Ruth Krall, Historical Meandering: Ideologies of Abuse and Exclusion (1)

Vasily Polenov, Le droit du Seigneur (1874) (i)

The essay by Ruth Krall that follows below is the fifth in a series of essays entitled "Recapitulation: Affinity Sexual Violence in a Religious Voice." The first essay in this series appeared in two installments, here and here. The second appeared in another two installments, here and here. The third essay is here, and the fourth essay, in two installments, is here and here. In this multi-part series of essays, in which Ruth generously offers us the fruits of her years of research about these matters, Ruth hypothesizes the endemic nature of religious and spiritual leader sexual abuse of followers. The current essay continues this theme by arguing that clergy sexual abuse is a global public health issue whose noxious presence can be found inside multiple language groups and national identities. In this essay, which is rich and lengthy and which I'll offer to you in several installments, Ruth continues her investigation of these claims with an historical sounding. Ruth's essay follows (first installment):

Michael Boyle on Princeton Seminary Controversy: "Progressive Christianity Only Has a Future if Progressive Christians Have the Courage of Their Convictions"

Because I think this conversation is essential — and important — I'd like to add one more statement to the set of reflections I've posted in the last several days about the controversy that ensued when Princeton Theological Seminary chose not to give an award to Rev. Tim Keller. I've discussed that controversy in three previous postings — here, here, and here. These three postings engage, in particular, Jonathan Merritt's claim that, in pressing for Keller not to receive an award from Princeton due to his opposition to the ordination of women and openly gay folks and his defense of a "complementarianism" that requires wives to be subordinated to their husbands, liberals are marginalizing people like Keller.

Anita Little Comments on Princeton Controversy: "Growing Trend to Cry 'Oppression' When the Opinions of Influential White Men" Are Challenged

In an essay entitled "The 'Marginalization' of Tim Keller: When Anything Short of Adulation Is Oppression," Anita Little, editor of the Remapping American Christianities initiative at Religion Dispatches, comments on Jonathan Merritt's insistence that Tim Keller is being "marginalized" by the liberals who objected to his receiving an award from Princeton Seminary (on this controversy, see my two previous postings, here and here). She writes, 

The Princeton Seminary Controversy: Concluding Thoughts About White Male Privilege and Intersectionality

The discussion about the furor regarding Princeton Seminary's decision to withhold its Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Witness from Presbyterian pastor Tim Keller continued at various internet sites yesterday. I blogged about the controversy yesterday morning, and about Jonathan Merritt's response at RNS to Princeton's decision.

Princeton Seminary Steps Back from Award for Pastor Who Promotes Female Subordination, Opposes Ordination of Women and Openly Gay Folks: Controversy Ensues

Yesterday, following controversy, Princeton Theological Seminary Seminary reversed a decision to give its Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Witness to Rev. Tim Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian church in Manhattan. Keller has been vocal in opposing the ordination of women and openly LGBT people by the Presbyterian Church USA. He belongs to a conservative wing of that church, the Presbyterian Church in America, which is largely identified with and known for its opposition to full inclusion of women and LGBTQ people in Presbyterian churches. He also promotes the ideology of female subordination to males, using a theology of "complementarism" to justify this stance.

A Sunday Resource: BBC Scotland Program on Slavery and Song

A month ago, I shared with you a wonderful resource compiled by my friend Ian Gilmour, a Church of Scotland pastor. As I noted, Ian and his wife Donna spent a good bit of time in October 2014 interviewing people in Arkansas and Arizona about African-American spirituals and the role they played in enabling enslaved African Americans to combat their oppression in the period of slavery.

O Tempora, O Mores: On the Politico-Religious Uses of the Calvinist Myth in American Culture

I blogged yesterday about an emerging neoconservative meme represented in yesterday’s op-ed piece by David Brooks in the New York Times. As I noted, this meme celebrates the good old-fashioned Calvinist work ethic, with its stress on self restraint and delayed gratification.

