Open Hands Vol 17 No 2 - Our Coat of Many Colors: Our Creative Responses to Exclusion

Open Hands Vol 17 No 2 - Our Coat of Many Colors: Our Creative Responses to Exclusion

17

2

2001

Fall

2 Open Hands
Vol. 17 No. 2 Fall 2001
Shaping an Inclusive Church
The Ecumenical Quarterly
of the Welcoming Movement
Executive Publisher
Marilyn Alexander
Editor
Chris Glaser
Designer
In Print—Jan Graves
Editorial Advisory Committee
Jeff Balter, RIC
Vaughn Beckman, O&A
Daphne Burt, RIC
Ann Marie Coleman, ONA
Chris Copeland, W&A
Jocelyn Emerson, W&A
Gwynne Guibord, MCC
Bobbi Hargleroad, MLP
Tom Harshman, O&A
Alyson Huntly, ACP
Bonnie Kelly, ACP
Susan Laurie, RCP
Samuel E. Loliger, ONA
Ruth Moerdyk, SCN
Mark Palermo, MLP
Caroline Presnell, RCP
Paul Santillán, RCP
Kathy Stayton, W&A
Margarita Suaréz, ONA
Judith Hoch Wray, O&A
and Program Coordinators
Open Hands is the quarterly magazine of the
Welcoming movement, a consortium of programs
that support individuals and congregations in efforts
to welcome lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and
transgenders in all areas of church life. Open Hands
was founded and is published by the Reconciling
Congregation Program, Inc. of the Reconciling
Ministries Network (United Methodist), in cooperation
with the six ecumenical partners listed
above. Each program is a national network of local
congregations and ministries that publicly affirm
their welcome of LGBT people, their families
and friends. These seven programs, along with
Supportive Congregations (Brethren/Mennonite
[www.webcom.com/bmc], Oasis Congregations
(Episcopal), Welcoming Congregations (Unitarian
Universalist), and INCLUSIVE Congregations
(United Kingdom), as well as the Universal Fellowship
of Metropolitan Community Churches—
offer hope that the church can be a more inclusive
community.
Subscription is $20 for four issues ($25 outside
the U.S.). Single copies and back issues are
$6; quantities of 10 or more, $4 each.
Subscriptions, requests for advertising rates,
and other business correspondence should be
sent to:
Open Hands
3801 N. Keeler Avenue
Chicago, IL 60641
Phone: 773/736-5526
Fax: 773/736-5475
openhands@RMNetwork.org
www.RMNetwork.org/openhands/index.html
Member, The Associated Church Press
© 2001
Reconciling Congregation Program, Inc.
Open Hands is a registered trademark.
ISSN 0888-8833
Printed on recycled paper.
Designer’s Note: A special extended duotone (two ink colors) technique is being introduced
in this issue providing a broader spectrum of colors to enhance the visual message.
Erratum for Winter 2001 issue (Vol. 16, No. 3): “Who’s Teaching Who? A Parent and Child
Teach Each Other About Homosexuality” by Marcia and Sarah Bailey was originally
published in The InSpiriter (Vol. 3, No. 3), the publication of the Association of Welcoming
& Affirming Baptists.
OUR COAT OF MANY COLORS
Our Creative Responses to Exclusion
4 editor’s word
World Towers & Church Towers
CHRIS GLASER
20 I’m Still Dancing
A one-man play about AIDS
PETER MASSEY
26 Celebration of Providence
A short story
DAVID R. GILLESPIE
Queer Quest 5
for the Broken Grail
JOE COBB
Shadow Workers 15
and Soul Guides
MARK THOMPSON
Re-Creating 10
Religion
TOBY JOHNSON
A Congregational 32
Memorial Quilt
DAN SMITH
18 Gospel Songs
in a Gay Bar
CLIFF BOSTOCK
22 If these churches are silent,
gay choruses themselves will sing out!
MICHAEL PURINTUN
stand-up comedy
God’s Glorious 16
Gadfly
HOWARD WARREN
“Fumorist” 16
Kate Clinton
Welcoming Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People
Fall 2001 3
Publisher
Reconciling Congregation Program, Inc. (UMC)
Reconciling Ministries Network
Marilyn Alexander, Coordinator
3801 N. Keeler Avenue, Chicago, IL 60641
773/736-5526
www.RMNetwork.org
Ecumenical Partners
Affirming Congregation Programme
(United Church of Canada)
Ron Coughlin, Coordinator
P.O. Box 333, Station Q, Toronto, Ontario
CANADA M4T 2M5
416/466-1489
www.affirmunited.org • acpucc@aol.com
More Light Presbyterians (PCUSA)
Michael J. Adee, Coordinator
369 Montezuma Ave. PMB #447
Santa Fe, NM 87501-2626
505/820-7082
www.mlp.org
Open & Affirming Ministries
(Disciples of Christ)
John Wade Payne, Interim Coordinator
P.O. Box 44400, Indianapolis, IN 46244
941/728-8833
www.sacredplaces.com/glad
Open and Affirming Program (UCC)
Ann B. Day, Coordinator
P.O. Box 403, Holden, MA 01520
508/856-9316
www.UCCcoalition.org
Reconciling in Christ Program (Lutheran)
Bob Gibeling, Coordinator
2466 Sharondale Drive, Atlanta, GA 30305
404/266-9615
www.lcna.org
Welcoming & Affirming Baptists (ABC/USA)
Brenda J. Moulton, Coordinator
P.O. Box 2596, Attleboro Falls, MA 02763
508/226-1945
www.wabaptists.org
9 A Prayer in Honor of Those
Whom Jesus Loved
JOAN CHITTISTER
photo essays
24 So Great a Cloud of Witnesses
The Shower of Stoles
MARTHA JUILLERAT
30 AIDS Quilt as Folk Art
SUSAN BUTTON
next issue:
SINGING GOD’S SONG IN A FOREIGN LAND
Stories of Resistance in the Church
Call for articles for Open Hands Summer 2002
Racism: Our Incomplete Rainbow
What Drives Us Apart? What Brings Us Together?
Theme Section: Our proud ingathering of 1000 Welcoming Christians at the WOW 2000
conference faced allegations of white privilege and failure to include people of color. Why
does race and racism continue to separate us? Why is it that the LGBT movement does little
better than the general population at involving people of color? What are successful models
for overcoming the racial divide and the sexual divide? Personal, organizational, and congregational
stories would be welcome, as wells as analytical articles and creative stories/visions.
We want writers of all colors! Any length up to 3000 words per article.
Columns: My Turning Point (how you changed your mind on the issue), How I Do Sex (how
you reconcile or integrate sexuality and spirituality), My Church (a profile of your welcoming
congregation), In Solidarity (with other justice issues), You’re Welcome (how to be welcoming),
Worship, Spirituality, Retreats, Resources (books and videos), Outreach, Leadership,
Marriage, Health, Youth, Campus, Children, and Family. These brief articles may or may not
have to do with the theme of the issue. 750-1000 words.
Contact with ideas as far before deadline as possible.
Manuscript deadline: May 1, 2002
An article should be accompanied by the author’s two- to three-sentence self-description, photo
(snapshot okay—we can crop to face), address, phone, and e-mail, plus any other photos helpful to
the article. E-mail article as an attached Word Perfect, Microsoft Word, or Rich Text Format files,
or paste in e-mail. Hard copy and photos should be sent to the mailing address below.
Chris Glaser, Phone/Fax 404/622-4222 or e-mail at ChrsGlaser@aol.com
991 Berne St. SE, Atlanta, GA 30316-1859 USA
www.ChrisGlaser.com
poems
Meeting a 23
Buddhist Monk
on the Way Home
from Work
CHARLES HILL
Puzzle 28
MALCOLM BOYD
sustaining the spirit
Revisiting Psalms 8, 25, 27
MADELEINE MANNING
Columcille 12
A Sacred Space and Place
4 Open Hands
People ask me how I came to be a
writer. First, I loved stories. But
second, I needed a way to express
how I felt, a way of “getting a handle”
on feelings over which I otherwise had
little control, like my sexual and spiritual
feelings.
Others of us have similarly used words
as their means of grappling with their
deepest concerns. Some have done so seriously,
even academically. Others have
done so fancifully, sometimes in fiction
or humor, sometimes in prayer or liturgy.
Still others have expressed their passions
without words, visually and ritually, in
acts of charity and working for justice.
Like Joseph’s coat of many colors
which set him off from his brothers, our
creative rainbow of responses to resistance
and oppression that we meet in
the church and culture sets us off as the
gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender
community. Our sexualities and genders
themselves call us to “think outside
the box,” as the cliché goes.
Those who share our struggle in the
church also “think outside the church”
as part of the Welcoming movement
whose denominational programs publish
Open Hands. This magazine’s very
name suggests welcome and receptivity.
The week following what I will call
“Terrible Tuesday”—the terrorist attacks
on U.S. soil—the leaders of the Welcoming
Programs met with our Editorial
Advisory Committee and a representative
from our newly formed Publishing
Managerial Board to plot the future of
the magazine at our regularly scheduled
annual meeting. We also shared a meal
with the recently formed WOW 2003
Organizing Committee, which will
mount a conference for us all like the
Witness Our Welcome 2000 that 1000
attended last year.
We were fertile with creative ideas
that will improve the magazine, persuading
more people to support it and
subscribe to it. This opening column by
the editor is the first of many innovations
to appear in future issues.
Resistance and oppression call for
such creative responses. When resistance
merely meets resistance or oppression
is used to address oppression, the
“battle lines” remain in place. Creativity
is the flanking movement required
to “think around the battle line.”
I write this two weeks almost to the
hour of Terrible Tuesday. It seems impossible
and irresponsible not to write
about that day’s events, to give voice to
my feelings and possibly your own.
Southern Voice, the LGBT newspaper of
the South, carried gay-related stories of
the tragedies: the New York Fire Department
chaplain, an openly gay Catholic
priest, who removed his helmet out of
respect as he gave last rites, killed by
flying debris; the gay man who phoned
his mom, who may have helped down
the plane in Pennsylvania, saving its intended
target; the Frasier executive producer
killed on one of the flights, not gay,
but a supporter who wrote an outstanding
“gay episode” of Cheers years ago.
I have the greatest appreciation for
these stories—remember, I love stories—
but the gay angle on these stories
seemed somewhat irrelevant to me in
the face of such catastrophe. In facing
the terrible, such categories seemed to
disappear, walls literally and metaphorically
came down. We were no longer
Democrats or Republicans, no longer
black or white, no longer gay or straight.
We were humbled, but not by the
terrorists. We were humbled by recognizing
our need for one another. We
do not, we cannot stand alone. Look
how quickly Jerry Falwell was slapped
down by his divisive comments that
blamed gays, feminists, and pro-choice
activists, as well as God. Remember how
rapidly we sought to defend Arab Americans
and Muslims that some would
separate out for retribution. And notice
how we resisted those few who would
divide us by blaming the victim, the
U.S., in a way they would never blame
editor’s word
the victims of any other form of violence,
such as rape or spousal and child
abuse.
We rallied around each other, symbolized
politically by the now everpresent
flag and spiritually by our neverending
prayers. It was a moment of
history, of chronos, marked on chronological
time; but it was also a moment
of kairos, how the Bible refers to spiritual
crisis, spiritual opportunity. This
terrible experience was a spiritual opportunity
to remember that we are ALL
children of God, that we are all Beloved.
Ancient peoples experienced God as
“terrible.” An encounter with God is
also humbling, prompting us to come
together, “neither Jew nor Greek, male
nor female, slave or free,” in the apostle
Paul’s words. Categories no longer matter
in the blinding flash of the eternal.
Eventually, Americans and the world
will move beyond the tragedies in New
York City, Washington, D.C., and the
Pennsylvania countryside. Walls and
differences and partisanship will be reconstructed.
The same thing happens to Christians.
An encounter with God transforms
us, and we are ready to love everybody.
But then we return to building
our walls, divisions, and categories.
Our churches face a kairos moment
in deciding how welcome LGBT people
will be. For some it will be an opportunity
for ecclesiastical terrorism, threatening
schism, the Body of Christ broken
and crucified once more. For others
it will be an opportunity for Pentecost,
an infusion of Spirit that reminds us of
our need for one another in the terrible
and humbling presence of God.
Just as the U.S. government must
seek creative ways to avoid recycling
violence, the Welcoming movement addresses
resistance and oppression creatively.
