Category Archives: Faith and Doubt

Sabine Huynh: “In Memory of a Two-Meter-Tall Israeli Buddhist Monk”


Last fall, I posted some poetry by Sabine Huynh, a Vietnamese-born writer, translator, and linguistics scholar who now lives in Israel. This next poem that she kindly shares with us also reflects the intermingling of cultures and faiths, appropriately for a meditation about crossing the boundary from life to death and…whatever happens next. (Note: A Neshama candle is a Yahrzeit memorial candle that Jews light on the anniversary of a person’s death.)

In memory of a two-meter tall Israeli Buddhist monk (U. L., 1959-2009)

If you google his first name, a Hebrew name
that sounds like “Where? Tell,” in French,
and his four-letter last name
which happens to be the town where
I grew up on bitter rice and green cherries,
you’ll find him in the World
Buddhist Directory, Chiangmai, Thailand,
after Phra “monk” – a two-meter tall one –
and before an O-six phone number
ending with thirty eight – our house number then,
the house where the mother smashed her anger
into the daughter’s piano keys,
the father’s dreams, the sons’ games,
the garden where the dog died.
Oh yes, an O-six number and an email address
spammed for eternity. There is a website too,
no longer available to disciples,
even the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine
– click on “take me back” –
fails to retrieve him from Nirvana.
When in the evening
I hang the Neshama candle
in my kam kwat tree – “gold orange”
in Chinese, I wonder
whether he is washing
his saffron robe in Basho’s old pond.
Sick on a journey, their dreams
wandered over withered grass.
No rebirth and no soul for him, no peace
of mind, no answer but so much
to remember him for.

****

See a photo of Udi on Sabine’s website.

Gay Students at Christian Colleges Seek Wholeness


Hat tip (once again) to Experimental Theology for this NY Times story about gay and lesbian students who are fighting to be open about their sexual identity in a seemingly unlikely venue: conservative Christian colleges.

Decades after the gay rights movement swept the country’s secular schools, more gays and lesbians at Christian colleges are starting to come out of the closet, demanding a right to proclaim their identities and form campus clubs, and rejecting suggestions to seek help in suppressing homosexual desires.

Many of the newly assertive students grew up as Christians and developed a sense of their sexual identities only after starting college, and after years of inner torment. They spring from a new generation of evangelical youths that, over all, holds far less harsh views of homosexuality than its elders.

But in their efforts to assert themselves, whether in campus clubs or more publicly on Facebook, gay students are running up against administrators who defend what they describe as God’s law on sexual morality, and who must also answer to conservative trustees and alumni.

Facing vague prohibitions against “homosexual behavior,” many students worry about what steps — holding hands with a partner, say, or posting a photograph on a gay Web site — could jeopardize scholarships or risk expulsion.

The article suggests their fears are well-founded. Though most Christian colleges officially say that they don’t discipline students for same-sex attractions, only for homosexual “behavior”, in practice, students have been punished simply for saying that they’ve decided to accept their gay identity instead of “struggling” with it.

So why are they going to these schools at all? Well, think about it. How many of us are so sure of our personal identity (on any dimension, not just sexuality) that we can just toss aside our entire support network and the cultural framework in which we were raised? And where would we get the strength to do this when we’ve turned our backs on our Higher Power?

This isn’t a healthy choice for anyone to make, at any age. It actually lends some merit to conservative arguments that gay identity rests on a liberal-modernist illusion of the autonomous self that denies the human and divine sources of its creation (God, community, tradition). But whose fault is that alienation? Gays aren’t forcing people to stop being Christian. We Christians are doing a good enough job of that.

The article addresses this question very well:

Gay students say they are often asked why they are attending Christian colleges at all. But the question, students say, is unfair. Many were raised in intensely Christian homes with an expectation of attending a religious college and long fought their homosexuality. They arrive at school, as one of the Harding Web authors put it, “hoping that college would turn us straight, and then once we realized that this wasn’t happening, there was nothing you could do about it.”

Murder Ballad Monday: Holy Week Edition


Yesterday our church celebrated Palm Sunday, a holiday whose mood swings I find disturbing, as I’m sure I’m meant to do. Some aspects of the traditional service feel like a preview of Easter: the entering procession with the palm fronds, the triumphal and almost martial music. At the same time, a minor chord is struck by the Passion Play and the hymns later in the service that uncomfortably foreground our guilt for Christ’s suffering.

I found myself wanting to arrest my long slide toward liberalism and force myself to dwell on this ancient accusation. What does it mean when I shout “Crucify him”?

Like Peter, surely, I can imagine myself losing my nerve to confess loyalty to Jesus when faced with torture. Hopefully this is an unlikely scenario in America, so there must be more ways I can challenge myself with this passage of Scripture.

