The Inner Light

Celebrating a gay couple's wedding in Florida

a few years ago.

A beloved transgender member of Ormewood Church, formerly a member of Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church, died unexpectedly last week, and, in addition to her own outstanding “Message of Hope” about this longtime member, our pastor Jenelle requested me to offer a brief reflection on her life based on our shared love of Star Trek during her memorial service this past Sunday afternoon. Afterward, her lifelong spouse gave me a beautiful Star Trek t-shirt commemorating its various incarnations over 55 years, 1966-2021. 

In recent weeks I had tossed about various ideas for my final post on this blog. Should I re-post an earlier blog about LGBT Pride for this Pride Month or write something new? I’ve decided that this reflection is a fitting way to end this ten-year-long blog. 

Star Trek, The Next Generation, was one of my binge-watched series during the pandemic, and one episode in particular stood out, entitled, “The Inner Light.” For those who want to watch it on Netflix, it is episode 25 of season 5. I had talked with Jenelle about it at the time, and I discovered lots of other people liked it too, receiving awards. 

The episode is simply described: “Picard awakens to find himself in a village where he is a well-known member of the community suffering from a delusion of being a starship captain.” I watched it again to prepare. 

I have come to think of Star Trek as a kind of “biblical stories of the future.” They often relate to something going on in the present, offering meaning and values and purpose, just as the Bible does. 

Spoiler alert, but what occurs in this episode is that the current Enterprise has happened upon an unoccupied alien spacecraft that sends a beam of memory into Captain Picard’s head, causing him to faint, unconscious for half an hour. But during that brief period, Picard realizes a whole lifetime on another planet. No one in his village believes him to be a starship captain, no one affirms his own “inner light,” thus the reason he is considered under a delusion. 

Instead he is recognized as a community leader and scientist who tackles his host planet’s own form of global warming, an unrelenting drought. He is married and has children, and we watch them grow from infancy to adulthood, as Picard and his wife age, and as Picard finally learns to play the flute. 

He eventually finds a solution to the planetary drought and offers it to his community leaders. Come to find out, their own scientists had figured out the same solution, but the local leaders (read “politicians”) refuse to make the hard choice to put it into practice, for fear of the average citizen. Again, his own “inner light,” his own “aha,” is rejected. 

The beam directed into Jean Luc Picard’s inner consciousness is the way the people of this now destroyed planet have finally told their story, perhaps as a warning for those of other planets. The people of the planet have been gone for a thousand years, but their history and their lives have been preserved and now communicated. Their inner light has become Picard’s (and our own) inner light. The parallel with scriptures and sacred texts of every faith handed down to us is clear, at least to me. 

What really moves me about this story is that this is what I experience in every death, including our beloved church member. With every death, we lose a vital (as in “life-giving”) story about ourselves, about life, about the universe, about the nature of things. We will miss their “inner light.” 

I will miss her grin, cheerfulness, intelligence, wit, and welcome. I will miss her story, her own inner light. Surely it was a reflection of the very nature and nobility of God. 

Some outside our welcoming community of Ormewood Church may have written off as delusion her inner light. But she came to understand something about herself, her gender experience and expression, and I would say, something about all of us and about all of our gender expressions. 

Her inner light has brightened our world on her journey into the inner light of God. To quote the opening of Star Trek episodes: “Space, the final frontier…[our] mission is to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.” 

Hallelujah! Amen! Thanks be to God!

 

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Though this is my final post, more than ten years of posts remain available to you on the blogsite, https://chrisglaser.blogspot.com and I encourage you to enjoy them. I regret that I never created an index of post titles, but the search engine in the upper left corner of my blog can help you find posts of interest by typing in a subject, topic, name, scripture reference, religious season or holy day. Or you may work through them by year and month listed in the right column. 

Comments are still welcome on any post. 

Though they may have been written with current events in mind, I intended them each to be read meaningfully at any point in time. It has been a pleasure writing this blog, but now, I believe, is a time for silence, something I considered when writing the Zen series. 

