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Featured, Justice

A Call to Repentance from Anti-Blackness & Gaslighting for the UMC

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“They were asking for it,” I imagine at least one of those officers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge said, as they rode off with the blood of John Lewis and Amelia Boynton on their bully clubs. 

They were asking for it.

They wanted the club.

They wanted the fist. 

They wanted the teargas.

It is what an abuser says, whether that be a system or a person, when the abused try to reveal their cruelty in the light of day.

When we practice non-violent resistance that does not mean there is no violence. Non-violent resistance means that we position our bodies in such a way that we take the risk of receiving violence. At lunch counters in Greensboro, on buses in Alabama, in the streets of Ferguson, in front of the Waller County Jail. 

We do this for a reason. We do this because there are evil and oppressive forces in the world that knot nooses at night, that abuse their staff by day behind close doors, that interrupt the ability of elderly Black folk to vote, that hide immigrant children in internment camps and hotel rooms, that end the life of Black women in back rooms of back wood jails. 

We bring this violence into the view of the public.

As John Lewis said, we get in the way. In the way of abuse. In the way of violence. In the way of oppression. 

We invite the oppressor to wreak their violence on our bodies in broad daylight, or in images at night on television screens, in order to reveal to the complacent, the privileged, and the comfortable the true violence of the politician, the Sheriff, and the manager who sits beside them in the church pew on Sunday. We aim to deprive them of their ability to look away, to be silent and complicit. 

We get in the way of violence in order to reveal in the light of day the evil that is done behind closed doors and in dark alleyways.

They were asking for it.

They wanted the club.

They wanted the fist. 

They wanted the teargas.

“You will see the desire for tear gas on both sides.”

I made a grave mistake a couple years ago. 

My denomination, the United Methodist Church, had chosen a book written by – what I would call – a Conservative think-tank with ties to Brigham Young University, as The Book that would save this huge and fracturing global community. 

The book, The Anatomy of Peace, explains a theory of community in which we must have a “Heart of Peace,” rather than a “Heart at War.” The philosophy is taught through a semi-factual, semi-fictional story, although it only acknowledges the semi-fictional part in a small disclaimer in the foreword. The intent of the transfixing dialogue of the book is to draw the reader into the story in a way that makes the details feel intensely real, because many of them are.

The part that is fictional is the identities of the men who created and are teaching the philosophy. In real life, the creators and main teachers of the philosophy are White Mormon men with ties to Brigham Young University. Men who practice a religion that is firmly committed to traditional gender roles, a religion that does not permit women to hold authority, and which did not permit Black people to participate in church ordinances until 1978.

In the story, those identities are concealed behind the fictional characters of an “angry Palestinian man” and an “old, wise Black man.”

Thus, we arrive at my mistake. In the two pieces I have written previously about this framing for our denominational progress, I was able to articulate the “what” – literary blackface – yet, I failed to adequately articulate the “why” – resistance suppression. 

My denomination had encouraged, and in some cases required, every leader – clergy and laity – in the whole world to buy and read this book. We are the third largest denomination in the United States, after the Roman Catholics and Baptists, so that is a lot of books. 

Not only that, but we had invested millions to have a group of diverse leaders meet over the course of a few years, with the book as their guide, to try to find a way forward for our church. 

We had invested so deeply there was no turning back.

When I wrote about this initially, I did have a lot of support after I published a blog explaining the problems of having an oppressive philosophy created by White men presented by fictional People of Color, but all I could feel was the danger and the anger. The Bishop who called me out by name in a response posted to her Conference website. The colleague who invited me to a “dinner for friends” only to blindside me with an angry diatribe. The longterm mentor who never spoke to me again. 

I was a young Queer woman, going through the process of coming out in a church that denies my right to exist, still in the process of recovering from two years of having my life under threat during the movement for Justice for Sandra Bland. I felt and was vulnerable to their power and their anger. I let their aggression make me smaller, quieter. I lived with wings clipped. 

As I watched the funeral of John Lewis today, I realized that the world needs more courage than that, so let me try one more time to right my wrong and give you the “why” and not just the “what” of the “how” our denomination needs to redirect its gaze in the future. 

The book itself, The Anatomy of Peace, tells us clearly the “Why” – the root of its inception – if we are able to wade through all the dialogue to sort reality from fiction. 

The book portrays a scene in which a diverse group of parents have come to drop their kids off at a recovery camp, and as part of that process must sit through some teaching themselves. 

When it comes time for the main teacher to tell his story, he finally explains that the philosophy he teaches came from some formative experiences in the late 1960’s that were defining moments for his life – those being the “race riots” near the campus of Yale University in 1967, and the Black Panther Trials that followed. 

There is great specificity in the storytelling that follows from pages 186-194. The narrator who explains the story tells how he came to be convinced that those who protested injustice were in the wrong, because they had a “Heart at War” and were not starting from a place of empathy for “those they railed against” or concern for the well being of those they felt were oppressing them. 

The reader accepts this because the teacher and the student of this philosophy are presented as a “wise old Black man” and an “angry young Palestinian man.” Rather than the truth of White men reacting to Black outrage, it is presented as a difference of opinion within the Black community about what the appropriate way of handling anger is. What those who believe in resisting injustice-  as Jesus did in the Temple – would call ‘righteous indignation,’ the “wise old Black man’ reframes as a “Heart at War.” 

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Images of police brutality from protests on the New Haven Green, referred to in The Anatomy of Peace, scenes that were formative to Warner’s philosophy. The Anatomy of Peace explains that the “riots” caused the observer to understand how selfish the Black protestors were. (File Photo of Hartford Courant)

All of this makes more sense, when we understand that while that scene of Black protest in 1967 did motivate the creator of this philosophy, he was neither an “old wise Black man” nor a “young angry Palestinian man.” Rather, Dr. C. Terry Warner, the Founder of the Arbinger Institute, and the creator of the philosophy, was the one who was just finishing his PhD at Yale University in 1967, before moving to Brigham Young University where he would eventually form the likes of James Ferrell… who would later join the staff at the Arbinger Institute Warner founded, and become the man behind The Anatomy of Peace.

The Arbinger Institute does not put any names of authors on its book. It says it does this to keep the authors from ego temptation. In reality, it makes it much harder for the reader to sort through fact from fiction, and to see to the truth of the “why” of “what” they are reading. 

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Dr. C. Terry Warner

A White man from a Conservative faith tradition, was upset by the behavior of Black protestors and created a philosophy that would shame their behavior, and form Institutional work spaces in which those who exhibited the behavior of resistance would be gaslit and labeled as having a “Heart at War.”

Years later, racial tension would again form the framework for the advancing of the philosophy when James Ferrell would himself have formative experiences surrounding race at Yale when following in his teacher’s footsteps and becoming a student there.

