Category Archives: Hospitality

When the Church’s “Welcome” to LGBT People Hurts

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In the last several weeks, we’ve noticed an uptick in messaging that churches do not need to extend a special welcome to specific groups because churches follow Christ’s example and welcome everyone. We believe that any time a local church extends a special welcome to any group, that welcome has its roots in past hurts. Even a celebration like Mother’s Day came after society realized it was not particularly appreciative of mothers. Neither of us has ever attended a local congregation that has explicitly identified itself as a community that welcomes LGBT people. On occasion, we’ve attended churches that are generally regarded as places that are willing to journey alongside LGBT people even if they don’t say so explicitly. At present, we feel blessed to have a priest who appreciates and respects our desires to live celibacy while assuming the best about our intentions. Nonetheless, this past Sunday was probably the most traumatic experience we’ve ever had in a church environment, even though we had done our best to prepare for the worst.

Churches that teach traditional sexual ethics tend to be traditional in other areas as well. Traditional churches often recognize places where the Gospel praises seemingly disparate approaches to life. They strive to find a good balance between extremes. They see it as important to proclaim both Love and Truth, to have space for both Justice and Mercy. They value both right belief (orthodoxy) and right practice (orthopraxy). We firmly believe that churches need to present a balanced view of the faith. Like many Christians, we know that the way of Christ is indeed a narrow way that can be hard to find. Like many Christians, we’ve experienced seasons of needing to be reminded of God’s law and other seasons of needing to be reminded of God’s grace. Growing spiritually can sometimes be two steps forward and one step back as we frequently overcorrect along the way. It seems fitting to suggest that maturing in Christ is a lot like bowling with bumpers where all things good and holy try to direct forward progress.

Just as individuals can struggle to find the narrow way of Christ, many church communities teaching traditional sexual ethics do struggle with welcoming LGBT Christians. Every week, we experience a mixed bag of “welcome” when we attend church. You could think of it in terms of our necessary adaptation to a certain undercurrent. On a typical Sunday, we might experience between 1 and 3 interactions that indicate a person feels considerable animosity towards LGBT people. We know to expect it and even truly welcome the occasional presumptive “understanding” of what our lives are like. It doesn’t offend us when people try to be welcoming, but struggle. We’re glad to educate those who want to be educated. People asking almost-stupid questions directly can be a sign that they trust us enough to let their guards down and open up to learning more. However, while we’re used to hearing questions that contain some arguably innocent misconceptions, a particularly pointed discussion about LGBT issues in the Church has the potential to rip our hearts out through our noses. It’s especially bad when misconception stacks on top of misconception, and discussants drift away from considering LGBT people first and foremost as people. We’ve seen this trend in multiple local church communities, so we wanted to take the opportunity to say what not to do if you are trying to “welcome” LGBT Christians:

  • Use the first possible opportunity to ask the pastor publicly to clarify teaching on homosexuality because you suspect that there are LGBT people among your church’s membership.
  • Explain that LGBT people are welcome only because all sinners are welcome, assuming that all LGBT people struggle with lust.
  • Zoom in on a vague sense of “sinful behaviors” when discussing LGBT issues without offering any discussion about what said behaviors are.
  • Defend conservative reactionaries who have been “hurt” by gay activists before acknowledging the emotional and spiritual strains on LGBT Christians who are constantly accused of any number of outrageous activities.
  • Permit cisgender, heterosexual people space to talk openly about LGBT issues while telling LGBT people to remain “discreet” about their sexual orientations and/or gender identities.
  • Discuss the sexual orientations and perceived sins of specific members in the congregation with a priest or pastor while less than 6 feet away from those members.
  • Glare over your shoulder directly at suspected LGBT people while talking about them.
  • Accuse celibate LGBT people of a well-crafted charade to corrupt a perfectly good congregation with a hidden “liberal” agenda.
  • Suggest that LGBT people are secretly flirting with one another at church.
  • Demand proof of exactly how pastors know celibate LGBT people aren’t having all sorts of sex.
  • Accuse celibate LGBT people of lying about their celibacy.
  • Inform LGBT people they’re being “too sensitive” if they give examples of people saying hurtful things.

To be crystal clear, we’ve directly experienced all of these things in multiple congregations. Moreover, we know other celibate LGBT people who experience comparable “welcome” from their congregations. Enduring this litany seems to be part and parcel of the parish experience for many LGBT Christians, both celibate and non-celibate, who attend churches teaching a traditional sexual ethic.