Perhaps, like the crowd who would spare the bandit Barabbas over the Messiah, there are times when I rush to condemn someone without knowing enough about them. It’s easy to spread gossip, for instance, or racist stereotypes, because I don’t want to be the only one in the crowd with nothing to say. It’s easy to convince myself that I understand who the heroes and villains are because I read something bad about “those people” on the Internet.

By choosing between Jesus and Barabbas, the crowd gets it half right. No one should be crucified. Their lack of insight is twofold: they play the role of jury in a system that metes out excessive punishments, and on top of that, they condemn Jesus, who is innocent. In what ways am I participating in an unjust system by not seeing beyond its false alternatives? Change could start with something as simple as choosing to contribute to both charities whose flyers show up in my mailbox today, rather than one charity and a new hat. Trivial maybe, but these choices add up.

Though I’m not threatened with physical harm or even job discrimination for my justice work on behalf of the GLBT community, I still often feel deep pain and self-doubt when the opposition is led by fellow Christians whose faith I respect. I complain too much to Jesus about how hard and confusing it is to follow him. “What did you think you were signing up for?” he says. “Be grateful that you have the privilege to choose to enter into this place of shame, when many have no choice.” Then he shows me how it’s done.

And so, our song for today:

Sing along at Oremus Hymnal.

Out of Our Heads, Into Our Hearts?


“Tell me where is fancy bred, Or in the heart or in the head?” asked Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice. A good question to ask about love–or truth, or spiritual understanding, or the source of ethical action. When we go astray, when we aren’t fully present and integrated in our responses to one another, does the problem lie in the head (alienation from our feelings) or the heart (mindless emotional reactivity)?

Framed that way, it seems likely that there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. We can deviate from the Golden Rule in either direction. Sensitivity to feelings can comfortably coexist with self-centeredness, while the dominance of reason over subjective impulses can just as easily become an excuse for lack of compassion, especially toward people whose narratives challenge your mental picture of the world.

American pop culture generally votes for heart over head, all the way, as in this Sheryl Crow song that I’ve been replaying a lot lately, from her album Detours. It’s catchy, it’s upbeat, and it sounds so simple. “If we could only get out of our heads, out of our heads and into our hearts…Children of Abraham, lay down your fears, swallow your tears and look to your heart…” (Read the whole thing at AZlyrics.com.)

When I was a teenager, I would still have loved this music but been angry about the lyrics. The problems that I faced, bullying and family instability, looked to me like the result of naively following the heart without the head. Not only children, but the adults who were supposed to protect us, acted on impulse and idolized self-expression regardless of the consequences to others. Though many people make fun of Ayn Rand, I found her work to be a helpful anchor in those years, because she insisted that everyone should be mindful about the values they wanted to live by, instead of being tossed around by unprocessed feelings.

As an adult, I’ve found that rationalism is no safe harbor, however. Bullying can also take the form of doctrinal rigidity that dismisses the human costs as merely rebellious feelings that must be subjected to God’s Word. Sin, like fancy, is bred in the heart and in the head.

Last week I attended a Unity Church spiritual retreat with my best friend who is a prayer chaplain in that denomination. In language that mirrored Sheryl Crow’s, one of the workshop leaders kept saying that in order to hear God’s voice when we pray for one another, we should move our awareness from head to heart. In this formulation, being “in our head” meant thinking and judging instead of listening. It meant remaining separate, holding ourselves back from communion with God.

During the discussion period, though, her co-leader noted that we also don’t want to be responding “from our gut”, enmeshing in the other person’s emotions or reacting against them, instead of allowing the person to have their own feelings and their own relationship to the divine.

Heart, then, could be considered the center where head and gut come together to produce a response that comes from our whole person. This is where language shows its inadequacy. “Heart” in popular parlance has been so identified with emotion that the word potentially misleads us into privileging spontaneous feelings over critical thought and self-mastery, as we are already prone to do in this culture. But what’s the alternative? “Soul” leads us into mind-body opposition, a worse problem for religion, in my opinion, than the reason-emotion issue. Heart is at least a part of the body. It’s also a word that the Old Testament writers used to express the whole nature of a person, the seat of his character, where today we might pick the more anemic “mind” or “soul”.

I’ll close these meandering reflections with a quote from Rabbi Laibl Wolf, a Lubavitcher Orthodox rabbi in Australia, whose writing melds Jewish mysticism and psychology. In his recent e-newsletter article “Living Consciously”, he writes:

How often do we catch ourselves speaking or doing something, only to discover that both mind and heart have gone AWOL? The behaviour is less than conscious. One merely ‘goes through the motions’.

Kabbalah defines varying states of consciousness, each determined by the degree of Kavvannah. Although Kavvanah literally means ‘intention’, in the deeper teachings of Chabad Hassidism, the Alter Rebbe relates it to degrees of consciousness.

In the west, ‘consciousness’ is an inexact term defined variously in psychology and science. Some analyze it in terms of brain and its component parts. Some define it holistically in terms of the total body and its neuro-transmission systems. And others claim it doesn’t exist – a mere mirage of the imagination, the product of some Darwinian joke.

