One of the more innocent temptations of the internet is the opportunity to thumb (or click, in this age) through friends’ photos. Facebook was designed with this practice in mind. For the adventurous, as I will call them, there are new acquaintances to ‘check-out’ and, for a more nostalgic browse, there are old pictures of long-time friends. New pictures from distant friends draw my eye, frequently, but my personal favorites are the old pictures of new friends because they provide a taste of what time-travel might if it were at our disposal. I found an old photograph of a young lady I pester, her long and dark flow of brunette shaded red, instead. Not auburn nor a strawberry tint but a glorious, saturated red worthy of the artists’ palette. It was quite foxy, literally, since foxes boast a similarly luxurious red. It may be darker and more vivid yet, like this red velvet lily. I liked it and agreed with another commenter, that the red-hair looked good on her, to which she replied “What about my hair do you agree with, creep?” [let us put aside the term of endearment...]
In the fashion of our friendship, what was meant to be a simple compliment became a discussion. “Everybody has a red-hair phase,” she said with some finality, perhaps dismissively. I believe she meant to say that everyone has a phase where they want to be ‘different’. To say that all have a ‘red-hair phase’ might be true, yet it rings dissonant because the essence of a ‘red-hair phase’ is that the person is having it alone, a private rebellion. Hair is the convenient canvas for these alterations (altercations?). I relished the opportunity to turn the clock back for her, sending links to some dated photos of our mutual friend and of myself. The both of us had a different look: his closely cropped hair was a magnificent pony-tail and my tuft of dirty straw was a long, wild mane of green and purple like shredded rhubarb. Sometimes, the superficial change is negligible compared to the transition it represents. Beards are more subtle. When my grandfather died, the soul-patch disappeared from my face: I lost something. When my almost-fiancé left me, it grew it back: I found something else. To say that everyone has a ‘soul-patch’ does not do justice to the fact that I do.
The surprise in-store for me was not waiting in Facebook’s archives but in my own. In an external drive, the remnant of a former computer, over two hundred photographs spilled from their folders into a massive squirrel-cache of pictures. A few nights ago, I went in search of my ex-girlfriend: the ex of exes. As I was deleting every image of her years ago, I remember, there was just one that I had not. “How amusing,” I thought slyly, “I believe I do have some evidence of her humanity.” I scrolled past the painful cluster of images from three subsequent relationships, probing for just one picture of the lady who had risen from mere girl to prodigious arch-enemy, someone who seemed never to forgive me and who I forgave only to be free from continual reminiscences. In short, I did want one last laugh at her expense.
I had grossly misremembered, though there was only one image of her. The photograph I found was of a girl with ketchup-red hair, wearing a dark-green hoodie and snuggled against the floor in peaceful slumber. Well, perhaps not quite peaceful: her fist is balled next to her mouth, obscuring it, and there is a flush of pink next to mole on her cheek; her eye-brows look a little troubled, as if what she really needed was someone to come-over and squeeze her tight. There was nothing funny about any of it and I realized, too late, that I had not kept this photograph with any plans for black-mail, malicious intent or twisted pleasure. I kept the photograph because I loved her. I just cannot delete that.
It was a feeling much like putting my leg in small pond only to feel a huge coy brush past my calf and surface, orange and white, next to me. If I could keep time in a bottle, the bottle smashed when I opened that photo to full-screen and relapsed to a time before rhubarb hair and soul-patches, when my favorite person in the entire world emerged from a mini-van with vivid red-hair. Only weeks before, I had finally worked-up the nerve to tell her how I felt and she had let me take her out for her birthday; we rode the bus together to Ruby Tuesdays at Meridian Mall. The girl I had asked-out was a gorgeous blonde but I really did not mind the red-hair phase. This was the woman who snuggled me after the most invasive surgery of my life; she had driven me up to Muskegon to meet her family and friends, in spite of my demandingly frail state. There were kisses and hugs and long-conversations, movies and TV-nights and games with friends, and even a long-walk across our snowy campus that I made into a haiku. A few fragile scrapings of that time remain, like shreds of old newspaper so dirty and smudged that the text of the story is legible only to an extent. Suddenly, I wished there was an archive extensive enough to reconstruct every detail of her red-hair phase. Still, I know I must have felt that way before and that is why this picture is alone, precluding any hopes that might bring more pain. I must wrestle with the knowledge that I am the one who left it all this way. True, she did return her hair to something like its natural blonde. My father noted how it was like meeting a different girl, the following March. That was the woman who had done a multitude of inconsiderate things, each a thread in the tapestry of reasons that she became the ex of exes, the bad-example alluded-to, the bane of my close friends and the person who, at last, refused to offer forgiveness for me and any apology for herself. By the time we reached that point, years later, I did not expect either anymore.