The natural next question is, “So why don’t you just find a different church?”

Short answer: it’s not that easy.

Longer answer: These experiences are shockingly common. Especially within conservative Christian traditions, it’s challenging to find parishes where several items on the above list don’t happen on a regular basis. Seeking a parish and a priest is emotionally taxing beyond description. It’s like dating while knowing full well that 8 of your 10 first dates will involve verbal, emotional, and spiritual abuse. It requires being willing to try out a specific church, actually going, meeting with the pastor, being prepared for the severe condemnation that usually follows, taking a week or two to recover from that encounter, then repeating the process again and again until finally landing in a parish that seems not ideal, but survivable. Both in the past when we were single and now that we are a couple, we’ve found that it can take months or years of searching before finding even one priest in our tradition who is willing to see us as people instead of pastoral challenges. At this point you might be wondering, “If the two of you are celibate, why are you encountering such problems?” When it comes to our presence within a parish, our celibacy matters very little to culture warriors who see us as nothing more than incarnations of a political agenda.

We’ve never made a public statement about our LGBT status. People simply assume that we’re public sinners because we have committed the unthinkable act of showing up for Liturgy. We’ve had to recalibrate our sense of welcome and what it means to have realistic expectations about acceptance. To us, “welcome” frequently means that there are at least two people present who won’t scowl at us for every person who does. That’s not the kind of welcome other groups of people receive at church, yet so many parishes where members behave in the ways described above seriously think they’re doing all they can and all they should need to do in order to welcome LGBT Christians. How is it welcoming to foster an environment where parishioners are constantly suspecting other parishioners’ actions and motives? This is why thinking about exactly how we experience “welcome” hurts. It hurts a lot. 

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.

In Which We Decide to Go to Church

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We don’t want to make a habit of posting on Sundays, but late Saturday evening we found ourselves needing to work ourselves out of an emotional funk. This post is our best attempt at that.

For LGBT Christians, the news cycle can be vicious. Many media outlets are primed to look for any way particular churches may be increasingly open to people in same-sex relationships. Last summer, World Vision made news in Protestant circles when it briefly signaled a move toward potentially hiring Christians in same-sex marriages. This week, controversy has abounded after a mid-term report from the Synod on the Family signaled that the Roman Catholic Church might shift to more welcoming language regarding gay people. We, like many people in the English-speaking world, were rather astonished to see a Catholic document that said,

Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community: are we capable of welcoming these people, guaranteeing to them a fraternal space in our communities? Often they wish to encounter a Church that offers them a welcoming home. Are our communities capable of providing that, accepting and valuing their sexual orientation, without compromising Catholic doctrine on the family and matrimony?

Fast forward to just a few hours ago, and it became clear that many bishops viewed the welcoming language as inviting too much compromise of Catholic teachings on marriage and family. Even though our Italian isn’t that great, it seems that the newly ratified document treats the mere presence of LGBT people as a challenge to the family. According to the approved version, some perfectly faithful families headed by married heterosexual people may have to deal with the presence of a gay person in the family…and that’s pretty much it. The new document does not have any words for LGBT people themselves. It seems talking directly to LGBT people is just too scandalous. Apparently, it requires much less trouble to talk to their parents who have the parental obligation of staying close to their wayward children. And of course, the Roman Catholic Church will be there to help the prodigals “move beyond the confines of the homosexual label to a more complete identity in Christ” provided that the prodigals are willing to take Step 1 of admitting they were powerless over homosexuality.

We’re not writing this post because we have a horse in the race when it comes to LGBT Catholic issues. Though Sarah was once a member of the Roman Catholic Church, we are not Catholic. But we do feel a great deal of solidarity with our friends having to make the choice about whether and where they’re attending Mass tomorrow. Honestly, most of the time when we see this much news coverage about LGBT people in the Church, we decide it would be a great week to visit a different parish even though our specific Christian tradition rarely makes headlines. However, today we’ve spent a lot of time wrestling with the reality that we’ll be with our home congregation tomorrow. We’re serving coffee hour, and we both felt knots in our stomachs this Saturday as we made plans for our chicken pot pie, lasagna, and chocolate chip cookies.

