The Flaw in the Pottery: God's Entry Point

With this blog, it’s a daily challenge to stay focused. My focus is wide, and as a result, the blog seems to draw a disparate group of readers—for which I’m glad. As the list of topics I’m pursuing here (the list is on my profile page) indicates, I talk about spirituality and social activism, the religious right’s absurd pretense to own God, the injustice churches practice towards LGBT persons, bullying of LGBT youth in schools, and building a more humane society. I’m happy to talk with anyone and everybody about these and other topics.

The challenge I have in staying focused doesn’t have to do with the disparate topics I’m pursuing. It has to do with my commitment—to myself first of all, and then to readers—to focus on the truth. It’s so easy to get nudged away from that place inside ourselves from which any truth worth claiming springs. It’s easy to get drawn away from transformative truth, which is the only kind of truth worth writing about.

It’s easy to get disconnected. For a number of years, I meditated daily on one of my favorite phrases from E.M. Forster, his call to readers in Howard’s End to connect. To make myself hear that call, I painted Forster’s saying, “Only connect,” on the wall of my office, where I could see it scrolling like a rainbow above my computer every time I raised my eyes from the screen.

To me, the significance of the phrase has to do with inner life: we must connect inside ourselves. We must connect to ourselves. In a world of competing voices, each of which lays claim to our loyalty, we have to struggle to hear our own unique voice—which is, in the language of faith communities, the voice of God speaking in the depths of our conscience.

It’s not easy. It’s much easier to disconnect, to stop listening, to let the babble of voices all around us flow over us and lull us into complacency. In some ways, nothing in life is harder than listening to our own depths, connecting to them, living from them, speaking, writing, loving, ministering from them. But it’s worth the pain: the truth we offer others when we retain a vital connection to the voice that speaks truth in our own depths is uniquely powerful.

And we are lost when we stop connecting to our own depths, when we let other voices overpower the voice of conscience inside ourselves. Nothing has more claim on us than that voice of authenticity inside us—that is, we should never let anything establish a greater claim on us than the voice speaking in our depths.

I say all this in part as a challenge to myself as I undertake a new project, one that grows out of this blog. For some time now, I’ve been encouraged by a number of friends to turn several stories from my own experience into books. These are stories that have fallen into my hands by “accident,” and which others consider it important for me to tell. They are stories that connect to my own life.

I have resisted the encouragement to write about these stories. I have not made time in my life to write. I’m frankly afraid to write—in the concentrated, depth-connecting way a book demands.

And yet, it seems I have no choice. The encouragement just doesn’t go away. In fact, the more I blog and the more others read this blog, the more the encouragement pours in. And there’s that inconvenient, nagging voice inside that tells me I have to listen, since the persistent call of others for us to do something surely lays claim to our attention.

So this is an important week for me, because one day this week, I’ll spend time with someone who has some crucial pieces of information about one of the two stories about which I am being urged to write. In fascinating ways, all kinds of pieces of the puzzle keep emerging and falling into place, to make it possible—well, to make it imperative—that I pursue this story and see if I can find a voice to tell it. Doors have opened, beyond my imagining or control, and I seem to have no choice except to make my way through them.

I will be grateful to readers for holding me in the light as I set forth on this journey.

Speaking of readers, of the disparate group of folks who continue to nudge me to think and write, I have been remiss in not noting the support of Jason and Amanda Gignac, both of whom have mentioned this blog on their own wonderful blogs in the past several weeks. My list of e-friends has links to Jason’s blog “Moored at Sea,” which discussed one of my postings a few weeks ago, and to Amanda’s blog “The Ramblings of a Hopeful Artist.” Amanda recently mentioned Bilgrimage in a family blog she maintains, “Gignacery.”

As best as I remember, Amanda and Jason got connected to my blog discussion when I happened to mention Emily Dickinson in a previous posting. I have found their feedback challenging and refreshing. When I taught, one of the things that I valued most about the teaching experience was being forced to listen to what students thought I had said, to hear my own words from an entirely different perspective.

For anyone who interacts with thoughtful and engaged younger folks, dialogue is a constant experience of having one’s feet put to the fire—and that’s a good experience for someone who thinks he’s the teacher and the one to whom he’s speaking is the taught. It’s seldom that way. In fact, it’s usually the other way around.

I’m thinking of this today after I spent over an hour last night chatting online with one of my nephews. We are much alike—prone to give ourselves to passionately to a smorgasbord of causes, prone to promote our passionate causes vociferously, quick to think others haven’t heard us clearly enough.

