LGBTQ Catholics and the Conversation About Staying or Leaving: 15 More Theses About Truths That Need to Be Heard in This Conversation

My last posting was an attempt to tell truth that is, in my view, often obscured and even barred as Catholics discuss the "problem" or "challenge" of welcoming LGBTQ people within Catholic spaces, or as LGBTQ Catholics discuss the question of staying in or leaving the church. As that posting indicated, some of us who are LGBTQ and Catholic have never had any choice in the matter: we were shoved from the church when our vocations were shattered without explanation, our livelihood removed, our daily bread taken from our mouths, our healthcare coverage yanked from us — as we were shown the door and it was slammed in our faces.

LGBTQ Catholics Are Asked, Why Stay in the Church? My 15-Question Response

A recent conference at Boston College asks LGBTQ Catholics, Why stay? Why do you stay in the Catholic church?

A Note of Profound Thanks for Your Emails

As the work week ends, a note of profound thanks to those of you who sent many very welcome emails to me in response to my posting Tuesday. I'm in Houston visiting my uncle and have fallen a bit behind with email. And I don't want those who sent me messages to think I'm ungrateful or ignoring you. I will be catching up with email very soon.

Peter Cameron's Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: A Brief Review

I'm not entirely sure why I don't blog more often about novels I happen to be reading.  I do read far more than the dry and frequently brittle political and religious analysis about which I seem to be perpetually babbling on here.  In fact, throughout my entire reading life (that is, from the time I was six years old), it has been stories--fiction, novels, fables, myths, plays, short stories--that have formed the backdrop to my thinking, to my entire being, far more than anything I've ever read in an academic context.

Starving Amidst Plenty: The Catholic Church's Curious Decline

Here are two postings I find it interesting to read as counterpoints to each other:

Thought for the Day: Jung on Questions Left Unfinished by Those Who Have Gone Before

When I was working on the stone tablets, I became aware of the fateful links between me and my ancestors. I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors.

Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections (as cited, Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul [NY: HarperCollins, 1992], p. 209).

Jung wrote this as he built a stone tower in which to live in later life. He began to feel such connection to his ancestors as he did so that he chiseled the names of his paternal ancestors on stone tablets and put them in the courtyard of the tower.

Vatican Attack on Theologians, Vatican Attack on Humanity

The following journal entry is from October 1990:

I've just read an illuminating, extraordinary passage in Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989) (pp. 35-6). Rorty's talking re: how Freud’s theory of the unconscious suggests that every person is a poet, a maker, as the etymological sense of the word “poet” indicates, one who spins a narrative of one’s life that strives to weave the contingencies of life into a story that will strike others as useful. As Lionel Trilling (Beyond Culture [NY: Harcourt Brace, 1965], p. 79) puts it, Freud showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind.

These passages bring to mind what Dorothee Sölle has to say about the term “fantasy” in her book Beyond Mere Obedience: Reflections on a Christian Ethic for the Future, trans. Lawrence W. Denef (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1970). Sölle says,

In German, Phantasie has a potentially far more positive value than the word “fantasy” has in English. Its meaning includes the dimensions of imagination, inspiration, inventiveness, flexibility, freedom and creativity (p. 10).

In fantasy, we reach for metaphors to signify, to tell the story we’re trying to tell, to weave the narrative. Thought itself is poetry; thought is thus precisely what Ernst Bloch calls it, a process of always venturing beyond.

My insight as I think about Rorty's insight: the tragedy—or better, grave injustice—of what the Vatican is doing to theologians today is the suppression of fantasy in theology. Why tragedy? Because to suppress fantasy is to suppress humanity. We theologians are now being asked to become machines that merely replicate information fed into us from without, information that itself pretends to replicate Truth Out There. Our task is to spit Truth out in machine-like fashion, never varying the message, never asking any questions about what it means.

+ + + + +

As I think, as I pray, as I listen to God's voice in my heart (and in scripture and the Christian community), I have come to believe that God loves gay people intensely, inordinately, deliriously. Ratzinger, do you hear?

Take that “intrinsically disordered” rhetoric and shove it.

