Biblical standards of marriage (because you can’t have just one!). Click on the graphic if you want to go to a site where it’s a little more legible.
I can’t believe it took me so long, but it occurred to me this morning that the Biblical standard of marriage could best be described like this: Marriage is between one man and whatever woman/women he wants to marry. I could be snarky and add that it’s strikingly similar to the marriage standard of a number of prominent conservative male talkers and thinkers. But I won’t.
Now that the issue of equal marriage is once again front and center, there’s a lot of handwringing among progressive/liberal friends of mine, across a broad spectrum of religious and non-religious affiliations, regarding how to engage people who cherry pick verses from the Bible to justify their opposition to marriage equality.
Here are my thoughts on this, heavily influenced by my gaymarriage (we like to say it as one word in our house) to PW. Let me tell you, being able to love and live in gaymarriage with a Bible scholar, who mines both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Testament in their original languages, is like living in a research laboratory for religion. I find it thrilling, but then you probably already knew that I’m a big gaymarried weirdo.
Raise your hand if you’re tired of hearing people reduce scripture to prop up arguments that condemn people for love. As people are wont to say these days, “I know, right?!” This sort of scripture mumblety-peg seems to me to be an extremely unfaithful use of these ancient texts we have inherited. And, I would argue that even if you’re an atheist, you have inherited these texts, since they inform (for better or for worse) so much of the literature, art, music, language, laws, and architecture that surround us.
More and more I wonder, whatever happened to Jesus’ very simple teaching, “With God, all things are possible”? It seems to me that Christians who explain resurrection by citing this verse, but then suddenly exile it when the topic is queer people being able to be ordained or to marry each other, show an extraordinary lack of both faith and imagination. I would go so far as to suggest that the willful exclusion of one of the most expansive verses in the Christian testament demonstrates willful opposition to what the Bible relentlessly shows that God wants for all of God’s people: freedom, justice, and fullness of life. “With God, all things are possible” also happens to be the state motto of Ohio, a big swing state. I don’t know about you, but I find that to be a particularly delicious gaymarriage coincidence!
As I think I’ve said before here, I believe that the progress toward full inclusion of queer people in the Church and in society is God speaking to us, here and now, through a relentless urge of redeeming Love.
My suggestion to those of us who will find ourselves in these sorts of conversations–whether in real life or on the Internet–is: don’t get sucked into arguing with people who abuse scripture this way. Save your tootsies from scripture mumblety-peg. Stand tall, be out and proud (whether you’re family, ally, or queer), and represent all that is possible in Love. But if you’re tempted to to cite a Bible verse, feel free to lean on that expansive teaching from an ancient and still prominent unmarried, homeless, rebellious Jewish rabbi who, from the stories we have, never seemed interested in playing scripture mumblety-peg with anyone.
Thus ends my locker room pep talk. Now let’s get out there and win one in the name of Love!
I’d like to correct my scorecard. Based on today’s news out of the White House this afternoon, I think we did more than that. I think we scored a run on that play.
The Internet has been aflutter all afternoon with people complaining about President Obama’s statement today in support of same-sex marriage. It’s too calculated, it’s too late, it’s distracting to the “real” issues that are plaguing our nation, it’s not enough, it’s a ploy to invigorate his base, it’s cynical.
Whatever. Some folks, when given the opportunity to see a glass half-full or half-empty, will maintain that we’re all out of glasses.
One small step, one giant leap
For me, watching the sitting president of the United States, who is a biracial man with an unusual name, come out in support of my equal rights — well, this is as riveting as the moon landing. I’ve watched the clips several times, with that same combination of awe and disbelief that I had when I watched Neil Armstrong make his way down that ladder.
I still can’t believe I have lived long enough to see the kind of progress on queer civil rights that have happened in the past 15 years. I wish Maurice Sendak, who never came out to his parents, and who made a home with the same man for 50 years, had lived to see this day. I wish Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde and Matthew Shepard and Harvey Milk had lived to see this day.
My hope, my prayer, is that those of us who have the good fortune to live and love in these times will continue to live and love in ways that honor the mighty ones who came before us.