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James Ferrell

As an article in BYU Magazine in 2007 explained, “As [James Ferrell] studied legal cases having to do with race relations, it occurred to him that the hallmarks of self-deception are everywhere. His thoughts led to a year-long writing project on how self-deception can explain current and historical problems between races. The resulting paper crystallized Ferrell’s passion for the ideas he had learned from Warner.”

Warner and Ferrell in observing the behavior of Black people during both of their times of study at Yale, concluded that “self-deception” was the root of racial tensions – rather than actual injustice that must be faced and dismantled with all haste and urgency in a way that will diminish the privilege White people hold over others.

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The New Haven Chapter of the Black Panther Party, who The Anatomy of Peace mentions as having such a formative impact on the creation of the philosophy that would help people understand the selfishness of Black protestors. (Photo by David Fenton/AP from Hartford Courant)

It is easy to see why such a philosophy would be attractive to Institutional leaders and those responsible for the survival of Institutions, and those who may not like to see their authority challenged. That, thus, set Dr. C. Terry Warner and the Arbinger Institute up to create a thriving and profitable industry of “peace-making” as everyone from Nike to Boeing to the United Methodist Church would seek to implement their philosophy as Institutional culture, and employ the diverse group of teachers that they hired to be the face of the philosophy.

For those who are, at this point, feeling confused, let’s dive into the story a bit. 

After, setting the scene and having nearly two hundred pages of dialogue between parents at this camp orientation – dialogue that is likely drawn from multiple real encounters – the main teacher begins to explain the origin of having a “Heart at Peace” rather than a “Heart at War.” He describes how when he arrived to the United States as “an angry Palestinian immigrant” he found himself (who knows why) in New Haven, Connecticut observing a “race riot” on the New Haven Green. He is gratified to see Black folxs resisting their oppressors, it reminds him of how he’d like to fight back against the Israelis. 

(I must remind you that the lens is made up, it was Dr. C. Terry Warner who would have been at or attentive to Yale in 1967 to observe the “race riots” that took place there.)

As he is watching, the “angry Palestinian man” starts up a conversation with an “old wise Black man” because he assumes he will agree with the protestors (the authors of The Anatomy of Peace know that you also will assume this, and so they are intentional in using a Black man instead of the real person – a White man – because they know you will not receive anti-Black Lives Matter rhetoric from a White man. Yet, they know that we will accept and promote it, if in our minds we are picturing a Black man saying it). 

The “old wise Black man”, instead of supporting the protests, teaches “the angry young Palestinian man” about how the protestors are wrong:

“So the oppressed are fighting back,” I commented almost nonchalantly…

“Yes,” The man responded, without moving his eyes from he scene, “on both sides.”

“Both sides?” I repeated in surprise.

“Yes.”

“How so?” I challenged. “I only see tear gas on one side.”

“If you look closely,” he answered, “you will see the desire for tear gas on both sides.”

(The Anatomy of Peace, pg. 187)

We are to understand that the ones receiving the tear-gas are just as in the wrong because they want the tear gas. They are just as responsible for it as those firing it. They were not being loving to the ones firing it. They asked for it. They made them do it. The philosophy of an abuser – that the responsibility for the conflict lies at the feet of those who raise it to visibility, not at the pervasive and persistent oppression that caused it. 

The oppressed must be taught to have a “Heart of Peace” – to be docile, forgiving, malleable. 

Our angers are equal. We are both in the wrong. If you did not mouth off, I would not have had to slap you. 

We accept the narrative that follows only because our analysis is so lackadaisical that we will swallow down the musings of a White man on the actions of Black people as wisdom because we are told it is an “old wise Black man” saying them. 

If this fictional “old wise Black man” took on flesh he would be a Herman Cain talking about a John Lewis – God rest both their souls. Whose legacy do you want to be following? 

With the help of the “old wise Black man”, the “angry Palestinian” soon sees the error of his ways. He realizes how wrong it is for the protestors to not be considering the feelings of those whose abuse they are protesting against.

“The people Ben and I witnessed that day on the New Haven Green appeared more concerned with their own burdens than with others’. I can’t tell for sure as I wasn’t in their skin, but it didn’t appear that they were considering the burdens of those who they were railing against, for example, or those whose lives they were putting in danger. It would have been well for them and their cause if they had begun to think as carefully about others as they did about themselves.”

(The Anatomy of Peace, pg. 190)

The Black protestors are portrayed as selfish for not thinking about how their protest might hurt the feelings of their oppressors, for not thinking of the burdens of their oppressors. The “angry Palestinian man” wonders why they weren’t asking themselves what might be the challenges and trials of the people they were protesting against, and how might they be adding to the trials and challenges of their oppressors. 

Only a White man would write that, and only a White dominated Institution would accept, purchase and promote it. 

The “angry Palestinian man” realizes how “wrong” he has been. He comes to regret the ways he has been insensitive to the Israelis by being angry at them for killing his father, without thinking about their feelings or the fact that they have bad days and emotional needs too. He decides he doesn’t want to be like the protestors. He wants to have a “Heart of Peace,” not a “Heart at War.”

(It is no coincidence that the Arbinger Institute has Policing Executives and former Israeli Government officials as their advisors and promoters, but not protestors or Palestinians. This is a resource for those who hold the power to use, not those who are on the underside of injustice.)

We, the readers, are only willing to accept those words and all the ones that follow because it is the stereotypical “old wise Black man” – played in our minds by Morgan Freeman – that is saying them, and it is the “angry Palestinian” who is receiving them and being “transformed” by them. 

We would never be willing to accept, purchase, promote and teach a philosophy that was built upon a desire to discredit the outrage of the Black Panthers, the Black Lives Matter movement, the Voting Rights Movement, the Farmworker’s Movement, etc. We would never be willing to knowingly accept into our minds a philosophy built with the intention to shame and gaslight those who protest and resist.

We would never knowingly allow White men talking about their opinions of Black protestors to be the foundation for the philosophy that would be our denomination’s salvation – but that is exactly what we did. We could claim that we do not see resistance and protest as a problem to be solved, but for Dr. C. Terry Warner and James Ferrell it was. They told us that themselves through the masks of Yusuf and Ben.  

We Progressives – especially we White Progressives, which is what we call White Moderates these days – are so very willing to drink that same cup of tea if you just throw a little racial artifice in there for us. Something to sweeten it, to cover the bitterness. 

I did not raise the alarm about this book two years ago because I am some snarky b*^#ch who just likes to point my finger when others falter. I use my voice when it matters. I raised the alarm because this philosophy is dangerous, because it promotes abusive gaslighting in the workplace and undermines movements for justice. 

You do not need me to tell you that. Yusuf, “the angry Palestinian”, and Ben, “the wise old Black man” tell you that, right there on page 187.

“See the desire for teargas on both sides.”

They wanted the teargas.

They were asking for it.

They wanted the club.

They wanted the fist. 

The Anatomy of Peace actually makes no secret of where and why it’s philosophy emerged. We just wanted so badly not to see it. Because we too are the oppressor, complicit regardless of our gender or race or orientation, in the oppressive systems that we uphold with our participation rather than dismantle with our resistance.