Thought for the Day: Douglas Coupland on the Postmodern Vocation

We know that this is why the three of us left our lives behind and came to the desert—to tell stories and to make our own lives worthwhile tales in the process.

Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), p. 8.

Thought for the Day: Ongoing Struggle to Find and Tell Truth as Heart of Artistic Endeavor

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), p. 409.

A Thank You to Readers

Dear Readers,

I've fallen a bit behind with postings today, but want to take a moment to thank all of you who posted birthday greetings on yesterday's thread. I'm very appreciative of all the comments, and glad to hear that yesterday's posting and the blog are useful to readers.

Reading the valuable comments on yesterday's posting reminds me that we have much work to do together, those of us interested in building a more humane world. And that insight keeps me blogging, with gratitude for readers who remind me of why I have undertaken this task of thinking and writing about spirituality, justice, hope, the churches, and the place of those pushed to the margins by the powerful of the world and, often, of the churches as well.

John McNeill's Prophetic Gay Theology: Sex As God Intended (2)

One of John McNeill’s most significant contributions to Christian theology is his carefully worked-out insistence that gay and lesbian human beings fit into God’s plan for the world. McNeill not merely asserts this: he demonstrates why it is the case, and he does so using unimpeachably traditional building blocks of Christian theology to make his case.

McNeill situates the lives of gay persons—he situates our existence in the world, an existence willed by the Creator—within the longstanding Christian tradition that through Christ, God has caught the entire cosmos up into a grand drama of divine salvation, in which all that has been created has a role to play in moving the created world to liberation. Echoing the Pauline insistence that the whole universe groans for salvation, and the declaration of patristic thinkers such as Irenaeus that the Spirit moves within all creation to make it (including human beings) fully alive, John McNeill asks what particular gifts gay and lesbian persons bring to the human community, to assist it in its movement to full life.

To ask this is also to ask precisely what it is that makes the human community fully alive. To ask about the particular gifts that gay and lesbian persons offer the human community is to ask about the eschatological goal towards which we move, as a human community. What is it to be liberated, to be saved? What does this mean, concretely? From what exactly do we seek salvation?

John McNeill’s thought is incisive on this point. In his view, the Western mind (and the mind of the human community in general) has, throughout history, been involved in a constant dialectic interplay between the masculine and the feminine (p. 100). McNeill notes that great religious founders including Jesus and Ignatius of Loyola were, in cultures and historic periods heavily dominated by a masculine mind, “extraordinarily open to the feminine” (ibid.). He attributes the fruitfulness of such religious founders’ vision to their ability to draw on the creative energies of the feminine in cultures and periods resistant to the feminine.

In McNeill’s view, the human community is currently undergoing deep crisis as it attempts to move beyond the crippling strictures of a masculine mindset imbued with heterosexism and driven by feminophobia (pp. 98, 114). McNeill sees inbuilt in modernity itself “an essentially masculine crisis” (p. 105). The modern period joined the fate of the human race—and of the world itself—to men’s domination of women, to the subjugation of the feminine to the masculine, to the denigration of gay and lesbian human beings by heterosexual ones. In doing so, it has brought the human community (and the world itself) to a perilous point, at which we face the annihilation of everything by nuclear war and unbridled ecological destruction (p. 105).

The salvation of the world depends, then, on the ability of the human race to move beyond the intransigent, stubborn defense of masculine domination of everything, in our current postmodern moment. Unfortunately, at this point of peril, the churches, including the Roman Catholic church, have chosen to make the defense of masculine domination of everything so central to their definition of what it means to be a believer in the world today, that many churches view the attempt to correct the exclusively masculine worldview we have inherited as apocalyptic: to question the right of males to dominate is to court the destruction of the world (p. 110). Churches are impeding a necessary movement forward by the human community, by clinging to outmoded, unjust patriarchal ideas and structures, at a point in which those ideas and structures are revealed as increasingly toxic wherever they prevail.