It is not the blonde-superhero or the scruffy gentleman in the mirror who indict me, however. It is the sweet, snuggly red-head and a baby-faced guy with a nebulizer. In some ways, that incarnation of myself is as much a part of her phase, to me, as the locks of red she was eager to shed. I took my shedding too personally. Not content to be a red-hair phase, I set-out to have one. The week I became single, I skipped the patch under my lip when I shaved and continued to do so. I left me behind, for being too weak: I wanted to become my own blonde super-hero. I suffered the consequences through my own hate and pride.
Nothing would make me more content than to climb into that photograph and cuddle with that dozing red-head. More horrifying still, my body seemed to be telling me that I belonged there next to her. It seemed to forget the years of mutual neglect and disdain, the repeated gossip and scathing blog entries on my part, and the colossal split in our fellowship group that no one could quite put their finger on. Even I dare suggest. Period. My emotions forgot all of the implications and just wanted to go hold her again. The clean-shaving, short-haired, too-skinny, inhaler-carrying, cough-drop popping teenager (I was 19) inside of me remembers that she was cool. Awesome. She was sweet, smart and sexy. She was even saintly, sometimes, and never more than when she finally closed her eyes, and her mouth, and slept. To see her in such a vulnerable pose humanized her in a way that caught me off my guard. I wanted to watch her topple off the pedestal she made for herself: peer-leader, model-UN rep, ministry intern and other résumé fodder. “How appropriate,” I thought, “would it be to see her going through a goofy-phase like the rest of us.” Instead, I found her up on the pedestal I had made for her, when she was in her red-hair phase. The paradigm shift was for me.
I must say that not everyone has a red-hair phase. If they did, it might be a more beautiful world. I want us to embrace the internal part of our red-hair phase, the part that allows us to be vulnerable even as we are trying to show the world that we are strong on our own. Shirking that vulnerability was the mistake that she and I shared, though I take the brunt of the blame. It’s what I deserve after pushing her away, for any reason. At last, I hope that we go through our future red-hair phases much closer to Jesus.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Out of the Closet
This revelation was destined to uncoil sooner or later. The first whip-cracks of a debate echoed on a Facebook thread attached to an article about David Kato’s brutal death in Uganda. Scriptures in use so far include Corinthians 6:9-20 and Mark 7:1-15. The Mark passage came from my hip-pocket; I recommend reading the whole chapter for context(find it also in Matthew 15:1-20). Soon, it will be impossible to gloss over the truth: I am a Jesus-following-ally. I am not a person who thinks it is ‘okay’ to be whatever sexual orientation you want, as if I did not care. I am also not a Christian who simply chooses not to hate; that is no longer enough, for me. I follow the Galilean who called us to make disciples and I believe he called me to stand-up with gay people and love them, fight for their spirituality with them. I am an ally now and I want to see a Church filled with people of compassion who will act on that compassion.
Six years ago I stepped into a chapel at Adrian College during UMC Student Forum. Someone mentioned a Reconciling Ministries service taking place that evening and I hoped to catch the end of it. New to Methodism, I thought that Reconciling Ministries had to do with broken families, death, estrangement and grief—I had it confused with Steven Ministries. As the door swung open, my eyes were assailed by every color in the rainbow, reflected mutely in the dim sanctuary. ‘Inclusiveness paraphernalia’ (as I call it) dominated the decor. An obviously male person in a dress motioned me over to the rear pew. Stunned, I obliged. Queerly enough, I cannot remember what was said during the rest of the service; I continued glancing at the brother in drag, his gaze (sorry... her gaze) fixed intently on the speaker. The dress was floral with a yellow background—it was quite lovely but not as striking as the painted toe-nails and sensible, white sandals. My discomfort became eerily salient. At the end of the service, I fell into the procession heading forward to be anointed with glitter. My reluctance melted away as I watched each person walking back toward the rear in turn: sparkling, smiling, glowing. I had a moment of clarity which has become vivid again—my often dull spiritual capacities were abuzz with Christ’s love for all people, and especially the disenfranchised.
