Category Archives: Church

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.

A Change of Season: When It’s Time to Seek a New Church Home

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Christmas is a time that brings truly epic surprises. Who could have guessed that the God of the Universe would be turned away from lodgings? Who would have thought that the first people to encounter Christ would be shepherds? Who would have known that myrrh — the funeral spice — would be a perfect gift for a newborn? Christmas is a time where God changes the story in ways that are both predictable and completely mind-blowing at exactly the same time.

This transition from Advent into the Christmas season has brought some uncharted terrain for us. After doing our best to be church with one particular community for nearly two years, we find ourselves experiencing clear confirmation that it’s time to move on. To clarify, we’re not moving from one Christian tradition to another, but to a different parish. We value our Christian tradition, and we intend on continuing to seek Christ within it until we draw our last breaths. Nevertheless, sometimes one needs to make some changes for one’s spiritual welfare. We’ve had seasons where it has become essential to seek different confessors and attend events at multiple parishes in search of some spiritual balance. Coming to these decisions is difficult for any person. Because we are aware that some of our readers are also struggling to find church homes, we decided to reflect a bit on what we’ve noticed about and in ourselves as God has directed us toward seeking a different parish.

At times, emotions, can be an important indicator that one would benefit from discerning the possibility that God is calling him or her elsewhere. In our case, we had started to notice that sadness set in just about every time we had the opportunity to go to church. We love our Christian tradition and all of the ways it invites us to shape our entire lives around Christ. Yet, we noticed that when we went to services at our parish, we couldn’t move past the sadness and it was becoming overwhelming. We had been regular attendees at our parish for over a year, but the atmosphere was full of (mostly) unspoken awkwardness. The feelings that inspired us to write 10 Things We Wish Our Church Family Knew lingered, and several months later we wrote In Which We Decide to Go to Church. We had experienced occasional hints that the atmosphere could have been changing, but only to see that those breaks in the ice were disappointingly fleeting. As this continued, our sadness shifted towards frustration. We noticed that we were constantly examining and re-examining ourselves to discern what we were doing wrong. Every time we queried ourselves, we arrived at the conclusion that all we wanted was to come to church and pray, and our expectations were entirely reasonable. We wanted to pray, go to coffee hour, and be part of a local church family during good times and bad. But the good almost never came. Our emotional experiences of church moved from sadness to frustration and eventually to anger. We reached a point at which we couldn’t imagine a Sunday with anything but awkwardness.

Especially as Sarah’s health has been steadily declining over the past four months, we’ve found ourselves asking, “Why are we trying so hard to get to church anyway?” Under normal circumstances, we enjoy going to church. We love praying with a community focused on encountering Christ, and we do our best to prepare ourselves to participate fully in the services. However, we started to notice that our Sunday preparations required steeling ourselves emotionally. We never knew what people were going to say or do around us, so we had to be prepared for almost anything. Preparing ourselves for Sunday began drifting more and more into the week, often resulting in high levels of anxiety. Once we started noticing feelings of dread intruding regularly into our Wednesdays and Thursdays, we had to ask “Are we going to church to encounter Christ, or are we enduring an emotional survival course to fulfill our Christian obligation?”

We started to take inventory regarding our spiritual growth, individually and as a couple. When one finds oneself in survival mode, it’s hard to thrive. Lindsey found it difficult to anchor solidly within our Christian tradition, branching out more broadly to other Christian spiritual practices that have been constant in Lindsey’s life. Sarah was able to engage in spiritual practices from within our tradition, but felt alienated from others in our parish community in terms of prayer life. In some ways, it felt as though any spiritual progress we were making was coming from sources apart from attending our regular parish. Chance conversations with friends developed into times for shared prayer. Visiting a different parish on occasion offered an opportunity to relax in an environment where we found ourselves able to pray. Once we began considering all of this with rigorous honesty, it became clear that our experience of spiritual life at the local parish level did not match with our spiritual experiences the other six days of the week.

