Why I left work in HIV/AIDS

Why I left work in HIV/AIDS

(or the real reason they don’t want this negro around)

Here I am sitting 16 miles outside the Cincinnati, Ohio area jobless after 6 months.  For those of you who don’t know, I left the city of Memphis as Fannie Lou Hamer put it “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Having gained 60 pounds in five months (I had hit 301 pounds), constantly making doctor’s visits for this or that ailment (how he kept track of my weight gain), the two of us in a tug of war about high blood pressure medicine which I get over 250 pounds, acid reflux, pained knees from too much weight, headaches, not to speak of my back, fluid retention that made me miserable, panic attacks and days where I just couldn’t get out of bed. Anger turned inward. 

I was working primarily with black gay men who were having hard times adjusting to being gay, as much as if not more than, being HIV positive.  I’d be a lie  (and the truth wouldn’t be in me) if I said I didn’t love working with those guys, the vast majority of which were young enough to be my sons and often got on my last nerve more concerned about Beyonce or who lost last night on American Idol than saving their own lives. 

I also enjoyed working with those few young African American women who came in to be tested sitting on pins and needles, our collective two heads working the dude over who possibly infected them.  We were a tag team beating him up and cussing him out, stopping ever so often to unfold fists for prayer to Jesus for a negative result, and once praying hands were split, we’d ball them back up to box him up and down the ring again.  It was a 20 minute stress reliever and serious, cries just behind the laughter.

I’ll never forget the last young African American lady who came in practically in tears that she might be….  I got to hear her story and made it my business to keep her encouraged. Hell she could have been my niece or sister or cousin.  Hell as far as I was concerned she was blood and I had her back. She got her negative result but I also had to remind her of her responsibility which she soaked up knowing we’d been sisters in the trenches for a little while. 

As a side note, I often wonder about my praying clients who I figured must know I was gay and wanted to ask on more than one occasion: When you leave are we enemies in the name of the Lord?  But I didn’t push it.  It wouldn’t have been “professional” no matter how human (and real) my question would have been after she’d hugged me tighter than tight in relief.  I did my job and I got to support another human being to a place of peace.

I must admit even when I got a positive result I loved being in the trenches with my boys too. They came in all kinds of packaging: effeminate, super over compensating macho, in the closet to nobody, but themselves (especially their mamas who they often colluded with in a lie rooted in the loss of love or banishment from whole families or beating by brothers or cousins).  They were always preoccupied by the most superficial things.  Their pecs or stomachs or hair “did right”, how they looked and making it to the club or drag show.  They could pop their asses better than any hoochie mama I’d ever heard tell of and could make a microphone or stripper pole out of a broom stick and work it.  Dysmorphia out the wazoo, they’d fight you if you said anything even remotely critical (no matter how true) about their church and pastor or their mama who refused to look at them let alone speak; rarely did I see anyone so sensitive about Dad.

I’ve often told the story about the African American young man (he was really a boy and that’s what really hurt my heart) who came in and got a positive result back.  When I was talking to him in post counseling he practically confessed that he was supposed to be infected because (1) he was gay; (2) he was black;  (3) he was young and all of his friends were positive and he didn’t want to be the outsider again;  (4) God hated gays and HIV was our due—we were cursed from the start!  I broke his face when I explained to him that I was 46 at the time and was not positive. I confused him as much as he left me dumbfounded.

My HIV status is a piece of information I rarely share with anyone.  The only time I’d disclose was when a positive client is disclosing under the assumption that “We” used when my client feels comfortable, are dealing with the exact same issue.  To disclose to me in tears and gnashing of teeth would be unfair if I didn’t disclose that I’m not quite the sister or brother they envisioned bearing witness to their hurt or shame or testimony. It’s a betrayal to my mind so I find a place in the conversation to intersperse the truth gently. I’ve never had anyone to change their mind. Often they were amazed and delighted that someone who wasn’t positive would even listen to them or not judge.  Normally, I just let people assume that I am. 

I came too late with my years and my testimony for that young man.  That was one of those times when I had to do some personal inventory about my own banishment or should I say estrangement from the black gay/sgl community, some imposed upon me and some self imposed.

You see I don’t fit in the black sgl community or the other gay community.  I won’t say larger gay community because it gives a false sense of white society being the point of reference for who I am and my choices when it’s not.  The whole wide world has that honor.

I don’t fit with the white gay community because they think I’m too pro black because I’ve been vocal about their own narrow vision that reeks of assimilation more than justice to me which can leave some people out of the equation.  To exemplify this, a few years back a local university was doing a study on gay parents of adopted children which I am one.  I was like oh I can do this and get my two cents in on what it’s like to be a gay adoptive parent. Reading further along in the flyer I had overlooked that they were looking for couples for their study. I, being a single parent was somehow not worthy of being counted in their study.  The researchers’ real goal was not gays having adoptive rights, but proving to the white heterosexual community that we can make two parent homes too, in effect stable, at least in ideal.  We all know of two parent homes not fit for human beings to thrive from parents to child so two doesn’t always make it better or right. I didn’t correct or scold letting them have their Eden’s dream of equality, their homage to the establishment.  I guessed us single parents were to set our faces against the window panes of their idyllic homes with envy.  I’d rather throw a rock.  I realized a long time ago, I didn’t fit their great white agenda which is an allegiance to their parents and their values, not justice for the sake of justice. And don’t mention the gay marriage thing. It probably puzzles me more than straight people because I’ve seen straight couples that would give wrestle mania a run for its money on a Friday night after payday.  I saw supposedly divinely sanctioned heterosexual couples that should never have married in the first place, shot gun or not.  That should have torn the divorce court door down to sign papers like parting shots at the end of a particularly cruel civil war.  Hell I’ve never even been on a date before let alone got to imagine setting up house with the white picket fence and 2.1 children. At almost a half century, I’ve never been in a relationship. Me and the brothers just don’t get along like that and inter racial dating with a white man just never peeked my interests.

The issue with the black sgl community is much more complex and is legion so instead of giving you the ugly details of that drama I’ll just give you the why I don’t fit list: (1) I’m not height/weight proportioned.  I don’t go to the gym 3-4 times a week like so many lovelorn on Match.com.  My Ms. Girl will slip out in mixed company and she has a temper; (2) I don’t claim to be a bible totin’ and quotin’ Christian (which has gotten me in trouble and some cat clawing fights with church queens, their pastor’s armor and bible bearers, singing, weeping and wailing at the altar for Jesus to let their punk asses in which I refuse to do.  As far as I’m concerned, God’s gone have to take what She made and get over it; (3) I can’t buy into the sin/redemption of Christianity even if I were heterosexual (which still gets me into tooth and claw fights with the church queens and the reverends and an occasional Grandma (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called demon possessed and confused);  (4) I can’t stand clubs and the freaks come out at night hours (I had a son to raise and get sleepy by midnight); (5) I can’t stand intellectual pretense and I have several degrees.  I’m talking about those guys who think because they have degrees, can use deconstruction and Derrida in sentences that they’re somehow above the common punk herd; (6) the black gays are stunned when the ole folks of the community have made me so mad that I lose my religion (oops I don’t have any).  I should say, my Southern bred manners and cuss them out for hurting my feelings and assuming because they were older they had a right to; (7) I want play dumb or closeted (even if I could) to win a “real” man who only calls after the witching hour and his girlfriend or wife is sound asleep; (8) then there is that group of black sgls who think I’m too smart i.e. white acting and assume I must be or am waiting on my prince to come—a white man—to save me from the doldrums of our colored lives.