What do gays and lesbians, who are increasingly the human fallout of the churches’ adamantine resistance to the feminine, have to offer in this dialectical struggle for the future of the world? In McNeill’s view, gays and lesbians have a providential opportunity to “model the ideal goal of humanity’s present evolution,” by demonstrating what it might mean to live with a balance of masculine and feminine principles inside oneself and in the culture at large (p. 115). Gays and lesbians can offer, simply by living their lives with unapologetic integrity, an example of “balanced synthesis” that a culture heavily dominated by fear of the feminine and unjust power of the masculine sorely needs, if it is to remain a viable culture.

John McNeill follows his sketch of the dialectic evolutionary process through which humanity is now moving—or, rather, has to move, if it hopes to overcome forces with the perilous ability to destroy the entire world—with a reminder of the special gifts that gay and lesbian persons bring to church and society. This Jungian-oriented analysis of the contributions of gays and lesbians to humanity is one that runs through everything McNeill has written. It sustains his thought, and is one of his most valuable contributions to Christian theology.

Following Jung, McNeill notes that gays and lesbians bring these gifts to the human community and the churches:

1. Deep bonds of love, which bear an often unacknowledged fruit in many social institutions that transcend the gay community itself;
2. A sensitivity to beauty;
3. Supreme gifts of compassionate service evident in the contributions of gay and lesbian teachers, ministers, medical workers and healers, workers in the fields of human service that serve the blind, those with mental and physical challenges, and so on, and many other service-oriented fields;
4. An interest in and commitment to preserving the best of traditions, aspects of tradition that remain viable and are often overlooked by mainstream culture;
5. And the gift of spiritual leadership.

One cannot read John McNeill’s work and not conclude that the church’s decision at this moment of its history to reject—even to seek to destroy—such gifts is tragically short-sighted. One cannot read John McNeill’s work and struggle, as an unapologetic gay person, to live in some connection to the church without feeling the tremendous weight of the tragedy that the churches are choosing to write today for themselves, the human community, and the earth itself by repudiating and undermining the gifts of gay and lesbian persons to the churches and the human community.

The unfinished question with which John McNeill’s theology leaves me, as a gay believer, is the question of what to do about that tragedy. For anyone who is unabashedly gay and who continues to believe that it is important to connect to the churches—for anyone who sees her or his sexual orientation as a gift of the same God whom the churches worship—the tragedy the churches are manufacturing by their cruel rejection of gay and lesbian believers produces existential, vocational crisis today.

How to live with any connection to an institution capable of such anti-Christian malevolence, an institution that not only has the capability to twist the souls of gay human beings, but which all too often gleefully does precisely that—assaults the very personhood of gay human beings in the name of a God who is Love? How to live with any connection to an institution that practices and foments violence against oneself and others like oneself, while preaching a commitment to peace and love? What to do about an institution that both transmits rich spiritual resources of which one wishes to avail oneself, and that functions as a toxin in one's life and history? How to forgive an institution which tells one that it is the way to salvation, and at the same time closes that way to any gay person who refuses to curse God for the gift of his or her nature?

I don’t know the answer to these questions—not fully. I am struggling to write this blog because I am pursuing that answer in my own life, and in my life as it is lived in solidarity with others who share this struggle. As a Catholic layperson, I sense that I sometimes have to look for answers in a different place than the place in which John McNeill (or James Alison, whose theology I also admire and find extremely helpful) finds them, as a former cleric. My experience of the church has been different, and the language I speak out of that experience is different.

This I can say: John McNeill’s prophetic theology opens up for me and for others a way that would never have been opened to us, had he not written books such as Sex As God Intended. For what he has accomplished, and for who he is, John McNeill deserves high honor and gratitude—and not only from the gay community. From the entire church.

John McNeill's Prophetic Gay Theology: Sex As God Intended

I’ve noted several times recently that I have just finished reading John McNeill’s latest book, Sex As God Intended (Maple Shade, NJ: Lethe Press, 2008). In what follows, I’d like to offer some reflections on a book that, in my view, will richly reward anyone who reads it. Because I have much to say about John McNeill's book and his significance as a pioneer of gay theology, I will write this review in stages. Part one consists of a personal testimony to the power of John McNeill's theology, as a prelude to my discussion of his latest book.

