TIME TO CHANGE BLOG SITES
This is my last Rollan's Censored Issues Blog notice here on Blogger where I have had difficulties since the new format which I don't fancy. I have just started a new site McCleary's Alternatives
at
rollanmccleary.wordpress.com
Its first feature is Cannibal Skies, Zombie Apocalypse. Thanks for coming here and enjoy going there.
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Friday, June 1, 2012
BREIVIK GAY…. AND OTHER
INTERNATIONAL PROBLEMS
BLOGGER DELAY
I can honestly say that
the latest suspicion to arise in Norway’s trial of mass murderer Anders
Breivik, namely that he is a repressed gay, is one I had recently arrived at
myself and intended to write about here and shall finally say something about.
Not however before a few words about why I haven’t written this before.
First, I have been
obsessed with finishing my extended essay Solomon’s Tantric Song: Questions of
Spiritual Sexuality, which hopefully should be out later in June – someone is
working on the cover right now. Second, there were a few others things like
forecasts and assessments of current events that I thought might be more
important to deal with than any Breivik article. Third, I have had trouble with
Blogger itself. When they changed format around the time I obtained a new
computer, I put a tick in a box to cancel one article and it wiped out a whole
years worth of Blogs including what I had forecast/speculated about Israel this
year. I was able to get someone to retrieve one or two of the more important
articles which I may put up again, but it’s dreadful. There’s no restore
function for errors as in the earlier Blogger system, no way of contacting
Blogger itself which merely refers you to a Forum where I found some others
were complaining helplessly about my own problem. The net is not really a free
zone, we are in the hands of a controlling few, alas.
The latter would posit
major evil is assisted and promoted by actual forces of evil, even guiding,
possessing spirits as was almost certainly the case with the Florida cannibal
of recent news who was growling like a dog as he chewed his victim’s body. Surely more
than insanity and drugs were here. Just as there was when, high on drugs, Breivik
performed his massacre with voices in his head (angelic?) telling him he shouldn’t do
what he was doing. But even if angels were speaking to him he went ahead –
because he too buys into Scandinavian ideas of natural goodness. In his
disturbed mind he is a good man doing good for his nation even though (as
revealed by a documentary here on the massacre) a mid European associate with
somewhat similar political views still reported recoiling in horror as though
hearing the devil when Breivik rang him with some ideas and intentions.
BREIVIK IN A POST VIKING
WORLD
Jung famously perceived
the principle of compensation at work in lives and societies. If you blind
yourself to evil Scandinavian style then you risk producing monsters. And in a
perverse, negative way Breivik is the prophet or symbol he perceives himself as
being. Arguably he is unconsciously compensating things in Scandinavian
society, including a poor management of an inherited violence. The Vikings,
were particularly violent and “adventurous”. Scandinavians have now gone to the
opposite extreme, making criminal issues out of spanking a child and, at least
in Sweden, erecting what Julian Assange calls a society that is the Saudi Arabia
of radical feminism. While many of us would question precisely that, it does
seem the feminism may be getting out of control. Recently there have been calls
to address and refer to all children as “hen”, (it), rather than any defined
sex. Again one sees unconscious male rage rising against this. Breivik himself
has said against the rearing he received at the hands of his mother, "I do not approve of the
super-liberal, matriarchal upbringing as it completely lacked discipline and
has contributed to feminising me to a certain degree.". (Even while
writing this article the intolerably gruesome news from Sweden is that a man
suspecting his wife of an affair has cut off her lips and eaten them. Sex and
love are not necessarily the sweetness and light some imagine up there in "liberal", permissive Scandinavia!).
The fact is one cannot
turn the descendants of Vikings, once the terror of Europe, into domestic pussy
cats and lapdogs by modern law in a generation or two. There must be new ways
of canalizing and rendering conscious various unconscious masculine ideas and
archetypes. Scandinavia doesn’t have enough of these and the women themselves
unconsciously resent the situation despite the rationalizations of their animus
function – it’s notorious that despite the feminism so many go to the Mediterranean and further abroad looking for gringos (when they do it’s called their rightful sexual liberation,
marriage being widely despised in Scandinavia as “possession”) and often prefer
settling down with machismo
men to living with their own tamed but privately misogynist males. And some descendants of the Vikings do seem just tamed or weak. Take Breivik’s father….
No sooner had news of
the massacre got out than this undiplomatic sounding one time diplomat to
England and France was condemning his son saying it would have been better he
had never been born. But perhaps it would have been better if he himself hadn’t
been born!? By the time Breivik Jnr was
one year old the parents were divorced, and outside of some visits to France
Breivik saw his father but little. In fairness to Breivik Snr he is said to
have petitioned for custody of his son but was refused – expect the laws of
Scandinavia to favour women. (Julian
Assange does have some reason to tremble). Number one problem with this murderer,
long seen as kindly by friends at school, a protector against bullying, is
almost certainly he has lacked proper male/paternal influence. He is a case of
Vaterhunger, another victim of the Scandinavian free and easy lifestyles which
flee any difficulty in relation - the women too readily walk out of Nora’s
doll’s house and the men who don’t want to argue, let them go. When Breivik
didn’t manage well in life he just returned to his disliked mother’s not his
father’s home living like a hermit
remote from the world. Alienated friends suspected homosexual problems in the
withdrawal – they felt he had always been a bit effeminate and obsessed with
his looks (the gay painted pony type?) and he hadn’t been notable for
girlfriends.
BREIVIK AS AN AQUARIAN
“UTOPIAN”…SORT OF.
Whatever his orientation
Breivik is also the text book case of the eccentric Aquarius(b.13th
Feb,1979 in London) except that he isn’t just eccentric. He is forward looking
and, in his way, Utopian like Aquarians, thinking and speaking in terms of how
he will be seen in the future and how history and attitudes will unfold.
Unfortunately there’s a bit of method in his madness as there usually is with
Aquarians. There was plenty of madness in the likes of Tom Paine, much derided
in his own lifetime, but he did see ahead clearly enough on some things
including the welfare state. Another Aquarian Francis Bacon well and truly saw
the future, his New Atlantis inspired ideas foundational for America. Jules
Verne dreamed many details of history in advance. James Joyce anticipated literary trends.
All this can be helpful,
but the trouble is Aquarians are too often rigid fanatics for what it is they
decide is or should be – an all time prime example is North Korea’s recently
deceased Kim Il-Jong of North Korea who reduced a whole nation to a state of
almost unparalleled destitution and repression for its own supposed good while
he indulged himself. Aquarians, ruled by
different, revolutionary, Uranus are also open to anything and this will often
mean they incline like the Emperor Hadrian or Ellen DeGeneres to being gay. And
we know that as a group gays are trend makers even more than trend followers.
BREIVIK GAY TENDENCIES?
