Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 18:57:30 -0400 From: Chris Ambidge Subject: *Integrator* files for 1991 INTEGRATOR, the newsletter of Integrity/Toronto volume 91-5, issue date 1991 05 75 copyright 1991 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 == [91-5-1] IN TUNE WITH GOD / by Sandy Tipper [91-5-2] A PASTORAL LETTER TO CLERGY AND LAY LEADERS OF THE DIOCESE OF EDMONTON by the Rt Rev Ken Genge [91-5-3] RIGHT ON! / a tongue-in-cheek letter on left-handedness [91-5-4] TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT MY LOVE / by Jim Hodgson [91-5-5] REQUESTING AMENDMENT OF THE *CANADIAN HUMAN RIGHTS ACT* a letter recently sent to the Prime Minister by Integrity/Toronto ======== [91-5-1] IN TUNE WITH GOD by Sandy Tipper Now, I would hate to be quoted as saying that God is a tuning fork, but I have a theory that helps me to understand prayer, miracles, and so on. This is another of the models that I use to help grasp the intangible; I do not pretend that they are an accurate description of reality, but are an image for my finite, scientifically-oriented mind to deal with when contemplating the infinite. So what about the tuning fork? In public school, one of the most impressive science demonstrations that I ever encountered was of sympathetic vibration. Two identical tuning forks were used. One was struck, and started to hum. The other was held nearby, and when the first was stopped, the second was found to be humming, although it had not been struck! It looked like magic, and was wondrous to behold, but it is a very simple scientific principle in action. Since the tuning forks were identical in construction, they each had the same natural frequency of vibration. When the first was struck, it started to vibrate at its natural frequency, and forced the air around it to vibrate at the same frequency (producing the sound we could hear). Those very sound waves that reached our ears also bathed the second tuning fork, which was pushed around by the vibrational energy of the waves. Since the vibration was at the second tuning fork's natural frequency, the second tuning fork started to vibrate strongly in sympathy with the sound waves (hence with the first tuning fork). When the first fork was abruptly silenced, the second continued to vibrate, and so hummed away happily. This principle actually is not limited to tuning forks, but is very far-reaching. Sympathetic vibration is what makes cars rattle, the Tacoma Narrows bridge dance and collapse, and in fact by affecting the tiny hairs in our inner ears, lets us hear. It is not limited to mechanical vibrations; radio receivers work because electrons in their antennae respond to radio waves. So What? Well, for me, it has two immediate consequences spiritually. The first has to do with the way God affects the created world. The God that Jesus portrayed to us is NOT just a Creator who, having completed the construction project (or experiment), just sits back and watches (or sleeps), indifferent or incapable of relating with its creatures. No, Jesus teaches us to pray, and to expect answers to prayer. Mary, Joseph, Paul, and a host of others saw visions, heard voices, and dreamed dreams. Were they all crazy? Were they all deluded, or have the records been embellished that much? I don't think so. I believe that God does speak to us, and can affect our perceptions, and abilities. And for me, it is the phenomenon of sympathetic vibration that seems to be the best physical analogy. I believe that our spirits can resonate with the Holy Spirit, receiving both direction and power. Just as our ears respond to a mechanical source of vibratory energy, and a radio responds to electromagnetic signals, so our spirits respond to the voice of God. In turn, our minds (including our sensory perceptions) are influenced by our spirits. This influence can vary from hunches to visions. The second consequence has to do with the purpose of prayer and spiritual discipline. If the first tuning fork was designed to produce an A, but the second fork was tuned to B flat, little or no sympathetic vibration would occur; the forks are not in tune with one another. If some of the little hairs in our inner ear are damaged, we become deaf to the corresponding frequencies. So it is that we can be insensitive to the voice of God. Prayer, then, is not only our telling God what we need or want, but also the exercise of getting in tune. Like a guitar, we are under enough stress and strain that without frequent maintenance and tuning, our strings sag and go out of pitch. Being finite, and somewhat lazy, we are not always in perfect tune, nor are we ever able to pick up the full spectrum all at once. This explains why sometimes we get different intensities of direction, and not always the same aspect of the same message as another Christian. We are like tuning forks or guitar strings, limited in our ranges, but the Holy Spirit is a symphonic orchestra, making use of each of our modest response ranges to produce the entire opus. Extending the analogy only the tiniest bit, the same principle applies in musical instruments, like a guitar or a piano. The vibrating string sets a sounding board vibrating in tune with it, and in fact the sounding board amplifies the sound. Just so, if one person is in tune with the Spirit, s/he can excite her/his whole community so that the power of God will be more widely experienced. This is the role of the prophet, to energise and mobilise the church to be God's instrument [pun intended] on earth. May the Spirit find us listening and willing to resonate with the divine Word. Amen. ======== [91-5-2] A PASTORAL LETTER TO CLERGY AND LAY LEADERS OF THE DIOCESE OF EDMONTON November 1990 Dear Friends: I am writing this letter to you in response to several conversations with members of the gay and lesbian community. They were people who profess and practice the Christian faith as Anglicans. They have shared with me in a very open way descriptions of their spiritual journeys. They described some of their pain in rejection from parents and friends, and often from the Church. There was joy, too, in their stories, most often in the experiences of acceptance by family or friends or parish when they finally had the courage to reveal that they were homosexual. Our conversations have been open and honest. I trust they will continue to have these characteristics. These Anglicans know that I am a child of my culture, as they are, both religious and secular. Therefore, I, like them, have been raised to look on homosexuality as bad. Each of us is an Anglican. Each of us professes the Christian faith. Each of us worships regularly Sunday by Sunday. Each of us is faithful in our particular relationships. I do not pretend to understand the whys and wherefores of sexual orientation. There are many theories both in and out of the Church. I do know that God calls us all (heterosexual and homosexual alike) to repentance and absolution -- to new beginnings. God issues that invitation out of unconditional love that is revealed in Jesus Christ to and for all of us. The question of human sexuality -- and not the least homosexuality -- is a delicate and difficult issue for many people. This is as true for clergy and lay people in the Church as it is for anyone else in society. These people who came to talk, came as hurting people in our Church family, and wanting to feel more an accepted part of the Christian community. How can we as clergy and lay leaders help this to happen? How do we hinder this acceptance? The issue will not go away if we simply ignore it. I ask you to prayerfully tackle these questions and challenges. You will have insights to share. God Bless. Love [Ken] Ken Genge / Bishop of Edmonton [This letter was written after Bishop Genge met with a number of members of Integrity/Edmonton, as he mentions in the first paragraph. It was brought to our attention by our friends in the Edmonton chapter, and it is reprinted here with Bishop Genge's permission.] ======== [91-5-3] In a lighter vein, from a genuine letter to one that is definitely tongue-in-cheek: RIGHT ON! Saw someone writing with his left hand the other day. Disgusting. Should know better. Claimed he was born with his left-handed writing preference. Nonsense. He's just perverted. Maybe he was molested by a left-handed person when he was a kid. He just chooses to be left- handed -- he could change if he *really* wanted to. Everyone knows you have to be right-handed. Right-handed, right-wing, right thinking, right in the head, all right! Told this guy I'd pray for him so he wouldn't be afflicted any more. His answer! How rude! Didn't he know I had his best interests at heart? Didn't he know lefties would roast in hell? He even doubted that! Look at the proof. After all, aren't we Christians righteous ? Ever heard of a lefteous one? Doesn't that prove my point? This guy said that about ten percent of people all over the world are left-handed. He even pointed out that there was a left-handed judge in the Old Testament. Ehud. He's dead, isn't he? Proves my point. I think it's high time we right-thinking people rose up and demanded our rights: never to see someone with the left-hand preference practising this filthy persuasion again. Keep our city clean. Let's not have anything sinister here. Right? Anonymous PS: That left-handed judge had the right idea, though (Judges 3). Makes you think. Stabbed a fat guy. Good thinker, eh? After the lefties, we can go for the fat guys too. Yeah! ======== [91-5-4] TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT MY LOVE by Jim Hodgson [JIM HODGSON is a gay Roman Catholic writer and educator who works in Toronto. He usually writes about the Caribbean and Latin America. This reflection was written on Easter Sunday, 1991.] To be gay, Christian and semi-conscious of the state of the world has always presented me and others like me with a set of problems. I have just written two pieces which have to do with alternative celebrations of Good Friday in Toronto. One was a Memorial March for the homeless who have died in our streets. About 70 of us, Christians and non- Christians, made the Way of the Cross, stopping and laying crosses where people have died or are now being exploited. The other was also a Way of the Cross, but with a focus on children, peace and human rights. Hundreds of us danced in Nathan Phillips Square and then walked through the centre of Toronto. The pieces I wrote are both for use in rather mainstream Christian settings. One is a reflection which I will use at an ecumenical youth event in May. The other is an article which could be published in any of several places. It deals with how people learn and change, and how people become active for social change. As I wrote both pieces, a voice in my head was thundering, "You are a gay man! Write about that!" I think this voice might have been that of James Baldwin (my latest muse?). I had seen a film about him the night before Good Friday at