Coffee hour is always tricky for us. We’ve grown accustomed to it being a staging area for a number of folks deeply involved in culture war issues. The hour right after Liturgy can be challenging even during tame news cycles. This week, it’s been nearly impossible to find anywhere in the English-speaking world that does not have all eyes fixed on Rome. [We would have preferred joining one of our Twitter followers and spending the week brushing up on our Spanish instead.] But given the conversation we know we’ll observe this Sunday, we can’t decide what scenario would be worse: 1) rantings about the Vatican being on the verge of radical apostasy for including a paragraph that welcomes gay people specifically, or 2) proclamations of relief that the Vatican’s courageous conservative bishops saved the Catholic Church from heretical teachings on sexuality. We’re bracing ourselves for a good dose of the latter because one hears everything when one serves coffee hour. Of course, Sarah might be somewhat fortunate to have a low hearing day, or conveniently forgetting hearing aids is a strong temptation…

Or we might have another day like Saturday where Sarah wakes up with some intense vertigo and other symptoms. Meniere’s disease is extremely unpredictable. But, no matter what happens, we’ve decided that Lindsey will certainly be at church. After all, it’s our turn to serve coffee hour.

Sometimes, deciding to go to church requires a whole heap of grit and determination. It’s especially hard to go to church on days when we feel the weight of having to police our language. We avoid certain topics of conversation altogether. Some members of our parish seem absolutely scandalized to know that after coffee hour, we’ll be going home (or somewhere else) together rather than going our separate ways as single people do. Around the holidays, we see a fair amount of awkward blushing from folks who ask us about travel. When we say, “This year, we’re heading to Minnesota to see Lindsey’s family,” instead of telling them that we each have individual plans, they never know how to reply. Very often, church people will end an interaction with us by stammering something like, “You two are really good friends to each other,” as if to assure themselves that there’s nothing especially meaningful about our relationship. A few readers on the blog have suggested that by claiming to be partners, we devalue the term “friendship.” But at coffee hour, we’re reminded every week that when people refer to us as friends it’s usually not because of a willingness to honor the beauty of love between friends — it’s to downplay the idea that our relationship has any sort of significance beyond “close roommates.”

During coffee hour, the two of us face similar yet different sets of problems. Lindsey, whose physical appearance pings straight people’s gaydars without fail, experiences universally awkward interactions with culture warriors. Sarah, whose appearance is very traditionally feminine, experiences the frustration of being viewed as any other member of the parish until Lindsey pulls up a chair and sits next to Sarah. Though it’s not always direct, there’s an impulse among our fellow parishioners to “protect” the Church from public sinners, and coming up against that every week is exhausting. Part of the reason it’s exhausting is that heterosexual people at our church tend to treat all other heterosexual people as though their virtuousness can be assumed. Being in an environment where one is not heterosexual and is therefore assumed to be a public sinner becomes taxing. Oftentimes, we wonder if there’s anything we could possibly do that would lead the skeptics to see anything even slightly virtuous in our relationship. All of this becomes heightened each time the news cycle includes extensive coverage of controversies involving LGBT Christians.

If you’re wondering at this point why we don’t just leave our Christian tradition and join an Open and Affirming denomination, read this post where we’ve already answered that question. As for this Sunday (and we hope all Sundays in the future), we have decided to go to church. No matter what will await us at coffee hour, we plan to wake up in the morning and join the other members of our parish for Liturgy because we — sinners, public and private — are all the Body of Christ. We will go to church because always and especially at times as uncertain as these, we have a desperate need to receive grace through the sacraments. We need the peace and wholeness that only Christ himself can offer, and challenging as it is to commune with people who find our presence inconvenient at best and scandalizing at worst, every soul who stands before the altar needs God’s love just as much as we do. When we go to church, we are faced with the reality that — in the words of Dorothy Day — “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.” And after Liturgy has ended, the food has been blessed, cups are filled, and conversation starts to get messier than the dishes, we will do the same as we do every sixth Sunday: we will serve coffee hour.

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.

After writing this post, we noticed that it fit nicely into the theme of Coming/Going of the Queer Theology Synchroblog.

