In the Shadow of the Bridge

by Joseph Caldwell

  During the course of this last evening together, he played on the phonograph some particularly raucous twelve-tone work. And he played it at top volume. It was an assault. He knew it and I knew it. I was being tested. Again, how much would I put up with? My state was precarious to begin with, but an inborn stubbornness saw me through. I showed no particular reaction beyond a determined listening.

  It was time to go. At the door, I told him I would see him no more. I offered him the keys he’d given me on the day we’d met. He accepted the keys. I asked for—and received—the key I’d given him. I went down the stairs. He closed the door.

  The Middle

  3.

  As must be apparent from what I’ve written so far, I was—and am—a Catholic. It’s equally apparent that I was—and am—a homosexual. As I’ve suggested at times, this may seem to be close to an oxymoron. So, I’ll put it this way. I am close to being a congenital Catholic. It’s almost encoded in my genes to the same degree and with the same imperatives as my homosexuality. I could not not be a Catholic any more than I could not be of Irish ancestry, or than I could not be a male of the human species. My faith has never felt dangerously challenged, even by my having been duly informed by the Roman hierarchy that I am—by choice no less—an abomination.

  But please allow me to interject that this faith was informed and enforced by two “conversion” experiences. It’s my contention that simply being baptized as a baby and receiving catechetical instruction is not enough to support a mature life of faith. Despite my biological claim to my persisting Catholicism, I also consider myself a convert.

  My first conversion occurred when I was about fifteen. As you already know, I grew up as one of a crowd. And the crowd, as a rule, was not limited to the eight of us children and our parents. More often than not, nonpaying strays turned up at our door and years could go by before they moved on. One was a woman named Lucille—a former neighbor who, in her early thirties, married a dashing young man about a decade younger and moved with him to St. Louis—and turned up late one Sunday morning alone and cheerful. She stayed for Sunday dinner and didn’t leave until more than several years later, when she’d gotten a job at the Milwaukee County Mental Hospital and had married one of the inmates.

  My conversion, however, was brought about by the inclusion in our family of a pregnant woman named Rosemary whose history was somewhat obscure and from whom my parents seem to have required few or no explanations. I resented Rosemary. I was weary of the continuous chaos surrounding me, intensified by the interior chaos of my secret and roiling sexuality.

  At one point, Rosemary—pregnant Rosemary—went off somewhere. When she returned she was no longer pregnant. If the rather radical change in her condition was ever discussed, I was not a participant. But here was my chance to get her out of the house. Prissy prick and, in this instance, despicable hypocrite that I was, I confronted my mother.

  Rosemary had obviously had an abortion. And here we were, good observant Catholics. How could we allow her to stay, considering the unforgivable sin she’d committed! That I myself had probably the previous night sought out satisfactions in some accommodating movie theater or city park was not included in the equation.

  My mother’s response was quiet but firm and I can quote her words without revision. “We don’t know that. All we know is that she’s lost her baby. And if she did have an abortion, doesn’t that mean she needs us more than ever?”

  I should have felt chastened by my mother’s rebuke. I should have felt shame for my selfishness and hypocrisy. I felt none of these. I felt, with a quiet of my own, only amazement. So this is what our religion was all about. It was not about sin and guilt and judgment. It was about caring—a simple caring for those most in need, no matter what.

  I should add, however, that this particular conversion, sincere as it was, hardly replicated what happened to Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus. Aside from an uncomplaining acceptance of Rosemary’s continuing residence in our household, there was no verifiable change in the way I organized my life. I was four people, each a distinct person of my own invention, each created in response to what I wished to project in a given circumstance. I was a reasonably affable teenager at home with my family. I was a popular student at school: on the debate team, writing for the newspaper, acting in plays. I played Lucy Fairweather in an old melodrama, The Streets of New York. Marquette High School was an all-boys school. After the first performance, my sister Sally came up on stage and whispered confidentially, “The dress zips up the back.” In a way I was, in effect, trying to seduce the entire student body, not sexually, but emotionally. “Like me. Like me. Accept me. Accept me,” was my school motto and, for the most part, they did. I was even voted most popular freshman of my year, complete with a photographic spread in the school paper, The Flambeau.

  At work, as a soda jerk in Walgreen’s Drug Store on Third Street and Wisconsin Avenue—the Times Square of Milwaukee—I was something of a showoff, too proud to be less than the best at my job. I was, by common consent, the fastest soda jerk in town.

  Then there was my sex life. Looking back, I’m rather pleased with myself that I could so adroitly juggle these several manipulations and mysteries without collision or collapse. And I have to wonder now if it was contributory to my becoming a writer of fiction and a playwright, an apprenticeship I am not inclined to disown.

  Which, if any, of the four persons was the real me? Each expressed a particular need, so maybe I was an amalgam of all four. But I must add that the secret sexual activist was the most honest, the least manipulative—qualities that I hope inform what I’m writing now.

  As for that first conversion, it has continued a lurking, sometimes more apparent presence that would eventually reinforce the second. The second occurred when I was living in what has since been reconfigured into a sanitized and gentrified “East Village,” then known less pretentiously as the Lower East Side. I was in a fifth-floor walk-up overlooking Tompkins Square. The skyline of lower Manhattan was a stunning view with glorious sunsets. The apartment itself went the length of the building, front to back, large enough to include a dining room with a nonworking fireplace.

