Breaking Silence, Rolling the Stone Away

I’m thinking about silence today. My email this morning contains an announcement from Ashon Crawley of Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN) regarding the National Day of Silence that will be observed in American schools this year on 25 April in memory of Lawrence King.

This annual GLSEN-sponsored observance is an effort to address school bullying, particularly violence in schools fueled by prejudice against those tagged as LGBT or gender-inappropriate. As I’ve noted before on this blog, in conjunction with the LOGO network, GLSEN has produced an important video announcement about this year’s National Day of Silence and Lawrence King’s murder. For those who haven’t yet viewed this resource, it’s at www.dayofsilence.org/content/video.html.

Ashon Crawley’s email announcement notes that silence takes many forms. It can be the kind of silence that is golden, the moment when we let out a deep breath and relax to take in the beauty of a landscape.

Alternatively, silence can be the deformative silence that is imposed on persons and groups of people by those who do not wish to hear the words a person or a group needs to speak in order to assert humanity, or to combat social norms that deform the person or group. As Crawley notes,

But there are times when silence is not sweet, times when silence isn’t chosen but when it is forced upon us. There are instances when silence bespeaks unhappiness. When a person or group is silenced, the choice to speak is stolen. Silencing of others is an act of coercion, making tangible inequitable distributions of power. So though there may be times when silence is golden, there are many other instances when silence is traumatic and terrifying. LGBTQ people are quite familiar with being silenced: having our lives questioned to the point that we fatigue from speaking; sometimes, literally lacking the words that convey our sense of being to the world; instances where our voices are effectively cut out of conversations.

LGBTQ people are quite familiar with being silenced. We are indeed. I’ve reported on this thread that at my last position as a professional educator in a church-based university, I was charged with the task of leading the faculty in developing a curriculum centered around civic engagement and social transformation.

In that capacity, I mentioned—on a single occasion—that GLSEN’s educational initiatives (among many other initiatives of other organizations addressing social problems) might be a resource for faculty to consider. I did so because the locale in which I was working was one in which violence against both homeless people and youth identified as gender-inappropriate was reaching epidemic proportions, both in schools and outside the school grounds.

Merely for mentioning GLSEN as a possible resource in the project I was charged to lead, I was severely punished. I was told to be silent. I was told I had “put my lifestyle into the face of colleagues.” LGBTQ people are quite familiar with being silenced, indeed.

This is silence that is intended to dehumanize those on whom it is imposed, to suggest that our humanity is less than that of those who are allowed to speak and to define social reality for themselves and the rest of us. It is the silence that is intended to keep our stories from being heard, because in coming to know us as human beings, others may come to see that our humanity is not inferior to theirs—that we offer another way to be human in a world that desperately needs many different models of humanity to match the diversity of the world’s population.

Silence never truly silences those who are oppressed—not when we continue to think, cherish our humanity against the blows of those trying to diminish it, love and dream. As Labi Siffre’s powerful anthem of liberation to which I linked in yesterday’s blog, “Something Inside So Strong,” says,

The more you refuse to hear my voice
The louder I will sing
You hide behind walls of Jericho
Your lies will come tumbling
Deny my place in time
You squander wealth that's mine
My light will shine so brightly
It will blind you
‘Cause there's......

Something inside so strong
I know that I can make it

This is the hope of the resurrection. This is the central message of the resurrection. Every power in the world in which Jesus lived sought to silence him, because his message that the reign of God had broken into the world was intolerable for those controlling the world in which he lived. This message of God’s preferential love for those on the margins, for prostitutes, for social outcasts, for the poor and the downtrodden, was unacceptable to those who profited from things as they were.

As a result, the powers that be in Jesus’s world sought to silence him definitively. They hung him on a cross and watched him breathe his last. They placed him in a tomb, and rolled a rock across the entrance. They left him there in a silence that, in their expectation, would be forever.

The Easter message is that Jesus remains alive beyond all attempts to silence and humiliate him, all attempts to stand athwart history and say “stop!” to movements of hope and progressive change. Far from silencing him, those who humiliated him by consigning him to the lowly fate of a common criminal made his voice louder, strong, universal.

I am not among those Christians who believe that only in Jesus is the voice of the divine accessible to the world. In my view, there are many ways to hear that voice, and followers of Jesus stand to gain much by listening for the voice of God in religious traditions other than their own—and in the lives and witness of those who may repudiate religion altogether, given their experience of the demonic face of religious groups, a face that every religion is capable of displaying.

I use the theological language of Christianity, of death and resurrection, of hope premised on this pivotal event in human history, because I grew up within a Christian culture, and that culture forms the framework of my religious imagination. In using this language, I make no claim that it is the unique, solitary way of talking about the intrusion of the divine into human history. To make such a claim would be to deny what is evident to anyone with eyes to see: that God manifests Godself in the world in many different ways, through many different religious traditions, and that, at the same time that religious communities across the globe sometimes show demonic faces to the world, all religious communities are also capable of being vehicles of salvation.

In my own Christian-framed religious imagination, part of the message of the resurrection is that one lives now as if the reign of God to which Jesus pointed—and for proclaiming which he was put to death—is already breaking forth in human history. Because of our witness to the resurrectional force of Jesus’s life and message, we live now as if the world has begun to change significantly, even when we recognize that our hopes point to dreams that have not yet come to pass.

