Nekkid Resurrection

A lot has happened in the past couple of weeks. The chapter I were that was cut last minute from the Baptimergent book was posted on Hombrewed Christianity (http://ht.ly/47xqD) and has been spreading around. I just want to say a couple of things about that. First, I support the larger project, which is in large part why I waited to put the chapter out online. Zach’s worked hard to put together a compelling book and it contains some great essays from several folks I’m thankful to count among my friends. That said, of course it stung more than a little to hear the news that the publishers cut my chapter. Perhaps the most frustrating part was that I’d gotten so excited about participating that I let my guard down. It really shouldn’t have been that big of a surprise. Ironically, I found the fear that the piece was “too gay” really curious given that the chapter was largely about my frustration with my experience of how church conversations have been reductive in just that way. In the end, the experience opened a lot of doors and helped me make lots of connections…and I think more folks have now read the chapter than would have if it had been included. So, thanks Smyth and Helwys for helping to get my work out there.

In the feedback from the Phoenix talks and the chapters, a couple of folks have asked about my use of the terms “sacred sex” and “resurrection sex.” What I mean by sacred sex is a consideration of sexual practice a form of embodied prayer. By prayer, I mean an act whose intent is to orient our attention towards God. So, sacred sex as a practice in my mind is an intention, it’s opening up to seeing and experiencing God in the embrace of another. It is reclaiming the profound power and beauty of the gift of sexual intimacy.

The term “resurrection sex,” which I used in my talk with Richard Rohr, was a direct reference to the Lazarus motif in my previous talk at Big Tent Phoenix (both talks are posted at Homebrewed Christianity). We are called to practice resurrection, to chose that which is life-giving in the face of the death-dealing violence. Sex as a spiritual practice — particularly for those of us who have experienced the same acts distorted into dehumanizing violence (which, to differing degrees, I think is probably all of us) — is about being fully alive, fully oneself, bringing all of you are to another to be seen and celebrated. It is choosing life.

After two weeks back home in NC, what strikes me most about the Big Tent experience is the ongoing conversations that I’ve found myself participating in.  I know that to a large segment of the Big Tent crew the level of activity on social media networks is nothing particularly new, but I’m a relatively latecomer to the party and am still surprised by the wave of communication following an event like this.  So, I’ll echo the sentiment that while the Big Tent movement still has room to grow the connections we’re making are powerful and, at least for me, transformative.

As has been stated in other reflections, the wall this event most significantly seemed to chip away at was the one between younger, post-evangelical, emergenty types and dyed in the wool, mainline progressives. As more of a post-liberal type who didn’t know he was doing anything emergent until other folks started telling him so, it was a good crowd for me.  My frame of reference for understanding Christianity has much more in common with the older set at Big Tent Phoenix, even though my practices look much more like the younger set.  To draw those distinctions just along generational lines is way too reductive, but it at least points towards a truth if not nailing it spot on.

The most interesting theme in the follow-up conversations I’ve been having has been around the politics of representation and the “what’s next” of taking incarnation (and thus bodies) seriously.  Undoubtedly there is work to be done in creating events less dominated by straightwhiteguys.  I look forward to the day when women, people of color, and queers have more space to speak about things other than being women, people of color, and queer.  A few of my friends and colleagues are pushing us in that direction by challenging attempts to be relegated to limited identity conversations (often by other women, people of color, and queers).  That’s happening more and more, and the Big Tent folk are playing a role in moving the culture in that direction.

The video of part of my conversation with Richard Rohr has been posted by my friends at Homebrewed Christianity (http://ow.ly/43QmV).  Earlier in the week they posted my solo talk from Phoenix, and in a few days they’ll also be posting the chapter I wrote for the  book Baptimergent that the publishers deemed (ironically, given its message) “too gay” and cut at the last minute.  So…check ‘em out if you’re interested in my ongoing attempts to rethink the conversations church folk are (and aren’t) having about sexuality.