Sex As God Intended gathers a lifetime of prophetic thought by therapist-theologian John McNeill about the vocation of gay persons in church and society. At a point at which a theological discourse by and about the gay experience was almost non-existent in Christian churches, John McNeill crafted such a discourse—in part, out of his own joyous, painful experience as a gay believer, in part, out of his experience working with other gay believers as a therapist. In doing so, he opened a path for many of us who continue to think it important to try to hold our gay experience together with our experience of faith.

I well remember my first encounter with John McNeill’s work. I read his pioneering statement The Church and the Homosexual as a young theologian just finishing graduate school and beginning a teaching career in church-related universities. Though I had lived in a committed gay relationship throughout my years of graduate study—one that reached back, in fact, to my last years of undergraduate study—neither Steve nor I was ready to make any public statement about our identity, as we launched into our vocational lives as theologians.

We were not ready to make such a statement because we had not made it to ourselves, despite our longstanding relationship (and what I knew to be the truth inside myself, though I would not own that truth). We saw no way to do so. There was no path—quite simply, quite starkly—for theologians like us, in the churches. There was no place for us in the churches, period. The only way was the way of denial, a denial of oneself that clove one’s being into painful shards, in which the ground and source of one’s creative and intellectual life—a life shared in love—could not be spoken, examined, claimed as the entry point for an entire vocational life in the church.

Living split hurts. It damages. It produces turmoil that runs through one’s whole life. From the outset of my career as a theologian-scholar, I experienced crippling panic in public settings, which I can now identify as one of the prices I paid for believing that I could cleave my life into public and private domains, and keep my private life separate—and closeted—from my life as a teacher in a Catholic university. It was only when this performance anxiety became so debilitating that I could barely face being in the classroom, that I began to face honestly the cause of my panic—and who I was. And the meaning of my life and my vocation.

During several years of hard struggle with the question of coming out, first to myself, then to friends and family, and then publicly, I contacted John McNeill. His book The Church and the Homosexual had pointed a way to me. This was the way of self-acceptance. I wanted to believe in that way. I wanted to believe in his deep spiritual insight that we who are gay are created as we are for a reason, that we have a place in God’s salvific plan.

But believing in that way and seeing it open before one are not the same thing. There was (and there remains, in my life) the problem of living what one knows to be true in one’s heart of hearts—living one’s vocation as a gay believer, and, in my case, a gay theologian—and existing within churches that refuse to validate the graced insights of gay believers. That refuse to accept gay believers, at all. That open no doors for openly gay believers working in church institutions.

I wrote John McNeill in crisis, then. And he responded graciously, as a priest (although one who had been removed from ministry due to his open admission of his sexual orientation) and a therapist. He assured me of my place, of God’s calling that ran through my life. His words opened that place for me, first and foremost inside myself, even as the church itself slammed door after door in my face and Steve’s.

It was important to hear those words in my coming-out period, as I struggled with both personal and vocational questions, with the impossibility of being true to myself and my vocation and securing a job of any kind in a church-related university. Those words gave me life—literally—as I struggled to deal with the many and forceful (if ultimately empty) claims that bogus therapeutic and salvific organizations make on the lives of gay Christians, with an astonishing sense of entitlement as they single us out among all other sinners to whom they might direct their ministry.

I did, briefly and painfully, flirt with the thought of the "ex-gay" option. I contacted one of the leading ex-gay organizations, asked for help. When I read the literature the group sent me and began a correspondence with a counselor the group assigned me, I realized that I was repulsed not merely by the group's theologically and scientifically fraudulent claims: I was repulsed most of all by its assurance that, not even knowing me, it had the right to reach into my life and the lives of others and dictate. To tell us what God wanted for our lives, without even knowing us.

When I told the group I did not want to pursue its oh-so-tenderly-offered therapy, I saw the mask fall away. I received threatening letters informing me I was and would forever be damned, that I must contact the savior group immediately or risk all kinds of divine punishment, that the group would appear on my doorstep and make a fuss if I did not accede to its demands.

All the while, I was also seeking to avail myself of the ministerial offerings of my own Catholic church. I was going to confession at the drop of a hat and hearing . . . unbelievable . . . counsel and theological balderdash from priests, some of whom I knew, some of whom had taught me as Jesuit professors at Loyola University in New Orleans.

