Recent News about Dolan Affair: Glaring Double Standard in Treatment of Pedophile Priests and Whistle-Blower Priests

In case you've missed these pieces, folks, I thought that this morning I'd point you to some statements about the Dolan affair that have come to my attention following my posting about that topic this past Monday: 

Father Geoff Farrow on U.S. Bishops' Religious Freedom Initiative, Terry Weldon on Resources for LGBT History

Ruth Klausner, "Discussing the News"

Also (piggybacking on what I just posted about Occupy Wall Street) from two more of my favorite blogs:

Fr. Geoff Farrow on Catholics for Equality: Constructive Critique of a New Catholic Group Promoting LGBT Equality

 

I don’t know anything more about the new (well, soon-to-be-launched) group Catholics for Equality than I’ve been reading on various websites.  The group’s website states that it intends to “support, educate, and mobilize Catholics in the advancement of freedom and equality at the federal, state, and local levels for our lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered family, parish and community members.”  The group has apparently been having organizational meetings for some time now.  

Archbishop Burke on Twin Evils of Gay Marriage and Abortion: The Lamb Continues to Be Only A Lion

Archbishop Raymond Burke is back in the news—the American news. As I’ve noted before, the former archbishop of St. Louis was sent to Rome last summer to head the Vatican’s Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the highest judicial office in the church beneath the pope himself. Many commentators have suggested that Burke was sent to Rome in accord with the ancient maxim, Promoveatur ut amoveatur: let him be promoted in order to remove him from the scene.

As it follows this maxim, the Catholic church has a history of handing out plum jobs to church officials who make a mess of their pastoral responsibilities. When court documents revealed the extent and longstanding duration of the sexual abuse crisis in American Catholicism in 2002, and when those documents showed the unsavory role that Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston had played in hiding and moving around priests abusing children, Law was nudged out of his pastoral responsibilities in Boston. Only to be promoted to the cushy post of Archpriest of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome . . . .

The maxim about promoting folks in order to remove them doesn’t apply, unfortunately, to women removed from positions of ministry in the Catholic church. When Ruth Kolpack lost her job as a catechist in Beloit, Wisconsin, earlier this year as a result of her views regarding women’s ordination, church authorities offered her no golden parachute, despite her many years of ministry. Nor has Sister Louise Akers landed a plush job in the Vatican following her recent dismissal by Archbishop Daniel Pilarcyzk from all positions of ministry in the Cincinnati diocese. Akers’s crime? Supporting women’s ordination.

The church is not in the habit of handing out plum jobs to silenced theologians, either—Roger Haight was not given a comfortable sinecure in Rome, with palatial quarters and a handsome salary (both of which Law receives), when the Vatican silenced him at the beginning of 2009. Nor do priests who come out publicly as gay usually receive anything but scorn from the institutional church, in response to their honesty. As Fr. Geoff Farrow reports on his blog, in contravention of canon law, his bishop gave him neither financial support nor health insurance when he came out as gay in 2008 and the bishop booted him. As he notes, a priest accused of pedophilia would have received those benefits.

Unlike what happens to women, lay ministers, and gay priests who have the courage to admit they are gay when they’re unjustly dismissed by Catholic officials, the Burkes and Laws of the Catholic church do well for themselves. The church stands by its men, even (or especially), it seems, when they woefully foul their pastoral nests and damage numerous folks in the process.

Though Cardinal Law has tended to stay in Rome following his promotion-removal, Archbishop Burke now spends his time hopping back and forth across the Atlantic, where he has an important, albeit unofficial, political position in the American Catholic church. He has become something of a darling of the Catholic right in the U.S., where he keeps his hand in by pontificating as frequently as possible about “the” Catholic position on American political matters.