What follows on the pages of
this and every issue of Open Hands are
samples of our creativity, “Our Coat of
Many Colors.” ▼
WORLD TOWERS AND CHURCH TOWERS
CHRIS GLASER
Fall 2001 5
The tea light danced in the bluetipped
glass chalice. The flickering
candle-light revealed a long coffee
table adorned with a beautiful rainbow
cloth draped down its middle. Surrounding
the table were deep, dark,
inviting chairs and couches. Light from
two lamps warmed the rest of the
room. Twelve people from across the
country filled the room at Ghost Ranch
in Abiquiu, New Mexico, to spend
the week with the writings of Henri
Nouwen.
Nouwen had long been a spiritual
mentor for me through his writings, tapping
my own vulnerability through his.
In his classic book Reaching Out, he
writes that “hospitality is the creation
of a free space where the stranger can
enter and become a friend instead of
an enemy.” The retreat facilitator, Chris
Glaser, a friend and former student of
Henri, offered an invitation into this
“free space”: “Bring your sacramental
gifts and place them on the table and share
what you like of their significance in your life. They will serve
as symbols of our sacramental life together this week.” I was
in a sacred space to befriend the stranger within and claim my
soul as a friend.
I pulled myself up from a very comfortable chair and
stepped toward the table, cradling a fragile, broken chalice. I
cradled my own soul, wondering if this would be the place I
could share my deepest fear and greatest gift.
I don’t remember the origins of the chalice—where I bought
it, who made it, why I liked it, or if I simply wanted to add yet
another chalice to my collection. It is earthen in color, with a
red orange tint on the stem and darker hues mixed within the
ridges on the cup. My earliest memory of the chalice is its
absence. For a long time it sat on a corner table in my office,
along with several others. One of the crowd. One day, it was
gone. The place it normally occupied was empty. Absence
made me long for its presence, so I got up from my desk and
went over to look. I peered around the edges of the table
and then behind. The stem was intact with two jagged edges
of its cup splayed like arms on the floor after a fall. The
pieces of the cup lay scattered. I looked at all the pieces. Still
life. a mirror of life. I turned and walked away.
Weeks went by, but not without my new daily ritual of
looking at the empty place, then behind the table, at the remains.
Someone will pick up the pieces. The custodian or someone
else might come in to vacuum or
dust. Someone will pick up the pieces.
The prophetic thoughts stunned me,
when early one morning, I discovered
the remains missing. Someone had
picked up the pieces. My ritual was broken.
I wept and wondered.
The sun shone brightly through the
western windows of the office as I stepped
to the curtains to pull them closed.
Reaching behind for the pull cords, I
noticed an object huddled in the corner
shadows. The stem of the chalice
was standing, cradling the broken
pieces. I released the pull cords and gently
swept the chalice into my hands to
look, and hold, and wonder. Whoever
picked up the pieces placed them for me
to find later, now. I placed the chalice on
the window ledge.
With a few days of direct sunlight, the
chalice became a depository of dust. a
good friend walked in one afternoon, surprising
me with her words. “That’s beautiful!”
“What?” I asked. “That chalice—the way the light is bathing
the brokenness—it is as though the light is being poured
over and through the pieces. What are you going to do with
it?”
“Oh, I was thinking about throwing it away.”
“Don’t you dare, Joe. It’s beautiful. Light has a way of shedding
beauty in broken places.”
QUEER QUEST FOR THE BROKEN GRAIL
JOSEPH L. COBB
6 Open Hands
Sharing the Brokenness
On Sunday morning, during the televised worship service, I
prepared the congregation for confession with the story of
the broken chalice and my friendly encounter. The very things
we passionately talk about and share with others may reflect
the truth of what we are hearing within the depths of our
souls. Sharing the brokenness of the chalice became a way for
me to begin sharing my own.
The following Wednesday morning a package arrived in
the office addressed to me. The return address read: Hamilton
County Drug Store, Syracuse, Kansas 67878. Though I could
have used some medication for the depression I had not yet
identified, I hadn’t ordered any drugs from Hamilton County!
The contents were a mystery. I carefully opened the top of the
box. Styrofoam peanuts popped out. I dove into the sea of
white and felt something metallic. I pulled out a silver chalice,
held it, and lifted it to the light. The cup was deep, well
worn and tarnished. Many hands had held this chalice. I looked
to see if anything else was in the box and noticed an envelope.
I opened the note and read…
Dear Joe,
My husband Lonnie and I watch your televised service
every week, as Lonnie is in the hospital and we can
worship together. We especially appreciated your story
of the broken chalice and want you to have the enclosed
chalice as a gift.
The chalice was given to us by an older woman whom
we cared for until her death. It was last used to serve
communion in the Dodge City Episcopal Church in
1919. We want you to have it because we no longer
have anyone to pass gifts on to. Our only child, our son,
was killed in a convenience store robbery last year.
May this chalice bring you comfort the way your
words brought comfort to us.
Sincerely, Betty
I held the note in one
hand, the chalice in the
other and wept.
The following Sunday,
during the prayer of confession,
I shared the story of
the silver chalice, knowing
that I would be speaking a
word of thanksgiving to
Betty and Lonnie long-distance.
Later in the service,
while preparing for communion,
my friend, who
shed light on the broken
chalice, now lifted the cup of
juice to bless it and then
poured the juice into the silver
chalice, blessing this
cup for a new work.
While this moment of blessing was a gift, a pervading emptiness
and sense of inner brokenness hounded me and eventually
led me back to the broken chalice and chards.
Secret of the Broken Chalice
Nearly six months passed before I could muster the courage
to hold the broken chalice and carefully
look at the chards. I was leading a retreat
on “Keeping the Bounce in Life
Without Getting Bounced” and knew
the time had come. I retrieved the
chalice and looked at its shape. I
gently held each chard and was
able to claim a new awareness.
From the journal I started that
morning (and have continued the
last four years) I wrote: “I am the
brokenness. Those broken pieces
are my broken pieces. I left them
laying because I wanted to. Why
pick them up? Why look at them?
I’ve handled them a lot.
“I’ve shown them to others, to
invite them to look at their own
brokenness and seek healing. But
I’ve always held them away from
me. I need to hold the chalice and the chards and explore
what they can teach me.”
The five chards revealed much about my deep, internal
struggle to accept and love myself as God created me. The
smaller chards were easy to identify: a need to always try and
please others; looking for definition through the external perceptions
of others; living with a shameful self-image and believing
that this was somehow good; believing that vulnerability
would only lead to judgment. The fifth chard was the
largest and the most severe, with the deepest edges. And it
pointed to my deepest fear: that the truth of my sexuality
could not possibly be received as a gift. Yet, even this fear
could not keep me from addressing the agony it was creating
in my soul and relationships. Through the careful listening of
a therapist, I was able to name my deepest struggle: my homosexuality.
Her response was a gift: “I am honored that you
shared your deepest struggle with me.”
The Beauty of Vulnerability
Vulnerability is surprising. The strength it carries is the beauty
of cracking open new perspectives in the movement of life.
For years, all I could see in the broken chalice was its brokenness.
The stem and the chards became a mirror of my soul—
or, rather, the way I saw myself. The depression I experienced
became a doorway to a deeply embedded truth. Hope knocked
on the door of my soul and invited fear to dance. The invitation
came through Emily Dickinson and one of her poems
I heard read by Garrison Keillor on radio’s The Writer’s
Almanac:
Fall 2001 7
A Call to Worship
Joe Cobb
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all.
Hope perched on what was broken and cracked it open.
While participating in a writer’s conference in Taos, New
Mexico, Natalie Goldberg introduced me to the gift of Zen
meditation and the importance of sitting, listening, being
present to life, and the courage to keep going. The time to
meditate and write also introduced the idea of cracking open
the structure of my life to be awake to what is fresh; to have
an intimate relationship with my soul. As I grow in this intimacy,
I can lift both the “cracked open” chalice and the silver
chalice and celebrate who God has created me to be.
Can You Drink The Cup?
Toward the close of the retreat at Ghost Ranch, Chris led us in
a beautiful ritual based on Nouwen’s book, Can You Drink
The Cup? The first movement invited us to hold the cup, look
at our lives, and claim who God created us to be. What I wrote
then, continues to bless me today:
I am a beloved, beautiful child of God
a tender, loving gay man
a wonderful daddy
a minister of hospitality
The second movement invited us to lift the cup and offer a
toast to life, to others, and to the larger community we live
in—a blessing of sorts. My blessing comes from the incredible
song, Lord of the Dance, by Sydney Carter:
“Dance, then, wherever you may be!”
The third movement invited us to drink the cup, take in
the whole of our lives, and drink in the goodness of what is
and what is yet to be:
I look forward to a new life
filled with honesty,
courage, joy and lots of writing!”
This queer soul is cracking open the gift of new life! ▼
Joe Cobb, a former United Methodist minister
from Kansas, is, in his own words, “a daddy to
two children and a free-lance minister of hospitality.”
Leader: Here’s to this day, O God!
A day you have created and called sabbath!
People: We lift the cup of our lives to you
in praise and thanksgiving!
Leader: Here’s to this moment, O God!
A moment to gather as the community of faith
and share the brokenness and blessing of our lives.
People: We lift the cup of our lives to you
in praise and thanksgiving!
Leader: Here’s to life, O God!
Life filled with awe, mystery, wonder and hope!
People: We lift the cup of our lives to you
in praise and thanksgiving!
This Call to Worship was used in a service based on Psalm 116:12-13: “What shall I
return to the Lord for all God’s bounty to me? I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on
the name of the Lord.” The service also included an altar designed to hold a river of
chalices and candle light, celebrating the way in which light pours over and through our
moments of brokenness to crack open new understandings.
8 Open Hands
Happy are those whose illusion is revealed,
Whose fantasied wholeness is made truly whole.
Happy are those open to the truth of their body,
And whose spirit has been opened to Truth.
While I kept silence about the truth of my body, I wasted away,
And groans pushed their way out through my clenched teeth all day long,
For day and night the truth of my yearning was heavy in me,
While I denied them, the juices of my longing dried up as in the heat of summer.
Then I acknowledged my lie to You
And I could no longer hide my true longing.
I said, “I will claim my truth before our God”
And You revealed me as mirror of Your own Longing.
Therefore let all who are true to our body-spirit
Speak openly with You.
At the floodtide, the mighty rushing waters of my desire
Still could not fill the core of my beloved;
Still fullness remained hidden from me.
You revealed the aching beauty of my yearning
At the heart of my glad cries of deliverance.
“I will instruct you and teach you the ways your body-soul is one;
I who am One will counsel you with my eye upon you.
Do not think your strong-tender flesh is a horse or mule,
Separate, without understanding;
Whose spirit must be broken with a bit and bridle
As if it could wander off and not stay near you!
“Many are the torments of those who try to be one or the other,
But the ceaseless ebb and flood of My Yearning-Love
Pulses in the soul-body rhythm of your passion.
Be glad in your echo of My Desire, and rejoice, my hungry one;
And shout for joy, all you whose hungers pulse in My Heart.” ▼
Madeleine Manning is grateful to Carter Heyward for providing
the peg “straight queer” on which to hang her passion.
A free lance writer and liturgist, her work has been used extensively
by the Houston Interfaith Gay Pride Worship celebration
for the past two years, and she co-authored (with
Winter 2001 Open Hands writer Victor Schill) the liturgy
used in the nationwide celebration of Reconciling in Christ
Sunday 2001 in Evangelical Lutheran Churches of America
(ELCA) congregations. These renderings are excerpted from a
full paraphrase of the Psalms under the working title
Wholebody Singing. Two of her other psalms are found on
pages 25 and 27.
Be Glad in Your Echo of My Desire
Revisiting Psalm 32
Madeleine Manning
Sustaining
the Spirit
Fall 2001 9
J
Prayer in Honor of Those
Whom Jesus Loved
Joan Chittister
Jesus who loved the Samaritan woman,
outcast proclaimer of your name,
let us love and support all those who proclaim
your name to the gay and lesbian community.
Jesus who loved the lepers
whom others called unclean,
let us see the glory of creation everywhere,
in everyone.
Jesus who loved the one condemned with him
and promised him heaven by virtue of his faith,
give us the faith to broaden our vision
of the reign of God.
Jesus who loved the hemorrhaging woman,
long ignored and thought to be intrinsically disordered,
give us hearts large enough to embrace
those whom the world calls bent.
Jesus who loved the tax collector the community feared,
enable us to put down our fear of those
who are different from ourselves.
Jesus who loved the Roman soldier,
foreigner and oppressor,
help us to love those who make exiles of
our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.
Jesus who loves us in all our humanness, all our glories,
enable us to love those
whose glories we have failed to see.
You who called women disciples in a male world,
who confronted leaders of the synagogue
with their sins of injustice,
who sent out your disciples to the whole world,
give us the courage to stand with
our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters,
their families and those who minister to them.
