A few weeks ago, I received a Chick tract in the mail. It was delivered to my home in a handwritten envelope with no return address. The little booklet inside contained a smug, homophobic comic in which Jesus was portrayed as offering love through the medium of hate. One of my colleagues at St. Stephen’s also received one of these tracts, and he said that he had at first recycled it, then decided that recycling was too good for it and put it in the garbage. I kept the one that was sent to me so that I could report it to the post office if this harassment continued.
On the following Sunday, a man approached me as I was returning from my weekly donut run between services. “You’re not going to like this,” he said. I’d been curious about this man, who is a gifted musician and had taken to playing the piano in the sanctuary on Sunday mornings, but never stayed for the services. This behavior wasn’t that unusual, as many people have been harmed by the church, and are negotiating their involvement in the light of that past harm. I had supposed that this man might, at some moment, decide that a church service was a safe place for him.
Then he handed me a handwritten note that he intended to send to our new bishop. The note attacked queerness and LGBTQiA+ people using all of the same tired tropes that I’ve heard throughout my career, and that had been present in the Chick tract. It included a demand that we take down the Pride banner from in front of our sanctuary. I read it and said, “You’re right, I don’t like it.” But I tried to engage my curiosity rather than my offense and asked, “Why did you feel the need to write it?”
“That banner doesn’t represent me,” he said.
“Well,” I told him, “it represents the people here.” I offered him a donut and invited him to stay for the service. He took the donut and left.
A week later, he sent a photo of the note to the bishop and to our parish office. I’ve been keeping a careful eye on our Pride banner, especially as there are increased reports of banners being torn down around the Columbus metropolitan area. In addition to the Chick tract and to this man’s note, the church has received a voicemail denouncing our LGBTQiA+ affirming ethic, and so we are necessarily on guard against harassment and vandalism.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the man’s comment that the Pride banner doesn’t represent him. We are an inclusive church, and so it rankles when the bounds of our inclusivity are tested. I think I was right to invite him to stay for the service. But if he had stood up in the midst of the service and started shouting out his views, I would have had to counter him, and to enforce the boundaries that keep queer people safe. Still, Paul’s words in First Corinthians echo in my mind: “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’” As do the words of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel: “But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.”
I have been wrestling with the question of how I can believe so deeply in love and interconnectedness, and still want nothing to do with the attitudes that this man, and the others who have been harassing us, have articulated. We can say that “all people are welcome here but all behaviors are not,” and sometimes we have to say it, but it feels perilously close to “hate the sin and love the sinner.” In some churches, a queer person might be told that their presence is welcome but that their expression of queerness is not.
On Tuesday night, I attended the Interfaith Pride Service at Stonewall Columbus 1 with all of these thoughts rolling around in my mind. It was a beautiful service. The music was good, the speakers were funny and vulnerable and wholly themselves, the prayers and scripture passages from the different faiths were powerful. And two of the speakers really helped me come to a new understanding. Mounir Lynch, reflecting on identity and pride in Islam, quoted the Quran: “To you be your way, and to me mine.” For Mounir, this indicates that we can be responsible for the things we are responsible for, without needing the approval of those who have chosen other areas of responsibility and work. Reflecting on this, I came again to the realization that a church doesn’t have to be all things to all people. Our work at St. Stephen’s is to embrace and participate in theologies and spiritualities of liberation. It’s not like there aren’t plenty of other churches that understand their work differently. But Christianity has a complex history of orthodoxy, of really wishing that everyone would just think and act the same. I know that this wish is a legacy of Christendom, but it is deeply ingrained. To truly think in terms of a diverse, multifaceted, multi-vocal and multifocal body of Christ is challenging when you’ve been brought up in a tradition that has been so invested in being systemized, hierarchical, and controlling. And yet it’s so freeing to realize that I don’t actually have to engage with the arguments of others. I can simply say, “to you be your way, and to me mine.”
The other helpful piece of wisdom came from Glenn Ge Jie Gustafson, a Zen priest. Glenn told us that “we can acknowledge our interconnection and choose not to interact with those who would disparage or attack us.” This is so simple and so true, and yet I find it very easy to forget. When I breathe or drink I partake in air and water that has passed through other people’s bodies, and is indifferent to their political beliefs. I can catch a cold from a bigot and receive a blood transfusion from a racist. I do not demand to know the politics of those who cook in restaurants or stock grocery shelves. I am connected with all of these people through myriad systems, and I am grateful for the things they provide to me, as I hope they are grateful for the things I provide. That doesn’t mean I have to be friendly and accepting, let alone lovingly attentive, if they decide to spew hate.
All this has led me to reexamine one of my central, faith-based ideals. I have spent my life hoping for the Kin-dom of God, and trying to act in ways that will help bring it about. I have imagined it in terms taken from Isaiah: “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.” Or through the parables of Jesus, as a mustard tree that all the birds can nest in. Yet there has been a subtext to my dreaming. Without realizing it, I have imagined the Kin-dom as a place where the wolf, lamb, leopard, and goat all agree with each other, where the birds are all singing the same song. Queer theology is teaching me many things, among them the flaw in this way of thinking. Perhaps in the Kin-dom the wolf is still a wolf and the lamb is still a lamb, and they treat each other with a kind of Ignatian indifference, not threatening each other with violence but also saying to each other “to you be your way, and to me mine.”
Of course, as my friend Ben points out, the wolf neither hates nor is motivated by hate when it eats kills and eats the lamb. In this world, I feel that I must stand up to hate as a person of conscience. When I’ve done so in the past, it’s been with a sense of grief, and perhaps that grief is appropriate. Why can’t we all just get along? Why must I feel anger, however justified, when I really want to love and live in a love-world? These questions still rankle, and are, perhaps, unresolvable. Yet I find hope in realizing that I can creatively choose my moments of engagement or non-engagement, and that I am not responsible for everyone’s sense of belonging.
- Co-created and co-sponsored by LOVEBoldly. ↩︎
KPB Stevens 