It does so by way of commenting on our current cultural and economic crises, and what—in the view of this perspective—has brought us to this crisis. Brooks appears to believe that at some unspecified point in the past (well, before the government intervened in our lives by setting up safety nets that mitigate the consequences of lack of self restraint), we adhered to Calvinist virtues that made us great as a nation, and brought us wealth without causing us to wallow in the self-indulgent luxury of nations with a more pliant moral fiber.

Brooks calls for a new moral revival to return our nation to its Calvinist roots. He urges neoconservatives to transfer the moral fervor of their culture-wars fixations to the economic sphere, and to help bring in this moral revival of our nation.

Having analyzed Brooks’s thoughts about these matters yesterday, I was intrigued later in the day when I picked up a book I had ordered recently through interlibrary loan and discovered it promoting the same religio-political analysis of American culture that Brooks makes, at an entirely different period of American history. The book was written in 1930, when Hoover was president, and when the nation was on the brink of an economic crisis created by several presidencies that gave big business free rein while doing little to assure that the corporate sector served the common good. That crisis would require the visionary leadership of FDR—and strong government intervention—to set the nation back on track politically, culturally, and economically.

Because this book is not in copyright, I’m going to cite it without providing a title or publication information. My primary reason for going that route is that I do not want to cause pain to any living members of the family of the person who wrote the book. I see no reason to do so. What I make of the book might well appear to them to be critical in a way that slams the legacy of their family member—though that is not my intent. My intent is to juxtapose analysis of the mythical hard-working, morally upright Calvinist past of our nation from two different periods of our history, to show how persistent (and how predictable) this theme is in conservative cultural commentary at times of cultural crisis.

The book in question focuses on the colonial history of a family that happens to be one of my own family lines—one of those Ulster Scots families who left Ireland in droves in the first decades of the 18th century to begin new lives in the middle colonies. Like many of these families, the Kerrs moved from Pennsylvania into the Valley of Virginia prior to 1750. The book focuses on their lives and legacy in the Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia.

As Ulster Scots, the Kerrs were intense Calvinists. Since they were among the first Scotch-Irish families to make the move from Pennsylvania to Virginia, they played a founding role in setting up an historic Presbyterian church, Tinkling Spring, near their homeplace. The family’s progenitor, James Kerr, is on a 1741 list of settlers in the Shenandoah Valley petitioning for the formation of Tinkling Spring church, and a 1742 list of founding members of the church. My ancestor Samuel Kerr was baptized in 1741 in the church, soon after his birth.

It would be hard to find a more prototypically Calvinist family than the Kerrs—the kind of stiff-backbone, hard-working, morally upright family that Brooks’s mythology about the American past celebrates. Through blood, marriage, and shared religious ties, the Kerrs connect to several noted Ulster Scots families who have left long political legacies in the United States, including the Pickens and Calhouns.

It’s interesting to see what one family member made of that celebrated Calvinist heritage just as the Depression hit in 1930. His interpretation of this heritage sounds remarkably similar to Brooks’s thesis as we struggle through the economic downturn of the first decade of the 21st century.

As he writes about the house James Kerr built in Virginia between 1730 and 1740—a house still standing in 1930—the author looks back at his family’s Calvinist heritage and compares the values he believes the Kerrs held in the past to those he sees dominating the culture in which he lives in 1930. He’s appalled at the discrepancy:

