confessingqueer

Confessing is Moving!

heyya friends and readers - 

this blog is moving to www.confessingqueer.com - beginning Dec 30th, 2010 all new blogs will be posted at the new url - after Feb 1, 2011 this blog space on the typepad site will no longer exist...please check out the new confessing queer space!

heart,

seth

"Like salt in a weakened broth" (a confessing church: part 2)

I was invited into a couple of conversations this week that have changed me: one with my good friend will and one with an article about poetry.  

will. we were talking about the church, the emergent church.  we were eating sandwiches, or more accurately, i was devouring a sandwich with bacon on it as part of my own exercise to be less rigid generally...this time particularly in my vegetarianism.  and we were talking about our desperate need to have spaces that we are wrong and wondering and that it is ok.  confessional space (confession). that we are held in our wonder.  if there's anything the broader church needs to hear from its leaders and its public voices, it's that they don't know.  that not knowing is the place from which we get to imagine and imagination is the realm of faith.  not knowing also makes room for other voices, other ways of knowing, more voices, more ways of knowing.  it makes us richer and fuller and inspires us with what we ourselves couldn't have imagined and therefore, what we couldn't have otherwise believed.

so if this is the result of claiming boldly that we don't know, then what holds us back?  a sense of desperateness that accompanies the myth of scarcity and power (part of white colonialist myth)?  a deep, rooted fear that not knowing makes us irrelevant (part of a patriarchal myth)?  whatever the myth, its taken hold of our potential to believe.

the poetry article: "written on the bones" by alison luterman in dec 2010 issue of the sun.  i don't usually read the sun - the chiropractor for whom i work gave it to me much like assigned office reading and despite my nonchalance about reading it, i cried most of my way through it and walked away once again called out on everything it turns out i know but haven't felt.  luterman is interviewing kim rosen in the article about the power of poetry - personally, culturally, spiritually.  rosen proposes two ideas for why poetry has lost some of its place in the U.S. culturally: 1) because we "have forgotten to think in metaphor" and 2) because it requires "openness & humility" which she believes we have lost in our "drive for upward mobility" [i read: colonialist, classist, white culture].  She says, "maybe it [poetry] demands a willingness to be changed, to be affected, to reveal our wounds without denial or muscling through them."  oh, kim.  insight into my soul.  

and insight i believe into another aspect of what holds us back from these conversations about diversity, justice, identity, and space.  the truth is, that we desire change and growth so desperately, and yet to get to it, just to get to it, we have to do so much uprooting of the myths that some of those identities have built into us.  and that is terrifying.  and we need to be freed.  

i have been taught to hold on to my power, my space, my sense of identity, and my security with an iron grip.  and it turns out, once again, that the iron grip will be my death.  and, will kill my community.  i need to find ways to show up fearlessly to the questions about my identities and what they have to do with power and dominance and people whom i love.  and believe that by doing so, i will be held by others.  i might be challenged and i might have my pride wounded and i might feel displaced and i might be changed, but i will be held in love.  i need people in my life who i do this for, and who will commit to doing it for me.  and in the changing, i also believe there is my own healing, and the healing of my family and community.  

i leave you with three quotes from poems in the article that are working on me:

"so long as you haven't experienced / this:to die and grow, / you are only a troubled guest / on the dark earth." ~goethe

"before you know what kindness really is / you must lose things." ~naomi shihab nye, "kindness"

"feel the future dissolve in a moment / like salt in a weakened broth. / what you held in your hand, / what you counted and carefully saved, / all this must go." ~ naomi shihab nye, "kindness"

 

Why Diversity is Bullshit (a confessing church series: part 1)

diversity |diˈvərsitē; dī-|

noun ( pl. -ties)

the state of being diverse; variety : there was considerable diversity in the style of the reports.

• [usu. in sing. ] a range of different things : newspapers were obliged to allow a diversity of views to be printed.

For many years (decades) the call has been one of diversity. 

The problem: our ________(company, church, club, school) is too _______ (white, straight, upper class, male). 

The solution: sprinkle some other identities in there to change the demographics.