The truth of the matter is that this scene on the New Haven Green did happen. There was an uprising on the New Haven Green in 1967. There was a young man who observed it, either in person or from a distance, and who built a philosophy rooted in his desire for people to understand that the abusive anger of racist White men – like Lou in the book – is equal to the righteous indignation of those they oppress.

If the oppressed will not get angry – if they will have a “Heart of Peace” – then the oppressor will not need to raise their voice either. There will be no need for the club, no need for the fist, no need for the tear gas. No need for episcopal censure, changing of appointments, or career suicide. We have more subtle ways of keeping things under control. 

Like the analogy of the Willie Lynch Letter, the book contains instructions for Institutions on how to keep the marginalized quiet and docile. By gaslighting them. By telling them that there is something wrong with their anger. 

By making sure that the one Black woman who they let into the workspace, who has enough self-respect not to endure their misogynoir in silence, will surely be seen after the Company does a training with this book as “crazy”, as “unstable” – and within the church, as “ungodly.”

We cannot abandon her to that fate designed by racist minds.

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Some of the Black Panther defendants that are referred to in The Anatomy of Peace, as having been formative in the creation of the philosophy that would teach people not to be like them. On the left is Frances Carter, and in the middle are Margaret Hutchins and Rose Marie Smith with her baby. (Photo by Robert Ficks / Hartford Courant)

To drive that point completely home, the book includes an “angry Black woman” who is revealed at the end of the book – suprise! – to be the daughter of the “wise old Black man.” The character who is created to be a stand-in for all the Black women who have frustrated the authors in their lives is named “Gwyn” and at the end she confesses that her father tried to teach her not to be angry about racial injustice, but she would not listen. The “angry Black woman” thanks the “formerly angry Palestinian man” for helping her finally hear the “wise old Black man” who is her father. 

“My ears have been closed to my dad’s ideas for years. ‘Don’t try to feed your philosophy to me,’ I used to tell him when he tried to suggest that I think of things a different way. He thought I should give up the hate I have for my former husband, forgive a sister who has wronged me, and rethink my opinions on race… Thanks for helping me to hear him, you’ve given me a lot to think about.”

(The Anatomy of Peace, pgs. 195-196)

 Please, tell me you understand why that is disturbing.

The White man created a fictional Black woman to be the daughter of the fictional Black man, to apologize to the White man in the mask of the Palestinian man, and say he’s been right all along. 

Then the White man convinces countless corporations, institutions, and my denomination to read and teach the book and humiliate and shame that Black woman in their institutions over and over again. 

When the consequences come, it will be easy to see that we were asking for it – those who resist, those who speak up, those who get in the way of injustice. Those that block bridges and roads and General Conferences with their bodies. 

They were asking for it.

They wanted the teargas.

They wanted the club.

They wanted the fist.

We who willingly stand beneath your blows, do so to reveal your violence – yet, it is you who create it. 

In this new awakening of consciousness about racism in our nation and institutions, may we finally have the courage to name *specifically* the ways that we suppress and gaslight the voices that cry out for justice. May we repent of our racism, turn away from the ways that it benefits us, and begin to do our utmost to get in the way of injustice.

“You must find a way to get in trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble.” –John Lewis

 

For further reading:

Dr. Martin Luther King’s “When Peace Becomes Obnoxious”

Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes’ Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength

Dr. Pamela Lightsey’s Our Lives Matter: A Womanist Queer Theology

Dr. Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage, and this article on it.

Dr. Carol Anderson’s White Rage.

Dr. Obery M. Hendricks’ The Politics of Jesus

Featured, Justice

The UMC in 2020: God Overrules Our Rules

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(On January 1, 2020 legislation went into effect that had passed by 53% at the United Methodist Church’s General Conference in February of 2019. This legislation – if obeyed – seeks to impose harsh penalties on those who stand with the LGBTQIA+ community, and drive LGBTIQIA+ clergy, like myself, out of the church.) 

“It is plain to me that the whole work of God called Methodism is an extraordinary dispensation of His providence. Therefore, I do not wonder if several things occur therein which do not fall under ordinary rules of discipline.” – John Wesley, 1771, Letter to Mary Bosanquet Fletcher

Every once in a while, when we have made gods of ourselves and set up our own words as idols, God has to step in and remind us who and whose we are, and who it is that calls us. God seems to prefer to do so by loving people we did not love, by calling people that we would not call, and by using people that we threw away. 

“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” they asked of the colonized form of a middle eastern carpenter. The answer that made them so uncomfortable was ‘yes.’ Not only could good come from Nazareth, but God chose that place exactly because they did not expect – did not want – their Savior to be “one of those people.” Jesus entered the world in such an unexpected way that it frightened the powerful, humbled the proud, and disrupted systems of oppression. 

God likes to use the people we would not choose ourselves to remind us we are not God. 

John Wesley, failed missionary, was just such a person. 

Plagued by accusations of disruption and disobedience to the Order of the Church, John Wesley wrote to his brother Charles in 1739 to explain his resistance. “I have both an ordinary call and an extraordinary,” he wrote. The ordinary call, John explained, was his ordination, that moment the Bishop lays hands on our head and says, “Take thou authority.” The extraordinary call is what God commands us to do with our ordination. 

In John’s view, the ones who ordain are not the ones who call, and the ones who ordain are not the ones who have the final word on what we do with that ordination. 

The evidence of the extraordinary call is not an adherence to the Discipline, nor the approval of the Bishop, John explains, rather “God bears witness in an extraordinary manner, that my thus exercising my ordinary call is well pleasing in His sight.” 

It is God who calls. It is the Institution that ordains. Yet, it is God – once again – who determines how we are to live out that ordination. While the institution may affirm, honor and even credential our call, the call belongs to God. We must always be ready for that moment when God reminds us of that.

This moment in time, this tiny measure of history, is that moment for United Methodist clergy and laity all around the world. That moment when God is using LGBTQIA+ folxs, and the call God has placed on our lives, to remind us that God is God and we are not.  

We are faced with a choice, all who stand as leaders in the United Methodist Church in this moment. Will we hide in the ordinary, or accept the extraordinary call offered to us in this historic moment in the church? 

John Wesley, himself, never felt like he had much of a choice in the matter. From the beginning of the third rise of Methodism, in the year after John felt his heart “strangely warmed”, he was under constant critique from his colleagues. He was accused of disrupting the order of the church by allowing lay preachers, and later women preachers. He was accused of interfering with the ministry of other pastors, by preaching in the fields of their parishes when he was denied the pulpit.

John was accused of ‘dismissing church order,’ of disruption, of risking schism. Specifically, his Clergy Order accused John of breaking Article 23 of the Anglican Order, their Book of Discipline, which forbade preachers from being sent out without the institution’s authority. 

