This past week-end the U.S. celebrated/honoured the memory of Stonewall, of those who have gone before us, those we may have lost for now.
What better time to remember the work of a LGBT elder and personal hero- Malcolm Boyd - who has graced and suffered our Church as a priest for more than fifty years.
This prayer comes to us through the generous ministry of Kittredge Cherry, an author & radiant minister in the MCC Church, and is offered with love and profound gratitude most particularly for the radiant priesthood of two treasured brothers in faith, who actually got to meet each other this past week-end.
We Stand Inside Your Church
By Malcolm Boyd
Christ, as lesbians and gay men we stand inside your church and know a wholeness that can benefit it. We learned long ago that we must regard the lilies of the field, putting our trust in you.
Pressured to hide our identities and gifts, we have served you with an unyielding, fierce, vulnerable love inside the same church that condemned us.
Carefully taught that we must feel self-loathing, nevertheless we learned integrity and dignity and how to look into your face and laugh with grateful joy, Jesus.
Although we have suffered a long and continuing torture, we assert a stubborn, unshakable faith in your holy justice.
Negativism was drummed into us as thoroughly as if we were sheet metal. We learned what it is to be misunderstood, perceived as alien, even sometimes hated. Yet, because of your grace and love, we witness to the fullness and beauty of all human creation, including ours, in your image.
We are alive and well and stand inside your church. Bless us, Christ, to your service.
source:Equal Rites: Lesbian and Gay Worship, Ceremonies, and Celebrations
Showing posts with label LGBT grace. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LGBT grace. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
From one of the two books I've included in my Lenten practice this year is 'Taking a Chance on God' by John J. McNeill; a passage which immeadiately brought to mind two treasured siblings in Christ- M.W. & P.S., both of them living blessings and extra-oridinary Episcopal priests:
For Jesus, all human suffering was contrary to God’s plan. God and suffering are diametrically opposed, and God always seeks to remove it. The only redemptive suffering is that which is voluntarily undertake or accepted in the effort to liberate others. Any suffering that we impose on each other is anathema. Evidently, Jesus was little interested whether the suffering was the consequence of sin or was innocent. Neither piety nor its lack set any limits to his concern. In his ministry, Jesus saw the suffering of others as his task, his mission in life was to do all he could to bring relief.
This understanding gives us a norm, a litmus test, to judge whether aspects of Christian practice are in conformity with the spirit of Christ. Whatever aspects of Christian practice contradict the demands of of a personal and collective human liberation must be rejected in the name of Christian faith itself. As followers of Jesus, we are obliged by our faith to be active in shaping justice and peace in our society.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
my Dec 1st
December 2, 2009
The day after World AIDS Day, and I can’t help but wonder, did anyone learn anything yesterday?
Living with the hard reality of unemployment and diminishing financial resources meant that World AIDS Day this year was observed the way I would have done so every year in the last 20+: in silence, in practice and prayer.
World AIDS Day is very personal for me.
It’s not just the loss of my beloved Louis, one of the most extraordinary beings I’ve ever known, co-founder of the first AIDS service organization here in Montreal and defining gift of my life.
It’s not just the 300+ buddies and friends who died in the care of a programme I helped run before moving on to other forms of activism.
It’s not just the great flood of memory and detail of two over-sized decades on the front lines of service and activism locally.
It’s not just the POZ folks I have known, most unforgettably from Africa, through conferences and networking.
It’s also the great wall of chosen indifference we’d thrown ourselves up against again and again for decades now.
It’s also the aching sense I’ve had since the very first time I met a POZ person from Africa that her suffering and the sense that , the obscene suffering of her great continent needn’t have ever happened if Westerners had re-examined their homophobia and stepped forward to help in that first, nightmarish decade of HIV/AIDS when some winter weeks we had folks dying daily.
It's all interconnected.
Sometime mid-afternoon, keeping my ass on the bench and the long-suffering of my creatures had brought me to a space beyond the memories of helpless frustration, loss and the seeming inability to make a real difference; to a reflective space.
Truth is, my life was totally altered by those decades- in more ways that you’d really want to know about.
Truth is, because of the very real courage, passion and grace I witnessed and shared in the lives of those we lost there are just some things I have zero patience with now.
Truth is it can never be the same: the way life was before those two over-sized, transformiatve decades.
Which strangely enough brought me to the seeing just how those years shape and inform my sense of what is going on in our Church at this moment.
The Church and AIDS you ask? Bare with me please.
Sitting there, the silence ended up asking a series of questions.
In those raw, first years before anyone really knew anything much; before AIDS had been normalized and so many careers were being built on the back of HIV AIDS; what were our options- what was our only real option.
To turn up- to step into the very real poverty of the ‘need’.
What did you have to work with?
Nothing much except each other. Let me rephrase that- nothing much but the grace of God in and through each other.
Please don’t misunderstand me, I am NOT glamorizing, idealizing, or fondly looking back.
I remember just how little there was in the way of resources; and how much at times, we were able to do with it.
