Author Archives: Sarah and Lindsey

Saturday Symposium: Celibacy and the Church

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Happy New Year readers! We’re eagerly counting down to the Gay Christian Network conference in Portland. This marks Lindsey’s 6th conference and Sarah’s 3rd. With the conference on track to nearly double in size from last year’s Chicago conference, we expect a lot of newcomers. If you’re going to be in Portland, we’d love a chance to meet you. If you can’t make it to Portland, consider checking out the live stream of the main sessions.

Now it’s time for our weekly 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 year, we’re presenting a workshop on Celibacy and the Church at the conference. We’re interested in helping celibate Christians, people who are exploring the possibility of celibacy for themselves, and churches who want to support people in celibate vocations. We’d love to get your input for our workshop itself: Are there particular questions you’d like us to address? Is there anything you would want to make sure we talk about? Do you have stories (positive or negative) of the way you’ve been supported in your celibate vocation? Unfortunately, the live stream only applies for main sessions. We’re tossing around different ideas about how to let our more distant readers benefit this workshop. We’ve had mixed success with audio recordings because it’s a 90 minute workshop. Do you have other ideas about what we might do to help readers attend from afar? 

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.

Supporting Gender-Variant Kids, A Guide for Conservative Parents

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A reflection by Lindsey

Like many people, I’ve been following news about the Alcorn family tragedy. Although this story has gone viral, I know that there are many similar stories that have never been told on a large scale. I’ve seen many journalists and bloggers taking up the story. In particular, I was struck by this tweet from Parker Molloy:

I have been navigating the “Can you be LGBT and Christian?” conversation for over 16 years. During that time, I have always held my faith as the principal informant of the choices I have made. There was even a season between 2003 and 2006 where I thought ex-gay ministries might be the best way forward to answer the question. I find ex-gay ministries to be exceptionally spiritually abusive and have written more about my experiences and my journey away from ex-gay ministries elsewhere on the blog. It’s been challenging and tricky for me to discern the “right” letter of the alphabet to describe myself. We constantly say LGBT people are first and foremost people. It’s a challenge to figure out how to be yourself amidst a lot of noise.

Navigating questions of gender identity can be challenging. Several months back, I wrote a post on affirming kids in a gendered world. Today, I’d like to reflect on some things I wish more conservative Christians would consider, especially if they find themselves parenting a gender-variant child.

Gender emerges naturally and organically as children express themselves. Kids love engaging with their world in their own ways. We don’t come out of the womb with an innate sense of “This is for a boy” and “That is for a girl.” We do have a sense of “I like this,” and “I enjoy that.” Not everything works for all people. I’d be hard-pressed to think of any kid I know with siblings where two of the siblings are exactly the same with their sense of understanding gender. Kids typically don’t behave in gender-variant ways because they are trying to send dismissive messages to their parents. Kids are simply being themselves and interacting with the world in a way that makes sense to them in a given moment. Go ahead and affirm your budding scientist, actor, reader, or artist. Deliver authentic praise when your children do something awesome. Wrap them up in hugs, tell them how much you love them, and let them know how glad you are that they are in your family. Telling a child to avoid something associated with the “wrong” gender is a kind of discipline. There’s a lot of that kind of discipline in society, which leads nicely into my next point.

Your family home should be the absolute safest place for your kids to be themselves. I understand that many conservative parents fear for their gender-variant child’s safety. Social gender norms exist. Being a person to push on those gender norms can invite all kinds of teasing, harassment, bullying, and abuse. How do you help your children if they are teased for being too short, having too many freckles, or being a big nerd? It’s okay to let your child experiment with self-presentation. I’ve learned that the envelope of what works socially is often far larger than adults think. Your child may just be the child who can totally rock a bow tie, a buzz cut, an eclectic dress-vest-boots combo, a ponytail, etc. It can be a good idea to help your child problem-solve various unwelcome attention from others. However, your kids shouldn’t have to problem-solve ways to be themselves to feel welcome in their own home. They might decide that certain clothes are for home-only or that it’s best to explore particular interests in specific ways. Sometimes, they might want to talk to a counselor or therapist to work through their questions in their own ways. That’s a good thing. It can be good for kids to talk with counselors and therapists about how they understand self-determination.

