23rd
Recovering and Reflecting :: Re-Visiting Faith and Sexuality
I had no idea.
My post this summer about faith and sexuality—actually, the post was more about trying to find my way into a conversation about how Christians can understand how to have open and honest dialogue with friends who are gay and lesbian (who are sometimes also Christian themselves)—is still generating conversations.
To be honest, I had written the post over 2 months before posting it and wasn’t sure I wanted to jump into the “shark infested waters” of this conversation and then flail my flapping arms, drawing attention to the fact that I didn’t know how to swim in this ocean.
I also was a bit apprehensive because last fall I posted some thoughts on gender equality and then posted some thoughts on the elections—both were roundly criticized by very conservative religious people.
And I paid for it. Literally.
Some of you know that Phileena and I have to find funding and sponsors for our positions at Word Made Flesh. Over the past 16 years we’ve struggled to build a consistent support team who stand behind us financially, allowing our continued participation in the community. After some of my posts about the elections last fall we actually lost several financial supporters—one of them even sent an e-mail to our board of directors because she was so concerned about my freedom of thought.
Tangent here, sorry, but what’s ironic about that is though some extremely conservative evangelical Republicans withdrew their support for us because of some of my political positions, we have since seen 3 former George W. Bush White House staffers join our support team. Crazy. People who actually worked with Bush and had offices in the White House can agree to disagree with us and still stand behind us. Crazy.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand.
So, I was anxious about how my post on faith and sexuality would be received.
And to be honest, I’m still surprised—more than that, overwhelmed.
You can read the comments yourself. Many of them are deeply moving. Some of them are extremely vulnerable. Words like, “relieved,” “weeping,” and others convey the intensity of feelings and emotions that this conversation touches on.
What I wish you all could see are (most of) the e-mails and Facebook messages that people took the time to write to me. More people wrote directly to me than commented on my blog—many of them afraid to come out or to put their thoughts and experiences in a public space where they could be further wounded by Christians. After reading a few of them I sat on my living room couch and couldn’t help but cry. And I generally don’t cry much. Really.
Friends from high school and college, as well as people I’ve never met, wrote long and heartfelt messages pouring out their pain and angst about their own sexuality identity and how they’ve felt conflicted because of their religious conditioning. Many of them wrote in painful detail about how churches and religious communities rejected them.
I had no idea. I had no idea that so many people today carry within themselves such deep and tender wounds, painful wounds that need healing. Many of these wounds inflicted by sincere and caring Christians who have no idea that sexual identity is such an intimate part of who our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters are.
We have a long, long way to go, but I’m hopeful that we can get there.
And yes, there were people on the conservative side of this who also reminded me to keep it biblical—most of them were cool, but I got scolded pretty severely by a few friends.
And I want to ask my gay and lesbian friends to be patient with us who are honestly trying to create dialogue and understanding as we unravel ourselves from some of our misunderstandings. But don’t let us off the hook either.