I remember the end of too many months when there was NOTHING to give.
The meals left out in the hospital hallway- on the floor!
Medical staff double-gloved and masked just to take a temperature.
Substandard housing, inadequate welfare and treatments options running out.
Friends carried out of their apartments, while the landlord hovered, impatient to change the lock.
Unpaid bills, unbought winter clothes, the indifference or rejection of families.
Funerals and late night bedside vigils.
The polite avoidance both by too many churches and the corporate sector.
I remember wasting flesh, the rawness of diapers needing to be changed, silent sunken eyes and fetid breath.
Yes, there was also moments of extraordinary grace- so many of them. Laughter, the incredible Christmas parties we somehow organized, the silent defiance of our marches through the gay village and the joy and generosity of our friends when they knew that Louis and I really were a couple.
Mostly, I remember the raw chasm of ineffective helplessness with each death, and none more so than that of my beloved.
Sitting there, a kalidescope of faces and memories- many of them of ‘the moment’ when individual lives broke open to the hard reality and grace of their situation. The naked place where ‘who,’ ‘when,’ ‘how’ became irrelevant; where victimhood was cast off, and Life- every precious moment of it became the only priority.
Which brigs me even closer to this sense of the interconnectedness between the reality we lived then and the current state of our Church.
Current appearances to the contrary- yes inspite of all the noise, the panicked fear, the threats, recriminations, the supercilious posturing and condamnations; we, the Church - let me be more specific, the Anglican Church is standing on very sacred ground, where the Holy Spirit is closer to us than breath, where the transformative possibilities are limitless; where the ‘dream of God,’ and the call to heal Her creation has never been stronger or clearer.
But inherent in that dream- that call, are a few things the Church- our Church has to embrace and own up to; and as I say this the face of one exquisitely precious friend comes to mind. An accomplished correographer and dancer, it was only in that quite, but very sacred moment when she owned her sero-status, that she stepped beyond being a victim of either circumstances or virus and owned the gift of life she had been given, with all its many graces, its gifts and its lessons.
Likewise, I’d suggest there are a few things our Churches have to own up to and own:
1) It’s history, and the suffering & harm it has done in too many lives, the scandal and insanity it has, at times been implicit in- never more so than currently in Uganda.
Buried in this hard but radically freeing truth is a TREMENDOUS gift once we step into the realization that the life, ministry and death of our blessed Lord and Saviour was about anything but power. It was and is about Life
I have come that they may have life, and have it more abundantly.
2) The sacred ambiguity (h/t saint Verna) which contemporary critical study of Scriptural texts calls us into is a wondrous, freeing, ambiguous gift. Within this context it is my understanding that ‘idolatry’ is essentially a futile attempt to control reality, to colonize or franchize the Living God and the sacrament of life itself- usually in the exercise of power.
3) The sacramental gift of the lives, grace and ministry of the faithful laity, and none more so now than the LGBT faithful, who continue to fill our pews, continue to contribute of their gifts and time, and continue to stand witness to that ‘Love beyond our wildest imaging’ in their lives and vocations within a patriarchal monolith which continually wills them back to a ‘crucified place.’
To quote one, very dear sister, ‘when are they going to realize, it’s our best they receive- the best of our loves, our lives and faith.’
Please let me contextualize this within two conversations which began in the weeks before December 1 but which resonated deeply within my practice and observance yesterday.
‘P’ is a man in his thirties, an accountant by profession, a faithful son of the Roman Catholic Church, who recognizing his gender as a gay man chose to remain faithfully celibate, and for more than a decade worked in his diocesan structure as a professional accountant before moving on to work in the corporate sector. ‘P’ knew of me through a family member of his in another city with whom he’d often had issues over her leaving ‘the Church’ over the issues of the ordination of women and the full inclusion of LGBT faithful. ‘P’ like too many closeted faithful was ‘the Church’s’ staunchest defender' in their ‘discussions he told me ironically.’
Two things in particular brought ‘P’ ‘to the wall,’ to use his words: ‘taking on’ James Carroll’s ‘Practicing Catholic’ and subsequently the ‘arrogant pronouncement of the American Council of Bishops’ on the efficacy of end of life suffering.
‘It all just shattered- like that’ he told me through audible tears. ‘Carroll is right- so much of it is man-made b.s. inflicted on a Jesus-hungry faithful to shore up the power of a bunch of old men in skirts.
There was one paragraph in particular ‘P’ read to me over the phone:
‘When the Gospels have Jesus ‘predicting’ the destruction of the Temple and identifying himself as the replacement, they are describing an after-the-fact adaption that Jesus’ followers made to what the Romans had already done. Writing in 80 or 100 a story that claims to be happening in 30, they bring into that story, as prophecy, the decisive destruction of the Temple in 70. The Temple will be destroyed, Jesus says, because the Jews are rejecting him. But the rejection in question is experienced not by Jesus in 30, but by Jesus’ followers in 80 or 90 or 100, afer the Temple has been destroyed.
