A faint light glows in the eastern sky.
In the garden, it is still dark, shapes just beginning to form hazily before her eyes.
A woman has come to weep.
Wait, is this a garden?
No, it is a cemetery. As the light slowly grows—lavender, to rose, to peach—the tombs slowly become visible—black to grey. Where is the one she seeks? The stone, freshly laid, should stand out, whiter than the tomb. Wait, where is it? This is the right place, isn’t it? Still so dark, the dew making everything damp, softening every line. Everything about this place is disorienting. It is so still, so quiet. She can almost believe the events of the past few days are just a bad, bad dream. But no, this is it. This is the one.
What greets this woman is not a white stone, but a black, empty cave. Something is very wrong here. His body is gone. Her stomach lurches. Please, no, this can’t be right. After all we’ve been through, is it really not over? Can’t we just be done, grieve, begin to move on without him?
This place, this half-lit, predawn place, garden and cemetery, mistily rising from night to day, from life to death and back again to life: this is the place, the crucial cosmic moment that will launch a new faith tradition, a new way of perceiving the essence and the promise of God.
It is not happenstance that this moment is so fully, so exquisitely shot through with liminality. The woman is Mary Magdalene, a figure perpetually described as living on the margin of her society. As such, she is uniquely situated to perceive this moment. Every one of her senses would have been alive with the sounds, sights, smells, touch of this particular time on this particular morning. If you’ve ever been awake in that hazy quiet—so quiet—that in-between place when so much of the world has yet to wake up, you know: there is nothing quite like the depth of transition that is taking place here, now. It surrounds you, envelops you.
And yet it is changing. Even if you want to stay in that moment, you can’t linger. Things move here, sensual experience shifts. Something new is happening, and you know it, feel it, breathe it in with every passing minute.
It is not an accident that humanity, embodied in this woman, first encounters the resurrection here, in this place, at this time. Mary has entered a threshold, one that communicates perfectly the nature of a God who will not be contained, whose dynamic, fierce love cannot be killed and cannot be tamed. What is happening here is very queer indeed; and while the fissure is most visible here and now, what is queer about it is not confined to this single liminal moment.
Christianity makes three truth claims that distinguish it from any other faith tradition:
That God came to earth in the person of Jesus Christ.
That Jesus Christ was killed, died, and rose from the dead.
That it is possible for any human being to perceive these truths and to join or form a community that worships this God, following the ethical path laid out by Jesus.
These three truth claims form the backbone of Christian faith. Each one dramatically and decisively ruptures a binary that previously was thought to be inviolable:
That God and humanity are fundamentally distinct from each other. Before Jesus, many traditions posited the idea that gods could pose as mortals; Judaism had asserted that human beings were made in God’s image, an emanation and reflection of the divine. The Sumerian and Greek pantheons included demigods who were half human and half god, but whose partial humanity impeded full exercise of their divine power. Christianity asserted something much different. Grappling with the question of who Jesus was and how he was composed, early church leaders declared that Jesus was “fully God and fully human.”1
That life and death stand in opposition to each other. On one level, this binary is an iteration of the one above, marking the distinction between God and humanity. God, by definition, is immortal: always and permanently alive. Humans are mortal: in terms of our corporeal existence, death always wins in the end. Christianity asserts that Jesus, fully divine and fully human, really truly died, and really truly came back to life. Jesus thus not only ruptures the ideas that God cannot die and that humans cannot return from death, but something more: Jesus effects all of this by traveling through death itself. Resurrection insists that experiences of death are an essential component of a life truly lived. Life and death are thus not eternally separate, but coexist in dynamic tension, interacting, constantly informing each other. This is the essence of Christian liberation, the salvation wrought by Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection: God does not hesitate to enter into our experiences of death, to travel through death with us. And the upshot is profound. Christianity boldly proclaims that for human beings, death is never the last word.
