suffering to love and a sufferless god

Hardly a night passed during my adolescence when I didn’t wake up—petrified, drenched in a cold sweat–convinced that God, because of some sin that I thought I committed, had returned from heaven and left me behind to a world that He’d soon push into an eternal lake of fire. One year, in high school, on the last day before Christmas break, my pastor came to the podium for morning announcements. “Look around, dear children,” he said, solemnly, holding his Bible and looking at as many of us in the eyes as he could. “Take this moment in,” he continued.  “This may be the last time we will be gathered together on earth.”

Not your run-of-the-mill morning announcement, really.  

To him, however, and to many in my religious community, God was something to be very afraid of.  

God—the god I learned to imagine and, through that imagining, experience as a real, powerful presence in my life—created in me, and creates in many, unnecessary and unproductive suffering. It is for this reason that many, rightfully, bid God, and religion, adieu.

In college, when God unraveled—when the God of my youth seemed like an arbitrary act of mental gymnastics; like the CEO of the local fear factory; like a way to masturbate, emotionally—I came to the conclusion that God was real, but that suffering and God were antithetical to one another. God, I reasoned, had nothing to do with fear: God gave peace and love, not suffering and hell.

As a result, in graduate school, when I first dove into the wild, beautiful ocean of Christian spirituality, I had a hard time reconciling the mystic-speak about the positive relationship between suffering and love. A victim of his culture, I’d say about St. John of the Cross and his notion of the Dark Night. Filter her delirium, I thought of St. Therese of Lisieux, who wrote that suffering made her more loving.  

Last Sunday night, seven of us gathered at a small Episcopal church in San Rafael as the sun’s decent colored the horizon with purples and pinks, as the church glowed in candle light, as soft winds beat against the roof. It was the fourth time we met for a group we’ve called Amare, which is Latin for “love,” in order to cultivate a sense of love within and around us. We let our imaginations play freely to the ambient sound of the secular, Icelandic band Sigur Ros; we sat in the “holy, animal silence of love, of one another,” as one of the members put it; I read poetic lines from Rumi and St. Thomas Aquinas and we pondered love which, as Thomas Merton wrote, “can only be kept by being given away” is, as Dr. King said, “the most durable power in the world” and is, in the existential psychologist Eric Fromm’s view, the underlying solution to the fundamental problem of human existence.

Once our final silence ended, we went upstairs to drink and discuss the service. During our chat, someone said something that I found compelling; that I’ve been thinking about ever since; that’s changing the way I understand what people like St. John and Therese wrote about the relationship between suffering and love. “Perhaps,” he said, “suffering can be a form of love if it increases one’s capacity to love.” “That,” he said later, “would mean that, when it comes to love, we need to make a distinction between productive and unproductive suffering.”

While, in a Nietzschean sense, God may be dead, most Americans still, in some capacity, believe there’s a divine, in my beloved little old Fieval’s words, “somewhere out there, beneath the pale moonlight.” And the God most Americans imagine is a thoroughly loving one. “For Americans today,” USA Weekend reported in 2010, “God, quite simply, is love.”[1] And indeed: studies indicate that nearly nine in ten Americans say that “love” is an accurate descriptor for God.[2] For many Americans, moreover, God is not just an arbitrary love-energy in the sky: God is also personally and interactionally loving, and love is a primary indicator of and method by which people come to experience God as personally and interactionally real in mind and body.[3]

The type of God that people imagine is important because it plays a major role in their psychological and social lives. Studies have demonstrated that, on the one hand, belief in a loving God can improve mental health, motivate one to act benevolently in the world, and is associated with inclusive politics.  On the other hand, studies have demonstrated that belief in an unloving God can damage mental health and create a discriminatory politic.  

How someone thinks about God, in other words, says a lot about how they think. And how someone thinks says a lot about how someone acts.  Christopher Bader and Paul Froese, sociologists at Baylor, have argued, in their book America’s Four Gods, that God is like the ultimate voice in one’s head.

