Category Archives: Lindsey’s Reflections

Speaking of Gender

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A reflection by Lindsey

In many conversations about faith and sexuality, people frequently emphasize one’s sexual orientation over one’s gender identity. Those attempting to talk about LGBT issues often overlook the last letter of the acronym. Questions about gender and gender identity get shifted into the background, pushed behind the stage, and were rarely welcomed into the conversation in the first place. Sometimes, concerns for fundamental equality between men and women can obscure why gender identity might matter.

I’ll be the first to admit that I feel out of my league when I try to speak of gender. I grew up thinking that gender was little more than a biological tag that indicated what restroom you used in public areas. I never had my gender flouted in front of my face to tell me that I couldn’t do x, y, or z. In many ways, I consider myself fortunate that I never encountered gender as an obstacle that blocked opportunities or prevented me from deciding how I wanted to express myself.

That doesn’t mean gender is easy.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to see how gender saturates the world around us. I’ve been lucky enough because I have never been able to be bothered with the “right” way of expressing myself. If you look at photos of me beginning at the age of 5 and continuing to present day, you’ll see that my self-presentation has been more or less constant for 25 years. Sure, there was a blip on the radar in 7th grade when I was experimenting with what it might look like to have long hair, but we all know that junior high students try on a range of self-presentations. In many ways, I feel safer because 5-year-old me knew how to be Lindsey no matter what other people might think. That’s one part of my 5-year-old self that I’m glad to still be holding onto to this day.

Yet, I wonder if we’re starting to see a shift in how we talk about gender. I’ve become increasingly aware that it’s possible to label another person’s self-presentation as “gender non-conforming.” In some ways, I wonder if conversations around gender identity are starting to diversify in a way akin to the many different conversations about sexual orientation. When people began discussing sexual orientation, the dominant word used to describe the minority sexual orientation was “gay.” For a good bit now, the dominant word used to describe the minority gender identity was “transgender.” I find myself welcoming the broadening of the discussions as people with degrees of gender variation begin to experiment with ideas like genderqueer, bigender, and agender even as these terms have exceptionally fluid definitions.

For my part, I’ll admit to being somewhat lost in the shuffle about what all of these terms mean. None of these terms seem especially comfortable for describing my own situation, but I’ve been on this journey long enough to know it’s okay that I’m not ready to go out and buy assorted buttons to broadcast my preferred vocabulary to the universe. I’m profoundly grateful that so many people over the years have related to me simply as Lindsey without asserting the various rules of gender identity, performance, and expression to control my activity. Since having my own awakening as to how gender manifests itself in our world, I’ve experienced some rather jarring discomfort when I notice people actively enforcing gendered boundaries. I joke that there’s sort of a gender scale that stretches from 1 (gender is not noticeably present in any constraining way) to 10 (gender organizes just about every expectation and interaction), where I’m particularly apt to label my experiences of profound discomfort as Gender 11 moments. I’ve also noticed that when I have my choice of where to be, I’d rather be in environments much lower on the gender scale.

Talking about this topic is hard, partly because I think we’ve gotten so used to the conversation being about sexual orientation that we overlook how people navigate questions about gender. I didn’t even realize that gender might be an important part of how I experience these conversations until just a few years ago. But I wanted to take some time today to open a conversation about gender here on the blog. The door is open, the kettle is on, and I’d love to talk with you more in the comments.

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White Knuckling Can Only Get You So Far

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A reflection by Lindsey

One of the lines sometimes used by Christians embracing a traditional sexual ethic when counseling people with same-sex attractions is that there is a difference between being attracted to someone and acting on those attractions. This counsel makes a distinction between temptation and sin, observing that absolutely everyone experiences temptation of some kind. Christ Himself experienced temptation. What separates us from Christ is that we frequently respond to temptation poorly. Christ is sinless because He never faltered on the divide between temptation and sin. According to this line of thinking, holiness is within our reach, provided we seek God’s help in making the right decisions when we feel tempted.

I’ve spent at least a decade trying to make sense of this particular message and have concluded that it fails miserably at answering the question, “Well then, how should we live?” When rubber meets the road, people find themselves devoting considerable time to learning how to resist temptations to do things that they know are unhealthy for them. I think this type of “just don’t do it” message is what can cause people to compare homosexuality to alcoholism: “An alcoholic must do everything in his or her power to avoid taking that first drink.” In this mindset, a gay person must do everything in his or her power to avoid sexual sin: holiness for a same-sex orientated person is defined by avoiding lust, pornography, masturbation, and anything else that might fuel the desires for same-sex sexual activity.

