Last month, Affirmation (LGBT Mormons and Mormon-affiliated individuals) held its annual conference in Seattle.
As part of the conference, Bob Rees delivered the keynote I share with you here
(with his permission). In this talk, Bob describes his view of a failure within
our faith community to genuinely understand our LGBT brothers and sisters, and
instead have chosen to view them as ‘the other.’
Bob is a long-time
champion of LGBT inclusion in the LDS community, a former Mormon Bishop, and
has worked for decades to bring these two worlds closer together. I hope you
find as much spiritual enrichment in his talk as I did—it’s clear this is a man
who loves his fellows, and loves his Savior.
Enjoy.
Love and the
Christian imagination
Robert A. Rees,
Ph.D.
(Keynote Devotional, Affirmation National Conference
Seattle, Washington, 21 October 2012)
Part of what
it means to be a Christian is that through the grace of Christ we have the
capacity to imagine what it is like to suffer as another person suffers. It is
impossible to do this if we have anger, hated or revulsion for the other. Such
imaginative projection is possible only within the context of love. Thus, those
who revile and persecute homosexuals, who treat them as if they are flawed or
have some kind of sinister agenda, cannot possibly take on their suffering,
cannot possibly hope to feel what they feel, but those whose compassion is
inspired by Christ, can feel, at least to some degree, what it must be like to
be anathema to society. We can imagine what it must feel like to be taught to
hate our own bodies, to be condemned for feeling what we naturally feel, to be
denied normal fellowship within Christ’s kingdom, and to want to blot out our
deep soul suffering through suicide.
Reviewing
the sad history of homosexuality among the Mormons, I conclude that where we
are today as a Church and as a people, though in many ways advanced from where
we have been, can best be described as a failure—a failure of faith, a failure
of courage, a failure of imagination, and most of all a failure of love.
I want to
talk about two aspects of that failure today—the failure of imagination and the
failure of love. I don’t think one can have a truly mature faith that isn’t to
some degree graced by imagination. We don’t often speak of imagination and
Christ in the same breath, but I read the gospels as the product of a great and
fecund imagination. It isn’t just the inventive language, the subtle irony and
humor, and the fresh narratives that flowed from his expansive heart and mind
that make Jesus of Nazareth such great imaginer, but especially his capacity to
imagine each of us caught in the snares of sin, lost in the tangled wood of
mortality, each uniquely in need of love, mercy and grace. Beyond this was his
god-like capacity to imagine each of us as glorified beings, each of our
futures a reflection of his present. Only such an imagination, I am convinced,
could have emboldened him to descend into Jerusalem
on Palm Sunday and ascend to Calvary the
following Friday.
If we share
some of Christ’s imaginative gifts, as I believe we all have the capacity to do
when we take on us his name, then we can use such gifts to expand his work in
the world. We can imagine not only that, but how, we can be better disciples
than we are and the Church a better institution than it is. The Church I
imagine, like Joseph Smith’s view of God, can be “more liberal in [its] views
and more boundless in [its] mercies than we are ready to believe.”
The way in
which I believe we have failed you our LGBT brothers and sisters is that we
have not used our Christian imagination to try and understand your experience
or to understand our stewardship in relation to you. Instead of seeing you as
Latter-day Saints who have made heroic efforts to conform to Church
requirements, we have instead characterized you as rebellious and unrepentant.
Instead of
seeing you as exercising faith in promises made by Church leaders and
therapists that if you were only sufficiently faithful, you could change your
core identity, we have tended to see you as willfully disobedient and
unfaithful.
Instead of
honoring the often heroic efforts you have made to prove to God and the Church
that you were worthy of such a miraculous promise of change, we have accused
you of not being sufficiently righteous.
Instead of
applauding you for spending years and in some instances decades in therapy
trying to deal with your depression, despair, and existential angst over your
identity, we have accused you of not being sufficiently valiant.
Instead of
seeing you as people who have made amazing sacrifices to fit in with your
family, friends and congregations, we have stereotyped you as lustful,
narcissistic Sybarites bent on indulging in and celebrating a “life style” that
we have labeled outrageous, deviant, and predatory.
Instead of
seeing you as desiring the Mormon ideal of fidelity in marriage, we have
characterized you as desiring something unnatural and uncivilized.
In short,
instead of seeing you as fully human, we have tended to see you as alien and
other.
We have
failed to imagine what it must have been like for you as children or
adolescents when you first recognized that you were different from your peers
and the societal norm you were expected to conform to and how frightened you
were of telling anyone about your feelings. According to the recent survey of
1,600 Latter-day Saint homosexuals conducted by Dr. William Bradshaw and his
colleagues, on average, participants report a ten-year gap between the time they
first realized their romantic or erotic attraction to those of the same sex
(around age 12) and their first disclosure of this to another person (around
age 22). We have failed to imagine the exquisite fear and loneliness you must
have experienced during that long, lonely decade—or how painful it was when you
did finally muster the courage to tell someone, only to discover that they
rejected you, driving you deeper into your loneliness, despair and alienation.
