For a few years, I’ve been pondering and dreaming about some way to demonstrate the love and care I feel for gay people in connection to Pride events. I’ve winced, as I know many Christians have, at the images of religious people holding placards in protest along the side of parade routes. The most ridiculous photo I saw was of the back of a man’s t-shirt that read, “Real Christians Don’t Sin”….. What????? Every real Christian I know sins – all the time. That’s why we need a Saviour. And what about I John 1:8, “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”? Anyway….needless to say, I have long desired in some small way to try to undo what some, who name the name of Jesus, have done in the past.
This year, things finally seemed to come together in a small, under the radar, anonymous sort of service initiative. In partnership with the Meeting House, one of the churches we connect with, we gathered a small group of people willing to serve as volunteers – and offered ourselves to the Pride Toronto committee. The initial idea was that we would go down and pick up garbage after the parade. Simply show up, be the presence of Jesus, and serve our city. But God seemed to have a different idea. When I initially spoke months ago to the fabulously organized Lisa Duke, Volunteer Coordinator, she thought it would be great if we could help them ‘de-register’ the vendors. Basically, last year a lot of vendors all took off at the same time and left a lot of garbage behind – which cost Pride a lot of money because they had to pay the city more to clean it up. So Lisa thought it would be great if we could go around to the vendors on the last day of events, introduce ourselves, offer our service in helping them de-register and make sure their site was squeaky clean. It seemed, we were being given the opportunity to make connections and be in conversation, as well as helping to clean up. Cool.
So the big day finally arrived. The parade was finishing up and we got our volunteer t-shirts, our photo i.d., our meal and snack tickets, got pointed to the tent where there was a constant supply of pizza and water, and told to have fun. Robert, the food vendor coordinator, was so great and so glad to have us. Allan,one of TMH’s pastors and key coordinator for our involvement, kept saying how as pacifist BIC pastors they would have to “radically love” the vendors into cleaning up their sites – the big love-enforcers :).
We had a fair bit of time to wander around before we had to really get down to the business we were there for ….. and though I’d seen many photos of Pride and watched it on T.V in the past, I had never been ‘in the flesh’ at Pride before. To be honest, I’m a suburb soccer mom and don’t get downtown too much. So I did feel like a fish out of water. Not because I was shocked or offended …. but it was just a very different context than I normally find myself in. That’s good. It was colourful, diverse, loud, and lively.
When Robert began to give us our assignments, a few of us chose to work to help out the vendors who were not selling food. To be honest, I was still a bit fatigued and jetlagged from my recent trip out west, and it seemed this volunteer role included a bit more sitting. As I began to make my way to the various booths to introduce myself and begin giving reminders about ‘tear-down’ and cleanliness, I found myself engaging some very interesting people. There were the service group booths: AIDS education, anti-discrimination groups, anti-poverty groups, District School Board representatives, Youth Helpline, and even a Barack Obama booth. And then there were the vendors selling stuff: sunglasses, t-shirts, hats, leather goods, and sex toys including glass penises. Hmm. That was a little awkward I must say.
I had shared in my church that morning that I was heading down to Pride events to volunteer, serve and simply be the presence of Jesus by being there. The elder who prayed for me said, “That is going to be really hard. I could never do that.” I hadn’t really had a lot of time to think about it – or contemplate that it would be hard. I engage gay people all the time so I expected it to be a pretty normal, every-day experience. So I said to the elder, “That’s why God is sending me – because He’s called me and I want to do it.” But I want to do it so that I can share with other Christ-followers how they, too, can be present through love and service – to begin to undo the enmity and divide. As I shared with the other volunteers, our being there was more about us being changed than trying to change anyone else. Our hearts need to continue to be open to what God is saying to us as we show up and be present.
Having said that, however, I was a bit surprised by the ways it was hard to be present at Pride. I found it hard to listen to God – I think just because of my own sense of distraction by so many different sights and images to take in. I began to feel in my body a heaviness, fatigue and quite quickly developed a tremendous headache. I’ve experienced these sorts of things before – and not to get all oogedy-boogedy on anyone, but I know a sense of spiritual heaviness when I feel it. So while I did find it hard to hear what God might be saying, or to really pray much at all, I do feel that in my physical body I was both carrying the presence of God and encountering the presence of darkness. Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not trying to suggest that every person there was filled with spiritual darkness. I saw people who seemed to be at peace and at rest. I saw couples strolling hand-in-hand who seemed very happy and content. I saw people deeply concerned about injustices – not just injustices toward the glbtq community – but global injustices. It was a very diverse kaleidoscope. But I also began to be moved in my physical gut with the kind of compassion that the scriptures describe Jesus feeling when he looked at the crowds and saw that they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd.