That religious belief and practice are part and parcel of tribal, ethnic, or national identity, staking out boundaries that are crossed at the expense of family bonds, social cohesion, and moral rectitude. Christianity transgresses these kinds of bonds, asserting that every human heart has the ability to perceive God in the person of Jesus Christ and to comprehend the salvific liberation effected by Jesus’s resurrection. And yet Christianity is not a solitary path; it is deeply, intentionally relational, designed to be lived out in community. Thus Christianity persistently calls people whose hearts perceive its truths to create or join communities of faith, communities that may dovetail with ethnic or national identities but that can include a remarkably diverse array of members; communities that live into an ethic based on the teachings of Jesus, proclaiming Christ’s role in breaking open the cosmic forces described above.
This is why authentic Christianity is and must be queer. We stand in that garden, our feet damp with the dew, looking up into a lavender pink sky about to explode into gold, marveling at the irrepressible life force that surrounds us, calls to us, demands our attention. Christianity is an invitation into movement, into change. It may contain moments of stunning simplicity, but it is never simplistic. It is designed to challenge simplistic efforts to grasp, to contain, and to tame both God and our experience of God. Christianity is a path that incessantly leads you to places you’ve never been before. Like the parables that were the hallmark of Jesus’s teaching, if this path doesn’t surprise you, it isn’t doing its job.
One of the most challenging aspects of human existence is perceiving and negotiating a healthy relationship between Self and Other. Our lives are a complex mix of deep connection to one another and to God on the one hand, and experiences of profound isolation on the other. We exist in bodies that constantly remind us both of the ways that we are connected to each other and of the ways we are separate from others, different from others. Our bodies are capable of interacting powerfully with other bodies, bringing us closer to ecstasy, to the sacred. They can also sustain damage, and do damage.
That mix of interconnection and isolation exists not just at an individual level. Our corporeal selves also join with others to form corporate entities. We exist within communities that are interconnected with other communities and that can be isolated from other communities. Our need of one another is fierce. Our ability to harm one another is vast.
It is impossible to comprehend God’s experience of this apparent dichotomy. God, not confined to a physical form, may not experience such intense complexity regarding Self and Other. Perhaps this is part of what it means to be created in God’s image: we have the ability to perceive spiritual connection to Others that is not bound by the limits of our skin, or the borders of our lands.
What we know for sure is that this business of negotiating Self and Other is a mixed bag, often fraught, and occasionally exhilarating. We know that there is tension between the states of being connected and isolated. And somehow, it is our identity as creatures of God that constantly demands that these two states of being interact, inform each other. Which is to say, it is our identity as creatures of God, made in the image of God, that constantly ruptures whatever impulse we may have to cast our connection and isolation as binary states, existing on opposite ends of a continuum from each other.
This is a dynamic in which each of us is immersed every day of our lives. It is the tension we navigate as individuals who need the love of our families but who sometimes go a little crazy trying to share the same bathroom. It is the tension that confronts us when our nations or tribes are trying to build productive relationships with each other, but find ourselves descending into armed conflict. It is the tension that tears into you when the person you love desperately has just broken your heart.
Living into that tension in a healthy way can be very hard. How do you understand yourself and your individuality in a way that comprehends what connects you to others? How do you understand the ways that you are different from others, separate from others, while comprehending the vital importance of our diversity? What happens when our needs compete? What happens when resources are scarce? What happens when someone gets hurt?
Philosophers and theologians from Lao Tzu to Abraham Joshua Heschel have pondered these questions throughout human history. A healthy approach to Self and Other is a balancing act, and the impulse to create binaries—and especially false binaries—can throw a person or a community off balance. Consciously inverting those binaries makes it possible to get one’s balance back. But again we must ask the question: Why would God care one way or the other about this?
God may have set up this business of figuring out Self and Other as an essential part of the human journey. The negotiation of Self and Other so pervades both our existential concerns and our daily life that I have a hard time imagining that God didn’t intend us to wrestle with it consciously. But God’s intention aside, there is no question that our ability to navigate the relationship between Self and Other profoundly affects the quality of our lives, in ways that most certainly matter to God. When we navigate it well, we build each other up. When we get it wrong, we damage ourselves and one another.