Give us the grace to confront their rejection,
to ease their loneliness,
to calm their fears and
to belie their sense of abandonment.
Give us all the grace of owning our sexual identity,
whatever its orientation,
as another manifestation of your goodness.
Give us the vision to recognize and reject
the homophobia around us and in our own hearts, as well.
May we and the church of Jesus open
our hearts and homes and sanctuaries
to the gay and lesbian community,
to the glory of God they bring in a new voice,
with a different face.
Let us bless the God of differences.
Amen. ▼
Sister Joan Chittister, OSB,
wrote this prayer in response
to the May 1999 decision by
the Congregation of the Doctrine
of Faith of the Roman
Catholic Church to silence
the ministry of Father Robert
Nugent and Sister Jeannine
Gramick to gays and lesbians, said in church
documents to be “intrinsically disordered.” [See
Movement News, Summer 1999 issue of Open
Hands, Vol. 15, No. 1.] Chittister, a noted Catholic
author and speaker, has also been a strong
advocate for women’s full equality in the church.
About that commitment, she has said, “I presume
my commitment to the ordination of
women might be a stumbling block to those who
believe, contrary to the experience and proof of
history, that theology never develops.”
You may order this prayer printed on cards from
the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, PA ($9/100 cards,
$5/50 cards, $3/25 cards. Add $1.75 shipping
and handling. to Benetvision, 355 East Ninth
Street, Erie, PA 16503-1107. Phone: 814/459-5994.
E-mail: msbpr@juno.com Website: www.eriebene
dictines.org
10 Open Hands
Especially in conservative religious
circles, the gay rights movement
is usually perceived and portrayed
as an extremist faction of the sexual
revolution and a demonstration of the
breakdown of morality. In fact, it is
much better understood as a manifestation
of dramatic changes in culture
and consciousness caused by modernization,
psychological sophistication,
ecological awareness, scientific thinking,
and expansion of the human population—
that are loosely (and occasionally
ridiculously) called “new age” or
“new paradigm” thinking.
Those conservatives are generally
correct about the breakdown in traditional
morality. But they’re incorrect
about the causes and the consequences,
and even the extent of this breakdown.
People probably aren’t any more sinful
today than ever. In fact, they’re probably
less likely to commit violence and
much more sensitive to issues of injustice
and unfairness than people were in
times past. The apparent rise in violence
and madness in modern society is more
a consequence of increased population
and increased reporting. More people
mean more incidents of crime, and more
reporters looking for news stories mean
more attention and sensationalism.
Nonetheless, there clearly are huge
shifts going on in public morality and
they are dramatized by changes in
sexual behavior, with homosexuality
seeming to be the most dramatic violation
of traditional sex and gender rules.
But the shifts in values are not caused
by gay people recognizing and embracing
their true sexual feelings. It is obvious
to most readers of Open Hands, but
needs to be said to the general public,
that gay men and lesbians coming out
and seeking to lead honest lives is not
the cause of divorce, teen pregnancy,
abortion, drug addiction, suicide, infanticide,
or school violence. Yet perhaps
a whole swath of these problems can
be traced to the failure of traditional religion
to address modern day issues in
ways that make sense to modern day
people. The breakdown in morality, in my
view, is a sign of the failure of religion.
Transformation of
Religious Consciousness
There is a transformation going on today
in the very nature of religious truth.
Exposure to the varieties of religion
around the world— combined with a
commitment to the fundamental proposition
that all human beings are created
equal— forces modern thinkers to
abandon the old-time notions that their
culture and their religion alone were
right and God-ordained. Modernization
and globalization force us to think from
broader perspectives. Our understanding
of religious truths changes when
we understand that religious stories
are metaphors with meaning beyond
the surface and that the surface details
come out of cultural conditioning,
politics, historical happenstance,
and imagination.
The old stories don’t make sense
anymore. For all that you might feel
saved by your personal relationship
with God, exemplified in Jesus Christ,
the fundamental doctrine of salvation
in Christianity based in the mythology
of bloody human sacrifice as fitting
appeasement of God’s wrath probably
doesn’t speak to you. Your relationship
with God and Jesus is probably something
more personal and loving and
comforting, not consistent with the
model of God as a stern and stiff-necked
patriarchal Middle Eastern potentate
demanding tribute. Your vision of God
as ruler of the universe is necessarily
based more on the model of a democratic
leader administering government
for the good of the governed than a dictator
ruling for his or her own arbitrary
pleasure.
We necessarily adjust our understanding
of religious mythology and
imagery to fit our modern world views.
We realize that the story of creation in
the Book of Genesis is about the divine
care for incarnate life rather than a history
of the first week of evolution. We
understand that the composers of Gen-
RE-CREATING RELIGION
TOBY JOHNSON
esis thought the whole universe a flat
disk about the size of the Mediterranean
Coast floating in a cosmic ocean with
little lights hung from a domed ceiling
overhead. We know that the invention
of telescopes has allowed a much different
view of the universe, and the
ancient religious stories have to be
adapted to that modern vision of space
and time.
We know we have to change how
we understand God because how we
understand the universe and how we
understand human nature has changed.
In a world of daily bathing, deodorants,
tampons, condoms, canning and refrigeration,
cleanliness and food safety,
many issues of Levitical law take on totally
new meaning. And we are having
a predictably difficult time making
these adjustments, not least because religious
institutions are slow to embrace
the changes, and the changes keep coming
faster and faster.
Spiritual Creativity
We modern human beings are literally
having to create our own religions,
figuring out what makes sense to us,
interpreting the stories in ways consistent
with the modern, global, scientifically-
modulated worldview. And that
worldview promises to keep changing,
and changing faster than we can keep
up with. It’s a little scary. But it’s also a
wonderful opportunity.
We are exposed to a panoply of ideas
including astronomy, psychology, evolutionary
biology, ecology, Buddhist
and Hindu meditation practice, yoga,
the Gaia Hypothesis, A.I. and E.T. speculation,
paranormal phenomena as well
as traditional religion. Indeed, it is said
that we are exposed to more information
by age seven than was known by
all the great philosophers of the past put
together. From this barrage of information
we have to creatively make sense of
life— and of God.
A new religious consciousness is being
born. It offers enlightenment and
life meaning to individuals, but it is tremendously
challenging to institutions.
The Gay Rights Movement is part of
that transformation, and that’s an important
reason it meets with so much
opposition from traditional religious
institutions.
Fall 2001 11
Even though sexual behavior and
gender roles really have very little to do
with the nature of God or how to think
about mystical experience and spiritual
phenomena, religion has been one of
the carriers of the rules about sex and
the conditioning about gender.
Gender Roles
Psychological sophistication and social
critique show us how males and females
are conditioned, even terrorized, into
traditional roles.
Men are taught to
be leaders, decision-
makers, competitors,
warriors.
Women are taught
to be followers, servants,
homemakers,
child-rearers. Men
are taught to dominate women. Women
are taught to be submissive to men. Men
are taught to suppress feelings and emotions,
to be always in control. Women
are taught to be victims of their emotions,
to be feckless and needy.
Everybody is supposed to see the
world divided dualistically between
dominant and submissive, male and
female, light and dark, right and wrong.
These dualisms preserve the status quo,
keeping men in charge— especially the
men who have risen to power within
institutions that absorb responsibility
and free them from accountability. This
is really politics and economics, but it
gets enforced through religion and
morality.
These models of men’s and women’s
roles don’t apply to modern society.
Women are now equal citizens, educated
and responsible, no longer the
submissive possession of a man who
gave them a name and a reason for living.
This is causing turmoil in society
as we try to adjust to these changes.
Gay people, in particular, demonstrate
the violation of these gender roles.
Gay people represent the ultimate flouting
of societal conditioning, and exemplify
the possibility of changing the old
rules. Even beyond sexual behavior and
gender roles, gay people challenge the
belief in duality.
Ironically, two thousand years ago
it was Jesus and the early Christians
who were challenging that dualistic,
male dominant view of the world.
Jesus scoffed at the elaborate taboos
of the Temple, showing how these
kept the poor suffering and poor and
the rich men rich and powerful. He
dismissed the dualism of clean and
unclean— which was the essence of
religion in those days— teaching that
love and respect for human persons
was what mattered, not obedience to
the Law.
Today the gay rights movement resonates
with those teachings about respecting
individuals and responding to human
needs instead of just obeying rules.
Gay Perspective
Gay people reveal the perspective beyond
traditional culture and belief that
all modern human beings are being
called to take. Most of us grew up feeling
we didn’t fit, that there was something
“wrong” with us, that we were
different. If we were unlucky, the feelings
of being excluded left us with damaged
egos and self-fulfilling prophecies
of failure and discontent. If we were
lucky, we later learned that not fitting
in had given us special skills and talents,
trained us to be sensitive to other
people’s emotions— if only out of selfprotection
and secrecy— and enabled us
to take a critical stance on the conventions
and assumptions other people take
for granted unquestioningly, and that
we could see limited and diminished
their life experience and perpetuated
victimization of women and violence
against supposed enemies.
If we were especially lucky and escaped
the internalized self-loathing and
homophobia societal conditioning tried
to impose on us, we might even have
escaped the presumption of dualism—
which includes both the notion that the
world should be full of conflict and disagreement
and that God and the world
are forever separate. We might also have
discovered the lesson, so important in
a time of population explosion, that you
don’t have to have children to live a
good, fulfilled life. And that, in fact, you
make an unselfish contribution to the
world by not having children and working
to better the world with no vested
or self-serving interest in the future.
These are precisely qualities needed
for our newly developing religious attitudes:
the ability to see from a perspective
that honors and understands the
meaning of the religious
traditions
that have come
down to us without
being enslaved
by the details (that
no longer fit modern
reality); the
awareness that the
apparent duality of the world is an illusion,
that enmity and competition are
not inherent; and the mystical sense
that we are participating in the development
of God just in the course of our
daily lives by stewarding the world
whether we have children or not.
A History of
Being Spiritual Leaders
It shouldn’t be surprising that gay
people would exemplify certain spiritual/
mystical qualities. Modern gay-sensitive
research into history and anthropology
has found that many of the
shamans and healers and miracle-workers
of primitive times who helped create
human religious consciousness in
the first place were people who lived
outside conventional gender roles.
These days referred to as “two-spirit
people,” healers and spiritual guides in
Native-American and other shamanic
traditions practiced cross-dressing and,
at least, ritual homosexuality in ways
that would make us think they’d be
called gay if they were alive today.
And throughout the history of Christianity,
people we’d now call “gay” were
the priests and monks and nuns who
chose religious life as a meaningful alternative
to marriage and family and
who therefore guided the development
of religious consciousness.
Religion is in dire need of major
transformation. The model of God and
the world we embrace has to give us a
These are precisely qualities needed for our newly developing
religious attitudes: the ability to see from a perspective that
honors and understands the meaning of the religious
traditions that have come down to us without being
enslaved by the details that no longer fit modern reality…
sense of meaning and purpose in life
and clear motivation to love one another
and work in harmony. Because
traditional religion— probably less out
of its spirituality than its societal function
of imposing gender and class
roles— has opposed gay rights and the
recognition of gay people’s human dignity,
it is modern gay men and lesbians
who should be especially motivated to
bring about this transformation.
And, two thousand years later, this
transformation is just the next step in
championing Jesus’s wisdom that the
cause of human suffering—what we
need to be saved from— is not our failing
to obey dualistic rules about cleanliness,
but our lack of love and respect
for one another.
Transformation in Action
In fact, today, all of us are consciously
or unconsciously adjusting our religious
and mythological belief system to fit
modern realities. It is a commonplace
now that everybody’s got a different
idea of what God means, and in a pluralistic
society with freedom of religion,
that seems okay with most people. Of
course, traditionally this hodgepodge of
opinions about the nature of God would
have been considered heretical. But now
it is just natural.
The proliferation of Christian traditions,
denominations, and sects is itself
an indication that there is no longer a
monolithic, authoritarian religious tradition
and no clear and definite interpretation
of what the Scriptures mean
or of who holds final authority. But the
transformation and amalgamation of
various mythological traditions is much
bigger than just variations on Christian
theology.
Within the context of what can
loosely be called “Gay Spirituality” are
several pertinent examples of how a
new religious/mystical vision is being
created out of past traditions.
Perhaps the most identifiable example
of religion in gay culture is the
Christian denomination founded in Los
Angeles in the 1960s by former fundamentalist
pastor Troy Perry called the
Metropolitan Community Church
(MCC). While definitely Christian, and
even evangelical, MCC proposes a very
loose theology. There are few essentials
you have to believe to be a member of
the church (except maybe that the other
churches are off-the-mark about homosexual
orientation). The emphasis is on
liturgy, community, and celebration,
not doctrinal correctness. MCCers are
almost all necessarily converts from
other denominations who did not feel
comfortable as openly or consciously
gay in their home churches. That means
that, in practice, MCC produces a liturgy
that tries to seem familiar to Catholics,
mainstream Protestants, and Southern
Baptists alike.
