Dear Seda,
First, thank you for linking to my blog. I'm always excited when someone likes my blog and adds it. When that someone is one from the exact opposite side of any sort of spectrum, I get even more excited. I love how the internet unifies the world in a way we never imagined possible.
Now, to answer your question. You read my blog about Christians being set apart and said, "When I read sentences like this, I feel scared. I have needs for safety and community that aren't met. Would you be willing to tell me what you hear when I say this? Would you be willing to listen when I tell you why?"
Everything that I do must be done under the base assumption that I am a Christian. As a Christian, I have a duty and obligation-- even a privilege-- to listen when someone wants to talk. I have the duty/privilege to love them regardless of how much we disagree (it can sometimes be harder to love other Christians than those who aren't!).
So, when you tell me that you have needs for safety and community that aren't met, I can only sympathize. A lot of times, my needs for safety and community aren't met either. For me, I realize that this is because I'm looking to other people to meet my need for safety when i should be relying only on God as my source.
As for community, I have to approach the issue differently. This does rely on other people and I have to be involved with them in order to experience community. So what to do when that need goes unmet?
I've learned that community is often what you put into it. If I'm sitting on my couch watching reruns of "The Office", of course my need for community is going to be unmet. I'm not saying that is is what you're doing by any means. I am saying that you can't expect community to come to you. You have to create it. Finding a group of people with similar interests and passions can provide this.
But I'm not living in a perfect bubble. I know that you can get excluded. I know that from experience. I know that sometimes you can feel alone in a huge group. Because you feel like no one truly understands you. Like no one cares the least bit about what you're going through or what you think or how you're doing. Because deep down, in the most fundamental level of personality, you're different. And that's not easy.
So please, let's continue this dialogue. Why do you feel scared?
I'm here.
3 comments:
Kate,
I love the unifying potential of the internet as well, hence my new mantra: “The internet is my/your/our friend.” I share your excitement in making this connection, and in comments that are made on my blog by total strangers who have been touched in some way by words I’ve written.
I also want to thank you for your warm response to my comments, and warn you that I have very conflicted feelings about Christians. I am not a Christian, and I’ve read the Bible cover-to-cover at least twice, and certain passages, like the 91st Psalm, Ecclesiastes 3, and the Sermon on the Mount dozens if not hundreds of times. My ideal is to live a life of unconditional love.
To recap, my comment was made in response to your post on Doctrine 101, “Still V. 1.” (I’d almost forgotten!)
Please understand that I know the words you used, by themselves, are non-threatening and innocent. So when I read them and felt scared, it’s because I have a bunch of baggage around this theme; it’s because of the context in which the words were said. It’s my stuff, I recognize that, and I own it. This is a place where I fall short of my ideal, yet I do not believe I can adequately explain my feeling without opening that baggage up and revealing it. The question is, how to do that without writing a book! Where do I start? There is so much… I’ll try to keep it concise, and to the point.
I feel scared because of judgments and political actions that have been cast at me and my community (lesbians, gays, bis, and transpeople), both in the past and in the present, and because many people in my community have been ostracized, beaten, and even killed because we are set apart as evil. In my perception, the Christian attitude that you are “set apart” – special, blessed of God, and therefore right – supports the mindset that drives the violence directed at our community, such as the beating death of Matthew Shepard and the transwoman who was left to die in Philadelphia when the EMTs realized she was a genetic male after they started treating her for injuries sustained in a car accident. Two of the actions that I’ve found particularly painful include the following:
Christians are currently spending millions of dollars to overturn the California Supreme Court ruling that allows gays and lesbians to marry (and they were instrumental in passing Measure 36 in Oregon, which prohibits that legal protection). I find this very painful and confusing, because I don’t understand how allowing us the same legal protection for our nuclear families that you enjoy threatens you in any way. We’re not asking your pastors to start marrying gay folks; there are plenty of preachers right now who are sanctifying same-sex vows under the banner of God. All we want is to have our unions recognized equally by a secular state, and to own our children as you own yours. (This doesn’t threaten me directly. I am currently in a legal same-sex marriage – despite the fact that my wife and I no longer share sexual relations – since I married as a man and now enjoy that big fat F gender marker on my driver’s license. Annulling our marriage would hurt her most, as it would effectively cancel her health insurance – and she’s innocent! I’m the one who lied to her and changed to someone with whom she could not remain married; she fulfilled her vows and acted with integrity for the 16 years of our marriage.)
Second, I used to have a dear friend, a devout Christian, whom I admired a lot. She has two beautiful children, and her daughter, in particular, has a strong and indomitable spirit. I love them. I enjoyed the relationship between her children and mine, as well as my own relationship with her and her daughter. At one of the darkest hours of my life, when faced with the choice of stripping the mask of manhood from my life or hanging myself from the Defazio Bridge; after deciding that my children would be hurt less by losing their father and gaining a second mother, than by simply losing a father; when knowing that no matter what choice I made, I still would and did betray the woman whom I love more than anyone else in the world – she withdrew her family from contact with mine. I know that she didn’t do it because I started telling the truth and living with integrity – but it feels like it. No, she did it because, in her judgment, her Bible, her God, and Jesus all condemn me to be tortured for eternity because I don’t conform to the gender binary she assumes is ordained by God. (This, at a time when the LGBT community opened their arms wide with love and acceptance.) I am surprised how painful that still is, at the depth of my grief for that lost relationship.
Okay, I’ve said enough. Thank you for listening. Just being able to say this stuff to a Christian is healing for me. I hope it will bless you, somehow, too.
I’m wondering now – how do you feel, having read my story? Do you think you understand why I feel scared when you say you are special and set apart by God? Would you be willing to tell me why you feel threatened by the marriages of my friends, and how we might make sure that your needs for safety or sanctity or whatever are still met, while meeting our own needs for legal recognition and protection in marriage?
Do you have any ideas for how to end the war between Christian and queer?
Love,
Seda
P.S. You're absolutely right that you have to create your own community! For an example of how we're doing just that, visit Kristin's blog - www.kristincollier.blogspot.com
Kate,
I hope I didn't hurt or offend you too badly. I feel sad that I spoke with so much pain in my heart to you, who are innocent of it and deserve none of it. I would also like to invite you to a more civil discussion, now that I've cooled off and healed a bit, on my own blog.
May you be warmly and richly blessed.
Seda
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