Nativity Stories

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We each have our own “nativity story.”

Mine is that it was a difficult birth, a prolonged labor, my mother turned blue, my father told the doctor she needed oxygen, I was born feet first, my legs were crooked and doctors wanted to put braces on them, but my mother resisted, choosing another therapy: massaging my legs. My Aunt Blanche loved to tell the story of carrying me wrapped in a blanket from the car, having just come from the hospital, and uncovering my head, expecting to find me sound asleep, but instead, found my eyes wide open in wonder, and my head bobbing every which way to see as much as I could see. Dad enjoyed recounting rocking me a very long time while I stubbornly refused to go to sleep. Decades later, after I had chosen to enter the ministry, my mother explained that she had dedicated me to God’s service in the womb, thus my name, “Christopher,” which means “Christ-bearer.” 

In truth, we each have multiple nativity stories: family-oriented, as above, but also spiritual, sexual, social, vocational, and so on. I believe it’s important that we first, remember them, and second, tell them. Much of my work has been about coaxing and coaching people in telling their stories, usually as a volunteer.  I told my own complex “nativity” or coming out story in my first book, Uncommon Calling.

At our mutual friend Janie Spahr’s suggestion, Mary Ann Woodruff approached me earlier this year to read and possibly write the foreword to her memoir, The Last of the Good Girls: Shedding Convention, Coming Out Whole. I was so much in awe of her book’s literary qualities, I couldn’t imagine writing a foreword that could do it justice, so I kept it short, beginning: 

“This engaging, heartfelt memoir quotes Judith Barrington from a 1993 poetry workshop: ‘The poet’s job is to write the truth. And then write the truth below the truth.’ That is precisely what Mary Ann Woodruff has done in often lyrical prose and occasional poetry. She did it first with her life, discovering truth under truth, and now with this remarkable book. A life well-lived deserves a story well-told such as this.”

Woodruff’s prose and poetry rises to the occasion of her remarkable life of self-discovery and growing confidence in herself as daughter, wife, mother, Christian, consultant, writer, feminist, and lover. I am looking forward to meeting her face-to-face when, by coincidence, I speak at her church in Seattle this January.

The day I am writing this I am looking forward to meeting another astounding author at a coffee shop in adjacent Decatur. Yesterday I finished reading Connie Tuttle’s as yet unpublished memoir, A Gracious Heresy, and I was taken by the sometimes non-traditional trajectory of her spirituality and calling as a Christian minister, one that her denomination, seminary, and presbytery found challenging. Her writing too is of a captivating literary quality. She intentionally made me laugh, angry at other times as I realized our shared experience of a church that is still largely unwelcoming of LGBT clergy, and yet ultimately hopeful about our shared intent to make the church a better place for all.

She is the founding pastor of Circle of Grace Community Church (soon to celebrate its 20^th anniversary) that my friend Erin Swenson used to attend on Sunday evenings. Erin too has written a remarkable memoir of her transition as a transgender Presbyterian minister, If Anybody Asks You Who I Am… I served as Erin’s writing coach, meeting regularly as she finished chapter after chapter to consult, but mostly to encourage. Her book is another literary masterpiece that has not yet found a publisher.

From an Assembly of God perspective, Randy Eddy-McCain sent me a manuscript of his own  memoir growing up in Arkansas, And God Save Judy Garland: A Gay Christian’s Journey. Well written, edited by Peggy Campolo and now recommended by Jay Bakker, it tells his own “nativity” story discovering his sexuality in the evangelical world.  At the behest of those who’ve read it, he has successfully raised funding on Kickstarter to publish and publicize this needed addition to LGBT Christian storytelling.

My friend Joe Cobb and his former wife, Leigh Ann Taylor, remind people that “coming out” is not just for individuals in Our Family Outing: A Memoir of Coming Out and Coming Through. Taking turns writing their story as a family, the reader better understands what a loving marriage is all about and how spouses and children have their own nativity stories.

R. Z. Halleson reminds us that the nativity story of another can be told by a writer like her who is attentive, compassionate, and detail-oriented in her novel Ambiguous, based on a true story of three airmen in the 50s and 60s coming to terms with sexuality. Years ago, Ruth asked me to advise her on the manuscript, and the book was finally published this year.

My former partner, Mark King, has written his own nativity story about coming out of addiction and coping with HIV in A Place Like This: A Memoir.  I encouraged him to write it and served as his first reader, but was surprised nonetheless to have him dedicate the book to me, long after our relationship ended. It’s a very good read, disturbingly honest, touchingly poignant, and often laugh-out-loud funny.

