Making Up Holy Days: The paucity of LGBTQ+ commemorations in our calendar

Campus Ministries run on a shortened liturgical calendar... Most Christian communities get 54 Sundays every year, we get 34. There is a deep sense then that everyone has to count for something. Generally we roll with the calendar at large, only alternating if we get a chance to celebrate a Prayer Book Holy Day. What I realized, however, were that these days were not giving us precise moments to enter into the turmoil, and revelations, of the past two centuries of Christianity, especially as they impact the lives of the students. As a community I recognized we needed to confront these realities within the context of our liturgical life.

I wanted us to engage with subversive theology and movements in the church. I wanted us to recognize the problems of following the status quo and ignoring the smaller voices. Located in the south west we needed to look at the troubled history between indigenous peoples and the Anglican church, so David Pendleton Oakerhater was transferred. No christian community in America can exist, in my mind, and not take the time out to confront the issue of the Church and Race, so Absolam Jones became a Sunday observance. Feminist critique has been a major component of unshackling the church and bringing about fresh movement for the Spirit, Li Tim-Oi is, for us, a Prayer Book Holy Day.

It was at this point that I hit a wall... at this point that I began to feel a little bit of burn... at this point it was asked if my ministry might be "too queer". For a variety of reasons, the infancy of the movement being one, there are not commemorations that readily speak to the recent history of queer theory, queer practice, and queer pastoral realities and the church in the way they do around issues of racism and feminism. Thus I took a step, with a bit of hesitancy and a bit of joy, and decided to take two days noted in my secular universities calendar and make them points of observance in worship.

The first is Coming Out Day. The reality is that every student comes to college with bits and pieces of who they are in the closet. Some of it is stuff they have been struggling with their entire lives, some of it is stuff they had not realized till halfway through their third semester. They need to know that our community is one that embraces honesty and the process of working ourselves out. We know the term, and we talk primarily about it, in regards to LGBTQ+ issues but its a reality that impacts every one of my students. My LGBTQ+ students are simply primary examples and mentors in the practice. The celebration falls on October 11th, which is a perfect point in our year for there to have been enough building of trust but still plenty of space for self revelation. [For our propers, see below.]

The second is Transgender Day of Remembrance. We note it on the Sunday closest to November 20th, the actual date of the commemoration. The reality is that noting sins past does not bring us to reflect on the current acts of horror and violence perpetrated against minorities in our communities today. A basic look at the statistics, which individuals are most likely to be the victim of a deadly hate crime, brings us to an awareness of the situation of transgender women of colour. This is the day that we confront systematic discrimination and the violence it feeds daily in our society, we are simply doing so by bringing a light into the midst of the community that our society would most like to keep hidden. I would strongly prefer that this not be a pressing day for us to commemorate, the caustic reality of our society and the message we as Christians need to make against it make this date a necessity of ministry. [For our propers, see below.]

So there they are, our two made up Holy Days. We are a Sunday evening worshiping community, fully under the auspices of "Order for Eucharist" with a general boon from our Bishop. Nominally the rubrics not only allow but promote our community taking up these days of pastoral concern. There needs to come a day, however, when we small communities are not "making up" commemorations to provide for the queer community the basic level of remembrance and commemoration the church currently provides other Subversive Movements of the Spirit.

Our Liturgical Propers for these days...

Coming Out Day Propers:

Collect: God, who made us for Yourself, to show Your goodness in us: awaken the life-giving power of your holy nature within us; bring us to a true and living faith in You, make us hunger and thirst for the birth of Christ’s spirit in our souls, so that all that is within us, every inward thought and outward deed, may be turned toward you and your heavenly working in our persons. Amen

Revelation 7:13-17, Psalm 116, Luke 12:2-12

Transgender Day of Remembrance Propers:

Collect: Blessed Creator, who loves creation in all its vast depths of variety, grant us your vision that we might see the created beauty of each person and no longer be blinded by sinful notions of gender that lead to the harm and death of our siblings in the family of Jesus Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, now and forevermore. Amen.

Genesis 32:24-30, Psalm 139:1-5, John 10:11-18

 

A new strategy: where the Episcopal Church fears to go in LGBTQ+ inclusion.

I was a closeted gay teen in the nineties and initially I was presented two possibilities about what would happen if I came out as a gay man. My Anglo-Catholic mentors, with whom I was out inside the confessional booth, opened up the possibility of monastic celibacy and discernment towards the priesthood. The broad and low church clergy and leaders with whom I had contact spoke of reparation therapy. Eventually I discovered Integrity. They offered me a third option. I could be an out gay man, I could have a partner, I could be a priest… as long as everything about my life mirrored that of the heterosexual norms of the church.   

Where does our welcome end?

If these three modes were characters on a improve stage, the comedy would be flat. Decades before I was born they stopped being able to be receptive to one another. Where once there might have been space for dialogue, growth, and understanding there is now only space for stimuli-response. Every group exists with its own cultured positivism, the surety that they have the authority on the subject at hand and the right actions to perform. They have created immutable concepts of orthodoxy and orthopraxy from which they shan’t be moved. It a stalwart example of the decadent heresy of partisanship in which the church so regularly bathes.

Now, to be clear, I realize that I am painting with a broad brush and at points doing a disservice to members and subsets of the various groups. This account is based on my personal experience with groups over decades, striving to process these experiences with peers, and quite often finding my experiences echoed back to me. It comes out of a continued longing for a safe place in the church for myself and also those around me, queer or otherwise, and the frustration I feel about not finding such a space.  The consistent reality that I have had to face is a need to choose a side and know that alignment with one means ostracization, if not worse, from the other.

