July 16, 2018
On Being a Queer Catholic (for Pride 2018)
I’ve taken the opportunity of Pride this year to celebrate and reckon with the mosaic changes I have undergone as I have become more open and public with both my queerness and the influence of Catholicism on my cultural practices and perceptions of the world. Religious iconography and symbolism inform some of the narrative streams I pull out to make sense of the constant flurry of signs and stimulations encountered by being in the world. My interpretation of holidays—be they state, religious, commercial, or community-oriented—is that they are enacted value formations and temporal choreographies that extend across scales and manifest in the body, memory, and flesh.
There is never any true resolution in my reflections on my ongoing learning, sculpting, and storytelling processes to intimately make sense of my self-identity, and what it means to communicate that to others interpersonally. But these experiences get filtered through the visual language, everyday philosophy, and material cultures in which I have been steeped, and which I continue to draw from to make sense of the world and express myself.Glass
Stained glass is a window into myself. This rainbow transforms the complexity of all that crosses its path with its gradient vision. Chemists and art conservators have discussed the reaction and dispersion of light, some have called light ageing (Tennent 2014). Light ages, but also ages things with its spectral power in different fastnesses (Kirby 1998; Saunders 2001). The visceral reaction I have to stained glass overwhelms my heart. Without aestheticizing quantum theory with parapsychology spirituality too much - although I sparingly do delight in doing so - I find that those traditions are also present in my upbringing in more subtle and traumatic ways. These representations also signify potentialities, but that those potentialities already manifest and change the present, reflexively.
Stained glass is not just a window, but part of the scaffolding of my religious education and hours spent inside churches, dragged on various Sundays, but willingly dragging myself sometimes too; remembering, forgetting, and most clumsily operating the rituals. It is a mode of representation that resonates on the level of being raised and repeatedly exposed to a tradition of worship, since or before my baptism in Huslia, Alaska. My cultural Catholicism and queerness interpollinate in ways still raw and beautiful and confusing to me, but that I feel I must face to understand my queerness, which is really a just a way to understand myself along a heuristic continuum, without trying to get to the bottom of it.
Others are 100% entitled to feel differently, and I am only writing this as a sort of diary entry, as blogs can sometimes be. Although I’ve gone through phases of atheism and agnosticism, and developed a strong intellectual respect for the special forms of wisdom beautiful and unique to Islam and Judaism. But, I feel that, despite my failure to keep up with devotional practices or the canon law of the Catholic Church, or my lack of belief in sin, or the prohibition of pre-marital sex, let alone my bitter and shameful reckoning with the ongoing violences the Catholic Church commits, I cannot simply shrug off that history from my body and soul. I couldn’t say to what degree or isolate one part of learning through encountering the world growing up, but on this I trust my intuition. Moreover, the tendency to feel guilty all the time is a well-remarked upon aspect of the secular Catholic experience. Although I no longer partake in the concept of sin per say, I still believe in doing right by others, and have guilt when I don't. I apply vague replicas of the Church's beliefs into action, and this is in the tradition of the interpretation of how to make worship my own queer thing.
Religion can be 'found' from within or without, as a personal and community endeavor. Without reconstructing the setting too much, in County Mayo (Contae Mhaigh Eo) in Western Ireland, all four of my grandfather's brothers were priests, practicing where they lived since whenever my grandfather will let on next time I see him. I worry that bringing it back to this lineage as if a biological is dangerous, but I also am trying to express that I think that one can inherit ways of being through histories, which involve cosmologies blended into storytelling, family structures, soverignities, and so on. Catholicism is one of the few cultural bonds that I have with them, aside from the occasional recipe, pub song or joke, received and given names.
My queerness is part of this story. The power of interpretation and reinterpretation of my faith has been helpful for finding the moral structures and aesthetics which most make me feel at home with myself. Does that mean I participate in the institution of the Catholic Church by default? Lest this entire elaboration be utterly indulgent, there is a glass ceiling to Catholicism, of which may already be making you question whether I have any authority to talk about this (which I don't). But more than that, it would be unjust and dissonant not to acknowledge its historical and ongoing violences and culpability in so many religious wars that ended in mass death.
The tradition of Catholicism is integrated into the history of the Papal state and the liberal arts. Generations back, my ancestors were Catholics, they presumably were governed by the moral codes dictated by the Vatican, these ecclesiastical codes were and are as much forms of discipline and governmentality as they are belief systems. But individual people within a faith have very different beliefs, too - liberals, conservatives, socialists, capitalists. How do groups like a church reach consensus about what they think is right and what they think is wrong? Hierarchies and power, yes. Societies often have dominant beliefs, and societies come into conflict, and they go to war. Some people think beliefs are more reasonable and more true than others. But it is the lack of consensus that opens up a window of possibility for individuals to enchant the cultural traditions of faith into their own lives and to 'make it their own,' even if secularized.
These things are unresolved for me. But this space has been helpful in consulting these aspects, and hopefully haven't completely wasted your time. I write this for Pride, a hyper-public, internationally coordinated operation. Many have commented on its increasingly corporate undertones and mediatization. I have my reservations; the transnational companies, T Mobile, Premera, Uber, and Delta were some of the top funders of the Seattle parade this year. Although this might seem late, Pride seems to extend well beyond the designated month of June, as was just celebrated this past weekend of the 15th of July in San Diego where I live. So I am giving myself some leeway, and thinking about Pride as a 'state of mind,' not just a public spectacle or corporate event so much as a coming together of thoughts and expression.In the next iteration of this writing, I will summon some of the imagery I have hinted at, and discuss the queer reforms within the Church. Stay tuned!*~
Sources
Barthes, R. (1977). Rhetoric of the Image.
Hebdige, D. (1988). Hiding in the light: On images and things. Psychology Press.
Kirby, J. and Saunders, D. (1998). Sixteenth- to eighteenth- century green colours in landscape and flower paintings: composition and deterioration. In: A Roy and P Smith, eds. Painting Techniques: History, Materials and Studio Practice. London: IIC, pp. 155-9.
Le Guin, U. K. (2012). A Wizard of Earthsea (Vol. 1). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Metzger, B. M., & Murphy, R. E. (Eds.). (1991). The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books: New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press.
Mould, D. (2003). A stained glass image filter. In Proceedings of the 14th Eurographics workshop on Rendering (pp. 20-25). Eurographics Association.
Saunders, D., & Kirby, J. (2001). A comparison of light‐accelerated ageing regimes in some galleries and museums. The Conservator, 25(1), 95-104.
Tennent, N. H. (1979). Clear and pigmented epoxy resins for stained glass conservation: light ageing studies. Studies in Conservation, 24(4), 153-164.