This was one of the first blogs I wrote, requested by the folks at Presbyterian Welcome. What an honor! Find the original post and check out their blog here.
I do some volunteering with an organization called Soulforce NYC, http://www.sfnyc.org/, which desires reconciliation between LGBT folks and anti-gay and anti-transgender religious traditions. For the past few months we have been visiting a church in Sunset Park, Brooklyn where the pastor has a history of making anti-gay remarks and writing anti-gay tracts. We contacted the church and let them know we’d be coming to worship and fellowship with them and hoped to open a dialogue with them. Preparing for these visits, we train using the principles of non-violence as outlined by Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We support each other and pray together. We discuss openness and reconciliation. We go in a small group. And we believe that it is God’s Will that we should reconcile. And yet, on the day it was my turn to visit the church, I was nervous to go.
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This was originally posted on the Sanctuary Collective blog as a response to my first Inspiration and Meditation, “Some thoughts on prayer, and a prayer challenge to you”.
Hello, Sanctuary Collective. So, in February I wrote passionately about my prayer life and my challenge to you to pray every day with me. It was my intention to write back to you the first Monday in March and report back on whether or not I had successfully met my own 30-day prayer challenge. Well, you know what they say about good intentions, right? So, here it is, the middle of May, and I am finally writing again, and this time it’s with a revelation I’ve had about prayer. This is going to sound heretical, but I realized over the course of my practicing that there is such a thing as too much prayer. Yes, I said it. Too. Much. Prayer.
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December 10, 2008 was the 60th anniversary of the U.N.‘s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). In conjunction with this I stood in a rally, along with members from Dignity/NewYork and DignityUSA outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral to protest the Vatican’s opposition to a European Union resolution being introduced to the UN that would urge all nations to abolish laws that make it illegal to be gay.
There are currently 70 nations in the world in which it is illegal simply to be LGBT. In 12 of those countries a person can be executed for being gay. Why would the Vatican oppose this? Oppose! Not even step out of the argument, but to actually speak out in opposition to the rights and lives of human beings is the opposite of the teachings of Jesus Christ.
I grew up Roman Catholic in a town in New Jersey where I actually had a relatively good experience. When I was in 9th grade I went on a retreat with my church youth group during which the pastor came to hear confession. You know how retreats are—they break down barriers—and I somehow felt safe enough to confess my sin of homosexuality to my pastor. Shockingly, he told me that, while he knew the church’s teaching stated that it was a sin to act on homosexuality, he believed that God created us each of as we are and that I should not be afraid or ashamed of being gay. Then we moved on to my more mundane sins. It was liberating and freeing, but of course, The Church told otherwise, so I didn’t feel completely absolved.
Over the course of my life I drifted away from church and didn’t really come back to the fold until a couple of years ago. Now I attend a big Protestant church in NYC that is not just accepting but affirming of LGBT people (http://www.marblechurch.org) and my journey as a follower of Christ has amazed me, strengthened me, confused me, empowered me, and wrecked me. As I feel called to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, I find myself looking at my actions in a whole new light. This is difficult stuff.
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