas Day we can have a date. I'd like that, if it's okay with you. In the meantime, I want you to have a peaceful and joyful Christmas. I'm content, at this point, to be where I am on the calendar and the medical charts. It's a blessing. I so want you to be at peace.
Sloan
Peace comes my way in small batches, because my body is not in good working order, on the one hand, and some of the shit I deal with, on the other hand.I was raised in royalty and wrote a book about some of that early this year: The Golden Flake Clown’s Tale.
The clown lived longer than Golden Flake, but without Golden Flake, the clown probably would have washed up on a beach near Key West after being nibbled on for a while by crabs and other sea creatures.After Christmas is fine for dinner. I wish there were no holidays, because they kink my day to day rhythm.LindaThere is a royalty hierarchy of Heaven, as you know.sloanI don’t remember anything about that and only hear rumors spread by religious people and angels :-)Linda" .. . angels and archangels and all the company of Heaven . . ." I am of course swamped in the language of the Church. I also believe in the temporary earthly embodiment of what is a mystical spirit. Starting with Jesus, who tried to show us how to live in it but was hideously thwarted. But the message survived, unbelievably through the centuries.I also timidly entertain the idea that the whole business is a myth, but a myth based on some kind of unknowable truth.sloanNo myth, but hideously twisted inside and outside Christendom. Touched some in today’s reflections at my blogspot to be dispersed later.LindaBoy, you nailed it-- "hideously twisted". Just what I was trying to say. I'll find your blogspot.Sloan
LindaMerci! I'll dig into it later this afternoon, after I make an attempt at secular obligations.
Backing up a bit.
Not hideously twisted everywhere, of course.SloanOf course, not everywhere, but in your church, from what you described, and I was attacked by a demon for telling you how I perceived your minister.About three weeks ago, I attended a wake service at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in The Tiny Kingdom of Mountain Brook, which was my mother’s church mentioned in my blogpost, which I emailed to you this morning.
The service was for the son of a member of a friend.
I hugged her in the reception line in the meeting hall and said I did not see how she could be doing this, for I would not have been able to do it after my son died. I started crying and walked to the nave and pulled down a kneeling bench and kneeled on it, as is the custom for Episcopalians when they enter the nave, and I wept more.
I thought about my brother’s daughter, named Sloan after me and my father, who had painfully died during Covid shutdown of ovarian cancer, whom I had loved like my own child. Her memorial was held outside at St.Luke’s, and it was nice, and I did not feel torn up by having to endure a service in the church. I griped to God that my niece was taken, and not me in her stead.
People I knew came into the nave and sat in the pew in front of me, and I moved up to join them. The woman I sat beside said this was her church, and I kinda wished it wasn’t, because I wasn’t in the mood.
I said this was my mother’s church, and it was where I was confirmed when the church was on Church Street in Crestline, and I had a lot of history in the church. Good memories, she said. Mostly not, I replied.
I said, many years after my son died and his remains were buried at Elmwood Cemetery, members of my family, without telling me, performed a memorial for him at St. Luke’s, and what kind priest would go along with that without the father involved? The woman sitting beside me said there are sinners in churches, too. I wept silently for maybe 5 minutes, for my son.
The service went back and forth between church hymns, prayers, Bible readings, and prayer book recitals, and deeply personal sharing by family members and friends of the deceased. The churchy part felt really off to me, whereas what the people who knew and loved the departed soul said was quite moving.
When a priest talked about the resurrection of the physical body, I cringed but said nothing. When a priest quoted from the Gospels that Jesus had told his disciples that he had other flocks, of which they knew not, and he was going to attend to them, I said softly, “And where were those other flocks?” The woman beside me said this wasn’t the right time to ask that question. I said no more and steeled myself to endure the rest of the service.
We sat about in the same spot where a woman I had loved dearly and I sat in 1999. We met in the church in 1998. She was raised Baptist, and like my mother, she finally had enough and joined St. Luke’s.
She felt if she did not attend Sunday service, she would die and burn in hell.