When I learned recently that my nephew had been bamboozled (what, me impose my worldview on someone else? Never!) into choosing a third-party candidate in the coming elections, I went on the warpath. Politely, you understand, in that sly way Southerners always do within the family circle.

I began to bombard his brother, who’s away at school with him, with articles about how the party that wants to neutralize student votes in the coming federal election is funding the campaign to seduce college students into voting for the third-party candidate. I asked said brother to convey the information to my nephew, in a way that wouldn’t make him feel I was attacking him.

We saw each other this past weekend, my nephew and I, and, in retrospect, the encounter had a certain tension attached to it. The gathering was a celebration of sorts of my aunt’s 80th birthday. My oldest nephew also had three friends from grade school visiting him, one Indian and the other two Korean, and the youngest two nephews had one of their African-American friends with them, so it was both a birthday party and a United Nations gathering with a number of folks I had never met. Talking to new folks across cultural boundary lines requires skill. It also requires energy.

By the time the youngest nephew arrived at the dinner table, I was talked out. I am a Meyers-Briggs INFJ who feels totally at sea in any large gathering—too many people to attend to carefully, too many signals and too much information pouring in through my intuitive-feeling filters. I often withdraw into a kind of shell and let the extraverts and sensates, who don’t have to contend with all that emotional and intuitive “stuff” pouring in, carry the day.

Steve’s a sensate, by the way, and a thinker, though we share the introvert and judging characteristics. It’s interesting to compare our takes after a gathering. I’m always amazed that so much that seems crystal clear to me—so much that has flowed into my psyche through the intuitive-feeling side—just goes right over his head: who’s fighting with whom; who’s unhappy and why they are unhappy; why X said that zingy thing to Y, etc. On the other hand, he sees thing—sensate things—that are right in front of me and which I completely miss, because I’m too busy fine-tuning the feeling and intuitive channels on my receiver.

My hour or so of talking online to my nephew last night was instructive. I needed this reminder that young people see things we older ones miss, and that young folks can perceive our distraction as a sign of disinterest in them. It was important that I have this discussion—which got heated on the political front as well as the interpersonal one—on the very day I blogged about the need of churches to reach out to searching youth.

Those younger folks keep us older ones honest. The process of ministry and the process of educating are two-way streets, in which the minister must be ready to become the ministered to, and the teacher must be willing to be the taught. Churches engaging in youth ministry ignore these dynamics at their peril.

As I thank readers who seem to come to this blog from a number of disparate paths, I also want to thank Julie Arms for her comments on yesterday’s “Camp Out” posting. I appreciate the information that there are United Methodist readers circulating my postings. I had suspected this might be the case.

I’m also aware of some ELCA readers, whose interest in the blog I appreciate as well. Knowing that people within the faith communities don’t find my critique of the churches unredeemingly harsh, and knowing that I am somehow tying into a theological dialogue within various communities of faith, keeps me thinking and writing.

Last week, I had another reminder of the significance of continuing to speak about the issues I enumerated at the start of this posting, when a mother of a boy bullied in a high school, who is reading this blog, contacted me to ask for support. And—if I needed further confirmation of the importance of this project—today when I opened my email, I found an invitation to support the Trevor Project, a national project dedicated to combating suicide of gay teens (see www.thetrevorproject.org/home2.aspx).

Since this is one of those “to speak of many things” postings, I want to add some notes on a number of stories that have come to my attention recently. This past Sunday, a Catholic priest at the Newman Center on the University of California campus at Fresno, preached a courageous homily about the initiative to withdraw from gay Californians the right to marry—Proposition 8.

I first read about Fr. Geoffrey Farrow’s homily—in fact, I read the homily itself—on Pam’s House Blend blog yesterday morning (www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=7392). Since that time, I’ve noticed links to the story on a number of other blogs, including www.afterelton.com/blog/brianjuergens/catholic-priest-comes-out-against-proposition-8-comes-out-gay?&comment=55467, www.towleroad.com/2008/10/fresno-priest-c.html, and the “Deep Something” blog of my e-friend John Masters at http://deep.mastersfamily.org/2008-10-06/courage-in-the-face-of-hate. These postings link to an ABC news report of the story at http://abclocal.go.com/kfsn/story?section=news/local&id=6431105.

