Monthly Archives: February 2014

Sometimes, I just need a date night…

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A reflection by Lindsey

I call after Sarah, “Please don’t change into your being-at-home clothes quite yet!” After raising one eyebrow, “Well, why not?” she makes eye contact before I say, “Because I want to take you out on a date.”

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself at my wit’s end. I have been on the job market for about a month. Unexpected job loss can take quite a toll on a person… and on a family team. My temperament has been off, fluctuating through the range of distressed to desperate to oddly hopeful to plain annoyed to…. you get the idea. The Big Financial Squeeze has its way of zapping energy out of me. Earlier in that day, I had a job interview. I drove the long-ish drive to the office building, had a reasonable-length interview, and was home before lunch. I made sure to drive all the way home because the cheapest food is food you already have. As I sat in the quiet eating my pasta, I couldn’t help but hear the voices that said, “HA! You just had a ‘day’s work’ and you were home by lunch!” and “Do you realize you spent more time traveling to the interview than you spent time interviewing? You’re a loser!”

These accusations are par for the course when navigating something like chronic depression. You know they aren’t true, you know they aren’t even coming from your own thoughts, and you know there is precious little you can do under your own power to make them shut up and give you a moment’s peace. I have gained some practice in overcoming the inertia of my own tapes. I started by looking at any objective evidence that the tapes might be uttering truths. Taking stock forward from that week, I realized I had secured some freelance work, likely had some additional temporary work on the way, and just finished an interview for a full-time position. Not surprisingly, the tapes were complete and utter hogwash, and I could consider an alternative. There was cause for cutting myself a break, for finding some space to be myself, and for celebrating. There was space for date night.

I began the practice of “Date Night” many years ago by taking myself out on dates whenever I felt so inclined. Panera, a walkable neighborhood, Noodles and Co., the local park, neighborhood coffee shops, and Pizza Hut offered me sanctuary at key moments when I needed to show myself an extra special dose of kindness. Although I was a cheap date (and very much relish in the skills associated with practicing Date Night on a budget), I began learning how to extend radical hospitality to others by first offering it to myself. I learned how to check in with myself and ask, “Lindsey, what do you really want to do right now?” I came to see myself as a worthwhile person and practiced simply being alone. The video below has some great pointers if you’re looking for a way to start.

As Sarah and I have gotten to know each other, I’ve brought my “Date Night” practice with me. It is something that we look forward to doing together. We never know when the other one will pull on the cord that opens the Date Night parachute, so we do our best always to have a few possibilities. We love cupcakes, Restaurant.com certificates, walks to various free things to do, outings to some of our favorite places if the day and time permits, and getting dinner together. We keep options open for every Date Night budget. I do my best to watch for when Sarah needs the time in addition to monitoring how I am feeling. We figure out what we are going to do, always knowing that a “plan” amounts to little more than figuring out travel directions. I think the only “rule” we have is that we must definitely get out of the house when enjoying a date.

A couple of weeks ago, we decided it was high time to use a Restaurant.com certificate that we had been sitting on for several months. It felt like a day where it was best to break completely from the routine. We tend to purchase certificates in bulk on different promotional days, and we bantered back and forth before deciding on a German restaurant. Truth be told, I don’t know much about German food, but I was feeling up for a culinary experience. We found ourselves in a small restaurant we wouldn’t have even known existed. As we looked over the menu, we listened to a live pianist and breathed a bit. We laughed as we realized that we could meet our certificate’s minimum spending guideline just choosing the two entrees and desserts we wanted to try. I always try to pick my meal so that it has components Sarah and I can share. Culinary adventures are more fun with multiple people; and, I thought the bread dumplings sounded interesting as I looked to pick the side dishes that would go with my dinner. Time seemed to stand still as we sat together, broke bread, shared a meal in a delightful venue, refreshed our spirits, and enjoyed one another’s company. We left the restaurant revitalized, and promised to return again and continue sampling from the dessert menu.

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.

Providing Spiritual Direction

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We do our best to maintain an active Twitter feed where we socialize with people reading our blog in real time. We regularly ask people what questions they have or what topics they would like us to address on the blog. One of our Twitter friends raised the following questions: How do you view spiritual direction? How would you counsel spiritual directors of LGBT people?

We’ll start with a brief, but hopefully helpful, definition of spiritual direction. We believe that spiritual direction is a process forged in a mutually respectful relationship where a spiritual director comes alongside a person to help that person discern how God may be calling him or her to grow ever-increasingly towards Christ-likeness. Every human being finds himself or herself negotiating complex realities where it’s not immediately clear how God might be working in and through the specific circumstances. We think spiritual directors would do well to remind themselves constantly that spiritual direction is a fearsome task that must be fully bathed in prayer. Good spiritual directors spend the vast majority of time in spiritual direction listening, both to the person seeking spiritual direction and to God.

