Hello Everyone,
After I recently came out on this blog I have been overwhelmed by all the positive responses and wonderful declarations of support. I am planning on writing more on this blog about many different topics that are important to me. However with school starting up I may take a little longer to update the blog.
So in the mean time I thought I would post a wonderful talk given by Robert Reese Ph.D. an active Latter-day Saint who has been an ally for LGBT Mormons for a long time. This talk gives a very thorough and wonderful insight into what it is like to be an LGBT and Christian. He calls on both sides to build understanding and love for the other. He also speaks on an interesting subject that I am guessing the vast majority of people probably haven't thought of before. I encourage everyone to read this talk. I hope that it can open hearts and promote greater love and understanding for all of God's children. Enjoy!
Lance
Love and the
Christian imagination
~ Robert A.
Rees, Ph.D.
Part of what it means to be a Christian is that through the
grace of Christ we have the capacity to imagine what it is like to suffer as
another person suffers. It is impossible to do this if we have anger, hatred or
revulsion for the other. Such imaginative projection is possible only within
the context of love. Thus, those who revile and persecute homosexuals, who
treat them as if they are flawed or have some kind of sinister agenda, cannot possibly
take on their suffering, cannot possibly hope to feel what they feel, but those
whose compassion is inspired by Christ, can feel, at least to some degree, what
it must be like to be anathema to society. We can imagine what it must feel
like to be taught to hate our own bodies, to be condemned for feeling what we
naturally feel, to be denied normal fellowship within Christ’s kingdom, and to
want to blot out our deep soul suffering through suicide.
Reviewing the sad history of homosexuality among the Mormons,
I conclude that where we are today as a Church and as a people, though in many
ways advanced from where we have been, can best be described as a failure—a
failure of faith, a failure of courage, a failure of imagination, and most of
all a failure of love.
I want to talk about two aspects of that failure today—the
failure of imagination and the failure of love. I don’t think one can have a
truly mature faith that isn’t to some degree graced by imagination. We don’t
often speak of imagination and Christ in the same breath, but I read the
gospels as the product of a great and fecund imagination. It isn’t just the
inventive language, the subtle irony and humor, and the fresh narratives that
flowed from his expansive heart and mind that make Jesus of Nazareth such great
imaginer, but especially his capacity to imagine each of us caught in the
snares of sin, lost in the tangled wood of mortality, each uniquely in need of
love, mercy and grace. Beyond this was his god-like capacity to imagine each of
us as glorified beings, each of our futures a reflection of his present. Only
such an imagination, I am convinced, could have emboldened him to descend into
Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and ascend to Calvary the following Friday.
If we share some of Christ’s imaginative gifts, as I believe
we all have the capacity to do when we take on us his name, then we can use
such gifts to expand his work in the world. We can imagine not only that,
but how, we can be better disciples than we are and the Church a better
institution than it is. The Church I imagine, like Joseph Smith’s view of God,
can be “more liberal in [its] views and more boundless in [its] mercies than we
are ready to believe.”
The way in which I believe we have failed you our LGBT
brothers and sisters is that we have not used our Christian imagination to try
and understand your experience or to understand our stewardship in relation to
you. Instead of seeing you as Latter-day Saints who have made heroic efforts to
conform to Church requirements, we have instead characterized you as rebellious
and unrepentant.
Instead of seeing you as exercising faith in promises made by
Church leaders and therapists that if you were only sufficiently faithful, you
could change your core identity, we have tended to see you as willfully
disobedient and unfaithful.
Instead of
honoring the often heroic efforts you have made to prove to God and the Church
that you were worthy of such a miraculous promise of change, we have accused
you of not being sufficiently righteous.
Instead of
applauding you for spending years and in some instances decades in therapy
trying to deal with your depression, despair, and existential angst over your
identity, we have accused you of not being sufficiently valiant.
Instead of
seeing you as people who have made amazing sacrifices to fit in with your
family, friends and congregations, we have stereotyped you as lustful,
narcissistic Sybarites bent on indulging in and celebrating a “life style” that
we have labeled outrageous, deviant, and predatory.
Instead of
seeing you as desiring the Mormon ideal of fidelity in marriage, we have
characterized you as desiring something unnatural and uncivilized.
In short, instead of seeing you as fully human, we have
tended to see you as alien and other.
We have failed to imagine what it must have been like for you
as children or adolescents when you first recognized that you were different
from your peers and the societal norm you were expected to conform to and how
frightened you were of telling anyone about your feelings. According to
the recent survey of 1,600 Latter-day Saint homosexuals conducted by Dr.
William Bradshaw and his colleagues, on average, participants report a ten-
year gap between the time they first realized their romantic or erotic
attraction to those of the same sex (around age 12) and their first disclosure
of this to another person (around age 22). We have failed to imagine the
exquisite fear and loneliness you must have experienced during that long,
lonely decade—or how painful it was when you did finally muster the courage to
tell someone, only to discover that they rejected you, driving you deeper into
your loneliness, despair and alienation.