As we pen these words we think of the hardships our parents and ancestors bore in their fights with the Indians and British to protect their families and homes and crops they labored so hard for, cutting down trees into wood and mauling rails for fences, and hewing logs to build houses and barns, raising flax and scotching it and their wives spinning it for clothes. And of the bearing of children of which my grandmother and mother each had a dozen, and what awful pain, anxiety, and care! And now we fuss about hard times while riding around in automobiles and reaping their labors, without shame, and boys and girls having a good time, smoking cigarettes and going to movies—and that is not all, by a long shot. And we are taxed heavy for schools to teach them to play baseball, football, basketball, and ball-room, etc., and a larger tax to build fine macadam roads for lovers of pleasure, more than lovers of God; and for Scripture on the perilous times, read 2nd Timothy, 3rd chapter, and 24th chapter of Matthew; and it reads, “Except those days should be shortened no flesh will be saved.” And this fast, wicked life is ushering in these last days. I think of days when they went to church on horseback and took their wives and children and sweethearts on behind the saddle, and cut their hay and wheat and rye and oats with scythe and cradle, and when I was fifteen or sixteen, I was one of two that cradled seventy acres of wheat my father had on his 300-acre farm. . . . . Part of that land is idle now, and men are idle and won’t work it.

Past good, present bad. Calvinist past good, decadent secular present bad. Self reliance, wonderful; government intervention, not so much. Horses fine; paved roads and automobiles deplorable.

You get the gist. This is a timeworn trope of American thought, this comparison of the mythic past of hard-working (white, patriarchal) Calvinist families with what we have now. It is a trope that uses religious language to decry current developments (the book also lambasts those who drink liquor and vote wet) that the myth-maker sees as morally abhorrent. And it links that moral abhorrence rather predictably to attacks on government “interference” in the lives of sober, hard-working (white, patriarchal, Christian) families.

Much that the book says about moral decay of (white, patriarchal, Christian) American society in the 1930s sounds precisely like what conservative groups in the Christian churches are saying today about gays and the effects of gay-affirming attitudes in our society. There is a clear carryover from the political intent of this myth-making rhetoric about our Calvinist past to the current cultural and religious debate about welcoming and affirming gay human beings. In the past, the moral crusades focused on prohibition and resistance to public funding for schools and roads. Today it centers on resistance to gay folks.

Same rhetoric: different targets. Same players: different enemies at different moments of American cultural development. And the same scripture verses are used by these groups to decry whatever is their current object of moral ire. The section of the book attacking those who drink alcohol cites Timothy, as does the preceding passage, lambasting lovers of pleasure who reject God, lead “silly women” astray, and usher in the last days.

I grew up hearing sermons that applied all these texts to African Americans and the socialists and communists who were said to be collaborating with black folks to bring down Christian civilization in the United States, and precipitate Armageddon. In my growing-up years, I heard stories about how those same texts and that same rhetoric had been applied a generation previously to women who sought employment outside the house, bobbed their hair and used make-up, and dressed in men’s clothes (i.e., slacks).

I recently read a fire-and-brimstone condemnation of railroads written by a late-19th century American evangelical writer. The writer claimed that when railroads were introduced, the culture went to hell in a handbasket and natural disasters began to proliferate as God tried to get our attention. God’s beef about railroads? That they ran on Sunday, breaking the Sabbath.

Given the way this religious rhetoric about our purported golden Calvinist past and our purported current decadence keeps cropping up in both American religion and American political commentary—always with the same political goals, though the objects of the moral wrath vary at different periods—one wonders why anyone continues to try to promote such religio-political analysis. It wasn’t right in the past. It didn’t stop necessary social changes in the past.

Why would anyone imagine it is suddenly right today and that it will succeed today in blocking social changes that have long been overdue in a land committed to democratic ideals and human rights?

Recent News: Prop 8, Church of Scotland, Mainline Clergy and Gay Issues, and Obama and Human Rights

Because of the long weekend and yesterday’s holiday in the U.S., many readers may have taken a temporary break from reading the news and their favorite blogs. So I thought I’d offer today a smorgasbord of commentary from several recent news or blog articles, which touch on themes I’ve discussed in previous postings.

Today’s the day on which the California Supreme Court will hand down its verdict about proposition 8, the voter initiative that amended the state constitution to turn back gay marriage in the last round of elections. Most political analysts are expecting the California Supremes to uphold prop 8. But it’s less easy to know what the court will decide to do about the some 18,000 same-sex couples who married in California prior to prop 8.

