Virginia is for
Lovers: Some Restrictions May Apply
©Sara Mackey
July 31, 2005
As the kittens climbed up my leg to propel themselves off
my lap and on to the table, over and over again, I laughed and
thought to myself, “Chump!” My friend from seminary (the
chump) had invited me over to see her new roommates. She, too,
serves a congregation that’s not in Richmond, and one of her
congregants had come by her office to take her to his house, to
show her his new litter of kittens. He persuaded my friend that a
woman living alone really needs a low maintenance companion. A
cat, for example. He did a good job, evidently, of persuading; in
fact, he persuaded her that once you decide to have a cat,
there’s really no difference between one cat and two cats.
(He’s right, by the way.) I spent the evening being captivated
by Grace and Sophia, and took great delight in my friend’s story
of taking them to the vet and being told that Grace and Sophia
were some fancy names for a couple of tom cats. When she found out
that the cats were males, my friend called her granddaughter,
three years old and her partner in every major decision she makes.
“What are we going to do, Alise?”
she asked her granddaughter. What are we going to name the kitties
now? Think about it and call me back.” In a couple of days,
Alise called with her solution. “Nanny, let’s just call them
girls.”
Let’s just call ourselves welcoming. We Unitarian
Universalists do welcome and support the gay, lesbian, bisexual,
and transgender community. We may be more affirming and supportive
than any other denomination. We most certainly never tell people
they are sinners, or they’re going to hell. We do not say to
BGLT members that even though we love them, they can’t
participate in leading worship. We take public stands in support
of BGLT causes all over the country.
Let’s just call ourselves
welcoming.
Let’s not go through that
challenging and complicated process of self examination, looking
at what we believe about gender identity and how we came to
believe it.
Let’s not ask ourselves if we are
more or less privileged than our friends and colleagues.
Let’s not set ourselves up for
conflict and disappointment and frustration and opening up who
knows what can of worms.
Let’s just call ourselves
welcoming.
And we ARE welcoming. In fact, I have wished many times as a
member of the Welcoming Congregations committee in my own
congregation that we could change the name of the program, because
the number one response we get when we talk about Welcoming
Congregations is just that: we already ARE welcoming. Becoming a
Welcoming Congregation, though, certified by the UUA as having
been through this demanding process, isn’t something we do just
for ourselves, just for our own congregation.
Another comment that comes up frequently is, why gay people? We
don’t want to designate just one group and say we welcome them.
We want to welcome everybody. We don’t have committees and
programs to welcome African Americans, or immigrants, or people
with special needs. That’s right. We don’t. And here’s why:
even during the worst times of chattel slavery in the United
States (the most devastating kind of slavery, because there’s
nothing you can do as a slave to free yourself), the Africans
still had church. It was usually forbidden to them, so of course
they had it in secret. They hid in groves of trees and hung
wet quilts around to absorb the sounds of their whispered worship.
They went to all kinds of lengths to hide their religious
gatherings. But they had church. Indeed, the civil rights movement
in the last century emerged out of the church. Through all the
horrors that African Americans had to endure at the hands of their
oppressors, from chattel slavery to dogs and fire hoses, they
still knew they were God’s children. They still had church.
Immigrants have church. People with special needs have church. It
BGLT people who don’t have church…who get kicked out of
church, or who’re told sure, you can come, but forget about
being ordained as clergy, even if you feel a deep call, and you
can’t read from the pulpit if you want to be a lay leader, and
don’t talk about being gay while you’re at church because of
course you’re a sinner, it says so in the Bible. (That’s not
an accurate representation of what it says in the Bible, by the
way, and to claim that it is does a disservice to the Bible.)
Additionally, you’re a sinner not because of anything you
did, but because of the way you are, by no design or choice of
your own. Is that what fills a person’s need when that person
needs a religious community? What does one do, where does one go,
as a BGLT person whose spirit longs for church?
Every BGLT person who seeks a religious community and has
been turned away, either by doctrine or by the behavior of members
(or both) has a story to tell. Every person who tries to live a
regular every-day life as a BGLT person has a story to tell. Some
of those stories find their way to me now and then, and this
morning I’d like to share pieces of them, to help make it clear
why we need to be a Welcoming Congregation. Not all these stories
are about church, but all of them are about loving community, or
lack of it. All the people involved could have sought strength,
sustenance, and comfort from a religious community, if they’d
had one to go to. Some did, and it may have been a UU congregation
that they found. Others did not.
This first person was someone I knew during my time in seminary.
My friend and I were eating lunch, and he was telling me about his
younger days and his struggle with alcoholism. He’s sober now,
but he went through some dark times to get to that point. “Not
even God loved me,” he said. “That’s what I learned from the
church, from the time I was a kid. There was nothing in me to
love, and nothing I could do about it. I knew I was different, but
I didn’t know how to be anything else. It was awful. After I got
older, the drinking helped.”
There was nothing in him to love,
he believed, and nothing he could do about it.
Can we live with that?
