Mikeology

Just as I expected to celebrate the move into my new home this week, I learned that a special friend from long ago had died from cancer last April.

As it happens, WaterFire Providence was celebrating the fight against cancer this weekend. Downtown was teeming with cancer survivors, cancer fighters, and their loved ones. After saying good-bye to some house guests, I walked over to the Capitol and the riverwalk with my camera.

I sobbed for my friend while taking these pictures of tributes and dedications.

I hope to have more to say soon.

I’m not female (surprise!), I don’t live in a depressed area, and my parents don’t live in my basement.

But the plight of a middle-aged woman hit home, nevertheless: Her friends have drifted apart, and she wonders how to find new friends or maybe a companion.

Less imaginative or innovative advice columnists might suggest joining an existing group which either doesn’t meet one’s needs or which requires conformity to someone else’s agenda.

But Salon.com’s Cary Tennis tells her not to await help from elsewhere:

I say build, not join. There probably isn’t an existing community for you to join that would meet your needs. You are going to have to build it.

Why?

Current community structures work for some but not all. What about the rest of us?

Over the years, I have encountered numerous “ex-gay” proponents who aren’t being changed at all by Exodus. Yet they wage culture war against sexually honest people because they resent that, during their time as openly gay or lesbian individuals, no one offered them a pre-packaged cure for loneliness. Perhaps no one nearby offered them a safe hangout, a friendly hiking club, an affirming prayer group, or a ready-made dating partner.

That’s a passive and self-focused attitude; it’s a near-guarantee of failure. Says Tennis:

Because our architecture and planning are so bad, many of us are literally starving for society. If your architecture and city planning were good you couldn’t be isolated. It wouldn’t let you be isolated. It would channel your purposeful movements past other groups so that you have regular, low-stakes contact at a safe distance and in motion. But in the face of bad architecture, bad planning and isolating patterns of work, transportation and consumption, we need to make artificial structures.

Life is not a fast-food restaurant, and healthy lifestyles are not served in pre-packaged happy meals.

Religious groups such as Exodus promise happiness in the form of pre-packaged conformity and claim that good health can be achieved through the consumption of emotional, religious, and therapeutic junk-food.

If you’re same-sex-attracted, feeling isolated, and wondering where to bond in healthy ways with others, don’t wait for community to happen — and don’t wait for someone else to define community.

Make community happen.

My friend Peterson Toscano warns of the environmental and Christian moral hazards of purchasing and consuming bottled water.

I share his opposition to the practical and moral evils of plastic: vast quantities of frivolously consumed petroleum, threats to wildlife, and the leeching of toxins not only into the bottled product but also into landfill groundwater.

But I also work out 3 or 4 days per week. And it’s a helluva lot easier to keep a bottle of water by one’s side than to surrender one’s elliptical cycle and walk across a room every 5 minutes to rehydrate. Some environmentally concerned or cost-conscious people reuse the same plastic bottle every day, but the food industry warns that re-used water bottles tend to contain high volumes of bacteria and degrade (i.e. leech their toxins) faster than new bottles. So whether the choice is to go plastic-free or to re-use, I find it difficult to do the right thing.

At home, I work long hours in my office and it’s a lot easier and more stimulating to keep a supply of bottled, flavored beverages on hand than to drink only tap water, cartoned milk, or glass-bottled OJ.

My friend Peterson seems to be calling me to a higher moral standard. Am I willing to follow — or is morality sometimes just too inconvenient in a society that has become addicted to throwing things away and poisoning itself in the process?

Composer Bear McCreary has posted the lyrics and history behind “Gaeta’s Lament,” a song that was sung by a seriously injured character, Felix Gaeta, a few days ago on Battlestar Galactica in the episode titled, “Guess What’s Coming to Dinner.”

Here’s a montage of clips from the song, which was scattered across the episode.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=P3gUY940chg]

McCreary recalls:

A solo bansuri states the Lament again as Gaeta goes under the bonesaw. The beauty of the melody plays in ironic contrast to the brutal severity of the scene.

However, the song truly takes form in Act 2. As Gaeta lays in his hospital bed, recovering from surgery and reeling in pain, he sings us the first Verse of his Lament:

• Alone she sleeps in the shirt of man
• With my three wishes clutched in her hand

When we return to him in the following act, he sings the next two Verses:

• The first that she be spared the pain
• That comes from a dark and laughing rain
• When she finds love may it always stay true
• This I beg for the second wish I made too

Later, after the scene where Natalie meets the quorum, Gaeta resumes at the Pre-Chorus…

• But wish no more
• My life you can take

…and finally sings the Chorus, with a stronger and more powerful performance:

• To have her please just one day wake

He winces in pain while repeating the line, and a solo bansuri picks up the melody, finishing the phrase for him. Then, Gaeta starts back at the beginning, suggesting that he’s been repeating this song endlessly.

The TV show’s fans have commented about the song’s role in plot development; but my reaction was more personal.

The song speaks to my own sense of loss over departed adult friends — and over a childhood spent in and out of hospitals, petrified with fear of the sick strangers, cold hands, and sharp needles that surrounded me.

The song also evokes memories of a song-filled religious community in my childhood that was gradually destroyed, from my perspective, by arrogance, vanity, and an increasingly mobile society.

I sometimes pray for the resurrection of that community, or one like it. It has yet to wake.

From Jesus Was A Liberal:

If Jesus said blessed are the peacemakers then why do more than 70% of the religious right support the war in Iraq and a potential war in Iran?

If Jesus warned that those who live by the sword shall die by the sword then why has Blackwater gotten rich serving a Christian president?

If the Bible prophesied swords shall be beat into plowshares then why does the religious right support huge military spending?

If Jesus taught to pray for your enemies and wish them well then why are we waging war to wipe them out?

If the Bible revealed that Jesus came so that there could be peace on earth then why do religious righters preach that anybody who wants peace on earth is working for the devil?

Rick has many more questions here.

Focus on the Family, the Southern Baptist Convention, and their spawn owe the nation some answers.