One former professor did all he could to peer through the screen of the confessional as I confessed. He warned me that, if I did not leave behind my sinful ways, I would one day step out of the church following confession, be hit by a bus, and go straight to hell. And then where would I be?

Another confessor hissed in a loud voice that my sins—committed, as I always scrupulously informed each confessor, with the same person with whom I had then lived in a longstanding relationship for over a decade—were the sins that brought God’s wrath down on the world. Another soberly told me my only choice, if I wanted salvation, was to go home, lock the door to my partner in sin, and never open it to him again.

The best pastoral advice I was offered by confessors at this anguished point in my life—the best, shockingly—was to understand that God had given me a unique cross to bear, and that if I bore it faithfully, returning to confession each time I fell, I would assist both my salvation and that of many others. The Jesuit who offered that advice encouraged me to come only to him as a confessor, not to any of his confreres. The others, he said, did not fully understand this gift I had been given.

Eventually, all this began to seem, well, simply silly. After years of theological education, how could I return my psyche and my intellect to the infantile (and exceedingly dim) state that such confessional advice, and the maleficent solicitude of the ex-gay saviors, required me to adopt? I did want salvation: who doesn't? But at such a price?

Eventually, some center of sanity and health deep inside my battered psyche was able to hear John McNeill’s words through the loud, destructive cries of many followers of Christ to me and other gay brothers and sisters at this point in history, and I was able to claim my identity. And my vocation, though that vocation remains mysterious to Steve and me within the framework of churches and church-related schools that have no place for us, and that attack us and use us as symbols of evil to deflect attention from the shortcomings of the churches themselves and of their leaders.

I apologize to readers (and to John McNeill) for this lengthy prologue to my review of his book. It is a story I feel compelled to tell, though, because it illustrates what a powerful, invaluable service John McNeill has done to gay Christians of our time, in providing a way for us to come to self-acceptance within the structures of a church that wants anything but self-acceptance for us. It is a story that creates a frame for a discussion of ideas that have life-and-death significance for many of us, as we struggle to live our vocation as gay believers in churches that are generally hostile and anti-Christian to us.

Theology from Gardens and Kitchens

We write from a place. I believe that.

I have sketched the place from which I write on this blog in various ways: I’m a theologian; I’m gay; I live on the margins of church life—in truth, on the other side of a wall that runs between gay people and the church.

I also write from a physical place that, to many people, is almost non-existent: one of those fly-over cities in the middle of the U.S. A small, provincial city that is not very close, even, to some of the power-brokering cities with “brand” in our general vicinity—New Orleans, Memphis, Dallas-Ft. Worth.

I write from an even more specific place, an east-facing room in a house perched on a gently-sloping hill in the foothills of the Ouachita Mountains, their first eastward escarpment along the banks of the Arkansas River. The chair from which I write overlooks what would, prior to the building of this neighborhood at the turn of the 19^th century, have been a small valley between two slopes running from the river towards the coastal plains of the southern half of the state.

My chair overlooks a garden on which Steve and I have labored, with more or less (emphasis on the latter) success for almost a decade now. The garden was thriving some four years ago, with several plum trees laden with fruit one spring, when the city decided to run a sewer line through the back of the garden, uprooting the plums and two beautiful apple trees we had also planted and tended towards maturity. Though the city promised that it would preserve the garden, its contractors stuck the trees back into the ground just as summer arrived, and of course, they did not grow again. At that point, I gave up on dreaming big dreams for my little garden.

Slowly, though, we have massaged it back into some semblance of a garden, and I write these days overlooking a scene I know I will see only for a few days, since spring is fleeting, and each day brings with it new illuminations. To be specific: I am looking out these days through a trellis Steve has just built on the east side of the house, to support Carolina jasmine and roses. There is a rose we have hauled from New Orleans to North Carolina to Little Rock to Florida, leaving cuttings of it rooted in each place, where thriving specimens of this red climbing rose now bloom.

