The Golden Ass

Photo taken from the website of L'Arche Portland
Yesterday, along with numerous other friends, I saw the news story that someone we had deemed a saint, someone we loved and looked up to as an interpreter and embodiment of the teachings of our Lord in a special and revealing way, apparently engaged in decades of sexually coercive and predatory behavior. Even worse, it happened in the context and under the guise of his role as a counselor for the spiritual formation of the very women he was abusing!

Jean Vanier is indirectly and to some degree responsible for my current vocation. I used to be an architect. I had a bit of a Messiah complex. I thought I was going to save architecture with my special gifts. That was how I was going to be known and celebrated. I, however, had a problem. I was looking at the world upside down. I now practice as a hospice nurse in part because of Vanier's teachings and the communities he instituted. He is to some degree responsible for showing me how Jesus turns our images of status and identity on their head by becoming the Servant-Man in the flesh, a Crucified Messiah. As an architect, I had no idea that my desires for how to be known, find a place in the world, be successful, have stability, and live a fulfilling life were shaped by schemes of Lordship other than that of the Lord himself!

And, Jean Vanier played a part in giving me some idea of the difference. Jean Vanier helped me see Jesus. Come to find out, his sexual manipulation was extremely hurtful and damaging to his victims - to the point of being traumatizing.

BAD NEWS

So, when I saw the news yesterday - LINK HERE - I was, to put it mildly, hurt and distraught. As Rich Villodas said it, I "called him one of my heroes in the faith. Devastated to read this." So, I wasn't the only one feeling this way. Another friend, who was dealing with similar emotions, messaged me privately:

"What do we do with the way in which people like Jean Vanier shaped our world?
I’ve read and implemented a shit ton of his work and theories into the way I see the world and practice what I believe. The news of his abusive behaviour is painful.
Do we chalk it up to 'God uses broken people?' That seems fucked up, to be honest.
Do I toss his books, now? (That’s a lot of money in the garbage can.)
I’m not sure what to do. Or how to process. This sucks. I’m sad."

Like this young woman - LINK HERE, which itself includes a link the official report of the third party findings Vanier's abuses - we're left trying to reconcile what we knew before with what we know now about Jean Vanier.

In the midst of that effort to reconcile complete opposites, I am not, however, thinking so much in terms of "God uses broken people." Though that seems true both in the scriptures and in my life, I internalized that message at a time when I held to a theory of atonement that relies on a lot of presumptive and speculative understandings of how God works in the world. And, where does "God uses broken people" leave space for accountability and transformation?

So, instead of reaching to grasp hold of an understanding of what's happening in the world and how God is working through it, I, as much as I could, began to consider how I myself tend to grasp hold on and around created things or people rather than the Word of God to guide me. The news of Jean Vanier's sin confronts me with my now false image of Jean Vanier. My ability to process this requires certain assumptions about God's accounting of sin in which I don't live in fear of punishment as I confront or lament the fact of evil lurking around my own heart. As William Blake said, "We become what we behold," so beholding the sin of Jean Vanier brings us face to face with the facts of our own story.

It's true that no facts go uninterpreted. There is no pure, spiritualized Jesus on which we can fix our gaze. The message and enactment of our Lord and His Way is always mediated through and in the world and its broken vacuum of darkness. Acknowledgement of the wholeness of our personhood in its full embodiment in incarnate flesh thus makes discernment of Jesus more difficult than if we skip over all that difficult mediation stuff and just stick to the Spirit's direct guidance and teaching into our disembodied spirit of what is taught as abstracted concepts in "scripture alone." The way that doesn't shed the flesh but redeems it, after all, is also His Way that itself goes straight through the dark night of the Cross.

LAMENTING THE BAD NEWS

So, in confronting, dealing with, and reconciling to our full embodiment in flesh redeemed in and by our Lord Jesus Christ, I feel like it's good to simply lament this news about Jean Vanier without necessarily needing a "take." My first response was to grasp hold of some articulated response to it rather than to simply face my sadness. I noticed that my response was attempting to covered over my grief, which itself needed some air, some room to breathe. Noticing these responses, I continue to learn that I suck at lament.

