location change...

hey, so B and I have decided to do a joint blog, so you can get both of our ramblings together as one.... you'll find us at notsostraightfromseminary.com I hope you'll keep reading, because the idea that even the most uncomfortable situations can be redeemed as great blog material is sometimes what keeps me going through them. Take, for example, tomorrow, when I have to present before my Christian Integration group my idea for my paper thesis, which goes something like this:

“As Christian psychologists, in the process of living out the reign on God it is our task to enter into the culture of another, particularly those who are ostracized by the current mainstream culture, and to help them seek integration between their personal story and identity, and the larger narrative of the culture as a whole. Based on the readings that we have done for class and on my own personal experiences, I will argue that one of the pivotal ways in which we can do this within our present society is to create a healing, therapeutic space for gay and lesbian clients to reconcile their personal identities with God’s larger story.”

So i'll be telling you how those goes.... on our new web page ;)

Degrees of Freedom

I was sitting in my statistics class this week, looking up information on the Human Rights Committee instead of listening to the education I am paying far too much to be ignoring like this, when something my professor said made its way through my intentionally diverted attention span. "Our degrees of freedom," he explained, "are based on how much we choose to include outside of the standard deviation." Now I have no idea what the statistical significance of this statement is, although I am sure it has one since he was pointing to highlighted areas of a graph when he said it, but what I can tell you is that ever since I heard this, I've been walking around campus mentally tallying all the different ways I have been finding degrees of freedom; all the ways in which I am learning to stretch the limits of the standard deviation to include more and more.

Take, for example, tonight when I reclaimed the movie Rent. Two years ago, when it came out, I went to see it in the theater with a group of friends, including one of my roommates at the time. She was offended by the way it "promoted the homosexual lifestyle," and insisted that we walk out of the theater. I did. At the time, I was not out to anybody, or even to myself, but I am appalled by the fact that I did not even bother to defend the rights of others to have their pain and beauty and laughter and tragedy portrayed in film with dignity. And so I watched the movie again tonight, from beginning to end with my current roommate and some friends of ours, and I wondered both at the beauty of the movie, and at all the ways that I have changed since I walked out of that theater. I know that I wouldn't leave now, and that I wouldn't stay silent while someone refused to honor the dignity of another person's life. While very few people in my life know much about my personal journey to understand and accept my sexuality, almost everyone who knows me to any degree these days is at least aware of my firm believe in gay rights and a more inclusive theology. It's not everything, but it is definitely something. Baby steps, as B and I are always saying. A year ago, I hadn't talked to anyone about my sexuality. I couldn't even say the word lesbian. I refused to voice, write, or even think anything that I felt fell outside of the "standard deviation." So how do you measure a year? For me, for this year, it was in baby steps...in degrees of freedom. In friends found and in stories rewritten; in laughter learned and in words reclaimed.

out on the gay grassy knoll

This has all been painful in ways I did not expect it to be painful… and yet, it has also been beautiful in ways I could never have anticipated. Take, for example, the night before last when I led A out to the grassy knoll, or perhaps it would be better named, the “gay grassy knoll” (to clarify, this is not my neighbor A, but another A, fighting his own brilliantly loving war at a nearby Christian institution). I have jokingly labeled it such because this grassy knoll, a few apartment complexes down, is where I go to have the conversations that I will not have in my own home, or in the courtyard of my apartment complex with its many open windows. Conversations about God, and faith, and rewriting our story. Conversations laced with underlying, unvoiced questions in countless hidden forms, all asking, essentially, can God really still love me? Can I really still, after all of this, find my way back to God? What if I am wrong? Not just, what if my ideas are wrong, but what if I, the person, am simply wrong?

The night before last on the knoll with A was no exception. Different conversation, same questions. He was grasping at every coincidental straw he could come up with to avoid believing that God was actually working through him and his sexuality to minister to others in similar situations. And it is heartbreaking to be faced, as I so often am, with these kinds of reminders that you could preach all day on the hypothetical level about how people should be more open-minded and understanding about diverse sexualities, but when push comes to shove, you just can’t believe that after all of this, God still loves you, works through you… not even just in spite of your sexuality, but actually even through it. Talking with A, I was reminded of my own “coincidences” in which I stubbornly refuse to see God. Take, for example, the fact that while I was half-way around the world this summer, I formed friendships with both A and B through mutual friends, and while A and B have become two of my primary sources of support in all this questioning/struggling/searching these past few months, none of us are even in touch with the people who introduced us any more. Why is it easier for me to believe that this is some bizarre kind of international coincidence, than to believe that God might actually be trying to create a support system for me in all of this?