Within many of the mainstream
churches, gay and lesbian affinity
groups have developed: Integrity
among Episcopalians, Affirmation
among Mormons, Dignity among
Catholics, CLOUT (Christian Lesbians
Out Together), and the gay-positive
denominational groups that have
formed the Welcoming programs that
publish Open Hands, to cite a few. These
groups generally maintain religious orthodoxy
on all issues except sexual orientation.
They generally strive to get
their denominations to wake up to
modern realities, while at the same time
providing worship and social opportunities
for openly gay and lesbian church
members.
Body Electric, Wild Men, Wicca,
and Faeries
Beyond these, though, there are examples
of the creation of whole new
gay-inclusive and gay-inspired religions.
At least three interweaving themes/
styles can be identified and offer examples
of the modern syncretism/eclec-
COLUMCILLE
A SACRED
SPACE & PLACE
Twenty-one years ago, William H. (Bill) Cohea and Frederick Lindkvist began
offering “weary sinners and reluctant saints” from all faiths and traditions the
opportunity to enhance their spirituality, celebrate the seasons, and find their unity
with the ever-new creation in this unusual place called Columcille, named for the
saint Columba (cille means church). Very close to the Appalachian Trail and
Kirkridge Retreat Center in northeastern Pennsylvania, this “playground of the
human spirit” boasts 80 individual stone settings, the largest soaring 20 feet high,
spread across 17 acres of hills and glens, forests and meadows.
12 Open Hands
ticism: Tantric-based spiritualized sexuality,
therapy-based transformative
communities, and neo-paganism.
Former Jesuit scholastic Joseph
Kramer founded the Body Electric
School, developing a series of trainings
in sexuality reeducation based in Hindu
and Buddhist Tantrism and Chinese
Taoism that are now presented around
the country in workshops called Celebrating
the Body Erotic. Now under
new leadership, most of the participants
are gay men, but the trainings, which
include techniques in touch, massage,
breathing, and meditation, are now also
styled for women and for heterosexuals.
The focus of the Body Electric training
is to relearn sexual arousal as an
experience of spirit-energy in the body,
not just a procedure for reproduction.
Participants learn to allow arousal to
build and maintain without orgasmic
release so that it generates mystical
states of consciousness, not just genital
pleasure. On the surface, Body Electric
is a workshop about eroticism and
erotic stimulation, but the participants
frequently come away with the added
benefit of having “seen God,” not just
a reassessment of sex, but having had
an actual mystical experience transforming
body and soul consciousness.
Arising out of the popular men’s
movement and so-called Wild Man
Gatherings of the 1980s, along with 12-
Step and other recovery and psychotherapeutic
programs, gay men’s gatherings
merge retreat, church camp,
back-to-nature spirituality, and country
campouts. The California-based Billy
Clubs and the Georgia-based Gay Spirit
Visions are major examples. Following
the style (started by non-gay poet Robert
Bly with the Wild Man gatherings)
of honoring Native American nature
spirituality and enriching it with the
gay-positive two-spirit wisdom, these
gatherings provide an alternative to
church as a way of experiencing fellowship
and ritual. With origins in psychological
and therapeutic models, they call
for life-transformation and participation
in spiritual community without the
mythological “baggage” of conventional
religion.
For lesbians, such country gatherings
appear as women’s music festivals and
feminist-based Wicca. Wicca, of course,
is the proper term for the Goddess-worshiping
religions of pre-Christian Europe
that have been misrepresented and
vilified in the term witchcraft.
The most extreme form of such
groups, and constituting a whole category
of its own, is the neo-pagan Radical
Faeries. The Faeries, using an archaic
spelling of the word to suggest ancient
and archetypal roots, developed out of
a rural gathering, mostly of Californians,
in 1979 called together by Harry
Hay, founder of the 1950s Mattachine
Society which initiated the modern gay
rights movement. Though there are
now men all across the country who call
themselves Faeries, there is no organization
as such. And so, of course, no
doctrine.
The movement is still based in Hay’s
merging of California hippie styles of
the ’70s, pop New Age notions, utopian
idealism, and a radical honoring of gay
consciousness as a special and “enlightened”
way of seeing the world. Hay’s
idea, echoed in the discussion above
about gay non-dualistic thinking, is that
gay people learn to relate to one another
as subject to subject rather than subject
to object. Because straight men and
women cannot really understand each
other’s deepest motivations and strivings,
they must seek out one another to
complement their masculinity or femininity
in another person who is generally
experienced as an object to be related
to, not as another subject to be
identified with.
The Faeries celebrate nature festivals
from Wiccan and pagan traditions with
country gatherings and elaborately con-
A trilithon (two giant column supporting
a lintel) serves as one entrance to
Columcille. St. Columba Chapel sits at
its heart, a simple hexagonal structure
that honors the visionary 6th century
Irish monk who founded a Celtic
Christian community on the Scots
island of Iona. Four-thousand visitors
per year visit Columcille, uniquely
catalogued by the National American
Art Museum of the Smithsonian
Institution as the only “Outdoor
Megalith Park and Celtic Art Center” in
the United States. For information,
contact: Columcille, 2155 Fox Gap
Road, Bangor, PA 18013,
colum@epix.net, www.columcille.org.
Fall 2001 13
14 Open Hands
trived rituals held at a number of “Sanctuaries“
around the country— the most
prominent in Tennessee and Oregon.
These Sanctuaries seem a little like oldtime
monasteries with a crew of fulltime
residents who live in community
practicing simplicity of life, ecological
awareness, and obedience to group consensus,
but with a sex-positive take on
chastity, and hosting the gatherings
which bring visitors from all over the
world, coming as pilgrims. One of the
most notorious (and misunderstood)
variants of this phenomena are the Sisters
of Perpetual Indulgence, a self-proclaimed
order of gay male nuns. Though
known for their whimsically irreverent
(and occasionally offensive to all) caricature
of nuns in outrageous drag costumes,
the Sisters really do perform
good works and charitable acts in a positive
imitation of the Catholic religious
life they are parodying.
Because gay people so often feel
alienated from religion by the politicized
rhetoric of TV preachers and selfproclaimed
“conservative” pundits (and
AM radio stars), many gay people end
up creating their religion entirely on
their own, without the help of the spiritual
communities described above.
A Personal Example
I edit a small circulation, reader-written
quarterly journal of gay men’s spirituality
called White Crane. Submissions
to White Crane routinely combine
Christian social teachings with Buddhist
notions of meditation and lifestyle simplicity,
as well as images and references
from pagan and classical mythology.
Freed from orthodoxy, gay people can
make up their own interpretations of
what all the myths were intended to
mean.Treating once sacrosanct and
immutable ideas as arbitrary—because
viewed from a broader perspective—is
the first step in transforming religion
for the needs of the modern world.
To get personal, let me tell you that,
through my exposure to the ideas of
comparative religion scholar Joseph
Campbell, I learned to make sense of
the real meaning of Christianity by seeing
the Redemption through an important
image in Mahayana Buddhism.
This 1st century reform movement in
Buddhist history told the story of the
attractive, lovable, and androgynous
young saint, Avalokiteshvara, who, like
Jesus, saved the world and became a
bodhisattva, one whose very being is enlightenment.
The mythological character
Avalokiteshvara, rapt in compassion
for all suffering beings, agreed to take
on their karmic debts and to free them
from suffering by living out their lives
for them. Hence all sentient beings were
saved and ushered into nirvana in distant
mythic/sacred time. And all of us
today, experiencing the suffering of life
in the world, are, if we only saw, all incarnations
of the bodhisattva fulfilling
his vow. We are all One Being. The
name Avalokiteshvara, depending on
how you divide the syllables, means
both “The Lord Who Looks Down in
Pity” and “The Lord Who Is Seen
Within.”
Isn’t this the meaning of the Christian
image of the Mystical Body of
Christ? And of the familiar Christian
idea that we should see Jesus in everyone
we meet? And isn’t this a more
meaningful way of saving the world
than by being a victim of human sacrifice?
Isn’t this a way of articulating in
metaphor the modern eco-spiritual idea
that all human beings are individualized
organs of Gaia, the Earth consciousness?
The Gaia Hypothesis, first suggested
by evolutionary biologists James
Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, asserts
that the earth can be understood as
functioning like a single organism,
named for the Greek Earth Goddess
Gaia.
It is said there are Three Wonders of
the Bodhisattva. The first is that he/she
is androgynous, simultaneously and
comfortably male and female. The second
is that to her/him there is no difference
between time and eternity, no
difference between earth and heaven;
he/she lives in the infinite Now. And
the third wonder is that the first two
wonders are the same!
This is a gay positive myth. Each
morning in my meditation, when I repeat
the Bodhisattva’s vows to save all
beings by relinquishing all resistance
and entering all the possible doors of
incarnation in order to attain the broadest
possible perspective, I am reminded
of the link between our androgynous
gayness, our delight in incarnation, and
our quest for spiritual insight.
Saving Religion
To transform religion, the first thing is
to start paying attention to that wisdom
human beings have been ignoring for
two thousand years. If we truly loved
our neighbors as ourselves, respecting
difference and diversity, not making
other people wrong, but seeing them
also as manifestations of God’s growth
in and through the world, then we
could choose the myths and stories that
enliven us, we could enjoy our religion
as a clue to who we really are.
Learning to love the people who exemplify
the break with the old outdated
world with all its superstitions and taboos
and all its wrong-making and institutional
enmity would be a good
place to start.
We save religion and redeem the
teachings of Jesus and Buddha and the
other founders of world religion by creating
our own synthesis consistent with
the modern vision of reality. That modern
vision recognizes that for a wide
variety of reasons human nature produces
homosexuals as well as heterosexuals
and that God’s work in the
world is the evolution of consciousness
to bring us all to love and harmony and
acceptance of difference so that the
world itself exemplifies God’s love for
creation and shows itself as the Kingdom
of God spread across the face of
the earth. ▼
Edwin Clark (Toby) Johnson, Ph.D.,
former Catholic monk turned psychotherapist
and gay community activist, was
a student of the comparative religion
scholar Joseph Campbell. Johnson is author
of some seven books including the
Lambda Literary Award-winning Gay
Spirituality: The Role of Gay Identity in
the Transformation of Human Consciousness.
He is the editor of the quarterly
gay men’s spirituality journal, White
Crane (www.white
cranejournal.com).
Fall 2001 15
who we think we are—or have been taught to be—dies in the
process.
Through this transmutational act, the archetype of the
wounded healer is brought to the fore. So, too is the
discovery of the gifts and powers that await those who live
out its myth. Claiming the wound is our spiritual occasion:
the royal road to coming out inside as the transformers,
healers, and workers of wonder we have the potential to be.
One of the key roles that queer people play in any society
is to preserve, refurbish, and expand its cultural values. The
tasks of a wounded healer are many: to teach and inspire,
proving a prophetic voice for all; to observe and uphold the
rituals of birth and death and other life passages; and to
create new ideas and forms of expression by which that
society can evolve. Dag Hammarskjöld, Margaret Mead,
Allen Ginsberg, Tennessee Williams, Aaron Copland, and
Bayard Rustin are among those intermediate types whose
lives and work have made an important contribution within
my lifetime.
The list of other such artists, writers, inventors, priests,
healers, teachers, mythmakers, and community builders
who have invested an often hostile world with ameliorant
vision is a long one, indeed. These individuals can be
characterized as shadow workers; those who elucidate the
mysterious, speak the unspeakable, make real what is
shunned or not seen by others. It has been a traditional
queer function performed throughout history. ▼
Excerpted by the author for Open Hands from the book, Gay Body:
A Journey Through Shadow to Self, by Mark Thompson (St. Martin’s
Press, 1997).
Mark Thompson is an author and editor who began his career
with The Advocate in 1975, culminating his time there by
editing Long Road to Freedom: The Advocate History of the
Gay and Lesbian Movement (St. Martin’s Press, 1994). He is
best known for his trilogy on gay spirituality: the anthology Gay
Spirit: Myth and Meaning (St. Martin’s Press, 1987),
Gay Soul: Finding the Heart of Gay Spirit and Nature
(HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), and Gay Body: A Journey
Through Shadow to Self (St. Martin’s Press, 1997), an autobiographical
memoir combining elements of Jungian archetypes,
gay history and mythology, and New Age spirituality. He lives in
Los Angeles with his life partner of 16 years, Episcopal priest and
author Malcolm Boyd. Photo on page 28.