Thank you, President Obama.
Update at 9:56 pm Eastern Time: feel free to use the comments to add the names of friends or family of yours who you wish had lived to see this day. Thanks for the idea, Miss L.
When I was a kid, I was pretty fast sprinter. I remember participating in only one track meet, held at the athletic fields behind our local high school on a raw, windy spring day. I was a skinny nine-year-old kid with gangly arms and legs. As I was shivering, my bony arms and legs felt like clattering wind chimes.
My parents were in the bleachers, and I guess they couldn’t bear watching me shiver, so my dad came down to the fence between the track and the bleachers and called me over. He had a bulky, corduroy coat in his hand, a hand-me-down from my older brothers. It had a big hood that zipped onto the back. Dad told me that he and my mom wanted me to wear it.
I happily put the coat on and waited for the heat of my race to be called. Seeing the other kids shivering made me even more glad for the coat. Then our heat was called. I looked for my dad, to give him the coat back, but I had no idea where my parents were sitting. I assessed the other shivering kids in the race, and knew I was much faster than all but one of them. That one kid was a stranger, so in my magical nine-year-old thinking, I figured he’d be eating my dust even with the coat on.
We got in our starting crouches. Five freezing nine-year-olds, and one perfectly warm one wearing an enormous coat. It must have looked ridiculous.
The gun went off and I hurled myself down the track, legs churning. The coat restricted my arm movements, so it was hard to find a good rhythm. And then there was that zip-on hood.
As I labored down the track, I apparently compensated for my inability to move my arms freely by turning my torso in an exaggerated manner. The result was that the hood slapped me in the face with every other stride.
I came in last. I couldn’t hold the tears back, as I saw my parents approach me. “Why did you MAKE me wear THAT COAT?!?!?” I asked incredulously. My dad smiled and said, “Well, honey, I didn’t think you’d wear it while you were running.” I blurted, barely coherently, “BUTYOU [sob] TOLDME [sob] IHADTO [sob] WEARTHECOATAAAAAAUUUUHGH….”
This was the story that was running in my head like a movie this morning as I sat on the bus and read my Facebook news feed of people reacting to the passage of North Carolina’s Amendment One.
What I want to say is enough. Enough with the shame. Shame is like that heavy corduroy coat. It restricts our movement, weighs us down, and slaps us in the face with the regularity of a metronome. Stop casting “Shame on North Carolina.” Stop wearing shame like that coat. It is shame that enables short-sighted people to win small, temporary victories like the passage of Amendment One. But shame will not overturn Amendment One. Only Love will do that.
The last time North Carolina’s constitution was amended with regard to marriage was in 1875. That lasted 96 years which, while a mighty long time, is nowhere near the forever that those amendment authors were hoping for.
At Heretic School yesterday, one of our band of scripture strugglers referred to the passage from John’s depiction of Jesus’ “Farewell Discourse” as being written with a key signature of farewell. In the passage we read, the most repeated words were “you” and “love.” My friend’s lovely musical metaphor enabled me to wonder whether the “Farewell Discourse” is Jesus as musical conductor, teaching us how to sing in the key of Love.
The opportunities of shucking off the coat of shame and singing in the key of Love in the face of Amendment One are enormous. In fact, by virtue of having Amendment One on the ballot, the work of Love has already begun. Disparate constituencies have found allies in each other, conversations about justice have erupted. People are talking, openly, at a NATIONAL level about marriage between same-sex couples. That, in and of itself, is victory. It is a sign that the shame that kept queer people and our allies silent for centuries is being cast aside, right now, right here, in our lifetime. We all know how toxic shame is, which is why it’s vital to not give into our desire to cast it on others as we remove it from our own shoulders.
Amendment One is the death rattle of a species on the verge of extinction. Or, if you prefer a baseball metaphor, how about this: In baseball, a player who gets a hit 30% of the time is considered a good hitter. That player is even better when s/he routinely does little things that don’t show up in the batting average, like moving runners over, or scoring runners while making an out.