I assure you I am well, content, and thankful to God for this extension of my ministry. Thank you for your interest, comments, correspondence, and contributions. I am grateful to Metropolitan Community Churches for recognizing this blog as an “Emerging Ministry” and ProgressiveChristianity.org for reposting many of my reflections, as well as the dozens of Facebook pages that allowed me to provide links to particular posts. I am grateful for the free services of Blogspot, Google, Facebook, and the delivery service, FeedBurner. I am grateful for artist and friend Becki Jayne Harrelson and my husband Wade Jones for their technical and moral support. 

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When Evangelicals Were Kinder

Qumran, West Bank, 

Palestinian desert, 1981 (CRG)

Christian got tired of hanging out with God in the wilderness and began having temptations to be something more than a mere follower of Jesus.

Turn these stones to “bread,” as in “money,” and with that money enjoy the prosperity you were intended to have! It’s long been believed that those with big houses and expensive cars and material wealth are especially blessed by God. You can’t live by God’s words alone!

See the high steeple of this megachurch: this will be yours—large and influential, popular and spectacular, maybe even global!—as proof of your faith and goodness and success to the world and to other churches. God will surely be tempted to reward you bigtime!

You will have political power if you bow to leaders who join you in abusing and controlling the bodies of others: workers, women, trans people, lesbians and gays, immigrants, people of color, the needy, and anyone who stands in your way. You can have all the power you need to make the world in your image! It will be sweet.

No, Jesus can’t come along. He would never understand. He had a good idea but just doesn’t know how to capitalize on it. You do. You’re better than he is. Remember even he said you’d do greater things than he did.  And such a loser! Got himself crucified!

This parable came to me in the middle of the night, as I thought about how much kinder my evangelical, fundamentalist parents were than the evangelical Christians of today. I realize, in their hunger for power, influence, and control, evangelicals have lost their way.

What got me to thinking of this was an opinion piece written by Liesl Schwabe, “Everything I Know about Feminism I Learned from Nuns.” It reminded me that many of the values I now hold and promote as a progressive Christian I learned from evangelical, fundamentalist Christians. Now, I know that many of you may have had quite a different experience, either of nuns and Catholic school, or of fundamentalism and evangelicalism, but some of us at least have takeaways from those experiences that may never have been imagined or anticipated or desired by those spiritual communities.

“Jesus loves the little children,” we were taught to sing, “all the children of the world: red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.” In no way does this support white privilege, let alone white supremacy. There are no boundaries or borders to God’s love; we are all God’s children.

“Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little ones to him belong, they are weak, but he is strong.” The vulnerable, deprived, underprivileged, marginalized, and abused alike belong to those whom Jesus loves. And, as process theologian Daniel Day Williams pointed out, it is more vital (as in life-giving) and needful to belong than to believe.

How many times we were taught that Jesus welcomed lepers, children, women, people with disabilities, those with mental health issues, the poor, the oppressed, while, in the words of his mother Mary, “sending the rich away empty” and in his own words calling upon the wealthy to sell their possessions and distribute the proceeds to the poor! Jesus was an early advocate of health care for all and a challenger of income inequality.

We learned that Jesus praised the faith of a child, the faith of those outside his religious community, the faith of foreigners, the faith of outcasts.

And, as he was himself dying on a cross, he welcomed a convicted criminal into Paradise, surely a subversion of the death penalty.

Jesus witnessed a God of mercy that too many fundamentalist evangelical Christians have abandoned, ignored, or forgotten.

Related Posts:

Beware of the God

Killing God

The Terrible God

“Pride Goeth before a Fall”—and Getting Back Up!

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Copyright © 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Tree of Life

Sunday morning, I read of Western science and Eastern spirituality agreeing that everything, every thing is interrelated, and dynamic, in ceaseless change, and that anything that seems unchanging is illusory.

