He chuckles weakly. "And always it's my face," he agrees in his boyish voice. The voice, I think, bespeaks a man's courage, and I marvel at the insistence of the human spirit to persist and endure and survive, and my own marveling causes me to ask myself which of us is really the stronger. Shortly I tell him I must go, and he bids me' Be careful," and I leave another thirty-five cents and tell him to have one more beer, and as I tum to go I take his hand for a moment. He thanks me and his grasp is more than a mere handshake and the things it expresses wordlessly are echoed still more strongly in his gaze. Even the artificial orb seems, for a moment, not sightless. Our hands part as a drowning man loses his grip on a proffered lifeline, and I wonder which of us is in the sea, for I am as unable to help him as he appears to be to help himself.

I leave the bar feeling the weight of the seeming futility of man's attempts to counter the tragic essence of his existence. This youth, with so little to to fight with-pitched against a brutal world which, despite all our fine wordage about "spiritual progress" actually grants survival to the "fittest"; lost in a confusion of psycho-sexual misidentity, at worst, or lack of identity, at best (or should that be the other way round?); assigned a fixed position low on the ethnic list; beset on all sides by a society of Tennessee Williamsonian camivorous birds which seek to overtum the helpless, fleeing, newlyhatched turtles in order to feed on their flesh-this youth had really asked me where he might find his missing self. And all I had been able to offer was a few minutes' friendly conversation and the price of a beer. It was more than anyone else in the place had offered, but it was nevertheless only solace,

not solution.

In this world the thinkers are ignored or ridiculed ("eggheads" and "longhairs"), and the sympathetic and concemed are ignored or ridiculed ('maudlin," "weak," "hypersensitive"), and the weak are ignored, or ridiculed, or used, or despised ("all is psychosomatic"; a Catholic book examines the "moral responsibility" of mental illness, offering only judgment where help is what is needed). It is the emotional and the strong in this world who get the following and the adulation. The hero, the conqueror, the victor. Theirs are the monuments, and it is they whom even the weak would emulate or usurp (Napoleon or Caesar is in every psychiatric ward).

It is a brisk, clear night, and as I climb the hillhomeward I note the myriad stars overhead, and I wonder whether the proper framework in which to view them is the poetic one which shows them as "candles of the sky" and "eyes of the night" and "heavenly lights," or the coldly scientific one which knows them as merely larger, if more distant, manifestations of primordial energy, violent, imperdonally reason less, purposeless.

I prefer a touch of poesy. There is a more important reality in the brief, personal exchange between this Indian boy and me than in all the wild animattachine REVIEW

mals in all the sinister convertibles on all the highways of the world.

Inadequate as my assistance may be, I retire feeling certain that the attempt is better than nothing, and I vow that when he calls on me again, I will be here with at least the same willingness to try.

RELIGION AND THE HOMOSEXUAL

By The Reverend Norman Benson

(First of Three Articles by a Protestant Minister)

Understandably many homosexuals reject organized religion. In a sense, they should. After all, organized religion rejects them. And, as a matter of fact, this organized religion's greatest mistake and weakness.

Rightly understood, it doesn't happen to be the business of religion or the churches to reject anybody. Religion, as I understand it, is a structured endeavor to relate to life, or to God. Its premise should be that God, having thought up life in the first place, does not reject any form of life. Rather individuals are given the right to reject God, just as a teacher gives a pupil the freedom to reject the teacher, but never himself rejects the pupil no matter what.

The difficulty with churches, and their organized religions, is that they have seen themselves in an appallingly arrogant light. They have presumptiously set themselves up as agencies purporting to represent God, and, just as you can't purchase a manufactured article without going through the properly designated agent, so churches have claimed to have a monopoly on God, saying, "You can't reach God except through us; we are His representatives. Furthermore, we alone know what or who God is and will tell you just what you must do and believe before you can have access to God." Such, of course, is absurd nonsense. It staggers one's credulity to think that any adult above moronic level would give a second thought to such a claim by any church.

It seems to me that our starting point must be to realize that churches are not created by God. They are man made organizations, and, as such, can perform a wonderful mission. But churches to do so, must teach a religion, not of authority, but of the spirit.

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