tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-50050009880848254422024-03-21T16:03:01.562-05:00Rites, be they CivilNotes on civil rights and rites, civic engagement, patriotism, writing, music, church and theology, et al., from a Gay Lutheran perspective.Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.comBlogger47125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-51165094331657138452012-11-08T21:13:00.000-06:002012-11-08T21:15:02.121-06:00Full Circle, with Tears and Joy<i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"By and by, when the morning comes,</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /><i>When the Saints of God are gathered home,<br />We'll tell the story of how we've overcome,<br />and we'll understand it better by and by."</i></span><br />
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I began this blog 4 years ago, in the aftermath of the passage of Prop 8 in California, when the country took a turn towards equality in its election of Barack Obama as our president, while some of our states took a sharp turn away.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">On Tuesday, my home state of Minnesota took a turn towards equality when we voted down a similar amendment to our constitution by a margin of 52-48%, the first time any state in the union overturned an effort to dehumanize LGBT people in its state constitution. We shouted and laughed and wept tears of joy. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But underneath it all, for me at least and I think for many others, were another kind of tears. These are tears for those who didn't make it to see this day, who died of AIDS and suicide, those young people who didn't make it to see their high school graduations like Justin Aaberg, whose death pierced my heart as it pierced the hearts of many. The following is my reflection on this experience:</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">TEARS. </span></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What I hear and feel most deeply around the defeat of the anti-gay marriage amendment in Minnesota is how deep it has hit so many of us in our souls, and how that power has come out of our eyes through those gentle drops of soul-rain. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Having to prove one's humanity again, and again, and again to those who deny it is not only tiring, not only demeaning, not only frustrating. It is also deeply sad. It is sad for me and it is sad for those who cannot be moved, whose binders and blinders are so thick that they cannot see what is in front of them: LOVE. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And that makes me sob like a baby. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And I think, man, I've been at this for 25 years, what about those who have hit this soul-draining homophobia for 35, 45, 55, 65, 75 years, those who died who never had a moment like we had on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning when this cursed proposed amendment took a header down the stairs of history? </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What about those who deal with multiple stigma being put on them from the outside of their beautiful bodies and souls that grows inside them like a mold that grows out of control, about those throughout the world who do not have time to worry about their sexual orientation oppression because that is too much of a first-world problem, about those who have scarce dared to tell another soul what is most on their heart? </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What about those who suffered in silence or out loud, those young people who were made to feel like villains for being who they were, who were physically, spiritually, and sexually abused, who took their lives rather than living another day in a world that they felt could do nothing but hate them?</span></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And then I see them: The Saints of God. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Those who are streaming in from all times and from all places, who have been washed in the tears that Jesus has for those who have undergone torment not only *in* his name, but *under* his name. Those whose faith has been kicked down the stairs along with their bodies, spirits, and souls, all the while those who are doing the kicking are repeating: JESUS, JESUS, JESUS, seized with anger or laughter or just plain blank-slate horror in the name of the Lord.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And the Saints stream in from all times and from all places, singing in the name of LOVE. </span></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And they know. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">They understand. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">They in glory shine. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">They have seen what there is to see. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And they have overcome.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">By and by, when the morning comes. When the saints of God are gathered home. We'll tell the stories of how we've overcome. And we'll understand it better by and by. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitKUoptdKv1jXglQ50jyovHRzFZbD7rF-hdGlpRSnGh9JHmM_omJM_uDPwsZzZEmAQbSRIPBydBhKj3xrwR6Z48L_9UioVsuQzDTziyH-2S9_d6TMIw1Cy7OLYCdGCiW-Ep452lfNRss0/s1600/festival_of_lights_450.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitKUoptdKv1jXglQ50jyovHRzFZbD7rF-hdGlpRSnGh9JHmM_omJM_uDPwsZzZEmAQbSRIPBydBhKj3xrwR6Z48L_9UioVsuQzDTziyH-2S9_d6TMIw1Cy7OLYCdGCiW-Ep452lfNRss0/s1600/festival_of_lights_450.jpeg" width="249" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Festival of Lights," <span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 16px; text-align: left;">© 2000 John August Swanson</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span id="goog_2058721588"></span><span id="goog_2058721589"></span><br /></span></div>
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-20367031384523134952012-10-11T16:29:00.001-05:002012-10-11T16:31:09.135-05:00Remembering October 11, 1998Part of why I always get a little sick this time of year is what happened 14 years ago. I'll never forget sitting in the little room I was sleeping in then in Manhattan, thinking about the boy who was dying in Laramie. After he died the next day (October 12, 1998), signs went up all over the West Village/Chelsea that said "Bring Your Anger." At the time I thought that message wrong, but in retrospect, I've rarely been angrier than I was when Matthew Shepard was beaten to death. That night there was also a peace march held around Union Square, which I missed, but instead I had my own peace march up 8th avenue, and the candle somehow stayed lit. <br />
<br />
So much has happened since 1998, but in some senses, little has changed. The fight against Gay and Lesbian families in Minnesota with the marriage amendment is a classic case of how it is still acceptable to find any rationale necessary to try to defame, diminish, and even destroy us. But our humanity, and the integrity of our families, triumphs over the darkness contained in chants of "religious liberty" and "protect our children," because the One who created and unites us also gave us those parts of ourselves that are most human. And for me, like for Matthew, that part is gay. <br />
<br />
No matter what some Christian voices say, God loves what God created, and nobody, of no denomination, of no ranking, of no nationality, of no level of wealth, of no language, political persuasion, education level, or any other factor can separate us from the love of God.Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-1295908093301934342012-03-26T14:48:00.001-05:002012-03-26T14:48:25.517-05:00Stop Sacrificing "Fem" Boys<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="commentBody" data-jsid="text" style="color: #333333; line-height: 13px; text-align: left;"></span></span><br />
<div class="p1"><span class="s1">The following article appeared in yesterday's New York Times opinion section, written by Moroccan-French writer Abdellah Taïa. It outlines one young man's experience of growing up in a strict Islamic society and being effeminate, yet it resonates so closely with a similar experience in our own so-called "Christian" culture. This article can be found <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/opinion/sunday/a-boy-to-be-sacrificed.html?src=tp&smid=fb-share"><span class="s2">here</span></a>.</span></div><br />
<span class="commentBody" data-jsid="text" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 13px; text-align: left;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Morocco was the most sexually complex environment I've ever been in, now 14 years ago, and only briefly. I met a young guy like Abdellah when I was there, not long after I came out in my own world. I can't say I can't imagin</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">e his fear. I think a lot of gay men and lesbian women can relate to a fundamental lack of safety, to being sacrificed to an ideal of religion or society that demanded someone had to die. </span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<div class="text_exposed_root text_exposed" id="id_4f70c425701111535173270" style="display: inline;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;">Yet, in our own culture, the hatred by gays of "fems" is not uncommon. "If I wanted to date a girl, I'd be straight," is a line that all of us gays have heard, or said, at some point or another. </span></span></div><br />
<span class="commentBody" data-jsid="text" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 13px; text-align: left;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Although bands of drunken "straight" men might not come to our houses and call us out for sex in the US (*this* is akin to sodom, not same-sex couples who want to get married), they do throw us against lockers, down stairs, and tie us to fence-posts. They do lust after us, while hating us and our "sin," mocking us, and making us at times kill ourselves, while wanting to get off on us. They make some of us *want* to sacrifice ourselves. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<div class="text_exposed_root text_exposed" style="display: inline;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;">But we who are gay do that to ourselves as well--we beat up each other and ourselves for some of the same reasons. We eat our own, as I've heard it said. And I'm not beyond reproach in this. Such is the price of being marinated for years in a culture of homophobia--we all come out smelling the same.<br />
<br />
My heart breaks for all the boys who still endure this here and abroad, and for the boy that I was who ignored what other boys did to one of us who was effeminate, who couldn't "pass" as I could, the boy I was who was perhaps glad that someone else was getting the torture. </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="commentBody" data-jsid="text" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 13px; text-align: left;"></span></div><div class="text_exposed_root text_exposed" style="display: inline;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;">Never again. The world, starting with me, and I hope with you as well, must support and protect them. We <i>must</i> stop sacrificing them and encouraging them to sacrifice themselves. <i>Nothing</i> is worth that sacrifice, certainly not ideals of behavior and religious principles.</span></span></div>Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-62251788638089601002012-02-22T14:00:00.000-06:002012-02-22T14:00:53.197-06:00We are All Made of Stars--a Reflection for Ash Wednesday<div class="p1"><span class="s1"><i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq2rpMiatJQ" target="_blank">“No one can stop us now, cause we are all made of stars.”</a></i> --Moby</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBTwZTemlCLY5dICTupZSD3oL2HNVf0BDT2y6zZbXdz_NyiKJGGrnandx2p0x1il02sKkfD5u0q7So5hfvJPS2ECHKdaJcaI7W9YRApkrbuz79gvA984prK7xNf602iqrxXxOCoAsnbxI/s1600/Hubble+Stars.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBTwZTemlCLY5dICTupZSD3oL2HNVf0BDT2y6zZbXdz_NyiKJGGrnandx2p0x1il02sKkfD5u0q7So5hfvJPS2ECHKdaJcaI7W9YRApkrbuz79gvA984prK7xNf602iqrxXxOCoAsnbxI/s320/Hubble+Stars.jpg" width="291" /></a></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">I.</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">A report came to me on the way home from Ash Wednesday service at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Minneapolis about another <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=147244957" target="_blank">two journalists being killed</a> while reporting from Syria about the brutal crackdown of President Assad. In some ways, it was hard to tell at first that they were talking about one of these reporters’ deaths, because they were saying how funny she was, how caring and full of life. </span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">But you knew what they were saying. Marie Colvin was dead, killed in the line of her duty, while being a witness of violence against one’s own people in a part of the world that has seen much violence. As one mentioned, she was covering this story, and had now become part of it. </span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">“You are dust, and to dust you shall return.”</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Marie Colvin was not dust yesterday. At least nobody would have said so. </span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Today, hearing these words, “you are dust,” sounds demeaning, diminishing, depressing, and final. But I am here to hear them said, and here to pronounce them: Child of God, whether or not you believe in God, however you believe or not, you <i>are</i> dust, and to dust you shall return.</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Some days, it is true, I do not feel much above the level of dust. I don’t know what I am doing, where I am going, how I will bring my life to amount to much more than a pile of dust when it is all said and done. </span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Sometimes, it seems like all my dreams are but dust, all my accomplishments, dust to the wind, all my caring for others, dust to brush off one’s sandals.</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Sometimes, dusty roads are the only ones that seem to lie ahead.</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">The problem with that is--whenever you try to hold on too tight to a handful of dust, it breaks free and takes to the wind. Dust calls to dust at the thunder of dustbowl storms, and all the dust has gone over us. </span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Because we are all made of stars.</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">II.</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUEMjrv6ySYwpCDurxS43VxI8EUz0W044F7phA6mq8w5gYLc_ug-DiRum-P-Qh2YrBsZ3krSOMFtOTGbHNsX7ZIsbUrfi_tniqB84uTcOePIOPgHXU4P5Ga0RelGgP1J-o1pbhQXLCH9A/s1600/Lars+Paulson+&+Anna+Erickson+Paulson.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUEMjrv6ySYwpCDurxS43VxI8EUz0W044F7phA6mq8w5gYLc_ug-DiRum-P-Qh2YrBsZ3krSOMFtOTGbHNsX7ZIsbUrfi_tniqB84uTcOePIOPgHXU4P5Ga0RelGgP1J-o1pbhQXLCH9A/s320/Lars+Paulson+&+Anna+Erickson+Paulson.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">My ancestors fascinate me, because they are now dust, and yet they blipped across the screen of the world for some great moments. I have images of some of them, back about 130 years at most. </span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">These ancestors were made of stardust, and part of my image of them is that once again, their souls returned back to the stars, to the structure of space that is all in God. My dust comes from them, and theirs comes down a path that extends billions of years into the past. And the past extends to the maker of what is, was, and is to come.</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Pages on which information about my ancestors is written crumble, as do their pictures. People who do not value these things throw these pictures away, and the ground or a fire claims them. They were somewhere, and now, like my ancestors themselves, many of these mementos of them are also dust. </span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">In some time, objects and humans come to resemble each other. But although we are made of stars, we’re made of more than makes up our things, mementos, pictures, records of our existence. </span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">We are also made of memory, and possibility, made of hydrated dust, but also of the starlight of life that shines from God through the prisms of our bodies, and into the future. </span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">III.</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr8r-quwajPG2XL0PgvUaPmQ7aexpixw3jkGnvuO5wwcyFqr7D6C1lzwBwiNZBKBWBeJHpqHUZ9g7tw7ih4EtKf7uoUZZ3ptItVDllFZVThqMQXSAQWG3md6_-eTfbQBnbBqqidXZlcWk/s1600/Ash+Wednesday.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr8r-quwajPG2XL0PgvUaPmQ7aexpixw3jkGnvuO5wwcyFqr7D6C1lzwBwiNZBKBWBeJHpqHUZ9g7tw7ih4EtKf7uoUZZ3ptItVDllFZVThqMQXSAQWG3md6_-eTfbQBnbBqqidXZlcWk/s320/Ash+Wednesday.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">The message of Ash Wednesday, which pronounces such harsh words, also calls us to release our tight grip over the dust of our lives, and not to worry so much about where we will go when we return to dust, because all of that dust is <i>in God</i>. </span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">“People they come together, people they fall apart...”</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Moby’s song “We Are All Made of Stars” says it all. </span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Christians turn again to the face of God explicitly on Ash Wednesday, but each of us must to daily, hourly, practically by the nanosecond, given our instinctive need to turn away from God, to run right straight into the sun, and experience all of the separation and desolation that our desperate hearts can give us. </span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">But those hearts are made for loving as well; they are filled with the water of oceans as well as the dust of stars. God would not give us lives to live if all they were is dust. We would have stayed in the stars. </span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Today is another day to live, to struggle with continuing to live in the face of trying conditions, to mourn those who are not living, to anticipate the day when we and our loved ones will not live, and yet, to live with all of the strength in us that fights to keep the flame of life alive, set ablaze by the spark of God's love. </span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Blessed friends, we are all made of stars. Let your star shine with the internal light of love given you before the ages began, and the eternal light of the one who made this universe and everything in it. </span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div>Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-6488356935156148042011-11-11T23:13:00.000-06:002011-11-11T23:13:36.346-06:00Fred & Hans: A 95-year Mystery from the "Great War"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzDrWeSUs9H_PEzjMJjKUGJdjMnvvL3olfJeR6y_lD1fLlYWGVjFScpq9nhBJEa0sbpk923opDrgqEC_ao7-FJAcDME1T1DDLhQu-4jwCus8ujbgFngDMcl78c50ETQ89V6V73Iuqx6KI/s1600/Fred+Livingstone+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzDrWeSUs9H_PEzjMJjKUGJdjMnvvL3olfJeR6y_lD1fLlYWGVjFScpq9nhBJEa0sbpk923opDrgqEC_ao7-FJAcDME1T1DDLhQu-4jwCus8ujbgFngDMcl78c50ETQ89V6V73Iuqx6KI/s320/Fred+Livingstone+1.jpg" width="306" /></a></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGrVY4JosFm4OyR361kEoOUrsHkwvMQNHkynDLnDme4Qw7vkjdkIN5XJGoPoYnWm9QPeqUsVg0tawdHbnEk9gRof6MN382yvOKFkQ4jOpsZjd8i6G_nkdtP_A_d-jHOWCX1hvJdQIh-Zc/s1600/Fred+Livingstone+Back+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGrVY4JosFm4OyR361kEoOUrsHkwvMQNHkynDLnDme4Qw7vkjdkIN5XJGoPoYnWm9QPeqUsVg0tawdHbnEk9gRof6MN382yvOKFkQ4jOpsZjd8i6G_nkdtP_A_d-jHOWCX1hvJdQIh-Zc/s320/Fred+Livingstone+Back+1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><i>"Hans Bach, from his sincere friend, Fred. J. Livingstone, Corporal R. A. M. C., Netley Hospital England. Mar. 25th 1915."</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
Nearly 15 years ago, when I was poking around in a curiosity shop in Cologne, Germany, I found this picture. The young man's beauty first caught my eye, in his simple military uniform, and a look on his face that I cannot describe--lips slightly parted, head slightly tilted, eyes open to the world, light on one side of his face and darkness on the other, and fully relaxed, almost in an ecstatic, somewhat removed reverie. I have wondered all of these years who this beautiful young man is, and what became of him during or after the war to end all wars.<br />
<br />
More than that, I wondered how this picture of an English soldier made it into the hands of someone who, by all accounts, looks to have been on the side of the enemy. Who was Hans Bach? Was he a young student that Fred befriended before the hostilities broke out that perhaps put them on opposite sides of the fence of mortality? <br />
<br />
Were they friends, brothers, lovers, star-crossed, brought together by a fate that so soon turned as would put them in each others' harm's way?<br />
<br />
A little digging on the internet today puts Laffutte, the photographer, at 184 Western Road in Brighton & Hove, about 60 miles from Netley, where Fred was serving in the great hospital there with the Royal Army Medical Corps, in which he was a Corporal in 1915.<br />
<br />
Which makes me wonder...was Hans an enemy soldier that Fred met, and perhaps helped nurse back to health, while he was a patient at <a href="http://www.qaranc.co.uk/netleyhospital.php" target="_blank">Netley Hospital</a>, having been wounded in the war? <br />
<br />
The Royal Victoria Military Hospital at Netley was opened under Queen Victoria's rule in 1863, after 7 years of construction, being then the largest military hospital in the world. During WW1, it was the site of over 50,000 patients, some of whom were perhaps German prisoners of war as was the case 25 years later during WW2, although the hospital also treated American soldiers in vast numbers.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguHrhFZgyn44bDs_4LuNPQ7r40Mt4mVWq_2spnMhsej3fLsOtYpG0cPVqdaUSELIwscRPPGFM77uxEdkfd2RnRne3qCB3g6wEjnsZLZAOYBZDvzUF0b19ypAkXZ9JIj0NJQKsVLybWloE/s1600/netley_hospital_lookingnorth.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguHrhFZgyn44bDs_4LuNPQ7r40Mt4mVWq_2spnMhsej3fLsOtYpG0cPVqdaUSELIwscRPPGFM77uxEdkfd2RnRne3qCB3g6wEjnsZLZAOYBZDvzUF0b19ypAkXZ9JIj0NJQKsVLybWloE/s320/netley_hospital_lookingnorth.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
<br />
We will likely never know what the relationship was between Fred and Hans, what became of them (despite searching British military records for someone whose name and age would have matched Fred's), or whether they met at the hospital or before. <br />
<br />
But what is certain is that they lived, that they served, that they had a fondness of some kind for each other, and that they found themselves as a part of one of the bloodiest, yet most hopeful chapters in the history of the human struggle of battle. <br />
<br />