Having the advantage of being a few decades out from the diversity initiative across the united states, we have seen some of the results: identity-based recruiting, thoughtful marketing (which sometimes leads to recruiting all of the 5 people of color in the 1000 person church to be photographed for the church brochure), a cycle of enthusiastic welcoming of “diverse” people with a puzzled questioning of why they eventually left or why we can’t retain “them”, “inner-city” ministries, etc.

The problem is that the demographics are not the problem.  The numbers are not the problem.  The Diversity model operates on the assumption that if we just figure out how to be “nicer” to people who are different than we are or more “inclusive” interpersonally, then oppression, injustice, and hate crimes will melt away.  The conversation remains trapped at the interpersonal level.  But centuries of people being hurt, enslaved, murdered, excluded, and assaulted is not an issue of how “nice” we have or haven’t been. 

So what is the issue?  Let’s set diversity aside for a moment and zoom out to a bigger picture.  I also ask for some permission to bring the mind to the forefront so as to have some analysis to inform the way we talk about this with our hearts and bodies.  But just for a minute!

Let’s talk about the concept of oppression.  There’s a paradigm for understanding oppression very lovingly referred to by myself and some other community organizing friends as “The 4 I’s”.  The 4 I’s seeks to define when an oppression is occurring by understanding it on 4 levels: Ideological, Institutional, Interpersonal, and Internal. 

So, sexism isn’t just about a man being mean to a woman. 

Sexism has:

Ideology – the idea that men are stronger, smarter, faster, better workers, more equipped than women

Institutional reinforcement that backs up the ideology – women are still paid $.73 to every dollar a man makes; we have decades of “science” and research that speaks to women’s physical, mental, and emotional inferiority; women are still struggling to be viewed as equivalent leaders in the church and doctrine has been used to reinforce that; (essentially any examples we can pull from major institutions: healthcare, religion, government, education, media, prison industrial complex, etc. that have wide-spread effects on people’s lives)

Interpersonal effects – sexual assault, domestic violence, interpersonal discrimination, “jokes”

Internal impact – internalized inferiority, guilt when a woman doesn’t live up to a domestic standard, care-taking (distinct from caring for), and all the internal effects of generational violence on her and her ancestors

So the 4 I’s leaves us with a few thoughts:

1. It leaves out the option for reverse-isms (reverse racism, reverse sexism, etc.) because while there may be bias & discrimination (interpersonal dynamics) that can flow between anyone, there isn’t an institution reinforcing or giving permission for the bias to happen.  Yes, a queer person can certainly be biased against a straight person, but the queer person doesn’t have institutions to reinforce the violence they may perpetrate on the straight person.  And there isn’t a cultural ideology supporting the idea that the straight person maybe brought it on themselves or suffered that violence because they were being too sexual.
2. It acknowledges that a barrier in our spaces is not about how mean people are to working-class folks, but that there is actually a dominant ideology & and dominant space that supports and normalizes upper-middle class & wealthy class norms.  The problem isn’t the numbers or demographics – the problem is a dominant culture.
3. It also acknowledges that in order to change the dynamics, we are shifting ourselves culturally, ideologically, and institutionally – not just being nicer to each other.  Our work is around each of the 4 I’s, as opposed just fixing the Interpersonal realm.
4. It makes a distinction between a dominant culture or oppressive culture and the individual identities that have been absorbed by that dominance.  Ex: since i've started doing work on uprooting "white" culture internally for myself and in spaces i exist in, i've realized that "white" culture also has done my family harm historically - there was a time that my irish family wasn't considered "white" and that by being absorbed into that definition culturally in the U.S. we gave up significant cultural wisdom, knowledge, and functioning and traded it in for increased power and access to resources - which, why wouldn't we as a poor irish family within the context of oppression?  but that doesn't mean i don't now benefit from being white and that i don't have a responsibility to uproot whiteness internally, interpersonally, institutionally, and ideologically.

So what does all of this analysis and thought mean as far as my heart for the church? And my heart for my co-confessing brothers and sisters? 

For me, it means I have to be willing to trade some ways of thinking, hearing, relating, and holding myself in the world for some different ways.

I need to trade in having conversations about how to diversify for having conversations about how to disrupt the ways I reinforce dominance.

I need to trade in asking about why there are so many white people at my church, for asking how I have let “whiteness” (which is VERY distinct from cultural heritages that existed before the racist construct of “white” absorbed all of those cultures) become more culturally important in my church than jesus.

