Gay Pentecostal Atheist

Monday, November 6, 2017

Next steps

(Originally published at "A Year of Service" 11/9/16)

It has been about a year and a half since I started this blog. I initially called the blog "A Year of Service" and used it as a place to explore how the theme of service has been unfolding around me. At the time, I had just recognized service to others as an organizing concept that was permeating my entire life - both professional and personal. That realization came as a big aha moment for me and I felt the need to live with it and examine it thoroughly. The learning that has followed has been incredibly dynamic. I feel like these past months have been unique in my life, probably the longest period of inspiration and change I have ever experienced. And while dynamic, this time of change has also been both progressive and orderly because I approached it with the intention to learn and think reflexively, actively seeking connections, looking into emerging realizations, wrestling with those things that made me uncomfortable, and moving myself ahead.

Looking intently at my life as service has required me to be more quiet in the presence of others, to listen for their needs and to compare their needs and my responses to keep track of how I'm serving. Often, my own needs intrude on this process. Sometimes I'm in the presence of someone I fear will betray me because of things they may believe. Who knows what motivations go unspoken? Am I really safe here? My determination in this process means I have learned to sit patiently with my own needs when they come up. Instead of distancing myself from potential danger, I sit still. I keep listening. My fear is inner pain so I sit with that pain for a bit and go back to doing the work at hand. This act of patience and centering has become almost a reflex and it seems like a kind of magic. I say magic because I sense the practice is directly tied to enormous changes in my life but the connections remain below the surface, just out of sight.

What are these changes? I've found a way to navigate around the beliefs and expectations of people of different faiths - at work, in community settings, and in my own family. These are often people who I would have avoided a few years ago because of the threat they could pose to me - Catholics, Pentecostals, Baptists, members of the Disciples of Christ church in my neighborhood. By navigate, I don't mean getting along. I mean interacting deeply with them while paying close attention to my own vulnerabilities. Because I can talk with them and work with them, I'm able to engage with them on a deeper level about their own interior lives. And somehow, I've felt safe enough to begin adapting those parts of their experiences that seem reasonable to me. I'm taking their wisdom and using it as building blocks to rebuild my own inner temple. I'm reclaiming the life giving parts of my religious heritage. And last month, after two years of visiting, dialogue, and engagement, I joined the neighborhood church - not as a repudiation of my past, but as a revealing of the the next steps of my journey. Finally, the joy all this brings me has convinced me that my story, although still in progress, may be useful for others. There are a lot of queer people like me in the world, damaged by exile, but still seeking unity.

What a time of change! Momentous changes! The biggest change of all though, has been the healing. There is a myth in our culture that we must be tough, keep a stiff upper lip. Focusing on our pain makes us weaker. This hasn't been true for me. Opening myself to my pain and to the pain of others has strengthened me, enabled me to approach others fearlessly. It is all these others who have held the tidbits of information and inspiration that I am touching. They have extended welcomes to me, invitations, trusting me as I trusted them, but often trusting me first. I'm under no illusions about my old wounds. They are permanent and healing will always continue as a process. But the healing that has come to me has already been abundant. Some days I just cry over it.

So where am I going with all of this? Service as a big part of my core identity seems to be well established. I'm comfortable with that. Now, as a result of these explorations, I have found a new footing in life and the question arises - how shall I proceed? It is time to develop new interior goals and to create strategies for living those out in the world. My most pressing need right now is a coherent personal world view that unites all the different ways my consciousness exists in experience. I have a wealth of resources at my disposal and I feel ready to continue clawing my spiritual birthright back from those who tried to take it from me.

Several times during the past summer I attempted to write posts about my atheism, to explain it, and to situate it within my ongoing development. I found this difficult because it did not fit comfortably into the themes of service I was considering. It fits here though, so I anticipate addressing this soon, and more.

A YEAR OF SERVICE

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Framing choices through grace

(Originally published at "A Year of Service" 8/22/17)

Grace is one of those concepts I've been exploring lately. Why would an atheist even care about that? Isn't it a religious term? Maybe, but I don't think it has to be.

Lately, I have been drawn to this concept as a way to frame experiences. It is part of a broader attempt to reconsider realities and experiences that are larger than facts. Love is one such experience. It cannot be subjected to scientific testing, but I doubt anyone who experiences love would say it isn't real or consequential. Like love, grace is abstract, not something to be proven or disproven. It exists, or doesn't, in the experience of the individual. If we accept that love or truth or community are concepts open to consideration by an atheist, why not grace?

