Anniversary Notes: Steve and I Celebrate 40 Years Together

Today's the final day of October.  And I can't let the month end without mentioning that it was in this month 40 years ago that Steve and I met.  

Living, Struggling, Believing in the Face of the Mystery of Being Gay

From a journal entry in March 1990:

How does one live in the face of mystery? Without seeking to control or manipulate . . . . This was the sin of Adam and Eve, in the view of neo-orthodox thinkers like Barth—they could not rest content with the sheer giftedness of the existence that had been handed to them; they wanted to penetrate behind this giftedness in order to wrest it to their own ends.

I feel lately as if I’m in the presence of a huge energy cell, as I keep struggling to integrate my identity as a gay person with my vocation as a believer and as a theology. On the one hand, the energy cell that emerges through this struggle charges me with new and deep recognitions, with an upwelling of hope and anguish. On the other hand, it burns and consumes and scars.

Part of the mystery of existence—a key to it—is to live in recognition of our sinfulness, as a prelude to opening our hands to all the undeserved gifts God sheds on us. For me, the narrow door—both mystery of evil and gift/grace—through which I must come to God is the door of my sexual orientation. My life will never be whole until I accept, celebrate, integrate that—and doing so seems to kill me, too, because the integrating and celebrating process brings me face to face with the evil that has long told gay persons that we should apologize for and hide ourselves, as God has made us. And that evil enters into our own psyche in a society saturated with homophobic messages.

The sinfulness I encounter in this struggle is not where the church keeps telling me to look for sin, inside myself and my gay human nature. It's in those who want me to understand my very nature, the nature God has given me, the source of my gifts, joy, and ability to love, as sinful. My sin is actually the temptation to hate myself because the church tells me who I am in my very nature is sinful.

Who will deliver us from the body of death? We need grace to walk through that door.

Continuing the Pilgrimage: Bilgrimage in the Weeks Ahead

Dear Friends and Fellow Travelers,

I’m writing to let you know that Bilgrimage will be undergoing a slight (and temporary) change in coming days. In the several other lives I lead outside blogland, I have a number of responsibilities coming up, which will be taking me away from the blog for a short period of time.

Bilgrimage will continue during that hiatus, though. One of the reasons I asked for your assistance a week ago was that I knew the hiatus in my ability to blog routinely was coming up, and I wanted to know whether the blog is reaching a particular audience who benefit from what I do on it most days.

I appreciated the response to the questionnaire, which was encouraging. Several readers kindly sent very positive feedback by email. It is encouraging to hear that people struggling to value their God-given sexual orientation in faith communities that often inflict harm find strength in the story told on this blog, and that people looking for resources for a spirituality of engagement that resists some dominant trends in the churches find empowerment here.

I’ve decided, as a result, to keep the blog running even when I will not have time to focus on it daily, by posting pre-written material on it. I’ll follow this path for the several weeks that I am away from my desk.

I’ve spent some days now transcribing material from things I’ve written in the past, which haven’t appeared on this blog (or anywhere else, for that matter). What I’ve selected focuses, for the most part, on a key period of my journey, in which I dealt with questions about coming out as a gay man while teaching theology in church-related schools.

As these journal selections will demonstrate, that process was a laborious and difficult one. When I went into the field of theology (or, more precisely, as I saw it, when I was called by God into that vocation), I knew, of course, that there would be a price to pay, in terms of my identity as a gay man. I knew that what I saw as my personal life and not the business of anyone else in a professional setting, unless I chose to disclose that life to someone else, could easily be made problematic by anyone with authority in my church and its institutions who wanted to marginalize me for any reason whatsoever.

I chose to trust in that distinction between the private and the public, and in the ethical integrity of those in leadership in Catholic institutions to respect that distinction. As the material I'll be posting shows, that choice turned out to be an impossible choice, since many of the institution's leaders do make a point of focusing on these "private" matters today, and anyone living in the closet and working in Catholic institutions is susceptible to attack for that reason.

It's far better to be open, honest, and let the chips fall where they may--as I was coming to recognize in the period of these journal entries.

But the path I chose at the start of my career as a theologian (private life, public professional persona) was the only one I saw open to anyone who is gay and working in Catholic institutions at the time. Perhaps things have changed since the late 1980s and early 1990s, which is the period captured in these journal reflections. I’m not sure they have, frankly, in most places.

I believe that gay and lesbian persons working in Catholic institutions still encounter the kind of quandaries that the upcoming series of postings will discuss, as I dealt with them almost two decades ago. And for that reason, I hope the postings will be helpful to anyone else walking the same path today.

I also help they will help LGBT people in general, who are trying to cope with questions about how to claim our God-given identities and to celebrate those identities within faith communities that assault us and deny our full humanity. I know there are many such folks out there, and that they include vulnerable younger people. I know this because some of them have emailed me to thank me for providing a voice for their experience as people of faith, trying to come out as gay, while maintaining positive ties to faith communities. Because they value their spiritual lives and the life of faith . . . .

Finally, I hope the postings that will be appearing on the blog in the coming days may help anyone who is seeking to understand, these days, what it means to be gay in the U.S. at the turn of the 21st century. Churches seldom make a place for our testimony, unfortunately. Faith communities talk about us and to us (down to us), but not with us.

The dialogue, such as it exists, is always unequal. Our voices—our real voices—are always excluded. At best, churches normally permit some sympathetic straight ally within a church community to speak on our behalf.

In the process, churches lose precious gifts that are right at their doorsteps, if they would only open the door and let the stranger in. And listen to her. And treat him as if his humanity counts in the same way anyone else’s humanity counts—precious humanity that comes from the same hand of God that makes every other human being in the world.

And the churches’ handling of issues of inclusion has become, unfortunately, paradigmatic for society’s handling of these issues, in this nation with the soul of a church. Certainly there are strong currents within society at large (and also within many communities of faith) that are pushing and pushing hard for full inclusion of LGBT people in American society, and full recognition of the humanity (and human rights) of LGBT people.

