On Dignity and Queens: Esther 1

Carol Wise

“For Just Such a Time: Living Out the Call”

Brethren Mennonite Council/Supportive Communities Network Conference

San Francisco, California

June 2007

Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well? …Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well. So speaks Minnie Ransom, the wise, eccentric healer in Toni Cade Bambara’s marvelous novel, The Salt Eaters1, a story about a Southern community’s complicated terror, fear, strength and deepest desires. The tireless, ever sturdy and dependable Velma has spiraled into the depths of despair. She is lost and sick, weary and forlorn, and the old women gather around to try and bring her home. No sense wasting each other’s time, sweetheart…Can you afford to be whole? Can you afford it, is what I’m asking you, sweetheart, Minnie persisted. The women concentrate in silence and patience, for as Bambara tells us, they knew that “…sometimes a person held on to sickness with a fiercesomeness that took twenty hard-praying folk to loosen. So used to being unwhole and unwell, one forgot what it was to walk upright and see clearly, breathe easily, think better than was taught, be better than one was programmed to believe – so concentration was necessary to help a neighbor experience the best of herself or himself. For people sometimes believed that it was safer to live with complaints, was necessary to cooperate with grief, was all right to become an accomplice in self-ambush.”

Besides turning your complexion a pasty shade of unhealth, the chilly days of winter in Minnesota have a way of pushing you inside quite literally as well as metaphorically. When the sun is scarce, books are reliable companions, and when you find yourself with an author like Bambara, it is hard not to take a more personal inventory. Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?

There are many within the lgbt and allied community who are of the opinion that those of us who persist with the Christian church are deluded, naïve, compromised, not quite really queer, an “accomplice in self ambush.” If we can avoid not over-personalizing it too much, perhaps we can see that the critique has some merit. The Mennonite Church, the Church of the Brethren, and the Mennonite Brethren Church, have hardly been shining examples of welcome and love towards us. Occasionally unwittingly, but often quite intentionally, the church has done a great deal of harm to our families, to our faith, and to our basic sense of human dignity and worth.

Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well? It seems to me that if this is our desire and if we are miraculously still reluctant to shake the dust that is organized religion from our feet, then our first task is to change the kind of conversation that we are willing to have with this dangerous yet beguiling institution. After all, the church has been our King Ahasuerus, his officials and ministers. Lavishing in its heterosexual privilege, drunk on its consumption of selected biblical texts, puffed up with its own sense of moral certitude, the church has rendered us invisible, save for moments when we are summoned for acts of sexual vulnerability. What I mean by this is that I note that the so-named “dialogue” in which we are supposed to be engaging, has been primarily comprised of lgbt people sharing our stories while the church sits back to critique and judge our value. And when we really get down to it, we realize that it is not just any story that the church wishes to hear from us. To be acceptable, the story must ultimately reinforce the overarching theme of heterosexual superiority. The plot runs something like this: a good Mennonite or Brethren boy or girl discovers, to her or his horror, that she has same sex attractions. This realization brings tremendous guilt, despair, revulsion, and disgust. The individual is to desperately wish to be normal, to be pure, to be good, but although he or she struggles frantically, mightily, they eventually come to the exhausted realization that they are simply unable to perform as virtuous heterosexuals. Shamed and broken, they can only offer their plaintive plea for the church to graciously condescend to accept them, because they simply cannot help themselves. Interesting.

Something has gone terribly awry, has it not? This expectation – that we will divulge intimate details of our sexual lives and human longings before a church that assumes it is entitled to hear and evaluate them – has become increasingly problematic for me. It feels intrusive and voyeuristic in a way that is becoming….well… creepy. I realize that I am tired of being expected to carry the weight of the church’s own sexual confusion, misgivings, fear and curiosity. I am not interested in providing titillating sexual fodder to a repressed institution. Not all of us have stories of angst and self hatred. Thus, my heart cheers the Queen Vashti’s among us who, with great dignity, say “no…no, I will not participate. I am not willing to display my vulnerability to satisfy your desire. I refuse to be at your mercy to summon or dismiss. I will not be your sexual object to use at will. “

Please do not get me wrong. Sharing one’s story in the context of a mutual vulnerability and respect can be powerful and healing and is a necessary part of any movement for social change. What I am suggesting is that we think very carefully, choose wisely, and not automatically assume that our lives are accessible to the church just for the asking. The Welcoming Dialogue Group, a Supportive Communities Network (SCN) community in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, has been inviting local pastors to come and share their faith stories with the group. I find this fascinating. It seems to me to be a subtle yet very compelling act of resistance and strength for it shatters the expectation that the burden of vulnerability and risk is ours alone. It is an expression of royal dignity that concurrently opens up the possibility for honest exchange.