As I saw 50-something year old men walking naked, except for a dog-collar, down the street, something in my heart grieved….. What is their legacy in life? Who is their family? Where do they find a sense of purpose? What is their hope? A man, I’m guessing in his 40’s, was riding a tricycle, sucking a pacifier, dressed in a baby bonnet with a sign “big baby on board” …. and it just made me very sad in my spirit. Two transvestites were rather aggressively trying to pick up a very drunk lesbian (who thankfully blew them off after about 10 minutes) – and something in me just ached. Again, please don’t misunderstand me. It was not judgment I felt, nor offense particularly. I tried to be careful to not presuppose too much about these individuals’ lives outside of the few moments I witnessed. But in a deep place I felt a groaning and sadness ~ a sense of emptiness washing over me.
I hadn’t expected all of that to be honest. Though looking back I’m not surprised that God stretched my heart in unexpected ways. True compassion isn’t patronizing. It isn’t about judgment. The dictionary definition of compassion describes it as, “The deep feeling of sharing the suffering of another, together with the inclination to give aid or support or to show mercy.”
The Hebrew people saw compassion as a deep, visceral experience – of being moved to the depths of one’s being – but they also saw it as the place where life is created. Compassion, by its nature, is the recreation of life, the bestowing of grace. They saw compassion as the trembling womb. In fact, the Hebrew verb rakham meaning “have compassion” is closely associated with the noun rekhem which means womb. In Isaiah 49:15 God says, “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.”
I believe the compassion that I felt in my body at Pride has everything to do with the longing of God to be known in the lives of those who are disconnected, lonely and empty – and needing to know the love of the Father.
I’m grateful to have been at Pride this year. Already, I’m looking forward to extending the invitation to more Christ-followers to volunteer with me next year. The Pride folks were fantastic. They were so grateful to have us there. Allan reports that some of the Pride Committee people were so intrigued that members of a church would want to come and volunteer (apparently it is the first time they’ve had volunteers “like us” :)), that some of them said they wanted to check out the Meeting House. Robert already said, “You guys have to come next year to help us get the vendors set up – this year it was a disaster.”
I was really grateful to simply be able to engage with my gay neighbours. I really enjoyed hanging with some of the other volunteers and having the opportunity to hear from some of the service group representatives. Some of the things I saw were hard to see, some things broke my heart, and some brought a smile to my face. I don’t have any grandiose notion that my presence at Pride is going to bridge the gap between the Christian community and the gay community ~ but I do think it is a step in the right direction. It puts me in a place where God can, even in spite of me, continue to work in my heart and to open my eyes to see what He sees.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
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12 comments:
Thanks, Wendy, for sharing this experience with us. Thanks for your obedience to the Holy Spirit. Thanks for demonstrating mercy and grace. Thanks for replacing judgment with compassion. Thanks for casting out fear with love, and finding courage along the way.
Wendy, I have the greatest respect for your good intentions, but volunteering at Pride is a case of "material cooperation in evil" and therefore would be morally acceptable only under limited circumstances that don't seem to me to hold here.
I will certainly hang out with gay friends, and once in a blue moon I'll go to a gay bar, but attending Pride in any capacity is different. Pride events encompass many purposes, but surely an intrinsic and unavoidable purpose of the event, one in which all participants are implicated to a greater or lesser degree, is to make a public statement. That statement is not simply that people of various sexualities should not be ashamed of who they are, but that homosexuality is normal and natural and good.
In other words, Pride Day intrinsically desensitizes our society to the sinfulness of homosexual acts, as well as facilitating (as you saw) all sorts of exhibitionism and other disordered behaviour. Pride Day itself is directed towards the sin of scandal, by which I mean "an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil" (CCC 2284).
I attended a couple of Pride Days in the first few years after I returned to Christianity, for reasons much like your own, of trying to find some way to share Christ in that spiritually parched environment. I didn't have the philosophical tools then to really sort out the problem, but eventually I still concluded that I just couldn't go back.