Out on the grassy knoll, A and I did our best to help each other look for ways that God might still possibly, just maybe, be working in our lives…and where we couldn’t find any answers, at least there is always plenty of understanding to go around. On our way back to my apartment, under the cover of the 2 a.m witching hour (a time in which I have been known to voice things I would never otherwise voice), I confessed that I don’t pray anymore- that I can’t, no matter how hard I try, seem to get past unspoken accusations thrown in God’s general direction: “This is Your fault, or infinitely worse, if this isn’t Your fault, then it has to be mine.”

I hadn’t even known I was thinking this until I said it, but it resonated within me as soon as I spoke the words. I know that I am scared of finding out that this is really God’s plan for me- all of this uncertainty and isolation, questioning and self-loathing…. But what paralyzes me, what consumes me so completely that lately I have been forgetting how to breathe whenever I show up in church or try to read my Bible, is that maybe this wasn’t God’s plan at all, and somewhere along the line I went horribly, deplorably wrong. Am, at my very core, horribly, deplorably wrong.

When I was trying to explain some of this to B, she asked me, “you mean, you think it’s wrong to be gay?” “No, no, not for you, not for anyone else, just for me.” Even as I said this, I could hear how utterly illogical it was, but knowing that it’s a double standard doesn’t actually do very much to erase it. I’m trying though… I think we’re all trying, the best that we know how. In the meantime, I’ll keep heading back to the grassy knoll, whether with friends in person or friends on the phone thousands of miles away, and we’ll do our best to hold up a mirror to each other and point out the ways that God is at work at the very places in which we are blind.

class snapshot

Christian ethics professor: "What percentage of Americans do you think would call themselves Christians?"

Seminary student: "All of them"

Me in the back row: sigh.

a note on comments

I just wanted to take this opportunity to add that if you are reading this blog and have comments to add about your own thoughts, reactions, or experiences, I would love it if you left a comment... thanks for reading.

At the story level

In pouring out my frustrations it is entirely possible- perhaps even inevitable, that I have been presenting only one side of the story. It is not all bad, life here at the seminary. Some of it, so much of it in fact, has also been beautiful almost to the point of tears. Take, for example, tonight. I returned from having a wonderful dinner with some classmates at my professor's house, to find my apartment community gathered around a make-shift fire pit in our courtyard, drinking from a keg and singing worship songs. As soon as I entered the gate, they called me into their midst, made room for me in their circle, and handed me a solo cup of beer. This, I think, is exactly what God meant by all the soft, incessant, whispering reminders over the summer about how I really ought to stop bitching and complaining about having to go off to seminary, because a place had been prepared for me there. I'm pretty sure that this right here in front of me, this is it. And even when I got up to leave the group tonight, overwhelmed by the amount of reading I still have to do, and by the amount of internal processing I find myself completely unequipped to do, my neighbor A promptly sent me a text message to say that I looked like I had had a long day, but that I should not forget that at least I have a cuddly dog and a cute red hat, and that's got to count for something, right?

And the simple kindness of this statement is what finally moved me to the tears that have been building ever since I began my time at seminary. For me, it is always kindness that pushes me over the edge when I am just barely hanging on- I can hold it together until somebody ruins it by asking if I am ok. And the truth is that no, I am not ok, and I feel very much as though I am starting to lose my center, or even as if I hadn't ever really found it. And in any case, I just don't understand why this all has to be so complicated. Take the situation with A for example, and all the conflicted things that come along with him being the one to ask if I am ok, aside from the most obvious one, which is that everything is naturally more complicated because our windows directly face each other across the courtyard, close enough that we can basically watch each other send and receive each other's text messages. But the complicated part comes in where I flirt with him- I know I am doing it and yet I can't seem to stop. But it's not fair to flirt with someone while you are secretly wishing that they would actually turn out to be gay, so that you could feel comfortable telling him them that you actually might not like guys anyway. But still, when he stops sending messages about the hope in little dogs and cute red hats, because he has been distracted by our other neighbor K, who can also see into both of our windows (this place is just that small), who has stopped by to say goodnight, I pull my blinds shut forcefully, and then I am really crying. Because it's definitely not fair (or even particularly sane) to be jealous of someone who likes the same person that you are trying so hard to "like" because it would make things so much easier if you could just settle into a nice, comfortable heteronormative couple that did things like advocate for gay rights, instead of actually having to be deprived of them yourself. But it is clearly not going to be that easy, because I can see even from my couch with the blinds drawn that K is there for the long haul, and as much as I would like to blame A for this, I've got to hand it to him for not falling for a gay girl. That would have probably ended messily for all of us- especially when you add in the whole window-proximity factor.

