The Synod, LGBT Catholics, and Women: Meh

I'd like to tell you that the synod in Rome (or whatever we choose to call it or however we decide to define it) means something to me. To be honest, it doesn't. Or, to be more accurate, it means about as much to me as does any gathering of the top leaders of the Catholic church, or any document that emanates from those top leaders.

A Sunday Resource: BBC Scotland Program on Slavery and Song

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

Melissa Harris-Perry on the Intersection of Black and Gay Struggle for Justice, and Liberating Role of the Bible

Reading Dan Savage's remembrance of the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, and of the role the churches played in that struggle, alongside Peter Montgomery's analysis today at Religion Dispatches of the thought of Melissa Harris-Perry is instructive.  Montgomery focuses on a keynote address that Harris-Perry recently gave to the Clergy Call conference of Human Rights Campaign.

All Means All: The Contribution of the Black Church's Prophetic Critique

And, as a follow-up to what I have just posted, and a first installment of the series from my journals discussed in that posting, I'd like to offer the following. This is from a journal entry in the summer of 1991.

I offer it now as a contribution to the discussion over the weekend of what welcome really entails, when a church professes to be a welcoming community.

As the following posting will indicate, I've been convinced for some time now that if churches don't mean all when they say all, then they might as well stop proclaiming to welcome anyone (and therefore admit that they are failing at the most fundamental constitutive obligation of Christian churches). If all doesn't mean all, then churches are just failing to be church. Church, at its most fundamental level, is always about welcoming everyone, about embracing everyone, about combating every invidious social distinction that makes one person more valuable than another, on the basis of distinctions that have nothing to do with human worth.

That's how Jesus lived. And that's how any church that claims its origin in him has to behave, if it wants to claim to lead believers to walk on the path Jesus walked. And so to my journal entry from the summer of 1991:

I never understood the old Southern hymn “When We All Get to Heaven” until I heard it sung by a soloist in a black church. As I heard the song sung in white churches when I was a child, I imagined the point was heaven—another of those many next-world songs that impoverished Southern people have sung for so long, full of lavish imaginings of the topography and ornamentation of the beautiful city where we won't weep or hunger anymore.

When the soloist in the black church sang the song, I suddenly knew it was not so much about heaven as about all—the accent is on getting all of us to heaven. The hymn is eschatological: it’s about the final gathering together of all God’s people, the final completion of salvation in which all thrive.

It takes the black church to tell this story. It takes a people who experience being shut out, deprived, maligned—a people for whom the way of salvation as defined by the self-righteous middle-class morality of many white churches is made much more difficult by the exclusionary walls that such morality constructs and refuses to see as even subject to discussion. How to obtain salvation in that middle-class moral framework, with its emphasis on propriety and appearances, when there’s hardly food on the table, no adequate health care, no work? Don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t fornicate, white slave owners preached to their slaves, and the middle-class church continues to preach as the core of its moral message. And damnation to those who do these things, the middle-class white church and its moral system have insisted.

No wonder that under the circumstances, many fail to make the mark and are cast into outer darkness by churches intent on equating their middle-class values with gospel values. But God’s ways are not our ways. God sees the heart whereas we see the appearance. God is on the side of the poor. When we all get to heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be—rejoicing because you brother who peddle drugs while politicians preached at you to work but provided no decent jobs, you’ll be there; and you sister who sold your body for a fix while white women in the beauty parlor whispered about the decline in morality, you’ll be there. We’ll all be there, and the first shockingly last.

How did the soloist get this across? With flawless execution, she took that “all,” held and elaborated on the word, exalted it till it filled the church and people began to clap and stomp and pass out with elation. All. That’s what God says to the church today.

+ + + + +

Some notes:

1. Philadelphia Sunday School teacher Eliza Edmunds Hewitt wrote "When We All Get to Heaven" in the 1890s, and it was published in 1898. Hewitt was Presbyterian. The hymn circulated after that in hymnals widely used in various churches in the U.S., and became a favorite hymn in Southern evangelical churches, one often sung at funerals.

2. The incident I'm recounting here occurred in the years in which I was teaching theology at Xavier University in New Orleans, an historically black Catholic university. During my time at Xavier, I went to a funeral in a black church at which "When We All Get to Heaven" was sung in a way that moved me profoundly and opened my eyes to the real significance of this popular old hymn.

3. As well as I recall, the funeral took place at a black Catholic church, though the hymn is more often associated with evangelical piety than Catholic piety. But many black Catholic churches in New Orleans have freely adopted elements of black evangelical piety and incorporated them into their Catholic liturgical traditions.

4. As I listened to the hymn and thought about how different the rendition of it was in this black church setting than in the white churches in which I had always heard it sung, it struck me that I was hearing, in this alternative rendition, the powerful current of prophetic thought that runs through some parts of the black church experience, which contests the claim of white middle-class Christians to own the gospel.