As for my earlier post about Richard, first and foremost, he’s a lovely man.  I found him to be incredibly gracious and supportive of my work.  We have some clear differences, but sincerely share some common concerns.  One of the great gifts of the Big Tent Phoenix experiences was the connection with him and his openness to continue in a conversation with me about the future of conversations about masculinities and Christian spirituality.  More to come on that…and I remain deeply grateful to all of those who have engaged me in the past few weeks around those questions.  I think we’ve got some important work to do.

As I fumbled to get from my car to my office this morning I counted seven bags in my backseat.  I rifled through or over yoga gear; two overnight bags (one left over from last weekend, one from last night); two different messenger bags I’d brought into work on two different days last week; my murse (man purse — “european shoulder bag”, “Indiana Jones carried one”, insert other pop culture reference here…); and a grocery bag with a chalice, paten, candle, and half a bottle of grape juice.

This is my life at the moment.  Once again I have transformed my back seat into my mobile locker room/office.  Somewhere between family visits that take me out of town, my teaching gig at Duke, the somewhat awkward and paradoxical attempt towards a healthier marriage that has taken the shape of my moving into a loft 30 miles down the road, I seek snippets of balance in yoga, dance, ritual, and prayer.  I spent a large part of Saturday in bed, eating cold pizza and finally giving myself space to watch season six of Lost.  Thankfully, a couple of emails and a dinner invitation pulled me back into the world before a morning off turned into wallowing in a pit of melancholy.

Honestly, I’m not feeling the tug of melancholy that I’ve known at other points, but I know I am resurrecting an old pattern.  When things get tough, I get busy.  I am a master at keeping the schedule packed so I don’t have to do the hard work of stillness.  I can thrust through a day, and even thrust through my very carefully planned spiritual practices, check them off the to do list and keep going.  Everything on the list seems so worthwhile — the opportunities too good to pass by — until I’m dropping balls, snippy with the folks closest to me, and just generally out of sorts.

So this is my confession.  Had my partner not claimed Sabbath for himself on Saturday (which irritated the snot out of me because I wanted his time and attention); had my closest local friends not been out of town or busy; had my back not been aching so much that it was hard to get out of bed; I wouldn’t have sat still all weekend.  I might not have noticed that there were seven different bags in my back seat this morning as a I came into work — and that I’m doing that thing I do again.

Granted, I’m not the bull in a china shop that I once was.  Even in my spread-thin places, I at least know where the ground is even if I lose sight of it from time to time.  But still, I find myself moving faster than planned then slamming on the brakes rather than an easy flow of movement and stillness.

That, and I have too many bags.

I’m headed to Phoenix in a couple of weeks to participate in a gathering of folks wandering/wondering into the spaces beyond the liberal/fundamentalist divide in Christian life (http://www.bigtentchristianity.com/).  Should be a good time — good conversations, good connections and reconnections, good good good.

I’ll be speaking a couple of times, focusing (not surprisingly) on issues of sexuality, gender, and Christianity.  The first of those is a short talk I’ll be doing in conversation with Brian MacLaren’s talk about reframing Jesus.  The essence of my message about reframing the conversation about LGBTQ inclusion can be boiled down to the question “why, as people of faith, must we assume that the gender of my partner choice is the defining aspect of my sexual identity?”  Not to suggest that gender isn’t important, but rather that the church’s recent singular fixation on it has functioned as a great strategy for avoiding bigger, more complex, and in my mind far more important conversations about sex as spiritual practice.

The other thing I’m doing out there – which is both really exciting and somewhat intimidating for me – is leading a breakout session with Richard Rohr, Franciscan friar and peace and justice advocate. I have not yet met Richard in person, though I’ve been reading his work and listening to his recordings for years.  The whole framework for this event is to bring some well-established voices into conversation with some of us newer to the public sphere.  I feel humbled and honored to get the chance to work with him.  That session is a little later in the event and its specific content and structure will emerge in the context of whatever else unfolds while we’re out there, however given our shared interest in the study of men and masculinity, I feel pretty safe in assuming it will come up.