I'm also in the midst of learning my own role in patriarchy, so that made my grief over Jean Vanier's predatory sexual advances more complex. From a recent blog post I wrote (LINK HERE):

"My default way of functioning is to seek after or peruse the 'external good' I want by preying on a woman’s desire to be desired, in order to get half of what I actually want [Genesis 3: 16]. In our world that is the macrocosm to which Victoria’s Secret is the micro, that desire amounts to fulfillment in being VALUED. We think of Victoria’s Secret as more 'adult' than the innocence of Disney stories, but I am having a hard time seeing much of a difference right now. Either way, in a social world characterized by what we have given the name 'patriarchy,' who is it who establishes what values?

I don’t participate in this with the 'external goods' of TV’s on Black Friday. My way is a much more shocking affront to human dignity. I (at times) do it with the image of Woman. And, it’s a POWER that I am using!"

So, of course, my first thought when I saw the news about Vanier was: "Is this true?" I wanted it be able to keep my distance from it. As it turned out, however, the news did, indeed, seem to be true. Cutting myself off from it was't going to be an option.

On one female friend's page, she was expressing anger that people are surprised at this. With my desire for distance from the bad news of my own sin, her anger felt convicting. Another female came along and said that the accusations are clearly not true, since they're just as obviously politically motivated. That turned into a whole, long, giant argument. And, I felt the need to take sides. The last thing I saw my angry friend say was that it almost doesn't matter whether the accusations of Vanier are true or not, because how we respond to them (surprise and shock or rather total lack of surprise and almost expectation) says a lot about how we view the world and our solidarity or relationship with the plight of women.

Meanwhile, another more disheartened friend posted the very same article and said what appeared to me to amounted to something like: "OK I'm going to go dig a hole and lay in it now." Something like, "This makes me want to give up on humanity." (Whether that's really what my more despondent friend meant or not, it's how I processed it in my own soul)

All the while, I was noticing that, as I was drawn into the content of those two posts and arguments, I wasn't simply allowing myself to feel the sadness and grief of the news. And, that sadness and grief that I WAS feeling, I should affirm and make clear, is mixed with the same lament I've been feeling lately over how I've been so verily missing the boat with my own sexuality, dishonoring myself and others for so long and not realizing it. Both are really a lament of the same thing.

But, my desire to take EITHER side in the angry argument OR give up and crawl in a whole with my despondent friend felt like different ways to cover over and resolve my grief and lament rather than face, access, and touch it. Rather than making friends with it.

That one woman's urge to declare the news obviously untrue participates in my urge to fight and win the culture wars. Whether that's what she was doing or not, I don't know. It's my urge to reach out and grasp for answers that aren't really there. My hole-digging friend's response seems to resolve the loss in the opposite way.

PRAYER AS OFFERING THE CLAUSTROPHOBIA OF OUR DARKNESS ROOM TO BREATHE IN GRACE BEFORE THE LIGHT OF GOD

So, with all of that complexity and contradiction in mind and heart yesterday, I was praying through what I said above. I know from many life experiences - including my lessons in how I made idols of my Architectural creations - that I tend to fix hold on created things or people to guide me. In prayerful communion with the Spirit, I became encouraged yesterday that we aren't called to carry forth the message of Jean Vanier but of Jesus. And, we celebrated Jean Vanier not in his self-glorification but as a messenger of Jesus. My one friend's question of whether or not to throw his books out got me to asking gently: "Did we not actually hear Jesus in Vanier's message and in what he did in and through L'Arche?" I think we DID hear Jesus in it, right?