5. The WPA slave testimonies report again and again that white plantation owners encouraged their slaves to go to churches whose preachers were controlled by the white community, where they would hear a carefully tailored "Christian" message that focused on the obligation of slaves to obey their masters, not to steal, not to lie, to work hard, etc. Many of those speaking to WPA employees about this experience in the Depression period stated that they were not persuaded by this white middle-class moral message.

6. Many former slaves asked, for instance, how those who had stolen human beings away from their homes in Africa had the right to turn around and tell those stolen human beings that stealing a ham to keep their families alive was sinful. They also noted that the God of Moses and Daniel and Jesus seemed to have different values than the God preached to them by the white church with its middle-class morality. That God, the God of the bible, seemed to value all human beings and to be particularly interested in those in bondage, whose side God took.

When Master and Slave Reverse: The Gay Struggle for Human Rights

I have never been entirely sure that I understand Nietzsche’s concept of the transvaluation of values. I know that he aims the idea at Christianity, which, in his view, perverts “natural values,” turning morality on its head in the process.

My primary entry point into Nietzsche’s concept of transvaluation in general has long been Hegel's master-slave analogy. What intrigues me there is how the slave, from her position of subordination and dehumanization, ends up claiming a humanity the slave system is designed to deny her—and which it ironically removes from the slaveowner himself, who imagines that his rules of subordination and dehumanization extend out into the entire cosmos.

In the folly of his belief that he can control the definition of morality, the slaveowner ends up being captivated by the very system of slavery he invents. The system subverts itself—it transvalues its moral basis—such that it is the slaveowner himself who ends up being enslaved. It is the slaveholder himself who is dehumanized, not the slave whom he seeks to dehumanize.

The slave system effects this because it forgets or glosses over a pivotal human reality, a moral reality, that the slave herself never forgets. This is the humanity of the one we seek to dehumanize. Try as we might, invent any rules we like to subordinate others and rob them of humanity, there is still something inside each human heart that affirms the humanity of the one treated as an inhuman object, something to which human beings cling desperately in the most dehumanizing circumstances imaginable.

What the slaveholder forgets—the humanity of the person he is treating as an object by buying, selling, controlling—the slave herself never forgets: that she is human, and not an object. So the slave system ends up dehumanizing—ironically!—the very one who sets it into place to dehumanize others. The slave ends up being master, insofar as she never forgets her humanity despite constant assaults on her humanity, while the slaveholder forfeits his humanity by holding a human being as chattel property.

This analysis of the transvaluation of values has been constantly in my mind lately, as I read some of the commentary on right-wing blogs and in the media about the response of the gay community nationwide to proposition 8. It is mind-boggling to read commentary suggesting that gay human beings who protest the removal of a fundamental human right are somehow debasing their humanity by protesting! Animals rampaging in the street, a right-wing maven informed readers of the Arkansas Times blog recently . . . .

It is amazing to see the same folks who have, for decades now, done all they can to assault the humanity of gay human beings and to remove human rights from gay human beings suddenly claiming that they are the object of attack, when the human beings they’ve been bashing cry out in protest. This process whereby the oppressor seeks to claim the status of the oppressed is fascinating to watch: and utterly grotesque. It is a transvaluation of values that tries to take the concept of oppression and apply it to the one being oppressed, as a reduplication of the initial oppression—a revictimization of the victim.

I began to understand these philosophical concepts existentially some years ago, when I received an unexplained one-year terminal contract at Belmont Abbey College. I had taught theology there two years. I had received outstanding evaluations from students, peers, and supervisors.

In fact, several days before receiving the terminal evaluation, I had my annual oral evaluation by the academic vice-president, who told me that I had published more than any other faculty member that year, that my teaching evaluations were outstanding, that I had given good service to the college—and that I would receive a one-year terminal contract. When I asked him why that would be the case, given his evaluation (which he never placed in writing), he told me he was not obliged to give me any reason for terminating me.

The story has many twists and turns, and it ended with my resigning when I met a total stone wall (and encountered one lie upon another) as I sought to be given a reason for the terminal contract. What I want to focus on here is the involvement of the abbot of the monastery that owns Belmont Abbey College.

That gentleman was, at the time, Abbot Oscar Burnett. When I was issued the terminal contract, I was still so naïve that I assumed the monks would be appalled to have their college treating any employee so inhumanely and dishonestly—violating core Christian moral principles in their treatment of an employee.

I naïvely asked to see Abbot Oscar to discuss the termination. I intended to tell him that my conscience was pointing me to leaving a college that was assaulting my faith in what the Catholic church stood for, and that I wanted to do him the courtesy of discussing that with him before I resigned.

Abbot Oscar ignored a series of phone calls from me, requesting an interview with him. When I finally placed the request in writing, he wrote me back a cold note informing me that he did not meddle in the affairs of the college (which his monastery owns and controls).

And here’s where the transvaluation of values bit comes in: down the road, Steve did manage to meet with Abbot Oscar for an interview—one in which he sat in front of Oscar for a good part of an hour as Oscar ranted, screamed, and threatened. I made a transcript of that “interview” afterwards, based on Steve’s oral report, which he told me through tears. It makes . . . interesting . . . reading.