Becoming an adult means asking a whole bunch of questions about oneself. I’m a rare breed of adult who thinks teenagers are awesome. Teenagers are some of the coolest people on the face of the planet. They spend so much of their time trying to figure out how they want to relate to the world. They have a sense that they matter, they can contribute to the world at large, and they’re getting ready to try and do those things to make the world that much better. But, they are encountering so many possibilities at once that it’s hard to cut through the noise. Their bodies are working very hard to become adult bodies. Everything is changing. It takes a good bit for the dust to settle. I wish someone would have told me that between the ages of 10 and 25, I’d be juggling through different senses of myself and that juggling was perfectly normal. Sometimes, I think it would be better if more parents could affirm that their teenagers are asking perfectly normal questions while becoming adults. If a set of questions really freaks parents out, then perhaps it’s better for the parents to find a way to talk with other adults about how to approach the conversations in a way that can be respectful of their teens. Suffice it to say, parents don’t need to have the final word on the conversations all the time. Chances are excellent that the conversation will be on-going.

When gender-variant kids are asking difficult questions about gender, parents have a range of options to give their kids more space. Parents have so many ways to affirm their children as unique and special people created in the image of God. You cannot go wrong in telling your child, “I’m so glad God gave me you.” Sometimes it’s good to throw in “I love that you’re mine,” or “I love having you as my child.” You can affirm your relationship with your child without constantly referencing gender. Your child has so many interests that have nothing to do with gender and everything to do with providing a safe space to be real. Let your child participate in places where you see sparks behind your child’s eyes. If a child feels out of place in a single-sex environment, parents can often explore opportunities that don’t require gender segregation. And, coming back to the tweet that inspired this collection of thoughts, please consider giving gifts that don’t make a direct statement about what your child’s gender should be. One tradition I like is giving gift cards to favorite stores that have awesome Day After Christmas sales. Alternately, parents can always consider gifts like books, board games, theater or movie tickets, or any kind of amusement that would be appreciated by your child.

Gender is tricky, but you’ve honestly been figuring out your children since the moment they were born. Children are actively figuring themselves out along the way as well. Your child is a precious gift, given to you by God. Many children want to know that their parents love them unconditionally, see them as individuals, and know that they are entirely far too multi-faceted to be reduced to a single descriptor of “male” or “female.” Look for the spark behind your children’s eyes, and do what you can do so that their souls have space to dance.

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.

Fighting Tradition

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Today we’re featuring the voice of our friend who wishes to use the name Tom Merrick. Tom grew up as a gay Christian in an Evangelical Protestant home. We’ve enjoyed getting to know Tom over the past several months. At the beginning of December, we were incredibly distressed to learn that Tom’s father had told Tom he’d no longer be welcome in his parents’ house. We wanted Tom to share his perspective about living as a celibate gay Christian, entering into a celibate partnership, and dealing with his family. As always when reading guest posts, please keep in mind that everyone’s story is different, and the experiences, perspectives, thoughts, and theological ideas presented by the author will not necessarily match completely with ours. For this guest post specifically, we would like to clarify that the word “tradition” can have different meanings depending upon the context. Tom uses the word “tradition” in reference to how fundamentalist evangelical Protestants have approached questions of faith and sexuality. 

A reflection by Tom Merrick

“Tradition, tradition!” goes the debut song of Fiddler on the Roof. Tradition tells us who we are and what God expects of us. It defines us. And sometimes it binds us.

Tradition, not Scripture, holds that one cannot be gay and be Christian. Tradition says being gay is a choice. It says gay people are unacceptable to God.

That is Tradition. And breaking with Tradition means breaking with God.

That lie I have battled against. And I lost that battle.

I lost when I came out to my parents and my father counseled me to get reparative therapy to become straight, refusing to think anything but that being gay is a choice. After a long, agonizing call where I tried to convince him otherwise, I cried. I screamed. I overturned tables and desks and chairs in tortured agony, despair, and rage. All because I could not fight Tradition.