I want to start then by going back to before these three groups had devolved to less than improv characters on a stage.  I want to, in fact, go back to 1963, a decade before homosexuality would stop being treated as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association. A time when we were legitimately still asking whether homosexuality was as natural as heterosexuality or if it was a problematic acquisition from the natural heterosexual state. It was at this point which a rather wonderful dense text was published by Martin Thornton: English Spirituality.

Now this text is, at its heart, an attempt to create an Anglo-Catholic reading of English History. It is not a text attempting to engage pressing social issues of its era. There comes a point, however, where Thornton is attempting to clarify the theological methods of Tomas Aquinas and chooses to bring up a question of his time. He chose to address the issue of homosexuality, and wrote:

“It is difficult to distinguish between innate characteristics, or “nature”, and acquired habits formed by circumstances. This difficulty must be accepted and its subtlety recognized, but the doctrine remains. Homosexuality is an example, for this can be almost subconsciously acquired, as a developing tendency, or it can be an innate characteristic. In the former case, the tendency should be fought, for it is but an excrescence upon nature; in the latter case it is part of nature, which can be accepted and ultimately sanctified. What must be avoided is the abominable heresy that the “Christian Character” implies a rigid uniformity; that rather than sanctifying our own God-made selves we should ape some other real or imaginary character”
(English Spirituality, Wipf and Stock, 1963, page 133.)

Finding this paragraph in my late teens was a God send for me. It provided me an approach to theological and spiritual dissonance around my faith and sexuality that gave me a balm of peace I had not known in my entire life. Unfortunately my finding of it was not well received by any of the three groups. The Anglo-Catholics, who had introduced me to Martin Thornton, did not want to engage the possibility his approach would allow for a change in their approach towards homosexual individuals. The broad and low churchmen were not exceptionally interested in any argument based in Thomism. Those in and about Integrity were strongly advocating I stop caring about Thornton, Aquinas, or any of the tradition that challenged the concept of including conforming members of the LGBTQ+ community.   

The resistance is understandable as what Thornton puts forward strongly critiques all three. Its first critique is towards those who consider homosexuality to be an acquired deviation. Thornton was still using a theory of Freud that some individuals took up homosexuality as an acquired trait. Even though Freud himself noted it was inherently impossible to “cure” homosexuality many have attempted this impossibility. As our scientific understanding of sexuality has grown since 1963 it is now recognized that sexuality and sex are naturally formed by a complex series of factors we do not fully understand and are not acquired traits. At this point what science has revealed to us is that individual’s who acquire LGBTQ+ identities as a developed trait, if they exist at all, are an exceptionally small minority subset of the LGBTQ+ community. That across the board individuals who identify in the midst of the LGBTQ+ community are expressing their natural characteristics.

To state this in another way, for a long time we considered members of the LGBTQ+ community to be guilty of acquiring their LGBTQ+ identity unless proven otherwise. At this point medical science has shown, repeatedly, that an LGBTQ+ identity can be taken as an inherit naturally occurring characteristic of an individual with the rare exception being a case of acquired psychosis. Our theological and pastoral response to the LGBTQ+ community must be based on the idea that their characteristics are inherently part of their nature.

The next twist we have to deal with is recognizing that the Anglo-Catholic response I encountered and the response from Integrity are, in fact, the same response. Both groups take LGBTQ+ identity to be an inherent trait in need of sanctification. Their difference is simply in the allowable mechanisms for that sanctification. Both expect “that the ’Christian Character’ implies a rigid uniformity” and that conforming to this uniformity will bring about sanctification. The Anglo-Catholic expectation being those not called to biologically procreative sex must conform to a call to monasticism, or at least celibacy. What Integrity has sought is that LGBTQ+ individuals and families be able to conform to the rigid uniformity of individuals and families already existing in the Episcopal Church. Members of the LGBTQ+ community who can readily conform to expected gender expressions, norms, and family systems we already have in our church should be free to do so. What happens if someone does not pass well in their gender expression, of if that expression is not a clear choice of either male or female... what happens if there is a twenty or thirty year age difference between spouses... what happens if someone's black slacks are neoprene not wool... 

Creating a space in which people are allowed to sanctify their own selves and not ape some other real or imaginary character is a difficult process. LGBTQ+ individuals cannot be expected to ape real or imagined characters of the non-LGBTQ+ community. Our theological and pastoral approach to them has to recognize their capacity to sanctify their own selves within our communities. Yes, this means that some LGBTQ+ individuals will be called to celibacy and monastic life. Yes, this means that some LGBTQ+ couples will be called to monogamy and married life. Yes, this means that some LGBTQ+ individuals are naturally going to assimilate into expectations of Episcopal norms. These are real characters of being across the spectrum. The issue is that the Episcopal Church is not called to be a safe space just for those people, LGBTQ+ and elsewise, for whom our norms is the real character of their being… The Episcopal Church is called to create the community that allows individuals to sanctify their God-made selves, to become Christian Characters, not ape our preexisting notions of “Christian character”.

The reality, at least from what I hear from my peers who are the younger leaders of the Episcopal Church, is that we want a church that takes both the historic voices of the church and the current voices of the LGBTQ+ community seriously. That there is a recognition that the “Christian character” espoused by any one group, Thomists, Integrity, or other… is going to have some major problems to it. That the goal of Christian Community is to bring individuals to a point where they can be open to sanctifying their God-made selves and place aside a set of expectations to which we must conform and ape. Until we can move beyond the expectations of positivism, that one group or individual has it right, we will continue to cut individuals off from a space where they can experience sanctification.

Memorial Service Worksheet Episcopal BCP 1979