Because we live in a time when the objectivistic values
of the Industrial Revolution and a Newtonian-
Cartesian worldview (which separated mind from the
body) are rapidly giving way, some people are realizing that
meaning in life can be found through subjective experience
rather than from something that is externally ordered. One
possibility this presents is an ecology of associated differences:
a world consisting of interdependent and multilevel
realities in contrast to the monolithic model of superiority,
conflict, and exclusion which still binds most people to
their outworn cultural myths today.
Queer people are harbingers of this new way of seeing
and being in the world: an ascending consciousness that can
help carry the world of the old, dying myths we now live in
toward a more inclusive reality. As traditional systems of
belief are forced to change, it will be recognized that we
intermediate types play a vital role in effecting that change.
When acting from our authentic selves, we evolve definitions
of family, community, caregiving, of culture itself,
even as that change continues to be resisted with an equal
force.
Creation of the new out of the debris of the old is usually
difficult, even dangerous. So how can those whose function
it is to mediate between the worlds of past and present, the
seen and unseen, assume greater awareness about the tasks
and trials ahead? I found that it usually takes a crisis of
faith, a dark passage of the soul, a feeling of being trammeled
by forces beyond control to break through to this
deeper level of knowing.
The accepted role of shamans in various native cultures
offers one clue about who we may really be, as tenuous as
that comparison may seem at first. Shamans are initiated
into their work as mediators, healers, and soul guides
through a ritual descent into the underworld, where they
are symbolically dismembered and their bones scraped of
flesh.
Shamans are mortally wounded, and thus, after their
resurrection, are endowed with the capacity to perceive the
wounds of others. In our complex, post-modern era, that
signifies the wounds not only of individuals, but of groups
of people and the societies they form.
What queer person who has struggled to gain consciousness
about his or her true Self has not felt the scrape of flesh
from bone? It is a soul-making process sadly without
context, perhaps not even wanted, but encountered nevertheless.
When we descend through the wound, a part of
SHADOW WORKERS AND SOUL GUIDES
MARK THOMPSON
16 Open Hands
Excerpts from His Stand-up Comic Routine
I know, I know, I don’t look like your average 62-year-old
Presbyterian minister.
Or do I?
Let me tell you about this rather gay clerical outfit. For
years I wore the traditional black frock with the little accent
of white. After working at the Damien Center [as Director of
Pastoral Care of that AIDS caregiving agency] for a few
months, I was asked to be in the World AIDS Day Memorial
Service and wore my black frock. Afterwards, Ronnie Russell
came up to me and said, “Howard, if I’d known you were
going to wear a black gown, I would have loaned you my
white pearls.”
So, on with the Rainbow colors—always have to make
sure that this pin, “Thank God I’m Gay” is on straight.
“FUMORIST” KATE CLINTON
A self-described fumorist (feminist + humorist), Kate
Clinton started her professional career as one of
America’s funniest openly lesbian stand-up comedians
in 1981 blending politics, Catholicism, and her
lesbianism to compose a repertoire. A reviewer for
The Los Angeles Times noted, “Kate Clinton is the
lesbian you want to take home to meet your parents…
She’s so far out of the closet, so natural with
her sexual identity, that a homophobe would beg
her to spend the night. She’s astute and—above all—
amusing.”
She has performed her one-woman show across
the United States and Canada, and has appeared
on Arsenio Hall, Good Morning America, Nightline,
Entertainment Tonight, among other television programs.
In 1996, she joined The Rosie O’Donnell Show
as a writer.
Clinton has been a big help to
Dignity, according to Marianne T.
Duddy, the organization’s executive
director. For example, Clinton
served as the LGBT Catholic group’s
featured entertainer during their
1997 convention in Boston. ▼
Howard’s handwritten notecards for his comedy routine.
GOD’S GLORIOUS GADFLY
HOWARD WARREN
Well, folks, choice or nature, remember
the words of Rita Mae Brown, who said,
“I became a lesbian out of devout
Christian charity. All those women
out there are praying for a man,
so I gave them my share.”
Fall 2001 17
Now, I’d like to say something wonderful about organized
religion. (Sorts through his notes, looks up.) Ted, did
you take my notes?
Oh, well, let’s go on to something really important.
Seriously, you out there, the local congregations that are
open to all God creates, you have certainly heard of the
Christian right or the religious right (oxymoron if I ever
heard one!)? They keep saying there is a Gay Agenda.
Anybody got a copy? I’ve never seen it. I’m gay and I’d love
to know what I’ve been doing.
Politics keeps getting us the headlines. Wouldn’t you
think most heterosexuals would like us to settle down, have
what we call same-sex ceremonies and be married? What an
uproar! When Kate Clinton [see sidebar] was in town last
year she said, “The freedom not to marry was always one of
the things I enjoyed about being gay.” In the New York
Times last week she called it the “Mad Vow Disease.”
I don’t want to say very much about my Presbyterian
church. Today I call it the Pale Presence of God. I only
remain a Presbyterian minister because as an HIV+ person, I
want to retain the health insurance I have paid into for 30
years. I don’t remember [gayness] being a question at
ordination. We really are on different wave-lengths. The
other day at a church and society meeting I talked about a
needle exchange program and they thought it was a sewing
project for a Third World country!
Well, folks, choice or nature, remember the words of Rita
Mae Brown, who said, “I became a lesbian out of devout
Christian charity. All those women out there are praying for
a man, so I gave them my share.”
So live and don’t let the ecclesiastical b- & b-’s (and I
don’t mean bed and breakfast) get you down. As they hate,
be outrageous and laugh right back at them. If you are
down and out and want real laughs, turn on the religious
TV channels, turn the sound off, and just watch the hatred
in their faces. Then turn them off and laugh. And always
remember, “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” Alleluia.
Shalom. Amen. ▼
Howard Warren, cofounder of Presbyterian ACT UP! and
beloved pastor of traditional churches before joining the staff of
the Damien Center in Indianapolis as chaplain to hundreds
living with HIV/AIDS (1989-1999), celebrated his 67th birthday
in September in a facility that cares for him as he copes with
dementia, believed AIDS-related. He is known as God’s Glorious
Gadfly. Thanks to Edgar Towne, Mary Z. Longstreth, and Rev.
Dan Smith for providing the text and photos.
18 Open Hands
Morticia DeVille has caught the Holy
Ghost’s vibe. Her blond wig frames her
face, and cascades sufficiently down her neck to
hide any back hair that—she worries aloud—might be
visible. Her face is beautiful in its uncannily open mix of
spiritual fervor and irony. She is bent slightly at the waist,
singing an old-time gospel song into the microphone.
When the song ends, the crowd gathered about her at
Burkhart’s Pub bursts into applause, but Tish remains bent,
looking downward. “My dress is so pretty,” she says of her
glitter-speckled purple dress. “You know, a drag
queen has to be careful what she wears. We can
become mesmerized by our own glitter.”
After a few more cracks—about sex, her 159-
pound weight loss, the muscles on a boy
standing nearby—the taped background
music cranks up and Tish and the Gospel
Echoes, Mark Roberts and Philip
Messer, perform a rousing rendition
of “John the Revelator.”
Morticia, whose name is a
reference to her former occupation
as a funeral director, has
been performing old-time gospel
music in Atlanta’s gay bars for 16
years. Her Sunday shows at 7:30
and 10:30 p.m., called the
“Atlanta Gospel Hour,” are
legendary in the gay community
but have attracted increasingly
diverse crowds in recent years.
The Gospel Hour even includes a
free buffet supper beforehand,
only adding to the sense of a
church bulletin’s inevitable
summary of an event as offering
plenty of “fun, food and fellowship.”
A casual observer tends to see Morticia’s show only as a
campy take on the music that has drenched the South for
years. It’s not altogether inaccurate. Many, if not the
majority, of Atlanta’s young gay men and women have
sought refuge here from the South’s small towns, and it is
astonishing to look around the bar during a performance
and see how many are singing along—often ironically, often
just because the music is so catchy.
But many find the experience deeply emotional even if it
isn’t explicitly religious. “This was the background music of
my childhood,” my friend Will told me. “My father put on a
stack of gospel records on the hi-fi every night. So, while I
don’t have religious experiences, I become extremely
nostalgic for my childhood when Tish is singing.”
But you don’t have to look far to realize that just as many
are caught up in something spiritual. A man in hot pants
bangs a tambourine, closes his eyes and virtually drowns
out Tish as he sings along. A young woman, rapturous, hugs
herself while she sings, then stops to assure you that she is
not a lesbian although her boyfriend happens to be bisexual
and seems to have disappeared. Here,
the “collection” comes in the form
of dollar bills pressed, one by one,
on the performers.
“None of this is surprising,” a
former priest tells me. “God
shows up everywhere.”
“As a man in a dress?” I ask.
“Hello,” he says. “What do
you think the average priest
is? Have you ever seen the
Holy Father in pants?”
Indeed, the Catholic
Church has a full roster
of transvestite saints,
mainly females like
Pelagia, Eugenia, Anna,
and above all, St. Joan.
Monks were explicitly
directed to feminize
themselves, to “become
the other.” During the
reign of Henry VIII in
England, boys were
expected to cross-dress
during carnival time
and, if the wardrobe was
not specifically female, it was that of a priest. In India, there
is a whole cult of cross-dressing religious performers. Native
American culture revered the berdache, a cross-dressing male
spiritual figure.
It is highly unlikely that Morticia DeVille and her cast see
themselves in this tradition, but it makes sense. Crossdressing
is transgressive; it takes us out of the ordinary, and
the eruption of spirit is similarly altering of ordinary
experience. For Tish the idea is much the same, even if not
historically grounded: “I have to think it’s the Holy Spirit
GOSPEL SONGS IN A GAY BAR
MEETING A PRIEST OF THE REAL
CLIFF BOSTOCK
Fall 2001 19
moving at Burkhart’s. It’s God coming into a place you
might not ordinarily expect to find him. Because he’s in
such a strange place, it’s even more powerful.”
“So, you’re deeply religious,” I said.
“Apparently,” she replied.
Of course, the otherness of the experience is heightened
by the nature of the “congregation” of gay people, historically
demonized by fundamentalist and mainstream
churches alike. “God shows up where he’s needed and gay
people, who suffer but are often excluded from church, do
need him,” Tish says. “But we like to have a good time, too.
So, If I get too drunk for the second show, it might make me
a bad performer, but it doesn’t make me a sinner.”
In that—the marriage of the sacred and the profane, the
Bible with booze—the Gospel Hour is virtually a blending of
the pagan and the Christian, like the Lenten carnivals of the
Mediterranean area and the rowdy Easter pageants of the
Hispanic world.
Morticia’s show isn’t limited to drag queens. Besides her
backup boys, she is joined by Ramona Dugger, a thoroughly
heterosexual African-American singer who often brings a
more serious tone to the proceedings. Her songs are almost
always interpreted by a man who performs a kind of
histrionic American Sign Language.
Another regular cast member is Tina Devore, a wellknown
African-American drag queen who sings and lipsyncs
raucous black gospel. An astounding semi-regular is
Alicia Kelly, who lip-sincs African-American gospel too, and
breaks into rapturous, floor-rolling dancing, her fists full of
dollar tips, sweat slinging off her lithe body, baptizing
anyone nearby.
But Morticia remains the absolute star of the show.
Utterly and unself-consciously devoted to that delicious
boundary between sex and the sacred, with a voice that can
make your diaphragm vibrate, she is the priest of the real,
pouring the gifts of the Holy Spirit with a thunderous laugh.
Attend her service. ▼
Cliff Bostock (cliff.bostock@creativeloafing.com) is a popular
Atlanta writer and insightful cultural critic who teaches courses
in writing. He is a regular contributor to Atlanta’s favorite
alternative paper, Creative Loafing, in which this article first
appeared (Sept. 4, 2001). Morticia DeVille & The Gospel Echoes
may be contacted at morticiadeville@aol.com.
20 Open Hands
Excerpts from the play adapted from the book, I’m Still Dancing (Chi
Rho Press, 1991), by the Rev. Stephen Pieters. Steve Pieters, a minister
in the Metropolitan Community Church, fell sick with multiple maladies,
including lymphoma and Kaposi’s sarcoma, and was finally diagnosed
with AIDS in the early 1980’s. An experimental treatment that
nearly killed him (thus abandoned as a remedy) brought his cancers
into remission in 1986. He transformed his AIDS diagnosis into ministry,
and with his newfound health led the Universal Fellowship of MCC’s
AIDS ministry for more than a decade. He’s still alive and well and
dancing, in churches and into the hearts of all whom he meets. Peter
Massey may be contacted by e-mail at petermassey@
earthlink.net.