We first got the rose from an elderly neighbor of ours in New Orleans, on whose shed it grew—Mouton Bickham. We call it the Mouton Bickham rose, though it probably has some other name: we suspect Mme. Isaac Pereire. It is a beautiful, easy climber with quartered bourbon blossoms, light red shading to mauve as they open, with a delicious scent. It grows easily and rewards even the slightest care with a long season of blooms in our hot climate. Here, it is even sometimes remontant, blooming both spring and fall. Since Mr. Bickham, a wonderful, elderly African-American neighbor, died while we lived in New Orleans, the rose means a great deal to us now. Each blossom brings back memories of his cheerful greeting as he sat on his stoop each evening, trying to catch one of the rare sultry breezes New Orleans offers in summertime.

“My” trellis, as I now think of it, is a frame for what grows just beyond the eastern window, just beneath the trellis itself. These days, it’s a wonderful medley: light yellow witch hazel blooms on a bare tree, hanging like miniature Chinese lanterns with the faintest spots of green sprinkled across the yellow; beyond them, spikes of purple flag that have just burst into bloom in the past two days; beneath the witch hazel, tiny narcissus, a deeper yellow than the witch hazel blooms, which the dogs have somehow failed to trample down; and to the north and east, like a haze beyond all of this, the deep red-brown of the smoke tree opening its leaves.

I cherish the scene, because I know it will not last. It will give way soon to something else, all the roses in bloom at once, followed by the intense hot days in which the Louisiana iris, Texas star hibiscus, and pomegranate all bloom on the unshaded eastern side of the garden that gets sun all day long. Hot colors for hot days—scarlet, orange, sun-yellow, with intense greens to frame them.

Why all this garden talk? I don’t know, frankly. In part, because the news often depresses me. I read in one news account today that, as our president cantered and capered this week—this week in which news of 4000 dead soldiers arrived—at a press conference in D.C., the reporters gathered to witness this performance applauded him, gave him a standing ovation.

What kind of world do we live in? What kind of world, now? What kind of world, in which the purveyors of “knowledge” and “information” can applaud cantering and capering atop a mass grave?

Enough. Such “news” sickens me, and I turn to nature for consolation, the starling I see right now, as I type, slowly clacking across the leaves to the bird bath, moving like a ponderous Oxbridge don in academic regalia, intent on a destination only he can see in his own head.

I write about the mundane, the particular, as well, because this kind of writing is an act of defiance—defiance of the norms that tell men (and scholars, and women whose power depends on playing by men's rules) they should write about the serious and not the domestic. Again and again, in my academic career, when I have submitted academic articles in which I reference the homey as an illustration of a ponderous point, I receive the edited article back with notes that, while the “riff” on cornpone may be interesting, it is off-topic.

Not to me. My garden, what I cook in my kitchen, the pollen I washed in dull yellow layers off my front porch yesterday: these are the stuff of my daily existence. My thought arises out of this stuff. Most of the world’s inhabitants live in worlds in which their lives are made of similar stuff. It is only a minority who live and work in academic studies, in high-rise office buildings, who can write while someone else (someone almost certainly female) does the cooking, the scrubbing, the garden-tending, the food-growing, food-selecting, food-preparing.

We need a theology that reflects where people really live and move and have their being. We need a theology—a serious, academic theology—that writes from the kitchen, the garden, the porch that has to be scrubbed daily. We need a theology in which the things that those who live in such places think about are taken seriously, as food for academic discussion.

I write about these matters on my blog because I can do so. For the first time in my life, in my academic career, in my vocation as an educator, I can write about gardens and kitchens as if they matter, and matter ultimately. I can use the homey to talk about God and not have an editor in a high-rise building, for whom someone else cooks and cleans (someone almost certainly female) eviscerate the homey references from what I have written.

In blogging, I believe I am continuing my work as an academic theologian and educator. But I am doing so outside Jerusalem, so to speak, outside the norms and boundaries that dictate what an academic theologian and educator can and must say. In nurturing an alternative discourse field—a new garden—for those of us who want to talk about God, about justice, about peace, about gender, I am, I hope, making it possible for new voices, those that have traditionally not been permitted into the conversation, to sound forth.

I hope. 4000 are now dead. A president capers. Reporters applaud. My voice is tiny. People I know are seriously ill, and my heart is heavy because of this.

But I hope. And so I go on speaking.