Yet by daylight the assembly was divided. Students from all across the country represented our denomination and, as with politics, ideologies seemed to vary by region. Even now, whispering the words as I type, the buzz-words vibrate with cavernous reverberations. I found myself strung like telephone-wire between the staunch insistencies of the Southeast Jurisdiction and more liberal view-points. If I recall, there were real gay-people from the West region acting in their jurisdiction’s inclusiveness skit. Called upon by my campus minister to represent the MSU Wesley Foundation, I felt a deep responsibility to table my personal feelings and vote prayerfully on each piece of legislation. Corinthians 6, Romans 1 and similar scriptures were on my mind, as were passages like Luke 6:37 but especially Luke 10:25-30 and Matthew 22:34-40. The latter passage is Jesus’s big boil-down of all scripture, where he asserts that all of the Law hangs on loving God with all our being and loving our neighbor as we have loved ourselves. To make many hours of deliberation sound brief, I voted “still discerning” on each measure that involved sexuality. If my new friends from the Southeast and West were cock-sure, I was gun-shy. I knew that the apostle Paul believed that homosexuality was immoral but I could not see any reason to discount the influence of cultural bias, just as I could not for my Southeastern friends. Searching the scripture, I discovered that Jesus had warned against ‘sexual immorality’ (as it is translated into English) but it was cognitively impossible for me to know if he was implying homosexuality. Yet, if homosexuality might be a sin I did not, in any way, want to condone it; the natural consequences of sin are damaging. If sin hurts people, they need a church that loves them enough to show them the way to truth, not humor dangerous desires.
Some pivotal moments in life become an instant turning-point and others take residence in our memories, repeatedly reawakened. The pivotal scene of that weekend occurred on Sunday morning. I was visiting, for the last time, with a young lady from my small-group; she had been raised Baptist and found refuge at a Methodist church in Oregon when she came-out as lesbian. I cannot help but remember how beautiful she was for her own sake—the gilded image of her lingers with me, now, because it came so purely from my emotional and aesthetic senses—I knew precisely what she was: lovable in Christ’s eyes. We talked about how I had voted, for some reason, and I explained why I had chosen to vote “still discerning”. Droplets hanging in her dark-brown eyes, she looked at me and said she could tell how much effort I was putting into discernment. She appreciated my thoughtfulness. Then she hugged me. Even now, I am closing my eyes and trying to drift back into that hug: no teleonomics, humor or sex-- just 100% compassion. One could meditate on such hugs. Its warmth burrowed into me and stood guard as I slid back into the life I had lived before. I left the Reconciling Ministries pamphlet in my trumpet case, promising to join but never following through; I decided to wear glitter to the first Wesley meeting of the fall but chickened-out, fearing ridicule from an ex-girlfriend. I lived a life that was more concerned with resuscitating my public image, only to drive it further into the ground; I turned prideful, then co-dependent and eventually confused and unethical. I maintained, then, that I would “never know in this life-time” whether alternative sexualities were sinful. I treated my gay contacts with respect but never offered support. My personal feeling was that they were not sinning, so long as they lived in fidelity with one person. That is what always mattered to me and does to this day: faithfulness in partnerships.
Beautiful simplification that this is, that sincere hug has become the symbol of all that is right about choosing the path of inclusiveness. Nay-sayers are always quick to quote a Pauline letter and instruct me; they try to conclude my discernment with a quick bite, as if I had missed something in the scriptures. A good tree bears good fruit and a bad tree bears bad fruit. If the fruit is black & white, I have already tasted and seen. I continued to taste and see. The lady from Oregon had faith that if I kept seeking I would reach the Truth. This January, after four years, I joined RMN.
