Bishop Gene Robinson to Matt Shepard: "Welcome Home"; Catholic Youth Synod to LGBTQ People: "You Will Not Be Named in Our Heterosexual Church" — Questions for Synod Participants and Voters

In his sermon at the interment of Matt Shepard, Bishop Gene Robinson says the following (these excerpts are from about 1:13:48 and 1:19:32 in the video above):

Krzysztof Charamsa's Letter to the Pope in English Translation: "I’ve Made the Decision to Publicly Refuse the Violence of the Church with Regard to [LBTI] People"

Because Giova Gallagher has kindly pointed us in a comment here to an English translation of the full text of Monsignor  Krzysztof Charamsa's letter to Pope Francis at the Crux website, I'm going to leave a final note before I begin my two-week retreat, sharing that link with all of you, with much gratitude to Giova for finding it for us. The Crux article (by Gaia Pianigiani of New York Times) says that the translation is by Crux.

Quote for Day: "It Is Still Globally the Case – and Pope Francis Is Well Aware – That the Poorest of the Poor, the Last on the List for Food, Medicine and Education, Are Women"

Once again: we cannot talk credibly about poverty and overcoming the exclusion produced by unjust socioeconomic structures without talking specifically about women--as philosopher Janet Martin Soskice notes recently in The Tablet:

Gospel and More Gospel: When the Gospel of Jesus (and Pope Francis) Meets the American Gospel . . .

Pope Francis says,

Why Do the U.S. Bishops Sound So Unlike Pope Francis? Vinnie Rotondaro Provides Answers

Vinnie Rotondaro

I also want to recommend today Vinnie Rotondaro's examination of why Pope Francis's message of merciful concern for the poor, which is, after all, as old as the gospels, seems to come as such a surprise to so many people, American Catholics included. The reason Francis surprises us, Rotondaro surmises, is that he's so unlike many members of his own hierarchy--the U.S. bishops certainly included:

The Missed Opportunities of Pope Francis's Evangelii Gaudium

In a statement at his Christian Catholicism site, Jerry Slevin concludes that, with his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis "missed real opportunities in his Letter, likely intentionally." Jerry writes,

Pope Francis's Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium: A Critical Response from a Nobody Who Isn't Even in the Room

When a big religious organization, one with global reach, announces that it's reforming itself, reaching back to its origins and seeking to bring the powerful originating impulse from which it stems into the contemporary world, it's major news. When the Catholic church announces that it's in a reforming return-to-origins mode, as it did at Vatican II and is now doing under Pope Francis, people take notice. And they should do so.

Pope Francis's Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium: Reflections from a Nobody Who Isn't Even in the Room

I've struggled for several days now to write something about Pope Francis's apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium.  I have read the document--sort of: it's lengthy and diffuse, and to be honest, much of it strikes me as a habriaqueísmo (a word I learned from the document itself, #96) that doesn't speak to me because it doesn't seem to see me in the room. And so my eyes scan the words without fully taking them in, since I suspect they're not addressed to me as an openly gay, partnered Catholic theologian who was never, throughout my brief, abortive theological career, accorded any lasting place within a Catholic college or university, or within a Catholic parish--because I am clearly not welcome within these institutions as I am in my real life.

Good News as Week Ends: Leading U.K. Evangelical Pastor Endorses Marriage Equality

As the week turns, I don't want to forget to draw readers' attention to some very good news from the past week. As Candace Chellew-Hodge and Fred Clark note, Steve Chalke, a Baptist pastor in London and evangelical leader in the U.K., came out in favor of marriage equality this past week. To quote Fred Clark, "This is a big deal."

What Really Drives Catholics Making Gays Unwelcome? Keeping American Catholicism Politically Pure

A thought that's been knocking around in my head since I posted about the recent discussion at the In All Things blog of America magazine about the controversy re: an All Are Welcome liturgy at St. Cecilia's parish in Boston:

Paul Lakeland on Humility as Virtue Needed by Catholics Today, and a Continuation of a Family Saga of Exclusion

Dinah Roe Kendall, "The Good Samaritan," 1994

Tom Fox's report on Paul Lakeland's recent College Theology Society address, “I Want to Be in That Number: Desire, Inclusivity and the Church,” is well worth reading.  Lakeland builds his theology of inclusivity around Elizabeth Johnson's observation that the communion of the saints is never inward-turning, never self-concerned and self-referential.  It is, instead, always reaching out to extend divine blessing to "all living persons of truth and love."

