Final Thoughts

As my 3 devoted readers have probably determined by now, I think I've decided to give up the blogging game (as if that weren't readily apparent from the 3 month gap in posts). Right now, I feel like I can do absolutely no good, so I've decided to take care of myself for a while. Perhaps I shall return at some future date in a blaze of blogging glory. A couple of final thoughts, though (I, like Jerry Springer, feel the need to wrap things up).

I am convinced that our churches are wrong to treat gay men and lesbians they way they do. Period. We deserve love, full inclusion and affirmation, not pity, dismissal, and revulsion. This is not just another 'issue' the church must deal with. The Church of Christ destroys lives and families when it throws stones. Our church must grow up, move past the pettiness of absurd doctrinal disputes, and move on to the real work of Christ.

Further, while most elders, preachers, and Christian college presidents and professors insist that their opinions are based on the Bible, I am convinced that their condemnation stems more from pure disgust. The refusal of so many to reconsider their doctrine (or to even give a modicum of respect to those whose opinions differ from their own) speaks volumes. Disgust, misogyny, and homophobia, however unconscious, drive the (male) decisionmakers at our universities and in our churches:

Consider, finally, the central locus of disgust in today's United States: male loathing of the male homosexual. Female homosexuals may be objects of fear, or moral indignation, or generalized, anxiety, but they are less often objects of disgust. Similarly, heterosexual females may feel negative emotions toward the male homosexual -- fear, moral indignation, anxiety -- but again, they rarely feel emotions of disgust. What inspires disgust is typically the male thought of the male homosexual, imagined as anally penetrable. The idea of semen and feces mixing together inside the body of a male is one of the most disgusting ideas imaginable to males, for whom the idea of nonpenetrability is a sacred boundary against stickiness, ooze, and death. The presence of a homosexual male in the neighborhood inspires the thought that one might oneself lose one's clean safeness, become the receptacle for those animal products. Thus disgust is ultimately disgust at one's own imagined penetrability and ooziness, and this is why the male homosexual is both regarded with disgust and viewed with fear as predator who might make everyone else disgusting. (Martha C. Nussbaum, Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law, p. 113)

The male decisionmakers in our churches are afraid of penetration, of vulnerability, of the so-called "female" traits they, in their (perhaps innocent) ignorance, believe to characterize the homosexual. We must convince our elders, our leaders, to let go of notions of masculinity and femininity, of what makes one a Man, so we can convince them to reconsider their readings of the Biblical texts.

Disgust, that most unchristian of virtues, controls the discussion now. Love must overcome it.

Cowboys (Or: Learning To Be A Man, part 1)

"Institutionalised in sports, the military, acculturated sexuality, the history and mythology of heroism, violence is taught to boys until they become its advocates."
- Charles Dickens

I wish someone told me I didn’t have to be a cowboy.

At church some months ago, during a discussion about gender, a middle-aged man gruffly said, “I wish someone told me I didn’t have to be a cowboy.” I don’t want to read too much into what he meant by this statement, but I haven’t been able to get the sentiment out of my mind. It represents a thought that can and should be echoed by so many boys and men; by those who were supposed to be cowboys, but turned out not to be, or by those who became cowboys only to discover they no longer wanted to be, by those who have discovered the emptiness of the masculine baggage we’ve been handed. I wish someone told me I didn’t have to be a cowboy. I want to write those words in ash and tears on the altars of our churches, on the hearths of our homes, and on the gates of our schoolyards.

I grew up in the South, in the land of football and cheerleaders, of debutantes and good old boys, of macho men and dainty women. Women have a place (the dirty secret: so do men). I remember Texas in the 1980s, a time of blue eye shadow and platinum hair for my mother, a thick mustache and a police uniform for my father. I was dressed in cowboy boots from time immemorial (though I always managed to pull them off so I could run around barefoot in the warm Texas dirt).

Dad, you see, was (and is) a lover of John Wayne and all things War and Western. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. They Died with their Boots On. Gunga Din. Ft. Apache. McClintock. Bridge on the River Kwai. He refused to watch Rock Hudson movies, though I could never understand why. (I finally understood when I learned that Rock Hudson had died of AIDS; or was the problem not so much the AIDS as the penetration that preceded infection?). Though he also enjoyed the occasional Cary Grant romantic comedy, or even one of Jimmy Stewart’s weepy performances, Dad typically stuck with guns and horses, tanks and valor, cowboys and Indians and women waiting for their soldiers to come home.

