fourth wednesday of easter

today i went to walk the line for a little while and not too far into the walk i was approached by a woman who introduced herself and identified what local news organization she works for. she wanted to know if i would be willing to talk with the media.

she said that every time they send out a reporter to talk with me, i am already gone. omniscient narrator from the future knows that later on today another person will tell me that they've wanted to stop and talk with me but can't predict how long i will be there or for how long.

omniscient narrator from the future also knows there were waves and a v for victory and a second person who stopped to talk and ask how we can get this story to news media.

anyway, i told the television personality that i was ambivalent about talking with the media because although walking with a sign every day is a very public statement, it only goes so far and that i am only forced to each successive step by the silences of the church.

i hope, i told her, that there may still be an opportunity to allow the church to do what's right or as close to right as their tardiness can allow without making more things more public.

she left it on the note that if i wish to talk to reporters on camera, i should call.

it's not a very spectacular story. it's pretty plain and fairly common. it is one of the problems with cultural and institutional silence. it is one small shard of a much larger thing, a thing with many moving parts and many stories worse but it all stinks.

my first choice of course would have been not to have been assaulted.

failing that, i would have liked to have been supported by my "church family", the same people who got all teary eyed when they told me what a gift i was to them.

and in the wake of the slow degeneration what i wanted was to be able to stay and mend my own fences, quietly and with work and patience.

when they threw me out telling me that it was just too uncomfortable for people to have to think about, i wished to make that community profoundly and disturbingly uncomfortable in a way that would not be forgotten even long after they've forgotten my face or name.

i move between two ways of thinking: some days i want nothing more than to hold on to this new order, this way of exacting payment. as long as you are all uncomfortable, i think, as long as you have to have meetings and talk about it and look at it every time you meet, you are having to pay more attention and expend more of your resources and be more uncomfortable than you would have been if you had simply done the right thing from the outset, or at any available point of choice.

and it pleases me to know that this congregation has to pay much more dearly to have thrown me out than to have actually practiced the "radical welcome" they preach every week.

but then some days i think that maybe this discomfort will lead them finally to make a different choice. it is too late to do right by me, but a thorough cleaning of their house will make the thing better and give it worthwhile meaning.

i want to leave open the possibility that something good or right can be done.

maybe.

it's not really important whether i walk each day from hope or from rage. it matters simply that i keep walking, because it looks the same no matter which place it comes from, and the result will be the same.

either way, i sleep nights. i wake mornings refreshed and i don't jump if i see a shadow and i walk comfortably on this earth and i am not prepared to give those things up ever again.