I need to trade in trying to voyeuristically learn about “other cultures” for learning about how the dominant cultures my own identity has been absorbed by (white, patriarchal, upper-class) influence what I value about my church culture.

I need to trade in relating to my brothers and sisters as one identity for holding them as a whole set of identities that interact in very messy and beautiful ways.

 

a confessing church series: introduction

race. gender. class. ability. citizenship. sexual orientation. religion. its not my fault what race i was born. its not necessarily a problem that our church's leadership is mostly straight. defense. defense. and fear. fear that i am not good enough, doing a good enough job, that i will be accused of being ____-ist. questions and questions about what it will mean if we are supposed to be something else. fear of not wanting to be a place where everyone is not welcome.  knowing that we perpetuate spaces where not everyone is/feels welcome (feels, is...same difference to the one who is "not"). fearing becoming, then, spaces where we participate in tokenism, fucked up identity-based recruiting - so that we are more down, more diverse, more open and affirming.  and trapped.  we can't win.  every way we turn someone is upset, offended, and hurt.  and that is super fucking frustrating because we participate in the church in order to heal, invite, and extend.  and here we are. 

i've been doing a lot of thinking and working and confessing about this mess.  and in my confessional endeavor on this blog, would like to put a lot of that thought and work out there - in order to invite others into the wrestling match with me.  i'm starving for folks - who share a confessional, christian faith with me - to struggle with me on this.  to work this with me.  i'm tired of therapy groups and i'm exhausted with the guilt and i don't need another intellectual debate.  i need to be transformed, again. and i know i can't be transformed in a vacuum or by myself.  so here we go. each week until it seems the conversation is mostly put out there i'll take another aspect or dimension of this elusive light show about the church as a body and the identities that compose it.  welcome to the wrestling mat. 

A Fat Tuesday Confession

i confess that i have to think hard about what i have to confess.

i confess that every day i am conflicted between the way i work for justice in the world and the way i harbor injustice in my heart. 

i confess that i don't often want to live in grace with those who hurt me...and that sometimes i think that i am more deserving of care and love and forgiveness than they are.

i confess that i don't like owning the ways that i perpetuate violence in the world.

i confess that i perpetuate violence every time i benefit from privilege in this world.

i confess that i would often rather hang out in places of guilt and shame rather than engage in a process of liberation.

i confess myself as genderqueer - as someone who does not buy in to the gender binary and believes that god is interested in the whole more than my ability to check a box.

i confess myself as queer - as someone who believes relationship is more important than how & which parts go together, who believes in the deviant as a catalyst to redemption, who believes that my bedroom is a sanctuary.

i confess my anger at the church for shutting down the erotic in our spiritual and religious practices.

i confess that i need other people to heal, create, love, and grow - and that makes me really angry sometimes. 

i confess the way i buy into the myth of independence and autonomy.

i confess that i am into borders and walls and the ways they keep me feeling safe, and that the only thing that often causes me to question those borders is when they keep me from someone i love. 

i confess myself as a complex being whose identities rage within me, struggle to be de-compartmentalized, desire to be seen and known.

i confess that i am known and loved and seen.

the confession collective

its all marcella's fault really.  i was desperate for conversation, thought, writing, art - really any form of input and interaction - about queer theology and i found marcella althaus-reid's book "the queer god" and hit the "order" button.  and then i found myself gulping up as much of her book as i could process at one time on silent retreat last year.  she is unapologetic, humble, hilarious, brazen, graceful, and deeply invested in what it means to be a whole person in the christian life.  and i'm pretty set on blaming her (attributing to her) the results of her challenge to practice our theology and to practice it in ways that have to do with our whole selves and our whole communities.  here is something else i love about her thoughts: that she is not afraid to tell the truth about the past (hurtful, oppressive, confusing as it may be) and the way it has shaped us, our theology, and our world, but doesn't allow it to define her present action and identity.  she is in the business of being freed - to love, to reclaim, to practice, to create, to define.  so beautiful is this practice.  it seems we feel pretty comfortable in our extremes.  its easy to stand pointing back at the past.  and its fun to stand waiting for the utopic future.  but it is a place of intentional practice to point to both while continuing to walk forward.  its a constant practice of confession.