James Carroll, ‘Practicing Catholic’ pp 143
‘Why were we never taught this? How can they continue to teach inerrancy,’ ‘P’ challenged me over the phone.
The other conversation began almost two weeks earlier, from ‘E’ in her late forties; single mother of two adult children; a narcotics officer seconded for a year to an American federal agency. ‘Away from home for a year’ on this posting, she’d quite innocently asked the pastor of the Lutheran Church she is currently attending for some reading suggestions for the long evenings she spends alone in her’ temporary quarters.’
‘E’ was reading Marcus Borg when she called- referred by that same pastor who has been an online friend of mine for more than two years now.
‘Jesus, Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary’ was the volume in question, and ‘the wall’ ‘E’ had hit was Borg’s chronological de-construction of Scripture.
Rather than weeping, ‘E’ was angry- without being sure who the real target was, and uncomfortable sharing what she was feeling with her interim pastor, ‘someone I barely know,’ she told me without being aware of the irony of speaking to an absolute stranger long distance.
When my initial suggestion, that what was really going on here was a call from the Holy Spirit, an invitation to embrace both a larger life and a larger faith, ‘E’s anger and the pain beneath it found its bullseye- yours truly.
Less than an hour later she called back, and we talked, prayed in our respective silences, and yes, even laughed late into the night. (Danged time differences!)
Several times ‘E’ quoted to me what I sensed were the articles of the faith of her particular denomination, none of which I ever challenged.
However I did suggest they might be only part of the picture, a ‘particular context.’
Sometime after midnight, with me asking questions more than anything ‘E’ was silent for several very long moments. ‘... I think I’m finally getting it... there’s God, and there’s the Church, and what I’ve been doing... what I’ve been holding on to is the Church, not God.’
I reminded her of her own family’s story, how one of her grandfathers or great grandfathers had literally been responsible for much of the construction and all of the beautiful carving in the prairie church she still considered her spiritual home, and that there is real beauty in all of that.
‘Yes, but Church without... personal relationship with God is... rules and real estate.’
We actually ended up discussing ‘the gift of Borg,’ how the scholarship he shares can be used as a lense- an always incomplete lense, for ‘seeing through the structure to God waiting for us in the very sacrament of our lives.
Yes, we actually talked about the sacrament of ‘E’s’ life, and that’s when there were tears.
‘E’ I sent back to her pastor with the suggestion that perhaps they might want to start a group study of Borg’s book.
‘P,’ with his permission I put him in touch with a gay Episcopal priest I know of in his city. Not for conversion- for friendship.
Their first contact was when ‘P turned up ‘unannouced’ at Sunday Eucharist, and sat there in tears, ‘at the sheer wonder if it all. So many tears I almost didn’t go up to receive the Sacrament,’ he told me.
‘P’ and his new friend have got together several times, for an ‘incredible meal’ at the rectory, for a film 'that had nothing to do with anything but laughter,' and several long walks.
‘E’s’ last e-mail to me closed with ‘ not a cloud in the sky. Everything is indeed possible with God.’
And sitting there late last night it all fit together- my understanding of the great blessings our ordained sisters have brought our Church; the awesome miracle of November 2, 2003 and the truly great gift the faithful of New Hampshire gave our Church; the frightened noisy theatrics from what another friend calls ‘the peanut gallery of the Anglican purity police’; the persistent wonder of the faithfulness and generosity of so very many LGBT lives within our Church and the life-affirming powerful ways in which the Holy Spirit is using those lives to bring us into ‘life more abundantly.’
Yes, there were tears, of love and thankfulness, of awe and remembrance.
Thanks be to God.
The day after World AIDS Day, and I can’t help but wonder, did anyone learn anything yesterday?
Living with the hard reality of unemployment and diminishing financial resources meant that World AIDS Day this year was observed the way I would have done so every year in the last 20+: in silence, in practice and prayer.
World AIDS Day is very personal for me.
It’s not just the loss of my beloved Louis, one of the most extraordinary beings I’ve ever known, co-founder of the first AIDS service organization here in Montreal and defining gift of my life.
It’s not just the 300+ buddies and friends who died in the care of a programme I helped run before moving on to other forms of activism.
It’s not just the great flood of memory and detail of two over-sized decades on the front lines of service and activism locally.
It’s not just the POZ folks I have known, most unforgettably from Africa, through conferences and networking.
It’s also the great wall of chosen indifference we’d thrown ourselves up against again and again for decades now.
It’s also the aching sense I’ve had since the very first time I met a POZ person from Africa that her suffering and the sense that , the obscene suffering of her great continent needn’t have ever happened if Westerners had re-examined their homophobia and stepped forward to help in that first, nightmarish decade of HIV/AIDS when some winter weeks we had folks dying daily.
It's all interconnected.
Sometime mid-afternoon, keeping my ass on the bench and the long-suffering of my creatures had brought me to a space beyond the memories of helpless frustration, loss and the seeming inability to make a real difference; to a reflective space.
