Category Archives: Faith and Doubt

A Christmas Thought


Coming home from Midnight Mass last night, as I gazed up at the stars that shone brightly in the crisp cold atmosphere, I had the thought that there were two ways to interpret this sight. Intellectually, I knew that I was seeing immense orbs of fire burning light-years away, dwarfing our little planet, not to mention the quiet street where I stood. Emotionally, though, I felt that the canopy of stars was a cozy and hopeful sign for us down below, a celestial response to our joy.

What a miracle, I thought, that the earth’s atmosphere is made in such a way that we can see these faraway lights. How kind of them to stoop to communicate with us!

So too with the Christ child. God is infinitely powerful and huge, the creator of those stars and galaxies whose scope we cannot imagine. Yet God also comes down to us, offering us a way in, a point of connection that is on the scale of the human heart and mind.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Audre Lorde on the Spiritual Power of Eros


Audre Lorde (1934-1992) was a black feminist lesbian poet and activist whose work continues to inspire creative writers and political movements today. This essay of hers, “The Uses of the Erotic“, was reprinted on the alternative spirituality site Metahistory.org.

It resonated with me because of my experience of eros in my own writing, and how it led me to greater confidence in a queer-affirming theology. I believe that any ideology that alienates a person from her erotic self must eventually cut her off from personal knowledge of the divine. (I’m not talking about a true vocation to celibacy, but rather the shame-based repression of one’s erotic nature, whether acted upon or not. I would imagine that a healthy celibate person acknowledges and mindfully sublimates desire, without aversion or self-delusion.)

For me, the erotic is where I most completely will myself, commit myself despite risks, and wake up to the consciousness of myself, at the same point where I am also most completely dissolved into an interpersonal connection. To know God, to know the beloved, and to know myself–all these are essentially one.

From the essay:

…As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibilities of it within themselves. So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters.

But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.

The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, and plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.

The erotic is a measure between our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.

It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society is to encourage excellence. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.

This internal requirement toward excellence which we learn from the erotic must not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor from others. Such a demand incapacitates everyone in the process. For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.

The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible. Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision – a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered.

Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. And the lack of concern for the erotic root and satisfactions of our work is felt in our disaffection from so much of what we do. For instance, how often do we truly love our work even at its most difficult?

The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need – the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.

As women, we need to examine the ways in which our world can be truly different. I am speaking here of the necessity for reassessing the quality of all the aspects of our lives and of our work, and of how we move toward and through them.

The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects – born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.

There are frequent attempts to equate pornography and eroticism, two diametrically opposed uses of the sexual. Because of these attempts, it has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical. “What do you mean, a poetic revolutionary, a meditating gunrunner?” In the same way, we have attempted to separate the spiritual and the political is also false, resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge. For the bridge which connects them is formed by the erotic – the sensual – those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared: the passions of love, in its deepest meanings.

Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, “It feels right to me,” acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding. And understanding is a handmaiden which can only wait upon, or clarify, that knowledge, deeply born. The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.

The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy, in the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, harkening to its deepest rhythms so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, or examining an idea.

That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.

This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
…

Read the whole essay here.

Sunday Random Songs: Scrooge Edition


All the forced good cheer and baby Jesus kitsch on the airwaves this time of year grates on my barren little heart. If you agree, you may enjoy these seasonal travesties that you’re not likely to hear in Macy’s anytime soon.

John Denver, “Please Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas)
This is not supposed to be funny. But I am a sinner.

 

South Park, “Christmas Time in Hell”
String up the lights and light up the tree, we’re damned for all eternity!

Kinsey Sicks, “God Bless Ye Femmy Lesbians”
From their hit album, “Oy Vey in a Manger

Suggest your own favorites in the comments box!

Mended Souls, Better Than New


A friend who is a sexual abuse survivor loaned me Renee Fredrickson’s Recovered Memories to help me be a better ally and represent these issues more accurately in my creative writing. I’d like to share these words from the book’s final chapter, as an inspiration to anyone recovering from trauma.