Nowhere has
our imagination failed us more than in our refusal to place ourselves in
your lives, in your hearts, your minds, and your bodies, to imagine how we
would feel and act if we were asked to do what we have asked you to do—forego
all romantic love, intimate affection, erotic expression, marital companionship
and parent-child relationships for the duration of your mortal lives. Failing
to consider the complexity of same-sex orientation and identity, we have
encouraged (and even pressured) some of you to bind yourself to another person
for whom you have no such desires or hope of any. We have also failed to
imagine how it must be for you to suffer opprobrium, denigration of character,
and alienation from the families, friends and congregations you most want to be
a part of. We have failed to imagine how you feel on Sunday mornings when you
want to be worshipping with your fellow saints and singing the songs of Zion.
Finally, we
have failed to imagine the despair, the hopelessness that has led so many of
you to take or attempt to take your own lives.
In a talk I gave over twenty-five years ago when I was bishop
of the Los Angeles Singles’ Ward—addressed to the heterosexual members of the
ward--I cited Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” in
which Hopkins says that each of us
Acts in God's
eye what in God's eye he is—[that is,]
Christ. For
[he says] Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in
eyes not his
To the Father
through the features of men's faces.
What Hopkins
means is that Christ as our advocate takes our part, acts on our behalf before
the Father, letting his light shine through our features and faces so that the
Father may see us as Christ sees us—lovely in limbs and eyes (that is, body and
soul), in spite of our weaknesses, limitations, and sinfulness.
Since we have
the light of Christ within us, since we take on his character when we are born
anew through him, thus becoming his children of light, then beyond expressing
who and what we are, we also express who he is. Christ justifies us to God, and
it is through His grace that when we act before the Father, in a sense we
become Christ, because his light shines through us. Christ plays in ten
thousand places and through many times ten thousand faces which he makes lovely
to the Father through his grace. Those faces Christ plays through are
both heterosexual and homosexual. He would bring us all to God.
The Gospel of
St. Matthew shows us that Christ intends for us as his disciples to imitate him
in this way—that is, that we are to see one another as he sees us, to
consciously engage our imaginations as he employed his so that we, like him,
can see the very essence of one another’s being, in Latter- day Saint terms,
see the light of Christ in one another’s faces. When we do this, our only
response is to love one another with as pure a love as we are capable of manifesting.
As the novelist, Francisco Goldman says, “The great metaphor at the heart of
the Gospel According to Saint Matthew is that those who suffer and those who
show love for those who suffer are joined through suffering and grace to Jesus
Christ.”
I concluded my remarks to members of the Los Angeles First
ward with these words:I pray the Lord will bless us as brothers and sisters in
the Kingdom of God, as those who have taken upon us His name, that we will let
Christ's light shine through our faces, that we will make of our community a
wholeness, that we will seek that common ground of peace of
which Paul speaks, and that we will learn how to love and serve the Lord by
celebrating who we are, his heterosexual and homosexual sons and daughters.
Because we are all his creatures, we are all born with his light. I pray that
we may let that light shine among us, that it might grow, that we ourselves
might be its beacon, and that, as a Church and as individuals, we not only will
pray to the Lord for greater light and understanding, but that we will turn
ourhearts with greater charity, love and acceptance of all of those whom we
might consider strangers.
In Matthew 25 Christ puts Himself in the place of the
stranger--of the homosexual, if you will, saying in effect, "Inasmuch as
you have done it or not done it unto the least of one of these my homosexual
brothers or sisters, you have done it or not done it unto me" (25:40).
What does this mean for you, my homosexual brothers and
sisters? I wish I could say that you just have to be patient with us, your
unimaginative, incomplete and wounded fellow saints, that you just have to
continue to endure our spiritual immaturity as we strive to become more
enlightened and more loving, but the fact is, you too have this role to
play—you must also see us, those who have despised and rejected you, who have
belittled and banished you, who have failed to find you in our imaginations—you
must see us in the same way Christ calls us to see you. That is, even as we
continue to cause you to suffer, you are called to imagine our lives--our
fears, ignorance and prejudice that characterize our un-Christian treatment of
you. That above all is what it means to be a follower of Christ. With him, we
are to replace, ignorance with knowledge, error with truth, injustice with
justice and, most of all, hate with love.
I know it is not just for you to have to respond in this way
to an institution and individuals who have treated you in unkind, unjust and,
yes, un- Christian ways, but if we are to find our way out of the labyrinth we
are in, which I think we must do together, it is incumbent upon us all to do
what Christ calls us to do. It is through this work that we reform both
ourselves and our Church. It is in this constant reforming that we prevent both
ourselves and the Church from becoming idols. Thus, in order for this to happen,
we have to get out of our social and religious ghettos, see one another’s real
lives and try to understand one another’s lived experiences. I love the
old Shaker hymn titled “More Love,” which includes the following lyrics:
If ye love not each other in daily communion, How can ye love
God whom ye have not seen? More love, more love;
The heaven’s
are blessing
The angels
are calling O Zion! More love.