In losing the battle over Amendment One, forces of justice and equality may have made an out, but we moved the runner into scoring position. So if you need a pick me up this morning as you read the stories about Amendment One, read some of the baseball box scores from last night, along with the little news descriptions of some of the games.
Then get back out there and sing in the key of Love. Find others to sing with, too.
And whatever you do, NEVER attempt to run the 100-yard dash while wearing a heavy coat with a zip-on hood. Unless, of course, you feel your track meet needs some comic relief.
All the churchgoing I’ve done in my adult life has been in urban settings. When I compare this to the churchgoing of my childhood, the biggest differences seem to be that, as an adult, I’ve attended churches with a lot more people who are either visibly mentally ill, or homeless, or both.
Listening to the radical teachings of a homeless rabbi to the marginalized people of a land occupied by a hostile foreign army is a lot more intense when some of my pewmates are marginalized people who stink to high heaven because they don’t have a regular place to bathe or wash their clothes, and/or who are clearly struggling to keep any sort of grip on their minds. Some have been given to what I think of as Liturgical Wandering, where they get up and mill about at inappropriate moments. Some have come storming down the center aisle, hollering incoherently and angrily. Some have panhandled during communion. You get the idea.
We have a few regulars at my church who are in the category that PW refers to as “the least, the last and the lost.” Like all the rest of us who more easily pass as “normal” (even though in our own ways we are also “least, last, and lost”), some are higher functioning than others. Recently, one of our “least, last, and lost” responded to an announcement in the worship folder that offered pastoral care services to anyone who needs them.
I will call this person Z.
Z’s pastoral care needs include help with laundry, grocery shopping, and getting rides to and from church. I don’t know if there’s any diagnosable condition involved, but Z is consumed with fear and suspicion. This results in incredibly tense situations at church, especially around personal contact (touching) and food. I’ve seen more than a few well-meaning people tenderly touch Z on the shoulder while trying to find out what it is that Z needs, only to find themselves on the other end of Z’s outraged, “Get your HANDS OFF OF ME! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE??”
Yesterday, I volunteered to give Z a ride home from church. Well, I didn’t exactly volunteer. PW asked if I would do it. I didn’t want to do it, but when my inner Bartleby the Scrivener muttered “I would prefer not to,” I took a deep breath and said “too bad” to it. Then I responded to PW with, “Okay.” There were at least a thousand other things I would rather have done, but it’s a shallow, flimsy, and ultimately worthless commitment to a difficult and demanding faith tradition if I only show up for the people I enjoy. There’s at least one thing I’ve learned in all these years of church-going: if we’re really following the example of our homeless rabbi, being a Christian is less like a garden party, and more like mud wrestling.
At the exchange of the peace during church yesterday, the co-chair of the pastoral care committee, B, hugged me and wished me “many blessings” on my afternoon adventure with Z. B knows how important those blessings are. She recently spent something like 5 hours sitting in a laundromat while Z did laundry and refused all help. I didn’t realize that such a simple exchange with someone I love would end up becoming a life preserver that I would cling to desperately in order to get through the afternoon.
Giving Z a ride home was excruciating – it took way too long, it overwhelmed every one of my senses in bad ways, and it tapped the bottom of qualities I think of myself as having in abundance: patience, kindness, compassion, empathy, and good humor. I completely underestimated the effect that an hour’s worth of Z’s paranoia would have on me. I knew that I was only experiencing a sliver of what it is like for Z to navigate the world on a daily basis. This simultaneously comforted me, made me feel ill, and shattered my heart. I squeezed the life preserver of B’s blessings and hung on tight.
As you may have gathered from the description of the scene at the laundromat, Z moves at a glacially slow pace. After a complicated and time-consuming trip to the grocery store, where I thought Z might collapse from stress, we arrived at Z’s apartment. I carried the groceries up and stacked them precariously on one of the few available flat surfaces. Z thanked me awkwardly, and looked smaller than ever as I closed the door behind me. When I left the tiny, chaotic room that Z calls home, I got in my car and took a deep breath. I didn’t know if I would throw up or start sobbing, or both.