That’s the nutshell of my estrangement from the community. I just don’t fit and I’ve got a bit too much of my ornery Mississippi red Mama in me. She wouldn’t go along to get along either. And maybe I’m more like her than I realized.

From time to time she was mistaken for a white woman.  She kept a little white boy back in the day that was going on about niggers. My mother incensed told him, “I’m a nigger,” which shocked the hell out of him.  I never got to ask if she kept that job or got fired.  My mother was a hoot who’d sat up with the preacher and cussed him out on hallowed ground for an incident involving my middle brother.  She cussed Harrie Mae Simon out, a paragon of the black bourgeoisie in Memphis over my sister at Magnolia where she was the principal. My father, more about middle class values and fitting in— educated, a postal worker, and a braggart (which my mother frowned upon)—was horrified; he got cussed out too. She just wouldn’t act right and hated pretense with a passion.   She was the one who distinguished to me that there was no difference between white niggers and black niggers; as far as she was concerned a fool was a fool was a fool no matter their race, class or gender and she’d tell them so.  So you have to understand that I got my “ain’t gone kiss yo ass” stuff honest.

Well being up North, jobless and not working in HIV I have to realize something when after having an interview for an HIV job up here in Ohio, I just don’t fit into the kind of negro they need working in this area.  You can just tell by the way some white folks look at you, under brow, head cocked and drawn up like they’re waiting in quiet panic to swat a cock roach that’s invaded their pristine kitchen.  That kind of seeing is a skill you learn growing up in the South where the sense of racism is sharpened down to a keen spirit of discernment and not necessarily a confrontation; learned from your own who marched through many a back door like soldiers on a mission after sweeping the front and dismissed the word nigger as if they were talking to somebody else.

At 48, maybe I’m just too old and seasoned to play the HIV game. Looks like the rules don’t favor me much these days.  The CDC and local agencies are really making HIV out to be a young people’s disease because of infection rates among the 13—24 age group as if they live in a vacuum.  I guess the rest of us are either immune to infection after 25 or we’re totally irrelevant in the scheme of things; if we don’t know any better by 30, we ought to just die off is the message it sends to me. 

Nobody seems to be paying attention to what I see and experience all the time. Young black sgl guys approach me, but I don’t quite speak their language nor have any remote interest in pop culture which seems to be the brick and mortar of their identities.

I prefer James Baldwin over Beyonce, morphogenetic field theory interests much more than Survivor, the Discovery or History Channel over BET, Toni Morrison over Black Gay Chat, imagination and intuition over facts, engaging conversation over idol gossip about who slept with who and how big it is.  I prefer theoretical speculation over who was in the furnace with the prophet Daniel over somebody’s infallible word of God. 

Often I find that they’ve lacked mentoring (not that I had it) and want somebody to “show me how to do like you, show me how to do,” as Stevie Wonder sang. I must admit I have backed away most often not wanting their Mama or Daddy looking to kill me for “turning them out” as we’re often accused.  Hell, I don’t want to turn them out. Just turn them inward to the realization that no matter what any so called holy book says, a Petri dish, a genetic sample, what their folks say; that they have just as much right to be on the planet as anybody else.  No explanation needed.  Your soul copyrighted the day of your birthday.  It’s insane for anybody to ask you for a permission slip to walk the halls of life on your own terms.  So many of the young want the whole package in sexual affirmation too and when I can’t respond properly they take it as a cosmic rejection. (I’ve got my baggage too). I do understand but, I can’t replace the love the world has denied them nor would I try. It’s too huge a job and I’m bound to fail and I don’t like failing.

But does the CDC and so many of these agencies understand the need for holistic affirmation. Not to just tell somebody to not have sex, but to teach them the whole value of their sex, the genitalia and teach them how to connect being a part of an affirming community as a counter against soaring infection rates.  But I forget the CDC can’t put love and culture, history and mental health and human frailty, the heart and affirmation in a Petri dish. How can you measure it?  Nobody knows how to harvest intimacy and give it away or sell it on aisle 19 at Wal-mart.  It just isn’t science. It’s only reality.   It’s how people feel.   

So nobody stops to look at the youngsters going after older guys like myself who not having dealt with their own stuff i.e. hurt, pain and rejection and have no sense of a historical or human connection and are not likely to use condoms. Why should they? Every message and signal they get all day is that they don’t matter; the same as the young guys, but much longer. All that’s left is kamikaze sex from young to old and back again.

When sitting with my guys every day and in trainings like Many Men Many Voices, I saw clearly what the real problem was. It wasn’t sex.  I heard people say both out loud, under platitudes and jest that nobody loves or wants me or I don’t know how to love and what do us older heads say when we’re on the kindergarten page of that instruction book too.

And race is an issue by and of itself.  I’ve watched agencies more often run by straight or lesbian white women who have no idea in their wildest dreams what it’s like to be colored gay me.  They have no idea when they have an agency full of white people what it’s like to come in and see nobody like you. They have no idea what it’s like to sit and try to bridge some common ground with a white counselor who in his or her ignorance (but well intentioned) says that race doesn’t matter and we’re just all people under the skin.  We’re all just the same.  And they’re right until you’re walking down the street in your black skin with a hoodie on or get followed through Macy’s because you’re black and have dreadlocks and hear the undercover say under his breath, “it’s a faggot.”  You’ve gone from one kind of criminal who might snatch and grab the Sean Jean jeans and make a mad dash for the exit to a waiting car of thugs to a criminal who might snatch and grab a set of Martha Stewart collection cookware and make a mad dash to a car full of hungry queens. Can’t win for losing.

Some of those same white women have no idea what it’s like to be a black man in America and dependent upon the demographics will hire black males to be out front to pull in other black males. If you’re black and gay that’s a plus!  I know I’m being used in such a fashion but where you run into problems is when the white female thinks she knows more than you do not only about black folks but about black gay men and you find yourself in a tug o war for control over who black sgl men and women are and how they don’t fit into the nice CDC guidelines. Real people rarely fit into nice neat categories and nobody believes they do but scientific theorists. 

They’ll speak to high heaven about CDC policy and what we’re supposed to do and the initial test results for this or that intervention or prevention program which you find yourself wondering who they tested it on because seemingly it has little to do with the young black guy who came in for testing whose uncle is “turning him out” and on to threesomes with his girlfriend.  Nephew is confused trying hard to figure himself out and prove to the only father figure he’s known and respected that he can hang and not use condoms as they take turns because only faggots get AIDS (nobody ever says HIV). 