Thinking about a loving God is better than thinking about a damning God. But we should worry about what happens when people are thinking about a sufferless God; a God who doesn’t send a fire that burns.

The difference between productive and unproductive suffering, and that a loving God could create suffering if it increases one’s capacity to love, are important ideas for our divine imaginary.  A God who only makes people feel good—who sends only goosebumps and giggles—is an impoverished god. A God who isn’t in our pangs of conscience—in the tired but dignified cry of the protestor demanding racial equality and in the impassable ears of the privileged that need to hear it; in the unsettling silence we swallow as we pass the homeless on our way home from work; in the waters moving through the divine imaginary, extinguishing the notion of hell—simply wouldn’t be a loving God.

Love necessitates productive suffering; it is a guidepost on the path to God.  

Drowning God in a sufferless love, therefore, given the centrality of “God” to human behavior, can suffocate Her prophetic voice and undermine our capacity to create justice.  We must be careful that our divine pendulum not swing too far.   

[1] Cathy Lynn Grossman, “How Americans Imagine God,” USA Weekend, December 17-19, 2010, 6-7.

[2] Paul Froese and Christopher Bader, America’s Four Gods: What We Say about God—and What That Says about Us (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 15.

[3] Tanya Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (New York: Vintage, 2012), 132.

love is not enough

“love is beautiful, but it’s not enough.”

I met Joel at a local bar two weeks ago, the night he had been fired from his job as a busser at a diner in the East Bay.  Gentle and unassuming, Joel is a self-professed loner.  “I am just lonesome all the time,” he told me.   When I asked Joel what love is, he said, without hesitation: “love is beautiful, but it’s not enough.”  When I asked, in response, “what is enough?” he picked up his beer, took a drag from his cigarette, and said, simply, “I really don’t know, man.” 

When you love, Joel told me, you identify with a person’s soul through the differences.  “It’s altruism through hope,” he said.  Joel told me that he experiences love the most when he is around the woman he is romantically interested in.  “I love how she loves other people,” he said.  “How she breathes and expresses her being.  I love her historical energy,” he continued, with a pulsating intensity in his eyes.  “Where she is in her past, her present, and her future.”

 

what’s in a name?

oh divine who

 

who

 

i taste on her neck, feel

 

in her feeling, see

 

in her seeing, hear

 

in her hearing, please,

 

please:

 

don’t answer this prayer:

 

shelter me from the cloud, let it

 

pass me by: if

 

unknowing means forgetting her,

 

no,

 

Her,

 

here,

 

then i’d

 

rather know than forget.

 

so help me suffer to name what’s nameless, touch

 

what’s intangible, discern

 

the indiscernible and

 

hold the air.

The Colors of Love: A Palette (1)

In The Erotic Phenomenon (2007), philosopher Jean-Luc Marion laments that philosophy, originally understood to be the love of wisdom, no longer has anything to say about love: and that, when it does speak about love, it mistreats or betrays it.   The result, he argues, “is that ordinary people, or, put another way, all those who love without knowing what love wants to say, or what it wants of them, or above all how to survive it […] are condemned to feed on scraps: the desperate sentimentalism of popular prose, the frustrated pornography of the idol industry.”

 

This blog is the first in a series of posts that will attempt to remedy Marion’s problem.  I hope to create something of a palette: a virtual board of colors from which to dip a proverbial brush in order to paint a picture of what love is.  The colors: the way thinkers, activists, poets, and everyday people conceptualize, and experience, love.

I must note, from the onset, that I agree with Pitirm Sorokin’s argument in The Ways and Power of Love (1954): that while love is qualitatively and quantitatively inexhaustible–that it is like an iceberg of which only a smart part is visible–something about it can be understood; something about it is recognizable, if only the tip.  I do not suppose, in order words, that love can be fully understood.  But I do think that the little that can be understood about love, as I have argued elsewhere, matters a great deal.  James Dobson, for example, counsels batter women to remain in an abusive marriage for love.  God loves you, my religious community told me growing up.  But fear Him: He’ll let you rot in the flames of hell forever if you stray from the straight and narrow.