Courtesy of Pam’s House Blend, I read an alarming article from Orcinus this weekend, predicting a violent right-wing backlash in the hinterlands, if the court should decide to void the prop 8 vote. This analysis ties into my caution in a number of previous blog postings (see e.g. here) about concluding that the power of the political and religious right has been decisively checked in our culture—particularly in areas in which it has long dominated political life.

Some thought-provoking reflections from Sara Robinson at Orcinus:

Yes, the right wing is losing on gay rights issues. That is, very precisely, why they’re more dangerous now than they have been in the past. Their impending irrelevance is not a reason to worry less; it’s a reason to worry more. And getting Prop 8 overturned in the courts would ignite the situation, because it will hit absolutely every angry-making right-wing button there is . . . .

It’s a sad irony that the best possible outcome for America’s gay movement could also turn out to be the tipping point for the biggest anti-gay, anti-liberal backlash we’ve seen yet. Tomorrow, we’ll know one way or another which way this will go – and whether a new court-ordered opportunity for America's gay community could also turn out to be a potent new source of danger from the right as well.

About a month ago, I noted an interesting editorial in the official journal of the Church of Scotland, Life and Work, which challenges the selectivity with which many Christians of the right quote the bible to challenge acceptance of gay persons. What I did not note at the time is that this editorial reflects an important conversation now underway among Scottish Presbyterians about gay people and gay issues.

In January 2009, after its then pastor had retired in June of the previous year, Queen’s Cross Church in Aberdeen chose to call as his replacement Rev. Scott Rennie—an openly gay minister, one whom the congregation knew to be gay and in a committed relationship. This action precipitated a lively discussion among Scottish Presbyterians about the propriety of appointing openly gay ministers.

An organized movement to block this appointment and the ordination of any openly gay ministers in the Church of Scotland got underway. A group of ministers within the Presbytery of Aberdeen filed a complaint about the appointment, precipitating deliberation by the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly in May 2009. A group calling itself the Fellowship of Confessing Churches formed and organized an online petition to consolidate opposition to Rev. Rennie’s appointment.

On 22 May, at its General Assembly, the Church of Scotland voted to uphold Rev. Rennie’s appointment as minister of Queen’s Cross Church. And now, Clerical Whispers is reporting today that opponents of this move are vowing to hold back contributions from the Church of Scotland.
And this is the point I want to emphasize, as I wend my way through this story. In February, I noted that the Presbytery of Arkansas had voted 116-64 in favor of striking down statements in the Book of Order of the Presbyterian church that prohibit the ordination of openly gay clergy. Though this initiative (which requires a two-thirds vote of approval from presbyteries throughout the country) failed, it came closer than ever before to succeeding in this year’s round of votes.

What I did not mention at the time I blogged about this issue was that, at the same time that the Presbytery of Arkansas voted in favor of abolishing barriers to ordination of openly gay clergy, a Presbyterian church in Little Rock, Second Presbyterian, ordained an openly gay deacon. I’ve followed the story of this ordination with some interest, since I have a number of friends who attend this church.

They tell me that the day on which the vote to ordain this deacon took place, one of their ministers reminded them of how their church has always been at the forefront of movements to defend human rights. The congregation sent participants to the Selma march in 1965. It also sent representatives to protests against American involvement in the Vietnam War. Its commitment to gay rights is an extension of its longstanding commitment to protect and defend human rights in many areas.

My friends tell me that the decision to ordain a gay deacon took place without rancor and with very little opposition in the congregation. However, following the vote, a number of well-heeled families informed the church (or so I am told) that they are withdrawing their membership and going to a more “biblically-correct” church.

This is, unfortunately, an all-too-common story. The primary reason many churches do not do what they know is right in the case of gay brothers and sisters has to do with money: fear of financial reprisal, if they put their words into action, in the case of gay brothers and sisters, holds many of our churches captive. It will be interesting to see how right-wing groups twist the screws, as they apply their financial blackmail to the Church of Scotland now—and whether they are successful in holding the church hostage to well-heeled interest groups that oppose gay rights.