But as we’re seeing with the current administration’s timidity (and the timidity of a Democrat-dominated Congress) to deal with gay issues, to see gay faces, to hear gay voices, to include gay contributions, the response of communities of faith to our presence continues to dominate the political life of the nation, in a way that harms LGBT people.

It is always easier to regard someone else as less human than you are when you refuse to see his face. It is always easier to safeguard your belief that you are a morally admirable human being when you talk about and talk down to someone else, while refusing to hear his real voice. Or to sit at the table with her and break bread with her.

This is among the reasons that I personally argue, and will continue to argue, that anyone interested in gay rights—including those of us who are gay—cannot ignore communities of faith and what they do to us. Faith-based groups frame the response of our political leaders, and thus the response of the culture at large, to LGBT persons at a very fundamental level. And, unfortunately, at a fundamentally negative level . . . .

The churches will one day have to repent of what they continue to do to gay people today, just as painfully as they are now trying to repent of their role in slavery, the Holocaust, millennia of oppression of women, anti-Semitic violence, the Crusades, the upholding of segregation, and the burning of witches.

Meanwhile, I offer this series of postings (which touch on other moral issues of concern to me in the same period, as well, because my approach to gay rights insists on the need for solidarity with all unjustly marginalized Others) with hope. I hope the postings will help someone. And I hope they will be of interest.

As always, I welcome feedback in the comments section, even though I may not always have time for several weeks to reply or acknowledge your contributions. I value your responses and I take them seriously.

The graphic is a picture of a portion of the pilgrimage path for Santiago de Compostela in Conques, southwestern France.

The Groaning Table: Holy Week Resources for Readers

For readers for whom the theological-liturgical language of the Christian tradition is not yet an impediment to spiritual life, there are some rich resources at blog sites during Holy Week. Michael Bayly’s Wild Reed blog is featuring a series on the passion of Christ, with beautiful, provocative Stations of the Cross-like paintings by contemporary artist Doug Blanchard.

The first in this series is here. From it, readers can click their way through each subsequent offering. The postings are also a wonderful smorgasbord of important statements by contemporary theologians with pertinence to the passion story. I find the third meditation (on the Last Supper) reflecting on John Dominic Crossan’s notion of Jesus’s “open commensality” especially illuminating.

As Crossan notes, one of the leitmotivs of the gospel account of Jesus’s life and ministry is his astonishing practice of inviting anyone and everyone to his table, in a culture in which table fellowship was governed strictly by religious and social norms that prohibited such free-wheeling mixing of people—of men and women, of rich and poor, of slave and free, of sinners and the righteous. As Crossan has long insisted, these stories of Jesus’s open commensality are the germ from which the Christian practice of the Lord’s Supper/Eucharist has grown.

Unless we incorporate into our own understanding (and practice) of the Lord’s Supper/Eucharist Jesus’s notion of open commensality, we betray something very central to Eucharistic life. The ravenous need of some contemporary Christians to draw insider-outside lines at the Lord’s table could not be more antithetical to the practice of Jesus, at his own table.

I also highly recommend—always—Colleen Kochivar-Baker’s Enlightened Catholicism blog (here). During this Holy Week, it has contained powerful reflections on themes that should be important to contemporary believers, including a persuasive (for me, at least) call for the pro-life movement to practice holy silence at a time in which its loud claims about its goals and objectives all too often undermine those goals and objectives.

Finally, I also want to draw readers’ attention to a beautiful essay by Clarissa Pinkola Estés entitled “Political Catholicism vs. Christ’s Catholicism” at the National Catholic Reporter website (here). Pinkola Estés addresses the growing number of believers (and they include me) who find it increasingly difficult to find a way in the highly politicized culture of the church today.

She argues that there is a third way for such believers. It is the way of the Lone Man (that is, Jesus) who stood against the priests-thugs of his day. It is a way that renounces the desire to coerce, do violence to, or punish those who see things differently than we do. It is a path that refuses to hunt down the souls of others, even when strong, baying cries all around us urge us to engage in such a hunt.

As Clarissa Pinkola Estés notes,

In our time, when it too often has come down to our listening hard, but not being able to tell some priests from most politicians -- as they too often sound exactly alike, choosing the same rhetorical references and processes to defeat or demand a cause ... we, in our beliefs, our striving to hold life sacred, have to go a different way.

I find this meditation moving because I myself am searching for that different way. As I have noted in the past on this blog, for me, the church, in the lives of some of its pastoral leaders and its most ardent defenders today, has become an impediment. Im-ped-iment: something that stands in the way of our feet as we walk, trips us, blocks the path.

The church, in the lives of some of its pastoral leaders and most ardent defenders, is becoming an obstacle to me on my own spiritual path. I write about these issues because I am struggling to find a way. This blog is my attempt to journey further along the path that the church itself has placed me on, by its practiced cruelty towards me, my partner, and other gay believers.

To put the point bluntly: the church simply closes the way to us as believers. It does not invite us along its liturgical, spiritual path. Many of us long for that path during Holy Week (and all throughout the liturgical year), but the price of participation—pretending that we are not there, that we are someone other than who we are; rejecting, renouncing, despising ourselves as God has made us—is impossible to pay, if we are to retain any spiritual core at all.

That places us . . . nowhere. We have no clear path. With all its beauty and power to move our hearts, liturgy and theological language become a double-edged sword. It feeds us and at the same time often betrays us, denies us, tells us we do not belong as God has made us.

To illustrate the point I’m making here, the problem the church presents to many of us, the problem the church has become to many of us: yesterday, in Holy Week, the legislature of Vermont overrode the veto of the state’s governor, making Vermont another in a series of states that now offer gay citizens the right to marry. This follows on the heels of an historic Iowa Supreme Court statement about which I blogged several days ago (here), in which that body unanimously struck down an anti-gay marriage statue.

