Choking on Credal Arguments

Joanna Macy - A Wild Love for the World, an On Being interview with Krista Tippett, stopped me in my tracks yesterday. I stood in the kitchen, frying my mother's zucchini from a too-abundant crop, when I heard Joanna Macy describe becoming devotedly Christian at 16 and how, four years later, everything changed.

"When I went into studies of Biblical history and theology, I began to choke," she said. "I found there was something that I balked at terrifically, which were credal arguments about items of belief, but also any hint of exclusivity, that there were people who were 'beyond the pale.'"

After 13 years of Catholic school (K-12), I left the church by my second year of college. Since that time, I've struggled in my arguments against the Church because I didn't know everything. In Macy's words, I recognized that fallacy. I need not know everything about a religion in order to decide that it doesn't serve my journey.

Senior year of high school, my best male friend, in the moment when I thought he was going to confess his love to me (how many of us have been in that boat), instead came out to me, and made me promise not to tell a soul. We went to the same Catholic school.

Three years later, I learned that a girl I'd known and loved since Kindergarten had had an abortion that same year of high school. Catholic credal arguments against homosexuality and abortion would never trump the innocent struggles of young people I loved, whose high school traumas were linked inextricably to the church calling them sinners in their moments of greatest strife.

According to Catholics, my friends were "beyond the pale." If an institution as powerful as the Catholic church could not offer comfort and support to its own children, honestly trying to navigate the world into which they were born, I didn't want any parts of it.

I've softened in my distaste for the church, the more I've become exposed to its evil stepchild, Evangelism. Where Catholics twist themselves in knots to provide sound reasoning on their credal arguments, Evangelists cater to the same lowest denominator as Fox News. It's all pomp, circumstance and emotionality; they don't even try to develop sound arguments.

My sexuality is intertwined with my spirituality. Both come from love, and from my sense of purpose. About twelve minutes into the interview, Macy talks about falling in love with the Tibetan people because their joie de vivre shone through their hardship so clearly. They are what drew her to Buddhism.

The ever-wise Tippett pointed out how Macy was drawn to the lived experience of the faith before learning more about its tenets.

I want to live my sexuality and life with Sonia in a way that reveals my own joie de vivre, clearly and emphatically, to anyone who is paying attention. It will require more grit and unabashed optimism than I generally wear publicly, but that struggle feels purposeful.

The next step is a picture postcard to the extended family. We'll get a shot on vacation and send it to the extended families and friends, a sort of "We've moved in!" announcement despite the homophobia expressed by several of them.

With the postcard, we'll know officially who's on our team, and the rest of them be damned. At least some part of finding joy in life must be curating the people you choose to have in it.

Vacation begins Saturday!

On Humility and Not Knowing Yourself

Gretchen Rubin noted the Voltaire quote, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," as a kind of mantra she returned to throughout her happiness project. For those of us with high standards and fair ability to meet those standards, this is resonant. I'm taking it to heart this morning. It's going to be a short one.

Paulo Coelho, late-blooming writer and a kind of mystic to many readers of his book The Alchemist, recently told Krista Tippett that he doesn't know who he is. Keep in mind this guy is pushing 70, a writer with a simple elegance that gives him the aura of a guru.

"To be totally honest, I don't know who I am," he said, "and I don't think people ever will know who they are. We have to be humble enough to learn to live with this mysterious question: who am I? So I am a mystery to myself." Find more and listen at Paulo Coelho - The Alchemy of Pilgrimage.

The idea that we could be humble and recognize that we cannot fully know ourselves has a unique resonance for LGBTQ people, who are so often asked to put ourselves in a box so that the mainstream might understand us better. So that we may be less threatening in our otherness.

For all of our differences, I credit my parents with instilling in me a keen sense of justice and a deep trust in my own mind and heart. And although I used the word "gay" for this blog, I've wrestled with all of the language thrust upon (and yes, often owned and embraced) by LGBTQ people. It's part of the reason it's taken me so long to begin writing about my own otherness.

Although it's early in my own pilgrimage of this blog, I'll pose my first question to you, reader. How do these words: lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer work for you? How have they contributed to or detracted from your own joy in being a person traveling through the world?