Contrary to popular belief, I’m a man—a black man. I’m a sgl man.  I instinctively know what’s going on with him.  He’s questioning and his uncle (only a few years older and more like a brother) is aware like me that there’s something “different” about him.  And in his honest concern to save his nephew from a life of faggotry, getting screwed in the ass like a bitch, and public scorn of their family name, he must expose him to the only affirmation of manhood he knows: Pussy.  And he’s bold enough to show him in real time on the spot; “show me how to do like you, show me how to do.”  It haunts.  I understand and don’t say, but let him know that even though his test results came back negative I’d love for him to come back and see me and talk about whatever, whenever he feels like it.  I never scold the brokenhearted, their esteem already on the ground.  How could I? Tears welled up in his eyes for more reasons than the fear of HIV.  He’s afraid of who he is. I never intimate that I’ve read his tea leaves.  I feel for him not as a CDC statistic or a potential infection risk which I know is where he’s headed via his uncle’s best efforts and his own fear around his sexuality.  Where is this in the intervention book?  Such knowledge is written in the heart.  Outside the book and the box, maybe I am too old for the game.

I may be black and gay but I get the nephew and my heart goes out to him. I would even say I love him and like his uncle I want to protect him too. He really does need it.  I get this overwhelming desire to hold him and rock him back in time to the first of us enslaved on these shores and let them tell him, show him the shackles and scars, sing to him the hurt; how high a price has been paid for him with flesh and blood, not money, to contemplate himself.  Inappropriate.  Unprofessional.  Rocking folks to the ancestors isn’t something of value in the HIV prevention world skating into a wall like a car on black ice, desperate, grasping at straws and redirecting its efforts to the assumption that all our black asses including black women are outright heading toward positive.  Looks like they’ve thrown up their proverbial hands and people of color and women will pay the most for that easy surrender.

Now no longer at the agency, I wonder if the nephew comes back will he see me the betrayer, having struck out North, no star to guide me, abandoning him. Will he be as honest with the next person as he was with me, dropping his guards, confessing his shame, asking for guidance with his eyes not words he’s never been taught by another black man. 

I’ve lost my little brother, whose angst is so deep because he can’t figure where he wants to stick it (or be stuck for that matter and I honestly believe looking back on it that the youngster is bi or that other emergent species the CDC hasn’t even sighted—the “if I’m feeling him/her I’m down” crowd, both male and female).  As is often the case with emergent behaviors there aren’t many rules, certainly not to protect hurt feelings or be concerned about HIV rates as the thing is too new, unnamed and nebulous as a community. 

That young man and being an HIV/AIDS counselor taught me that judgment was so irrelevant in the face of learning. That anguished young man along with the other one who came back positive have taught me so many invaluable lessons about what it means to be black and gay or questioning or bisexual or whatever in the early 21^st century. A change is going on.  When I’ve spoken at public forums/panels about what I’m seeing my heart sinks to the collective gasp of a room full of black folks who think our children have lost all sense of direction, moral fiber and biblical home training and gone to hell in a safer sex kit.

I’m seeing a bunch of young people questioning the limits set in response to racism, sexism, abuse, antique church views that have really served no one, outright unadulterated ignorance and mean spiritedness.   The younger generations ought to question us, but we ought to have some honest answers and guidance not rooted in our own unresolved issues around sex and sexuality and regret.  I owed my young brother my ear and to listen, not judgment, to see what it was he was trying to work out and support him in that process whether he comes back and tells me he’s straight, crooked or turned around exclusively to his own sex.  That’s really what HIV counseling should be about, helping the person find themselves so they’ll know they are worth protecting. Not towing the line of fitting people into boxes so we can get the grants and money and are so totally lacking in love and compassion for that person’s all too human journey.

And let me say this about black folks running agencies. We can be just as much the problem when we don’t understand the nature of power that has historically undermined us.  It can shift forms and races and genders and sexual persuasions, not respecting the neat boundaries of pain we’d like to fence it in. Power is a spirit and dependent upon the strength of character or lack thereof it can always corrupt in the presence of a victim and in the victimizer’s fear of a loss of control of a reality that doesn’t even belong to him or her. Which of us can control the sun or the turning of the earth? We can barely get a grip on a feeling. But human beings so often in the face of fears, their own and their groups whether racial, regional or national, succumb to it; to be anything but the outsider and the stranger.

Racism comes out of a distorted view of power and perception—we (whoever that vaunted group is at that particular time in history) are the real human beings not those other different people.  It’s about power when you don’t feel good about yourself or have lied to yourself about your own importance in the scheme of things that you, black person, become an honorary problem too, sometimes worst.  I can’t tell you how many so called black leaders I’ve met who haven’t or refuse to grapple with their fears and shortcomings.  The need to dominate and mentally or verbally strong arm people into towing the line with their good opinion and berate them if they differ is the same distortion of power that created slavery and said women didn’t have souls. It’s still an ism (racism, sexism, isms…isms…isms).  Just different drag for that day.  To be black and make a criticism of the black or gay community is not betrayal. The truth is the truth no matter what quarters it comes from.  The test is how you handle it.  As I stated earlier, my mother taught me about critiquing everybody when she saw white niggers and black niggers and put them all in the same trick bag of fools.   None of us is helpful if we come through the door assuming we’ve got the answer and the person sitting across from us is void of any good conclusions about their life or pat them on the head like a good dog. It’s a lesson people of color have had to learn but so many of us have forgotten thinking we’ve got the degree or have bought into our own hype about being a “success” and reaching for “excellence.

Don’t let me forget my straight black guys who’ve come for testing to sit in my chair and they have been legion. It’s amazing how people can get over their street props homophobia and the biggest macho man ever will slump down in my chair to tell me why he’s really there.  HIV testing brought him in of course, but it’s so fulfilling to watch that brother prodded by my questions plot his way through the last 6 females he slept with (and he’s married), most of them black, with which he’s used no condoms to figure out why he can’t keep it zipped up.   He rises up moving to the edge of the chair contemplating himself and his behavior tracing the long road of personal history back to the same hurts and distortions his sgl brothers have suffered differently.  Contrary to popular belief all men aren’t dogs. I’ve seen brothers tear up, and come clean trying to work out their father’s issues with their mothers through women who don’t even know what truck him them and why.  I’ve sat with straight guys at three hour intervals, through lunch and breaks, to figure he’s not his mama’s savior thirty or forty years later and he’s not his daddy son.  He’s his own man. And no amount of saving women with his sex will make him or her whole.  He realizes she’s not the damsel in distress. He is. His journey to himself must be his own with few guides in this world and plenty of tricksters even amongst women who want him to be the big strong man!  I remind him he’s only human.

I’m good, with no counseling or public health degree, but not fit for today’s HIV/AIDS climate. 

So you see I’m becoming painfully aware that I may be obsolete, a has-been, a relic from the past who needs to be put out to pasture, my mind burnished to a fiery glow in a black gay man’s pain and experience. 

It’s tough out here being colored gay me.  I’ve seen some things in my day that no one seems to see as valuable.  

I also have to take inventory of my stuff. 

The older I’ve gotten the less bullshit I can tolerate. Sociopaths and fools find me a loose cannon and difficult.  I speak my mind, won’t tolerate abuse, refuse to abuse, won’t scream at other adults in the workplace, will not be screamed at, expect adults to act like adults and children like children.  Trouble doesn’t’ have to make you bad as the blues singer crooned, but it will give you a piercing eye for mundane evil in everyday life, deception, the simple quality of joy and an honest heart. And a quick tongue dividing the lie from the truth and discerning where the two are so completely intertwined they’re better left alone for time and God to tease out with her comb. 

It’s hard living in your truth. 

