The Truth below the Truth

Rev. Bill Johnson was the first gay minister I met,

and he became a role model for me.

I took this photo in San Francisco in the fall of 1972.

In honor of Pride month, this is the first of four posts adapted from a Meekhof Lecture I gave at Newport Presbyterian Church in Bellevue (WA), January 11, 2014, regarding the meaning of the LGBT movement for the broader church. You will notice some references I’ve used before on this blog.

One of the members of Newport Presbyterian Church has written a remarkable “coming out” memoir, The Last of the Good Girls: Shedding Convention, Coming Out Whole. In it, she quotes poet Judith Barrington: “The poet’s job is to write the truth. And then write the truth below the truth.” And that’s what Mary Ann Woodruff has done in lyrical prose and occasional poetry.

I believe that was the job description of the biblical writers, “to write the truth below the truth.” And I believe that’s the job description of preachers, prophets, and professors, “to write or tell the truth below the truth.” And that’s what I hope to do in this and the posts that follow: to talk about the underlying truths regarding the LGBT movement within the church.

Now, trying to tell the truth below the truth led in my seminary days to demythologizing, and in today’s seminaries it has led to deconstruction. That’s well and good if you have someone like the late Joseph Campbell, who could take a myth apart and put it back together again in such a way that its meaning is enhanced rather than diminished.

In the words of Kathleen Norris, “Human beings, it seems to me, require myth as one of the basic necessities of life. Once we have our air and water and a bit of food, we turn to metaphor and myth-making,” she writes. To me, myth is not a story that is untrue, but a story that carries a deeper truth that draws us in. As a 5-year-old once said, a myth is a story that is true on the inside. (Gertrud Mueller Nelson tells this in Here All Dwell Free.) Within the words is a Word with a capital “W.”

So for me, this is an opportunity to find the deeper truth of the LGBT Christian movement, and because I have devoted my life to that movement, it’s very personal—it’s about the meaning of my own life. And because the church has wrestled with the LGBT Christian movement over the past forty years, it’s very personal for the church as well, it’s about the meaning of church life.

What is the inside truth? What is the truth beneath the truth?

Nelson Mandela’s death reminded us of a segment of the South African population known as the “born freers,” those born after the end of apartheid, who have little idea what separation of the races meant, how oppressive was the domination of the white race.

It reminded me of the last book my mother was reading before her death at age 84, Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation, a book lauding my parents’ generation for enduring the hardships of the Depression and then World War II.  I had sent her the large print edition of the book for Valentine’s Day because she had watched Brokaw’s television special of the same name, telling me over the phone, “I’m glad our generation is finally getting the credit it deserves.”

Timewise, I was in a like place as South Africa’s “born freers,” having been born five years after the end of World War II, having no direct experience of what my parents went through: separated by the war, living on my father’s army pay, having goods rationed, losing friends and family in far off battles or having loved ones return home with physical and psychological wounds.

And now I have a similar experience, along with today’s church, witnessing young people, “born freers” who will never understand why we struggled so over homosexuality, why it seemed so important, why the church resisted full membership and society resisted full citizenship, why the church refused the ministries and marriages of its gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender members, and why, when so many gay men were falling to a pernicious disease, there was so much resistance to helping persons with HIV and AIDS.

Younger people who watched this year’s television series about the secular LGBT movement, When We Rise, remarked their surprise at what earlier generations endured. “I had no idea what you went through,” one millennial told her mom.

This post will be the first of four segments for LGBT Pride Month, not so much describing “what we went through” in the church as much as discerning the “truth below the truth.”

What did it all mean, for God’s sake?

I urge you to make a donation and/or attend these once-in-a-lifetime ingatherings of LGBT saints and allies:

Rolling the Stone Away

Oct 31-Nov 2, 2017

St. Louis Airport Marriott

40th Celebration of LGBTQ Lives at Kirkridge

Sept 8-10, 2017

Kirkridge Retreat & Study Center

Btw, the LGBT Religious Archives Network updated my bio earlier this year: https://www.lgbtran.org/Profile.aspx?ID=4

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Copyright © 2017 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Communion of Sweet Rolls and Coffee

I first recorded the experience that follows in a letter to the late Bill Silver during the summer following our (with many others) successful lobbying efforts to persuade the 1976 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church to set up a task force on homosexuality and ordination. Bill and I had become great friends in the process.