Sitting on our deck, I look up from my book and experience this truth firsthand: leaves drop one by one from the tree in our backyard against the backdrop of a vibrant blue sky and an intensely green lawn on this crisply cool fall day that has followed the weekend rain. The azaleas are in lively red bloom as the dead brown leaves collect.

Last week I witnessed an old friend dying in a hospital bed. The next day around 3 a.m., I awoke in my own bed thinking of him, unconscious, mouth agape, yet breathing on his own, and I felt for him. And I also thought, this could be me or Wade or my sister or brother. Later I would learn he died within the hour I unknowingly sat vigil.

That had been a hard week, nation-wise. Probably world-wise too, if we Americans could look beyond our own troubles to see others’ suffering as well. It was a week that started with the federal government planning an attack on the rights of transgender and intersex people, continued with pipe bombs mailed to progressive leaders from a right wing fanatic, included another hate crime against blacks, the disenfranchisement of voters in advance of the midterm elections, troops being sent to intercept those on a pilgrimage for asylum, and a week that ended with a massacre of Jews worshiping in their Pittsburgh synagogue, Tree of Life.

As I read the news story of the Tree of Life, I could not stop crying. It may have been grief accumulated over that week, but I think also it is the grief that accumulates over generations of virulent anti-Semitism, unintelligible to me. Several of those who died there were survivors of the Holocaust.

My LGBT community and its allies have often gladly utilized the work of the late Yale medieval historian John Boswell, documenting the treatment of Queer people in Europe and the church through the Middle Ages. But many miss the overall theme of his short life’s work, which was the treatment of minorities at the hands of majority cultures. Maybe his work was inspired by horrific scenes he witnessed as a youth as an “army brat,” like the heads of a hated group stuck on spikes along a road in the Middle East. Undoubtedly it was also inspired by his own experience as a gay man.

On one of his several trips to give the Lazarus lectures in Los Angeles that I organized, we arranged a lecture at UCLA that I took him to. He began the talk by announcing he would be describing the treatment of a minority in medieval Europe. He wanted the audience to discern if he was talking about the mistreatment and prejudices of Jews or of gay people. His ironic conclusion was that his description covered both groups!

When asked about gay rights in another context, he said it would be better if the LGBT community fought for rights across the board rather than for just ourselves, because it was too easy for a dominant culture to pick off one group at a time, as is happening now in the U.S. with transgender and intersex people, as well as current immigrants.

Boswell’s most memorable story came during that same series in a lecture entitled, “Why Bicycle Riders?” Just before WW II, A British gentleman and a German Nazi were forced to share a room. The German went on and on about all the troubles the Jews were causing. As he listed each false “truth,” the British gentlemen egged him on as if he were agreeing with him. Finally, at the end of the German’s diatribe, the Britisher adamantly agreed, “Yes, all the troubles of the world are caused by Jews and bicycle riders!”

The German looked surprised and confused, and asked, “Why bicycle riders?” To which the British man simply said, “Why Jews?”

Yesterday I eulogized my friend, Thom Hayes, as “good, civil and kind.” I said that if all people were like him, the midterm elections wouldn’t be such a worry for us. I said that if our national leaders were like him, they would talk out their differences over coffee or drinks. I said that if world leaders were like him, they would go to lunch rather than to war.

Thom was unassuming, I said, but he did assume everyone just needs somebody to see them as a person with their own story and a desire for human connection. A mutual friend had told the story of him and Thom getting stuck somewhere, and decided to enter a biker bar, in which the gaily dapper Thom proceeded to meet everyone in the place before they left.

Everything is interrelated, and dynamic, in ceaseless change, and anything that seems unchanging is illusory. Those of us who are “good, civil and kind” must lean in to change history’s trajectory. God’s kingdom come!

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Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

It's a Wonderful Life

This morning I’m up early as last week’s post, Wade’s Mezuzah, is being published, distributed, and hopefully read by subscribers. Shortly I will begin my weekly promotion of its link on organizational pages on Facebook as well as my own.