The slightly unnerving part for me is that while I love the rest of Rohr’s writing, his stuff on “men’s work” has generally frustrated me.  The reasons are simple enough, and in many ways reflect a classic tension between essentialist and constructivist views of the world.  Rohr, coming out of the Jungian influences of the mythopoetic men’s movement, holds that there are core, universal elements to male spirituality that need to be ritually tended to in order to facilitate growth and maturity.  I, on the other hand, coming out of the profeminist men’s and queer movements, tend to question the assumption that “male,” “men,” and “masculine” are self-evident and stable realities.  My attention turns towards the ways the ideas are used to produce and/or reinforce other forms of knowledge and power.

But it would be too simple a move to suggest that the differences are simply in our spiritual vs. political leanings.  Rohr’s work on masculinity exists within a larger body of writing and activism that is supremely concerned with the use and abuse of power, while my work exists within a context of working and writing as a spiritual director, pastor, and educator.  Just as he has well established activist street cred, I have spent my time in drum circles and gender segregated spaces.  I value the possibilities for rethinking what it “means to be a man” that those spaces provide.  I value retreat and ritual, embodied ways of knowing and representing our journeys and encounters with mystery.

The really the big sticking point for me in engaging mythopoetics is the claims to some universal spirituality and the need to categorize (somewhat arbitrarily) traits and behaviors as masculine or feminine.  While weaving together threads and influences from male rites of passage from other cultural contexts into an experience for contemporary Western men may be a brilliant interventionist strategy, it still occurs in a particular place and time, marked by all kinds of other identities and privileges.  To suggest that we could isolate one cluster of bodily characteristics (here those which define maleness) and hold that they so centrally define an experience of the world that they transcend all other differences is more than a little problematic.  If we were to make similar suggestions around a cluster of bodily characteristics defining race, for example, and to base similar claims about the essence of the spirit of a people based on that…well, that takes us back to some really scary places.

Rather, I wonder if we can claim the need in this moment, in this particular cultural context – at a time when we can acknowledge that masculinity is socially constructed and bother performed by and read onto particular bodies…and that even the physiological characteristics of anatomical sex are more fluid and ambiguous than the terms male and female suggest – that there is still something to be said for bringing folks together who identify (or have been identified) as men to reflect on how that shapes their experience of navigating the world.  I’d say yes.

But then I’d want to know who counts.

What are the qualifications for being a man?  Is it about having the necessary genitalia?  If so then my friend James, despite being the butchest guy I know – great with auto-mechanics, superb athlete, gruff exterior, father of two – doesn’t get in.  Is it about being husband and father?  If so then neither I, who is partnered to a man and has no children, nor Richard Rohr, who took vows of celibacy, gets in.  Is it dependent on being a breadwinner? On being upwardly mobile? On being what my friend Steve calls “emotionally constipated”?  If so, then who else is excluded?  Can we assume that my experience of being a man is the same even as other men of my generation? As TuPac’s was?  As John Leguizamo’s is?

I say all of this, and then also name that I spent most of my Christmas day with two other guys who were also away from their partners (each of us for different reasons) and we talked about our experiences of growing up navigating the expectations of “becoming men” in ways that were astounding and deeply moving.  I went to a birthday party last weekend with a group of ten men who fumbled towards building connections and on the way sometimes landed in places that were reminiscent of high school a locker room.  I am going on a retreat next weekend with men who will sing and dance and roll around the floor together as we try to stand in active resistance to the division of our bodies and spirits.

As I settle into accepting that I am entering mid-life, I have a need for peer friendship with men more than I ever have.  After a lifetime of surrounding myself professionally and personally mostly with women, I long to be in spaces where I stand shoulder to shoulder with other men – not as father figures, combatants, or even lovers – but as friends.  So, much as I think that the mythopoetic men’s movement, and Richard Rohr’s Chrisitian articulation of it, is limited by largely reflecting the desires and fantasies of white, middle-class, North American, baby-boomers, I know I can’t dismiss it.  Too much resonates.

And I wonder what comes next; for those of us (many still white, middle-class, and North American) who question the categories, but are still shaped by them; for those of us whose father issues are not those belonging the baby boomers, but those raised by the baby boomers; for those of us who claim labels like nerd and sissy with pride, and often less discomfort than man and masculine; for those of us committed to dismantling systemic privilege based on gender, race, and class.  The mythopoetic men’s movement is not mine.  And though I understand the longing for a universal manhood, I don’t want to be held subject to it.

