I always get into what I’m reading. I’ve been wanting some biography, and happened on Before Night Falls through a book list. It’s a memoir of Reinaldo Arenas, Cuban poet, freedom fighter and gay activist.
Not the kind of book you’d expect a preacher to be reading. Lots of rowdy sex.
Besides that, what I like in this book is the longing evident from early days in Arenas’s life, a longing for something missing in the Communist paradise he grew up in.
Maybe food. As a boy he often ate dirt to fill his stomach.
His writing brought him to the attention of the literary community in Cuba. Despite the many parasites who sold out to State Security, there were others who gathered in small groups to read their work.
In one meeting the poet read his original poems, then burned the only copy in a hibachi to the gasps of the crowd. In Cuba it’s criminal to write except in connivance with the State.
Arenas’ friends smuggled his work out of Cuba, and it was published in France, winning acclaim.
He writes that tyranny hates the Beauty of a poem which cannot be enslaved to its purposes.
He would have liked Ephesians 2.10, “We are God’s works of art…” [lit. poema] NJB.
In my heart is a longing that Arenas somewhere, somehow met the God, who might be known by other names—such as Beauty, Medicine, Truth, Justice, Love. Transcendent names.
I don’t know. I’m just really clear that the system I grew up with, in which people were either saved or lost (no other possibilities), doesn’t cover all the people I know.
There are those souls who long for a better God than all the gods they know, souls who serve their better God even though they have no proof their God exists, souls who put many “saved” folks to shame.
C.S. Lewis wrote of one such soul in The Last Battle. Emeth [Hebrew word meaning faithful] was an enemy soldier who loved the pagan bird god Tash fiercely, risked his life to catch a glimpse of Tash, only to learn in Aslan’s country that he had worshiped the great Lion all his life.
Lewis explained, you can’t offer true worship to a false god; nor can you give false worship to the true God. By whatever name they call God true worshipers serve the true God; false worshipers, false gods.
O true God of mercy, love and grace, you have other sheep, belonging to other folds. May you bring them home in peace at the last. Amen
Note: high pain today, so I can’t write a lot.
Photo by Mary Fran