Following the Vermont decision yesterday, a friend called me. She was traveling through the Dallas airport and happened to see the news on television. She had to share her joy with me. This friend is a straight, married woman who has lost a son to AIDS. She and I butted heads when we first met. I did not know anything about her personal drama, that she had a gay son, that she was struggling with his illness and then his death.

I found her cranky and off-putting, and wrote her off the list of people I wanted to know. Fortunately for me—and as a sign that she is a better follower of Jesus than I am—she continued to reach out to Steve and me and then shared her story with us.

I’m extremely happy about this, because I now find her a valuable source of inspiration and grace. Her son’s death led her in a fairly astonishing way to a small Episcopal church whose saint’s name is the same as her son’s—Stephen—where she finds a nurturing community. After her son died, she began to do volunteer prison ministry with her parish.

Her experience with the HIV community has stood her in good stead in that ministry, and has allowed her to affirm people who would otherwise not be reached by her ministry. The stories she tells me from her ministerial experience nourish my soul. They are stories about the teacher learning from the one who is taught, about the righteous one with the answers and the grace receiving answers and grace from the despised, rejected outcast.

It was good to share my joy at the Vermont decision (and the Iowa one) with this friend.

But as I do this, it does not escape my attention that, when I click to the websites of my brothers and sisters at the center of the American Catholic church, I find nothing at all—total silence—about these two historic events. Though those websites profess to provide Catholic perspectives on current events, politics, culture, the church, they are deafeningly silent about important gay issues.

About me and my life. About all the gay brothers and sisters who find no place in the church these brothers and sisters of the center celebrate.

We go to these websites, and we read fulsome welcome statements for Mr. Gingrich, but never a welcome for us. We read abashed apologies to Cardinal George, but never an apology to us—for our exclusion. For the ways in which we are stereotyped, tacitly banned from conversations about us, as well as from all holy conversations of the center.

Silence. Silence that speaks volumes. It tells us that we do not exist.

And no message can be more painful than that, in the final analysis. Particularly during Holy Week.

Rod Dreher and Faith in the Church: People Need Church Too Much to Know Full Truth

I’ve been following with interest a thread at Commonweal (here) discussing a recent USA Today article by neocon columnist Rod Dreher (here) explaining why he has chosen to leave the Catholic church. Dreher’s piece is entitled “How Much ‘Truth’ Is Too Much Truth.”

Dreher credits the clerical sexual abuse scandal with shattering his confidence in the Catholic church. As the wide parameters of that scandal became apparent from 2002 forward—and as it also became apparent that the hierarchy, all the way to Rome, had long known about this scandal and had covered it up—Dreher “lost the will to believe and became profoundly spiritually depressed.” And so he and his family made the trek out of the Catholic church and into the Orthodox Church of America—a church whose scandals he does not intend to investigate, for fear of deligitimating the religious authority on which his faith now rests.

Dreher’s analysis pushes an interesting question, one he batted about with Richard John Neuhaus before that leading neoconservative Catholic figure died in January. This is whether people need to know and how much they need to know: hence the title of Dreher’s piece, how much truth is too much?

Neuhaus was unambiguous—unambiguously on the side of suppression of information that (in Neuhaus's judgment: an important qualification) people do not need to know: “There are things (Catholics) really don't want to know about their church," he maintained. Neuhaus censored information about the abuse crisis in the journal First Things, noting that "we thought there were some things people didn't need to know and didn't want to know, and for good reasons."

Dreher, by contrast, is conflicted. His conservative convictions lean in Neuhaus’s direction—that is, in the direction of censorship:

I do not believe Father Neuhaus was a cynic; he really did believe that there were certain things that ought to be concealed from the public for the greater good. And though it might be heresy for a journalist to say, as a matter of general principle, I agree with him.

But on the other hand, as Dreher notes, Jesus informed his followers that they would know the truth, and the truth would set them free. And God knows, if neonconservative Catholics talk about anything at all, it's about truth, and Truth: that rock on which they imagine everything is so solidily founded.

We also live in a culture that values the free exchange of information—an exchange premised on people’s right to know—and, as Dreher notes, institutions that seek to cover up damaging information about themselves court further damage when that information (and their deception) becomes public:

But any institution — sacred or secular — that has to depend on deception, and the willingness of its people to be deceived, to maintain its legitimacy will not get away with it for long. These days, the attempt to withhold or suppress information doesn't work to protect authority, but rather to undermine it.

Even so, Dreher concludes, the claims of authority figures and authoritative institutions (the terms “authority” and “authoritative” loom large in Dreher’s thought: on which, more in a moment) are implicitly undermined when we allow the free exchange of any and all information. The free flow of information is inherently corrosive to authority and “full transparency can harm society — and even, perhaps, our souls”:

Societies cannot survive without authoritative institutions. Societies cannot survive without authoritative institutions. But which authoritative persons or institutions can withstand constant critical scrutiny? In our culture, we are predisposed to see damage done from failing to question authority. We are far less capable of grasping the destruction that can come from delegitimizing authority with corrosive suspicion. How much reality must we choose to ignore for the greater good of our own souls, and society?

In the final analysis, Dreher concludes, “People need the church too much to know the full truth about her.”

I appreciate Dreher’s candor. Conservative (and neoconservative) thinkers do not always admit something that is strongly apparent to their critics: their penchant for censorship, and the authoritarian philosophical claims that underlie that penchant. The desire to suppress information that discloses less than admirable behavior or motives in institutions they admire is woven deeply into conservative ideology and conservative souls. As is the desire to attack and disempower those who promote the free exchange of information that they consider damaging to their authority figures and authoritative institutions . . . .

For a number of reasons, I find Dreher’s argument entirely unconvincing and even dangerous—and for that reason, I’m surprised at the sympathy it appears to receive among those centrist Catholics who form the knowledge class of the American Catholic church. It’s an argument that is all about enshrining authority—that is to say, certain authoritative figures and authoritative institutions—in a cultural location that places them beyond criticism.