I retreated into myself, feeling abandoned, betrayed, hopeless. I drank, figuring a hedonistic lifestyle condemning me to hell was all I could do. That was, after all, what Tradition said gay people did.

I wrote, attempting to hide my writing from my parents, who were unwilling to accept me. However, they discovered I was writing, and I spent another hopeless night trying to reason with my father. But Tradition said otherwise, and, again, I lost the battle.

I found hope in a small online community of gay Christians, who welcomed me in with open arms. I found acceptance and subsequently retreated further from the unaccepting parents I lived with.

And I found love for the first time. I fell in love with a fellow man, who loved me in return, and showed me more about Christ’s love than I could have ever understood. I learned to accept myself. To look at my reflection in the mirror without seeing myself as ugly or wounded. I found what it meant to support and be supported in rough times.

But such could not be endured by Tradition. So my father confronted me about this man I loved. And again, I lost the battle with Tradition.

Two weeks before Christmas, my father asked me to choose. Choose him and Tradition, or the man I loved. I broke with Tradition and he asked me to leave.

Tradition won that battle. The stupid Tradition found nowhere in the Bible that any not straight are hateful to God. The Tradition that says cast the unrepentant from your home to their life of rebelliousness.

And so Tradition won. I spent Christmas estranged from my family and living with the man I love. And I find myself trying to make sense of a world where Tradition reigns supreme and causes me to lose the family I love. I struggle to know how I should feel or what I should do. And I try to make ends meet in the real world of job searching, loan payments and car troubles, all in a new city and environment.

Tradition has won today. But maybe someday it will lose. And maybe someday Tradition will not ruin a family like it has mine. In the meantime, I will retreat, mourn my loss, and look forward to the day when Tradition no longer defines and binds peoples’ minds and hearts.

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.

Differentiating between Divine Comfort and “Feel-Good Religion” Is Hard

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A reflection by Sarah

Last night seemingly out of the blue, my middle school basketball coach came to mind. He had a tendency to work us harder than we were physically able and managed to suck all the joy out of the sport for many of us. He always justified his severity by saying, “If it doesn’t hurt, you’re doing it wrong.” Anyone who has experience in basketball practices knows that wall sits and ladder drills are supposed to hurt. They are normal parts of the conditioning program for basketball. But my middle school coach was never satisfied and would sometimes humiliate us by having us perform intense conditioning drills in front of the crowd at games during halftime. I recall several occasions when our team was in the lead 30-2, and because he was unhappy with how we were playing we had to spend halftime running laps after getting chewed out in the locker room. As I reflected, I wondered why these memories were coming back to me so strongly.

Especially as Lindsey and I are discerning as we search for our next local parish, we hear frequent messages like, “Doing community with people hurts. It’s easy to shop around to look for a place where you’re not challenged and everyone is just like you. There’s more to being part of a Christian community than feeling good about yourself.” These sentiments, while stated with the best of intentions, remind me of messages I’ve received in the past from Christians who assail anything that resembles “American feel-good religion” — a pseudo-Christianity where God is basically a vending machine who dispenses any and all requests because God’s main role is to make people “happy.” I’ve reflected before on the importance of experiencing God’s compassion, and that feasting on divine compassion is not the same as consuming a cotton-candy spirituality. Cotton-candy spirituality is characterized as light, fluffy, superficial, and soft. Yet in attempt to avoid this, asserting that pain marks a rightly-ordered spirituality is exceptionally dangerous. Few people would argue that it is appropriate or helpful for middle school basketball coaches to berate their young players and sometimes run them to the point of vomiting.

Nevertheless, I struggle to find the balance between experiencing spiritual pain on a daily basis and encountering divine comfort that transcends my every understanding.

On Christmas Eve, I was given a wonderful gift from God. Lindsey and I attended services, and I found myself able to pray more easily than I have in a long while. I experienced a sense that God had seen me and my prayers. I began to feel that my presence mattered to God. It’s been hard for me to be present many days, especially as my physical ability level is changing. I can’t leave my bed during and after intense bouts of vertigo. Should severe attacks happen on Sundays, going to church is out of the question. I’ve felt ancillary to Christian communities and as though few notice whether I have managed to make it to service that day. Yet on Christmas Eve, I became overwhelmed by joy at the thought of Christ reaching out in a personal way to tell me that he was glad I was there, that I mattered to him, and that he was happy to receive my prayers.