Building a Life Together: Imagining the Possibilities

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As we interact with more and more people both online and in person, we encounter new challenges that compel us to reflect on aspects of our life together in ways we have not yet shared on the blog. We’ve seen how others with different perspectives react to us and our manner of living our faith and sexuality, and a common thread we’ve noticed is that people often learn of our circumstances and question how likely we are to continue living as a celibate couple 5, 10, 25, 50 years down the road. Both here and in other places on the internet, we’ve seen it suggested that in all likelihood, we’ll either give up on celibacy at some point or give up on our dream of a future together. Perhaps these speculations are fueled by the human tendency to skepticism over anything that deviates from social and cultural norms, but we have to wonder if part of the issue is that we haven’t devoted much time yet to sharing what we envision for the future of our community of two. Over the past few weeks as we’ve been looking back over posts from eight or nine months ago, we’ve realized that most of our posts specifically related to celibacy focus on how we got to where we are now rather than where we see God leading us. In today’s post, we want to share with our readers five possibilities we imagine for our future as a celibate couple. Some of these are directions where we are confident that God is leading us. Others are fuzzy, distant possibilities that will require years more of prayer, guidance from our spiritual fathers, and candid conversations with those we love and trust most.

When thinking about life together over the long haul, we keep returning to our shared spiritual life and how much effort it takes from both of us to ensure that we are living into this aspect of celibacy. We came to our current Christian tradition from very different religious backgrounds. It has been an adventure to watch and learn from how God shows us that our distinct perspectives on spiritual matters complement each other. Nevertheless, we constantly hope that God continues to develop in us a truly shared spirituality. In some ways, it seems like we’ve experienced some first fruits in surprising places. We welcome every way God might draw us closer to Christ through continuing to merge our various spiritual practices, and we believe firmly that God is calling us into a deeper, more unified spiritual life together as our relationship with each other continues to grow.

We also have great hopes that God will continue to show us more about our vocations as teachers. Though we work in vastly different fields (Sarah in theology and Lindsey in engineering education), we’ve already seen bits of evidence that God is calling us to strengthen each other in our commitments to helping students get the most meaningful and intellectually challenging educational experiences possible. Sarah’s experience of teaching as been that it comes naturally and is a great joy, even amidst occasional frustrations. Until getting to know Sarah, Lindsey’s experience of teaching was anxiety provoking and sometimes came with significant dread. As we’ve begun sharing a household, we’ve found that both of us have uncovered important details about our vocations as teachers. Sarah has inspired Lindsey to take greater interest in the needs of students, and to seek teaching opportunities that are the right fit emotionally even if not affiliated with more prestigious educational institutions. For the first time, Lindsey has begun to see teaching as a clear part of Lindsey’s vocation. Lindsey has challenged Sarah to empathize more with students who have little interest in theology but are taking a course in this field for a university requirement — particularly students majoring in STEM fields. As a result, Sarah is developing a better sense of how to reach students who enter introductory theology classes with apathy. Every term we’re both teaching, we notice more examples like these. If God intends to use both of us as educators, we pray that he will continue to open up new insights to us within the context of our relationship.

All our regular readers know by this point that one of our primary goals in blogging is to offer support to other lay people like us who are discerning the possibility of making a commitment to celibacy — particularly those who are LGBTQ and/or pursuing celibate partnerships. So many people have contacted us with questions about their own life situations. Each time we receive this sort of email, we devote some time to praying for that person and asking God to help us respond in the most helpful manner. As this happens, we find ourselves hoping for additional opportunities to help other lay people who are considering living some non-monastic form of celibacy. Neither of us knows much about legal matters, but we’re fortunate to have a friend at our church who is knowledgeable in this area and is willing to guide us to the best resources for ensuring that we have non-marital legal protections. Once we learn more about the process of managing our legal relationships to each other, we sense that God might be calling us to provide help and support for other couples like us as they sort these and other matters for themselves.

Though we try to write in an accessible, reflective style on the blog, we also have an interest in making a more academic contribution to conversations about lay celibacy. Our own Christian tradition has a long history of celibate vocations, but nearly every resource we’ve encountered from within our own tradition discusses celibacy solely within the context of monasticism. Sarah is especially interested in taking on future academic writing projects that explore the question, “What would a theology of non-monastic, lay celibacy look like in our Christian tradition?” Both of us have seriously considered creating an online repository of documents and other media related to celibacy that represents a plethora of Christian denominations. We’ve been contacted by untold numbers of people whose denominations say nothing whatsoever about celibacy (or so it appears), or have only negative things to say about the practice of celibacy. If God opens the door for us to provide these kinds of resources to the people who need and desire them most, we would consider it a great honor to fill that role.

