Some Valentine's Day Thoughts: On Love, God, and the Churches' Destruction of Gay Lives and Gay Love

And now some Valentine's Day statements for you — about love (and what assaults on love in the name of "God" can do to people):

Dorothee Sölle on Inseparability of God and Love: Implications for Catholic Discussion of Welcome Tables

Because the following posting seems (to me, at least) so pertinent to the post-synod discussion right now about the Catholic (un)welcoming table for gay folks (I also don't forget divorced and remarried folks), I'm going to do something I seldom do, and repost a piece from the past. I first posted this piece in December 2010. I've made a few minor changes to it as I repost it now:

Quote for Day: Leonardo Boff on Link Between Christ and Krishna, Charisma and Caritas — Questions Worth Asking

Leonardo Boff, at his blog site several days ago:

Weekend Party Celebrating Our Marriage: Love Does Matter (No Matter What Catholic "Pastoral" Leaders Say about Gay Love)

I've been away from the blog for several days, dear friends, because Steve and I organized a little party this past Saturday to celebrate our marriage with local friends and family members. For high introverts like the two of us, being on stage in that way is, well, downright scary — and it's enervating. By the time the event was over (and we were very pleased that so many folks turned out, stayed for hours, ate and drank well, danced, enjoyed the amazing music from the group that our friends Wendell and Pat Griffen had secured for the party), we found ourselves pretty worn out from the days of planning, the party itself, hosting several house guests who came for the celebration, etc.

Charlotte Observer on Charlotte Catholic High Controversy: Kudos to Bishop Jugis for Discovering Charity . . . Now, That is

Writing for the Charlotte Observer, Peter St. Onge notes how . . . very odd . . . it is that Catholic Bishop Peter Jugis of Charlotte discovered the primacy of charity only after students and parents at Charlotte Catholic High School took Sister Jane Dominic Laurel (and the diocese) to task for attacking their gay family members and friends:

Quote for the Day: "We Must Love One Another, Whatever Our Condition in Life, Canine or Otherwise"

I'm reading Alexander McCall Smith's Love Over Scotland (NY: Random House, 2006) now, and love this passage in which he comments on the reunion of lonely artist Angus Lordie with his constant companion Cyril, a dog stolen from him at "their" bar in Edinburgh, where Cyril daily laps a saucer of beer as Angus daily drinks his pint: when Cyril is found and returned to Angus, he whoops with delight and jumps into Angus's arms, and the narrator says, 

Catholic Blogger Asks Why Gays Don't Feel the Love When Some Christians Hold Forth; Frank Strong Responds

At the Dominicana blog site, Dominican brother Dominic Mary Verner asks why many gay folks often perceive the love of Christians opposing marriage equality as the opposite of love. Frank Strong responds:

A Mormon Mother's Testimony: "My Religion Didn’t Teach Me How to Love. Jordan Did. My [Gay] Son Did."

Today's my birthday, and Steve has a birthday lunch planned for me at a Chinese restaurant we both love. So I'm going to take a little breather from blogging today (and aren't you glad?).

Bridegroom: An Interview with the Filmmaker, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason

A quick footnote to my posting last week about Linda Bloodworth-Thomason's wonderful new documentary Bridegroom, focusing on the love story of Tom Bridegroom and Shane Crone: 

Bridegroom: The Love Story of Tom Bridegroom and Shane Crone, a Primer about Gay Youth, Coming Out, and Religion in the Heartland

I mentioned several days ago that the Oprah Winfrey network had aired several programs about being gay in America. One of the films that OWN aired as part of that initiative was Linda Bloodworth-Thomason's documentary Bridegroom.

Leonardo Boff on Lumen Fidei, Benedict (and Francis's) Encyclical on Faith: "Without Love, Truth Is Insufficient for Salvation"

Leonardo Boff

At his blog site, theologian Leonardo Boff recently offered a response to the encyclical of Popes Benedict and Francis on the virtue of faith, Lumen fidei. After I read Boff's valuable commentary, I also discovered that early in July, Rebel Girl had provided an outstanding translation of the Spanish version of Boff's response at her Iglesia Descalza site. In what follows, I'll excerpt some key passages of Boff's important commentary, with brief notes.