On display in the Freer Museum in Washington, D.C., are ancient Zen ceremonial bowls renowned for their delicate beauty and fine craftsmanship. Over generations of use these lovely porcelain bowls became cracked and chipped, and some had whole pieces missing. Rather than being discarded or devalued because of the damage, the porcelain was repaired with gold. The gold adds strength, beauty, and value to the bowls, and the sacred bowls are marvelously enhanced by the repair process.

So it is with survivors. You were damaged as you grew up, and the more abusively you were handled, the greater the damage. When you undertake to repair this damage, you replace bitterness and sadness with understanding and healing. You become stronger and more resilient when change comes. You grow kinder to yourself and more compassionate toward those you love. You, like the sacred bowls, are enhanced rather than diminished by the repair process. (pg.225)

(See images of repaired Zen bowls here and here.)

Historic Homecoming for GLBT Alumni at Wheaton, an Evangelical College


Wheaton College in Illinois has been called the Harvard of the evangelicals. Longtime readers of this blog may recall my reports from their theology conferences on the Trinity and spiritual formation. Though at one time I felt nourished by immersion in a community of serious Christian intellectuals, my shifting political sensibilities eventually made me too uncomfortable to return to an environment where non-heteronormative lives were (at best) erased. 

That’s why I was particularly happy to receive the latest Soulforce e-newsletter, which featured a report on OneWheaton, “a community of LGBTQ’s and allies at Wheaton”. This month, some 600 members took the bold step of attending Wheaton’s homecoming weekend as openly queer alumni and allies. Here’s an excerpt from the newsletter:

“This is a real coming out, being here, being ourselves,” said Frances Motiwalla, a 2000 Political Science graduate. “That’s what this weekend is all about. This was a reassertion of our whole self as part of the community.”

Motiwalla joined dozens for whom this past weekend was their first time returning to their alma mater. Most gay Wheaton alumni never return to campus, associating their college years with shame, loneliness, and marginalization. But in a show of pride and courage, over 50 rainbow clad alumni spanning the classes of ’54 through 2013 ate together in the school’s cafeteria, attended the sold-out Homecoming football game, and showed their families around campus.

They kicked off the weekend with a free concert by Jennifer Knapp, a Christian musician who recently came out as lesbian, and a panel led by LGBTQ Wheaton graduates. OneWheaton explains that most LGBTQ Wheaton alumni never return to campus because of too many negative associations and hurtful memories. This homecoming weekend, however, saw over 50 rainbow clad alumni going back to 1954 and even current students eating together in the cafeteria, attending the football game and showing friends and family around campus.

The groups explains that the weekend, besides a few stares and off-hand comments, was a success in engaging students in conversation and providing some reconciliation for alumni. Said the group’s Co-Director Ruth Wardchenk, “When I drove onto the campus Friday I was there for the first time in 15 years and I burst out in tears. I was home and I was no longer afraid.”

While the school is not officially budging on the issue yet, their impact was certainly felt on campus. Wrote one student, “Thank you for coming to campus this weekend… I don’t quite know what I think yet, but you’ve got me asking questions and thinking. So, thank you so much for coming back to Wheaton.”

Click here to support Soulforce’s Equality Ride, which brings the message of inclusion to Christian colleges across America. Click here to sign OneWheaton’s statement of support, share your story, or find resources to end your isolation.

Holidays, History, and Idols


This weekend I heard a creative and challenging sermon linking our celebration of Columbus Day to the Biblical story of the Israelites worshipping the golden calf. Our preacher acknowledged the human impulse to create a tangible symbol of connection to the God we love. With Moses up on the mountain and God seemingly silent, a people adrift in a strange land needed an anchor for their devotion. This embodied imagination is the source of great religious art, but paradoxically, it can also create hindrances to knowing God. We mistake our concepts for the real God, who actually exceeds our comprehension. God became angry with the Israelites because He was trying to move them forward from concrete and magical thinking, toward openness to His infinite mystery.