In that we may honor their memory, and the memories of millions who served, fought, loved, and died, today, 11.11.11, 93 years after the first Armistice Day. Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-39185067493604525222011-11-11T22:13:00.002-06:002011-11-11T22:13:40.606-06:00Eight is EnoughThree months plus since I started writing a 15-entry series on 15 years of being out of the closet, I've finished only eight of them. I wanted to finish what I started, but so far have not. And it's gotten in the way of writing further entries, even though there's been much to write about in the meantime. Well, eight is enough, and now starts some new material!Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-2383388835112961312011-07-09T23:49:00.004-05:002011-07-10T01:10:45.910-05:0015 for 15 VIII: Why I Must Be Out<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"You must remove any mention of your sexual orientation from your paperwork, resubmit for assignment elsewhere, and not mention it in any interviews with churches."</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> --ELCA Official, recommending the only way she saw me being able to get a first church</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I am resuming my series of 15 meditations on 15 years of being out today, because on this of all days, I understand more deeply every LGBTQ person's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">obligation</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> to be out, if they can: </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">because we can</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This ability is definitely not available to everyone. But if there are to be fewer people of all ages who are </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">forced</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> by our society, by their religions, employers, civil governments, families, friends, and other major factors of their lives to be in the closet, those of us who </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">can</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> be out </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">must</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> be out.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">One year ago today, </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOMPpTkTCsA"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Justin Aaberg</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> took his life in Andover, MN, not 20 miles from the gay mecca of Minneapolis. I cannot, nor can anyone, ever know the despair that Justin felt that led him to the point of ending his life. Organizations such as the </span><a href="http://www.afsp.org/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">American Foundation for Suicide Prevention</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, which lead in suicide research and prevention, caution against drawing too strong a line between being bullied, harassed, raped, humiliated, and taunted, and one's suicide. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The reasons for suicide are complex. But it cannot be disputed that Justin suffered significant ill treatment, not because he was gay and out, but because those who could have helped prevent this abuse did not, and because those who abused him were pushed in that direction by their parents, their religions, their popular cultures, and yes, in some cases their educational system and civil governments. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Because Justin can no longer be out,</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> I</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> must be, because I still have a voice, and that voice must both speak and be heard for my own dignity and that of others.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Because Justin was out when he could be, he was able to be a friend to those who, along with him, underwent this kind of abuse at the hands of those who knew all too well what they were doing, and did not stop to consider what they were doing meant to someone who did not deserve such treatment.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">That kind of friendship is vital to those who live in fear and persecution. It sometimes does mean the difference between life and death.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">II.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I have not always been able to be out. And because I have not always been able to be out, I </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">must</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> be out now, whenever I can be. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">At some point in my life, it no longer became possible for me to acquiesce in this system of oppression that said I had to be in the closet. The closet was never a safe place, because it has its own side affects, and sometimes what is meant to save actually can help to kill. But the closet remains, its door ajar, every time a new person comes along and I face the challenge of opening or closing that door. It becomes all too easily a default position for one's whole life, even in our country, where homosexuality is no longer criminalized in our laws.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Still, in dozens of countries throughout the world today, one can literally be put to death for being gay. Uganda is not the only country that has contemplated, or even passed, strict laws against homosexuality.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In the countries in which one's life is literally at risk for being LGBTQ, the closet may be one's only means of survival. When it is, it should be used. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But for those of us who have passed the age of majority, live on our own in countries that do not actively seek our destruction, and can make choices about where and how we live, I at least put the question to those who are not out but could affect much positive change in their circumstances if they were: Why not be out?</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Ultimately, the choice is up to each person who could be out whether or not actually to be out. There regrettably still </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">are</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> consequences, in employment, in housing, in family life, in vocation, and in other fundamental aspects of our lives, to being out. Being out is not simple, and is sometimes problematic.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">That said, I am convinced that the more people who are out who possibly could be, the less these systems of oppression will have the opportunity to tell us who we are, where we can work, where we can live, whom we can marry, and what we as human beings are worth. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">And the more who are out here, where we can be, the more support there will be for those who are being persecuted throughout the world, and the more voices speaking from a place of personal authenticity will be raised to shout to the world that such violence against people cannot continue. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This is why we </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">must</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> be out.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">III.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I have paid my own price in being out in terms of my vocation to the ordained ministry. I actually did hear the words spoken above, by an official of my denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), that if I wanted to live into the vocation for which I'd been educated, trained, and in which many people over the years have supported me with their prayers, money, time, and energy, I would have to forsake the part of my personhood that got me there. I would have to deny the animating energy that puts life into my living. I would </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">have</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> to be dishonest, and that was that. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Yet that was much higher a price to pay than not getting a church, indeed, much too high a price for me to pay. And true to her word, to this day, not one church has interviewed me to be their pastor.</span><br />
<div style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 19.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></span></div><div style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The same person later told me, after the rules of the ELCA were changed to allow open and partnered LGBTQ people as ministers, that she deeply regretted ever having to say such a thing. I can understand that regret. But I’m not the only one who has been told these things, and the church should be the </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">last </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">place to encourage duplicity. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span> </span></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Beyond the actual harmful messages that those in the ELCA and in many other church bodies have told and still tell those who are LGBTQ, these churches yet have to atone for encouraging their own ministers of the Gospel to lie in order to become ministers of the Gospel of truth.</span></span></span></div><div style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 19.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span> </span></div><div style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 19.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">And the church ought not to be in the business of making liars out of its leaders.</span></span></div><div style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 19.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></span></div><div style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">IV.</span></span></span></div><div style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 19.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></span></div><div style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">On the civil and societal front, being out is key to ever securing our rightful place at the table of full citizenship, and to make it impossible for political leaders to use me and people like me as political fodder to scare their like-minded constituents into getting them elected and re-elected. </span></span></span></div><div style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 19.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In Minnesota, my home and current state, we are now known for the wacky anti-gay politicians that we are producing. Rep. Michele Bachmann, and her unfortunate husband, Dr. Marcus Bachmann, are using LGBTQ people and the fear of some around same-sex marriage in order to help launch their presidential campaign. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But I have a deep feeling that if he could be out, Dr. Marcus Bachmann would be out. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Instead, he runs a clinic that seeks to change LGBTQ people by telling them that they do not have to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, in fact, that these ways of living are wrong and contrary to God's word, and that they are even "</span><a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2011/06/michele-bachmanns-strategist-husband-called-gays-barbarians-who-need-to-be-disciplined-audio-1.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">barbarians</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">." One man went undercover to discover and communicate the truth of what Bachmann's clinic practices, which you can read </span><a href="http://www.advocate.com/Politics/Commentary/In_His_Own_Words__How_I_Went_Undercover_at_Bachmann_s_Clinic/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">here</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Because Dr. Marcus Bachmann, and other purveyors of anti-gay "research," "therapy," and anti-gay religious-based rhetoric, such as Dr. George Rekers, whose research </span><a href="http://articles.cnn.com/2011-06-08/us/rekers.sissy.boy.experiment_1_george-alan-rekers-miami-new-times-gay-scoutmasters?_s=PM:US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">helped ruin lives</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> while he got to </span><a href="http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2010-05-06/news/christian-right-leader-george-rekers-takes-vacation-with-rent-boy/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">vacation with paid gay companionship</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, cannot be out, I </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">must</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> be out.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">For in order to stop such therapy from having legitimacy in the eyes of many as it still does now, those many must know who we really are as LGBTQ people. And when they cannot know who we are from us, they </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">must</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> take the word of people who wish us erased from the pages of history, from the present, and from the future.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">V.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">There are many reasons to be out, and many reasons why I feel I must be out. But being out and coming out, as a complicated, ongoing, and life-long process, still presents times when I could say that I'm gay but I don't, because in the moment it feels too hard to do so. In offering to elderly people why I am not married, for example, I don't say it is because I cannot marry, or because I don't have a boyfriend, but simply that I am not married, end of story.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">These sorts of moments, which are moments of truth that pass as the proverbial ships in the night, are so important because they are where real change happens, and where, once frankness defines the basis of a discussion, real connection can possibly happen on more than an intellectual level.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Of all the reasons why I must be out, perhaps greatest reason is the prospect of those deep, personal, and connected conversations, and the relationships that can ensue from them. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">My hope, for myself and others, is to find the strength in the most difficult moments to speak out the truth of our lives to those for whom that truth might effect the most ultimate good. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Together, we can achieve that good, for ourselves as individuals, and for those whose voices cannot be heard. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span>Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-10785452156664157632011-05-24T01:17:00.006-05:002011-05-24T10:50:53.838-05:0015 for 15 VII: Pride, or Anti-Pity"<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCLtU2FaOyU&feature=related">What have you done today to make you feel proud?</a>" --Heather Small<br />
<br />
"You can take away my job, my vocation, my marriage, my home, and my life, but you can't take away my pride." --C. W.<br />
<br />
I.<br />
<br />
"I'm on my way, can't stop me now. And you can do the same." Pride may be one of the seven deadly sins, but frankly, there are a lot of deadly sins that are not counted among these seven sins, such as hate, fear, and pity.<br />
<br />
I say, let's redefine these deadly sins. What have you done today to make you feel proud?<br />
<br />
To say I'm fan of Showtime's series "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_as_Folk_(North_American_TV_series)">Queer as Folk</a>" is an understatement. When my friend, David, a fellow Minnesotan and a life mentor, first lent me his recorded episodes on VHS tapes back in New York City more than 10 years ago, I knew I loved this rag-tag bunch of metro-homosexuals. It is sexy, edgy, real, funny, semi-pornographic at times, but that is the reality of our lives. No apologies, no regrets.<br />
<br />
Just now, I finished watching the series finale (the last scene is in the link to the above quotation), which ended with the song above--"What have you done today to make you feel proud?" Not "make <i>me</i> feel proud." Not "make <i>God</i> feel proud." Not "make <i>your parents, your teachers, your employers</i> feel proud." But <i>you</i>. The very you who is reading this sentence right now, and who is typing it. Because feeling proud is something new every day, like God's manna from heaven, something not just to re-live, or re-make, but something that comes up as a requirement for us to live as flourishing, loving, proud, and fierce human beings.<br />
<br />
II.<br />
<br />
I've taken a few weeks' sabbatical on this series of writing 15 reflections on 15 years of being out. In the meantime, I visited the scene of my coming out, my alma mater, <a href="http://www.lawrence.edu/">Lawrence University</a>. I hadn't been there in nearly 10 years, and many people have come and gone since then. Many buildings are new, many people are new, but as I approached college avenue and rode past Main Hall, the cobwebs fell from my eyes, and I saw the place that was so formative in my life--not just my intellectual life, but my emotional life, and the life that I found worth fighting for after so many years of fear.<br />
<br />
Every corner of this university, especially the <a href="http://www.lawrence.edu/conservatory/">Conservatory of music</a>, had a memory, or many memories. The friends I made, the friends I lost, the people I loved, hated, the people I passed who have themselves passed on to another dimension, those places that are now silent, that used to be the center of activity. "Mozzi sticks!!!" I could hear one saucy Union kitchen lady yelling as I waited for one of the dearest friends in my life that I haven't talked to now in 10 years. Now, silent, a closed door, like that friendship feels. <br />
<br />
But pride is on the other side, waiting to open the door.<br />
<br />
I wasn't exactly proud of myself when I got to college at age 18. My parents were proud of me, and for that I'm both grateful and fortunate. The pathway to 18 and beyond is filled with so many possible wrecking points, that in some ways I think it is a miracle that as many people make it to that one, lone spot as do. But the hardest times do not pass when one makes the first forays out onto one's "own." <br />
<br />
It's coming to own one's own that can present some of the tightest spots of our lives. And the road there is lined with those who have made it only part of the way, not because of their own faults, but because others made the road so damned impassable. But the road is not *necessarily* impassable. There are angels who can help you get through, if you can open your eyes when they are most tightly closed and <i>see</i>.<br />
<br />
And we need to help those angels along, and to be those angels of our better natures.<br />
<br />
III.<br />
<br />
I put writing this entry off because in many ways it is the hardest one to write. The time I've taken getting here mirrors the time I've taken getting to any place in my life where I can be proud both of who I am, as well as what I've done.<br />
<br />
It's hardest, sometimes, to cut oneself some slack, let alone others. In fact, I think we often treat ourselves with harshness that would make us go to the mat for our friends and loved ones if we saw them being treated the same way that we sometimes treat ourselves.<br />
<br />
So pride is not such an easy thing, for a number of reasons, for a number of people. Being told you're worthless, scum, lowest of the low, perverted, wrong, abnormal, sick, damned, and a whole host of other horrible things, seems to sink in with some time, and sinks us. A lot of people who are not themselves LGBTQ have experienced this kind of soul-murder. So why does so much of the animus come to those of us who are LGBTQ?<br />
<br />
Because, I sense, we expose the beauty and diversity that is each person's in this life, that so many are afraid will give them such fulfillment, that it will literally blow their minds.<br />
<br />
People are diverse, they're not of one mind, they know themselves often much better than they are known, in short, people are not on one standard track of being recognized, comfortable, productive, and beneficent to themselves first, as well as to others.<br />
<br />
And the LGBTQ community, as far as we are a community, is the exemplar of this diversity. While our sexuality, "lifestyles," and the choices that we make to live more fabulously every day make us part of who we are, we live, each of us, being "repairers of the breach," reconcilers, and living those lives away from the quiet desperation that makes people die a death much worse than that of the body: the death of their spirits in their limited time in this life.<br />
<br />
IV.<br />
<br />
Those who wish to say that our relationships, that our lives, in all their color, do not count as much as theirs, miss one of the greatest gifts of this brief life: that life does not all have to be the same, and that we have agency in making of our lives what God would, I don't just think but am<i> certain</i>, want us to make of our lives: as absolutely much as we can.<br />
<br />
Many of those who couch their opposition under the name of the God of <i>all life</i>, look at gay pride parades and festivals as the exemplars of our shame: leather daddies, open sexuality, sodomites laughing and parading their difference through the streets, people who are one step away from taking us all down the fast road to hell.<br />
<br />
Well, I have a message for these purveyors of doom: those who fear the rainbow are bound to be crushed by it. Not crushed by the triumph of "fag enablers," but by their very own, human, and misguided fear. And that makes me pity them, although I know that fear as well as they do.<br />
<br />
I remember my first pride well, in the summer of 1998 in New York City. It was the first time in my life that, for just a few hours, in a small part of the world, I felt like everyone in the world was LGBT or Q, where nobody had to explain anything about what I had felt all my life, where I could feel, even if briefly, the home that is so common to so many people, where I came home from a lifelong exile. And that feeling is not something to fear, but to celebrate.<br />
<br />
<i>This pride</i> is the pride that we take in our own lives, in our own feelings, in the exultation that each of us and a human being can feel <i>in our humanity</i>, not in the humanity that is imposed upon us, but in what we ourselves know is our truth.<br />
<br />
V.<br />
<br />
Pity, not humility, is the antithesis of pride. <br />
<br />
I know pity well--I'm prone to self-pity, one of my deepest flaws. Self-pity, in feeling that I have not made enough of my life, that I have not attained my calling as a minister of the Word of God, that I have not sustained a long-term relationship or marriage, that I have not yet peaked in the arc of my living, afflicts me as it does many, and seeks to quash the beauty that my life can, and often does, have and has to give. This feeling of self-pity almost kept me from going back to Lawrence, the goal of which was to celebrate the awesome life and contribution of one of the most fabulous Lawrentians ever, our late archivist, Carol Butts. <br />
<br />
I am eternally glad that I opposed the poisoned source from which these impediments derived, to avert what would have been a true pity: missing out on this fabulous celebration and reunion. <br />
<br />
I was proud that day that we gathered Carol's family, friends, and colleagues, to celebrate her memory and contributions, as she has so long deserves. I only wish she could have been there with us to enjoy a well-deserved honor. <br />
<br />
Now, this is hard to say, but I think it is the truth: LGBTQ people are often trained more in pity than we are in pride. We are made the victims of people who cannot accept the truths of their own lives, let alone the lives of others, and we cry out altogether too often in the pain that others inflict on us, and that we inflict on ourselves. But we also shout from the rooftops, and within the halls of power, that God indeed does love us in equal measure, that we are human in equal measure, and that our relationships are equal, not because we fight for them to be, but because they just are.<br />
<br />
I had the chance to be proud for a while last week, in the midst of fighting against a vote by the Minnesota State Legislature to hand off for the people to decide what rights we should all have under the law. I am grateful to <a href="http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/members/members.asp?id=15353">Rep. Debra Kiel</a>, freshman representative of district 1B, my home district, for hearing me out. I hope truly that she thinks and prays about what I had to say to her. <br />
<br />
The most important thing I had to tell her was this: We are equal in our humanity, and we are equal in our baptisms (those of us who are Christian), but we are not equal under the law, and the law is very important, and something that our representatives, such as herself, have in their hands.<br />
<br />
Hundreds who protested this anti-gay constitutional amendment made me proud, standing, singing, and shouting for our rights at the very door of power. Organizations like <a href="http://http//outfrontmn.org/home">OutFront Minnesota</a>, <a href="http://www.project515.org/">Project 515</a>, and the new <a href="http://www.minnesotansunitedforallfamilies.com/">Minnesotans United for All Families</a>, are all helping to gather the power of our communities around making justice for all families a reality in Minnesota.<br />
<br />
A few Republican representatives made me especially proud, most notably <a href="http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/members/members.asp?id=15354">Rep. John Kriesel</a>, whose experience in the war in Iraq, and particularly serving with a gay soldier who was killed, made him see that this anti-gay amendment must be opposed at all costs. (His speech is <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WyYRA4aZSI&feature=player_embedded">here</a>.) He said "I'm proud of this, because this is the right thing to do." And he was absolutely right.<br />
<br />
My parents, each in writing their representatives, made me proud as well, just one of many times.<br />
<br />
VI.<br />
<br />
Pride is not just doing what you're told. Pride is knowing that you are worth more than others say you are, that your worth is from a source beyond yourself, beyond your own family and community, beyond your own accomplishments, from a source that reaches out to all of humanity, the wonderful and the awful, that for those of us who believe reaches to God and comes from God.<br />
<br />
This kind of pride feeds our lives and gives them meaning. It's not a sin. The hate that challenges who we are, <i>that hate</i> is a deadly sin, literally. And that is what Jesus came on this earth to oppose.<br />
<br />
We hit the mat for a moment when the MN State Legislature passed <a href="https://www.revisor.mn.gov/revisor/pages/search_status/status_detail.php?b=Senate&f=SF1308&ssn=0&y=2011">this sorry bill</a> (a.k.a. SF 1308 and HF 1615). But we are <i>not </i>going to stay down.<br />
<br />
We're going to kick such ass on this anti-marriage amendment. Not because we're going to be louder, tougher, and more determined than those who oppose our relationships, but because we're simply going to love them more than they hate us. <br />
<br />
We are going to love their scared selves into a place of salvation. <br />
<br />
Jesus is not going to come down from the sky to save them from us, but, rather, Jesus is going to work through us to redeem <i>them,</i> until there is no more "us" and "them," but only "we." <br />
<br />