If in the
Church we can imagine change beyond policy and practice, beyond culture,
perhaps even beyond currently accepted doctrine, we may become agents of change
and thereby help transform the Church, perhaps liberate it from some of its
less enlightened traditions, and even glorify it in new ways, thus
demonstrating that we are indeed ready and anxious to receive on this subject
new revelation regarding "great and important things pertaining to the
Kingdom of God." As the humanist Ihab Hassan says, "Liberations come
from some strange region where the imagination meets change. . . . We need to
re-imagine change itself, else we labor to confirm all our errors." Or, as
Saul Bellow’s Henderson says, “All human accomplishment has this same origin,
identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a
person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to
actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!”
In his powerful essay, "Notes of a Native Son,"
James Baldwin speaks about the rage he felt as he went through a series of
humiliating experiences as a young man living in New York [City]. He was
refused service in a number of restaurants simply because he was black.
Finally, the accumulation of humiliations caused him to react with a kind of
unconscious violence . . . . I saw nothing very clearly but I did see this:
that my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people
might do, but from the hatred I carried in my own heart."
Later in the
same essay Baldwin concludes, "In order to really hate white people, one
has to blot so much out of the mind--and the heart-- that this hatred itself
becomes an exhausting and self-destructive pose. But this does not mean, on the
other hand, that love comes easily: the white world [and here one can
substitute the straight world] is too powerful, too complacent, too ready with
gratuitous humiliation, and above all, too ignorant and too innocent for that .
. . . Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who
hated and this was an immutable law."
Twenty-one years ago I gave the keynote address at the
Affirmation national conference in Palm Springs. In that address, I made an
analogy between what was happening in the Church in relation to homosexuality
and what had transpired in American and Mormon culture in relation to blacks. I
quote from that address: In a letter to his nephew, James, written on the
hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Baldwin writes,
"There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there
is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept
you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I
mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For
these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in
a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they
cannot be released from it. . . . We cannot be free until they are free."
Have any of you ever considered that part of your work for
humanity might be teaching heterosexuals how to love better? It may not be fair
that you are asked to do this, but I believe that it is God's will that you do
so because, like blacks and other hated groups, you have experienced the
deprivation of love in a profound way, and that depravation has given you a
gift which, if you will use it, can bless your lives and the lives of others.
Having been subject to rejection, ostracism, and even hatred, you may
understand something about the importance of love which others do not. I
believe that it is in rising through our suffering to such love that we attain
holiness.
I would like to close with a story that illustrates this
principle, Raymond Carver’s “A Small Good Thing.” In this story a couple, the
Weisses, make preparations to celebrate the birthday of their only son, Scotty.
They order a cake from the local bakery. On the day of the party the boy is hit
by a car and lapses into a coma. The parents wait anxiously by the bedside day
after day but their son never awakens and, after a short time, dies. The baker,
unaware of the accident, continues to call the parents to come and pick up the
cake. Grieving, they do not return his calls. He continues to call and leaves
abusive, threatening messages on their answering machine. Finally, one night
they go to the bakery to express their outrage at the Baker’s behavior. When
they tell him that their son is dead, he is embarrassed and ashamed. A simple
man, he does the only thing he can think of—he offers them some of his
fresh-baked bread. As they sit in the darkened bakery eating, he reveals his
own life of loneliness, of being childless, of working sixteen hours a day
baking thousands of wedding and birthday cakes and imagining the celebrations
surrounding them, none of which ever touch his life personally.
Finally, he
takes a fresh loaf of dark bread from the oven, breaks it open and offers some
to them. “Smell this” he says, “It’s a heavy bread but rich.” Carver writes,
“They smelled it, then he had them taste it. It had the taste of molasses and
coarse grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed
the dark bread. It was like daylight under the florescent trays of light. They
talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows,
and they did not think of leaving.”
This is a
powerful story of loss, grief, death, forgiveness, and most of all of love. It
is also a story of redemption. The association in the story of bread with light
reminds us of Christ who is both the bread of life and the light of the world.
Partaking of the bread of life each week, we too taste of his light. (Here I
would add that if you do not feel comfortable partaking of the sacrament in a
Latter-day Saint congregation, find one that welcomes you and partake of it
there.) It is a small good thing we do and is akin to all of the other small
acts of understanding, forgiveness and compassion we give to one another. Such
acts of love, it seems to me, have their genesis in the light of Christ which
is in every one of us. It is our sacred calling to magnify that light in our
hearts and souls and to carry it to and receive it from one another as we
receive the emblems of Christ’s sacrifice, that is, with gratitude and hope.
In the name
of Jesus Christ. Amen.
More love,
more love; The heaven’s are blessing The angels are calling
O Zion! More
love.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all of my readers. I know that Christmas can be a mixed bag when it comes to the various family and cultural experiences that people have. Whoever you are and wherever you may be in your life and in your relationships. I hope that you can find peace and hope both in a religious sense and a secular sense. Although this blog post will not be exactly about Christmas it is in a way about new beginnings and the growth that comes from the discovery of something new. 
