DON'T BE DOWN --- COME OUT!
Sean:
at the risk of causing offense, I have to cite that inspirational whatsit about footprints in the sand often found on plaques in little old lady’s living rooms. (While a great admirer of Little Old Ladies in general — perhaps because I seem destined to become one — I generally start to get antsy where they start dealing with Jesus. But I digress.) The question arises half-way down the plaque: where were you when there were just one set of foot-prints in the sand? The answer is: that’s when I was carrying you. Well, this is obviously sentimentalization of a high order, which Jesus needs less than anybody, but there is a grain of truth to it. And that grain is this: the fact that you do not perceive him does not mean that he is not there. I know in my bones that where there is suffering, he is there, and waiting to be invited in.
I am allergic to many of the fads in contemporary church life, and somewhere in the flotsam of the 90's came the “guided meditation”. I was, as so often, out of town on a job; it was Lent. I was having the first baby steps of my nervous breakdown, but this baby took REALLY BIG STEPS. I kept myself glued together by attending communion services every Sunday and Wednesday, and I have never been so grateful for Lent in my life. [Right at the moment I feel like life IS Lent, which is not quite the same thing.] So Sunday the pastor asks us all to close our eyes and imagine ourselves in a room, a messy room, well, you know where this is going. Eventually, he got to the part about the knocking on the door, overcoming fear to answer the voice at the door, and the information, finally, that he would come in as soon as the door was unlocked. He had to wait because it was locked on the INSIDE. Well, I sat there with tears streaming down my face because I had been exactly where you describe yourself: begging and pleading for help and getting nothing I could get ahold of — endlessly re-reading Psalm 51:
Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness:
according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.
Wash me throughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.
For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me.
Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight:
that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest.
Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.
Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts:
and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.
Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Make me to hear joy and gladness; that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.
Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities.
Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me.
Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit.
And it hadn’t been doing me much good. I was in agony, well, the agony you describe so well. I don’t mean for a moment to say that what I viewed as my sin is, or should be sin, to you or anyone else — it was, for once, all about me. Something broke in me during the sermon I was ready to hate as usual, and the truth behind the platitude came flooding in. Peace did not come then, certainly not the peace past all understanding, but I was able to go on for another couple of days, and I wasn’t really looking for much more than that. It beat calling my home number over and over just to hear my wife’s voice on the answering machine; and it certainly beat some of the local alternatives. I will never know whether it beat all of them, because I felt and still feel myself bound by my marriage vows — bound in spite of the fact that I believe that one of the hallmarks of our age is the way that life-long commitments are giving way, in ways that are often fruitful and life-giving, to the wisdom to let things die in hopes that they may be resurrected, or even just to let them die. (I recently heard of a church with a crisis of membership who met in prayer to discern God’s purpose for their congregation, and came to the conclusion that it was God’s will that the congregation die and make way for some new life. That blew me away; talk about not in the handbook...)
I would say for all the torture of my current situation, and if you have been reading this, Sean, you know what I am talking about, I do feel that peace that passes all understanding: I am absolutely convinced that I have no choice but to walk a certain path; that path started with coming out to myself however many thousands of years ago, took on some shape with coming out to my wife seven or eight years ago, and is now moving into a broader reality through my inability to live in silence any more, even for her sake. I have tried to let her woe trump mine, and I find I can no longer do it. It is only in crossing that threshold myself that I have come to understand my gay friends who could not keep silent; my mother and her generation were content to tolerate almost anything if they didn’t have to acknowledge it, and could not understand why the private could not stay private. Nor could I, on some level, but now, ah, now I do. And in SPADES.
Once that threshold is crossed, I will have to find my way again, but I can look at the possibility of my children turning against me, of losing my home, of losing the love that has born me up for twenty-six years, all but the last with something like resignation, and say that I know that whatever may come, it will be the result of my own free choice, and I will try to be ready for what I cannot imagine. There is an odd kind of peace in that, no matter how little anyone else understands. As I said to the one called Piggo:
Remember this one: “I used to be fucked up on drugs until I found Jesus; now I’m fucked up on Jesus”? Well, I used to be fucked up on porn until I found the Bear and the Blog Brothers, and now I’m fucked up on them.