Burke was in the U.S. back in March to attend the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, an event sponsored by Republican political operatives that does all it can to suggest that the Republican party has the endorsement of the Catholic church. This was on the heels of an embarrassing interview Burke gave to American Catholic anti-abortion activist Randall Terry (and here), in which Burke appeared to give official sanction to Terry’s extremist antics, which include skits depicting President Obama ordering doctors to stab babies, and which continue unabated even as I post this piece.

Last November, Burke sought to influence Catholic voters to vote Republican by characterizing the Democratic party as “grievously anti-life” and unworthy of Catholic support. Burke has repeatedly sought to use the Eucharist as a political weapon to try to swing Catholic voters in a Republican direction, as he calls for communion bans on Catholic Democrats running for office. During the last election cycle, he pontificated from Rome about how the Democratic party is in the process of turning itself into the “party of death,” and continued his campaign to encourage bishops to deny communion to selected Democratic candidates like Joe Biden.

And now Burke is back in the U.S. again. Still pontificating. This time about truth and charity. Well, about truth, his version of the truth, the version of truth comfortable to the posh Republican businessfolks who hang onto his pronouncements.

Burke is in the U.S. now to be given an award, the “Service to the Church and Our Nation” award, by the Morley Institute’s InsideCatholic.com news site, headed by the former in-house guru for all things Catholic in the Bush administration, Deal W. Hudson. Predictably, the good archbishop, whom InsideCatholic banquet attendees describe variously as warm, kind, humble, gentle, simple, and quiet—a lion speaking with the voice and face of a lamb—used his platform at the D.C. awards banquet to make a wide range of political observations that play to his Catholic-right audience.

Deal Hudson’s summary of the banquet address (to which the next-to-last link points) says that Burke “returned again and again to the scandal of Catholic politicians who support abortion or same-sex marriage,” insisting that such politicians should be denied communion and Catholic burial—in what Hudson opines was “an obvious reference to the Kennedy funeral.” The lion with the voice and face of a lamb also used his InsideCatholic forum to take a swipe at Catholic supporters of health care reform, noting (Hudson’s summary) that endorsing universal health coverage because it achieves “some desirable outcomes” while it “includes abortion” is “false reasoning.”

The InsideCatholic banquet was not Archbishop Burke’s sole forum on this trip to the U.S. According to Michael Sean Winters at America magazine, he also gave an interview to FOX news, in which he stated that the health care reform bill prepared by Senator Baucus contains a “mandate” for abortion—a claim Winters flatly dismisses. Winters says that Burke told FOX that the Baucus bill “provides for the provision of abortion, so it’s simply not acceptable.”

As Winters notes, the only sense in which that statement might be parsed as true is that the health care reform bill does not outlaw abortion outright, something it cannot do with Roe v. Wade on the books. Winters goes on to discuss the “nettlesome policy issues” created by the interface of health care reform, abortion, and Catholic teaching. In a subsequent posting following up on Winters’s discussion of those issues, I want to discuss the abortion question and health care reform more closely.

For now, though, I want to return to Archbishop Burke’s claim that abortion and same-sex marriage are necessarily linked for Catholic voters, as a kind of diptych of non-negotiable truths on the basis of which “true” Catholics will cast their votes. When I hear the leonine archbishop with the voice and face of the lamb talking about abortion, I have to admit, I have a tendency to stop my ears—just as I do when I hear Mr. Hudson, with his history of sexually assaulting a co-ed student at Fordham University, talking about the sanctity of marriage.

To say that the Catholic church in the U.S. is developing an image problem for its anti-abortion politics—and this problem is growing because of the lamentably unwise, unjust, and uncharitable stance the church has chosen to take regarding gay people—would be an understatement. The church’s draconian anti-gay politics are undercutting its attempt to make a persuasive argument in the public square about the sanctity of life.

The image problem the Catholic church is creating for itself by its anti-gay money laundering in places like Maine and its use of gay people as political cannon fodder to distract attention from mishandling of clerical abuse cases in places like Connecticut, is becoming a substance problem. The homophobic image the church is building for itself in Maine and Connecticut and many other places in the U.S. evacuates its pro-life teachings of any compelling substance, for many Americans, both Catholic and non-Catholic.