Please Don't Call It Love: Gay Catholics Respond to Cardinal Dolan

Okay, one of those scourge times again, albeit that it's Eastertide and we're supposed to be basking in the love of the risen Christ. The past few days, I've chosen to make comments in response to Jaime Manson's outstanding article at National Catholic Reporter asking Cardinal Dolan and Archbishop Cordileone to call what they intend and practice towards their gay brothers and sisters something else than love.

From the Blogs: End-of-Year Statements by Phil Ewing, Michael Bayly, and Frank Cocozzelli

Three good end-of-year pieces by fellow bloggers whom I esteem greatly and from whom I always learn a great deal:

Ten Points about Love as the Signpost Along the Way: Retreat Notes, Day Three

Pilgrim Feet

More reflections from this period of retreat--which I offer with some concern that I'm foisting on others what are very private thoughts about very private struggles, which may not be of much interest to anyone but me, and which probably ought not to receive much attention from others, because these are idiosyncratic note-jottings from the margins of the Catholic church and its theological traditions today:*

Schism in Catholic Church? A Snapshot of American Catholic Responses

And for a crisp snapshot of precisely where that thriving "we're number one!" right-wing Catholic church (about which I just blogged) is trending these days in American Catholicism, have a gander at the discussion thread following this good posting by Michael O'Loughlin at America's "In All Things" blog.  O'Loughlin asks readers whether Oxford professor Diarmuid MacCulloch is onto something when he suggests that there may be a major schism in the Catholic church in the not-distant future.

Book Ends: Paul Russell's The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov

I didn't intend to finish Paul Russell's novel about the life of Vladimir Nabokov's gay brother Sergey on Palm Sunday.  In fact, when I began The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (Berkeley: Cleis, 2011) a number of days ago, I had no intention at all of connecting Sergey's story to Holy Week and the passion of Christ.

Reflections on Rick Perry's Response Rally: Attack on the Love Ethic and Corporatist Puppet-Masters

I didn't watch Rick Perry's Response rally this weekend.  I took last week as a kind of retreat-discernment week, and as I did so, I deliberately weaned myself of all but the most essential news coverage.  

A Report from the Front: Sunday Liturgy at Most Holy Redeemer Parish in San Francisco

Steve and I went to liturgy this past weekend at Most Holy Redeemer church in the Castro district of San Francisco.  It's the parish of the friend we've been visiting, Richard.  So we met him there for liturgy on Sunday.

I've been thinking about the experience and want to share a few insights on this blog.  Since it's in the Castro, MHR is a largely gay parish--that is, it has a large percentage of gay, lesbian, and trans parishioners, though non-gay Catholics, including heterosexual couples with children, also come to MHR because of its vibrant worship style and its welcoming community.  And quite a few people, we understand--including a cousin of Steve's and the cousin's partner--drive into the city on Sunday from a distance to attend liturgy at MHR.

Pastor Steven Anderson: The Impossible Road from Jesus to Hate

Jim Burroway at Box Turtle is asking readers of his blog what we would ask Pastor Steven Anderson if we had a chance to talk to him.

Steven Anderson is pastor of Faithful Word Baptist church in Phoenix. He has made statements that gays should be killed, and accuses all gays of being sexual predators and rapists. For someone who claims to take the bible literally (in its King James version, at that), he has an astonishing facility for twisting scriptural texts to turn them into anti-gay texts, when not even his most ardent right-wing allies have divined the homophobic significance of said texts.

For instance, he reads Noah’s condemnation of his son Shem when Shem uncovered his father’s nakedness (Genesis 9:18-10:32) as a passage about Shem raping his father. It is interesting that Anderson fixates on that particular passage to prove that gays are rapists, given that it has a sordid history in Christianity in quite another direction. It has long been used to suggest that all people of color (who are said, in this fantasy-spinning reading of the text, to descend from Shem) are doomed by Shem’s sin to eternal servitude to lighter-skinned people.