Frustrated, John wrote to his older brother Samuel, “What is the end of all ecclesiastical order? Is it not to bring souls from the power of Satan to God, and to build them up in his fear and love? Order, then, is so far valuable as it answers these ends.”

With his brother Charles, John could be more transparent than with Samuel, writing, 

“‘But,’ they say, ‘it is just that you submit yourself to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake.’ True; to every ordinance of man which is not contrary to the command of God. But if any man, bishop or other, ordain that I shall not do what God commands me to do, to submit to that ordinance would be to obey man rather than God.”

John Wesley, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Harriet Tubman and Jarena Lee, found that the way that we answer our call is more than pragmatic – it is also about the integrity in our relationship with God. If we are determined to obey God, we will from time to time be called to disobey man in both his governmental and religious authority. This is inevitable in a world where both our governmental and religious institutions are often tempted to place themselves on the throne.

We are living in just such a moment. A moment when the world seems upside down, because they want us to believe that we are disobedient and rebellious simply because we seek to be obedient to the call from God.

Mary Bosanquet Fletcher knew well this game that Institutions and powerful men play, when she wrote to Wesley in 1771 to plead with her friend to finally have a little backbone when it came to women’s leadership, to stand with them in their right to preach. She used his own words to argue that some of us have an extraordinary call, and we have no choice but to answer it. She held him accountable to give the same grace and flexibility with the Discipline to others that he had allowed for himself. 

Her words – and more importantly, her witness and her fruit – worked. He assented to the fact that she held a truthful claim to the same extraordinary call that he had claimed for himself. Women began to receive license to preach thereafter. 

This is what has always been powerful about our movement – that a group of people so intense and disciplined and focused on Scripture and Tradition, could also be so open to our understanding being transformed by Reason and Experience. 

It was our Order that organized us, but it was Grace that transformed us. It is our Discipline that informs us, but it is the Spirit that guides us. Let us not prioritize the former over the latter.

Woe be to those who make an idol of their own words. Woe be to those who abandon the fruit of the spirit that is self-control, in order to seek control of others. 

Our desire for understanding and control – our desire to be like God in our mind – has plagued us since the beginning, clashing with God’s desire for us to be like God in our hearts. Our lust for order and power clashing with God’s compassion and grace.

Focusing on what LOOKS like a speck in another’s eye, we fail to remove the log out of our own eye in order to see them clearly in all their glory.

Like James and John, men struggle for the seat at the top, bickering like apostles over the seats at the left and right hand of the throne. Even John Wesley struggled with Whitefield, struggled with Asbury, struggled with Garrison, struggled with his brothers Charles and Samuel, seeking to protect the power and control and order that had been accumulated. 

We have always been a stumbling, bumbling crew, that require signs and wonders to believe. That demand that those God has chosen will let us kill them before we will trust their call.

I have stood at the end of a gun, at the edge of a knife, before. The gun-cocking on computer screens did not scare me out of my calling. Warnings to “Go back to the church of Satan” did not make me budge. I know what it is to have my ordinary call interrupted by an extraordinary one. I know what it is to face fear and refuse to give it the final word. 

I have stood on sacred grounds with these Queer feet; held the Holy Book and broken the Bread with these Queer hands; proclaimed the timeless Gospel with this Queer mouth. And God has rendered my witness irrefutable. 

In the words of John Wesley, “God bears witness in an extraordinary manner, that my thus exercising my ordinary call is well pleasing in His sight.”

All throughout the world there are members of our LGBTQIA+ community – clergy and laity – living out these extraordinary calls, with great faithfulness and deep sacrifice and profound courage.

The United Methodist Church is made up of many more people who will have to make the choice between protecting their own ordinary call – their ordination and leadership positions – and listening for and yielding to an extraordinary call that is summoning us out of our stable, secure place. Do you hear it?

All of our careers, they have been telling us that it was on our shoulders to save this Institution. What would happen if we choose to save the church instead?

Will you be a true Methodist? Will you rebel, resist, disobey unjust laws? Reject stability and professional advancement when it gets in the way of God’s call? Read, write, and create vociferously? Preach the Gospel with courage and compassion? Care about the health of people’s bodies like you do their minds and souls? Reach out constantly and stay connected? Empower people no one has empowered before?

Will we look threats and cruelty square in the eye and resist harm together? Will we declare that all belong?

Will you refuse to stand under the shelter of a mutilated tree if these LGBTQIA+ limbs are severed?

We build towers. We build walls. We make rules. But God tumbles towers, God tears down walls, and God most certainly overrules our rules.

“But what if a bishop forbids this? … God being my helper, I will obey Him still: and if I suffer for it, His will be done.” -John Wesley, 1739, Letter to Charles Wesley

 

Looking for resources to aid in resisting? Check out the resources for individuals and communities at #ResistHarm. Look into the efforts at All Belong. Find liturgy and add your support to the work of enfleshed. Find resources specific to your context at RMNetwork. Heard about something? Suggest other ideas in the comments section below!!

 

Community, Listening

You can play with me

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“You can play with me,” a little voice said to me from the other side of the slide. It was my first day at a new school, and when recess came, I had fled to conceal myself under the big metal slide on the far edge of the playground. Turning my head, I looked up to see another girl, tiny like myself, with a hand of friendship reached out in sincerity. Slowly, I crawled out from under the slide and took her hand. For the next twelve years that we went to school together, I would never forget the way that Becky made me feel in that moment. Included. Worthy. Interesting. Loved.

Over the past week, I’ve found myself wanting to say the same thing that Becky said to me to some many hundreds of United Methodists: “You can play with me.” 

In the weeks since the Special Called Session of General Conference, I know that I have not been the only one hiding under the slide, feeling as if the whole world is chatting on the swings without me. We can’t really see or hear to know for sure whether that feeling is real or just our imagination. Perhaps everyone has found a corner of the playground to hide in themselves, or perhaps they are all twirling and talking together on the tire swing, spinning until they feel like they are going to throw up. Secrets are held close, and no amount of craning our necks will give us a clear view. 

Gatherings were announced for May, one open to the public, and one by invitation only; each offering a space to discuss how we would move forward, what would come next. The public gathering invited anyone who wanted to come to join the conversation. The selective gathering encouraged people to nominate others or nominate themselves if they wanted to be chosen. 

At first the reaction and condemnation of the selective talks was swift on social media, people said things like “we’ve tried this before” and “the time has passed for cis-het white men to be steering the ship.” As time passed, though, people became curious. They poked their heads out. Those that hadn’t had much interest in playing kickball found themselves wondering, “Will I be picked for the team?” Wondering whether they would be called special, chosen, leader, worthy, wise. Gradually, rigid resistance gave way to the expectant awaiting that fell over the crowd. 

In a moment when so many of us were feeling cast out, what a comfort it would be for somebody, anybody, to draw us into community, to help us feel less impotent. 