So, what do I think grace is about? It's a tough call and I've had a hard time locking it down but when I find myself unexpectedly in a very meaningful situation that produces dramatic, positive, long-term changes in my life and psyche, my experience of that whole process feels like it could be called grace. One of the most important examples of this for me in the past few years was standing in the street at Shaw and Klemm, in front of Vonderitt's mother, as she cried over the loss of her son. I had no business being there. They are not my family, the shooting was not on my block. My motivations for going were vague. I could have seen her on television, as most St. Louisans did, but the effect would have been quite different. Experiencing her grief, not as an image on a screen, but in a community of strangers, all grieving, was heart-rending to me. The chain of events that followed, and to which I opened myself, is still playing out and it has carried me deeper into a love of us all and into a greater desire to find a just world.

What was positive about that experience? Obviously, not the death or grief. Vonderitt and his family paid a terrible price. It was a hideous and wasteful thing that happened. Rather, the key for me is that in the middle of that terribleness, I opened myself up and that act of opening allowed other things to follow. If that is grace, then grace is not easy. It does not arrive on the doorstep one day, gift wrapped as a happy cosmic surprise. Grace is a process that comes with struggle and pain. I've lost a lot of people I thought had been friends since that night in the street - people who couldn't go with me into the new places I was heading. Sleepless nights, worry, conversational struggles, deep self-questioning, all have been part of the process.

But through all of that communal pain and personal struggle, I found opportunities to uncover truths previously hidden from me. Opportunities for love, learning, gratitude, emerging from the absolute worst situations. I have found a more whole version of myself and I am deeply grateful for that. Maybe this reaching towards grace is our species' salvation - our choices, our work.

I do not think grace is inevitable. I opened myself up this time, but I witnessed so many others close themselves a little tighter. The opportunities for grace are fleeting and, if not seized immediately, they may slip away forever.

A man who attends my church passed away recently after a long illness. His memorial service at the church was attended by his male life partner of many years, our church family, and many non-religious members of the LGBTQ community. During the memorial service, a conservative brother of the deceased made a brutal anti-gay speech. Apparently, this was a continuation of years of abusive behavior directed at the deceased and his partner. The diatribe derailed the memorial, angering and demoralizing the entire audience. Many of the people present, both church members and general public, had previously experienced family and religious disinheritances around queer identities. This foolish man did a lot of damage and re-opened old wounds for many.

Sadly, he had already missed years of opportunities to experience the grace embodied by his gay brother. Perhaps the dark side of human relationships, our constant propensity to separate ourselves from others, is the opposite of grace. What if, instead of tormenting his relative for all those years, he could have seen in his brother the image of the marginalized Christ? What if instead of making his last months more difficult, he had responded to his brother's suffering in light of the suffering of Christ? How sad to claim to be a Christian and to have missed that Christ's suffering was the suffering of relationships, the exclusion from those he considered to be his people.

A moment of grace, or a lifetime of moments of grace, was missed. No matter how hard the work is, I hope I never let that happen to me.

A YEAR OF SERVICE

The sound washed over me

(Originally published at "A Year of Service" 8/22/17)

Yesterday I stood on the porch of a coffeeshop in Hermann, Missouri watching the eclipse with a small knot of employees. As we marveled and chatted quietly, the katydids striking up an evening chorus in the background, I began to think about all of us - Americans. I thought about how we are such different people - different places, different politics, different struggles, different needs, fears, beliefs, loves. And yet millions of us were all staring up, together, letting the things that divide us recede into the background for a few minutes.

We looked up at the source of all our lives, in wonder, in awe. Just being children for a few minutes.

And then a bubble of pure, incomparable brilliance bloomed out the back side of the moon and hundreds of people behind me, out of sight on the riverbank a quarter mile away, burst into screams. The sound washed over me and my hairs stood on end. And I thought of the sound in videos of the Boston Marathon bombing, the Ariana Grande concert, all the other horrific times when people become an organism, moving and wailing together.

But this time was different. It was joy, it was almost like worship. And I shuddered for joy too. We were made for this. Why can't we make this thing happen more often?

A YEAR OF SERVICE

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

"Stewardship is giving of what you have"

(Originally published at "A Year of Service" 11/9/16)

This morning I woke up feeling dizzy, disoriented. Maybe I've been feeling dizzy for a while and I'm just now noticing. During the post-nomination campaign, I cycled back and forth from feeling doomed by a Trump win to feeling delivered by a Clinton win. On election morning my chest was as tight as a drum and I breathed shallowly. Then I found the live-stream from Rochester, NY showing thousands of pilgrims visiting Susan B. Anthony's grave and leaving their "I Voted" stickers on her tombstone. The reverence and pride in their voices was the change I needed from the poisonous tone of the election. I left the live-stream open on my screen as I worked and by noon I was thinking "Now THIS is America. THIS is who we are, not all of that negative stuff." At lunch break I took some time to meditate on history's curve towards justice. The battles are always difficult, but good seems to trump discrimination and ignorance over and over. By the end of the day, I was feeling confident about the outcome.