Since we first began making plans for sharing a household and living together as a family, we’ve also been discussing how to broaden the scope of our practice of hospitality. Though we both consider our relationship with each other the most meaningful relationship in our lives next to God and the saints, we would welcome the expansion of our two-person community. As we’ve prayed about how God might be calling us to extend our family, we’ve both felt inspiration to (eventually) move into a larger home and offer the unused bedrooms to people who are recovering from addictions and experiencing difficulty reintegrating into work/school after taking time off to focus on getting healthy. We want to offer a safe space where those in recovery can get their needs met for basic resources and emotional support and stay for as long as necessary. Because of Sarah’s experience with different addictions, this issue is near and dear to our hearts. Very few people outside the recovery community realize how few opportunities for this kind of support exist in the “real world” outside of treatment centers and group meetings. There is a great need for resources to bridge that gap. For the past several months, the two of us have felt a clear sense of call to work toward this goal in future years when we are more financially established.

Of all five items discussed in our post today, the next is certainly the fuzziest, most undeveloped possibility for our future as a celibate couple. Sarah has mentioned before that one of the most difficult aspects of celibacy for Sarah is the fact that celibates do not get to become mothers and fathers, at least in the biological sense. Sarah has devoted and continues to devote considerable time to reflecting on how best to direct the desire for motherhood. While Lindsey has never felt any inclination toward parenthood, the two of us occasionally discuss the possibility of taking in foster children and what that would mean for the celibate vocation we live together. In an ideal world, there would be no need for foster care. In an almost-but-not-quite-ideal world, there would be enough interested couples living marital vocations that no need would exist for celibates like us to be foster parents. But we don’t live in an ideal world or even close, and there are so many children who will never know what it is like to be loved by a parental figure. There are kids who will spend their entire lives in group homes and abusive foster care situations because there are so few good potential foster parents. Then, there are some kids who can’t be placed because available foster families aren’t able/willing to manage disabilities, behavioral problems, mental health diagnoses, etc. We don’t plan on pursuing this anytime in the near future as it is a decision that would require long and serious discernment, but if God should call us to provide an unloved, uncared for child with a Christian home, basic needs, a solid education, and two very loving and firm adults, we pray that we’ll be prepared to answer that call.

These examples are mere glimpses into the hopes and dreams we have for our future as a team, a partnership, and a family. The possibilities are both exciting and frightening, and we hope that the right decisions on all of them will become clearer as we grow in greater love for God and each other. We have a mutual feeling that this isn’t the last time we’ll be addressing this topic.

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.

Defining Celibacy, Revisited

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In one of our very first posts on this blog, we took some time to define celibacy. We offered a working definition of celibacy that centers on vulnerability, hospitality, shared spiritual life, and commitment. Not surprisingly, many commenters have been pushing back against our definition of celibacy for months, offering some variant of 1) those characteristics are/can be true of anyone living a Christian life or 2) non-celibate people certainly display those characteristics as well. It’s tricky for us to say how our practice of these values as celibate people is distinct from how non-celibate people can practice these same values. We share a strong disapproval of stereotypes of celibate vocations, and we’re concerned about doing the same thing if we were to discuss how these values manifest themselves in non-celibate relationships. We don’t see ourselves as qualified to tell married people (or even other celibate people) how they live or should live the four characteristics in our definition. Nonetheless, it’s worth revisiting how we define celibacy in response to some of the comments we’ve received.

To begin, it’s important to note that we understand both celibacy and marriage as vocations people enter into as adults. Part of living into one’s vocation is maturing in how one participates in the world. We’re sure many readers can bear witness to how marriage forced them, or others they know, to grow up in some profound ways. We believe that making a commitment to a celibate vocation also spurs a person towards maturity. Since both vocations provide a sort of proving ground for becoming an adult, we shouldn’t be entirely surprised that they challenge people to exercise certain values. If you flip through the New Testament, you’ll find a lot of different lists of what values increase when a person commits himself or herself to Christ. Vulnerability, hospitality, community, and commitment happen to be the four words we’ve chosen to call out relative to our experience of the celibate vocation.

Arguably, one of the most famous lists in Scriptures is found in Galatians 5 where Paul lists the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. (We took this list from the ESV, and the wording of your preferred translation might differ.) We would be hard pressed to think of any Christian we know who does not display these fruits of the Spirit to some degree. In all honesty, we’ve seen again and again that the children in our parish frequently do the best job at displaying these fruits. Neither one of us has any predisposition for searching out ways our fellow Christians fail to display the fruits of the Spirit. We’re much more prone to ask ourselves the question, “How can we cultivate good spiritual fruit?”