In the midst of that prayer, I began to suspect or imagine that Vanier's coercive and abusive sexual advances weren't actually disconnected from his GIFT for the truly and genuinely authoritative presentation of compassionate and gentle connection. To participate in our desire to declare the character and actions of Jean Vanier as simply and completely either good or evil fits the same above-noted pattern of my trying to cut myself off from the lament of sin and evil in and among myself and the world I inhabit. My shock was my desire for easy resolution, for final answers, and for a fully circumscribed horizon around a world I can draw up for myself in my imagination.

So, in the process of facing - in the safety of the grace and mercy of prayerful communion with Christ - the complex realities I know about myself and dear, close friends (I do still consider Vanier a friend of sorts), I suspect that or wonder if Jean's sin was the dark and disordered side of his gift - rather than the other way around. Perhaps it's too easy to now simply declare him a wolf in sheep's clothing, deem him evil incarnate, and burn his books in a new Inquisition. Taking this more complex approach would mean that we can't throw out our love for what he taught us, as though it's rooted in evil. Evil doesn't have that much of its own existence, much less authority. The evil, rather, is the empty, vacuous, twisted side of the good. In Jean Vanier, the world, and in myself.

At that point, then, I have to take the revelation of this news story of what went on in Jean Vanier as an opportune moment to embrace the fact and reality of precisely what's going on in me. To wit:

“Communion did not come easily to me. I had to change and to change quite radically. When you have been taught from an early age to be first, to win, and then suddenly you sense that you are being called by Jesus to go down the ladder and to share your life with those who have little culture, who are poor and marginalized, a real struggle breaks out within oneself.

[....]

I discovered something which I had never confronted before, that there were immense forces of darkness and hatred within my own heart. At particular moments of fatigue or stress, I saw forces of hate rising up inside me, and the capacity to hurt someone who was weak and was provoking me! That, I think, was what caused me the most pain: to discover who I really am, and to realize that maybe I did not want to know who I really was! I did not want to admit all the garbage inside me. And then I had to decide whether I would just continue to pretend that I was okay and throw myself into hyperactivity, projects where I could forget all the garbage and prove to others how good I was. Elitism is the sickness of us all. We all want to be on the winning team. That is at the heart of apartheid and every form of racism. The important thing is to become conscious of those forces in us and to work at being liberated from them and to discover that the worst enemy is inside our own hearts not outside!”

That's a quote from Jean Vanier himself (link here). So, maybe my angry friend was right. We should't be so shocked. He, in a sense, already told us about himself - just as he told me about myself! In a sense, then, my shock of this news about Vanier isn't any different from the shocking news that my Architecture had been my idolatry. Does our response not remain the same? Are we not "called by Jesus to go down the ladder and to share your life with those who have little culture, who are poor and marginalized"?

GOOD NEWS

Imagining the news of Vanier's transgressions this way allows me to remain in touch with what I'm lamenting, without covering it over, hiding it, or cutting myself off from it. I am still moving forward, both in connection to what I'm lamenting - as it's still present among us and myself - and in acknowledgement of how the same relationship between good and evil is ever on the open horizon before me.

Imagining the sin of Jean Vanier and myself this way also doesn't excuse it or make it OK. Because it's clearly not. In fact, imagining it this way also fits perfectly with the way I've begun to, thanks to my friend Mako Nagasawa, better or more clearly imagine the scriptural narrative within the framework of "medical" or "ontological" substitution. Without confidence and trust in the love of God, without a robust belief in God's goodness, I would have more difficulty relating to my grief. As Mako said it in a now lost conversation (I can send it to you privately if interested):

"[Jesus] shared in our fallen human nature, so we could share in his healed human nature...Jesus shows wrath against the diseases, the demons, and death. But his wrath is an expression or activity of his love - and his love for...persons...Jesus succeeded at battling temptation and killed the thing that was killing us, so he could rise cleansed and purified from the Adamic wound. 'He learned obedience...he became perfect...to become the source of salvation' from human evil' (Heb. 5: 7-9)...The sacrificial system proved medical, not penal substitution, because God was acting like a dialysis machine. He was drawing to himself all the impurity and uncleanness of Israel, and giving back purity, as an expression of His restorative justice. God was not acting like a Western courtroom judge, giving out 'punishments' to exhaust His supposedly retributive justice...God does not change a disposition in Himself. He changes something in us. Atonement is medical, healing, and restorative, not penaal, punitive, and retributive."

