The Week in Review: Combating Violence Against Gay Youth

As this week winds to a close, and I try to juggle multiple projects (what birthday gift do you give a connoisseur of chocolate who has every variety in the world?), it occurs to me to gather an assortment of articles that have impressed me in recent days. All are pertinent to themes discussed in previous postings.

As my profile for this blogsite indicates, one of the issues that most engages my passion is to stop bullying of LGBT children in school. This passion stems, in part, from my own experience of having been bullied for my conspicuous lack of gender “normativity” in childhood. I can recall being taunted in junior high school, called a queer, even before I had any inkling what that term meant. I remember coming home the first time I was called this, and asking my mother what the term meant.

Her answer was a variant of one she gave me when I learned the 10 commandments as a young child, and asked what “adultery” meant: “It’s when mommies and daddies do bad things.” “Queer,” she replied, means “when men do bad things.”

Not very enlightening, but enough to clue me in to the fact that this term had something to do with the forbidden area of sex, and that, as with everything falling into that murky shadowland, to be queer was to be shameful. So I was queer, then, even though I had no clear idea what this meant, and the area of sexuality itself was a complete shadowland into which I had never even ventured . . . .

Whatever being queer was, I soon learned, it evidently justified being knocked down by the vice-president of the school’s bible study club, whenever I missed a shot in volleyball (not an infrequent occurrence). It justified the coaches standing by and watching this happen and doing nothing to reprimand the boy who repeatedly assaulted me.

Being queer evidently also allowed other boys to grope what they called my breasts (my non-existent male breasts!) in gym class, again without any punishment by the coaches. It allowed the coaches to put me at the start of the line of boys on all fours over which the class vaulted when we did gymnastics, a position that allowed anyone vaulting over to kick the first person in line in the ribs or side—hard kicks excused as part of the launching process.

I sensed, without having full clarity, that being queer had something to do with being a sissy, another term with which I had contended in school (and at home, and at church) as far back as I could recall. I was a liability in most games boys played on the school ground, so that I was almost always chosen last for a sport. In baseball, I was put far, far into one of the fields, where I could usually find something that really interested me, like heads of clover to be woven into flower necklaces—thus confirming the poor opinion of my sporting skills when the ball that I wouldn’t have caught, anyway, flew over my head as I sat on the ground in the clover, oblivious to the game around me.

I remember the cheek-burning shame of being nominated for the position of captain of the safety patrol team in fifth grade (whatever can S. Gibbs have been thinking?), and the speech my nominator gave before the whole school: “Bill Lindsey may walk like a girl and talk like a girl, but I can assure you he’s all boy.” Most of all, I remember the howls of laughter that day from the sixth-grade classes who occupied the front rows of the auditorium.

I don’t recall these scenes to wallow in self-pity. I can laugh at most of them now. I recall them to remind myself and others that there are still children enduring this treatment in our school system—and with the full complicity of school officials and parents. What happened this week to Lawrence King in Oxnard, CA—a gay fifteen-year old boy murdered by a classmate after repeated taunts about his sexual orientation--should not happen again to any other child in an American school: http://www.towleroad.com/2008/02/gay-junior-high.html.

And even now, the “mainstream” media remains shamefully silent about this event, and about the problem of bullying of LGBT children in schools (on media silence, see www.bilerico.com/2008/02/wheres_the_outrage.php). At my last job, where I was repeatedly reprimanded (in a church-based institution!) for bringing up issues having to do with LGBT concerns, I remember being told—by a supervisor whose son is gay, no less—that it was inappropriate and unacceptable for me to mention GLSEN, Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, in a discussion of the school’s mission to educate students to address social ills.

Never mind that the school prides itself on having a founder who linked liberal education to civic engagement, and who stressed that the scope of a college’s civic engagement should be as wide as the needs of the community it served. Or that the university’s Education Department is accredited by an institution that requires the Department to assure that it does not discriminate on grounds of sexual orientation, and prepares teachers who can respect diversity and teach tolerance . . . . Or that my charge was to lead the faculty in preparing a major project that would highlight the school’s commitment to civic engagement of all kinds . . . . Or that violence towards gay students is a serious problem on many historically black college/university campuses (HBCUs)—a group to which this university belongs—where a culture of silence feeds violence and leaves LGBT students with few role models to help them navigate currents of shame and self-loathing.

I was also told by the same supervisor that bringing up attacks on homeless people was unacceptable, because the faculty leaders who reported to me weren’t interested in hearing about this problem. Interestingly enough, just this past week, the NY Times reported that the community in which the university is located has been identified as the key city in the nation in which educational networks must address the problem of violence against the homeless. This is an epidemic problem in the community in which this civic engagement-oriented HBCU is located; and it is youth, youth who need education, who are primarily responsible for the problem.

When I proposed that GLSEN, among many other organizations helping youth address social ills, should be looked at as a possible resource for our school’s civic engagement project, I was told by my supervisor that I was “putting my lifestyle into the face of colleagues.” My response—that I have a life, and not a lifestyle—was not well-received, to say the least. When the powers that be decree that LGBT people have lifestyles rather than lives, it evidently behooves us to accept the demeaning social location we’ve been assigned, and to be silent—even when we are educators charged with leading civic engagement projects on behalf of the youth we are educating.

So my concern with LGBT bullying has deep roots. For that reason, an article in today’s Bilerico blog caught my eye: www.bilerico.com/2008/02/the_way_we_raise_our_gays.php. Erik Leven asks what happens when we leave LGBT children to fend for themselves as they are bullied and shamed. He calls the churches to accountability for their silence about this endemic American problem. A choice quote:

“If a child is particularly beaten down--by their church, their parents, their school or their peers when they come out--the baggage is that much heavier. As they approach adulthood it would be common and understandable if they carry feelings of worthlessness, self-loathing and general depression. Is this what we want? All you Christians who believe you're speaking FOR Jesus--do you really think Jesus himself would want this? Whole populations of unhealthy, unhappy kids who go on to lead unhappy and unhealthy lives. This is not because we're gay. It's because YOU can't accept it. Wouldn't you suppose this world would be a better place if children were to feel comfortable with who they are and then approach adulthood in that way?”

On a related, but separate, theme, this week’s news carries many articles noting that the Vatican’s attack on the Spanish government, which has legalized gay marriage and teaches tolerance for LGBT persons in its schools, continues. On this, see especially two postings on the Clerical Whispers blog at http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com, entitled "Rift Between Madrid and Vatican" and "Spanish Opposition Leader Targets Gays." It strikes me as particularly reprehensible that the Vatican-backed opposition party is using the issue of gay adoption as a wedge issue to gain votes.

And on the continuing use of that wedge issue in our own political context, I recommend Brynn Craffey's www.bilerico.com/2008/02/my_give_a_damns_busted.php.

"God’s got my back,” indeed.

For a humorous look at how gay marriage is responsible for every possible calamity in the universe, see the second video on Peterson Toscano’s a musing blog under the entry “Friday Night Ex-Gay Entertainment” at http://a_musing.blogspot.com/.

And as a reminder that gay artists and activists are interested in issues transcending those of the gay community, see Sam Harris’s new anti-war song at www.samharris.com/waronwar/.

And, finally, for a heartening reminder that some church folks do get it, see the following article about a Catholic Chinese ministry to the gay community at Clerical Whispers:
http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/02/sister-fabians-pro-gay-crusade.html.

Since this is Black History Month, I want to close this week in review blog entry with a quote from one of my African-American heroes, who worked intently (as did Bayard Rustin, the black gay Quaker activist whose quote about angelic troublemakers forms the footer for this blog page) to develop strategies of social analysis that recognize the interconnection of problems such as racism, sexism, poverty, and homophobia. This hero is Mary McLeod Bethune.

Bethune once spoke of seeing a small girl cross the street and thinking to herself that this child could one day be a Mary McLeod Bethune. Mary McLeod Bethune saw everyone’s child as a child to be nurtured, educated, taught self-respect. Her philosophy of educating students through requiring them to be involved in civic engagement is based on a strong conviction that colleges and universities should be involved in addressing the social ills of their own communities.

If Mary McLeod Bethune were alive today, I have absolutely no doubt that she would be intently concerned about incidents such as the murder of Lawrence King. I have no doubt that she would be strongly supporting the coalition of HBCUs who have banded together under the auspices of the Human Rights Project to address anti-gay violence on black college campuses. And I can well imagine she would applaud Barack Obama for his heroic speech in a black church in Atlanta several Sundays ago, in which he spoke courageously and forthrightly about the need of the African-American community to confront homophobia.

Bethune’s last will and testament speaks eloquently of her commitment to build a better world for youth. During Black History Month, wouldn’t it be wonderful if black churches and white churches—all churches alike—realized that some of the youth to whom we are handing over the world are gay and lesbian youth, or youth who will choose new gender identities? Those youth are often, as people are reporting about Lawrence King, sensitive, kind, gentle, gifted human beings whose gifts are sorely needed to build a more humane world.

They do not deserve to live in shame. They certainly do not deserve to be bashed, taunted, or murdered. I call on the churches to listen to Mary McLeod Bethune’s last will and testament and to imagine some of the youth Bethune envisages here as gay youth:

"The world around us really belongs to youth for youth will take over its future management. Our children must never lose their zeal for building a better world. They must not be discouraged from aspiring toward greatness, for they are to be the leaders of tomorrow. . . .We have a powerful potential in our youth, and we must have the courage to change old ideas and practices so that we may direct their power toward good ends."

Keeping On Keeping On

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Lessons for Pilgrims

Lessons for pilgrims: yesterday, Steve and I spent the morning chasing an elusive family cemetery in Tennessee, near the Alabama border. I had only the vaguest of directions: on Liberty Valley Road; a cemetery on Leonard's Bluff; overhung by trees, overlooking a small lake; at the end of the garden walk from the old house, which no longer stands.

We searched. We drove--along Liberty Valley Road, along Leonard's Bluff Road. We stopped and asked for directions. Strangers who saw us searching kindly stopped to ask if they could help us. We ended up at two cemeteries on hillsides, neither the one for which we were searching.

All the while, the western skies grew ominous with scudding dark clouds, and a high wind began to whip the trees.

Finally, I spotted a sign for the farm that I knew is now on the land formerly owned by my Leonard ancestors. If anyone would know how to find the elusive graveyard, surely they would.

Unfortunately, when we pulled up into the driveway and knocked at the door, we found no one at home. This was, I decided, the end of the road. We'd made a valiant try. Time to move on, find some other pilgrim route.

As we prepared to drive away, though, something possessed me to remark to Steve, "Well, we should at least look over our shoulder as we drive away, in case we're missing something."

And we did that, and there the cemetery was, right over our left shoulders, just behind the house that now stands where the old Leonard house, built in the early 1800s, once stood. All along, as we knocked at the farmhouse door, it had been there, waiting.

So a lesson for pilgrims: what we often seek is already there. We simply don't see it. Not until we reframe our way of seeing and look over our shoulder. Pilgrimage is as much about reframing how we see the "everyday" as it is about encountering the extraordinary.

What I Do Is Me: For That I Came

Writing this set of thoughts on a mini-pilgrimage. I'm in northern Alabama to take a fresh set of photographs of the tombstones in the family cemetery where my Lindsey 4-great and 3-great grandparents are buried. I need these for a family website I'm organizing as part of an international DNA study.

Frankly downhearted as I read the news. Another same-old, same-old statement from the pope about male-female complementarity (read: about how women should keep to the place nature has assigned them). Will they never learn, those who want to keep using this biology-as-destiny argument to subjugate others--and to bolster up unjust social systems in which the church is deeply implicated?

I did read today, though, a rather amusing report that well-dressed businessmen visiting posh hotels and bars in Dallas have been picking up pretty young women who are keeping to their feminine role of being soft and seductive, and keeping to that role with a vengeance. An old story, but with a new twist: a number of these man have awakened, pants around their ankles, to find they've been drugged and robbed, and, in one case, beaten with a pair of high heels. I'm not sure Benedict would agree that this story illustrates that the subordinate role nature has assigned women can have some interesting reversals built into it. But for me, the story does say that.

Disheartened, too, to hear that a right-wing Anglican group plans to issue a book about the success of ex-gay therapy, as the Lambeth synod begins. Again, same-old, same-old. With the very real challenges facing our world today--not the least of which is mass environmental destruction--there are some in the churches who would rather keep out the energy and gifts of gay believers, than invite us in. At a point when the churches need all the energy they can muster to be effective signs of salvation in a world crying out for transformation. . . .

I suppose what has me most downhearted is the apparent futility of talking about these issues to the bulk of those who remain in the churches. The social space constructed for gay believers is still so constrained, that any blunt testimony about the ugly effects of that space is too easily dismissed by those in the mainstream as whining.

The best the churches seem able to offer gay believers these days is a faint blanket welcome statement: we love everybody. We welcome all. Open minds, open doors, open hearts. Ask those who assure you that their worship community welcomes you whether they actually have openly gay believers in their congregation, however, and they're likely to stare at you with blank consternation. The fault is not in their welcome; it's in our response. We gay people who absent ourselves from church are the guilty party: we are making ourselves unwelcome!

This baffles me, the inability of the church at its best--the church in welcoming posture--to ask precisely why, if the churches are so darned welcoming and caring, openly LGBT folks aren't flocking to the churches. It's not as if the culture at large is welcoming, as if we don't need places of welcome, healing, and refuge.

The ability of good Christians to shrug their shoulders and carry on baffles me--as if the conspicuously unwelcoming stance of the churches, once we move beyond rhetoric to reality and examine how many churches actually behave, doesn't undermine the most fundamental things the church says about itself. How can churches proclaim a justice and inclusion they do not practice? How can churches consider reaching out to, say, starving children in Africa when they turn their back on the LGBT people right in their midst--their own sons, daughters, brothers, sisters? It's always so much easier to love the strange at a distance rather than the one who knocks on our own door. And, yet, the test of our willingness to regard everyone as a stranger (and thus a human being equal to ourselves and deserving the compassion we'd like to have for ourselves) is whether we can treat the strangers in our midst as fully human.

As I think through all of this, I recall that magnificent line of Gerard Manley Hopkins, "What I do is me: for that I came." Hopkins envisages each created being as having a unique vocation in the world--some unique gift, talent, insight that the world will miss (and be poorer for not having) if that being is not allowed to fulfill her or his destiny.

It is no accident, I think, that Hopkins was identified by many of his brother Jesuits as gay. Within his Jesuit community, he often endured cruel taunts about his fastidious dress (his fondness for colored slippers), his "sensitivities," his "femininity." Some biographers have correlated the immense depressions from which he suffered--those "cliffs of fall" in his mind--with the constant torment he underwent at the hands of the Jesuits with whom he lived.

Whether Hopkins identified himself as homosexual or not is not the point. The point is, he was so identified by some of his brother Jesuits, and he was cruelly taunted because of his perceived sexual orientation--so much so that he actually rejoiced in his rather early death.

This gives Hopkins' observation, "What I do is me: for that I came," added force--at least, for many of us who continue to knock at the door of the churches and ask to be included in the liturgical community. If Hopkins' theology is correct--if we are created by God to bring unique gifts and talents to the world, to the worshiping community--there is something particularly malicious about the church's attempt to thwart the self-realization of LGBT persons.

There is something particularly malicious about the church's attempt to deny, in the face of abundant scientific evidence to the contrary, that God creates some people to be gay. This is to say, God sends some people into the world with the destiny of discovering what it means to be gay, with the vocation of sharing that discovery with the church, of offering the gift of a gay-lesbian life journey to the worshiping community.

To ask people to pray in some voice other than their own is not merely cruel: it is nonsensical. And yet that is what the church asks us to do, when it asks us to renounce our sexual orientation at the church door. In behaving this way, the church impoverishes itself and demonstrates that its claim to be a welcoming community is vacuous, all rhetorical smoke and mirrors.

Lessons for Pilgrims

The following is a journal entry from a pilgrimage I made to historic religious shrines across southern England and Wales. I began on the eastern side of the British Isles at the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, and ended on the far western tip of Pembrokeshire at the shrines of St. David and his mother St. Non, which--as with many venerable Christian pilgrimage sites in the British Isles--appear to have been places of pilgrimage in pre-Christian times.

The following is a journal entry from 11.5.06:

"Lessons for pilgrims: in the Tree of Life, our roots are forever intertwined. Last night, Steve and I turned on t.v. It was a BBC cooking show, two large hairy men who explore places on motorcycle.

They were in Chiapas, which is where Steve was headed when he met me. A reminder that what may have seemed a diversion on his pilgrimage became our shared pilgrimage.

Every pilgrimage illuminates for us the pilgrimage we're on in our lives. All the lessons we learn on any one pilgrimage stand us in good stead on our life pilgrimage. To wit:

Grace comes from unexpected quarters and pops up in unexpected places. Who'd have thought, as we set out for T., that we'd meet M. and I., and discover we have so much in common--retired teachers, years spent caring for declining parents, a shared interest in the history of their house?

The agent of grace--the angel unawares--may look very different from what we imagine an angel to be. On any pilgrimage, there are graced moments when we meet extraordinarily kind and helpful people--some of them ones we'd not approach, just judging from their exterior.

Only to discover that in the Tree of Life, our roots are intertwined: we have something in common with them, no matter how distant or alien they seem. . . .

And we must be prepared to discover that we ourselves may, on pilgrimage, become conveyors of grace to others, unexpectedly. That is perhaps for me the hardest lesson of all to learn."

Thanne Longen Folk to Go on Pilgrimages

Jane Christmas, What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim (Vancouver: Greystone, 2007):

"The Camino does that to you. It Preys upon your conflicted self. It forces you to make decisions when your spirit is at its weakest. . . . You constantly think about quitting and going home. That single issue gets debated and rehashed by every pilgrim" (219).