So I’m asking – both my friends who identify as men, those who don’t, and those who challenge the very idea of gender identification – where do we go from here?

Hearing Lea Michele, Glee’s Rachel, break into “Papa can you hear me…” on last night’s episode was met with fluttering hands, deep gasps, and a race to my Twitter account.  Sorry for the spoiler West Coast friends, I was just way too excited.  The fact that on the same day I received a copy of the original Yentl soundtrack as a particularly kind gesture of friendship from a man I expect might have been slightly embarrassed to purchase it (I can imagine him saying, “It’s for a friend…really”), just made the moment that much sweeter.

I know it’s a ridiculously sappy, emotionally manipulative, self-indulgent Bab flick, but I love it.  Yentl is part of my story, and encountering it this week reminds me of who I was twenty-five years ago.
Yentl was released in 1983, but I didn’t see it until it made its way to HBO the next year.  We had recently purchased a VCR, and I secretly recorded it, knowing it spoke to me in some place not to be named out loud.  I kept the tape hidden under my bed and only watched it on the rare occasions I found myself home alone.  The shame wasn’t in the film itself (I don’t think I yet knew the implications of being a Barbra fan) it was in me.  Yentl is the story of a young woman pretending to be a man in order to study scripture, in love with her best friend, simultaneously angered by the restrictions of gender constructs and awkwardly embarrassed by her failure to adhere to them.  The fact that I played the scene where she reveals her secret to the man she loves over and over again, the closest thing I’d ever seen to a love scene between men, was what confused, troubled, and thrilled me.

Let’s put some context around this: I was a sissy, but of the nerdy type, so with the exception of one particularly homophobic bully my experience of harassment could have been much worse.  Nonetheless, I received the clear message that all boys got that nothing was worse than a girly-boy, and nothing made a boy more girly than liking other boys.

At age eleven (1984) while performing a bit part in the NC School of the Arts junior class production of Shakespeare’s MacBeth, I walked in on two men kissing in the dressing room.  I was thrilled.  They were beautiful.  I was stunned. They saw my drop-jawed expression in the mirror, smiled and laughed.  These two lovely men taught me how to play chess, and since they were rarely on stage at the same time they kept a game going with me while I awaited my one scene (which consisted of fourteen lines and a murder).  They took me in, and became my guardians as the lone child in a strange culture of college theater types.

Not long after that, I developed a crush on a youth leader at church.  He was a big burly guy, kind and warm.  It was in the arms of a (very safe and appropriate) hug from him that I experienced an awakening.  I was turned on.  I felt safe, known, and loved.  I felt sure that I heard a voice from God which I identified as a call to vocational ministry. Later I would deconstruct and reconstruct what was going on in my psyche in that moment — the mix of ecstasy, shame, longing for approval — but the complicated link between my sexual and spiritual awakenings that have shaped much of my life was established.

About that same time, AIDS became headline news.  All I knew of men who loved men was that they died young and tragically, that they were abandoned by their families and cast out by society.  I cut articles about them out of magazines and newspapers.  Those clippings stayed securely in a shoebox with the secret videotape.  Be clear, I was nowhere close to identifying myself as gay.  That was inconceivable.  I literally kept the lid on my desire, boxed up and hidden in the dark.

The twists and turns of the following couple of years, the ways in which my world was distorted through a Sunday School Teacher’s (different man) sexual abuse, only deepened the simultaneous sense of longing for God, craving a life of ministry, and coming more and more to realize my exclusion from the institutional church.  As a middle schooler I never could have articulated all of this, but I could watch Yentl over and over again.  Not even really knowing what drew me to the film — the keeping of secrets in order to live out one’s faith, the hope for the secret’s unravelling — it kept calling me back.

Sixteen years later, I found myself sitting in the back row of a ministry class in my first semester at divinity school. At that point I was in a well-established relationship with Ron.  I’d been quite transparent about my home-life as I entered the school.  I was not alone; there were three or four other same-gender-loving folks who showed up that year, too.  But when our professor, illustrating some point I can’t recall, asked if any of us remembered the last scene of Yentl, it was me that gasped, clutched my chest, and sang out “Papa can you hear me…”, promptly confirming every stereotype lingering in the back of my classmates’ minds.