This isn't a post about penal vs. ontological substitution, so I'm just going to let that sit there. The point is that God is good, and God is love. That is required for me to not only say what I've said here but to process the world in what I am learning is a more healthy way. Fear of omnipowerful punishment doesn't have to be one of the things that might stop me from even looking in the direction of the darkness I can now otherwise lament.

So, in effect and to sum up, I would not even be wary of my desire to cut myself off from my sadness and grief in the first place if not for the tender mercy of the Father for the Son that overflows into love for and blessing over us. The purity and completeness of the goodness, mercy, and love of God allows, enables, and empowers me to confront my own sin in the process of grieving and lamenting the loss of the purity of the idolatrous image I improperly held of one of the heroes of my faith. As it turns out, the idolatrous image of my hero is the same idolatrous image I hold of myself. Pressing further into the good news that God not only accounts for but overcomes our sinful disobedience that launches a world engulfed in evil, the idolatrousness of the idolatry has no substance or solidity of its own for us to carry forward with us.

God's accounting for and overcoming our darkness with the light of His Kingdom in Christ is mediated in and through His grace at work in the L'Arche communities established by their founder, who we now know was often overcome by evil. God's launching of His Kingdom in the redeemed flesh of Christ, with our dark disobedience cut off from said flesh at the Cross like the excretory and toxin holding organs of the sin offerings of the ancient Jewish sacrificial system, like a circumcision of the heart, allows me to confront the darkness in the heart of my idols, which is no different from a confrontation with the vacuous, empty, disordered distresses of my own heart. It's the love of God that allows me to face and lament the me in my image of Jean Vanier.

...in pain you shall bring forth children,
yet your desire shall be for your husband,
and he shall rule over you.
- Genesis 3: 16

I grew up with Victoria’s Secret lingerie catalogues on bookracks in the downstairs half bath. And, they weren’t my Dad’s. Who do you think was the one who put them there? Who wanted to look at them, and why? Well, I ended up looking at them, and I’m learning that they profoundly shaped my desires. My desire isn't just a biological urge but is shaped by the cultural construct of value: what we value, how we value it, and the system around which the value is generated.

The New York Times recently published an article called, “Angels in Hell: The Culture of Misogyny Inside Victoria’s Secret” (LINK HERE). That sounds terrible, right? There’s a clear and easy to name villain there. In the story, his name is Ed Razek. Figuratively, he’s the patriarchal head of Victoria’s Secret whose abusive behavior helped create a culture of control and power where beauty and joy are intended to flourish. My main takeaway when I read it, however, was that I identify with Razek’s desires. So, although I don't see myself verbally abusing women the way Razek does, the story hit me pretty hard.

Where models saw obvious signs of abuse of power, his hopes were in fantasies of real intimacy and mutual desire with them. He’s a handsome dude, too. There are stories of private emails in which he promises vacations on his island and financial care and support while also expressing desire for personal affection and intimacy. Meanwhile, the angels tended to be polite and courteous with him for the sake of their careers.

I have only recently begun to awaken to how I grew up in a culture where abuse of power tended to mask a desire for intimacy, affection, and connection. In other words, in a culture like that of Victoria’s Secret. I’ve learned that the trauma of such an environment inhabituated me to a practice of dissociation from my body in moments of utter paralysis. The formation of my sexual desires was ordered around glamorous images in shiny lingerie catalogues while, paradoxically, I was simultaneously trained into disconnection from the real desires and language of my body in all its earthen textures.

