I was charting out some future blog posts earlier today and until I set words to keyboard, here’s a selection of books that cover some of the topics you suggested, These are all books that have been on my shelf at one time or another and have had a powerful impact on my own spiritual development. There are hundreds of others but these are the first ones that popped into my mind.

Forgiveness

• Shame and Grace: Healing the Shame We Don’t Deserve – Lewis Smedes
• Forgive and Forget: Forgiving the Hurts We Don’t Deserve – Lewis Smedes
• The Art of Forgiving: When You Need To Forgive And Don’t Know How – Lewis Smedes

Reconciliation

• Reconciling Journey: A Devotional Workbook for Lesbian and Gay Christians – Michal Anne Pepper
• The Grace of Coming Home: Spirituality, Sexuality, and the Struggle for Justice – Melanie Morrison

Christian Identity

• Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith – Barbara Brown Taylor
• Altar in the Word: A Geography of Faith – Barbara Brown Taylor
• Take this Bread: A Radical Conversion – Sara Miles
• Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith – Nora Gallagher
• Practicing Resurrection: A Memoir of Work, Doubt, Discernment, and Moments of Grace – Nora Gallagher
• The Cloister Walk – Kathleen Norris
• Dakota: A Spiritual Geography – Kathleen Norris
• Here if You Need Me: A True Story – Kate Braestrup

My favorite picks from the photographs I’ve taken over the past three years

Martin Luther’s Commentary on Galatians, one of the greatest glimpses on grace ever! Do yourself a huge favor and print out this PDF and read it with Bible in hand.

A couple fun links I’ve been enjoying recently: What Should I Read Next?, Clay Monsters, and Art Thread.

With Coming Out Day (October 11) fast approaching, go in your kitchen and make these awesome rainbow cupcakes. Can you imagine a sweeter way of letting your loved ones know you’re gay? Now get in the kitchen and start baking!

And be sure to visit all the dedicated and fine folks over on the SisterFriends Blog Roll.

See you next week SisterFriends and BrotherBuddies.

For those receiving blog content through email subscription, a shockwave version of ASTEROIDS has been embedded in the space above. Come on over and play!

Yesterday I was working away on an upcoming entry that follows up on the topic of coming out but when my RSS feed notified me there was a new entry posted to John’s site I closed up shop and headed over his way where I read “I’m Only Saying: If My Gay Loved Ones Go To Hell, I’m Going With Them.”

…If my gay friends, whom my life experience tells me can no sooner stop being gay than I can stop being straight, have to go to hell after they die, then I’m going with them. Too many gays and lesbians in my life have been too good to me in this life for me to leave them behind in the next. I won’t do it. That’s really all I was saying.

What I am not saying (and certainly haven’t said) is that the Bible is wrong, or should be changed, or that fundamentalist or “conservative” Christians are wrong or should change. I’m not even saying that it’s true that gays and lesbians are born homosexual in the same way I was born straight. Maybe I’m wrong about that. I don’t care. I leave those kinds of questions to the future, and to those in the present who, unlike me, find debates on insolvable matters engaging. (And you better believe I have no interest in alienating my fundamentalist and “conservative” Christian friends, for whom I have nothing but love and respect. I wish I had blood relatives who’d ever been as good to me as some of my conservative brothers and sisters in Christ have been.)

Again: I’m saying nothing more than this: If any of my dear gay friends get condemned to hell for no other reason than that they’re gay, then I will choose to go to hell with them. I am sure Christ will let me make that choice. I’m not sure of a lot of things, but I’m positive Christ understands sacrificing oneself for the love of others. (John Shore, Suddenly Christian)

If John, the married straight guy, were to sit down with Anita, the partnered gay girl, and we were to weave our way through the minutia of homosexuality and the Bible, we’d no doubt find places where our ideas diverged, yet the differences wouldn’t matter all that much because ultimately John and I would find ourselves talking less about the finer points of homosexuality that were at odds and more about matters of faith we share in common. We’d talk about Jesus, maybe kick around some thoughts on atonement or reconciliation or hey, how about this, the depth and breath and height of God’s love. Christians talking about the love of God. Imagine! The reason we’d be able to navigate beyond the hot topic and onto the essentials is that overarching our interaction would be a shared sense of respect for the other, recognition of the other’s faith in Christ, and appreciation for the person they were without judgment. I believe the same would be the case with Shush and Jon and Adam and Christian and others.