Further, I have to dispute Marion’s smug elitism: learned as the scholar may be on the subject of love, her ivory tower does not entitle her to understand love better than “ordinary people.”  We all feed on our own scraps.

To begin, then.  The first color: from one of my favorite poet’s, Allen Ginsberg, the famous Beat Poet.  In this poem, “Song,” which he reads here, Ginsberg describes love as “the weight of the world,” which is “under the burden of solitude” and “the burden of dissatisfaction,” that we carry “wearily.”  Love, for Ginsberg, is a sort of universal gravity that impels us to a restful union: for him, to the body from which he emerged, breathed, for the first time.

I will return to Sorokin’s color(s) of love later–and probably often.  But here, a parallel to Ginsberg’s color:  In The Ways and Power of Love, Sorokin argues that love is ontological: a universal, creative force (something about it is not socially constituted, that is) in the material world that creates harmony and eschews divisiveness, suffering, and evil. It is the antithesis to fear and destruction.  This universal, ontological force is, for Sorokin, operative in the physical (from the smallest subatomic particle) in biology (it is the animating power of life itself), in the social (in human relationships, wedding healthy agapic interactions), and in the psychological (the life-giving pulse in our minds).  Love, for Sorokin, as for Ginsberg, is the heartbeat of the universe; the beat of the heart’s beat.  It is gravity itself.

A Fragment: on love, god, and a great woman

I have this blessing (which is also a curse): An insatiable appetite for love; the incessant drive, however misguided and polluted, to give and receive it.  To feel it, in every crevice of my mind and body.   I want love to lay with me in the past as I sleep in horrors of my abusive childhood; I want it to rise with me in my present triumphs.  And I want this for everyone, even my enemies.  Everyone, I think, has this blessing (and curse).  I agree with Christian Smith: that love is normative to human personhood (that it’s what makes people people).  I don’t quite know what it is, however–or what it isn’t.  Love, that is: I haven’t much a clue about it.

“That’s precisely what love is,” a friend told me recently, after I shared this thought with him.  “And that’s what makes love love,” he said.  “It’s a mysterious, relational force that simply can’t be understood,” he continued.  “Love, then,” I responded,” is a lot like God: an ineffable source with which one is connected, even in one’s still-inexplicable depths (however misguided, however polluted).”  God, as Tanya Luhrmann writes, is something of a social (and loving) relationship.

I am still glued to the conversation.

There’s an interesting and unique relationship today, I think, between God and love.  It hasn’t always been this easy, afterall: to know (and to feel) God as loving.  Incidentally, it also hasn’t always been this difficult: to believe in God (at all).  It’s a secular age, Charles Taylor writes.  The old gods are dying, Emile Durkheim wrote into the future.  In terms of belief, as Ann Swidler would suggest, we’re in “unsettled times”: and, in response, people are using culture (their “cultural repertoires,” that is) more rigorously in order to solve what has become a problem of disbelief.  And indeed: it takes hard (psychological and social) work to believe in and experience a personal God, as Luhrmann writes.

However “rationalized” or “secularized” we’ve become, much remains mystery.  Things are still inexplicable; the universe(s), for example, we know, are beyond our grasp.  Love is at the center of this mystery as something that we desire in ourselves, in and with one another but can’t explain.  Though we’ve made love a hollow commodity (confused words and images spilt all over the market), many of us are in solidarity with Roland Barthes: “Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs, despite impulses to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm love, within myself, as a value.  Though I listen to all the arguments which the most divergent systems employ to demystify, to limit, to erase, in short to depreciate love, I persist: ‘I know, I know, but all the same …'”

Perhaps, in a secular age, love makes God easier to believe in.  Perhaps, that is, in an unsettled time of secularization and love, God is safe in the harbor of the sacred inexplicable.