So, yeah, I know it’s not a great movie, but color me Barbra — it still grabs my heart.

I changed belts four times this morning.  While a recognize that I have lots of clothes in my closet, I also know that they span three different sizes of Brian.  I’ve let go of most of the biggest of my clothes, but this morning I was dead set on wearing a pair of pants that I bought about ten pounds ago, thus the belt was important.  It not only needed to bring together the upper and lower portions of my outfit, it actually had to keep my pants up.  It took me four belts to settle on one that met my standards for both purposes.

The disturbing thing is that they were all brown, casual, leather belts.  Pretty basic design.  Had I shifted into brown dress belts, another four.  Slightly funky belts that look good with jeans, another three.  Add one webbed belt you complete my brown collection.  The brown ones do account for the vast majority of my belts, but still — how could I possibly need twelve brown belts?  How did I even end up with that many?  I know several were purchased on the road when I had been careless in packing — hardly an excuse.  Once again, I’m embarrassed by the contents of my closet.  I don’t even really like half of them.  More to let go of.

I wish I was doing something really noble or impressive here, or that it hadn’t taken me another half hour past getting dressed to recognize the absurdity of the belt thing.  Blogging about this is not a grand gesture, it is an attempt to keep me honest — to look at my relationship with stuff and begin asking hard questions.  It’s really a small-scale start, but it’s what I can do today.

Pledged what I figure I’ve spent on belts and socks each month for the past year to support a friend’s work in town.  Sigh.

I’ve decided. I’m committing.

I am not going to buy any clothes or shoes for the next year.

I’m embarrassed to say that this is as big a deal to me a it is — and I confess that before making this proclamation I stocked up on new underwear. I stood in my closet a few minutes ago and realized that I could wear a different pair of shoes every day for a month and still not get all the way through my collection. I could wear a different blazer every day for three weeks, a different t-shirt for nearly two months, a different belt for three weeks, a different sweater or sweatshirt for a month…you get the idea.

I like clothes a lot, though honestly I rarely get very attached to individual items (with the exception of some really cute shoes). That’s been my way of justifying my reckless relationship to apparel for years. About twice a year, I give away trunks full of stuff I am not wearing. Yup…and I still have more than a closet full…a big, walk-in closet at that.

I’m a bargain shopper and nothing gets me quite so excited as digging through a rack in an outlet or surfing my favorite discount websites for a deal. I get obsessive about it. Those great deals are my other justification, but in the end I know it’s insane to have accumulated this much and to keep on buying.

My intent is to keep up with my practice of thinning out the wardrobe and letting go of stuff other folks could get more use out of. The difference is, this year I won’t follow my trip to Goodwill with a trip to my favorite boutique at Cameron Village.

I’m embarrassed to talk about this openly. It amazes me that I can stand up in front of crowds of folks and talk about sex all day, but talking about my relationship to money and stuff is still really difficult. Here’s what I am increasingly convinced of: my relationship to my stuff and my money is inseparable from my relationship with other people. I’m not sure of all the implications of that statement, but I know there’s truth in it.

I’ve got decent access to financial resources, and I like to tell myself that I use what I have got responsibly, but I also know that I turn a blind eye to my own behavior regularly. So, this is the time. I’ve got something to learn in this practice, and I get anxious about hitting the “save” button on this entry…once it’s out there, I’m in. I’m anxious about it, and I don’t know why. It’s not in the least bit rational.

I trust I’ll understand more about the choice as the year goes on.

About five years ago I began a journey with the Mercy of God Community (www.MGC.com) an ecumenical, non-residential, religious community based in the traditions of Saint Francis and Saint Clare. I cam to this community via a friend who had been involved for several years. I was a tentative explorer, long for some other expression of my faith and ministerial identity than what I had available at the time. I showed up pretty wounded, but our little community is well versed in the art of spiritual triage. I was well tended to and companioned through a multi-year discernment and formation process on my way to taking my full vows.