Another
man, about the same age, told a different story across a different
table. “All the stuff I learned in church when I was younger,”
he said, “I always knew it wasn’t true. I always knew there
was something worthwhile and valuable in me. I knew I was gay at a
young age, and I knew that church stuff was lies.” My own pain
came out of the fact that he had been obliged to go to church and
listen to those lies about himself when he was young. Questions
overwhelmed me. How did you know? I wondered. What was in you that
kept you safe from being devastated by what you heard? Where did
it come from? To myself, I wondered, why did you have it and my
other friend didn’t? This is not the first time I’d talked to
a BGLT person who had experienced the same understanding of
personal worth and value, but I’d never heard anybody be able to
articulate the “why”. Still, even in the case of the friend
who knew he was a child of God, finding Unitarian Universalism was
a powerful healing experience for him. It put him into a community
of caring and acceptance that let him know he wasn’t the only
one who believed he was valuable and worthy. Suppose he had never
found a UU congregation. Suppose he had never heard our good news?
Can we live with that?
At a gathering one evening, people were asking about the
experiences of BGLT people, and someone asked each of us to
consider what we do every day, at work or in social contexts, to
avoid being called gay, queer, fag, dyke. The question took me by
surprise. “I don’t do anything to avoid that,” I answered.
“It doesn’t cross my mind.” Another person who was there
that night is a friend of mine. She has offered me many kinds of
help under many circumstances, has provided considerate care at a
time when her attention needed to be elsewhere, has read endless
e-mails from me and responded with wisdom, compassion, and
understanding. My answer, she said, had such an impact on her,
because she thinks all the time, every day, about who knows
she’s gay, who doesn’t know, what the implications are for who
does know or who may not know but may find out. The possibility
that she might be called a lesbian is never off her mind. She
doesn’t resent me, I don’t pity her, but I don’t want a
privilege that she doesn’t have, and carrying the burden of that
privilege without earning it in any way oppresses me. If she were
hungry and I had food, I could share with her. But there’s no
way for me to share my privilege as heterosexual with her. All I
can do is try to work toward a time that is surely coming, when
being heterosexual doesn’t put me in a position of privilege.
What if becoming a Welcoming Congregation could bring that
time closer, and we decided NOT to do it?
Can we live with that?
The final story took place at yet another table, with yet another
seminary friend, a young woman. She spoke of the frustration of
being told, “It’s not that I disapprove of you, but I can’t
agree with your lifestyle.”
“I don’t have a lifestyle!”
she said. “It’s like they think when class is over I get in my
gay car and drive down the gay road. Lesbian is not the only thing
that I am!” Eventually she shared with me the story of a
long-time friend of hers (and later she gave me permission to
retell the story). I have told it before, from this pulpit, in
fact, and some of you may remember it. Her friend is also
gay, and one night while she was visiting, his mother called.
Mother and son had been fighting, and they fought some more on the
phone.
“Then,” my friend said, “his face just got blank. He said,
‘OK, Mom,” and then he hung up and ran out of the apartment. I
chased after him and caught up with him in a couple of blocks. He
was standing in front of this steel door. He had punched it, and
his hand was bleeding, and he was kicking it, kicking it, with his
boot. I said,’ What did she say to you?’, and he said, ’She
called me a f***ing faggot.’ I just held my arms out to him,
held on to him, and he cried.”
My friend looked straight at me, and the anguish in her face
blocked my own throat with tears. “Why?” She asked me. “Why
would God let a thing like that happen?”
“God didn’t let it happen,” I told her, and she said,
“I know. I know.” But she wasn’t a UU, and she didn’t
share the language of what that pure light within her really is.
She wasn’t yet able to name that God chased her friend down the
street. God stood as a witness to his suffering as he beat up that
steel door with his fist and his boots. And God held him in
God’s own arms while he cried. As Methodist children we learned
to sing, “God is love, God is love.” God was there that night
the whole time. The whole time.
What
I have not told you about the young man in that story is that when
he was 14, he drank Drano in an effort to commit suicide. At such
a vulnerable time in his life, he decided it was so difficult to
be gay in this culture that he would rather die.
Can we live with that?
That, my friends, is why we
become a Welcoming Congregation. It’s an emergency. It’s
not just for us, for our congregation; it’s for whatever damaged
spirit out in the world may be thinking it’s better to be dead
than to be gay. It’s for those who’ve been taught that not
even God loves them. It’s for those who’ve always known they
were good, but have had to listen to others malign them in the
name of religion. By becoming a Welcoming Congregation, we shine a
bright light for BGLT people and their families who know nothing
about Unitarian Universalism. We say here we are, we’ve been
waiting for you, whatever you learned in church before now about
being gay, you can leave that behind. By becoming a Welcoming
Congregation, we who are heterosexual can start to free ourselves
of the burden of privilege we did not earn, that puts us in a
position of disequilibrium with our friends. By becoming a
Welcoming Congregation, we can begin to alleviate, a little bit,
the anguish of people whose families have cast them aside because
they’re gay.
What do we do first? My hope
is that you will take home the brochure in your order of service,
read it, and look at the UUA website for the Office of BGLT
Concerns, under specialized ministries, to read more. The first
step to becoming a Welcoming Congregation is to form a committee,
which you can do today by gathering up here in the corner after
the service to talk to each other if you want to do that. Then the
committee will eventually offer a series of workshops for the
whole congregation, and I encourage you to participate in them. I
lift up this morning the deep conviction that if Williamsburg UU
becomes a Welcoming Congregation, we can make individual
people’s lives in this community better, and that will make a
difference in this town, and that will make a difference in
Virginia. Which will make a difference in the world.
And so may it be.
|