Nowhere has
our imagination failed us more than in our refusal to place ourselves in your
lives, in your hearts, your minds, and your bodies, to imagine how we would
feel and act if we were asked to do what we have asked you to do—forego all
romantic love, intimate affection, erotic expression, marital companionship and
parent-child relationships for the duration of your mortal lives. Failing to
consider the complexity of same-sex orientation and identity, we have
encouraged (and even pressured) some of you to bind yourself to another person
for whom you have no such desires or hope of any. We have also failed to
imagine how it must be for you to suffer opprobrium, denigration of character,
and alienation from the families, friends and congregations you most want to be
a part of. We have failed to imagine how you feel on Sunday mornings when you
want to be worshiping with your fellow saints and singing the songs of Zion.
Finally, we
have failed to imagine the despair, the hopelessness that has led so many of
you to take or attempt to take your own lives.
In a talk I
gave over twenty-five years ago when I was bishop of the Los Angeles Singles’
Ward—addressed to the heterosexual members of the ward--I cited Gerard Manley
Hopkins’ poem, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” in which Hopkins says that each of
us
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is—[that is,]
Christ. For [he says] Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
What Hopkins means is that Christ as our advocate takes our
part, acts on our behalf before the Father, letting his light shine through our
features and faces so that the Father may see us as Christ sees us—lovely in
limbs and eyes (that is, body and soul), in spite of our weaknesses,
limitations, and sinfulness.
Since we have the light of Christ within us, since we take on
his character when we are born anew through him, thus becoming his children of
light, then beyond expressing who and what we are, we also express who he is.
Christ justifies us to God, and it is through His grace that when we act before
the Father, in a sense we become Christ, because his light shines through us.
Christ plays in ten thousand places and through many times ten thousand faces
which he makes lovely to the Father through his grace. Those faces Christ plays
through are both heterosexual and homosexual. He would bring us all to God.
The Gospel
of St. Matthew shows us that Christ intends for us as his disciples to imitate
him in this way—that is, that we are to see one another as he sees us, to
consciously engage our imaginations as he employed his so that we, like him,
can see the very essence of one another’s being, in Latter-day Saint terms, see
the light of Christ in one another’s faces. When we do this, our only response
is to love one another with as pure a love as we are capable of manifesting. As
the novelist, Francisco Goldman says, “The great metaphor at the heart of the
Gospel According to Saint Matthew is that those who suffer and those who show
love for those who suffer are joined through suffering and grace to Jesus
Christ.”
I concluded
my remarks to members of the Los Angeles First ward with these words:
I pray the Lord will bless us as brothers and sisters in the
Kingdom of God, as those who have taken upon us His name, that we will let
Christ's light shine through our faces, that we will make of our community a
wholeness, that we will seek that common ground of peace of which Paul speaks,
and that we will learn how to love and serve the Lord by celebrating who we are,
his heterosexual and homosexual sons and daughters. Because we are all his
creatures, we are all born with his light. I pray that we may let that light
shine among us, that it might grow, that we ourselves might be its beacon, and
that, as a Church and as individuals, we not only will pray to the Lord for
greater light and understanding, but that we will turn our hearts with greater
charity, love and acceptance of all of those whom we might consider strangers.
In Matthew
25 Christ puts Himself in the place of the stranger--of the homosexual, if you
will, saying in effect, "Inasmuch as you have done it or not done it unto
the least of one of these my homosexual brothers or sisters, you have done it
or not done it unto me" (25:40).
What does
this mean for you, my homosexual brothers and sisters? I wish I could say that
you just have to be patient with us, your unimaginative, incomplete and wounded
fellow saints, that you just have to continue to endure our spiritual
immaturity as we strive to become more enlightened and more loving, but the
fact is, you too have this role to play—you must also see us, those who have
despised and rejected you, who have belittled and banished you, who have failed
to find you in our imaginations—you must see us in the same way Christ calls us
to see you. That is, even as we continue to cause you to suffer, you are called
to imagine our lives--our fears, ignorance and prejudice that characterize our
un-Christian treatment of you. That above all is what it means to be a follower
of Christ. With him, we are to replace, ignorance with knowledge, error with
truth, injustice with justice and, most of all, hate with love.
I know it is
not just for you to have to respond in this way to an institution and individuals
who have treated you in unkind, unjust and, yes, un-Christian ways, but if we
are to find our way out of the labyrinth we are in, which I think we must do
together, it is incumbent upon us all to do what Christ calls us to do. It is
through this work that we reform both ourselves and our Church. It is in this
constant reforming that we prevent both ourselves and the Church from becoming
idols. Thus, in order for this to happen, we have to get out of our social and
religious ghettos, see one another’s real lives and try to understand one
another’s lived experiences.