Francis of Assisi and Mother Birds: The Story of Jesus Always Renewed

I’ve begun my Holy Saturday listening to Paul Robeson sing “Were You There.” And thinking about rivers, about Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan. About vocation, and about how crucifixion and resurrection is everyone’s story.

Paul Robeson: that deep, rich voice that sounds like something emanating from the center of the earth. And which, for the same reason, has the power to touch the depths of one’s soul, such that the words of the spirituals he sings becomes the song of one’s own soul. The genius of African-American spirituality is to take biblical texts, read them through the prism of historic injustice, historic unmerited and imposed suffering, and cause them to shine as though the texts had been written just the day before yesterday.

The bible as our story. This is one of the many significant contributions of African-American culture to American culture at large, this genius for making the text meaningful here and now, so that the call and response of the text implicates us, implicates me, and is not simply a perplexing word from a strange, unfathomable past with no obvious significance for the here and now.

At a time in which American culture seems curiously, willfully amnesiac about the manifold contributions of African-American culture to the nation’s culture at large, Paul Robeson—and the spirituals—bear remembering. And bear hearing anew.

The immediacy of the biblical story in the spirituals’ rendition is a reminder that the story of Jesus is not simply his story, but everyone’s. I think today of a remark that I believe Henri Nouwen makes in one of his books—that, when John plunged Jesus under the water of the Jordan River, the river took Jesus.

In submitting to baptism by John, in going into and under the waters of the flowing river, Jesus let go of leading his life as if it were his life. His life became the life handed over to God. The river took him. From the Jordan to Calvary, Jesus lived out the consequences of a vocational decision to live utterly and completely for God, for others, and not for himself.

The river takes us. The river takes us when, in the depths of our own souls, we somehow lay hold of our unique calling in life. The river of vocation runs through each human life, giving depth meaning to the shallows of everyday existence. When we reach into the depths, when we reach the rivers flowing at the depths of our own being, and when we give ourselves to those depths, the river takes us. Our lives become not our own, but the life lived in the sway and current of the river flowing through us.

A river that leads inevitably, in every human life, to crucifixion. Crucifixion is part and parcel of the human experience of life. It happens to us over and over again. It is where the river takes us, if we plunge into the river and allow ourselves to be taken: if we give in to vocation.

But inherent in that giving up of our own command of our destiny is the simultaneous—and insane—hope that the self-abnegation will become a fruitful gift: not for ourselves, but for others. This is the resurrection half of the diptych that forms the central mystery of Christian faith: in dying we are born to eternal life; in death, we rise again. We live to become the grain of wheat sown in the ground, which produces sheaves of wheat in abundance for others we will not see, who will come after us.

Or, as Maya Angelou puts the point, “When we cast our bread upon the waters, we can presume that someone downstream whose face we will never know will benefit from our action, as we who are downstream from another will profit from that grantor’s gift.”

A certain kind of distorted piety has often led Christians to think of the story of the crucifixion and resurrection as unique to Jesus. And yet the implication of the four gospels’ account of Jesus’s life is clear: this story of grappling with the voice of God, with a calling to submit to the river, to be plunged beneath it, to let it carry us where it will, to die in order that others may live—this story of Jesus is our story, as well. This is the raison d’etre of the gospels, the reason they were written: to link our human stories to the story of Jesus, such that the story of Jesus becomes our own story, and our story part of the story of Jesus.

We do not dishonor Jesus and his memory when we appropriate the story to our experience, or when we use our human experience to hear and understand the story of Jesus. In doing these things, we show that this story has become paradigmatic for us, that it casts ultimate meaning on our lives: that it has become the hinge story of our own vocational lives.

This recognition that the story of Jesus belongs perennially to the people of God, and not to the hieratic classes that, in any church and any culture, keep claiming the story as the unique possession of the guardians and purveyors of the sacred mysteries, is a recognition that, again and again, enlivens the churches with reforming experiences. This recognition again and again calls forth reformers whose task is to point to the possibility of living the story of Jesus in a new way in new cultural settings.