My galvanizing moment came three weeks later. MSU Wesley Foundation was doing a series on taboo topics. I made the trip to Lansing to take-in a panel discussion on alternative sexuality. The panel consisted of a pan-sexual, a transvestite, an adamant ally, a man who identified as gay and another who chose the distinction of ‘queer’. I found an opening to ask about the spiritual lives of the panel—how they related to the divine. The ‘queer’ gentleman had mentioned at dinner that he grew-up in an evangelical church in the South which was, predictably, unaccepting. That rejection became salient to me in the expressions on his face as he explained his initial faith, how he had turned his back on the God that had seemed to turn a back to him, how he still prayed to that God occasionally but rarely and, finally, how he just could not envision returning to a church community. My heart splintered for him—not a clean break or some crystalline shatter but a nasty crunch underneath my ribs like someone had put their knee through the door in my ventricle. In childhood, he knew a God that cared for him. If he still prayed sometimes, some part of him was still looking for that Deity yet the only Deity he had known from his church of origin was rigid, indifferent to his confusion. Fig-leaf theology struck again and took away the Jesus in his nightlight. Faced with a room of Christian allies, this man still could not hurtle through the walls he had erected to protect himself from that bad theology—not that quickly. It so fanned my compassion, I could hardly sit-down. There was nothing I could do.
No one should be deprived of their spiritual life, the right to be in relationship with a Creator that works with them. At that point, just being in RMN was not good enough any more. I want to out myself and suffer in solidarity, to the extent that this is possible. It will take time and I will never fully understand their suffering, nor precisely what God wants, but I am going to be on my feet and by their side.
...by the way, I always do keep some glitter hidden with my prayer-stones.
Six years ago I stepped into a chapel at Adrian College during UMC Student Forum. Someone mentioned a Reconciling Ministries service taking place that evening and I hoped to catch the end of it. New to Methodism, I thought that Reconciling Ministries had to do with broken families, death, estrangement and grief—I had it confused with Steven Ministries. As the door swung open, my eyes were assailed by every color in the rainbow, reflected mutely in the dim sanctuary. ‘Inclusiveness paraphernalia’ (as I call it) dominated the decor. An obviously male person in a dress motioned me over to the rear pew. Stunned, I obliged. Queerly enough, I cannot remember what was said during the rest of the service; I continued glancing at the brother in drag, his gaze (sorry... her gaze) fixed intently on the speaker. The dress was floral with a yellow background—it was quite lovely but not as striking as the painted toe-nails and sensible, white sandals. My discomfort became eerily salient. At the end of the service, I fell into the procession heading forward to be anointed with glitter. My reluctance melted away as I watched each person walking back toward the rear in turn: sparkling, smiling, glowing. I had a moment of clarity which has become vivid again—my often dull spiritual capacities were abuzz with Christ’s love for all people, and especially the disenfranchised.
Yet by daylight the assembly was divided. Students from all across the country represented our denomination and, as with politics, ideologies seemed to vary by region. Even now, whispering the words as I type, the buzz-words vibrate with cavernous reverberations. I found myself strung like telephone-wire between the staunch insistencies of the Southeast Jurisdiction and more liberal view-points. If I recall, there were real gay-people from the West region acting in their jurisdiction’s inclusiveness skit. Called upon by my campus minister to represent the MSU Wesley Foundation, I felt a deep responsibility to table my personal feelings and vote prayerfully on each piece of legislation. Corinthians 6, Romans 1 and similar scriptures were on my mind, as were passages like Luke 6:37 but especially Luke 10:25-30 and Matthew 22:34-40. The latter passage is Jesus’s big boil-down of all scripture, where he asserts that all of the Law hangs on loving God with all our being and loving our neighbor as we have loved ourselves. To make many hours of deliberation sound brief, I voted “still discerning” on each measure that involved sexuality. If my new friends from the Southeast and West were cock-sure, I was gun-shy. I knew that the apostle Paul believed that homosexuality was immoral but I could not see any reason to discount the influence of cultural bias, just as I could not for my Southeastern friends. Searching the scripture, I discovered that Jesus had warned against ‘sexual immorality’ (as it is translated into English) but it was cognitively impossible for me to know if he was implying homosexuality. Yet, if homosexuality might be a sin I did not, in any way, want to condone it; the natural consequences of sin are damaging. If sin hurts people, they need a church that loves them enough to show them the way to truth, not humor dangerous desires.