That's me, out of formation in the lower left corner
More and more, I think the practice of going to church is, basically, swimming in the School of Love. It’s about learning that sometimes love is as simple, and as difficult, as escorting a nausea-inducing person to your car, opening the door, and helping the person sit down on the once pristine passenger seat. It is about remembering to hold your breath while you reach across to help that person, who does not want to be touched, with the seat belt. It is about wielding a grocery cart and 20 bucks to buy diet soda, blueberry muffins, pita bread, hummus, and taboule. It is about choosing to be compassionate, even when everything about it makes you feel ill.
One of my swim coaches once told me, “You won’t get any better if you back off from the pain. So if you want to be better, when you get to the pain, just swim through it.” He made it sound so easy. Oh sure, la dee dah! Just swim through it! La la! Even when I knew there was an endorphin rush on the other side, I always found it terrifying to swim through the pain. That was several decades and two shoulders ago, before I found that most of life’s swimming doesn’t happen anywhere near a pool.
What do I want to be when I grow up? Better. Better at compassion today than yesterday. Better at love this year than last. Better at doing the next right thing than I was just a moment ago. And so I keep swimming in the School of Love, clinging to the lifeline of my many blessings.
Isn’t that just so IT? So much of what matters in life, so much of the meaning OF life, flows from the act of showing up. Not necessarily because you think you’ll have a great time, or that you’ll even get anything out of whatever the IT is. Maybe you KNOW you’ll have a terrible time. Maybe you’ll never know how important it was to other people that you showed up. If you’re lucky, you get to know how important it is to other people, and if you’re REALLY lucky, you get to have a sense, maybe only a glimmer, or maybe a huge cascading fireworks of an AHA!, of how important it is to YOU that you were there, wherever IT is, bringing your particular you-ness to an event, a day, a weekend, even to a fleeting moment.
A lot of people showed up this weekend for SweetP’s institution as the 12th rector of her parish – the first woman and the first openly queer person to be chosen for this position by this parish. Some people traveled great distances. Some came with a lot of baggage (of various kinds.) Some brought only themselves and whatever they could fit in their pockets or purses. Some came with babies. Some came with conditions (physical, philosophical, emotional, psychic, etc.) that required them to make enormous, even exhausting, efforts to be there. Some were dressed to the nines. Some wore costumes. Some wore whatever they usually wear. Some sang along. Some didn’t. Many of us wept, some of us sobbed, some of us giggled uncontrollably, some of us were still, solid, and strong, and some of us were the emotional equivalent of a clown car, veering and lurching wildly among all sorts of states. Some of us were dressed as dragons. Yes, Internet, there be dragons, even — and maybe especially — in church.
The title of this post is something my sister-in-law said to me after we had processed to the back of the church during the final hymn of “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise.” I think she exclaimed this as she hugged me shortly after I had come completely unglued when I hugged my brother. Poor guy, there I was, hugging him, and as I whispered into his ear the words, “Thank you SO much for being here today,” I was completely overcome with body-wracking sobs. I buried my face into his shoulder and, because I wear glasses, it felt a lot like I was smashing my face up against a window. Picture the sobbing guard at the gates of the Emerald City, with tears fire-hosing out of his eyes, but have him pressed up against a pane of glass. That’s the scene. Oh, plus, somewhere in there, I’m pretty sure my brother was holding me up. I bet I outweigh him, but he’s essentially all muscle, so I think it all worked out. I haven’t heard that he’s being treated for a hernia, so I’m assuming he’s okay.
The whole weekend, the day on Sunday, the ceremony itself, they were all like this weird combination of a wedding AND a funeral. All sorts of people doing the miracle of showing up, and lots of SweetP’s favorites: music, readings, flowers.
The church looked like it was decked out for a wedding, with red tulips and gerber daisies and other flowers everywhere. There were huge beeswax candles at the ends of every 3th or 4th pew. The place smelled so intensely of beeswax that I could have sworn that there was incense burning.