The Alter Rebbe’s ‘text book’ of practical Kabbalah, The Book of Tanya, takes a pragmatic approach. A high order of consciousness employs a level of Kavvanah that arouses profound mind and emotional energy to animate one’s words or behaviours. Middle-order consciousness is purely cerebral in nature, lacking emotional charge – the heart is uninvolved. The action is focused, but lacks feeling. Low-order consciousness results in mechanical non-thinking and emotionless behaviour – the stuff of mechanical habit.

In Kabbalah, consciousness is more than a mere state. It is also ‘value-laden’. Kavvanah may be misguided or downright evil e.g. an act of murder may evoke a highly focused state of mind coupled with a strong emotional thrust – high-order consciousness, yet degrade the holy act of creation. On the other hand, positive Kavvanah elevates the ‘creation sparks’ (Nitzutzot) that are scattered throughout the Cosmos and creates a ‘tikkun’ (repair) for the imperfect world. Even low-order-Kavvanah-consciousness, barely facilitating words or behaviour, can nevertheless elevate the world – retro-actively. This can be achieved by repeating the same words or behaviour with higher Kavvanah on a future occasion, imbuing the new moment with higher consciousness.

To live a conscious life requires training, focus, practice, and profound awareness. Kavvanah has to be ever-present. There are no limits to profundity of consciousness, including higher states of ‘meta-consciousness’, ‘supra consciousness’, and ‘sub-consciousness’. (I haven’t raised these phenomena in this short blog). These higher spiritual states allow soul-consciousness to bypass mind and heart altogether, engaging the cosmos more directly.

The more profound the Kavvanah, the higher the flow of consciousness, and the higher the quality of life.

HuffPost Asks: Is the Bible True?


In a column published earlier this month at the Huffington Post, David Lose (author of Making Sense of Scripture) asks this teasing question in the headline, but then points out that what we typically mean by “true” is based on post-Enlightenment concepts that were alien to the Biblical authors. Narrowly identifying “truth” with “fact”, we have no choice but to line up on one side or the other of the liberal-conservative divide, either contorting ourselves to align the text with the latest scientific and historical discoveries, or assuming that because this can’t be done, the Bible lacks authority. Lose begs to differ:

…Both sides, however, miss the literary nature and intent of the Bible as stated within its own pages. Take for example Luke, who in his introduction acknowledges that he is not an eye-witness to the events he recounts but depends on multiple other stories about Jesus. He writes what he calls “an orderly account” so that his audience may believe and trust the teaching they have received (Luke 1:1-4). Or consider John, who near the end of his gospel comes clean about carefully arranging stories of Jesus so as to persuade his readers that Jesus is the messiah (John 20:30-31). The gospels — and, indeed, all of Scripture — do not seek to prove but to persuade. And so John, convinced that Jesus is “the lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world” (1:29), portrays Jesus as clearing the Temple of money changers at the very outset of his ministry because he, himself, is God’s sacrifice. Similarly, Jesus dies on the Day of Preparation at the exact moment the Passover lambs are slaughtered. John’s aim is thoroughly theological, not historical.

For this reason, the Bible is filled with testimony, witness, confession and even propaganda. Does it contain some reliable historical information? Of that there is little doubt. Yet, whenever we stumble upon “verifiable facts” — a notion largely foreign to ancient writers — we should keep in mind that the biblical authors deployed them not to make a logical argument but rather to persuade their audiences of a larger “truth” that cannot be proved in a laboratory but is finally accepted or not accepted based on its ability to offer a compelling story about the meaning and purpose of the world, God, humanity and everything in between. To attempt to determine whether the Bible is “true” based only on its factual accuracy is therefore to make a profound category mistake, judging its contents by standards its authors were neither cognizant of nor interested in.

By way of illustration, recall for a moment the scene from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction when the two main characters, Jules and Vincent, argue over how to explain what happened when a drug dealer unloaded his handgun at them at close range but missed them entirely. Vincent (played by John Travolta) believes it’s a freak occurrence. Jules (played by Samuel L. Jackson) considers it a miracle. Jules’ defense of his judgment bears closely on our discussion. In response to Vincent’s assertion that what happened didn’t qualify as physically “impossible” and therefore could not be considered miraculous, Jules says, “You’re judging this the wrong way. It’s not about what. It could be God stopped the bullets, he changed Coke into Pepsi, he found my … car keys. You don’t judge shit like this based on merit. Whether or not what we experienced was an according-to-Hoyle miracle is insignificant. What is significant is that I felt God’s touch. God got involved.”

Jules’ sense of the criteria necessary to assess truth is far closer to that of the biblical writers than that of not only Vincent but also both contemporary liberals and conservatives alike, as he asserts that the ultimate criteria of truth isn’t factual accuracy but a compelling, even transformative witness.
…

This is a nice attempt at a third way between the liberal-conservative impasse. Still, it seems to me that there are some factual claims in the Bible that we simply can’t get around. Did God become man, or not? Did He raise Jesus from the dead, or not?