And that’s something that Christians cannot and must not do with any person or institution, including the church and its leaders. Constant critique of all social structures and all institutions (and their leaders)—including the church and its leaders—is a fundamental obligation of Christians, an obligation inbuilt in the call to discipleship. It is our obligation and our call because the failure to critique leads to idolatry. What is beyond criticism—beyond the free flow of information, no matter how damaging that information may be to the claims of the institution or person being critiqued—is an idol. And idols exact flesh: we pay a high price for forming them.

If Dreher is correct in his claim that “people need the church too much to know the full truth about her,” then the price we must pay to make the church credible—to enable it fulfill our needs—is a steep price, indeed: it’s the price of turning the church into something fixed and beyond critique, which we end up serving in the end, even as we claim that the church exists to meet our needs and to serve us.

This is one of the theological points I wanted to make in my initial posting about the ecclesiology of Vatican II the other day (here). One of the key implications of the traditional patristic and biblical ecclesiology Vatican II retrieves is that, as the pilgrim people of God within history, the church never finds a permanent place in history. It is always on pilgrimage, always critiquing every social structure in light of the vision of the reign of God that urges the church forward throughout all historical periods.

And applying that vision of the reign of God and its critique of all social structures to itself: as an institution on pilgrimage, which refuses to settle down in history and canonize (and idolize) any particular social or political structure, any particular moment, any particular way of being in the world, the church has a constant obligation to be self-critical. To admit that its present and past ways of being in the world simultaneously move towards and betray the vision of the reign of God that is the engendering center of the church as it moves through history . . . .

As I read Dreher and Neuhaus, I wonder what those who accept these thinkers’ ideological penchant for censorship do with the many “inconveniences” of the history of the church. And I’m afraid I do know very well what their tendency is, as they deal with these “inconveniences”: the principle of censorship is applied not just to troubling information in the present, but to information from the past, as well.

The abuse crisis is horrific. I’m appalled that so many Catholics seem content to live with it—to carry on business as usual, to act as if we can continue being church in the same old untroubled way, without a fundamental analysis of what this crisis means for us as church. Without a revolution. Without, it often seems to me, much awareness at all of the many lives shattered by the leaders of a church with whom many of us are still content to live all too cozily, without demanding more—of them. And of ourselves.

Even so, I’m also painfully aware that this is hardly the first time the church has so betrayed its fundamental mission and identity that it is exceedingly difficult to know how to place one’s faith in the church, because of what it has done. There have been other dark moments, after all—the Inquisition, holy wars, the witch hunts, pogroms and ghettoes, blessing of troops and burning of heretics, slavery, welcome of Nazis, the never-ceasing abuse of women century after century and all the theological arguments developed to legitimate that abuse.

The church’s history is replete with damaging information that undermines its claims—and this is true of all churches, and not merely the Catholic church. Those of us who remain in any way connected to an institution that can behave in such shameful, anti-gospel, anti-Christian ways need to be constantly aware of the propensity of the church to do evil, to trample on people, to turn human lives upside down and harm human beings dreadfully.

We need to be aware of that tendency so that we can struggle to keep the church from doing this again in our day. And to stop ourselves from doing so, with the same unthinking abandon of believers in the past, who often assaulted other human beings because they felt entitled to do so—precisely as believers.

I am surprised, in short, that those who want to shield us from accurate (and damaging) information about the church and its leaders seem to have a strong doctrine of the sanctity of the church while lacking an equally strong doctrine of the sinfulness of the church. History would seem to indicate the need for both doctrines—and for those two doctrines to be held in tension with each other, at every period of the church’s history.

I understand the nostalgia for an institution beyond critique. At the same time, I find that nostalgia ultimate ly childish. Running through so much neoconservative argumentation about the need to preserve cherished institutions in the face of rampant social change and social decline is the belief that there are—or should be—unquestionable “authorities” behind it all. Authorities to whom we should submit, so that we are not engulfed by the changes around us . . . .

Scan Dreher’s writings, and you’ll find the words “authority” and “authoritative” everywhere. A particularly interesting (and, to my mind, revelatory) piece is an essay Dreher published in Dallas Morning News back in January, entitled “What Child-Men Need Is Some Tradition” (here). Dreher characterizes the tradition-denying men of the baby boom generation as “child-men,” men wrapped up in themselves, without traditional norms of manhood to instruct them about how to behave, how to become real men.

And in this cultural abandonment of manhood, authority is everything.

For 40 years now, we have been living through a cultural and psychological revolution that has rendered young men (indeed, most people) incapable of recognizing and submitting to authority . . . .

Which brings us to our latter-day child-men, the wayward sons of a generation that crawled on purple and never got over the experience. Quintillian and his successors through the ages knew that the process of becoming a man requires a juvenile male to subordinate his own desires to an objective code of conduct – which is to say, some sort of higher authority . . . .

They have deprived their sons of authoritative tradition, both in word and example, and with it the ability to transcend the adolescent state . . . .

Sad, isn’t it? Plaintive? Get out the handkerchiefs: the heart-rending cry of a generation of boy-men who feel they have lost their way as men, and who cannot find the trustworthy authority figures to shape them as men that they assume men of the past had. Men hungering for an authority figure to whom to submit. Men looking for an authoritative tradition to assure them that they are real men.

Men looking for a father.

One cannot read Dreher’s analysis of religion and the role that the flow of information plays in religious bodies without hearing that same plaintive cry there: the cry for a father that will not betray our expectations of a bona fide authority. The good father.

Built into the emphasis on authority in neoconservative ideology is patriarchy: a determination to make everyone else submit to the paternal authority figure on whom I have hinged my self-worth and my belief that the world has order, and is not headed to hell in a handbasket. What does not seem to strike Rod Dreher and did not seem to trouble Richard John Neuhaus is the possibility that not everyone in the world may share their psychodrama.