And that's something to be proud of.Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-48149280665076694462011-05-10T10:13:00.002-05:002011-05-10T12:25:57.300-05:00An Open Letter to Jim Wallis on LGBTQ “Civil Rights.”<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I am taking a break this morning from my meditations on coming out, which shall continue soon, to express my disappointment in <a href="http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=about_us.display_staff&staff=Wallis">Jim Wallis</a> & the <a href="http://www.sojo.net/">Sojourner's</a> Board's decision not to run an ad supportive of LGBTQ people submitted by the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0buh-1quVs&feature=feedu">Believe Out Loud campaign</a>.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">10 May 2011</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Dear Jim,</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I was among those who were disappointed by your response to the Sojourners Magazine’s “editorial” decision not to run the Believe Out Loud ad that is supportive of LGBTQ Christians. Unfortunately, a lot of people who call themselves progressive seem to have taken this as an opportunity to give you and Sojourners the old heave-ho as having anything to do with progressive Christianity. This is unfortunate, as was your response that attempted to backtrack and promote a position that is, in fact, contrary to the one that you and Soujourners has taken with this ad. You state:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"Given the time Sojourners is now spending on critical issues like the imperative of a moral budget, the urgent need to end the war in Afghanistan, and the leadership we are offering on commitments like immigration reform, we chose not to become involved in the controversy that such a major ad campaign could entail, and the time it could require of us. Instead, we have taken this opportunity to affirm our commitment to civil rights for gay and lesbian people, and to the call of churches to be loving and welcoming to all people, and promote good and healthy dialogue." (This is taken from your longer response, found <a href="http://blog.sojo.net/2011/05/09/a-statement-on-sojourners-mission-and-lgbtq-issues/">here</a>.)</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Believe Out Loud ad is merely proclaiming that we, too, as LGBTQ people, should be welcome in Christian churches of our choosing, and that we have as much of a place in pouring forth our ardent prayers, and bearing the mutual burdens of our brothers & sisters in Christ, as those who would keep us from the altar and deny us God’s means of grace. Although many could agree with the feeling of being excluded or looked at funny when they newly enter a church, this is especially the case for LGBTQ people. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It is unfortunate to see that words mean more than actions to you and the Sojourners Board in this case. Not only because you seem to think that the only urgent needs lie outside of the realm of sexuality, but because you would say that you’re in favor of civil rights, while seeming not to care that millions of individuals are using the name of Jesus to torment and even to kill LGBTQ persons here and throughout the world. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This is a teachable moment, Jim. It is a moment in which you can publicly state that what is happening in Minnesota with our legislature near a vote to ban same-sex marriage in our constitution is wrong not only from a <i>civil</i> standpoint, but a <i>moral</i> one as well. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This is the moment in which your voice should be the voice calling Uganda to account for its seeking to introduce a law that will lead to a holocaust of LGBTQ lives in that country, and should be condemning the use of Jesus’ name to condone and even initiate the deaths to come in that country. Is this something that would embarrass you to say, and detract from your work of justice in other areas?</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It saddens me to say, Jim, that your words of support have no currency with those to whom they would count as long as your actions do not match them.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But, if you wish to be helpful, but cannot be, Jim, don’t worry: We are working tirelessly to liberate you and thousands like you who do not yet feel you can help us, for reasons of controversy or whatever other business considerations you might have. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We are also tirelessly working to liberate the Gospel of Jesus from the hands of those who would use it to condone violence here and throughout the world. Because it is a matter of justice that the Lord of Life not be used as the Demon of Death. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">You are needed, Jim, and so is Sojourners. The welcome of the Christian Church here and throughout the world is not ornamental to the cause or justice, nor is it merely a civil matter. The name of Jesus is at stake here, as are the lives of those who could perish under it. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I will be praying for you.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In Christ,</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Chris Wogaman</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Minneapolis, MN</span></div>Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-88986562096499942612011-05-07T01:51:00.003-05:002011-05-09T12:12:09.583-05:0015 for 15 VI: The First Time, or I'm Finally Out!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjL9zFfkONK2eVqOvBygwitWrzpKnM9gHmEGj8AibjNmqUhyphenhyphenEZiGjcmqsfBbBPE2rBOh0SyVpwOmoiZLV4HGLG4bYXlKMfRhv_zYz721eDOumr9WRQSVKl1JzTozRPid2YV_MMjKadAOc/s1600/Im+finally+out.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="88" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjL9zFfkONK2eVqOvBygwitWrzpKnM9gHmEGj8AibjNmqUhyphenhyphenEZiGjcmqsfBbBPE2rBOh0SyVpwOmoiZLV4HGLG4bYXlKMfRhv_zYz721eDOumr9WRQSVKl1JzTozRPid2YV_MMjKadAOc/s640/Im+finally+out.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />
The day had to come. <br />
<br />
Earlier that day, I was agonizing, as I did every day, over the guy I was in love with but didn't, or couldn't, tell. When he told me that he was in love with another guy, I told him how I felt about him, and there it was.<br />
<br />
Out.<br />
<br />
Finally.<br />
<br />
I.<br />
<br />
<i>But the one to whom I am out and whom I love loves another. I want to laugh and cry and vomit.</i><br />
<i> </i>--May 6, 1996<br />
<br />
Those were the hardest years of my life, so far, both preceding and following that statement. <br />
<br />
Since that time, I've come to think that emotional puberty, which happens around age 20, is harder than physical puberty. I went into a cocoon, psychologically, and to some degree physically as well.<br />
<br />
Like many young men of that age, I grew out my hair, on my face as well as on my head. I actually had hair to grow out back then. <br />
<br />
Along with this growth of hair around me, I continued growing barriers around myself psychologically to keep people out. I became so good at it, that by age 21, I could say that I hadn't kept any friends consistently since I was a kid, and although I made friends in college, it would be some time before I worked on those friendships at all. Mostly, I was insecure, overly-competitive, and didn't want anyone to know I was gay.<br />
<br />
It all ended that night.<br />
<br />
II.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgotif46urq0GD_CPzCE63uFst6I-N_s9fNxxV6ZPUM8KbggbcUHMNC0e0wYeW8R6HQXjkXJbava0OdDvZoirJnazcSneU8pxsQkvFWNmh35bphSSP-9hySClT3Tk2pheWpg_lKksisMVI/s1600/Been+waiting+so+long.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="75" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgotif46urq0GD_CPzCE63uFst6I-N_s9fNxxV6ZPUM8KbggbcUHMNC0e0wYeW8R6HQXjkXJbava0OdDvZoirJnazcSneU8pxsQkvFWNmh35bphSSP-9hySClT3Tk2pheWpg_lKksisMVI/s400/Been+waiting+so+long.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><i>My view of the world has changed so drastically, I can't. This is the night I have been waiting for for so long...</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
I knew after that night that something more than my sexuality had come out. <i>I</i> had come out, started to destroy the cocoon of secrecy that I'd built around myself with hundreds or thousands of "saves," putting my mind to work several moves ahead of where a conversation might be going so that I would not have to answer certain questions or lie. <br />
<br />
The piano had been my adolescent lover, and the eccentric pianist <a href="http://civilrites.blogspot.com/2010/12/glenn-gould-queerly-normal.html">Glenn Gould</a> had been my "virtual" lover, long before the idea of virtual had come to my mind. I was safely hidden behind an intellectual exterior in which I could be busy thinking about things, or practicing the piano. I became enveloped in the works of Ayn Rand, who, from her physical and emotional grave, egged me on to be different and alone. Being an individual was the most important thing to me, so much so that when I went to college, I wanted to do an "individualized major," which at the time was kooky, although has caught on since.<br />
<br />
Through all of the nights that I had gone to sleep for 10 years wondering if I was hopelessly lost, or if I was "the only one," I knew in those moments, on that night 15 years ago, that I was never going to be the only one again.<br />
<br />
The first time I came out was like returning from a long, lonely exile in a foreign land, whose customs I sort of knew, and whose language I spoke with great difficulty because I kept tripping over the words, but whose food I didn't enjoy, and whose oppressive culture I could not wait to escape. <br />
<br />
This feeling of exile, of not being welcomed in your homeland, is perhaps common to a lot of people for a lot of reasons. People can challenge this feeling only in the company of those who are "like" them, or perhaps in books, movies, other media, or characters of their own making. But it's not the same as connecting in person, with real, live people whom you <i>know</i> are enough like you so that you don't have to mouth a barely familiar language that everyone else seems to know fluently.<br />
<br />
My whole perspective on the world changed, because <i>that night</i> I no longer <i>had</i> to think in terms of dynamic equivalence, translating the lives of others, and particularly the loves of others, into something that made sense to me in my own mind and deeply felt experience. My world changed that night because it finally became <i>my world</i>.<br />
<br />
III.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQCDXiM05Om7FjOl6sCcRPWtoDslXAShlhWJ5WXc2UHl0MXd7adnJ2FXt5G0CdY94i78YsWjoxB_0__DqN_fLJfvnUQ3oxQk8lD19OYa1UZsmo6Rn4DAQVJEK0ieJBz1tD1SglMTPeYZg/s1600/so+confused+and+ecstatic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="58" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQCDXiM05Om7FjOl6sCcRPWtoDslXAShlhWJ5WXc2UHl0MXd7adnJ2FXt5G0CdY94i78YsWjoxB_0__DqN_fLJfvnUQ3oxQk8lD19OYa1UZsmo6Rn4DAQVJEK0ieJBz1tD1SglMTPeYZg/s400/so+confused+and+ecstatic.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
<i>I'm so confused and elated and nervous and sick and ecstatic. Sleep seems light years away.</i><br />
<br />
A million feelings went through my mind and heart all at once, so powerful that I felt like I was going to go insane or literally explode, internally combust, go up in the flames of gay fabulosity before I knew what those even could be.<br />
<br />
I felt, in that moment, that I had crossed over a threshold of experience that I thought I would never cross, and entered a world I could only sense existed, but had been there all the time. And what I wanted felt further out of reach than ever, because my feelings were not returned.<br />
<br />
Feelings are a funny thing--substantial, but not quantifiable; ephemeral, but lasting; they are the ultimate paradox.<br />
<br />
And feelings seem to give us permission to act in any way that we wish. I did that, and was not proud of how my feelings affected the object of those feelings. Objectifying another, especially one about whom we feel strongly, seems impossible to avoid, but in the cold light of long reflection, I would have acted quite differently. At that time, though, I simply could not. One learns not to repeat certain mistakes, even though some of those mistakes seem to fall into a pattern of action that, no matter how many times one tries to reason his or her way out of them, seems to keep coming back the same way. It is almost like an addiction, and the effects can perhaps be just as harmful.<br />
<br />
Still, I came to value those feelings only by finally experiencing them, and putting them out there in the world. If they are returned, that is somehow a bonus, but there is no way in which one can or should force another person to feel what one does not feel.<br />
<br />
Being forced into feeling what one does not feel is precisely the aim of the closet. It is not only a place of privacy and safety, but it is a place that often compels people to feel that that is the <i>only</i> place in which they <i>can</i> be safe. And that is not right.<br />
<br />
IV.<br />
<br />
Many first times have come since that one those many years ago: first lovers, first boyfriends, first poems, first culinary delights, first times being without a home, being on my own and unsure of what to do next, first trips to Europe and Africa, first times walking the streets of Paris and New York and San Francisco, dreamlike places that I never thought I'd be, but that have come to define my personality and my life in ways similar to this lived sexual orientation.<br />
<br />
First times are indeed very special, even if they aren't anything special in and of themselves. I remember the first time I changed a headlight on a car, the feeling of accomplishment that I had, and the feeling of empowerment. First times can, but do not always, empower us to try for higher levels of experience, and make us realize that what never seemed possible actually is something we just haven't tried yet. Of course, that doesn't go for everything. Like eating liver.<br />
<br />
Tonight, I celebrated these many years of being out, and all the gifts and challenges that have come with it, at the lovely Nicollet Island Inn restaurant in Minneapolis. Here was one of the fabulous courses with which my table was adorned:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZbbn9yhbYpjFuqL81Zs16XjHb7kSy09EwsrJ-hH8GaISlTR2aA4ydEKPI6Ww7gx5TaMGV-MIhThoKRWm71yiprMFePCMWCNbwkK2cnpsUFZXGEbC4VN1lDpVbg5mmY-QsHqb9y6xfCxs/s1600/Asparagus+Salad.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZbbn9yhbYpjFuqL81Zs16XjHb7kSy09EwsrJ-hH8GaISlTR2aA4ydEKPI6Ww7gx5TaMGV-MIhThoKRWm71yiprMFePCMWCNbwkK2cnpsUFZXGEbC4VN1lDpVbg5mmY-QsHqb9y6xfCxs/s400/Asparagus+Salad.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>The colors, the flavors! This was living. And this is what life can be like: a colorful, delicious feast. <br />
<br />
For we are called to the great feast, to the Gospel feast, to the feast of honesty and integrity that adds all of the flavor to life. Facing one's areas of pain and struggle honestly, and for a long time, can yield much greater treasures that can be bought and paid for with money. <br />
<br />
And you are <i>always</i> welcome at my feast.Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com1Minneapolis, MN, USA44.9799654 -93.26383609999999244.899412399999996 -93.33152059999999 45.0605184 -93.1961516tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-34741855918880202862011-05-06T16:16:00.001-05:002011-05-06T17:16:43.525-05:0015-for-15 V: Who I Am, or Identity, Equality, and ValueI know who I am. More or less. <br />
<br />
I.<br />
<br />
It's easy to say that sexuality is just a small part of our lives, that it's not "who we are." It's also easy to say that sexuality is our <i>entire</i> life, that it's <i>all</i> we are. <br />
<br />
When I say that I am gay, and thereby oppose the words that headline the first entry in this series, I equate myself with my sexual orientation, I own that part of myself, and I use it to define myself. I am Chris, but saying that is not quite the same way of defining self, because "Chris" doesn't have a definition in itself. <br />
<br />
Saying "I am cold," similarly, describes a passing state or feeling. "I am rich," or "I am poor," too, might get at something true for a while, which shapes who we are and how we are, but these descriptors are not necessarily identity characteristics. Our "net worth" does not come in how much money we have in the bank the day before the stock market crashes and wipes out our assets.<br />
<br />
Yet people debate the extent to which sexuality is a passing phase, essential to our beings or a choice, or a product of our doing.<br />
<br />
I think that sexuality is a very big part of our lives, because it affects how we relate to ourselves, others, our society, religions, and to every huge factor in our lives. Sexuality goes far beyond those with whom one has sex, far beyond one's private domain, and indeed beyond one's "personal preferences" or "lifestyle choice." The term "lifestyle choice," in fact, has always been both nebulous and insulting, highlighting an ornamental, act-based idea of sexuality that somehow people might chose out of boredom with the "normal" way of life. It doesn't get at such a large part of what I think is connoted by the term "sexual identity"--the source of one's passions.<br />
<br />
What "turns you on"? What "floats your boat"? What gets your blood pumping, and what paints your sky? What brings a flush to your cheek, or a spring to your step? Sexuality is <i>in our blood</i>, and blood is thicker than water. The <a href="http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/biology/sanode.html">sinoatrial node</a> might physically produce the electrical force behind the beating of our hearts, but sexuality is the metaphoric animating principle behind that and every aspect of our creative lives.<br />
<br />
Sexuality goes a long way beyond T & A. (Especially if you're gay.)<br />
<br />
II. Defined by Difference? Enlivened by Equality?<br />
<br />
Being different gives a person the opportunity to spend a lot of time thinking about things that people who are not different probably don't think much about. Some might take exception with my use of the term "different." But when you're defined in ways that lead to a different set of rules for how you can live your life, you're different.<br />
<br />
Difference, in the case of sexual identity, means that you do not <i>necessarily</i> follow the life patterns and roles that are set in place for you when you're born. The consequence of that difference is that society sets out for you the same expectations, but a different set of rules.<br />
<br />
I'll be the first to own that sometimes those of us with this difference of sexuality, or any difference, spend too much time thinking and talking about it, and not enough time living it. That is because justice has not yet come for many of us, and because our siblings in difference around the world and on our own shores are still being mocked, beaten, assaulted, shamed into self-hatred and worse, and indeed put to violent death. We think about this difference because our world won't let us forget.<br />
<br />
In thinking about this difference, we often talk about "equality." Frankly, the more I think of it, the more insulting the idea of asking for "equality" is. <br />
<br />
<br />
It is insulting to argue for equality, because we <b>are</b> equal, and we don't ask anyone else to be equal to <b>us</b>. I would never look at someone and say, "Prove that you are equal to me." People who don't realize that LGBT people are fully equal in our humanity and our relationships are fully equal in their legitimacy will not do so because we say they are. <br />
<br />
We spend so much time <b>defending</b>, and that leaves less time actually to <b>live</b>.<br />
<br />
My leap came when I realized the value of my own feelings, at least to myself, not that they were <i>equal</i>, but that they were <i>valuable</i>.<br />
<br />
III.<br />
<br />
Sexuality is a value. And one person's sexuality is no more a value than another's.<br />
<br />
Sexuality is a value in what it does to enliven and paint the skies of our lives. It is also a value in how it challenges and points out our brokenness. Everyone has a broken aspect to their sexuality. This is one of the chief reasons why same-sex attraction scares people--because thinking of it as an attraction that is fully broken, wrong, diseased, or criminal, gives people who think like that a way to avoid confronting their own brokenness.<br />
<br />
It's hard to name all of the discrete experiences of our lives that name our sexuality in one way or another. Holding hands in the movie show, as one old song put it, is something that people without a difference would not think twice about doing, and might indeed take pleasure and gain social status by being seen "together."<br />
<br />
One can name one's sexuality in any number of subtle ways, in a look or a few carefully placed words, in whose names one mentions casually in conversation, in pictures that adorn one's public spaces, or in the stories that we tell about important experiences in our lives that involve other people. <br />
<br />
People who cannot be public about their sexuality find any number of ways to avoid it becoming known. My most potent memory from my high school years involved sitting in the library on a study break with some guys who began talking about how a girl was admiring another guy's ass. I interjected, without realizing that I was in danger of totally outing myself to some of the not nicer people: "Oh, she could do better." Snap!<br />
<br />
This comment did not escape their attention. One shot back with a look on his face that I've seen a couple of other times, in dangerous situations where they see the gay within you and don't like what they see. The words exploded, "Oh yeah?? Who??!"<br />
<br />
A breathless moment passed. It seemed like they had gotten me, and that all I had feared would now come to pass.<br />
<br />
From out of nowhere, the word came into my head and out my mouth with as little thought as I had given when I initiated this crisis just seconds ago:<br />
<br />
"Me."<br />
<br />
And with that, they laughed their asses off, and I breathed an internal sigh of release. Way too close for comfort.<br />
<br />
That's such an innocuous experience, and yet given the context of being forced to avoid saying any little thing that might "tip them off," I had just dodged what I feared would be metaphoric and literal bullets.<br />
<br />
Just imagine all of the experiences, in all of the years, that all of those who do not want to be "found out" go through, and the weight that puts on one's shoulders. <br />
<br />
Every experience that one might have to pass through in order to stay in the closet is an experience in which sexuality makes itself known outwardly in our lives. <br />
<br />
Who I am, who you are, is partially defined by the weight we carry, what we do with it, and what we let it do to us. <br />
<br />
But we are also defined by what lifts us. <br />
<br />
And someday, hopefully within my lifetime, the widest part of our society will support the enlivening force that takes us through each day, that connects with the Holy Spirit and taps us into God, that is our muse for writing, singing, and creating beautiful things, the enlivening force that makes our relationships live, and our words take flight, that sends our rockets to the farthest reaches of physical space, and gives us the energy to dream a better world, while living with greater fulfillment in the one we have. <br />
<br />
Who will we be then?Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-652692630686044502011-05-03T21:35:00.005-05:002011-05-03T21:55:01.983-05:0015-for-15 IV: Gaining My Religion"God hasn't brought you this far just to let you go now."<br />
--<a href="http://civilrites.blogspot.com/2009/01/odetta-loretta-in-loving-memory-on-day.html">Loretta Hernton</a><br />
<br />
I.<br />
<br />
Somehow, I got dragged back into church after foreswearing it for Aristotle.<br />
<br />
It was going to be so neat and tidy: Let God be whatever God was supposed to be, which I supposed wasn't much, pray when I really needed something somehow expecting that would work, and stay in my rational mind as well as I possibly could. That was my "lifestyle choice" for a good long time. Looking back now, I mouthed the words of atheism, but my heart wasn't in it. It was like me trying to be heterosexual. <br />
<br />
This is not to say that atheists, agnostics, humanists, and persons of dozens, if not hundreds, of world religions do not have a heart, and, indeed more of a heart than I. But I could never have come to the religious belief I have without being openly gay. Indeed, some of the most "Christian" people I know, and some of the better theologians, are atheists, and some of the beastliest things I've seen and heard have been done in the name of Jesus. <br />
<br />
I've always been a doubter and a sceptic when it comes to faith. Indeed, faith without doubt is like pig iron; it is brittle, and breaks at the least trial. Doubt to faith is like the carbon that turns iron into steel, making it strong and pliable enough to shift without easily falling down.<br />
<br />
II,<br />
<br />
In college, I never felt like the church was any place for me to be. After I left home, I left the church as well, as many young people do, except to earn some money playing organ or piano for services here and there. <br />
<br />
My family attended a Methodist church quite faithfully, each Sunday, so it was a part of my upbringing. In fact, I've not lived a day without being baptized, as I was baptized the very day I was born. It was a lifestyle choice, yes, first made by my parents, and then myself. But I never wanted to be a part of the "Christians" that I saw at college, because I knew that their company was no place for the likes of me. But "my religion" has become far more than a casual choice or accident of birth.<br />
<br />