Dirty business . . . .

And speaking of debates within the Presbyterian church about gay persons and gay rights, I should note the Clergy Voices Survey of Public Religion Research. This survey was conducted last year, and its results were recently released.

The survey polled clergy from seven mainline Protestant denominations in the U.S.—the United Church of Christ, Episcopal Church USA, United Methodist Church, American Baptist Church, Disciples of Christ, Presbyterian Church USA, and Evangelical Lutheran Church. The survey finds strong support among mainline clergy for laws prohibiting discrimination against gay and lesbian citizens. Two-thirds of mainline clergy support hate crimes legislation and workplace protections for gay and lesbian persons. A majority supports adoption rights.

However, on the issue of same-sex marriage, the survey notes some stark differences among mainline denominations. While 67% of UCC clergy and 49% of Episcopal clergy support gay marriage, only 25% of United Methodist clergy and 20% of American Baptist clergy do so.

I find the response of United Methodist and American Baptist clergy to questions about whether the churches should refuse to work actively to make homosexuality acceptable particularly disappointing. While 51% of all mainline ministers agree that the church should not work to thwart society’s acceptance of gay persons (this includes 81% of UCC clergy, 77% of Episcopal clergy, and 61% of ELCA clergy), among United Methodist and American Baptist ministers, fewer than 4-in-10 agree.

And finally, I want to mention a persuasive article asks about what seems to be going wrong with the Obama administration, when it comes to issues of civil liberties. Bromwich focuses in particular on the president’s national security speech on 21 May, which simultaneously repudiates Bush-Cheney policies while appearing to accept some of that administration’s infringement on constitutional rights in times of perceived danger to the American public.

A provocative quotation:

Let us say it: something is seriously wrong in this administration -- though we are not yet in a position to judge the cause. We do not know who the lawyers are that gave Barack Obama advice that goes against a long career of ostensible commitments. And it is too early yet to say at what point a new president, confused by the depth of his burdens and uncertain how much even now he believes of what he used to say, becomes instead a man we are compelled to see as lacking in convictions. It cannot be a virtue that he sheds the Constitution with a gentler demeanor than George W. Bush. . . .

A misjudged statesmanship has allowed Obama to think himself magnanimous when he declines to expose the wrongs he has come to know. The way to right a wrong is not to install a somewhat reformed version of the wrong. People, by that means, may be spared embarrassment, but their instinct for truth will be corrupted. It is a false prudence that supposes justice can come from a compromise between a lawful and a lawless regime. On the contrary, the less you tell of the truth, the more prone your listeners will be to commit the next barbarous act that is proposed to them under the cover of a national emergency or a necessary war.

On the whole—and sadly—I agree. I agree, in particular, with Bromwich’s insistence that they way to right a wrong is “not to install a somewhat reformed version of the wrong,” and that “the less you tell of the truth, the more prone your listeners will be to commit the next barbarous act that is proposed to them under the cover of a national emergency or a necessary war.” And this is why a href="http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/05/on-truth-commissions-parallels-between.html">I support the call for a national truth commission

Accidie and Running from Whales

Sometimes I feel itchy inside—in heart and soul—and when that happens, I know I’m entering into a period of what early Christian monks of the desert called accidie. They defined this state of soul as a kind of dryness in which it seems that no matter what you attempt, you fall short. And so you slide into a state of not caring . . . .

For me, the spiritual malady of accidie presents as more of an inner itchiness. I can’t focus. I have ideas, but they lead me nowhere. Everything seems too much—too much bother, too much busy-ness.

In this spiritual-psychological state, prayer becomes . . . gruesome. Not that I have ever been much of a pray-er, in the formal sense of the word. I do say my prayers, knowing full well as I do so that words are not ultimately what praying is all about. Praying at its best is disposing our whole selves—mind, heart, soul—to be receptive to God’s influence in our lives. We can (and should) pray, no matter what we’re doing. And we often do it best when we aren’t even mouthing the pious words—when we’re hoeing in the garden or stirring the pot of beans.