If you say no, or yes only in the metaphorical sense, your version of Christianity may be good and satisfying for you, but it’s still fundamentally different from the “yes” version. Death and sin are real, historical, scientific, this-worldly facts. A God who enters into the concrete realm where these conditions hold sway, in order to triumph over them, is a different God from one who only inspires us from afar and strengthens us spiritually within.

The facts of the Incarnation and Resurrection haven’t been proven by Enlightenment scientific and historical methods. The Resurrection could even be disproven by them someday. In the meantime, I believe in them because that story offers me the “compelling, transformative witness” Lose describes. But in order for the magic to happen, I have to believe in them as facts.

And that, perhaps, is why attempts to reconcile religion and liberalism never completely succeed. A Christian like myself believes in certain scientific and historical facts on the basis of non-scientific, non-historicist criteria. That necessarily scandalizes the modern mind. Even the postmodern turn away from factuality into narrative, such as in Lose’s article, doesn’t take you all the way there, because some facts (most of all, death) are impervious to anything we say or feel about them. As my husband likes to say, nature gets a vote. But I want to believe God gets a veto.

Saturday Random Song: Dolly Parton, “Jesus & Gravity”


Now that’s the story of my life:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gyqjSn-q34&NR=1
(sorry, no embed code)

I’m to the point where it don’t add up
I can’t say I’ve come this far with my guitar on pure dumb luck
That’s not to say I know it all
Cause everytime I get too high up on my horse I fall

Cause I’ve got
Somethin’ lifting me up
Somethin’ holding me down
Somethin’ to give me wings and keep my feet on the ground
I’ve got all I need
Jesus and gravity

But I’m as bad as anyone
Taking all these blessings in my life for granted one by one
When I start to thinkin’ it’s all me
Well somethin’ comes along and knocks me right back on my knees
And I’ve got…

Somethin’ lifting me up
Somethin’ holding me down
Somethin’ to give me wings and keep my feet on the ground
I’ve got all I need, Jesus and gravity

He’s my friend
He’s my light
He’s my wings
He’s my flight

I’ve got somethin’ lifting me up
Somethin’ holding me down
Somethin’ to give me wings and
Somethin’ to keep my feet on the ground
I’ve got all I’m gonna need
I got Jesus, I got Jesus,

I got somethin’ lifting me up
Somethin’ holding me down
Somethin’ to give me wings and keep my feet on the ground
I’ve got all I’ll ever need
Cause I got Jesus and gravity

I got somethin’ lifting me up
Somethin’ holding me down
Somethin’ to give me wings and keep my feet on the ground
I’ve got all I’ll need
Cause I’ve got Jesus and gravity
Jesus, I’ve got Jesus, I’ve got Jesus
He’s my everything
He lifts me up
He gives me wings
He gives me hope
And He gives me strength
And that’s all I’ll ever need

As long as He keeps lifting me up
He is my life
He is my God
He is my wings
He is my flight
Lift me
I’ve got Jesus, I’ve got Jesus
And that’s all I need

Lyrics courtesy of www.cowboylyrics.com

Letter to an Evangelical Friend, Part 2: Obeying Jesus Without Knowing Him?


Last week I posted some of my email dialogue with my evangelical friend “Denise” about gay rights, the Bible, and how we choose our bedrock principles for discerning God’s will on such controversial issues. Her letter culminated in the following invitation to self-examination:

“…Speaking just for myself here, I have had to say to Jesus: ‘If it turns out those aspects of Calvinism which so trouble me are right, and that faithfulness to You means I have to accept their views, then I have to choose You.’…Might it be that one reason you don’t any longer want to read books/arguments contradicting your position is that deep down you wonder if you ever might be faced with that choice, and definitely don’t want to ‘go there’?…I just wonder which would come first, were it to come to that? Jesus, or your position on the gay issue?”

Denise and I are close friends, and our dialogues always take place in a spirit of love and humility, with respect for each other’s boundaries and for the limits of human knowledge of the divine. My next remarks, then, are not intended to apply to her.

I’m troubled by the power imbalance that can occur in debates between gay-affirming and traditionalist Christians when the latter make the rhetorical move of questioning their dialogue partner’s level of submission to God, Jesus, or the Bible. Suddenly the ground of argument has shifted from our intellectual disagreement to a personal defense of my core faith. This is not a conversation that anyone should be forced to have when friendship and trust have not already been established between the speakers.

Even where a personal context exists, an individual’s relationship with God belongs to the realm of sacred mystery where words fail. We should hesitate to speak of it or demand that others do so, lest we violate its intimacy or, by dragging it into conceptual space, make it too rigidly specific and idolatrous. It should not be put on display to prove a point. And if that point remains unproven, will not that core faith also be shaken? Would traditionalists rather see me agree that Christ is not my Lord, than remain a Christian who happens to support GLBT equality? Sometimes it seems that they would.