She kept going back and forth trying to decide if I was a Christian or an infidel, which included not being a hard-core capitalist, even as she kept telling me that God was telling her to leave me alone about that, because I was working for God.
Early in our courtship, she told me that God had told her that a man was being brought to her, who would put God first, and her second. I replied that I was that man, and she looked like she was wondering if I might be the Devil? I asked her, if it worked both ways? Would she put God first? She looked like a deer caught in headlights.
When we became intimate, our passion literally was not of his world, and whenever she started in on me about not being a good Christian and/or capitalist, it became hell on earth for me. I told her from time to time that God would break us up, if she did not change her way of thinking.
Her evangelical Christian brothers kept trying to get her to leave me. As did an associate minister at St. Luke’s. Her mother really liked me and said I reminded her of St. Paul. Go figure :-)
Anyway, we sat in the pew that Sunday in 1999, listening to the rector and junior priests and lay people speak of St. Luke's being in financial difficulty and the congregation needing to tithe more.
I had told my lady love that Mother Theresa told her followers not to solicit donations for their work with the poor, for if they did God’s work, God would provide the money. And, my mother had told me that Lee Graham, who founded St. Luke’s, detested giving sermons on tithing, and he only did it once a year, when the Episcopal Diocese required him to do it.
A lay person in the St. Luke’s tithing cabal quoted Jesus, “Be a generous giver, good measure pressed down.” I felt like I was stung by an asp. My lady love jerked straight up in her seat. That passage had nothing to do with giving money to a church.
When the collection plate was passed, my lady love pulled out a pre-written check from her purse and wrote a note on the back of it to the rector, a renowned theologian who had left a more conservative denomination to be an Episcopal priest: “Payment almost stopped, please call me.”
I knew the rector from having met with him weekly in his office when I was in the black night of the soul in early 1998, and was suicidal.
One time we met, I told him that I recently heard in my sleep, “The reason you are having this experience is because you once were Judas”.
The rector said, “That could not have come from God!”
I asked how he could know that for sure?”
Looking like a deer caught headlights, he said he could not know it for sure.
Sometimes he advised me, sometimes I advised him.
I suggested we set that aside, and asked him to tell me his take on Judas.
He settled down, said we all betrayed Jesus, and he thought Judas’ mistake was killing himself, for God would have done great works through him.
I said, and maybe we would not have heard of St. Paul?
Deer caught in headlights.
Back to the tithing service in 1999.
I mailed the rector a note, saying I thought Jesus was misquoted. The rector mailed back that many people in the church had really liked the service, I was in the minority.
My lady love did not have a heart to heart with the rector.
Shortly after, she spent the night in my apartment for the first time. Before that, we slept together at her home. I felt her staying over with me was a major leap forward in our relationship.
I woke up in the wee hours, and she was gone. I dressed quickly and ran out of my apartment and the building in my sock feet and into the street and caught up with her slowly driving her car away. She looked terrified. I asked her what had happened? She said God had told her in her sleep, “You are not the one.”
About a week later, she told me that God had told her in her sleep to tell me that Adam must cling to God for both Adam and Eve, and let God discipline Eve.
I didn’t want to hear that. It seemed really unfair. Yet, I knew just how difficult it is for women to be on a world where Eve is blamed for the fall of mankind.
When I was a boy, my mother told me that she started smoking two packs of Pall Malls a day when she was fifteen, to rebel against her Puritan parents.
My mother became an Episcopalian to rebel against her parents and their Southern Baptist Church. She took her children with her to St. Luke’s. She made me attend church services, instead of Sunday school class, which I had loved at Mountain Brook Baptist church.
One Sunday night over dinner, my father asked me what the church sermon was about that day? I had no clue. I hated church services, and spent them off somewhere in my imagination, fishing and hunting. My mother gave me the look.
I was twelve.
She enrolled me in Confirmation class, which was every Saturday afternoon. I hated school, and now I hated church.
Through me, my mother had to prove to my father and his and her parents that she had made the right decision.
When the Bishop came to St. Luke’s to confirm my class and give us our first communion, my parents and their parents were in the pew with me.