I started playing football when I was six, baseball when I was five (I would eventually play football until I was sixteen and baseball until 17. Not a short run.). I wasn’t bad at either sport, and I could have been considered an above average first baseman. My father, like many fathers, seemed noticeably more proud when I scored the winning run than he was when I received perfect scores on my report card. And I think he was proudest when I shot and killed my first deer at the age of 7. Violence and victory and tackles and touchdowns were ways to prove my worth as a boy, it seemed.

Being a boy in my family, and in most other families I encountered, meant certain things. Don’t cry. Play rough. Win. Fight dirty if necessary, but never run away. Don’t hug too much, especially not another man. Above all: don’t cry. Oh, yes, and: don’t cry. I learned these lessons over and over. Sometimes I was taught subtly: I was rewarded for good grades with a fishing pole or a new bat; I received more than one gun as a gift. Other times, the training was more, shall we say, overt.

I have focused on my father, but he was only one of my trainers. I remember a day my mother took me to the dentist. One of the perks of visiting Dr. Connor was that, after the cleaning, I could pick out any toothbrush I wanted (not a small deal to a young child). At the end of this particular visit, I picked out a pink toothbrush, which prompted the following discussion with my mother:

“Boys don’t use pink.”
“Why?”
“They just don’t. Pink is for girls. Do you want blue?”
“No, I don’t like blue.” (I did, in fact, like blue, but I couldn’t pick the same color as my little brother.)
“Take green then. Your father will be upset if you bring home a pink toothbrush.”

So, pink was out. And so (I would later learn) were flowers, dolls, all things that sparkle, long hair, boy bands, doing the dishes, and cooking. And let’s not forget crying.

Gender, it seemed, made a lot of difference. Though he loved us all, I had a different kind of value to my father than did my sister and younger brother, or so he told me. I couldn’t understand what difference it made that I was his firstborn son; I was, after all, the middle child – he had a daughter before me and another son (whose age was so close to my own that we were practically raised as twins during our younger years).

I was also learning that gender made a lot of difference in church. Only men preach. Only men make decisions. Only men pray (They told us that women pray too, they just do it silently. I couldn't be sure at first.). I, as a male, would one day be expected to protect, to teach, to pray, to preach, to lead. My sister, for her part, would learn to follow, to submit. We would both learn that the husband was the head of the wife. We each had our burden. I would learn to pray and be strong; she would learn to cook and to mother.

Typical of my Texas fundamentalist upbringing, the Bible played an important role as I learned “what it means to be a man.” The first chapters of Genesis taught me that Adam was formed first, and then Eve formed from him. Paul reminded me that this order of creation meant that the husband was the head of the wife, just as Christ was the head of the Church. Women were to be silent. You know the rest, especially if you were raised in a Church of Christ.

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Much of what I have described above is often seen (perhaps rightly) through the lens of the ‘subjugation of women’ in the culture of the American South and in Churches of Christ. But that is not what I want to focus on. Though the treatment of our daughters is shameful, I want, instead, to focus on the way our boys are trained to be men. I was taught that I had more value than my sister, both at home and at Church (I after all, could pray in front of the congregation and at the dinner table; she could not). This elevated place in the church and the home, though, relied in large part on my ability to swing a stick in a baseball game, tackle a foe in a football game, injure someone in a fistfight, to hide my emotions, to be hard and unyielding. I had value only as long as I eliminated everything Soft about me. If I didn’t fit the mold (if I wasn’t a Man) then, since I wasn’t a woman, I had no place in either the home or the church. My place in the world and in the church depended on my decision to buy into the violent and kyriarchal training of my youth.

Maybe my focus is off; maybe I should focus on the way my sister was treated. But I will leave that to the feminists among us, and I will wish them luck. I want now only to make this point: someone should have told me, just once, that I didn’t have to be a cowboy. Someone should have told me that I didn’t have to be ashamed that I didn’t fit the mold. Someone should have told me that it was acceptable to just be, well, me. No one ever did, especially not at church.