I’d like to call bullshit.

The “just don’t have sex or do anything lustful” directive characterizes homosexuality as a propensity towards a particular kind of action: being gay simply means experiencing temptation for particular kinds of sexual activity. People of all orientations who do experience significant sexual temptations can find themselves trying to “fake it until they make it” resorting to white knuckling as the main approach. Often in the lives of gay people seeking spiritual counsel, that approach is not only encouraged, but is couched as the only possible means for living celibacy. I’ve watched so many people paralyzed by white knuckling that I can spot it a mile away. White knuckling offers false hope and denies people a life-giving way of being. It doesn’t matter what a person is trying to resist; white knuckling can only get him or her so far.

This kind of thinking dominated the approach to the ex-gay ministry I was a part of several years ago. I approached the ministry blissfully unaware of a great deal of things that might be considered potential sexual temptations. I noticed that there was something about me where it made sense that I might be a member of the LGBT community, but at that point had no experience with any kind of sexual activity. Truth be told, I came to ex-gay ministry because I was terrified of falling out of grace and finding myself on the “wrong” side of the Church. It’s remarkable that 13 years later, I still have to swallow that fear from time to time. Fearing everyone in the Church and everything vaguely “gay” did a lot to tear at me emotionally, spiritually, and even physically. In the ex-gay world, I was learning that it was only appropriate to fear my sexuality. In other words, I was being inundated with the message that white knuckling was the only Christian response to the experience of same-sex attraction.

To be sure, there might be seasons when white knuckling is the most appropriate strategy to try and stop undesirable behaviors of one kind or another. Not to draw any comparison between homosexuality and addiction (Sarah has written on problems with that comparison), but I have a great deal of compassion when a person is starting the process of ceasing addictive behaviors. Sometimes sitting on one’s hands is the only way to keep oneself safe in an immediate season of crisis. But what can get a person through one minute is not adequate to get one through the rest of one’s life. Thinking that it will can cause a lot of damage. Specifically concerning sexuality, such an approach can hold a person back from ever integrating fully this part of his or her humanity.

White knuckling is exhausting. Living in constant fear can be an incredible energy drain. People devote so much energy to resisting things they should not do that it becomes easy to lose track of what they should do. Furthermore, behaviors themselves become the problem. When someone is white knuckling, he or she only sees particular actions as problematic. In the case of sexuality, people can lose sight of the fact that this part of our being is a gift from God that enables us to connect with others. When in the thick of ex-gay ministry, I found it impossible to connect with other people because I had learned to fear just about every possible interaction.

I had to move away from the idea that my sexuality was something to be feared. I’ve encouraged hundreds of people to reconsider their beliefs that fear is the most appropriate emotional response to their sexualities. Moving beyond white knuckling requires changing one’s perspective. We need to be able to affirm what is good about how we interact with others, perceive beauty, and experience attractions of all kinds. Getting past white knuckling enables many people to move beyond fear and honestly assess how certain behaviors may work in their lives. As I’ve watched people move beyond white knuckling, I’ve seen time and time again how perfect love casts out all fear and creates space for people to be transformed by God’s grace.

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.

Unlocking the Feast within the Fast

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A reflection by Lindsey

I received a phone call recently from a dear friend. She thought of me because it’s Lent and she doesn’t know anyone who loves Lent more than I do. Every time a friend mentions the Lenten season, I can’t help but smile.

My love of Lent began almost immediately as I started exploring Christianity. I was attending a Lutheran church that had regular Wednesday night soup suppers before a Lenten service series. The theme of the first Lenten series I attended was “Can you drink of this cup?” During the first week we received a small clay cup, and we received items to put into our cup during subsequent weeks. My cup is still on the bookcase in “my” room at my parents’ house. I immediately associated Lent with more communal gatherings and a focused effort to grow closer to Christ.

In college, I attended an Evangelical Protestant church that didn’t make a big deal about the liturgical calendar. Nonetheless, the community believed that God did awesome things when we took time to fast and pray. We started taking a 40 day period before Easter to pray for God to pour His blessings out on us as individuals, on our friends, and on our church. The pastoral team prepared various guides to encourage us to read through a chosen set of Scriptures and to suggest different faith experiments related to prayer and fasting.