More on Lent and the Tears of Things: Andrew Sullivan on James Alison and Gay Believers' Pain

And now I see, having blogged earlier today (here) about Lent and taking pain into one's depths to confront it and perhaps transmute it into greater compassion, that Andrew Sullivan has posted on a similar theme (here).

Andrew Sullivan talks here, as I did, about the specific pain gay believers bear in relation to the church, and our hope that this pain can be made redemptive. He notes that gay believers may ultimately offer the church a gift through our struggle with pain: the gift of helping the church as a whole to understand more accurately what it means to be church.

He puts the question of this specific pain of gay believers vis-a-vis the church in a developmental context. The human community is slowly coming to understand the truth about gay human beings and gay lives, and as it does so, the continued commitment of many in the churches to lies now exposed as lies becomes more painful for gay believers to bear. As he notes, "As the truth about homosexuality struggles to the surface of our consciousness as humans, the depth of the cruelty and lies imposed on gay people for so long can sting even more acutely . . . ."

Sullivan links to a wonderful essay of James Alison on this topic, which I actually read some days ago and which (I now see) has clearly influenced my own thinking on the topic in my previous posting, and so I ought to have acknowledged it. Joseph O'Leary linked to the essay last Friday (here), and it can be found in full at James Alison's blog (here).

I don't dare summarize someone as nuanced and complex as James Alison. I'll say here, only as a teaser for those who may want to read the essay (and I highly recommend it) that it argues that, as things grow better (in the sense that the concsicousness of the human community about the truth of gay lives grows more accurate), those of us who are gay and who remain in connection to communities of faith may actually experience more and new pain.

And that is certainly my case as I continue reading American Catholic blogs of the center, and encountering there the same tired, recycled arguments--with no gay voices invited in at all--that I began to encounter in the 1980s as I entered my years in Catholic academic circles. It vexes to see we have moved so little towards light.

And, even more, it hurts--and the sense of bafflement that accompanies that hurt at our exclusion grows deeper when one listens to the same voices talking about love, compassion, catholicity, inclusion, and justice. Among themselves. In their tight circles that do not represent the church as a whole.

With their gay brothers and sisters as silent bystanders who have been made silent by these guardians of the door to the center. Who even, God help us all, talk about us as if we are not there. Without ever asking what we think about ourselves, what we have to say about ourselves, and how we might frame the questions quite differently, if we had a voice. If we were given a voice.

Lent and the Tears of Things: A Meditation on Mourning and the Spiritual Life

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt . . . .

I have been struggling with sadness lately. I continue struggling with sadness as Lent begins. I’d like to reflect on sadness today as a theme for this season of preparing the heart to receive more of God.

The particulars of the grief are perhaps not so important as its facticity: its simply being there as a universal human experience, with which we must cope and of which we struggle to make sense in our spiritual journeys. One root of my current bout with melancholy is our discovery that one of the two pups we rescued through an animal shelter in the winter before last is apparently seriously ill.

Our two little brother dogs have never been separated from the time of their birth, so, of course, I worry about the pain inflicted on one if the other dies. I also struggle with watching a tiny, innocent creature (he’s not yet even two years old) so full of life and mirth begin to endure the torments of cancer. The mother inside me wants to hold him, cuddle him, and croon away the pain.

I lie down to nap, and wake up with that line from Jonah ringing in my head—the divine statement near the end of the book, in which God tells Jonah that if Jonah grieves for the gourd vine that has wilted above his head, Jonah’s grief is but a shadow of the compassion God feels for all the citizens of Nineveh whom Jonah scorns. And for their animals . . . .

I have always loved that affirmation of a divine compassion that encompasses our brothers and sisters in the animal kingdom, over whom we have long thought it our right to exercise lordship. If God’s love is so broad, then surely our hearts need to expand to encompass more of those we exclude from the scope of our compassion.

I’m morose these days, too, after I have finally completed my work on the first stage of a project I’ve discussed on this blog before. I’ve just written an article that will, I hope, eventually turn into something more substantial. It sketches the history of a branch of my family that crossed the color line in 19th-century Mississippi and Arkansas—the story of a white planter who lived his entire adult life, almost fifty years, in a marital relationship with a woman of color by whom he had six children whom he acknowledged and to whom he left his property.

I say “marital relationship” because this couple could not marry, of course, in the 19th-century South. Their being together, their having a family together—their very love for each other—was regarded by the vast majority of their fellow citizens as immoral, disgusting, illegal, something to be scorned and outlawed. The fact that they were able to maintain a family life at all under the conditions with which they coped is remarkable in itself—a manifestation of grace, it seems to me.