What does not seem to occur to these neoconservative thinkers is that not everyone may be so ravenous for authority—for male authority, for paternal authority—as they are. Or that not everyone in the world and in the churches may think that everything hinges on authority—and male authority in particular. And that not everyone shares their analysis of a world hurtling to destruction through its denial of authority and tradition and its thirst for information.

And to return to a theme I cannot seem to drop on this blog (here): isn’t it interesting that a centrist American Catholic publication like Commonweal and the members of the knowledge class of the center of American Catholicism that maintain the Commonweal blog are so attuned to the plaintive cry of Mr. Dreher as he is dispossessed of his church home—yet seemingly so tone-deaf to the cries of millions of other equally dispossessed brothers and sisters who never seem to have a hearing at the center? Kathleen Caveny characterizes Dreher’s piece about his struggle with the church as “anguished.”

Yes. And so, for years, have been the wonderful cries from the heart of John McNeill. And Andrew Sullivan. And James Alison. (And I have cited the names of gay men here, to make a point about the kind of male pain the center seems to notice, and the kind it refuses to notice, knowing all the while that I could also cite names of woman after woman, both gay and straight, whose story also deserves attention). And millions of other gay and lesbian Catholics to whose suffering at being excluded and having our faith shattered those at the center seem curiously inured.

As if we are not there. Not there at all. While child-men struggling with the loss of the good father—a predictable psychodynamic for those seeking adulthood, and one that is, on the whole, to be welcomed as we come to maturity—occupy center stage . . . .

The Two Tables Again: Communion and communion

Dear Readers,

Some intent readers of my blog have questioned my emphasis on the connection between Communion and communion—between the bread we break with one another around our family tables, and the Bread we share at the Lord’s table.

It has come to my attention that some readers find it perplexing that I criticize the churches and their members and call churches to think about that connection—indeed, to take it seriously. For the sake of readers who seem puzzled by my insistence on connecting daily bread and the Bread of Life from the Lord’s table, I’d like to offer some explanatory remarks from my journey as a believer and theologian.

As my profile page states, I’m a theologian who have long been interested in connections between spirituality and social justice and in collaborating with others to build a more humane world. As my response to a comment on my posting for 29 May states, I’m interested in resources of all world religions that draw together spirituality and social justice, worship and practical, everyday, lived expressions of faith.

My book Singing in a Strange Land was an effort to explore those connections. In that book, I note key motifs running through all world religions that link justice and love: I agree with theologian Karen Armstrong (whom I’ve cited on this blog—see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/02/equality-is-moral-imperative.html) that practical compassion is the soul, the very heart and center, of the ethical codes of the world religions. As the blog posting I am citing notes, Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase states,

The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology.

Just as the religions of the world all stress practical compassion as the litmus test of authentic spirituality, almost all of the world religions envisage the act of sitting at table together as a concrete, lived experience of unity, of communion. All the religions of the world have rituals in which our breaking bread together commits us to live together—in love, unity, affirmation of one another, acceptance of one another, and practical concern for one another expressed in deeds of assistance to each other at times of need.

I have long been influenced by an observation of Lutheran theologian Dietrich Dietrich Bonhöffer in which he states,

The table fellowship of Christians implies obligation. It is OUR daily bread that we eat, not my own. We share our bread. Thus we are firmly bound to one another and not only in the Spirit but in our whole physical being. The one bread that is given to our fellowship links us together in a firm covenant. Now none dares go hungry as long as another has bread, and anyone who breaks the fellowship of the physical life also breaks the fellowship of the Spirit.

My undergraduate education at a Jesuit university gave me a great admiration for the prophetic leader of the Jesuit community Pedro Arrupe. Arrupe, too, links social justice and the Lord’s table. As does Bonhoeffer, he notes that when we receive communion, we obligate ourselves to commune not only with God, but with one another.

This rediscovery of what might be called the "social dimension" of the Eucharist is of tremendous significance today. In the Eucharist . . . we receive not only Christ, the Head of the Body, but its members as well .... Wherever there is suffering in the body, wherever members of it are in want or oppressed, we, because we have received the same body and are part of it, must be directly involved. We cannot properly receive the Bread of Life without sharing bread for life with those in want.

In the various rituals of the world religions, including Christianity, the act of gathering around the table of the Lord together commits us not merely to receive bread from God’s hand, whether divine bread or daily bread. If we understand this act—if it means anything beyond empty ritual—this act is also a commitment to share our bread with one another, with those around the table, as well as with all those in need of daily bread.

This is why I stated on yesterday’s blog,

My very belief in the sacred meaning of Communion (and communion: it is impossible to celebrate Communion as sacrament—and mean it—without intending to live in communion with those with whom one breaks bread) makes me abhor the thought of returning to churches where I encounter those who celebrate Communion on Sunday and break communion on Monday through Saturday. What can the Lord’s bread mean when we intend to shove anyone from the table of daily bread even as we partake of the Lord’s bread?

In speaking of Sunday and Monday, I am not, of course, speaking of two specific days in my life or in yours. I am contrasting what those of us who are Christian do ritually in churches on Sunday, and what we do the rest of the week, Monday through Saturday, in the “non-sacred” spaces of the home, workplace, and world. I am stressing that there has to be a confluence of the sacred action and the daily lived experience, if the sacred action is to have any meaning at all. Communion as a sacred church action must translate into communion as a secular action—an intent to share our lives together in love, peace, justice, and right relationships with one another. We have to live communion in our everyday lives, if the sacred act of Communion is to have any real meaning.

This is not a new theme in my thought or writing. I have written about it for some time now on various Internet sites. In these blog discussions, I have spoken of an experience of workplace injustice that first crystallized these theological themes for me. This was my experience of having been given a one-year terminal contract as the chair of a theology department at a Catholic university with no stated reason for the terminal contract. This contract came days after I had been given a glowing evaluation by the academic vice-president of the school. I was never given a written copy of this evaluation.