Since that time, I’ve become aware of an ancient fasting tradition during the Lenten season that still lives in Eastern rite churches (Orthodox, Eastern Catholic, and some Protestant groups seeking to discover the early Church). The tradition exhorts people to abstain from meat, dairy, eggs, fish with a backbone, wine, and olive oil during penitential seasons and twice a week outside penitential seasons. Like many fasting traditions, it suggests a certain discipline around eating with the expressed intention of helping a person grow spiritually. The ancient wisdom has 2 other teachers: prayer and almsgiving. To be clear: I don’t consider myself to be a good student of any of these teachers. Yet I find that approaching the Lenten season with joy unlocks the feast within the fast.

I’ve found myself gradually shifting towards the Eastern rite fasting disciplines because my local church communities try to keep the Eastern rite guidelines around food. It’s been important to do so gradually because I had to learn to cook first. During the ordinary times of the church year, I rely on easy-to-prepare staple foods that use roughly the same ingredients. Each fast paradoxically presents a new invitation to deepen my appreciation of food. The year I was most observant in the dietary rules was the year I decided to avoid eating out at restaurants during the Lenten period. Having to go to the grocery store regularly caused me to experiment with different combinations of new grains, various vegetables, and beans. Last year, I discovered that avocados have a similar texture to cheese in a lot of dishes. Who knew? Sarah’s higher protein needs have spurred me onward to exploring previously uncharted protein categories of lentils, shrimp, and crab. I haven’t arrived fully yet, but I do enjoy trying. In “fasting” for a season, I actually haven’t lost any foods that I love: I’ve grown in my love for diverse foods, eating a fuller array.

Taking on a certain discipline as a community has a way of bringing people together as a family. You will always have the person who think it’s impossible to eat any foods that follow the guidelines, the person scouring the labels to determine if a particular item has any “forbidden” ingredients, the family quietly inviting lost newcomers to come over for dinner, the person who reminds you that the guidelines emerged during a different place and time, people sick of eating peanut butter and/or lentils, and folks eagerly swapping recipes. Sometimes the same individual falls into multiple categories.

The communal nature of the fasting discipline creates a lot of space for conversations. Looking at my own experiences as a guide, the feast of the Lenten fast can be found in community. No matter what Christian tradition I’ve been a part of, people have made time to come together, pray, and eat during Lent. I find it amusing that churches have more meals together during “fasting” periods than they do in “ordinary” time. Care to pass the guacamole?

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.

Actively Cultivating a Celibate Vocation

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A reflection by Lindsey

We’ve made a general practice of not giving advice on this blog. We are keepers of our own story, and we are not interested in telling another person what his or her story should be. Nonetheless, I was struck a few weeks ago when Eve Tushnet said that there was a place in these discussions for people to cry, “This is the path! Follow me!” lest we become an echo chamber. We’ve also had multiple people sending us emails asking us for more guidance on actively trying to cultivate a celibate vocation. I’ve spent nearly a decade trying to sort these questions for myself, have journeyed alongside tens of other people trying to cultivate celibate vocations themselves, and think that I can highlight some practical elements of actively cultivating a celibate vocation. So, in this reflection, I’m going to make a brief trip to how-to land.

Some disclaimers: I’m going to talk about cultivating a celibate vocation in generalities rather than zooming in on the experience of cultivating a celibate partnership. I’ve shared before about my experiences with a failed celibate relationship, and I know other people who have been profoundly hurt by starting their explorations of celibacy in the context of an intimate relationship. While I have spent a lot of time myself trying to cultivate a celibate vocation, I don’t regard myself as an authority at any level.

Get to know people who live a celibate vocation
Finding active models of a celibate life worth living is hard. I spent time hanging out at monasteries and reading memoirs of people who remained single throughout their entire life. One of the most helpful books for me is My Song is Of Mercy by Fr. Matthew Kelty because Fr. Matthew is living out a celibate vocation as a gay man. Fr. Matthew’s sermons include occasional examples from the gay community that show he integrated his sexuality into his life. But getting to know monastics from different communities showed me that there is a lot of variety within the celibate vocation. It’s okay if not every celibate person inspires you with a vision for what your vocation can look like. In many ways, it’s probably better for you if there’s a subset of celibate people you love and admire. I tended to look towards people in religious communities, but many people from different walks of life have lived a celibate vocation. Find a few models that resonate with you and provide a glimpse into the kind of life you’d like to cultivate.

