A God Who Loves Queers
March 21, 2013 § 3 Comments
Valerie quoted to me recently Kate Bornstein’s direction to find the God who likes you, the God who acknowledges and affirms your being. I found this God initially, oddly enough through the Christian church, and primarily through studying the Bible. Lately, I’ve been at risk of letting go of what I know. I’m going to bypass the question of if God is real, since people name God as a motivator for all kinds of things, and thus God is real, whatever kind of real that means. And also since more than one God has been real for me, in my life. I’ve heard other queer people struggle with this, to keep hold and keep learning this God, as God. Not everyone can put it into words, and not everyone has to. But for myself in this moment, and for other people, I am going to try.
Who is the God who affirms queers? Who loves the people society hates? What have I seen about him? What do I know about her?
This God is not a God who is invested in control. This God does not need to shape creation to please himself, break it open, contort your truth, your individuality, consume you and leave you obedient.
Instead, this God is a God who is invested in freedom, committed to free will despite the cost, who is invested in consent. That God created from a place of taking joy in creativity, who wanted the joy of watching what was initiated take on a life of its own, go places and learn a self separate and divine.
This God is not going to hurt you. Even if, sad to say, you hurt someone else. Instead of control, instead of intervening in our free will by stopping us or punishing us until we are controlled by fear and made “good” she gave us the resilience of the human spirit, the presence of conscience, empathy, the will to change, the brilliance and potential of humanity to unbury the wisdom the Creative Spirit put into their own bodies and the living world and find it still there after suffering so much violence, and see new ways of being, nonviolent and creative and loving ones.
This God is not in the angry voice, the machine gun, armies made uniform and obedient and ready to be deployed, the nuclear bomb, the voice of shame, the electric rake of fear going up our spine and threatening what will happen if you do not obey. This God is not in the machine, the suppression of the self, the murder of the soul.
This God is in your own body, in the opening of your chest when witnessing something beautiful, in the energy of new truth running up your spine, in the pleasurable ache of desire in your belly, in the exhaustion of content. This God is in the resistance of the spirit against its own oppression, the courage of the commonplace person to refuse to harm another despite the threat of punishment, this God is in the vision of the radical, the humility and strength of the civilly disobedient, in each connection between human beings, in each moment of truly seeing the world, in the humanity and vulnerability of knowing ones own or another’s suffering without blindness or a need to move away. This God is in the natural world, in the reverence for one’s own true loves, the expansion and liberation of the soul.
When I say this God is real, it is because I know her. I know that other God, too, the one who hates us queers. And I say, from the spirit, don’t follow that one. That one is real. But that ain’t God.
On Christianity and Homosexuality
March 21, 2012 § 4 Comments
I recently heard a new catchy argument about homosexuality floating around the Christian community: “There are arguments on both sides, but only one side has Scripture to back it.”
I think I have proven that wrong in other posts, and so have many other people. I have pointed to the ways the Bible was used to condone slavery and mask an evil practice, and to fight against it. And many other Scriptures can be added to the argument. Take the only dialogue between Jesus and Satan in the Bible, which undoubtedly shows that Scripture can be used wrongly. And the fact that most of Jesus’s arguments with religious leaders of his time Jesus was regarding the letter of the Law. While they applied dead letter, Jesus had the right application of the Spirit of Love as his argument, which seems a much better backing to me.
To me, it feels like this argument embodies much that is wrong with contemporary Christianity. It comes from the totally wrong spirit. It does not even feel loving. It is meant to shame and silence people who would call the Christian community out for emulating the homophobia and bullying of mainstream culture under the guise of spiritual and loving behavior.
And it shows a fear and laziness in how some of us bear challenges to our beliefs about sexual ethics. If we were truly guided by a living Spirit, we would be ready to embrace new information, to make arguments in peace, and grow into new truths.
We need to collectively face the reality that our history as a culture includes rampant violence regarding sex. And that Christians have offered no alternative with strength of Spirit or beauty of vision enough to move the hearts of people and motivate them to change the way the teachings of Jesus did.
Perhaps some might envision the Kingdom on Earth as a place of nuclear families with heterosexual couples who married as virgins and never masturbated. But there is nothing radical about that vision, and it will not motivate the world to change. It will instead create a norm that we will attempt to impose upon one another with blatant or subtle violence, and draw us away from reality and the living context in which the Spirit can move and create beauty and instead into a detached and dead religious practice that creates confusion and suffering leaves us vulnerable to the manipulation of false spiritual leaders seeking power.
I think the Spirit is moving us to a grander vision, one beyond fear, where we can see how sad and weak violence is and how alive and creative and filled with joy we can be through and on the other side of the process of healing. I think we are called to rethink what we’ve learned regarding sex, and I am glad those questions are being asked relentlessly. And I don’t think throwing up blind arguments that misapply dead letter to a living world with a living Spirit can stop it.
