Gifted by Otherness: 4 of 6

June 9, 2008

We Show Forth the Courage to Live Whole Lives Before God and the World.

A human being comes into the world in wholeness with everything a human life can possibly contain all muddled together in one flesh-bound package, and then something happens. Society, religion, loving authority figures, not so loving authority figures and peers show up on the scene and a young life that had known nothing but to be just who she was, do what she felt and say what she thought is instructed, threatened and cajoled into being and doing and thinking something else. Yes, children need help learning how to keep from acting out on all their emotions but somewhere in the process what children seem to pick up is that it’s not just the acting out that’s wrong but the feelings that fueled them. “You shouldn’t be mad at her, she was only trying to help.” “Come on now, there’s nothing to be sad about.” “Stop crying. There’s no reason for that!”

As we get older the major influence in our life shifts from the context of home to school and right away we can see that anyone who’s too different, from how they speak to what they wear runs the risk of being ostracized and so we learn to adapt our interests, our likes and our dislikes, our dress and even our speech and mannerisms to fit in to the crowd. We want to belong even if it means occasionally putting aside who we really are and what we really want to be like everyone else.

Enter that brand of Christianity that’s held together in rules and lived out in churches where people are taught that their feelings and desires are to be denied as corrupt, too tainted by the flesh to be trusted. Language that’s familiar to many who’ve spent any time in such churches includes words like “putting down, denying, and submitting.” I don’t argue that all those have their place within the Christian life but not when those disciplines are being held over people to bring them into conformity with the churches ideology rather than encouraged to assist them in becoming more like Christ; not when those who are denying self are cutting of parts of who they really are and in the process losing their own soul.

Between the messages of childhood, the peer-influenced life of adolescence and the religion-based calls to deny self is it any wonder that people have lost touch with who they really are; not knowing what it is they really feel or what it is they even want at the core of their being? It shows up in so many ways. Not a day goes by that somewhere in this world a therapist is sitting down with a first-time client and after listening to the unfolding of a heart-wrenching story asks “And how did that make you feel?” only to receive a baffled “I don’t know” in reply. Recovery rooms are filled with people who muddied up their lives with too much alcohol or food or sex or material things in an attempt to numb real feelings they didn’t think they should have or to search for something they couldn’t find because they didn’t even know what it was they were looking for. Today someone will take their life because by force or default they’ve been living a life that was never theirs to begin with and they can’t bear the falsehood and emptiness another day longer. People are hurting everywhere, living fragmented lives, as they try to find the pieces that seem to be missing.

This was my own experience that I wrote about earlier in my coming-out story:

As the years passed, I found myself pastoring in full-time ministry in a position that provided me with incredible opportunities among people I deeply loved working along side. I was doing the very thing I had always wanted to do and I loved it. I had developed an amazing circle of friends, a wonderful family, and had a nice home. And yet, even though my life was good, there was something underneath that felt incomplete or missing from my life that I couldn’t name. I felt like there was something I didn’t know and if I were to know what it was then everything else would fall in place.

It was only when I came to acknowledge my sexual orientation that I felt fully complete because in accepting that I was gay I also came to accept a much bigger reality; that my existence as a sexual being wasn’t a product of the flesh but was a gift of a creative, life-giving God. How I use that gift determines whether it will be a bridge or a barrier in my spiritual journey but in and of itself my sexuality is good and embracing it made me whole. That’s the joy I felt the morning when I realized for the very first time in my life that I was a lesbian. It was the missing piece and at last I was whole. Irenaeus said “The glory of God is a human fully alive,” and I shout Amen! To live out the full expression of God in us is to live fully and freely alive.

To live out the fullest expression of God in us is that for which all people hunger. It’s the “hidden wholeness” that Parker Palmer says resides within all of us. As GLBTQ people who have embraced our wholeness, whether by accepting our most true sexual expression or our most true gender identity, we’ve embraced an aspect of our humanity that many in the church have spent a lifetime ignoring, denying or killing. For others in the church, the fragments missing might have nothing to do with their sexuality. It might be that somewhere along the way in their journey through childhood and into adulthood they wrapped a piece of themselves in rags of shame and hid it away, out of sight to themselves and out of sight to God. In our willingness to live whole lives before a holy God we call others out to bring those hidden parts of themselves out into the light of grace as we have already done and are continuing to do each day. Look at your life. Reflect on what it is you most desire and what it is your heart longs to do and know and say. Feel what you most truly feel. Say what you really mean. Be who you really are. Bring every part of who you are before God and out into the world. You can live in wholeness. You can be fully alive.

There’s nothing quite like it.

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Posted in Gifted by Otherness, Special Series