As Arkansas moved towards enacting legislation (it passed in February 1859) that demanded the immediate expulsion of all free people of color in the state—if they did not leave, they would be returned to slavery—these parents managed to get their children north, to see them well educated and set up on farms. All three of the children (three had died young) married into white families with strong abolitionist ties, with strong ties to churches that supported abolition. One of these families was closely related to Harriet Beecher Stowe. The families of these children of color crossed the color line from that point forward.

But they suffered. The oldest son, who had married first and who lived apart from his siblings—who continue to appear on the census as mulattoes in some decades, while he is always white on the census from the time of his marriage to a white woman—did not return home for over thirty years. He did so finally in the months before his mother’s death. He could not do so, as a biracial man living white in the North. He was susceptible to violence if he returned South.

The letters of his parents are full of laments over the years, as they endure separation from their children: sunt lacrimae rerum. They want to see their children. They tell their children of their love for their sons and daughter. The letters state over and over that their mother sighs for her children who have been exiled from her.

When the father of the family died in 1883, he left his considerable landholdings in south Arkansas to his youngest son. That son returned from the north to live on and farm the land. And in 1899, as he was riding horseback on his land, he was shot in the back, killed instantly. A mysterious black man whom the newspapers call “General Washington” was charged with the crime.

It is hard not to believe this was a lynching in which a hapless black man was framed for the terrorist murder of a man of color whose white father had dared to leave land to him, and who returned from the north to live on that land. In the week in which he was murdered, there were multiple lynchings of black men all across south Arkansas. The 1890s were a reign of terror for black citizens—unbelievable horror—in which the state enacted laws to disenfranchise black voters, to return African-American citizens to quasi-servitude.

And as this happened at the governmental level, lynchings escalated—violence as a tool of repression designed to put black folks back into “their places” as government and law created a legislative framework for such humiliation, for the denial of rights and of justice. Reports from this decade say that hundreds of black citizens were fleeing the state, taking steamboats north as quickly as they could to escape the reign of terror.

And so I feel a well of sadness inside me as I think about this story. I have pictures of these people. Their eyes are sad—the eyes of the children sent north. The eyes of the daughter, in particular, are pools of sadness. Her letters constantly employ the word: sad, she writes, heavily underscoring the word.

It is painful to know that your humanity is the same humanity others enjoy and celebrate, but is not regarded by others as humanity equal to theirs. It is painful to be told that a part of yourself, of your God-given nature, is unacceptable, is beyond the pale, is to be parsed and controlled and put into its place by laws.

It is painful to know that these attitudes not merely exist, that they are not only enshrined in longstanding custom, but that they have the force of law. It is exceedingly painful to think that a majority of your fellow citizens not only agree with your dehumanization, but that they believe that their majority opinion captures the divine mind: that might makes right.

It is painful to me to know that these racial attitudes have persisted into my own lifetime, to discover how little I know of the draconian history of my own state—in its gory, ugly, inescapable details—vis-à-vis treatment of a racial minority by the majority to which I belong.

It is also exceedingly painful to live my own version of the preceding story, as a gay man whose humanity is demeaned and even denied by large numbers of my fellow citizens. Who put the name of God into their mouths as they legislate against me—as my foreparents did when they legislated against people of color and their families and their loves. It is painful to be told that majority rule makes for right when the decisions of the majority clearly contravene the most elementary canons of human decency—not to mention the most fundamental moral insights of the world’s religions.

I have experienced a particular kind of pain—a kind that runs across the skin and scalds it—in the past few days as I have read comments about gay lives by the arbiters of taste, the knowledge class, on centrist Catholic blogs. I cannot believe what I am reading. I cannot believe that educated people can say such things, and apparently not think seriously, ever, about the effects of their words on real human beings who are their brothers and sisters in Christ.

It is painful in the extreme to read discussions of the theology of James Alison that are prefaced by considerations of his “errors”—when no such preface ever finds its way into the discussions of the theology of any non-gay theologians, of any ideological stripe, on these blogs. It is painful (and ludicrous) to read that Alison’s “error” lies in his attempt to combine the gospels with bacchanals. James Alison. Bacchanals.

Can someone making such an absurd comment even have read Alison’s complex, thoughtful, anything-but-bacchanalian theology? Why would anyone's mind even go there—to the bacchanal—when they hear the name of James Alison? Why do our brothers and sisters persist in distorting our real lives to such an astonishing degree, as they entertain salacious fantasies about who we are and what we do that they would not entertain about other human beings?

Why do they not invite us in and let us talk, so that they can hear our real voices and have those fantasies decisively dispelled?