Relative to providing spiritual direction to LGBT members of a parish community, we think it worth mentioning that LGBT people are first and foremost people. An LGBT person will bring very similar concerns to spiritual direction as a cisgender, heterosexual person. Many times, LGBT people will be talking with spiritual directors about all sorts of human issues before discussing their LGBT status. However, as soon as a person discloses his or her LGBT status, many spiritual directors truncate their usual practices and immediately start talking. For some spiritual directors, learning that a person is gay can cue an auto-tape where suddenly, the spiritual director is the font of all wisdom and the gay person cannot get a word in edgewise. If you find yourself as a spiritual director with this habit, stop that. So many LGBT people have encountered such a great number of auto-tapes that they have adopted a habit of listening politely once, and then never darkening the church’s doorstep again.

One reason spiritual directors start talking and stop listening is they make assumptions about what a person means when disclosing his or her LGBT status. The sentence “I’m gay” can conjure up all sorts of associations. As a strategy for cutting through the script, spiritual directors can ask questions like “What does being gay mean to you?” to offer reassurances that they are still listening and care about providing direction to a person. It’s also great to ask questions like “Have you discussed this with anyone else? What were their reactions?” Sentences like, “I’m glad you thought you could broach this subject with me,” can be reassuring to some people. We think it’s impossible to go wrong in telling LGBT people that they are welcome in your faith community, they are beloved by God, and you know that they bring a tremendous blessing to your community. You might be the first spiritual director from within your tradition ever to tell that LGBT person he or she is welcome in the parish.

We think there are two main ways certain auto-tapes can negatively impact members of the LGBT community. One, some spiritual directors can default into assigning someone a vocation. A reasonably common assigned vocation is, “Well, if you’re gay, then you have to be celibate.” For many LGBT people, this assignment comes like an unfunded mandate at best and a death sentence at worst. Another commonly assigned vocation is, “Well, just pray and God will enable you to live fully into a heterosexual marriage.” This latter assigned vocation can lead to false hopes and produce destroyed lives should the LGBT person feel obligated to enter a mixed-orientation marriage. Two, other spiritual directors try to emphasize guiding people towards normative gender expectations. Spiritual directors will typically start these auto-tapes with sentences like, “Your identity should be in Christ. You are a powerful, strong, and talented MAN of God!” When spiritual directors using this approach begin to pray for people, they emphasize pronouns: “God, thank you for SUSAN. Guide HER into all truth, showing HER your plans for HER life. Help HER to see HERSELF as you see HER.” They start encouraging “the guys” to join in on various athletic teams organized by the church while connecting “the girls” with opportunities to serve in the children’s ministry. For transgender and genderqueer individuals, this kind of pastoral treatment can leave them feeling invisible and discarded. For gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals, all of a sudden gender norms have become the sole marker of their “gifts” to their community.

While some LGBT people may feel comfortable with educating their spiritual directors on matters related to sexual orientation and gender identity, many (even most) likely will not. Do not automatically expect an LGBT person to educate you. If you as a spiritual director do not have any experience offering spiritual direction to LGBT individuals, then default towards treating them like your other parishioners. Trust God to give you wisdom about how to respond to specific individuals (because everyone is different) and know that each LGBT person is likely figuring out his or her own queer calling. If you’d like us to try to track down resources that might be useful for your specific context, feel free to use the comments box or our Contact Us form. One good starting resource is a documentary called Through My Eyes that can give you some idea what it might be like to sit across the table from a young adult trying to sort questions of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Relative to your own education as a spiritual director, think about what you know about marriage and celibacy as vocations. It can be helpful for you to review what your own Christian tradition says about marriage and celibacy from a theological standpoint. Too many spiritual directors look for resources about what their tradition teaches about homosexuality. In traditions that regard homosexuality as a sin full stop, the official teaching can be focused so much on exhortations to avoid homosexual sin that it backs LGBT people into a corner. For example, it’s commonplace that spiritual directors will recommend that men do not cultivate close, intimate friendships with women unless the man intends to marry a woman. When you apply this counsel to LGBT people, it can sound like “We don’t want you to have close, intimate friendships with people of your same sex because you will be constantly facing temptation, but you still can’t have close, intimate friendships with people of the opposite sex because we don’t let heterosexual people do that unless they are planning on marrying each other.” An LGBT person trying to follow such direction can very easily find himself or herself cut off from all relationships; and, these efforts can wreak havoc on the person’s sense of well-being and acceptance. If you as a spiritual director focus on finding resources about marriage and celibacy, then you’ll have a much greater appreciation of the struggles LGBT people have applying the existing teaching to their lives… and you’ll be in a better place to help them locate information within the context of your specific Christian tradition.