I'd suggest that you read at least the first quarter of this web page, which provides a set of short essays on the morality of cooperation in evil.
"There may, however, be particular circumstances in which it is licit to render material cooperation in the sin of another in order to achieve a necessary good or avoid a great harm. Such cooperation rests on the fact that 'charity, by which we are obliged to avoid it (the other person's sin), does not oblige if there is great difficulty.'(7) Obviously if the good effects can be obtained in other ways, cooperation in evil is not licit."
Given the gravity of the scandal that Pride creates, I would argue that even the indirect cooperation you provided is unjustified.
So unless the only way to reach the people you're trying to evangelize is to help out at Pride, I say you really shouldn't do it again.
Hello Sheepcat - thanks for stopping by. As you know, I respect your thoughtful engagement on these realities.
Certainly, what you have raised provides much food for thought.
There are multiple ways to look at engaging in the manner our team did. And I'm sure there will be much more unpacking in my mind and heart as God helps me to continue to process and unfold what and how he is asking us to engage.
Thanks 'throughthestorm'. The idea of judgment to compassion seems like such a simple and good shift to make - and yet, until we actually embody that shift, risk experiencing the good and hard things about that - all it is is a good idea.
Thank you Wendy for sharing your experience in detail, as much as you were able to process your first Pride.
I will take a day oor two and process what I want to say , as there is much I want to ask you about your experience, as well as some other insights. I compliment the first and secnd responses to your post, the first being sooo neccesary to support the courage, and genuine work, you and others obligated to do, for that evevnt.
I get some of what sheepcat is saying, but as a gay women trying and decideing to make a transition out of the lifestlye, you have helped wth gentla and careful words, as not to offend me. And while, I understand, most if not all aspects of what many of the varietys reopresented and stated at pride, I feel, that hearing sheepcats, honest, but somewhat condeming of you 'mixing or condoning with evil, a dismissal of your abslolutely innocent (i beleieve) intention, to defuse, the righteous angry on both sideds of the playing field.
And frankly, evengelizing without volunteering may have been easier, as if you evevn watch the parade with the thousands who come down to onlook, you will heaer gawking and often homophobic statements that could use some bold comments even in the crowd.
Maybe that is a safe place for sheepcat to, participate, in pointing out to come down and 'make fun of, is reinforcing homophobic attitudes. Now there an example of much we all could do that day, as well.
shalom
Thanks for your response, Wendy.
Just the other day a friend pointed out that compassion is an emotion, not a virtue. Clifford Orwin, a philosophy prof at the University of Toronto, charts the development of the concept of compassion from the ancient Greeks through Christianity and then a radical shift thanks to Rousseau (I admit I kind of glossed over the second half of the essay).
Charity, then, was not a (merely) natural virtue such as those taught by the ancients, but a “theological” or “infused” one. As such, moreover, it necessarily aimed not only or even primarily at the relief of our neighbor’s earthly suffering but at his eternal salvation. Salvation alone was the good (and damnation the evil) beside which all others paled.
So while Christianity may indeed have multiplied soup kitchens, it never confused happiness with the absence of hunger pains. Truer to say that while modern compassion seeks to eliminate suffering, Christianity, recognizing its inevitability for mortal and sinful beings, sought to make it meaningful. It sought to teach us to grasp it as that suffering in and with Christ on which salvation ultimately depends.
We need always to hold feeling and reason in right relationship (something I myself certainly struggle with!). I find it very striking that in Mark 6:34, Jesus "had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things" (emphasis added).
In a way you seem to point to this yourself by referring to people's need "to know the love of the Father" (emphasis added, though I imagine neither of us would intend this knowledge as purely cognitive).
I haven't quite digested Orwin's analysis, but it seems to me that in treating compassion in the modern sense as necessarily virtuous, our society has allowed emotion to trump reason and truth (not to mention trying to trump the Way, the Truth and the Life specifically). It is misplaced compassion that has allowed certain denominations to get into such a terrible muddle, being "tossed about by every wind of doctrine" (Eph 4:14).
I'm not saying that's where you are theologically, but the area is fraught with risks you may not be equipped to grapple with, and the more I think about churches' actively helping Pride to do what it does, the more alarmed I become.
This goes out to sheepcat, while as a gay woman, I frankly do not have the knowledge or space your coming from, I have no doubt there is merit and opportunity for some good disusion and points.