I was chatting on the phone with a friend on my way home from work when she went to check her email. “Maybe there will be one for me,” she said hopefully, like Charlie Bucket opening another chocolate bar, hoping to find that one last Golden Ticket to gain entry to Willy Wonka’s tour of delights. “Oh.” I heard the pain in her voice. The sound of one already excluded, being excluded still. It turned my heart inside out. 

All I could think in that moment, all that I’ve been able think in every moment since, were Becky’s words: “You can play with me.” 

I wanted to say it to her and I wanted to say it to you… and to be honest, it did not even start last week, I’ve wanted to say it every day since February 26th. 

I want to be on your team. The guys who have declared themselves team captains did not pick me either, friend. But that does not mean that we can’t play. I want to climb out from under my slide and pick dandelions with you. I want to join the crowd throwing the dodgeball up against the big stone wall. I want to take turns timing each other on the monkey bars, and spin in circles until we fall down laughing in the grass.

I want to play with you. I want you on my team.

I think you are so special, and worthy, and interesting, and wise. I think you are a leader who we cannot do this without. I am just such a big fan of yours, and I am sorry that I have not told you that enough. You amaze me every day when I see the brave and creative things you are doing passing through my newsfeed. 

Friend, I know that I can’t offer you a field to play on, or the newest toys, but I have a feeling that we can make do. That is when we have always had the most fun anyway. Running through the woods. Using our imaginations instead of our search engines. Creating toys out of sticks and rubber bands and dreams. That is when we have created the most beautiful things. When resources were low, but love was high. When power was lacking, but creativity was abundant. When we did not have the answers, but we had faith that God would give them. 

Friend, I do not know what comes next, and it has been so hard for me to pull myself out from under this slide. But now that I’m out here, standing in the warmth of the sun, I find my heart overflowing with the words that someone once said to me: You can play with me. You are not alone. You are fun, and wise, and incredible, and good. You are brave, and strong, and creative, and kind. You are simply fantastic, and I just can’t wait to see what holy mischief we can cook up together. 

Come on, let’s go adventuring, friend. You can play with me.

Featured, Listening

What are you fighting for?

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Riding my bike along the narrow inches of shoulder between the paved road and the deep ditch, I struggled not to fall in the water, and thought about the children I was told had walked these same treacherous trails to come to church. It was about a decade ago, and I was in my first appointment, a rural community where folks worked hard and loved harder. I would hear many stories before then and since then, but no other story would haunt me the way this one did – if by haunt one means accompany, travel with, teach, convict and inform. 

It all started when the congregation that I had come to serve had hosted a vacation bible school at their church. They had a great time and so did the kids. There were two children, in particular, that were so drawn to the love that they found that week that they began to come to church on their own. There was no one in their family willing to bring the two young kids, but they would not give up. So they walked to church along that dusty shoulder by themselves. 

Living in the marshes, where flooding was a constant and a way of life, an intricate system of ditches interlaced our landscape to control, or diminish, the interruptions that the water brought to our lives. The ditches meant that roads were sometimes narrow ribbons, curves were sometimes sharp, the shoulder was sometimes eroded, and the cars were sometimes fast. Walking to church was never the safe option, it was always the brave option. And brave they were.

The church members were overjoyed by the children’s commitment to coming to church, but as time passed some of them decided that they needed to “love” the children better by telling them what they were doing wrong. To start with, the kids were not wearing clothes appropriate for church, they were just wearing jeans and t-shirts, the only clothes they had. Secondly, with all that walking in the dust, the kids were showing up dirty and dusty and not quite presentable. Eventually, somebody took it upon themselves to sit the kids down and explain to them what they were doing wrong. 

The children never came back. 

The woman who narrated the story to me told it with so much grief. A justifiable grief. A grief that many of us have felt over similar missteps in our journey, as we mistook our own discomfort for someone else’s problem; as we mistook our need to control the behavior of others for love; as we mistook our exclusive actions for welcome and embrace. 

That was, for me, in a nutshell, the relationship between young people and the church. They come to us longing for a place that pushes them away. They walk such treacherous and sacrificial paths to get to us. And, often, as soon as they decide to trust us, they end up wishing that they had not.

At that time, a good decade ago, my solution was to protect young people from the excessive criticism and control that the church is so prone to exert by being perfect myself. I thought that if they were happy with the most visible young person in the space, then maybe they would not notice the torn jeans and flip flops worn by the rest of us. Maybe I could distract them. 

I got up each morning, in my big, country parsonage, and dressed in slacks, a button down, and dress shoes. I did my hair and my make-up. I ruined more shoes than I can count walking out into my all-too-often flooded front yard, trying to look the part  in attire that was not built for the rigors of marsh life. Some days, the roads would be too flooded to leave my house, but that did not stop me from putting on my armor. I never knew when someone might drop by unannounced to check on the young pastor. Besides, even if no one came by, twice a day, the elderly gentleman across the street could be counted on to pull his big brown sedan out of the driveway and up the street to the garage where the men gathered, to get a coke and report on the movements of the young woman in the parsonage. 

I knew I was loved and respected in that parish, and the love and respect was returned, but I still felt the eyes upon me. I concluded that if folks were happy with the young pastor and I gave them no reason to complain in how I presented myself, then the young people of the community would draw less criticism. For my part, if my appearance did not draw any complaints, then I’d have more space to stir things up with my words, as I preached about the Gospel that rejects racism and sexism on a regular basis. 

When I was commissioned and was moved north, all that began to change in my second appointment, in another rural part of another state. One day, looking out at a congregation where many young people wanted to just come as they were, something clicked. I decided that the best way to be a good shepherd and to shield the young people was not to look less like them. I decided to come to church looking like me, looking like them, looking like us. I decided that if people wanted to be mad and complain about the young person in blue jeans, that young person should be me. 

So I put on my blue jeans before I walked into church the next Sunday.

I decided, if you want to judge someone, judge me. 

If you want to complain about someone, complain about me. 

If you want to push someone out, make it me. 

Not them. Not our beloved young people. Make it be me. 

I learned that distance and respectability and authority will never be so transformative as solidarity. That is why Jesus gave up all of those things to come and walk amongst us, to look like us, walk like us, love like us, break like us.

We often do not have any idea what a young person has gone through before they walk through the doors of our churches. Maybe they have walked for miles in the dust along the narrow shoulder of a country road. Maybe they have spent three years in therapy trying to get over the ways they were rejected the last time they trusted a church, before walking in that morning and giving yours a try. Maybe they did not have the “right” clothes, or the “right” hair, or the “right” look, but they came anyway because they knew that this was the right place for them and they hoped you agreed. In so many different ways, they risked themselves, they risked their lives, they risked their hearts… on us

In November, after more than a decade in ministry, two decades if we start before licensing, I had listened to more tears and broken hearts and shattered dreams than I could even begin to count. I had ministered to too many mothers of gay sons, and brothers of Queer sisters, and non-binary youth.