In the end, this I know, my heart was in what I gave and not for grant money, numbers and bragging rights (which my mother would frown on from West Tennessee cemetery).   I know supporting those guided to me was crucial in some round about mystical way having nothing to do with HIV.  Strangers that they were, I loved them all. 

Obsolete, maybe I need to simplify life at 48 in a bad economy and stand at the I-275 exit with a homemade cardboard sign that reads:  Will work for food.

© 2012 Conrad R. Pegues

What a Body Remembers

What a Body Remembers

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love (1929-1968)


Well it’s happened. My adoption is threatened in the sense that my child’s foster mother has been harassing him about me and my sexuality. She suspects I’m gay and my son has confessed that, “She calls you that word.” I said, “That word?” He said, “Yeah, you know that word.” He confessed this after telling me of a recent episode that took place with her where she accused him of “liking men too much.” He said, “You know what I mean?” I said, “Yeah.” This “liking men too much” has become conflated with the fact that he has started to become very emotionally attached to me (faster than he has with anyone before), so I had to work with him on this matter amongst many until 2 a.m. Sunday morning.

To say that another human being (especially a minister's wife) would try to manipulate a child to use him as a weapon is off the scale evil to me. I had been warned that this woman wanted to keep my son for the check and I would have to be on guard for sabotage. Well, it’s come down to that.

I reported it to one of the workers. Now because of suspicions the foster mother is throwing upon me about “is he” or “isn’t he” one of the social workers is now talking about having a meeting because “we’re all adults here”. She wants to talk about issues around sexuality (I guess mine if I am gay) and how this might impact my son who does have issues around sex and sexuality. He’s had past homophobic experiences in foster homes including the one he’s in now. So now out of all of this I’ve become suspect, but suspect for being gay? Or suspect for being effeminate? Or suspect for being gay and workers not wanting to place him with a possibly gay man since the child has issues around his sexuality and is asking questions? What’s suspect here? Who’s suspect or should be? The nature of the question itself?

I’ve sat with this and turned it over in my mind, but this morning it was like Spirit came to me with an answer or should I say with a reminder of an incident in Nashville when I was going through PATH (Parents As Tender Healers) classes for adoption in 2005.

I had to have a physical to complete my home study. I randomly chose a physician in Nashville who was not far from my apartment as many of my co-workers’ physicians were out of county. I went to this stranger’s office and we introduced ourselves. I told him that I needed a physical pursuant to what was requested on the form from DCS and he looked it over and looked at me. “You’re not married?” he asked. I said, “No.” “You’ve never been married?” he asked. I said, “No.” He checked my birthday. I was 41. He then said, “Well I have to give you an HIV test.” I said, “No, you don’t. That’s not on the list of things to cover in the physical.” We went back and forth until he finally looked over the form to see that I was right. He wanted to give me one anyway, but I told him, No. He proceeded with the physical and found nothing wrong. Finally, he says, “When’s the last time you had your lower colon checked since you’re in the age and racial group for high incidence of cancer and cancer runs in your family.” I said, “It’s been two years.” An alarm went off in my head and I became nervous. “Well, let’s check you for that, drop your pants.” I was reluctant and something in me was like he’s trying to figure if you’ve been penetrated since you won’t do an HIV test. At the mercy of my own fear of not being able to adopt, I pulled my pants down and bent over, my body tense as he put on rubber gloves and lubricated his finger. I remember thinking this is no gay sexual fantasy to me thinking about jokes people make about gay men and proctologists. It was horrible. He probed with his finger as I resisted with my sphincter tight, not wanting him inside of me. He pushed in, telling me to relax and part of me went out of my body counting time, wanting this to end fast. I remember thinking it’s for the child and the adoption. I had no evidence to accuse him of wrong behavior. I was a grown man submitting to his finger. He finished and smiled contentedly. “Alright Mr. Pegues, everything looks fine.” He took the anal specimen and packaged it although he and I knew he neither needed it nor wanted it; it was his insurance against accusation of wrongdoing. I could see he was happy with his findings. My anus showed no signs of scar tissue or my having been penetrated. I left his office feeling low and violated and began to think of women I’d known who had felt violated by doctors doing pelvic exams. I knew solidarity with them I never could have guessed at in a hundred years.

I got home and called my insurance company to ask when I could change doctors as I was not happy with the service I’d been given with this particular physician. I remember the woman on the phone asking me, “Mr. Pegues what happened? Is there something we need to know about?” I said, “No ma’am…well, ah no ma’am…nothing really.” She pushed, “Mr. Pegues if something happened we need to know about it.” How could I prove he’d done anything wrong? I was a grown man. He was a grown man. They could easily accuse me of being paranoid or just plain crazy. I had no proof, only what I felt and knew in my heart and who’d ever heard of a 220 pound, 6 foot tall, black man being assaulted in the ass with an index finger? I backed off and said, “No that’s alright. I just need to know how long I need to wait before he files his claim so I can change physicians.” She gave me the information and I hung up. It bothered me so that when I went back to work I told my supervisor at the time what had happened. She shook her head and said, “Conrad you don’t let anyone violate you like that. Even if it just feels wrong don’t do it.” She said, “I’ve gone to get pelvic exams and if the doctor gave me a bad vibe I got up and walked out.” I knew she was right. I had betrayed myself out of fear; it wouldn’t be the first or last time and the hardest lesson of my life.

The thing about self betrayal is that it leaves you angry with yourself more than any other. You can’t set yourself out enough. You can’t walk away from yourself disgusted. You have to live with your actions and your anger 24/7. It’s not an easy thing to do and it’s hard to forgive and takes work to do so which makes the experience stick in your flesh and blood like that irritating splinter you can’t quite dig out of your finger. You have to tear up healthy flesh to get to it and get it out before it infects and ruins more of you. Your allegiance has wrongfully been to church, tradition, shame and guilt or what your mama might think to defeat your best self and mind. I’ve done it too many times thinking that if I defend myself or take up for myself I’m going to be the villain, they’ll know who I really am and I’m not always nice, then no one will defend me or back me up.

I had to go back to pick up my tuberculin skin test and sign off on my paperwork a few days later. The nurse saw me come in and immediately handed me my form. She looked at me and smiled and there was a knowing between us which I can only describe as sympathy. I said, “Shouldn’t you all mail this to DCS?” She said, “No, you take it,” and hurried me out of the office. No mention was made of the results for the specimen. I felt relieved when I saw that he had signed approval for me to adopt. I also felt like I’d dodged multiple bullets, especially with him, my desire for a child held in the tightness of my sphincter.

Spirit reminded me of this episode I’d forgotten that took place in 2005. I’d wondered how I’d forgotten so easily when I promised myself to let no one violate my body like that again. Now, I come to another level of suspicion because I’m not butch masculine and I’m unmarried at 43 and a worker wants me to have a conference between myself, my son and his therapist. I’m not so sure about this drudging up old issues of being judged, not quite a human being and not quite worthy to raise a child who others have traumatized around his sexuality.