One of the most hilarious things Oscar told Steve as he raved was that I had tried to assault him: yes, you read that right—I, the one fired, without a job, without health coverage, the one lied to and dehumanized, I had tried to assault Oscar, who had food, shelter, health coverage, social status, everything of which his Catholic college had robbed me.

Oscar told Steve, in fact, that I had caused his blood pressure to rise and that I was a malicious person akin to the man who had sought to assassinate Pope John Paul II. He said that for such persons, there can be no forgiveness, only prison, since they are evil and to be cut off from society and the body of Christ.

And—get this—Oscar informed Steve that I had caused all this suffering to him because I had not come to tell him that I was resigning! He refused to see me. He slammed the door in my face when I repeatedly asked him for an interview—to tell him I feared I had to leave a Catholic college that could violate core Catholic principles so egregiously.

And yet I had assaulted him by not coming to tell him that I was resigning—when he refused to see me. Mind-boggling, isn’t it?

But not uncommon, I have since found. It is a typical response of oppressors to those they oppress. The body of literature dealing with the twisted relationship of sexually abusive priests to their victims reveals that, over and over, priests who abuse children blame the children for their abuse. The children who are molested are flirts; they draw the priest in and cause him to rape them. It is the child's fault and not the fault of the adult, the pastor, who assaults the humanity of the child to its very core.

Sick. And a sickness that lives right in the heart of the church. A sickness that inhabits the heart of all systems in which power is unequally distributed, so that a person can have power over others from which those others have little ability to escape. A sickness that thrives on turning the moral universe topsy-turvy, so that the oppressor genuinely believes he is the oppressed, when the “object” he has continuously assaulted finally speaks back, and proves him wrong, in his fundamental assumption that the objectified person is less than human.

That is what is happening now with gay people in this society. We are speaking back. We are refusing to live with the strictures placed on our humanity by those whose only concern is to read our humanity as less than their humanity.

And how amazingly angry the oppressor is when he has even the tiniest taste of the dehumanizing aggression he has doled out decade on decade. What a surprise for him to learn that dehumanization doesn’t taste very good after all—not when he is the taster and no longer the disher.

Caged Birds and Songs They Sing

Thinking of cages as this day goes on.

Specifically, of Maya Angelou’s autobiographical statement about why the caged bird sings. From the moment I first read Angelou’s memoir, I fell in love with it, and with her metaphor of social stigmatization and marginalization as a caging of the human spirit.

As a gay man, I understand a bit about what it means to be placed in a cage. Because I also challenge myself continuously to understand and push against the social tendency to place people in cages solely because of innate characteristics such as skin color, gender, or sexual orientation, I find a place inside myself where I can form solidarity with others who are placed in cages for reasons different from my reason for being caged.

I believe—and I know from my own experience—that it is possible for us to project our hearts, minds, and souls into the experience of others, not so that we completely understand the unique experience of others, but so that we can empathize. And in empathizing, begin the process of assisting others to break their cage bars. Because we ourselves know how painful it feels to be shut into a cage against our will.

Because I believe in the possibility of such solidarity of heart, mind, and soul with the caged Other, I find it difficult to understand those who have every reason to know what it feels like to be unjustly caged, but who find it impossible to muster solidarity with Others different from themselves.

When I encounter, for instance, African Americans and/or women who do not intend to make solidarity with gay-lesbian persons, I am baffled. I can never fully understand what it means to live life in the skin of someone who is African American, or in the body of someone who is female. It would be pretentious and false for me to claim that I do understand those experiences, or the particular kind of marginalization people of color and women endure.

Nonetheless, I have the ability to understand in my heart, mind, and soul what being put in a cage against one’s will feels like. And that ability compels me to do everything in my power to open the cages of those unjustly imprisoned due to innate traits over which they have no control.

People shut up in tight little prisons; people treated as if they do not have intellect and capability to feel deeply when their dignity is assaulted; people lied to and lied about solely because of their denigrated innate characteristics; people lied to cynically as though they cannot discern a lie from the truth; people susceptible to manifold forms of social violence because of how they were born; people against whom others use the law as a tool of oppression rather than a tool to effect justice: these people know what it feels like to want out of the cage.

And because they know, because their own souls have been seared by the injustice of being treated as non-persons, they commit themselves to the liberation of others from cages. That is, they do so if they do not want to diminish their own humanity.

Because in the final analysis, when we blame others for finding themselves unjustly imprisoned in tiny cages, and when we cruelly use their own attempts to batter down the cage bars as justification for keeping them caged, it is ourselves we diminish.

Not the one we’re trying to keep in a cage. Those folks usually know in their souls that their humanity is the same kind of humanity everyone else shares. And even in prison, even as caged birds, they can still sing to assert their humanity against the bars of their cages.

And, of course, given even the slightest chance, they fly out of the cage the moment the door springs open.