The stories that we tell about ourselves as a people, said our preacher, can become an idol as well. Like the golden calf, the celebration of Columbus’s “discovery of America” helped unify and reassure a nation of displaced immigrants seeking a new common identity. But like the calf, this story is limited and distorts reality, erasing the genocide of Native Americans and implicitly judging their nomadic occupation of the land as less than its highest and best use.

I’m not content to leave this analysis with an easy moral, as both admirers and detractors of Columbus are wont to do. Had the Europeans not arrived at (discovered, colonized, civilized, exploited) the continent we call North America, later generations might not have had a refuge to survive other genocidal situations. These include my own Jewish ancestors, who fled from pogroms and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Some historians include the Irish Potato Famine as an example of genocide, citing British prejudices as a cause of the government’s inadequate response. Many Irish emigrated to America because of that disaster.

Secular, commercialized holidays simply can’t capture the tragic complexity of cross-cultural encounters in a world of scarce resources. The Bible does it better. It includes stories where the Israelites are persecuted, stories where they are rewarded for their faith, stories where they become the oppressors of the poor and the alien, and stories where they just screw up. If we read any one of these stories without the others, it becomes an idol too. Just look at the Middle East today. I believe the Jews needed a homeland after the Holocaust, and I also believe they are oppressing the Palestinians today. We like stories with heroes and villains, but maybe we should ask what it would mean for God to triumph, rather than our side.

Gay Rights and the Right to Sanity


This June 2011 article from the progressive website Religion Dispatches captures the essence of why I fight so hard for GLBT equality, particularly within the church. In his piece “The Battle Beneath the Battle: Do Gay People Exist?”, Jay Michaelson says the issue is nothing less than the right to believe your own perceptions, and to be recognized as an authority about your own subjective experience. In a word: sanity.

I’ve taken the unusual step of quoting the whole article because Michaelson’s argument is so concise and well-constructed that to leave out any paragraph would undermine it. I’ve boldfaced key points. He writes:

There’s a cognitive dissonance in our religious and political debates about homosexuality: it’s the only cultural struggle I can think of where one’s very existence is routinely denied by political opponents. African Americans have long had their humanity denied—but they are still seen, and recognized. Women’s rights and freedoms are again under attack, and their full equality is still denied—but no one doubts that women exist. Yet when it comes to LGBT people, our very existence is still, somehow, subject to debate.

This makes public debates over LGBT equality seem uniquely pointless, because the real questions are not the ones being discussed. For example, several states are asking should gays be allowed (or prohibited) to marry. But the real questions they are asking are deeper: Do gay people exist? Is sexuality simply a “lifestyle choice”; and if so, should it be rewarded or burdened by the state?

For a moment, I want to bracket the question of whether sexuality and gender identity are traits or choices, and assume for a moment that many (though not all) LGBT people experience them as the former: that is, as fundamental characteristics of what might be called the soul. I recognize that not every queer person feels this way. Studies have shown, for example, that women tend to experience their sexuality as more fluid and more likely to change over time than men do. I also recognize that, in some iterations of political liberalism, none of this should matter; it’s perfectly coherent to argue that the state simply should not be involved in regulating how people organize their intimate lives.

But I also want to recognize that, in my experience at least, whether or not one is “born this way” does seem to matter to a whole lot of people. For political as well as intellectual reasons, LGBT activists are loathe to base our rights on the latest scientific or pseudo-scientific data. This strikes me as wise. But as I talk about these issues with folks in the “movable middle,” I’ve noticed that the reluctant allies, semi-supportive family members, and more-or-less-convinceable moderates come to pro-gay conclusions for the reasons Lady Gaga identified: because gay people are born that way.

So it does matter, politically at least, whether sexuality is a trait or not. And here is where it gets weird. Because if that’s true, then what’s really at issue in our public debates about equality is my own subjectivity. I am telling my political opponents that I am gay. I didn’t choose it; I didn’t even want it, at first. But it’s as much a part of how I understand myself as being 6’1”, Caucasian, and male.

