Today, Christians from many different traditions stop to remember the events of Good Friday. This year is unique because the Eastern and Western dates for Easter match. We have found some videos to share with you that showcase the beauty of Good Friday as observed by Christians, East and West, for hundreds of years.
The first three videos capture the Passion According to St. John, presented in Gregorian chant. The last video is the first stasis of the burial lamentations in the Orthodox Church, chanted in Greek. Don’t worry! All videos also have English translations.
We pray constantly that God would heal the schisms dividing Christians from being one body. We hope this collection of videos will speak to your heart and soul as we all contemplate Christ crucified.
May Good Friday bring you hope that God’s power exceeds even our deepest darkness.
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As many people know, I’ve been aggressively job hunting for several months. I have lost count of the number of applications I’ve filled out, cover letters I’ve written, phone interviews I’ve fielded, and on-site interviews I’ve attended. Every time I enter a new environment, I’m constantly interrogating how gender is enacted. Failure to read gender appropriately might cause a disaster for me as a person who is rather easily identified as a part of the LGBT community. The majority of states do not have any legislation to protect LGBT people from workplace discrimination. (But, it should be noted that actually proving one has been discriminated against in one’s workplace regarding perceived LGBT status is incredibly difficult.)
Recently, I posted an article on my personal Facebook account where the author asked people to “please stop calling people you don’t know ‘ladies.’” I’ve posted similar articles in the past on my Facebook page, and these articles about gender tend to generate some of the more vocal conversations. On one side, I’ve heard people make an argument that boils down to “Gender doesn’t matter. Simply treat people with respect.” On the other side, I’ve heard people make an argument that boils down to “That’s spoken with a real degree of male/cisgender privilege.”
Because of these conversations, I wanted to take a step back and think about where I’ve seen gender most strongly enacted.
Gender is an essential part of our language of respect. When you call a random help desk for technical support, the person on the other end of the line greets you with the pleasantries of using a gendered title or with “Sir” or “Ma’am” as deemed appropriate. Being gendered is not the purpose of the call. Most of the time, I’m so relieved to be speaking to a human that I just want to get the call over with as quickly as possible. The gendered aspects of the call go smoothest when secondary sex characteristics match what is on record. I have a decent number of transgender friends in various states of medical transition who have had to fight any number of uphill battles because their vocal tones didn’t sound appropriate for their first names or their legal gender markers.
I think one of the reasons why people react so strongly when they are corrected about their use of gendered language is that correcting gender is akin to correcting manners. Kids as young as 3 already practice automatically gendering people they meet. Gender is supposed to be easy.
When you tell someone he or she is getting gender wrong, I wonder if that person feels like he or she has failed kindergarten. Every time people feel like their first guess of my gender is wrong, I can’t help but notice how profoundly embarrassed they are. Here they are, simply trying to be polite, and they feel like they’ve insulted me in the first sentence they’ve uttered. Going from being polite to uttering an insult by making the “wrong” choice of a 2- or 3-letter word…the idea that this is possible is in itself confusing. It’s no wonder the question, “How is gender used?” can elicit such strong responses.
Gender can reinforce valuable social hierarchies. Some of the most gendered environments I’ve been in are the military and educational institutions. There’s a reason why the military wants lower-ranked people to sound off “Yes SIR!” and “No MA’AM!” It seems you get a gender when you’re important enough to pay attention to. I’ve been in many a drill environment where people have been dropped for push-ups because they have misgendered their interrogating superior. After all, “attention to detail” is a core skill being taught to newcomers. Less cynically, it seems that gender is used in educational environments as a way to teach children about respecting their elders. The adults have a last name; the kids have a first name.
Gender can imply to women that they are included in a particular conversation. The Declaration of Independence begins with “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” A student of history knows that the writers of the Declaration focused on the rights of land-holding, white males. Many feminist movements have included an effort to adopt more inclusive language in many areas of life that clearly reflects the presence of both men and women. Shifting language from “man” to “human” can do something psychologically where people clue in that we’re not just talking about the male gender. Clarifying that a community development program wants to support “male and female farmers” can correct an assumption that “All farmers are male” in a proactive fashion. I’m of the opinion we’ve gotten so much better at adding gender where it’s important that we have developed this odd tendency to insert gender where it shouldn’t matter.