We think making a commitment to one’s vocation involves making a decided choice to cultivate spiritual fruit in specific ways. For us, our celibate vocation has challenged us to commit to the practices of being vulnerable, extending radical hospitality, forging a shared spiritual life, and opting into this way of life with 100% of ourselves. We learned about these practices by prayerfully observing as other people have lived celibacy. Many of these people are monastics who live in communities of various sizes. We don’t regard ourselves as having any particular authority on celibacy, and we are still discerning our vocation as a community of two. Individually and corporately, we have seen how the practices that define our celibate vocation have borne good spiritual fruit. For example, praying together about how to support Sarah’s health has helped Lindsey experience peace even in some exceptionally trying times. Sharing our thoughts vulnerably with one another and building a shared spiritual life has encouraged Sarah to exercise greater faithfulness in talking with God throughout the day. Because we share so vulnerably with one another, we know each other’s weaknesses and can challenge the other to choose the way of Christ in a much wider range of circumstances than ever before.

What strikes us as we consider the uniqueness of our way of life is that each practice connects with every other practice. These values are a package deal. With God’s help, we try to keep them going strong 100% of the time. As humans, we fall short of that goal often. Nonetheless, our eyes remain fixed on this particular path. But drawing a clear line that divides our celibate vocation from every other non-celibate person is next to impossible. Throughout time, there have been billions of married people sorting their values in ways that makes sense to them. It would be rather presumptuous for us to assert, “There has never been a married person who would describe vulnerability, hospitality, a shared spiritual life, and commitment as core values of a marriage.” We’ve never tried to make a claim that all celibates live one way and that all married people live in a wholly distinct way. There are places of unavoidable overlap in values that may manifest differently in individual couples. For instance, we know many married couples who regard welcoming children into their family as an essential aspect of their vocation. Welcoming children is a form of radical hospitality even if our friends rarely would use the word “hospitality” when describing why they are so committed to welcoming children. We do our best to avoid celibate triumphalism. It would be wrong to highlight how a monastic community in Guatemala runs an orphanage and overlook an untold number of married couples called to practice a similar ministry. We’re also entirely averse to writing anything on this blog that amounts to “We’re awesome because we do x, y, and z.” It’s difficult to say what God has called us to because of the way the tasks fit uniquely within our celibate vocation rather than because we’re better Christians for doing them.

The spiritual life rarely has neatly defined limits even as Western society has collectively howled for divisions and separations between “opposites.” Offering a working definition of something does not necessarily mean rendering it wholly distinct from all other things — even things in seemingly opposite categories. If you want to make Lindsey super irritated, try asserting that STEM disciplines are completely separate from the liberal arts disciplines. We have spilt so much ink since the Enlightenment trying to establish clear categories of difference. However, there is value in recognizing BOTH/AND constructions. Both men and women are people and bear God’s image. Both clergy and laity have important roles in the life of the Church. Both celibacy and marriage are vocations. We all live in the tension of being both sinner and saint. Recognizing the commonalities between things previously regarded as disparate deepens our appreciation of a world created by a God who is limitless, mysterious, beyond definition.

Our definition of celibacy fits snugly into the place of both/and. If how we live our vocation inspires non-celibate people to be more vulnerable, to practice more hospitality, to steward a communal spiritual life, and to consider making authentic commitments to one another, then perhaps it is bearing some good fruit. More to the point, as celibate people living in the world, we’re constantly inspired by non-celibates who make these values work amidst the craziness of life. If we recognize ways that our life looks different from other people’s lives, those differences likely stem from the fact that everyone is different. God isn’t up there in heaven shouting down to us clearly if some values are inborn and others need to be cultivated within our vocation. Truth be told, we can all grow towards Christ. And as long as we fix our eyes on Christ and pattern our lives after His example, we should be rejoicing that our lives look similar.

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.

