The Rev. Dr. Paul Tellström Irvine United Congregational Church

“Standing in the Grave of Alphonsine Plessis” July 1, 2007

Hebrew Testament—27: 1-6 word count: 2,750

Epistle Reading—1 John 4:16b-21

A convocation of cemetery cats perched on fallen stones in the cemetery at Montmarte, and Jeff and I stopped to look. We had made plans to meet in Paris, and I was leading him on a quest. Five years had passed since I left New York, which meant five years of missing the daily company of my best friend. It was as if we needed the backdrop of Paris to say all the things we had to say to reaffirm our bohemian friendship in the second half of our lives.

In another lifetime we had met often in our little run-down apartments in their vastly run-down buildings to throw together what money we had to make pasta, with chicken if we were flush, and perhaps a quart of beer—in those years of our early 20's. Now we were sharing a room in a fleabag hotel in Paris over a cheese shop. I insisted that it have a private bath and he called me bourgeois.

And now we stood in these streets of the dead; those for whom revolution had been reality, whose lives Hemingway harked back on and Hugo knew intimately. To the right there were orderly rows of small houses. They were roughly 9' tall, 6' wide, and 8' deep. Each had gothic spires and a small window in the back, which held cracked stained glass, or nothing at all but wind and the autumn leaves passing through. Most had a gate; many were locked to visitors, and others hung open and beckoned.

But first, to our left on old tables of stone—those cats. I had heard a romantic story about the cemetery cats of Paris. The ancestors of these cats were brought to the graves of their departed at the burial, and abandoned there. They do not look loveable because they do not look like they have ever received love. We stepped closer. They tensed their haunches, and stared us down. Each cat bore marks of a rough life. Mange, missing parts, decrepitude, and overall filth from a lack of self-care unusual in cats. But they could do something powerful. They could look into our souls. What their eyes spoke we felt deeply; “You—we know you—one of those who brought us up, took care of us, told us you loved us. Then something happened, and we are here—with no love, no mercy, and no justice. We recognize you.” Jeff and I looked long—and they looked back. Finally we turned toward the streets of the dead, and I was haunted by something from T. S. Eliot's Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats:

“His manners and appearance did not calculate to please;

His coat was torn and seedy, he was baggy at the knees;

One ear was somehow missing, no need to tell you why,

And he scowled upon a hostile world from one forbidding eye."

We looked back from a distance, and they still watched.

After walking past row after row of these mausoleums, which looked like little gothic or neo-classic chapels, we found what I was looking for—the borrowed grave of Alphonsine Plessis, la Dame aux Camelias. The door of the tomb was laid open, and Jeff walked in. I took his picture in the doorway.

There was a real Camille, and Dumas fils, the author of the novel about her life, is buried nearby. There was a real Violetta and her lover Alfredo in a story that Verdi put to music in La Traviata. Her door was open, as in the old days of her grand salon in Paris when gentlemen came to visit, and we too, stepped in to join her as gentlemen callers. Like the fictional Marguerite of Camille, and Violetta of La Traviata, Alphonsine Plessis was cut off from the love of her family and depended on the kindness of others. Wealthy male admirers set the beautiful young woman up in style, and she was seen and admired in all of the best places. She became a courtesan; her home was a salon where the cream of society came. When she began having trouble with tuberculosis, a young man stated his love; he would take her to the country and marry her. She loved him, and began selling her effects so that they might make a home. One day while he was away, his father paid a visit to Alphonsine. He needed to make her understand how the world works. People like her could be admired for their beauty and talents, but must be made to grasp that they are outside the bounds of society and not a part of decent family values. He convinced her that it was for her lover's sake that this scandalous marriage should not happen. He convinced her that she was not worthy of belonging to a sacred family unit, so she agreed to her own invisibility—to go back to Paris and never tell her lover why she had left.

Her tuberculosis grew worse, and as depicted in Camille, she returned in poor health and finances. As she lay dying, she heard the auction of her belongings taking place in the salon. She was far from decent society now, dying alone in a hallway without her lover nearby. One admirer lent the grave we now stood in. Alphonsine Plessis, with more selfless love than most, yet somehow lacking in traditional family values.