I finally realized that it was time to put on my blue jeans again. I acknowledged to myself and to others that I was Queer, just like so many of the young adults I had ministered to from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, to the poetry events of Houston, Texas, to the college students of Tucson, Arizona.

It was not enough to tell them, “God does love you” while wearing my armor, when I had it in my power to say, “God does love us.”

So I put on my blue jeans.

I decided, if you want to judge someone, judge me. 

If you want to complain about someone, complain about me.

If you want to try to push someone out, make it me.

Not them. Not our beloved young people. Make it be me.

I will not let them be pushed out onto the street alone. 

I’ll be there. You’ll be there. We’ll be there.

When the final vote came in at Special Session of General Conference, I thought of all the millions of dollars, and countless hours and thousands of initiatives that had been launched to create new places for new people. Could it be true that they were all rendered null and void with the push of a button?

In her book, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements, Charlene Caruthers reminds us that we must not get so caught up in thinking about who we are fighting against, that we forget to ask ourselves what we are fighting for… 

…I am fighting for those kids walking along the dirt road to get to church because it is a place they believe they will find love. I am fighting to make us worthy of the trust they offer us, the risks they take for us, the sacrifices they made for us. I am fighting because I want our promises to ring true again. I am fighting for love. I am fighting for them. I am fighting for me. 

What are you fighting for?

Listening

When the hand that held you holds the stone

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“I miss my dad,” I thought looking down at the creamed chipped beef on the plate in front of me in the Thunderbird Cafeteria outside of Canyon de Chelly. The last time I had seen my father, he was looking down over the railing into the entryway of the Dome in St. Louis where I stood locked out with many of the Queer clergy and allies after the Traditional Plan had passed at Special Session of General Conference. Did he see me? Was he looking for me? I don’t know. 

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Maybe it doesn’t matter. I was not the reason he was there. He was there to support my mother as she cast her vote for the Traditional Plan. 

A week later, sitting in the cafeteria of the old-fashioned motel in the town of Chinle in Navajo Nation, reminders of him were everywhere. They served all of his favorite foods – creamed chipped beef, corned beef hash, cream of wheat – all the foods that would have been popular when he road tripped through this region with his family in the 1950’s. Everywhere I turned, every vista and landmark, reminded me of him. As Wade and Hannah T. led us deeper into Navajo Nation, on this journey of “Decolonizing Theology,” I found myself coming to a deeper understanding of why a part of my father had never left this place.

That last time I had seen him, looking down at us with confusion as we sang, I had waved at him. I do not know if he saw me, but I wanted him to see me. I wanted him to find me. He had always found me before. Countless times, he had found me. 

I missed the weight of his hand on my back the hundreds of times that I had run to my room, plopped facedown on my bed, and emptied my eyes into my pillow case. It was predictable as clockwork that when the pillow under my face was as wet and worn out as my tiny shaking body, I would feel the weight of his hand on my back. Countless nights my little-girl heart pounded like a drum in my ears, every part of me straining, hoping for an apology that would never come. She never came. Instead, it was always him that came. It was always him that could not listen with indifference to my pain any more. He never said anything. There was not anything for him to say. The apology that was needed was not his to give. Quietly, he would slip into my room, sit down beside the limp body of the youngest of his four daughters, and place his hand on my back. Warm. Heavy. Comforting. Silent. It was not everything I needed, but it was enough to hold me together. 

Time after time, the former Drill Sargent transformed into a field medic, putting pressure on the wound to keep me from bleeding out. His hand on my back the only thing standing between me and irrevocable despair. His hand on my back silently fighting the lie that I was not and could not be loved. His hand thrust out at the final moment, pulling me back to safety again and again and again.

Like many Queer clergy, I am the intensely ethical child that my father raised me to be. My ethics are consistent, just different from his, emerging from a different identity and experience. Still, my convictions are passionate. My determination is tireless. My spirit is indefatigable. And somewhere along the journey towards solidarity, I left my home and  learned from those who have suffered more than I can imagine how not to cry. I learned how to swallow tears whole before they see the light of day. I learned to be a sponge, relentless in my absorbency of trauma, unwilling to allow the District Superintendent, or the Sheriff, or the white nationalist see a glimpse of my pain. 

I have not cried since General Conference; since I was locked out of the Dome; since I watched my dad turn and walk away. I do believe he was looking for me, but at the same time he was not in St. Louis to be there for me. He was there for her. There would be no hand on my back, no hand to catch me, so I better keep far away from the ledge. 

It had been somewhere around the time that John Lomperis’s photo went up in my parents’ kitchen that I knew this day would come. There he was staring back at me as I sat at my mother’s kitchen table. The place where we had drunk so many thousands of cups of tea; the place where my father had served me scrapple in the morning, and my mother pork chops in the evening. Now, across the small round table – my first altar – the smiling face of the Inquisition stared back at me, affixed with a magnet to my mother’s fridge.  

Home was no longer home. Tears were no longer safe. Love was no longer mine. 

In grief, I told my mother that someday our church would split, and that I would not be able to be in the same denomination with them anymore. Undeterred, she spent the next several years doing everything in her power to ensure that day would come to pass. 

Sitting in the spectator stands of General Conference, I watched all this unfold before my eyes. “Hi daddy,” I said to my father softly as I climbed past him up to the top row where the polity wonks were gathered. I longed to be with him, but he was not there for me. 

Over and over again, I heard the verse that had hounded my family throughout my childhood read out by the Traditionalists as an argument against the LGBTQIA community. 

“Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?” “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

Matthew 19:3-6. It had been the reason that my father was not allowed to serve on the school board at my Christian school in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. My mother was his second wife. Throughout the twelve years that I was enrolled there, the shame lay heavy on my parents, heaviest on my father. Slowly grinding down. For his children, the shame was not heaped as heavily on us as it was upon the students who had two homes. At least my own parents were still married to one another. That put me one step up in my school’s hierarchy of shame. 

I remember one day when my brother and I decided to sit in on the adult Sunday School at our home church, Bethlehem United Methodist Church, when my parents were teaching. One couple in the Sunday school was unleashing vitriol, arguing that to divorce and remarry was an abomination. My brother and I turned red with embarrassment. This conservative couple was saying this to our parents’ face, in front of their apparently dishonorable and illegitimate offspring, not knowing – or not caring – that my mother was my father’s second wife. I will never forget how hot my face burned that day. 

Now, this same verse that had caused my parents so much pain when I was a child, was being used by their Traditionalist compatriots to heap shame upon me. And they were not speaking out against it, as my brother and I had in fact done in that Sunday school classroom for them. This weapon that had hacked at the roots of our family tree for forty years, they now watched without protest as it was lifted to sever one of their own limbs.

Those that shamed my parents called that correction “love,” just as my parents would now insist that what the Traditinalists are doing to me is “love.”

