Love Poem: Pride and Wonder
Gerald Dillenbeck Avatar
Written by: Gerald Dillenbeck

Pride and Wonder

I told the nun in charge
of Religious Education
If asked about sexual orientation
I will say
I'm gay.

I want to teach
deep listening learning
not how not to lie.

She wonders why
such forthrightness
feels so important
Are you a recruiter
for gay pride?
Are you a political activist?

Gay pride
makes as much sense to me
as straight pride,
as if our sexual orientations
were something chosen,
accomplished through heroic effort,
like mental health
in a too LeftYang Patriarchal culture
forgetting Left with Right bilateral mindbodies
are sacred gifts
of karmic grace,
to live here with now
in this cosmically interdependent time
as place.

Yet,
while gay or straight pride,
maybe even transgender supremacy,
feel competing bully inappropriate,
given these are gifts
not originating from our own accomplishment,
so too
shame and denial
of whichever of these diverse non-predative
victimless
sexually co-passionate orientations
greeted our FirstDay incarnation,
call it PositivEnergy karma
and call it  ego-ecosystemic grace,
I see no point in shame,
nor even blaming a corrupt moral environment
for who and where and why 
I am meant to sensory-spiritually become.

To lie
would be to teach shame
for karmic grace as we deep learning listening are,
and have been
co-passionately non-violent
born.

My veiled
and roundly black habited nun
observes
Sometimes what and how
and who and why we learn to ego-ecologically love
lies between orthodox happiness
and heterodox despair.

Rabbi Abraham Heschel
taught sacred Love
as Wonder and Awe experience

Joy and Ecstasy
their persuasive climax destination

Toward a mystic flash 
of Teilhard's brilliant CoOperative Omega Pointed Bridge
for reborn synergetic baptism,
but this has not been my path
or hoped for destination,
certainly not warm regarding sexual co-passions
as cause for voluptuous public celebrations
and pride of wonder and awe
I have of myself alone,
or not,
accomplished.

Perhaps
for Teacher Abraham
Wonder and Awe
and sacred Love,
regardless of sexual passions,
all three in one,
reside between sacred WinWin
healthy multiculturing hope
and secular monoculturing LoseLose despair,
pathological,
totalitarian,
fundamentally anti-evangelical.

But,
why would Rabbi Heschel
be a teaching icon
for a Catholic Religious Education Director?

Who can still remember
a Jewish girl child
who knew more Deep Learning Wonder
and Awesome Sacred Ecology
than could be erased
by MisEducation
settling for bleached out lies
against multiculturing mysticism,
eco-spiritual matriotic experience
of warm radiant days
and dualdark NewMoon 
revolutionary nights.

She double-snapped,
pivoted,
and sashayed away.

Just as well.
I could think 
of nothing else to say,
gay
or other wise.