Geoffrey Farrow’s homily focuses on the choice of the Catholic bishops of California to support the proposition to withdraw marriage rights from gays. Not only have the bishops made such a choice, they are also encouraging all priests in California parishes to read pastoral letters supporting the bishops’ decision. It was an act of courage for Fr. Farrow to announce publicly that his conscience forbids him to support the bishops’ political initiative against the human rights of gay citizens.

In his ABC interview (in which he also made public his own gay sexual orientation), Fr. Farrow notes that we have an ultimate obligation to listen to and obey our conscience, since we will one day die and will then be asked by the Lord whether we lived in fidelity to our consciences. It is highly likely that Geoffrey Farrow will be severely punished by the church for following his conscience in this matter; in fact, news reports indicate he had already cleared his belongings out of his rectory yesterday and was staying with friends.

I happen to be reading Scott Pomfret’s Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (NY: Arcade, 2008) as this news breaks. Interestingly enough, just after reading about Geoffrey Farrow’s homily, I came across a passage in Pomfret’s book that lists seven American priests who have come out publicly as gay men in the period 1987-2006 (pp. 88-89). As Pomfret notes, many gay priests refuse to come out publicly since, “For many, coming out costs them dearly” (p. 89).

In a church in which a significant proportion of priests are gay, priests are expected to support and actually preach in favor of political initiatives that cause misery to gay human beings. That same church quickly retaliates against a priest who states publicly that he is gay (or a woman who is ordained), while shielding priests who repeatedly molest minors.

Something is rotten here, clearly. It is an act of astonishing cruelty for an institution that proclaims that every human being has fundamental rights and fundamental worth in the eyes of God to require its ministers to violate their consciences (and their own personhood) to pursue morally ambiguous—if not outright evil—political goals.

And, while one would like to imagine that such cruelty is confined to one particular church, my experience in United Methodist institutions has led me to see that the special kind of cruelty the churches reserve for gay individuals is hardly restricted to the Catholic church: it is apparent in many churches, where people who proclaim themselves to be followers of Jesus do not think twice about humiliating and violating the rights of gay human beings in ways designed to scar us decisively, who are the objects of this behavior. What was done to Steve and me at one of these institutions, by a good Methodist leader, was designed to hurt and to humiliate. And it did hurt and humiliate. And not one of the Methodist leaders sitting on the board of that institution has ever raised his or her voice against the injustice done to us.

Since I’ve mentioned Scott Pomfret’s book about growing up gay and Catholic, I want to close with a brief notice of one of the important themes of his book. Throughout the memoir, Pomfret draws on a theme of native American spirituality: he notes that native American potters often deliberately introduce a flaw into their pots, since it is through the flaw that creative energy enters the world.

Pomfret’s story focuses on the assortment of misfits with whom he has been associated as a gay Catholic who has sought to retain some connection to a church that bashes him: people who seem to belong nowhere, who find a place nowhere other than in the church. It is among these believers, with their conspicuous flaws, that he finds grace and welcome.

Among those who aren’t flawed—or those of us who like to believe we have no flaws—not so much . . . .

"Camp Out": Churches and LGBT Youth

This weekend Steve and I watched “Camp Out,” a 2006 documentary by Kirk Marcolina and Larry Grimaldi. The film tracks the experiences of a group of upper Midwestern gay and lesbian teens at a summer camp sponsored by the ELCA—the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.

I found the documentary fascinating; I recommend it to anyone working with adolescents. At the same time, I found aspects of the story disturbing. I’ve spent the weekend trying to put my finger on what bothered me about this movie.

On the one hand, it is absolutely wonderful that any church is providing a safe space to teens coming to terms with their sexual identities—a sanctuary in which to learn to accept and celebrate themselves, a secure space in which to ask questions, including religious ones, about their lives and futures, an untroubled place in which to form bonds with other youth who share experiences similar to theirs.

Because my current situation removes me from the young adults with whom I interacted in college teaching (and, in fact, I haven’t ever taught at the high-school level), I have to stretch myself to remember what growing up is like. The film began with brief biographical vignettes focusing on several of the teens who took part in the summer camp.

In almost all of these, the young woman or man interviewed speaks of having come out of the closet in early adolescence—at the age of 13 or 14. To me, that’s unimaginably young. It’s unimaginably young to have a firm grasp of something so decisive to one’s personhood as one’s sexual orientation.

And yet the data are there, and they’re solid: early adolescents, even children, now have an inkling of being gay or lesbian. The age at which such awareness breaks through, and at which youth begin struggling with questions of sexual orientation, is younger and younger. It’s far younger than it was when I was growing up.

