Saturday Symposium: Struggles and Self-Care

Good morning, readers. We hope your weekend is off to a great start.

We want to thank you for another great week of interactions here at A Queer Calling. We truly appreciate the kind and respectful dialogue this space is able to foster because of the grace and compassion you show us in the comments section and on Twitter. We have received a lot of email this week, so it might take us a few days to get back to you if you have written to us, and we thank you in advance for your understanding. Now, we would like to share with you our new “Saturday Symposium” question.

How this works: It’s very simple. We ask a multi-part question related to a topic we’ve blogged about during the past week or are considering blogging about in the near future, and you, our readers, share your responses in the comments section. Feel free to be open, reflective, and vulnerable…and to challenge us. But as always, be mindful of the comment policy that ends each of our posts. Usually, we respond fairly quickly to each comment, but in order to give you time to think, come back, add more later if you want, and discuss with other readers, we will wait until after Monday to respond to comments on Saturday Symposium questions.

This week’s Saturday Symposium question: This week, some of our posts have touched on the themes of struggle and self-care. In When Legal Recognition MATTERS, we shared our concerns about navigating aspects of life together that necessitate our having some form of legal relationship to each other, and how determining the best way to meet our needs in this realm has been a struggle. In Providing Spiritual Direction, we spoke to the struggles LGBT people can face when seeking spiritual direction and the difficulties spiritual directors might have in trying to support LGBT directees. In Sometimes, I just need a date night… Lindsey reflected on how the practice of date night as an individual or a couple can be a good self-care strategy. And in Dealing with Loneliness, we addressed the assumption that loneliness is the greatest struggle for celibate LGBT people. This Saturday, we are interested in knowing: what do you perceive to be the greatest struggle that LGBT people face in the Church or in the world? What do you see as the greatest struggle for celibate LGBT people? If you are a celibate LGBT person, what self-care strategies do you use when life gets overwhelming? Which ones work best for you?

We look forward to reading your responses. If you’re concerned about having your comment publicly associated with your name, please consider using the Contact Us page to submit your comment. We can post it under a pseudonym (i.e. John says, “your comment”) or summarize your comment in our own words (i.e. One person observed…). Participating in this kind of public dialogue can be risky, and we want to do what we can to protect you even if that means we preserve your anonymity. Have a wonderful weekend!

Blessings,

Sarah and Lindsey

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.