We are an imperfect group, stumbling towards grace with all the awkwardness of a middle schooler at a spring dance, but we keep showing up together, following a sense of call that gets articulated through the filters of our multiple faith traditions. So yeah, this is me, Southern, queer, Baptist Franciscan.

What strikes me most when I think about MGC in relation to recent conversations I’ve been having is how much this group fits within the larger framework of the emergent church discourse, though I doubt many of my brothers are more than vaguely aware of the work that has made up that movement. But here we are, intentionally ecumenical, theologically diverse, looking for ways to live in community that hold us accountable to what our faith asks of us in how we relate to the world.

The community is just over twenty years old, and though we long for more women members, at this point is largely made of men who live in the northeast and have some history with Roman Catholicism that shapes an understanding of religious community life. We’ve got a lot of Episcopalians, various Catholics (Roman, free, etc.), a Lutheran, a Presbyterian, a United Methodist, a Baptist, and then several hybrid identities that include threads of Quakerism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Buddhist meditation. In fact, relatively few of us are denominational purists, and most have moved with some fluidity in and out of a few traditions. Some of us are over the denominational system altogether, and all of seek healing from the “scandalous divisions” in the resurrected body of Christ that is the church.

Here’s my point: what get’s included in the Emergent Church conversations (I capitalize here intentionally in order to reference a specific movement that that self identifies with that language) is only a snippet of the larger emergence of new forms of Christian community and ways of doing church in the world. Few of the (mostly retired) members of MGC would be much at home in the coffeehouse, MacBook culture of the EC, but they’ve been talking about the same stuff for decades.

Only one in our number came out of an evangelical Protestantism that looms so large as the backdrop of the EC, but we are arriving at similar spaces. I’m thankful for what I’m learning from EC friends, and am thankful for participation in a larger emergence that has multiple expressions.

Mercy abounds.

Over the past year or so I’ve found myself in conversations from time to time where I’ve been put in the situation of trying to figure out whether or not I fit into the “Emergent” church classification.  I’m not a formal member of any kind of organization that would make that status clear…not sure what that organization would be (maybe Emergent Village?), but it seems like the very concept of compulsory membership  runs pretty counter to what I understand those who claim the Emergent moniker to be talking about. 

Recently I’ve found myself in a couple of conversations about racial diversity and institutional racism in the Emergent Church (EC) — which I’ve found engaging and interesting, but full of the same kind of challenges and frustrations I’ve found within my denominational home when we’ve tried to work on the same questions.  It’s not easy stuff, but it’s important and I’m committed to continuing those conversations.  A couple of things struck me in those exchanges: 1. Seems like there is a devaluing of aesthetics, which I’d just as soon claim as significant, 2. I still can’t figure out how one is or isn’t included in this “Emergent Church” construct, and 3. seems like there might be some interesting lessons to learn from Queer discourse for what we’re about here.

I’ve been known to make my share of jokes about the “Emergent look”, though it’s generally a look I’m down with. I’m one of those white guys with cool glasses and a Mac.  Dependent on the day, I may or may not have some form of facial hair, and I’m almost always in jeans.  There are certainly racial and gender politics worth paying attention to in any aesthetic that becomes normative, but there’s also a space to claim that part of what defines EC is an aesthetic value.  The coffee-drinking, tech-savvy, hipster isn’t just a stereotype, it’s an aesthetic identification.  The notion of EC as a network of friends and conversation partners only works when this aesthetic is really claimed.  Rather than being defensive about why other church movements are not subjected so openly to comments about their “look” (which is arguable — I mean, Southern Baptist hair does evoke a certain image), it seems that it’s more productive to go ahead and claim that part of what EC is about is thinking about church in a way that appeals to certain aesthetic values.  We are smart consumers of cultural texts, and from the blogs we read to the books we buy, there is a “feel” to what EC is doing. 