But I awoke to the thought of writing this post, and the memories here told brought tears to my eyes as I am reminded again what a wonderful life I have had. I know I will “crash” later, having been up later than usual last night attending a musical outside Atlanta with friends. Wade is out of town for work, so my schedule is mine this morning.

I mentioned the religious artifacts in our home, and I’ve decided to briefly tell the stories of those I mentioned. Their stories are what make them sacramentals, material objects conveying spiritual meaning.

The Latin American altar cloth upon which my laptop rests I purchased when I began leading retreats on Henri Nouwen as a way to deal with my grief at his death. It represents his love and service to Latin America, and its multicolored stripes are reminiscent of the rainbow flag that Henri never got to wave for himself.

The Sacred Heart sacramental was a gift from Ed McGee, who accompanied the worship and directed the Sunday choir during the annual gay and bisexual Christian men’s retreat we led at Kirkridge. With a mischievous wink, he gave it to me because I inquired of him, a Roman Catholic who loved to play for Presbyterian congregations, about the tradition of the Sacred Heart.

Ganesha was sent to me one Christmas by my Mormon nephew, my sister’s second son, knowing my penchant for things religious and my challenge for things computer.

The embracing clay Muslim men in kaftans was brought to me from Egypt by my friend, Bob Lodwick, the U.S. Presbyterian representative to European churches, when he filled in for Ben Weir in the Middle East after Ben was abducted and held captive. Bob also brought me one of the plates inscribed with a verse from the Quran hanging in another room. He provided the Lazarus Project with a supply of St. Lazarus icons from Cyprus to adorn our Lazarus awards. He and Hedy hosted George Lynch and me when we visited the offices of the World Council of Churches in Geneva.

The ceramic tile from Israel with Shalom in Hebrew was brought from Jerusalem by Vicki Goldish and Vicki Dakil, a lesbian couple. Vicki-1 (as we sometimes designated them!) was Jewish and Vicki-2 was a Christian of Lebanese descent. They had a tree planted in Israel in tribute to my father when he died. Both succumbed to cancer at early ages.

The Christ Pantocrator was given me by a congregant when I was ordained by MCC in 2005. The origin of the African goddess is a mystery to me. Perhaps that’s as it should be! 

The Balinese mask was a gift from my first longtime boyfriend, pseudonymously referred to as “John” in my first book, Uncommon Calling: A Gay Christian’s Struggle to Serve the Church. He was my loving “redeemer” after I was dropped as a candidate for ordination by the Presbytery of the Pacific in May of 1978 after the Presbyterian ban on ordination of LGBT people was put in place. We are no longer in touch, but I fondly remember his touch.

The papyrus scene of Pharaoh being judged—his heart weighed on a scale opposite a feather—was something I acquired on a Fordham religious studies tour of the Middle East. Judgment came if his heart weighed heavier than that feather.

The Tree of Life across the room I acquired in Katmandu on another religious studies tour, and it was woven in Cashmere, the disputed territory between Pakistan and India. I used it as a symbolic banner during a Christian season when I served as interim pastor of Christ Covenant MCC in Decatur, Georgia.

Something I didn’t mention last week, but on the opposite wall hangs a water color of the cliffs of Moher in Ireland, painted in retirement by the pastor who became my first Presbyterian mentor and pastor, James King Morse. I hoped for him a long life by telling him I wanted him to preach at my ordination!

I’ve saved for last the other plate I mentioned with a Quran quote—rather, the shallow bowl pictured above—because it entails one of my favorite stories. A transgender Muslim friend from Pakistan translated the phrases on both plates for me once, but the sticky notes with their translations have since fallen off. I acquired it in the Orthodox section of Jerusalem, Mea Shearim, on the religious studies tour of the Middle East.

Our leader was Byron Shafer, who, besides being a professor and one-time head of the religious studies department of Fordham University, served as primary author of the report of the Presbyterian task force on homosexuality, on which I served. He took a few of us on the trip to his favorite tiny shop.