And pushing the lion-like Republican archbishop with the voice and face of a lamb center-stage to babble to his rich constituents about the twin evils of gay marriage and abortion is not going to help matters. Not for many of us. I’m surprised, frankly, that my centrist Catholic brothers and sisters continue to listen. I long ago stopped doing so, when I realized that the lion was only a roaring lion seeking to devour. There never has been a lamb there.

Ask the good people of St. Louis who jubilated when the leonine lamb got sent packing to Rome after his pastoral shenanigans in their diocese.

Economic Downturn and Job Loss: Added Burdens for LGBT Citizens

The 365 Gay news site carried an interesting article yesterday on the extra burden that the economic downturn poses for many LGBT citizens (www.365gay.com/news/mounting-job-losses-pose-additional-problems-for-gays). As this article notes, when gay workers lose jobs, they often face challenges in addition to those that many other unemployed workers face.

Like other workers given pink slips, LGBT citizens who lose jobs must deal with the search for a new position in a tight job market and declining economy. Like others who are terminated, they often cope with excruciating questions about relocating and starting over in a place new to them, without familiar support networks.

But, as the 365 Gay article also notes, gay workers who lose jobs face as well the question of discrimination. In particular, in a tight job market, gay persons seeking employment have to scrutinize job leads to see if the new employer has any policies in place to protect gay workers from discrimination, or if partner benefits are offered.

This story is a reminder to me that many LGBT citizens of this country live in places that have no state-level protection against discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. As my recent posting about the situation in Florida notes, a majority of our states permit employers to fire an employee simply because he or she is gay; they also permit someone to be turned away from renting a place to live merely because of his or her sexual orientation (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/01/florida-continuing-struggle-for-rights.html). In a majority of our states a partner of a gay person who is hospitalized may be barred from visitation of his or her partner or from making decisions about the partner's medical treatment solely because he or she is gay.

And for some of us, there's still the added burden of overt discrimination, of black-balling. This is particularly the case for gay employees who have run afoul of those who control church-based institutions.

Those of us who have worked for Catholic institutions, for instance, and who have chosen to acknowledge our sexual orientation and relationships openly, quite commonly find ourselves black-balled by all Catholic institutions after we lose a job in a Catholic institution. We also often discover that the institution that fired us and/or key Catholic leaders do everything in their power to interfere with our ability to find employment at church-related institutions that do not even belong to the Catholic communion.

I was reminded of these ugly dynamics that I have seen close up in my years as a Catholic theologian, but which are too little known to the public at large, when I read recently what has happened to Rev. Geoff Farrow, about whom I blogged several times last October (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/10/flawed-in-pottery-god.html and
http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/10/end-of-week-reflections-christian.html). He’s the Catholic priest of the Fresno diocese who stated in a homily that his conscience forbade him to support the initiative of the California bishops to promote proposition 8 in California.

As those postings noted, Geoff Farrow lost his job, his livelihood, his health insurance, as a result of his act of conscience. Recently, several blogs have updated Geoff Farrow's story (http://progressivemamablogger.wordpress.com/2009/01/24/the-latest-on-father-geoff and www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=9225). These report that when he applied for a position with the Los Angeles branch of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE), he found himself mysteriously blocked after an initial positive interview.

To his credit, Rev. James Conn, a United Methodist minister involved in the interview process, has been willing to go public about what happened. Conn indicates that the Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles threatened to cut its funding to CLUE, if Farrow were hired. Geoff Farrow remains unemployed and without medical benefits at the age of 51, due to the intervention of church authorities who evidently want to prevent him from obtaining any employment, even in a non-Catholic institution.

I am deeply saddened but not surprised to read this story. It is a sorry series of events I have seen with my own eyes a number of times. It is one through which I have myself lived.