That is not to say that the aesthetics trump the theologies, but that the aesthetics are perhaps more normative than the theologies, which is a distinctive move.  The capacity to make room for differences in theological convictions is part of what EC claims to be about, so the defining EC-ness, what makes someone or something all emergenty isn’t just about what is being professed (though there are certainly some more popular trends), but how it is being said.  Does the packaging affect the message?  Of course it does.  Are we Mac folk more likely to have bought into a particular kind of lifestyle branding that gets clustered with other cultural markers, of course we are.  Is there an implicit tirbalism? Yup…it’s there, problematic perhaps, but present. 

Be clear, I’m not saying that claiming the EC as at least in part an aesthetic movement is intended to either disregard the important critiques that are being levied out of that camp towards the binary thinking that has for way too long split Christians into liberal/fundamentalist or mainline/evangelical camps.  It’s a powerful and important message — but not one that belongs to EC alone.  Other folks who fell off the grid of intelligibility that the modernist binary demanded have been working from different models for a long time, particularly people of color, women, and LGBT folk.   Nor do I think that claiming the importance of aesthetics in the EC means it’s okay not to deal with issues of access and power (which could easily be hidden behind such a mask).  These gender, sexuality, and race conversations surely need to keep happening, and I trust that they have the power to be both personally and culturally transforming. 

So while on the one hand I’m down with acknowledging this whole scene is a scene because some of the kids who couldn’t figure out what lunch table to sit at found each other and gathered around a new table, I’m also aware that the new table of yesterday’s outsiders has managed to gain a lot of cultural capital and has some responsibility for what to do with it.  EC is long past, “Dude, I was just hanging with my friends” — but it doesn’t mean the nerd chic that gave birth to has to die. 

Which gets me to my second point: how is one inducted into the Emergent Church?  Is it a decision on the part of publishers?  Is there an infomal admission once you’re tweets are being followed by a certain number of previously identified emergents?  It feels like a really messy category.  While identification within or in relation to the Emergent Village seems a bit easier to pin down, is there anyone who would really suggest that the EV encompasses the EC?  I can’t imagine that being the case.  And as I have no real connection to the EV, other than having some acquaintances who do, I’m left with wondering how to know if I’m emergent enough to be Emergent.

It’s an issue of identity politics, the kind of thing I generally steer clear of these days.  Like the young man/woman said to my friend, “I’m not a soup can.  Don’t put a label on me.”  This isn’t a new game for me.  I got uncomfortable being identified as gay years ago, though I’m partnered with a man and in my adult life have only been in sexually/romantically intimate relationships with other men.  Nevertheless, large parts of the political and cultural aesthetic of being gay don’t really appeal to me.  I’m much more interested in health care and immigration reform than I am access to marriage (an institution that needs some serious rethinking best I can tell); I’m much more interested in the politics of peace than I am gaining access to military service; and give me Johnny Cash over Lady Gaga any day (though I have tickets to see her with some friends in September).  The point is, I lost track of how I was doing on the checklist that makes me a good gay sometime in my late twenties, and I ain’t going back.

For awhile, “Queer” has been my best alternative when needing language to describe who I am in terms of what (and who) I do, but it isn’t without flaws.  There is a sort of punk aesthetic that queer evokes — a thumbing of the nose to the establishment that I admit appeals to me more than HRC-style assimilationist politics.  Where “gay” finds meaning over-against “straight”, “queer” finds meaning in relation to “normal,” and thus queer resists being normalized in and of itself.  When it’s used in its noun form as an identity category, it’s hard to say what exactly makes one qualify as a queer (sound familiar?).  The whole question as to whether one is or is not “queer enough” seems really un-queer to me.  Yet, to divorce “queer” from the playful transgressions of gender and sexual performance from which it emerges renders it meaningless.  So, yeah.  It’s complicated.  

Queer movements — starting as loose networks for friends and resisting institutionalization and often noted for their wild attire, youth, and hipness — have also been critiqued for a tendency to constitute “normal” in a way that fails to recognize how the cultural push for a singular (heteronormative) model has functioned to enact policies and power plays that also target folks who aren’t necessarily same-gender loving.  Cathy Cohen does a great piece in which she points out the limitations of queer rhetoric in recognizing the ways the same systems they critique function to produce the “welfare queen” and disproportionately stigmatize poor and working class women of color for “failures” to adhere to dominant cultural values around sex and family. 