Truth is, my life was totally altered by those decades- in more ways that you’d really want to know about.
Truth is, because of the very real courage, passion and grace I witnessed and shared in the lives of those we lost there are just some things I have zero patience with now.
Truth is it can never be the same: the way life was before those two over-sized, transformiatve decades.
Which strangely enough brought me to the seeing just how those years shape and inform my sense of what is going on in our Church at this moment.
The Church and AIDS you ask? Bare with me please.
Sitting there, the silence ended up asking a series of questions.
In those raw, first years before anyone really knew anything much; before AIDS had been normalized and so many careers were being built on the back of HIV AIDS; what were our options- what was our only real option.
To turn up- to step into the very real poverty of the ‘need’.
What did you have to work with?
Nothing much except each other. Let me rephrase that- nothing much but the grace of God in and through each other.
Please don’t misunderstand me, I am NOT glamorizing, idealizing, or fondly looking back.
I remember just how little there was in the way of resources; and how much at times, we were able to do with it.
I remember the end of too many months when there was NOTHING to give.
The meals left out in the hospital hallway- on the floor!
Medical staff double-gloved and masked just to take a temperature.
Substandard housing, inadequate welfare and treatments options running out.
Friends carried out of their apartments, while the landlord hovered, impatient to change the lock.
Unpaid bills, unbought winter clothes, the indifference or rejection of families.
Funerals and late night bedside vigils.
The polite avoidance both by too many churches and the corporate sector.
I remember wasting flesh, the rawness of diapers needing to be changed, silent sunken eyes and fetid breath.
Yes, there was also moments of extraordinary grace- so many of them. Laughter, the incredible Christmas parties we somehow organized, the silent defiance of our marches through the gay village and the joy and generosity of our friends when they knew that Louis and I really were a couple.
Mostly, I remember the raw chasm of ineffective helplessness with each death, and none more so than that of my beloved.
Sitting there, a kalidescope of faces and memories- many of them of ‘the moment’ when individual lives broke open to the hard reality and grace of their situation. The naked place where ‘who,’ ‘when,’ ‘how’ became irrelevant; where victimhood was cast off, and Life- every precious moment of it became the only priority.
Which brigs me even closer to this sense of the interconnectedness between the reality we lived then and the current state of our Church.
Current appearances to the contrary- yes inspite of all the noise, the panicked fear, the threats, recriminations, the supercilious posturing and condamnations; we, the Church - let me be more specific, the Anglican Church is standing on very sacred ground, where the Holy Spirit is closer to us than breath, where the transformative possibilities are limitless; where the ‘dream of God,’ and the call to heal Her creation has never been stronger or clearer.
But inherent in that dream- that call, are a few things the Church- our Church has to embrace and own up to; and as I say this the face of one exquisitely precious friend comes to mind. An accomplished correographer and dancer, it was only in that quite, but very sacred moment when she owned her sero-status, that she stepped beyond being a victim of either circumstances or virus and owned the gift of life she had been given, with all its many graces, its gifts and its lessons.
Likewise, I’d suggest there are a few things our Churches have to own up to and own:
1) It’s history, and the suffering & harm it has done in too many lives, the scandal and insanity it has, at times been implicit in- never more so than currently in Uganda.
Buried in this hard but radically freeing truth is a TREMENDOUS gift once we step into the realization that the life, ministry and death of our blessed Lord and Saviour was about anything but power. It was and is about Life
I have come that they may have life, and have it more abundantly.
2) The sacred ambiguity (h/t saint Verna) which contemporary critical study of Scriptural texts calls us into is a wondrous, freeing, ambiguous gift. Within this context it is my understanding that ‘idolatry’ is essentially a futile attempt to control reality, to colonize or franchize the Living God and the sacrament of life itself- usually in the exercise of power.
3) The sacramental gift of the lives, grace and ministry of the faithful laity, and none more so now than the LGBT faithful, who continue to fill our pews, continue to contribute of their gifts and time, and continue to stand witness to that ‘Love beyond our wildest imaging’ in their lives and vocations within a patriarchal monolith which continually wills them back to a ‘crucified place.’
To quote one, very dear sister, ‘when are they going to realize, it’s our best they receive- the best of our loves, our lives and faith.’
Please let me contextualize this within two conversations which began in the weeks before December 1 but which resonated deeply within my practice and observance yesterday.
‘P’ is a man in his thirties, an accountant by profession, a faithful son of the Roman Catholic Church, who recognizing his gender as a gay man chose to remain faithfully celibate, and for more than a decade worked in his diocesan structure as a professional accountant before moving on to work in the corporate sector. ‘P’ knew of me through a family member of his in another city with whom he’d often had issues over her leaving ‘the Church’ over the issues of the ordination of women and the full inclusion of LGBT faithful. ‘P’ like too many closeted faithful was ‘the Church’s’ staunchest defender' in their ‘discussions he told me ironically.’