Eventually, other people from our parish started to approach us to discuss how we were experiencing parish life. Especially within the past couple of months, some have dropped by to see how we are. Sometimes, great conversations happen over casseroles. We’ve been blessed to have two or three families in our lives who are willing to go the extra mile to walk with us. Over the last several months, some of the friends we’ve made at church have been confirming that we did not invent or imagine the concerns we’ve expressed about how we fit into our parish. They have recognized and affirmed that we’ve been trying different things to alleviate the awkwardness, and that it hasn’t been improving.

We’re incredibly blessed to live in an area where we do have other options. Searching for a parish is challenging. We notice different things when we visit a new parish. Our individual spiritualities are quite distinct, and we never know what features will combine to allow a place to feel like a spiritual home. We are aware that a perfect church exists nowhere, and we are not seeking perfection. We’re not looking for a Christian utopia where no one ever experiences hurt, disappointment, sadness, or anger. We do not desire a parish where we can avoid being challenged and never have to face our sins. We just want to be part of a growing, vibrant spiritual community within our Christian tradition that challenges us to grow closer to Christ.

This Christmas season, we’ll be praying for all who are without a church home regardless of circumstances, and especially for those making the difficult step of exploring new Christian communities. We would be grateful for your prayers as well. Blessed Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord to all of you.

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.

“Forced or freely chosen celibacy: how can I tell the difference?”

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Last week this question came in from a reader. It relates to a broader issue that we discuss regularly: how people involved in discussions about LGBT issues in the Church use the descriptors “forced” and “freely chosen” when talking about celibacy. A reader who identifies herself as Mariya expresses uncertainty about how she sees non-celibate LGBT people and straight allies commenting on the lives of celibates:

“Congratulations on making the Washington Post! I’ve been reading responses to the article and I keep coming back to comments like this one: ‘If these people choose celibacy for themselves this isn’t a real story. It’s a story because the ex-gay movement is dead now and these people are its replacement. They’re brainwashed into celibacy and they want to brainwash the rest of us too. It would be different if they didn’t want to make us all deny our sexuality.’

I see those comments but then I see other liberal blogs like New Ways Ministry writing about having respect for people like Eve Tushnet because she doesn’t insist that everyone embrace celibacy. As a heterosexual woman who cares about the gay people at my church, I wish someone would tell me how to tell the difference between someone who is forced into celibacy and someone who chooses it because they want to be celibate. I also want to know about the difference between celibate people forcing others to be celibate or just believing in and practicing what the Bible says without shaming anybody else for not doing that.

Some people see it as the same thing, but is it? Can someone like Eve for example be both forced and not forced, forcing others but not forcing others all at the same time? It’s not just Eve. I see people saying the same things about you two. Can you help me understand?

This is a heavy topic. We’ll begin by saying that most of the time we are also confused by what other people on the internet say about “forced” and “freely chosen” celibacy. We think a great deal of the confusion stems from disagreement about the basic meanings of these two descriptors. Some people would begin a discussion on this topic by asserting that in a truly free society, no one can be forced into doing anything. One might engage in or avoid a particular behavior because of legal, social, or other types of consequences, but the existence of these consequences does not mean that the person is being forced to behave in a certain way. Example: if you are an adult who lives in a free society and is not required to belong to any religious group, pressure to remain celibate within a conservative Christian tradition does not mean that anyone is taking your freedom away or forcing you to to anything. However, others would argue that the presence of any kind of pressure concerning what to do or not to do means that the person making the decision cannot make it freely. Example: if you are part of a religious tradition and that tradition is clear in its teaching that celibacy and heterosexual marriage are the only two vocations, gay people who want to be faithful do not actually have free choices when it comes to vocation.