I love the
old Shaker hymn titled “More Love,” which includes the following lyrics:
If ye love not each other in daily communion,
How can ye love God whom ye have not seen?
More love, more love;
The heaven’s are blessing
The angels are calling
O Zion!
More love.
If in the
Church we can imagine change beyond policy and practice, beyond culture,
perhaps even beyond currently accepted doctrine, we may become agents of change
and thereby help transform the Church, perhaps liberate it from some of its
less enlightened traditions, and even glorify it in new ways, thus
demonstrating that we are indeed ready and anxious to receive on this subject
new revelation regarding "great and important things pertaining to the
Kingdom of God." As the humanist Ihab Hassan says, "Liberations come
from some strange region where the imagination meets change. . . . We need to
re-imagine change itself, else we labor to confirm all our errors." Or, as
Saul Bellow’s Henderson
says, “All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination
is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination,
imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it
redeems!”
Twenty-one
years ago I gave the keynote address at the Affirmation national conference in Palm Springs. In that address,
I made an analogy between what was happening in the Church in relation to
homosexuality and what had transpired in American and Mormon culture in
relation to blacks. I quote from that address:
In his powerful essay, "Notes of a Native Son,"
James Baldwin speaks about the rage he felt as he went through a series of
humiliating experiences as a young man living in New York [City]. He was refused service in a
number of restaurants simply because he was black. Finally, the accumulation of humiliations caused
him to react with a kind of unconscious
violence . . . . I saw nothing very clearly but I did see this: that my life,
my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do, but
from the hatred I carried in my own heart."
Later in the same essay Baldwin
concludes, "In order to really hate white people, one has to blot so much
out of the mind--and the heart--that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting
and self-destructive pose. But this does not mean, on the other hand, that love
comes easily: the white world [and here one can substitute the straight world]
is too powerful, too complacent, too ready with gratuitous humiliation, and
above all, too ignorant and too innocent for that . . . . Hatred, which could
destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an
immutable law."
In a letter to his nephew, James, written on the hundredth
anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Baldwin
writes, "There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and
there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must
accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them.
And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love.
For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still
trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand
it, they cannot be released from it. . . . We cannot be free until they are
free."
Have any of
you ever considered that part of your work for humanity might be teaching
heterosexuals how to love better? It may not be fair that you are asked to do
this, but I believe that it is God's will that you do so because, like blacks
and other hated groups, you have experienced the deprivation of love in a
profound way, and that depravation has given you a gift which, if you will use
it, can bless your lives and the lives of others. Having been subject to rejection, ostracism,
and even hatred, you may understand something about the importance of love
which others do not. I believe that it is in rising through our suffering to
such love that we attain holiness.
I would like
to close with a story that illustrates this principle, Raymond Carver’s “A
Small Good Thing.” In this story a couple, the Weisses, make preparations to
celebrate the birthday of their only son, Scotty. They order a cake from the
local bakery. On the day of the party the boy is hit by a car and lapses into a
coma. The parents wait anxiously by the bedside day after day but their son
never awakens and, after a short time, dies. The baker, unaware of the
accident, continues to call the parents to come and pick up the cake. Grieving,
they do not return his calls. He continues to call and leaves abusive,
threatening messages on their answering machine. Finally, one night they go to
the bakery to express their outrage at the Baker’s behavior. When they tell him
that their son is dead, he is embarrassed and ashamed. A simple man, he does
the only thing he can think of—he offers them some of his fresh-baked bread. As
they sit in the darkened bakery eating, he reveals his own life of loneliness,
of being childless, of working sixteen hours a day baking thousands of wedding
and birthday cakes and imagining the celebrations surrounding them, none of
which ever touch his life personally.
Finally, he takes
a fresh loaf of dark bread from the oven, breaks it open and offers some to
them. “Smell this” he says, “It’s a heavy bread but rich.” Carver writes, “They
smelled it, then he had them taste it. It had the taste of molasses and coarse
grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark
bread. It was like daylight under the florescent trays of light. They talked on
into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they
did not think of leaving.”
This is a
powerful story of loss, grief, death, forgiveness, and most of all of love. It
is also a story of redemption. The association in the story of bread with light
reminds us of Christ who is both the bread of life and the light of the world.
Partaking of the bread of life each week, we too taste of his light. (Here I
would add that if you do not feel comfortable partaking of the sacrament in a
Latter-day Saint congregation, find one that welcomes you and partake of it
there.) It is a small good thing we do and is akin to all of the other small
acts of understanding, forgiveness and compassion we give to one another. Such
acts of love, it seems to me, have their genesis in the light of Christ which
is in every one of us. It is our sacred calling to magnify that light in our
hearts and souls and to carry it to and receive it from one another as we
receive the emblems of Christ’s sacrifice, that is, with gratitude and hope.
More love, more love;
The heaven’s are blessing
The angels are calling
O Zion!
More love.
In the name
of Jesus Christ. Amen.