Despite their assurances of respect for human rights, Catholic officials will always hound anyone who threatens those who have had a place within Catholic institutions, and who then become public about being gay. There is a tremendous need to punish and destroy those of us who refuse to toe the official line about homosexuality in Catholic institutions--often because we know too much about what goes on in the seamy underbelly of the institution.

We know, for instance, that those who pursue openly gay Catholics and try to disrupt our lives and careers are themselves often closeted, self-hating gay men who occupy positions of power within the church . . . .

End-of-Week Reflections: Christian Necrophilia, Gays as Alcoholics

As the work week ends, some theological odds and ends from dialogues this week . . . .

Yesterday, I replied to a good comment from Carl on my posting about prowling wolves and the silence of the shepherds. In that reply, I noted that, in my view, there’s a strong strand of necrophilia running through Christianity. I’d like to day more about that today.

For some time now, it has struck me that, in some essential respects, as Christianity has developed historically, it has incorporated necrophiliac tendencies at more than a subliminal level into its very core and not merely into marginal areas of doctrinal and cultural life. Though the kerygma of early Christianity stresses that the cross and resurrection are together the center of Christian faith, as Christianity has developed, the cross has often eclipsed the resurrection in the lived kerygma most Christians practice. As an illustration of this, think of how, throughout Christian history, most Christian churches have used the cross as their chief identifying symbol, and how many churches combine that symbol with a corpus of the suffering Christ in their key iconography.

In my view, the necrophilia became prominent as Christianity incorporated various aspects of Hellenic thought into its doctrinal statements and theology in its formative years. In particular, from early in Christian history, there has been a continuing fascination with the world-denying, flesh-repudiating aspects of Greek philosophy—with the belief that the soul is what is essential about human beings, and the body only a dispensable shell in which the soul resides until its final liberation by death.

It’s only a small jump from that idea to the notion that helping people towards a “good” death is a noble thing for Christians to do, that cultivating death not merely for ourselves but for others whom we "love" is a desirable project. It requires only a small stretch of the imagination to begin thinking, as influential Christian thinkers have insisted throughout history, that this world is merely a shadow of the “real” world of heaven; that life is like a night spent in a bad inn, to be endured because the bliss of heaven awaits us; that it is better to die than to live, if death means our salvation and life might lead us to damnation.

A whole superstructure of devotion has been erected around these ideas in institutional Christianity. They have resulted in a fixation of churches on saving people from eternal damnation—on saving their souls while ignoring their bodies. This superstructure of devotion focuses on the need for mechanisms to enable us to negotiate the wilds of this passing life successfully, so that we may find ourselves worthy to enter heaven: on the need for pastor or priest to help us along, to proclaim the eternal Word of salvation to us, to baptize us, to chrism us, to feed us with the Eucharist, to forgive our sins, to help us assure that we are prepared to face death.

Though Protestant Christianity began as a revolt against such mediatory beliefs, those beliefs remain strong under other guises in Protestant traditions. The belief of many Christians in the Protestant traditions that the Bible is the inspired Word of God and the only trustworthy guide to eternal salvation often absolutizes the scriptures, turns them into a fetishized mediatory object that we must venerate and submit to, if we expect to enter heaven. And the preaching of many Protestant churches is every bit as much focused on the next life, on sin and death and the cross, as is that of the traditions Protestantism repudiated in the Reformation.

The necrophiliac strand runs through all versions of “official” Christianity today, as a central and not incidental heritage. And this is exceedingly ironic, since it was not at all the central preoccupation of Jesus’s own life and ministry, which focused on the proclamation that, in his life and ministry, the reign of God was breaking into the world. Into this world . . . .

Jesus did not develop a superstructure of beliefs and practices to assure that we could escape damnation and enter heaven. He seems to have been entirely disinterested in all those rituals and cults and doctrines that Christians now cherish as indispensable for salvation.

