Refrigerator List

Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, the new Pope Francis, is an ordinary guy, we are told, who rides the subway to work. Having ridden the subways in both Buenos Aires and Rome, I can say these are challenging ways to get around town, the kind of thing that certainly can make you a saint, if not a pope.

Being ordinary, Francis probably keeps a to-do list on his refrigerator door in the Papal Apartments. This is my suggested list for him as he assumes his duties as supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church:

• begin the process of divesting the Church of its wealth, accumulated over many centuries contrary to the wishes of the Founder: Now when Jesus heard these things, he said unto him, Yet lackest thou one thing: sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me. Luke 18:22.
• immediately close all the churches around the world and reopen them as museums (the big, beautiful ones) or as centers for community activities such as feeding the poor, finding people jobs, helping people to fill out medical insurance forms, and so on.
• disband the priesthood: as Garry Wills argues brilliantly in his new book, Why Priests? A Failed Tradition, we don’t need priests to get to God–or to have a rich spiritual life, as I myself argue (also brilliantly, of course) in my book God On Your Own: Finding a Spiritual Path Outside Religion.
• make the Church hierarchy confess its sins and do penance for them…real penance, not 10 Our Fathers and 10 Hail Marys…sackcloth-and-ashes and ministering to the poor and homeless.
• vacate the Vatican after transferring the Vatican Library to digital banks and making it available to everyone everywhere who wants access…this has already begun, btw: Vatican Library Transfer. Also, give up the nutty idea of Vatican City being a sovereign state–what nonsense. Turn it all into a museum–with free admission for senior citizens like, um, me.
• abolish Baptism, or at least water it down (!) so that it does not designate fundamental differences between ‘believers’ and ‘unbelievers’–the root of so many wars over the centuries.
• abolish the rest of the sacraments…we don’t need them and, if there are no priests (and therefore no bishops), there would be no one to administer them, in any case. Without sacraments, we wouldn’t need to be concerned about gay marriage, since matrimony is a sacrament. Holy Orders would also be unnecessary, since there would be no priesthood–and no need to ordain women or allow priests to marry.
• use the money that is left over to get help for former priests with deep psychological problems, including child molestation.
• recognize that women are the other half of the human race and that they, like men, have reproductive organs, but they are on the inside.

A lot to do, but I think Francis is up to it. He can start by taking his list off the refrigerator door and keeping it in his vest pocket on the subway, checking off items as he jostles along.

Oscar Story

My Greer Garson Oscar Story

Who Presented the Oscar to Greer Garson? I Did.

On March 4, 1943, Greer Garson received the Academy Award for Best Actress of 1942 for her role in “Mrs. Miniver”. The ceremony was held at the Cocoanut Grove of The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles — the presenter was Joan Fontaine. The award was the last of the evening and Greer’s speech ran on, according to Hollywood legend, for a very long time…for 45 minutes, some remembered, and certainly more than 30 minutes.

“Nonesense,” she told me many years later. “I spoke for only five and a half minutes. Really, I did.”

I had known Greer all my life (who of my generation hadn’t?), but finally met her in the mid-80s in Santa Fe. I was in a small ice-cream parlor on Guadalupe Street when she came in with a woman companion. I immediately stepped aside and allow her to order her ice-cream.

“Oh, a gentleman!” she said.

“Chivalry is not dead, Miss Garson,” I managed to blurt out.

“In that case, you won’t tell my doctor I’m having a chocolate cone today.”

I assured her that her secret was safe with me, then spent the better part of an hour talking to her over a tiny table about, not movies but the scenic beauties of New Mexico.

We became friends. I was a frequent visitor to her ranch in Pecos, 30 minutes from Santa Fe, where she spent her summers. When I created the film school at The College of Santa Fe, she endowed the project, in 1990, with a gift of $3.3 million to build the Greer Garson Communication Center and Studios.

In December 1989, a fire destroyed a luxury apartment building in the Westwood area of Los Angeles. Greer had an apartment there, as did the director Billy Wilder. Wilder, who lived there (Greer only stayed there when she was in Los Angeles), lost a lifetime of memorabilia and his art collection. Greer lost the Oscar she had been awarded for “Mrs. Miniver’.