Many gifts were exchanged. The night before, at the big family dinner we hosted for 18 of us crammed into the renovation project that we call home, SweetP opened some cards and gifts from the extended family. I had been wracking my brain trying to think of something significant that the girls and I could give her. In a phone conversation earlier in the week with my eldest brother (the same one whose suit suffered water damage from my sobbing episode detailed in the previous paragraph), he was telling me about a book I had first heard about a few weeks ago. He said that the first time he looked at it, he didn’t move for 2 hours as he pored over it. I knew it would be the perfect gift for SweetP for a whole bunch of reasons. So this is what the girls and I gave her:
Now she’ll NEVER get any work done! The Red Book is every bit as stunning as I expected it to be, and every bit as perfect as I hoped it would be.
But I digress. Back to the ceremony on Sunday. The last part of the gift exchange in A Celebration of New Ministry involves the priest giving gifts to her family. Before we went up to receive our gifts, I asked the girls if they’d be willing to huddle up and all put our hands in the center and do a cheer, like a team does before it takes to the court or the field. They nixed that, but they did agree to huddle up after SweetP presented her gifts to us, which was really all I wanted in the first place. I’m sneaky like that.
Several people came up to me afterward to tell me that this was the most intensely moving part of the service for them. Some people sought me out to say that they were especially moved by hearing and seeing the word “wife” used to refer to me. One of the small but mighty gifts of marriage equality is the witness to the power of words that a lot of people take for granted, words like “wife.” Conversely, I know that the opposition to marriage equality reflects an awareness of how powerful these words are, and betrays a deep fear of us queers having access to the power of such language. But THAT, dear Internet, is a topic for another day.
So. This family that I have, that the five of us have made together, quite simply leaves me speechless with awe, wonder, delight, and a deep abiding love that makes the very word “love” seem tiny and utterly insufficient. And this moment right here, when we all circled up, put our heads together, wiggled our toes, and laughed, I officially have no words for it. Still. Days later.
But enough about us. Here’s a hairpin turn for you. Check out the artistry of a young pastry chef who was born and raised in the parish and is now on the young adult leadership team! I had told her that SweetP’s favorite flowers are red tulips, so she created these edible tulips out of some sort of candy wrapped around jellybeans. Some of the cupcakes had the letter P written on them. Also, there were little white P’s created out of some sort of icing that were strewn across the tablecloth like confetti.
At the reception, I was approached by a man I didn’t know, who said something that made me realize that he was James Primosch, the composer who created the amazing setting of e.e. cummings’ poem “spiraling ecstatically” that SweetP chose as one of the musical offerings of the service (the EMI chorus sang it beautifully, with a bonus version offered in the morning service, for additional rehearsal purposes.) I’m not usually given to swooning or being rendered speechless by meeting new people, but I’m pretty sure I made a fool of myself when my hands involuntarily flew up to my throat and I gushed something to the effect of “Oh my gosh!!! You’re James Primosch!!! Thank you SO much for your work!!!” I don’t usually speak in exclamatory triplets, but I just couldn’t help it. Then I blurted, “I just know that [SweetP] wants to thank you” and before he could object I grabbed the poor man by the hand and dragged him across the crowded reception as though I were some sort of human cow catcher, pushing several well-wishers aside (no well-wishers were harmed in the making of this introduction.) I planted him in front of SweetP, and announced, “THIS is JAMES PRIMOSCH!!!” I sure as hell hope I didn’t also say “Ta Daaaa!!!” I’m pretty sure that stayed in my head, along with the sounds of trumpets announcing the arrival of an important guest to the ball. I was somewhat relieved to see that SweetP had a very similar response to him that I did, nearly sloshing her glass of wine onto all three of us as she struggled to free up her hands to greet him.
Speaking of spiraling ecstatically. Whoa. I need a deep breath.
Even though my reflections on the weekend continue to ripple, and our life in and with an amazing and complex parish is beginning anew, and my old job is ending, and my new job – whatever it is – is somewhere out there, this particular blog post needs to end. This song, “Rise” by Eddie Vedder, seems like a fitting song with which to honor both beginnings and endings:
P.S. Very special thanks to Duane Dale for the exceedingly generous gift of the lovely photos from the ceremony and reception that I’ve included here.