It is also exceedingly painful to read the clownish remarks of other centrist American Catholics on these blogs, in which they defend the choice of Catholic institutions to fire and/or deny rights to openly gay employees. With a straight face, these arbiters of opinion in the American Catholic church seek to argue that gay employees in Catholic institutions represent the “face” of the church to the public, and so the church has a right to enforce its moral positions by firing such persons when it chooses to do so.

I have worked at Catholic colleges in which this tawdry little argument has been advanced to justify ongoing abuse of gay employees. And those justifying it were divorced Catholics who were dating other divorced Catholics. And in some cases they were unmarried Catholics living with other (but—all-important point—heterosexual) unmarried Catholics in an intimate relationship. And in many cases, they were Catholics who were, one had to assume, using artificial contraception, since they were not producing a child every year and a half or so.

What would have been outrageous to them—and should have been outrageous to them—the decision of their employing institution to delve into the secrets of their bedrooms, was not considered outrageous at all, when it came to gay employees. Their personal lives were off-limits. One did not, and should not, make assumptions about those personal lives that went beyond what those living these lives chose to share.

But these same advocates of Catholic morality did not choose to extend the same decency to their brothers and sisters who happened to be gay. Nothing was off-limits. The most lurid imaginings possible regarding our sex lives—our bacchanalian sex lives—were perfectly defensible, since Catholic morality, the face of the church, was at stake.

How can educated people entertain such arguments and not recognize that they are engaging in discrimination of the grossest sort? That their concerns are not about upholding Catholic sexual morality in all its intricate detail, but in excluding gay human beings from their circles?

And that’s what it’s all about, in the final analysis: exclusion, pure and simple. While the occupants of the inner circles at the center of the American Catholic church fire up their cigars to celebrate their triumphs (yes, they do talk this way, unabashedly and without a hint of awareness of what cigars mean, of their use as symbols of heterosexual male exclusion and domination), many of us stand outside in the cold, looking in. And those celebrations are, to all appearances, as shamefully unaware of our exclusion—and our existence—as I find I have been, when I examine in detail the history of racially discriminatory legislation and actions in my own home state.

In fact, to some of us, it begins to appear that the cigars and cocktails are actually in celebration of our exclusion. That the victory being toasted is a victory over us, and the heterosexual manhood being asserted is asserted at our expense.

And so Lent. And sadness. I have pondered for some years now the insights of Thomas Moore regarding the place of mourning in spiritual life. There is a wisdom in what Moore says against which I rail, but which I have to try to find ways to incorporate into my own soul-making process.

Moore notes that we skim the surface of experience, by denying the place of sadness in our lives. We do anything possible to avoid confronting our mourning. We rant and rave—and I am exceptionally good at that. We cast blame: ditto. We tell ourselves we are not sad.

Because we do not want to go there. We do not want to go to the place to which mourning takes us. We do not want to go down into those dark, chthonic depths in which the roots of sadness reside in our souls.

We do not want to die.

Lent is a time to remember that things are full of tears. A time to remember that in the midst of life, we are in death. A time to go into the depths of our own sadness and simply be there, with the sadness, with the mourning.

Because that journey to the depths is a precondition to our participation in the healing of the world. In which life and death constantly tango together, and the practical compassion that changes things in the lives of others arises out of my willingness to come to terms with the depths of sadness in my own soul.

Keeping On Keeping On

Home again, with some lines from a book I read on my 2005 pilgrimage across southern England and Wales running through my mind. These are from Ellis Peters, Ellis Peters' Shropshire (Guernsey: Sutton Publishing Co., 1999):

"Have you ever noticed how, if you set out on a definite quest, at the next meeting or parting of ways there are three to choose from, and either no signpost at all, or one that fails to mention the place you are seeking?" (107).

Indeed. Part of learning to live life as daily pilgrimage is learning that the way on which we think we're setting out may often not be the path down which spirit ultimately nudges us. And perhaps one of the hallmarks of the path spirit chooses is always that the signposts are either non-existent or impossible to decipher. The point is simply to keep walking . . . .

And as soon as we got home this afternoon and walked through the door, in quick succession, four phone calls, all promising interesting new avenues for us to walk down, as if taking a short trip--a diversionary one--shakes up what has seemed stuck in one's life, so that new and interesting possibilities emerge.

And the dialogue continues, on the National Catholic Reporter "Intrinsic Disorder" thread (http://ncrcafe.org/node/1337) to which I keep linking some of these blog postings. This is a posting I have just placed there in response to another poster's statement, '[L]ooking back over my post, I realize I should make it clear that I know that it is a vocal minority among homosexuals that pushes the agenda and events that I and others find so offensive":

"H.T, I've fought with myself not to reply to your posting. I have the impression that the conversation on this thread has reached a kind of dead end, and the more I keep trying to plead for the churches to understand the truly evil place in which they have put gay believers, the more I confirm the analysis you're offering here: 'vocal minority' 'push[ing] the agenda.'