When we opened the Garson Center and Studios in October 1990, it was already a big success: we had around 70 new film majors in the academic part of the facility; in the studios, Billy Crystal and his company were shooting “City Slickers.” I had written to Karl Malden, who was President of the Academy, to ask if a new Oscar could be struck to replace the one Greer lost in the Westwood fire — and if it could be done in time for the opening as a surprise. Malden wrote back and said that he ordered the Oscar and that it should arrive before the opening.

The Oscar arrived in an impressive red velvet lined box, but Greer didn’t. She was recovering from the flu and her doctor wouldn’t allow her, at the age of 86, to travel from her home in Dallas. She did make a phone appearance to the crowd of 700 having dinner in the studio that night. And during the conversation, Art Linkletter, the night’s host, told her about the replacement Oscar…at which she squeeled, “Marvelous!”

We kept the Oscar in a trophy case in the lobby of the Center for several weeks. Then, just after Christmas, I was going to Dallas on business and Greer invited me to tea at her penthouse apartment on Turtle Creek. I brought the Oscar with me.

We sat, Greer, me, and her assistant, Pamela, over tea and chocolate cake for an hour, then I stood and said I had a surprise.

“Oh, I do so love surprises,” Greer said with a light laugh.

“The Nominees for Best Actress of 1942 are: Bette Davis in ‘Now, Voyager’, Katharine Hepburn in ‘Woman of the Year’, Greer Garson in ‘Mrs. Miniver’, Rosalind Russell in ‘My Sister Eileen’, and Teresa Wright in ‘The Pride of the Yankees’ — and the Oscar goes to…”I opened the box, took out the heavy gold statuette, and handed it to her. “Greer Garson in ‘Mrs. Miniver’.”

I had expected there to be a flush of emotion from Greer at that moment; instead, she just stared down at the Oscar, smiled wistfully, then looked up at us and said, “This time I’ll be brief…thank you.”

Greer lived another six years. When she passed away of heart failure in 1996, the Oscar was still holding court on the mantle in her living room.

 

Pope Petrus

The sudden and unexpected resignation of Pope Benedict XVI has opened again, at least for some of us who watch these things, the possibility that the next pope may be the last pope.

According to the Prophesies of Malachy, the next pope will take the name of Petrus (Peter, the same name as the first pope), and he will preside over the dismantling of the Roman Catholic Church. We also have the vision of Pope Pius X, now a saint, who in 1909, while granting an audience, leaned back and closed his eyes. Suddenly he ‘awoke’ and cried out: ‘What I see is terrifying. Will it be myself? Will it be my successor? What is certain is that the pope will quit Rome, and in leaving the Vatican, he will have to walk over the dead bodies of his priests.’

I have thought for some time now that the Roman Catholic Church will fall, and in our day. I’m not sure how this will happen or what things will look like at the end of the process, but everything, everything will be different…dismantled, making for the knackers to come and truck away the remains not for salvation, but for salvage.

The ‘Faith’ may remain — there are a lot of good things to admire about Christianity. The philosophy of love and union that Jesus apparently preached, if we are to believe the gospels (you see, everything is in question now), is not only uplifting, but also quite evolved in terms of the development of our human species.

The ‘Church’ however needs to go. It’s record of atrocities is so long and depressing, from the earliest persecution of pagans to the present, that one gets weary and increasingly upset and alarmed reading down the list. It cannot hold together in this new Aquarian Age, when freedom-of-information is the key and all secrets must come flying out of the dark closet.

So, maybe our cry in the next few months and years will be, ‘The Church is dead…long live the Faith.’ Personally, I feel privileged to be living at this time, and hope to be among the vanguard that goes storming into Piazza San Pietro yelling that new truth.

Dare Not

When I read recently about Jamie Kuntz, the 18-year old who was kicked off his football team for being in relationship with a 65-year old man,  I thought of a phrase that was first used more than a hundred years ago: “The love that dare not speak its name.”

What is the love that dare not speak its name? Most of us, on hearing the phrase, would reply quickly, “Homosexuality, of course…gay love.”