I thought about it this morning and decided I’m not going to do it after Nashville 2005 was brought to my remembrance with a physician who has worked under the banner “Do no harm.” I may not get my son, but if I lose him I’ll just have to stand on principle that I did what was right for me. I know he’s a child and many would deem him worthy of such sacrifice, but to be bent over a table again, even figuratively, is more than I’m willing to bear. I recognize the kind of world we live in and its rampant homophobia and what the Christian church teaches about gays and lesbians all over the world and how those in and out of church hate people like me and don’t think we should be adopting children. I refuse to be crucified again laid over an examination bed, a white man’s finger probing up in my ass for signs of homosexual practice.
I’m not ashamed of my sexuality and I’m not going to be remade to feel any shame of my sexuality that I’ve worked hard and long for years to counter within myself. The system is too fucked up for words. I won’t be violated again--not even for a son’s love.
c. Raphael—God has healed
5/11/07

The Heart of the Word

The Heart of a Word

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; John 1:1-2

Recently there has been a great deal of debate over Don Imus and his comments about the Rutgers women’s basketball team calling them “nappy headed hos”. I had to sit with this one a while vacillating between dismissal of him as I do so many so called shock jocks to debating with myself on how serious name calling can be especially for someone like myself who has been called out of my name (i.e. punk, sissy, faggot) all of my life. When I heard he’d been fired I was still rather so so about the whole thing. I wasn’t sure if that was overkill or not looking at critics from both sides. I looked at the usual arguments around race which of course are the bulk of them and rarely if ever has anyone brought up the inherent sexism that “hos” implies because so many people across the racial divide don’t really see the issues of how women are treated as really important.

Looking at one web site, I was outdone at the number of whites who sidelined the issue because Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have stepped into the fray and have decided to dismiss and/or apologize for Imus’ behavior like he really didn’t mean it and it was a mere slip of the tongue. Others felt that Imus’ remarks are not to be taken to heart because African Americans haven’t been as forthcoming to defend the Duke Lacrosse players who were accused of gang raping a black stripper and now the charges have been dropped. In addition many of the white posts and some of the black posts consider African Americans to be hypocritical since rappers use the word Nigger and refer to black women in particular as bitches and hos in so much of their music. It turned into finger pointing from both sides, black and white. One side extols the virtues of freedom of speech in this country. The other side says that no one has the freedom to be abusive to anyone.

More deeply, I had to wonder about the idea of a word, any word, that creates hell for so many so completely. Women reel from the word bitch and ho. If men are sexually promiscuous it’s more likely to be a compliment or seen as the way men are fundamentally until at least they’re married—at least that’s the myth so many would like to believe. Same gender loving men and women are called faggots and bull daggers or something even more scathing. It’s always the ones with the least institutionalized power that can easily become targets on the street or in their own homes via physical and verbal abuse, because of a word and what we choose to fill those words up with as we’ve been taught to believe about those different from us.

“In the beginning was the word.” It seems so simple but so many cultures worldwide attribute creation to a single word that calls the creation into being. What so many of us fail to see is how easily the words that we breathe from our mouth can create hell on earth for so many. It’s easy to believe that freedom of speech entails being able to publicly denigrate someone especially if the word has racial and sexual connotations. We all think we should become thick skinned and not let the words hurt, but the words do hurt because they proceed from the human heart and they wound us at heart because all hearts are one having proceeded from a common spiritual source. There are so many ways to call people out of their name even without using words as a definition always precedes a word. The world we live in is built upon denigrating one group or another but often in ways which we rarely make a mental connect.

Women are the least likely to be paid a decent wage for equal work and the most likely to fall through economic cracks along with children since so often children do follow the condition of the mother. The system was not built to extol the virtue of being a woman simply because of birth. It never has been. We’ve been calling women hos for centuries in our own insidious way through our economic and social system. So many talk about families falling apart but no one really stops to see so many people (many of which are people of color and women) who’re working several jobs just to make ends meet without the social constructs in place to raise their children who are left vulnerable to gangs and other temptations in the street. We’ve been calling so many people out of their name simply by the way we deem to see reality and/or God and who gets to be in power.

And that’s the real issue for me. How do we challenge a system where someone deems it okay to call a bunch of women (mostly women of color) nappy headed hos when we all know the racial implications of the words in the first place. Imus knew that and he meant what he said. Whether he intended to hurt or not, his error comes from a deeper well of understanding who is on top in our culture and who is not and nobody ever seems to challenge the system that deems second class citizenship (if any at all) to be problematic. Too many of us are addicted to violence and its consequences to where we’re really not nearly as shocked as we should be by the way people are choosing to live their lives with less the expectation of something better.

A whole lot of people jumped on the wagon screaming bloody murder at Don Imus’ comments and the finger pointing gets sillier and sillier and more confusing because it becomes evident that we’ve all bought into a world not so neatly divided into parts where one person’s living can be separated off from another’s until we’re all hurting. The recent killing of students on the Virginia Tech campus shows us just how much we all suffer together in the end; Cho Seung-Hui killed and wounded men and women from various backgrounds which are reflective of the nature of his pain. It ran cosmic and he became an indiscriminate killer. We’re all disturbed to the core of our souls because we really are one, but in time we’ll forget this common thread of humanity that holds us together in our deepest places because it is rarely nurtured in our culture. Fear has made the divides we live with too comfortable.

We live so easily with a culture rooted in the ethos of hos and bitches and faggots and niggers and chinks and white trash all day and it has become normalized violence that never stays in the nice little niches of our personal lives, on the TV or the radio. It never stays confined to the jokes comedians spew forth on BET comedy shows on radios with shock jocks or in the privacy of our homes. Evil always breaks out to make a connection! Our words travel out into the world unbound and build to critical mass in the most sensitive of us, turns to illness in others or just keeps those of us less prone to pick up a gun and shoot in a state of constant anguish not sure who the enemy is we’re fighting that we can’t quite see but feel everywhere; that kind of anger turns to illness later, either physical or mental. More and more of us are on anti-depressants or are suffering from anxiety or drowning ourselves in sex, drugs (legal and illegal), toxic relationships or food just to cope. We live perpetually with the violence of words and nobody seems to notice how words shape our world into an even uglier place than that of our parents, yet we have more freedom of movement now than ever but less the means to move about when funds are hard to come by, the rich are getting richer and smaller as a group, and the poor are enlarging their borders to receive more and more refugees in an economic war so many of us have already lost. Way too many of us human beings are suffering from a level of existential angst that’s breeding more suicides and murderers than the news can keep up with.

We shouldn’t be standing by waiting for Don Imus to apologize or get fired and think that the real issue has been dealt with because it has not. We’re all guilty of accepting a world built up out of prejudice and hatred and words that bind our lives like bars in a prison cell. We’re all guilty of accepting an America that is built up out of the lie that what we say is not really real, is not really volatile, so why should anyone’s actions be deemed any more important? Actions and words are one. In the beginning was the word and the word became flesh? Sound familiar? It’s no more right for Imus, rappers or anyone else as par for the course to refer to women as bitches and hos, women to refer to other women as “females” as if they were dogs, gays as faggots, lesbians as bull daggers, black folks as niggers, white folks as trailer park trash and somehow lose sight of the fact that our words and perceptions only end up chaining us all to a collective suffering from which none of us can easily be extricated.

