There’s a lot going on in this poem, beneath its rather conventional, hymn-like stanza form and rhyme; and the more time you spend with it, the deeper it becomes. It’s a bit too linear for my own taste, yet its mysterious power depends on that linearity: the series of questions, all unanswered, with the underlying image of the manufacturing forge. The unanswered questions drive home the single fact that God made this terrifying thing, this beautiful killing machine of flesh and blood, the tiger who inhabits the unknown “forests of the night”.

After about fifteen drawings, I found myself creating a picture of my own: a wily old fox looking out from behind a featureless human mask, allowing himself to be seen; and the mask was held by a human hand. That’s me, I realized. Not just the fox, or the mask, or the hand: all three, together. That’s the person whom I have become.

I think it’s time to write down what I’m up to in these spiritual posts, particularly the theological ones—and why I think and hope they may be of some use, especially to queer people who remain attached to Catholic-Christian ways of living and feeling. First of all, we queer people aren’t sheep; we’re goats. We don’t belong in the sheepfold. But that doesn’t mean that God rejects us. In fact, he speaks to and through us all the time. He calls us. Unlike some of the institutions that claim to speak in his name, he accepts us, and loves us.

On the final night of the course, he took us into the empty theatre, and we sat scattered across its steeply raked two hundred seats in the dim. The stage was dark. “The true playwright,” Tom told us, “gets goosebumps, just looking at the empty stage.” And that’s exactly what I was feeling: goosebumps. All these imaginary creatures, calling, waiting to be drawn into existence; all these stories, asking—demanding—to be told.

As I draw these strangely beautiful manifestations of God’s imagination, I muse both on the brilliance of their adaptation, and the profound dysfunction of my own human species: how, like a particularly virulent virus, we live to destroy other living things, without moderation and without limits, apart from our own self-annihilation. It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that every other species on our mutual planet would be better off if we did not exist.

I experienced a quiet revelation last week. Quiet, but far-reaching. Writing it down makes it sound more dramatic than it was, since I’d already mostly come to terms with the separate elements of the story. But just the same, it was shocking, and it is—or should be—life-changing. I realized that I’ve wasted my life on three things: a mean-spirited and ungrateful family; a writing market that neither needs nor wants me; and a religion that rejects me and my kind.

No matter how holy a person may be, he or she acts and teaches and witnesses within the necessarily partial and imperfect and “sinful” limits of a particular culture and time. Therefore his or her teaching and witness is necessarily tainted and incomplete. This applies to the greatest of teachers. Where his human knowledge is concerned, it applies to the Lord Jesus himself. Hence—to cite only one example—his belief that possession by evil spirits was the cause of illness.

We know what thousands of people have thought and said concerning Jesus, who is arguably the most influential person who ever walked on this earth—but we know absolutely nothing with any certainty about the man himself. Yet out of this historical uncertainty comes a faith notable for its celebration of certainty: certainty that Jesus not only lived, but that he was, in the words of one of the early councils, fully God and fully man, the fulcrum of human history….

I always wanted to draw but never could. A Christmas gift in my teens didn't help: Drawing Made Difficult, it was called. I switched to writing. And then, about three years ago, plagued by writer's block and inspired by the discovery that I could sculpt strange puppet faces, I picked up a pen and started copying photographs of birds. It was only a warm-up exercise, something to begin the day creatively, rather than sit sweating at a wordless screen….

They seemed like such a successful couple. They were liked and admired by neighbors, and acquaintance—always well-dressed, always well-mannered, Dad something of a character with his famously “booming” voice, my mother with her sudden laugh and continual empathy. They gardened; they conducted vigorous Sunday walks, sticks in hand, through fields and along riverbanks; they constantly. entertained—desserts and drinks (always drinks) on Saturday or Sunday evenings in their pleasant large living room, often before a roaring fire, everyone talking over each other, shouting louder and louder as the drinks went on into the night, my father booming over them all.

…So the pandemic hasn’t meant much change to my basic routine—a bit more rigor in the social isolation; cutting back my already limited social activities; social-distancing and mask-wearing and hand washing; Zoom inevitably, but not, happily, every day. Yet it feels different, as the weeks and months tick by. Something has changed, beyond the strange quiet in the streets. I’ve learned something about solitude….

“Never say a word to your mother about her father, Jerry. She’ll cry.”

Dad delivered this warning in a hoarse stage whisper and went on to explain that my brilliant maternal grandfather—a Rhodes Scholar, Jerry—died from an angina attack while carrying a bucket of coal up the cellar stairs, shortly after losing a fortune—three hundred thousand dollars, Jerry!—in the crash of 1929.