Strangely enough, in coming to understand the part of myself that had to come out of the closet, especially in the context of what really mattered in my life and in the universe from my vantage point, I couldn't escape the many elements that had affected my life through religion. Yet, even though I am certain I never went to a church service in which the pastor or priest said that homosexuals were going to hell, somehow I got that message through the air, or the airwaves, because enough other people were saying it: God condemns gays. I know that to be a<i> lie</i>, in some cases very carefully manufactured for maximal political effect, but it was a lie that helped keep me in the closet.<br />
<br />
My first summer in New York, where I have lived 5 years of my adult life, I recall a subway evangelist (there were many) approach me on the uptown platform of the A train at 42nd Street. He said to me, "Do you have Jesus?" I answered, and can still clearly see and feel what I felt when I said it, "I already know I'm going to hell."<br />
<br />
That frame of mind, however, is not where I would stay.<br />
<br />
III.<br />
<br />
As someone who went through seminary, I learned how to tell my "faith journey" while standing on one leg, like Ayn Rand claimed she could do and recite her whole philosophy (which I'm sure she could). And not only did I go to one seminary, but two: Yale Divinity School/Institute of Sacred Music for my "Masters of Divinity," a title to this day that makes me laugh with images of donning leather and picking up a whip to recite the Word of the Lord, and Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, which granted me a CATS, a Certificate of Advanced Theological Studies, which sounds like something between a pet and a medical procedure. Altogether, I became a Master of Divine Cats who could whip out a faith journey narrative like last-minute pancakes for unannounced company. <br />
<br />
My path was somewhat untraditional, lacking a particular influential mentor, but common as well to others who went to seminary. I was raised in the church, left the church, left God, found out that I hadn't left God, got peppered with dreams and "coincidences" that forced me to think about God, as well as felt an increasing desire to know more about religion, to experience more, to become a pastor, at which I would have laughed when I was in college, and, after a time, to go to seminary.<br />
<br />
I first came back to the church in Harlem, at the Convent Avenue Baptist Church on the corner of 145th and Convent Avenue. There was a big pink cross up in front, and a fiery preacher, Minister Grant, who along with the choirs made the Word of God come vibrantly to life. They let me use their piano to practice as I hadn't one of my own at the time, and it helped get me in the door on a Sunday morning when I wasn't doing anything else in particular. Piano of God #1.<br />
<br />
Later, after I moved north of Harlem, I found the Lutheran church down the street from where I lived while looking for a piano to play. Piano of God #2. Something seemed to be at work to unite the place where my heart resided during my teenage years, in music, and where it was starting to find itself more and more, in a wider place within my being.<br />
<br />
My interest in Greek, my undergraduate major, led me to pick up a Bible for the first time in years when I was shopping at the Chelsea Salvation Army in New York one Saturday afternoon. The teller gave it to me, saying, "We don't sell Bibles; just take it." The beautiful Greek characters brought the Scriptures to my mind fresh and alive, and made me want to know and experience more. <br />
<br />
When I picked up that volume and looked at the title page, I saw the name of Bruce Metzger, who had led the committee that edited that Bible from the Greek manuscripts. Since he was still living in Princeton, where he taught for many years, I resolved to go and meet him. This desire led me to my first experience at a seminary, Princeton Theological Seminary. Before that visit, I hadn't even much of an idea what seminary was. <br />
<br />
A dream during my visit to that seminary convinced me that I must go to seminary, but not yet, so soon after coming back to the church. I later learned that I dreamt a verse from the Book of Jonah (also found in Psalm 42): <br />
<br />
<i>and the flood was round about me;</i><br />
<i>all thy waves and thy billows</i><br />
<i>passed over me. (Jonah 2:3; RSV)</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
I passed through the overwhelming flood in that dream, which I had seen Fantasia-style, in the 3rd person, encapsulated safely in a gleaming crystal case. The waves rolled a mile over my head, but I was safe, as the waves all went over me. I woke feeling as though I had been washed deeply, like in a steam bath but without the sweat. It was as though I had been baptized again. It was if I had <i>been</i> Jonah, running from God, and right into the belly of a whale.<br />
<br />
In these formative years, I learned to appreciate the energy and deep commitment of those in the National Baptist tradition at Convent Avenue. I also spent time with extremely conservative Mennonites; formed a small Bible study in which I translated the Greek version of the week's Gospel passage, complete with long footnotes describing theological concepts; took several courses at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian's Center for Christian Studies; discovered writing poetry there through a course on Modern Poetry and the Book of Hours; celebrated communion every day at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church on my lunch breaks; and hung out at Union Theological Seminary, all while starting to worship at a Lutheran Church.<br />
<br />
Perhaps most powerfully, every morning in New York, I would also shut my eyes and pray on the A train on the way to work, envisioning myself encapsulated in a ball of light. Everyone in the train was part of that prayer, wishing them peace, healing, and love. It was the only time in my life I can say my prayers were regular and absolutely transformative. Not so after seminary.<br />
<br />
IV.<br />
<br />
Religion in America seems often to chase LGBT people away with dreadful visions of a tortured afterlife based on our particular "sin" in this life. I believe instead that these religious voices are simply making for a tortured life for us here on earth, and have nothing to do with the possible afterlife. <br />
<br />
Shortly after my denomination, the ELCA, voted to allow open and partnered LGBT people to serve as ordained clergy in 2009, a series of articles popped up on the LGBT news-blog <a href="http://www.queerty.com/">Queerty.com</a> written by Lutherans about the changes voted in, which many in the church had been working hard to get enacted for many years.<br />
<br />
Given the voices of hatred towards LGBT people from people calling themselves "Christian," it is no wonder to me why many would be forced away from the church, indeed run screamin. Personally, after the last several years of waiting for a church and wondering if this vocation to the ministry will ever pan out, or if I will just look like I was aimlessly drifting for 10 years, I can genuinely empathize with the feeling that churches can seem at best irrelevant and at worst actively, vocally, and indeed politically harmful, even deadly in their narrow and rigid messages of wide sin and narrow salvation. <br />
<br />
So why go back to a religion that has spent so much energy on actively opposing me and millions of LGBT people?<br />
<br />
Because God bewitched me, "jokester that she is," as one of my clergy acquaintances says.<br />
<br />
V.<br />
<br />
The brain in me that worked so hard to keep me in the closet for my first 10 years of knowing I was attracted to my same sex, which worked so hard on problems of philosophy, music theory, and politics, which reached out to the farthest reaches of the universe and tried to reach beyond, to the other side of the universe into whatever might be beyond, and that dismissed the possible reality of God, ended up taking a back seat to my gut and to my heart after I came out.<br />
<br />
Why do we do what we do, think what we think, and feel what we feel? When I was younger, I thought that we human beings functioned best when we did not let our emotions get involved, but used as pure of reason as we could, unclouded by the irrational heart. But when my heart and mind connected, which I strongly feel was not until after I came out for the first time to other people, I dropped my insistence on pure reason, and learned I was a gut sort of person. <br />
<br />
The heart has its own knowledge, the brain its own, the gut as well, the soul another, close to the spirit. If all lie in separate containers all the time, and do not converse, they can grow lonely, proud, and dictatorial, as each of us becomes without the benefit of kind and challenging human interaction, hearing various points of view, and feeling closely how our opinions affect the lives of others.<br />
<br />
God works through our minds, but surpasses the bounds of reason. Sexuality, as well, cannot be the sole concern of one organ over another. <br />
<br />
In coming out, I set myself on a path to connect with God in a way that never would have happened if I'd attempted to make sense of life with whatever share of reason I was given between my ears and behind my eyes. <br />
<br />
And that path is not over yet. God hasn't brought me this far just to let me go now.Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-2842162295536747872011-05-01T22:44:00.145-05:002011-05-02T15:25:42.802-05:0015-for-15 III: Honesty<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"It's not lying if they make you lie."</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> --Brian Kinney (Gale Harold), "Queer as Folk" (Showtime)</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Now, be honest. You might not rejoice in the death of Osama bin Laden, but is there no part of you that was at least relieved to hear that he had finally been killed? And if relieved, grateful? A seed of inappropriate glee, perhaps, that would taint you as someone who can't quite live up to the great martyrs of peace of the past?</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The last thing most of us would want is for people to know all of our true feelings all the time, because a lot of those feelings could affect our relationships, jobs, and general reputations should they be known. So we have to be selective in what we tell others. Honesty, true, unadulterated, 24/7/365 honesty, is nearly impossible to have within the recesses of our own minds and souls, and quite impossible to achieve in dealing with others.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But some level of honesty, with others, about ourselves and our views, is absolutely essential to who we are. We must select what we will present, and in presenting, create the "I" that others see through their eyes.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Honesty is central in coming out of the closet, but it is not simple. It begins with people being honest with themselves about their true feelings, and that may lead into a crisis that may or may not resolve itself with becoming honest with others. Some may come out, at an early age, without any complications in their own minds--I've met people for whom this is the case. But for many others who are gay or lesbian, a wide variety of complex factors and fears affects this kind of honesty with others. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">II.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Foremost are the factors of one's fear of losing close relationships with people they think might not take this news well and decide to end the relationship. And this has indeed happened with a number of people who have come out as gay or lesbian, particularly before the last two decades. It has happened with me.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">At one time, not long ago, and indeed still to this day, the economic factors of losing one's job or not being able to gain employment were key to keeping people in the closet. I worried, and am not proud of doing so, that I would be disowned if my parents knew I was gay, and I did not see how I could pay for college if I were to come out when I was still in high school. I sensed anyway that I would become like Stephen King's Carrie had I come out in high school, with a bucket of blood hanging over my head at every turn, ready to end forever any cool factor that I had built up.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The fear of being beaten or abused has also been central to people not coming out, for this is still a realistic fear for many who are young, and more who have moved on into their own lives, yet live within tight restrictions on their expression within those lives. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Even in a society as tolerant as ours, w</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">e are far from living </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">in a "safe" place as openly gay and lesbian people everywhere we go. Where we might choose to hold hands, might give in public the most innocuous signs of affection towards those for whom we feel affection, things that I would guess every heterosexual person takes for granted, is still greatly limited, in many cases only in those establishments that openly accept or cater to gays and lesbians or the neighborhoods immediately around them.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In vast parts of our country, we're still sitting in the Stonewall Inn on June 26, 1969, when the police could come in at any moment and take everything in our lives away at their whim. Police raids have famously happened within the last few years in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/us/05texas.html?pagewanted=all">Fort Worth, TX</a>, and <a href="http://www.cbsatlanta.com/news/20905044/detail.html">Atlanta, GA</a>, hardly small and conservative towns. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The fear of not being able to follow out one's calling in life, whether as a pastor, a professional athlete, a teacher, an actor or actress, musician, business person, or in many other walks of life that still carry a heavy expectation of being heterosexual for the sake of those for whom the business or organization is run, still keeps people in the closet and in relationships that begin as relationships of "convenience," though might develop into more. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">One of the hardest things to do is to be honest with oneself about the hard things within oneself, let alone to be frank with others. But both are essential, I would say, to living other than a life of quiet desperation, in the words of Thoreau.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">III.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I first was compelled to be honest with myself about being gay because of an overwhelming sexual attraction I had to someone, who although I didn't know, I knew was gay. I saw him every day on the bus that I took from the St. Paul University of Minnesota "farm" campus to the main campus in Minneapolis, on the east bank, when I was there in the summer of 1994. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Perhaps it was his mannerisms that first tripped my nascent gaydar. Perhaps it was the sticker on his bag that said "I fuck to come, not to conceive." But soon I heard him talking about being gay to someone else on the bus. That cinched it for me.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I remember getting off that bus and walking behind him, trying to come up with even a lame pick-up line. But I was afraid of sex, and afraid of contracting HIV, which in 1994 could still be a death sentence for many who were living with it, before the arrival of most anti-retroviral drugs. Fear of many kinds kept the lid on a boiling pot of hormones and emotions for yet another period of time when it could have come off. The result was the journal entry that I shared in my <a href="http://civilrites.blogspot.com/2011/04/15-for-15-15-days-of-meditations-for-15.html">first entry</a> in this series. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Later, I was compelled to be honest with <i>others</i> about what I felt, because I learned that those feelings went beyond mere sexual attraction. I learned that I had feelings for someone else that were just like those feelings that I had watched in most every movie ever made, and that were described in the vast majority of songs ever written. If people could make those movies, and sing those songs, then <i>I</i> deserved to value and honor those feelings in myself, as imperfectly even as I expressed them at that time, as well.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I became honest with others when my heart connected, perhaps for the first time, to my head, and I could no longer deny that I, too, had a claim to my feelings and had needs that issued from them, and not only from my penis or my brain. I still hadn't experienced anything that I longed to experience physically, but I knew what it was that I wanted, to be with another man, and what I could never have: a Jane to my John, a Mrs. to my Mr. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">As deeply as I had tried to feel romantic attachments to girls, and then to young women, nothing could connect with my deeper reality. No kiss with a girl could do anything more for me than leave me feeling weird, and that wasn't fair to either of us. No amount of visual stimulation could have any effect beyond moving my retinas from one part of a page or screen to another. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">For a long time, I thought there was just something wrong with me, that I needed to try harder, and I'll be honest, I never prayed to God that things were different--I didn't even think to do so. Some have described this feeling as noticing at some point that you had boarded the wrong airplane, flying to the wrong destination, yet without any way to alter the course. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It would be a long time before I sat back and enjoyed the flight.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">IV.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The quotation above, which the character Brian Kinney says several times in the TV series "Queer as Folk," resonates with me on many levels. Lying, and the moral approbation that might be attached to it, is morally wrong only so long as you have any other option at all. It is like the legitimate defense of killing <b>only</b> when one's life is in immediate danger, only in the case of outing oneself, it's everything that attaches to one's life, and in some cases, one's physical life itself. This is a fear that some gay and lesbian people carry with themselves <i>every day</i>. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I tend to judge those who have not come out most especially when I do not remember what it was like before I came out. It's easy to cast such stones when you forget that you were once (and perhaps sometimes are still) afraid of being hit with them yourself.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">If everyone who could come out would come out, in all circumstances, to all people, all the time, there would be no closets, not because there wouldn't be anyone in them, but because there would be no need for them. That area of privacy in one's life is there almost exclusively because of the possible repercussions and fears that I stated above. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"It's nobody's business but my own" only so long as were that business to be made known, there would be negative consequences. Inconsequential business has no need of privacy. Otherwise, why not put up that picture of your hottie love muffin in the office, like everyone else does, or talk about your weekend, or mention your wife or husband in your sermon, or talk about that experience that changed your life and the person who was there to hold your hand when it happened?</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But reality remains: it's not safe for everyone to come out in every circumstance at all times. The closet is still a place of cold refuge for many, many people.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">V.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I do carry a rather unattractive chip on my shoulder about the consequences of honesty I have faced in my own calling to being an ordained Lutheran minister, as one who is yet neither ordained, nor a Lutheran minister. I have the same training, with the same professors and mentors, as dozens of my seminary colleagues who are now ordained and in church calls. Yet, my last four years of waiting for even an interview for a first call in my present denomination looks like this:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Make sure you file everything on time.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Thank you for filing everything on time and completing your requirements.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We approve you for ordination and think you will be an excellent pastor. You have wonderful gifts for ministry.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Why did you have to put your sexual orientation in your paperwork? Nobody else does.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">No church will give you an interview unless you "fly under the radar," "don't lead with your sexual orientation," and "feel things out as far as their attitudes go before you say anything about being gay."</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We don't have any churches for you, but your name comes up all the time in our conversations about churches looking for first calls.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">That church would be great for you, but it is not a first call church.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We gave that church to someone as a first call even though it wasn't a first call church--it just fit them.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">There are no churches at the moment that would be open to someone like you.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We're afraid of even recommending you to that church, so why would you want to interview there?</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Any church would be lucky to have you as its pastor.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The bishop has said that he can do nothing for you.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The bishop has your paperwork and will follow up with you shortly.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">You're too outspoken.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">All of the bishops admired your integrity, but they cannot do anything as long as you say you will not be in compliance with the rules.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">There are too many other candidates waiting for a first call for you to be considered in our synod.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We gave that church to someone who wasn't in our synod because it was a good match for them, even though we have several other candidates waiting for call.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">You have demonstrated maturity, compassion, and extraordinary patience throughout this process. We admire your consistent positive attitude.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">A lot of people are affected by the economy because pastors are not retiring since they have lost their pensions. But we still placed 5 of 6 candidates whom we received in the Fall draft in first calls.</span></li>