Sometimes the damage is extreme. One way people get it wrong is by radicalizing the separation of Self and Other. Perhaps the worst version of this happens when the Other becomes cast not just as different, but as despised. Now, I’m not talking about the phenomenon of not liking someone else; nor am I talking about the anger and even rage you may feel toward someone who has hurt you. The Despised Other is someone who has become so alien to you that you stop being able to conceive of that person as human. That person may become simply a screen upon which you project your worst pain and fear. This is a place of profound danger, spiritually. It can certainly be dangerous for the person who has been dehumanized; an enormous amount of violence, including genocide, is justified in this way. But it is also dangerous for the person who despises the Other. Here is where some of our worst sins are committed.
The inverse of the Despised Other would be the collapse of those categories as distinct at all. Co-opting the Other into one’s Self can be a profoundly abusive act. Sometimes the collapse is the result of a kind of suffocating faux love. Sometimes it is born of privilege that simply fails to perceive that there are others present who are markedly different. It can happen in churches, both in local congregations and in sweeping gestures of global reach. Either way, as with the invention of the Despised Other, the end result is an erasure of the Other’s humanity, rendering a person or community invisible or nonexistent.
These are extreme situations, to be sure, but the fundamental balancing act in navigating the relationship between Self and Other exists for all of us. You and I could come up with hundreds of daily, mundane situations in which clarity about Self and Other is something that you have to figure out, with outcomes that affect your well-being or the well-being of another person. Understanding and negotiating one’s sense of self and one’s connection to others, drawing appropriate boundaries while maintaining necessary interconnection, is of vital importance. Getting it right may be the core ethical challenge of the human condition.
Christianity worships a God who disrupts any glib or easy notion of what Self and Other are, constantly challenging us to hit a “reset” button in our efforts to comprehend how we are supposed to relate to ourselves, to one another, and to this God.
Throughout history, human beings have employed binaries as a way of conceiving the relationship between Self and Other. Sometimes binaries are created to help one make sense of oneself, to ease intestinal uncertainty or discomfort about one’s identity or inherent value. There is a certain comfort in knowing who I am at a very basic level. There is a certain comfort, to me, in knowing who you are at a basic level. The desire to comprehend oneself is a good thing; however, the urge to create binaries as a tool for such comprehension can be deeply problematic, especially when those binaries are overly rigid or simply false. Sometimes binaries are imposed on others not in an attempt to make meaning but in order to achieve self-serving ends. Sometimes in matters political or religious, binaries are established with the specific intention to set Those People apart from Us.
False binaries can create painful spiritual quandaries. As a priest, I have spent a great deal of time counseling people who are consumed with the basic question, “Does this thing I’ve done/this feeling I have make me a bad person?” As if good and bad were mutually exclusive. As if one slip can leave a person permanently stained.
Binaries are often fraught with moral complexity, and moral danger. That’s why they are such an important matter as one discerns and negotiates the relationship between Self and Other, and it’s why any religious tradition worth its salt takes them very seriously. Christianity—authentic Christianity—incessantly dukes it out with binaries, constantly questioning them and rejecting them when they get out of hand or prove wrong. It makes perfect sense that Christianity would do this. Christianity focuses intently on our relationships with one another, encouraging and demanding essential health in our interactions and interconnections.
Let’s go back to that garden, that cemetery. Imagine yourself in that light, waiting for the sun to rise. You have to open your eyes as wide as they can go in order to see anything. You have to allow forms to come into shape so that you can make sense of them. All of your senses are alive, awake. This is a place where you have to be ready for anything. Maybe you are simply allowing yourself to perceive all that is coming at you, quietly, peacefully. Maybe you are hungry to make meaning of it, to move forward with purpose and clarity. Maybe you are standing stock still, amazed to be surrounded by so much mystery, so much beauty, so much that is so different from what surrounds you during the routine, glaring, familiar light of midday.
The God I worship is One who shows up in moments like this, constantly taking me by surprise, constantly showing me things that I only barely perceived before. I have come to believe that this is an essential quality of God’s love for us, this ability to surprise and amaze us, and that it is one of the most extraordinary gifts that God gives us. I have come to believe that it is built into whatever purpose God had in creating us in the first place.