I’m a New Yorker—circa 1980’s. I knew people like her. Friends who lay in graveyards or are scattered across bodies of water, and many of them had families, those sacred and closed societies, who squirmed and struggled with the concept first of who their children were, and then squirmed more about AIDS and taught them to be invisible. The family and friends of Matthew Shepard stood in one such graveyard and can tell you what happens when someone is different. We know or are people who have felt the sting of racism, or whose gender or age has consigned us to the outer circles of power. The family and friends of James Byrd can describe the singeing heat from the hate that caused the death of their loved one. We have heard people in responsible positions in recent history playing the race card, demonizing the poor, and a campaign that used our relationships to stir support for a constitutional amendment to ban any legal acknowledgement of our relationships and the rights that accompany them in a fearful electorate as the great moral issue in this age of war. The results may have played out well in terms of elections, but the inflammation of hate from those who know better is what results in the continued physical and psychological violence done to people who are different only when it comes to whom it is that they hold dearest to their hearts.

You don’t have to be invisible in order to make the mainstream comfortable. You are a part of the whole. You don’t have to change; they do.

Today, although we do not have full knowledge of what causes this difference, science now embraces the theory that people are simply born into their sexual orientation as the most logical theory of all.

It therefore follows that if scientists don’t know what causes sexual orientation, and then pastors certainly don’t either. You don’t have to change—they do.

More insidious perhaps than the hate today’s politicians and pulpit-jockeys stir up for their own power heedless of the pain and suffering that is inflicted upon their targets, is the low self-esteem that is engendered in the targets of hate.

I add Jeff to my list of friends who are survivors of the many kinds of attempts to erase or make invisible the despised and rejected portion of our population. Suffering from AIDS Dementia, Jeff was found in his apartment sleeping and starving himself to death. His behavior had troubled us for a while, but we never would have known that he had AIDS, as he managed to hide his illness and his sexuality from all of us, even his best friend of 20 years. I met him when he was in an unhappy relationship with a woman. When it ended, he never had a relationship again.

Because it's not supposed to happen, you see. There are religious myths about what God sits around worrying about, from the story that people can’t be naturally attracted to their own sex, that one race is superior to another, or that feminists are evil—they can't be good people from good families, and you surely couldn't know any of them; it's impossible to even think that they might find a healthy love and happiness, because the good folk of decent society say so. And they’ve got God to back them.

Virginia Woolf once said, “I sat up last night and read the Book of Job. God doesn't come out of it very well.” I can identify with Job, admiring him as he holds on to his integrity. Faith is a difficult enough enterprise for us, without being blasted by the righteous trance channellers of God.

Here is a community of people whose churches turned against them for being born who they are, demanding that they be something they are not and cannot be or disappear. Why do those oppressed by race, gender, and poverty—those who have felt the sting of hate from those claiming to be righteous, why are these people often the most faithful?

I think it is perhaps because of a secret knowledge. A knowledge innate in those who are oppressed for any reason, who raise themselves up without benefit of role models, who refuse to believe what they are told about themselves, who dodge blows and verbal abuse, who believe in their worth, and who seek after lasting love believing they are worthy. Most importantly, here is a community of people who know that God made them and loves them as they are. These are people of faith, who refuse to believe they can be separated from God by the ignorance of many who go about calling themselves Christian. But like the cemetery cats, in this age of ignorance and hate crimes against minorities, we now look up from graves of banishment and from the outside saying, “You. We know you. You brought us up, took care of us, told us you loved us. Then something happened, and we are here, without your love, with no mercy, and no justice. We recognize you, but we don't recognize your notion of God”.

Communities of outcasts learned the meaning of faith, grace, hope, and love, by experiencing the loss of each in the withdrawal and disdain of family, society, and the false idea of a God who stopped loving us. By being put to the test in this age of ignorance. And by passing that test in deepened compassion, self-examination, and caring, a test the killers of Matthew Shepard and the political and religious goaders of hate failed miserably.

