Author Archives: John Linscheid

About John Linscheid

John Linscheid learns a bit more each day from his gay old soulmate, friends, and life generally. A writer and activist, John has been an author, activist, editor, pastor, amateur artist, burger flipper and factory worker in the course of his 60 plus years. Over 30 have been spent with his gay old soulmate, with whom he has led workshops, made presentations, built a labyrinth, planted trees, and sought out the company of spirited queer folk--particularly men. They have become fixtures at Germantown Mennonite Church, the western hemisphere's oldest Mennontie congregation and now one of its most progressive. Experience places John in the mystical circles of both Queer and Christian spirituality. If he becomes a doddering old fool, he intends to do so with reckless, joyful abandon.

A Holy Picture on My Wall

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barn


I dream a dusty path
where cattle obliterate the grass,
making their routine pilgrimages
past a looming red barn
through weedy green pastures
to a creek’s still waters.

 

I never lived here,
a generation removed
from where I grew up
playing town-kid games,
seeing fields and pastures
only as a wilderness for imagination.

Fence posts mark a corner
where a barbed-wire crown dangles
half-wrapped back upon itself,
and dense hedge trees with their own barbs
grow lime-green apples
as rough as a farmer’s hands.

Distant from the farm
as from the gardens
that bracket my salvation,
I dream it as a sacred painting
an idealized icon
shining on my path.

I frame that glistening dream
now foreign to my life
and hang it as a blessing
to grace my older days,
like Jesus in the garden
or knocking at the door.

Latent Superhero

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When queer was odd
and gay was happy
and no vocabulary contained the word
homosexual . . .

smiling boy with face in hands

Before my parents read to me
of Susie’s babies
and I learned that grown up men and women
did the same repulsive things
that hamsters did . . .

In a time when every boy
married a girl,
but that felt okay because
marriage really was just living together . . .

and I was too young to know
that my fascination with shirtless men
and bare-chested farmers
was anything more than fascination . . .

I had already discovered
the secret of human flight
and could make myself invisible.

I disarmed the world
by invisibly transporting
Russia’s and America’s atom bombs
to my factories of destruction,
because Mennonite—pacifist—boys
must do that first.

Only then did I secretly save
high-school basketball players
(in those revealing uniforms)
and the handsome neighbor
(who mowed the grass t-shirt off)
from evil captors.
And they were not the only ones.

You would be surprised how many villains
conspired to lock away hard-muscled men
in secret basement dungeons
under the buildings of Goessel, Kansas
—a town of just three hundred or so people.

After I rescued them—,
naked, cold, and lonely
—and nursed the wounds on their strong chests,
and on the exquisite skin of their arms and legs
and fine-looking faces,
they would come to live with me
in my not-so-Mennonite mansion
with many bedrooms
just outside of town.

There we lived together
in chaste contentment
in a time before I knew that
something more super was possible.

Writer’s Block

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wet chair

I am awake now

I cocooned myself in sheets
relishing dreams
bidding my mind drowse back
into foggy meandering.

At 9:30, I thought,
“This is ridiculous,”
and pulled on yesterday’s jeans.
(I still wore yesterday’s t-shirt.)

I straightened the sheets,
pulled the covers back up,
and made the bed
into a semblance of respectability.

Soon I found myself,
left side plastered to the bedcover
head drowning in the pillow,
not curled up but definitely curved

By 10:30 I had fought myself
to the point of wandering
into the sunshine
on the cottage deck.

“This is ridiculous,”
I told myself again.
“I should be accomplishing something.
I must be productive.”

Re-heating the coffee from last night’s pot,
I picked up my computer
and shuffled back to the deck,
my body still complaining, “Bed!”

Instead, I turned to my chair
and plopped myself down
ready to write
ready to get something done.

I hadn’t noticed the water
ready as well,
pooled in the seat
from yesterday’s rain.

I am awake now.

Leaving Dorothy’s House*

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shelf with missing itemsFor three days following her funeral
I have been desperate to be home
overanxious to putter in my own kitchen
to doze off in my own bed

Now the day to leave has come
My back clings to this mattress
stretching out the minutes
If we don’t rise, we won’t have to go

Her reflection fades already
in the transformation of this place
as we sort her things
deciding their fate

This house will not be hers again
nor frame her presence for us
Departing requires that someday
we come back to her absence

 

*My Gay Old Soulmate’s mother (my mother-in-law) died in mid-March. We had been gone from our home for a month and a half on various aspects of family business when she died.  An amazing woman, she had prepared us well and she was ready to make the transition from life and flesh. In multiple respects, we were ready to go.  But the reality that she is no longer there will come home to us for a long time.  I wrote the words above on the day we left her home in Kansas to return to ours in Philadelphia.

At the End of the Day

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men embracing in bed

Bare chest to naked back
skin pressed hard to weary skin
one arm awkwardly squeezed
to the mattress below
the other wrapping him tight

Silence, mostly silence
we turn, reverse position
his arm now wrapping me
in duration proportionate
to the burden of the day

Sometimes hanging on
is simply hanging on
sometimes it is survival
the one reliable embrace
the world can offer

Divine Disruption

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loud imageI was asked to preach on January 11, 2015.  The texts for the day were from Genesis 1, Psalm 29, and Mark 1.  These were my thoughts.

Once, as a child in Kansas, playing with neighbor kids in their yard, we watched as heavy clouds rolled across the sky toward us.  They were so thick, with such a defined edge, I remember us childishly speculating if this was how night came.