  Enviable as the view may have been, the apartment, being on the top floor, with the fire escape outside my bathroom window, was the prime candidate for anyone coming down from the roof wishing to acquire a television, a radio, a typewriter, and other marketable artifacts. An accordion metal gate was installed on the bathroom fire-escape window. After it became apparent that access was also available from the ledge of the library building next door, that window, too, was given a gate. Next, the two kitchen windows. Security was breached, however, by simply breaking through my wooden hallway door. An iron plate was bolted in place and a rod-enforced lock was installed. You get the picture.

  At that time, the neighborhood was, to say the least, interesting. Previously a Ukrainian and Polish enclave, these initial refugees were made exiles once again in flight from the despotism of drugs and the invading hippies intent on a freedom only anarchy can provide. And yet, it was very definitely a neighborhood. Its citizenry was not limited to those mentioned above. The parish church of St. Brigid was on Avenue B, on the east side of the square. Its young priests, Matt and Dermot, had learned Spanish to reach out as effectively as possible to the Hispanic families moving into the territory. (I noticed that when they preached in Spanish, they gestured much more generously than when they preached in English.) They also tried to bring together the artists, writers, dancers, and booksellers attracted to the undeniable vitality of the area, to say nothing of the day laborers who, with their families, formed the hard core of any neighborhood.

  It wasn’t easy for Matt. It wasn’t easy for Dermot. Poverty, crime, rivalries, and exploitative real estate gougers were prevailing influences. And I watched as these two young priests struggled tenaciously and creatively to bring us all together.

  That was my second conv
ersion. The true mission of Christianity to which I had subscribed was to an inclusive community, a community irrevocably established by the birth, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. Christianity’s purpose was neither the exercise of power nor the imposition of dogmas. Its striving was not for conformity enforced from above, but for its opposite—a unity from within, inspired ideally by love. If that couldn’t be fully achieved, then at least by a determined caring. Nothing less. We are each other’s divinely appointed protector—and whatever harm we do to each other, it is a harm perpetrated by a God-appointed guardian—oneself.

  These are the truths that, along with a sacramental life, sustain my faith.

  This does not mean that I don’t have moments of serious doubt, which is hardly a unique experience for any person of persisting faith. Do I really believe that the consecrated bread (actually at its beginning it was rather like present-day matzoh, unleavened bread made necessary for the Passover meal before a quick getaway from Egypt) and the consecrated wine are truly the actual body and blood of Jesus Himself, and not a symbolic memorial? Well, yes.

  Rather than go on and on ticking off one bizarre belief after another, let me just say this: one of the more important ingredients of faith is humility—a humility that doesn’t require that everything be fully known or explained completely, making no allowance for mystery. As far as I’m concerned, the purpose of reality is to show the way to mystery, which is the ultimate reality.

  One more quick challenge to one’s faith: the efficacy of prayer. It’s my considered contention that not one of us who has ever prayed has not been troubled at times by an inescapable thought: “Is anyone really listening?”

  This leads me to some thoughts as regards my religion and my homosexuality.

  Whenever I’m asked about my sexuality, I say, “I am, by God’s good grace, as gay as a goose.” Glib, I know, but true. I have come to see my homosexuality as a form of grace. Because of my outcast state I was forced to think for myself. The rules that guide heterosexuals were not applicable to me. For starters, the old saying “Save it for the girl you’ll marry” had no meaning. There would be no circumstance in which I could fulfill my sexuality within a shared love. I was, in effect, given to understand that only a celibate life was acceptable. In other words, I was informed that I must take a perpetual vow of chastity—a sacrificial life to which I knew only too well I had not been called. My conscience therefore had to be shaped independent of hierarchical instruction and dogmatic guidance. This was liberating, but it was liberation that was also alienating.

  In New York, cardinal after cardinal after cardinal was in highly vocal opposition to any laws that would prohibit discrimination against homosexuals. Without this law-given protection we could be fired from our jobs, evicted from our apartments. Ultimately, we were to be hounded off the edge of the earth for the simple reason that God, in his inscrutable wisdom, had included homosexuality within the human nature he had allowed to evolve into his own image.

  My response to the cardinals proved to be quite simple: I knew I was not expelled from the community, that I could continue in good conscience to fully participate in the sacramental life that lies at the heart of the Church.

  At one time, until proscribed and forced to disperse by the then cardinal, there was a faith group of homosexual Catholics called Dignity. I never joined. With all due respect to them, I refused to separate myself. I was a member of the full and indivisible community expressed by my membership in St. Brigid’s and, later, the parish of St. Joseph in Greenwich Village. And I would in no circumstance remove myself. Unfortunately, a similar insistence did not inform His Eminence’s ruthlessness. According to him, homosexuals by their nature had no place in his Church. His indeed! The Church is Christ’s Church and its unity is indissoluble. Whether that community will ever be fulfilled is another matter.