Our common experience of this is somewhat comedically explored by Woody Allen in a memorable scene of his film, "Annie Hall." The most relevant part of the video starts at about 1:55. Man: "Is something wrong...I dunno, it's like, you're removed...you seem sorta distant." Woman: "Let's just do it, alright?" Man: "Is it just my imagination, or are you just going through the motions?...See, THAT'S what I call REMOVED!" Woman: "Awe. You have my body." Man: "Yeah, but that's not, that's, I want the whole thing!" Woman: "Well *sigh* I need grass. It helps me relax."



It didn’t help that I was both implicitly and explicitly taught in my culture of Christianized Gnosticism that lust is identified with and equal to the body (which is why I recently wrote “Lust Isn’t Bodily” - LINK HERE). Purity meant association with the spiritual realm to which we will finally and ultimately escape when we die. This disconnect from the humanity of Christ led to a default, patriarchal authoritarianism that I simply accepted with the same smile as the one on the face of the friendly Senior Pastor who ran the institution. See, I grew up in the heyday of the Purity Culture, whose rotten seeds have been reaped in news stories like those of Joshua Harris.

Some people walk away from the faith they grew up with and don’t believe it anymore. I walked away from the teachings on sexuality and don’t believe them anymore. But now what? As I’ve begun to learn that my entire framework for interpreting the world was informed by the practice of dissociation born of trauma, I’ve at the same time - through communal training in a Gravity Leadership cohort (LINK HERE) - been able to begin to name and own my various desires, including for intimacy, affection, and faithfulness.

Unstated in the NYT piece was the way Ed Razek’s power was generated by desire for the models in the first place. And not just his own. Not only the very existence of their modeling careers forged in a rather competitive market but – presumably, to some degree or another - their reason for choosing said career in the first place is the value of their being desired. As David Fitch said (HERE): “We can sexualize anything for money and still think this does not pollute the personal ethics of the people running the company/profiting from it.” Victoria’s Secret sets up a particular version of an entire system of transaction of desires in which it participates: follow for follow, like for like, sex for money, pleasure for pleasure, or tips for visual stimulation, all in an environment of market competition. “There are other fish in the sea,” we often hear.

The UNDERSIDE of this microcosmic transactional and competitive system is when Razek blocks a staff member's path to seconds at a company-provided buffet and:

"with dozens of people watching and Ms. Crowe Taylor holding her empty plate, he tore into her, berating her about her weight and telling her to lay off the pasta and bread. Ms. Crowe Taylor, who was 5-foot-10 and 140 pounds, fled to a bathroom and burst into tears."

So, the models' desires to be desired are legitimate, in the sense that they are REAL. The Victoria’s Secret catalogues in my home growing up weren’t my Dad’s. Who do you think put them there? Who wanted to look at them? And why? The alternative to not fulfilling the Secret promise of Victoria’s Angels is Ms. Taylor’s sobbing. It’s a DEVALUING.

A gorgeous Aphrodite recently said to me, “Baby, you make me feel so good.” “Baby, I love the way you talk to me.” I was basically engaged with her in valuable transactions of pleasure while - I later found out - she was trying to get featured on various lingerie modeling websites. Those sites generate significant amounts of money. She says she has a new mindset. What new mindset, I ask? “To find love,” she says! One of her last texts to me was, “I just don’t open up.” Victoria’s Secret is a microcosm.

I asked a different gorgeous Helen - who had been showing signs of interest in me - why she doesn’t model. Like, for a living. She said because she didn’t want to deal with the travel and stuff. Meanwhile, her lack of desire (ultimately) for me seemed to be my lack of VALUE – like, monetarily. I drive merely a Mitsubishi Mirage. She says her desire is to get her PhD to practice psychology and retire at thirty-five. But, she keeps going on trips to faraway tropical locations, paid for by rich men. And she’s still not back in school to get another degree. But, she knows a lot about what cars are on the market at what values.

Sarah, on the other hand, had something right, I think. “I’m an expensive hooker. I cost lifelong commitment. LOL!”