This means that God’s revelations to us are very often doing at least two vitally important things. First, they are shaking up our attachments to binaries in which we are getting something wrong, messing up our ability to live well. Second, they are imploring us to perceive with wonder realities that are almost too amazing, too sublime, to grasp. To walk the Christian path is to encounter God’s self-revelation, which constantly advances both of these ends—shaking us up, and breaking us open. Both of these ends have something to do with liberating us, which is to say: God queers our world, our lives, our hearts in order to set us free.
Before the term “Christian” was coined, followers of Jesus knew themselves to be involved in the tradition of Judaism, even as they were articulating and forming new beliefs and practices. Trying to name what distinguished their movement, they described themselves as being part of the hodos, a Greek word translated in the Acts of the Apostles as “the way.” The word literally refers to a road, or the journey that one makes on a road.
It is a path that one journeys with others. Christian ethics are deeply informed by the sensibility, inherited from Judaism, that our community is a kind of family. According to Jesus, the dominant characteristic of this community is supposed to be love: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”2 Paul clarified that this love is no gooey emotion, but is rather a commitment to one another, a hard-won discipline that demands the best in oneself and looks for the best in others: that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things.”3 For Paul, love was the glue that holds a community together. But that love was never designed to be insular. Rather, the evangelistic impulse is precisely about expanding that sense of love outward both in proclamation and in service to the larger community. This was one of the significant ways that Christianity diverged from Judaism, becoming a community that transgresses ethnic ties, hoping to expand in scope and scale to include those in need throughout the entire world.
Historically, this notion of Christianity as a path has been visible in many forms. We can see it among those who embrace contemplative life, often as members of religious orders. It is plainly visible in our sacramental traditions, in which the sacred is invoked to mark and sanctify life events such as birth, marriage, death; in daily rituals of prayer; and weekly gatherings to celebrate the mass, also known as the Eucharistic feast. Among those Protestant denominations for whom sacrament is less central, the path has long been manifest as a relationship to scripture and an effort to bring scriptural teachings to bear in one’s daily life.
It has always been true that different kinds of Christians tend to gravitate toward different aspects of the three essential Christian proclamations I spelled out earlier. Thus today some Christians strongly emphasize faith in the first two, which might be called the “cosmic events” of Jesus’s incarnation and resurrection. Faith in these events is crucial to what evangelicals see as faith in Jesus as a personal Lord and Savior. Other Christians place less emphasis on the cosmic aspects of Jesus’s mission, preferring to focus more on his teachings as the basis for ethical life. Oftentimes progressive Christian communities are far more interested in how people treat one another—expressed in commitments to justice and inclusion—than in cosmic truth claims about Jesus’s Lordship.
These movements, which involve millions of people who have myriad and complex attachments to diverse aspects of the Christian tradition, cannot be oversimplified. Authentic participation in Christianity will encounter all three of these truth claims and must deal with each of them. Leaning too far in any one direction creates a significant barrier to authentic proclamation of the Christian gospel. When some Christians treat the cosmic claims about Christ as a litmus test determining whether you are justified in the eyes of God, many people are repelled—and harmed—and the evangelistic enterprise is thwarted. When other Christians dismiss the cosmic claims as unimportant or irrelevant to the path, the entire enterprise becomes theologically unmoored. These dynamics all by themselves go a long way toward explaining the challenge that Christians across the spectrum face in speaking as credible moral voices in today’s world.
Many queer people have been burned by Christian proclamation that leans too far toward rigid moralism. Many people of faith have grown weary of tepid Christian proclamations that, in the name of inclusion, fail to hold anyone to account. One side is soul crushing; the other is boring. How do we find our way back to the electric predawn, earth-altering moment in that garden?
What always guides me back is an appreciation for the inherent liminality of the tradition. I never cease to wonder at the frequency with which my queer identity and experience pop into view as I am studying scripture, pondering a sermon, or engaging someone in a pastoral conversation. I have long had to restrain the impulse to bring queer insight to bear explicitly. If I did so every time it occurs to me, that’s almost all I’d talk about.