The exegesis of those who used a scripture about divorce to speak of the LGBTQIA community was confusingly inaccurate, and the irony close to unbearable. Rev. Anthony Tang got up and proposed an amendment that if we were going to use this verse, then we should also bar divorced and polygamous clergy from serving in the church. He was followed soon after, however, by my candidacy mentor, Rev. Dr. Joe DiPaolo, who got up to the mic with condescension and annoyance in his voice, to tell the gathered assembly not to be distracted by the amendment. In other words, not to fall for this attempt to reveal our hypocrisy and make us ethically and exegetically consistent. Instead, Joe encouraged them to stop wasting time and vote the amendment down so that they could push forward in focusing their exclusion solely on the LGBTQIA community. 

In the end, the same verse that had pushed my father’s head down in shame throughout my life, was used to deal a blow to me. It was used to argue against my morality, my humanity, my identity, my call. And it won. What a strange legacy to pass on…

…but I will not bow my head beneath this false weight. I refuse. I dissent. I defy. 

Thank you dad for holding me together decades ago, until I gained the strength to stand up to anyone… even you… even your beloved IRD… even your cruelly punitive WCA. 

I’ll be standing my ground right here, if you ever want to come and find me. I do not need a hand on my back, but I would take another friend in this struggle, if you could ever bring yourself to stand with me – and for me – on this side of the divide. 

Featured, Listening

Grief on the Margins of UMC General Conference

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Amidst the concentric circles that sat within The Dome in St. Louis this week, it was the outer ring that leaves my heart hurting most as I walk away. We gathered for this Special Session of General Conference to discuss human sexuality and bring to a conclusion the battle that had raged in the church since the 1970’s. On the floor of The Dome, where football rivalries are usually waged, a different game played out. In the center, on that floor, the voting delegates, elected from around our global church, both clergy and laity, convened to cast their votes on our Queer family’s place in the church. Around them were the Bishops, and pages, and various support folks given access to the space. Above all that, in the stands, were the Observers, folks like me, who had come from far and near to witness what would take place.

Yet, even they were not the outer circle.

Outside of the stands, on the Concourse Level, were the non-unionized employees working the concessions stands of the Dome, serving us overpriced water and soda and popcorn. Positioned to their left and to their right in each opening were large television screens, broadcasting the images and sounds of everything happening inside on the microphone into their ears. The screens were there for the people in line to stay up to date on what was happening inside, and few of those people probably thought about the effect they were having on the people behind the counter, handing them their hotdog and taking their cash. 

As the Conference moved through the first couple days, something beautiful began to happen. Seeing those of us in rainbow stoles, our beautiful brothers and sisters behind the counters began to feel excitement and hope. Many of them began to wear rainbows themselves, at first just a little, and then fully bedecked. There was something of a sense of celebration to it. It was as if they were not only showing solidarity to us, but also celebrating an affirmation of themselves as supporters of LGBTQIA+ folxs who had found church people who agreed. 

Yet, as we got into discussions, there were those screens above their heads, the speakers blasting every word that was said into their hearing. They were not passive recipients of our presence, they were active participants in our church community this week… for those of us who had the eyes to see them, the ears to hear them, the hearts to love them. 

They, in kind, heard every ugly word we said from the microphone. They heard every bit of gaslighting. They heard every snide conversation held between Traditional Plan supporters waiting for their soda. They saw the results of every vote we passed to condemn our Queer family.

It did not take long for the rainbows to vanish, disappearing as quickly as the joyful smiles left their faces. 

My heart ached most of all for them. 

The amazing Rev. Sara Baron had a bag full of small yarn rainbows with notes that said “You are loved” that had been knit by a woman at her church and prayed over by the children of the congregation. She had given me a bunch of them to hand out to people who needed them, and as I walked by a concession stand, I handed them to one of our family behind the counter. “Wait, I want one!” the person next to her called out. They took them, and slipped them into their pocket, away from condemning eyes but still close to their hearts

The small bundles of colorful yarn matched the large yarn rainbow stole that I was wearing, and so word spread quickly among the workers that if you wanted one of the notes with rainbow yarn, to look for the lady in the big yarn stole. I found myself being hailed down as I walked through the halls, dropping pieces of rainbow yarn into people’s eager hands. The colorful drops of love, that matched the stole my Aunt Jackie knit, became like water running off the edge of the cup that overflows with mercy.

When the Traditional Plan passed, and I rushed down to the lobby to make sure that Queer family and allies were safe from police, we found ourselves locked out. Police barred us from re-entering to the closing worship service. I could not get to my belongings, and I could not get to my family behind our Concession Stands. I could not remind them they were loved. I could not tell them we would still fight. I could not tell them this changed nothing about how precious and beloved they were. I could not tell them that I will still put my collar on this Thursday and serve Holy Communion. 

Yet, though separated by police, and gates and distance, the air between us was clear. So, when we sang out at the top of our voices there in that lobby about the unconditional love of God, I know they heard us.

I know they heard us.

I know they heard.

I know. 

Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do.

 

Community, Justice, Listening

When Celibacy Conflicts With Faithfulness

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Most young clergywomen are familiar with the predictable conversation that takes place when people encounter us for the first time in the wild. Scrunching up their face in puzzlement at my clergy collar, the woman cutting my hair, or the man ringing up my groceries will almost inevitably ask, “So can you get married?”

In earlier years my answer always came easily, “Of course I can get married! No, I’m not a nun.” In more recent times, however, I have found the answer does not come as readily. “Technically…” has become my cryptic reply.

Having come out as Queer clergy a few months ago, I have been wrestling with what that word “technically” means to me. It means that I can get married – technically – but not in a way that would be life-giving for me, since the only marriage that my denomination condones – technically – would be if I were to marry a man. In a few days in St. Louis, many people that know and love me will have the ability to vote on whether that technicality will change. What a strange circumstance, that there are people that I have lived with and worked with that will be able with the push of a button to decide something so important to me. Some of them plan to vote to set me free, and some of them plan to vote to end my career by requiring me to reject who I am to continue in it. Emotionally, and practically, it is a strange power for people I love to have over me, like holding the keys to a medieval chastity belt.

A heavy weight has sat on my chest every time I try to write about this. Since coming out, I have observed that some who know me would like to make this reality easier for themselves by choosing to think of me as “not like those other Queer people” or somehow better than my Queer family because I’m not in a relationship, and am therefore not “practicing.” It seems easier to tell themselves and others that I am the one choosing celibacy, than it is to talk to me about it and understand how I feel. 

While it is uncomfortable for me to talk about this as well, I do not want to be used as an easy out by anyone either. I need to speak my truth and my reality.

So, let us be accurate. I am celibate. This does not mean I have a call to celibacy. This does not mean I have the “gift of celibacy.” If someone tells you that, then it means they have not loved me enough to talk to me about it. This is simply my reality. I am celibate. Full stop. And I wish I wasn’t.

It bears noting that it has been a difficult year for women who grew up in the purity culture. Joshua Harris expressing his remorse over his book – that was treated as evangelical doctrine – does not lessen the trauma it caused. 