The bishop called my confirmation class to the communion rail. The body of Christ wafer went down okay. However, the blood of Christ wine went down my windpipe and I was strangling to death.
I somehow willed myself to be still and not cough, and stand up and somehow walk back to the pew showing no emotion.
I pulled down the communion rail and knelt and closed my eyes and begged God to save me.
My mother was vindicated.
I felt hideous.
During my second year in law school, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer, which had spread all over her upper body. There was nothing medicine could do but make her comfortable.
When I was in college, she had told me that she called off the divorce, because her mother told her, “If you divorce Sloan, it will kill me.”
Hideous takes many forms.
Eve merely did what God designed her to do.
A poem up and leaped out of me a few years ago, to remind me to keep taking my own fearless and searching inventories."Bi Polar"
the world's favoritemood disorderthe cause of allhuman ails,including wars,if the demons aren't counted
bi polar disorder,the destruction of thesouth pole,the feminine,the north pole,he ain't beenright in the headsince she's been gone
Some time passed, and this arrived:"Eve's Answer”Vexing TruthLife is Poetry,Poetry is Life,There's no more to say,but that wouldmake Goda really dull boy,now wouldn't it,Eve?So, Eve,What say you?After all,You have been,still are, blamed,for everything that went wrong withhu - MAN - i - ty.Well, do you really want to hearwhat I gotta say?Is this one of thosebe careful what you ask forpregnancies?Well, is it?Probably, but saywhat you wish -I s'pect you needto be heard.Heard?Funny you mention ears.Yes, ears.Such important receptacles.Yet filled with concrete,shit, propaganda, beliefs,certainties, well,let's not leave outSUPERSTITIONandRELIGION,now should we?By the way,where do yasupposeGod came from?Or, out of?
And,why do ya s'poseI made Evein my ownIMAGE?'Cause Adam wasso bored and dull -so ... predictableHe was BORING!!!the shit outta me!!!That's why.
NowShusssssh -Don't go round quoting me onany of that -I've had quite enough ofthe religious rightta last methe rest of foreverLindaThat rings in my head as a theatrical musical title that I remember from my youth but had never seen-- I'm sure I was too young to know or care about it. But it rings in my head right now after reading your poetry.Ain't been right in the head since she's been gone, hmm? That might just sum up the ills of the present world: the power of women is rising and is deeply resented and feared by a bunch of males, yourself outstandingly excepted. Not even the present world-- more like the world since humans started walking upright.Oh, Sloan--- Do you mean to tell me that your niece Sloan has died? I'm so terribly sorry-- I know you loved her very much.About my church: We'll talk about it, but at this moment I think you may have sensed something that's implicated in it: another assault on its life and polity by the block-headed right (political and theological right, that is). But many of them are catching up with the rest of us and are getting bored with their new, young minister (BORED, as you would say), who is plainly struggling with some inner conflicts of his own that swim around in a Baptist-like broth.I must get on to other things at the moment, in the midst of this fascinating business with you. I do hope you have a good, really good, day.SloanYes, my niece died in tremendous physical pain, and I had words with God about not switching me for her.I don’t know if women are moving forward, or not. But I say it's crystal clear that men had many chances and look at how America and the world are today, so I say women should be given a chance to fix things, or not. I keep going back to all women crossing their legs until things improve, citing St. Paul’s preference for celibacy, and if things don’t improve, the human species dies off and the planet and angels don’t have to intervene to save the planet from the species that depends totally on the planet for its survival.No, I have not been picking up anything about your church, and I hope I don’t, because I got pretty roughed up internally by the demon hanging out around that young minister.Many Christians have told me the Holy Trinity is all male. If so, how do He reproduce, except by cloning his own self?When I was dating the lady I met at St. Luke’s, I attended a few Sunday school classes, and in one I said, in Judaism, the Spirit of God is called Shekinah, gender feminine, meaning, the Holy Spirit is the female side of God, and that started some women smiling and talking, and even one man seemed smitten.I suppose it was better to go about it that way, than to say the Holy Trinity is gay, like St. Paul?Ciaosky
sloanbashinsky/@yahoo.com
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