Then the election happened and this morning I was dizzy. Clearly, we have become a nation of hate. We vote for people we don't respect in order to spite other people we don't even know. Discrimination is our most treasured privilege. Maybe all the progress we have made will be lost. Perhaps it has all been for nothing. We are deplorable, stupid, small and we deserve nothing.

But, of course, the truth is that America is both of these, at the same time. Our baser natures manifest as we injure, discriminate and kill our neighbors. Too many of us actively seek to harm others. Even greater numbers of Americans refuse to acknowledge the damage we do. Sometimes we protect our ignorance above all else.

At the same time, those ideals that lift us and drive us to be better are still here. But they have no permanent existence in the material world. Fairness, justice, equality, truth -- they aren't like rocks or trees or houses. You can't touch them and they don't have an address. Our government buildings, neutral stacks of marble, can't contain them. They cannot be set in stone, inviolate for all time. They only exist inside our human hearts. Occasionally, they bubble up into the real world in the shape of a law that helps someone. And then later, that law might be taken away. But the core of what is good about America only exists inside of us. People of good will, we are the keepers of America and we are the only ones who can pass this goodness on to the next generation.

Laws can be erased. Rights can be interrupted. We can be hurt. That is one truth.

The other truth is, this year, millions of us made our ideals visible as we campaigned, drove voters to the polls, voted with our hearts and heads, and visited the Anthony grave. This cannot be taken away by an election. Our flame burns even while we despair. It cannot be quenched.

In a few days, once we've rested, let that flame come back up. Tend it. Feed it a little direct action. The world needs us now more than ever before.

*The title of this essay is a sentence I heard during a meeting at Compton Heights Christian Church tonight. Sometimes I think of my own service in terms of success/ failure. It's good to be reminded that doing the right thing doesn't necessarily ensure success and failure doesn't always indicate an unworthy effort.

A YEAR OF SERVICE

Sunday, October 23, 2016

Service is plural

(Originally published at "A Year of Service" 10/23/16)

It takes only one person to identify a social problem. Sometimes, that one person can imagine a workable solution. But implementing the solution? Making it permanent? This takes a team.

I don't have a lot to say about this so it will be a short post but this may be the most important lesson I have learned from working in my community: no two teams are alike and as much care must go into constructing the team as into any other aspect of the project.

We installed a quarter acre of prairie restoration along Hwy 44 a few years ago. That project worked because we rallied hundreds of allies including neighbors, local politicians, city departments, non-profits and grant funders. That team was able to accomplish the planting, publication of the project, community involvement and continuing support. As the project has aged the original team has contributed a little less each year. This year we began building a new team that is aligned with the evolving needs of the project. We no longer need community volunteers to dig holes. Instead, we need botanists to monitor specific species. We need public relations work. We need a specific piece of maintenance equipment. New needs, new team.

Similarly, the Shaw Memorial Forest began as a project requiring a lot of neighbor support and manual labor. We accomplished that by writing tree grants and inviting neighbors to plant a free tree for a loved one. The project has been a smashing success so far. As we look towards the beginning of the third year we anticipate changing project parameters. Planting and watering will be minor needs for the future. Mowing the grass and developing the public experience of the forest will become the main needs. That will require a large mower and small group of people who are passionate about memorials, place making and perhaps the Shaw neighborhood. Whether or not these people like to dig holes is immaterial. New needs, new team.

Both of these projects began as the idea of one or two people. They would have never gotten off the ground without our strategic efforts at team building. By the same token, the projects will fade away if we can't master the art of team succession. Stay tuned.

A YEAR OF SERVICE

Sunday, June 26, 2016

Sacred gardens

(Originally published at "A Year of Service" 6/26/16)

I was asked by a coworker to write an essay about my connection to nature for our workplace newsletter. The essay is next month's contribution to an ongoing series called The Green Corner. I started doing just that -- writing about how I had developed a connection with nature -- but it became something else entirely. It morphed into a statement about service to nature and to people and where I see myself located between those two things. I'm thankful for the opportunity to work that out on paper because it helped me formulate some new thoughts on my work. The ecology projects I'm carrying out are acts of creative love. Here is my essay:

Why do snakes look so weird? Why did birds evolve to fly above the ground? Why are they both so different from us? I don’t know those answers but the more we look at nature the more variation we see. It’s almost as if difference is valued by the creator, or natural selection, or both.