I will not recount the sordid details of that story, which I have told elsewhere. It was an experience of profound injustice. It was also a learning experience in which I began to understand the depths of malice the Christian churches (and many Christians) bear today towards gay believers, the willingness of those within the churches to treat gay human beings as non-persons, and the apparent belief of those within the churches dealing dishonestly and cruelly with us that they have God on their side as they behave this way.

As I note in postings at both blog sites, my experience at this Catholic college has alienated me profoundly from my own religious community. I have written about how, not long after I was shoved from the table of daily bread—placed in a precarious position of disemployment and lack of health insurance at a time when Steve and I were providing care for my mother in the final years of her life—I went to church at Easter time.

As I have noted in these accounts, on that Easter Sunday, I desperately wanted to go to Communion. But my legs just would not carry me to the communion table. I was physically repulsed by the sight of the priests who had been ultimately responsible for my terminal contract standing around the table of the Lord. I was repulsed by the thought that they themselves have comfortable lives, job security, social respect, health insurance, a safety net if something happens to interrupt their employment, and yet they could, seemingly so callously, exclude me from all of those things at a time when I needed economic stability and peace in order to provide care for an aging mother.

To be specific and precise: I was repulsed by the disparity between what the church and its representatives declare about the Bread of Life, and how the church and its representatives behave. In church that Sunday (and ever after), I ask myself if church members who invite each other to the table of the Lord, yet are willing to exclude anyone from the table of daily bread through unjust actions, can truly believe what is taking place at the table of the Lord on Sunday.

My very belief in all that Communion or Eucharist means makes it impossible for me to approach the Lord’s table when church leaders and church members practice conspicuous injustice towards others after they leave the table of the Lord and enter the world of work and family.

In my view, the churches today practice a unique kind of cruelty towards gay believers. I have written about that frequently on this blog and elsewhere. At the heart of this cruelty is a belief that gay persons are simply less human than “normal” Christians—that we do not suffer as the normal person would, when rights are violated and one is excluded from social and economic life.

The impulse of churches today is to exclude us. This impulse has everything to do with the need of church members to make themselves feel clean by identifying a scapegoat group as the unclean, and then sending that group into the wilderness to die carrying all the sins of the good, righteous, holy—the clean. Our very absence from the table—out of sight, out of mind—legitimates our exclusion, in the eyes of those doing the excluding. They would not have been shoved from the table, after all, would they, unless they somehow deserve to be shoved away?

This radically cruel and radically unjust exclusionist tendency militates against all that church means at its most fundamental level. If I believe church means anything at all, I have no choice except to keep addressing this exclusionism. The originating impulse of church is to gather and include, not to expel and exclude. The table of the Lord’s Bread preserves the memory of Jesus’s table fellowship with sinners. The two are connected. We cannot adequately celebrate the Lord's Supper without remembering Jesus's table fellowship with outcasts. Jesus sought out the social outcasts of his day, to eat with them. He ate by preference with unclean sinners, thus becoming unclean as they were unclean, in the ritual-purity belief system of his co-religionists.

In the final analysis, I have come to the conclusion that the behavior of the churches towards gay believers is often so savage because we human beings are simply savage—and particularly so when we wrap up our savagery in pious proclamations. We allow ourselves to be particularly savage when we do not connect what we profess with what we do. When we permit ourselves to engage in religious ritual that does not translate into practical compassion, we are capable of almost anything. When we convince ourselves that we are the righteous and some group stigmatized as dirty are the unrighteous, we can legitimate acts of cruel exclusion even within the sanctuary itself.

And if we exclude in the sanctuary, in the name of God, will exclusion in the workplace or the family be far behind? If exclusion seems legitimate at the Lord’s table, will we have any moral sensitivity about shoving others from the table of daily bread?

This is why I keep on keeping on, calling the churches to think about what it means to be church—to be church in the very core meaning of church, to be church in the world today. As Martin Luther King noted so beautifully in his Letter to Birmingham Jail, his expressions of bitter disappointment in the church—particularly the church of liberal sweetness and light whose words about compassion did not translate into action for justice—derived from the fact that he was a pastor, someone who loved the church.

My critique of the church arises out of my vocation as a theologian. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s thought and his prophetic witness remain critically important for the churches today, as we rehash again the question of whether churches ought to emphasize law or justice in the context of the battle for gay civil rights. Dr. King’s Letter to Birmingham Jail distinguishes eloquently between just and unjust laws, between a majority rule that permits itself power and privilege it denies to the minority, simply because it can do so, because it is in the majority and the laws on which it relies reflect the power and privilege of the majority.

These are questions the churches must revisit today as gay and lesbian people struggle for justice. As someone who grew up in the white churches of the American South in the 1950s and 1960s, I know in my bones that black citizens of this land would never have achieved civil rights had the majority been allowed to determine what was right and legal, or had those of us who call ourselves Christian been permitted to continue identifying what is legal with what is right.

Had civil rights for black Americans been dependent on the churches leading the way, we’d still be waiting for a long-deferred justice. Had civil rights for black Americans been dependent on enforcing unjust laws or on a legal system easily manipulated by those of us who considered ourselves right because we could do as we pleased (since we were in the majority and had wealth in our hands), justice would still be deferred.

There comes a time when those who know right from wrong simply have to stand up and be counted. There comes a time when Christians who know that Communion requires communion—yes, even with dirty, excluded gay people—have to insist that their churches stop offering Communion as long as they refuse to preach and practice communion.

There comes a time when justice can no longer be deferred, if institutions that talk about justice want to be taken seriously as they do their talking.

And the Pilgrimage Continues

Readers, brothers and sisters on the journey with me, thank you for your patience during the few days I have been silent. I appreciate the messages on the blog (and will respond to them) as well as several emails asking about me, and a query from a friend who saw me at a party this weekend and asked when my blog would return.

Because I’ve been silent for several days, this will be a lengthy posting—my apologies. I want to make some connections between my own pilgrimage in faith, my journals from a year ago, my vocation as a theologian and educator, and some specific questions I am encountering at this point on my pilgrimage. The questions are at the very end of this blog posting, for those who don’t have time to slog through the entire entry below.