I’ve been cultivating the practice of waiting to hear a person use pronouns before adopting a set of them myself. Admittedly, I started this habit because I lived in England and heard a person call his spouse “partner.” Being an American, I’m so used to “partner” being a covert way for a person to come out as LGB that I had to do a double-take when his next sentence uttered was about his pregnant wife. When my gut reaction was to try and puzzle out how this guy had both a partner and a wife, I knew I had to check my assumptions. Learning to listen for the pronouns (and practicing framing sentences where I don’t quite know the right pronouns yet) has saved me tons of embarrassment.
How might these three observations interact in the request, “Please stop calling people you don’t know ‘ladies'”? I think the standards of politeness have shifted towards indicating that we see humans as gendered beings. I’ve observed more than one situation where a group of women harangued a person for addressing the group as guys: the women asked, “Do you see any guys in this group?” in a way that deeply shamed the person who had unwittingly failed the gendered aspects of politeness. However, I also think that the request is fundamentally raising awareness that our standards of politeness ought to be inclusive of transgender, genderqueer, and gender non-conforming individuals. The word ladies is a profoundly gendered word. Ladies suggests not only that a person is female, but also that she has developed a particular kind of decorum appropriate for the upper class. It’s often conveyed either as a compliment (a girl is so grown up that she’s become a real lady) or as a disciplinary measure (adults working with a group of girls running amok yelling “LADIES!” to get their attention). But it’s often hard to read the true subtext.
It can be okay, and even linguistically survivable, to hold off on gendering someone you’ve just met. One potential default greeting for a business could sound like, “Hello! We’re so glad you’ve chosen to visit us today. How can I help you?” Many groups of 3 or more have an organic way of using pronouns to refer to other members in the group. I’ve had a lot of fun talking about people in a way that does not automatically assign gender. One of my personal favorites is, “I’m so excited that two of my friends recently had a baby. Both parents and the child are doing well, but they’re still adjusting to life together.” With some people, I’ve observed palpable discomfort when they figure out I haven’t given them any clues as to whether the child is a boy or a girl. These people frequently follow up with “Is it a boy or a girl?” as an immediate question. With other people, I can tell they are perfectly comfortable speaking of a human as a human first rather than as a gendered being.
As I’ve been interviewing, I have been incredibly guarded about how I disclose my relationship with Sarah. I keep my antenna sky high as to whether I should be discreet (using words like family) or if I can actively test the waters by using the word partner. I can’t help but feel extremely relieved when someone has noticed I haven’t assigned a gender to my partner. Some people ask questions right away to get an appropriate pronoun. Other people follow my lead of sticking with the word partner. Either strategy indicates to me that there’s enough cultural competence around LGBT issues that I’m more likely to be safer in that workplace. To be sure, people are actively gendering me, but I like to think the more culturally competent have at least consulted the gender marker I’ve put on the application. And I look forward to the day when one does not need to disclose one’s gender at the beginning of the job hunting process.
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Last week when we published 12 Ways People with a Modern, Liberal Sexual Ethic Can Be More Supportive of Celibate LGBT Christians, we received much thoughtful feedback and many questions from our readers. One such question arose from item #6, specifically the sentence: “Don’t assume that you’re above reproach because you have a long history as an ally.” We heard from allies who found that statement confusing and wanted some clarification. One person contacted Sarah and asked: “I take it that statement means you’ve had negative experiences with allies. Can you tell me more about that so I can avoid doing the same things myself?” The purpose of today’s post is to discuss more thoroughly what we meant in saying that allies are not above reproach.
First of all, we believe that no human being is above reproach, and that includes us. Everyone makes mistakes, and if we ever say something that comes across as hurtful or discriminatory, you can feel free to open communication with us about it. That doesn’t mean we’ll necessarily come to a place of agreement, but we’re willing to talk about the issue and would never want to be dismissive of another person’s experience. We believe very strongly in this approach to dialoguing about LGBT Christian issues, and we hope that our allies do to. When we say that allies are not above reproach, it is not an attempt to hold them to a higher standard than ourselves: it’s our way of saying that there’s a need for everyone involved in this discussion to be respectful and listen.
We also believe that allies generally have the best of intentions. Neither of us has ever experienced intentional harm or offense by a straight ally. However, even the most compassionate of people can say and do things unknowingly that hurt others. That’s why listening and communicating is so important. We’re pretty good at sticking feet in our own mouths at times, so we empathize with how unpleasant it is to do what one thinks is right, then find out later how said action adversely affected someone else. But these times are opportunities for teaching, learning, growing, and loving.