  I would later articulate my insistent stand in the following terms: surely the Almighty has a sufficient fund of grace to sustain my faith even against the repeated onslaughts of a cardinal archbishop.

  Sometimes I have wondered if the greatest satanic success since the eating of the Edenic apple was the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine to Christianity. This, in turn, led one of his successors, Theodosius, to proclaim Christianity the religion of the Empire. As a power of the state, the shifts and changes began. Power wants nothing so much as perpetuation and increase. The Bishop of Rome, the Pope, and his hierarchy had considered themselves before as “the servants of the servants of God”—those servants of God being, of course, the community. All too soon the servants became the masters. The Community of Love became an Institution of Laws, the Church’s mission no longer the fulfillment of the divinely established Community, but obedience to a hierarchically imposed conformity.

  Vatican II, convened in Saint Peter’s Basilica by Pope John XXIII in October 1962 and closing in December 1965, did what it could to effect something of a return. But the attempt was largely nullified by Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, Humanae Vitae, issued in July 1968, in which he unilaterally, like the absolute monarch that the Council had tried to reform, decreed that contraception was still not to be permitted, overruling his own committee that had overwhelmingly agreed that it should be allowed.

  In his near-hagiographic biography of John Paul II, His Holiness, Carl Bernstein notes that it was Karol Wojtyla, then the Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow, who warned Paul VI that if he were to contradict previous popes on this subject, it would diminish the authority of the Papacy. So much for being a servant.

  Full disclosure: The great hero of my life is Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, Pope John XXIII (1958–1963), the man who, when the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem came at his invitation to Rome, walked out on to the tarmac at the airport. He opened his wide arms, and in the most personal way possible proclaimed in Hebrew a central Christian truth that nullifies for all time to come any presumed justification for Christian anti-Semitism, “I am your brother Joseph.”

  With the elevation of Francis to the Chair of Peter, there has been a change of tone and attitude that is most welcome. Particularly welcome is his reaffirmation of the pronouncement of Vatican II that defines the Church as the People of God—the Community, as well as his reminder (from Vatican II) concerning the primacy of individual conscience. Then, too, there is his call for an apology from the Church for its treatment of women and gays.

  As for women, any hope for a much-needed reform—starting with the ordination of women priests—has already been declared futile. Pope Francis has publicly subscribed to the ruling of Pope John Paul II: since only men were apostles, only men can be priests. For me, this reasoning is a failed attempt to avoid the truth lurking behind John Paul’s and Francis’s decision that women are second- or third-class citizens and must deal with it as best they can, preferably, as the popes would have it, without complaint.

  My disagreement is apparent. To make my case, a true story: When I was at the American Academy in Rome (how I got there comes later), one of my colleagues, an architect, designed as a project a church and, for help with the iconography, enlisted a priest attached to the Vatican. To thank him, he invited him and a younger priest to dinner in the apartment where he and his wife and children were staying. As one of the few Catholic Fellows at the Academy, I, too, was invited. A most enjoyable evening.

  After dinner, we settled down in the living room to continue. This was in 1980, and the priest asked me what I thought of the (then) new pope, John Paul II, whose pontificate began in 1978 and ended in 2005, I more or less shrugged and said, “Mezza-mezza” (so-so). This surprised him. Why the half measure of approval? I pulled out of thin air the first thought that came into my mind. Another shrug, then I said, “The ordination of women. The Holy Spirit calls whom the Holy Spirit wills to call—a man or a woman. You may not tell God what God may and may not do. And if you persist, it’s a grave matter, and gravely will he [Pope John Paul II] answer for it.�
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  At this, the younger priest stood up and said, “Well, time to go.”

  “No,” I pleaded. “I just got started.”

  By this time both priests were on their feet. Goodbyes were said and they left. After they were gone, my host explained to me that the older priest who had helped him had been an Episcopalian priest who had come over to Rome because of his Church’s ordination of women. I congratulated myself. The man was obviously in need of my instruction.

  For gays, it has proved to be another matter indeed. I was as much astounded as I was moved by the report of the Chilean victim of sexual abuse, Juan Carlos Cruz, who met privately with Pope Francis at the Vatican. According to him, it was through his tears that he told Francis that he had always persevered in his Catholic faith even though the hierarchy had claimed he could not be a Catholic because he led a life of perversion. More specifically, he had been informed beyond contradiction by catechetical instruction that he was “intrinsically disordered and contrary to the natural law.” (Sounds familiar.)

  In response to the man’s distress, Francis said, “You have to be happy [happy?!!!] with who you are. God made you this way and loves you this way, and the Pope loves you this way.”

  For those few moments, the Church had become again its early self, an inclusive community of love and caring. Whether the moment expands to revised teachings remains to be seen. Formidable forces are arrayed against both Francis and Juan Carlos Cruz—those who would prefer dictated conformity and are opposed to those who continue the struggle to fulfill an inspired community. On yet one more level, we live in interesting times.

  With Pope Francis in mind, I’d like to bring up his eloquent if futile attempt to convert the Congress of the United States to simple human decency. One of his pleas was for an end to capital punishment, a subject to which I’ve given considerable thought. Those lawgivers so adamantly in favor of it cry out for justice. I respect that, and, in response offer the following: