Good Question

"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians," the great civil rights leader Mahatma Gandhi is purported to once have said. "Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” This contradiction is one that comes to mind especially when one thinks of the way major world religions have treated and continue to treat their LGTBQ+ members. In The Book of Queer Prophets, edited by Ruth Hunt, a constellation of queer writers tackle the relationship between their sexuality and their faith.

 

The Book of Queer Prophets, ed. Ruth Hunt (London, 2020)

The book is full of beautiful writing. "I believe God is a good question," muses the Irish theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama in his essay "Let My People" (18). In one of my favourite essays,"Outside in? Inside out?", Anglican priest Rachel Mann explores how her identity as a trans woman shaped her responses to the Bible.

One of Jesus' most profound and enigmatic sayings came alive for me: 'For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.' It is a statement with endless ripples, a stone thrown in the mind's waters. (196)

For me, some of the most moving passages in the book come when the writers reflect on their relationships with their parents. Some of these relationships have come to places of understanding, as in Episcopal priest Winnie Varghese's relationship with her mother.

I still ask for my mother's prayers, and she for mine. I don't pretend to know how any of it works, except that there is this place that we get to go where we lay down all our pain, confusion and limitation in the presence of a wondrous holiness who, like us, knows pain and loss. "How Do All the Parts Fit?" (30)

Some of them remain fractured and full of silences. I loved Garrard Conley's reflections on the things he has never been, and likely never will, be able to talk to his father about.

I don't tell him that sitting there beside my husband was like church for me, that our partnership has been an act of faith that continues to challenge and astound and enrich my life. "Phantom Pain," (41)

One of my very favourite essays in the book is Keith Jarrett's "50 Observations on Avoidance" (I do love a good list), in which he reflects on his upbringing and growing awareness of his own sexuality. "If I employ a broad meaning of queer to mean 'at odds with the prevailing culture'--including the way said culture handles relationships--my upbringing was radically queer." (213).

Many of the writers express active hope and faith that churches will continue to grow into spaces that are more welcoming to all kinds of people. As Rachel Mann writes,

I hope and pray that as the Church evolves, trans candidates for leadership should not be expected to be like me--boring, old-fashioned, binary, capable of passing or going stealth--but be themselves in the full richness of God's human, rainbow calling. I hope to live to see a day where there are a rich varieties of trans leaders--non-binary, agender, and so on. I refuse the invitation to be seen as the trans norm. The only 'model' worthy of being held up by Christians is Christ. (203)

Having grown up in the United Church of Christ (which adopted a resolution publicly supporting gay marriage in 2005), I wrestle often with whether I should keep attending the church where I currently worship. In the Church of England, same-sex partners cannot marry; the liturgy and readings used enforce and affirm gender binaries. Discovering The Book of Queer Prophets in my local library was a timely and welcome surprise.

Is a perfect book? No. Unsurprisingly for a book about sexuality and religion published in England, quite a lot of the essays are by Christian writers (predominately Anglican); atheist, agnostic, Jewish, and Muslim perspectives are represented by a single essay each. Writers typically make general comments about queerness and religion solely in reference to Christianity, which feels like a missed opportunity. In the essay "Jenga-Block Faith", Lucy Knight quotes the film Pride, which about the 1980s solidarity movement Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, 

Mark [one of LGSM's leaders], in one of the film's many poignant moments, says 'I've never understood--what's the point of supporting gay rights but nobody else's rights? You know? Or workers' rights but not women's rights. It's--I don't know--illogical. (156)

The statement applies to the variety of faiths and sexualities and identities represented in the book. I'd recommend it.

The Sweetness of Dogs

What do you say, Percy? I am thinking
of sitting out on the sand to watch
the moon rise. It's full tonight.
So we go

and the moon rises, so beautiful it

makes me shudder, makes me think about

time and space, makes me take

measure of myself: one iota

pondering heaven. Thus we sit, myself

thinking how grateful I am for the moon's

perfect beauty and also, oh! how rich

it is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile,

leans against me and gazes up into 

my face. As though I were just as wonderful

as the perfect moon.

~ Mary Oliver, Dog Songs (London, 2013), p. 61

 

This poem makes me think of the beautiful love between my mother and our family red setter, Molly. With each other, sometimes they are both like Percy in this poem. And they are both wonderful as the perfect moon to me. Here they are on a recent trip home.

9 April 2022

Attending

How do you know when to stop thinking and pay attention? As you may have gathered from the infrequency of posting this year, I've been struggling with this a lot. A weekly routine of teaching and work has helped, as has training for a half marathon, but has left me able to do very little outside of those things.

Today's daily devotional from the United Church of Christ, the church I grew up in, stopped me for a moment of thought, and I wanted to share my response to it. Phiwa Langeni writes,

At a recent meeting, the centering activity snatched my attention. The leader invited attendees to imagine this scenario (greatly paraphrased with some creative liberties): You’re on your way to a long-awaited event that’s been postponed since 2020. You’re quietly enjoying your ride to the venue when a fiery red Japanese maple in someone’s front yard catches your attention. You suddenly realize you forgot to prepare the event’s opening reflection entitled “Barefooted Blessings” based on Exodus 3:5! Your ridesharing app says you’re two minutes away....Set a two-minute timer and ponder. What will you say?

My first thought is that I would take at least thirty seconds of the time to explain my situation to the driver, and ask them to take the long way around and drop me off at the far end of the block, to give me a bit more time to scramble an answer.

My second thought is that I would open my reflection by saying that I had forgotten to give it, and then speaking the truth that I came to when I set my two-minute timer, and bowed my head, and thought about it: sometimes we don't know when we're in the presence of something sacred. We don't know, or we can't see. We need someone, or something--like our gods, if we have them; like a beautiful tree--to tell us to stop and pay attention.