so my question then with her writing was: how do i practice a queer theology? 

i do a lot of work in the community so i thought about getting a group of folks together to talk about it.  no.  i'm tired of processing theoretically.  and for the same reason i didn't want to write about it.  i wanted some way to practice that is about my body and my relationships and images and the tangible.  and then marcella mentioned several times "the erotic" and the bedroom and the places that are at our core of intimacy and vulnerability and relating to each other.  and it felt really right to think about practicing theology through art.  because art provides a venue for image, for questions, for truth-telling and also imagining, and breaks some of the hierarchies that queer theology seeks to disrupt (like the academic realm).  art is also (or should be) part of a dialogue - not just me and what i think, but me and how i am reacting to input from others and history and the world, and then something i put out in order to engage further in the conversation.  marcella says: "theology is not a private matter and involves more than a domestic contractual act of two people."  so i was also interested in creating a space for more than two people to be practicing together.

"the confession collective" is the result of all that.  and now what we need is "the collective".  the platform is there - who's interested in the art-making, disrupting, creating, relationship questioning practice space?  who's got art that is pushing our theology to be informed from other places besides the power centers and the past?  who's interested in imagining new forms, new structure, and new relationships while honoring all that has informed us?  who's interested in holding space in places that don't usually hold "the queer"? who's interested in using art as a tool for dialogue and feedback loops and viral conversation?  check out the confession collective

homos & the evangelical church

This weekend i spent mostly in a booth with headphones on, talking to and taking direction from people in other booths who i couldn't see, but could hear.  Its an interesting social experience, but one that i always enjoy with the band...i won't go into the layers of thought that stem from the experience of us all being isolated in booths so that we can produce something cohesive, collective, and intimate.  Needless to say though, we did walk away from the weekend with all the tracks to a new full-length album recorded.  I took a small break from recording though to talk at an event at Highlands Church in Denver entitled "The Evangelical Church & Homosexuality". That's right folks - they both exist and they got some things to work out.  So i gathered with about 100 folks on a saturday afternoon to talk about that. 

A couple of things to start out:

- "unsure" is an understatement of the way i feel about the "evangelical" church: being raised in a conservative, evangelical household i know evangelical xtianity pretty well - and while i still know and love people who practice in the evangelical church and who haven't hurt me, i don't quite trust the whole or even the paradigm of evangelicalism...i've just had too many experiences of hurt and alienation with it and watched it hurt a lot of folks i love

- i am currently having quite the dissonant experience with the evangelical church: some of the people who i am in relationship with who seem to be the most invested, honest, vulnerable, and embodied about what living a message of the gospel might look like are in the evangelical church - and i CAN NOT reconcile that with the fact that the philosophy, institution, and structure of the evangelical church seems to be everything that is not gospel (violence, colonization, empire building, exclusion, isolation, and misogyny)

- few words can get my hairs bristling like 'homosexuality': it comes from a medical, psychological model that needed a word to diagnose folks with same-gender attraction as mentally ill and has nothing to do with people describing to the world what relationship, intimacy, or identity means to them

And with all that i walked into Highlands Church at 1pm on Saturday.  And i sure appreciate the folks who showed up that day.  

The thing is that here's where i wish that power models of relationship actually work and/or that i believed in using power models as an acceptable, ongoing approach to the world. 

This is why:

- in a power model of relationship, i could walk into a space and tell everyone there what's wrong with them

- in a power model of relationship, i could feel free to give a whole bunch of statements about what i need to feel in control, validated, and secure again within the church

- in a power model of relationship, i'm not obligated to respond to other people's fears, frustrations, process, or the multitude of ways they are also walking into a space wounded

- in a power model of relationship, i can feel free to cut anyone off who hurts me or hurts others that i love

And that is why i'm so annoyed with the gospel.  because i believe in increasingly intimate ways that it calls me to something different.  To not play the power game with others just because they have played it with me - to have a different economy of relationship.  Its all about "the body" stuff again...within the paradigm of the gospel, i am part of a body.  with all of those folks who have hurt me, say fucked up stuff about me and my identity and those that i love, and have told me where and when and how i get to participate.  the thing about body is that its not just about acknowledging someone else exists - it means that they effect me and that i need them.  no matter what my experience with them has been up til now, i need them and they need me and without each other we are a dismembered, smeared-all-over-the-road-like-road-kill set of limbs and organs and brains and skin.  bodies don't work well that way.  its worse than death - to not have your body communicating with itself but to still be alive. 