Things, of course, are never so simple.  Love isn’t just a safe harbor for God; it’s also a dangerous one for God to be anchored in.   While love may indeed make God easier to believe in, that is, love can also make God more difficult to believe in.  This is because love, the sacred inexplicable, means different things to different people (it’s a relative meaning with variant consequences).  “The heterosexism associated with religion,” a woman said to me at a bar last week, “has made God impossible for me to believe in.”  A gay friend of mine, now an atheist, left God at his conservative church in New York.  “We love you but not your sin” (your sexuality; who you are, in other words), they told him.  His church would call their God loving, no doubt–and taught him to see a God who calls him a sinner for being who he is loving too.  Bravo for leaving that god, I say.  And bravo to our culture for creating the plausibility structures that have helped him to know that that’s not what love is, whatever it is.

I still agree with Dr. King: that love is the most durable power in the world.  The problem with this power, however, because it is discursively produced (while, for me, remaining ontological), is that it can be dressed in hatred and used to justify injustice.  Associating God with love, therefore, is a dangerous enterprise.

Teresa of Avila, the great Christian mystic of the 16th century, had a keen sociological insight: God has no body–no feet, no hands; no tangibility–but ours.  People, in other words, by virtue of how they represent the God they imagine, are the best proof for the existence of God.

A week ago to the day, the world lost a remarkable woman.  I lost a great mentor.  Dr. Elizabeth Leonard, a sociologist who worked tirelessly to educate the public (and the academy) about gender inequities in the criminal justice system (namely its sexist treatment toward battered women who kill their abusers), died of cancer in her beloved Ireland last week.  No one had a greater impact on my life (which legions, no doubt, can say) than she did.  Dr. Leonard taught me the little I know about what love is: and, by extension, who God is.  She taught me that love, that God, is a radical (embodied, often selfless) commitment to the betterment of others: that love, that God, is a force, which people actualize, that transforms bad into good; injustice into justice.  Were it not for her mentorship in college, disillusioned and traumatized as I was from escaping the cultish religious world which reared me, I doubt that I would have been able to marry God and love in myself.

If this fragmented musing (an externalization of peculating and disparate thoughts in my mind which, I hope, people will find resonance with), has a thesis, it is this: the manner in which we call God loving, and in turn represent God to others, in this secular age that is obsessed with love, is extremely important.  I have less interest in “leading people to an experience of God” than I did when I was an adolescent.  My evangelical fervor has cooled.  I do have a great interest, however, in leading people to an experience of love.  It’s our greatest weapon in the pursuit of peace and justice, as Dr. King said.  Given the salient relationship between the two (the way we imagine God is act of politics and poetry because of the extent to which it constitutes and governs individual and social life) it is imperative that the God we call loving is indeed loving (whatever love, and whoever God, is).

cursing the lilies

it’s my first night on the streets in some ten years,

she said.

her body was quivering in the cold, asking

for what her mind refused to exhale.

i sat still,

protesting her silent plea for my jacket, wandering

around in the space between

her missing teeth and

the scabs on her face and

the sores on her hands and

the gaps in her scattered parlance.

when i saw my uncle’s long hair in her

eyelashes, wondering

what it looked like when the medics found him in that detroit hotel room,

her pain shot through me.

meth,

she said,

i just can’t stop.

i’m sorry,

she said,

i don’t mean to trouble you with this sinner’s woe, but

it’s sure nice of you to listen.

i cursed the lilies of the field and

the lips that likened them to raiment and

said

to her,

as if to him,

that my words would no longer toil nor spin to pretend that

he’s made good on his promises.

i’m sorry,

i said, and

i don’t mean to theologize, but

this is god’s sin, not

yours.