Instead, he gave primary attention to practical compassion as the path to union with God. His focus was this-worldly. If there are qualifying tests for entry into heaven, his parables inform us, they have everything in the world to do with whether we find him in the least among us, in the man beaten by thieves and left to die by the roadside, in the tax-collector, the prostitute, the poor widow, the imprisoned one, the one with no clothes, food, or shelter, the despised and oppressed brother or sister.

Salvation, in Jesus’s preaching and ministry, has as much this-worldly force as it has next-worldly implications. It begins here and now. Death is not the goal, the friend we welcome because death liberates our immortal souls from our flesh. It is the enemy, to be combated, to be overcome. Death is to be overcome as we share our bread with the hungry; it is to be combated as we provide medical care for the ill; it is to be overcome as we educate people to live productive lives in this world. It is to be transformed in manifold ways by our activities here and now.

To the extent that the churches depart from this vision of life for a death-centered, otherwordly scheme of salvation focused on the mediatory power of priest-pastor-church, they are departing from the very center of Jesus’s life and ministry, his proclamation that, in him, the reign of God was breaking into the world. The persistent challenge of Christian theology and of Christian practice is to return to the gospels as a critical starting point for all devotion, for all Christian ways of being in the world. Death-fixated prelates who try to frighten us into submitting to their whims lest we lose our souls have little to do with the way Jesus sets before us in the gospels.

+ + + + +

And some reflections on the story of Fr. Geoffrey Farrow, about which I blogged some time back (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/10/flawed-in-pottery-god.html). He’s the priest of the Fresno diocese who spoke out in a Sunday homily recently, stating that his conscience forbade him to support the initiative of the California bishops to promote legislation abolishing the right of gay couples to marry in California.

As Fr. Farrow’s courageous homily suggested, his act of conscientious objection was likely to have dire consequences, and those consequences have now been made apparent. He has been suspended from ministry by Bishop John Steinbock of Fresno (http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/2199). This is a penalty that both deprives Fr. Farrow of the work he is trained to do—ministering to God’s people—and of an income, of health benefits, of housing, and of retirement funds. Suspension is no light penalty.

Following the National Catholic Reporter article about Fr. Farrow’s suspension, for which I have just provided a link, is a blog discussion of the suspension. I want to comment on one particular proposal in the thread of discussion about this story.

This is a 16 October contribution of blogger Brendan Newell. It appears that Mr. Newell is responding to a posting I made earlier in the thread in which I cite the work of world-renowned geneticist Francis Collins, leader of the Human Genome Project. Collins’s work in the field of genetics has recently been used dishonestly by a number of “ex-gay” ministry sites. These groups use Collins’s observation that no single “gay gene” has been discovered to conclude that there is no genetic basis at all for sexual orientation.

Collins has publicly repudiated the ex-gay misrepresentation of his genetic findings. As he notes,

The evidence we have at present strongly supports the proposition that there are hereditary factors in male homosexuality — the observation that an identical twin of a male homosexual has approximately a 20% likelihood of also being gay points to this conclusion, since that is 10 times the population incidence. But the fact that the answer is not 100% also suggests that other factors besides DNA must be involved. That certainly doesn’t imply, however, that those other undefined factors are inherently alterable . . . .

No one has yet identified an actual gene that contributes to the hereditary component (the reports about a gene on the X chromosome from the 1990s have not held up), but it is likely that such genes will be found in the next few years (www.exgaywatch.com/wp/2007/05/major-geneticist-francis-collins-responds-to-narth-article).

Mr. Newell’s response to these genetic findings (and, it appears, to my proposal that they have to be taken into account by moral theologians doing sexual ethics), is fascinating. Newell argues, “It doesn't matter if homosexuality has it's [sic] root in genetics.”

He then goes on to compare homosexuality to alcoholism. As he maintains, alcoholism is also rooted in genetics, and yet the Catholic church calls alcoholics to sobriety and opposes legislation that would encourage alcoholics to give in to temptation.