So we have two
questions. Is Breivik tapping into any real future and is he gay? As the second
question is slightly easier than the first I’ll cover it first. As said there's been talk of using makeup, vanity lack of girlfriends etc. This of course isn't conclusive - Latin men can prove quite vain. What about the birth pattern? Strictly
speaking we need the birth time that no one appears to possess to analyse for
gayness, but there are suggestive factors as things stand. Homosexuality falls
under the Uranus that “rules” Aquarius though among straights it could just
make for surprising behavior or proneness to accidents. But many gays do have
Breivik’s Mars square Uranus affliction. It’s what makes for the in-your-face
conduct and more reckless and kinky kind of sex of some gays. The massacre was
Breivik’s “orgy” of violence under Mars/Uranus. But it’s also an aspect which
assisted his technical knowhow to do it, Mars/Uranus people are technical round
sex the type that uses kinky sex instruments but the rifle with which he had
almost a personal relationship was enough for Breivik. Overall It would however
be more helpful to know if Brievik’s moon is in aspect to Uranus (which it
could be on his birthday if we knew the time) as this is a surer sign of
homosexuality and an associated will to separate from women.
Breivik’s Mars opposite
Black Moon Lilith is a strong warning of the already erratic disposition to
violence turning potentially demonic at the same time as it could issue from
some kind of Viking resentment towards angry feminist womanhood. Yet his cold
and conventional Venus in Capricorn could work against wanting to come out gay
and/or to experience same sex love as any aspect of his protest. A problem is
that on the one hand the loose conjunction of Breivik’s Sun with Mars renders
him keen to be rather conventionally male and belongs with his known interest
in sports (to help him keep nicely in shape apparently!). But his disharmonious
moon in Virgo and other factors could incline him to something more feminine or
effeminate. We must also recall that Uranus itself when as in his case dominant can incline to the
sexual extreme whether that will mean striking androgyny or a marked
masculinity. So Breivik could swing either way as he appears to have done.
As to the future, just
as I see Breivik as being an unconscious representative of a repressed,
politically incorrect but in context not unmeaningful anti-feminism, so he
represents awkward unconscious compensation towards something. This is the excessive, secularist, half, or
post-Christian rationalism which simply can’t and won’t accept certain core
truths. Breivik is mis-expressing and of course wrongly responding to certain
contemporary ideas. Yet he may still in his way be ahead of his time, Uranian
style, in recognizing problems not yet to be properly assimilated and
enunciated. It is not necessarily the mere “illusion” that politically correct,
liberal thought would make it out to be, to insist that a problem exists in the
West with such as immigration and multiculturalism. Nor is it necessarily wrong
to speak of them as entailing an “invasion” or at any rate some kind of
conflict. Repress even the expression words like “conflict” as discriminatory
and you court troubles of which Breivki is merely the harbinger.
Sadly, Breivik’s talk of conflict arguably perceives, Aquarian style
ahead of time, what eventually the complacent may be forced too late to realize
– there really is a challenge to be addressed by more than appeasement. Indeed,
since it seems Christians are on the way to become the new persecuted refugees,
the West would not be unjustified if it debarred Muslim immigration just to
make room for the massive influx of all those Christians and others the Muslims
don’t want near them and which the West is duty bound to be concerned with if it honestly believes in its own human
rights philosophies.
The influx of immigrants
to the West (six million Muslims now dwell in France alone and around 3 million
Turks in Germany) is inevitably controversial. It’s hardly racist to ask
questions considering the entire population of New Zealand is only around 3
million and the Irish Republic 4 million! We are finally compelled to ask can
and should nations be distinct or total hybrids or entirely new entities all
but defined by their immigrants who with their higher birth rates will soon
rise in proportion to the population? A quarter of all Breivik’s Oslo is a
ghetto of immigrants whether Muslim or other, and if and when an immigrant
attacks the native (as had happened to Breivik and people he knew and as has
happened in Sweden’s Malmo with a major crime problems it hardly dares
mention), one can almost rely on police to downplay or even ignore the offence
lest the truth appear discriminatory, “racist”, fascist or extreme. So justice
is not done and obvious truth unspoken in the interests of a convenience
calling itself tolerance.
This toleration is a
mere rationalist, secularist parody of Christian values. The open door to such
large numbers of people bids fair to become like the uprooting and (dis)placing
of entire nations, nations which, besides, wouldn’t themselves reckon to adopt
westerners on the same scale and certainly not tolerate their ways even as a
small minority. The persecution of Christians in especially (though not
uniquely) Muslim nations is now well nigh ubiquitous from Pakistan to Sudan,
and is a scandal of such proportions that a frightened and/or indifferent media
doesn’t deal with preferring to espouse the more trendy theme of denied gay or women’s
rights. Aid pours into Afghanistan but churches mustn’t be allowed there,
Christians are threatened with death, gays mustn’t exist etc. In Europe Britain
now has towns with some schools having seventy to eighty per cent overseas
pupils to the point English pupils scarcely have identity in their own land and
English is not spoken around them. This isn’t a true and enriching
multiculturalism, it’s merely a social inefficiency occasioned by the policies
of purblind leaders who don’t themselves live in or near the new ghettos.
Worse, at least among
some sections of Muslim immigrants, namely the more radicalized which I don’t
suggest most are but who can dominate the moderates who fear them, there is
hardly such a thing as immigration. Instead, it can equate to virtual
colonization (A mosque built belongs to the commonwealth of Islam for ever –
the principle has been a ground for raging disputes in Hindu India). The moment
is merely awaited when their own values, assisted by higher population growth,
can be imposed on the host nation, the process regarded as a religious cum
political duty. Meanwhile it can get protested anything great or small barring
the way to “acceptance” of these values is “prejudice”. This differs from the
outlook and contribution of most other immigrants to anywhere, but again
political correctness and the equality fetish must not be allowed to privilege
or prefer one group over another. Again, this is the merest parody of Christian
agape, one that parasitically and decadently draws upon its legacy.
The success of eventual
integration and/or the workability of multiculturalism despite the signs is the
one generalization political correct secularism allows itself. Otherwise it can
draw or allow no generalizations. While Rome burns it dithers with the UN and
the committee that demands ever more statistics and sociological surveys and
proofs. It denies the man of action, which the likes of Breivik think of
themselves as being, any meaningful role or voice. It denies the obvious and
commonsensical. It is unnatural, and unhealthy an invitation to the outburst.
If the West could have generalized from history and culture it would for
example never have wasted its time and been so long deceived by the behavior of
Assad in Syria. The West and its liberals if they were at all aware and able to
generalize should have anticipated the so-called Arab Spring would more likely
engender conservatism and desperate upheaval than democracy. Stubborn pride
alone prevents these interest groups from admitting their miscalculations and
the obvious truth.
Sometimes regretfully
one must just speak the language of conflict and accept its burden, something
which amid his many illusions Breivik does, though of course we should not pick
up a gun with him either. But one cannot trivialize or romanticize or rationalize
away major ideological and religious conflicts with all the barnacles of their prejudices in the style of the
Norwegian girl who, with the almost childish innocence of her nation in the
face of evil, concluded the docu on Breivik admitting she loved the variety of
interests and colour multiculturalism brings to her country. Much more is
involved than the variety of restaurants and cultural spectacles, in fact so
much more that it’s almost selfish to
talk that way. And until one faces the backlog of social and political
irresponsibility governing many current policies, nations risk producing and
half deserve the monster that Breivik, once supposedly quite kindly, has
become.