We need to train our boys what it really means to be a man. We need to teach them that violence is bad, not good, and that domination is to be avoided, not lauded. We need to teach them that there is neither male nor female in Christ. We need to teach them to learn from the women in their lives. We need to tell them it is not shameful to cry, that it is not shameful to express love and affection for those around them, that intimacy (whether sexual or not) is a gift from Above. We are failing our sons by trying to make them something they don’t have to be. We do it everyday at home and at school. And, saddest of all, we do it every Sunday at Church.

Family Values.

An excerpt from Know My Name: A Gay Liberation Theology, by Richard Cleaver

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It is worth asking ourselves what kind of movement Jesus tried to build. Where did he begin? Matthew 4:18-22 tells one version:

As [Jesus] walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea--for they were fishermen. And he said to them, "Follow me, and I will make you fish for people." Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.

Notice that they drop everything. We know (because Jesus heals Peter's mother-in-law) that Peter is married. There is no mention here of Peter arranging to take care of his family. We are told explicitly that James and John just walk out on their father, to whom presumably they have both business and family obligations. Elsewhere we hear similar advice for other followers of Jesus. In Matt. 8:18-22, we read:

Now when Jesus saw great crowds around him, he gave orders to go over to the other side. A scribe then approached and said, "Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go." And Jesus said to him, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." Another of his disciples said to him, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father." But Jesus said to him, "Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead."

This is not a movement for family values. It is not built on a husband, a wife, and 2.3 children in the suburbs; ... Jesus' movement cut through even the most important relations in society, such as the duty to bury one's father. In Matt. 12:46-50, Jesus himself sets the example:

While he was still speaking to the crowds, his mother and his brothers were standing outside, wanting to speak to him. Someone told him, "Look, your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you." But to the one who had told him this, Jesus replied, "Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?"

Remember, Matthew is the evangelist who devotes his whole first chapter to "begats," all the way back to Adam, so that we can know precisely who Jesus' mother and brothers were. But here he tells us that Jesus, "pointing to his disciples,...said, 'Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.'"

The Jesus movement is not a workplace from which we go home to our families for emotional support. It constructs a new family not defined by blood or by marriage. It is the family of hearers and doers of the Word.

For lesbians and gay men, this is good news indeed. Many of us have been thrown out of our families. All of hear those with power in the church and in the state preach that such bourgeois families are the basic unit of society and the church. This is why they say we must be cast out: we are a threat to the family. But their kind of family, if we believe Matthew, does not seem to be the basic unit of the community that Jesus built. Indeed, it could not be, because such forms of family did not exist in the society where Jesus worked. If we put the bourgeois family at the heart of Jesus' message instead fo the assembly of hearers and doers, we worship an idol.

Some will object that we must be prepared to accept the reality of social change in history. They are right. But we must also be able to accept the social changes that have forged new forms of family amoung lesbians and gay men. Underlying the debate over family values is an assumption that "families" and "lesbians and gay men" are two separate groups, without overlap. In fact, we are all part of the families we grew up in. We may not always get along well with them, but a lot of straight people do not either. Many of us get along fine. Often we are heads of families ourselves--lesbians especially, if they have been allowed to keep their children. The bourgeois family is not necessarily any more foreign to lesbians and gay men than to others. We, too, may be guilty of worshiping that idol.

Framing the debate on the family in terms of an all-or-nothing choice between some well-defined unity unchanged throughout history, on the one hand, and the liberation of lesbians and gay men, on the other, is a kind of shell game. It diverts our attention from the uncertain place of families in a changing society, for good and for ill, and from how a changing society in turn molds families, also for good or for ill. These are issues for theologians along with everyone else, and lesbians and gay men, being, so to speak, both inside and outside the institution, have valuable insights. In this, as in so many aspects of U.S. culture that are so familiar as to be opaque to their beneficiaries, Ethan Mordden, the chronicler of New York gay life in the 1970s and 1980s, aptly observes: "We have to know more than the straights know: have to understand what we are as well as what they are--have to find our unique place in their culture."

Idols are false gods that we worship because they are easier to manage than the real thing. We have made the bourgeois family into an idol because it, unlike the living God, gives us permission to confine our concern only to our own kin and kind. It tells us it is OK to worry above all about keeping our families safe from the resto fo society.