So my pursuit of justice and of body-ness and life and of reconciliation calls me to something else:

- to fight for relationship with my more "conservative" and my more "liberal" and all my in-between brothers and sisters as if my life depended on it

- to engage with people in a way that allows us to breathe into each other and inform each other and bring each other back to life

- to let the rest of my body know about the wounds that i have and then to ask them to help me heal them because the strength of their body depends on it

So i started to figure out at Highlands Church that day what practicing this new way, this gospel might look like within the context of the homos & the evangelical church...and i hate it when practicing something new that i internally resist goes well, cause then the excuse to not practice it is taken away...and for that i am thankful.

I headed back to the studio after that and resumed working on tracks for a song that dan has written, and found myself held by these words:

"And so my friends, it seems like the truth is

All these rivers of justice, flow to uncertain seas"

~ "Holy Moses" (yet un-named album) Dan Craig

"confession" (thoughts from #c21)

so i thought i'd put up here some of the main thoughts that i talked about at Christianity 21 since some folks have been asking for the transcript (which i don't have) and since the thoughts from that talk inspired the title of this blog. 

first, i'd like to say that my talk at #c21 was the reflection of a 9 month process for myself on the topic of Confession...it began when i asked myself in thinking about the conference what the greatest value of the church to me in the 21st century would be.  Generally, i'm a person with a lot of privilege and have most of my needs met - as well as having a lot of my 21st century, post-modern wants met (books, masturbatory intellectual debate space with friends, cultural validation for doing things like biking everywhere and drinking fair-trade coffee, infinite venues to feel self-righteous for working for justice in the world, etc).  So what does the church bring to me?  what space could the church offer that i don't get anywhere else in the world?  the answer to that for me was a place for confession.

Two images of confession: kneeling & standing (this imagery was a gift to me from my friend malcolm)

Kneeling: a place to be wrong, to be uncertain, to not have everything figured out, to query, to play and experiment, to be forgiven.  And how can the church be that space for me?  Only by being a space where i know i am loved before i know that i have to be right.  Everywhere else in the world, there is so much pressure to be right and to have things figured out (and i would argue also most places in the church) because the consequences of not being right are ostracization, shame, guilt, risk of losing friends & community, ridicule, and confusion.  In a space where i am loved first and unconditionally, i am free to be wrong.  and it is a relief.  I said in my talk, "i need to know that because my relationship with g-d is non-negotiable, my relationship with the church is non-negotiable, and can't be taken away because of something i don't have figured out."

from my notes:

      you see, I walk through the world constantly defending or proclaiming: I defend my right to be in the world & in the church at all because of my marginalized identities; and I proclaim and struggle for justice daily in my life: justice around race, justice around oppression, justice around glbtq rights, labor justice – and the relief for me when I walk into House every Sunday at 5pm is that I get to be wrong – that I get to not have all the answers – that I get to talk about how I am complicit in those injustices hourly – that I get to be called to a different standard: one that is not about how right or just I can be, but one that is about how much I am loved

Standing: a place where i can confess my faith - which means that i have to be able to show up with all of my identities.  i need a place to de-compartmentalize.

from my notes:

·        I also walk through the world as a compartmentalized person: I am queer, I am gender-queer, I am a community organizer, I am a partner, I am a friend, I am white, I am middle-class, I am able-bodied, I am a Christian – I have a thousand identities and as a person in the 21^st century am skilled in accessing and repressing those identities as I need to in order to be safe and to be loved and to get what I need.  The other aspect of confession – the aspect of being able to confess my faith and confess myself as a whole person is vital to me in participating in the church…that when I walk into the church my theology has everything to do with me and all of my identities have everything to do with my faith – that there is no shame to be carried in with certain parts of myself…that my whole self can be confessed.  That my faith and theology can be about my body and my gender and my relationships and all of the parts of myself that I am sent consistent messages should be things that I keep in compartments