Which is the greater dignity? The way of Helen and Aphrodite, or that of Sarah? It may sound as though I’m asking that question with rhetorical confidence. But, you see, when I said I identified with Ed Razek’s desires, that included the way they are formed by distant, ephemeral images presented before us of Helen and Aphrodite, glamorously erotic speculations that have a certain elite value in the world in which we live. If you look at the stage sets of their fashion shows, they don’t actually hold very many people. Witnessing angels in person is only for an elect few. The rest long erotically from a distance on their televisions. And, yet, the show doesn’t last very long. Why am I so drawn to it?

So, that erotic elitism generates great value. It is activated as we gaze up at the capital of the democratic column that is our social body. And, I mean “value” very actually here. Victoria’s Secret runs off of it. It IS “Victoria’s Secret.” Even the man who presides in the office of the capital of the culture of Victoria’s Secret can’t get a full grasp around her.

Capitalism means a lot of things, but at least one of them is the reduction of all good to externals that can be bought, sold, and traded at agreed upon VALUES established through market competition. You would think, then, that the secret wouldn’t be so inscrutable. After all, we’re talking about well crafted and produced images purposely ordered towards being displayed out in the open. Here, though, there is no good internal to the embodied practice of affection, intimacy, and fidelity in the ordered relationship between man and woman. There is only a secret depersonalization of that which can only be most essentially personal. While putting her "external goods" on open display for many to see, Aphrodite said, “I just don’t open up." Victoria’s Secret is a microcosm.

I may have turned from the sexual teachings of the evangelicalism of my youth, but that doesn’t mean I know what I’m doing. The Secret isn’t actually easy to discern. No one in my home SAID why those catalogues were in that downstairs half bath growing up.

Victoria’s Secret presents an image of being known, of stardom, and of a certain freedom in the liberating power of female beauty. It’s the American Way! Hence the obvious theme in one of their fashion shows, depicted above. Their default way of functioning, however, is by a hidden, darker power who rules over the whole enterprise. In Genesis 3: 16, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you is not a prescription for how marriage is to function moving forward. The voice of God is, instead, telling us the result and characterization of what is named or known in the story as “sin.”

My default way of functioning is to seek after or peruse the “external good” I want by preying on a woman’s desire to be desired, in order to get half of what I actually want. In our world that is the macrocosm to which Victoria’s Secret is the micro, that desire amounts to fulfillment in being VALUED. We think of Victoria’s Secret as more “adult” than the innocence of Disney stories, but I am having a hard time seeing much of a difference right now. Either way, in a social world characterized by what we have given the name “patriarchy,” who is it who establishes what values?

I don’t participate in this with the “external goods” of TV’s on Black Friday. My way is a much more shocking affront to human dignity. I (at times) do it with the image of Woman. And, it’s a POWER that I am using! A dark and by necessity hidden one. That’s why it’s called Victoria’s SECRET.

And, being hidden, my power to get half of what I want, paradoxically, always leaves me empty handed. Somehow, the transactions of desire and value at the Secret heart of Victoria’s external display always break down. My power must remain hidden, because it’s ineffective if exposed. "How [much money] did you pay as a fair price for the image of God?" - Gregory of Nyssa (c.335 – c.395 AD), Fourth Homily on Ecclesiastes (via Mako Nakawawa HERE).

My guess is that while Ed Razek was driven by fantasies of intimacy and affection, the models probably tried to give him the benefit of the doubt that, while furthering their careers, he wasn't or wouldn't be a dickhead to them. When the expectations of that transaction broke down for either side, then so did the pleasure of the relationship. Ed Razek gets reported to Human Resources for murderous verbal abuse or for vain sexual offerings to unwilling angels. Suddenly, that angel is no longer in the catalogue or fashion show. She is devalued. I am learning that these dynamics are not confined to the walls of Victoria's Secret. They’ve somehow found their way into my life (and my death).