that may be,

she said, but

why don’t you see now what

you see now?

why don’t you hear now,

she asked, still quivering,

what you hear now?

forgetting to get there

i see a place inside of you,

she said,

that i’ve forgotten how to get to.

for a moment, i broke our stare

and watched

the bartender fill empty glasses

and watched

the elderly man across from me,

sitting alone,

whisper out the lyrics to the love song playing on the jukebox.

tell me about this place,

i said,

the place you’ve forgotten how to get to.

it doesn’t have a name,

she said,

and there’s really no way to get there.

somehow,

she said,

it’s nowhere and everywhere at once.

and sometimes,

she said, smiling,

twirling the ice cubes around and around in her glass,

it just pours into you.

so how is it,

i asked,

that you’ve forgotten how to get

to a place you can’t get to?

but that’s just it,

she said in a slur, spilling

her manhattan.

i suppose that i’ve forgotten how to forget.

 

 

Has Romantic Love Changed God? An Amusing (for me, at least) Musing

Something interesting has been happening to God in America. Consider the God of the early colonial period. John Calvin’s God was distant and damning; people predestined to hell by “His” sovereign decree. Jonathan Edwards’s God was judgmental and vengeful; people were sinners in “His” angry hands. Today, God is remarkably (but not altogether) different. “For Americans today,” USA Weekend reported in 2010, “God, quite simply, is love.”[1] Indeed, studies indicate that nearly nine in ten Americans say that “love” is an accurate descriptor for God.[2] For many Americans, moreover, God is not just an arbitrary love-energy in the sky: God is also personally and interactionally loving. According to Tanya Luhrmann in her recent book When God Talks Back, love is a primary indicator of and method by which evangelicals come to experience God as personally and interactionally real in mind and body.[3]

 What in the good heavens, if I may be crass, has happened to God? How did a God of fear transform into a God of love (I am taking about degrees of emphasis here, of course–God has “always” been understood to be “loving” in some fashion)?  This question of divine love is one that I have been obsessing about lately–and, in a way, since the haunts of my fundamentalist childhood.   From founding sociologist Emile Durkheim, who argued that god is society and that society is god (god is a collective representation of what is socially constituted as sacred vis-a-vis the profane, that is), one could surmise that social changes will change god.  One such salient social change that has made God “more loving,” I believe, is captured in Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) which demonstrates how, beginning in the 17th century, romantic love became the quintessential human desire through the imaginative prowess of the novel.  Before then, people didn’t “marry for love” as we moderns do.

More on that later.  For now, I am left with a rather curious question: is there a relationship between how one imagines/experiences God and how one imagines/experiences a lover?  Are these imaginings and experiences-these relationships–constituent of one another?

Furthermore, aside from the rise of the novel, are there other historic sources which have served to bridge divine love with romantic love?  How about the Song of Songs, almost universally interpreted by Christians as God’s love for the Church and the soul’s love for God?  Below is a brief and informal review of a The Song of Songs: A New Translation (1995) by Ariel and Chana Bloch.  The book surprised me a bit; put a new spin on this ancient Israeli love poem that I have always loved (in fourth grade, it was the only book of my then-Bible in which every word was highlighted) .  Thought I’d include it for curious eyes.  It’s interesting: while this ancient love poem may have bridged divine and romantic love, as it turns out, according to the Bloch’s, the Song isn’t explicitly about divine love at all.