One of my favorite trees is called devil’s walking stick and I will never forget the day we met. As a child, I spent a lot of time in the woods and thought I knew all the trees and shrubs and forest flowers around me. One fateful day I ventured off my usual rambling trail and lost my footing in a pile of dry leaves at the top of a steep slope. As I slid down I reached out for a nearby trunk to slow my descent. The thorns greeted me first so I let go! When I eventually stopped sliding downhill I faced the stinging pain and wondered what on earth I had just encountered. What was that thing with those ridiculous thorns? Could trees even have thorns like that?

On my next trip to the library I found the tree in a field guide. It is a small tree, no more than 10 feet tall, and its leaves are lush and tropical. In spring the tree is topped with foamy clouds of white blossoms. I learned that the spines covering its trunk protect it from deer that would otherwise eat it to the ground and from smaller mammals that would climb the tree and devour its fruits. I learned that mammoths and mastodons may have been warded off by those spines in the distant past. The spines help the tree reserve its fruits for songbirds and, in return, they scatter the seeds far and wide.

This information transformed my dismay to respect. When I next visited the tree and reflected on its story, its script on the stage of life, my respect became admiration. Devil’s walking stick is uncommon and few people know that it exists. As we continue to replace woods and fields with roads and shopping malls it will become even more uncommon. I wonder how many other wonderful things have already vanished along with their stories, unknown and unloved, victims of our carelessness.

One day shortly after these events I came home from school to the sound of heavy machinery and chainsaws. The 100-acre woods I had known as my own Eden was being cut down. The landowner made a few thousand dollars from the timber and put that money into an investment account. By the next spring, the creek had filled with silt. The leaves and flowers carpeting the ground had washed into the creek or died. Large erosion gullies appeared everywhere. The birds, the crayfish, the garter snakes, the butterflies, the devil’s walking stick, the 200-year-old beech tree with exposed roots forming a big chair high over the creek – all my friends – had disappeared.

It’s difficult to explain the sadness I felt but the loss of that place was very real to me. While a part of my sadness was selfish, a longing for the woods I loved so much, there was also grieving for the rich web of life that was extinguished there. Even as a child, I knew that the birds could fly away but the crayfish and the shiners in the creek pools could not. They died with the trees. I didn’t have the words for it at the time but now I can say the place was sacred. The animals were sacred, the trees were sacred. The wood was a temple where I went when I needed to pray. I always found quiet and I always encountered god there. I was a part of that place and the whole thing was sacred.

I can’t get that wood back but I still have a deep connection with nature. It is like a language learned through experience and reflection. It’s not a commonly spoken language but anyone can pick it up. I spend my evenings and weekends giving lessons by engaging my neighbors in habitat projects.

A year ago I was invited to design the country’s first Transgender Memorial Garden, a garden dedicated to the memory of transgender people who have been lost through acts of violence. I admit for about five minutes I wavered, wondering what people would say if they knew I had affiliated myself with the transgender community. But I was not put here to separate myself from others or from nature. The natural sacredness in the world includes us in all our variations. So I accepted and I designed with trees and flowers of eastern Missouri. I talked with the community about the native beauty that still exists, hidden and overlooked, in our alleys and waste places and how we can bring that back to life in the garden. I brought along my old friend, devil’s walking stick. The symbolism is not lost on the community: unknown and disregarded by many; with a name and thorns that present a façade of danger; yet beneath it all the complexity and intense beauty that can come with a struggle for survival.

I can’t speak for this community but I heard their stories of loss. They too have been cast out of Eden, out of their families, out of their churches, and all too often out of life itself. They have been told they are not sacred. I don’t know why people who are different trouble us so much. We are all part of the same family of life, infinitely varied.

In response, I drew a sacred landscape and filled it with native trees that are strange, formidable, unapologetic and almost entirely unheard of. The garden has rapidly become a haven, a pilgrimage site where people flock together to meet, grieve and share life. As knowledge of the garden spreads the trees are becoming a small part of the story of the transgender community in St. Louis. Often I sit apart and observe how the trees are anchors, even in their youth, connecting the community to this soil. They form a sacred structure - real, true, beautiful, millions of years old - while around them the people transform their lives and bodies. The garden is sacred. The people are sacred. The whole thing is sacred.

I was asked to write an essay about my relationship to nature but I can’t separate the trees from the people. The only way I can go back to my sacred wood is by taking people with me. When I see beauty in nature and beauty in people I am there in spirit. The world is an amazing place full of variety we’ve not yet appreciated and stories we haven’t yet heard. I look for it and look at it in order to honor it. I’m going to keep looking and talking and holding because I don’t want any more of it to slip away.