What I am trying to say, in my ham-fisted way, is that the peace does not resemble what you want or expect. It just passes all understanding. And I think that our tradition is wise in not attempting to say any more about it.
Part of my problem in speaking to you is that our experiences of Christ and church are so very different. My parents stopped going to church when I was six, after years of living in a very supportive and genuine faith community; I came to Christ very much on my own; at twelve, I spent a year at a school with compulsory chapel attendance, which made me vow never to say one word I didn’t agree with --- the result was that I had to really THINK about everything in the service. That struggle went underground, to erupt almost ten years later in a full-blown conversion [which also did not look like what you probably imagine]. My point is not that you need to know any of this, but that since I did not join a church for another twelve years after THAT, I am not sure that I can use the language that is natural to me to express anything that will not call up other associations for you. You said:
Sure, I have had warm fuzzy feelings like God loves me. But I'm not so sure that wasn't just indigestion. No way to know, really.
Wasn’t it Scrooge who told the ghost that he might be no more than an undigested bit of beef or mustard? I am not talking about warm, fuzzy feelings here [as you know, I got those when you cited me] but about the annihilating power and presence of God. Helmuth von Moltke, one of the leaders of the German resistance to Hitler, wrote to his wife from prison on the day he received his death sentence:
If I were to be reprieved now --- which under God is no more likely or unlikely than a week ago --- I must say that I should have to find my way all over again, so tremendous was the demonstration of God's presence and omnipotence. He can demonstrate them to us, and quite unmistakably, when he does precisely what doesn't suit us. Anything else is drivel.
Amen to that. You wrote, at first quoting me [and I can still hardly believe it]:
"...maybe he was telling you that you were perfectly OK as you were." My question is, then, "Why didn't I hear that?" Why, if you loved someone enough to actually DIE for them, wouldn't you figure out some way to communicate that love to them so they could understand and experience it? If God was telling me something (anything), why didn't I get it? I was SEEKING Him! I was asking! I was pleading for SOMETHING! What was wrong with me that I just couldn't receive His signals? I have always believed that in communication, it is the responsibility of the person initiation the communication to make sure the message gets across. I would think that an Omnipotent, loving God could figure out some way to make Himself Real To Me.
Now let me just repeat one piece of that: “I have always believed that in communication, it is the responsibility of the person initiating the communication to make sure the message gets across.” Are you hearing the same thing I am, or is this the game of Telephone, where what you say and what I repeat bear less and less resemblance to each other as time goes by? If you were seeking and pleading so hard, were you making so much noise that you couldn’t listen? I know I do that A LOT. Let me be perfectly clear what I am NOT saying: I am not saying that I have the answers and you don’t — that one would be ridiculous to more than one of us; I am not saying that what happened is your fault; and I am not saying that anyone else but you could begin to explain what happened. I only want to ask a question, and it starts: Why are you here, Sean?
But the word of the LORD came to him, "Why are you here, Elijah?" He answered: "I have been most zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts, but the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to the sword. I alone am left, and they seek to take my life." Then the LORD said, "Go outside and stand on the mountain before the LORD; the LORD will be passing by." A strong and heavy wind was rending the mountains and crushing rocks before the LORD--but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake--but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake there was fire--but the LORD was not in the fire. After the fire there was a tiny whispering sound. When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak and went and stood at the entrance of the cave. A voice said to him, "Elijah, why are you here?"
Isn’t it possible, and it’s only a question, that in waiting for the earthquake, the fire, and the wind, you missed the “tiny, whispering sound” in which the LORD said what he had to say to you? To save you the trouble, I will answer my own question. I believe that you did hear what some other translations call the “still, small voice”. And I believe that this is what it said:
“Leave the church; there is nothing but more suffering here for you any more. Find out who you are and find your strength. Leave the land of your fathers and go to a land I will show you. You may spend forty years in the wilderness but I will bring you into a land of milk and honey.”
Isn't it possible that if you heard such a voice, that you might have failed to recognize it as the LORD’s?