The implications of what type of work the church needs to do to become a place where this dual approach to confession can happen are vast:

- it means the church (we) have to be a place where someone is held tightly enough that it is safe to be wrong...that relationship with the other is non-negotiable

- it means we have to be less concerned with being right, and more concerned with being grace-full

- it means we (the church) have to be humble enough to allow ourselves to be shaped and formed by each other

- it means the church as a body needs to learn how to confess to our wider community and world

What would the church in the 21st century look like, if it had a spirit of confession?

relationship with the church (part 1 of 156,879)

i was speaking at Edina Lutheran Community Church on Sunday as part of the #c21 conference weekend and we were talking about the relationship of more traditional, denominational congregations to congregations on the more emergent end of the spectrum.  I started talking about how i could not stop thinking the night before (as i lay in my hotel bed totally exhausted and totally unable to make my brain stop) about how i have all these issues with the church as an institution, but the thing is that the church is a body too.  That reality makes my usual clear-headed power analysis, cut-like-a-knife insight into systems effect on individuals messy.  very very messy. 

i've been on a month-long trip around the US for my paid work holding conversations with folks in communities about how to start thinking about social justice and their role in change in this society.  one big point that comes up in every place is how to hold a tension between naming & imagining...between resisting and creating.  i think this has something to do with this mess i'm in with the church.

The Institution - naming & resisting: *the church has harmed me and many that i love - like real harm that effects mental health, inspires suicide, and destroys relationships *the church has been complicit with power - with the state, with oppressive ideology such as racism, classism, homophobia, and xenophobia *the church continues to primarily view its role in the world as being right and announcing morality *the church continues to perceive itself as persecuted, while holding enormous privilege in US culture

The Body - imagining & creating: *the church is james dobson and nadia bolz-weber and sara rosenau and lloyd gestoso and brian donovan many many other people who are broken and wounded and beautiful and loved *the church is a venue for god's word to me - flesh and blood - the body *the church i need - to be called out on my shit, to learn what it means to be loved and held, to confess, to be affirmed, to be served bread & wine, to eat with, to make art with, to practice anything that has more to do with anything besides myself *the church, because it is a body of people, is going to feel just as complicated as any other human relationship in my life - turns out that's how i end up being transformed - when i have to rub up against other people and they rub up against me all uncomfortably and rudely like in an overpacked elevator

"The church is a whore, and she is my mother" ~Augustine

"Love in reality is a harsh and difficult thing...it's complicated to be in relationship with flesh" ~Debbie Blue #c21

starting from a new place

I've held a blog account for over 6 months and haven't blogged once.  not sure what i was waiting for, but have always had a hard time writing consistently in any sort of journal/daily writing way.  i think my perspective changed over last weekend though in ways that i'm not sure i can even articulate.

I attended and spoke at the Christianity21 conference - my heart and mind was shaped - here is an attempt to list things about that conference that were transformative to me:

* the process leading up to the conference was one of six months of me holding and meditating on the topic of "confession: a relief from righteousness"...enough said about that.

* i've been in a pretty reactionary place with "the church" and church communities for the last 10 years or so of my life...being invited to participate in this event shifted that - i no longer had the luxury or role of reacting, but was asked instead to create.

* i encountered incredibly kind people

* folks showed up to the conference to participate - not to be entertained, or directed, or to have information dumped into them - but to participate.  with each other, with ideas, with food, with art, with themselves.  i can't imagine what the church would look like if we all started showing up more like this.  i can't imagine what the church would look like if we were more intentional about building our spaces to invite that.

* i watched two straight, white, men spend (and disrupt) their privilege.  they had access to venues, connections to people, support from sponsors, budgets to watch, and reputations to maintain, and they organized an event that supported the leadership and voices of folks who have been asked to take the backseat in the church.  and asked other folks who have similar privilege to show up for it.  and we were transformed.  and that laid a foundation of courage for each of us to turn to the people in our midst who we take for granted are in the backseat of the church and start figuring out how we disrupt our own privilege in order to bring more voices into informing the church in its process.  it turns out, we can only be transformed by inviting more participation.

* i got some glimpses of what it means for us to confess our selves and our faith to each other

* i was reminded, once again, why christianity is not a faith that can be practiced in isolation