In reflecting on Jesus’ life and death, I had the thought that God’s life among us took this particular form to establish once and for all that we should not worship any power other than love. Love is the only power that God retained when he was born as a homeless, illegitimate, peasant baby, and died as a criminal whom the secular and religious authorities conspired to execute.

Therefore, when Christians invoke power-based concepts (God’s sovereignty, Biblical authority) to limit actions that compassion would otherwise recommend, one could say they are reverting to a worldly misunderstanding of what it means for Jesus to be Lord.

****

Here is what I wrote to Denise:

I can’t imagine Jesus would ask me to take a position that seems incredibly cruel and factually unsupported (to the very best of my cognitive abilities) as proof of my obedience to him, because then the concept of “Jesus” would be emptied of all content except inscrutable absolute power.

Certainly I can, as an intellectual exercise, entertain the possibility that God-in-Jesus could turn out to desire child sacrifice (to use an extreme example that nobody is arguing for, although one could say that Christian parents who cast out their gay children are enacting a present-day version of this story). Kierkegaard considered this very scenario in his commentary on the binding of Isaac, and if I remember my college philosophy class correctly, he came down on the side of the “teleological suspension of the ethical”—namely that God could command us to do something that seems totally evil and pointless according to our best judgment as human beings, but we should do it anyhow.

The problem with this position is that it takes away the main reason I believe Jesus is Lord—as opposed to Kali the Destroyer, Satan, Mother Nature, etc.—which is that Jesus is supremely loving, compassionate, nonviolent, humble, a defender of the radical equality of all people, and someone who privileges just outcomes over rule-following. I am a Christian because I want to believe God looks like Jesus, and because I am a better person when I try to look like him too.

It’s possible that the God who runs the universe is so alien to our ideas of kindness and goodness that we should just shut up and do whatever He says. But there is no workable way to implement this. There’s no unmediated, uninterpreted access to God’s will. When we suspend our own evidence-based judgment and suppress our compassionate instincts, we are only handing over our soul to some other human being who is all too happy to tell us “what God wants”.

When I take a stand on gay rights, I don’t see myself as relying on my personal feelings and “subjective ideological preferences” against Scripture and tradition. I’m speaking out of the collective experiences of all the gay people who have struggled, often at the price of their lives, to love God and their neighbors while honestly living the way God made them.

One could be more justified in saying that certain non-affirming Christians are privileging their personal preferences (about gender roles and human sexuality) over the evidence of science and psychology, not to mention the testimonies of their silenced gay brothers and sisters. We seem like isolated heretics and random individualists only because there are many more who are afraid to bear witness. Religious, familial, and civil discrimination collude in preventing gay and gay-affirming Christians from connecting with one another to create a new spiritual community and a new interpretive tradition.

It seems to me that on the issues that preoccupy us both—salvation for non-Christians in your case, or the permissibility of homosexual relationships in my case—we ourselves are personally not at risk. You are a Christian, and I am straight. Our anxiety springs from the yearning to have all others enjoy the same blessings that we have received. Based on the movement of the entire Biblical narrative toward an ever-widening membership in “God’s chosen”, it also seems to me that this motivation is greatly to be trusted, as a reason to choose one Biblical interpretation over another.

The two issues seem similar to me in another way. If God loves everyone and desires their well-being, whatever God commands must ultimately turn out to be for the benefit of every person. Eternal damnation, with no possibility of repentance and forgiveness, might be good news for some abstraction like “God’s sovereignty”, but it can’t possibly be of any benefit to the souls thus punished. Similarly, overwhelming evidence suggests that the results of suppressing a person’s sexual orientation are deeply traumatic for that person, which is why anti-gay rhetoric usually focuses on the benefits to “us” (society, the church, etc.) from getting rid of “them”. One simply can’t make the case that the closeted person himself is better off, spiritually, than one whose body and soul are integrated.

I honor the humility and sincerity of your struggle with obedience to Scripture. But to me it looks like a struggle between a natural inclination toward compassion, and a fear that this compassion is impermissible. That way of life doesn’t attract me.

Finally, to return to where you began, I absolutely agree with you that faith in the Person of Jesus requires some doctrinal container to shape it. That’s actually why this whole opposition between obedience and inclusiveness makes no sense to me. I follow Jesus because he stands for some very specific values, inclusiveness being among them. I don’t think he intended it to be very mysterious, either. In all the actions he took to manifest God’s nature working through him, he appealed not only to law and Scripture, but to logic, the poetic imagination, and the evidence of people’s senses. God’s idea of good and bad is different from ours, sure. But in every example where Jesus makes this point, he’s revealing God’s love for outcasts, never shooting down as “disobedient to Scripture” a person who crosses social and religious identity boundaries in the name of love.