</ul><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It goes on like this, and it is little wonder that a part of my spiritual life has atrophied. But, to be honest, that is also my responsibility to say "enough is enough," and move on with my life. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Honesty has not been the best policy in my dealings with the church, and something seems wrong with that.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Thankfully, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has moved into a new period of honesty in which it can value the honesty of its clergy and commissioned lay persons and stop forcing its pastors and candidates for ordination to lie about being gay or lesbian, as it did for more than 20 years. Before August 21, 2009, a pastor could be brought up on trial for publicly admitting he or she was gay or lesbian and in a relationship, and a church could be completely removed from the ELCA in an expensive and embarrassing church trial; thankfully this is no longer the case. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Yet the pre-change reality remains in the ELCA, and no change has happened in many other denominations. And gay and lesbian persons are </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>by no means</b></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> the only people who are disadvantaged in the current ELCA system of approval, call, and ordination. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">VI.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Being honest, as being a bully, is not a simple issue. It's not the picture of George Washington and the cherry tree, or of "Honest Abe," whose early business practices, though unsuccessful, were apparently unflinchingly honest. These stereotypes of being honest are not such that any mortal can attain, just as no human besides Jesus could be sinless, and I question what that meant for Jesus.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The issue of marriage, beyond being an issue of civil rights for gay and lesbian people, is an issue of honesty: being able to be publicly honest about who your better half indeed is, as well as being honest about the limitations and realities of any marriage.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The main argument that I would lift up in favor of same-sex marriage is not even equality, because we are equal, and to debate our equality and the equality of our relationships is an insult. I think a better argument is to state the honest reality: that conservative moralists are imposing unreachable expectations on those marriages that they do allow, while at the same time, by opposing same-sex marriages, they suggest that these "traditional" marriages could be blown over by the first stiff gay wind to hit them. I want to think heterosexual relationships are stronger than this.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">There are also a vast number of people who vote against same-sex marriage, and a vast number of politicians who introduce this as a wedge issue into political discourse, who are far from being honest about their motives. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Each Minnesota legislator who has voted in favor of advancing a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, as in all 30 states that ban same-sex marriage <i>in their constitutions</i>, and each citizen voter, should face a crisis of honesty on their position against same-sex marriage. Is a same-sex marriage going to "destroy" opposite-sex marriages, or are a host of factors already in place, from no-fault divorce, to economic injustice, to exceedingly high societal demands, threatening these marriages? </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Bad relationships, impossible demands of perfection, and economic adversity, among other things, destroy marriage, not gay and lesbian relationships. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">VII.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Perhaps death is the most honest thing there is. There's no saying it is anything that it is not. There may be many varieties of death, but when someone is stone cold dead, that's that. Which is why it is so important to live your life while you have it.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I wonder sometimes what it would be like if honesty were more constitutionally a part of who we are. It's not a natural human state, but must be taught by instilling a guilty conscience as constant punishment for not being honest.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Being who one is honestly should not entail being guilty. Some things about ourselves could benefit from change. Sexual orientation is not one of them.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">What, for you, are the most difficult things to be honest about with yourself, dear reader? And what in your life has initiated a crisis of honesty in dealing with others? I think we all have substantial experience in debating these questions within ourselves, and some of these parts of ourselves have forced us into our own versions of the closet. Closets are not just for people of a particular sexual orientation: there are endless varieties of closets. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">My hope is that we might someday very soon reach a new level of honesty in our national discourse on sexual orientation, race, gender discrimination, and a host of other issues that can get better only when we start being honest with ourselves and with others about what we think and how we feel, without descending into banning people's relationships constitutionally, breaking off relationships because we disagree, and falling deeper into a pit of partisan tar.</span></div>Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-88020110223329480682011-04-30T23:57:00.002-05:002011-05-01T02:29:34.172-05:0015-for-15 II: Bully, or It Gets BetterMy first crush was on a bully. And it was probably not you.<br />
<br />
I.<br />
<br />
Last Fall, the nation was gripped by reports of young gay and lesbian people committing suicide. Although this is sadly nothing new, this was the first time perhaps many people became exposed to the issue of higher rates of suicide for LGBTQ youth. A <a href="http://www.thetaskforce.org/reports_and_research/ntds">report </a>by the <a href="http://www.thetaskforce.org/">National Gay and Lesbian Task Force</a> recently profiled even higher incidences of abuse against Transgender persons. <br />
<br />
"Bullies," such as <a href="http://www.nj.com/newsflash/index.ssf/story/roommate-hit-with-bias-charge-in-rutgers/5f9c2e9786c443f2918ad72437bff8cf">Dharun Ravi</a>, Tyler Clementi's roommate at Rutgers University, whose abuse helped to incite Tyler's death, have had their actions come to greater prominence and national disdain. Some of the other prominent suicidal deaths have also focused on the actions of others who abused them. In light of these deaths, schools have reviewed their anti-bully training and policies, and calls have gone out from all corners to end bullying as we know it.<br />
<br />
I, too, became involved in the anti-bullying campaign supported by some parents, teachers, and students in the Anoka-Hennepin School District, which I wrote about last year in these pages. But I did not pause to remember at that time that when I was 12, I developed a crush on a bully.<br />
<br />
II.<br />
<br />
He wasn't the first bully I knew, by any stretch of the imagination. I remember one of my childhood acquaintances, a year younger than myself, gutting a living toad with a fork when I was about 5 years old. It was one of the worst things I have ever seen in my life. Several years later, this same fellow walked up to me in the hallway of our elementary school with a strange, big smile on his face, and proceeded to punch me, hard, in the stomach. And what do you think he turned out to become? A serial killer who had his start with small animals? No. A dentist. Bingo. Mind you, a few years after that, I hatched a scheme not much better, and tried to pay 2 friends a quarter each, to catch frogs so that I could cut off their legs (the frog legs, not my friends' legs) and sell them to the local grocery store. I doubt that I would have found any humane way to have done in the frogs. Thankfully, they refused the money, and saved me from becoming a frog murderer. <br />
<br />
This bully wasn't perhaps even the first boy I had a crush on. That could conceivably have come as far back as age 3, when I had a fascination for an older boy on a dirt bike. Once, when I was about that age, I remember going up to him and his friends, who were sitting in a grove of trees, and announcing to them that my Mother had told me I could spend 5 minutes with them. I don't know if she had actually said that, or if it seemed to me like a convenient lie. As soon as I sat down, I heard, "Well, time's up." I'm sure many wouldn't think of this as a "gay crush," but there you have it.<br />
<br />
I did have a number of crushes on girls throughout my younger years, at about the same time most boys were just interested in playing baseball and riding dirt bikes, which I enjoyed very much as well, but when the boys started to take to their bike rides with girls, I turned inward and started playing the piano, which carried me sexlessly through my teenage years. <br />
<br />
III.<br />
<br />
I met this particular enthralling young bully while playing baseball, probably when I was about 9 or 10. I don't remember him being such a particularly dreadful person at that point in his development, but my memories are sketchy. He was my age, and liked baseball too. He also liked to beat kids up. I hear that once he beat up someone's kid sister. <br />
<br />
In a few years, after my hormones started going completely kerplewie with puberty, I remember watching him walking down the hallway, in a white button-down shirt, like he had been enveloped by a cloud. I had a feeling of exhilaration, fear, and a longing that caught in my throat. The next year, in gym class, I saw him without that shirt, or anything else, on. I had an electric shock go through me that I have since heard described as a spontaneous orgasm. The only time in my life. It was literally shocking, and told me this was no ordinary feeling I was having.<br />
<br />
Needless to say, I never said a thing about this crush, to him or to anyone else in my class. This is the first I've put it out there, not quite "Boys in the Band" style, sitting around by a phone late at night and calling our old crushes up, but it has met your eye, dear reader. This was a big part of my life for a few formative years. <br />
<br />
When we were sophomores, he used to stab me with pens in my legs. I guess I was hoping it would have been something else besides pens with which he was stabbing me. My health teacher gave me permission to beat the shit out of him, but I didn't. I was still somehow in his thrall, and at the same time I couldn't hurt someone to whom I was attracted like that.<br />
<br />
IV.<br />
<br />
How do we come to be attracted to people who treat us like shit? At the very least, the issue of who is a "bully" and our relationship to them, is complex. I can only think that I knew what I was, a little gay homosexual faggot, and that somehow in my complicated understanding of myself at that age, I deserved to be beat up. This wasn't long after Boy George, one of the first gay cultural icons, released "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izw8KKo6VhY&feature=related">Do You Really Want to Hurt Me</a>." Boy George creeped me out, and I didn't want to be anything like him. But something resonated with me and this song, even at that age. The names of derision for people who looked at other boy like I did, as well, resonated in me, and I sat in it all like a lobster starting to be steamed in a deadly stew.<br />
<br />
I hear from people of all sexual orientations this inclination to fall for those who hurt them, especially from women who endure physical and emotional abuse for years, from one person or from a variety of lovers or partners who seem to be similar. Women still often don't receive the best messages about themselves from society either, particular as sexual beings.<br />
<br />
Reader, whatever your age, race, gender identity, sexual orientation, whatever your place in life, if this is you, nothing in you deserves to get you beat up. Nothing. Ever.<br />
<br />
It wasn't as though I was never the bully myself. I will never forget kicking a little kid, maybe 2 years younger than myself, in the gutter in front of my house. He annoyed me, but he didn't deserve that.<br />
<br />
I was a bully to the first boy who kissed me too. It was such a surprise, standing at the top of the stairs of the house I grew up in. I don't remember what I did at the time, but I did not react well. And a few years later I beat him up in an elementary school fight. He wasn't the only one, and I got beat myself a few times. And elementary school isn't that last time I could be said to have bullied someone.<br />
<br />
But, seriously, nothing, no thoughts, desires, impulses, ideas, that take place in our minds, hearts, or emotions, deserve to get us abused. We do not bring abuse on ourselves. We do not deserve it. Nor do we have permission to abuse others. Ever. From anyone. Not even from God.<br />
<br />
V.<br />
<br />
Many people are hurt at some time by other people labeled as "bullies" of all ages--random people, acquaintances, neighbors, professors, lovers & spouses, bosses, road ragers, clergy--and we are, sometimes, ourselves those who practice harassment, violence, humiliation, intimidation, and a variety of other horrible things against those we know and don't know, and sometimes even against those we love.<br />
<br />
Is "bully" really a helpful term for those who are beating up, abusing, sexually harassing or violating, calling horrible names, stalking, embarrassing, and doing all of these things against someone in person, by text message, on Facebook, and in a number of other media in this media rich age? Isn't "terrorist" perhaps a better title, given that what they are doing is inciting terror?<br />
<br />
It's easy to hate these people, especially when each of us probably has a seed of being one of these people inside of us. I know I do.<br />
<br />
VI.<br />
<br />
"It gets better" is an apt message--but it must go further. It must add the word "when." "It gets better when..." for example, when we treat ourselves with the respect, integrity, and love that we don't get from everyone else, and when, perhaps, we see that bullies are not necessarily a monolithic "other." <br />
<br />
A recent scene in the TV series <a href="http://www.hulu.com/glee">Glee</a>'s episode "<a href="http://www.hulu.com/watch/233330/glee-born-this-way#s-p1-so-i0">Born This Way</a>" features a reconciliation of sorts between Kurt and Dave Karofsky, whose violent abuse and threatening of death to Kurt forced Kurt's transfer to another school. Dave, as viewers know from pervious episodes, is dealing with some sexual orientation issues himself. But Dave can never again abuse Kurt, and must give himself some breathing space in his understanding of his own sexual orientation. He sees that he cannot continue to do what he had done, and admitting to that and following through were key for that reconciliation to work.<br />
<br />
In real life, the abuse of <a href="http://www.jamienabozny.com/">Jamie Nabozny</a>, profiled in the recent terrific documentary "<a href="http://www.tolerance.org/bullied">Bullied</a>," led to a nationally-profiled court case that turned on the honesty of one of those who had tortured Jamie on a regular basis, confessing his torture in open court, which honesty came even after high-ranking members of the Ashland, Wisconsin, school system had sought to cover up their complicity in Jamie's abuse by claiming never to have heard of it. <br />
<br />
In each case, things got better when the truth was told, or at least understood by those who committed acts of violence, and when those who were abusers had an opportunity to step out of that role, which can be as stifling and life-draining as the role of "victim" that seeks to complement "bully." But sometimes even reconciliation cannot be possible or even desirable. Sometimes it gets better only when we can get some distance, and peace within ourselves.<br />
<br />
We should not be our own judges, despite the fact that we often judge ourselves far more harshly than others would, and yet we should not destroy each other with judgment either. Yet there must be justice, for the person who is bullied, and for the bully. <br />
<br />
Moving beyond the easy categories of "bully" and "victim" might be one way in which we can start to get that justice for both. Admitting truth of wrongdoing and seeking reconciliation may be another. The work of the <a href="http://www.glaad.org/">Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation</a> is central to bringing to light this kind of truth about wrongdoing towards LGBTQ people on local and national scales. <br />
<br />
Tomorrow I will explore the idea of honesty, admitting truth, in more detail, and how this has impacted my own journey in these last 15 years of being openly gay.Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-47755616242982682112011-04-29T23:57:00.011-05:002011-05-09T12:13:39.306-05:0015 for 15: 15 Meditations for 15 Years of Being Openly Gay<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlxCF0KrByjugGpOh7o8F1Y2eVp5ZeGXjHbMDF0tlecJs5yZcy5PLcFkc9recCLi9tKuVdPQC88j5qYD1HIBxocER8PTWs8pASz9jWLbyVqe5t5Db6f06viLTjCVJu1SrRipnk_UybzWU/s1600/I+am+not+gay.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="37" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlxCF0KrByjugGpOh7o8F1Y2eVp5ZeGXjHbMDF0tlecJs5yZcy5PLcFkc9recCLi9tKuVdPQC88j5qYD1HIBxocER8PTWs8pASz9jWLbyVqe5t5Db6f06viLTjCVJu1SrRipnk_UybzWU/s400/I+am+not+gay.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"Mourn your losses, because they will be many. But celebrate your victories, because they will be few."</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> - Debbie Novotny (Sharon Gless), Queer as Folk (Showtime, 2003)</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I don't know whether this line, which I know from the Showtime series "Queer as Folk," is actually original to it, or quoted from elsewhere. But it is right on the money.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">There are few occasions for celebrating anniversaries in our lives: marriage or relationship, sobriety, the opening of a successful business, and ordination are the ones that immediately come to my mind. As of today, I cannot celebrate any of those in my life. But there's one I can celebrate, which is coming up a week from today.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">15 years ago, on May 6, 1996, I came out to another person as being gay for the first time in my life. I had come out to myself, actually admitted to myself that I was gay, only two years before. The homophobia that I had learned over my first 19 years, which came from many sources, was deeply a part of me when I wrote: </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>I have heretofore not revealed my most innermost thoughts and secrets, not to these pages, let alone anyone else. I'm afraid that the pages may fall into the hands of others, after I have written what I shall write and my secret will be revealed to all. For now, I will reveal it only to these pages--a large step indeed. </i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><br />
</i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>I have known since puberty that I am attracted to the male, and not the female, body....It is definitely not a <u>choice</u> that I have made--not as some homosexuals, I would choose <u>not</u> to be one. My attitude would bring me severe reprimands from most other homosexuals, and my inclinations would obviously bring me nothing but hardship from all of my friends and family. </i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><br />
</i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>...I am definitely <u>not</u> gay, in the strict sense of the word. I do not act faggishly.... I merely find the male body sexually attractive. ...I do not particularly want to form a true love relationship with another man. I do <u>not</u> want to marry another male, just as I do <u>not</u> want to become involved in the traditional gay causes--the psychotic activities of many of these politically active homosexuals sickens, surprises, and depresses me. --6.24.1994, 9:45pm.</i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><br />
</i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">To look back on these words, as I have from time to time over the years, both saddens me, that I ever felt that way, and gives me a feeling of empathy for so many who "struggle" with homosexuality, whether because they are gay or lesbian themselves, or because they oppose even the slightest positive mention of homosexuality. They also give me an imperfect empathy for others who struggle because others seek to marginalize them.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">How I get from that day nearly 17 years ago, through the anniversary whose original day came some two years later, to today, is complicated, and yet it is part of the most important work I have done in my life: coming to terms with something in myself that up until 2003 in <i>these United States</i>, could be punishable under the law. I have come a long way personally, and attitudes across the nation have changed significantly, in these 15+ years.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Thankfully, as Dan Savage said, <a href="http://www.itgetsbetter.org/">it gets better</a>.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">II.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I write these following meditations over the next 2 weeks to recognize this journey of my own, which is the journey of so many, even those who are not gay or lesbian, for the closet, the suffocating privacy that we impose upon ourselves because we fear what will happen if we don't do that, is the reality for many who suffer through their lives in silence. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I don't mean these meditations to be a judgment on those who do live in the closet--they must do what they must do, as I must do what I must do. If anything, I would want any invective here to go towards those who <i>enforce</i> the closet on others, because my guess is that many who inhabit this liminal place between being secret and being known would choose to be who they are in public, if they felt, as I did not at the time I came out to myself, that they would not incur wide wrath, loss of key relationships, jobs, homes, personal injury, and even death. Death and significant harm still comes to people who are gay and lesbian for that very fact alone. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">III.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Over the next 15 days, from tonight until two Fridays for now, I will write one meditation each night on some aspect of this journey. In each case, I will not identify the others who are a part of my journey at this time by their real names. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">My plan for the structure of these writings will occur as follows:</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">1. 15-4-15: 15 days of meditations for 15 years of being openly gay</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">2. Bully or It Gets Better</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"></span><br />
<div style="font: 13.0px Arial; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">3. Honesty</span></span></span></div><div style="font: 13.0px Arial; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">4. Gaining My Religion</span></span></span></div><div style="font: 13.0px Arial; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">5. Who I Am</span></span></span></div><div style="font: 13.0px Arial; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">6. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">The First Time</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"> </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">7. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Pride</span></div><div style="font: 13.0px Arial; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">8. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Why I Must Be Out</span></div><div style="font: 13.0px Arial; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">9. Coming Out Everyday</span></span></span></div><div style="font: 13.0px Arial; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">10. Stereotypes: Lonely & Sad</span></span></span></div><div style="font: 13.0px Arial; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">11. Stereotypes: Promiscuity: Fuck Them All</span></span></span></div><div style="font: 13.0px Arial; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">12. Stereotypes: The Homosexual Menace</span></span></span></div><div style="font: 13.0px Arial; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">13. Self-Acceptance</span></span></span></div><div style="font: 13.0px Arial; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">14. Other-Acceptance</span></span></span></div><div style="font: 13.0px Arial; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">15. Anti-Bully or Walk Hand-in-Hand</span></span></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"> </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This exploration will be framed by the experience of bullying, and working against bullying, which is ongoing work for me and for</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> many. The way we treat others does depend to a great degree on the way in which others treat us, and in the way we treat ourselves. The crisis of anti-gay bullying is something that has become much more public in the last 6 months, but is something that goes back millennia, and something that may take more than a lifespan to repair. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">My ultimate aim, besides making this experience public and, hopefully, resonant with some others, is reconciliation: self-reconcilation, other-reconciliation, and communal reconciliation. I don't know how I will accomplish some of that at this point, and some is just part of a long-term process that cannot be completed in a couple of weeks.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It is my hope that any who choose to read this will find it in some way helpful and worth reading. Even if that is not the case, it will be a helpful exercise for me, and, I hope, might inspire one or another person to undertake a similar project with themselves.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Ultimately, love, of self, others, community, and God, takes leaps as must faith, and, in the words of one of my favorite spiritual figures, Father James Huntington, "Love must act as light must shine and fire must burn." </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I appreciate your company, dear reader, along the way.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #000002; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span></span>Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-67802588327757282982011-04-22T20:33:00.007-05:002011-04-26T23:19:07.584-05:00Christ Without a Cross Dies Twice<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr0IS88CEQLOFPLIHXoCHOxWIZdEyWLsJpcrNxkGu_GeDAj_8F4rYE9l6mR97ipkM7mfmxZLE6Nt_3hnGf_8D15nA9OFrFqYjv3wJEXOLp3whsVEaAh_3kQGxeCfLWkWTi0-zy_apom5s/s1600/spanish+crucifix+1150.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 213px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr0IS88CEQLOFPLIHXoCHOxWIZdEyWLsJpcrNxkGu_GeDAj_8F4rYE9l6mR97ipkM7mfmxZLE6Nt_3hnGf_8D15nA9OFrFqYjv3wJEXOLp3whsVEaAh_3kQGxeCfLWkWTi0-zy_apom5s/s320/spanish+crucifix+1150.