In Mr. Newell’s view, “The exact same is true for those with a disposition towards same sex attaction [sic]. They are to be encouraged in every way to remain chaste. Any teachings to the contrary are no more signs of Christian love than giving an alcoholic a bottle of Jack Daniels.”

I’m fascinated by this seemingly plausible, but entirely misguided, theological argument. First, it does what few of those using the churches to bolster their adamantine prejudice against gay human beings today want to do: it admits that there is a genetic basis for sexual orientation, even though a single “gay gene” has not been found and may never be isolated.

But what the argument gives with one hand it quickly snatches away with the other. It takes the now-incontrovertible scientific finding that sexual orientation is linked to genetic factors, to the biological structure of the brain, etc., and twists that finding to compare being gay to being an alcoholic.

How many ways is this argument wrong? In the first place, it equates a genetic predisposition towards self-destructive behavior with a genetic predisposition to love—to love in a particular way, admittedly, and a way that Mr. Newell apparently seeks to deny as possible. But to love nonetheless.

In other words, it encourages gay human beings not to love—something that the final section of Mr. Newell’s post calls “bearing the cross” and denying oneself to follow Christ and his way of salvation.

And this is where I find the argument of the Mr. Newells of the world that gay people are fine as God has made us, but are called to lifelong denial of who God made us to be, so baffling. So unreflective. And so cruel—my second point.

Telling people not to love—to love according to their nature, according to their lights—is perhaps the most cruel thing any human being can do to another human being. Love fulfills. Love allows us to transcend ourselves, to overcome our isolation, to form bonds with others that build those whom we love and build ourselves at the same time.

Love enriches: it enriches the lover; it enriches those who are loved. It enriches communities in which it roots itself. Love builds. Love gives life, even when that life is not the new biological of a child. It gives life in manifold ways. Stable, healthy, public, publicly affirmed relationships of love—stable, healthy, public, publicly affirmed marriages between two people committing themselves to live in love—are good for the community in which these relationships live themselves out, because they enrich and build and bring life to the community in ways beyond counting.

Being gay and loving as a gay person is not akin to being an alcoholic. I have deep and sad experience with alcoholism in my own family. I know whereof I speak. My brother died tragically young in 1991 after years of self-destructive binge drinking. My parents both drank themselves to death more slowly.

I am fortunate not to have inherited that predisposition to heavy drinking. Or perhaps the truth of the matter is that I have been blessed to have been given a life partner who has so enriched and built me as a human being that I do not have any impulse to explore that genetic predisposition to addiction, if it is, indeed, lurking there in my human make-up.

The relationship of love I share with Steve: it’s an antidote to self-destruction. Without that relationship, I might well be tempted to throw my life and gifts away. I can understand the temptation, and I have nothing but compassion for those, like my brother, who succumb to it.

Why do those who now want to admit that being gay has a genetic basis still insist that being gay is like being an alcoholic? I can only assume that they do so because they cannot come to terms with the destructiveness of a prejudice to which they want to cling at all costs.

In some cases, they do so, as well, because they do not want to come to terms with their own gay inclinations, and they have found no other way to cope except to tamp down, repress, and deny—and to attack gay people who refuse to hide and be shamed. I do not know Mr. Newell. I am not suggesting that he fits into this category of folks. What I do want to note is that they are legion within the churches—self-hating gay people whose choice of a life of “self-denial” is self-destructive.

This is not a path to recommend to those who want to live healthy lives that open to love. I cannot find it in my heart and mind to believe that it is the path Jesus sets before us. That path leads always to love.

Bearing the cross, in the worldview of Jesus, has everything to do with putting up with all those forces in ourselves and the world at large that make it more difficult to love. We bear the cross because we love. It enters our life because we have set forth, in the foorsteps of Jesus, on a journey of love. Bearing the cross has nothing to do with denying love—in ourselves, or in others, when we stand against the right of others to love as God has made them.

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 . . . .