That is why, even if I turn out to be mistaken on the gay issue when I stand before the throne of judgment, in the meantime I’d rather err on the side of inclusion.

Letter to an Evangelical Friend, Part 1: Why I Don’t Read Anti-Gay Theology


“Denise”, a close friend from the days when I was an evangelical fellow-traveler, has long wrestled with the question of the salvation of non-Christians, with the same intensity that I devote to gays-and-God. Her compassionate heart inclines toward as inclusive a vision as possible, yet she also holds the firm conviction that she needs to find Scriptural warrant for any position she takes, in order to be fully obedient to Jesus as Lord.

Perhaps this is where our theological paths diverge most, though I can’t say I’ve really settled exactly what role the Bible does play in my life–some as-yet-unarticulated third way between Denise’s view that “every word in Scripture is exactly as God wanted it to be”, and the liberal view that it’s an important source of history and mythology but not uniquely authoritative.

Earlier this month, I had the honor of giving a talk at my church about how my faith and my creative writing inform one another. I sent Denise a copy of my notes, excerpted below, and she sent back some profound questions that inspired another six-page letter. She’s given me permission to share excerpts from our dialogue. I think it encapsulates the core issues in this debate, and some of the reasons why affirming and traditional Christians often seem to be talking past each other.

First, here’s a section from my speech notes:

…When I began this novel, I knew two things in my heart that didn’t make much sense to me: these characters came to me from outside, and I felt the Holy Spirit empowering me to do things I’d never done before. At the time, my mentor was an evangelical writer who said that a book about “sodomy” couldn’t possibly be honoring God. I didn’t have the Biblical expertise to stand up against that. I just couldn’t shake the conviction that these characters had been entrusted to me somehow, and I shouldn’t abandon them in order to secure my spot in heaven.

To make a long story short, this led me on a journey into progressive theology and political activism. I thought more about the reasons we are attracted to certain Biblical interpretations, and the importance of taking responsibility for our emotions and prejudices when we approach the Bible. The human element appeared inescapable. I kept coming back to Jesus’ words, “By their fruits ye shall know them.” You can make clever arguments for just about any interpretation, but if the net result isn’t more love and more equality, you’re probably off-base, whatever the text seems to say.

But along the way, I lost a lot of confidence in the authority of the Bible, and I still wrestle with guilt and uncertainty about my Christian identity because of this. It’s not that I don’t think you can make a good Scriptural case for inclusion, but that I really don’t care as much as I used to, either way. I hope this is more of a way station than a final stance.

How radical it felt to me, how scary, to begin to believe that creative writing is a source of theological knowledge! Though we have Scripture and tradition to tell us what Christians have historically believed, I think we equally need personal, contemporary experience to understand the world to which those doctrines are being applied. The arts, guided by the Holy Spirit, can give us that experience, particularly by widening the circle of our compassion.

There’s a lot of hidden privilege in our theologizing. The question about gay inclusion, for instance, is often framed as “Should we (normal straight people) let them into the church?” Writing, or reading, a story from the perspective of a gay person makes us think twice about assuming that we deserve to be the gatekeepers in the first place. If we’re open to it, we can see that this very different person is just as human as ourselves, and that their life and love has the same potential to manifest the divine spark. This seems to me to be very much in line with the gospel stories, where Jesus constantly reverses the expectations of people who think they’re God’s favorites.
…

And here are Denise’s questions:

The main theme as I read it in all of the above centers around this question: Does an orthodox doctrinal faith operating as “container” for prayer, the creative imagination, and one’s personal living, help or hinder? Do the constraints of a doctrine one doesn’t feel free to question cramp prayer, the imagination, and living, or does an orthodox doctrinal Christian faith free one up from “slavery” to more subjective ideological preferences and agendas for the deeper freedom Paul speaks of, that we have in Jesus Christ?

You know, I’m sure, how much I always resist many of the constraints of a tightly systematized doctrine–both because of my temperament and because I honestly believe the paradox and mystery of the Bible argues against its importance, or even its possibility. At the same time, it seems to me that absolute commitment to Jesus as Savior and Lord has to be at the heart of any true Christianity. How much does that commitment mandate faith in doctrine (as opposed to faith merely in a Person?).

We all have our own issues here– issues that are so crucial to us that any threat to our preferential position shakes us at our very core. For me it has always been the salvation issue, and specifically some perspectives on predestination. For you I sense that the gay issue is the most important, though obviously the salvation issue raises questions for you as well. Speaking just for myself here, I have had to say to Jesus: “If it turns out those aspects of Calvinism which so trouble me are right, and that faithfulness to You means I have to accept their views, then I have to choose You.” I don’t know where you would come out on this “forced choice” were you to be faced with it. I realize that you don’t believe, and probably can’t imagine, you would ever be faced with this choice, since you are so convinced faith in Jesus does not require us to consider homosexual behavior a sin. Quite the opposite, in fact.