It is 1997.
An apartment or hotel room, with simple furnishings.
A boombox, hand weights, and other items.
Disco or jazzy, party-like dance music.
Steve is dressed in workout pants and a tanktop,
exercising as the lights come up. …
I realize that from the beginning I took a very creative
approach toward AIDS and cancer and everything.
He reads from a journal.
This is from one month after my diagnosis:
“I am not going to capitalize the letters to “aids” anymore.
It’s an acronym, of course, for Acquired Immune
Deficiency Syndrome, and when you write A.I.D.S. it’s
proper to capitalize and put a period after each letter.
But when I read it that way, I do not like how it screams
I’M STILL DANCING A ONE-MAN PLAY
PETER MASSEY
out at me from the page. Capitalizing it gives it too much
power, too much terror. So I don’t. It’s not AIDS. It’s
aids. I’m not trying to diminish the seriousness of the
situation. I just want to deflate some of the fear.” …
He turns another page.
“I have learned to face the stigma of the purple spots of
Kaposi’s Sarcoma. I am fond of reminding people that
purple has for centuries been considered the color of
spiritual power and transformation. It’s been my experience
with at least some people with aids, that as they
have opened to their purple spots, and subsequently to
their deaths, they have been filled with a unique spiritual
power.
“One such man is a friend I’ll call Alex. He rode in the
Gay Pride parade last summer. His skin was covered with
purple lesions and at the start of the parade he wore a
huge sun bonnet, scarf and sunglasses to hide his purple
face. But as the parade got underway, he took his protective
clothing off, and he showed his lesions. It had a
remarkable effect on the crowd. Some people turned
their faces away, but most people applauded Alex. Many
broke through the lines of the parade and came up to
shake his hand or hug him. He sat up proudly, with a
gleam in his eye. For once, he was not ashamed of the
purple lesions covering his face, and people learned from
him. And Alex looked more joyful than I had seen him
in a long time. He died two weeks later.”
He closes the journal.
I have a growing conviction that healing is not mutually exclusive
of dying. …
Anyway, when I was first diagnosed with cancer in 1984—that
spring— I preached the Easter sermon at MCC of the Valley in
North Hollywood. I discovered that Easter that believing in
the Resurrection meant that even though they had told me
the worst thing I could imagine, I could still do a tap dance!
So I did. (He turns on the tape player and dances through the
following.) I tap danced in front of the altar on Easter Sunday...to
proclaim the life I still felt, even in the face of what I assumed
was my impending death. It was foolish, of course, but gee—I
had terminal cancer! What did I care?!
I consider myself a fool for Christ, actually. I’ll do anything
for him. It doesn’t matter.
I’ve tap danced in churches all over the world. …
I’ve known I was gay for as far back as I can remember. … I
remember being called a fairy for the first time in the second
grade. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I could tell the other
kids didn’t mean it kindly, and I knew it had something to do
with my acting more like a girl than a boy...
Fall 2001 21
He steps behind a screen and
begins changing clothes.
…At 17, I was worried about
the fact that I still liked fairy
tales.
You see, I believe in fairies.
Truly. I don’t mind the fact
that we’re called fairies. What
is a fairy? A unique spiritual
being. Doesn’t that describe us
all? And didn’t we all grow up
clapping along with Mary Martin
dressed up as Peter Pan when she’d say “if you believe in
fairies, clap your hands and make Tinkerbell live!” Well, I
clapped my hands year after year after year and every year I
helped bring that little fairy back to life. But of course, I believed
I could.
You know, for a while I felt that if I had just stayed in my
closet, if I had never come out, if I had never had sex, then I
would not have aids. I immediately realized the truth: the closet
would have suffocated me and my spirit would have died.
What kind of man would I be?
He emerges from behind the screen, dressed in a purple clerical
shirt and white collar.
I have to tell you a story about this shirt. I was at an interfaith
conference and an Episcopal laywoman approached me. She
said, “I couldn’t help but notice your shirt. If you wear a purple
clerical shirt in the Episcopal church, it means you’re a bishop.
What does it mean in your church?” I thought about it and
said, “In my church, it means you’re gay.” She was noticeably
shocked for a moment and then remarked, “Well, sometimes
in the Episcopal church it means that as well.”
One of the most profound aspects of my experience with aids
has been the reinforcement of my gay pride. I mean, saying
something like that to a stranger. What is gay pride? Pride in
myself. It’s that simple. But from a very deep place. It is directly
connected to my faith. …
When I was at McCormick Seminary, my preaching professor
always told us to look for the grace in any given situation. So
where is the grace in the aids crisis? I would like to begin by
suggesting that God’s grace is in the present moment. Right
here and now, in the ability to smile anyway, to share a good
laugh, to enjoy another person’s company. There is a grace
Peter Massey performing I’m Still Dancing presented by the
Mohonk Mountain Stage Company at the Woodstock Arts
Festival in New York in July, 1996. Afterward, Steve Pieters
(right) joined him on stage to talk about the trip he had just
made to the Vancouver AIDS Conference, where “combination
therapy” was the talk of the gathering.
for me in God’s loving presence
in my life. At what
could be a time of feeling
abandoned by God, I have
never been more sure of
God’s love for me. God did not give me this disease. God is
with me against this disease. …
I resonate with Paul, who writes, “So we do not lose heart.
Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is
being renewed every day. For this slight momentary affliction
is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.
O Death, where is thy victory? O Death, where is thy
sting?”
Lights fade to black. ▼
Peter Massey has served as actor, director, playwright, and producer.
He was Artistic Director of the Florida’s Riverfront Theatre
and Managing Director of the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles.
Earlier this year, Los Angeles critics uniformly praised his debut
one-man tribute to the poet Ogden Nash.
Oldest Continually Serving
Disciples Congregation
SEEKS A
NEW SENIOR MINISTER
This Open & Affirming urban Disciples
Community with ecumenical partnerships,
Day School and strong social action commitment
is beginning to search for a new senior minister.
Please indicate your interest to:
Ragnar Naess
Chair, Search Committee
Park Avenue Christian Church
1010 Park Avenue
NY NY 10028
22 Open Hands
Since the early 1970s gay and lesbian choruses have
been singing and growing, changing hearts and minds
through music. GALA Choruses is an international group
of over 180 choruses with over 12,000 members. Every four
years it holds a huge festival. Last year, over 6000 singers and
supporters descended on San Jose, California, July 22-29, and
poured our hearts out in music.
This is my story. My chorus, Voices of Kentuckiana, is a
mixed chorus of men and women. We have spent four years
planning and doing whatever it would take to get us to San
Jose, an enormous undertaking for 60+ people. We sold raffle
tickets, calendars, Entertainment coupon books, and just about
everything we could to raise money. We planned and ordered
new outfits, parts of which were made by chorus members, as
we prepared to be physically ready. We planned our program,
practiced our music and refined our presentation, trying to be
as good as possible.
Then we boarded planes to go to GALA Festival 2000 in
San Jose. The festival began with splendid opening ceremonies
that included a roll call of the choruses and lots of cheering.
Harvey Fierstein and Broadway singer Kristin Chenowith
sang and acted their way into our collective hearts; Kate Clinton
made us laugh and sing; and a surprise appearance by folk
singer Holly Near closed the ceremonies! Awesome.
The next day, Sunday, July 23, GALA VI got down to business.
The festival provides a place for each chorus attending
to sing for its peers in a non-competitive atmosphere. What a
joy to hear so many groups: Gloría, a mixed chorus from Ireland,
the London Gay Men’s Chorus, the choruses from Germany and
France, and those from California, Texas, Ohio, New York, Toronto
and Vancouver, and many more. There was no way one could
hear everyone (or meet everyone), but you sure wanted to. Over
120 choruses sang, danced (some of them), waved, and charmed
their way into our hearts. Many of them performed pieces commissioned
especially for their group.
The Turtle Creek Chorale joined with the Women’s Chorus
of Dallas and sang “Old Turtle” in their concert block, a
choral and dramatic reading of the famed children’s book.
Then they were persuaded to do a special workshop performance
of their “Sing for a Cure.” This work was commissioned
by the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and the
two choruses to support Breast Cancer research. I remember
one song about a mother, wondering who would care for her
child after she was gone. I was so proud to be part of a movement
doing so much.
Of course the festival was picketed and preached at by folks
proclaiming God’s wrath, and how we are the scourge of the
earth! One particular evening I was overcome with my interior
frustration with God, and this whole church thing. I had
sung with the Festival men’s chorus and walked by these picketers
on my way to sing. Police were everywhere. I tried not to
feel discouraged, and poured myself into the music, keeping
my mind on my task at hand. After our sets were over, I just
wanted to be held and told it didn’t matter, to be told that I
mattered to GOD, to the world.
But I was alone (the story of my life!) and I had almost
gotten on the train to go back to the hotel, when something
changed my mind. I ran over to the other performance venue
in hopes that the last chorus to sing had not yet finished.
Fortunately, they were running late. The Lavender Light Chorus
from NYC sang about God’s love in a Gospel style. The
audience was on their feet clapping and cheering! I can’t describe
for you this experience. Hearing exactly what I needed
to hear: that I matter…that we, GLBT people matter, that ALL
of us matter and are God’s children. I felt like I was in church…a
holy space! In that place, God spoke to us all through those
voices and assured us of our worth!
After a week of listening to other groups, my chorus, Voices
of Kentuckiana, finally performed. We were the very last chorus
to sing in San Jose. We put all our energy and all our
passion into the music, communicating our love, acceptance,
and our overwhelming “yes” to creation…to the music of life.
We sang about birth, choices in life, death, and life, and yes,
we sang about love. It was one of the most powerful moments
of my life.
My favorite song that we sang was “Even When God Is
Silent.” When the Allies liberated Cologne, Germany, in 1944,
they found this inscription on a wall in a cellar where Jews
hid from Nazis during Kristalnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.
It speaks, where I cannot:
I believe in the Sun, even when it is not shining.
I believe in Love, even when feeling it not.
I believe in God, even when God is silent.
As I sit here, writing, tears spring from my eyes as I think
about this: how it related to the writer, and how it relates to
me, my feelings about the church, God, everything! It brings
to mind one of my favorite hymns:
My life goes on in endless song,
above earth’s lamentation;
I catch the sweet, though far off hymn,
that hails a new creation.
No storm can shake my inmost calm,
while to that rock I’m clinging;
Since Christ is Lord of Heaven and Earth,
how can I keep from singing?
Thanks to GALA Choruses for renewing my faith, brightening
my days, and filling the world with song. ▼
Michael Purintun is a singer and lifelong Presbyterian living in
Louisville, Kentucky. He is active in More Light Presbyterians, and
sings as a tenor with Voices of Kentuckiana, Inner Voices (small
ensemble), in church, and with the Kentucky Opera Chorus.
“IF THESE CHURCHES ARE SILENT,
GAY CHORUSES THEMSELVES WILL SING OUT!”
MICHAEL PURINTUN
Fall 2001 23
He told me I looked like a Korean person
and I bowed lightly toward him,
my buzz cropped head bobbing like a lotus in the summer rain,
the sun was shining still and
he and I stood under his umbrella like two lovers
eyeing only
what we could see
without more time.
Minutes passed.
I can’t say that I knew him or he knew me in that moment
only that
we could feel something like
it is meant to be
when one human
finds another
in time
to say
thank you for being born.
that was only hours ago
and now it is Friday evening and the sun is setting
and I’ve come home from work and feel
changed by what has happened.
Buddha walked with Jesus today
and they sat together
at the entrance
of the temple
and he wrote his address on my namecard
and sitting by my side he said,
“come and see the mountains in Korea where I live,
follow me
and rest.”
they were the best words I heard all day.
Come.
See where I live.
Ride in my jeep over the mountain roads
and see the life of Buddha
in Korea.
I lived with Buddha when
I was younger, I tried to wash his feet
and meet his needs,
Christian that I am
and now much older than I feel,
I am glad
to find
faraway from ever finding home
someone
whose eyes
hold me
like
a
Lotus Blossom
in the pool
I stepped out of my own skin
and into heaven and with
the laughing monk
who shares the year of my birth
(The monk and I were both born in 1954!)
I could see
the way back to a place I long to go again
a place where
I let go of someone and
the way we touched so long ago
in spirit and in flesh.
Listen,
If you see the Buddha,
kiss him in Jesus’ name.
there is no shame in being real.