A YEAR OF SERVICE

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Like sunflowers that look towards the sun...

(Originally published at "A Year of Service" 5/11/16)

"Like sunflowers that look towards the sun and as a compass needle seeks the pole, so your minds should always turn to the Lord."

Conferences, p.29

St. Mary Euphrasia

This quote came across my screen today at work. Mary Euphrasia is the founder of the order I work for and Melinda, our Mission Effectiveness Coordinator, regularly sends us inspirational quotes from ME's writings. I always read them and from time to time the quote will resonate deeply with me or will spark an old memory or lead me off into a rewarding avenue of thought. I guess that isn't all that difficult to do since I live so much in my own head, but Melinda has a genius for selecting a phrase or quote that contains so much good stuff.

When I read the quote I thought 'well, that's me!' My mind constantly turns to god all through the day. It's certainly not the same god that I grew up with. It's not a supernatural smiter or miracle worker. I don't really know what god is but I am like that sunflower. Why do I still do that?

And then I thought of my mom and I remembered the stories she told of the time when I was a baby when she and dad took me before the church and dedicated me to god. Of course I don't remember it but she always spoke of the dedication with pride.

One Sunday just a few weeks ago a young couple at Compton Heights Christian Church brought their newborn to the front of the church and Pastor Jacque held the baby and dedicated it before the congregation. It was a moving ceremony but it didn't last very long. It seemed more a way to bring the child into the church family than a dedication of the child's entire life to god. Afterwards I thought about the other infant dedications I witnessed while growing up in the church. From what I remember they all seemed brief, not that remarkable. My dedication was probably not that different.

What I'm realizing for the first time is, regardless of what actually happened in the ceremony, its meaning was huge to my mom. I can't remember her ever speaking of my siblings' dedications but then I'm the first born. When she talks about my dedication she always says "We dedicated your life to God."

I suspect my mom saw parallels between her experience of my birth and dedication and the Bible story of Hannah and her son Samuel. Hannah couldn't bear children. She prayed so earnestly at the temple that her behavior violated the customs of how women should behave. God gave her a son, Samuel. In return, she took him to the temple to live as a servant for the priest Eli. My mother lost two babies before I was born. When I was born the midwife said I was dead too. The umbilical cord was wrapped tightly around around my neck and I wouldn't breathe. Apparently I was grey all over, not pink. After much prayer I began to breathe. Mom must have prayed many prayers before my birth. Perhaps she made a deal with God, like Hannah, to dedicate her first born to service.

Unlike Eli though, I was not forced into the ministry. While growing up I heard lots of other adults voice the expectation that I would become a preacher but neither mom nor dad ever said that. Consequently, I never felt that I had to become a preacher. Instead, what I felt was an extraordinary closeness, a personal relationship to God, a blessedness even, from childhood.

Did the retelling of the dedication story over the years do that to me? Has my face constantly turned to god as a result of the expectations set up by my mother's experiences? Those may sound like positive outcomes, but there is also a darker side. I was taught explicitly that I would always have access to supernatural help. Did the dedication represent a bargain? Have I always expected reciprocal gestures from god, a reciprocal amount of attention to my needs? This is a question I have never thought to ask myself before but when god didn't answer my fervent teen-aged prayers that he make me straight we went through a break up of monumental proportions. Of course. How could it have been any different?

A lot of answers I seek are still inaccessible to me. Maybe they will always be beyond my reach but of what use is it to complain about parental actions and unrealities taught to children? After all this time there is only the sorting through of the remaining threads, the making of meaning in the midst of my reality. I certainly have not been dealt with harshly and I'm beyond complaining. This world of beauty would be much less beautiful without the call I hear and to which I respond.

When god called out to Samuel in the night he misidentified the call. He ran to the priest Eli and said "Here I am". Eli's contribution was to teach Samuel to identify the call to service as the voice of god. For a few years now the world has been calling out to me. There is so much to do, so much need among people and among the creatures of creation. I have heard the call and have responded but where does the call come from? Is it coming from the earth? From my neighbors? From within my self? From god? Can the answer to all those questions be yes?

Right now I am playing with the idea that god can be understood as the totality of our love and existence - nothing less than that and nothing more than that. I know the Bible says god is love but I'm still having a hard time seeing past the old image of god as the supernatural ass kicker in the sky who doesn't exist. I'm mulling this over in my mind and attending church and seeing which parts do and don't match. In the meantime, there is a lot of work to do and I continue to answer the call. Maybe it doesn't matter where the call is coming from. Speak; for thy servant heareth.