Some pivotal moments in life become an instant turning-point and others take residence in our memories, repeatedly reawakened. The pivotal scene of that weekend occurred on Sunday morning. I was visiting, for the last time, with a young lady from my small-group; she had been raised Baptist and found refuge at a Methodist church in Oregon when she came-out as lesbian. I cannot help but remember how beautiful she was for her own sake—the gilded image of her lingers with me, now, because it came so purely from my emotional and aesthetic senses—I knew precisely what she was: lovable in Christ’s eyes. We talked about how I had voted, for some reason, and I explained why I had chosen to vote “still discerning”. Droplets hanging in her dark-brown eyes, she looked at me and said she could tell how much effort I was putting into discernment. She appreciated my thoughtfulness. Then she hugged me. Even now, I am closing my eyes and trying to drift back into that hug: no teleonomics, humor or sex-- just 100% compassion. One could meditate on such hugs. Its warmth burrowed into me and stood guard as I slid back into the life I had lived before. I left the Reconciling Ministries pamphlet in my trumpet case, promising to join but never following through; I decided to wear glitter to the first Wesley meeting of the fall but chickened-out, fearing ridicule from an ex-girlfriend. I lived a life that was more concerned with resuscitating my public image, only to drive it further into the ground; I turned prideful, then co-dependent and eventually confused and unethical. I maintained, then, that I would “never know in this life-time” whether alternative sexualities were sinful. I treated my gay contacts with respect but never offered support. My personal feeling was that they were not sinning, so long as they lived in fidelity with one person. That is what always mattered to me and does to this day: faithfulness in partnerships.
Beautiful simplification that this is, that sincere hug has become the symbol of all that is right about choosing the path of inclusiveness. Nay-sayers are always quick to quote a Pauline letter and instruct me; they try to conclude my discernment with a quick bite, as if I had missed something in the scriptures. A good tree bears good fruit and a bad tree bears bad fruit. If the fruit is black & white, I have already tasted and seen. I continued to taste and see. The lady from Oregon had faith that if I kept seeking I would reach the Truth. This January, after four years, I joined RMN.
My galvanizing moment came three weeks later. MSU Wesley Foundation was doing a series on taboo topics. I made the trip to Lansing to take-in a panel discussion on alternative sexuality. The panel consisted of a pan-sexual, a transvestite, an adamant ally, a man who identified as gay and another who chose the distinction of ‘queer’. I found an opening to ask about the spiritual lives of the panel—how they related to the divine. The ‘queer’ gentleman had mentioned at dinner that he grew-up in an evangelical church in the South which was, predictably, unaccepting. That rejection became salient to me in the expressions on his face as he explained his initial faith, how he had turned his back on the God that had seemed to turn a back to him, how he still prayed to that God occasionally but rarely and, finally, how he just could not envision returning to a church community. My heart splintered for him—not a clean break or some crystalline shatter but a nasty crunch underneath my ribs like someone had put their knee through the door in my ventricle. In childhood, he knew a God that cared for him. If he still prayed sometimes, some part of him was still looking for that Deity yet the only Deity he had known from his church of origin was rigid, indifferent to his confusion. Fig-leaf theology struck again and took away the Jesus in his nightlight. Faced with a room of Christian allies, this man still could not hurtle through the walls he had erected to protect himself from that bad theology—not that quickly. It so fanned my compassion, I could hardly sit-down. There was nothing I could do.
No one should be deprived of their spiritual life, the right to be in relationship with a Creator that works with them. At that point, just being in RMN was not good enough any more. I want to out myself and suffer in solidarity, to the extent that this is possible. It will take time and I will never fully understand their suffering, nor precisely what God wants, but I am going to be on my feet and by their side.
...by the way, I always do keep some glitter hidden with my prayer-stones.
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