June 23: Sex on Earth, Labels, Leaving Things in Better Shape

There were five sexes on Tralfamadore, each of them performing a step necessary in the creation of a new individual.  They looked identical to Billy--because their sex differences were all in the fourth dimension.

One of the biggest moral bombshells handed to Billy by the Tralfamadorians, incidentally had to do with sex on Earth.  They said their flying-saucer crews had identified no fewer than seven sexes on Earth, each essential to reproduction.  Again:  Billy couldn't possibly imagine what five of those seven sexes had to do with the making of a baby, since they were sexually active only in the fourth dimension.

The Tralfamadorians tried to give Billy clues that would help him imagine sex in the invisible dimension.  They told him that there could be no Earthling babies without male homosexuals.  There could be babies without female homosexuals.  There couldn't be babies without women over sixty-five years old.  There could be babies without men over sixty-five.  There couldn't be babies without other babies who had lived an hour or less after birth.  And so on.

It was gibberish to Billy.

Vonnegut really was ahead of his time with this discussion of sexes on Earth.  Back in the 1960s, he was talking about homosexuality, and not in any pejorative way.  Homosexuality is necessary for survival in the universe of Slaughterhouse.  Sex and sexuality are very fluid things.  That's a pretty amazing thing for Vonnegut to say.

In our country where the rights of all people who aren't white, male, heterosexual, Christian, and healthy are under attack by white, heterosexual, Christian, healthy men, perhaps every person in Congress needs to pick up a copy of Slaughterhouse Five to read.  Or maybe everyone in Congress needs to spend some time in a Tralfamadorian zoo.

I am not going to write about the Senate's version of Trumpcare in this post.  Not climbing up on a soapbox tonight.  I simply want to say that it really doesn't matter whether a person is gay, straight, Muslim, Christian, black, white, or blue.  Defining someone by any kind of label is dangerous.  I am more than a man or Christian or heterosexual or father or husband or poet or blogger.  I am a fellow traveler on this third rock from the Sun, trying to leave things in better shape than I found them when I arrived.

Every person is important.  I think that's Vonnegut's point in this little passage.  Everyone has something to contribute from the day that they're born to the day they die.  So it goes.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for the chance to make the world a better place.

August 9: Failure of Imagination, Marilynne Robinson, Immensity of Love

But it could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination.

Dillard writes about God and faith all the time.  Her understanding of the natural world is filtered through the lens of Christianity.  When she sees a muskrat or monarch butterfly or the Perseid meteor shower, she knows all the sciences--biological and ecological and astronomical.  But she also nurtures a sizable sense of awe and grace.  Dillard is a rarity:  a serious Christian writer.

Christianity has gotten a bad rap in recent times.  This has something to do with small-minded conservatives who disguise their small-mindedness as a form of Christianity.  For example, they claim homosexuality is an affront to Christianity, even though nowhere in the Bible does Jesus Christ utter a single statement about homosexuality.  How about this one:  marriage is a covenant between a man and a woman?  Donald Trump, the Chosen One for many so-called Christians in the current United States presidential election, must really believe in the sanctity of marriage:  he's done it three times.

One of the best Christian writers working today, Marilynne Robinson, says this about the current state of politics and religion:  "Something called Christianity has become entangled in exactly the strain of nationalism that is militaristic, ready to spend away the lives of our young, and that can only understand dissent from its views as a threat or a defection, a heresy in the most alienating and stigmatizing sense of the word."  Robinson gets it on a deep level.  She sees the danger in this brand of Christianity.

No, I'm not getting on a soapbox tonight.  My point is that I appreciate the fact that there are writers like Annie Dillard and Marilynne Robinson.  They don't water down their Christianity when they write.  They embrace it in complex and meaningful ways.  It's not an easy faith they write about.  It's real faith, sometimes full of questions and doubt.  That's a faith I understand.  That's my brand of Christianity.

My faith is limited by smallness, as Dillard said in the quote above.  My imagination sometimes doesn't allow me to embrace the immensity of love that exists in God's heart.  All I see is what my limited vision allows.  Dillard and Robinson see something grander in their writing.

That's the kind of writer Saint Marty wants to be.