Accidie makes you not even want to try. It’s about giving up, succumbing to distraction in a way that you know is all about fragmentation: of concentration, of that disposing of self to be available to God.

I’ve learned to live through these periods. They always do teach me something—about myself, about the very different rhythms by which the world I try to place at my own disposal lives independently of me, and about God. If nothing else, they teach me to be less certain that I know something, that I can control anything, that God is at my disposal rather than vice versa.

They teach me to be careful even about using the name God, which we profane by overuse. When G-d becomes a word we speak oh so glibly, rather than the Word that calls us to life, we have lost all sense of what that word means. When we’ve begun to think that we know what the word G-d means, we’ve lost contact with the Word.

So what’s all this high-falutin’ theological theorizing about, ultimately? In my case, these days, I have a fairly good grasp of what the accidie is about.

First, I’m on information overload. When there’s too much information to take in, process, run by heart and soul so that I can internalize it and mull it over, I go into a kind of shut-down process. Can’t take more in, won’t take more in, don’t ask me to process . . . .

Things are happening fast and furious these days in some of the worlds I feel compelled to follow. Right on the heels of the GAFCON conference, there’s been high drama in the Anglican church as (the English media report) the Vatican has been holding secret meetings with some high Anglican officials who are ill-disposed to allowing women to be bishops.

A significant number of bishops and clergy are seeking to hold the Anglican communion hostage, just after GAFCON fired its volleys at the same communion. In the case of GAFCON, the “presenting issue” (to echo the less than scintillating archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen) is the gay issue: gay people. Our existence. Our expectation to be at the table of the Lord. The choice of the Episcopal Church USA to make one of us a bishop—one of us not hiding his/her identity, that is, but one of us who is out and proud. As Katherine Jefferts Schori, the presiding bishop of the ECUSA, said some time ago, it’s no secret at all that the ranks of the episcopacy in the Anglican communion have always contained a significant number of closeted gay men.

For the group now pressuring Rowan Williams on the heels of GAFCON, the presenting issue is the choice to make women bishops. The Anglican communion is faced today with a two-pronged, overlapping set of threats to divide the communion—one group pressing the gay issue, the other the women’s issue.

Though the two groups are not entirely coterminous with each other, and though one is low-church evangelical (GAFCON) and the other high-church Catholic (the anti-women bishops group), they share a certain set of theological and political predispositions. And these theological-political predispositions are being gleefully exploited by right-wing interest groups in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Australia.

The bottom line is bullying. These right-wing interest groups want to de-fang the mainline churches, to eliminate their political influence within the global North, to reduce that influence to frippery. They’d far rather have “their” churches foaming at the mouth about the length of lace to be worn on an episcopal gown than preaching about the sins of capitalism, exploitation of the environment. Or about the sins of racism and homophobia.

To its credit, the Anglican communion has just chosen to stand up to these bullies. Yesterday evening, a synod gathered in York voted to move ahead with ordaining women bishops in the Church of England (the U.S., Canada, and Australia are already ahead of the curve here).

The Anglican communion will pay a price for its courage here, as the ECUSA has been paying a price for making Gene Robinson a bishop. And this news comes on the heels of a recent decision by the Presbyterian Church USA to overturn its ban on (openly) gay clergy and to move towards blessing gay marriages.

That decision now has to be confirmed by the presbyteries of the church, and in all likelihood, will not be confirmed by many of the presbyteries—particularly in the last big stronghold of ecclesial misogyny and homophobia, my homeland, the American Southeast.

Nonetheless, these are important decisions. They indicate that the power of the religious right (and, above all, of its right-wing puppet masters) to control the conversation of mainline churches is waning. They suggest that the religious right will be less capable of manipulating the consciousness of American voters in future, by playing anti-gay and anti-women cards.