Anderson’s hatred doesn’t focus exclusively on gays. He’s one of those “Christians” now caught up in reviving the tradition of imprecatory prayer in the psalms—despite Jesus’s injunction to his followers to forgive our enemies, and his refusal to condemn the criminals crucified with him—in the hope that President Obama will die and go to hell. And the man who showed up recently at a Phoenix town hall meeting carrying an automatic assault weapon is a member of Pastor Anderson’s church.

I’ve been asking myself precisely the question Jim Burroway encourages his readers to ask: given the chance, what would I ask Steven Anderson? Pastor Anderson has already been on my radar screen, actually. I blogged about him back in February 2008 when he preached on a text—I am not making this up—which, in his view, mandates that real men should urinate standing up.

Pastor Anderson has a bee in his bonnet, and the bee buzzes around questions of male supremacy and male inadequacy, which seem to elicit a great deal of confusion and rage in his psyche. That in itself fascinates me, as a psychological-religious process that happens among so many Christians intent on using the bible to bolster male power and privilege—even (or perhaps especially) when that power and privilege is used to demean, trample on, and even kill the despised other.

And so I’m going to take a stab at asking Pastor Anderson what I’d like to ask him, following Jim Burroway’s lead (and I will post a link at Box Turtle, since it’s Jim’s invitation that leads me to post about this on Bilgrimage).

Pastor Anderson: hatred? It fascinates me that people are energized by hatred. But it fascinates me even more when those who are so obviously energized by hatred also happen to be men of the cloth.

I’m especially fascinated when those intent on hating profess a religion founded by someone who preached that God is love, that we die by the sword when we brandish it, that we need to turn the other cheek and let our enemies smite us on it, to go the extra mile, to forgive seventy times seventy. Jesus taught that we should pray constantly to be forgiven as we ourselves forgive and that we must forgive our enemies—always, everywhere, in every circumstance. No matter what.

How does someone who follows Jesus get onto the road of hatred?

I will admit that I can understand very well how people hate. Being human involves us in dealing with hate—not just the hate of others, but our own hate. Hate is always there inside all of us, like a rank weed ready to spring up at a moment’s notice under the right circumstances.

It’s, frankly, easy to hate. It’s easier to hate than to love. One comes naturally; the other requires, in many circumstances, energy. It’s always easier to tear down in one day a house that was built months on end by many hands and much work.

So I understand hate. I am susceptible to it. Like any human being, I have to learn to deal with it—not only when it confronts me from outside, but when I see the rank weed threatening to sprout yet again inside the dark recesses of my own soul.

But I will admit, what I find a little harder to understand—and please help me here; I am sincerely trying to understand—is hate that we justify. I find it hard to understand hate in which we revel, hate we proudly display rather than admit, shamefacedly, we are struggling to overcome.

How does one come to hate and take pride in hating? Even worse, how does one come to hate and believe that God blesses one’s hatred, that God smiles on one’s hatred and urges it on?

I do not know or understand such a God. If I thought such a God existed, I would turn my back on that God as a force to be resisted and despised, not to be worshiped and loved.

Because in my experience the wonderful things that happen in the world happen when people have the courage to resist hate and to love instead. They happen when a parent nurtures a child. They happen when someone is lying beside the road and a bystander picks him up and takes him to have his wounds treated.

The wonderful things that happen in the world happen when a callow young person takes time to stop and listen to a querulous, wise old person who would otherwise be altogether too easy to overlook and to ignore. And they happen when an elderly person embittered at growing old and being ignored takes a youngster under her wing, and sees that his needs are met.

They happen when we meet our enemy and see that, like us, our enemy has grown older, tireder, slower—that like us, our enemy is simply another human being, and deserves the same compassion we would like for ourselves. The wonderful things that happen in life happen when someone dares to love, by reaching across social barriers that seem impossible to bridge, and discovers that those despised, hated others across the line are human just as we are human.

How have you learned to hate, Pastor Anderson? And to hate with such facility? And to be so absolutely certain that God blesses and energizes your hatred? And to be so sure that who you are—a white, heterosexual American male—is the pinnacle of creation, and everyone else is a lesser being?

