Bowing to the image of God in you
Why I'm not permitted to be quiet anymore
I missed Bruce Cockburn coming on stage in November - I’d dodged out to the lobby- so I didn’t see him, spine bent, leaning on two canes. When I re-entered, it was dark, and I carefully slipped down the steps, admiring the shimmering lamme sun and moon backdrop. He crooned “Blues Got the World,” his left leg up on a box, his guitar shining as I scootched rudely past row mates. Minutes before, our friend, Fr. Jason said, “I almost wore my collar, know this would be like coming to church.” I grinned at his wife, one of my dear friends. Some shared moments, however “secular” are sacred and holy.
Indeed, Cockburn orchestrated holy moments. He played songs I’d never heard, which surprised me because I’ve listened to Cockburn for two decades. Then again, he’s been in music since the late sixties. Seven songs in his“Strange Waters” left tears streaming down my cheeks in the blessed darkness.
Ooh, you've been leading me
Beside strange waters
Streams of beautiful
Lights in the night
But where is my pastureland
In these dark valleys?
If I loose my grip
Will I take flight?
When I came back into myself, I considered why these lyrics cut into me. They express the ambivalence that has come with being honest as a person of faith. As I age, such laments judder in the recesses of my mind. The truth behind Flannery O’Connor’s “Don’t expect faith to clear things up for you. It’s trust not certainty” has proven truer than the moral certitude that my fundamentalist upbringing. Then again, since my faith is about relationship with the person of God, certitude should be suspect. Relationships are negotiated on the conditions of where persons are at. God may be constant - and constantly standing at the door, bidding to come in - I’m in process. This means my ideas about faith, God, people, right and wrong have always been in flux, and will remain so.
While this has been my experience since the first time I thought about drinking, one specific area has been in loving and dignifying the needs and faith life of LGBTQ people. When this process started, I knew no one out of closet, except celebrities like Amy and Emily of the Indigo Girls. Of course, there were people whispered about in my childhood church - men to stay away from because they seemed disinclined to marry or young women with short hair because a woman’s crown is her hair - and some were gay, but not free to be honest to the congregation. I shudder to think about what those men and women experienced in that church.
I’ve worn that burden for a few decades now and until my jurisdiction of the Orthodox Church passed a deeply hurtful encyclical in summer 2022, I’ve kept my advocacy and care separate from the church. That statement broke me open. I’d been double-faced and skittish about how I related to and served an increasing number of friends, young people I taught or mentored as a camp counselor, and my kids’ friends.
I didn’t feel free to tell people in my parish how many dear friends of mine are gay. What would they say about the straightforward love and care I try to offer to the campers who came out, the family members, the priests with LGBTQ kids, the PKs who are gay or lesbian, the trans people I know. I’ve sat with too many who know their spiritual needs, their desire for community and love, especially the deep and fulfilling love of God are completely discredited. Swords of all sorts pierce my heart as so many give up having persisted in their search for a place to grow in their faith only to be rejected, or their allies see how the Church and its members treat them.
This is my attempt to answer a question posed to me recently by a priest with an international podcast after several callers approached him regarding their experiences as parents or members of the LGBTQ community. I’d sent him a resource recommended by members of a group working with our archbishop to become more pastoral to those people who’ve consistently been shut out, ostracized and treated as suspect.
One summer at church camp, I met a priest’s daughter, one of the most hilarious and disarmingly honest human beings I have the joy of knowing. She and a single guy with a similar sense of humor became the project of campers insistent on pairing them up. By the end of camp, I knew why that would never work out. She’d known since she was young that she was attracted to women. She’d been distant from the church for years. She couldn’t be her honest self and to find out who she was, she’d strayed from home. Her parents rejoiced when she came home, spiritually and literally.
There were others, dozens. A camper who attended the school where I taught, campers whose dear friends were gay, another priest’s son, then another, and then a friend’s marriage busted up when her partner transitioned. I worked with two other trans women. My son’s theater crowd was a safe space in a small conservative town, a place so conservative that a column I wrote about Christian gay people evoked a letter to the editor saying Gay people can’t be Christians. - I once got a similar response reading a book by a Palestinian Christian priest in a doctor’s office. “Arabs can’t be Christians,” a complete stranger asserted condescending to me, a grown woman. “Yes, they can.” - So also LGBTQ people can be Christians. Many are and, boy, wouldn’t be amazing if they had a safe space to worship with other Christians, to work out their salvation, to serve and mature in their faith?
Somehow, my husband, a priest for those who don’t know, befriended an Orthodox Christian man in Florida, newly married to a man in the military. After I wrote about immigration for a publication friendly to LGBTQ Orthodox Christians - as had several people I knew - I connected with him. While some of my friends were defrocked, censured or just left the church, somehow Joel and I maintained our ability to minister and write. - This still shocks me since I was sure someone would discover my blog post pre-seminary when I advocated for legalizing civil unions and predicted my husband would never be ordained on those grounds alone. - Either way, I found myself privvy to another anguishing story.