Spend real time with married people
One thing I’ve noticed is that many LGBT people who feel compelled to explore a celibate vocation because of their faith convictions are prone to crafting a utopian vision of marriage. Marriage can become a wished-for, yet completely unattainable, happy place where people are never lonely, social get-togethers are awesome, and God totally pours out blessing after blessing. Yet, spending time with married people I admire showed me that married people and celibate people face many of the same struggles when it comes to finding our places in this world. Additionally, I learned that married people who make the practice of opening their homes to others have this odd gift of making me feel like a part of the family in a very short time. I’ve had the privilege of reading bedtime stories to kids and I’ve experienced why families with kids might try to hightail it out of social engagements before the kids have a meltdown. When you meet real married people, marriage doesn’t look so utopian after all.

Regard the things in which you find great delight as sacred
It can be hard as a celibate person to communicate why a certain action “counts” as intimate and meaningful. Our culture, and even the culture within our churches, has primed us to view sex as the only expression of intimacy worth saving for special people. Yet, each and every one of us has things that we especially enjoy doing, and we want to save particular experiences for sharing with special people. It doesn’t matter if your special things are going to a concert, sharing a meal together, playing board games, going geocaching, geeking out over Latin word roots, or any number of other things. Your special things are still special, they make you the unique human you are, and they are worth sharing with special people in your life. Treasure the unique parts of yourself as sacred. Treat them with care. As you grow closer to particular people, allow them to see more of you. I found that treating my love of freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies, my excitability when going to concerts, and my tendency to relish in a good hug with sacred appreciation enabled me to experience significantly more intimacy across a wide range of relationships.

Find a rhythm in your own life that includes prayer and positive self-care
In trying to discern my celibate vocation, I worked with the examples I found in monasteries. Life in a monastery is centered upon communal and individual prayer. When I talked with monastics, they told me they entered the monastery because they felt a vocation to prayer. Yet, a lot of life in the monastery also involved caring for the community. Monastics prepare common meals, take one another to seek medical care when needed, go shopping, and work together to support the monastery. As I got to know monastics, I realized that monastic lives are indeed very human lives. An abbess once shared with me that if I wanted to explore the possibility that I was called to monasticism, I would be served by trying to put monastic life into practice as much as possible in my daily life. I’ve experimented with incorporating different regular devotions into my day and preparing proper meals. These disciplines have shown me that I have in-built settings that need to be acknowledged if I’m going to take care of myself.

Share life meaningfully with others wherever possible
When I started actively trying to cultivate a celibate vocation, I did not have a clue how to share life meaningfully with other people. I had to overcome significant cultural programming that the only “real” meaningful relationship would blossom into a marriage. Since I had to start somewhere, I started by asking God to show me the meaningful relationships present in my life. God showed me that I did have profoundly meaningful relationships already present in my life and that I had the potential to develop meaningful relationships with people I was only just getting to know. In shifting my focus away from cultivating one marital relationship, I was able to see myself in a network of other relationships. As a direct consequence of living this way, I have numerous friends–married and celibate–for whom the word “friend’ fails communicate the depth of intimacy we experience in those relationships.

Practice serving others regularly
Getting out and doing something to help people is a great way to see past the end of your own nose. I also found that being positioned to see others’ needs helped me consider how I could be a blessing to them and how they could bless me. As I began to cultivate a celibate vocation, I drove a one-day shift with Meals on Wheels in a low-income area of my town. Visiting briefly with the clients on my route allowed me to make those tentative spaces of connection. Seeing them week after week, I practiced making friends who were in a very different state of life than I was. It wasn’t a huge obligation, but I found myself missing the regular interaction when I moved abroad for a season. I’ve learned that I’m happiest when I’m giving to others in a consistent way. As time has gone on, I’ve shifted where I’ve invested my energies. Please know that serving others is a balance. Too much serving can lead to frustration that you’re always pouring yourself out and not receiving anything in return. I’ve come to ask myself, “Do I find this act of service meaningful and life-giving or am I doing it out of a fundamental sense of obligation?” The question has helped me find meaningful and life-giving ways to serve others. For folks looking for a number, I’ve found that I do best with 1 regular weekly commitment. I can usually find at least 2 hours in my week to serve others in an intentional way.

As this post was a brief venture into how-to land, I’m sure that your mileage will vary if you were to put these ideas into practice. This list reflects how I actively cultivated a celibate vocation. I’d love to hear from other people who have chosen to cultivate a celibate vocation about what they’re doing.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

When vocation doesn’t come naturally

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A reflection by Lindsey

One of the hazards I encounter is that Christians talking about celibacy frequently speak of the gift of celibacy. The gift of celibacy is treated on a level much like the gift of teaching or the gift of administration. If someone says he or she has a spiritual gift of teaching, then we often assume that means he or she is good at teaching. It stands to reason then that people might assume I’m good at celibacy, it comes naturally to me, and I don’t have to work especially hard to cultivate a celibate vocation because I feel called to celibacy. In many people’s eyes, I must have the gift of celibacy coupled with an odd human constitution that allows me to experience a great deal of joy even if I’m not having sex.