Making up for lost
Blogger time and keeping to a theme somewhat, everyone either has been or
should be reading Simon Montefiore’s book and the have read it persons now
include Bill Clinton and David Cameron, the latter oddly admitting to do it
backwards. While still writing Solomon’s Tantric Song, I have joined this very
wide reading audience for a deserved bestseller that covers a three thousand
year panorama of what is often pure horror. The account has sometimes appalled
me and sometimes had me in stitches but I feel I have learned a few things
along the way and it somewhat colours the above reflections. I can’t take the
side of the Crusaders with Breivik, but I can’t go in the opposite direction
and take the side of Saladin et al. Even this supposedly generous man like most
rulers throughout history has been glamourized and he crucified and tortured
people when it suited him. He was only rarely forgiving and mild. The rulers of
the Middle East seem mostly to have been Herods for murder, tyranny, torture and
lies and among the Muslims they seem to have rejoined the cause of jihad in
most generations even if they were personally the grossest decadents. Today’s
Puritanism is almost a novel phenomenon.
ISRAEL IN JUNE/JULY
Mentioning Jerusalem
leads me naturally to the point that Blogger also lost me an article I had put
out on prospects for Israel. I am not going to try to reconstruct its details
but just in case and for the sake of it I shall put its core astrological
observation on record.
The other place to watch
is what this month’s lunar eclipse might trigger for New Zealand. I don’t know
what is the right best chart of New Zealand but a widely used 1907 ones is
seriously afflicted by the eclipse. I mentioned in the erased material of last
year that some would-be Anglican prophet of Maori origins alleged he was shown
Wellington would be destroyed. He didn’t know in what year, but when it
happened it would be in June, he said. Only recently there have been more
shakings around Christchurch, so it looks like Wellington might be at some risk
at this time.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
CORPUS CHRISTI: THEATRE AND FILM OF CHRIST OR WHAT?
FROM DAMNED GAY JESUS DRAMA TO QUEER JESUS LOVE CRUSADE
Already previewed and debated, on the 28th of April the docu film Corpus Christi: Playing with Redemption is officially released in San Francisco. The film follows the Corpus Christi gay Jesus play and its reception since 1998. Though some early death threats to the play were always indefensible, any negative reception has been predictable and understandable. I have not managed to attend a performance in Australia and there have been altered versions over the years, but if as reported the play originally included such as “F- your Father, F- your Mother and F-God”, transports Jesus to 1950s Texas where he marries two (female) apostles, is seduced by Judas (did this inspire Lady Gaga’s Judas song?) and is asked by Philip to perform oral sex on him, then by normal standards obviously this would be considered offensive and mendacious in ways presuming on a tolerance other faiths would not extend to it.
If the “obviously” word doesn’t register it’s because supporters, placing the onus for controversy on the religious right, subscribe to implicit belief ONLY intolerance is sin and ANY propaganda serving gay aims is justifiable. Though critical acclaim has included the statement “in this show I found ....how one could reconcile being gay and Christian”, that’s nonsense. And indeed Christians gay and straight alike should never agree to, but rather protest, the hypocrisy of what has now become a virtual CC cult which is printing “I am Love” Tee shirts and promoting itself as a “campaign” against ignorance as though devotees owned a new gospel to rival or better represent the non-Redeemer’s love.
While there’s no reason to dismiss the expression “Gay Christian” as an oxymoron and, like the daughters of Zolophehad (Num 27:1) who successfully questioned Moses’ law, believers have the right to question individual issues like homosexuality, they don’t have the right to ignore the first Commandment by consenting to be inspired by or defended by profanities. Advocating CC is a form of idolatry to the extent it rates rights causes above God devotion and implicitly denies trust that things can be changed without secular assistance. The idolatry of rights to which support of CC belongs, is arguably registered –subconsciously - within the larger community by use of the rainbow symbol (a rainbow surrounds the divine throne, Rev 4:3) to signal LGBT concerns – traditional gay pink and mauve could suffice.
CORPUS CHRISTI: QUEER THEOLOGY BY ANY OTHER NAME
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Since some Christians, especially of revisionist theological opinion influenced by queer theory, ardently defend CC, the question is raised who owns not just Christ but truth as regards homosexuality and does truth matter here? Any truth to fact is easily blurred as Jesus is believed to have said nothing about the non-biblical word “homosexuality”, though as a gay theologian I deny that.
From both inside and outside the Bible I believe much that’s relevant today can be known without descending to irreverence and profanity to encourage dialogue on religion and same sex issues. But that same evidence (whose availability at this time I believe to be not accidental but providential) is as ignored, dismissed or censored as Corpus Christi playing the victim card isn’t. In fact, both the play and the queer theology that derives from the convoluted queer theory which unrepresentatively (even with elitist selfishness relative to grass roots needs), dominates discourse on all matters gay today through academe and publishing, is more or less where they want to be. That, according to the most outrageous of queer theologians, the late bisexual Marcella Althaus-Reid near conclusion of her The Queer God, is the hell zones from which to mount demonic attack on faith as “redemption”. (The Queer God, pp 164-171)
And yes, redemption is being played with by CC. The film’s title is correct if nothing in the play is, and......”many a true word spoken in jest”. Except that the devil is “father of lies” (Joh 8:44) and nothing is “true” for evasive, migratory “queer” theory: not fact, history, doctrine, gender or sex. It’s all negotiable, borderless, permeable, in motion, open and ironic, more bisexual than gay because to be “born gay” suggests something fixed and essential, not floating and relative.
By the same token Jesus, if and when not as in CC recognizing everyone’s divinity, becomes relative like queer theologian Patrick Cheng’s Christ, who might be Kwan Yin whose image, he says in his Net essay Kwan Yin, Mirror of the Queer Asian Christ sits on his desk as he writes theology - that is if the Holy Spirit isn’t Kwan Yin, a speculation queer theologian Elizabeth Stuart is open to. (Religion is a Queer Thing, p.25). The Net mission notice of the MCC Church in the Valley, North Hollywood, controversially declares, “We have discovered the Holy Spirit as Trickster and Mischief Maker... We attempt to practice a little mischief for God by following the Spirit”. The noisy Soulforce activist group, a sponsor of the CC film, is a prime example of queer apostasy which behind an appearance of openness is virtually closed to non-queer perspectives. (Years ago its site even refused all link to and mention of my groundbreaking published doctoral work on gay spiritualities, A Special Illumination (2004) as that would have been too ”commercial” for them. It would certainly have opened upon a few more Christian perspectives. I have also never heard
from the gay MCC church, another supporter of CC from the first).
INCARNATION: GAY PERSPECTIVES
.....But what would any specifically “Christian” perspective be? As regards Jesus himself, most essentially one not compromising incarnation and the related redemption as CC does. Whoever or whatever you assume “Antichrist” represents, denial of Christ as incarnate Son/Logos/Wisdom is somewhere involved (1 Joh 2:22). But just this is what Althaus-Reid’s hell zones queerdom spokespersons and some MCC representatives are involved with. Their materialist “body theologies” don’t give room to incarnation of divinity or embodied soul (pace Soulforce) – this would affirm something “essential”. Instead they embody ideas: compassion, inclusivity, political engagement etc that any person or deity like Kwan Yin might be appropriated to represent. There can be Christ Buddha. Christ Krishna and Christ anybody if it makes people feel together and good.