Still, even as I sit here writing, I am listening to the laughter and the music floating up from the fire pit below, and wishing so badly that I could explain to all of the neighbors down there, and also to everyone in my cohort I keep studiously avoiding, that the reason I keep disappearing abruptly is not because I doubt that they are all wonderful people who could each enrich my life in one way or another, but rather because I have suddenly become that person we've all met at some point who is hesitant to get close to anyone. But what really terrifies me is that I don't recognize that kind of thing on myself- I've never been that person before. I have absolutely no experience with it whatsoever, and apparently I haven't gotten very graceful at it yet either, because everyone keeps noticing my awkward exits and half-hearted excuses.

But I don't know how to explain to them that I don't want to get close to any of them because I am paralyzed. All the time that I was traveling this summer, processing everything I could get my hands on while trying to come to a deeper acceptance of my sexuality, I had this vision that I would be able to come here to this grad school and present, if not a completely honest version of myself, then at least a more authentic one. I thought perhaps I could find a way of using a sort of sexuality-neutral language to convey myself, kind of like the gender-neutral language that is so popular these days (Or maybe its gender-inclusive, which would make the more appropriate term "sexuality-inclusive," and I like the sound of that much better anyways.) But within the first week, everyone was already assuming that I had a crush on A, and I went ahead and let them believe it.. maybe even encouraged it a little. The thing is, though, they would have assumed I was straight anyway, because not only is that the generalized assumption of our society, it is also most definitely the assumption that is made of girls who show up for grad school at a Christian seminary, wearing dresses with beaded necklaces. So all that optimistic conviction stuff went out the window pretty quickly, leaving me with only the option of directly correcting them in their assumption about my sexuality, and the fact of the matter is that I am just not ready for it. For all I know, they might all be wonderful, open-minded people who are ready to hear it, but I most certainly am not ready to say it.

Still, at the same time, I am also not ready to create this whole new circle of intimate friends who will one day look at me in disbelief if I find the courage to speak openly with them- most likely not so much because of what I am telling them, but because I have not told them any of it before; because, in the course of a thousand conversations in which they came to know me as someone who deeply values authenticity and vulnerability in relationship, I was withholding both of these things all along.

But what I would explain to them, if I was having the common courtesy to explain anything to anyone these days, would be that it is not easy. It is not easy to do school and life and relationships, when all the while you have used up all your strength just trying to create a space within your own self where you feel safe enough to breathe. It is not easy to ground yourself in a narrative that has told you throughout your entire life that you either simply don't exist, or that if you do, you are an "abomination to the Lord", whatever the hell that means, anyway.

In my Christian Ethics class, we have been talking a lot about different levels of understanding the world and our place in it. The chain of things goes from concrete rules, to broader principles, to our basic convictions in which everything is rooted and grounded. This, according to my professor, is the story level, or the overarching narrative that shapes us- the stories we have been told and the stories we have learned to tell ourselves both about who God is, and about how we are made to interact with the world. The critical thing, according to my professor, is that by definition, you cannot change something at the narrative level without it disrupting and changing pretty much everything about your daily life.

What we were talking about in class was more along the lines of our abstract ethical formation, or something like that, but what I was hearing in all of this was that perhaps why I have been feeling so uncertain and unstable lately- why I have been joining hands to claim my place in this sort of collective instability, is because the narrative that I was taught my entire life didn't include any space for women who liked other women- or at least, not any space for women who liked other women and weren't damned to spend an eternity being punished for it in hell. So what you have on the outside is a high-functioning, high-achieving woman in her early twenties who is on the fast track to her PhD, supported by good friends, a loving family, and a warm church community. But what you have on the inside looks a lot more like the messy overturning of everything that already exists, and the consequent unearthing of a long-buried little girl who is trying desperately to recreate a world that contains space for her; to rewrite her role in a story that she has been written out of. To redefine everything from the basic conviction level, up.

I suppose, when you look at it like that it's only natural that things should be a little complicated, what with all the reconstructing, redefining, recreating, and rewriting that's been going on. We all know that every writer goes through a lot of drafts before they weed through all the crap and sift out what they were really trying to say. Have patience with me while I find my words. Have patience with me while I undergo this messy process of rewriting my story to include a more authentic version of myself. And when I make this request for patience, I suspect that more than anything, I am making this request of myself.