We live for a more humane world at the same time that we are painfully aware that this world does not yet exist. We commit ourselves to making that world evident in our lives, to creating the conditions for making that world possible in the lives of others. We try to live as Rilke encouraged the aspiring poet to live in his Letters to a Young Poet: “Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

It is against this backdrop of the already here but not yet, of crucifixion-resurrection, that I keep seeking to address the social problems that reach my own tiny life, that call forth a concern in my own shriveled heart. It is against this backdrop that I struggle to keep talking in a world that seeks to silence those who speak from the margins, who insist on saying what others do not want to have said.

Only when such discourse can find a way to make itself heard beyond the margins, will the world will ever truly change for the better. As Ashon Crawley’s reflections suggest—as the National Day of Silence indicates—silence about school bullying and its root causes only reinforces the violence that will continue to repeat itself in our schools, unless we find ways to talk, to break silence.

Interestingly enough, after the New York Times posted its article yesterday about the bullying of Billy Wolfe in the Fayetteville, AR, school system, a blog discussion of this story developed on the website of the statewide free newspaper, Arkansas Times. This discussion was fascinating—more for what bloggers did not want to say or discuss, than for what they actually said.

The discussion began with a blogger reporting that he himself was bullied in an Arkansas school in the 1950s. Predictably, those bullying him tagged him as a “fag,” though he is heterosexual. Building on that account, another blogger noted that the same theme is present in the story of Billy Wolfe: though he identifies himself as straight, the Facebook site set up by his bullies (to which I referred in yesterday’s blog) refers to Billy Wolfe as “a little bitch” and a homosexual that no one likes.”

This theme of identifying boys as gay, and then abusing him because they are gay, is omnipresent in patterns of school bullying in American schools. We cannot address—we cannot solve—the problem of school bullying, without confronting this issue head on. In order to address school bullying, our schools have to address homophobia.

And yet, they do not want to go there. The churches do not want them to go there. Parents influenced by the churches often fight tooth and nail to keep any discussion of these issues out of our schools.

The blogger who brought up the omnipresent pattern of homophobia underlying bullying of boys in our schools was met by silence yesterday, on the Arkansas Times blog. Though discussion of the Billy Wolfe story continued throughout the day, other bloggers obviously did not wish to engage the homophobia issue.

This is the sadly typical response to analysis of school bullying as homophobia-incited: silence. Until we break this silence and move beyond it, until we discuss these issues honestly and openly, we will not resolve the problem of school bullying. And that means that more youth will be bullied in American schools. It means, sadly, that we are likely to see more incidents such as the Lawrence King incident in the future.

And, in a country that historian Martin Marty has called “a nation with the soul of a church,” there is no way to discuss the endemic problem of school bullying premised on homophobia without engaging the churches in the discussion. The churches are at the heart of the problem.

As a fine blog posting on the Bilerico Project website last week—Terrance Heath’s “Apology Accepted”—notes, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of American (ELCA) recently issued an apology to the LGBT community for the way in which historic Lutheran teachings have been used to wound, rather than welcome, gay people (see www.bilerico.com/2008/03/apology_accepted.php).

But as Heath also notes, the very way in which the announcement is framed—as part of a validation of the historic teaching that the only acceptable form of marriage is between one man and one woman—continues the wounding and unwelcoming process. Heath insightfully focuses on the way in which Christian teachings about marriage, and about the “natural” order of human sexuality, implicitly diminish the full humanity of gay human beings:

[B]eing gay means that I have to expect less and accept less from life. Being gay means I deserve less from life. I don’t deserve love, I don’t deserve family . . . . Of course that means understanding that as queers we must accept less and expect less from life than our heterosexual brothers and sisters, because we are less than our heterosexual brothers and sisters.

Churches cannot become welcoming spaces for LGBT persons as long as their teachings frame gay humanity as somehow less than the full humanity of straight human beings. And the problem of violent assaults on young people tagged as gay or gender-inappropriate will not be successfully addressed until the churches examine their own homophobia, and call on their members to cope with the homophobia that is inside all of us and is all-pervasive in American life.

There is hope. In this Easter season, I celebrate the prophetic witness of people like Sister Jeanine Gramick, on whom a Clerical Whispers blog posting focused last week (see http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/03/supporters-of-latin-mass-will-use.html).

Jeanine Gramick has been a longstanding fighter for gay rights in the Catholic church. She has suffered for standing up and speaking out. The Vatican has sought to silence her. Fortunately, it has not succeeded.

As Jeanine Gramick notes, her conscience does not permit her to remain silent. As the Clerical Whispers interview notes, Jeanine Gramick agrees with the observation of a Catholic bishops’ conference which says, "Prejudice against homosexuals is a greater infringement on the moral norm than any kind of sexual activity.”

Yet Jeanine Gramick wants to push the conversation further. As she notes: “Well, let's put this into practice. Instead of the Vatican making all these pronouncements about homosexual activity, let's make the pronouncement about the evils of prejudice and violence against the gay community. That's what we should be teaching."

Amen. Thank God for those who refuse to remain silent when the powers that be choose to silence them. Thank God for those like Jeanine Gramick, who choose to speak truth to power within the churches in which they remain active.