Two things in particular brought ‘P’ ‘to the wall,’ to use his words: ‘taking on’ James Carroll’s ‘Practicing Catholic’ and subsequently the ‘arrogant pronouncement of the American Council of Bishops’ on the efficacy of end of life suffering.
‘It all just shattered- like that’ he told me through audible tears. ‘Carroll is right- so much of it is man-made b.s. inflicted on a Jesus-hungry faithful to shore up the power of a bunch of old men in skirts.
There was one paragraph in particular ‘P’ read to me over the phone:
‘When the Gospels have Jesus ‘predicting’ the destruction of the Temple and identifying himself as the replacement, they are describing an after-the-fact adaption that Jesus’ followers made to what the Romans had already done. Writing in 80 or 100 a story that claims to be happening in 30, they bring into that story, as prophecy, the decisive destruction of the Temple in 70. The Temple will be destroyed, Jesus says, because the Jews are rejecting him. But the rejection in question is experienced not by Jesus in 30, but by Jesus’ followers in 80 or 90 or 100, afer the Temple has been destroyed.
James Carroll, ‘Practicing Catholic’ pp 143
‘Why were we never taught this? How can they continue to teach inerrancy,’ ‘P’ challenged me over the phone.
The other conversation began almost two weeks earlier, from ‘E’ in her late forties; single mother of two adult children; a narcotics officer seconded for a year to an American federal agency. ‘Away from home for a year’ on this posting, she’d quite innocently asked the pastor of the Lutheran Church she is currently attending for some reading suggestions for the long evenings she spends alone in her’ temporary quarters.’
‘E’ was reading Marcus Borg when she called- referred by that same pastor who has been an online friend of mine for more than two years now.
‘Jesus, Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary’ was the volume in question, and ‘the wall’ ‘E’ had hit was Borg’s chronological de-construction of Scripture.
Rather than weeping, ‘E’ was angry- without being sure who the real target was, and uncomfortable sharing what she was feeling with her interim pastor, ‘someone I barely know,’ she told me without being aware of the irony of speaking to an absolute stranger long distance.
When my initial suggestion, that what was really going on here was a call from the Holy Spirit, an invitation to embrace both a larger life and a larger faith, ‘E’s anger and the pain beneath it found its bullseye- yours truly.
Less than an hour later she called back, and we talked, prayed in our respective silences, and yes, even laughed late into the night. (Danged time differences!)
Several times ‘E’ quoted to me what I sensed were the articles of the faith of her particular denomination, none of which I ever challenged.
However I did suggest they might be only part of the picture, a ‘particular context.’
Sometime after midnight, with me asking questions more than anything ‘E’ was silent for several very long moments. ‘... I think I’m finally getting it... there’s God, and there’s the Church, and what I’ve been doing... what I’ve been holding on to is the Church, not God.’
I reminded her of her own family’s story, how one of her grandfathers or great grandfathers had literally been responsible for much of the construction and all of the beautiful carving in the prairie church she still considered her spiritual home, and that there is real beauty in all of that.
‘Yes, but Church without... personal relationship with God is... rules and real estate.’
We actually ended up discussing ‘the gift of Borg,’ how the scholarship he shares can be used as a lense- an always incomplete lense, for ‘seeing through the structure to God waiting for us in the very sacrament of our lives.
Yes, we actually talked about the sacrament of ‘E’s’ life, and that’s when there were tears.
‘E’ I sent back to her pastor with the suggestion that perhaps they might want to start a group study of Borg’s book.
‘P,’ with his permission I put him in touch with a gay Episcopal priest I know of in his city. Not for conversion- for friendship.
Their first contact was when ‘P turned up ‘unannouced’ at Sunday Eucharist, and sat there in tears, ‘at the sheer wonder if it all. So many tears I almost didn’t go up to receive the Sacrament,’ he told me.
‘P’ and his new friend have got together several times, for an ‘incredible meal’ at the rectory, for a film 'that had nothing to do with anything but laughter,' and several long walks.
‘E’s’ last e-mail to me closed with ‘ not a cloud in the sky. Everything is indeed possible with God.’
And sitting there late last night it all fit together- my understanding of the great blessings our ordained sisters have brought our Church; the awesome miracle of November 2, 2003 and the truly great gift the faithful of New Hampshire gave our Church; the frightened noisy theatrics from what another friend calls ‘the peanut gallery of the Anglican purity police’; the persistent wonder of the faithfulness and generosity of so very many LGBT lives within our Church and the life-affirming powerful ways in which the Holy Spirit is using those lives to bring us into ‘life more abundantly.’
Yes, there were tears, of love and thankfulness, of awe and remembrance.
Thanks be to God.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
The Point
Yes, of course I read it (the HoB New Orleans statement) along with many of the hurt and confused responses of sisters and brothers throughout the Communion and our LGBT tribe.
But a fall cold and real life (more on that later) kept me very much occupied elsewhere.
Time and distance from engaging with post New Orleans blogdom brought an interesting insight- for me at least. An insight informed by years of dharma study and practice as much as by the work on ‘process’ by Margaret Wheatley PhD.