The interaction between the group threatening to leave the Anglican church over ordination of women bishops and the Vatican also points to the continuing ugliness of many ecclesial and political stands taken by the current pope and his cronies. And that recognition (the recognition of the ugliness at the center of my church) in turn points to the growing divisions between the Vatican and many Catholic people, particularly in the U.S. On his return to Australia from his recent American tour, Bishop Geoffrey Robinson recently noted that he was shocked at the amount of discontent he found among American Catholics, and at the corruption of church officials that is producing this discontent.

Indeed. The American Catholic church is a mell of a hess, as my aunt likes to say. And that hess is not likely to be resolved anytime soon—not until a significant number of American Catholics get as mad as hell and determined not to take it anymore. And until those who continue to affiliate publicly with the hess start withholding money from the church, from their church . . . .

And through it all, the United Methodist Church remains, as I predicted it would, once delegates to General Conference had gone home, bafflingly silent about the issues it so hotly debated at General Conference—about the issue, the gay issue, the place of gay human beings in the church and at its table. It appears that, as with previous General Conferences, the United Methodist Church will continue to get away with the claim that it opposes discrimination against gay people, while its own institutions discriminate freely and unapologetically against gay people.

It appears that not even the most recent statement of General Conference deploring discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation will provide some UMC-sponsored institutions to adopt policies stating flatly that they will not discriminate on grounds of sexual orientation. As a blogger on the gay-inclusive UMC Reconciling Ministries website noted recently, while Presbyterians are debating gay ordination and gay marriage, Methodists are still stuck over whether even to admit gay members.

John Wesley must be hanging his head in shame.

So, accidie: all of this quick shifting and turning and buzzing within various churches today, regarding significant issues, leaves me overloaded with information. I need to get a feel for what is going on—at a spiritual level; at a deeper level than that fathomed by media soundbytes. I need some “away” time to take it all in.

I’m feeling accidie as well because, out of the blue, I have a delightful invitation to publish something in a venue I admire. And, again out of the blue, in quick succession, I have received hard shoves recently to publish a book I have long outlined in my head. And have been hesitant to publish.

For all kinds of reasons. The book touches on stories that in turn touch on the lives of people still living, and I want to be careful to do justice (and practice charity) if I do publish anything about those lives.

I’m also plain frightened to try to write this book. Not sure I have it in me. Not sure that what I think is an important story to tell will turn out to be important, once I have done the research necessary to gather narrative detail. Not sure I have the ability to work narrative detail into clean, compelling narrative line.

But aware, at some level, that whatever or Whoever is pushing me in this direction is beyond my own control, and that resisting some Whoevers can be more than a tad dangerous, as witness one Jonah. It’s easier to shut down and scratch my itch, than to go ahead and grasp the live wire of this vocational nudge.

Perhaps there’s a nice quite monastery somewhere that needs a lay gardener? Or a placid little Quaker community that wants a live-in cook to assist the Friends to whom it offers retreats?

But I suspect a whale can swallow a body even in the hills of Pennsylvania or Kentucky—or wherever those refuges are to be found. Particularly when that body is running away from what’s really worth doing in his own life?

And I'm surely not any Jonah. But I suspect that all of us end up getting chased by his whale every now and again, when we try to divert our lives to a direction other than the path set before us . . . .

* Another nudge: I'm intrigued that, in the past day or so, as the Anglican synod gathers in York, my counter for hits on this blogsite shows several log-ins from York. I do not intend to be self-promoting in noting this. I note it because it's another nudge to me not to let the accidie stop me from trying to put word after word, as I gather thoughts and seek with millions of other Christians to hear what the Lord says to the churches today.

The Sounds of Silence

“I have never heard a sermon that offered wisdom as to how a gay man should live his life in a faithful Christian manner. All I have heard is silence, or when there was something other than silence, the words have been condemning" ~ Rev. Paul Capetz.

Presbyterian News Service for Jan. 28 carries an interesting article by Duane Sweep, entitled "Twin Cities' Presbytery Restores Capetz' Ordination (www.pcusa.org/pcnews/2008/08063.htm).