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5598612220554097970" /></a><br /><i>"For me, kind Jesus, was thine incarnation,</i><div><i>thy mortal sorrow, and thy life's oblation;</i></div><div><i>thy death of anguish and thy bitter passion.</i></div><div><i>for my salvation." --Johann Heermann tr. Robert Bridges</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>I.</div><div><br /></div><div>Our culture denies death. Our culture denies death's power by saying that it is nothing, only a change. Our culture denies death's sorrow by making of it a celebration. And our culture makes of death's horror a cheap cologne that smells more like bacon than decomposition.</div><div><br /></div><div>The challenge of Christ's death and resurrection is the greatest gift that the Christian church can give this culture, indeed any culture. But Christ without a cross, especially among his followers, dies two deaths: the actual death, and the death of relevance, for Jesus as just another man who died, another sucker whom the state overpowered, another dupe of the Caesar, no matter how many nice things he did or good things he taught, is doubly dead.</div><div><br /></div><div>II.</div><div><br /></div><div>The doctrine of atonement, the idea by which the death of Jesus makes good for the sins of the world, for <i>our</i> sins, is problematic for many to say the least. The idea that this act of Jesus, casting aside his Messianic crown for us, was in fact an act of divine child abuse, God killing God's own son, or the act of a political prisoner alone, seems to me fairly pervasive. </div><div><br /></div><div>One powerful idea given me in seminary was that instead of a Mel Gibson-style pornographic torture fest, Christ's torture and death on the cross was an <i>interchange</i> of God's justice for our constitutional human injustice, happening through Jesus as through an electrical conduit. More than a <i>felix culpa</i>, a "happy fault," that "allows" God to build something better out of our faults, this interchange is an exchange of all that is just in God for all that is unjust in a creation that goes its own way. We get a better deal.</div><div><br /></div><div>III.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm hardly a heavy-duty theologian, or a student of literature and art and cinema who can quote all of the concepts that I'm referring to here in the history of human achievement. But it seems pretty clear to me that many in the church, uncomfortable as we are with death, might seek to hide Jesus's death behind bunnies, eggs, candy, and parades. </div><div><br /></div><div>What is an age-appropriate explanation of the crucifixion and resurrection to children? I'm by no means an expert, but talking directly about Jesus dying, and God bringing Jesus back from the dead, seems like it could be very powerful for those whom we often forget about when tragedy happens, because it seems even more difficult to explain it to children, who know something bad when they see, hear, feel, and experience it.</div><div><br /></div><div>It seems to me that Christ without a cross dies twice, as I said above: his actual death, and the death of his relevance to us as Christians and to our or any culture, time or place. Our culture is not exclusively Christian, but it is one to which we might share a word from this perspective of death and resurrection, and at that a word of hope. Jesus without resurrection is Jesus without hope. </div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps we are ashamed because we cannot explain God's place in evil, either the evil of the crucifixion or the evil of natural disaster, war, famine, and other engineered acts of evil that we humans perpetrate on other humans? </div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps it is so difficult to believe in the resurrection that it is easier to sugarcoat it than try to explain it to others, much less ourselves and our own people? I can't say I understand the death and resurrection of Jesus all that well, but something in me <i>believes</i> beyond the need to sugarcoat my own impending death with the cross, to use <i>the cross</i> as a means of escape from reality, as must appear to many who do not share this same belief.</div><div><br /></div><div>A church that sugarcoats the death and resurrection of Jesus with the candy of culture may well be as odious as a believer who uses the cross to deny his or her own death. But as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said famously in <i>Cost of Discipleship:</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>"As we embark upon discipleship we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with his death--we give over our lives to death. Thus it begins; the cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise godfearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. <b>When Christ calls people, he bids them come and die</b>....In fact every command of Jesus is a call to die, with all our affections and lusts. But we do not want to die, and therefore Jesus Christ and his call are necessarily our death as well as our life. The call to discipleship, the baptism in the name of Jesus Christ means both life and death" (</i>Dietrich Bonhoeffer, <i>The Cost of Discipleship<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">, 89-90. New York: Macmillan, 1959, Touchstone ed. 1995). </span> </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>There is a broader point of forgiveness and mutual burden-bearing to Bonhoeffer's message here, but the necessity of death, and of death in Christ for a Christian, is of central moment. </div><div><br /></div><div>Any version of Christ that can escape the tomb without the cross is not <i>the</i> Christ. Any version of Christ that gets caught in torture without the work of God in resurrection from the tomb is not <i>the </i>Christ. But my sense is that our human tendency is more to liberate Christ and ourselves through him without taking the hardest steps to and through the cross. </div><div><br /></div><div>IV.</div><div><br /></div><div>I wonder if a failure to encounter Jesus in all of his shame on the cross, around the crucifixion, and jumping right to the resurrection, may not be an element of what has chased people away from church by the droves? </div><div><br /></div><div>Not only has there been a cultural shift since the 1960s that shows a marked decline in the relevance of church in much of American society, but perhaps the church itself has aided in people leaving it through downplaying its own relevance through its core concepts, and through becoming a place of trying to make people feel good about themselves in a way that a gin and tonic could do much better.</div><div><br /></div><div>As a kid, and as an adult, direct talk has engaged me much more than beating around the bush. I don't want to hear about a Jesus who is merely a glory-machine, triumphing over death without experiencing it. That kind of Jesus doesn't make much difference to me or anyone else.</div><div><br /></div><div>I want to hear about a Jesus who went all the way, who experienced everything I have experienced, and who came through it in a way that I can know meant a lot to him, not only an insignificant key change in the tune he was whistling, but a whole shift in the reality of what death and our relationship with God means to me and to humanity. </div><div><br /></div><div>We crucify Christ again by forgetting the cross. We crucify Christ again by forgetting the tomb. We crucify Christ again by forgetting the resurrection. It is only with each of these elements, and by accompanying Christ in these places, and in teaching this to our children, and in insisting on our reality to the wider culture, challenging first its denial of death, that we respect most profoundly the God who has given us Godself in human form, and who has loved us so much that even death can't separate us from God.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Loving Jesus, the tomb awaits, but not yet. Nor your glorious resurrection. Not yet. Keep me for a moment from it, that its power and glitter not overwhelm me. Keep me for a moment with you in death's embrace. Amen. </i></div><div><br /></div><div>(Photo credit: <a href="http://www.mrbramesblog.org/2010/07/weekend-in-new-york-part-1-cloisters.html">http://www.mrbramesblog.org/2010/07/weekend-in-new-york-part-1-cloisters.html</a>)</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-45018600231737181262011-04-19T13:58:00.005-05:002011-04-26T23:30:23.189-05:00"The Stone that the Builders Rejected""The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone." --Psalm 118:22<div><br /></div><div>I.</div><div><br /></div><div>For some reason, I thought this line appeared at some point during the Holy Week readings, but as it is, the only time we who follow the Revised Common Lectionary will be hearing it this year is on Easter. </div><div><br /></div><div>Yet this phrase informs the whole Holy Week leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus, and particularly what happens through God's raising of Jesus on the third day. The stone, which didn't look like much, which was mis-shapen, mistaken, mis-heard, the stone that rolled the wrong way down the hill, that didn't quite seem to fit the tomb, those stones from which God would raise up children, all these stones were rejected. Those in charge, the builders, didn't happen to think the stones would fit, or that they should properly be included in the plans for such a magnificent building.</div><div><br /></div><div>Not only did the rejected stone end up being used, but it became the most important stone of all, on which the entire edifice was built. What this edifice is, who the builders were, who the stones were, is all part of the Christian faith tradition, and important questions to wrestle with. But for now, simply, I'm hearing the stone that was rejected, and marveling at how it became a cornerstone.</div><div><br /></div><div>II.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's hard not to read myself into this line, and perhaps a bit perilous at the same time. We all experience rejection, and few are probably really spectacularly happy at being rejected. I fear reaching out to people whom I think might reject me, because that has happened plenty. I'm cautious of putting my written work out there in the fear that it might be rejected, which is pretty much what generally happens to written work for which people seek publication. I'm self-conscious about talking about a faith in a loving and graceful God that challenges the view of God and Jesus presented by many who go by the name "Christian," even though sharing that graceful vision of God is more vital now, more life and death, than ever.</div><div><br /></div><div>The stone has been rejected. Accounted unworthy by those who are supposed to know what is worthy and what isn't. Rightly tossed to the side, and thankfully out of the way.</div><div><br /></div><div>I would not be the only person who has been at some point rejected, in many ways, not least of which by the church. I have also been accepted in many ways, by many people, and not least of which by the church. </div><div><br /></div><div>But instead of the rejection stopping the stone, it becomes the cornerstone. It risks <i>everything</i> and comes out ahead. I don't know if I'm that adventuresome, or just wish to hold on to what I have, modest as it might be. The stone could have stayed stuck.</div><div><br /></div><div>The time comes to risk it all does come, and at that point, rejection cannot be a defining issue.</div><div><br /></div><div>III.</div><div><br /></div><div>I've been questioning lately whether that time is coming for me. My job, at which I'm gratefully accepted, will not last forever, and I must find new employment in the next 6 months. Plenty of time not to have that end come as a shock, but I need to get serious about ministry, if that is to become the calling in reality for which I've been called, educated, and sent into a land of limbo. This is not so different from a lot of people who have been affected by the down economy of the last 3 years. To have employment has been a blessing that I am not unaware of.</div><div><br /></div><div>Many of us, no matter our sexual orientations, have faced this challenge of being rejected in many ways at many times. </div><div><br /></div><div>I've recently become aware that a lot more people than just myself have been waiting for years for their first calls to become pastors in the ELCA. A number of these people mention how difficult it has been to piece together a life while trying to retain hope that God indeed is back there somewhere, having something to do with this lengthening road that seems not to be leading anywhere.</div><div><br /></div><div>In times when you still hear that there's a clergy shortage, we would be hard-pressed to understand why, when sitting as rejected stones next to the road. But perhaps we will become the cornerstones of the new buildings, the new ways in which the church will need to be in the time to come?</div><div><br /></div><div>IV.</div><div><br /></div><div>Many question, rightly, the place and shape of the church in the years to come. My work church is joining my worship church and another church in a 3-way configuration in which each church will have its own worship space, retain its own identity, and share space. The reason is because each of these churches built their buildings and envisioned their futures with about 90% more people than they have now. The old ways, as the old buildings, are crumbling. New people with new ideas are going to be key in bringing the Gospel to new generations who will not be content just to debate the curtains in the library or whether or not mums should be the flower on the altar Sunday mornings.</div><div><br /></div><div>What are the words that we stones, whether we've been rejected, included, or are yet becoming, can speak to a church that often seems to stand in stone-deaf silence to the needs of its people? </div><div><br /></div><div>I was grateful the other day to share an idea for a welcoming church start in an area that has no LGBTQ-publicly welcoming Lutheran churches with the bishop of the local ELCA synod here. He listened patiently, kindly, and said that my idea would be hard to implement. I responded that truth that what would make it a hard proposition is what would make it especially necessary.</div><div><br /></div><div>Congregations that proclaim their welcome most earnestly, and are often welcoming in many ways, often fall short when it comes to LGBTQ people. That is one reason why there are still only about as many ELCA congregations that are publicly welcoming of LGBTQ people as there were congregations that left the ELCA in order to be particularly unwelcoming or because they felt the ELCA had abandoned its Biblical principles. </div><div><br /></div><div>What God will make of us stones is yet to be seen. But our church needs us, as it needs every potential leader, ordained or lay, who prayerfully feels compelled to make a difference, because the time for that difference to be made is passing us by. </div><div><br /></div><div>If we do not wish harsher varieties of Christianity to control the public perception of "Christian" for good, some of us have to start speaking up more, and some of our churches and denominations need to get behind us and figure out how best to use our gifts.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the meantime, this stone is open to being included, open to listening to other stones that have been or have felt rejected, as well as to pushing his agenda for God's grace and justice onto the builders who need to hear it.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Gracious God of all that we are and all that we can ever be, lift us up to be there for your people who are lost in the night, who wait for you as watchers wait for morning, who feel that you hate them, that your are angry at them, that you wish them destruction, that you are damning them to an eternity of torment for some arbitrary reason. Is this your will, God, that people doubt you because you seem cruel and whimsical? I have a harder time believing that than that you do not exist at all. In whatever way you can, work through each of us to raise up another dear stone who has felt rejected, that we might build up your cathedral of grace on earth as it is in heaven. Through Jesus, the rejected stone who became the chief cornerstone in your plan for reconciliation, we pray. Amen.</i> </div>Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-66686168021173764622011-04-15T21:55:00.003-05:002011-04-15T22:25:02.023-05:00My NOH8 Story on a Day of Silence or Meditation on my Namesake<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLE3Ysu22sziIjeOeMaARXRQZfK17Kp8EVHTx6R3IkfUR0zSCPWeyZRbTH5BqZ8h4o4H4E1V1iTFM0oJs1buiLZq2V-pYchsTVVuLXr5oigFr28oyH0cE-mGkIwKma-YWxJsINPoJ8Sg8/s1600/Chris+NOH8.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLE3Ysu22sziIjeOeMaARXRQZfK17Kp8EVHTx6R3IkfUR0zSCPWeyZRbTH5BqZ8h4o4H4E1V1iTFM0oJs1buiLZq2V-pYchsTVVuLXr5oigFr28oyH0cE-mGkIwKma-YWxJsINPoJ8Sg8/s320/Chris+NOH8.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5596015759166774802" /></a><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" border-collapse: collapse; font-family:arial, sans-serif;font-size:13px;"><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Back in February, I had the chance to attend one of the most wonderful gatherings of LGBTQ people I've ever had the chance to attend: the Creating Change Conference, in Minneapolis. What made this gathering so great was that it best represented the whole "tent" of queerdom: young and old, men, women, and people who didn't cling to one binary gender, gay, lesbian, bi, and a rainbow of transgender persons, genderqueer, poly, allies, intersex persons, you name it, and persons from the group were beautifully, wonderfully represented. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Among the activities that weekend was the opportunity to become part of the </span></span><a href="http://www.noh8campaign.com/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">"NOH8" campaign</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">, the brainchild of young gay celebrity photographer Adam Bouska, originally in response to the Prop 8 campaign (which likewise spawned this blog), but now reaching far beyond California and the issue of anti-gay prejudice. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">For a mere contribution of $40 (far from a pittance for many people, and an unfortunate bar to the full representation of people who would best represent this campaign), anyone could feel like a supermodel for justice for a few seconds, and come out with a professional portrait of their own activist selves. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">At first, I didn't think I could justify this price and this indulgence, as cool as it was. But then I looked at my special shelf, and saw on it my clerical collar, gathering dust, and my Great-Grandfather's watch, a prized heirloom that my Father has let me take care of. Both of these items are very special to me, the one a signature part of my vocation to the Lutheran ministry, and the other, a prized possession of one after whom I was named. The combination of the two inspired me to have that photo taken, and to represent fully who I am to this cause for freedom and equality.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">What follows is the description that I provided Adam in helping to understand the meaning behind this pose. I don't know that it will gain any kind of wider audience, and so I share it here for the few of you for whom it might be of interest. I love my vocation, and I love my Great-Grandfather, even though we could never have met. I respect his hard work and dedication to his profession, which the watch honors after 30 years of service. And I am proud of his name, Elsworth, which is my middle name and my Father's middle name, as I am of the man who gave it to me.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Love should never keep one from being honest about love; yet that is what Prop 8 does. May that proposition, in time, fall to the ground as an embarrassment to those who supported it, as much as the pride I feel in opposing it with my whole being. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">"My pose for the NOH8 campaign was filled with symbolism both personal and of wider-reach. This pose represents family, time, tradition, my personal and our communal struggle for equality and justice. I wore around my neck my Great-Grandfather's watch given to him for 30 years of service in 1953. I also wore one of my clerical collars. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">My calling is to the ordained ministry of Word and sacrament in the Lutheran church, the faith into which my Great-Grandfather was baptized on his deathbed. Yet being openly gay has prevented me from getting a church and being able to wear the collar as an ordained person. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Time, literally entangled around my neck, is therefore represented on at least 3 planes in this image: 1. The time of tradition, weighing physically and metaphorically on my vocation (as it has on many others); 2. The time (4 years) I have been waiting to become a pastor; 3. The duration of our movement for Gay and Lesbian rights, which began in America around the time that this watch was presented to my Great-Grandfather. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">I never knew my Great-Grandfather, but am proud of his work and love him. I am, along with my Father, his namesake. Our middle name, Elsworth, was his only given name. Yet past, present, and future meeting in one place on this point is bittersweet. I have encapsulated this experience in the following poem:</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Time Entangles Our Necks</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Time entangles our necks,</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">breathing life and death</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">past years of pressured peace and silenced dreams.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Great our Grandfathers'</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">wishes, ambitions for</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Their Unseen, a gleam</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">of semen stretched</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">through several faltered</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">beams of forced omission.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Faith of our fathers,</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">stopping still</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">cockblocking their sons,</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">frockboxing their daughters</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">behind a god who pressed in law</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">what certain ancient lawyers saw.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Faith remains, lifeglue,</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">more than a living,</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">or escape from dying,</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">shining too from the</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">eyes of the future who</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">know what the sins</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">of the past could do:</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">a lasting screw.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">If our great grandfathers only knew.</span></span></div></div></span>Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-76482275778549430002011-04-14T23:31:00.012-05:002011-04-15T01:29:46.774-05:00Ideas Percolating: The Church, HIV/AIDS, Poetry & Community<div>I.</div><div><br /></div><div>I had a few good new ideas at the beginning of the year, most of which seem to have passed on for want of development and conversation. The main energy this year was around community. It's time I got my butt in gear and started to write about them.</div><div><br /></div><div>The element of community was central in the Anoka/Hennepin School District controversies that I briefly joined in the fall. The District has made its position quite clear on matters of LGBT equality, e.g., having been sued into allowing a lesbian couple to walk together in a high school pep rally last January, canceling performances of a play written by youth for youth for 7th and 8th grade students in Anoka because an anti-gay adult complained about a segment of the play where a young person comes out, and denying any connection between anti-gay bullying and any of the suicides of the previous year in the District, which went against testimony they received over a period of several months in their meetings. </div><div><br /></div><div>While I continue to support the cause for justice for students in this District, I pulled back from involvement as it became clear that my involvement wasn't directly helpful. But I have other ideas in the works that may be. Time will tell how those will pan out.</div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps this community orientation, the need for one community to call itself on how it treats a segment of its population, helped illuminate other thoughts.</div><div><br /></div><div>II.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here are three ideas I wish to resurrect with the Easter season:</div><div><br /></div><div>1. Positive portrayals of Christianity are vital to communal well-being, especially for young people. The voice of condemnation, which belongs rightly to no person, has been too prominent for too long in the church's voice in our society among others. Challenge of culture is one thing; condemnation, or condemnation veiled in "concern," is another. Does one condemn the condemners? This is a good question that begs some further consideration. Progressive faith voices have leveled challenge against judgmental Christianity and judging Christians, but it's still yet to stick on a wider level. But we owe our society the best voices that our faith can provide, and those voices do not preach hate in any form.