This became my favorite passage in my first book, Uncommon Calling: A Gay Christian’s Struggle to Serve the Church, which is not just my story but the story of many, as well as the story of the Presbyterian Church dealing with the issues involved. Published in 1988, the book had four printings with Harper & Row, and an updated 1996 version with photos had two printings through Westminster John Knox Press, totaling more than 20,000 copies.

It was Bill Silver’s candidacy for ordination that prompted New York City Presbytery’s request for “definitive guidance” on the ordination of “avowed, practicing homosexuals.” I too was an openly gay candidate for ordination in another presbytery, and had just completed a year’s internship in campus ministry, working with LGBT people for the Christian Association of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

In July 1976, before moving from Philadelphia, I took my car for servicing and, as usual, waited for it in a nearby café. During a prolonged breakfast, I wrote of my experience to that point as a gay minister. At this relatively early time in my ministry, I already found myself describing a feeling that a primal scream lay buried within me—a scream that expressed the cumulative pain and birth as described to me by hundreds of gay sisters and brothers. I felt like their vessel, a vessel of their feelings, their stories, their hopes and fears entrusted to my care; and I felt as if I would burst if I did not write out their feelings.

The café waitress was unusually gregarious and solicitous, equally generous with coffee and conversation. She picked up an ongoing conversation with a regular customer, evidently begun when he was last in, about methods to avoid crib death.  She had a new grandson to worry about.

Now they turned to discussing an article in the paper about women as priests: she said “Why not?” but he was opposed. She spoke her mind plainly, without fear, as one might in a friendship of trust, in which the parties agree to disagree. She had already learned my intended profession, so she shouted over to me, “Hey Rev, what do you think of women priests?” I said I agreed with her, that women should be priests.

She brought me more coffee as a reward and whispered about her other customer, “He don’t like women, that’s his problem. Two divorces and can’t find anyone to marry him. Not surprising!” She said this matter-of-factly, not meanly.

Even more compassionately she added, “Y’know, the other girls warned me he didn’t tip when I started to work here, but I decided to be just real friendly with him, take some time to talk with him. I figured he was lonely. That’s what’s wrong with most people today—just plain lonely, just need somebody to talk to. Well, I’ve worked him up to a 50 cent tip! D’you know, he’s a shrink? People pay to talk to him, and he comes in and talks to me for free! Ain’t it funny?” The coffee fell a little over the brim of my full cup.

Noticing I was writing, and with my left hand, she exclaimed, “I was left-handed too, growing up. But the nuns made me write with my right hand. I’m sure that’s why I’ve been a nervous person ever since! When my kids were old enough to go to school, I went down and told those nuns that if any of them were left-handed, to leave ‘em be. I wasn’t gonna let the same thing happen to my kids as happened to me! Honestly, I think you got to be a genius to be left-handed in a right-handed world.” With that she returned to her post behind the counter.

I was stunned. I believed she was speaking about much more than which hand I wrote with. I looked down at what I had written about others who had been forced “to write with their right hand” in a sense, the anxiety and suffering church and society’s coercion had caused countless gay people. I believe the waitress intuited far more about me than I had disclosed.

I felt deeply moved by her unqualified affirmation. I smiled in gratitude toward this minister who dispensed wisdom and insight as readily as coffee and sweet rolls. Her counter was at once pulpit and communion table, an integration of word and sacrament. The church needed ministers like her. The commonwealth of God had come near.

Copyright © 1988 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit distribution with attribution of author and book title. Other rights reserved.

For more on the LGBT movement in five mainstream Protestant denominations, check out R. W. Holmen’s comprehensive Queer Clergy: A History of Gay and Lesbian Ministry in American Protestantism. For Holmen’s account of some of my personal involvement, please click here.

Those concerned for Israelis and Palestinians in the current crisis might want to read my earlier post: Peace in Jerusalem. Despite what I wrote then, I have resumed following Israel and Palestine’s struggles with dismay and grief.

On today’s anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Saturday’s anniversary of Nagasaki, you may want to read my post: Acts of God and Acts of War.

Please make a tax-deductible donation to my blog ministry by clicking here. Thank you!

Progressive Christian Reflections is an unfunded Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers.

Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.