Attention to the queerness of our tradition has the potential to shed light on the part that progressives tend not to proclaim well: the content, the theological heft. Queerness can do this with particular potency for two reasons: First, because queer identity is itself the topic of some of the most energetic conversation between theology and ethics today, both within faith traditions and in secular society. Second, because LGBTQ people already speak the ethical language that is so familiar to this wing of the faith tradition. Which is to say, queerness can also be understood as a kind of path.
As with the Christian path, walking the path of queerness with honesty and some measure of integrity makes possible a kind of virtue. The path of queer virtue looks something like this:
One discerns an identity;
One risks telling oneself and others about that identity;
One engages with others, touches others, to explore that identity;
One confronts and is confronted by scandal;
One lives out one’s identity with and through community, looking to the margins to see who is not yet included.
Queer experience cannot be systematized. There is something about the image of a path that illuminates the relationship between these various experiences that LGBTQ people encounter, but that image is defiantly not rigid; there is nothing “step-by-step” about it. In fact, it is the nature of queerness to resist being neatly ordered. That resistance to ordering is one of the particular gifts of my people, and it is also one of the qualities that most puts us in touch with the divine (which, you may have noticed, also resists order). So don’t even begin to imagine a neat, well-trimmed walkway. If queerness is indeed a path, it is wild and chaotic, overgrown, twisting and turning back on itself, at times plunging into deep pools of unknown liquid, then emerging suddenly onto dry ground. On this path, the future is often so murky that you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Then suddenly you turn a corner, and a breathtaking vista opens before you.
Nothing on this path is once and done. The demands of this path—the obstacles and opportunities—interact with one another. They may take place in any order, and are likely to be repeated, exacting more precise demands all the time. A queer person lives them over and over again. None of us walks the path perfectly, and some queer folk are not able or flat out refuse to walk parts of it at all. But it constantly amazes me how dedicated my community is to this path, on the whole, and how hard we work both to stay on it and to make it accessible, possible, for others.
To the extent that queer experience can be conceived as a path, it bears a remarkable resemblance to the path of Christian virtue. And this is also clear: what I know about Christian virtue, about Christianity as a path, I have learned primarily from walking this queer path every day of my life.
I am one of those progressive Christians who for years evaded a direct encounter with the cosmic truth claims of Christianity. But in grappling with the queerness of my tradition, I have begun to understand with depth and clarity the import of the astonishing theological claims made by Christianity. It is possible to gaze upon the incarnation, the Christ event, and the resurrection not as rigid, take-it-or-leave-it doctrines, but as true sources of liberation and hope. It is possible to talk about them passionately, without threatening psychic or spiritual harm to other queer people, or women, or children, or anyone else who knows what it is to be the target of religious bullying. Queerness can be a powerful lens, helping Christians proclaim our faith with pride, in a way that issues a genuine invitation to others to participate in something we know to be truly life giving. Queerness has, perhaps ironically, helped me understand what honest evangelism—life-giving evangelism—can look and sound like. For all of these reasons, I am come to believe that progressive Christianity would benefit simply by being more intentional about allowing queer voices to speak freely, particularly in leadership positions, and by listening carefully to these voices.
Why should we do this?
First, Christianity is inherently liminal, inherently queer. Many queer people possess a visceral understanding of these dynamics. We are uniquely positioned to ponder, perceive, and make visible what is most alive, vexing, and fabulous about this aspect of the Christian tradition.
Second, there is tremendous resonance between the paths of Queer and Christian virtue.
Third, many queer people are deeply motivated to do this work. This interest is personal because it involves claiming our lives and proclaiming our integrity. It is political, because it is a way to push back against forces that continue to oppress us.
And for vast numbers of us, it is deeply spiritual. Christianity has always been most vibrant and most prophetic at times and in places where people are struggling to overcome injustice. In today’s world, LGBTQ people know as much as anyone about what it means to hunger for spiritual connection and to have roadblock after roadblock thrown up by the people who most visibly keep the official gates.
This book is an attempt to breathe fresh air into public conversations about both queerness and the Christian tradition. The chapters that follow explore aspects of what I am calling the path of queer virtue, as enumerated above. Each chapter reflects on what it is like to encounter these aspects of queer experience and spells out where and how Christians encounter these same issues, explaining how an appreciation for queerness might help Christians better understand and better navigate the path.