Then I felt so guilty that my participation in worship that day had given me a good feeling about myself. Immediately, I began scrutinizing myself morally, asking what was wrong with me. What sort of improper attitude had I brought to worship? How had I been cultivating pride? How was it that the feelings I experienced that day in worship matched feelings I’ve frequently had after a good therapy session?

No matter what Christian tradition I’ve been a part of throughout my life, I’ve constantly been catechized that the purpose of Christianity is to worship the living God and to encounter Christ. Virtually everyone around me has made it crystal clear that the purpose of faith is not to make me feel good about myself. Going to church is not the same as going to a therapy session. And if anything, encountering Christ should make me aware of  so many ways I fall short of living fully into my Christian life. Christianity is not supposed to make me feel good. Christ does not exist to tell me that I’m a good, moral person who makes valuable contributions to society.

At that point, I started to see a problem. I have so internalized the messages that religion is not supposed to make me feel good that often I am unable to experience joy, receive moments when God decides to embrace me, and know that God loves me. I don’t think I’m alone in this struggle. Many Christians are deeply committed churches that constantly decry American feel-good religion. Sometimes, I think pastors, priests, and devout lay Christians inadvertently give the message, “If practicing Christianity doesn’t cause constant pain, then you’re not doing it right.” My middle school basketball coach justified his practice regimen by saying, “This is what we need to do to win every game.” Applied to Christianity, this philosophy teaches that daily spiritual exercises exist for one purpose and one purpose only: to get into heaven where you’ll finally receive your reward and all the spiritual suffering will have been worth enduring.

I doubt that when parents say they want their kids to understand the realities of sin and have a profound sense of awe at the God of the universe, they intend to send the message, “You are little better than pond scum.” If you’re a kid who does feel like pond scum, it can be anxiety-inducing to receive messages about being vigilant for any way that sin is creeping into your world. It’s easy to interpret these messages as, “If you’re not experiencing acute levels of pain for your sinfulness at every possible moment, then you’re doing Christianity wrong.” Since Christmas Eve, I’ve been recalling the different times when I’ve been told to doubt experiencing peace and joy because these emotions indicate the presence of a very real passion out to destroy me. At age 30, I’m flabbergasted at just how difficult it is to uproot erroneous thoughts that experiencing joy, peace, or love should have me running in the opposite direction. I have a graduate degree in theology, yet it is surprisingly challenging to affirm how God mercifully extends comfort to us amid loud cultural megaphones decrying feel-good religion and therapy culture.

I am saddened to observe that I don’t have the foggiest idea how to fix this problem. Priests and pastors need to educate people about the purpose of religion. It’s impossible to tell a meaningful story about Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection without ever discussing sin. We can’t talk about putting on Christ and bearing good fruit without warnings about alternative costumes and bad fruit. It doesn’t make sense to proclaim Christ as the Truth if we fail to acknowledge that our own hearts can occasionally be deceptive. We are called to be like Christ. As I’ve continued to explore what it means to be like Christ, I can’t help but see the ways that I fail to live into his commands. How is it possible for any of us to teach about living fully into Christ when all of us see so dimly? To this I can only say, Lord have mercy.

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: Light Shining in Darkness

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Hello readers. Merry Christmas! We’ve been enjoying some low-key days around our city with Lindsey’s parents. This year, our Twitter feed is full of people who have decided to marathon Harry Potter movies over the holidays. We’re still trying to decide the best ways to dance with a hippogriff.

Now it’s time for our weekly 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 year, we’ve noticed that many friends are struggling with hard things this Christmas season. Lindsey reflected yesterday about how observing Christmas can leave us longing for Christ’s Second Coming even as we remember his first coming. We’re curious to know: what do you do when you feel immense sadness during times of joyful celebration? How have you been able to gift others with ministries of presence? How have others been able to minister to you through their presence? How have you found light in the darkness? 

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.