We entered and found nothing on its shelves. The old, wizened proprietor greeted us warmly, inviting us to sit, and offered us tea. He started boiling the water as we chatted about our trip and eventually, after serving us tea, he began pulling items from behind an apron on the lip of a shelf, one by one. This made each artifact seem special, unlike the many shops with shelves crowded with merchandise. I just had to have one, it was so memorable.

So I splurged $40—a lot of money to me then—to purchase a now 160-year-old copper bowl covered in tin from Persia, now Iran, etched with a verse from the Quran, I think meaning, “God is great.”

As I look back, that gentle old man is an image of God, pulling out of his stores one beautiful thing after another, offering it to us to admire and possibly hold on to as we sip tea together, conversing. Einstein once said the reason for time is so everything doesn’t happen all at once.

It’s a wonderful life. God is great!

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Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Transgender Tweet

I had another post halfway prepared for today, but an image came to mind I could not dismiss in the face of President Trump’s tweet on banning transgender people in the United States military, a means of communication that seemed to trivialize both the armed services as well as transgender people.

Many years ago I was attending a men’s retreat led by Franciscan author Richard Rohr on the campgrounds of Ghost Ranch in New Mexico.  Rohr’s theme was the need for men to be initiated into manhood to avoid our sometimes loutish and confused and even violent behavior as adults.

If, as in some other cultures, men were taught how to be men through ritual and education from their elders, guidance about what it means to be a man could diminish the bluster, bullying, and aggressive ways that men today use to claim our manhood. For Rohr and the hundreds of men gathered from all parts of the world, it’s never too late for such initiation.

Richard attracts men who are justice-oriented and seeking to deepen their Christian spirituality. As a gay man, I found them either non-homophobic or self-consciously working on their homophobia and heterosexism, as well as their sexism. A few were gay themselves.

So when one young man followed me out of the initial gathering at the retreat, wanting to talk, I assumed I was going to hear yet another story of a gay Christian trying to live his faith and his identity. We had gone around in that first meeting introducing ourselves, and I had mentioned my ministry as a gay Christian.

Instead, here in the midst of a gathering of men learning to be men, and Christian men, he explained that he believed he was transgender and hoped to talk with me about it. I can still picture his face, modest and almost apologetic in asking my time and counsel.  I was moved by his situation, training for Catholic priesthood, and hope that he had, as I like to pray, “the best possible outcome.”

The truth is, in my wide travels as a gay Christian activist, I have met many more self-identified transgender people than bisexual people—a surprise to me, because I have always assumed there are many more bisexual people along the sexuality continuum than there are gays and lesbians.  Beyond just listening to their stories and showing my support, I have been able to suggest transgender resources and mentors.

I once wrote a kind of initiation rite for LGBT Christians entitled “Coming Out: A Witness to the Resurrection.” Males are not alone in needing a ritual to affirm their identities.

Some years earlier, at an LGBT retreat, also at Ghost Ranch, one retreatant told me the story of coming upon a garbage can on the grounds emitting wild sounds. He almost did nothing, so afraid of what might jump out if he were to look inside. As it turned out, he was able to free a frenzied squirrel that had fallen into the can and could not escape without help.

What a metaphor for coming out! Someone inside us may feel trapped by the confines of our bodies or our cultures or our faith communities. We may emit wild noises in our panic to be who we are; others may be afraid to come near to help.

Tweets coming from the White House are scary and mean, demeaning and hateful. The person inside might have benefited from an initiation rite that taught him that being a man does not need to entail aggression, brutality, greed, lust, winning at any cost—or even winning.

Right now, though, he sounds like a squirrel raging in his own garbage.

Related post: An Extraordinary Friendship

Helpful curriculum for congregations: Gender Identity and Our Faith Communities

The Coming Out ritual is in chapter seven of Coming Out as Sacrament.

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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.  

Opening Pandora's Box - Part Two

Though our movement was serious, we had a lot of fun along the way!

With James D. Anderson, editor of our newsletter, and Sandy Brawders, 

a candidate for ordination who came out at the 1978 General Assembly.

