Loving the Holiest Object 15 comments

By Kelly Foster

Note: Today, Good Letters is participating in a “synchroblog”—a day when many bloggers will be posting on the subject of the relationship between Christians and gays. The event is sponsored by New Directions.

Because he knows this is an issue of special importance to me, Greg asked me this week to blog on June 24, which has been dubbed a North American day of dialogue between Christians and gays. Now, I have to confess, for me to claim I have some special insight into this particular dialogue simply because I have friends on both sides feels a bit like saying, “I have some black friends and some white friends; therefore, I completely understand the Civil Rights struggle.”

I don’t know what it’s like to be gay, in the church or out of it, though I have lots of dear friends who do. I am, however, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in the church, not out of it, so I must admit that’s where I’m coming from.

Also, I have one more important confession to make. As most of the people who love me/put up with me most can testify, I am not so good at dialogue when I disagree with people. Whatever validity there is to the Irish being quick-tempered or irascible, I have that quality in spades, so my standing here encouraging respectful dialogue between groups that disagree so essentially should also be tempered with that knowledge about me, the nasty spitfire. People who disagree with me can make my view of myself, in its entirety, seem to totter and tumble, so I’m no good at this either.

With that out of the way, I’d like to begin with two simple truths, fundamental and revolutionary, that I must remind myself of again and again.

First, you cannot have a conversation with anyone unless you are willing to listen. In the prologue to his book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, Timothy Keller makes the point that the rhetorics which surround evangelical Christianity as well as secular liberalism are both couched in profound fear of their own imminent destruction.

For instance, “The gays and lesbians are gaining political power. If we don’t squash this, traditional family values will be destroyed.” Or “The religious right has a vast conspiracy to oppress all people, and if we don’t stop them, we will all be enslaved.” Keller asserts that if both groups could simply own that both appear to be flourishing in numbers, rather than diminishing, perhaps we could maintain more civil and more fruitful discourse. Keller also suggests (which was radical to me) casting the other person’s argument in the best possible light, to give them the benefit of the doubt, rather than casting them as perpetual and disposable straw men in the battle for rightness and stability being waged inside your own mind.

Second, the GLBT community is made up of people. The Christian community is made up of people. Which means, for me as a Christian, that we are all made in the image of God himself; that we are all subject to the full range of human aspirations and dejections. The fact that anyone could find it “surprising” that gays claim to have interest in God and in spirituality* should break my heart. I should find this shameful.

But once again, I have to come clean. Last year, one of my best friends in California was a lesbian. Some of the most profound conversations I had about art and beauty and Christianity were with her. She loved Flannery O’Connor and many other spiritual writers I’ve come to cherish over the years. When I kept her cat while she and her partner were on vacation, I loved flipping through the books on their coffee table—Jacques Maritain, Best Spiritual Writing of 2007, desert fathers. And to be perfectly frank, there were times when I found myself genuinely surprised. “Oh, gay people think about things like this too.” Well, of course, they do. They are PEOPLE.

In my own defense, I think one of the main reasons for my surprise is that it’s hard for me to imagine why a gay person would be interested in Christianity in any orthodox sense in the first place. Why would I willingly associate with or be curious about a group of people who view me (in practice, if not in theory) as sub-human? Why would a gay person ever want to dialogue with Christians when so many of them, though they may not hold up signs in public, appear to have hearts that shout so shrilly “God hates fags”?

However, in the interest of casting all arguments in the best possible light, I feel I should simply insert that many, many Christians view love only as that which brings people closer to a right relationship with God as they see it, not to mention that which keeps them from hell, something they believe in very deeply. So what looks like an unwillingness to love and simply to accept the GLBT community “as they are” might possibly be a different kind of love, and may not feel at all like love as we might like to think of it.

More than once, I’ve been asked by a friend, “How can we be consistent with God’s word and still befriend homosexuals?” The answer that always comes to mind is that of a priest who was living in San Francisco during the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. He had begun visiting hospices and simply sitting with the dying. Just sitting with them. In silence. With love. After a time, his congregation began to fill with homosexuals. The long-time churchgoers found this threatening. “Where are we supposed to sit?” they asked him. He answered, “Well, just like usual. You sit beside the gluttons, the drunkards, the adulterers, the gossips, the abusive, the fearful, and the needy.”

On whatever side of this “dialogue” we find ourselves, I think we could all use a healthy reminder, as C.S. Lewis offers in The Weight of Glory, “Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.” Let us be very careful then, how we approach.

*The Barna Group, a Christian research organization, recently released the following findings, “Spiritual Profile of Homosexual Adults Provides Surprising Insights.”