Because Christian culture broadly understood is readily perceived as telling LGBT people NO!, we’d like to stress that good spiritual directors want to cut through the noise in order to find all of the yeses associated with an abundant life in Christ. Many Christian LGBT people can be so aware of what they cannot do that they lack any assurances that there are things they can do. Remember that good spiritual direction is borne out of a mutually respectful relationship that encourages a person to cultivate greater Christ-likeness. As a spiritual director, it’s important to meet people where they are so you can journey towards Christ together. Keep your focus on Christ, cultivate humility by practicing empathy, and be quick to ask for forgiveness when you make mistakes. May the light of Christ illumine the way.

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.

When Legal Recognition MATTERS

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One evening not too many weeks ago, Sarah was having trouble breathing. Typically, one puff from the inhaler and all is well. But that night was different. Sarah couldn’t hold coherent conversation, was having trouble lying down, and labored with every breath. Lindsey tried to assess the situation. After watching Sarah’s symptoms develop and worsen over the course of the evening, Lindsey made the call to drive Sarah to the nearby Emergency Room.

It is times like these when legal recognition matters.

As a couple dealing with chronic health conditions, we are no strangers to navigating various healthcare webs. Health can play up just about anywhere or anytime. Because Sarah has severe asthma and other health problems, we tend towards choosing to see a doctor when we deem it necessary. In dealing with healthcare professionals, we have had significantly more positive experiences when seeing a provider who can recognize our relationship than when seeing one who cannot and will not.

We were in the middle of an impromptu day trip somewhere in the State of Virginia. On the side of the road, we saw an old train station that had been turned into a museum. Intrigued, we decided to stop and visit. It was a combined railway station and post office from 1910. In this building, a placard over one door reads, “White” while a placard over the other door reads, “Colored.”

It is in places like this where labels matter.

Now, before we take this post too much farther, let us say directly that we do not think it is appropriate to compare the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s with current movements to expand legal rights of LGBT people as though the two are exactly the same. There are many important points of difference, and the few points of similarity that do exist are not our reason for sharing these two stories in the same post. We began with these stories because they are experiences we have shared as a couple. Being in the two different environments–the emergency room and the train station–evoked various reflections that influence how we see questions of legal recognition for LGBT people.

As members of a sacramental Christian tradition, we have no intention of advocating for our church to recognize our relationship as a sacramental marriage. We have no problem with being known simply as “Lindsey and Sarah,” and we enjoy participating in the life of our parish together. A sacramental marriage in our tradition crowns two people as martyrs to one another, laying down their lives for each other in an act of sacrificial love. A sacramental marriage is not about legal name changes, the ability to file taxes together, qualifying for health insurance, gaining access to medical records, coordinating treatment across diverse providers, combining incomes when trying to qualify for a mortgage, and managing end-of-life care. Those functions get housed in the civil (legal) sphere.

Lindsey is often bemused when thinking about how monasteries secure various legal rights that enable them to care for members of their communities. Could you just imagine the scene of an atheist father and a newly-Buddhist mother barging into a Catholic monastery to demand that they alone have the right to plan the funeral of their son who has recently fallen asleep in the Lord? Chaos and madness would ensue. Could you imagine an Orthodox nun tasked to take a very ill member of the community to the hospital only to drop the patient off at registration and have no access to any information about her during her stay? It does not happen that way. Somehow, some way, laws exist in most places to protect the fidelity of the monastic vows and the relationship of each individual sister or brother to the community. …and if those laws do not exist, many Christians rightly call forth “Persecution!”

Society has a lot of automatic systems that just seem to “kick in.” There is a lot of support when parents are trying to make sure that a new baby is appropriately recognized as a member of their family, when monasteries tonsure new members, and when two individuals get married. Along the way, additional benefits accrue–often, without the recipients of the benefits even being aware. A call to one critical agency can set a Rube-Goldberg-type legal machine into action. It’s unlikely that anyone (except maybe some attorneys and the IRS) actually knows the full process by which a newly married couple formally receives all of the 1,000+ legal rights and responsibilities associated with that status.