That is precisely the kind of family Jesus tells us to reject.

Re-examining our core homophobia.

The family must be nurtured and defended. In my childhood, I never imagined how much change I would live to see in American home life. Today, even the definition of the word family is up for grabs. No-fault divorce, cloning and gay marriage - things unimaginable 50 years ago - have joined the host of forces intent on tearing down the foundation of society, the home. Properly understood, the home provides care for the elderly, protection and training for children, respect for both men and women, sanctity for sex, and love for all. It is such a remarkable institution that when the Apostle Paul wanted to describe the marvelous relationship between Christ and the church, he turned to the home (Ephesians 5:22-33). If you look in our current catalogue on Page 5, you will find that our mission statement includes "stressing a lifelong commitment to marriage and the Christian family."

- David B. Burks in the most recent Harding Magazine

Several other bloggers have commented on Dr. Burks's recent Harding Magazine article, "Re-examining our core beliefs." My participation in the discussion on other blogs has been limited to short sarcastic statements. I want to discuss the article (or at least one part of it) further here.

For obvious reasons, I choose to focus only on the above excerpted paragraph. The paragraph begins with an assertion with which, facially, most people can agree: "The family must be nurtured and defended." Sure. I want to protect my parents and siblings. I want to nurture my grandparents and care for them as they age. I want to guard my mother and sister from harm whenever possible.

But that's not what Dr. Burks means. Dr. Burks assures us that Harding is here to defend the family from Change and especially from no-fault divorce, cloning, and gay marriage. Eschewing history and the Bible, he nostalgically and naively looks back in time and sees an (imagined?) Epoch characterized by familial strength and purity, an epoch that will quickly be brought to a close if we don't act. The good old days are being challenged. And not by progress. Not by accident. Not in the interest of those trampled on and marginalized by Dr. Burks's 1950's-style Ward and June Cleaver white middle class suburban America (itself largely a fiction of Dr. Burks's imagination). No. Instead, a 'host of forces' has joined together, 'intent on tearing down the foundation of society.' And, though Dr. Burks does not say it, we all know how you respond to a host of forces hell-bent on destruction: you go to war.

Dr. Burks has painted a near-apocalyptic picture for us in the first three sentences of the paragraph. His portrait is of a lovely home full of happy, smiling Christians who are intentionally torn apart by the invidious forces of chaos, by those who would purposely shake the ground on which society stands. By faggots who want to marry. A dark picture, indeed. Something must be done. The foe must be defeated.

Thank God Dr. Burks has such high respect for the institution of marriage. Or does he?

Dr. Burks goes on to describe what a home should provide. Among the things provided by a home: "love for all." This is interesting because of the phrase's close position in the paragraph to the call for war against those who would dispute Dr. Burks's normative view of family. Maybe instead of 'love for all,' Dr. Burks means 'love for those on our side'? Love for those like us? Love for those in our families? Love for those who deserve it?

I may sound a bit harsh here, but I think it's important to point out what Dr. Burks is missing. He is forgetting that I (one of those intent on 'tearing down the foundation of society') am already a part of someone's family, that I am worthy of love and respect. He assumes that I, and others like me, have no respect for the family because I want to marry a man instead of a woman. He ignores the fact that, far from wanting to destroy the institution, I want to join it (albeit in a slightly different way).

He also seems to forget something else: since when is the family the basic unit of society? Since when is the 'one man, one woman, 2.5 kids in the suburbs' model the norm? Since when is marriage primarily and institution that teaches respect for both men and women? Since Adam, whose son Cain killed Abel? Since Abraham, who took a wife and then conceived a child by another woman? Since Jacob, who had children by 4 different women? Since the days of levirate marriage? Since Jesus, who (so far as we know) never married and who, at one point, seemed to turn his back on his own family? Since Paul, who declared that celibacy was preferable to marriage? Since the days when women were passed like chattel, sold to the husband who could best bring title and fortune to the girl's father? Since the days women were refused medicine during childbirth because it was God's curse that they feel pain during birthing? Since the days, not so long ago, when women were trained to be obedient and subservient to their husbands, not matter what? Since the days when, taking the words of Jesus literally, divorced was refused to any who could not prove marital unfaithfulness, even to the woman who had been beaten to a pulp? Which 'good old days' should we look back to, Dr. Burks?

