Colleen,
Once again, you’ve left a comment that is so rich, I want to lift it from the comments section and reply to it in my blog proper, rather than in the comments box.
Your comment focuses on the creativity, spirituality, and energy for institutional transformation that self-accepting gay folks bring to our vocations in secular and ecclesial institutions. Using transpersonal psychology, you say, I'm talking about a kind of freedom from gender typing, and because of that, a freedom to explore and accept other realms of thought, creativity, and spirituality.
Your analysis notes that, because gay folks have to learn to negotiate complex questions about gender roles in accepting our God-given human natures, we develop the ability to move between various definitions of ourselves demanded by the rules of straight society. In the process, we often develop a balance of male-female principles inside ourselves, which can translate into creativity and spirituality:
This is a case of knowing you have what it takes to be competent and successful in non traditional gender roles. In this sense gays exhibit a kind of both/and rather than either/or. This is very different from the straight world, where gender roles are much more tightly defined. This tight definition manifests sexually as well.
The gay way of being in the world, at its best, involves a both-and rather than either-or. The balance—or, better, creative tension—that gay people can achieve in learning to negotiate conflicting demands of gender roles, a creative tension rooted in the ability to hold together male-female principles inside ourselves, results in a release of creative energy with the potential to transform institutions that welcome self-accepting gay people and our talents.
Key to this release of creative energy is learning to transcend the either-or thinking of hierarchical institutions that want to subordinate one group to another—in particular, female to male:
There's a school of thought currently being developed which explains spiritual, creative, and relational abilities as products of sexual energy. Sexual energy can be really polluted when a person fails to deal with dominance and submission issues.
Social and ecclesial institutions locked into dominance-submission ways of thinking thwart the release of creative energy, because they siphon off a huge amount of energy that could be expended in institutional transformation in the work of maintaining the status quo, and in particular, the dominance of one group over another (often, of males over females):
The problem with this is that if you can't get out of that system you can't experience transcendence in creative expression, spirituality, or sexual relationships. As you say, maintaining takes precedence over mission.
I think you’re absolutely right in these observations. Since our spiritual life calls on us to discern the movement of spirit within our daily lives and the experiences of daily life, I can’t help “processing” your rich reflections through the prism of Steve’s and my most recent experiences at a United Methodist university in Florida.
The Florida United Methodist Conference website has uploaded an article about the recent General Conference’s discussion of LGBT people, and the decision to hold the line against us yet again at this General Conference. This article by reporter Tita Parham focuses on the need for continued dialogue about the place of gay people in the Methodist church in Florida (www.flumc.info/cgi-script/csArticles/articles/000047/004774.htm).
A response to this article by a lay leader of First United Methodist Church in Orlando, Robert MacLeish, focuses on the role played by the Florida UMC bishop, Timothy Whitaker, at the 30 April deliberations that resulted in the vote to hold the line. Mr. MacLeish states,
My heart goes out to our good Bishop. He was in a bind with that abominable, counter biblical homosexuality issue. It's a shame it must be dealt with when addressing it as sinful should be so simple a matter. My heart goes out to him also for having to abide by Roberts Rules of Order.
There’s quite a bit to note about this response to the 30 April vote at General Conference. Again, I want to stress that I do so in light of Steve’s and my experience of being actively recruited in 2006 by a Methodist college in Florida under the pastoral jurisdiction of Bishop Whitaker.
I’d like to suggest that our experience is, in some sense, paradigmatic. It’s paradigmatic for gay people in general, insofar as our being self-accepting, open, celebratory of the love and grace in our lives and relationships, threatens the status quo of the very institutions that tell us they need our creativity, energy, and transformative potential.
This is not the first time Steve and I have experienced this invitation-expulsion dynamic. We have learned much about it in our professional lives as openly gay theologians working in church-affiliated colleges.
We have learned that the church and its institutions want (and need) our talents and creative energy. But they do not want our openness. They do not want our honesty. They don’t want our integrity. They don’t want our love.
In other words, they want our talents and creative energy without wanting the very pre-conditions for the release of creative energy in our lives as a gay couple.
This creates a horrible quandary for gay people, vis-à-vis the churches. It creates a terrible quandary for those of us who still feel called by the Spirit to live vocational lives that have some connection to the churches—which are capable of tremendous cruelty and deceit towards us as gay human beings. (And I have to say honestly that it grows harder and harder for me as a gay person to see anything but evil in many churches today, given the extremes to which churches seem willing to go to keep gay people at bay.)