Lena Dunham’s recent acceptance speech upon receiving the Point Foundation’s Horizon Award provides a great example of an unintentionally hurtful statement from an ally. As Dunham accepted the award, she told the audience about her sister Grace’s coming out and said the following:
“It was actually a huge disappointment for me, when I came of age and realized that I was sexually attracted to men. So when my sister came out, I thought, ‘Thank God, someone in this family can truly represent my passions and beliefs.'”
No doubt, Dunham’s intention was to show support for her sister and for the broader LGBT community. However, this statement struck us as thoughtless and unkind. Being glad that one’s sister is a lesbian because she “can truly represent” one’s “passions and beliefs” effectively reduces the sister’s existence to “symbol of a political cause.” Whether Dunham meant it or not, she implied that her happiness for her sister’s decision to come out is entirely for selfish reasons. Lindsey has one brother and Sarah has one sister, both of whom are straight. If either of our siblings were to make such a statement about us, we would feel terribly hurt because we are not incarnate symbols of the political left, and we’re skeptical of anyone who cares about LGBT people as a demographic rather than as individuals. Dunham’s remark is the sort of likely-well-meaning-but-ignorant comment that we’re talking about when we say it should not be presumed that allies are above reproach.
We’ve also had a number of conversation experiences with allies in our lives that have turned out to be less than productive. In most cases, it’s because that person has been unwilling to engage further in discussion once we’ve pointed something specific he/she has said or done that we’ve found inappropriate. One example of this came early in our relationship when we showed up together at a function and people who knew Lindsey began asking, “Now that you’re in a relationship, what does that mean for your prior commitment to celibacy?” That’s a fair question, and we had some great discussion about the issue with Lindsey’s friends who were interested in talking about celibacy. But during this conversation, we happened to overhear someone saying, “It’s only a matter of time before those two give up on celibacy. Two more former gay celibates for the cause!” Sarah noticed a pained and irritated expression on Lindsey’s face, so Sarah approached this person and attempted, as kindly as possible, to address what she had said. Instead of acknowledging that she had made an offhand comment that might have been hurtful to us, this person told Sarah that she is a longtime, tried-and-true, dedicated ally of LGBT people. She began to list all the ways she spends her time serving the LGBT community, including lots of grassroots activism and building friendships with married LGBT couples. Sarah expressed gratitude for that commitment, then asked, “Could we talk about what I heard you say a few minutes ago? I’d like us to have a conversation about it.” The ally dismissed Sarah’s request and asked Sarah to think on it again once we see how celibacy is working out for us after a few years.
As a result of that interaction, we’ve never been able to trust this person or see her as safe. The way we see it, being an ally is more about being a safe person for LGBT people than fighting for certain political causes. Past reputation with LGBT people does not warrant an automatic “in” to other LGBT folks’ circles of trust. That’s why we suggested in both our “12 Ways” posts that listening and getting to know people as individuals is of utmost importance. Allies can make errors in judgment when discussing experiences different from their own. So can we. So can anyone. We believe it’s good to practice humility when interacting with people’s stories and coming to see how others understand themselves. Often, the best way to avoid hurting another person unintentionally is to accept that you are not above reproach and receive feedback graciously.
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Over time, I’ve grown accustomed to hearing the claim that no Christian should use words like “gay,” “lesbian,” or “bisexual” to describe himself or herself. I’ve heard just about every variety of this opinion. Some Christians holding a traditional sexual ethic argue that “same-sex attracted” is more appropriate as a descriptor because the other terms are necessarily linked to the “homosexual agenda.” Others, particularly straight people who would do not understand how LGB people define our terms, say that using words like these means identifying with sin. An extension of this idea is that adopting any label for one’s sexuality is a denial of one’s true identity as a man or woman made in God’s image, and of one’s identity as a Christian. These statements differ slightly, but they all posit that any identity label other than “man,” “woman,” and “Christian” (or perhaps specifically Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant) is ungodly and should be avoided at all costs.
My reaction to these claims? As my favorite high school English teacher Ms. Chafin would have said, “Horse feathers.” In all my years of trying to learn what it means to practice a Christian sexual ethic, I’ve never once come across any evidence that describing myself as “gay” or “lesbian” has caused me to forget the saving work Christ has done and continues to do in my life. Further, it seems flagrantly hypocritical that people who chastise LGB Christians for our preferred labels have no trouble describing their own identities as multifaceted (i.e. a Christian who is also a white, Republican, Kentuckian deer hunter). But at the same time, on some level I can understand the concern that theoretically, using identity descriptors of any kind could cause misplacement of priorities. I’ve experienced this myself, but in a manner irrelevant to my sexual orientation. Though I’ve been a Christian my entire life, for several years I did not see “follower of Christ” as the core of my identity.
