So. Easter leaves us with the obligation of returning to the everyday.No easy task, that. The precise obligation is to live the everyday as if it is more than ordinary. If Easter has any meaning, that’s its central message: transfiguring the everyday, so that it is shot through with significance transcending the “mere” ordinary.
Such highfalutin’ language. Poor chatty little Christianity, E.M. Forster said. Always relying on one more word to limp along, to try to get its message across to a new group of believers.
And I understand that critique, and share it, so that I don’t belong—not on the churched side of the line, not among the respectable. I can’t be there, because I don’t see a lot of transfiguring going on. I completely understand—and agree with—Nietzsche when he says that if anyone is going to buy the Christian message of salvation, Christians need to look more saved. Or with Gandhi, when he observed that he found Christ exceedingly attractive, but did not find Christians attractive.
I write, think, live out of a specifically gay perspective and gay experience with the church. That experience is, brutally and frankly, one of unwelcome. There is no other word to describe what happens to us who are gay, vis-à-vis the churches.
I know that many churches have sought to create welcoming spaces in their midst for gay believers. The Episcopal church in the
And yet that bishop is not being invited to the coming Canterbury Conference. The mere acknowledgment that some priests and some bishops and many believers are openly gay (emphasis on “openly”) is intolerable for some members of the Anglican communion. A communion in which a leader of a ministry, Changing Attitudes, in
The churches are, at their best, tolerant. They are not welcoming. Not yet. They are not affirming, accepting, capable of blessing gay people and our lives and our relationships. They are not transfigured. They are not places in which gay people can experience transfiguration—the Easter experience or the Easter message.
And so we live our spiritual lives on the outside, those of us who care to salvage any vocabulary of spirituality from our brutal encounters with the churches. And, ultimately, it’s not precisely the brutality, the savagery of the churches towards gay persons that is the all-determining factor in my inability to commune: it’s the stolid refusal of church people even to admit that the inability to welcome—to welcome anyone at all—undercuts everything about church, everything about its message.
A church that is unable to welcome—anyone at all—is simply not church. A church that is incapable of becoming a welcoming space for anyone in need of compassion and healing is not truly church: such a church is not living the gospel message in a sacramental way which allows that message to be understood and accessed through the life of the church itself.
I say all of this today against the backdrop of ongoing conversations with some of my co-religionists at the National Catholic Reporter blog café—conversations that leave me extremely frustrated. The struggle to establish some common ground for dialogue with people who appear to share one’s conviction that our culture desperately needs ways to talk about becoming a more humane society—that struggle seems impossible when one of the dialogue partners refuses to occupy that common ground, that shared dialogic space.
When people already have all the answers (and some Christians persist in thinking this way), there is no point in dialoguing. From the standpoint of the catechizer, conversation becomes an act of imparting nuggets of truth to the poor soul who needs those nuggets. It is not an exchange in which each dialogue partner offers insights from her own life experience, in a shared journey towards a truth that transcends both conversationalists.
And for those who have all Truth in their hands and are intent on dispensing nuggets of The Truth to the rest of us, it is fatally simple to arrive at an imagination of one’s dialogue partner as fundamentally defective. In my “dialogues” with my co-religionists at the NCR café, I find myself continuously up against the brick wall of others’ definition of me as less than human.
Again, this is the persistent experience of gay human beings in relation to the church. The churches, at their best, imagine us as rather pitiful objects of charity, who need those nuggets of truth to make us more stalwart followers of the Lord. If only we could understand that there is a plan for the world, God’s plan, and that it’s premised on getting everything in its place: men here, women there; male and female God created them; men as guardians and protectors, women as homebodies and cheerfully obedient servants. If only we could understand the basic plumbing of human sexuality, that everything fits in its proper place—at least, from God’s perspective.
How simple life would be for us poor misguided gay souls, and for the church itself, if people would just understand The Truth, remain in their places, cooperate and believe—and submit and obey.
This is the approach of some of my co-religionists with whom I have sought to talk about our shared interest in a more humane society. It is an approach that demeans me, an approach that—ultimately—reduces me to silence by reducing me to an object, something these conversation partners imagine, rather than a complex human being with human depth, intense human feelings, human questions.
It is so easy to “place” the other when we imagine him as Other, when we reduce her to a stereotype, to an object. And placing the Other is what Christianity seems all about, in the application of its truest adherents today.
In taking that path, the churches are forfeiting the chance to become real agents of change in postmodern culture. In taking the path of making placement of the Other the central task of Christianity, the churches forfeit the claim to be places of a welcome that makes any real difference in the lives of their members, places in which real transfiguration of the ordinary and every day occurs.
In taking this path, the churches cause many LGBT persons simply to shrug our shoulders and reject the language of spirituality altogether, because that language has become so tainted with disdain for our gay humanity that it is toxic for us.
And meanwhile, the task of creating truly welcoming spaces in our culture continues: today’s New York times reports on a boy, Billy Wolfe, who is being bullied on an ongoing basis in a school in Fayetteville in my state (see www.nytimes.com/2008/03/24/us/24land.html?th&emc=th). This is a school system in which, a decade ago, William Wagner was bullied for being gay, and beaten so viciously that he still suffers from the aftermath of that beating.
Not much seems to have changed in a decade. Though Billy Wolfe is not gay, his attackers—who have now assaulted him repeatedly—use the gay tag as an excuse to assault him. The NY Times reports that one of the bullies created a Facebook site several years ago entitled “Every One That Hates Billy Wolfe,” on which a picture of Peter Pan was superimposed over Billy’s face, with the statement, “There is no reason anyone should like billy he’s a little bitch. And a homosexual that NO ONE LIKES.”
This is a persistent problem in American schools. It should not be happening. The pattern repeats itself over and over: a boy is identified as gay or gender-inappropriate, or he himself identifies as gay. He is then assaulted. The response of the school system and of parents is all too often faint-hearted. Sometimes the boy himself is blamed for “causing” the bullying.
The violence escalates. The beatings continue. Murder is sometimes the outcome.
This must not happen again. The churches lose all credibility when they provide the conditions for such violence in any shape, form, or fashion. The churches in places where such school bullying occurs must stand against violence and for acceptance. Churches that take seriously and live the Easter message must commit themselves to becoming welcoming places in which social divisions are healed and social wounds are staunched.
If the Easter message means anything at all, it has to mean that Lawrence King did not die in vain. Churches, are you listening?
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And for those of us who stand outside, but still sing Easter songs, an anthem for this Eastertide, Labi Siffre singing his powerful "Something Inside So Strong":
www.youtube.com/watch?v=otuwNwsqHmQ&feature=related.
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