On the one hand, we have inside ourselves—precisely as a result of our willingness to undergo the hard struggle to understand and accept our God-given natures—creative energy that needs to flow somewhere. Somewhere good. It’s creative. It issues forth in our lives and hearts as the desire to do good in the world, by helping to build a better world. We know it's good and creative energy because it has good and creative results in the lives of those around us with whom we interact.
This energy flows forth in our lives and hearts, as well, because, having learned to celebrate our unique natures as God’s gift to us (and to others), we then often form strong loving relationships that endure one assault after another, in a world that wants to reduce who we are and what we do to sex, and not love. Living together in long-standing committed relationships in a world that offers almost no reinforcement for such relationships, and many obstacles to them, takes miracles, on a daily basis.
We bring all of this—this history of struggle to understand ourselves, to accept ourselves, to love—to the church-affiliated institutions that tell us they want and need our talents. These church-affiliated institutions then use the talents gladly, but just as gladly discard us when it is convenient to do so—when powerful monied pressure groups “notice” that there are gay folks working in church institutions and not hiding themselves or lying about who they are; when a leader without guts and courage finds it useful to scapegoat the gays in order to save her own skin; when rewards flow to such spineless leaders from the church itself precisely because they are willing to lie to and about the despised gays and to expel them in vicious rituals of public humiliation.
I’m looking at these dynamics as a problem for those of us who have to live with them and with their aftermath in our lives. I’d like now to turn the analysis around and to examine how these dynamics affect not us who are the obvious victim of them. I'd like to look at the the churches who employ these dynamics against us and to analyze the increasing cost the churches are paying by victimizing gay human beings.
I’d like to begin by noting that the churches clearly need energy. They need creative energy. The churches of Main Street USA are aging. They are, in fact, dying. Fewer young people take part in church life, and there is every indicator that this trend will continue into this new millennium.
The response of churches to this process of internal decay has often been to engage in ever more glitzy media shows, to commercialize themselves and the gospel message, to pander to the lowest common denominator in their expectations of discipleship, by reducing what they have to say to media sound-bites. This response has been “successful” insofar as it allows the churches of Main Street USA to stay afloat.
It continues, above all, to bring money into the business of church life—and churches are businesses. It allows the churches to congratulate themselves about all those they bring to Christ—that is, to engage in self-congratulation as long as they don’t ask critical questions about what bringing people to Christ actually means. As long as we equate success with how much money comes into the coffers, how many new buildings we throw up, how many heads we count in the pews on Sunday . . . .
At their heart, in the depths of their souls, the churches of Main Street USA experience a certain soulnessness today, I would propose. Many of those hanging on with their fingernails through the happy-clappy media shows recognize that something is wrong, radically wrong, and know in their bones that more glitz and more media and more bearded pretend-macho men leading the shows are not really going to address the soulness at the heart of it all.
For many of us, church is about something else altogether. It’s about engaging in authentic community, community that affirms each of us in our uniqueness, and values and uses the gifts we each bring to the table. Community celebrated when we gather around the Lord’s table, as children of God who all have a place there, as sinners all in need of the medicine of mercy. Community that makes it unthinkable for any of us to kneel beside another brother or sister in the Lord on Sunday and then knife that person in the back economically, professionally, and interpersonally on Monday.
We long for community that embodies the gospel message. We long for authenticity in the message we first live and second proclaim. We long for authentic connection to our spiritual roots, whether they are Franciscan, Wesleyan, Protestant, Catholic, whatever. We long to find our way around commercialized sound-bite distortions of our tradition that translate into mindless acceptance of any nonsense we are told in both the religious and political spheres.
And so enter the gays. The churches of Main Street USA are in a mess. Youth—the brightest and best of this generation—want nothing to do with the happy-clappy media-driven babble about winning souls for Christ. Most youth today in the global North know and love some specific gay folks who put a human face on the stereotype the churches continue to maintain. They cannot understand the cruelty and deceit that are the price the church is willing to pay to keep gay people and gay voices and gay talents outside.
The church needs the gays. The youth of the church know this and are raising their voices. The energy and talent we bring to the institution are attractive. But who we are—our potential to rock the boat—is tremendously frightening to the same institution that recognizes the gifts we bring. And so the cruelty and deceit continue, even as they are increasingly unmasked for what they are by younger church members who recognize the violence being done to people whom they love, insofar as the church adverts to its LGBT brothers and sisters.