Yes I was hurt and dismayed, yes I shook my head over the essential impotent irrelevance of the New Orleans offering., but the longer I sat with the experience, the clearer it became. The whole thing had to be what it was because of where they started out: a place of re-acting instead of a place of acting.
And let me be clear here- I am neither criticizing or blaming the HoB. With all the noise and acrimony of the past many months they would have had to shut themselves away for a lot longer for any other sort of outcome.
And thank God indeed there's still the rest of TEC & House of Deputies to balance the New Orleans statement!
To understand what I'm talking about, it is perhaps necessary to revisit a term I've used in this space previously, and which has earned me a certain amount of criticism. 'Bullies of the patriarchy' I believe speaks not only to the real issues at stake, but to the behaviour of many I would associate with that moniker.
But to get back to my point about The Point.
One of the most valuable gifts the dharma has brought me has been some insight into the important and essential difference between acting and re-acting. An insight I might add which came in the rawest days of our local fight against AIDS, with friends and clients sometimes dying daily.
Re-acting always
Acting
Of course I wasn’t there in New Orleans, so can only read the outcome and the pain and confusion of my brothers and sisters in Christ. But the bottom line appears to be that no one was ‘satisfied’ and the essential process our Communion is going through right now wasn’t advanced a centimetre- on the contrary judging by the reaction of the patriarchy.
Yes, I shook my head, but I also felt real sadness for our brothers and sisters wearing the onerous mantle of the Episcopacy in the American Church.
By re-acting, with the best of intentions no doubt, and only after they themselves had gone through the same agonizing long months we’ve all traversed since Dar-Es-Salam, they essentially found themselves implicitly having to overlook much of what has gone on in that same period of time:
Unfortunately New Orleans couldn’t be anything more than it was, when the discussions were framed by the deadline and conditions established by the statement of Dar-Es-Salam.
So what’s the alternative model ?
Might I risk sounding simplistic (once again some might add) by suggesting it be that of our sweet Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ who Himself ‘drew apart’ regularly as Scripture tells us.
One of the many dharma teachers who has nourished my practice over the years speaks ’three breathes.’ Taking time ie enough breathes to get beyond whatever might be coming at us, enabling us to respond in the larger unconditional openness of the ‘now’ rather than in the dead history which lead to the original attack or accusation.
What did I expect/pray for/hope for?
Nothing short of sheer radiance!
A statement which would have established the example and teachings of Jesus Christ as the first and only principle of the exchange.
A statement which would not have wasted time or energy trying to accommodate a problematic resolution which is already effectively dead-in-the-water.
A statement which would have admitted the need for God’s grace and patience as the HoB was not of one mind on all things.
A statement which would not have contradicted or compromised the final declarations of its communique.
Only then could the meetings of TEC have stood as proof that their discussions were
Once again, you have my full permission to call me simplistic, but I’d offer a parallel example.
Earlier this week, at work, I was given an opportunity to work with a colleague who was buying-into a series of continually escalating exchanges and accusation about ‘fairness’ & ‘responsibility’ with another colleague.
Both parties are basically decent human beings, each who at different times have confided in me some of their personal baggage and the resulting behaviour patterns.
‘You know you still have a choice in all of this’ I reminded Jenny, bringing her up short in her list of complaints. ‘You can still decide wether or not to buy into this game, or owning your feelings and personal history, to step outside into something larger. The choice of how you will spend your next breath is still yours.’
Of course our discussion didn’t end with my suggestion, but one thing did change, and that was Jenny. Instead of returning to her cubicle and firing off another re-active e-mail or shouting her response over their common wall, she chose to not return to her work space until we had talked the whole thing out and she was ready to get on with the real reason she turned up each day- the work awaiting her.
And when she didn’t respond?
Jenny and her colleague eventually talked about the specific work issue which had been the grounds of the latest aborted round. When her colleague tried carrying it further, turning it into a personal attack, Jenny simply disengaged- citing her ringing phone.
It may not happen next time, but it did then, and that’s some sort of a start.
And thankfully, our blessed Communion is further along than Jenny.
Personally, I’d most readily refer to all of the radiant voices of inclusiveness within the Communion which continue to nourish, bless and inform me daily. You know who you are.
I would also take great hope from the existence of the House of Deputies within TEC, the structure of our own Canadian Synod, and similar structures throughout the Communion.
Then there’s the courageous embodiment of grace in the insistence by our countless LGBT sisters and brothers in faith, of their full inclusion in that same Communion, through God’s grace and the rite of baptism.
But there’s also the unwavering assurance that ‘God so loved the world that S/He gave His only begotten son Christ Jesus’
Thankfully this is not our Church, our Truth, or even our issue that our beloved Communion is undergoing at the present time.
Unfortunately, too often in the past, too much Christian history has been one of ever- escalating action and re-action; a direct result of the dualistic-thinking necessary for the establishment of the patriarchy which for too long imposed its fears and insecurity on Christian practice.
