On June, Pride, & Peculiarity

What does it mean that I'm the weird gay Sunday School lady?

Dear Friends,

On the first June day I came into the office, I turned the corner from Water St. onto Main St. and found a Pride flag planted on the lawn of the church where I work. But here’s the thing about being, what I tend to term “a boring adult” – I didn’t have any big feelings about it.

I don’t have any big feelings about that rainbow-colored flag. And then I think about what that flag would have meant to me as a teenager.

I was “out” in high school. I led my high school’s Gay Straight Alliance for 2.5 years. I organized protests and vigils, Day of Silence actions, and trips to LGBTQ film festivals. But when I wasn’t scrambling around my high school or displaying my own rainbow flag in my room, I spent hours at my family’s ELCA church. And there, while I wasn’t closeted, I also wasn’t out.

Sexuality was never spoken about in that space, positively or negatively, but whatever that community’s actual perspective on sexuality, being a lesbian did not feel like something I could speak into that space. I couldn’t have articulated it then, but what I was feeling was something of an Imago problem: was part of me not reflected in the image of God? I was seen, and not seen. I knew who I was, but did not feel beloved in that identity.

From teaching VBS (top right) at my childhood church to attending the first Staten Island Pride that was actually ON THE STREETS! (bottom left), to rainbow flags in college (center left), and building a life with my amazing wife (bottom right and top left) - it’s been an adventure.

I graduated from high school 14 years ago – hardly a lifetime. And I can’t say how much that space has changed. This was a congregation that struggled to accept a female priest in the late 1990s. I rarely went back after I finished high school. I moved away. And by the time I was in graduate school, I found something more: a TEC congregation with three priests – 2 of them women, 2 of them gay, with countless lesbian women and gay men teaching in the Sunday School classrooms, and with children of same-sex parents sitting in my Godly Play circle. In that congregation, I did not need language around my sexuality spoken. I saw my belovedness surrounding me, celebrating at the altar, building lives held in God’s grace.

I don’t need a flag in front of my church to know I am beloved by God and community, but as a teenager, I wonder if it would have helped.

But Is It About Pride?

I didn’t write this post earlier in Pride Month because, well, I don’t think a lot about pride. Pride was a valuable framework at one time, but I don’t know that “pride” is the feeling most young LGBTQ+ people in the church are actively seeking. Like everyone else, we’re looking for belonging and love. So, what does your community do to offer that?

Maybe it’s the little things. With young children, so much of what matters is maintaining a sense of the ordinary. About talking about my family the same way I talk about their families. The PreK-K kids are much more interested in my cats than my wife, let’s be honest. Or even in my sisters, or the plain fact that I’m a grownup who doesn’t live with my parents, but I still go to bed early.

Maybe it’s the stories you tell. Books like A Church for All by Gayle Pitman, inspired by Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco does a lot more than address the place of LGBTQ+ people in the church, but also turns to disability, age, race, and class, all factors that can be just as othering for people seeking a church home.

Maybe it’s also the simple act of undoing the old harms passed down to us – the gendering of clothes or activities. My colleague, the Rev. Rowan Larson writes about this in their article, “Gender Inclusive Children’s Ministry” over at BuildFaith. It’s easy to avoid asking children to break up into groups of boys and girls. It has always been necessary to intervene in bullying, even when that bullying upholds norms that we were taught. Our work with children is sometimes the work of undoing what we were taught by the wider world. But then again, that is Christian work in other ways to not necessarily be of this world, to welcome the Kingdom of Heaven and the peaceable relationships between all people.

With older children and teens, well, the world is moving fast and they know a lot more about the broad spectrum of human experience than you or I did at their age. Which is why the question here is, Are you listening to the young people in your community? And, are you in your language, behavior, and choices, demonstrating that you are someone they can trust? Are you trusting them to lead when it comes to their own needs? These are things we should be doing anyway, but when we falsely perceive our programs as homogeneous, when we don’t turn to the richly inclusive nature of our tradition, rather than the most narrow messages conveyed by the world, so much is lost.

When it comes to ensuring our youth feel welcome – and to be clear, I don’t work with youth much – I particularly appreciate these notes from the Rev. Ben Garren about supporting LGBTQ+ youth, which demonstrate that it’s not actually about radically changing your community and its practices. It’s about making sure your community offers safe points where these young people can find anchor by choosing resources from affirming organizations and identifying mentors and consultants who can support them and and support your program as needed.

The Fruits of the Spirit

In this week’s lectionary, we find the lesson from Galatians on the Fruits of the Spirit. It’s a text often used to shame all of us for our bodily natures, but let us remember that God became flesh and walked among us to know our longings and sufferings more closely. Rather than focus on the condemnation of the bodily, the works of the flesh – “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these” – that we focus on our responsibility to display the fruits of the spirit.

Let us, with ourselves, and with our communities, display the kindness, patience, and gentleness granted us through faith. Let us not point out the speck in our brother’s eye while ignoring the log in our own. The purpose of Galatians is to offer us guidance on being in community and welcoming the kingdom of God, not to condemn the reality that we are human. Because I am human and subject to the desires of the flesh, I am neither proud nor ashamed. I am embodied as God made me to be, fully free as God created me, and in all things I yearn to be closer to God through my actions, my love, and my faithfulness.

So, this June, fly a pride flag, sure. Fly it all year long. Or don’t fly it at all. The flag is not, at the end of the day, the thing that tells me who you are, and it’s certainly not the thing that tells the young people in your church who you are. We are in the room and we hear you. We’re watching. We need a mirror for our experiences much more than we need a parade.

Peace,
Bird