Thoughts on rights from the Religious Right

Tuesdays are my long days here in grad land, with an exhausting string of classes that begins with Christian Ethics, ends with Christian integration, and has a nice long statistics class sandwiched in the middle. I want so badly to like my Christian Ethics professor, if only because she identifies as a pacifist and feminist, which are two of my favorite words when it comes to things that end in "ist." I hesitate though, hang back and watch silently, as I find myself doing so frequently these days, made cautious by the readings I skipped ahead to that were assigned for our upcoming class discussion of sexuality. The lingering idealist in me wants to believe that our outspoken pacifist/feminist professor will refute and not support the author's "eloquent" theological argument explaining why he cannot "condone" the "lifestyle" of his gay friend because: "Under the power of the cross, we are not subject to our pasts, to our psychology, or to our biology." Oh, really? That's news to me. Here I am, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an integrative Christian education in psychology, and apparently psychology is erased by the power of the cross. I wonder if the news has made it to my psych professors yet, who have dedicated their lives to this very field? We better pass the message along to all the doctors and scientists too, since biology is a bust as well. Oh, and do you want to be the one to tell the little girl I know who was raped by her father when she was five, and by a whole string of foster parents after that, that she isn't subject to her past, or should I?

And the really fantastic thing about reading this whole article was that when I started talking about it to my best friend of six years, as a sort of trial run to see if I was ready to talk to her about my own struggles with sexuality, she cut me off with: "Well, you really can't limit God, I mean, what's the point of believing in Him if you don't think He can do anything." Ok, sure, I'm no theologian, and frankly, I don't want to get into an argument about the theology of God's omnipotence. What I do want to get into a discussion about it how the author's argument and my friend's argument in support of it sound to me a lot like saying: "God has the power to make you a _____ (fill in the blank here with male, blond, basketball star, etc) , so then if you wake up tomorrow still female, a brunette, or clumsy and athletically challenged, etc, then it's somehow your fault.... probably because you didn't trust in God's sovereignty or something. Sure, I'll admit that there are some holes in my argument and probably some big theological words I need to insert in key places... but you get the idea. Needless to say, love her deeply though I may, she and I will not be having any confessional, revealing conversations any time soon.

So anyway, where I was actually headed with all of this wasn't in any of these directions, but was more towards the enlightening conversation we had in Christian Ethics this morning about abortion. I'll spare you the details, since I'm sure you've all heard both prepackaged sides of the argument regurgitated more times than is healthy for anyone's fragile psyche, and instead I'll fast-forward to the part where we are talking about some complexities of the loaded statements "right to life" and "right to choice", and the blond guy in the back row raises his Ralph Lauren enrobed arm and says: "I don't really think rights are important here, as Christians we don't have any rights, we just serve Christ." Is that a fact? I am twitching in my seat with the raging heat of my unvoiced words, silently shouting at him: As a white, straight, upper-middle class, highly-educated, American male, you are honestly going to sit there and tell me that you don't have any rights? And please, I'd love to know which one of those adjectives has given you so much personal experience in the absence of rights that you now have the authority to speak to us from your enlightened understanding of just how unimportant rights are?

Maybe, instead of answering that one, he'd like to ask the fifty year old black preacher in the row ahead of him what he thinks about rights. Or he could ask the handful of women in the room who have only recently been allowed to even occupy space in this once exclusively male seminary- so recently, in fact, that the women's bathroom just outside our classroom is nothing more than a small section that was partitioned off of the men's bathroom a few years back. Or perhaps, if I one day find the courage to tell him and others like him, whether he asks or not, I'll share with him what it means to me to be sitting there, in a room filled with the fellow believers of my faith tradition, contemplating the whole array of rights that I have watched evaporate before my very eyes over the past year as I begin to honestly face my own sexuality.... the right to a wedding and a marriage, to the adoption of some of those children we are all hypothetically debating about bringing into the world, and then conveniently forgetting about once they arrive into the over-crowded arms of a terrifyingly destructive foster-care system. Or even, the right to speak honestly about what I am currently experiencing within the walls of this "academic Christian community," without risking being pointed in the direction of the section of the student handbook that labels me someone who falls outside the biblical will of God, and then provides a hotline where people who suspect me of homosexual activity can call to report their "suspicions".

I don't want to "play the victim" here, to use a phrase that makes my skin crawl for a whole myriad of reasons, nor do I want to claim to be any sort of expert on what it feels like to be marginalized when I myself partake daily of so many privileges that are denied to others around the world and within my own community. But what I do want to ask quietly, insistently, is.... are you listening? Do you hear the voices that are not your own, whispering, singing, sobbing, silently mouthing, shouting, humming the lines of their unwritten stories? I am just now starting to catch fragments of their many, varied voices. I am just now starting to find my own. I pray that you are listening... that we are all listening.