In those days, newsletters were the lifeblood of the LGBT Christian movement.

Photo by Mark Sick.

In honor of Pride month, this is the third 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.

When the LGBT movement first blessed the church decades ago, churchgoers feared opening “Pandora’s Box,” which, in Greek mythology, was really a jar that contained all kinds of human evil, which I prefer to call “challenges.” But it also contained Hope with which to face the eight challenges represented by our movement. I wrote of four last Wednesday: xenophobia, inertia, erotophobia, and pleasure. Today I write of the final four.

Our fifth challenge: progressive interpretations of scripture. During most of the 20^th century the progressive Christian movement was less defined because, I contend, mainstream-established Christianity was itself progressive.

Only as biblical literalists and fundamentalists and evangelicals grew in influence in society and in the church did progressive Christianity appear to be a minority position, I believe.

You can’t read Fosdick, Evelyn Underhill, Bonhoeffer, Tillich, the Niebuhrs, Teilhard de Chardin, Dorothy Day, John Robinson, Pope John XXIII, Hans Küng, William Sloan Coffin, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Mary Daly, Rosemary Radford Reuther, James Cohn, Letty Russell, Desmond Tutu, Joan Chittister, Henri Nouwen—just to give multiple examples, and not recognize them both as progressive and influential in the 20^th century church in America.

The problem was, though, that out of compassion or for the sake of job security or simply because of sheer sloth, much of what we learned in seminary did not get communicated from pulpit to pew. I would say that’s why Bishop Spong is such a lightning rod in the broader church: he’s spilling the beans about what most of us learned in seminary!

Our sixth challenge was gender dysphoria. Some of you may know that for a long time those whose understanding of themselves did not match their designated gender were diagnosed as having “gender dysphoria.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “dysphoria” as “a state of unease or discomfort; an unpleasant state of mind marked by malaise, depression, or anxiety.” I would say that now describes much of the church in relation not only to its transgender and intersex members, but to all who do not neatly fit gender expectations, such as lesbians, gay men, bisexual women and men, and ever more contemporary women and men who are shaking up gender roles.

Our seventh challenge revolved around ordination. I used to joke that trials for ordination virtually replaced heresy trials! That was when we often determined what is orthodox in our beliefs and behaviors.  Now of course there are more church trials, and most of them seem to be about our differing views on homosexuality.

But what does ordination mean when all Christians are called to be ministers? Are ordinands to be “holier than thou”? Do the sins of the celebrant affect the sacraments offered? (Calvin said “no.”) When a governing church body discerns that gifts for church leadership are present, shouldn’t that be enough?

Our eighth challenge was marriage, which, as some pointed out, should’ve been discussed before the question of ordination. In the discussions on homosexuality and ordination throughout the church, there would be audible gasps if someone even suggested the possibility of same-gender marriage. We’d be talking about ordination to our spiritual leadership, but marriage was untouchable.

When the 1991 Presbyterian Study on Human Sexuality questioned heterosexual marriage as the paradigm or model for all sexual relations and instead suggested an ethic of justice-love that would govern sexual relations including those of marriage, much of the denomination went ballistic. I was at the Baltimore General Assembly that discussed the report, and the feeling among some delegates seemed to be, “We’ll give you ordination, just give us back marriage”!

So what is the Hope left in “Pandora’s Box”? Find out in next week’s post!

I urge you to make a donation to 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

https://rollingthestoneaway.org/

40th Celebration of LGBTQ Lives at Kirkridge

Sept 8-10, 2017

Kirkridge Retreat & Conference Center

http://www.kirkridge.org/?e=event&eventId=26746&rDate=1504878949

To support this blog ministry: 

http://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

Be sure to scroll down to the donate link below its description.

Or mail to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. Thank you!

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

An Extraordinary Friendship

Selfie taken by Erin Swenson with me when we took 

a walk along the Atlanta Beltline a few weeks ago.