But what if it did????? Might it be that one reason you don’t any longer want to read books/arguments contradicting your position is that deep down you wonder if you ever might be faced with that choice, and definitely don’t want to “go there”?
I’m not trying to persuade you of anything here, Jendi. As you know, this is not one of my “issues”. But I just wonder which would come first, were it to come to that? Jesus, or your position on the gay issue?

Here is the first half of my response (with minor edits for style):

Why I Don’t Read Anti-Gay Theology

[1] Non-affirming theologians are often starting from such different premises, regarding the “inerrancy” of the Bible or the “infallibility” of the Catholic magisterium, or an essentialist and complementarian view of gender roles, that there isn’t sufficient common ground for me to get any value from their arguments. I disbelieve in the above-mentioned premises on wholly separate philosophical grounds, not because of the outcomes they might produce for the gay issue.

[2]I don’t need to seek out these arguments because they are all around us in politics and the media, as well as in the writings of conservative Christians whom I read on other subjects. Every time gay people are lobbying for secular civil rights such as marriage, adoption, employment non-discrimination, and anti-bullying programs in schools, Christian leaders who oppose these measures are given an opportunity to air their Biblical position. The Proposition 8 trial alone generated hundreds of pages of this.

Generally, it is not only easier but inescapable for a minority group to know what the majority thinks about them, including the rationales for their subordination. It’s the majority that needs to make a special effort to notice that other perspectives even exist.

[3] Entering one-sided conversations makes me wary. I’d like to flip the question around and ask why non-affirming Christians are so reluctant to listen to gay Christians’ narratives of their own lives? Why, in other words, is it incumbent upon GLBT people and their families to seek out arguments against us, from people who often choose to be uninformed about something we know about first-hand?

A recent instance of this occurred at Harding University, a Church of Christ college in Arkansas. A group of students (anonymously, for fear of retaliation) created a website and print magazine collecting their personal narratives of living with same-sex attraction as Christians at Harding. They spoke about bullying, coerced “reparative therapy”, and suicide attempts—all merely because of their orientation, not sexual activity. The administration responded by blocking the website and declaring the magazine to be in violation of the student handbook.

[4] Let’s concede for a moment, for purposes of this discussion, that non-affirming Christians have the better of the textual argument—namely that the authors the relevant passages in Leviticus and the Epistles intended to condemn all same-sex activity, not only male prostitution and rape of the defeated enemy during wartime, as affirming theologians have argued. That’s a reasonable position, though not the only one.

From that, however, most non-affirming Christians make the questionable leap that the social mores that pertained in Biblical times must be timeless universal commands. This ahistoricism seems to me to foreclose important justice-based critiques of the status quo.

Whichever society you look at, the norms concerning family and sexuality have almost always been formed under conditions of gender inequality—a structural sin that Jesus cared about quite a lot. We conveniently erase a key political dimension of Christianity when we adopt a presumption against progressing beyond ancient social structures.

The direction of the Biblical narrative, especially in the New Testament, is toward ever-expanding equality before God, breaking down barriers based on ethnicity, ritual purity, socioeconomic class, and gender, to name a few. The first Christian communities didn’t perfectly achieve this, and neither have we, but we should try to head in that direction. It would be a shame if we froze that development 2,000 years ago by reifying their imperfections instead of continuing their forward movement.

[5] I would respect, though disagree with, a Christian who conceded that there were no personal pathologies or societal harms associated with homosexuality and that sexual orientation is unchangeable for most people, yet who still believed that the prohibition on same-sex intimacy was a Biblical command, albeit one with no explainable reason behind it except God’s mysterious design.

However, that is hardly ever how the debate unfolds. Probably suspecting that most modern people would not accept such starkly deontological ethics, non-affirming Christian writers/leaders/activists nearly always feel the need to bolster their case with derogatory and long-discredited factual assertions about homosexuals and homosexuality. Such assertions include:

*gay men are pedophiles

*gay people “recruit” others into homosexuality

*gays are incapable of, and/or opposed to, sexual fidelity and monogamy

*gays who want equal rights under civil law are persecuting Christians and interfering with their religious freedom

*gays are unfit parents

*recognizing gay marriage (under civil law, not in the church) will create a sexual free-for-all that undermines marriage and families

*people become gay because they experienced child abuse

*people become gay because their father was emotionally unavailable and their mother was domineering

*all people are naturally heterosexual—”gays” are just confused

*homosexuality can be changed through prayer and therapy

*the “homosexual lifestyle” leads to poor health outcomes and unstable relationships because it’s inherently wrong (in other words, not because of social stigma, parental abuse of gay kids, and discrimination in health care and employment)

Not only do these errors fatally undermine these writers’ credibility in my eyes, but I hold them somewhat accountable for the hate crimes and gay suicides that result from the spread of false stereotypes about gay people as dangerous, perverted, and unnatural.