Instead, I would argue that, for the Christian, the family is not the foundation of society. God is the foundation. For the Christian, care of the elderly, the training of children, the love of others is the job of the whole community and the individual disciple. For the Christian, there is no reason to fear gays and lesbians who would attempt to be covered by the civil law of marriage; there is only reason to love.

I don't want this post to be too long, so I'll close with this. I stumbled across another paragraph about marriage today while reading for a class:

Marriage [] bestows enormous private and social advantages on those who choose to marry. Civil marriage is at once a deeply personal commitment to another human being and a highly public celebration of the ideals of mutuality, companionship, intimacy, fidelity, and family. 'It is an association that promotes a way of life, not cause; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects'...Because it fulfils yearnings for security, safe haven, and connection that express our common humanity, civil marriage is an esteemed institution, and the decision whether and whom to marry is among life's momentous acts of self-definition.

This was taken from the majority opinion in Goodridge v. Dept of Pub. Health, 440 Mass. 309 (2003), the decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court requiring equal recognition of gay and lesbian marriages. Sounds like they know what marriage is, doesn't it? Are you listening, Dr. Burks?

Another Letter

To follow up the last letter, I thought I would write another. This may seem a bit lame, but I have written a letter to myself. It is a note I wish I would have received when I was an 18 year-old freshman at Harding

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Dear Self,

You are 18 and lost. You don’t know why everything seems to be falling apart. You thought everything would start to make sense once you got out of the house and went away to college, but it hasn’t. Things won’t even begin to make sense for a very long time. You feel confused, alone, frightened. You are trying to find your place in this world and in the church and inside yourself, but you are beginning to feel as though it is hopeless. You think you will never be whole, and you think you will always hurt.

I remember. Trust me, I will never forget, though I am the older You. I remember what it was like that first year at Harding, when you thought you could finally make everything right if you just found the right crowd, studied the right books, and prayed the right prayers. You even asked to be re-baptized, thinking that the first one must not have counted if you were feeling these emotions and thinking these thoughts. You aren’t totally unhappy, having made some friends in the first few months away from home. But you don’t think you can tell those friends what is going on inside. You don’t think you can tell Mom and Dad. You are afraid of what will happen if the Secret gets out.

I am writing to tell you this: you will survive, you have strength, you are loved.

It is okay that you are scared. It’s only natural. You are growing up into someone you don’t yet know. You are afraid of who he will be, what he will believe, and how he will live. You are afraid you don’t have the strength to do what you think you have to do. You are afraid that you will end up alone.

But you have the strength. You will have the strength to turn your eyes inward and face the demons. You will have the strength to sort through the fears of Hell and of rejection. You will read what others have written and realize that others have done what you think you have to do. And they have survived, too.

You will read still more (since you will wrongly think you can’t talk to anyone) and discover that there are many out there who challenge the traditional interpretations of the texts by which you feel so terrorized. You will learn that there are many others out there who are working to teach others that, perhaps, the Old Readings of the Bible may not be the True Readings (if such readings exist). You will learn that there is more to Faith and to Worship than you have been taught. You will learn that, sometimes, it is okay to be unsure of the answer.

This will not be an easy journey. I, even as I write this to you, still struggle. I struggle with faith (though my faith has deepened immeasurably), I struggle with family (though I am able to love them so much more, now that I can love myself), I struggle with the Church (though I and others like me are part of the Church we struggle with).

The journey will be made bearable though, because of the people you encounter along the way. At Harding and beyond, you will meet people who will love you when you don’t think you deserve it, who will bear your burden when you no longer can, and who will stand beside when you need it (or in front of you to shield a blow). You will not make it without these people; let them into your life. These people will be your friends at Harding, friends you make after Harding, and even a couple of Church of Christ ministers (though you can hardly imagine that now). They will love you and will show that love in countless ways.

So stand firm. Cry when you need to, and shout your rage to Heaven when you need to. Just be patient. God loves you. I love you. Your friends and yes, even your family, love you.