The transactionalized and depersonlaized market competition of sexuality, in the value system and the transactions surrounding it, of our American Capitalism, I am also learning, doesn’t lend itself very well to that for which my sexuality is really meant. I am here beginning to discern the contours of differences between value and dignity, transaction and fidelity. I am learning to name and own that part of myself that wants the goods internal to the embodied practice of affection, intimacy, and fidelity in the ordered relationship between man and woman. I thank God He’s beginning to teach me a way other than the paradigmatic evangelical one from which I turned, and I pray for help trusting that He is mercifully guiding and teaching me as I continue to learn to discern our open Secrets.

“Red is the color of the water in the rock here,” I stammered, looking down at my poem. That was the first line of an inspired poem, “City of Angels,” which I had penned early one morning in a new far away city that I was soon to call home. The line streamed from my mouth as smoothly as the stammering paper on which it was written, that shook nervously in my hand. While I sheepishly began to walk back toward my seat and the other forty or fifty artists in the café clapped politely, my other hand remained safely hidden in my pocket. At the end of the night, Harry, the host of Expression Mondays, purposefully made eye contact with me in the midst of the chaotic crowd and said, “Hey man, that was poetry!”

Weeks later, I gazed directly into the eyes of my audience as I said, “Have you seen the white haired monk, who is walking,” and my hands motioned in a rhythm and figure that mirrored the action of the poem as I continued, “And gazing and piercing slowly along in the desert?” When I sat down, another of the performers, Lisa, I think her name was, made direct and purposeful eye contact with me and said, “You write poetry about the things that no one can explain.” In that moment, her eyes became, “A union of the white in the sky and the shadow in the branch,” much like the deep piercing eyes of the monk, in the poem, about whom I had just spoken. That café became a home for me.

My third week at Expression Mondays was Adam Noble’s first. I saw him in the crowd at the end of the night, and he remarked, “As I was listening to your poem, I felt like I was taking a bath in a rainbow.” Some months later, with butterflies in my stomach, I thought back on his remark before venturing out on stage at the Baha’i Center for their open mike night. I gave all of my energy and heart to the performance; as I entered the poem’s last stanza, which began, “Here igniting we see hot white fire burning brightly,” I sensed the energy in the room rising in coordination with each line of the poem. As my hands gyrated around and then settled with the poem, the audience, which filled a room that was quite a bit larger than the intimate little café of Expression Mondays, immediately, spontaneously, and in unison jumped up and erupted into a long, cheering, pandemonian uproar that lasted all the way until I hesitantly sat back down in my seat with a sheepish smile. By then, I realized I had something to offer to the world.

Months later, after I had not performed in a long time, I was not surprised to learn of the end of the event that had become home to my community of artists. One night, the owner of the little Rockotitlan café, where Expression Mondays was held, got on stage. Although his English was usually very good, he stuttered and stammered his way through announcing the café’s closure and Expression Mondays’ end. By that time, though, I saw that I had been seeking my own glory. I had been offering my poems as extensions of myself.

Long before I moved to Los Angeles, my architecture professor once said, “One definition of home is a place you return to.” This statement became a reality for me when, years after Expression Mondays ended, I returned to Los Angeles for the host’s wedding. I stayed at a Christian brother’s apartment because, without question, I always counted on my Christian community, which had been open for centuries. While in town, numerous times, I passed by the Expression Mondays’ sign, overgrown with the vines of time. The sign, however, still remained bolted to the stuccoed wall of what had been the once vibrant Rockotitlan café. I realized, then, that I returned less to the scattered community of artists who I loved and more to that of the Living One who was teaching me to trust. Later, when my pastor said, “I bring an offering; I am the offering,” I realized that I carry with me something more powerful than myself to offer to the world. I bear a love that, by necessity, simultaneously includes and is greater than both myself and my poem.

*I did the above drawing while living in Los Angeles, "The City of Angels."