****
Next in this series: Would I choose Jesus first? Does the question have any meaning? What do you think?

My Poem “not with the old leaven” Now Online at the St. Sebastian Review


My poem “not with the old leaven” is now online in the first issue of the St. Sebastian Review, a new literary journal for GLBTQ Christians and allies. Yes, we do exist! As editor Carolyn E.M. Gibney says in her introduction:

Many times over this past year, in the midst of my clumsy attempts to get this journal going (It’s sort of
felt like learning stick shift all over again: You think you’ve got it, then you lurch forward violently for a
few seconds, sit stunned for a moment, and start the damn car once more.), I’ve had people – mostly
genuinely concerned and gentle people – ask me: Why would you create a journal for queer Christians?
How many of you are there?

My answer is always the same: Twelve. There are twelve of us. (At this point in the conversation I smile
and tell them I’m kidding. Which I am. Mostly.)

It’s true that this seems like a bit of a strange niche. Queer Christians tend to fall into the section of the
Venn diagram that most people either A) don’t think exists (which in most cases is easily rectifiable), or B)
vehemently deny is metaphysically possible. ‘You can’t be gay and Christian!’ they say.

Word on the street, though, is that metaphysics can only take you so far. (Buy Martin a beer and he’ll tell
you why, in the end, he never could finish Being and Time.) And, in any case, the problem, unfortunately,
has never been metaphysical. The problem is not whether gay Christians can or should exist. The problem
is that we do exist, and that people still consider our existence a metaphysical question.

The question of being queer and Christian is deeply, terribly physical. And immanent. And quotidian. (‘See
my hands?’ I would like to say back. ‘See, here: Touch the wound in my side.’)

That’s partly why I started this journal. I want to affirm that the question of the intersection of queer and
Christian has moved, must move – entirely and completely – from the realm of the metaphysical to the
realm of the ethical. The question, now, dear friends, as I’m sure you already know, is not ‘What?” but
‘How?’


The issue is available for download as a PDF here.

Bad Daughters of Eve


One of the lectionary readings for yesterday, the first Sunday in Lent, was the Genesis story of Adam, Eve, the snake and the apple. On its face, this text suggests that we disobeyed God by using our own judgment instead of obeying blindly, and all of humanity’s problems go back to this root. Given how easily and often this interpretation has lent itself to abuses of church authority, I feel compelled to search for more creative ways of understanding one of the foundational myths of Western culture.

Without proposing a reduction of religion to mere psychodrama, I’d like to suggest that the Garden of Eden story expresses (among many other things!) an early stage in the maturation of the individual. It’s a poetic representation of how the child looks at the parent’s authority. And because, in St. Paul’s words, we are eventually meant to “put away childish things”, it’s not the last word on the interplay between independence and obedience.

Remember how it felt to be a small child. Our parents made a lot of rules whose purpose we didn’t always understand. As we got older, hopefully we saw more of the reasons for rules that seemed arbitrary at the time. Meanwhile, though, the bargain looked a lot like Eden: nurture and protection, and the freedom to ignore the hard choices that adults had to puzzle through (“the knowledge of good and evil”), in exchange for being a dutiful son or daughter.

But one day, we decided to test those limits. Ride that bike into traffic. Eat a whole box of cookies. What happened when we got caught? If we tried to hide the evidence, or shift the blame, that reaction, rather than the disobedience itself, was the greatest proof that we really weren’t mature enough to write our own rulebook yet.

Even so, Eden was kind of nice. They do your laundry for you and there’s always popcorn in the cupboard. From the teenage perspective, being kicked out feels like punishment. What are you talking about, go earn your own bread by the sweat of your brow? Without that responsibility, though, you’re not really living into the independence that you said you wanted.

What I’m suggesting is that the Fall and expulsion only look like a crime and a penalty from the human viewpoint because we’re ambivalent about growing up–“growing into the full stature of Christ”, to quote St. Paul again. Adam and Eve’s first act of self-awareness is to clothe themselves, to create physical separation and privacy between themselves and their divine parent. Individuation is a necessary but lonely process, and both parent and child sometimes feel nostalgic for the Edenic oneness of the womb.

For Christians, this trajectory comes full circle in the Incarnation and Atonement. Where Adam and Eve fell short of God’s design for full human maturity because they didn’t take responsibility for their own transgressions, Jesus embodies that design by taking on and cleaning up the transgressions of others. Where Adam and Eve clothed themselves in fig leaves to become different from their creator, God clothed Godself in human form in order to restore that connection, but still in a way that respected human freedom.

Again, this has its parallels in family life. As we develop an adult’s broader perspective, we discover that our personal autonomy, which may have seemed so absolute during adolescence, is shaped and limited by family obligations and by the behavior patterns we’ve inherited from our forebears. Though our abusive ancestors weren’t our fault, it falls to us to say “The buck stops here”–to face and reform those abusive tendencies in ourselves, and to bind up the wounds of our loved ones.