Do not be ashamed, and do not be afraid. Be strong. The secrets you so fear will not destroy you, and it is only when you face what lurks in the dark corners of your heart that you will begin to heal and begin to grow. Just remember that you are “convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate [you] from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

With love and even with certainty,

Yourself, age 25

Quote o' the Day

Many thanks to Irie at Gal328.org for bringing this quote to my attention:

"On the whole, however, the ideal of unity and equality has never been recognized in reality until the inferior group, whether women or slaves or a racial group, has asserted that equality and compelled the church to translate its principles into practice."

H.Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism

Deus Caritas Est

Pope Benedict's first papal encyclical is available online here. I haven't read it yet, but I hope to read it later tonight.

A Letter

One of the purposes of this blog is to personalize the so-called ‘gay issue.’ That means letting you into my life a little (while still trying to maintain some modicum of privacy). I share with you this letter I wrote to my father. I haven’t yet sent it, and I’m not sure if I will, but I want you to read it because I want you to understand the pain that families have endured, and will continue to endure, because of our Church’s current ‘position’ on the ‘gay issue.’ I don't yet know at this point what will happen between me and my family. Hopefully we can come to terms with each other. I fear that we cannot.

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Dad,

I’ve given much thought in recent months about our relationship. I’ve wanted to call you, tell you everything that’s going on in my life and in my head. I’ve wanted to open myself up to you in hopes that you could understand what, exactly, I am doing and thinking (and correspondingly, why I am doing and thinking those things).

But I haven’t called to talk. I haven’t written, and I decided not to talk to you when I was visiting home. I can think of a few possible reasons why (but, frankly, I’m not sure which is the real reason):

I think I haven’t talked to you because I’m afraid of losing you and Mom again. The last few years have been hard on me (harder, I think, than you appreciate), but no time in my life has been as difficult as the months when you refused to speak to me and refused to have me in your home. I don’t want to endure again the pain of separation, the loneliness, the anger, and the emptiness of being a virtual orphan. I am afraid you’ll turn your back on me again.

I think I haven’t talked to you because I’m afraid of sounding unsure when I talk to you about my life and my faith. It’s odd: I can ramble and talk incessantly to perfect strangers about my faith, my theological ruminations, my concerns for the future, and the hurts of my past. But when I sit down to talk to you, I freeze. Instead of a moderately intelligent, somewhat self-assured 25 year-old, I become a stumbling, bumbling, confused pre-teen who’s in trouble with his parents again. I can’t explain myself to you because there is too much to say; I can’t defend myself because I can no longer speak on your terms and with your religious vocabulary (and when I use my own vocabulary you just tell me I should read less). So I end up stuttering and, flustered, I become defensive and combative. I haven’t talked to you because I’m not sure I’m able to talk to you.

I’m also afraid of not having all the answers. You, it seems, have it all figured out. If you have any Doubts, you’ve never revealed them to me. And since you have church, God, faith, and sexuality seamlessly woven together into a bullet-pointed, proof-texted devotional lesson, you allow me no room to wonder, to question, or to doubt. This makes me feel as though I can’t talk to you until I can combat each point, each assumption, each conclusion, each text. Until I can match scripture for scripture. I am not prepared to do that, so our conversations are between one who knows every answer and one who is struggling to figure out a few of the many possible answers to our common questions. You must give my mind room to breathe and process when we talk before you list yet another six verses and end the conversation. I would like it to be okay with you that I’m struggling. You could tell me that everyone struggles, but you don’t. Instead, you tell me the answer (your answer), and get upset when I don’t unquestioningly accept it.

I am, in short, afraid of you. My father. And, I’m afraid of me. Afraid of what I’ll say, and, frankly, afraid of where I’m going, since I go there largely alone (you will not accompany me, I trust). I would like to be able to lean on you, but I don’t think I can anymore.

Earlier, I said I have too much to say to get it all out. What is it I want to tell you, though? That you’re wrong? That the things you’ve taught me are wrong? That your visions of Church, of God, of Scripture, are crooked or backward or upside-down? Sometimes, yes, that’s what I want to say. But it’s more than that.