My opponent responds: no you aren’t. So what am I?

Well, the answers have shifted quickly over the last few decades. At first I was just a sinner. I indulged (or was tempted to indulge) in sodomy the way others are tempted to indulge in gluttony. Later, I was a psychological “invert”; someone with incomplete sexual-psychological development, and a dozen other varieties of psychological freak. But I was not what I said I was: a perfectly normal human being with a certain sexual orientation.

Today, even our opponents recognize this. The Catholic Church recognizes that homosexuality is a part of the human condition; albeit one which must be sublimated or repressed. Even in the “reparative therapy” and ex-gay movements, the rhetoric has shifted from promises of true conversion to heterosexuality, to promises of the ability to sublimate one’s desires into heterosexual expression. Ex-gay folks realize that almost no (male) clients actually stop feeling same-sex attraction. They just promise that one can work with it, live with it, and function sexually with a woman.

In other words, the only people who still say that sexuality is purely a choice are those who know nothing whatsoever about it. When you think about it that way it’s outrageous. I’m being forced to defend my subjective self-understanding to people who not only don’t share it, but who don’t even read objective books about it! I stand on the opposite sides of picket lines with people who deny that I am right about my own mind. They insist that millions of people are so deeply deluded about themselves that their own testimony must be disregarded.

Maybe, then, gay rights really are like civil rights after all. “Am I not a man and a brother?” asked Frederick Douglass. Which is to say: I experience myself as fully human. You, if you are listening to me, must hear and see that I am a human being. Yet our society denies my humanity, insists that while I am something close to a man, I am not quite one.

I hear myself saying something similar. Is this not love? Do I not know my own heart? Is my love not that of one human being for another? Not lust or perversion or sin, but love? When straight people really see gay people, when they allow themselves to look, they see that we are people, that our love is love. Similar in some ways, different in others, not necessarily better or worse—but real. We exist.

What I feel like we are still fighting for, in the places where our freedom is still contested, is neither rights nor freedoms nor any particular bundle of privileges, but some more fundamental, and fundamentally religious, human right that has only begun to be articulated: the right to self-definition, to say that I exist—and to be believed.

This is exactly right, in my opinion, and deserves to be restated far more often in the current debate. To religious people, in particular, I would say that you cannot discount gays’ own perceptions–first, that their orientation is real, and second, that their relationships can be loving and spiritually fruitful–without undermining confidence in the same psychological faculties that produce religious convictions.

Do you use reason to read and interpret the Bible? Yet you tell gays to “lean not on your own understanding” when they defend their equality based on lessons from history, science, and moral logic. Do you feel God in your heart when you pray? Yet you tell gays that “the heart is deceitful above all things” when they try to speak about their experience of love. If their minds are so darkened and their wills are so corrupt that nothing they say about themselves can be trusted, that condition of “total depravity” applies to you and your religion at least as much. (Which, I think, is what St. Paul was actually getting at in Romans 1: you holy rollers will be judged by the same measure by which you judge “those people”.)

What distinguishes abuse from other forms of violence is the element of mind control. You’re not just being hurt, you’re being brainwashed into doubting whether your pain really happened, allowing someone else to erase your reality and replace it with one that meets their own needs. Because I’ve experienced some of this, though not in the context of sexuality, the fight for gay rights will always be my fight.

Torah: Sacred Object, Living Word, Challenging Legacy


As I’ve mentioned on this blog, my husband and I both come from a Reform Jewish background, though we’ve taken other spiritual paths since then. This weekend we attended Shabbat and Bar Mitzvah services for one of his relatives at a temple in New York City. The service leaders’ joyful reverence for the Torah, coupled with their apparent comfort at reinterpreting it to emphasize modern progressive values, made me think that Christians who wrestle with the question of Biblical authority could learn something from our Jewish heritage.