The reality, obscured by queer theologies and fundamentalist ones alike, and even a reason historically the churches fell into such confusion defining and explaining the two natures of Christ, is that they failed to acknowledge any esoteric or sexual principles. On 20th April England’s Guardian newspaper belatedly reported on Sussex University’s chaplain, the Jewish Christian Canon Paul Oestreicher whose Good Friday sermon declared “Jesus was probably gay”. I suggest there’s not much “probably” about it.
Churches and their councils have always failed to realize that to be incarnate at all and representatively for both sexes, to be the Logos(male) and Wisdom (female), Jesus had, humanly, to incarnate as a gay male. That is to say to be a female soul in a male body, which he was from birth and as good as told people he was when he mysteriously referred to some as born “eunuchs” from their mother’s wombs (Matt 19:12).
The eunuch word, unused by St Paul (who is more concerned with issues like recreational bisexuality and gay prostitution), is the nearest Jesus’ society had to the modern “homosexual”. By Jesus’ times it didn’t invariably mean either castrate or celibate, but it did signify an outsider to social/domestic norms - which all Christians may need to be but may lack courage or discernment to be. In the case of Christ, and precisely because he and his disciples believed he was divine, celibacy was inevitable as otherwise Jesus would be like boundary-crossing fallen angels who mate with women in Genesis. For other persons and circumstances there might be other arrangements as with the centurion and his pais who received a miracle, an episode giving every indication of Jesus encountering a gay relation. But there would not be that relation for Jesus and John, attached though they were. More on Jesus and homosexuality and proof for it presently. First let’s consider those Althaus-Reid hell zones and their happy days when His Satanic Majesty stalks the heavens as an angel of light for the undiscerning.
HEAVEN AS WITNESS AGAINST QUEER
On 19.11.11 Pakistan’s PTA banned the name Jesus from cell phones with obscene and offensive words. (Pakistan regularly harasses its Christians). On that day Saturn, traditionally planetary symbol of restriction and in religious contexts the devil, conjuncted the Jesus/Christ/Messiah conjunction of Jesus’ natus which registers across history for Jesus issues to this day. (More presently, but if you don’t know the extraordinary details of the birth it’s because Christians - who no doubt consider the Magi as disobedient to God as gay Christians - have been screaming abomination and secularists superstition so that the whole vital issue is censored out of range in one of the religious and information scandals of the century).
I rightly guessed that 28.4.12 would show something similar. Sure enough, after moving forward some degrees, by apparent retrograde motion Saturn is back conjuncting Jesus/Christ/Messiah for the day of the premiere. The devil’s in the works somewhere even if queer doesn’t see it. I don’t generalize from a single example.
A DAY OF ISHTAR
On the very day in ‘07 that the Mardi Gras Australian premiere of CC took place, blasted in advance by a Sydney bishop as deliberately offensive but defended by its Christian director as encouraging dialogue on sexuality, there was an eclipse. It fell degree exact on the Lucifer/Ishtar axis of Christ’s birth. And in certain respects Ishtar is – broadly - what and who much queer theorists worship. Althaus-Reid made offerings to images of the Egyptian cat goddess Bast (according to body theologian Lisa Isherwood’s Introduction to Dancing Theology in Fetish Boots, 2011), Elizabeth Stuart can write of God being so frustrating – you catch her scent now and again but She disappears.
CORPUS CHRISTI AND THEATRE LIES
The eclipse preceding the very first and postponed premiere of Corpus Christi (which finally took place 13.10.98), fell conjunct asteroid Lie in Christ’s birth data. Lie itself is opposite Christ’s Part of Homosexuality and asteroid Boda (marriage), both life issues that would always be challenged by various distortions, perhaps especially through theatre and the entertainment industry. Lie is, and the eclipse was, in Leo the theatre/entertainment sign. Recall it was a famously insolent dramatist, Marlowe, was the first to suggest Jesus lived like an inhabitant of Sodom.
MCNALLY AND A WILL TO SHOCK
That the intention of Corpus Christi was to shock and probably offend too, is betrayed by McNally’s data. At birth McNally (b.3rd Nov 1939) had what astrology deems a classic gay signature, Mars aspecting Uranus, but in his case inharmoniously so via the close afflicted square aspect favourable to recklessness and “in your face” attitudes. By what’s called chart comparison this same aspect “attacks” Christ’s reputation through the gay fantasy of the dramatist’s Uranus. It stands in less than a degree of affliction aspect to Christ’s Midheaven angle (his destiny/reputation) which McNally’s Mars then aggressively conjuncts.
THE HEAVENS AND BEING GAY FROM BIRTH
I have explained elsewhere on this Blog and in Testament of the Magi the respectably scholarship supported means by which has made it possible to pinpoint the data for Christ’s birth and read that data in traditional and also modern ways employing bodies still unknown and unnamed in Christ’s day. But because all time and languages are one (to at least God!), the modern input works and vividly to this day.
Any remaining mysteries about Christ and homosexuality are dispelled by the extensive evidence emerging from the patterns, including the close connection of Born and Saris (eunuch) across the so-called ruling planet of Jesus’ birth, a feature which bespeaks his self-identification as a born eunuch. Only recently, against all probability I have seen what looks like coded confirmation that the mysterious raca issue in the Sermon on the Mount, which I and others have long speculated implies condemnation of homophobia and cursing the faggot/outsider, is very likely that. Aramaic Raca was slang for faggot/effeminate. Suggesting the personal tensions and conflicts involved socially and personally for Jesus, a new asteroid Racah eloquently and argumentatively conjuncts Honoria (honour) and the Part of Coitus of men with women (the faggot is dismissed as lacking) while challengingly opposing The Part of Sexuality in the House of sex besides. Be that as it may....
THE TRAGEDY OF THE GAY DEBATE
The tragedy of the current gay debate is that it leaves the spiritual condition of gays caught between the nutcrackers of profane heretics seeking to liberate them and fundamentalists seeking only to cure them. Both in different ways deny the gospel truth that (even if and though some people are sexually undecided, challenged or bisexual) most people are born one way or the other and must work with and from that.
Unless it’s a case of drug or sexual addiction, God is not in the business of curing gays, and it’s falsehood and even cruelty to maintain otherwise. Nor can and will gays destroy religion, the family and civilisation – unless they go the way of directionless, amoral queer theory. It’s little short of divine judgement upon churches that the message “born that way” gets out through the sensationalist Lady Gaga rather than persons properly representing their faith. If praise is not given the stones will cry out (Luk 19:20). Likewise truth will out from any source if Christians won’t do their duty. But I have long realized that the fanatical, Pat Robertson style view of gays – everything up to and including they are devil possessed and cause cyclones – will never be cured unless and until there is the shock of realization that Jesus himself would today be considered gay.
A QUEER WISDOM, BUT NOT OF THIS WORLD
Yet almost no one is willing to consider and assimilate that fact unless via the distortions of the profane much as, anciently, only the contaminated messages of false prophets were eagerly received. I have recited before how, despite being published on gay spiritualities, I have not had reply from a huge list of persons and groups including the specifically gay MCC church who theoretically should have had every interest in my work. It is also apparent the wisdom of the wise and this world which God confounds (1 Cor 1:19) is unwilling to countenance the possibility that the skies might be witness to Christ and anything about him in acute revelatory detail besides. That would be one miracle too far. (After all, Dawkins might be amused).