"A pilgrimage is not about punishment but about making an intentional decision to look at the world with fresh awareness and to consider your place in it. A pilgrim defines her own pilgrimage; maps are guidelines, not prison sentences" (221).

"The pilgrim life is a largely artificial one; you exist in a bubble of camaraderie, pain, and poverty, of shared purpose" (286).

"You can't be certain when or if such serendipitous moments will happen, but it helps if you leave yourself open to the random nature of life unfolding. What you can stake your life on is this: there's an adventure waiting around every corner. Of that I am certain" (295).

And the following, from a journal entry of mine, 27.11.2007, on my most recent brief pilgrimage:

"I keep hearing in my mind's ear something Peterson Toscano said on a program I watched recently, a video of a conference for survivors of ex-gay 'ministry.' He said that our story is extremely powerful, when we tell it.

So why am I here? To learn to tell my story. To spot my story. To follow threads that tell me I have a story.

So much conduces to delude, to convince those of us shoved to the margins that we don't have a story. Story empowers. It frames existence. Better, it provides a skein that gives meaning to the disparate threads of existence.

For those whose story has the power to challenge the dominant narratives, it's crucially important for the makers and keepers of the dominant narrative to try to thwart our ability to see strands of meaning in our marginal lives. It's important to keep us from retrieving those strands and weaving them into a coherent narrative.

It's important to convince us that our lives have no meaning except that imposed by the makers and keepers of the dominant narrative. If we are to have stories at all, we must accept them as given to us, imposed on us. And those narratives will naturally distort the significance of our real stories and subject them to normative social meaning."

Court Theologians and the Novum

Thinking this afternoon as I slogged on the treadmill, matching steps to the dialogue on Ellen's show, about those theologians Walter Brueggemann calls "court theologians." Brueggmann characterizes the theologians who persecuted and sought to silence the prophets of Judaism court theologians. Court theologians excuse and assist those who wield unjust power over others. They're the hired guns of the powers that be.

They exist in every age.

For those who are LGBT, as with all those who live on the margins, the voice that keeps luring us forward is not the voice that justifies what presently exists, but the the voice that sketches what Brueggemann and other theologians call the novum. These are the theologians who point us to a horizon of hope as the goal of history, a horizon continuous with this world and what happens in it. These are the theologians who urge us to build a more just, inclusive, humane world here and now, because we can glimpse the outlines of such a world in our dreams of the future.

Jesus stood in that prophetic tradition. And following in his footsteps and those of the prophets have been witnesses upon witnesses, pointing to the novum, calling us to live in hope, building a better world, collaborating with anyone else who catches this vision, whether that person be friend or foe, believer or infidel. Francis of Assisi was such a prophetic figure: he went, after all, into a mosque to pray. And he found God there.

I, think today, though, especially of Julian of Norwich, who speaks so tenderly of Mother Jesus: "The mother may give her child to suck her milk, but our precious Mother Jesus, he may feed us with himself, and does full courteously and full tenderly," says Julian.

In speaking of God's maternal concern for us, Julian transcends the medieval period and becomes prophetically pertinent to Christianity today--at a moment in which some forces within the Christian churches seek to make an idol out of maleness, to propose that the revelation that God as male is part and parcel of the unchangeable revelation of Jewish and Christian faith.

Julian's present pertinence was evident when the current Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church of the U.S. used Julian's phrase "Mother Jesus" several years ago. When Katharine Jefferts Schori quoted Julian, she was immediately attacked by . . . traditionalists. She was attacked by the same people who have been telling the churches that they are the sole, unilateral guardians of The Tradition.

Suddenly, a quite traditional citation from a woman who has been declared Blessed by the Roman Catholic church became controversial, a feminist warping of the scriptures that has a political agenda attached to it. Suddenly, the same traditionalists who have been safeguarding (so they claim) the very jot and tittle of every verse in scripture and tradition began to engage in acrobatic exegetical exercises to explain what Julian "really" meant when she spoke of Jesus as the Divine Mother.

The tradition holds far more options than the court theologians would like us to believe. Some of those options continue to point us towards a novum that is more just and inclusive than the status quo for which court theologians are prepared to fight tooth and nail. The voices we on the margins listen for today are not those seeking to preserve the world as it is for those they are hired to serve. The voices we seek to hear point us towards a novum much richer with promise of justice than the present in which we live--and those voices often speak surprisingly out of a bible and tradition that the court theologians and their masters have done all in their power to tame and sanitize.