I have been thinking in this vein this week as I finished Linda Bird Francke’s On the Road with Francis of Assisi (NY: Random House, 2005). Francke writes about a pilgrimage she and her husband took several years ago, in which they sought to visit every place of significance to the life of Francis of Assisi that they could discover.

Francis lived at a turning moment in European history, a time of urbanization in which the traditional monastic patterns of spirituality no longer reached the lives and cultural experiences of the newly urbanized masses of European nations. Part of Francis’s genius—part of his unique calling to rebuild the church—was his ability to act out, with a band of followers, the gospel story in a way that made this story fresh to those living in a new cultural setting.

Much has been written about the charism of Francis and his followers, and the ways in which they reframed the story of Jesus to fit new socio-economic patterns. Something that I have not seen discussed much, however, and which crops up here and there in Francke’s re-telling of the life of Francis, is an interesting gender-transgressive tendency of Francis and the early friars.

Francke notes that, in a letter to Brother Leo now held by the cathedral of Spoleto and dated sometime before 1220, Francis refers to himself as Leo’s mother. “I speak to you, my son, as a mother,” the letter begins, after Francis has greeted his devoted companion (as cited, p. 25).

The use of the maternal language is also found in Francis’s 1217 rule for hermitages. In the rule, Francis called for each hermitage to have three or four friars, in which two would be the mothers of the hermitage, and the other(s) the son(s) (p. 129).

My posting yesterday noted that, from the first creation narrative in Genesis, through the prophets, to the gospels and the words of Jesus, God is continuously imaged as a mother bird seeking to bring her chicks under her wings, to enfold them with love and protection. Francke notes that Francis also employed this imagery (p. 176).

As his community struggled over the question of how or whether it was possible to live Francis’s ideal of absolute poverty, Francis dreamt of himself as a hen spreading her wings to enfold and protect her chicks. Francke indicates that this dream is depicted in paintings in southern Italy, with Francis holding his cloak around his followers.

What to make of these whispers of an alternative view of God and gender in medieval Christianity? First, the whispers can’t be dismissed. Francis’s goal was to tell the story of Jesus in a way that reached those living in an entirely new cultural setting. Like Jesus himself, he acted out his message in dramatic ways—disrobing and handing his clothes to a father who sought to make him over in the father’s image, dramatically repudiating the paternalistic vision of his life. Francis acted out the Christmas narrative in a way that has radically influenced all subsequent generations of Christians. It was he who developed the idea of staging nativity scenes to make the story real (and human) to Europeans of his day.

Francis’s kissing of lepers, his sitting on the floor to eat scraps with lepers and other dispossessed wanderers of the roads of a Europe in which urbanization was widening the economic gap between rich and poor, also brought the gospel message home to his countryfolk. Francis is known as alter Christus because, in so many radical ways, he sought to enact the life of Jesus in a new cultural setting, to keep the story alive, and as a result, his own life is seen as an exemplary emulation of the life of Christ.

This being the case, Francis’s choice to echo Jesus’s use of the maternal imagery of the Genesis creation narrative must not be dismissed or taken lightly. This choice may have been ignored for generations, as Christians focused on other aspects of the story.

Today, however, when currents within the churches seek to use distorted interpretations of scripture and tradition to force women (and men viewed as feminized) into submission, the story takes on a new, portentous, radical (and radically important) significance. If we take Jesus seriously, if we take Frances as alter Christus seriously, we must also take seriously the willingness of both to bend traditional gender lines by using maternal imagery to refer to themselves.

At the very least, the story of Francis illustrates that those rooted firmly in Christian tradition should not find it shocking—as many Christians do today—to see a male assuming what is thought of as a “female” role, when the nurturing role is warranted for a male. There is a quicksilver quality about the varied gender appropriations within the Christian tradition that makes our current fixation on using religion to assure that men be real men and women be real women seem outright bizarre. It did not bother Francis to assume the “female” role of nurturer, of mother, of the mother hen drawing her chicks beneath her wings.

It does bother many Christians today to think in these terms. To the extent that it does so, perhaps we have lost sight of some central strands of the scriptural text and of Christian tradition. And Easter is about remembering that the most central strands of all—the message of ongoing dying/rising—belong to all of us and have to be lived by all of us here and now.