When former editor and religious journalist Phyllis Tickle wrote me about my researches – not being gay she at least had the kind consideration to respond! – from years of experience with publishing she informed me there was no one she could imagine would consider such material if she were to recommend it. Then woe to the fools of faith (and unfaith) in the circles she knows, who in recent years have all too often published any lies and profanity about Christ for profit. Arguably people might search further and press harder if the subject was deemed important (which credibly to solve the mystery of the Magi after two millennia should be to the point of being historic), but that’s another matter.
As things stands, it’s just a case of “no room at the inn” over again. A very devout believer on whom I tested an early version of my work, admitted they nearly fainted out at certain implications and were so troubled they took it to Jesus. Later they alleged Jesus spoke to them about this and told them the reason people were not listening, and that the researches I have been dealing in is what the world is meant to know. At that point I had better rest the case and simply declare that Wisdom is justified of her children (Matt 11:19), though personally - in at least one thing like St Paul! - I can’t “suffer fools gladly”, especially not queer profane ones and fundamentalist fanatics.
Already previewed and debated, on the 28th of April the docu film Corpus Christi: Playing with Redemption is officially released in San Francisco. The film follows the Corpus Christi gay Jesus play and its reception since 1998. Though some early death threats to the play were always indefensible, any negative reception has been predictable and understandable. I have not managed to attend a performance in Australia and there have been altered versions over the years, but if as reported the play originally included such as “F- your Father, F- your Mother and F-God”, transports Jesus to 1950s Texas where he marries two (female) apostles, is seduced by Judas (did this inspire Lady Gaga’s Judas song?) and is asked by Philip to perform oral sex on him, then by normal standards obviously this would be considered offensive and mendacious in ways presuming on a tolerance other faiths would not extend to it.
If the “obviously” word doesn’t register it’s because supporters, placing the onus for controversy on the religious right, subscribe to implicit belief ONLY intolerance is sin and ANY propaganda serving gay aims is justifiable. Though critical acclaim has included the statement “in this show I found ....how one could reconcile being gay and Christian”, that’s nonsense. And indeed Christians gay and straight alike should never agree to, but rather protest, the hypocrisy of what has now become a virtual CC cult which is printing “I am Love” Tee shirts and promoting itself as a “campaign” against ignorance as though devotees owned a new gospel to rival or better represent the non-Redeemer’s love.
While there’s no reason to dismiss the expression “Gay Christian” as an oxymoron and, like the daughters of Zolophehad (Num 27:1) who successfully questioned Moses’ law, believers have the right to question individual issues like homosexuality, they don’t have the right to ignore the first Commandment by consenting to be inspired by or defended by profanities. Advocating CC is a form of idolatry to the extent it rates rights causes above God devotion and implicitly denies trust that things can be changed without secular assistance. The idolatry of rights to which support of CC belongs, is arguably registered –subconsciously - within the larger community by use of the rainbow symbol (a rainbow surrounds the divine throne, Rev 4:3) to signal LGBT concerns – traditional gay pink and mauve could suffice.
CORPUS CHRISTI: QUEER THEOLOGY BY ANY OTHER NAME
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Since some Christians, especially of revisionist theological opinion influenced by queer theory, ardently defend CC, the question is raised who owns not just Christ but truth as regards homosexuality and does truth matter here? Any truth to fact is easily blurred as Jesus is believed to have said nothing about the non-biblical word “homosexuality”, though as a gay theologian I deny that.
From both inside and outside the Bible I believe much that’s relevant today can be known without descending to irreverence and profanity to encourage dialogue on religion and same sex issues. But that same evidence (whose availability at this time I believe to be not accidental but providential) is as ignored, dismissed or censored as Corpus Christi playing the victim card isn’t. In fact, both the play and the queer theology that derives from the convoluted queer theory which unrepresentatively (even with elitist selfishness relative to grass roots needs), dominates discourse on all matters gay today through academe and publishing, is more or less where they want to be. That, according to the most outrageous of queer theologians, the late bisexual Marcella Althaus-Reid near conclusion of her The Queer God, is the hell zones from which to mount demonic attack on faith as “redemption”. (The Queer God, pp 164-171)
And yes, redemption is being played with by CC. The film’s title is correct if nothing in the play is, and......”many a true word spoken in jest”. Except that the devil is “father of lies” (Joh 8:44) and nothing is “true” for evasive, migratory “queer” theory: not fact, history, doctrine, gender or sex. It’s all negotiable, borderless, permeable, in motion, open and ironic, more bisexual than gay because to be “born gay” suggests something fixed and essential, not floating and relative.
By the same token Jesus, if and when not as in CC recognizing everyone’s divinity, becomes relative like queer theologian Patrick Cheng’s Christ, who might be Kwan Yin whose image, he says in his Net essay Kwan Yin, Mirror of the Queer Asian Christ sits on his desk as he writes theology - that is if the Holy Spirit isn’t Kwan Yin, a speculation queer theologian Elizabeth Stuart is open to. (Religion is a Queer Thing, p.25). The Net mission notice of the MCC Church in the Valley, North Hollywood, controversially declares, “We have discovered the Holy Spirit as Trickster and Mischief Maker... We attempt to practice a little mischief for God by following the Spirit”. The noisy Soulforce activist group, a sponsor of the CC film, is a prime example of queer apostasy which behind an appearance of openness is virtually closed to non-queer perspectives. (Years ago its site even refused all link to and mention of my groundbreaking published doctoral work on gay spiritualities, A Special Illumination (2004) as that would have been too ”commercial” for them. It would certainly have opened upon a few more Christian perspectives. I have also never heard
from the gay MCC church, another supporter of CC from the first).
INCARNATION: GAY PERSPECTIVES
.....But what would any specifically “Christian” perspective be? As regards Jesus himself, most essentially one not compromising incarnation and the related redemption as CC does. Whoever or whatever you assume “Antichrist” represents, denial of Christ as incarnate Son/Logos/Wisdom is somewhere involved (1 Joh 2:22). But just this is what Althaus-Reid’s hell zones queerdom spokespersons and some MCC representatives are involved with. Their materialist “body theologies” don’t give room to incarnation of divinity or embodied soul (pace Soulforce) – this would affirm something “essential”. Instead they embody ideas: compassion, inclusivity, political engagement etc that any person or deity like Kwan Yin might be appropriated to represent. There can be Christ Buddha. Christ Krishna and Christ anybody if it makes people feel together and good.
The reality, obscured by queer theologies and fundamentalist ones alike, and even a reason historically the churches fell into such confusion defining and explaining the two natures of Christ, is that they failed to acknowledge any esoteric or sexual principles. On 20th April England’s Guardian newspaper belatedly reported on Sussex University’s chaplain, the Jewish Christian Canon Paul Oestreicher whose Good Friday sermon declared “Jesus was probably gay”. I suggest there’s not much “probably” about it.
Churches and their councils have always failed to realize that to be incarnate at all and representatively for both sexes, to be the Logos(male) and Wisdom (female), Jesus had, humanly, to incarnate as a gay male. That is to say to be a female soul in a male body, which he was from birth and as good as told people he was when he mysteriously referred to some as born “eunuchs” from their mother’s wombs (Matt 19:12).