In synagogues, the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures), handwritten in Hebrew on a scroll of parchment, is kept in a sanctuary behind closed doors or curtains at the front of the worship space. The scroll is covered with a fancy cloth casing and sometimes also adorned with ornaments. At a certain point in the liturgy, the clergy open up the sanctuary, and everyone bows and sings songs of reverence to the Torah. During Saturday morning services, the rabbi takes out the scroll and parades it around the sanctuary for the people to touch with their prayerbook or the hem of their prayer shawl. It’s not unlike the Catholics’ display of the Host in the monstrance. The object itself is beloved, physically transmitting the presence of God and connecting today’s worshippers to past and future generations.

As the service leaders dressed and undressed the Torah in its velvet wrapper and necklaces of silver crowns, I was reminded of Hindus presenting jewelry, clothing, and food to the statues of their gods. This tender relationship with inanimate objects, sincere as a child with a doll, could be called idolatrous by purists and delusional by skeptics, but to me it appears as an opportunity to re-enchant the world, taking the risk of saying that we perceive the unseen God immanent in all things.

The Jews love the Torah in part because it represents their improbable survival. The Torah has been the center of a distinctive identity that resisted thousands of years of persecution and temptation to assimilate.

But what about the Torah is most meaningful and relevant today? For this congregation, the emphasis was on the ethical ideals of caring for the stranger, the orphan, the poor, and the natural resources that we share. Unselfishness, humility, empathy, responsibility for one another: these were the qualities that Jesus, too, chose to foreground from his own Jewish heritage.

The thing is, though, you have to do some pretty heavy interpreting to play up the universal and rational aspects of the Torah to the exclusion of the tribal and ritual ones. I didn’t sense that anyone was agonizing about the delicious crabcakes and shrimp sushi that we enjoyed at the bar mitzvah boy’s reception. Nor do I think we should. Still, it was hard to reconcile that freedom with the day’s parsha (weekly Torah portion) from Deuteronomy 26-29, in which God warns of the horrifying atrocities the Hebrews will experience at the hands of foreign invaders if they don’t keep the Law of Moses.

The key may be that Jews have always been more comfortable than Protestants with admitting — even celebrating — the role of interpretation in our relationship with the sacred text. One theory retroactively confers divinely inspired status on all future rabbinic interpretations (Talmud and so forth); these too were given at Sinai, the legend goes, but only revealed to us in stages. After all, we have to exist in linear time, but God transcends it. The Torah and its interpretations could be considered the “still point” (in T.S. Eliot’s words) where time and timelessness meet.

As someone who had no Jewish education, I have found the centrality of Hebrew in Jewish worship services to be a barrier to full engagement. I can see how this set-up could also lead people to compartmentalize Torah, not seeing it as a relevant standard for their weekday behavior. On the other hand, being continually presented with the foreignness of the text, Jews have to be more honest about the role of interpretation in every reading. Contrast this to Protestant fundamentalists who behave as if the King James Version had been handed to them by God in leather-bound volumes.

I welcome commentary from readers who are more familiar with Jewish theological practices. Have you found rabbinic styles of interpretation to be freeing and illuminating? Have you seen the Torah updated for modern values in a convincing way?

The Beatitudes in Prison: My Pen Pal’s Response


Earlier this summer, Richard Beck at Experimental Theology posted about the challenges of studying the Beatitudes with the Bible study group he leads in a men’s prison. Considering the risks of nonviolent compassion in a place ruled by the law of the jungle, he realized afresh how much it can really cost to be a follower of Christ. An excerpt:

…Week to week, as you lead a bible study with prisoners, you can come to believe that this is the most holy, devout, and saintly bunch of Christians you’ve ever seen. This is, incidentally, one of the joys of prison ministry, how nice, grateful and cooperative the men are. You’ll never have a better audience.

But I know that this is a bit of an illusion. To be sure, the men are grateful. The time they have with us is, perhaps, the only non-coercive, relaxed and egalitarian interaction they have during the week. So they are truly grateful and happy to be a part of the bible study. And many have become committed followers of Jesus.