I do not know you well — I should probably say I do not know you at all — but I think that in leaving the church, in leaving someone else’s certainties, you have taken up the cross. It is not my cross, but I can clearly see that the price you pay for taking it up of your own free will is the same that I pay for taking up mine.
Well, that is probably more than you ever want to hear from me.
But if this offends you, give me a chance to apologize.
I don’t have so many friends that I can afford to lose any.
And stay in touch.
I am allergic to many of the fads in contemporary church life, and somewhere in the flotsam of the 90's came the “guided meditation”. I was, as so often, out of town on a job; it was Lent. I was having the first baby steps of my nervous breakdown, but this baby took REALLY BIG STEPS. I kept myself glued together by attending communion services every Sunday and Wednesday, and I have never been so grateful for Lent in my life. [Right at the moment I feel like life IS Lent, which is not quite the same thing.] So Sunday the pastor asks us all to close our eyes and imagine ourselves in a room, a messy room, well, you know where this is going. Eventually, he got to the part about the knocking on the door, overcoming fear to answer the voice at the door, and the information, finally, that he would come in as soon as the door was unlocked. He had to wait because it was locked on the INSIDE. Well, I sat there with tears streaming down my face because I had been exactly where you describe yourself: begging and pleading for help and getting nothing I could get ahold of — endlessly re-reading Psalm 51:
Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness:
according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.
Wash me throughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.
For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me.
Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight:
that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest.
Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.
Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts:
and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.
Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Make me to hear joy and gladness; that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.
Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities.
Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me.
Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit.
And it hadn’t been doing me much good. I was in agony, well, the agony you describe so well. I don’t mean for a moment to say that what I viewed as my sin is, or should be sin, to you or anyone else — it was, for once, all about me. Something broke in me during the sermon I was ready to hate as usual, and the truth behind the platitude came flooding in. Peace did not come then, certainly not the peace past all understanding, but I was able to go on for another couple of days, and I wasn’t really looking for much more than that. It beat calling my home number over and over just to hear my wife’s voice on the answering machine; and it certainly beat some of the local alternatives. I will never know whether it beat all of them, because I felt and still feel myself bound by my marriage vows — bound in spite of the fact that I believe that one of the hallmarks of our age is the way that life-long commitments are giving way, in ways that are often fruitful and life-giving, to the wisdom to let things die in hopes that they may be resurrected, or even just to let them die. (I recently heard of a church with a crisis of membership who met in prayer to discern God’s purpose for their congregation, and came to the conclusion that it was God’s will that the congregation die and make way for some new life. That blew me away; talk about not in the handbook...)
I would say for all the torture of my current situation, and if you have been reading this, Sean, you know what I am talking about, I do feel that peace that passes all understanding: I am absolutely convinced that I have no choice but to walk a certain path; that path started with coming out to myself however many thousands of years ago, took on some shape with coming out to my wife seven or eight years ago, and is now moving into a broader reality through my inability to live in silence any more, even for her sake. I have tried to let her woe trump mine, and I find I can no longer do it. It is only in crossing that threshold myself that I have come to understand my gay friends who could not keep silent; my mother and her generation were content to tolerate almost anything if they didn’t have to acknowledge it, and could not understand why the private could not stay private. Nor could I, on some level, but now, ah, now I do. And in SPADES.
Once that threshold is crossed, I will have to find my way again, but I can look at the possibility of my children turning against me, of losing my home, of losing the love that has born me up for twenty-six years, all but the last with something like resignation, and say that I know that whatever may come, it will be the result of my own free choice, and I will try to be ready for what I cannot imagine. There is an odd kind of peace in that, no matter how little anyone else understands. As I said to the one called Piggo:
Remember this one: “I used to be fucked up on drugs until I found Jesus; now I’m fucked up on Jesus”? Well, I used to be fucked up on porn until I found the Bear and the Blog Brothers, and now I’m fucked up on them.
What I am trying to say, in my ham-fisted way, is that the peace does not resemble what you want or expect. It just passes all understanding. And I think that our tradition is wise in not attempting to say any more about it.
