We're still on the road, though hope to be settled in by this evening--at which point, I will have more time to blog again.
I'm sorry about the formatting problems in my last post, which I only now noticed. The loss of paragraph markers is something that seems to be happening lately after I publish a post. Paragraphs are fine until I publish, and then they disappear. I'll keep trying to work on that problem.
Meanwhile, we're just about to leave Asheville, North Carolina, where we spent the evening. As many readers may know, Asheville has a noticeable LGBT population. In particular, many lesbian couples live in and around the city, and have contributed much to making it a livable, interesting cultural island in the western North Carolina mountains.
After we sat last evening at supper near a table with a number of these couples, all around our age, I woke in the evening thinking, "John McNeill's work is absolutely prophetic, when it notes (and it noted this years ago now) how much gay and lesbian couples offer society and the church through the love they share, which then flows out into the communities around them."
And as I thought about that, I asked myself why this story isn't better known. Obviously, it's not better known because the mainstream media rarely report on this aspect of gay culture. It's so much easier to grab a picture of a naked man on a bicycle during a pride parade, and plaster that over the pages of newspapers as an icon about what being gay "means."
But part of the blame for the lack of communication of our stories lies with the gay community itself. We have often internalized homophobia that interrupts our narratives, as we try to follow their line. We often fail to see ourselves clearly, beyond the lens of internalized homophobia.
We have significant stories to tell, and they need to be heard. But the telling has to begin with a process of healing inside ourselves that permits us to glimpse and understand our own narratives, as a preliminary to telling them.