I have very limited bible knowledge from new and old testament, however, I have much knowledge in a most humbling way of our fallen state. And, while it appears your comments and intellect relect important ideas, gay and lesbian friends of wendys may be able to help and protect through friendship and prayer her process of serving and discovering what and Why certain statements, beliefs or acts in the gay community mean so much to so many. It could very well just be a lesson in understanding whats so important to SHow another , more safer and peaceful life. We all must show up to demonstarte this.
Let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together. —Hebrews 10:24-25.
Thank you for your thoughts, I grapple with.
Rhonda
Good post, Wendy. I appreciate your sentiments.
The weirdness one sees at Pride parades causes a lot of gay people to wince as well. It's a controversial element in gay discourse. Many stay away because they don't want to be associated with it.
Like you, I have seen what you have and also had to wonder what happened that got someone to dress or act the way they do and what statement they are trying to make. I try, albeit not always successfully, to put my "ick" reaction aside and ask myself what they are trying to say. Sometimes I learn something new.
But what others say or do no more reflects on me as a gay man in a relationship, as the Christian protesters reflect on you. It's easy to distance ourselves from our fringe but often hard to allow others to do the same.
Anyway, this year I happened to be in New York for gay pride weekend. The Episcopal parish I attend there, which is almost entirely heterosexual and in Brooklyn, always makes a big effort to show up and show an alternative view of Christianity to gay people along the parade route.
Far from being a "spiritually parched environment", the Bishop of New York presided over prayers, hymns and the Eucharist which attracted passerby from other religious groups: Catholics, evangelicals and Lutherans to our Table. 300 of us Episcopalians then followed a bagpipe band and carried banners of love along the street to a great deal of applause and accolades.
One of the best memories was that the group behind us in the lineup were the Palestinian/Israeli Gay Friendship Association. Once they realized we were Episcopalian Christians they were thrilled that we were there and started passing out amazing Middle Eastern food. Most were Jews, Muslims and Maronites and the thought of Christians accepting and loving them was hard to fathom. (I have no idea where all the food came from but they weren't happy until everyone was holding something.)
I know the weirdness is going to be the focus for most, but to me, the love that transcends divisions: Jews and Palestinians, Catholics and Protestants, blacks and whites together is what I always remember along with all the social service groups. I wish the world were the same way.
It's spiritually invigorating.
And this is a good rant on the whole thing from a blogger friend of mine.
Joe.My.God: Watching The Defectives
Mild profanity alert.
I think he has the right idea. And let's face it, go to Spring Break, Carnival or Mardi Gras and you'll find lots of straight people who do the same thing, albeit less flamboyantly.
toujourdans - thanks for stopping by. Your comments point to the reality that Pride events raise many different reactions for many different people - gay or straight. Your friend's rant was an interesting read. It seems to speak to that deep need within humanity to be accepted. The irony is that while we ourselves often desperately want to be accepted we can be very frugal in offering acceptance.
For those who are beginning to feel very nervous, I do believe that you can offer unconditional acceptance of a person without agreeing or condoning everything they do. I sensed that at Pride - I didn't agree with a lot of things I saw - but behind those things were real people, people who were created in the image of God, people who were created to be enfolded into the dance of the Trinity .... and if they were created for that kind of adoption and acceptance - who am I to not extend acceptance of their personhood and our common humanity?
Pride is not a scandal, but simply a day where us rainbow folk can be ourselves, be happy about who we are and celebrate the joy and beauty of living in a world that believe it or not, a portion of us believe God created. Pride is a day I believe Jesus would be at, because Jesus was a margin kind of sitter, that is where he engaged with people.
Thank you for doing this and do it again next year and the next. You did a beautiful thing, and myself as a non heterosexual person, was happy to read your report. One thing I would remember if I were you is that GLBT people come in all religions too. There are many of us that are also Christ Followers. We may differ on Biblical exegisis and theology but we also are Mennonites, Anglicans, Catholics, Seventh Day Adventists, Bretheren and more just like you and your church. I think it's important to remember that. I know many Christian married, couples who are non heterosexual and who also seek to serve and know God in the world.
Thank you for your courage and hard work. On behalf of The broader Christian community I thank you for stepping out of your comfort zone!
All the best.
Hey Cassie - thanks for commenting. The conversations on this blog are meant to embrace a plethora of diverse voices .... with the prayer that we will all grow in extending authentic friendship to one another.
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