It’s not so much that I think you’re wrong. I just think there is more to be said. There has to be, or I have to leave behind the faith you’ve given me. I can no longer (and have for some time been unable) to accept all the things you’ve taught me, at least without some qualification. I can no longer look at the Bible in the way you taught me. I can no longer look at my mother in the way you taught me. I can no longer look at myself in the way you taught me. As I try to make your faith my own, I find I have to make adjustments.

I can’t look at the Bible like you want me to. Your way just seems too shallow and unfulfilling. I would love to just cite a chapter and verse for each theological proposition I proffer, but I can’t do that in good conscience. The way you taught me to look at scripture ignores too much: it ignores the humanity of the authors, compilers, and redactors. It ignores the bias of those who have given us our traditional glosses of texts. It reads selectively to fit a predefined comfort zone. It diminishes the Gospels in favor of the Epistles and pretends that apocryphal and non-canonical books don’t exist. It ignores the social, cultural, historical, and ideological contexts of the Scripture.

I can’t separate scholarship and faith like you want. You are afraid of what will happen to me if I keep reading. I think you’re afraid that the books I read will lead me away from God. I, on the other hand, am afraid of what will happen to me if I stop studying and learning. I’m afraid my faith will shrivel. For me, studying, learning, and reading are acts of worship. I can’t imagine faith without them. I must admit, though, that your fears are, to some degree, founded. The things I read change me. I can’t read a book on feminist theology and then look at Paul’s writings the same way I did before. But that doesn’t mean I can or should stop reading and thinking. It just means I have to be careful while I do so.

I can’t separate my faith from my Experience. Take the experiences I’ve had with my friends as an example. In the same way the things I read change me, my friends and colleagues change me. You are afraid of this, too. I know that. But it cannot be helped. When you and Mom told me I could not come home, when the stress of graduate school, loss of family, and near loss of faith landed me in the hospital, my friends were there for me. I was cared for, loved, and affirmed by those you believe are leading me astray. Perhaps they are; I don’t yet know. But I know that when I was at my lowest, they held me, stood by me, and gave me what you (and my Church) would not: affirmation. They saved my life and, perhaps, my faith. So what am I to do with them? Am I to leave them behind because they don’t share our (your) faith? Am I to shut them out when they tell me I should find a different church for my own health and sanity?

I have to make adjustments because of the things I know in my heart. I know that women are equal to men in value, intellect, heart, faith, and clerical ability. I know that it is immoral to assign them a lesser place. I know that it is wrong that I’ve never heard either of my Grandmothers pray (not because they have no faith, mind you, but because they are women). It is wrong that I haven’t heard my mother pray since I was baptized. I know that any use of scripture to diminish the place of women in our society, our families, or (and especially) our churches has to be a false and errant use of scripture. I know and believe this and, though I can accept the fact that you think I’m incorrect, I cannot accept the ease with which you seem to dismiss me and those like me who want our sisters’ voices to be heard.

Another thing I know in my heart: I am gay. You will not accept this, nor will you accept the way this shapes my view of faith. You still believe I can be cured. You still believe that I’ve made a misguided lifestyle choice. You believe it impossible to be gay and a Christian. You insist on believing that my eternal salvation hinges on whether I am “practicing” or “celibate.” I can live with the fact that you believe these things. I cannot, though, abide your absolute refusal to consider the possibility that I might have actually thought this all through, that I might actually deserve your respect, that I might actually be more than a petulant, misguided child. I cannot abide the fact that you never ask me how I’m doing, that you’ve never expressed concern that I might be hurting, and especially that you’ve never acknowledged that you and your church might have caused me pain. You’ve never apologized for the comments you’ve made about gays and AIDS, you’ve never apologized for the things you said to me after I first said the words “I’m gay,” you’ve never acknowledged that you may have overreacted throughout that first year.

So, for all these reasons, I can’t talk to you about my faith. I can’t tell you that I was asked to leave a church I had been attending for two years. I can’t tell you that I’m afraid I’ll never find a church I can call home. I can’t tell you that, while I’ve figured some things out, I don’t have all the answers (I am, after all, only 25. I’m young and could sometimes use advice.).

I don’t know where we go now. I don’t know how we come to terms with our differences. I don’t know how we rebuild our relationship after the last several years of pain. I hope we can. Maybe it will just take time. But until the time comes when we can be truly reconciled, what do we do?

All my love,
Your Son