The question I am asking there does, however, connect to what I am posting today. So for those who have time to read the posting (and those who don't), and who may have information to provide in response to my question, I will definitely appreciate feedback. And so for my posting as I resume this pilgrimage:

This is an important day in my life. As readers know,

was a communion Sunday for this Methodist church, and the day following, something happened to me that so grossly undercut the meaning of communion, I now find myself estranged from a church that has meant much in my life. I find myself estranged from my own Catholic church for the same reason.

My very belief in the sacred meaning of Communion (and communion: it is impossible to celebrate Communion as sacrament—and mean it—without intending to live in communion with those with whom one breaks bread) makes me abhor the thought of returning to churches where I encounter those who celebrate Communion on Sunday and break communion Monday through Friday. What can the Lord’s bread mean when we intend to shove anyone from the table of daily bread even as we partake of the Lord’s bread?

I speak very specifically out of the gay Christian experience. What I have experienced in churches is no different from what other gay Christians experience. Because some other Christians do not consider us human in the same way that they consider themselves human, we are often savagely expelled, with the expectation that we will simply accept our chastisement and be silent.

Our humanity is not obvious to those who frame our human lives as less than human. Thus, our feelings of pain, exclusion, diminishment, anguish at the injustices dealt to us—some Christians overlook these as emotions that don’t really count, as if they are not the same kind of pain these Christians themselves would feel, placed in similar circumstances. Many Christians proclaim mercy while practicing injustice to gay brothers and sisters because they are, simply and shockingly, oblivious to the pain they cause us. They just do not hear us and our cries of pain, having relegated us to subhuman status and shoved us from the table.

What I experience as a gay Christian is more than that, though. It is more than pain. It is blessing and calling. When I am excluded, I grow stronger. When those who practice injustice while preaching mercy try to stop up my mouth, I speak all the louder. I believe, with Oscar Romero, that any attempt to silence me—even one that results in my ultimate silencing—will never truly silence me.

Who we are and what we do live on in the world even after we leave the world. When we live for what is right, true, and good—when our lives flow in the river of divine love through our attempt to love each other—all that we have done remains as testimony and constructive influence, even when we leave the world. Not long before he was assassinated while celebrating the Eucharist at the altar of his church in El Salvador, Oscar Romero stated, "I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people."

And so it is. The soldiers who murdered Oscar Romero did not succeed in silencing him at all. Because of what they did to him, they released his words to go around the world with a power the words did not have prior to his martyrdom.

As I reflect on these themes in light of this anniversary, I turn to my journal to see what I wrote last year at this time. I find that I did not record an entry on 3 June, but I did record the following reflections early in the day on 4 June, a day with great significance for my life as a theologian reflecting on the connection between spirituality and social justice.

The dream mentioned in the entry is one I had had a few days earlier, in which I had returned to my grandmother’s house to turn her entire yard into a garden:

So the dream is about how I continue planting the grandmother's garden—à la Alice Walker? Those female virtues run strong in my life, Bridget (Tobin) to Kate (Ryan) to Hattie (Batchelor) to Clo (Simpson).

What are they? Determination. Determination to survive. Determination to thrive. To keep on keeping on.

To live humanely under inhumane conditions. To plant a garden, regardless: famine, five children dead, exile to a strange new land; 16 children borne, 5 died, and still containers of moss rose on the porch; husband dies as one has the 6th child, Depression hits, one raises 7 children, and one plants prize-winning peonies; husband's an abusive, philandering drunk who gambles away a family's livelihood, and one plants coxcomb. I have a heritage to live up to . . . .

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[I then record a different dream from the night of 3 June]: And then I awoke, thinking, "[Name deleted; someone with the ability to make decisions that affected my life] dislikes me because I have a canopy over me. She can't harm me. And she resents that she doesn't have a canopy."

And the word "bima" came to mind. I looked it up and found it's "bema," Greek for a ceremonial stand in Greek gathering places. In Judaism, it's a bimah, and is where one stands to read Torah in the assembly.

In Shavuot—this year, May 23 and 24—it’s covered by a canopy with flowers. It was on May 23 that I wrote my essay re: my grandmother . . . and the contemporary academy.

The reference to a May 23 essay is to something I had been asked to write at my workplace in response to a workshop about transformative leadership in the academy in a journal-type reflection. Here are some excerpts from that essay:

“As I begin this ‘journal entry,’ I’m aware that I am writing it on the anniversary of my grandmother’s [Hattie Batchelor Simpson] death in 1968. My grandmothers—but, in particular, my maternal grandmother—played key roles in my upbringing. Since my immediate family’s life was often turbulent because of my father’s propensity to drink (and sometimes to abandon his family), my grandmother played an important role as a point of stability and comfort: she was always there. With its familiar smells and beautiful garden, its assortment of relatives, including my beloved unmarried aunt who provided care for her mother and brother while teaching school full-time, her house was the focal point of family gatherings.

My grandmother’s death in 1968 was not entirely unexpected, since she had long suffered from crippling heart disease. Nonetheless, it came as something of a shock to me, since it occurred three days before my high school graduation.

I last saw my grandmother the Sunday before her death. She died the following Thursday morning. As I left her house, I begged her to come to my graduation. She called me back to talk to her as I walked to our car. As she stood inside her kitchen’s screen door, she told me, ‘When you were born, you had eyes that were looking for something—always looking, peering intently. I hope that you find what you are looking for in life. Remember that Mama expects great things from you.'

Those were her final words to me. Her calling me back was out of character. This was something she had never done before. I have to believe she knew her death was imminent. So I have always regarded her final statement to me as a kind of ‘commissioning’—to do precisely what, I am not sure, but what is very clear to me is that she affirmed me and called on me to do my very best in life. Her legacy to me was a request to become the best person I am able to become.