The eunuch word, unused by St Paul (who is more concerned with issues like recreational bisexuality and gay prostitution), is the nearest Jesus’ society had to the modern “homosexual”. By Jesus’ times it didn’t invariably mean either castrate or celibate, but it did signify an outsider to social/domestic norms - which all Christians may need to be but may lack courage or discernment to be. In the case of Christ, and precisely because he and his disciples believed he was divine, celibacy was inevitable as otherwise Jesus would be like boundary-crossing fallen angels who mate with women in Genesis. For other persons and circumstances there might be other arrangements as with the centurion and his pais who received a miracle, an episode giving every indication of Jesus encountering a gay relation. But there would not be that relation for Jesus and John, attached though they were. More on Jesus and homosexuality and proof for it presently. First let’s consider those Althaus-Reid hell zones and their happy days when His Satanic Majesty stalks the heavens as an angel of light for the undiscerning.
HEAVEN AS WITNESS AGAINST QUEER
On 19.11.11 Pakistan’s PTA banned the name Jesus from cell phones with obscene and offensive words. (Pakistan regularly harasses its Christians). On that day Saturn, traditionally planetary symbol of restriction and in religious contexts the devil, conjuncted the Jesus/Christ/Messiah conjunction of Jesus’ natus which registers across history for Jesus issues to this day. (More presently, but if you don’t know the extraordinary details of the birth it’s because Christians - who no doubt consider the Magi as disobedient to God as gay Christians - have been screaming abomination and secularists superstition so that the whole vital issue is censored out of range in one of the religious and information scandals of the century).
I rightly guessed that 28.4.12 would show something similar. Sure enough, after moving forward some degrees, by apparent retrograde motion Saturn is back conjuncting Jesus/Christ/Messiah for the day of the premiere. The devil’s in the works somewhere even if queer doesn’t see it. I don’t generalize from a single example.
A DAY OF ISHTAR
On the very day in ‘07 that the Mardi Gras Australian premiere of CC took place, blasted in advance by a Sydney bishop as deliberately offensive but defended by its Christian director as encouraging dialogue on sexuality, there was an eclipse. It fell degree exact on the Lucifer/Ishtar axis of Christ’s birth. And in certain respects Ishtar is – broadly - what and who much queer theorists worship. Althaus-Reid made offerings to images of the Egyptian cat goddess Bast (according to body theologian Lisa Isherwood’s Introduction to Dancing Theology in Fetish Boots, 2011), Elizabeth Stuart can write of God being so frustrating – you catch her scent now and again but She disappears.
CORPUS CHRISTI AND THEATRE LIES
The eclipse preceding the very first and postponed premiere of Corpus Christi (which finally took place 13.10.98), fell conjunct asteroid Lie in Christ’s birth data. Lie itself is opposite Christ’s Part of Homosexuality and asteroid Boda (marriage), both life issues that would always be challenged by various distortions, perhaps especially through theatre and the entertainment industry. Lie is, and the eclipse was, in Leo the theatre/entertainment sign. Recall it was a famously insolent dramatist, Marlowe, was the first to suggest Jesus lived like an inhabitant of Sodom.
MCNALLY AND A WILL TO SHOCK
That the intention of Corpus Christi was to shock and probably offend too, is betrayed by McNally’s data. At birth McNally (b.3rd Nov 1939) had what astrology deems a classic gay signature, Mars aspecting Uranus, but in his case inharmoniously so via the close afflicted square aspect favourable to recklessness and “in your face” attitudes. By what’s called chart comparison this same aspect “attacks” Christ’s reputation through the gay fantasy of the dramatist’s Uranus. It stands in less than a degree of affliction aspect to Christ’s Midheaven angle (his destiny/reputation) which McNally’s Mars then aggressively conjuncts.
THE HEAVENS AND BEING GAY FROM BIRTH
I have explained elsewhere on this Blog and in Testament of the Magi the respectably scholarship supported means by which has made it possible to pinpoint the data for Christ’s birth and read that data in traditional and also modern ways employing bodies still unknown and unnamed in Christ’s day. But because all time and languages are one (to at least God!), the modern input works and vividly to this day.
Any remaining mysteries about Christ and homosexuality are dispelled by the extensive evidence emerging from the patterns, including the close connection of Born and Saris (eunuch) across the so-called ruling planet of Jesus’ birth, a feature which bespeaks his self-identification as a born eunuch. Only recently, against all probability I have seen what looks like coded confirmation that the mysterious raca issue in the Sermon on the Mount, which I and others have long speculated implies condemnation of homophobia and cursing the faggot/outsider, is very likely that. Aramaic Raca was slang for faggot/effeminate. Suggesting the personal tensions and conflicts involved socially and personally for Jesus, a new asteroid Racah eloquently and argumentatively conjuncts Honoria (honour) and the Part of Coitus of men with women (the faggot is dismissed as lacking) while challengingly opposing The Part of Sexuality in the House of sex besides. Be that as it may....
THE TRAGEDY OF THE GAY DEBATE
The tragedy of the current gay debate is that it leaves the spiritual condition of gays caught between the nutcrackers of profane heretics seeking to liberate them and fundamentalists seeking only to cure them. Both in different ways deny the gospel truth that (even if and though some people are sexually undecided, challenged or bisexual) most people are born one way or the other and must work with and from that.
Unless it’s a case of drug or sexual addiction, God is not in the business of curing gays, and it’s falsehood and even cruelty to maintain otherwise. Nor can and will gays destroy religion, the family and civilisation – unless they go the way of directionless, amoral queer theory. It’s little short of divine judgement upon churches that the message “born that way” gets out through the sensationalist Lady Gaga rather than persons properly representing their faith. If praise is not given the stones will cry out (Luk 19:20). Likewise truth will out from any source if Christians won’t do their duty. But I have long realized that the fanatical, Pat Robertson style view of gays – everything up to and including they are devil possessed and cause cyclones – will never be cured unless and until there is the shock of realization that Jesus himself would today be considered gay.
A QUEER WISDOM, BUT NOT OF THIS WORLD
Yet almost no one is willing to consider and assimilate that fact unless via the distortions of the profane much as, anciently, only the contaminated messages of false prophets were eagerly received. I have recited before how, despite being published on gay spiritualities, I have not had reply from a huge list of persons and groups including the specifically gay MCC church who theoretically should have had every interest in my work. It is also apparent the wisdom of the wise and this world which God confounds (1 Cor 1:19) is unwilling to countenance the possibility that the skies might be witness to Christ and anything about him in acute revelatory detail besides. That would be one miracle too far. (After all, Dawkins might be amused).
When former editor and religious journalist Phyllis Tickle wrote me about my researches – not being gay she at least had the kind consideration to respond! – from years of experience with publishing she informed me there was no one she could imagine would consider such material if she were to recommend it. Then woe to the fools of faith (and unfaith) in the circles she knows, who in recent years have all too often published any lies and profanity about Christ for profit. Arguably people might search further and press harder if the subject was deemed important (which credibly to solve the mystery of the Magi after two millennia should be to the point of being historic), but that’s another matter.