It has also been a difficult month for women with vows of celibacy. The Pope expressing his remorse that nuns have been being used as sex slaves by some priests and Bishops does not lessen the trauma caused by those who feel betrayed by their vows and their institution. 

It will be a difficult week for queer clergy ordained in the United Methodist Church. The expressions of sympathy from church leadership will not lesson the trauma that is about to be caused as the intimate aspects of our lives will be casual discussion for our global colleagues, as they are discussed right in front of us as though we are not in the room.

Here I sit. Occupying all three of these realities. This is no coincidence. 

How heavy the task of finding the words to say about my own life, when for others it is so easy to speak of us. It is so easy to assume things about Queer clergy. The word Queer somehow makes people think they have permission to assign all kinds of assumptions onto you that they would feel shame ridden to have cross their mind about their heterosexual colleagues. Somehow logic does not prevail, and they assign judgment to the object of their imagination rather than to their own imagination itself.  How comfortable sits the man with power and hubris, speaking with ease about things which he will never experience, know or understand. 

This vow of celibacy, shared by those nuns, their abusive priests, and I, was imposed upon us for the purpose of institutional preservation, then camouflaged successfully over the centuries and decades by a rationalization built upon a false equivalency between being called to the priesthood and being called to celibacy. 

Let us break this down. 

Somehow the church survived the first 1000 years of its history without this connection between celibacy and the priesthood. Yes, it certainly appeared here and there, and now and then, but never as a comprehensive and compulsory requirement. It was not until the First Lateran Council in 1123 A.D., in a selective and non-ecumenical gathering, that celibacy was decreed as a comprehensive commitment for priests, rather than the occasional and geographical ways it had sprouted up from time to time. The church, frustrated with fighting over inheritances with the children of priests, was eager to rid itself of the complications and costs that accompanied a priest who had wives and children. Thus, it was decreed in Canon 7:

We absolutely forbid priests, deacons or subdeacons to live with concubines and wives, and to cohabit with other women, except those whom the council of Nicaea permitted to dwell with them solely on account of necessity, namely a mother, sister, paternal or maternal aunt, or other such persons, about whom no suspicion could justly arise

The fact that protecting the finances of the church was the crisis of the moment was further emphasized in the next line, Canon 8 of the First Lateran Council, which stated that laypeople, regardless of “how religious they may be,” may not carry out church business because they may “arrogate to himself the disposition or donation.” In other words, the church feared laypeople getting their hands on those tithes and offerings, just as they feared the families of priests getting their hands on church resources in Canon 7. 

Therefore, we found ourselves a thousand years into the history of the church, compelling all people who were called to devote their lives to God, to also devote their lives to celibacy. We placed upon them the requirement to suppress something that was good, godly, and beautiful about themselves, in order to be permitted to answer their call to serve the church. 

This requirement of celibacy for the priesthood did not come from God, however, and was not rooted in scripture. It was a decision made by man. Requiring something so huge from people as the price for “letting them answer their call” did great damage to the relationship between God and those called to serve God. It created a false barrier in the communication between God and those God called. It required them to give up something that God had not called them to give up, but that the church needed them to give up for financial reasons.

This is abuse. Abuse of the trust that people place in the church. 

In time this became evident to some. The many traditions that arose as a result of the Reformation permitted their priests to marry. Vows and expectations shifted, and with time the priesthood in these other traditions even came to include women as well as men. 

The latest chapter of this came in 1983, when I was only three months old. At that time, my own tradition, the United Methodist Church was concerned for their institutional preservation, as the Roman Catholic Church had been at the First Lateran Council. 

As Bishop Jack Tuell would later give testimony:

“It’s February 1983, a little over 20 years ago.  I am meeting in an airport in Albuquerque with two other United Methodist bishops and an executive of the Division of Ordained  Ministry out of Nashville. We are doing preliminary work on legislation for the 1984 General Conference. Our subject matter was ordained ministry. We worked on many aspects of the subject. But a particular concern being raised was: “How do we screen out homosexual persons from becoming ordained ministers?”   

I proposed a seven-word addition to the list of things to which candidates for ministry must commit: “Fidelity in marriage and celibacy in singleness.”…
Now why did we do that?  You would think that on as important a matter as that we might look to Wesley’s guidelines of discernment: that is, scripture, tradition, experience and reason.  But I’m here to tell you that we did not look at the scriptures; we never mentioned tradition; we did not refer to experience, and reason.  It was almost absent from our discussion. Instead of those four classic words guiding our conversation, we were unconsciously guided by two other words: institutional protection.”

In other words, men in my denomination made the choice, for the purposes of institutional protection, to avoid the whole “gay conversation” by taking advantage of the law of the land, and the fact that it was not legal for gay folks to get married. By inserting a phrase “celibacy in singleness” into the ordination vows, they could ensure that those who could not legally be married would have to remain lifelong celibates, in order for the church to avoid an authentic engagement with them and a loving conversation about their thoughts, experiences, identities, and realities. 

I was born and baptized into a church that did not include that in the vow. Yet, 28 years later, it would be a vow that I would take when I answered my call to ordination. At the time, I believed the vow to be a part of the history of the church, I did not know it had been inserted in my lifetime. At the time, I had not embraced my queerness, and I had no idea how that vow was strategically created to bind me. 

For the years that followed, there was something that I could not put my finger on that lay between God and I. It was not until recently that I would find out what it was: this vow that God did not require of me, that man forced upon me as the price that I had to pay for others to gain the ability to avoid the loving conversation.

God, on the other hand, has never avoided the loving conversations with me. I felt the same good-humored embrace of the Spirit when I accepted my Queerness as I had when I accepted my call, “Welcome, it took you long enough.”

We can debate the content of the vow, whether it is reasonable or not, but that is a straw man, a distraction. Why those words are there matters. As a person who strives to live with integrity, the “why” always matters to me. The intention behind putting those words in my mouth matters to me. Both in the case of the Lateran Council, and in the case of the General Conference of 1984, institutional preservation was what was at stake, and not spiritual integrity. That is a betrayal. 

There have always been people on all ends of the sexuality spectrum, both heterosexuals and members of the LGBTQ+ community, who have recognized that this vow was a result of church politics and not sound exegesis. There have always been Queer clergy who have followed God’s calling into the relationships that God intended for them.

I admire them, and I aspire to have their courage to follow God with boldness.

To make a person choose between two callings God has placed on their life – one to be ordained and the other to be in loving relationship – is spiritual abuse. It is meddling in an area where only the Spirit has a say. It is prioritization of the institution over the community of faith. 

I am Queer. I am celibate, but I will likely not always be. I have never feared anything so much as I fear being outside of the will of God. So, if God calls me into relationship, I will obey. That is the integrity and courage that I have seen from my colleagues like Mary and Susan, Kimberly and Sofia, Bailey and Kelli. That is the integrity and courage that I want to have. I don’t want to hide any longer behind my work, behind my collar, or behind my vows.