Finally, I am grateful to be included in professor Patrick Cheng’s Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology, an accessible round-up of  LGBT theologians, and R. W. Holmen’s carefully researched and well-written story of the LGBT Christian nativity and movement within five mainstream Protestant denominations, soon to be released, Queer Clergy: A History of Gay and Lesbian Ministry in American Protestantism.

These weeks of Advent need not be just about the nativity of Jesus, but all the nativities of the Spirit his story has inspired, including your own.

Related posts: 

Put Yourself in the Nativity Story

Everybody Has a Story

Mohammad’s Child

The Magic Kingdom

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC. Click here to discover how you may support this ministry. Thank you!

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite. Consider using a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com. 

Pentimento and Palimpsest

We watched the film Julia this past weekend. Vanessa Redgrave as Julia is at her most beautiful, I think, in this film. It’s a film about writers and lovers Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, and Hellman’s adventure, after her play The Children’s Hour opened  on Broadway, smuggling Julia’s money into Berlin to save Jews during the Nazi madness. The authenticity of the story has been questioned, but it’s a high-minded tale worthy of truth or fiction, much like scripture.

Released in 1977, it brought back a flood of memories of my own past. “The longest sentence in the world,” Hellman once wrote, “begins with ‘I remember…’” I graduated from Yale Divinity School that year, was midway through serving on the two-year Presbyterian Task Force on Homosexuality, and began as founding director of The Lazarus Project, a first-of-its-kind ministry of reconciliation between the church and the LGBT community at the West Hollywood Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles. I was also one of a handful of openly gay candidates for ordination in the Presbyterian church. Both the support of colleagues and the interest of the media seemed to assure me of a promising outcome of my activism and ministry.

Monday was my day off, which of course was virtually nobody else’s day off, so I “recreated” alone, running on the beach, reading in a park, and sometimes going to the movies. That is how I came to be sitting in an almost empty Westwood movie theatre to see Julia by myself. But before the movie started, someone behind me leaned over a row of seats and tentatively called, “Chris?”  It was Troy Perry, founder of MCC, seated next to a friend and sometime bodyguard, and he invited me to join them, which I did. At the end of the movie, just like my mother, I was crying. Troy turned to me supportively but chided with a smile, “Oh Chris, you’re so sentimental!”

I recalled this as I cried once again at the end of Julia. Wade is used to me by now, so was unsurprised. But I was crying not just for the lost innocence depicted in the film, but for that moment that Troy and I shared in a Westwood movie theatre, just as our dreams were taking off—his founding an LGBT-affirming denomination and me hoping to help change the Presbyterian church.  So much seemed possible then!

This week I took Hellman’s paperback Pentimento from my bookshelves, the memoir of which “Julia” is one chapter. By the bookstore receipt that I obviously used as a bookmark, I purchased it on Halloween (Oct 31), 1974, for $1.95. The other book on the receipt, I imagine, was her memoir An Unfinished Woman, which has gone missing. I know I didn’t read these for any class, and I’m not sure what prompted my purchase. But I remember how much I enjoyed these memoirs.

“Pentimento” is the term for a painting that fades, revealing another painting behind, of which the artist is said to have “repented.” Hellman uses it as a metaphor for memory and memoir, explaining, “Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.”

Another favorite writer, Gore Vidal, entitled a memoir Palimpsest, which he thought of as an architectural term, but discovered its original use had to do with paper or parchment “which has been written upon twice; the original writing having been rubbed out.” Vidal observes, “This is pretty much what my kind of writer does anyway. Starts with life; makes a text; then a re-vision—literally, a second seeing, an afterthought, erasing some but not all of the original while writing something new over the first layer of text.”

That’s what I find myself doing these days, remembering and re-membering. And that, to me, is what scripture (and scriptural interpretation) is. It’s a remembering and a re-membering. In Hellman’s words, “an old conception, replaced by a later choice…a way of seeing and then seeing again.” And in Vidal’s words, “Starts with life; makes a text; then a re-vision—literally, a second seeing, an afterthought.”

That’s also the process of the spiritual life.

Related posts:

Better to Follow than to Arrive

“I Love to Tell the Story”

Mark your calendars, L.A!  I will be offering a lot of “I remember’s” speaking during the 11 a.m. Sunday service October 13, 2013 of the West Hollywood United Church of Christ, formerly known as West Hollywood Presbyterian, as part of its year-long celebration of its 100^th anniversary! This is where I served a decade as founding director of the Lazarus Project.

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite. Consider using a post or quotes in your congregation’s or group’s newsletter, including the blog address: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com.

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC. Your donations are its only means of support. Thank you!