That would be right—up to a point. The “love” in question actually has a specific meaning, born of an interesting historical event: one of the four trials of poet, playwright, and wit Oscar Wilde in the spring of 1895 in London.

Four years earlier, in 1891, Wilde had fallen in love and begun a relationship with the 22-year-old Lord Alfred Douglas, nicknamed “Bosie”. Wilde was 38. The two of them were discrete, mostly—remember that in England at the time homosexuality was a criminal offense—but Wilde was a flamboyant celebrity whose private life was under constant scrutiny.

Eventually, Bosie’s father, John Douglas, the Marquess of Queensberry, demanded that his son stop seeing Wilde. Bosie would not give in to his father, even when the Marquess disowned him. Enraged, the elder Douglas accused Wilde of being “a Sodomite”—not just an idle rant, but, under the circumstances, an allegation that carried grave legal consequences. Wilde appeared to have no alternative than to deny the charge with a suit of libel against the Marquess. Douglas was arrested and brought to trial.

The trial, the most entertaining show in town—almost as entertaining as Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” which was playing across town to packed houses — ended badly for Wilde. After the testimony of the Marquess, who appealed to the jury as a loving father who was trying to keep his young son from the clutches of an older man bent on “gross indecency” (the punishable crime), Wilde’s case seemed lost. And indeed it was. Wilde was arrested and himself brought to trial.

At the first of the trials, Wilde was asked to explain a line from poem written by the young Lord Douglas, Bosie. It was the last line of “Two Loves”: “I am the Love that dare not speak its name.” From the context, it was clearly a poetic message from Bosie about the fulfilling love he shared with Wilde.

This is the exchange between the Prosecutor, Charles Gill, and Wilde.

Gill: There is no question as to what [the poem] means?

Wilde: Most certainly not.

Gill: Is it not clear that the love described relates to natural love and unnatural love?

Wilde: No.

Gill: What is the “Love that dare not speak its name”?

Wilde: “The Love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect….There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him….The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.

 The court record notes that this statement, completely impromptu, was met with “loud applause, mingled with some hisses.”

So, “the love” in question is not simply same-sex love, but older/younger love. Although sexual attitudes have changed radically since Wilde’s time, age-gap in relationship still hovers on the edge of acceptance in our society, even more so, perhaps, when it comes to same-sex couples. Even within the gay community, partners many years apart are frowned upon. It may be the last prejudice against gay relationship waiting to leave the cultural closet.

But love between partners of different ages—sometimes vastly different ages—is far from “unnatural” and has, as Wilde noted, a long and noble tradition. Let’s hope that in our day we will begin to see a wider acceptance of age-gap love between adults who just happen to be many years apart. There is no good reason why that love cannot be the love that boldly speaks its name.

Mrs. Jesus

The scrap of papyrus found last week at an archaeological dig, and today soundly discredited by the Vatican, suggesting that Jesus had a wife is, apparently, authentic.

CNN reports that, “The fragment referring to Jesus wife was written in Coptic, a language used by Egyptian Christians, and says in part, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife …’”

Further investigation by scientists studying the fragment have concluded that it is part of a larger piece, a long note written by Jesus to his wife, Judi as a kind of “Dear Jude” letter. In it, he recalls his good early years together with her and the children. But then her moods became dark, he says, as she scolded him for not being ambitious, like some other men, like, say, Herod Antipas. At the age of 30, all he had to show for himself were a few pieces of wood furniture — nice, of course, but nothing special — made in his father’s carpenter shop. In all those years, she needled him, he could have been studying to be a doctor or a lawyer, or a Pharisee.

All the nagging had finally gotten to Jesus, as he says in the melancholy letter, which was delivered to Judi by a villager an hour after Jesus left on foot for a neighboring town. “Maybe you are right — maybe I need to go out there and try to make something of myself…like John the Baptist. Maybe I need to do something very big — but, unlike John, without getting killed doing it. I don’t know. But anything will be better than all the pestering.

“My wife…but not my life, alas,” was his full closing sentence.

Another piece of papyrus was found alongside this one, recording the response of wife Judi. Her only exclamation, according to archaeologists, was, “Jesus!”