But through God’s unfailing grace and the living contradiction to patriarchal dualism we LGBT people of faith embody at this time, Christ’s Church is once again being called out of fear, to be the radiant embodiment of God’s love which has always been it’s true vocation.
To act (embody Christ Jesus in the world)
rather than re-act in the realm and vocabulary of fear.
the choice is always ours.
A new day...
But for this to happen, the ‘listening process’ becomes more essential than ever.
Not just whatever forums and ‘public processes’ individual dioceses and provinces may offer, but every blessed life, every blessed voice within the Communion- and none more or less so than my radiant, blessed LGBT sisters and brothers- each and every one of you.
LGBT lives - LGBT grace - essential - yes essential to the life and future of the Anglican Communion.
Who would have ever imagined the day?
But that is exactly where we are now.
Dare I say it? Praise God!
All we have to do is show up- be still and know that I am God, to quote scripture.
The Communion may rend- no make that- the Communion may be rent. But it will still be the Communion, working its way back to the inclusive wholeness God has always wanted for all of Creation & the Church.
So what are we supposed to be afraid of in the long run? Nothing comes to mind... because this is not just our process of growth beyond fear, not just our growth in grace, this is not just our Communion.
It never was. Thank God.
Amen.
But a fall cold and real life (more on that later) kept me very much occupied elsewhere.
Time and distance from engaging with post New Orleans blogdom brought an interesting insight- for me at least. An insight informed by years of dharma study and practice as much as by the work on ‘process’ by Margaret Wheatley PhD.
Yes I was hurt and dismayed, yes I shook my head over the essential impotent irrelevance of the New Orleans offering., but the longer I sat with the experience, the clearer it became. The whole thing had to be what it was because of where they started out: a place of re-acting instead of a place of acting.
And let me be clear here- I am neither criticizing or blaming the HoB. With all the noise and acrimony of the past many months they would have had to shut themselves away for a lot longer for any other sort of outcome.
And thank God indeed there's still the rest of TEC & House of Deputies to balance the New Orleans statement!
To understand what I'm talking about, it is perhaps necessary to revisit a term I've used in this space previously, and which has earned me a certain amount of criticism. 'Bullies of the patriarchy' I believe speaks not only to the real issues at stake, but to the behaviour of many I would associate with that moniker.
Bullying is rarely ever about what it claims to be ie.
fear of the open vulnerability to both God and life which is the vocation of
every Christian.
Bullying breaches the norms and conventions of the
group ie. storming out of one of the most sacred rites of our
Communion, the Primatal Holy Eucharist at Dar Es Salam.
Bullying
resorts to a continually escalating vocabulary of threats and accusation which
is a non-stop denial of the essential humanity, experience and grace of its
target.
Bullying’s charges can never be effectively met or satisfied, as its
real agenda is never admitted (see The Chapman Memo nefariously written
back in 2003).
Bullying can never be satisfied as the essential
dishonesty of its attack requires a continual escalation and shifting of its
target.
and need I say it?
Bullying is always an expression of a lack of emotional
intelligence, spiritual maturity and experience.
But to get back to my point about The Point.
One of the most valuable gifts the dharma has brought me has been some insight into the important and essential difference between acting and re-acting. An insight I might add which came in the rawest days of our local fight against AIDS, with friends and clients sometimes dying daily.
Re-acting always
limits any subsequent discussion or peace-making to the vocabulary and context
established by the bullies.
is implicitly incapable of including the experience and understanding of the party under attack
will always fail to satisfy either party, as it is always speaking to the past ie. earlier charges rather than the current situation & fails to call forth the bullies real
agenda
Acting
disengages, while owning both the charges of the bully and the experience of
being bullied
practices prayerfully (ie be still and know that I am God) until the deeper truth, experience and understanding of the real situation are gained, at the same time disengaging from one’s own instinctual responses
speaks or acts only from that larger place ie: taking the whole
exercise outside the area of violence and accusation, addressing both the shared
humanity of all parties and once again opening the discussion to God’s grace.
Of course I wasn’t there in New Orleans, so can only read the outcome and the pain and confusion of my brothers and sisters in Christ. But the bottom line appears to be that no one was ‘satisfied’ and the essential process our Communion is going through right now wasn’t advanced a centimetre- on the contrary judging by the reaction of the patriarchy.
Yes, I shook my head, but I also felt real sadness for our brothers and sisters wearing the onerous mantle of the Episcopacy in the American Church.
By re-acting, with the best of intentions no doubt, and only after they themselves had gone through the same agonizing long months we’ve all traversed since Dar-Es-Salam, they essentially found themselves implicitly having to overlook much of what has gone on in that same period of time:
So it was inevitable that we all came away from the latest exercise shaken, sore and still hungry for the bread of heaven.Primatal poaching from outside TEC
irregular consecrations of more bishops
than I need to see
the damning of duly consecrated primates, bishops, priests
and the lay baptized including my radiant LGBT brothers and sisters of
faith
too many of the resources of the Communion squandered on these ‘issues’
while the holocaust of AIDS continues to spread, wars wage and whole societies
unravel under the curse of poverty.