And that God has designed things in such a way that you just happen to be the pinnacle of creation?

I really would like to know, if you care to respond.

John McNeill's Prophetic Witness to the Churches: Enough of the Denial of Gay Love!

Jesuit theologian John McNeill has long been a hero of mine. When I could not find a vocabulary to name the love I experience as a gay man in a committed relationship, or to claim that love or the grace I experienced in my life and relationship, John McNeill paved the way for me to speak of my experience of love in theological terms. He paved a way for me to claim my love as a gay man love, to welcome my experience of grace as grace.

I suspect that for many Catholics of my generation, as for me, John McNeill's courage in writing about gay love and testifying to the experience of grace in gay lives has been foundational. It has allowed us to respect ourselves in a way that the church as a whole refuses to make possible. Almost singlehandedly in his generation, John McNeill opened up a discursive space within the Catholic church for some of us, at least, to talk about gay love and gay experiences of grace as redemptive, as worth hearing about, as part of the drama of universal salvation.

For this reason, I was delighted to hear from John McNeill lately, and grateful that he drew my attention to a document I hadn't yet read. This is an updated (January 2009) version of an open letter he wrote in November 2000. The first version of the letter was addressed to the U.S. bishops. This version is addressed to Pope Benedict, Cardinals Levada and George, and all the Catholic bishops of the world.

A copy is at the Soulforce website (here). I'm highlighting the following excerpt with permission from John McNeill:

At this point, the ignorance and distortion of homosexuality, and the use of stereotypes and falsehoods in official Church documents, forces us who are gay Catholics to issue the institutional Church a serious warning. Your ignorance of homosexuality can no longer be excused as inculpable; it has become of necessity a deliberate and malicious ignorance. In the name of Catholic gays and lesbians everywhere, we cry out “Enough!”

Enough! Enough of your distortions of Scripture. You continue to claim that a loving homosexual act in a committed relationship is condemned in Scripture, when competent scholars are nearly unanimous in acknowledging that nowhere in Scripture is the problem of sexual acts between two gay men or lesbian women who love each other, ever dealt with, never mind condemned. You must listen to biblical scholars to find out what Scripture truly has to say about homosexual relationships.

Enough! Enough of your efforts to reduce all homosexual acts to expressions of lust, and your refusal to see them as possible expressions of a deep and genuine human love. The second group you must listen to are competent professional psychiatrists and psychotherapists from whom you can learn about the healthy and positive nature of mature gay and lesbian relationships. They will assure you that homosexual orientation is both not chosen and unchangeable and that any ministry promising to change that orientation is a fraud.

Enough! Enough of your efforts through groups like Courage and other ex-gay ministries to lead young gays to internalize self-hatred with the result that they are able to relate to God only as a God of fear, shame and guilt and lose all hope in a God of mercy and love. What is bad psychology has to be bad theology!

Enough! Enough again, of your efforts to foster hatred, violence, discrimination and rejection of us in the human community, as well as disenfranching our human and civil rights. We gay and lesbian Catholics pray daily that the Holy Spirit will lead you into a spirit of repentance. You must publicly accept your share of the blame for gay murders and bashing and so many suicides of young gays and ask forgiveness from God and from the gay community.

Enough, also, of driving us from the home of our mother, the Church, and attempting to deny us the fullness of human intimacy and sexual love. You frequently base that denial by an appeal to the dead letter of the “natural law.” Another group to whom you must listen are the moral theologians who, as a majority, argue that natural law is no longer an adequate basis for dealing with sexual questions. They must be dealt with within the context of interpersonal human relationships.

Above all else, you must enter into dialogue with the gay and lesbian members of the Catholic community. We are the ones living out the human experience of a gay orientation, so we alone can discern directly in our experience what God’s spirit is saying to us.

These powerful words richly deserve a hearing--especially by anyone seeking seriously to hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches today. So much hinges, in the final analysis, on love. In the final analysis, everything depends on love. What a pity that the churches today invest so much energy in denying powerful, redemptive love between people of the same sex, in a world starved for love.