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I always knew that I was gay and growing up in what became the OCA I never actually felt that I could never be part of the Church. As I grew older I could tell that there we others “ like me” but they were respected and were a part of the parish. I remember one Sunday when we had a monk filling in and one of my older cousins joked, “I know why he went to seminary.”
The atmosphere in the country was bad and in college even though we have a “ Gay and Lesbian Outreach “ the meetings and parties were secret and no one admitted that it was an issue.
I went to a Pride Parade in NYC, and it was joyous and wonderful and very political with an outcry for civil rights and freedom that I thought was an offshoot of the Civil Rights movement for African Americans. I went to graduate school in Chicago, and I remember the dark dirty mafia gay bars. I lived in a “gay neighborhood” so I felt safe but I did not feel safe or secure at my job. I was a member of an Orthodox Church and there were several gay people there who were “quiet and respectable.”
I was enamored of Pride and I remember thinking that the movement wasn’t for just gay people but an extension of a thirst for justice and civil liberties like the various reasons that many of our grandparents and great-grandparents came to America - they came for a chance to be free. I saw that the gay pride movement changed and the Gay Pride Parades changed from a mass of very serious men and women marching “Two 4, 6, 8, Gay is just as good as Straight “to floats, gay choruses, and men in drag with everyone just celebrating the fact that we just exist. I am always moved by the Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays who march and I always cry when I see the men and women who offer “parental hugs to you who need one,” and the weeping men and women who are being hugged as they wish their parents could love and hug them.
Those men and women hugging those broken men and women are truly an Icon of Christ Pride is all of that and it’s a celebration of just existing amid people who would rather we didn’t exist. We do! We are, we exist and we contribute to the world. That is what I celebrate at Pride.
I mourn for the Orthodox Church. I talk to young people who won’t go to Church because of the animosity towards the LGBTQ community and I really wonder what the Church will look like in a few years.
That statement from the OCA Church just proves how meanness has taken root and the meanness in the internet from Orthodox clergy. I still go to Church as my husband who converted when he started living with me wants to go but we are quiet, and we don’t get too involved although people including clergy know and affirm us. It’s actually a bit ironic that during Pride I go to Church and keep quiet about an important part of myself which is the antithesis of what Pride is, and I hate the Orthodox Church for that but I go because no other Church has suffered like the Orthodox Church has or can celebrate Easter like we do in which all of Creation chants Christ is Risen Indeed He is Risen! I am learning to meld Pride with the Church, and I pray that Christ will show all of us our shared humanity.
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I consider my ability to hold space for his life experience, holding it up against where I started - not knowing gay people, let alone ones who want to worship God, to writing that post for civil unions thinking it would peaceably solve the issue of dignifying gay people’s desire for intimacy without challenging the Church’s rules for the sacrament of marriage. When I came into the church and started writing for an Orthodox women’s quarterly, I interviewed venerable archpriests who off the record were quite pastoral with the couples in their church. Their wisdom along with the strong sense that God pursues us and that our deification is a minute-by-minute turning towards a God who desires that none should perish, started to shift my sense that God has room for everyone. Me with my mental health issues and average struggle with my passions. Friends who’ve been addicted. Super judgy Christians who are so self-certain they cut off others as not worthy Christians. And LGBTQ people. Congregations shouldn’t been clubs excluding people. Here is where we meet Christ together, in each other, for the life of the world.
I’d just finished Us Versus Us by Andrew Martin when I heard about the OCA statement. I’d been shouting “yes. This!” all over Keflavik, Iceland, having been stuck there due to an airline issue. Yes, our gay Christian church members should be trusted to teach church school, lead choir, serve in the altar and have Bible studies. Then I wrote a long letter, which trusted priests advised my husband and me to send to our newly elected bishop. What will you do with us? We asked.
When he contacted us he said, “I think I have good news.” That’s what the gospel is supposed to be. Good news. The pasture lands in life’s dark valleys.
I just wanted to get a grip again on faith because if it’s “right out” for some people no matter what, then what am I supposed to do with that?
Since we’ve been able to be shaped both by the transparency and internal unification and by the resources that have come out of this. I’m still walking alongside strange waters, but for the first time in decades, I have a sense of streams of beautiful. Because I’m so weary that so many of my gay friends have lost the love of God after running into the brick wall of resistance, so very sorrowful that they don’t get the same grace to work out their salvation. Where’s the good news for them? I hope that this changes.
It’s about relationship with God. After all, it’s like Fr. Alexander Schmemann wrote, “Christianity is the end of all religions.”
Religion is needed where there is a wall of separation between God
and man. But Christ who is both God and man has broken down the wall
between man and God. He has inaugurated a new life, not a new religion.
It was this freedom of the early church from “religion” in the usual,
traditional sense of this word that led the pagans to accuse Christians
of atheism.
Christians had no concern for any sacred geography, no temples, no
cult that could be recognized as such by the generations fed with the
solemnities of the mystery cults. There was no specific religious
interest in the places where Jesus had lived. There were no pilgrimages.
The old religion had its thousand sacred places and temples: for the
Christians all this was past and gone. There was no need for temples
built of stone: Christ’s Body, the Church itself, the new people
gathered in Him, was the only real temple. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up…” (John 2:19).
Thank you.