If you want to be complete, go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor. Then you will have treasure in heaven. And come follow me. – Jesus, Matthew 19.21 (CEB)
The pipes are frozen and the shelters are full as we gather in a squat to help deliver God into the world. We wait, we work, midwives of eternity beckoning crying hope into the midst of poverty. Swaddled in donated blankets, the child God first breathes the warmth of love in the frost of Empire. Seraphim sing hallelujah, proclaiming the reign of the poor and suffering, heralding the fall of Caesar. Joy to the world.
Queerness is the creativity of God. God as pure immanence; so close to the body as to become transcendent. Matter as spirit and spirit as matter. We are a world and in the world, the imagination of the universe creating and re-creating itself again-and-again, learning to find joy in its self-creation. We are a body, a body in loving-becoming, re-membering through holding one another, in our blossoming and sunlight and retreating and moonlight. Queerness is a you-and-I, a we in difference, not one by sameness but one by love, a compassion that takes all into-itself as an unfolding of infinity.
Beloved child of God, cosmic creation incarnate in powerlessness, the ember of faith faintly burning like a wood stove. She was born a carpenter’s daughter, her hands calloused and dirty, caked with soil and wet with rain. Hoped-for sibling of humanity, she kneels in the mud of the creekbed and enfleshes herself in weakness. Holy kid of the occupied slums, she throws mercy against power and compassion against war. She threads a whip of cords and strikes against the alien beast, the idol being birthed from Caesar’s occupation: quantity. “Give everything to the poor and follow me.”
Queer love breathes at the edge of the possible. Sophia (incarnate knowing, creative relationship in energeia) is enfleshed in infinite mossy worlds. The owl hoots eternity into the divine beauty of queer longing beyond the beyond of the present. Being becomes becoming in the halo of eros, a fragment of the good-in-itself becoming the breath of persons in intertwined belonging. The earth is my body and I am the earth. Gaia is trans, a Sophia of free forests. In all queer folk I see the breath of God; and in our queerness we create a new heaven. Queer love whispers the promise of the impossible.
Future ancestor of justice, love-loving-love becoming creaturely in a conspiracy of friends. Sister-spirits uproot division and serve peace, turning their back on ambition, outmatching hate with recognition. “Turn the other cheek” is another way to say, “hit me again, I dare you.” Awaited-for future home, washing feet and welcoming flesh into the eschaton, take and eat, receive and drink. We are one flesh, sharing a meal together; we are one spirit, drinking wine together. This dinner we share, the literal body of God. We sojourn rest, clothed in the cosmos, playing tag in the freedom of the kindom.
The kiki is an ekklesia.
I’m sorry it’s had to be this hard. But if I hadn’t walked this path, who would I be? At the moment I felt at the center of my life, the dream still braided like sweetgrass in my memory. I remembered Duffy’s challenge. Imagine a world worth living in, a world worth fighting for. I closed my eyes and allowed my hopes to soar. I heard the beatings of wings nearby. I opened my eyes. A young man on a nearby rooftop released his pigeons, like dreams, into the dawn. – Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues
Image: Christ of St. John of the Cross by Salvador Dali (1951)
Fish In the Afternoon 