Faith, medicine, and poetry …

… Rafael Campo: Poetry as Healing, Illness as Muse - Image Journal. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Also in this book is his painfully forthright essay, “Like a Prayer,” on his relation to the Catholic faith of his Cuban-American heritage. As a child he loved Mass: “Poetic language began for me upon a praying priest’s lips, in the rhythmically intoned words that seemed as luxurious and sensually attractive as his flowing gowns.” But when, as a teenager, he gradually realized he was gay, he came to see with horror that “I was the degenerate homosexual whom I imagined my Church so despised.”  

The focus of the faith — something the official Church often overlooks — should always be on what Graham Greene called  "the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God."