I conclude a series of personal reflections on the LGBT Christian movement that posted each Wednesday of June, Pride Month, and now extended to this first week of July, given the “interruption” of my post on Orlando. For those unfamiliar with this blog, be assured that I will return to other topics next week! And for the dozens of activists I’ve encountered and have yet to write about, maybe I’ll tell more stories next June.

There are momentous occasions in our lives that cause us to remember details surrounding them vividly. It was inside the El Capitan Theater in downtown North Hollywood when I was 19 years old that I saw The Christine Jorgensen Story, a 1970 film about a transgender person, long before that term was familiar.

As a young gay man, I identified with her, though I did not think of myself as other than what we now call cisgendered. But that she crossed gender expectations was one more encouragement for me as a same-gender loving young man, and one more reason why I never resisted including “T” in “LGBT.” For me, it’s always been a “no-brainer” to do so, and I speculate my attitude originated from seeing that film.

It seemed fitting, then, when I learned that New York City’s Stonewall Rebellion that is heralded as the beginning of the U.S. queer rights movement was largely initiated by drag queens and transgender folk discontent with the abusive enforcement of gender expectations of our American society.

My first Presbytery of Greater Atlanta meeting after moving to this city was one that considered the continued ministry of the Rev. Dr. Erin Swenson after transitioning from Eric to Erin. Having been ensconced as a volunteer in presbytery and synod ecclesiastical committees and conclaves in Southern California—to my dismay having little effect on changing Presbyterian views on lesbian and gay Christians—I had delayed involvement in similar commitments in my new home of Georgia.

But I wanted to be supportive of Erin, whom I had never met, and see how this presbytery behaved in considering her ongoing calling. I was impressed with her pastoral approach, showing great patience in answering even the most insulting of questions. I was also impressed that, as a therapist who had “been there” for many of the presbyters as Eric, many of them were more receptive and respectful of her own choices.

When her calling was affirmed by a healthy majority, the heavens opened up for me, and the Spirit descended in a rare appearance at a presbytery meeting.

That began what I consider a beautiful friendship. I’ve spent time with her former and loving wife and her faithful daughters, with her father and her sister and brother-in-law, and a friend—whose Pakistani birth certificate read “female” when he knew he was male—and his wife, both faithful Muslims, whose wedding, celebrated by Erin, I attended in their Sufi circle. I also was invited to attend their festivities on Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan.

I think the most memorable holiday dinner I’ve hosted included LGBT Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and atheist/pagan guests and there were only seven people around my dining room table!

Erin was there for me the night when my mom died, the first to come to my house with Sharon Taylor, my pastor whom Erin had notified. Erin was there for me when Mark and I separated, helping me with my double grief, recommending a couples’ counselor and serving as our divorce negotiator as well. She retained me as her writing coach when she was writing her as yet unpublished but powerful memoir.

She gave the charge at my MCC ordination in 2005, and she served as celebrant of Wade’s and my wedding in 2015. And she was beloved by my dogs, Calvin and Hobbes, with whom she would stay when I was out of town, and last July, joined me and Wade and a few friends celebrating Hobbes’ life at a recently opened Mexican restaurant.

And she was among the “trinity” to whom I dedicated my book, Henri’s Mantle, for getting me through “the recent unpleasantness.”

I entitled this “an extraordinary friendship” not only because of Erin’s great friendship, but because I believe transgender folk have been great friends to lesbians, gay men, bisexual and straight people, enlarging our view of gender and gender possibilities.  To me, that is a spiritual value, and applies to our understanding of God as well.

The Religion and Faith Program of HRC, the Human Rights Campaign, contracted me to pull together their curriculum, Gender Identity and Our Faith Communities: A Congregational Guide for Transgender Advocacy.

Earlier posts in this series:

Out of the Closets and into the Kingdom

Don’t You Want Me?

Guess Who Came to Dinner?

Love between Women

Nobody Doesn’t Like Janie Spahr

Stranger in My Office

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Copyright © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author, photographer, and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

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

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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.