And as I think about the differences, I’m aware that this disparity in my generation’s experience of coming out and that of the current generation of youth has everything to do with information. There’s simply far more information available today to youth about sexuality in general, about the presence of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons in the human community.

But this information—the prisms it provides for someone questioning her/his sexual identity at an early age to frame her/his experience—does not necessarily make the coming out process simpler for youth today. It can, in fact, do the opposite.

When an early adolescent begins to recognize that her attractions are not “normal,” and has a name to affix to these alternative attractions, the burden of coming to terms with the recognition can be well-nigh impossible to shoulder. It is one thing to sense at an early age that one is not “right” in the eyes of mainstream society. It is quite another thing to have a specific name to apply to the non-normative aspects of one’s personhood, and to learn that this name makes one a despised object in the eyes of one’s peers.

And this is a recognition that contemporary LGBT youth come to at ever earlier ages, just as they come to the recognition of their sexual orientations at earlier and early ages: I’m speaking of the recognition that one’s orientation is despised. Just as gay and lesbian youth today have access to a much deeper pool of information about sexual orientation than previous generations have had, so do their peers.

And those peers can use the information to torment, to cut the questioning youth out of the herd and attack him, to exclude and punish. They can and they do.

In such a world, it’s imperative that the churches do something. It’s imperative that they do something for these youth. And it is profoundly disturbing that, for the most part, churches are doing absolutely nothing.

At worst, they are reinforcing the attacks by encouraging these youth to seek reparative therapy or to “repent.” At best, they observe a stony silence that murders the hearts and souls of youth needing to talk about their struggle for identity every bit as much as any adolescent needs such dialogue to form a healthy adult identity.

So I’m bowled over—as a gay adult, an educator, a believer, I’m profoundly grateful—that the ELCA has provided a venue for gay youth to examine and celebrate their sexual identities. This is a ministry all churches ought to beproviding today. But it is a ministry that, to their everlasting shame, hardly any actually provide.

As one of the camp leaders, Rev. Jay Wiesner, who is himself openly gay, says at one point in the film, pastors who have a heart for these youth are sick and tired of seeing gay youth try to kill themselves. Rev. Wiesner says he is passionate about ministry to gay youth because he does not want to see another gay teen commit suicide—not a single one more.

One of the most moving scenes in the documentary captures an evening fireside gathering at which the youth sing a hymn called “Sanctuary.” I have to admit I don’t know the song, though the film suggests it’s popular in churches today.

The lyrics speak of both church and the indvidual believer as sanctuary. As the group of gay and lesbian teens gathers singing this song, one breaks into tears. She weeps bitterly while clinging to her friends, who comfort and minister to her in her sorrow.

It is impossible to witness this scene without thinking painfully of how gay and lesbian teens (of how gay and lesbian persons in general) struggle to claim any place at all in a church that calls itself sanctuary for all wounded children of God. It is not possible to witness this young woman’s intense grief without recognizing how savage are the wounds inflicted by church and society on gay youth—of the struggle of gay youth to feel any sense of self-worth, any sense of belonging, above all, in the church context, any affirmation at all from the church that they can be sanctuaries for the divine presence, precisely as they are. As gay or lesbian human beings.

In my recollection of the film, the preceding scene coalesces with another to form an inspirational diptych that is as central to the theme of sanctuary as is the scene I’ve just recounted. The second scene is a clip from the ordination of Rev. Wiesner to the Lutheran ministry in 2004.

As I compiled this blog entry, I discovered that there’s actually a website devoted to remembering this ground-breaking ordination: “The Extraordinary Ordination of Jay Alan Wiesner” at http://bethanyrev.home.att.net. As the website materials and “Camp Out” emphasize, the choice of Bethany Lutheran Church in Minneapolis to ordain an openly gay ministry candidate in 2004 was, indeed, extraordinary. This action contravened ELCA polity of the time; that polity forbade the ordination of an openly gay man who did not commit himself to lifelong chastity.

Not only was the choice of the church to ordain Pastor Wiesner extraordinary, but the ordination ceremony itself was equally exceptional. As the pastors gathered to lay hands on the ministry candidate surrounded him, the entire congregation got up and participated in the laying on of hands. To someone such as I, someone frequently disappointed by the churches’ inability to listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches today—particularly in the powerful voices of suffering brothers and sisters who stand outside church doors asking for bread when they have been given stones—the scene was engrossing. It brings tears to my eyes.