Both perspectives have a strong presence in the LGBT Christian conversation, and both are represented by very loud advocates. We’ll use a fairly benign example to illustrate our own perspective: in almost every society where vehicles are used, there is some kind of regulation on speed of travel. In the United States, nearly every driver we know has some gripe about speed limits. No one likes them, and most experienced drivers have been pulled over for speeding at one time or another. It is an expectation that drivers obey speed limits, even if most of us know that it’s unlikely to be pulled over for speeding unless one is driving 10+ miles per hour over the speed limit. We know that we have the option of disobeying, and that regardless of reason this decision may result in consequences such as fines, driving sanctions, car insurance rate increases, and traffic accidents. Yet two of us have never met a driver who would claim to be forced into obeying posted speed limits. If you think speed limits are ridiculous, unnecessary, or oppressive, you can break them even when faced with consequence after consequence. You also have the option of giving up on driving entirely: you can choose not to drive or even have a driver’s license. If you are unhappy with traffic laws in this country to the point that it makes your life miserable, you can move to another country where maximum speeds are higher or almost nonexistent. You could also continue living here and attempt to debate the matter with the powers that be. Oppositely, if you are intent on obeying the speed limit exactly as posted and find yourself frustrated with all the speeders along your commute who expect you to give into their pressure, you can stay in the slow lane as everyone else honks and blows past.

We find this comparison helpful for breaking down the false dichotomy between “forced” and “freely chosen” celibacy because most of time when people claim to be forced into something, there’s actually more to the story. Not long ago, the two of us were talking about a speeding ticket that Sarah had received on the way to work. Sarah’s first reaction to getting the ticket was, “I had to break the speed limit. Otherwise I would’ve been late for work. My students would have left the classroom by the time of my arrival, the class would have gotten behind, and it would have ruined my plan to spend two whole weeks on the next unit.” All of that is true, except for one sentence: the first. Sarah had the option to obey the speed limit but chose not to because in the balance of things, the possible consequences of being late for work seemed to outweigh the possible consequences of speeding. Being behind normal commute schedule and needing to make a difficult decision is not the same as being forced and having no options. In the same way, belonging to a Christian tradition with conservative teachings on sexual ethics is not the same as being forced into celibacy as an LGBT Christian. You can stay within the tradition and disobey its teachings, you can leave the tradition for a different one, you can take your disagreement up with a pastor, priest, or bishop, or you can be like the person in the slow lane on the freeway who obeys the law even when all other drivers are blaring their horns and giving you the finger. The last option is not the one most people choose, but it is an option nonetheless.

Now for the other part of our reader’s question: from where we stand, it doesn’t make sense to say that a person voicing a desire to live into a traditional sexual ethic is necessarily attempting to force beliefs or practices anyone else. That goes for major voices in the discussion as well as the average Joe or Mary in your parish.

Some celibate LGBT people do engage with non-celibates primarily through aggressive proselytization for celibacy. We’ve run into celibate people who are ready to condemn and make non-celibate people’s sex lives their business. We do not support this approach to discussing celibacy. But there are also celibate LGBT folks who do their best to obey the teachings of their Christian traditions while speaking publicly about their experiences for the benefit of anyone interested…and that’s all: no intention of insisting that every person make that same decision. These people understand that obedience cannot be forced because it is, by definition, a gift freely given. Most likely if asked, they will tell you about their convictions in a way that is neither self-righteous nor condemning.

These two approaches have almost nothing in common except that both are talking about celibacy. Conflating the two is no different from conflating the perspective a gay person who is openly involved with hookup culture and that of a gay person who is waiting until marriage to have sex with his/her partner. Both believe same-sex sexual activity is morally acceptable, but no one on the more liberal side of this discussion would ever argue that these two people are the same in ideology and approach. It would be equally ridiculous to argue that every celibate LGBT voice is part of some broader agenda to oppress everyone else in the LGBT community.