As things stands, it’s just a case of “no room at the inn” over again. A very devout believer on whom I tested an early version of my work, admitted they nearly fainted out at certain implications and were so troubled they took it to Jesus. Later they alleged Jesus spoke to them about this and told them the reason people were not listening, and that the researches I have been dealing in is what the world is meant to know. At that point I had better rest the case and simply declare that Wisdom is justified of her children (Matt 11:19), though personally - in at least one thing like St Paul! - I can’t “suffer fools gladly”, especially not queer profane ones and fundamentalist fanatics.
THE TITANIC: CAUSES OF AN OBSESSION
A CENTENARY RENEWS THE MYSTERY AND PATHOS
Looking in at some of the centenary Titanic material I ask myself, not cynically but curiously, quite why this ship’s disaster continues to haunt us to the degree it does. The James Cameron Titanic film of 1997, though perhaps the most overall inaccurate and romanticized record of the tragedy, was the biggest grossing film of all time (until his own Avatar overtook it). We now have even a Titanic Requiem being performed.
There seems little question that all our fears of drowning, sudden disaster, of loss amid ease and pleasure, separation from dear ones, the thought of having to look the jaws of death in the face gather around the story; but then there are tales of loss and heroism at war that have great pathos. So perhaps too we see the Titanic event, occurring as it did not long before WW1 as also profoundly symbolic in more impersonal ways, the soon disappearance of an empire, a lifestyle, a world that no longer exists though we are not vastly removed from it. Some of us just project personal associations upon it. In my own case when I was a child I was on a vividly remembered voyage between Wales and Ireland so rough people thought the old ship might sink - which a few weeks later it actually did, but fortunately enough in Dublin harbour rather than out at sea!
A BLACK TRAGEDY OF ERRORS
But there’s not just the pathos and the symbolism, there’s also our incredulity at the tragedy which has perhaps increased over time as research has made the picture clearer. Humanly it turns out to be a saga of the most mind-boggling, incredible series of errors, oversights and accidents from the weak, low grade iron ore rivets in the steel plating of the perfect ship and insufficient lifeboats insufficiently filled because officers didn’t understand how many should go in them, to the undelivered wireless messages and even making the vessel sink faster by gathering speed instead of staying still or at least progressing very slowly. How could even the keys to the box containing the binoculars for the Lookout have been lost?
The list goes on and on. Many people and things contributed to the disaster but it strikes me one of the most directly and gratuitously guilty was (inevitably and unjustly!) a crew survivor, Harold Bride. He seems to have been too interested in sending income boosting radio messages for the rich and famous to be concerned with warnings about general conditions and icebergs. When he was strongly told he grew so irritable with the nearest ship, the Californian, which could have steamed over in time to save passengers, it switched off for the night so that emergency messages couldn’t be received when needed.
If the passengers remained too long secure for their own good in belief the ship was unsinkable, not even the popular captain Smith that millionaires like to travel with seems to have been too bright. An arbiter of fashion, Lady Duff Gordon, who had been prone to interesting states of foreboding during the voyage, walked on deck on the morning of the 14th and found it so cold she was convinced icebergs must be near which the Captain laughed off as improbable. But admittedly it was improbable. Though April could be a dangerous month, icebergs shouldn’t have been so far south at the time and it seems the massive culprit had broken off and made a very long journey and even from the time the Titanic began to be built.
The story begins to become like a parable of something, a dark tale of doom or retribution like Captain Ahab’s Great White Whale or the whale that God “prepared” for Jonah, all ultimately unavoidable. Yet not entirely unavoidable. There are strange tales of people’s late cancellations for the Titanic’s maiden voyage, everything from dreaming it would be wrecked to perhaps providential “accidents” that prevented their going as in the case of various clergy like the Rev Holden whose wife’s sudden illness prevented him from leaving for America, Pastor Nesbitt’s suddenly changed arrangements. The ship had been like a challenge to fate by its very name. The titans like fallen angels had revolted against the Greek ur-God, Saturn. The Titanic was the boat that ”even God himself couldn’t sink” (famous words attributed to Captain Smith who perished so that we can’t check) but which nature if not God did sink.
FATE AND FAITH ON DROWNING SEAS.
It’s a sign of the times that this last weekend’s docus did not stress religion really at all though the event would carry a lot of religious resonance and stories for many people. The Cameron film included violinists playing “Nearer my God to thee”, but it’s disputed it was precisely this hymn was played. However we do know that on deck there were priests giving absolution (to those from the second and the half abandoned third class) and on some boats, like the one 17 year old John Thayer managed to get onto after floating around, people were praying and singing hymns.
However not everyone on all life boats. The unsinkable Molly Brown was registering she was unsinkable and Lady Gordon in her detailed and fascinating account, and despite all her justified premonitions about the Titanic (where or how did she have them?), never once mentions God or Providence in the matter. In the lifeboat, scarcely able to endure the cold, the sea sickness, the sight of the sinking ship and the cries of the dying across the waters, like Voltaire’s Candide she only mentions that the stars above the boat (the night was illuminated by only stars, it was the dark of the moon with a new moon due on the 17th) seemed remote and uncaring to the scene. She hardly seems thankful to have survived – possibly she suffered survivor guilt. The British Dulwich College science teacher Lawrence Beesley likewise registers nothing emotional but the horror of the screams of the dying (some said they went on for hours but that’s what it must have seemed as most people would die in minutes from hypothermia). There is no thought or mention of God or fate; we may suppose science forbade everything but fact.
An idea I musingly draw from what I read and hear in this respect is that, (as I describe near the end of my The Great Circle), belief is a truly complex thing and is not necessarily influenced or decided at all by disaster, emergency and the face of death. People have a sense of God and the beyond or they don’t and often seem to believe what they want to believe. Ultimately it is almost as though there is a predestined, or at least highly “irrational” element to the faith decision.
The most extreme Titanic story of the religious kind belongs to the Scots Baptist minister John Harper after whom a memorial church would be founded in Glasgow. He was the traditional “soul winner” and was so to his last breath. His “last convert” a fellow Scot who managed to cling to some wreckage till he was later rescued would later attest that Harpur had heroically given away his lifejacket and was being driven back and forth in the water. He had come close shouting to him to trust in Jesus and be saved and asked him if he thought he was saved. “No,” replied the man. Harper was driven away by the current but later swept back to him and shouted had he now put his trust and was he really saved?” 'No, I cannot honestly say that I am' was the reply. Harper then sank. The man said he suddenly then believed. As I don’t find the name of the alleged convert one wonders if this is evangelical fantasy but probably not as Harper had also been observed by numbers of people on the sinking deck and then in the waters similarly calling on people to place their trust.
BELATED GRIEVING?
Harper’s daughter, Nina, survived but as her mother had died in childbirth she was brought up by family friends who never let her even discuss the Titanic during her youth. One wonders with such suppression and repression, with no grief and trauma counselling how even with prayers, hymns and faith Titanic survivors quite managed. And it seems they didn’t do so too well. John Thayer suffered depression and committed suicide later in life, Madeleine, the widow of John Jacob Astor who drowned lived a confused and troubled life. There are similar tales.
