Wives, Subject Yourselves To Nobody

Okay, as promised I’m starting with the goal list this morning. I looked at number one from the most current revision (November 2) and it said, “1.I am bicoastal. I have beautiful residences that I love in both LA and NYC” and you know what? I don’t really need that. I might want that down the road but for right now, I don’t want the aggravation of trying to maintain residences on both costs. If I meet my— sorry, Santino— when I meet my financial goals, I can well afford a place to stay that suits when my work takes me to the left coast and who knows, down the road I may decide I’m spending so much time there I want to own but for now, I’m good with focusing on manifesting my place to live in New York City. “God has told me” (if you know me and you have any sense you know what that means to me by now) that I’m supposed to be living in New York City. That felt totally right when it came to me a week or so ago when I was damn near ready to move back to LA. You know if you’re standing there barefoot in shorts in November and you’re overcome with the desperate desire to be standing on the wet, windy streets of Gotham, there’s something powerful behind that. I haven’t felt the need to overanalyze it (amazingly enough). I’m just marching forward and trusting that God will show me each “next right step” and that after the holidays, I’ll move back to my beloved New York and get busy getting these two new plays to Broadway.

So now, about goal number one. The revised version: “I have a residence that I love in New York City.” Okay, good. that’s good. Occasionally I hear the voice of Edwene Gaines, spiritual prosperity teacher in my head. Her wonderfully Southern way of expressing herself and the divine ideas she has for those who’ll listen seems to easily resonate with me. She says, “Don’t say, ‘If I only had the money…’, say,’If I only had the faith…’.” I like that. I know that in Reality, there is no limit to the resources I need to allow these goals to come into manifestation. The truth is, from the day I was born until the day I die, there are literally gold bars sitting unused in vaults and since money is just an idea that we’ve all agreed upon, there’s really enough and more than enough. I don’t think God minds if I use that money to take care of myself and make it so that I can share my talents with the world and help my fellow travelers in the way that I have envisioned. I actually think it is me that is standing in the way of their immediate manifestation. There is one sort of difference in semantics that I would use to alter the way Edwene puts it. I would actually posit that we all have exactly the same amount of faith: 100%. Wait, wait, before you’re so quick to disagree, here me out. I believe that we all believe what we believe and that represents 100% of what we believe. We’ve all heard the Henry Ford quote a hundred times by now. “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” Fuck the Office Depot motivational poster section for making it so cliché but there’s actually great truth in it. I’m coming to this day with 100% of my creative power. What I do with it and how I direct it is what’s important. Y’all know my feelings on the Bible. I think it was written by humans and from it we can learn and grow by observing how many different humans sought to understand their creator and the nature of life over thousands of years. I also believe that there are great spiritual truths there. I also think some of its authors were full of shit. That’s okay. We can learn from them too. For example, a lot of the time, Paul (the artist formerly known as Saul) was just regurgitating the same misogynistic, homophobic, patriarchal bullshit the Jewish MEN had been shoveling out for centuries. In I Peter 3:1, Ephesians 5:22, and Colossians 3: 18, women are commanded to “subject yourselves to your husbands.” Fuck. That. Women don’t you dare ever subject yourselves to nobody! Men, your having a penis doesn’t entitle you to anything except the biological capabilities it affords and perhaps the ability to more skillfully write your name in the snow in pee. When you ask most modern Christians about that passage, you know what they’ll say (even the women!)? They’ll say, “But it also commands the men to love their wives as Christ loved the church!” 100% of the time. That’s what they’ll say. Let me tell you something, regurgitating a commandment for men (and by the way I don’t know how many men are willing to be whipped mercilessly and nailed to a cross for their wives, most of them can’t even keep their cocks parked at home for them for an entire message) is not a sufficient justification for some misogynistic bullshit that far too many lemmings are carrying around above their heads a “the word of God.” Women if any man ever approaches you with the idea that his gender, according to God, has dick-tated that you are to “subject” yourself to him, you tell him to go fuck himself because your pussy is off limits. Trust me, he’ll rethink all that “subject” shit real fast.

Boy, did I get off track. But it needed to be said. Part of why God created queers is to help straight people straighten out their fucked up ideas around gender. Not that we’ve got it all figured out. The opposite is true. But at least we trouble the paradigm. Maybe that’s enough for a good start.

So the reason I started talking about the Bible in the first place is to talk about the fact that there are some very useful things in there and my Bible School upbringing has insured that many of those things are permanently implanted in my gray matter. One of them is that I am, “Created in the image, likeness of the Father.” When I was a little boy, I thought that meant that God must look something like us, just like Michelangelo depicted him. (I find pink-dress muscle-daddy God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel kind of hot by the way so I’m good with that) but I actually have come to believe that the greater spiritual truth in that passage is that we are all endowed with the same creative power of that which created us and the Creation myth from Genesis  (and the allusion to the Creation in The Gospel of St. John) gives us clues about how to direct that power. That’s why I have  John 1:1 tattooed on my right bicep. It’s an homage to the religion of my youth (as a symbol and reminder to me of the healing work I’ve done around all that), an allusion to my Diving calling as a poet (to include the Classical use of that term) and a reminder to me about the creative power of the Word. Preachers love to preach the “The Word” there is to mean Jesus Christ. Even homos will hit me up on Scruff to try to impress me (get some of my much-craved attention) with the fact that they know that “The Word” there means Jesus. That’s not what it means. It’s about the word as both the Creator and the Creative Force. Stop getting that wrong.

Blah, blah, blah, he just can’t keep that crazy brain of his on track to save his soul. (wow.)

So why all this talk about the Bible, and metaphysics, and Faith, and creative power. What in the possible hell can any of this have to do with my goal, “I own a residence that I love in New York City/“ Well tomorrow I’ll tell you.

See y’all tomorrow.