When I gave my salutatory address the following Sunday, I did so with my grandmother’s words ringing in my head. Though I felt loath to stand up and speak before that large group of people, I did so with conviction and passion because, in my mind and heart, I was doing so as a tribute to my grandmother. The text I chose as the basis of my address—Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, with its insistence on not merely enduring, but prevailing—seemed entirely appropriate, as I pondered the commission my grandmother had given me.

Why go on at such length about these personal memories? Because a major thread of the workshop was the need for faculty to build a learning community that engages in dialogue that reaches the affective domain of learning. We can mentor students in forming learning communities only to the extent that we are successful in forming such communities ourselves.

We call on our students to risk much as they learn: to expose their inmost thoughts, to dare to be vulnerable in sharing life experiences, to put painful life experiences on the table and discuss them in a communal context. But we don’t often follow suit, as colleagues in the academy.

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For me, the workshop lit a fire in my soul. It brought me back to the passion that informs my vocation as an educator—a passion for social transformation, a passion to understand the world in transformative ways, a passion to build a community engaged in such transformative learning in order to create an academy that becomes an agent of transformation in the world at large.

Though the experience of walking in the valley has diverted me from that passion in subsequent weeks (even as it smolders inside), I continue wondering about the heart and soul of American higher education. I wonder what it is in our worldviews and practices that predisposes us to talk about collaborative learning, about reaching the affective domain, about sharing life experiences—but to retreat to the safety of liberal managerial practices of academic life after we’ve had such discussions, when those discussions threaten to change the way we do business. I wonder why it is that we seem unable to see that we cannot be agents of transformative change without being transformed ourselves, and without transforming the academy, so that it conforms in practice to the rhetoric we proclaim.

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In the postmodern period, there is contestation of the rules of liberal managerialism—an agonistic approach to truth that recognizes the need of those shut out to struggle for their voices finally to be heard. The postmodern academy struggles against the dominative model of liberal managerialism bequeathed to it by modernity, in order to become something new—a new space for dialogic interaction of many different voices, proceeding from many different perspectives, in which no voice and no perspective is valorized over other voices.

I find many parallels between this postmodern worldview (and its attendant view of the academy) and the vision of Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune. Dr. Bethune’s insistence on the inclusion of African American and female voices in the dialogue constituting American democracy was based on the contention that democracy contains within it a logic of inexorable extension: to include any marginalized group, on democratic principles, is implicitly to recognize that all marginalized groups must eventually be brought to the table.

Martin Luther King articulates the same understanding of American democracy, and prefigures the postmodern world (and postmodern academy) with similar brilliance and force. As a scholar of the American social gospel, it interests me that both Dr. King and Dr. Bethune depend in many respects on the social gospel’s reading of the American experience and of the logic of American democracy.

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How do we form that safe space for dialogic interchange in an academic context still often dominated by liberal managerial concerns and techniques of control? How do those of us who are within church-affiliated institutions deal with these concerns and control techniques, when they dominate the behavior of the churches with which we are affiliated? In both church and academy today, a pressing question is how to build anew within the crumbling foundations of the old. The commitment of both institutions to liberal rhetoric has not allowed for a happy or fruitful transition to the postmodern world.

In a world in which it is increasingly difficult to shut out marginal voices and the information they offer us—because technology makes such transmission of knowledge much easier everywhere in the world today—how do we struggle to reinvent the academy? Within the ruins of modernity, how do we form a new safe space for the interaction of many different voices incorporating many different perspectives, none of which can lay claim to objectivity and ownership of the truth?

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I am moved as well by questions arising out of my solidarity with gay and lesbian persons. As M. Paz Galupo notes in an article entitled ‘Advancing Diversity Through a Framework of Intersectionality: Inclusion of LGBT Issues in Higher Education’ (Diversity Digest 10,2 [2007], 16-17), though the modern academy commonly pays lip-service to diversity and inclusion of all voices and perspectives, it lacks systematic or thoughtful strategies for integrating lesbian-gay concerns under the rubric of diversity. The academy still resists first-person testimony by its gay-lesbian members, and disallows such testimony as biased, self-interested, or distasteful.

Galupo (who is bi-racial) speaks expressly of HBCUs. She notes that HBCUs ‘typically have no institutionally recognized LGBT student groups’ and that ‘structural barriers’ in HBCUs prevent the successful integration of lesbian-gay persons into the academic community.

Galupo calls on the academy (and the HBCU in particular) to ask the following ‘hard questions’ about such structural barriers, if the academy wishes to be truly inclusive:

Why do we advocate for LGBT inclusion in general, but remain afraid to challenge homophobia within our racially diverse communities? How can a dialogue about the experiences of LGBT persons of color inform…our work within the larger African American and LGBT communities? How can our successes in advancing racial diversity and gender equity inform our advocacy for LGBT inclusion? And conversely, how can arguments for LGBT inclusion be used to shift our discussions about race and gender to creative and more effective directions?”

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And so, dear readers, the pilgrimage continues. You will note that I have added to this blog some ads. I’ve done this at the suggestion of a reader who suggests that this will enhance my site for a number of reasons. Traffic has increased dramatically on this blog in recent weeks, both in the U.S. and in places around the world. I take heart from the increased traffic. I interpret it as an expression of interest in the questions this and other blogs are pursuing—questions of great importance to people interested in spirituality and justice throughout the world. I am trying the ads not to commercialize my discussion, but to assist in making the blog accessible to more readers who may be interested in these issues.

And, finally, a question: if any readers anyplace know of instances in which churches or church organizations have ever sought to use legal threats to shut down blogs discussing theological issues and issues pertaining to social justice, I’d appreciate hearing about this attempt to suppress free speech. I’m gathering information about the claim of churches or church institutions that they have the right to buy the free speech of scholars, theologians, or citizens in general, and in doing so, to censor what a scholar, theologian, or citizen might write on a blog.

Thanks to any readers who can assist me in this quest for information.