“In the beginning was the Word” and we are one as that Word implies, created from a common source and responsible to that source and one another because of it. Such a reality is considered too lofty for most when black folks are in conflict whether or not to love their same gender loving sons and daughters or God as if the two were as opposite as evil and good. White folks fear releasing so much of the power they’ve wrongly acquired from their ancestors because they were white and live in constant fear that people of color will seek revenge. Men have to let go wholeheartedly of their need to believe that women were created for them as if they couldn’t be whole human beings outside of male dominance. Black men really need to get over their pissing game with white men over the power they have over so many; that kind of power should be nobody’s goal to hold as total power corrupts totally! We really do need each other when it’s all said and done. Not just to survive, but to truly learn to live.

Don Imus wasn’t right. So called race leaders aren’t right to only open their mouth for particular kinds of human pain and not for others. It’s not right for white people to go on the defensive to delineate the many white people who’ve suffered to counter the destructive power of racism. None of us can afford to think that somehow we’re all even stewing together in a huge pot of suffering. Nothing changes because way too many of us, across racial lines and lines of sex, have accepted the status quo. Way too many of us have accepted things as they are and just hope that the pain and suffering of others is not contagious like the flu or a cold. It doesn’t work that way, not from my perspective of God.

A whole world comes into being with a single word and then we all have to live with it but the catch is what word and what worlds will we create? We’re responsible for every blessing and curse that emanates from our mouths and that power that adds and grows to a larger evil just waiting to break out in concentration camps, serial killers, mass murderers, rapes, and beating folks to death because the church or society says it’s okay. At the rate we’re going we’re breaking our neck to get to an apocalyptic finish line that will be the end of us all. We’re suffering from a distorted view of reality that somehow believes that suffering remains where it was last seen, that what hurts my neighbor has nothing to do with me, that because I am Christian that I’m absolutely right and somehow exonerated from any responsibility to the whole wide world. We’ve got some serious and profound work to do in this world and if it were only as easy as firing Don Imus what a wonderful world this would be.

c. Raphael—God has healed
© 2007

Peace! Be Still!

Peace Be Still (#20)

And he awoke and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. Mark 4:39

I have been afraid my whole life. It’s something I’ve learned to live with whether it was fear of my mother and father’s battles destroying the fragile world I’d come to call family or of hoping no one found out about my sexuality when I was a boy. Either scenario was the apocalypse and I’ve lived at that awful precipice all my life, never knowing what situation would push me over into the abyss. That fear has morphed over the years and changed into other kinds of fear when I and my siblings were old enough to stop my parents from fighting and I got tired of trying to hide my sexuality. Fear is always with me.

Over the years it has come to cover me whole like a cloak. It shields and comforts like the friend you never had growing up to make you feel safe. It keeps you alert at the mall, or walking down the street in your own neighborhood. Your body learns instinctively to bear itself in a certain hunched stance so the cloak never slips off. It shields you against the words you might be called (and have been called so many times before); those words can be as sharp as the tip of arrows to cut deep and bear a poison that can paralyze the mind into an embarrassing stasis. I’ve come to realize that those who say they have a thick skin and the words don’t bother them are often lying. The words cloud the air like a toxic cloud and we all breathe it in and somewhere down the road of life it turns cancerous, causing us to see the world from the skewed and killing angle of fear. And that’s when you realize that the fear is everywhere. If you’re not careful you’ll begin to believe that the fear is all that is there in the world because so many are subject to it.

Still Spirit is attempting to show me another world that counters that fear or at least leads me to understand that I don’t have to be a slave to it.

Recently in the process of adoption, I had to forego a weekend with my son to do battle with one of the organizations handling the foster care/adoption process. I did talk to him beforehand and explained to him that he wouldn’t be coming to spend the weekend with me. His first question of course was, “Have I done something wrong?” I explained to him that he hadn’t and I had to wrestle with grown folks about some grown folks stuff around him, but when it was settled I’d get him again.

I missed him that weekend terribly, but it was a process of learning to trust that the universe would unfold as it should and hopefully that that unfolding would be all good. As much as I’ve tried not to put it in good vs. evil terms I still have to fall on the side of judgment that expects that a good and loving thing will emerge from the ashes of pain and suffering. Hopefully, out of such hard decisions that we have to make in life that are neither popular nor look good on the surface that good will emerge or should I say the hope of life for something better.

The opportunities for fear to get the upper hand in my soul are forever rising. There was a conversation exchanged today with someone who made the comment about my leaving at 5 o’clock that “You’re salaried and you can stay longer as much time as we’ve given you off to get your son.” I thought it was one of the cruelest things anyone has ever said to me, but when I came home and sat with it, I had to stop and realize that this is just a means for me to make a decision. I can start looking for another job which I’m always open to, it’s just that dealing with getting my son has made me put that search on lockdown for awhile. Then this happened. I thought to not say anything wondering what would happen if I spoke my mind, if I said how I really felt about such a cruel remark from someone always claiming to help me get my son. It makes gifts offered and kindnesses shown forever suspect and you learn to trust less and less.

I have had to face my fear all over again when I look at those things that could threaten my getting him like a viable job. I’m deciding how to deal with this. Bide my time until I can find another job with less people knowing about the joys and trials of being a new father or I can say something to defend myself. I’m more than likely to say something and let the chips fall where they may. Again, I’m facing my fears and hoping that the universe will unfold as it should and that nothing can stop me from getting my son.

I’m learning to not be enslaved to my fears as people decide they can play my vulnerabilities against me. I have to learn to shed that cloak I’ve developed over the years to protect myself against hurtful words and people who think they’ve got you figured or cornered because you’ve had the audacity to take that great leap of faith and love someone in spite of the hundreds of hurts that can be shot at me in a day’s time.

Yes, I’ve been afraid my whole life and I’m not that far from still being terribly afraid every day God sends and I rise up out of my bed to walk out the front door. Still, I’m a courageous black man for not lying to myself about how I feel and what frightens me about the world we’ve come to live in. And the fact that I will not lay down and die proves to me that the fear has not won yet. I have the scars from many battles with the fearful who have a problem with my existence and with my own fears, but I will not let anyone make me prostitute my own soul, even at the possible loss of love. That’s the real victory I think spirit is trying to teach me: Peace! Be still! No fear! In the midst of drama, I can still angle my heart toward a hope that expects the universe to unfold as it should in spite of all our fears and somehow I will get my son whether at this job or another one.

c. Raphael—God has healed
© 2007

The Rape of Prayer

The Rape of Prayer (#13)

Hear a just cause, O Lord, attend to my cry! Give ear to my prayer from lips free of deceit! (Psalm 17:1)

I was sitting in a church in Nashville last year when it came time for prayer requests from the laity. Along with the usual requests for the grieving, the sick, the hospitalized, the jobless, and the anonymous requests, I requested prayer about my potential adoption. The minister took my request and prayed to God that “if it was God’s will for him to adopt….” Regardless of its innocence, I felt horribly violated. I broke closed eye to look at her over rows of bowed heads thinking she’d lost her mind and if it was God’s will, I was the one to help her find it again.

Now many people reading this and beyond would find her prayer in my behalf quite innocent and usual. Not me. It was a desecration to all that I hold dear. I’d wanted to adopt a child some time before I put the wheels in motion and was amazed during the process of adoption classes how smoothly the whole thing was going. I just needed the community to give me that extra boost of support and prayer. I’ve a mantra, “You don’t sleep with everybody, you don’t pray with everybody.” This time, I let my guard down in a church that at times easily slipped into a holier than thou mentality. That should have been my first sign to be careful where I laid my prayer down.

