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Author, Speaker, Storyteller, Mississippi native
i just found this and am reading it with tears in my eyes. So well put. The best piece I’ve ever written on a subject terribly important to me. I so admire your courage for going to give that talk, and for finding the reason to go. Bless that calling.
I want to share this with all my religious friends who somehow cannot accept gay people as their sisters & brothers in Christ – in the hopes of explaining why I feel called by God to welcome gay people into His church and His family – no different than anyone else.
This has been the only real tension w/in me as I became a believer, that somehow in the same breath I was called to reject people I loved, simply for an orientation they had been born with. Perhaps if I had been a Christian BEFORE I was a friend and family member of people who were gay, it would have been different. But I could never bring myself to reject those I loved just for the sake of theology, & I never could believe in my deepest heart that God wanted me to.
It led me over the years to reject God instead, and to search wildly for a church & theology that could encompass both. I’m not sure I have found it, in the end. But I have gotten a lot closer.
Thank you again for writing this. You are right, telling our stories w/o expectation of a particular outcome, is one of the most healing things we can do.
Blessings to you!
I came here from that article, because I could see only one comment on the Commonweal site, and that one at best unclear as to whether it was intended to be supportive or not — it was important to me that someone say thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you for speaking clearly and lovingly to a community I don’t know well enough to speak to that way — for saying what only a child of that community has the ability to say.
Thank you for sharing the experience of speaking plain truths, the kind without goals or defenses. It’s the hardest, scariest, most powerful thing I’ve ever (almost?) done.
Thank you for having made the choices that brought you here, not just surviving but growing from even the painful things in your life, and able to share those with others in this clear, simple (but not easy) way.
Thank you.
Dear Janine,
Thank you for your kind and generous email. Like you, I’ve really had a hard time not making religion an either/or absolute proposition. There is so little encouragement to live in the tension, in the unknowing and the mystery of our relationship with God. I’m so glad you can relate. And also thrilled that you are sending to people you know. That is the highest compliment of all.
BTW, Utne Reader just reprinted the piece. That did such a wonderful job with the graphics.Utne Reader: The best of the alternative press
Blessing to you as well.
jon
Michele,
Michele,
Thank you so much for reaching out and understanding the difficulty of speaking of something you care about with defense and agenda. I still struggle with that. I have quite a strain of self-righteous indignation that often gets the best of me.
Jon
Jon
As a Christian mother of a gay son, I’m struggling to understand why this is still an issue. My son is the exactly the same beloved child (ok man) he was the moment before he came out to his father and I. He was raised to believe he is a child of God and nothing has changed that in his eyes or in ours. However, our church is another story. While we are starting the ONA process, the pastor does not have his heart in it. I’m hoping your article will ignite a spark in him. Thank you for such a thoughtful and well written essay. It will be our topic of discussion at Wednesday’s meeting!
Susan, I’ll pray for you, your son and your pastor. I’m so gratified that you found the essay a comfort and do hope it will serve to open the dialogue with your pastor. That was my purpose in doing the speech as well as writing the article. This conversation cannot be held without regard to the humanity and the personal stories of the people involved. This is not something that can be neatly swept under a rug woven with a few choice Bible verses. Your pastor’s heart MUST be engaged.
I wish he could have been with me last week. I was the artist-in-residence at a weeklong camp for gay teen Christians–seventeen beautiful young people who are struggling to show their love for Christ through the truth of whom God made them and not the lie their churches would have them tell. I left inspired and hopeful.
I’ll be thinking of you on Wednesday. Please let me know how it goes.