I’m rambling on about this for a couple reasons:

1. I was really moved by what he wrote and wanted to share it with you. If you appreciated his post I’d invite you to go leave a positive comment over at his site. I know that would mean something to him.
2. Many of us came from or are still walking in the evangelical Christian tradition where the rhetoric concerning homosexuality remains negative and oppositional, but there’s another voice raising up among evangelical Christianity. While their theological positions of homosexuality are perhaps varied from ours and from each other, they recognize GLBTQ Christians as equal relatives (not distant black-sheep cousins) in the family of God and they express a commitment for GLBTQ people to gain access to equal treatment under the law.
3. These are blogging communities where you can contribute your wisdom and insights as a Christian and they’ll be received with respect by the blogger and by the majority, though not all, of their readership. While I hope SisterFriends will be your home base, I encourage you to visit these other blogs and get involved, but not only in conversations involving homosexuality. When we’re on the journey to reconcile our faith and sexuality, our focus can understandably become somewhat myopic but it’s good to occasionally lay that all aside and get engaged in other faith questions you feel passionate about or are interested in. Please check out the BlogRoll on the right column for additional blogs and websites.

So that’s about all I wanted to say. Now…go click a link and feel the love!

Shush over at !*[emphatic asterisk] has posted a couple entries in recent days I’d encourage you to read. The first is titled simply enough Gay Marriage, and the excerpt below is testament to why I’m starting to think the world of this young woman and have become such a pathetic groupie:

If I have a piece of paper that says that I can sleep at my husband’s side every night, even if he’s in the hospital and breathing his last, everyone else who wants that piece of paper should be able to get it. That doesn’t mean that pastors and priests will now be FORCED to wed gays, any more than they now are forced to wed every snot-nosed heterosexual kid who says he’s ready.

Just how much do you love that?! The other entry is Please, DO Think of the Children and addresses the question of gay parenting.

…Ask yourself if the worst thing a parent does is love another person of the same gender, does that somehow disqualify them from parenthood? What if they love their kids, hold them when they can’t sleep at night, make them homecooked meals, send brownies to the teachers, do their homework with them, hem their pants, and also hold hands with another man? Does the last item make all of the others mean less?

Shush keeps it real by un-complicating the issues and breaking things down to the bottom line. The beauty of that is opposing such positions are a little more difficult to argue convincingly against since guiding principles like justice, grace, and love seldom get wrestled into the corner and scream “Uncle!

Cecelia at Closeted Pastor recently shared something I found to be quite moving in her post on New Initiatives. She shares quite honestly her own reflections on being a pastor, gay, closeted, and the internal tensions and questioning that come with being in that position.

And lastly, Adam at Pomomusings gives a brief bit of info on BGLASS 2008 Week at Princeton Theological Seminary. BGLASS stands for Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian and Straight Supporters. As an aside, his site is bare bones graphically today but normally it’s a visually sweet site. So sweet that I took his customized theme and tweaked it for SisterFriends-Together.

If you have a little time, use it to look over the insights and reflections shared by these three folks and the diverse range of comments they inspired among their readership. While some comments echo the more negative rhetoric that many of us are all too familiar with, you’ll also see there are others out there offering a different voice in respect to GLBTQ people and justice. If you read something by Shush, Cecelia, or Adam that you really like or even if it just gets you thinking, let them know by adding a comment to their post. Pass on the love!

Here’s a tip. The more entries you read, the funnier they get. I’ve read back through the past three months over the last hour and am at the present moment downright giddy. Congested but giddy.