I’ll never forget the aunt who when I was a child, pinched me because I wouldn’t go to the altar during altar call. I was furious, a child raised not to question elders, and I never forgot the dynamics of that sense of prayer by force and obligation. It was a psychic rape in the name of God that taught me a sense of God no child should come to know. I’ve been exposed to enough “good Christians” telling me they’d pray for me when they disagreed with me. It always sounded like a battle cry more than any kind of desire for right relationship with God or me. I learned to fire back with I’ll pray for you too. I realized how dangerous I’d become one day when my response was particularly acerbic: “Yeah I’ll pray for her alright, that she’s hit by an eighteen wheeler, one wheel at a time!” People laughed nervously, stunned. Deep down I was serious and that scared me, a little. Wars waged under guise of prayer were getting the best of me.

To hear the preacher throw God’s will into my prayer request when I never asked her for God’s will made me crazier than a road lizard. I see prayer as a private thing that when shared with the public is not something for another to sort through like a mother picking food for a baby off her own plate. God knows I’ve had my share of selfish prayers. But to snatch an honest heart felt prayer born out of the need to love a child was presumptuous on her part. This is the rape of prayer. A deeply troubled heart will make an honest prayer; I’m a living witness. I needed the blessing of a praying community. It wasn’t her heart, but mine, stepping into the human arena to love a stranger’s child. Silly me, I had assumed God’s will was already in play.

I saw a church marquee recently that read “Pray without giving God directions.” I wanted to throw a rock. Sometimes you really don’t know what to say to God without giving directions. Sometimes we can only step to the altar with what we know. It’s said that Abraham Lincoln was approached about praying to God for a misguided South in the Civil War as the North was assured victory because God was on their side. He’s said to have responded that no doubt the South was praying the same prayer feeling God was on their side. The true prayer is all about our response to a situation. Not just what you got on your knees and prayed, but what you got up off your knees to do if there was anything to be done. In authentic embodied prayer, actions don’t speak louder than words, actions are the words. When my mother was dying of cancer, I asked God to heal her and when it became evident to me that she would die, I did not pray to God to heal her nor did I pray to God not to heal her, nor did I pray, God not my will but thy will be done. None of that would have been proper prayer to me on my journey, so I stopped praying. My prayer was in tending to the needs of a dying woman. Not that I wouldn’t have rejoiced, cheered, did splits with pink pom poms in hand and turned cartwheels down the street over my mother being healed. It just wasn’t the issue any more. I simply felt the need of prayer in my actions that was a response to her suffering, keeping her clean, safe and comfortable until she passed over.

To adopt a child was my response to my own suffering in wanting a child to love and moving beyond the fear that I wasn’t capable of love and to eliminate my son’s suffering of believing that nobody wanted him, that he’d never be loved, and give him a sense of community and home. I never asked God if it was the deity’s will. I just felt the urge to adopt over time and one day moved with it. Yes, I prayed giving God as many directions as I could. And Spirit is seemingly following some of my directions. This isn’t blasphemous. This isn’t my equating myself with the mind of God. That’s stupid to me. It’s commingling two hearts, God’s and mine, with the same beautiful desire to heal. This is the work of God and people too. Have I directed God’s path? No, it’s impossible. I made the effort to attend classes and initiate contact with my son’s social worker and do everything on my part to make the adoption happen. I recognized there were things out of my hand and I told the deity so with the sometimes-shaky expectation that God would handle it. It never crossed my mind that God wasn’t behind my decision. I resent anyone snatching prayers from my mouth like food, chewing them, then giving me back what they didn’t swallow in the name of the Lord.

I’m critical enough to ask God for what I need from a place of honesty and put all the effort I can in making it come to pass. I sometimes feel like God and I have got it going on like that (although there are days I swear the deity is missing in action). And like God’s relationship with Abraham, I expect the deity to answer my prayer. Sometimes we must all recognize that raping the mouths of others for the prayer we think they should be praying is violent and destroys relationship to God and other people. And I must recognize that my learning to pray to God my way is a journey in faith for me, not someone else. But next time somebody attempts to rape my prayer, instead of praying out of a frustrated anguish that an eighteen-wheeler hits her or him one wheel at a time, I’ll call the person on the insult and if they get offended, gently remind them “in love” that it was God’s will for me to correct them about what’s in my heart to bear.
c. Raphael—God has healed
5/18/06

My Faith Ain't Like Yours

My Faith Ain’t Like Yours

And he brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” And he believed the Lord; and he reckoned it to him as righteousness. (Genesis 15:6)

Nothing can be more destructive to faith than to speak it out loud or act upon it before the faithless and watch people tear it apart like a pack of mad dogs when things get shaky.

After being ill, I knew by the Spirit that I had several unfinished tasks that I had not completed; the assignments were months behind schedule and I had consciously taken an attitude with God that I ain’t doing it because it won’t do any good anyway and I’m finished with all that mess; leave me alone about it; they’re crazy and sick as they want to be and my life is peaceful. Back up on my feet I was moved to complete the cycle of directives I was given. Needless to say the responses to some weren’t necessarily positive. I pissed some people off to say the least then I worried about it. Or should I say I worried about whether or not God had mislead and betrayed me and I’m left looking like Boo Boo the Clown.

Weeks later, I tortured myself worrying whether or not I looked like an idiot to a whole bunch of people who might decide I don’t know when to quit, need to be hospitalized or given a wide berth. He’s crazy, I could just hear them saying. God began to teach further.

The weekend approaching, I had gotten this sense that I needed to wash my car on Saturday (not any other day), which I had not washed in over a year and a half. I got up to a bright sunny spring-like day, but as I got my wash bucket and all things prepared gray clouds slowly drifted in. I was determined to wash the car anyway and I did with clouds looking like they’d burst above my head any minute. A neighbor came out and pointed up. We both laughed and I explained I was going to get the year and a half’s worth of dirt off and out of the car, rain or shine, if it killed me. We laughed again. My ego started to beat me up a little self conscious about how I looked. What would people think? I finished washing my car and it sparkled to the point that it actually looked silver again instead of a pale gold. It was clean! As the day went on, gray clouds came and went, and finally the sun returned full force. It did not rain that Saturday.

As if that weren’t enough, I have not worked full time in ten months. It’s been a hard road juggling car and insurance payments and all and it certainly didn’t help that I got ill recently and made $8000 worth of medical bills being uninsured. A few months back, I went through orientation with the Memphis City School system to be a substitute teacher, which I did not want to even do. I have no desire to teach school age kids. It’s just not my thing. I know that. I’d put it off for months and listening to others tell me how much I needed to work or if I took this lowly job then other doors would open for me, I decided that the following Monday I would go ahead and follow their well meaning advice. Believe me when I say the very thought of substitute teaching sent me reeling into a depression as if I didn’t have enough on my mind. I decided that I should override what I labeled “negative” feelings, be practical and get up Monday to go substitute, be a responsible man. I prayed about it before going to bed, told God I don’t want to do this but we’ll see in the morning. I woke up the next morning and didn’t move to go teach. I did not want to be there and told myself maybe Tuesday. Later I got up to go to the grocery and noticed children everywhere but school. I passed the local elementary school and there wasn’t a child or car in sight. I had to laugh at myself when I found out that they were on spring break. I had sent myself through hell for nothing!