This is part of the catch 22 that social structures create for minority groups, when they assign to a denigrated group a tightly confining box as the only acceptable social location for the group. The box is so designed that, as the walls close in ever tighter and the more those inside shout about the injustice of being straitjacketed, the more they confirm the stereotype used by social structures to justify entrapping and tormenting them in the first place!

I'd like to probe the point you make about the church's responsibility to turn away from the altar any public sinner, including (your words) 'a heterosexual couple who got married outside the church after years of secretly living together.'

Perhaps this is a pastoral responsibility of the church. If so, I would submit that the church is doing a lamentably bad job of exercising its pastoral responsibility. Do you know of any parish throughout this country or anywhere, for that matter, where heterosexual couples living together 'in sin' are routinely turned away from the altar?

Or other public sinners? Those who profit from bleeding the poor of their resources? Those who charge extortionate interest rates? Those who engage in shady business deals, known to the public at large? Those who promote war? Those who engage in racism? Married couples practicing birth control? Divorced Catholics who have remarried or may be living together with someone of the opposite sex without benefit of sacramental marriage?

Perhaps I'm agenda-driven, but I hear only of gay people being turned away from the altar as public sinners.

Doesn't the extraordinary interest the church takes in the pastoral care of its gay members seem just a tiny bit misplaced to you--as if some other agenda is going on here, rather than pastoral concern?

I'd like to propose, once again, that the real agenda is exclusion, pure and simple. It's a question of drawing insider-outsider lines, of creating an insider group whose purity is bolstered and demonstrated by scapegoating an outsider group and then expelling it in rituals of public humiliation.

When I read your final comment a day or so ago, I was at first rather angry. The anger has now turned into grief. Your statement about agenda-driven vocal minorities that 'I and others find so offensive' really does grieve me.

It's a line-drawing statement, a we-vs.-them statement. It's a statement that implicitly puts everyone who is gay and speaks out honestly about this on one side of a line, and everyone inside the church (really inside, as in scrupulously observing every possible jot and tittle of the law) on the other side of the line.

This viewpoint turns the church into what I believe the church is not meant to be: a gathering of rabid purists for whom drawing lines of exclusion is a driving force and an overwhelming preoccupation. And it's rather ironic that those who follow this line of thinking (e.g., restorationist Catholics of the JPII generation) don't seem to recognize that they themselves are a vocal minority pushing an agenda as hard as they can. There are many Catholic viewpoints, and in some of the Catholic countries in which the hierarchy is now fighting hard against gay rights, the large majority of Catholics support gay rights--because they value Catholic teaching on social justice and inclusion.

Enough said. I feel as if I have really not made much of an inroad in challenging this thinking by pursuing this thread, when someone with your acuity of mind keeps framing the issues this way. I respect your right to hold your opinion, and I admire you for defending it. But I find it, in the final analysis, hurtful to many of us who stand on the outside looking in--and hurtful in a particularly cruel way, since it seems so unreflectively assured of the divine stamp of approval and so unthinkingly certain of its rightness even when it is causing pain to others."

I've begun to feel rather hopeless about the project of addressing the church, as an out, honest, gay person on a pilgrimage that I know to be graced--and the grace is evident to me precisely because I have claimed all the gifts that have come to my life through my sexual orientation and my relationship. The person I am addressing in the NCR posting strikes me as intelligent and caring.

It baffles me that churchgoers--including (and perhaps most of all) the "best" churchgoers--just don't seem to get it. They just don't seem to understand the injustice in which they are implicated when they create such cruel and self-defeating social locations for despised minorities, when they don't seek actively to abolish or open up those denigrating social places, rather than confirming them with scripture and tradition.

I can completely understand why a huge number of gay people with church backgrounds have simply given up on the churches, avoid the churches like the plague. Who needs to go through life (changing metaphors wildly here, but it seems right to do so, given the point I want to make) constantly opening his/her veins to let a group that claims divine sanction drip poison daily into one's veins? And in the name of God? And within the sanctuary itself, right in the worshiping community?

And as these interminable one-sided "discussions" with the churches continue, gay people are assaulted all over the world, still. One of the latest horrifying stories is the shooting of a fifteen-year old boy in a California school yesterday, with strong suggestions that he was shot because of his perceived sexual orientation. He has now been declared brain-dead.