The more I meditate on the scriptures, the more problematic the teachings of Paul become. And that’s not a small thing. Some scholars consider him to be the true founder and creator of the Christian religion. And whether you accept that view or not (I don’t), it’s indisputable that for centuries we have perceived Jesus through the filter of Paul.

When she moved to a nursing home in 2002, I thumbed through Flight of the Mind, the book in which she kept her cash, to be sure that no money remained in its pages. That’s when I found its hidden treasure: a single, undated typewritten page, written by her, at some point before her move to Ottawa. I’ve kept her always eccentric spelling, capitalization and punctuation….

I opened the conversation with a few broad rhetorical strokes, in which I reminded everyone of the tumultuous nature of the past year—the pandemic; the attack on the seat of US government by a mob egged on by the then president himself; the Black Lives Matter protests that seized our cities; the rise of the extremist right; our own soul-searching on the issue of systemic racism. But if I expected some artistic version of the podcasts and the hand-wringing articles that we all hear and read—I was wrong.

Lazarus was a young gay man who lived with his sisters, Martha and Mary, in the village of Bethany, not far from Jerusalem. They were comfortably off, and Jesus numbered them among his friends. He and his disciples would visit their house when they were in the neighborhood. One day, Lazarus got sick….

“How’s Wray?”

“Dad died fifteen years ago.”

“Did he?”

A reflective pause.

“Well, I certainly haven’t missed him!”

Night after night I connect to a feeling of warmth and peace; I feel loved. This experience brings healing, and maybe that’s the deepest kind, since it displaces and dissolves the hurt and anger that are so much a part of every human life, including mine. As, little by little, the negative feelings drain away, so does the need to get back, to be right, to have revenge, to be superior.

She perches on her couch, erect, contained. Her huge gnarled hands lie motionless in her lap, a pose drilled into her as a child. She always wears her pearls; the emerald ring that belonged to her mother hangs loosely on her index finger.

My father was tortured by insomnia. He’d wake at two or three every morning and roam around the house, especially the kitchen, opening and shutting cupboard doors. Then he’d return to thrash and groan in bed. He’d doze off briefly and jerk himself awake, muttering, “I wasn’t asleep, I wasn’t asleep.” And in the morning he’d lament his exhaustion.

In the broke-backed mental album that constitutes my memory, I’ve always had three snapshots that just kind of hang there on a blank black page.

I was twenty-four, newly minted as an openly gay man and an atheist back in 1969 when I went to live in London, ostensibly to do a doctorate, although in reality the PhD was just an excuse for living in Britain and becoming a famous writer and never returning home to my father’s Canada.

The Christ of this particular crucifix entered my life in a jumbled antique shop in Guadalajara, beautiful, grimy and mute, the unprotesting lamb led to the slaughter, covered in wounds, his glass eyes half closed, his heart-shaped pale face inscrutable, his outstretched arms longer than his entire lovely body, as if they enclosed a universe of pain.

In Turkish culture, Karagoz and Hacivat are like Punch and Judy: the inseparable mainstays of a long comic tradition, the precise origins of which are uncertain. Ayhan Hulagu is a young performer from Turkey who has trained with a master puppeteer and made it his mission to bring Karagoz to America. I met him this summer.