Since before I started school as a young child, I’ve thrived on academic challenges. Nothing made me happier than to visit the home of my paternal grandmother, a retired elementary school teacher, and work my way through a reader three or four grade levels above mine. In eighth grade, I was a member of my middle school’s first-ever state championship academic team. In twelfth grade, I became the first student from my high school ever to bring home an individual title at the state academic championship. During my younger years, I was an intolerable know-it-all much like Hermione Granger. My number one goal in life was to achieve as much as possible academically . I knew that I didn’t fit well with the culture in which I was raised, and concentrating all my energies on earning straight A’s and exceptional test scores was the only means of individuating I knew. I could be “Sarah” by being “the achiever.” This pattern continued with me into college and graduate school, and eventually the new standard of achievement became presenting as many conference papers and publishing as many articles as possible.
Somewhere along the way, the desire to learn got lost and the compulsion to achieve took over completely. Though theology and other humanities subjects were my primary areas of academic work after high school, my spiritual life suffered because I struggled to remember the big picture reasons I had wanted to study these subjects in the first place. One might think devoting so much time to learning about theological developments would lead to a greater sense of connection with the Christian identity, but often this was not so for me. It was only about five years ago that I began to see how dependent my sense of self worth was on academic achievement. A therapist I was seeing at one point asked me a very simple question: “Who are you?” Immediately, I began to reply that I was a graduate student and a young teacher within my first few years of classroom experience. She cut me off mid-sentence. “That’s what you do,” she interjected. “I asked who you are.” It occurred to me then that I had no idea how to answer the question without focusing on my perceived accomplishments…and that terrified me.
Now, my priorities are different. It’s been a couple of years since my last conference presentation, and I don’t find myself obsessing over the achievement checkboxes very much anymore. I’ve made a decided effort to be more intentional in my work, and to remind myself frequently that studying (especially in theology) is not meant to be a self-serving pursuit. I’ve sought a lot of counsel from spiritual directors about how to direct my love of learning and my interests in theology toward the greater purpose of glorifying God. It became a bit easier to curb the achievement obsession when I entered my late twenties and realized that in life, there are no gold stars for super achievers. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not interested in becoming an underachiever. Hard work is necessary to achieve one’s goals, yet there’s a whole lot of life (most importantly, life in Christ) to be missed when trying so desperately to be the best at everything.
Currently, I live in a city where such a statement is considered anathema. Here, more so than many other places, one’s worth is determined by one’s highest recorded salary and level of social and political connectedness. When I first moved here, I was in a relationship with someone who considered me a pathetic failure for being unable to crank out my doctoral dissertation (which I’m still working on) within her preferred time frame. Even though I’ve come see life as more gratifying and purposeful when I focus on being Sarah instead of “Sarah the super achiever,” I’m still learning how to cope when others disagree with me on that.
Returning to my original point, I do understand in some ways why conservative Christians might feel compelled to warn LGB Christians about the dangers of becoming encapsulated by an identity marker not clearly tied to Christ. That said, I wonder why none of the people who have admonished me to stop identifying as a lesbian have ever seen a problem with the overachiever identity that actually did draw me farther away from Christ. In fact, many of them were my greatest encouragers to be the best, achieve the highest, and think little of the negative consequences. Some of my acquaintances who insist that identifying as a lesbian means identifying with sin have been equally quick to tell me, “Being a good person gets you nowhere in life. Having a long list of accomplishments is far more important than being virtuous. You’ll have time for virtue when you’re old.” There’s an obvious double standard here.
I do not mean to suggest that all conservative Christians have cultivated this attitude. If that were true, I would feel very worried for the future of the Church. However, I do believe the pressure straight Christians place on LGBT Christians to identify with certain terms rather than others is unnecessary, and is often counterproductive. It’s also disproportionate to reactions against other types of potentially problematic identity markers. Lindsey and I don’t like to do much advice-giving because we consider ourselves poorly suited to it in most circumstances, but I’ll close with these thoughts: working through the unhealthy parts of my own self-concept has helped me to show greater empathy to other people whose preferred descriptors don’t meet with my approval. Still, I’m far from perfect at subduing the entitlement I sometimes feel to question another person’s identity markers. Lately, I’ve been thinking that it might serve all of us to focus more internally on our own varieties of ungodly identity and less on presuming to know exactly what’s going on in another person’s mind and heart.