It’s important to discuss the very real problem of churches issuing celibacy mandates and having no further discussions about what it means to live celibacy as a vocation. We hope that conversation will happen within all Christian traditions. However, dwelling on descriptors like “forced celibacy” and “freely chosen celibacy” does more to hold back productive dialogue than help people who are sorting out sexual ethics questions in real life. We would encourage everyone involved in these discussions to stop fixating on “forced” or “chosen” and instead ask, “What can I do to support people in my parish who may be discerning a celibate vocation? If I am one of those discerning, how can I invite my faith community into this journey so they can support me?”

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.

Love and the Layers of Vocation

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On November 18th a group of young adults gathered in DC to talk about Eve Tushnet’s book, Gay and Catholic at a discussion hosted by Fare Forward. The focus wasn’t on the morality of queer sexual relationships, but on the opportunities our churches and communities offer parishioners (gay and straight) to offer deep, sacrificial love outside the “default” paths of marriage and monasteries/ordination. The discussion explored alternative ways to offer love and service (whether through vowed friendship, intentional communities, moving in with family, or choice of work).

Below is the the reflection we wrote on this discussion. Due to many circumstances beyond anyone’s control, it was not able to be published on Fare Foreward’s website. We offer it here for our readers, and we also offer our thanks to Fare Forward for giving us the opportunity to write this piece. 

The two of us have grown accustomed to feeling alone in our own discernment processes, but gathering with over twenty young adults to discuss Gay and Catholic helped us realize just how many people yearn for more concrete vocational guidance from their Christian traditions. Despite the title, Tushnet’s work casts a wide net; all of us gathered sought common ground on the question, “What is vocation in the first place?”

Throughout the discussion, we noticed the focus shifting to questions of loving others well: vocations are not discrete, mutually exclusionary pathways. Husbands, wives, and monks have vocations that extend beyond marriage and monkhood.

Tushnet has discussed some strategies for how one can discern vocation by cultivating the practice of “doing the next right thing.” Being fully present in the moment can enable God to show you something different. We enjoyed trading stories about places we’ve experienced some sense of direction while simultaneously hoping for more supportive forms of community. For example, one participant shared how at his university, fourteen Christians from radically different faith traditions gathered to pray together regularly. We also spent a considerable amount of time discussing how we can borrow from various vocations to help us give shape to our specific vocations.

Taking inventories of different needs, we began to think about how we could become more active in making Christian communities just that much better for people seeking spiritual support. Saying Compline together seemed like a natural first step. As we left the gathering, the two of us found ourselves wondering what the right next thing will be to make our own spiritual community that much stronger. Throughout our late twenties and early thirties, we have heard a lot of people bemoaning the fact that young adults often leave the church only to come back when they are ready to baptize their children. Yet as we consider our own experiences in and our observations of other people our age discerning vocations, we note that many young adults desire guidance, help, and support in the church, but cannot find vibrant Christian communities willing or knowledgeable of how to do so.

Churches often put a band-aid on the problem by hosting an occasional meet-and-greet for single adults while simultaneously behaving as if meeting that “special someone” is the normative solution for a person’s vocational confusion. But in the discussion, Tushnet’s book struck a chord with people wanting more from life than the daily grind of thriving professionally. Direction matters. One participant joked, “So many people wind up as investment bankers because at least then they are told what to do next.” Repeatedly throughout the discussion, we wondered how the Church might minister more effectively if it would become normative for Christians to seek spiritual guidance at all times rather than exclusively in times of great need.

If you are interested in learning more about Gay and Catholic by Eve Tushnet, you can also check out our review of the book and our interview with the author.

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.

Loving Differently

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A reflection by Sarah

A couple of months ago, Leah Libresco who blogs at Unequally Yoked called for a series of guest posts on the theme of “loving parishioners in their particularity.” Each of the posts in this series is insightful and challenging, offering issue-specific commentary on the question, “How can the Church do better at loving and welcoming people relative to ways they are different from others?” In the days since my surgical procedure last Friday, I’ve been thinking back to many of these posts and how delighted I was to see this conversation developing.