The Meaning of “Support”: A Second Response to Maria McDowell

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Most of the conversations we engage in involve people who see the world differently than we do in one way or another. Occasionally, the direction conversation takes clues us into the possibility that we and the other party are likely talking past each other; by all appearances we are using the same words in different ways. As we read Maria McDowell’s second response to us, we perceived that Maria might conceive of the term support differently than we do. Therefore, we thought it would be helpful to clarify what we are requesting when we ask for support from others. For those who have not been following along thus far, our post discussing our celibate gay agenda kicked off this discussion. In that post, we stated:

“We fear the possibility that a time may be approaching when celibate LGBT Christians have only two options: 1) attend a church with a liberal sexual ethic where, in many cases, celibacy is frowned upon or misunderstood and celibates are not supported adequately; or, 2) attend a church with a conservative sexual ethic where celibates are expected to deny their sexual orientations or leave.”

We understand why people might be confused by what we mean when we say that celibates need to be supported by their faith communities, and more specifically when we discuss our own struggle to find that for ourselves. We can understand why one might become angry if that person perceived us as asking for support while at the same time withholding the same from him or her.

When a person asks us for our support regarding any life circumstance, we like to take some time to talk with him or her to understand the request. The word “support” can be interpreted in a variety of ways. If a random person holding a clipboard approaches us on the street asking for support, he or she most likely wants us to part with some money or to sign a petition. If a friend calls us at 3 AM crying, he or she asks for our support implicitly by hoping we’ll pick up the phone, listen, and maybe provide some pithy words of wisdom. If a person on Facebook is posting constantly about support for a particular cause, chances are pretty excellent that he or she hopes we’ll take some action to advance that cause. If one of our friends is dealing with major stress amid a seemingly hopeless situation, he or she likely covets our prayers that God would somehow intervene. We all have our own natural filters for determining what a person intends when asking for support. Oftentimes, we hear a person’s request and align our response with the kind of support we could see ourselves desiring in the same situation. All of us who strive to show empathy and compassion can struggle with how to offer the “right” kind of support, especially as we frequently project our own meanings onto the original request.

It’s really hard for non-celibate people to have any idea of how to support an individual trying to live celibacy, especially a non-traditional sort of celibate vocation. We get that. We’ve done our best to be explicit about what kinds of support we find helpful while writing for many different audiences. We have discussed how people with more traditional sexual ethics could support celibate LGBT Christians, both as a category and within the context of our own church family. Our experience has shown us that these people can find  our use of LGBT language to describe ourselves perplexing. We have also discussed how people with modern, liberal sexual ethics could be more supportive of celibates, and challenged our readers to think a bit more carefully about what it means to affirm a person before claiming the label “Affirming.” For the sake of being absolutely clear: when we ask for support as celibate LGBT Christians, we are asking simply to be treated as human beings who are part of a community of believers. We are not asking for pity. We are not asking folks to speak out if we do not receive communion in a particular church for whatever reason. We are not asking people to endorse our way of life explicitly. And we are certainly not asking people to dote on us because of all the ways they imagine our celibate vocations must induce pain and suffering.

As we see it, every person needs support to live a Christian life. The two of us are not special or unique among people. While we feel somewhat flattered when people see us as an authority on celibate partnerships, we constantly stress that we are not experts, and frequently we haven’t the foggiest idea of what God would have us do next. We feel like we are building the plane while flying it, and we do not have all of the answers. We find it surprising that all of a sudden, a handful of readers regard us as authoritative experts who are somehow responsible for everyone else who is discussing (or has discussed in the past) related topics in a similar way as we are. This leaves little room for us to be regular humans trying our best to discern an unusual vocation. It seems that Maria is holding us at least partly responsible for how any person within our Christian tradition has ever responded to LGBT people. Additionally, it seems as though she sees a connection between us and authors calling for shifts in pastoral practice towards a more inclusive “third way” or with a bit more “generous spaciousness.” Perhaps we have read Maria incorrectly on this, and we’re sure she will correct us if we did. Regardless, we do not think it’s reasonable or fair to hold someone who is trying a different approach responsible the shortcomings of anyone else who also happens to be seeking space for a less polarized conversation.

One of the claims we were truly surprised to see from Maria is:

“Sarah and Lindsey have made their personal decision public. It is the public declaration of a private practice that makes their blog such an important contribution, in large part because it transgresses the very neat lines we hope to draw around biological sex, sexual activity, and affinity for the other.”