A friend later commented that you’re addicted to pain and he’s right and it’s all because I won’t trust the very God who whispers in my ear intimate things about my life, who I am, the present and the future and I don’t trust it very well because the God I’m now learning is so opposite to the fire and brimstone, paternalistic, mean deity that I saw coming up and still see on religious television. I doubted my seeing because it wasn’t the God everybody else was claiming to see.

God’s directives aren’t always about seeing a blinding light on the road to Damascus. Sometimes, it’s just the “knowings” that come our way and sometimes God doesn’t have to say anything as it lets you choose, trusting that your intuitive stuff is of such working quality and in synch with a divine plan that you’ll either trust it or torture yourself with the lie that you didn’t hear what you heard or see what you saw. Sometimes what I don’t want to do is in accordance with a divine plan. Not wanting to do something isn’t necessarily a sign of disobedience or ego; sometimes it is trust.

Abraham and God had this intimacy going on that bubbled over into a trust that God turned around and labeled “righteousness”; in other words, he trusted God at face value without knowing the reasons why or how he’d give him the return on any promises made. That quality of faith has you doing the craziest things and not knowing why; you just don’t look sane or even practical to everyone else. Faith is the audacity to imagine another option in spite of what’s before your eyes; God then makes the imagined real before your very eyes. So you learn to trust God for yourself and maybe not speak about it too much because people just don’t get it or you; they point up to an overcast sky while you’re washing a car and only God knows the sun will be out later. You just know you’re washing the car for some deeper reason than just washing it. It was God’s teaching tool for Saturday, Faith 101. You sit up and worry yourself to death over a situation that’s not even coming to pass. It was God’s teaching tool for Sunday and Monday, Faith 102. And I’m still a little shaky with these oh so simple lessons still looking for lightning bolts and blinding revelations when all I got was these little intuitive taps on the shoulder, no earth shattering kick in the butt. I chose to believe and do. So begins an intimate level of trust that makes God and I some kind of intimate friends--amazingly simple. Uh-oh, now I might have to start worrying about what God’s going to direct me to do next. Will I feel like Boo Boo the Clown again? Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s the learning ground that comes with a lived faith, imagining more than what you can see with an intimate friend who will make it happen!

c. Raphael—God has healed
3/13/2006(#5)

God Has Healed

God Has Healed

For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord. They are plans for good and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. (Jeremiah 29:11)

First came the dream of being sprayed with bullets by someone with an automatic weapon, but only three bullets hit me in my upper gut. A day or so later I was walking the floor, holding my back and lying out on a cold floor crying like a child and begging for pain killers. I had never felt such excruciating pain before in my life. The nurses called it male childbirth. I called it eight days of hell. I was passing three kidney stones. After giving birth to the triplets, on the ninth day I cautiously accepted the peace my body began to feel. It was the questions of what had really happened that began to haunt me. I knew I’d been through something major and I needed community (a teacher or guide) to help me understand exactly what had just transpired in my body. It was a rebirth into many things one of which was accepting the gift of healing and of being healed that God granted me before I was born.

Enduring waves of pain traveling through your flesh like ripples in a pond can give you a whole other perspective on life that you didn’t know you could have. I’ve lived, for years, in a sort of darkness thinking I’d done something wrong which I myself couldn’t quite figure out. It’s that nagging feeling that haunts you, but you just can’t figure out the source of it, but over time I’d gotten bits and pieces of the nature of a possible truth.

After the pain, one of the first messages of healing the spirit sent to me was that I was carrying no weight now. I felt that whatever had plagued me for years had been settled in my mind, but it had actually been settled before I was even born. I’d been granted a reprieve that I never really needed in the first place. God had never held anything against me. I remember as each kidney stone was moving asking God to take the pain away and heal me, but the pain would only go away for a while only to return full force. I felt God was cruel and not answering me. It was not until the last stone that the doctors even realized that there was more than one. I remembered my dream and knew there had been three. In my pain, I’d felt that God had not heard me and was somewhere reveling in my pain; it did not occur to me until later that my prayer was being answered one stone at a time. In my pain, I had come to believe that God had forgotten me and it fed back into the feelings of being cursed or something; that I needed to be punished for something; that feeling that you’re always the last in line, the forgotten one, the undeserving.

An understanding came to me As Christ would say, Let him who has an ear hear. In another place and time, I’d been a teacher, a spiritual teacher—a damn good one. I’d taught and trained many students in spiritual gifts many would call psychic. I had a student in particular whom I loved deeply. I trained him and trained him well, the apple of my eye. As it was another dark teacher corrupted him out of sheer jealousy of the relationship we shared. He corrupted him simply to counter every good thing I’d taught; a pure act of malice. Over time my student used everything I’d trained him for as a healer to do evil. I ended up having to not only destroy my student, but the other teacher as well. I took no students after that ashamed and feeling the ultimate failure. I could not hear the voice of God nor the voice of wisdom amongst men and women. I was too wounded to be able to hear and this is how I died. In this life, both the student and the dark teacher returned and the same scenario has almost played out again. I sidestepped the tragedy when I confronted them both without violence; upon doing it was a feeling of drunken euphoria which left me with a sense of having altered space and time and creating a chance for healing in the present where there had been none before.

I got up off of my sickbed and recognized the power of illness to heal; pain does have its upside, which I might add is easy to say after the fact. My God sent word through the spirit that I had always been healed and that God held nothing against me but wanted me here in this place and time not to replay the past but to do a greater work of healing and re-embrace my role as spiritual teacher and begin taking on students again. For years I’d categorically rejected the teacher’s role only to accept it in the form of an English teacher, which never seemed to bring a great return for me career-wise; out of twelve years of teaching I’ve only worked one year in a full time position and that only on a year-to-year contract basis. Nothing lasting has come of it.

I am a healer. It is my calling before God and humans alike. But the illness had to be the gift to get me to accept that role once again carrying age-old guilt about what I thought was a mistake and murder. What I’d tried to do in the past was not a mistake. It was a try for the sake of light and love.

Beyond the illness a friend reminded me of the scripture above. Even more, I happened to be flipping through my Bible the other day and there inside sticking out was an old card from someone with the same scripture printed on it. God needed to remind me.

Whatever you’ve done, whoever you’ve hurt, know that God does have a plan rooted in love for you and wants you to thrive and prosper in this life. I don’t mean this in the sense of some trite Pollyannaish way in this world. You live long enough, you will have trials and tribulations, but what God promises is that trials and tribulations themselves are not God’s goal neither will your response, good or bad, change how God feels about you.

God reminded me that we made a pact before I was born. I was reminded for days afterward that my middle name is Raphael (God has healed). There are still days where I have to be reminded that God’s intention is love, not evil and that there was a plan in place for me even before I was born. When love is present you can have nothing but a future and hope. God struck out across time and history to release me from shame and guilt over the past. I’m taking on new students now free of a past that haunted me and free to use that past as a teaching tool about the power of overcoming darkness and tragedy. I’m living proof that God has its hand on not only me, but them as well, but they’ve got to believe. And they shall learn that even the pain of the past can set you free.

c. Raphael—God has healed

(2/23/06)

© 2006 CONRAD PEGUES