 

 

 

Dog Years

The last sense that leaves us as we slip out of this world is our hearing, I’m told. A person lying as still as a corpse, barely breathing, will see nothing, smell nothing, taste nothing–but will hear everything. This is why priests pronounce absolution upon the nearly-expired and why nurses are careful about what they whisper around a death bed.

Dogs are the opposite, it appears: Milly can still smell everything, and does so with her usual enthusiasm, but she is having some trouble seeing and, just lately we are noticing, even more trouble hearing. Just this evening, I called her to go on a walk with me, but she did not show up at the gate. I called her several more times. Nothing.

When I found her, she was on the patio slurping up some water. I called again and clapped my hands, but she did not turn around. Finally, I tapped her on the back of the neck. She swung around and looked at me, then quickly got the idea and followed me through the yard, out the gate, and into the campo.

She has slowed down considerably this past year. In the six months that we have been away, doing my cancer treatments in the States, she has aged noticeably. Her once ink-black coat has gone salt-and-pepper, with the fur around her mouth almost pure white. She walks more carefully, as if trying to avoid stones and twigs–something that never bothered her in the early days, when she would dash down into an overgrown arroyo like a black panther, chasing an invisible (to us) rabbit, then race back to us, with an wildly oscillating tail, waiting only a few seconds before speeding off on another caper.

Now when Milly is out walking with me, she stays close to my side, as if she might be afraid of getting lost. She moves around the house much more slowly, too. When she stands, stiffly, it is on little legs that Mike has observed are arthritic. We have been adding glucosamine powder to her food, and that has helped.

But we are trying to prepare ourselves for the inevitable, while holding onto a brave denial scenario: after all, she still likes her food, she still snaps at strangers, she still… and so on.

Like most people, I had thought that ‘dog years’ to human years were a simple seven-to-one. But that is incorrect. The right formula, from those who study these things, is: 10.5 dog years per human year for the first 2 years, then 4 dog years per human year for each year after. It makes much more sense.

By that way of counting Milly, who is 14 — is, if she were human, 69. My age.

No wonder I am watching with a certain fascination the gradual setting of her glorious sun. No wonder I am attentive to and curious about each new sign of senility in her.

And no wonder that I have been treating her with new respect, she who guarded the house for so many years, who bared her teeth when a stranger got too close to us, who warned us of approaching visitors, some of them unwanted. She deserves that respect now, living out the long autumn of her life alongside us.

No wonder, when I pass her, I look into her eyes, suddenly clouded with cataracts, and whisper, louder than before,’Good girl.’

 

NOTE: On October 4, 2012, Milly passed away peacefully in her sleep under the dining room table…dreaming, one hopes, of juicy bones and running through arroyos. Dreaming, also, of looking at us through clear, youthful eyes, seeking the loving approval that we, mere humans, tried as generously as we could to give.

Captain Kirk

We all watched as Kirk Cameron was dragged through the streets to the whipping post today. But it might be good to remember that he is not that off-base, religiously speaking. And I’m not referring here to the crazy Roman Catholic clerics, from the Pope on down, who are known by their fruits (as it were) in this matter.

No, I am thinking about the Dalai Lama, who in a 1997 interview, was asked about homosexuality and said, the purpose of sex in general is for procreation, ‘so homosexual acts do seem a bit unnatural.’ The Dalai Lama!

Why can’t religions ‘get’ homosexuality? How on earth (or in heaven, for that matter) does sexual orientation count for or against one’s spirituality? What law could keep a gay person from having an intimate relationship with God? What God would withhold love from that person?

Actually, I don’t think Kirk needs to be punished for his words. Karma will take care of that. It did with all the nutball Christian Evangelists who climbed sweatily down from the pulpit after denouncing queers and climbed sweatily into bed with their ‘male escorts.’ I predict right here and now that within a week some hot guy in tight Levis will step forward claiming to be Kirk’s long-time boyfriend…Mrs. Cameron and kids and the rest notwithstanding.

Let’s not be too hard on Kirk (no pun intended). He is, after all, a dying breed and therefore an endangered species. But let’s do get ready for the fun when the closet door swings open to reveal Captain Kirk in all his gay glory, experiencing very different kinds of growing pains.