Still, for the most part I know that the devoutness on display during the bible study is hiding a great deal of darkness. And we don’t talk much about that darkness. At least not in our bible study. But I knew it was there and I wanted to try to talk about it a bit before reading the Beatitudes.

So I waited. And asked again, “Inside the prison, who is blessed?”

Finally, a man answered:

“The violent.”

I nodded. “So that is Beatitude #1. ‘Blessed are the violent.’ What else?” The floodgates opened.

The thieves.
The liars.
The manipulators.
The hypocrites.
The wealthy. (There is an underground black market economy.)
The strong.

On and on it went. These were the “virtues” that got “blessed” and rewarded inside the prison. These were the “virtues” that helped you get ahead, survive, and thrive. And I wondered, is it any different on the outside where I live?

Not much.

After creating this list we then turned to Matthew 5 and we read aloud:

Blessed are the poor in spirit…

Blessed are those who mourn…

Blessed are the meek…

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…

Blessed are the merciful…

Blessed are the pure in heart…

Blessed are the peacemakers…

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness…

As we read these words the room became very somber. In light of what we’d just been talking about the radical call of Jesus shone like a white hot light. It burned. When you read the Beatitudes on the outside it all sounds so nice and happy. But read inside a prison you suddenly see just how crazy you have to be to be a follower of Jesus. How the Beatitudes really are a matter of life and death.

I asked the prisoners, can you be meek, poor in spirit, or merciful in prison? Finally opening up, they said no, you can’t. You’d get hurt, taken advantage of, raped, killed. Your days would be numbered if you tried to live out the Beatitudes.

And suddenly, I didn’t know what to say. For it became very clear to me what it would mean for me to preach the Beatitudes to these men. I’d be asking them to give their lives to Jesus. I’d be asking them to die.

So I hesitated. For one simple reason. I didn’t know if I was ready to make that commitment. And sensing hesitancy in my own heart, my own fear of Jesus, I couldn’t ask these men to do something that I myself lacked the courage to do.

None of this was verbalized. After the men described how it would be suicidal to live out the Beatitudes inside the prison we started to talk about how, in small moments here and there, they could let their defenses down to show a little meekness, to show a little mercy. We started to figure out ways they could fit Jesus into the gaps and margins of prison life. Where their shell of violence and toughness could be dropped for a moment.

Basically, we talked about compromise. How to accommodate Jesus to the ruling ethic of prison life. And like I said, I couldn’t ask for anything more. Who was I to push them for more mercy and meekness when I’d be walking out of the prison gates in less than an hour? I didn’t know what I was asking them to do. Nor was I confident about what I would do if I was in their shoes….

I printed out this post and mailed it to my pen pal “Conway”, whose poetry and letters I have shared on this blog. Conway responded with one of the most inspiring stories of Christian love that I have read in a long time. Let me also add that when he wrote this, he was in the middle of a three-week hunger strike to demand more humane conditions in California prisons. Here is an excerpt from his July 4 letter:

I can see some prisoners feeling relaxed inside of the chapel setting in prison. I have only entered the chapel for religious service on one occasion in prison. That was for a friend who had died of AIDS at Vacaville. I was there for maybe two years recovering from being paralyzed by L.A. County sheriffs. (In L.A. County Jail.) It took about eighteen months to be able to walk again.

I was pissed off that it took several months before the service was held for Johnny. He and four others had died from AIDS in that time.

I was listening to the priest or what they call chaplain speak on each man’s life that had passed. And it just seemed so weak to be waiting this long to be approved for a decent ceremony. He’d already been cremated months before. Why now? and why pack them all into one ceremony?

But I do recognize that the blanket patch had to be sewn together with others. It was large.

