Written by:
Victoria A. Brownworth
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this Issue of Curve:
Vol. 14#8
As the holidays approach and 2004 draws to a close, I’m contemplating a homily for the season. I love Christmas — I’m a practicing Catholic — and I revel in the spirit of the season that I define not by rampant and rabid consumerism, but through spiritual reflection and the reclamation of the soul. That’s a Sisyphean task this year: Hope seems more elusive than ever, joy elided from our national landscape, and peace — well, Iraq and the death and destruction wrought there daily makes me wonder if peace remains in our lexicon.
It was a bad year. In 2004 I was sick, my illness and debilitation progressing. I was angry: furious at the decline of our country under one of the most corrupt administrations in our nation’s history; furious at the mounting death toll in Iraq, the result of the lies that took us there; furious at the escalation of terrorism throughout the world.
The debate over same-sex marriage — a debate in which straights questioned the validity of queer civil rights — enraged me. If J.Lo and Britney can do it several times in one year, shouldn’t Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon be allowed to do it once after 51 years together?
Millions more Americans sunk into poverty under the Bush administration. I was among those millions and felt disenfranchised. Other things distressed me as well: the widening class chasm in America. Intensifying racial tensions. The escalating rate of new AIDS infections among young queers and women. The lack of health care for more than 45 million Americans. Genocide in Sudan and the Congo, and not one nation seems ready to help. The level of cruelty and barbarism in the terrorist attacks on women and children in Russia set a hideous new bar. Abu Ghraib chilled us all. There are more grim realities to ponder: melting glaciers; a devastating hurricane season; the steady decline of several endangered species. And so much more.
This year, 2004, has indeed been a terrible year, filled with horrors of almost unimaginable proportions. How does one write about the gift of the holiday season under such grim circumstances? How, for example, do I excise from my consciousness the images of bodies in flames in Iraq after an American bombing of more than 60 women and children in September? How do I forget the 7-year-old Russian girl whose father could identify her only by her red panties and the cross embedded in the flesh of her neck? She had been beheaded by terrorists who overtook her school on her first — and last — day there. How do I erase the memory of the Sudanese women detailing endless, systematic rapes endured in Darfur in their efforts to escape the Islamist genocide there? How do I control my sorrow upon hearing that a friend’s 19-year-old nephew who joined the Army to get the education his family could not afford received fourth-degree burns in an attack in Iraq?
These pictures are seared so deeply into my consciousness that they seem to contravene all other memory. I have written about terrorism, homophobia, racism, violence and the endless imperiling of women around the globe. I spent 2004 working for social justice and found it unbearably elusive.
This year has tested me, as it has so many others. Despair stalks those who live on society’s margins: racial, ethnic and sexual minorities; the poor; the disabled; women. I look at all the homeless men and women who live in the shadowy recesses of the beautiful parkway in my city, patterned after the Parisian Champs d’Elysees, and I wonder when it was we stopped talking about the homeless and, seemingly, stopped caring that they exist.
It’s hard to embrace joy in the midst of such stark realities. It’s hard to reclaim the concept of peace as war rages. It’s hard to access hope with despair hovering so very, very close. Yet that is what this season demands of us: to reflect upon the meaning of these intangibles, regardless of one’s religion.
On Christmas Eve, I will attend Mass. My church is refreshingly diverse. I will worship with straight white and black families interspersed with gay male couples and lesbian families of all races. I will inhale the stark beauty of the Gothic stone church and feel held by a power greater than myself. I will listen to the story of Christ’s birth into poverty and peril, a story I have heard since childhood, and I will feel less marginal as I contemplate the marginality into which he was born, the son of an unwed mother who grew up to be a political activist whose closest associates were even more marginal than he. Or us.
Those of us who have faith are sustained by it in dark times. But despair is never far from any of us — religious or secular — and with or without belief in a higher being, we make our own justice in this world. That seems an insurmountable task these days with mere survival at such a premium. And yet we each are blessed with souls and spirits. The power to make moral choices — to choose good over evil, joy over anguish, hope over despair, peace over war — is granted to each of us, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity or ability.
And so I choose that moral course.
I choose joy. I choose to revel not in sorrow over my illness and debilitation, but in the joy of having people to love, women who nourish me and replenish me with their mere presence in my life and whom I cherish in return.
I choose hope: Each day I awaken sick and pain-wracked, but I plunge forward, knowing that there is important work to be done and I must do my part.
I choose peace: My rage at the injustice in my life and the lives of others throughout the world is intense, but my desire to promulgate love and nurture in the face of violence and terror contravenes my anger.
In a year as bad as 2004 has been, the holiday spirit is easily muted by the volume of grim realities that vie with it. However, if we allow despair to take root, if we turn our backs on joy and hope and the prospect of peace, we make ourselves marginal in a way that can never be reversed.
In the midst of so much hate, terror and loss we have a moral imperative to survive. That struggle for survival requires that we grab tight to what gives us joy, what proffers hope, what creates peace. In embracing those things we sustain not only ourselves, we mitigate against the forces that threaten the planet and us. When we embrace joy and hope and peace in the face of hate and fear and terror we make the world a better place simply by who we are. And that will sustain the spirit of the holidays well into the coming year.
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