A Queer Calling is openly accessible to the public, yes. We agree with Maria that one of the contributions we are able to make is challenging various categorical boxes. We also agree that our decision to pursue celibacy does not exist in a vacuum: personal decisions of this nature do have an effect on other people. But at the same time, our pursuit of celibacy is not nearly as public as some might think. That we blog about our experience as a celibate LGBT Christian couple does not automatically mean we make a point to discuss either our celibacy or LGBT status within our local parish. Outside the blog, conversations with friends, and confession/spiritual direction, we do not discuss these matters in other areas of our lives. Defining celibacy as vulnerability, radical hospitality, a shared spiritual life, and commitment makes our celibacy visible as a way of life. Yet, even members of our own families were not aware of our celibacy until we began blogging because we never had a significant reason to bring it up. We don’t walk around with the word “celibate” tattooed to our foreheads. Truth be told, before launching A Queer Calling, the only people in our lives who had any idea about our practice of celibacy were our spiritual fathers and close friends.

We’ve saved what we understand as Maria’s core objection for last. Maria writes:

I am also aware and deeply appreciative of Sarah and Lindsey’s hospitality through our personal communications, and am glad that A Queer Calling does all it can to be hospitable in an inhospitable environment. I am 100% sure I would be welcome at their table with them, in their home. I would be delighted to swap stories and enter with them into their daily prayer life. Until that prayer life broadened to include their parish. At that point, the hospitality of their home broadens to include the hospitality of their larger household, their ekklesia. Whether we like it or not, their priest may be required by the rule of his church to include or exclude me based on whether or not I am sexually active. Since I do not know their church or their priest, the invitation to pray with them corporately will inevitable be fraught with anxiety and grief: will I or will I not be allowed to eat with my friends at their ecclesial table?

Maria rightly highlights the existence of church communities that actively exclude LGBT people — both non-celibate and celibate — from partaking of the Eucharist. Lindsey still has poignant memories of the first time Sarah discussed our relationship with the priest at our current parish. The outcome of that conversation was positive, but the experience of it was terrifying. We’ve both had dreadful experiences when seeking pastoral care in the distant and not-so-distant past. At one point, Lindsey was nearly asked to leave a Christian tradition entirely because word got around that Lindsey was planning a spiritual retreat for LGBT Christians. In Sarah’s previous Christian tradition, Sarah was once denied absolution during the sacrament of confession — not because of a sin, but because Sarah had used the word “lesbian.” In many Christian traditions, it’s all too easy for clergy members to become obsessed with homosexuality, ignoring everything else about a person’s lived experience. We are willing to say that if the only kind of a person a priest would exclude from the Eucharistic table is a sexually active LGBT Christian, then that priest has seriously misunderstood the praxis of excommunication. Priests and pastors can act in haste when talking with an LGBT Christian, so we understand why Maria would perhaps be nervous and anxious about having a conversation with our priest.

At the same time, we’re puzzled: how is it our fault or the fault of any member of our parish if our priest were to decide not to commune Maria? That’s completely, 100% out of our control. Deciding who is or is not permitted to commune is not our place as lay people. And quite frankly, we’re glad because that’s not a responsibility we would want to have. We don’t envy the job of our priests in this regard. Every Sunday, our church is full of both communicants and non-communicants. People abstain from communion all of the time for a multiplicity of reasons. We try to do our best to ensure that we are growing towards Christlikeness, and have no interest in ascertaining the exact reasoning of every non-communicant. The question of whether to receive communion or to abstain should invite sobering consideration where, periodically, most everyone will abstain from receiving.

We do understand the pain of not being able to receive communion during a Eucharistic service. We exclude ourselves from Eucharistic tables with some regularity. Our celibacy does not ensure that we are welcome at every Eucharistic table. We are members of a closed communion tradition, and we have chosen to follow our tradition’s wisdom on discerning when and where to receive communion. When we visit churches outside of our tradition, we don’t commune. And we greatly appreciate being offered space to choose not to receive.

Throughout all of these points, a central aspect we noticed as we read Maria’s latest response was her framing the discussion in terms of solidarity. Solidarity is not a word that we invoke much in these conversations because for many people it brings up associations with politically-charged activism, which is not at all how we conceive of our needs for support within a faith community. We’d be interested in hearing Maria’s take on what she means when she discusses solidarity and support. What we mean when we say “support” is being surrounded by other Christians who treat us like people. We want to join our humanity with the humanity of everyone else seeking Christ. All Christians need encouragement to grow towards Christ, and part of existing within an ekklesia necessarily is supporting others in their journeys to unity with God.

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