Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 18:56:26 -0400 From: Chris Ambidge Subject: *integrator* files for 1988 INTEGRATOR, the newsletter of Integrity/Toronto volume 88-3, issue date 1988 12 01 copyright 1988 Integrity/Toronto. The hard-copy version of this newsletter carries the ISSN 0843-574X Integrity/Toronto Box 873 Stn F Toronto ON Canada M4Y 2N9 == Contents == [88-3-1] CHRIS GLASER'S UNCOMMON CALLING / Book Review by David Pederson [88-3-2] BISHOP INGLIS ON A STAMP [88-3-3] EXODUS: Coming out as a Faith Journey / By Sandy Tipper ===== [88-3-1] CHRIS GLASER'S UNCOMMON CALLING Book Review by David Pederson [Uncommon Calling: A Gay Man's Struggle to Serve the Church. Chris Glaser. Harper & Row, San Francisco 1988] There are times in our lives when statements of faith help us to see the grace of God in the world. Our Judaeo-Christian history shows us that such statements of faith normally arise out of the experience of suffering, whether it be under an oppressive political regime or from a tragic personal loss. To speak of God from these places of humanity is the mark of our human response to divine grace. It is an underpinning of faith. Chris Glaser's autobiography is an account of gay faith. Glaser is a gay man in the United Presbyterian Church of America and was part of the 1978 decision to reject the ordination of lesbians and gay men. Chris' part in that decision was to watch the devaluation of himself and his seven years of training as he faced the rejection of his "uncommon" calling. In committing his experience to print Chris Glaser adds one more voice, the voice of gay faith, to the affirmation of God's work in the world and humanity's steadfast resistance to grace. Glaser writes from a wound, now ten years old, that is not likely to be completely healed until human action becomes just and merciful: "I am unable to offer a detailed, objective description of the United Presbyterian Church's General Assembly convened on 16 May 1978, in San Diego...Recollections of both my own action and that of others at the General Assembly are fragmentary ...For what happened during the ensuing nine days of the assembly became not simply an attack on me and my people, but a refutation of all I believed and hoped for the church ...One member of the committee, another "high-steepled" pastor, sought absolution from me immediately following the vote. Extending his hand to shake mine, he said 'I hope you don't take this personally.' How could he deny my faith experience, my call to ministry, my loving gift, and not expect me to take it personally? I refused his hand and walked past him without speaking. How could I forgive someone who was unrepentant in zealous persecution of my people?" Chris Glaser, like many other persecuted people throughout history, becomes an important testimony to the grace of God, a God that could attack but instead graciously refuses to affirm the unrepentant. In his book, *Uncommon Calling*, Chris recounts his experience as a gay youth, his attraction to justice, the reconciliation of his sexuality to his faith in Christ, his coming out to friends, foes, and family, the development of his spirituality, his encounters with homophobia and heterosexism, his ministry to gays and straights, and the loss of ordination. The book is filled with insights into collective prejudice and fear, cowardice and manipulation, patriarchy and the human abuse of political science and theology. Written from a Presbyterian perspective within the American culture, this book offers both layperson, academic and pastor an insight into the deeper and harder questions of North American Christianity; questions about the relationship between sexuality and spirituality, love and the essence of Christian family. Uniting experience from his studies at Yale with his rearing on the West Coast, Chris tells us how he learned the harder Christian lessons of accepting rejection and isolation. These lessons were tempered with moments of comfort and fellowship in both university and his home in California. Writing out of this temperament, he paints a picture of everyone's universal struggle between accepting rejection and refusing to give up hope. One cannot say that the book has a happy ending because Chris is still a minister of God rejected by those within the institution who lack the courage to defend him. Nevertheless Chris' life has been both fruitful and productive. Over the last ten years, Glaser has directed the Lazarus project, a programme of reconciliation between gay and straight Christians, which has done many things to move the love of God into a resistant world. Operating from the West Hollywood Presbyterian Church the Lazarus Project has, under his direction, brought new life to a dying congregation, turned the hunger of street people into lunch programmes, anti-gay ballots into ecumenical services, prostitution into half-way homes for new life patterns, and a murder into a weekly worship for inmates. God has continued to use Chris Glaser despite the shameful behaviour of the Church. In Glaser's case shame was a good fuel for a powerful liberation. Unfortunately it is also a good fuel for pain. Chris sums up the needlessness of this pain in a perceptive analogy: "Despite gospel-writing hindsighters, I wonder whether Jesus knew for sure what would happen when he approached Jerusalem for the last time ...Traditional theology would have you believe God planned it all, as if God would not have been satisfied with anything less than Jesus' death to bring about out salvation. But I don't believe in that kind of God. I believe God would have been delighted if the people, including the religious leaders, had been delivered from their legalistic, idolatrous, selfish, and self-righteous ways simply by Jesus' words and deeds. Jesus' death was God's last resort, the last line defence so to speak. It was the people, not God, who demanded and continue to demand Jesus' death." From the experience of sexuality and spirituality, rejection and isolation, gay theology will enhance the Holy. Chris Glaser has provided the future of gay liberation theology with more data for a new and much needed reflection of God in humanity and for that alone *Uncommon Calling* is a book that deserves to take its place with any "conventional" interpretation of Christian theology. ======== [88-3-2] BISHOP INGLIS ON A STAMP [Illustration of a 37 cent commemorative