Part of my problem in speaking to you is that our experiences of Christ and church are so very different. My parents stopped going to church when I was six, after years of living in a very supportive and genuine faith community; I came to Christ very much on my own; at twelve, I spent a year at a school with compulsory chapel attendance, which made me vow never to say one word I didn’t agree with --- the result was that I had to really THINK about everything in the service. That struggle went underground, to erupt almost ten years later in a full-blown conversion [which also did not look like what you probably imagine]. My point is not that you need to know any of this, but that since I did not join a church for another twelve years after THAT, I am not sure that I can use the language that is natural to me to express anything that will not call up other associations for you. You said:
Sure, I have had warm fuzzy feelings like God loves me. But I'm not so sure that wasn't just indigestion. No way to know, really.
Wasn’t it Scrooge who told the ghost that he might be no more than an undigested bit of beef or mustard? I am not talking about warm, fuzzy feelings here [as you know, I got those when you cited me] but about the annihilating power and presence of God. Helmuth von Moltke, one of the leaders of the German resistance to Hitler, wrote to his wife from prison on the day he received his death sentence:
If I were to be reprieved now --- which under God is no more likely or unlikely than a week ago --- I must say that I should have to find my way all over again, so tremendous was the demonstration of God's presence and omnipotence. He can demonstrate them to us, and quite unmistakably, when he does precisely what doesn't suit us. Anything else is drivel.
Amen to that. You wrote, at first quoting me [and I can still hardly believe it]:
"...maybe he was telling you that you were perfectly OK as you were." My question is, then, "Why didn't I hear that?" Why, if you loved someone enough to actually DIE for them, wouldn't you figure out some way to communicate that love to them so they could understand and experience it? If God was telling me something (anything), why didn't I get it? I was SEEKING Him! I was asking! I was pleading for SOMETHING! What was wrong with me that I just couldn't receive His signals? I have always believed that in communication, it is the responsibility of the person initiation the communication to make sure the message gets across. I would think that an Omnipotent, loving God could figure out some way to make Himself Real To Me.
Now let me just repeat one piece of that: “I have always believed that in communication, it is the responsibility of the person initiating the communication to make sure the message gets across.” Are you hearing the same thing I am, or is this the game of Telephone, where what you say and what I repeat bear less and less resemblance to each other as time goes by? If you were seeking and pleading so hard, were you making so much noise that you couldn’t listen? I know I do that A LOT. Let me be perfectly clear what I am NOT saying: I am not saying that I have the answers and you don’t — that one would be ridiculous to more than one of us; I am not saying that what happened is your fault; and I am not saying that anyone else but you could begin to explain what happened. I only want to ask a question, and it starts: Why are you here, Sean?
But the word of the LORD came to him, "Why are you here, Elijah?" He answered: "I have been most zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts, but the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to the sword. I alone am left, and they seek to take my life." Then the LORD said, "Go outside and stand on the mountain before the LORD; the LORD will be passing by." A strong and heavy wind was rending the mountains and crushing rocks before the LORD--but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake--but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake there was fire--but the LORD was not in the fire. After the fire there was a tiny whispering sound. When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak and went and stood at the entrance of the cave. A voice said to him, "Elijah, why are you here?"
Isn’t it possible, and it’s only a question, that in waiting for the earthquake, the fire, and the wind, you missed the “tiny, whispering sound” in which the LORD said what he had to say to you? To save you the trouble, I will answer my own question. I believe that you did hear what some other translations call the “still, small voice”. And I believe that this is what it said:
“Leave the church; there is nothing but more suffering here for you any more. Find out who you are and find your strength. Leave the land of your fathers and go to a land I will show you. You may spend forty years in the wilderness but I will bring you into a land of milk and honey.”
Isn't it possible that if you heard such a voice, that you might have failed to recognize it as the LORD’s?
I do not know you well — I should probably say I do not know you at all — but I think that in leaving the church, in leaving someone else’s certainties, you have taken up the cross. It is not my cross, but I can clearly see that the price you pay for taking it up of your own free will is the same that I pay for taking up mine.
Well, that is probably more than you ever want to hear from me.
But if this offends you, give me a chance to apologize.
I don’t have so many friends that I can afford to lose any.
And stay in touch.
No comments:
Post a Comment