Bloch, Ariel and Chana. The Song of Songs: A New Translation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

In this enlivening treatise and translation on the only surviving secular ancient Israeli love poem, Ariel and Chana Bloch argue that the Song of Songs is a sequence of episodic lyric poems about the discovery of erotic love. The poem, the Bloch’s suggest, was likely written by a poet (or a school of poets) in the Hellenistic period sometime around the third century B.C.E. While the Song has long been interpreted by theologians as historical or religious allegory (as (a) God’s love for Israel, (b) God’s love for His Bride, the Christian Church, or (c) the soul’s longing for God) in a way that may have had the effect of “safeguarding” the text from scrupled minds and tamed bodies, the Bloch’s posit that the Song is only correctly interpreted as an embodied, emphatic, and unapologetic celebration of sexual love between an unmarried couple. Indeed: as the Bloch’s point out, there is neither an explicitly divine (God is never mentioned) nor nationalistic impulse in the poem. If a theological theme can be surmised at all, however, the Bloch’s suggest, it is that the Song invites readers to locate (and, indeed, experience themselves) the Kingdom of God in the “habitable present” (not in the mythic past, not in a prophetic future) of human love. A striking feature of the Song, according to the Bloch’s, is its feminist impulse: in the poem, for instance, (1) the female lover (the Shulamite) is equal if not superior to the man (she is love’s “daunting,” bold, and relentless initiator (4.16, 6.4); she is also love’s teacher (2.7, 8.6), and (2) women are given unparalleled prominence and power (there is no mention of “fathers” but repeated mention of “mothers” (1.6, 3.4, 8.5); mothers are the ones who pass the power of love’s lineage along, and “daughters” are looked to as a chorus of social legitimation. To be sure, the Song was not intended to be a logical discourse, and so it may be unfair to bring certain questions to bear on it. I cannot help but be curious, however: how might one understand what love is in accordance to the Song, and what might the implications of that understanding be, say, for the evangelical church (a church that is widely recognized for its prohibition against sex before marriage in addition to its usage of the Song–as the video below illustrates)?

 

[1] Cathy Lynn Grossman, “How Americans Imagine God,” USA Weekend, December 17-19, 2010, 6-7.

[2] Paul Froese and Christopher Bader, America’s Four Gods: What We Say about God—and What That Says about Us (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 15.

[3] Tanya Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (New York: Vintage, 2012), 132.

breathing us together

it’s not the same ocean,

she said,

breathing smoke out her lungs.

don’t be silly,

i said,

breathing her smoke into my lungs.

look there,

i said,

don’t you see it holding that little girl’s

body and

coloring her

hair and

making her laugh?

i just see my mother’s tears,

she said,

and the hidden violence in my family’s silence.

i see a girl,

she said,

but she’s not being held.

i took the cigarette from her fingers,

brought it to my lips

into my lungs and then

rested my head on her chest.

maybe it’ll be a different ocean tomorrow,

i said.

one of her mother’s tears fell

onto my left cheek, burnt

by the sun.

it already is,

she said.

i see Her breathing,

hovering over,

breathing us together.

From One to Another: A Letter to Evangelicals

Dear Friends: fellow evangelicals of all shades and colors; of diverse beliefs, practices, and political positions.  From mind, from heart, from keys to screen: I enter this virtual space today to ask a question of us.  In one way, the question is simple: what kind of church—and, indeed, what kind of God–do we want to give to those outside of our church?  In another way, the question is complex: are we, today–in this maddening sea of conflicting beliefs, practices, and political positions that beat against our traveling ship like strong waves in a dark storm, threatening to sink it–fulfilling what Jesus said is the Greatest Commandment and embodying what St. Paul argued is the fundamental mark of the Christian, the way that we will be known?  Perhaps, perhaps: this is the most important question we can, and need to, constantly, ask ourselves.

 

Is our church, if I can put this question another way, giving those outside our walls (and really, we know there shouldn’t be any walls) a gift of love?  Are we doing what we, above all else, have been called to do: to be gifts of love to one another?  In what follows, may deep speak to–sing and dance with–deep.  May divine rain pour on our parched land, our thirsty hearts, and our divisive discourses–so that love can grow and bloom like a wild flower in the desert in order to help others see how beautiful–how loving, how sweet, how precious, and yes, how just and righteous–the God we say we love is.

Today, I have no answers, really.  Just a few questions.

