Ideas Percolating: The Church, HIV/AIDS, Poetry & Community

I.

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.

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.

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.

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.

II.

Here are three ideas I wish to resurrect with the Easter season:

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.

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 Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York, Gay Men and HIV: An Urgent Priority, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 have AIDS, as we have said even in our churchwide assemblies, but the church helps to cause AIDS and HIV transmission, and that still needs to be faced.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

These voices could speak powerfully through poetry, and perhaps are. An effort to bring these voices together into one prophetic source is sorely needed.

III.

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.

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.

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.

My Ideas Should Not Depend on Yours for Their Validity

Another 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.

A friend of mine, Matt, helped me to realize this today when he wrote in his blog about why he does not, shall we say, see religion in the same way I do. Check him out at www.themindofmatt.com. We agreed, however, that we can respectfully agree to disagree, and remain friends, indeed are even more respectful as a result.

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.

It hasn't always been this way, and it doesn't have to be this way.

I.

Here is the epiphany: 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.

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 Westboro Baptist Church). 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.

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.

What would it look like to be truly "neutral" with regard to these beliefs?

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.

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."

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."

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.

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?

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?

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?

I imagine the number is pretty low.

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.

II.

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?

I respect you, and you respect me, when we can agree to disagree on some things.

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.

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.

III.

I can see many ways in which people would disagree with me, or see this stance as being naive or untenable.

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.

For another, particularly from a religious point of view, those who do not believe as we do transgress, 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?

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.

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.