</div><div><br /></div><div>2. HIV prevention needs a new focus on the role of community. It's not enough to tell someone to wear a condom, to scare people into abstinence or safer sex by telling them what will happen if they don't, or by shaming people about sex and sexuality. The latest study from the<a href="http://www.gmhc.org/"> Gay Men's Health Crisis</a> in New York, <a href="http://www.gmhc.org/files/editor/file/a_pa_msm_report_090710.pdf">Gay Men and HIV: An Urgent Priority</a>, highlights the rise in HIV contraction by gay and bisexual men over the last 5 years (particularly between 2005-2008), and one of the highest risk groups is, bingo, "among white MSM (men who have sex with men), the bulk of new infections are occurring among men in their 30s and 40s" (p. 6), which happens to be my age/race group. </div><div><br /></div><div>The report offers some ideas for this rise, among which are the factors of social isolation, homophobia, and drug use. I could offer them my perspective on why for some of us staying HIV negative seems an ever-increasing struggle, and for others a lost cause. There are a lot of assumptions and judgments around HIV that still carry the prejudices of the 80s, the ideas of "innocent victims" (or victims at all), of certain people deservedly being punished for having the "wrong" kind of sex or for being "promiscuous," and of honest discussions about sex, its meaning in our lives, and our actual practice of it being still to a great degree taboo. These prejudices and judgments must continue to be challenged as they are killing us.</div><div><br /></div><div>Can we have an honest conversation about barebacking among gay/bi males? It would involve us being honest about the judgments we have around sex and, more importantly, around each other. Gay men can, it's no secret to ourselves or others, be fairly judgmental at times about whom we would choose to relate to from within the gay universe. Age is a factor, money, accomplishment, ability to exclude or include certain people, HIV status, and most certainly body type. These are not hard and fast reasons for being included or excluded in one group of gay men or another, but they often do influence who will talk to you.</div><div><br /></div><div>The reasons why people have unsafe sex are not just because we're stupid, uncaring, amoral, disgusting people who (according to some with whom I don't agree) flout God's laws and bring upon ourselves and others destruction, and not just because people outside of the gay community are spewing homophobia. Some of that homophobia comes from within, and needs to be faced honestly and together in smaller and larger levels of gay community, and some of it comes from within ourselves, and must be honestly faced there, with a leading edge of grace in both situations that is sometimes harder to use with oneself than with others.</div><div><br /></div><div>Can you imagine having an honest conversation about some of these issues in church? Now that we have finished fighting the battle for whether or not Gay and Lesbian people can become pastors or have our relationships blessed in the ELCA, to what further conversations about sexuality, which have been forestalled around these other issues for so long, could the church aid in shedding its grace and commitment to honesty? Long and still a proponent of much homophobia, not only does the church <i>have</i> AIDS, as we have said even in our churchwide assemblies, but the church helps to <i>cause</i> AIDS and HIV transmission, and that still needs to be faced.</div><div><br /></div><div>There's much more to say on this, for another time. But think about how, if you're HIV negative, HIV is not just someone else's burden, and how, if you're HIV positive, you can work claim the support that was there for you in the community during the hardest years of the AIDS holocaust. That support is there, if only from people like me, who don't always know how best to lend it.</div><div><br /></div><div>3. Poetry can help build, enliven, and liberate community. This idea came to me as part of a Lutheran Poetry Project, which still has yet to be realized. It came to me as a way to put my own negative energy around being marginalized in my long wait for a call into something positive, and something that all those who have felt marginalized by the church could tap into. You don't need to be a professional poet, published, recognized, lauded, or even much cared for, in order to write poetry, and put your situation out there in your own voice. And your voice may be the one that speaks a needed word of truth and consolation to another who is struggling out there in the night.</div><div><br /></div><div>I heard something last year that I've not been able to verify, but I would not have difficulty believing to be true: African-American women typically wait 5 years for a first call in the ELCA. Is there a way to verify this? There are not a lot of African-American women who are in training to be pastors in the ELCA. </div><div><br /></div><div>I had a very dear friend in seminary who was an African-American woman who passed away before the end of her seminary training; she would have been a spectacular pastor, and indeed was to me and many others in our year as neighbors in the seminary apartments at PLTS. I miss her terribly, especially her wisdom and strength. The loss for the church of her ministry is as well incalculable. But are there women like her whose voices are ready to be engaged, yet are being left to the side? That, too, is an incalculable loss for a church in need of its best, strongest, and most graceful voices.</div><div><br /></div><div>What could these voices, the many besides my own who have felt dishonored in waiting so long for the church to implement or even realize our love and capacity for ministry, have to say to a church that is struggling to define its future in a landscape that does not see Jesus or the church as central, as some have called "post-Christian"? Christianity is itself now marginal in a way that it probably has been at many times in the past, yet is only coming to our consciousness in the last 40 years as being marginal, forgotten, unnecessary, even many times either unhelpful or hurtful to Christians and those who believe other creeds or faiths or profess no particular faith alike. </div><div><br /></div><div>The stone that the builder rejected will become the cornerstone. This was as true for Jesus himself as it is for his disciples along the way and today whose voices are being forced out of the church due to neglect or more aggressive challenge of the central truths of their lives. </div><div><br /></div><div>Yet these voices may yet become those who have the most to say as we continue to live lives of faith and honesty, perhaps redefined in some ways in this new age, but close as always to the heart of Christ, which beats most strongly for those most forgotten. </div><div><br /></div><div>These voices could speak powerfully through poetry, and perhaps are. An effort to bring these voices together into one prophetic source is sorely needed.</div><div><br /></div><div>III. </div><div><br /></div><div>All of these ideas have community, our interrelations with others, as well as our self-community, the internal dialogues that we carry on with ourselves, at the center, and see that how we talk together will determine how we as individuals will fare. For far too long in the past, and with renewed vigor in the present through the Tea Party, society has been seen as nothing more than a bunch of individual blips moving past each other on an increasingly complex and desolate screen. </div><div><br /></div><div>How can new landscapes of conversation and interrelation help inform our future together and individually? I'll be thinking of some of these things more out loud here, and would be grateful for your thinking through them, perhaps in conversation, or at least in your own way. </div><div><br /></div><div>Our only way forward as a country, church, as families, and as individuals, is with more, not less, care for community. My hope is to stir up a few new directions in finding some ways to approach that building of community. I'd value your effort in this direction as well.</div>Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-85441370581066238222011-04-13T12:40:00.004-05:002011-04-13T12:49:27.984-05:00Here Comes Spring!<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPAUr84h8O_aZVcTwL1PpiTalsySBHsdresCuPd0gOjGAqoQGKUGeETdol1B_OV1Qg1zrMHKbTi_MD9IybUf5-0rHS8COqOqDlAiGm2qYmcFKPjqUfHAtd6QB4Wz_hLFXVFHH5BxJ9Z1g/s1600/Fire+flask.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPAUr84h8O_aZVcTwL1PpiTalsySBHsdresCuPd0gOjGAqoQGKUGeETdol1B_OV1Qg1zrMHKbTi_MD9IybUf5-0rHS8COqOqDlAiGm2qYmcFKPjqUfHAtd6QB4Wz_hLFXVFHH5BxJ9Z1g/s320/Fire+flask.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5595126247705474178" /></a><br />In the last few days, the ice has completely melted from Lake Calhoun and Lake of the Isles, both 2 minutes out my apartment building's back door. This means that Spring is finally here. But of course, Minnesota winter always promises a late relapse, happening as late as June some years. So we Minnesotans enjoy what Spring we can, especially after such a dreadful Winter. <div><br /></div><div>Here is my little bit of Spring in a bottle, refracting sunlight through my flask of maple syrup (yes, that is what it is!) against the backdrop of the newly melted Lake of the Isles. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-71084861935979541672011-03-28T16:25:00.002-05:002011-03-28T16:37:53.620-05:00A Spontaneous, Inexhaustive Lutheran Credo<div>One of my friends posted a question on what her statement of "What Lutherans Believe," and in thinking of it, I was struck with a flurry of spontaneous Lutheran credology. My favorite statement here is the last. Here it goes:</div><div><br /></div><div><ul><li>Lutherans believe that Christ is the center and the center will hold. </li><li>Lutherans believe that no sin is original--they've all been tried before.</li><li>Lutherans believe that Christ showed his true colors on the cross, and we showed ours, yet God is above all seen in a rainbow of all colors.</li><li>Lutherans believe that "Love your neighbor as yourself" does not mean to keep using Jesus' name to attack that neighbor for any reason whatsoever. </li><li>Lutherans believe that the New Commandment doesn't supplant the 10 Commandments, but rather interprets law through the prism of the Gospel. </li><li>Lutherans believe that God forgives you first, and then you respond with works of charity and compassion out of thankfulness, rather than trying to buy God's favor through good works, which doesn't work anyway.</li><li>Lutherans believe that faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit and not a work that one Christian is better at than others. </li><li>Lutherans believe that humans are not fully good or fully bad, but fully both. </li><li>Lutherans believe that Jesus, and not Rob Bell, emptied hell of all sinners past, present, and future. </li><li>Lutherans believe that human beings struggle and are not perfect.</li><li>Lutherans believe three solas ("alones"), grace, scripture, and faith, but these are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive. </li><li>Lutherans believe that doubt is an asset, and not a liability, to faith.</li><li>Lutherans believe that Jesus really is present in communion, not just a memory.</li><li>Lutherans believe that God is gracious, even in judgment.</li><li>Lutherans believe that the Holy Spirit works today, and that God was not buried in the Bible.</li></ul></div><div>And, most importantly:</div><div><ul><li>Lutherans believe that God is still speaking, even if some Christians never shut up.</li></ul></div>Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-53928089733638917412010-12-27T22:57:00.010-06:002011-01-06T11:51:57.386-06:00Glenn Gould: Queerly Normal<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHBqyMEifn8kBJLrW0JbiLp7h_i__pa50ChOvbY7ZJBWM59YXDjckD55LPk9x4xyUh39zt0SXYPjLMBEJedMevFB-q9DCQH_ndGttTlxMwB6EMLlbKX8YeQGyp5GFHOX3k0MuNeVOeX1s/s1600/GlennGould2_1965_f.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 148px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHBqyMEifn8kBJLrW0JbiLp7h_i__pa50ChOvbY7ZJBWM59YXDjckD55LPk9x4xyUh39zt0SXYPjLMBEJedMevFB-q9DCQH_ndGttTlxMwB6EMLlbKX8YeQGyp5GFHOX3k0MuNeVOeX1s/s200/GlennGould2_1965_f.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5556162091530658114" /></a><br />Glenn Gould was the wizard of my adolescent years. <div><br /></div><div>His playing first blazed into my imagination through a rebroadcast on CBC's "Sunday Arts Entertainment" of his performance from the 60s of Beethoven's <i>Tempest Sonata</i>, which I was then learning, which he played without notes and so crisply, cleanly, and inexorably that I grabbed a VHS tape and got about 2/3rds of the first movement and the rest of the second and third. On the same program, perhaps, or soon after, his performance of Beethoven's Op. 69 Cello and Piano Sonata in A major with Leonard Rose was aired, again with him playing from memory, somewhat involved in theatrics, and playing with a deep passion that seemed to reach beyond the music. This reaching has inspired in me a life-long search for what it was he saw, what any true artist sees, just beyond the edge of our perception, yet firmly grounded in our abilities and capacities as humans.</div><div><br /></div><div>I don't know at which point Gould crossed the line in my life from a performer to something akin to a soulmate, a personality preserved in film and recording and written and spoken words, which seemed more alive to me than some people who actually were alive. </div><div><br /></div><div>In his projection of alienation there was intimacy, an intimacy of the kind that I was denied through the social convention that said boys had to date girls and vice-versa that was prevalent when and where I grew up. Gould transcended the need for such relationships by bringing you so close to the center of music that it was like opening a beating heart and seeing a level of reality that was astonishing, ugly yet enticingly beautiful, different from conventional representation, and life-changing in its realization. </div><div><br /></div><div>The artificiality of his playing was yet honest, deeply probing, and provoking in a way that merely another lovely, let alone a so-called "correct," performance could never have been. Music lived for him and through him in a way that bewitched some, enraged others, and cheered still many more. </div><div><br /></div><div>The ecstasy of his playing, so clear in even his latest recordings, seems to rise to a new, reaching level just as his star was eclipsing (listen to the Brahms Ballades Op. 10, recorded in February of his last year, 1982, especially the middle section of Op. 10 #3). </div><div><br /></div><div>And yet his personality was paramount for me. </div><div><br /></div><div>II.</div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps for years I figured that Glenn Gould was gay too. There was little evidence to the contrary, and those who knew him best guarded his privacy like good friends would, denying any such rumors that he was gay. The reality of Gould's relationships came out to the broader public only very recently, in the last few years, and most recently in a recent broadcast of a fairly new documentary about him, <i>Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould</i>. </div><div><br /></div><div>I first saw this documentary in a theater a few months ago, and many things were revelatory, such as his relationship with Cornelia Foss, not something that was part of the broadcasts on Sunday Arts Entertainment years ago. </div><div><br /></div><div>Yet the reality of Gould's sexuality does not detract from his fundamental queerness, or his fundamental normality--he was a man whose eccentricities got the better of some of his relationships, and yet was one who, surprise!, craved human connection despite his growing need for electronic space.</div><div><br /></div><div>Yet see, nearly 30 years after his death, just how much electronic space has come to define our relationships? This medium of self-publishing random thoughts to random people, the connection to social media that was never even a glint in Glenn's eye during his lifetime, yet would have served his lifestyle well, have become the norm. Electronic space, via computer platforms, social media, Skype and other modern versions of telephony, gives each of our lives a distance and an intimacy that now defines a new, perhaps queer, normality.</div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps our whole era has attained a level of eccentricity through all of these new means of communication and social organization that makes each of us queerly normal in relation to those who have gone before. </div><div><br /></div><div>III.</div><div><br /></div><div>Another element of Gould's personality was the power of it to bring me through what easily could have been a time of extended despondency in those dark and frustrating teenage years; this seems to be something that he also unwittingly did for many. During my sophomore year of high school, when I was most frightened about people in my class, home, and elsewhere finding out that I was gay, and most frustrated that nobody else seemed to be like me, I listened to Gould's 1981 recording of Bach's <i>Goldberg Variations</i> nearly every night, it offering me 50 minutes of peace and structure in a life that felt chaotic and uncertain, the Variations beginning, growing, changing, and coming back to home base at the end. </div><div><br /></div><div>Anyone who knew me in those years would recall my obsession with Gould, which I had hoped at the time might play out into a biography, as there was only one available in those years, Otto Friedeich's "Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations," which, though extensive, still left me wanting to know more. I voraciously ingested every fact, anecdote, or even reference to Glenn Gould that I could get my hands on. The biography never materialized, but others followed, both biographies and more creative works based on Gould and his personality and musical life.</div><div><br /></div><div>During my senior year of high school, I used the proximity of Christmas and my birthday, as well as my graduation from high school, to wrangle a trip to Toronto in September 1992 as a "student delegate" to the Glenn Gould Conference, one of the most amazing weeks of those years and one of the more memorable weeks of my life. Not only was it my first time all on my own in a city, but it also put me in contact with dozens of people who knew, worked with, studied with, and even were related to Gould. </div><div><br /></div><div>His assistant, Ray Roberts, was there, along with some of his fellow piano students from the Toronto Conservatory, some musicians with whom he'd made music, and, perhaps most poignantly, his father Herbert, then 90 years old. I will never forget, in particular, the day that we all went to Glenn's grave in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto. I had the opportunity there to pay my respects to Mr. Gould, and he graciously accepted my condolences on the death of his son 10 years earlier. </div><div><br /></div><div>Later that year, I submitted a series of questions to Mr. Gould through Ray Roberts & Glenn Gould's lawyer, Stephen Posen, which related to Gould's childhood and experience in school. I've never shared these answers with anyone, not out of a sense of privacy, but because I never thought they would particularly interest anyone. If they might interest you, please let me know. </div><div><br /></div><div>IV.</div><div><br /></div><div>I don't know if Glenn Gould was conservative or liberal when it came to sexuality. One story related by one of his friends remembers some random stranger showing him porn in a restaurant once, and Glenn being quite undone by the experience. Who knows. I can imagine that his confidants, who denied that he was gay long before this recent documentary came out, might not want him to be labeled "queer," even though, in a very extended way, he was. </div><div><br /></div><div>But at the same time, he was not quite in the same way "normal" as society still somewhat expects people to be. He could not become legal brothers with a close co-worker and collaborator. Yet why not, but for social convention not reaching that point of realizing that we're all cousins at some distant point in the past, and if cousins, why not brothers and sisters?</div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps "queerly normal" goes as far towards describing Glenn Gould as can be done. He didn't have to be eccentric, or distant, or isolated, or ecstatic to be who he was, yet all of those things contributed to who he was and became even as his problems with things that he did not want to state were problems grew in his last decade. Some have said, notably the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, that if he had married like most people do, and taken some of the energy he put into music and thought into a family, he might have lived longer. Who's to say?</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm still turned on by Gould's playing, by the personality that made it what it was, which still in its strange way makes for a feeling of home. </div>Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-4274647246162746482010-09-11T23:52:00.005-05:002010-09-17T13:51:05.876-05:00My Ideas Should Not Depend on Yours for Their ValidityAnother nocturnal walk brings another epiphany: My ideas should not have to depend on your believing them as I do in order for them to have validity, and vice-versa. It seems so simple, something that I have heard countless times, but tonight it is clicking in a new way for me.<div><br /></div><div>A friend of mine, Matt, helped me to realize this today when he wrote in his blog about <a href="http://www.themindofmatt.com/archives/6165">why he does not, shall we say, see religion in the same way I do</a>. Check him out at <a href="http://www.themindofmatt.com/">www.themindofmatt.com</a>. We agreed, however, that we can respectfully agree to disagree, and remain friends, indeed are even more respectful as a result.</div><div><br /></div><div>We live in a time, of which we are reminded every 9/11, indeed every day, of extremely dysfunctional political, philosophical, and theological relationships. The red states (counties, cities) are getting redder, and the blue states are getting bluer, and I think that makes all of us both red and blue in our own way. The culture wars ratchet up, and only seem to be getting more intractable day by day and year by year. Congress deadlocks, court decisions are discounted as "activist," families are torn apart, and friendships seem impossible to form with those who don't believe exactly as we do.</div><div><br /></div><div>It hasn't always been this way, and it doesn't have to be this way.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>I.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here is the epiphany: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">1. Ideas (religious, political, or otherwise) become dangerous when we have to force them on others to validate them for ourselves; 2. If my beliefs do not depend on your believing them in order to gain their validity, and vice-versa, we can respect each others' independence of thought.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Let's play with this a bit. Suppose you are a Bible-believing Christian who does not allow for homosexuality as a variation of human sexuality because the Bible disapproves of it in at least seven passages (more, according to our friends at the <a href="http://www.godhatesfags.com/">Westboro Baptist Church</a>). The Bible clearly states that a man who lies with a man as with a woman commits to'evah, an abomination, and the blood of the both shall be upon them; they shall both be put to death. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Short of actually working to carry out that rather horrific scene, what is wrong with believing this? As it turns out, plenty, if this belief is, as it often is, forced on others. Because this belief has had countless political consequences as a result of being "forced on" those who do not believe in this way. Parents have disowned their children, or rejected them, students have beaten and sexually abused other students, school districts, the military, churches, and other institutions have imposed a strangling code silence, and states have prevented marriage, all in the name of upholding the beliefs of some. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">What would it look like to be truly "neutral" with regard to these beliefs? </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">It would look neutral if, and only if, I say to you that I believe this, but I am not going to impose this belief on you through curtailing your civil rights, insulting your personhood, tearing apart your families, firing you from your jobs, and preventing you from voicing your views. Why? Because you let me do the same as I let you: speak the truth as you see it.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Many things in the Bible are to'evah, not least of which is what comes almost immediately before Leviticus 20:13, the verse quoted above about men lying with men as being an act punishable by death. The act of which I am thinking is quoted more often throughout the Bible than "a man shall not lie with a man as with a woman." </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Here it is in Exodus (21:7): "Anyone who curses his father or mother shall be put to death." Again, in Leviticus (20:9), "If anyone curses his father or mother, he must be put to death. He has cursed his father or his mother, and his blood will be on his own head (NIV)." Again in Proverbs (20:20): "If a man curses his father or mother, his lamp will be snuffed out in pitch darkness." </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Even Jesus finds this verse important enough to repeat verbatim in Matthew (15:4) and Mark (7:10): "For God [or Moses, in Mark] said, 'Honor your father and mother,' and 'Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.'" Jesus says this!! Nice, good Jesus.