stamp] Check the stamp on the envelope that brought *The Integrator* to you. It depicts Charles Inglis, the first Anglican bishop of Nova Scotia. The bicentennial of his ordination was 1987: true to form, the Post Office is a year late. Born in Ireland, Inglis worked as a missionary and school teacher in the American colonies from 1754 -- at one point he was at Trinity Church Wall St in New York. A loyalist, he moved north after the Revolutionary War, and was consecrated bishop of Nova Scotia in 1787. At that time, his diocese encompassed all of British North America, including Toronto. Inglis' ministry is part of the long history of the Anglican church on this continent: the first recorded Eucharist in 1578 was in Frobisher Bay (modern day Iqaluit) on Baffin Island; today the Anglican Church in Canada has grown to about 800 000 members. ======== [88-3-3] EXODUS: Coming out as a Faith Journey By Sandy Tipper Jesus loves me, this I know, For the Bible tells me so ... I have loved this hymn all of my life because of its reassurance that God loves me. During my late teens and early twenties it was especially comforting because I hated myself so much. Most of the time I believed that I was total filth. This was not because of anything I did or said, but because of who I was. Raised as a devout medium-low Anglican, I was subject to a strong evangelical influence. My maternal grandmother was Baptist, and my mother was with the Brethren before she was married. I was deeply affected by the oft-repeated penitential elements of the Book of Common Prayer. At seventeen I became involved with a fundamentalist Protestant youth group. It was drilled into me that I was unworthy and that even my best was worthless. God could not tolerate imperfection, and only the Blood of the Lamb could atone for my sin. No problem with all that, quite orthodox as far as it goes. However, there was too much emphasis on self-degradation as opposed to recognition of the incredible magnitude of the mercy of God. I also bought into the distorted theory of justification, in which God loves me only because he looks at me through Jesus -coloured glasses. So he doesn't love me, as I am unlovable. He loves Jesus, and I get filtered out, according to this view. This in contrast to justification being a real transformation within me. The grace of God changes my state, not just my legal status. The difference profoundly affected my view of myself. This included my hopes, abilities, emotions, and my sexual orientation. Certain about my orientation, I thought of it as a defect and did not act on it. I kept praying to be a different person, and God answered in a way I was not expecting. This is usually the case, I have found. In university, I attended a high Anglican parish, and in second year I joined a Catholic Charismatic group. There I began to see that truth is not as simple as I had thought. The realisation came that fundamentalism was not necessarily the only authentic Christian spirituality. However, it was there that I felt required to claim healing for my homosexuality (as if it were a disease or a wicked choice). No one had known, but they all congratulated me. In reality, I experienced no change at all. After three years of university, I took two years of training at an Anglican seminary. There I learned a great deal of Church history and theology, and started reading the scriptures in more comprehensive and deeper ways. I truly felt called to ministry, but all the while I kept feeling more and more like a fraud. I was not able to accept that Jesus has redeemed and sanctified all of me. He has not just issued an "ADMIT ONE" ticket because of my so-called better parts, overlooking or excluding the rest of what makes me who I am. I am driven by the need to be whole and to integrate my life. To be authentic in whatever I believe and do is essential. There was tremendous stress because of the apparently irreconcilable differences between my orientation and what I believed my faith dictated. Finally, I blew a gasket. I had to leave the seminary after an immobilising depression which included two suicide attempts. God refused to let me go, although I wanted him to abandon me and let me be annihilated. I still remember how, when I had given in to despair, a solid conviction of his persistence came over me. Several years were needed for me to heal and grow again to rejoice in the knowledge of the love of God. Part of the healing process was to come out to myself. That is, I had to accept that my orientation was toward members of my own sex. What's more, that was the way I was put together. It was not a product of my own volition. My choice was not whether to be gay. It was whether to be gay and sick or gay and healthy. I have now learned to celebrate my sexuality as a gift from God. To be able to do this, I look at what the Bible is really telling me. Jesus loves me! God is with me! He will never forsake me! The new commandment is to love one another as he has loved us! A few selected special people in the Church have aided me enormously on my continuing journey. Most helpful were a couple of organisations of gay and lesbian Christians and friends. These are Integrity (Anglican) and Dignity (Roman Catholic). Eventually, I continued with further theological studies, but I am not aiming for ordination. The current definitions of the system do not include me. I am in a committed permanent relationship that I would not renounce or hide. God is greater than anything I can imagine. I must constantly seek his will and strive to make the most of the talents he has given me. If I do, he will make the most of what I have to offer and will not refuse me. If I ever do fail, he is able to be my correction, my strength, my comfort, and my guide. When asked if he believed in infant baptism, Mark Twain answered, "Believe in it? Hell, I've *seen* it!" Just so, there is really no question whether it is possible to be gay and Christian. I am. Others may attempt to disallow God's love and care for me, or to discredit my faith in him, but, "I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day" (2 Tim 1:12b). ======== End of volume 88-3 of Integrator, the newsletter of Integrity/Toronto copyright 1988 Integrity/Toronto Editor this issue: Bonnie Bewley comments please to Chris Ambidge, current Editor chris.ambidge@utoronto.ca OR Integrity/Toronto Box 873 Stn F Toronto ON Canada M4Y 2N9