So while I may claim identification with queer, I hold it loosely, I hear and acknowledge the critiques of privilege made just as I levy similar critiques towards “the gay community”.  These days, I am much more invested in queering, the verb form, utilizing strategies to disrupt power by making the familiar strange and make explicit the implicit politics that make some things normal and some abominations.  Likewise, I’m much less interested in claiming membership in THE Emergent Church, than identifying with other folks who are invested in living in community with others who are participating in emerging Christianities, still in process and full of multiplicities. 

The concept of Emergents as a class of people is always going to be a contestable notion.  If you set up a class of folk then you inherently have to deal with the boundaries of who gets included and who doesn’t.  How about instead we hold onto the idea that those theogeek Mac guys represent one of countless rethinkings of Christianity — one of a limitless number of emerging Christianities, some of which will have a big impact and some of which will fade away, depending on who and how they engage other folk.  Let’s just be sure to give some air time to those emerging communities, too.

Same as it ever was.

I know some of you who read my work here also follow Tony Jones, but I also know some of you probably don’t.  Though I don’t always see to eye to eye with Tony, I find him provocative  – and there is a ministry in that kind of rabble rousing.  So if it seems like I’m giving him lots of energy right now, it’s because I’m intrigued.

Below is a repost of one the comments I entered on his blog (http://blog.tonyj.net/), as part of an ongoing conversation sparked by the cover of the latest issue of Sojourners, which posed the question “Is the Emerging Church for Whites Only?”  Tony, referring to the ambivalent silence of the Sojourners crowd on the “inclusion of GLBT persons in church and society”, responded with a post titled “Is Sojourners for Straights Only?”  A lively discussion ensued.  This is one of a one of a couple of my responses, specifically addressed to Gabriel Salguero, who responded (I think) to my earlier entry.

Okay…that’s enough set-up.  Let’s get to the point:

Dear Gabriel,

I’m not sure if I’m the Brian you were addressing, but either way, I’ll take it as an opportunity to jump back in. I really appreciate the conversation that’s happening. Despite its difficult nature, there is something really hopeful for me about the attempts on the parts of so many in this forum to really engage one another and not slip into “us and them” dualities. At its best, this is what I see as the EC’s primary intervention into the larger cultural discourse.

I agree, Gabriel, there needs to be some serious unpacking of the role “issues of LGBT/GLBT” plays in this conversation. I am suspicious of evocations of welcoming and affirming stands as a means of marking one’s social location. First, it perpetuates the sort of litmus testing around who is in or out of certain theological circles even as it tries to disrupt that sort of thinking. Secondly, it disregards the actuality of LGBT people (and maybe particularly those of us who claim Q for queer, because we got tired of the same sort of binarism in LGBT politics) who are played as pawns in someone else’s cultural battles. Thirdly, it seems mostly invested in a politics of distraction. Brushing off critiques of race because those raising the critiques have work to do on homophobia just seems too easy. After all, I’m still a middle-class white guy with a Mac and hip glasses. I blend in pretty well in an EC crowd, so let’s not let my inclusion be reason for avoiding the difficult work around race.

Finally, these sort of rhetorical strategies perpetuate a notion of competing oppressions that maintains repressive hierarchies, resulting in a constituting of LGBT identities that is dominated by white, middle-class, and arguably male assumptions and values. The often unintentional result is a false distinction that “issues of GLBT” have little to do with issues of race, class, gender, and nation — and that identity categories tied to each each exclude the members of others. We thus further participate in silencing the voices for women of color, poor queers, etc.

Perhaps, then, a more coalitional approach is needed in which the codes of “normalcy” for the community (or movement, or network) are transparently considered and questioned. That is not to suggest an anything goes sort of approach (as if the escape from such codes could or even should be desirable), but rather and humble and reflexive stance in which we consider how our communities are producing and regulating normativities even in the most subtle ways.

I’m grateful for a call towards anti-racist work. What does it mean to claim that our Gospel narrative requires of us an anti-racist commitment? How would we live that out?

Peace!
Brian