I continue to follow discussions about General Conference, in part, to continue trying to understand what happened to Steve and me at a United Methodist college in Florida. In many blog discussions of that fateful 30 April discussion of the place of LGBT brothers and sisters in the Methodist church, I find recurring concerns about several issues:
- Since Bishop Timothy Whitaker of Florida is known to be one of the leading proponents of holding the line against gays in the Methodist church, how did it happen that he was chosen to preside at the fateful 30 April session on this issue?
- Doesn’t the choice of a leading proponent of holding the line in itself represent an a priori attempt to skew the process of holy conferencing in an anti-gay direction?
- Were Roberts Rules of Order misused by those trying to engineer another anti-gay vote in the 30 April session?
- If so, do Roberts Rules of Order have much at all to do with holy conferencing?
I might add two more questions based on my own experience
I am putting these questions in very personal terms because those personal terms indicate how acute is the crisis the churches of Main Street USA face today, re: gay people and gay energy. The churches want our energy and talent.
They do not want us.
Not us, insofar as we are open, honest, living lives of integrity and love—all of which is the precondition for our having the very energy we bring to church institutions.
This is a serious problem, one the churches can no longer avoid or gloss over, no matter how hard they try, by uploading to their institutional website one more happy-clappy article about "approved” minorities, or by electing to positions of power and authority members of “approved” minorities who do the dirty work to gay brothers and sisters on behalf of the white male power center of the churches.
It is a problem the Spirit will not allow the churches to avoid any longer, because the Spirit is creative energy. The Spirit wills creation, ongoing creation. The Spirit wishes to see the churches alive with profound transformative energy. The Spirit speaks to the churches of Main Street USA today through the voices of young members in whose hands the future of the churches lies.
The Spirit calls gay brothers and sisters to the churches, gives us creative energy for our vocations in the churches, and is grieved when the church slams its doors in our faces.
In conclusion, to return to your analysis, Colleen, I see two wellsprings of this creative energy in gay lives, following your transpersonal psychological analysis. One is the hard struggle we who are gay go through to see ourselves as God’s children, when the churches insist on calling us spawn of the devil or “abominable, counter-biblical” sinners.
You locate the wellspring of that energy, once we accept ourselves, in freedom, “freedom from gender typing, and because of that, a freedom to explore and accept other realms of thought, creativity, and spirituality.” I think this is absolutely right.
A study was done some years ago (and I can’t place my fingers on it now) of the moral development of priests. The study used the Defining Issues Test to identify levels of moral maturity among priests.
The priests studied were asked to identify themselves as gay or straight. The study found an interesting correlation between sexual orientation and moral development. On the whole, gay priests scored higher on scales of moral development than did straight priests.
The author of this study and others who commented on it at the time noted that coming to moral maturity requires that one struggle with issues that test the boundaries of our moral assurances, of our givens about what is “obviously” right and wrong. We develop conscience (and the moral maturity to use conscience correctly) not by being provided all the answers, but by encountering disjuncture between what we take for granted and other worldviews that have different ways of viewing the world.
The author of this study noted that straight priests often do not have to struggle in the same way gay priests do to come to terms with their sexual orientation, with profound questions about gender identity and gender roles, and with the inadequacy of formulaic answers (in bible or church teaching) to all moral dilemmas. This struggle—when one undergoes it with honesty and integrity (and obviously not everyone, gay or straight, is ready to undergo such struggle)—yields higher moral sensitivity, ability to negotiate difficult moral questions in one’s own life and that of others, and compassion for others in their struggles.
You also put your finger on another wellspring of creative energy in the lives of many gay people which demands a whole other blog posting: this is the creative balance of male-female principles within ourselves, which gives us the potential to bring such creative balance to the churches.
And the churches definitely need that balance, along with the wisdom to move beyond paradigms of female subordination that idolize masculinity in its cheapest, rawest forms. Look at the pictures of those sitting at the presiding podium and on the stage, as the churches pass laws to keep gay people and our energies out. They are essays in the problem the churches need to overcome today, if they wish for authentic transformation.
When the rule of white males in the churches must be protected even at the cost of lying, deceit, manipulation of rules for holy conferencing, overt violations of the social principles of the churches, the price begins to seem simply too high. And when the energy being kept at bay demands that we use such devilish tools to keep that energy at bay, then what is the church doing to itself, by refusing the gifts of its gay brothers and sisters?
I have been fighting with myself about this posting. Because, God help me, I cannot read the sickening memos about our recent legacy of torture that the government released yesterday (here), without reminding myself that George W. Bush is a Christian. And, to be specific, a United Methodist.
