christiannonduality.com Blog

Brian McLaren and Tim King, among others, have been blogging about Uganda’s proposed anti-homosexuality legislation, the Bahati Bill. Both ask some pointed questions.

Tim closes with:

So I have a question on top of Brian’s insightful question, but this one pointed at ‘us,’ the readers of this blog. 2,000 years ago Paul of Tarsus called those seeking to walk in the way of friendship with God ‘ministers of reconciliation.’ Reconciliation is something near and dear to my heart; reconcilers often get walked on by all kinds of shoes. Friends of God who are waking up and in the reconciling business might find themselves befriending and welcoming groups that are very different from one another; groups that do not like each other – like evangelicals and Muslims and gay people! So as we’re trying to befriend and extend hospitality to one other, what do we do with their prejudices? (What do they do with ours?) What when your heterosexism clashes with my poverty-phobia? How tolerant are we to be of intolerance? Do two intolerations cancel each other out…does one bleed into the other? How do we bear one another’s cultural convictions and burdens with integrity and love?

I don’t have the answers…I’m just a guy asking questions.

My musing follows:

First, we acknowledge our grief and then naturally grieve all of this pain and misunderstanding. And we allow this pain to somehow transform us that we will not continue to somehow transmit it. How can MY response change is my first responsibility.

Where others are concerned, we must recognize that such deeply held convictions, whether wholly or partly erroneous, are a very complex combination of irrational, pre-rational, nonrational, rational and supra-rational dispositions. As such, they do not yield in the face of superior logical argumentation, debates about religious epistemology, scriptural proof-texting, pragmatic appeals, enlightened self-interest, meta-ethical reformulations or natural law syllogisms. Such approaches only serve to further harden hearts and close minds.

To reach people holistically, with a full body-soul-spirit and heart-mind “blow,” we need parables, stories, poems, songs, plays, movies and other musical & dramatic arts presentations. And, even more than that, primarily, we need to tell our relevant personal stories, share and exchange our personal, real life experiences, reinforcing our compassionate outlooks and forming and reforming our desires in prayer and liturgy.

And we need to recognize that, such seeds that we plant, we may not be around to see sprout but others will assuredly reap the benefits. We must be willing to plant trees, the shade of which will not be ours to enjoy.

Ministers of Reconciliation and Story-tellers are the most important people in the world (on average, about two generations after they’re dead.)

In this vein, below is part of my personal story-telling, which I published years ago, elsewhere.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

How would you like it if that happened to you? My Keys Unlock Your Shackles: Our Unwitting Kinship?

My fourth child, now a young man on the verge of adolescence, has always brought a great deal of sensitivity and tenderness to our family. From a young age, whenever he’d witness a tragedy on TV, he’d exclaim, for example, to no one in particular: “How would you like it if that happened to your house?!”

One can substitute any noun, any person, place or thing, in place of the word “house,” and you’ll get my drift. His childhood angst remains palpable. Living in the New Orleans metro area will do that to one nowadays.

I think it was in one of Rahner’s very first sermons, around 1946, that he noted that most people do not seem to experience a theodicy problem until tragedy overtakes them personally, this despite the fact that millions of “other” parents, each year, lose millions of “other” children, for example.

I mention my son and Rahner’s sermon as a backdrop to my acknowledgment of how out of touch I have often been with the depth of suffering of so many who have been marginalized in different ways by our churches and societies.

Growing up in South Louisiana, I was sensitized to racial discrimination and am grateful that my conscience was properly formed by family and church in that regard. Regrettably, however, there is too much truth in one of my favorite jokes: “I was almost forty years old before I learned that not every serious sin is sexual!” That may sound like hyperbole but, realistically, possibilities for larceny, murder and heresy weren’t really blips on my ethical radar screen (so, if I wanted permanent existential alienation from God, illicit sex was one of my only options, as I understood such things).

I say all of this by way of admitting that, earlier on my journey, I simply did not seriously engage many church-related issues and enjoy any ensuing aha moments until those issues overtook me, personally. For example, only when I got married did I seriously look at the birth control issue. Only when I had to catechize children did I try to better understand what the church was trying to say regarding masturbation. Teachings on liturgical renewal, social justice and just war theory were stimulating and engaging, compelling even, for those of us coming of age in the sixties; a natural law discussion of homosexuality was not even interesting to me.

Long story short, the more I dug into the underlying philosophy and metaphysics of the church’s theology regarding gender and sexual behavior, prompted by my attempt to reconcile my own personal experiences and beliefs regarding same with that of the teaching office, the more it dawned on me that I had uncritically swallowed a doubtful perspective regarding other matters, too, especially such as masturbation, celibacy, women’s ordination, homosexual orientation and homoerotic behaviors. This realization was painful because certain of my earlier responses to certain of my very good friends had been tremendously hurtful and the resulting long estrangement so very unnecessary. (This is NOT to say that my response at all squared with the church’s supposedly sensitive pastoral guidance.)

What could I say to my friends? How have I said it in so many ways? I am SO sorry. Forgive me; I did not know what I was doing. It was only in my attempt to free myself that I opened the gates that would free you, too.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has been in town the past few days and the wounds of my past transgressions were feeling somewhat raw because of my again-raised consciousness regarding this divisive, almost schism-inducing misunderstanding. I am slowly learning to ask, more often: “How would you like it if that happened to you?”

It seems that gender and sexuality issues have broad implications. People need to be able to see and understand that the keys that unlocked their fundamentalist shackles regarding manifold moral doctrines and church disciplines are the very same keys that will free all who are marginalized, in this way or that, by such as the “intrinsic disorder question.”

If one group remains bound, all of us remain enslaved.