I by no means wish to be flippant, but more and more it seems that the debate as to whether “the homosexual” is somehow deficient or faulty, is fast becoming stunningly obsolete. Psychology, sociology, biology, social ethics, theology, biblical exegesis, anthropology – so much work has been done and overwhelmingly it challenges any assumptions of deviancy, unhealth or abnormality. It is simply irresponsible to continue to cling to false stereotypes, ill-informed opinions or inaccurate biases.

For me, the issue that needs to concern us is not the essential morality of homosexuality or bisexuality or transgender identity, but rather the morality of a church that persists in its harmful practice of injustice and oppression towards a particular group of people. The questions that I wish to explore are these: What happens to the soul of a church that actively and knowingly participates in the oppression of another? What are the costs? What are the implications? What does it do to the church as an institution, as a body, as a people of faith? These kinds of questions are becoming more and more relevant because it is now harder and harder for the church to hide behind a façade of innocence or a curtain of ignorance.

The church is on a destructive path. As I reflect on the damage that the church’s insistence upon a rigid heterosexual norm that is reinforced by the oppression of lgbt and allied people, there are some precipitating consequences that I see happening. The first is a general slide into mediocrity. When we fear information, when we reject quality leadership, when we refuse to engage certain topics and silence dissenting voices, when we cut ourselves off from conversation and study, when we stifle excellence and imagination, we enable the emergence of a tedious mediocrity that has serious implications for the long term well being of the institution. If you have doubts about this, I offer you my own beloved denomination, the Church of the Brethren. We wring our hands and whine about a dearth of trained leadership and declining membership, but fail to make connections between our circumstances and practices of discrimination that push many of our brightest and best into the more welcoming pastures of the United Church of Christ, or towards no church at all.

Related to mediocrity is a loss of credibility, particularly with young people. In an ecumenical survey of church attending youth, 96% reported that they know someone their age that is gay, lesbian or bisexual.2 This means that young people are forming their opinions based upon their actual experience with lgbt people. Not surprisingly, this tends to make them significantly less homophobic and also much less patient with a church that refuses to get it.

But there are more serious issues as well, for the damage wrought by oppression is far more insidious and extends far beyond the targeted group. A refusal to talk honestly and forthrightly about human sexuality means that youth, left to their own devices, risk making poor judgments related to sex. I am not just referring to youth who might be questioning or even identify as gay or lesbian, but also to those who feel compelled to prove their heterosexuality by becoming sexually active before they otherwise might have done so. This can be tragic, in part because it is so unnecessary.

And what do we say to the pastor who flecks off a little piece of her or his soul each time she or he violates their pastoral covenant by refusing to offer the comfort, healing, and celebratory ministries of the church to their lgbt congregants? Brenda Dyck is pastor of the Calgary Inter-Mennonite Church, an SCN community that has the distinction of being expelled from three conferences because of its welcome to lgbt people. Brenda has received numerous phone calls from other Mennonite pastors, asking her to provide pastoral care for one of their members because there is an lgbt connection that feels uncomfortable for the home pastor. While I am grateful for the presence and witness of Brenda, in terms of those other pastors, what does the set apart ministry really mean in that context? What kind of pastoral ethics are being displayed? Called by God for what?

And finally there is the deep problem of language, which just makes my heart ache. As a church, as a people of faith we have been entrusted with a particular language. Ours is the language of the Spirit poured out. It is brazen, immense, powerful and dangerous for it carries remarkable and weighty words like justice, grace, mercy, forgiveness, hospitality, redemption, love. It is the language of risk and possibility, of imagination and engagement, of relationship and wonder that is simultaneously overwhelmingly human and awesomely divine. It is language that can announce something as expansive as a new world order, and it is language that can heal the broken heart of the most humble servant. But what happens when the church takes its language of love and justice and Jesus and uses it to justify exclusion and condemnation, to punish and expel, to dehumanize and destroy? What do words about sacredness and the sanctity of love mean when parents are forced to choose between their faith community and their child?