Loving others as they are instead of who we would like them to be is hard. When we see people in our parishes experiencing difficulty or lack of welcome due to some form of difference, sometimes our first reaction is, “Let’s find a way to help that person be more like everyone else, or at least remind him/her that in Christ we are all the same. That will solve the problem.” I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve had these thoughts myself. “Of course the best way to welcome a black person at a predominantly white parish is to treat him/her like everyone else,” or “Isn’t that what the person in the wheelchair wants? For others to acknowledge that the disability doesn’t make a difference in God’s eyes?” I’ve been guilty of this in the past. And since my own forms of difference have become more noticeable within my current parish environment, I’ve been thinking more often about how hurtful and unloving these attitudes are — no matter how compassionate and equalizing they may seem.

Over the past few months I’ve been engaging in conversation with friends and loved ones about ways to be hospitable and loving to people with chronic illness and people who are Deaf or are dealing with hearing loss in adulthood. Going through various highs and lows associated with my Ménière’s disease has made me more keenly aware that, “Just treat everyone the same” is not enough. But if it isn’t the best response, what does it mean to show hospitality and love to parishioners in their particularity? I do not have a complete answer to this question, but these are some scattered thoughts based upon my own experiences.

I believe firmly that asking questions is an essential part of loving another person. We cannot assume that we know and understand the needs of people whose life experiences are different from our own. Simply asking, “What do you need from us as your Christian family?” is a great first step. Not all people are accustomed to being forward about their needs, but this opens the door for conversation. A hearing person is not the best determiner of a Deaf or hard of hearing person’s needs within a community of faith. A healthy person is not the best determiner of a chronically ill person’s needs. A straight person is not the best determiner of a gay person’s needs. Yet for some reason, many of us think we already know how to “solve the problem.”

That brings me to another facet of this issue. As we’ve said here before with regard to LGBT issues, people are people — not projects. Kind as this may seem, it is not necessarily loving to visit a chronically ill person and tell him or her, “You seem to be doing fine! You’re sitting up today.” Many people in this situation will hear the comment as invalidating. In the same way, it is not loving to tell an adult who is going deaf, “It seems like your hearing is getting better. You can hear me now and hold a conversation with me.” I’m not in the habit of policing people’s words, but I do think it’s easy to make such statements without realizing their implications. If you tell me you’re glad to see that I’m hearing better, especially when we’re in a quiet room and you’re sitting beside me and speaking at 60 decibels, what you are actually telling me is that you value me as a hearing person — not as a person created in God’s image. You are communicating that you see my hearing loss as nothing more than a problem to be solved. A more hospitable approach to discussing health and disability issues with people who are chronically ill or disabled would be to remind them consistently that you love them because of who they are.

I also believe that loving parishioners in their particularity means acknowledging that intentions only go so far. We might have the best of intentions in what we do or say to show love to a person who is different from us, but our intentions matter very little because really, it’s not about us. When we say or do something that causes offense and our first response to being called out is, “I didn’t mean any harm by that,” we’re being selfish. We are communicating that the other person’s feelings of unwelcome are less important than our own need to be helpful. “You’re hypersensitive. Political correctness makes everyone a bad guy. When I was growing up, ‘deaf and dumb’ is what everybody called them. I didn’t mean anything by that.” This sort of remark serves only to disenfranchise a person who is already feeling less than welcome at church. Chances are, the offended party already realizes that you didn’t intend offense. He or she is likely seeking an opportunity to discuss the issue further and explain why certain actions, language, and attitudes are harmful to others. Loving people as they are means being open to that conversation.

Loving people in their particularity means learning to treat others as you would like to be treated…while realizing that this is not equivalent to, “Just treat everyone the same.” No other person deals with exactly the same things as you do. Perhaps I’m wrong about this, and feel free to challenge me, but I would guess that none of us really want to be treated exactly the same as every other person.

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.