I became real today when
I bowed low and met him
in the rain under his umbrella
by the temple in the gentle sunlight where
we talked for minutes
that were like a lifetime;
and as I rose and left the Buddhist temple mountain,
I bowed low before the monk,
felt how easily
my hand found his
as his hand reached mine,
and then both bowed again
with palms drawn together in peace
I and
the monk, both strangers,
who meeting by the lotus pool
felt some kind of second grace
smiling in our amazed faces.
Lost in distant gazes that reflect rainbows,
I walk away thinking that I know nothing more than this
until we meet again
until we meet again
Come.
Follow me.
I will give you rest. ▼
Meeting a Buddhist Monk Today On the Way Home from Work
A poem based on meeting Jong-Woon Sunim
Charles Hill served as educator-missionary for the Presbyterian Church (USA) from 1978-
1998 in Korea in university undergraduate education. He has translated and produced Korean
plays in English and has been active in the human rights movement and democratization
struggle in Korea from 1978 to the present, as well as the peaceful reunification
movement. His last produced play was in Korea, called Second Sunrise, and dealt with
national and personal loss: the 1980 Kwangju People’s Uprising and resulting civilian massacre
and his own personal loss of his closest friend in Korea to death. The play is about
finding hope in the ashes to go on. Presently, he is a faculty member at the University of
Hawai‘i, Kapi‘olani, where he coordinates programs in international education.
Charles Hill (Korean name: Han Chulsu)
August 3, 2001, Honolulu, Hawai‘i
My partner, Tammy Lindahl, and I were both
ordained ministers, serving churches in rural
Missouri and carefully hiding our relationship.
Tammy came out in a dialogue on homosexuality on the
floor of Heartland Presbytery, effectively ending both of our
careers in parish ministry. In 1995, no longer able to work
in the church, I chose to set aside my ordination. It was
important for Tammy and me to impress upon our
presbytery the fact that we were only two of hundreds of
gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people of faith who
were active in the life and ministry of the church.
At the annual meeting of More Light Presbyterians that
summer, we asked LGBT friends and colleagues to send us a
stole, that we might hang them in the church where our
presbytery would be meeting on the day that I was to set
SO GREAT A
CLOUD OFWITNESSES
A PHOTO ESSAY OF THE
SHOWER OF STOLES
MARTHA JUILLERAT
aside my ordination. We were hoping to receive a couple of
dozen stoles; instead we received 80 stoles almost overnight.
After that presbytery meeting the stoles kept coming,
along with cards and letters. By the following spring we had
200. We bought suitcases at thrift stores and took them to
an annual meeting of More Light Churches in Rochester,
New York. Seven weeks later we had over 350 stoles! By
now we realized we had a sacred trust, and we committed
ourselves to creating a project that would allow us to share
this collection—and all of these stories—with the church.
24 Open Hands
To contribute a stole, arrange a display (partial
or full), or offer financial support, contact:
The Shower of Stoles Project
57 Upton Avenue S.
Minneapolis, MN 55404
612/377-8792
stoleproj@aol.com
www.showerofstoles.com
▼ A volunteer hangs stoles for a display
at Iliff Seminary in Denver.
Story of one of the stoles being
read to the congregation of First
United Methodist Church,
Boulder, Colorado.

▼ 2001 Presbyterian General
Assembly in Louisville, Kentucky.
Jack Hartwein-Sanchez
▼ First United Methodist Church in Omaha, Nebraska—
the Rev. Jimmy Creech’s former church.
▲ Stoles adorn walls, balconies, and worshipers at the More Light
Presbyterian worship during the recent General Assembly.
˛
I turn to You to be treated with dignity, O Gracious One,
For people walk by me as though I am not there;
Day by day, disregard undermines me.
My doubts nibble at me all day long,
And I see my misgivings mirrored all around me.
O Source of Truth, when I am afraid
Draw me to trust in You.
You who always call me by name,
In You I trust and sing for joy;
With You I am not afraid,
What can strangers do to me?
Day in and day out they are blind to who I am;
They see not the beauty You have given me,
But only the caricature of their imagining.
They watch only to be sure I do not step
Out of the role they have cast for my life.
I Turn to You to Be Treated with Dignity
Revisiting Psalm 56
Madeleine Manning
Sustaining
the Spirit
Waken them from the arrogance of their blinders;
You can’t let them play god, o God!
You have kept track of my efforts to fit in,
Gathered the tears of my isolation to be cherished,
Each one pooling in Your own heart.
When will these who erase my soul retreat ?
I call on You this day to waken them.
This I know, that God is for me.
In Truth, whose image I am, in Gift, whose worth I echo,
In Dignity I trust; what can mere ignorance do to me?
I will turn to you daily for confidence, o Wisdom.
I will thank you each time your Breath
Revives my soul from the thousand deaths
Inflicted by these who cannot see
The light of my life;
Cannot see in me
You, Light of my life. ▼
Fall 2001 25
The Shower of Stoles Project has expanded greatly in
recent years. The collection now contains hundreds and
hundreds of stoles—often with stories attached—from gay,
lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in well over a
dozen denominations, from the United Methodist
Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the
United Church of Christ to Southern and Free Will
Baptist. The stoles are displayed over a hundred times per
year throughout North America. ▼
▼ Martha Juillerat joins Bishop Calvin McConnell and wife, Velma, beside the
stole in which he was consecrated bishop in the United Methodist Church.
Declaring that he could no longer wear it as long as not all were free to
wear stoles, he transformed it into what is designated as a “signature stole”
(a stole signed by those who stand in solidarity with LGBT people) by
having members of the Pacific Northwest Annual Conference sign it.
▲ United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities.
Jack Hartwein-Sanchez
▲ The stoles adorn police barricades surrounding the Soulforce
demonstration during the 2000 Presbyterian General Assembly
in Long Beach, California.
A CELEBRATION OF PROVIDENCE A SHORT STORY
DAVID R. GILLESPIE
When he shows me the announcement, I grab it
from his hand and say, “Damn it, Mark! You
would think I still had some privacy around here!
Isn’t there some sort of federal law against opening another
person’s mail?” I stuff the letter back into the envelope and
throw it onto the coffee table. Sinking to the couch, I look
up at him and immediately feel guilty for my outburst, all
the while wishing I had checked the mail today. Fact is, I
usually do and every envelope which arrives bearing the
return address of Dabney Theological Seminary is hurriedly
tossed unopened into the trash.
I can see the hurt in his eyes and tell him how sorry I am.
He smiles and asks, “How about a cup of coffee?”
Mark has that way about him, always knowing the right
thing to do or say to make me feel better. It’s one of the
many things I love about him.
“Coffee’d be nice,” I say and he walks toward the
kitchen, his every step taken in by my eyes. He rounds the
corner and my eyes shift to the envelope on the coffee table.
The alumni association still refers to me as The Reverend Mr.
Thomas J. Knox even though the association president, and
all my other classmates for that matter, know I haven’t been
that for a long time. I graduated twenty-five years ago, back
during my time of lies, and haven’t been a reverend for
twenty-one of those years. You’d think they would have
caught on by now. I have.
The aroma of brewing coffee creeps into the den followed
by Mark bearing two mugs. He’s eight years younger
than my forty-nine and it shows; or at least I see it. I see it in
the way he walks, a spring in his step even now, here in the
den. I hear it in his voice, an enthusiasm which I seem to
have lost somewhere along the way, a vocabulary which at
times seems strange. The gray I see each morning in my hair
multiplying like fleas is conspicuously absent from his as is
the slight sagging I’ve noticed on my jaw line. I sometimes
feel invisible. He doesn’t see these things, or overlooks
them, and reminds me at least once each day how handsome
he thinks I am, like now when he says, “Here, good
looking.”
He hands me the coffee mug and joins me on the couch.
“A reunion would be fun,” he says.
“You think?”
“Absolutely. I could even go with you.”
“Oh, yeah,” I say, shifting one leg under the other and
turning toward him. “I’d say they probably haven’t had a
good queer burning down in Mississippi for at least five,
maybe six years.”
He scoots over closer to me. “You always become
sarcastic when you want to avoid something, T.J.”
We both laugh because he is right. I do. It’s a well
practiced habit developed during what seems to have been a
lifetime of equivocation.
His eyes twinkle. “I know,” he says, “I could go in drag.
That way you could tell them you’ve seen the error of your
ways. You know, a little makeup, a wig...” I’m laughing
outloud and he continues, “...some outrageous strapless
gown. Black and red, of course. Oh, and a pair of five inch
heels to top it off. Why we’d be the perfect couple.”
I lean over, kiss him and say, “We are the perfect
couple.”
He strokes his chin and says, “You think I should shave
or leave the goatee?”
I push him and say, “You ain’t right, boy,” and we both
laugh. Another thing about him. He makes me laugh just
when I need to. I kiss him again and say, “I love you.”
The impact of those three words still, after all this time
together, is not lost. It gives me pause when I utter them. So
much is embodied in them, those three simple words I hear
in my mind: I love him.
They are the words I uttered twenty-one years ago in
response to the question posed by a classmate from seminary,
Jason McCormick. Jason was serving on the commission
assigned the task of adjudicating the charges which had
been brought against me in the name of the Presbyterian
Church. I had loved Jason, too, but always in silence. It was
an unspoken affection and desire which had grown during
our years together in college and seminary. My first serious
crush I suppose. And my heart was glad when we both
accepted calls to churches in the same presbytery after
graduation. It was to this trusted friend and colleague, after
Mark and I met, that I had first revealed my secret, my
nature.
At the trial, after I had answered Jason’s question regarding
the nature of my feelings for Mark, a member of the
commission whom I did not know asked, “And what does
that love entail?” He knew damn well what that love
entailed. They all did. I must have had a questioning, if not
stupid, look on my face because he immediately followed
with a clarifying query. “Have you engaged,” he asked, “in
sexual intimacy with another man?” I’d like to give him
more credit than just simply wanting to know all the juicy
details. I’d like to. But I thought at the time, and still believe
today, that for those men it all boiled down to sex, as if a
person is defined by whom he or she sleeps with rather than
the love which emanates from one’s inner being. Love
didn’t seem to matter to them at all back then; not at all. It’s
all that matters to me now as I sit here next to the man who
is my second self.
In recalling that time, the laughter and joy of a few
minutes ago has been replaced with a silent sadness and I
feel Mark’s hand on the back of my neck. “You okay?” he asks.
I say yes, but he knows where I am. He leans back and
puts his feet up on the coffee table while his hand rubs my
back. I notice how his heel obscures the return address on
26 Open Hands
the envelope and I wish I could conceal the memories with
such ease. I close my eyes and see faces, young men laughing
across the pool table in the seminary’s student center. I
see serious faces, almost pained, staring intently at the front
of the classroom while Professor Klooster scribbles Hebrew
words on the chalk board. I see Jason’s face, a face I had
longed to touch and kiss, and other classmates sitting
around a table drinking beer, eating pizza and debating the
presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. I am with them
again and they want to talk of transubstantiation while I
want to extol the virtues of loving another man. But I am
not there. I am here sitting next to Mark who speaks. “Do
you remember the first time we met?” he asks. I hear only a
muffled sound and say, “What?” “The first time we met. Do
you remember it?” he asks again. He snuggles closer and
says, “I remember. When you walked into dad’s restaurant
that day I thought you were the most gorgeous creature I’d
ever seen. And when dad told me who you were I could
have died. I don’t think I’d ever lusted for a preacher
before.”
I gently jab him with my elbow and we both giggle. I tell
him I thought he was pretty hot that day, too, and he says,
“Really? You never told me.” I look at him with incredulous
eyes, but I know he’s right. How could I have told him back
then? He was working the summer in his father’s restaurant
in Kingstree and I was into my second year as pastor of
Cedar Swamp Presbyterian, a congregation of fifty or so
souls located a few miles from town. His father, Leland
Harrington, was a member of our church session and I
made it a point to eat in his restaurant at least once a
month. I had heard Leland and his wife, Mildred, speak of
Mark, of course, and had seen photographs of him on my
visits to the Harrington house but neither had prepared me
for what I felt when he was introduced to me by this father
that hot June day.
It was Mark who first suggested we get together sometime
which ended up being a shopping trip to nearby
Florence that concluded with our making out like a couple
of high schoolers at Lynches River State Park. After Mark
returned to the University of South Carolina that fall, I
began spending my off days in Columbia, driving up on
Sunday evening and returning to Kingstree early Wednesday
morning. I told the Session I was visiting an elderly aunt.
Living a lie sometimes requires telling one. Finally I told the
truth to Jason McCormick and began my new life of
honesty and authenticity, the one I live now with this
wonderful man.
I look at Mark and ask, “Any regrets?”
“None whatsoever,” he says, then asks, “You?”