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.
Continually, we interact with people who posit that the idea of gay Christians being called to celibacy is absolute madness. Arguably, the most common objection centers upon the cruelty of consigning LGBT Christians to lives of singleness that are characterized by loneliness and an absence of any intimate connections. Yet this objection conflates celibacy and singleness and makes negative assumptions about both.
We think this conflation comes as people define celibacy as “not marriage.” If you’re not married, then you’re single. Therefore, since celibate people do not enter into sacramental marriages, all celibate people are single. Our culture values using the presence or absence of marriage as a way to define a person’s state in life. Many people regard “getting married” as an essential coming of age ritual that marks a person’s ascendence into adulthood. Because of this, people often see singleness as a temporary state, and since most celibates are single by societal standards it gets assumed that celibates are isolated people who are missing out on an important part of adult life. Taking some time to look in the thesaurus, single has synonyms of “individual, lone, separate, simple, isolated, separated, and solitary.” There is a reasonable amount of positive associations too (original, distinguished, undivided, and unique), but in our experience, people dominantly focus on how living a celibate life features an almost definitional struggle against loneliness.
In the modern world, we’ve lost a sense of vocational diversity. Within many Christian traditions, celibacy has all but disappeared. For those traditions that still preserve a sense of celibacy as a vocation, celibacy is often tied to the priesthood or joining a monastery. Marital imagery dominates discussions of the monastic discernment process. When a person begins visiting a monastery regularly, people will speak as though the individual is dating the monastery. Becoming formal novice at a monastery is regarded as the engagement period before one takes vows to be “married” to the Church. This focus on marriage as a formal commitment overshadows the communal reality of joining a monastery. Monastics do not enter a random cloud of every person called a monastic; monastics join the life of a particular community, entering into a web of diverse relationships with particular people. As arguably the oldest expression of Christian celibate vocation, monastics live their lives richly connected to one another in community. Many monastics we know see themselves as richly connected to the world through their intercessions.
Focusing so much on marriage vs. singleness as a dichotomy seems to place relationships in a hierarchy. At the top is one’s marital relationship. Friends and acquaintances occupy second and third place. For people who view relationships this way, to forgo marriage requires a massive sacrifice as one is expected to give up not only a hypothetical spouse, but also partnership, companionship, intimacy, and even love itself. Furthermore, unmarried people are encouraged to explore virtually all opposite-sex relationships with any emotional depth to discern the “marriage potential.” With such a cultural emphasis on marriage, it’s not terribly surprising that relationships between sexually abstinent people are devalued and dismissed as to their ability to offer partnership, companionship, intimacy, and love.
We’d like to state again that we regard celibacy as a mature vocational pathway that people enter rather than a default state of life that unmarried people live because they “can’t” marry for whatever reason. Our experience suggests that celibacy is most sustainably lived in an intimate community where members share life with one another. There’s a reason why monasteries have been an enduring expression of how one can live out a celibate life. Our own celibate vocations opened up to each of us fully after we started exploring the possibility of sharing life together. We’d also contend that celibate people living their lives as single in the world develop a knack for finding a meaningful community of like-minded people along professional, personal, and affective lines.
Lindsey has been actively cultivating a celibate vocation for years. While Lindsey’s discernment began in the context of a celibate relationship, the bulk of Lindsey’s learning came as Lindsey lived as a single person in the world. Lindsey sought out meaningful relationships in diverse places. Over time, Lindsey developed a sense that some friendships are “singular friendships,” that is to say that these friendships exist in a category of 1. Lindsey was amazed constantly by the depth within these friendships and the uniqueness of each friendship, even one to another. By the time the two of us met, Lindsey had four singular friendships, all of which continue to this day.
As a final thought, we think it valuable to note that historically celibate vocations have had tremendous diversity. Celibate people are not easily categorized by black-and-white thinking. For every person who has lived a celibate life in a monastery, an untold number of people have lived celibate lives in the world. Some celibates live alone as hermits while others live in large communities. There are also plenty of celibate people who live in small groups. Christian traditions have affirmed value in a celibate vocation by blessing people as priests, consecrated religious, consecrated virgins, monks, and friars. We hope our blog can be a community among people living celibate lives in the world right now so that others can better see the rich diversity of this vocation.
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.