But as comedienne Lynn Lavner says, “The Bible contains 6 admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments to heterosexuals. That doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals. It's just that some of them need more supervision”.

Those of us who have experienced hate or diminishment have had to learn to love ourselves because of who we are, and to do so not just without those whose command is to love their neighbors, but in spite of them, and to say as Job did:

“As long as a shred of life is left in me, and the breath of God breathes in my nostrils, my lips

will never speak evil, nor my tongue utter any lie. Far from admitting you to be in the right, I

shall maintain my integrity to my dying day.”

I flew to New York to bring Jeff, in his state of dementia, to his parents' home. His family would not come and get him, and we needed to discuss removing him from his drugs so that he could die. When we got back to New York, his mind was close enough to the surface for me to ask him if in any of his encounters he had at least once felt love or even tenderness. His answer was swift. “Of course not.” He had believed what the world had told him; therefore, he went about setting his life apart in a series of denials of who he was, cutting off all opportunities for love or happiness. He didn't deserve it.

On the morning I had to leave, I sat at the empty table where we had shared so many meals and conversations, and looked at his vacant chair. It hit me that I might be saying good-bye to him forever.

Jeff was taken to a new doctor, who put him on protease inhibitors. His mind has been fully restored, and he has learned to love himself. Today he lives with a partner and refuses to be invisible so that the status-quo might be comfortable. Moreover, today my great sadness is that we find it hard to be friends, because I represent the church, and the church is on the wrong side of this issue.

Arthur Schopenhauer said, “All truth goes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed, next it is violently opposed, and finally, it is accepted as being self-evident. Look at the spiritually violent opposition that has brought people together this weekend—the idea that Exodus International believes people should change who they are in order to become something they aren’t, when even their leaders say that you can never fully change. When will the truth seem self-evident?

Here is the greater disease than homophobia. Bill Coffin once said, “Too often we show symptoms of a deadly disease called psychosclerosis, a hardening not of the arteries, as in arteriosclerosis, but of the psyche, the spirit. As a result, our hearts no longer remain vulnerable. Our minds can no longer see, let alone embrace others in our midst. For a cure, the trick in life is to die young as late as possible. But sufferers of psychosclerosis clearly seek to die old as young as possible.”¹

If only they had a knowledge, a “gnosis” of a God that blesses and restores. This knowledge simply says, “I have given you the great gift of knowing yourself to be born exactly who you are, when others can't see. To know that God loves all, not punishes the other.”

To know that God loves you when the world and its institutions tell you otherwise calls for a big leap of faith. In that leap, your limited understanding of God is freed; liberated from the perceptions, projections, and restrictions of humankind. Simply, as Victor Hugo wrote in Les Miserables, “to love another person is to see the face of God.”

In the New Testament, we hear John say that “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them… There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love…Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.” Show us the love!

Those who suffer from homophobia, from racism, sexism, and the unset place for the disabled, see the world through a window where everyone else is at a feast and no chairs have been set for them. Yet in our love, some of us are blessed enough to see the face of God. We are just so astonished at first to find that God is outside standing with us, in the graves of so many Alphonsine Plessis'; with our hands on the gates, some open, and some locked. God standing with us; looking in at the world through the broken shards of sharp stained glass hanging from gothic windows, which have only cut at the light. Standing with God, loving the unloved, like the cemetery cats of Paris—with mercy, and with justice.

1) Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Riverside Church

Scripture for Sunday, July 1, 2007

Job 27:1-6

1 Job again took up his discourse and said: 2 “As God lives, who has taken away my right, and the Almighty, who has made my soul bitter, 3 as long as my breath is in me and the spirit of God is in my nostrils, 4 my lips will not speak falsehood, and my tongue will not utter deceit. 5 Far be it from me to say that you are right; until I die I will not put away my integrity from me. 6 I hold fast my righteousness, and will not let it go; my heart does not reproach me for any of my days.

1 John 4:16b-21

God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. 17 Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. 18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. 19 We love because he first loved us. 20 Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. 21 The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.