Then our neighbor’s mom tore out the back door. She yelled at us to run, run home as fast as we could.  As we crossed the alley, my parents hurried out to meet us and to get us into the basement. We made it just as the storm hit, with weeds, branches, and debris tumbling past our basement windows.

“The voice of God shakes the wilderness …,”
writes the Psalmist. “The voice of God twists the oaks,
and strips the forests bare.
And in God’s temple all cry, ‘Glory!'”

In the age of Sandy and Irene, we no longer perceive divine power within a storm. We understand even the most capricious winds as meteorological events, capable of human explanation. A TV evangelist may may rail about God’s wrath in the wake of a hurricane. But the degree of his awe may be measured by the fact that he does not fall to his own knees, but only calls on others to do so.

Psalm 29 is not the only scripture to speak from a place of powerful disruption..
Continue reading →

Compline

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person lying beneath moonDarkness of heaven,
beyond the moon’s painting
over my pale weariness,
I rest my fading body into your night.

I lay upon you
the sheer force of will
by which I hold together
this patched, unpainted frame.

How easily I could fly apart,
abandoned by gravity,
into a thousand pieces,
just glassy shards of flesh.

Must I then
be swept away
as shattered debris
of dust and ashes?

Or might I,
from every glinting fragment,
each threatening splinter,
still glitter persistently?

For My Gay Old Soulmate on Our 31st Anniversary

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(two months and twelve days after legal marriage)

male coupleLove of my life,
how redundant it felt
to make vows of marriage
having traveled
a thirty-one year road.

Did we not take vows the night we
set out on this journey:
anointed by coffee at Perkins
sanctified on a sofabed alter?

Neither of us anticipated then
that a day would come
when force of law would bind us.
But court rulings do not define the heart.

On our thirty-first anniversary of love,
I undertake this vow:

No “I do” shall supersede
our queer covenant:

to be friends and lovers first
and married second

to value spiritual growth
above conventional relationship
and create “family”
intentionally

to dance across the lines
of social respectability
and seek justice
promiscuously

to celebrate sexuality
spiritually
and sex
playfully

to risk adventure
flagrantly
and seek joy
recklessly

So that whatever life may throw in our path,
our world may be renewed
just by our traveling
together.

Post Prostate

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I never imagined—
back when, before I can remember,
I learned to “hold it”
and “go” at my own command,
or when, even in recent memory
control seemed simply natural (complex and unnatural as it was)
—that a day would come
when, with constant self reminders,
I again would need to learn to “hold it”
and wished I would go only at my own command.
It feels so unnatural (as it is)
to have to will oneself to continence.

young and old eyes

I entertained no notion—
back when, with teenage hormones rising,
my awkwardly positioned hands covered
inconvenient evidence of unconfined libido,
or when, even in recent years,
stamina alone limited me
—that a day would come
when, with wearying desire,
I would strive to manifest that libido
and would hope for its unbidden evidence.
It seems so unnatural (and it is)
to have to train one’s body for arousal.

I failed to see—
in youth and even naïve older age
before thought-less acts
lost their second-nature;
before they demanded
constant thought
—this day,
in which divided attention
yields unpleasant consequences,
and pleasant consequences  require undivided attention.
It feels weirdly natural now
to think my body through its urges.

Old Friends

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friends on sofaAn old friend stopped by the other day, having heard through his colleague, who heard from my Gay Old Soulmate, of my diagnosis.  I don’t think we have seen each other since my Gay Old Soulmate and I went down to the Schuylkill to watch him in the dragon boat races four years ago, and I, with my poor eyesight, strained in vain to figure out which figure in which boat was he.  He commented that in earlier times we would hardly go three days without seeing one another.  That was a different lifetime for us both.

A doctor, he asked the medical questions about staging and Gleason scores and mentioned some other numbers that I didn’t understand.  It felt as though he knew more about my prognosis from my limp attempt to describe what the surgeon had told us than I did myself—which felt comforting.  It recalled the time he saved my life.  Fifteen or sixteen years ago. I waited for a  liver transplant.  One night I began bleeding internally.  Blissfully ignorant, I knew only that I had not the strength to get up from the bathroom floor.  My Gay Old Soulmate called him in desperation, and he came in the middle of the night.  I presume he grasped the critical nature of my condition when he saw me. But I insisted they take me to a hospital across town where I knew the doctors.  He advised calling the ambulance.  He told me he would let me ride across town if I could make it down the stairs on my own energy.  I could only go, sitting butt down, stair by stair, one step at a time.  That settled it.  He called 911, conveying the urgency to the operator with a host of medical terms I did not fully comprehend and now do not remember.  I remember only that the ambulance came and I made it to the emergency room on time.

Now we primarily see each other on Facebook, or at times of crisis like this.  It feels good to see him settled on the sofa again.  We pick up with news of each other’s lives, his partner’s Ph.D. defense, my recent retirement and our celebratory trip to Phoenix to visit his ex—and cancer.  The intertwining of our lives no longer brings us face to face with any frequency.  But our lives remain connected.  Even over the years and chasm of experience that caused our worlds to diverge, we are bound together.

We no longer promise, as we once did, “I’ll call you,” or say, “We should get together more often.”  We know we won’t.  Without fail, another diagnosis, another dragon boat race, or . . . .   We will see each other again.