Many people will argue that marriage or a similar type of legal recognition for same-sex relationships is unnecessary because a same-sex couple can use alternate contractual structures such as securing a Power of Attorney. Both of us know different LGBT couples who have tried to navigate the complex gamut of legal procedures required to use these alternate contractual structures. Several attorneys and multiple thousands of dollars later, they have a piecemeal collection of documents that they hope will safeguard their relationship when legal recognition matters most.

The problem of securing legal protection to care for and provide for loved ones is not unique to LGBT couples. Oftentimes, singles and heterosexual couples who have not yet married face similar problems. One of Sarah’s friends once shared a story in which he was denied bereavement leave from work when his fiance’s mother reposed. His workplace cited that they could not grant him bereavement leave because he was not yet married and had no familial relationship to the reposed. It did not matter that months later, the reposed would have been his mother-in-law. If this event had occurred when he was married, his workplace would have taken him at his word that he needed leave time for his mother-in-law’s funeral. In America, people who are related through blood, adoption, or marriage have a privilege that people who are related by choice do not. (Common law marriages try to bridge the gap in at least some of these instances when a man and a woman share a house for a number of years.)

When we think about it, we see that many Americans do not have the security of knowing the people they choose to share life with will be legally authorized to be there when their presence matters most. The only exception to this is if the people with whom one chooses to do life happen to be one’s family of origin, one’s (opposite-sex) spouse, or one’s monastic family. Any other relationship is relegated to a second-class status. In a way, it is like those signs that hung over the train station doors. It is discrimination based on one human being’s label for his or her relationship to other human beings: family of origin and family by marriage have access to the full range of rights and privileges, and family of choice often gets stuck with the leftovers. More than a few times, Lindsey has had no choice but to remain silently in waiting rooms with no updates when Sarah has been seriously ill or undergoing a medical procedure. Doctors have actively denied Lindsey the ability to see Sarah in a surgical recovery room and access to any sort of aftercare instructions. Once, when Sarah told a physician, “My partner, Lindsey, is here to take me home afterward,” the physician said, “That doesn’t matter. I asked if you were married and have a spouse here.” That same physician later requested contact information for Sarah’s parents even though Lindsey was less than 15 feet away. Because of various legal mechanisms, lack of a legal title negates any level of relationship that two people have to one another.

Given this reality, we ask: what option does an LGBT couple who do not regard their relationship as a sacramental/religious marriage have for ensuring that they are legally protected? Many Christian denominations have promoted the idea that allowing LGBT people to marry legally will have a detrimental effect on how that particular denomination can articulate an understanding of marriage. Therefore, these denominations assert the importance of limiting the legal definition of marriage to one man and one woman. But for all the concern about protecting the institution of marriage and ensuring that there will be no misunderstanding regarding their doctrines on the religious nature of marriage, there is little to no empathy for the lived experiences of so many LGBT couples when one partner has been denied the basic privilege of caring for the other in times of emergency.

For this reason, we tend to believe that all Christian denominations have a responsibility to define marriage theologically in whatever way they deem appropriate while also working to protect LGBT people from undue discrimination in various social contexts. We do not claim to know the best solution for accomplishing this particular work of justice. But, we find these questions critical, and we are grateful that currently, we live in a place where we have some legal options to ensure that we can care for one another. Not every LGBT couple is so fortunate.

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.

Saturday Symposium: Making the Church Safe

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Hello, Friends. Happy Saturday! It’s hard to believe it’s already February. The time has been flying!

We’re so glad you’re a part of the discussions at A Queer Calling. We have enjoyed reading all your comments on our posts and your responses to us on Twitter. Many thanks once again to those who continue to share our posts on Facebook and share our link through other means. We feel so blessed to have heard from many of you in the comments section and via email this week. We would like to encourage all of you to participate as you feel led, and the time has come for a 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.

Now, for the question…

This week’s Saturday Symposium question: This week, we have featured three posts that touch in various ways on how LGBT people can be treated by and in the Church. We’ve shared that we have had really negative personal experiences when people divide “the good gays” from “the bad gays,” when we as LGBT people might not fit within the community norms at an existing Open and Affirming church, and when religious leaders try to mandate celibacy for all LGBT Christians. This week, we would like to ask: How do you feel your Christian tradition falls short of extending appropriate pastoral care to LGBT people and their families? In what areas does your Christian tradition excel at providing pastoral care to LGBT people and their families? How have you tried to join LGBT Christians on their spiritual journeys? When you have been getting to know LGBT people, what are some observations you have made that you wish were more widely known in the Church? Would you regard your home church as a “safe” place for LGBT Christians and their families to encounter Christ? Why?

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.