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">How many children have cursed their fathers or mothers for any number of reasons? And how many of those children have we put to death, or driven to death by saying that we must hate their sin of cursing their father or mother, while loving them as sinners? </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">How many preachers are advocating that children, or adult children, be put to death for this cursing? How many "ministries" exist to "cure" children of cursing their fathers or mothers? </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">How many children are thrown out in the street for cursing their fathers or their mothers? And how many schools impose strict policies on their students and staff never to curse their fathers or their mothers?</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">I imagine the number is pretty low.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">I wouldn't hate you for believing that your children should be put to death for cursing you. I'd think it an awfully strange thing to think, and I would oppose your imposing that thought on your children in a way that would damage them. I'd probably even say it's a good thing my Mom or Dad didn't toss me off a bridge at numerous points during my growing up. And I'm sure your Mom and/or Dad, or Mom & Mom, or Dad & Dad, would say the same thing about you.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>II.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Why, I ask, must we force our views on others? Must we insist that if you do not believe as I do, that we should have nothing to discuss further? Must we insist that everyone throughout the world should live as we do, and should believe the same beliefs in the same way? Because there are indeed a large variety of beliefs, which, as long as they do not end up building walls of shame, walls of isolation, and literal walls around others, as long as they do not lead us to fly into towers or start wars, as long as they do not lead us to codify laws and policies to restrict others from expressing their own beliefs, as long as they do not lead us to think ourselves better people or more worthy of living than others, as long as they can be spoken in a way that do not start riots throughout the world, why not speak them?</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">I respect you, and you respect me, when we can agree to disagree on some things.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Building conversations on this basis, rather than on the basis of forcing each other to believe as we do, can build relationships, tear down walls, and save lives.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">I cannot believe that my ideas are so weak that they must depend on your assent to them for validity, or vice-versa. I believe what I believe, from my experience, from what faith has been given me, from what my own human mind has been able to reason out, and there you have it: a thoughtful conclusion.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>III.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">I can see many ways in which people would disagree with me, or see this stance as being naive or untenable. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">For one, people do, out of both fear and a will to dominate, impose their beliefs on others in countless ways. Whether it be through weakness of character or joy in domination, people seem invariably to fight to be right. I myself like being right and being agreed with when it comes to something that I find important. But, for example, because my friend Matt does not believe that this bread and this wine is the body and blood of Christ, that does not prevent me from believing that the elements are the real presence of Jesus Christ, the son of God, the savior.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">For another, particularly from a religious point of view, those who do not believe as we do <i>transgress</i>, indeed break the law, that we ourselves must live by in order to have the kind of life that we feel we must live. But, for example, are heterosexual marriages so inherently weak that they cannot tolerate people living in same-sex marriages? Are same-sex relationships so inherently desirable that they will entice those who would otherwise be out making babies to stay home and make whoopee instead? Are your children so weak of mind and character that they will glom on to every view expressed to them, and try out every possibility floated in their direction?</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">It seems to me asinine, not to mention disproven by experience, that people will try everything and become anything to which they are exposed. If this were the case, we'd have a nation of rapists, drug addicts, and especially murderers, given the amount of this activity that is shown on television, let alone video games. I worry about how certain song lyrics and video games that extol violence against women give young people the impression that it is OK to rape. But I also fear the stance that mentioning a fun weekend at Valley Fair with your gay boyfriend will have any impact on a whole class of children's sexual development. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">This is not merely a plea for tolerance, but for allowing others to live the lives that are given them, and trusting that, given plenty of lessons in respecting others, they will carry out that respect themselves. </span></span></div>Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-90307032722923015442010-09-11T00:02:00.007-05:002010-09-17T13:49:51.985-05:00"Leverage the Voice of Love"<div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span>I.</div><div><br /></div>Nocturnal walks have always been helpful to me. Walking out in the rain tonight, just now, a phrase came to me, I have no idea from where, but it is something that quivers with possibility: "Leverage the voice of love."<div><br /></div><div>What does this mean? What is the "voice of love," and how is it to be leveraged?</div><div><br /></div><div>The need for the voice of love today is greater than ever. On this 9th anniversary of 9/11, we seem to be threatened from so many corners: terrorism, extremism, racism, homophobia, sexism, overpopulation, environmental disaster, natural disaster, and the list goes on. </div><div><br /></div><div>And I hear: "Leverage the voice of love."</div><div><br /></div><div>What a concept! The voice of love, which seems to have been drowned out by voices of fear and hate, needs help. It needs each of us who hear it to say that we're hearing it, and that it must be brought out from its closet of fear, from underneath its bushel, and placed where it will shine as a beacon in the night to all who live in despair.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Leverage the voice of love." Don't let it go out. Don't let it get so quiet that it is no longer heard. Don't assume that it will speak for itself. Don't assume that it is not <i>your</i> voice, or that someone else will say what is in your heart to say.</div><div><br /></div><div>The cadence catches my ear--the assonance, the meter, the symmetry. "Leverage the voice of love."</div><div><br /></div><div>This is a call to act--and the action is one which does not take so much work or thought. It does not take a genius to be loving, or a master of divinity to realize that it is within our souls to speak at such a time that needs to hear the voice of love, reason, and grace. It only takes one to speak up and say, "I love."</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span>II.</div><div><br /></div><div>In particular today I am thinking about the need for this voice leveraged strongly in the <a href="http://www.anoka.k12.mn.us/education/components/links/links.php?sectionid=29370">Anoka/Hennepin school district area</a>, where the suicides of 7 students, some of whom were gay or perceived to be gay or lesbian, have bereft dear people of their loved ones, much like several thousand were bereft on a 9/11 many years ago.</div><div><br /></div><div>Tonight, I was fortunate, indeed blessed, to share the table of Tammy and Shawn Aaberg, and their sons who remain, as they and I were interviewed on the death of their son, Justin, to suicide, and to some extent the relation of his death to the Anoka/Hennepin <a href="http://www.anoka.k12.mn.us/education/page/download.php?fileinfo=NjA0LjExX1NleHVhbF9PcmllbnRhdGlvbl9DdXJyaWN1bHVtX1BvbGljeS5wZGY6Ojovd3d3Ni9zY2hvb2xzL21uL2Fub2thL2ltYWdlcy9kb2NtZ3IvMTUwNDlfZmlsZV80ODU4NV9tb2RfMTI2MDk5MTE5MC5wZGY=">policy of "neutrality"</a> on matters of sexual orientation within the curriculum of the District. I brought the voice of a concerned outsider to their lives and the district, but they shared what was rending their hearts at the most personal loss anyone can experience--the loss of a child.</div><div><br /></div><div>Their hospitality to me and the interviewer was as moving to me as their story. I, a stranger in their home, was treated as a welcomed guest. It is hospitality that was given to us freely and gracefully and lovingly as the hospitality that Jesus offers to his own.</div><div><br /></div><div>I did not know Justin, but I would have walked through fire for him, to stop those who were tormenting him. Never underestimate the voice of love within you, and know that there are those out there who would walk through fire for you, whom you do not even know. Never forget that your voice might be the one to save a life.</div><div><br /></div><div>The story of Justin's loss will soon be known more widely within the gay community through this interview, and in the Minneapolis/St. Paul community through a report that will be broadcast on WCCO news in the Minneapolis metropolitan area this coming Monday night (9/13/10) at 10pm. More will rise up who would walk through fire for Justin, for Tammy, Shawn, and their remaining dear sons, for every student of Anoka/Hennepin who still lives in fear and abuse and for whom despair is a daily diet, for each person who hears that God hates "their sin," which is indeed a message in the case of many that God hates them. You, dear reader, may be one to rise up.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Leverage the voice of love."</div><div><br /></div><div>The voice of love, that which has touched my heart through so many voices in my life, starting with my own parents and sister, through so many family, friends, teachers, mentors, ministers, and even through people I have hardly known, this is the voice that we must raise to the highest rafters of torture and pain, the voice that cuts despair, the voice that destroys terrorism by transcending it, because the power of love is stronger than the power of hate. </div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span>III.</div><div><br /></div><div>The voice of love too is the voice that God speaks when God says, "This is my son, the beloved, in whom I am well-pleased." This is the voice that God speaks to each of us, in our desolation and torment, the voice that God was quietly yet persistently speaking as Jesus, God's own son, was dying on the cross, lost, isolated, forgotten, and ashamed, in his own crucifixion.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Leverage the voice of love."</div><div><br /></div><div>This is the voice that my cinematic hero, Father Barry in "On the Waterfront," raised from the depths of a death ship in which one was killed for the cause of justice. Father Barry said of that death: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XLbRI0kdLg"> "That is a crucifixion."</a> </div><div><br /></div><div>Anytime a policy takes precedence over peoples' lives, <i>that</i> is a crucifixion. Anytime people put their ideas over the lives of others, whether those ideas are religious or political, whether those voices are Christian, Muslim, Liberal, or Conservative, <i>that is a crucifixion. </i>Lives will <i>always</i> be more important than ideas or policies, which should only serve to protect lives and not help to end them, although sometimes lives must be lost to defend the ideas and principles of freedom that our country was founded on, that all were created equal, <i>all</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>By the account of his parents and those who knew him, Justin's was a voice of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOMPpTkTCsA">music</a>, laughter, and love for his friends, his parents, his brothers, and many others. A voice any one of us would have been privileged to hear. A voice that none of us will hear again spoken alive in this life.</div><div><br /></div><div>But as the voices of those who could have spoken for him in the place of his torment, in his school, were silenced, so was his. For the neutrality on sexual orientation with respect to curriculum that staff are required to follow extends far beyond what the staff may or may not say or do with respect to curriculum, and, I think, far beyond what the School Board may realize as its intended reach. The consequences of this policy impact the lives of its students.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span>IV.</div><div><br /></div><div>I appreciate that the Anoka/Hennepin district has begun to take <a href="http://www.anoka.k12.mn.us/education/components/whatsnew/default.php?sectiondetailid=233410&itemID=32271">concrete measures</a> to stop the violence against its LGBTQ students. It is to be commended on beginning to take these steps. My last blog entry elicited the response from the district that I was acting on misinformation, which could be true to some degree, but <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTvjCOIZEYg">I am not mistaken about the effects of their policy</a>, one which existed over a year ago when two teachers were called out on their torment of one of their students, based on their student's perceived (and not actual) sexual orientation. </div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/08/13/student-harassed/">The district paid out $25,000 a full year ago</a> to this student because of their torment of him, but did not admit that there was a problem beyond this supposedly isolated case, and one of those teachers in fact <a href="http://www.startribune.com/local/north/98376439.html">sought compensation for being "outed"</a> as a tormentor. My hope is that her outing did not subject her to the same treatment that she visited upon her own student. </div><div><br /></div><div>By treating this harassment as an isolated incident and not the result of a systemic problem, caused in great part by the neutrality policy, the District enabled the harassment of others to continue, which it does to this day.</div><div><br /></div><div>The real kicker with this policy is the sentence: "Staff are encouraged to take into consideration individual student needs and refer students to the appropriate social worker or licensed school counselor." </div><div><br /></div><div>Although this sounds wise and professional, unfortunately conversations with social workers and counselors are subject to a higher degree of confidentiality, unless these conversations approach topics of harm to self or others, while conversations with teachers are at a lower degree of confidentiality. Teachers could inform parents of warning signs and bad experiences far ahead of the time that social workers and counselors could. This was the case with Justin, and may have been the case with many others. </div><div><br /></div><div>As long as the policy of neutrality exists, no step the district might take will be able to topple the wall of abuse that meets many in the course of their daily lives. No action will be sufficient to allow people who are experiencing despair to reach out in trust to their teachers and speak the words that they must speak to stop the violence from happening to them.</div><div><br /></div><div>For, let's be honest, what really is a policy that enjoins its staff to be neutral on matters of sexual orientation actually saying? </div><div><br /></div><div>It is not telling staff or students that they cannot mention matters of heterosexual sexual orientation. Because if that were the case, they could not talk about anyone, gay or straight. Sexual orientation is a deep part of everyone, no matter the particularity of their sexual orientation. </div><div><br /></div><div>Neutrality on "sexual orientation" is a polite euphemism for not saying anything about homosexuality. </div><div><br /></div><div>Imagine if teachers could not mention their opposite-sex spouses, girlfriends, or boyfriends in class. Imagine if they could not display a picture or wear a ring on a prominent finger. Imagine if their sexual orientation were considered by parents as a disease that their kids could catch. </div><div><br /></div><div>This is the real meaning of "neutrality"--silence on homosexuality. And, as was said in the 80s when thousands were dying from AIDS and the government was doing far less to stop it than Anoka/Hennepin is doing to combat bullying, silence = death.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span>V.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Leverage the voice of love." The phrase continues to sing in my mind's ear. Who are the voices of love in your life? What do they have to say at this time of crisis, which for many is a crisis of faith as well--faith in others, in God, and in a system that proclaims itself a protector of each of its students? How can we work together to bring these voices together, to leverage their love and the power they have to transcend hate?</div><div><br /></div><div>We've all got work to do in getting these voices of love together, of focusing them at a problem that will not go away by mere dint of thought. At the very least, we can raise our voice, to let one other person know about what is going on in the Anoka/Hennepin school district, or in the district closer to you, to raise the voice of love that says "I do not hate you, my brother/sister," or to say "I will not burn your sacred book," or to say "I will walk through fire for you."</div><div><br /></div><div>As another of my heroes of faith said, "Love must act as light must shine and fire must burn." <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Otis_Sargent_Huntington">Father James Otis Sargent Huntington's</a> voice of love speaks clearly some 75 years after his death. And he is right: Love must act.</div><div><br /></div><div>Leverage the voice of love--of your love, and of the love of all whom you know. Bring these voices together into one powerful tool of healing, that will not let terrorism, whether it be from without or within, have the final say.</div><div><br /></div><div>For this is the time when the voices of love must come together and act. </div><div><br /></div><div> </div>Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5005000988084825442.post-17245644393402482712010-08-31T14:56:00.003-05:002010-09-13T10:58:48.358-05:00Anoka/Hennepin: Tear Down That Wall (of Deadly Homophobia)!<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiclfL8zXi09RvlAov0gmzVTWR36nII3TYnTAcYYuBVAyBUELOg3yTEVKFebVR6Yw3-h46EAQ2VMmmLqbJPf7rp-3rsSi-D-ko47IT62v7M99OhXu96ZjFJFFv6Q8LTyP859rNhqaarUTE/s1600/berlin+wall+fall.gif"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiclfL8zXi09RvlAov0gmzVTWR36nII3TYnTAcYYuBVAyBUELOg3yTEVKFebVR6Yw3-h46EAQ2VMmmLqbJPf7rp-3rsSi-D-ko47IT62v7M99OhXu96ZjFJFFv6Q8LTyP859rNhqaarUTE/s320/berlin+wall+fall.gif" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5512007579773207202" /></a><br />In the last year, 7 young people in the <a href="http://www.anoka.k12.mn.us/">Anoka/Hennepin School District</a> have committed suicide, 3 directly related to being or being perceived as LGBTQ. The wall of silence, also known in the district as "<a href="http://www.anoka.k12.mn.us/education/page/download.php?fileinfo=NjA0LjExX1NleHVhbF9PcmllbnRhdGlvbl9DdXJyaWN1bHVtX1BvbGljeS5wZGY6Ojovd3d3Ni9zY2hvb2xzL21uL2Fub2thL2ltYWdlcy9kb2NtZ3IvMTUwNDlfZmlsZV80ODU4NV9tb2RfMTI2MDk5MTE5MC5wZGY=">neutrality</a>," is creating some strange fruit hanging from the trees up there.<div><br /></div><div>Because, although they say that these youth committed suicide, they were actually killed by those within their community, their schools, their churches, and in other contexts that should rather have held their tongues than spouted wounding words. It was merely a sleight of the District's hand that made it look like the young people killed themselves. </div><div><br /></div><div>What a sleight of hand the Anoka/Hennepin School Board pulled by saying that the sexual orientation policy had to do only with curriculum, and not with bullying! As though they weren't able to see a connection between the wall of silence they created, the bullying by students, teachers, pastors, some family members, and other "concerned citizens," and the deaths that resulted.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Anoka/Hennepin School Board had such a problem with hearing the truth about their policies in their August 23, 2010 meeting, that the recording of those proceedings was somehow glitched or lost. This was the meeting at which the mother and friends of Justin Aaberg, one of the gay youth who committed suicide in that district, spoke from their hearts about how his death affected them, and how the district is still a dangerous place for LGBTQ, and even hetero, youth. </div><div><br /></div><div>This is a Berlin Wall moment. </div><div><br /></div><div>The wall of homophobia that was built around these youth, the wall of hatred and bureaucratic nonsense that was built around those for whom sexual orientation was not the main factor in their deaths, must be toppled once and for all.</div><div><br /></div><div>Anoka/Hennepin School Board, what is keeping you from saving the lives of your students? Is it the mis-named PAL, <a href="http://www.parentsactionleague.org/">Parents Action League</a>, which hides itself behind a wall of anonymity? Which cries about receiving hate mail, as though it has not been out to engender it? Which claims as its motto, "Education, not Indoctrination," when what is meant by indoctrination is enacting measures that will stop gay kids from killing themselves?</div><div><br /></div><div>Anoka/Hennepin area Churches (of the variety that preach against homosexuality), is it your contention that God wants gay and lesbian kids dead? Do you believe that the heart of the Gospel is in Leviticus 20:13? Do you pride yourselves on the success of this message over that of the saving Gospel? Because the Gospel <b>SAVES</b>; it does not <b>KILL</b>.</div><div><br /></div><div>To paraphrase Psalm 13, How Long, Anoka/Hennepin, will you lay waste to those who did you no wrong?</div><div><br /></div><div>How long will you taunt, spit at, beat up, and terrorize young people who did nothing but get up and go to school?</div><div><br /></div><div>How long will you preach that God is a super-terrorist, that the fulfillment of the Gospel is death of those you believe God would oppose, that Jesus was more concerned with where a person's penis was put than where a person's heart is?</div><div><br /></div><div>How long will you justify yourselves with policies, when coffins continue to be draped in a sea of tears?</div><div><br /></div><div>How long will you say that it is a "lifestyle choice" that leads to these deaths, when no different or discernible "lifestyle" was at the root of the hatred, terror, and brutality that actually led to these deaths?</div><div><br /></div><div>How long will you seek your seat of power in a young man's coffin?</div><div><br /></div><div>How long will you lose the evidence of your wrongs? (Update: video of the August 23, 2010, Anoka/Hennepin School Board Meeting, is now (9/12/10) available. See Tammy Aaberg at 15:20 <a href="http://anoka-k12.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=2&clip_id=53">here</a>, and listen to subsequent explanation by the School Board Chair, and further testimony of abuse around the Neutrality policy.)</div><div><br /></div><div>Consider, and answer me!</div><div><br /></div><div>Answer for those who have fallen, and those who will continue to fall as long as your feet drag!</div><div><br /></div><div>Answer for those families you have helped to tear apart, and those lives you have ended!</div><div><br /></div><div>Answer for those careers you have threatened to end because your people have wanted to provide some small measure of support or solace!</div><div><br /></div><div>Answer for those people who will hear the word "Jesus," and see a man with a gun!</div><div><br /></div><div>Hear those, O God, who call out to you "Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death, and my enemy will say, 'I have prevailed.'"</div><div><br /></div><div>Hear those, Anoka/Hennepin School District, whose voices are still crying out in pain.</div><div><br /></div><div>Hear those who want only to live their lives in peace.</div><div><br /></div><div>Hear those who want only to live another day, to see another sun rise.</div><div><br /></div><div>Hear those who want only to love those who are in their hearts to love.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is time for you to choose: </div><div><br /></div><div>Your policies, or your people. </div><div><br /></div><div>Your ideas, or your youth.</div><div><br /></div><div>Your bullies, or your innocent.</div><div><br /></div><div>Choose wisely. God is watching.<br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div>Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13300596637986884250noreply@blogger.com5