que(e)r(y)ing the call

“What will you do with your one wild and precious life?”(Mary Oliver). Living into this question led me to into ministry, shifted my sensibilities from biological and chemical to the theological and philosophical, directed me away from medical school and into seminary. What will I do with my one wild and precious life? With this question I deviated from the relative secured certainty of a future in medicine, where because of my aptitudes and privileges, I could count on myself, my own work and will, to palpate the promise in this possibility. Ordained ministry, however, took the future from my own hands, exposed this certainty as a façade. “Part of the terror of a new future,” writes Marjorie Suchocki, “is the fear that it may not be a possible future: What if we let go of the past only to find out that the future we dared cannot be? Where are we then in terms of security? Will not our last condition be worse than our first? And so, we imprison ourselves in that past against the terror of a new order.”

A central theme in discerning, negotiating, and pursuing this call is cultivating resistance as a spiritual practice, resisting imprisonment in a safe and secure past, resisting the terror of a new order. When spiritually grounded, this resistance is embodied in all night wrestling with God, sometimes limping away like Jacob, marked on my body by my encounter with the divine. It is community on the margins, welcomed into open arms adorned with a rainbow stoll at 2004 General Conference, wordlessly, because of my tears. It is creating and growing an LGBT Christian Coffeehouse at the Wesley Foundation in Iowa City, supported by the community and campus ministers, even as this ministry put our funding and good standing with the Bishop at risk. When my spiritual grounding is shaken, however, when I allow gravitational pull to dislocate me from the margins, when I try to do it alone, to stoically hide my pain, to gain respectability by thinly veiling my radical, queer, difference in which I really, truly believe God delights, when I become so focused on finding a job, getting ordained, being approved that I forget the wild, precious risk which grounds this work, then I imprison myself in the past, safeguard myself against the terror of this new possibility.

William Sloane Coffin reminds me to delight in, not merely fear, this new possibility showing through the cracks of the old. “I love the recklessness of faith,” he writes. “First you leap, then you grow wings.” I wonder if he held this wisdom when he left Union Theological Seminary to become a CIA agent, fighting communism. Would it come later, when he enrolled at Yale Divinity School, disillusioned with the CIA and US Government? When he spoke out publicly against adhering to illegitimate authority? Passionately supporting rights, inclusion, and welcome for queer folk? I wonder how many times he leapt, terrified? Whether he ever stood on the sill, full of fear, before climbing back down?

And radically erotic Anais Nin proclaims, “…the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” I long to cultivate resistance in which risk works with passion, longing, vision, possibility, connection, no longer confined to the realm of fear, hesitancy, failure, or timidity. Coming to Pacific School of Religion, residing in the San Francisco Bay Area, has been a life-giving and perhaps life-saving act. While some found their spark for activism, prophetic witness, and resistance ignited here for the first time, I came to know what it meant to rest, to trust others to do this work and support them in doing so. Finally free from being “the” queer Christian to initiate conversation, offer pastoral care, connect other aching queers, challenge communities to witness and welcome, I could blossom from the tight bud of always and only connecting LGBT issues with faith, and begin placing issues of economics, war and peace, race and culture, racism and imperialism, at the center of my learning and ministry. No longer expected to be “The Voice” of queer Methodism, I began to find my voice. And, perhaps, simultaneously, to lose it.

While certainly not without pain, this space has indeed been safer. But bearing this burden, for better and for worse, has become part of my call to ministry. I do not wish to be a martyr, to glorify or position suffering as redemptive. I am too responsible to my theology, to my feminist sensibilities, to a gospel that condemns violence and finds good news not on the cross but in the empty tomb. So scared of glorifying this suffering and thus justifying the spiritual violence of hegemony, heterosexism, and homophobia, however, I have often too quickly pushed out the possibility of any redemption in the midst of my suffering, forgotten how to make meaning of the crosses in my life. I have grown wary and weary of my own pain, and have tried to push it out rather than find appropriate space for this pain in the equation of my call. My training as a chemist has taught me the beauty of a balanced equation. Perhaps my training as a theologian and cultural critic can help me re-balance.

Last Sunday, my sister called me in tears, enraged by a youth group skit at her UMC in Iowa City that presented sexuality as something to be contained, constrained, feared, and forced into a tight, neat, box. Because she loves her queer sister, because she is becoming queer in her own right, my sister cannot find a spiritual home in the UMC in Iowa City. “You would do it differently,” she said. “I’m scared to,” I replied. And, for the first time, I felt a commitment not only to the other queer kids in Iowa, to creating and enabling spiritual spaces for nourishment for them, but also for all the Iowans I know and love. The United Methodist Church is not clearly divided into Us and Them, West and the Rest. The bodies I know and love do not fit into this tidy, binary equation.

I’m scared to start thinking about returning to Iowa. Doing ministry in that context would require a depth and sustainability of spirit and support I am only beginning to learn to cultivate. I fear returning, knowing it may well be a future not possible. It would require leaping first, and then growing wings. It would require trusting less in the safety of remaining tight in a bud, and trusting more in the risky business of growing pains, the flamboyant, queer dispersal of blooming vulnerable. Struggling to glimpse what I will do with this one wild and precious life, I come, again and again, to the image of an empty tomb, the stone rolled away. The gospel lure of daring to imagine, hope for, believe in, and embody, a possibly impossible future.