Earlier this week, in an interview with Christianity Today, World Vision’s president Richard Stearns announced that his organization would allow Christians in legal, “same-sex marriages” to be employed at World Vision.  Stearns explained that the controversial decision was about creating “Christian unity” rather than doctrinal compromise.    Just two days later, however, World Vision, a 1 billion dollar development organization that seeks to transform communities through child-sponsorships, reversed its decision.  It was a “bad decision,” Stearns told Religious News Service, “with the right motivations.”  The reversal was likely caused by the number of conservative evangelicals who stopped supporting World Vision when they got wind of the decision.  Stearns reported that, as a result of the decision and the conservative backlash against it, some 5,000 sponsorships were lost, amounting to 2.1 million dollars annually.

There are a lot of reasons why some of us oppose gay marriage.  For some of us, for instance, gay marriage is bad because the Bible tells us so: we think the Bible is against homosexuality, and that we need to be against it too.  Some of us oppose gay marriage because we think that God will reek havoc on the world if gay marriage is permitted in a country we believe to be “a city upon a hill,” existent by divine providence for divine glory.  America, some of us think, is a candle in a dark world slipping into eternal decay and that we need to do everything we can to keep that candle aflame.   For these reasons, some of us believe that political opposition to gay marriage is tantamount to fighting the good fight; to fighting God’s fight. Opposing gay marriage, that is, is standing up for God; for the Gospel that many of us have chosen to give our lives for, come what may.

When the people outside of our church lambast us for our opposition to homosexuality, many of us feel justified: we take the conflict to be a sign that we are doing God’s work in the world.  Jesus came not to bring peace but a sword, some of us will say.

What, though, is God’s work?  In Galatians 5, a chapter that many of us learned as children, we are told that the fruits of God’s work are love, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self-control.  Micah 6:8 tells us what the Lord requires of us: to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.  True fasting, according to Isaiah 58, is to loose the bounds of injustice, to undo thongs of the yoke, to share our bread with the hungry, to shelter the homeless, and to cloth the naked.  Jesus was clear about our Greatest Commandment: to love God with all that we have, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.  St. Paul was also clear about what the fundamental mark of the Christian should be; that we will be recognized in the world by our love for one another.

When we oppose gay marriage, we need to ask ourselves: are we cultivating the fruits of the Spirit?  Are we doing what the Lord requires of us by acting justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with our God?  Are we fulfilling the Great Commandment and embodying our divinely-inspired identity?  In a word, are we loving?  Are we creating a gift of love for those outside of our church?

Increasingly, those outside of ours walls (and, again, there really shouldn’t be any walls), do not, as a result of our opposition to gay marriage, think so.  Increasingly, we are seen not as gifts of love but as propagators of hate and oppression.  And it’s not just that we are being perceived as propagators of hate and oppression; it is also that God, by virtue of our actions in the world, is being seen like that too.

Is it time, perhaps, to examine our stance against homosexuality in light of love?  To put down the few passages of the Bible that we think speak against homosexuality and, instead, pick up the whole thing which impels us to, more than anything, be gifts of love to one another?  Is our opposition to homosexuality actually a toxic form of self-love, disconnected from the good of others?  Perhaps, perhaps: nothing less than the very relevance of our message is at stake here.

We have a lot to talk about, to be sure.  The reasons some of us oppose homosexuality, as I mentioned, are not simple; they are also, to many of us, sacred.  But asking this question of love–if what we are doing with our politics and our opposition to homosexuality is loving–is where we need to begin again.

What kind of church, friends–and indeed, what kind of God–do we want to be for the world?  A church of love or a church of hate?  Do we want to speak, with our politics, of a God of freedom or of a God of oppression?

It seems to me that it is especially dark when the moon is mistaken for the sun, and that it is especially cold when fire is mistaken for ice.  Indeed, there is no greater danger than dressing hate with love.

in love, and with the hope that we may be more loving

paul houston blankenship