“Just that I didn’t meet you sooner,” I say and he touches
my face and says, “You and I met when we were supposed
to.” He sits up straight and says, “Listen, I’m going to go
start something for dinner. Any special requests?”
I tell him no, that whatever he wants to make will be
fine, and watch him walk into the kitchen. I look at the
envelope on the coffee table and think how stupid, how
childish I am to have let the announcement bother me so—
for it was the thing itself, and not Mark’s opening of it,
which had really set me off in the first place. I pick it up and
pull the letter out and read it again. The words scream at me
now: “to celebrate God’s providence in our lives,” it reads
and the truth of Mark’s statement slaps me in the face. I
would not be living here now with the man I love had I not
attended Dabney Theological Seminary. I laugh and wad the
paper and envelope up and toss them into the trash can. I
stand and walk to the kitchen, quietly, and come up behind
Mark, sliding my arms around his waist and he places his
hands on mine.
“You going?” he asks.
“I don’t think so,” I say, then ask, “Know what?”
“What?”
“I am so glad you came into my life. God must love me.”
“I think so,” he says. ▼
David R. Gillespie is a former Presbyterian
minister turned writer living in Anderson,
South Carolina. His nonfiction has appeared
in numerous journals and magazines, his fiction
in ByLine and Lonzie’s Fried Chicken,
and his poetry in Timelapse. He may be contacted
at drgsc@yahoo.com.
When I make my home in fear,
I tell myself, “There is no god.”
I trust no one completely.
I trust myself least of all.
God looks out from the heart of my heart
To see where my pain may be consoled,
Seeking the wound to be made whole.
The lifelines that wove me with hope have fallen away,
There is no prospect for good in my surroundings,
No, not one.
I have no certainty; all I knew crumbles before systems
Chewing up people as casually as bread,
And never questioning their entitlement.
And I live daily in great terror
In terror such as surely has not been known before,
For I question—I question, but cannot trust myself
To find my way—within? outside?—my system.
How can I hope in Love when I live in shame,
Live in the fear that Love has rejected me?
O that tenderness may bloom among the peoples!
“I place all my trust in you,” says the Holy One—
O, how terrible, how joyful to be trusted by such a One! ▼
Seeking the Wound to Be Made Whole
Revisiting Psalm 53
Madeleine Manning
Sustaining
the Spirit
Fall 2001 27
28 Open Hands
don’t you see the irony
you ask God to bless you
for murdering me
you pray aloud
as you torture me
I see tiny flames
you want to castrate me
I’m human, I’m tender
I love, I work
you strike me with an altar cross
oh God it hurts
please
I want to go home
water my plants
feed my cat
hear Bach
love someone
you feel me
measure my size
a closeted prelate
with bad breath
whispers
“tell a lie for Christ”
Malcolm Boyd is poet/writer-in-residence at the Cathedral
Center of St. Paul in Los Angeles. An Episcopal
priest since 1955, he is the author of more than 25
books, including the spiritual classic, Are You Running
with Me, Jesus? He has just published Simple
Grace: A Mentor’s Guide to Growing Older
(Westminster John Knox Press) and Running With
Jesus: The Prayers of Malcolm Boyd (Augsburg Fortress
Press). He lives in Los Angeles with his longtime
life partner, author and activist Mark Thompson.
why me?
I’m your son
your brother
your friend
your schoolteacher
your pastor
my God, my God
why forsake me?
your angry crowd
sings a hymn
throws prayer books on fire
makes it burn brighter
my genitals are hanging
for puritanical voyeurs
your so practiced
to use old stereotypes
to condemn me
like selected Leviticus
like Paul out of context
like Sodom and Gomorrah (again??!!)
to make me appear
evil, immoral
irresponsible, unworthy
in seductively selected words
yet another “church resolution” ▼
MALCOLM
BOYD
PUZZLE
Fall 2001 29
ISBN # 0-9701568-0-4
Order from your denominational Welcoming organization
or from www.RMNetwork.org
Don’t miss this opportunity to “help the rest of the church
rediscover its soul.” —from book review by James B. Nelson
$14.00
Shaping Sanctuary
Proclaiming God’s Grace
in an Inclusive Church
A collection of essays, sermons,
liturgies, and hymns from the
Welcoming movement. Valuing
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and
Transgender persons as an
integral part of the Body of
Christ. Exploring themes of
embodiment theology, integrating
spirituality and sexuality,
and inclusive worship.
Includes an eight-week group
study guide.
Dear Friends of Open Hands,
This fall I visited a small church in Dayton, Ohio. The pastor told me that in
her training for ministry, she was encouraged to subscribe to a number of helpful
publications, including Open Hands. But when she began her pastorate, limited
finances and time required her to cut down on her magazines. Open Hands was one
of two publications she continued to take, both because she enjoys reading it and
believes it’s vital to her ministry.
Many of you feel the same way.
But there are friends of yours who may not even know Open Hands exists!
At this holiday season, start the new year right for your friends, family, pastors,
and church leaders who would benefit from a gift subscription to Open Hands.
On the next page, extend your own subscription by a year and/or give as many gift
subscriptions as you can.
And consider giving an additional, generous, tax-deductible contribution to
support our work, especially as we become self-supporting during the coming year.
All additional donations will receive a personal note of thanks from me.
Gay poet W. H. Auden wrote of Christ’s nativity: “Remember the gift, the one
from the manger; it means only this: we can dance with a stranger.”
Open Hands teaches us how to dance together as God’s beloved children!
Please support our “dance lessons”!
With warm hugs and many thanks,
Chris Glaser
Editor, Open Hands
ecumenical welcoming
Bible study resource
on homosexuality
✦ seven-session study series ✦
For more information
or to place order contact:
Reconciling
Ministries Network
3801 N. Keeler Avenue
Chicago, IL 60641
voice: 773/736-5526
fax: 773/736-5475
www.RMNetwork.org
Claiming
the
Promise
▼ Examines biblical references to
same-sex conduct in light of the
broader biblical message which
affirms that we are children or
heirs of the Promise.
▼ Explores biblical authority and
biblical interpretation.
▼ Discusses “gracious hospitality,”
“gift-ed sexuality,” and
“inclusive holiness.”
▼ Tackles hard questions of “right
relationship,” lust/love, and
sexual responsibility.
▼ Calls us all to live out the
Promise as reconciling disciples.
Includes adaptation
for using with youth
study book $5.95
leader’s guide $9.95
discounts for
bulk quantities
$20 (U.S. currency) per year (four issues). $25 outside U.S.
Please make checks payable to “Open Hands/RMN.”
Mail to Open Hands, 3801 N. Keeler Ave., Chicago, IL 60641.
❑ Please extend my present subscription by one year.
❑ Please send gift subscriptions to names on the right.
❑ Enclosed is a tax-deductible contribution of $_________.
Gift cards should read:
Enclosed is my total payment and/or donation of $_________ OR
Charge $_________ to my VISA MASTERCARD (Circle one.)
# ___________________________________________ Expiration _______/_______
Name on Card
Signature
My Name
Address
City/State/Zip
Local Church
Denomination
Shaping an Inclusive Church FOR FRIENDS, FAMILY, PASTORS, CHURCH LEADERS:
Name
Address
City/State/Zip
Local Church (if known)
Denomination (if known)
Name
Address
City/State/Zip
Local Church (if known)
Denomination (if known)
Name
Address
City/State/Zip
Local Church (if known)
Denomination (if known)
CLIP & MAIL
The AIDS Quilt is a creation of the people, by the
people, and for the people. It is an expression of
anguish, compassion, determination, and love. One
panel is a scream, another an elegant memorial, yet another
a scrapbook of family photos and mementos reflecting
accomplishments and personalities.
Pictured here are a few examples of panels with identifying
religious symbols. These symbols challenge religious
people who would separate themselves from people with
HIV/AIDS and perpetuate the stigma of AIDS. These symbols
comfort the often closeted religious people who
mourn the loss of their own full identity even as they
mourn the loss of friends, parishioners, or pastors.
Most of the creators of the AIDS Quilt do not see themselves
as artists, but rather, people who have more in their
hearts than words can say. This is an art form that brings
straight and gay together, that reaffirms family and spiritual
values, that unites for a moment those who have
passed with those who have created and those who view
the panels.
Visit the panels yourself at www.aidsquilt.org. ▼
Susan Button is a retired special educator. She is a member
of Centenary-Chenango Street United Methodist Church in
Binghamton, New York, where she is a frequent speaker on
gay Christian issues. She is also one of the cofounders of Broome
County Affirmation which has met weekly to worship since
December, 1990. A group of her friends created her husband
Phillip’s AIDS Quilt panel (not shown).
Photos (unless otherise noted): Chris Glaser
30 Open Hands
AIDS Quilt as Folk Art
Susan Button
Fall 2001 31
Alan NeJame
Alan NeJame
Susan Button
32 Open Hands
By the late 1980s, the tragic effects of escalating deaths
and multiple loss of partners, loved ones, and friends
from HIV/AIDS hung like a cloud over the lives of the
members of our congregation. Every week the prayer list
grew and every month the number of funeral and memorial
services increased. We were a community consumed by
death and dying. Our people were experiencing so many
deaths, so rapidly, that there was not really time for any
closure or healing to occur before the next death occurred.
In addition to this massive loss of young men in the peak of
their lives (mostly men aged 20-40), our members were
experiencing the natural cycle of deaths of family members.
In 1989, as a way of remembering all those who had died
within our family of faith, one of our deacons, David
Muller, suggested we create a Memorial Quilt. The idea of
this quilt was similar to the AIDS Memorial Quilt, a creation
of The Names Project, but our quilt was not limited only to
those who died of AIDS. Our quilt is a unique combination
of friends and family members. Some panels memorialize
one person, some panels have many names.
The quilt covers the front wall of the chancel and has
two side panels. Each panel of the quilt is 12 inches by 12
inches and any member of the church may remember a
loved one by making a quilt square. New panels are dedicated
on All Saints Sunday, the first Sunday in November,
and the quilt hangs in the sanctuary throughout the month.
One of the most important parts of the quilt was the way
it enabled people to grieve. Making a panel for a loved one
took a lot of thought. The rows of the quilt are in muted
tones of rainbow colors and each person had the option of
picking a color and location for their individual panel. Each
person made her or his own panel, in a folk art fashion.
Finding one or two symbols that summarized a loved one’s
life involved a real thought process which also brought
about many painful and wonderful memories of their loved
one. Every symbol imaginable is used in the quilt: flowers,
hats, embroidered lace work, a camera, a tree of life,
rainbows, crosses and even Mickey Mouse ears (after all
this is Southern California, and “the little mouse” is our
mascot!).
Most people said that making their panels for the
Memorial Quilt was one of the most helpful grieving
experiences they
had. So many of the
panels are sown with
tears and thread!
That has certainly
been my experience.
The year that we
designed the quilt, I
made a panel for my
infant nephew who
died twenty-one days
after birth. Since he was a boy, I chose one of the blue
panels. I decided a teddy bear would be the appropriate
symbol, with his name (he was named after me) above. I
looked at teddy bear appliqués in many fabric and craft
stores, but they all seemed “too perfect” for what I wanted. I
wanted a teddy bear that was not perfect to memorialize a
child that was not born perfect. Finally, I decided I would
make one. So I gathered a soft fuzzy brown material,
purchased some batting and started away. With almost
every stick of my needle, tears of sadness and love flowed
forth! The teddy bear was “not perfect,” but it was perfect
for what I wanted.
On All Saints Sunday the panels of our Memorial Quilt
were dedicated. A Remembrance Book was created and
many members shared the story of their loved one on that
first day of dedication.
At the time, we weren’t sure if the quilt would be a “one
time” experience or what its future would be. But as each of
the individual squares were sewn together, and once the
quilt was hung in the sanctuary, it was clear that this would
become a living treasure of the church.
Every year since 1989, members are invited to make
panels for loved ones who have died. New panels are added
every year on All Saints Sunday. Over the years, I have
added panels memorializing both my father and mother,
and dear friends who have died. Each time, it is a wonderful
process of reflecting, grieving and remembering. The quilt
for me, and all of us at West Hollywood Presbyterian, has
become a living memorial of those who have come and
gone before us, and it is one of the most beloved traditions
of the church. ▼
Dan Smith is the pastor of West Hollywood Presbyterian
Church, one of the first More Light congregations in the
Presbyterian Church (USA). He is one of the first openly gay
pastors serving congregations in that denomination, and served
on the General Assembly task force on human sexuality whose
report brought controversy in the early 1990s. The church is a
progressive congregation, serving the lesbian, gay, and supportive
heterosexual communities in Los Angeles.
A CONGREGATIONAL MEMORIAL QUILT
DAN SMITH