George Steiner is a literary critic and masterful scholar whose experience as a Jew has made him particularly sensitive to the power and life of language. He writes: “Languages have great reserves of life. They can absorb masses of hysteria, illiteracy and cheapness. But there comes a breaking point. Use a language to conceive, organize, and justify Belsen; use it to make out specifications for gas ovens; use it to dehumanize…something will happen to the words.” 3

God’s table, y’all come…sort-of.4 Something is happening to the words, to the language of the Brethren, Mennonite and Mennonite Brethren church. We need to ask: What will this distortion, this corruption, this misrepresentation mean for the future, for the witness, for the very soul of this body that professes to be a people of the word?

In Bambara’s story, prodded and poked, comforted and challenged by Minnie, Velma moves through despair and edges towards healing. Suddenly she rises and takes to dancing… “[Velma] could dance right off of the stool, right off the edge of the world and collide with comets scheduled for a splashdown on her fiftieth birthday and not miss a thing, dance off into space with snakes in her hair and tusks sprouting from her gums and her head thrown back and singing, cheering, celebrating all those giants she had worshiped in their terrible musicalness. Giant teachers teaching through tone and courage and inventiveness but scorned, rebuked, beleaguered, trivialized, commercialized, copied, plundered, goofed on by half-upright pianos and droopy-drawers drums and horns too long in hock and spittin up rust and blood, tormented by sleazy bookers and takers, tone-deaf amateurs and saboteurs, underpaid and over worked and sideswiped by sidesaddle-riding groupies till they didn’t know, didn’t trust, wouldn’t move on the wonderful gift given and were mute, crazy and beat-up. But standing up in their genius anyhow ready to speak the unprounounceable. On the stand with no luggage and no maps and ready to go any where in the universe on just sheer holy boldness.”

We get this, don’t we? I mean, here we are, a ragtag collection of women and men, maybe not the most glamorous people, but a community who nonetheless has managed to claim a quiet dignity in the midst of an often hostile and rejecting world. I think about those early leaders of BMC and my heart floods with gratitude and admiration. I cannot imagine what it took for a Martin Rock or a Jim Sauder or a Christian Yoder or a Doug Basinger or a Su Flickinger who often stood alone and tall as “that homosexual” in the Mennonite or Brethren church. I cannot imagine what it took for Bev Brubaker’s mom, Helen, to stand at the microphone at Annual Conference with her prayer covering and her support hose and announce, “I love my lesbian daughter.”

We have been bruised and battered, bewildered and betrayed, derided and debased, yet here we still are laughing and singing, dancing and praying, speaking the unprounceable, loving and living with an elegance and pride that is persistent, resilient and defiant. A community built on such courage, audacity and hope will not easily flounder and indeed, we haven’t. This broken, wounded and fearful community that was at the focus of BMC’s outreach in its early years, has through its struggle and commitment to honesty and life, developed a passion, a spiritual grounding, a sense of purpose and meaning that is compelling and good, strong and sacred, ready to go anywhere in the universe on just sheer holy boldness.

And then there is the Church of the Brethren, the Mennonite Church, the Mennonite Brethren Church and countless derivatives: these stubborn, arrogant, fearful, stumbling and hurting institutions that we still care about, sometimes in spite of our better judgment. To these institutions we pose two simple yet treacherous questions: Do you want to be well? Are you ready to be healed?

If the answer to that question is “yes” (and we are no where near that point), then I cannot help but think that the path of healing for the church, if it is to be real, must pass directly through the queer community. It is going to take a lot of work and a lot of pain and a lot of faith to reconstruct this fragmented soul that is the church (work, incidentally, that must be mostly done by those who are not gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender). But those of us who are lgbt are here to say to those courageous non-gay people who, in spite of all the risks and in spite of all the fear, are still willing as an act of love and redemption to step forward in defiance of oppression, that yes, yes, it is worth the struggle. It is true that there is “a lot of weight when you’re well,” but there is also a lot of joy and a lot of freedom and a tremendous release. For we are here to bear witness that in liberation one gains a dignity and strength that is…well…queen-like, and the good Lord knows that we have plenty of queens in the queer community. We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re willing to help – for our sakes, for the sake of the church, and especially for the sake of future generations. But we are not going to beg, and we are not going to do work that isn’t ours, and we are not going to stop moving forward because we have struggled too long and there is too much at stake to give up now.

Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well? …Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well. Don’t we know it.

Thanks be.

1 Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters. (NY: Vintage Press, 1992)

2 Steve Clapp, Kristen Leverton Helbert, and Angela Zizak, Faith Matters: Teenagers, Religion and Sexuality. (Fort Wayne, Indiana: LifeQuest, 2003) p. 103.

3 George Steiner. Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) p. 101

4 This was the theme of the 2003 Mennonite Assembly in Atlanta, Georgia.