Obviously, this is a film I loved. I loved it because I celebrate the commitment of at least one church to live the church’s mission of providing a safe space to everyone in the world. I celebrate the commitment of one church to hear the Spirit speaking through the needs of LGBT youth today, and to offer sanctuary to these precious human beings who are so obviously in need of this particular ministry.

So what is the “on the other hand” that picks up on my train of thought in the second and third paragraphs of this posting? That’s harder for me to put my finger on. Obviously, part of what bothers me profoundly in this story is something I’ve already alluded to—the stolid refusal of churches to recognize the needs of LGBT youth, a refusal that has, as Rev. Wiesner rightly notes, life-and-death consequences for some gay youth.

How churches can think they are being church at all—in the most essential sense of that word—when they either shut out or remain silent about the gay and lesbian youth knocking at their doors, or about anyone in need knocking at their doors, is beyond me. I just don’t get it. I won’t ever get it.

But there’s more to my discomfort. That more has to do, I think, with the puerile way churches engage in youth ministry, period—ministry to both straight and (all too rarely) gay youth. Too much of the religious rhetoric in this film—the “official” rhetoric of ministers and counselors—was, frankly, cringeworthy. Amidst difficult adolescent struggles, youth, both gay and straight, are asking the churches for solid food. What the churches all too often offer is pablum, predigested sentimentality and wispy, vacuous theology.

I do recognize that it’s important to tailor religious (and other) messages to people’s maturity level. I’m not an expert in youth ministry, and I challenge myself, when I watch a film like “Camp Out,” to remember that some of the exercises that might strike me as a tad on the childish side may be effective ways of dealing with adolescents.

At the same time, I heard the youth in this film asking for more when they spoke outside the earshot of adults: for intellectually challenging and personally stimulating information, responses, dialogue sessions. All too often, they received, instead, canned, formulaic religious responses and encouragement to engage in meaningless diversionary rituals.

Why does this trouble me so profoundly? Both because it demonstrates the church’s inability to listen carefully to what a segment of its population—adolescents—really need, and because it suggests to me that churches in general are frozen in a kind of adolescence, in American culture. Working at church-owned universities, I’ve seen time and again how superficial ministerial initiatives to the young are—but also how superficial the church is in responding to all kinds of needs of the society in which it lives.

I have sat through session after session—particularly in United Methodist settings, but in Catholic ones, too—in which we sang, passed little notes with covenantal promises around, picked up special rocks and dropped them into bowls along with those promises. And nothing changed. Because the rituals were empty and meaningless, exercises in making us feel good when all of us knew darned well that they meant nothing and would change nothing.

Because those mounting these exercises in futility don’t intend for the exercises in futility to mean anything or to change anything. When the retreat is over, the same power will reside in the same hands (at the top, in the hands of the grossly overpaid church-affiliated administrator who makes life-and-death decisions about the lives of personnel under him or her, with no recourse at all to those little slips of covenant promises or those little rocks in the bowl). In retreats of this ilk, we knew not only that any covenant promises any of us made to one another meant not a hill of beans in the dog-eat-dog world of professional life: we also knew that the church-protected administrator at the top of the heap was perfectly capable of taking what we wrote on those slips of paper and using it against us, if we were not careful. With no regard at all for the covenant promises she or he had made in the retreat context.

Church needs to mean more. It needs to offer more. A big part of what youth in general are struggling through in adolescence—and gay youth in particular—is the recognition that adults are all too often phony, empty, hypocritical, ill-informed and yet oh so certain of what we think we know. For the church to offer these youth slips of paper to pin on crosses and burn them, fake baptisms in a lake to remind them of their official baptism, stones to pick up and put at the foot of the cross, is just insulting—as it is insulting for the same churches to offer those who work in their employ the same nonsensical smarm at retreats.

People—adolescents included—are hungry for authentic human encounter, in which those meeting each other at, say, a retreat, are encouraged and helped to let the guard down, to speak from the heart. People are hungry for meaningful dialogue about theological and moral issues, not insipid inspirational pap. People want to know that having something to do with church makes a real difference and not a pretend difference in every aspect of their lives, their economic and professional lives included. People want church and church-sponsored institutions to be safe places, sanctuary—not to promise sanctuary when they have absolutely no intention of offering it.

That’s my grousing about this movie. I love the fact that this particular church group is offering sanctuary for LGBT youth. I can’t overstate my praise for this courageous decision. At the same time, I’d very much like to see the offerings of churches in general to youth in general broadened and deepened. I’d like to see them be meaningful. And real.

I’d like to see churches be meaningful and real, for a change.