The most important thing would seem to be that we should learn a few lessons from the Titanic, not just the need for responsibility and efficiency on sea as much as land but even the need to mourn and express rather than repress which perhaps today we do rather better than back a century ago. Indeed it is almost as though the collective sensed it had to do the grieving for people and those of a generation who never quite did it for themselves. However the recent wreck of the Costa Concordia, another tale of remarkable bungling, suggests we may not have learned as much as we might have done.
Looking in at some of the centenary Titanic material I ask myself, not cynically but curiously, quite why this ship’s disaster continues to haunt us to the degree it does. The James Cameron Titanic film of 1997, though perhaps the most overall inaccurate and romanticized record of the tragedy, was the biggest grossing film of all time (until his own Avatar overtook it). We now have even a Titanic Requiem being performed.
There seems little question that all our fears of drowning, sudden disaster, of loss amid ease and pleasure, separation from dear ones, the thought of having to look the jaws of death in the face gather around the story; but then there are tales of loss and heroism at war that have great pathos. So perhaps too we see the Titanic event, occurring as it did not long before WW1 as also profoundly symbolic in more impersonal ways, the soon disappearance of an empire, a lifestyle, a world that no longer exists though we are not vastly removed from it. Some of us just project personal associations upon it. In my own case when I was a child I was on a vividly remembered voyage between Wales and Ireland so rough people thought the old ship might sink - which a few weeks later it actually did, but fortunately enough in Dublin harbour rather than out at sea!
A BLACK TRAGEDY OF ERRORS
But there’s not just the pathos and the symbolism, there’s also our incredulity at the tragedy which has perhaps increased over time as research has made the picture clearer. Humanly it turns out to be a saga of the most mind-boggling, incredible series of errors, oversights and accidents from the weak, low grade iron ore rivets in the steel plating of the perfect ship and insufficient lifeboats insufficiently filled because officers didn’t understand how many should go in them, to the undelivered wireless messages and even making the vessel sink faster by gathering speed instead of staying still or at least progressing very slowly. How could even the keys to the box containing the binoculars for the Lookout have been lost?
The list goes on and on. Many people and things contributed to the disaster but it strikes me one of the most directly and gratuitously guilty was (inevitably and unjustly!) a crew survivor, Harold Bride. He seems to have been too interested in sending income boosting radio messages for the rich and famous to be concerned with warnings about general conditions and icebergs. When he was strongly told he grew so irritable with the nearest ship, the Californian, which could have steamed over in time to save passengers, it switched off for the night so that emergency messages couldn’t be received when needed.
If the passengers remained too long secure for their own good in belief the ship was unsinkable, not even the popular captain Smith that millionaires like to travel with seems to have been too bright. An arbiter of fashion, Lady Duff Gordon, who had been prone to interesting states of foreboding during the voyage, walked on deck on the morning of the 14th and found it so cold she was convinced icebergs must be near which the Captain laughed off as improbable. But admittedly it was improbable. Though April could be a dangerous month, icebergs shouldn’t have been so far south at the time and it seems the massive culprit had broken off and made a very long journey and even from the time the Titanic began to be built.
The story begins to become like a parable of something, a dark tale of doom or retribution like Captain Ahab’s Great White Whale or the whale that God “prepared” for Jonah, all ultimately unavoidable. Yet not entirely unavoidable. There are strange tales of people’s late cancellations for the Titanic’s maiden voyage, everything from dreaming it would be wrecked to perhaps providential “accidents” that prevented their going as in the case of various clergy like the Rev Holden whose wife’s sudden illness prevented him from leaving for America, Pastor Nesbitt’s suddenly changed arrangements. The ship had been like a challenge to fate by its very name. The titans like fallen angels had revolted against the Greek ur-God, Saturn. The Titanic was the boat that ”even God himself couldn’t sink” (famous words attributed to Captain Smith who perished so that we can’t check) but which nature if not God did sink.
FATE AND FAITH ON DROWNING SEAS.
It’s a sign of the times that this last weekend’s docus did not stress religion really at all though the event would carry a lot of religious resonance and stories for many people. The Cameron film included violinists playing “Nearer my God to thee”, but it’s disputed it was precisely this hymn was played. However we do know that on deck there were priests giving absolution (to those from the second and the half abandoned third class) and on some boats, like the one 17 year old John Thayer managed to get onto after floating around, people were praying and singing hymns.
However not everyone on all life boats. The unsinkable Molly Brown was registering she was unsinkable and Lady Gordon in her detailed and fascinating account, and despite all her justified premonitions about the Titanic (where or how did she have them?), never once mentions God or Providence in the matter. In the lifeboat, scarcely able to endure the cold, the sea sickness, the sight of the sinking ship and the cries of the dying across the waters, like Voltaire’s Candide she only mentions that the stars above the boat (the night was illuminated by only stars, it was the dark of the moon with a new moon due on the 17th) seemed remote and uncaring to the scene. She hardly seems thankful to have survived – possibly she suffered survivor guilt. The British Dulwich College science teacher Lawrence Beesley likewise registers nothing emotional but the horror of the screams of the dying (some said they went on for hours but that’s what it must have seemed as most people would die in minutes from hypothermia). There is no thought or mention of God or fate; we may suppose science forbade everything but fact.
An idea I musingly draw from what I read and hear in this respect is that, (as I describe near the end of my The Great Circle), belief is a truly complex thing and is not necessarily influenced or decided at all by disaster, emergency and the face of death. People have a sense of God and the beyond or they don’t and often seem to believe what they want to believe. Ultimately it is almost as though there is a predestined, or at least highly “irrational” element to the faith decision.
The most extreme Titanic story of the religious kind belongs to the Scots Baptist minister John Harper after whom a memorial church would be founded in Glasgow. He was the traditional “soul winner” and was so to his last breath. His “last convert” a fellow Scot who managed to cling to some wreckage till he was later rescued would later attest that Harpur had heroically given away his lifejacket and was being driven back and forth in the water. He had come close shouting to him to trust in Jesus and be saved and asked him if he thought he was saved. “No,” replied the man. Harper was driven away by the current but later swept back to him and shouted had he now put his trust and was he really saved?” 'No, I cannot honestly say that I am' was the reply. Harper then sank. The man said he suddenly then believed. As I don’t find the name of the alleged convert one wonders if this is evangelical fantasy but probably not as Harper had also been observed by numbers of people on the sinking deck and then in the waters similarly calling on people to place their trust.
BELATED GRIEVING?
Harper’s daughter, Nina, survived but as her mother had died in childbirth she was brought up by family friends who never let her even discuss the Titanic during her youth. One wonders with such suppression and repression, with no grief and trauma counselling how even with prayers, hymns and faith Titanic survivors quite managed. And it seems they didn’t do so too well. John Thayer suffered depression and committed suicide later in life, Madeleine, the widow of John Jacob Astor who drowned lived a confused and troubled life. There are similar tales.
The most important thing would seem to be that we should learn a few lessons from the Titanic, not just the need for responsibility and efficiency on sea as much as land but even the need to mourn and express rather than repress which perhaps today we do rather better than back a century ago. Indeed it is almost as though the collective sensed it had to do the grieving for people and those of a generation who never quite did it for themselves. However the recent wreck of the Costa Concordia, another tale of remarkable bungling, suggests we may not have learned as much as we might have done.
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