Unfortunately New Orleans couldn’t be anything more than it was, when the discussions were framed by the deadline and conditions established by the statement of Dar-Es-Salam.
So what’s the alternative model ?
Might I risk sounding simplistic (once again some might add) by suggesting it be that of our sweet Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ who Himself ‘drew apart’ regularly as Scripture tells us.
One of the many dharma teachers who has nourished my practice over the years speaks ’three breathes.’ Taking time ie enough breathes to get beyond whatever might be coming at us, enabling us to respond in the larger unconditional openness of the ‘now’ rather than in the dead history which lead to the original attack or accusation.
What did I expect/pray for/hope for?
Nothing short of sheer radiance!
A statement which would have established the example and teachings of Jesus Christ as the first and only principle of the exchange.
A statement which would not have wasted time or energy trying to accommodate a problematic resolution which is already effectively dead-in-the-water.
A statement which would have admitted the need for God’s grace and patience as the HoB was not of one mind on all things.
A statement which would not have contradicted or compromised the final declarations of its communique.
Only then could the meetings of TEC have stood as proof that their discussions were
outside the ‘fist’ of the bully,
a true reflection of the path that TEC has walked, and the grace they have known in their efforts to be a true embodiment of Christ’s loving vocation for humanity,
witness to glorious outcome of Christ’s Incarnation, Christ’s crucifixion and yes, Christ’s resurrection ,
only then could the current discussions have been truly taken beyond the place of accusation, acrimony and condemnation.
Once again, you have my full permission to call me simplistic, but I’d offer a parallel example.
Earlier this week, at work, I was given an opportunity to work with a colleague who was buying-into a series of continually escalating exchanges and accusation about ‘fairness’ & ‘responsibility’ with another colleague.
Both parties are basically decent human beings, each who at different times have confided in me some of their personal baggage and the resulting behaviour patterns.
‘You know you still have a choice in all of this’ I reminded Jenny, bringing her up short in her list of complaints. ‘You can still decide wether or not to buy into this game, or owning your feelings and personal history, to step outside into something larger. The choice of how you will spend your next breath is still yours.’
Of course our discussion didn’t end with my suggestion, but one thing did change, and that was Jenny. Instead of returning to her cubicle and firing off another re-active e-mail or shouting her response over their common wall, she chose to not return to her work space until we had talked the whole thing out and she was ready to get on with the real reason she turned up each day- the work awaiting her.
And when she didn’t respond?
Jenny and her colleague eventually talked about the specific work issue which had been the grounds of the latest aborted round. When her colleague tried carrying it further, turning it into a personal attack, Jenny simply disengaged- citing her ringing phone.
It may not happen next time, but it did then, and that’s some sort of a start.
And thankfully, our blessed Communion is further along than Jenny.
Personally, I’d most readily refer to all of the radiant voices of inclusiveness within the Communion which continue to nourish, bless and inform me daily. You know who you are.
I would also take great hope from the existence of the House of Deputies within TEC, the structure of our own Canadian Synod, and similar structures throughout the Communion.
Then there’s the courageous embodiment of grace in the insistence by our countless LGBT sisters and brothers in faith, of their full inclusion in that same Communion, through God’s grace and the rite of baptism.
But there’s also the unwavering assurance that ‘God so loved the world that S/He gave His only begotten son Christ Jesus’
Thankfully this is not our Church, our Truth, or even our issue that our beloved Communion is undergoing at the present time.
Unfortunately, too often in the past, too much Christian history has been one of ever- escalating action and re-action; a direct result of the dualistic-thinking necessary for the establishment of the patriarchy which for too long imposed its fears and insecurity on Christian practice.
But through God’s unfailing grace and the living contradiction to patriarchal dualism we LGBT people of faith embody at this time, Christ’s Church is once again being called out of fear, to be the radiant embodiment of God’s love which has always been it’s true vocation.
To act (embody Christ Jesus in the world)
rather than re-act in the realm and vocabulary of fear.
the choice is always ours.
A new day...
But for this to happen, the ‘listening process’ becomes more essential than ever.
Not just whatever forums and ‘public processes’ individual dioceses and provinces may offer, but every blessed life, every blessed voice within the Communion- and none more or less so than my radiant, blessed LGBT sisters and brothers- each and every one of you.
LGBT lives - LGBT grace - essential - yes essential to the life and future of the Anglican Communion.
Who would have ever imagined the day?
But that is exactly where we are now.
Dare I say it? Praise God!
All we have to do is show up- be still and know that I am God, to quote scripture.
The Communion may rend- no make that- the Communion may be rent. But it will still be the Communion, working its way back to the inclusive wholeness God has always wanted for all of Creation & the Church.
So what are we supposed to be afraid of in the long run? Nothing comes to mind... because this is not just our process of growth beyond fear, not just our growth in grace, this is not just our Communion.
It never was. Thank God.
Amen.
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