We’ve reflected elsewhere on our blog about how we regard the “gift” of celibacy, but what I’d like to do today is to reflect on what happens when one’s vocation doesn’t come naturally. We regard radical hospitality as the first defining virtue of a celibate vocation. But honestly, practicing out that virtue is a tremendous struggle for me. Practicing hospitality can be exceptionally draining the vast majority of the time; and, practicing radical hospitality only ratchets up the demand.

A continual commitment to hospitality is hard for me because I’m an introvert. To make matters even more difficult, social skills are definitely not my forte. Everything I know about relating to other people has been learned through hard fought lessons. So many things that people take for granted in social situations, I’ve had to learn. I have my fair share of embarrassing moments with one crowning example being when our couples therapist asked me in front of Sarah how I might start to get to know someone I’m just meeting. I was beyond clueless, struggling to get past my first tentative reply of, “You ask them their name?” knowing full well that our therapist had slightly more advanced social skills in mind. I have to work hard to muster anything remotely like confidence in social situations, and truth be told, I’d rather curl up and hide in my room most of the time than meet new people. If my friends were to think about the first words they associate with me, hospitality would be virtually absent from the list.

Yet, I regard radical hospitality as a core virtue of my God-given vocation. As such, I’ve made an active choice to try and cultivate hospitality even when it does not come naturally to me in the slightest. I find some refuge in trying to practice a radical hospitality centered on Christ, His Incarnation, and His example, but I certainly am not pretending for an instant that I have it all sorted.

When I’m practicing radical hospitality, I try to leverage my personality as an introvert as much as possible. I’d rather focus on building rich, meaningful, and deep relationships with a few people as opposed to perfecting the gentility associated with being an ideal host, a social butterfly, and a person who can attend to the most minute aspects of social cues. If radical hospitality necessarily had to involve the latter, I might as well be trying to sail a ship from a completely landlocked country. Instead, I work with what I have: my natural tendency towards generosity, my complete appreciation for the realness of human experiences, and my almost canine sense of loyalty. I live as simply as possible to try and always have a little bit more I can give to another (even if that gift is as immaterial as a smile and a kind word to the person collecting my toll money). I’ve worked through a lot of my own issues associated with trying to be human in this fallen world, so I can appreciate the authentic spiritual journeys of others. And I’m always looking at building my list of friends rather than transitioning away from friends after a season of closeness. The more vulnerable a person has chosen to be with me, the much more likely I am going to be his or her friend in a decade’s time.

I do not have a gift for small talk, and equally, I have zero interest in seeing how small talk could ever be a gift that I should work towards cultivating. Instead I spend a lot of time asking God to show me which people I should try to get to know better. I look for opportunities to be around the same group of people over time to give myself time (and space) to figuring out how to practice hospitality as best as I know how. I’ve been incredibly surprised that God keeps putting people in my path in a meaningful way, but I know that it’s not for an instant a relational network of my own building.

There’s a certain gift in not being interested in small talk. I look for places to hang out where it’s much more likely that people are engaging in deep talk. As such, I’ve seen that virtually every human being is staring bravely into the face of some very hard battles. Being present as people share what assails or ails them, I find myself frequently moved into prayer and encouragement. Encouragement unlocks my own excitabilities in such a way that some people don’t even realize I’m an introvert because I could play an extrovert so convincingly on television. But more to the point, in trying to get to know people in their hidden-away spaces, I increasingly feel the spark of prayer rise up in my heart as I try to present their concerns to Christ.

I don’t know where I’d be without trying to cultivate a celibate vocation. It’s the demand my vocation places on me to be radically hospitable that has pulled me out of my own shell and into a rich network of relationships with others. It’s been my natural cluelessness about how other people establish friendships that has led me to ask God for help. It’s been my desire for guidance that has spurred me to seek out men and women living celibate lives to ask them how they pray for the needs of the entire world even if they live intentionally detached from the world. It’s been my own battles with social anxiety and depression that have shown me that none of us have life as figured out as we think… and that many people are open to receiving an authentic dose of encouragement from a generous heart along the way.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.