Still why wait to leave this soul roaming along the halls of that place? It had me mad and I stood up to confront the chaplain. He called me up to the podium and asked me to say a few words of what Johnny was about. The funny thing is even though he was gay and had caught his sentence for protecting himself, this was not what I talked about. It didn’t matter to me what preferences he had. He was just a good dude and I wanted everyone to know it.

All of those cons were crying like babies when I’d finished my tirade. And of course I was too. But the point I make is that the label of holy or devout, what the hell is that, if we are to become righteous in our lifetime. Like I said that was the only one time I went to a religious service. But it amazes me. So many of those guys later on thanked me for standing up and speaking on that day….

…I’m sure I got off track on that subject, but the comments [on the blog post] brought back memories of my connection with their discussion. But I disagree with one point they said you can’t be merciful in prison. Actually you can. It’s not as ruthless a crowd as everyone makes out. Nevertheless it is a harsh environment that one must prove themself everyday. But we all are tested daily.

Visit the website of California Prison Focus to find out more about the hunger strikers’ demands and track the progress of the reforms. Their five core demands were as follows: (1) Eliminate group punishments for prisoners of the same race when one breaks a rule; (2) Reform the criteria for declaring a prisoner to be active in a gang (currently prisoners like my friend Conway are sent to long-term isolation on dubious evidence); (3) Comply with the recommendations of the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in Prisons (2006) regarding an end to longterm solitary confinement; (4) Provide adequate food; (5) Expand and provide constructive programs and privileges for indefinite SHU inmates. (Conway was mentoring at-risk youth until he was transferred to the Segregated Housing Unit on false evidence of gang activity.) The California state legislature held hearings on these issues in August.

Related resources: PrisonerSolidarity.org; TGI Justice Project (advocate for transgender, genderqueer, and intersex inmates).

Love the “Sinner”…or the Person?


Pastor Romell Weekly, founder of the Gay Christian Fellowship discussion forum, has a new blog, Affirming Theology. These sites occupy a unique niche in that they are theologically evangelical and grounded in Biblical studies, yet gay-affirming. Below, an eloquent passage from Pastor Weekly’s recent post about the “love the sinner, hate the sin” catchphrase that’s so popular with anti-gay Christians:

…[H]ow realistic is it to identify a specific sin that we despise, yet draw a clear line of distinction between that sin and the ones committing it, so as not to allow our disgust to seep onto people? I submit that when we narrow our hatred of sin to a specific list, we make it near impossible to draw this distinction. In fact, something in us causes us to look more favorably upon those who don’t commit those particular sins, while harboring some degree of disappointment or even indignation toward those who do.

The phrase itself calls attention to the “fallenness” of the one being judged. “Love the sinner” refuses to lift the person supposedly being loved from the profession of “sinner.” It ever-reminds people that while they’re loving someone, they’re loving them “in their sin.” But, Scripture’s description of love says that we aren’t to keep a record of wrongs (1Co. 13:5). So, why does it suffice us to classify, relate to, and even love people on the basis of their status as sinners? Why can we not love on the basis of a person’s quintessential human quality—the inestimable value of their being created as an expression of God’s image and likeness (even though we all fall short of that wonderful intent).

It doesn’t seem to occur to us that every Christian sins, which means that this saying applies equally to the entire human race. In being so broad in its application, the phrase loses all potency and purpose, and becomes nothing more than a self-righteous way to justify the negative feelings we have toward people.

I submit that Jesus didn’t love “the sinner”, while hating their sin. I believe He simply loved people. He saw all of us as falling short of His grace, and simply loved us. He loved the adulterous woman, the Gadarene demoniac, and even the self-righteous Pharisees who were so busy pointing out the sin in the lives of others that they neglected to deal with their own.

So, I think the phrase needs to be completely retired from Christian vernacular. Since we all sin, yet should all be loved, let’s just take it as a general rule that we should hate sin, while fiercely loving everyone. Let’s not perceive or relate to people on the basis of their sin, and just worry about our own sins, while encouraging those around us to strive, along with us, to be the best servants of God that we can be!

Follow Affirming Theology on Twitter.