The story concerns a Presbyterian (PC USA) minister Paul Capetz, who renounced his ordination in 2000 after the PC USA added to its Book of Discipline a 1997 statement requiring ordained ministers to practice “fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and woman or chastity in singleness.”

As many commentators noted at the time the policy was implemented, it was primarily aimed at lesbian and gay ministers living with partners--that is, lesbian-gay ministers who potentially might reveal their sexual orientation to the public, rather than living silent, closeted lives. Commentators in the Presbyterian church and other churches that have adopted similar policies note that they tend to be used almost exclusively to weed out openly gay-lesbian ministers. Straight (or straight-identifying) ministers who are unmarried are not normally subjected to such stringent scrutiny re: their "celibacy" as are lesbian-gay ones.

Capetz recently decided to ask for reinstatement to ordination, on the ground that the implied "vow of celibacy" that the PC USA requires of non-married clergy represents a theology of "works righteousness" antithetical to Reformed theology. His appeal was upheld on Jan. 26 by the presbytery of Minneapolis-St. Paul.

What strikes me in Capetz's testimony to the presbytery, as reported in the article cited above, is the pronounced theme of calling and witness running through it. Capetz reports that it was the church which, from childhood forward, nurtured his life of faith. It was within the church that, as a young man, he discovered a strong sense of vocation, a calling to follow in Jesus's footsteps and minister to his flock.

And it was the same church--the church that had nurtured him and provided a context within which he heard the calling to ministry--that then attacked him when he sought to integrate the experience of being gay with his vocation. It was that church that told him to live in silence about his very personhood, or incur penalties.

It is out of this painful exclusion that Capetz addresses his experience (and that of other openly gay-lesbian believers) in the church: either silence or condemnation; either the injunction (tacit or spoken) to remain hidden, defined the shameful member of the family who is never spoken of, or direct assaults on his personhood, from the very community that nurtured his faith and vocation.

Capetz's testimony strikes me powerfully, because his story could be mine. It is also the story of countless other LGBT members of Christian communities around the world, whose entire experience of grace and vocation is framed by our natures, by who we are, by what we have experienced as LGBT children of God. We experience the divine as LGBT persons. We cannot experience God in any other way. To ask us to deny our natures or pretend to be who we are not is to ask us to forfeit the experience of a God who comes to each person just as that person is....We experience God through the mediating structures of our own personhood, of our personalities, predispositions, our unique way of being in the world.

The ultimate cruelty of the churches' assault on us as LGBT persons--specifically and precisely because we are LGBT--is the churches' denial that we lead graced lives. In telling us that our nature is malformed, or that our love is inauthentic, the churches tell us that we have no witness of grace to offer the Christian community.

Yet the powerful testimony of LGBT Christians everywhere--there is a veritable cloud of witnesses--repudiates the validity of the church's judgment of us. Not only can we live lives of grace, vocational lives within the Christian community, we do live such lives.

To their shame, the churches are unable to recognize this. The loss is surely the churches' loss. In behaving so savagely, by excluding LGBT members who refuse to live in quiet shame, not only do churches undercut their claims to be church: the family of God in which everyone is welcome. In behaving thus, the churches also diminish the significance of their many ministries to heal, make whole, right the wrongs of society.

The churches cannot stand to claim for love, inclusion, healing, and justice, when they conspicuously deny those ideals by their shameful treatment of their gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered members.

Silence is never an adequate response to persons in need of love, affirmation, and healing. The Jewish and Christian scriptures show prophets and holy people, as well as Jesus, consistently reaching out to anyone in need, to speak words of healing and consolation. God is forever speaking....

A church that employs silence as a way of avoiding speaking words of healing and blessing to one group of human beings can hardly speak effective words of healing and blessing to others. Silence is an indefensible response on the part of churches to anyone in need.

Between silence and condemnation: this is not a place in which human beings can live and thrive.