the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. While the film, I felt, did not deal adequately with Jimmy's way of loving, I know enough about him to know that writing about being gay was an issue for him too. You make strategic choices. Your cause is not helped by revealing your sexual orientation when you are trying to build a movement that will stop the war against poor people in this country, or when you are making peace in Latin America, or when you are trying to open people up to the idea that Muslims are people too. The flip side of this question is how you speak of love and spirituality in a gay and lesbian community which often feels attacked by organised religion. It doesn't help your credibility to come out as a person of faith. How do I say that Lesbian and Gay Pride Day is like Easter or Passover or the end of Ramadan in that it is a taste of a better world to come? But when do I do it? When do I tell the whole truth? And if I don't tell the truth, how do I help advance the lesbian/gay political agenda? How do we ever advance our stumbling efforts to develop our gay/lesbian spirituality? How do we talk about loving our neighbours generally without talking about how we love individuals specifically? The truth is something like this: two of the people I mention in those articles are former lovers of mine; at least a dozen people I greeted during the Good Friday marches are gay or lesbian; one of the people dancing in the huge circle at Nathan Phillips Square cost me my job once because of her homophobia and my self-revelation. The truth is that while I argued with another woman about rights for refugees -- and even write about the argument in one of the articles -- everything that I said was shaded by the fact that I live with a refugee. He has been my lover for more than three years; we are breaking up right now; and I feel like a failure because at some point the costs of that love got so high that I said no, I can't do this any more, please leave. These were my thoughts as I walked and later as I wrote. I told some of those with whom I was walking some of what I was thinking, but again I was being selective (even now, I am being selective: I am not free to tell you more about some of those men!) As we walked, we were singing, chatting, greeting old friends and meeting new friends. I thought about all the people I knew in this group, people I have worked with, argued with and played with at various times in the past decade in struggles against racism and war, for housing and human rights, and for gay and lesbian rights. At one point I said to someone, "this is my church." Sometimes I sit and talk with people about solidarity, liberation theology and how it is the privilege of the poor to know God in a way that people who are rich never can. I can follow a discourse about hermeneutics and contextual theology, and grant that these big words are important. Sometimes we need those words so that we can argue with those who have taken Christianity and used it to bless structures of power and oppression. But the heart of Christian faith is much simpler. My best moments have been when I have been able to talk openly about myself and my own history of oppression. I have known oppression and marginalisation: In being gay and lonely at some moments in my life; in being young, gay and in a small town in British Columbia; in being with people with AIDS in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Kenya and Canada. I have also known liberation in those same contexts. It is in telling the truth about my love that I have been most able to help others understand something more about loving. To mark the Way of the Cross by walking with the homeless on Good Friday in 1991 is to walk with Jesus as he walks to his execution. Unless you are willing to die or to let go of what is old, tired, selfish, fearful and greedy, there can be no resurrection to a new level of consciousness and being. To sit on the floor of the drop-in centre and to listen to their stories of brutality and triumph and gentleness and rage means more than a dozen sermons; I have had this same feeling listening to people living with AIDS. To come away feeling like an Easter person, that there really will be resurrection, that all of our work really means something even as everything seems to be getting worse, is somehow proof of the foolishness of Christianity. To worship this crucified god is to have faith that somehow, through our labour, the reign of God will triumph and that there will be justice and freedom for everyone. ======== [91-5-5] REQUESTING AMENDMENT OF THE *CANADIAN HUMAN RIGHTS ACT* This letter was recently sent by Integrity/Toronto to the Prime Minister. A similar one was sent to the Hon Kim Campbell, federal Minister of Justice: Dear Prime Minister Mulroney: We are writing to you on behalf of Integrity/Toronto, an Anglican group of Lesbians, Gays, their friends and family members. In October 1985, you are reported as having said, "minority rights are indeed fundamental and very important in Canada" and that you are "against discrimination whatsoever". As you are well aware, five years ago a special all-party Parliamentary Committee recommended that the government move to ensure that lesbians, gays and bisexuals be included among those protected from discrimination under the *Canadian Human Rights Act*. The then Minister of Justice, the Hon. John Crosbie, responded to that report in March 1986 with a promise to "take whatever measures are necessary to ensure that sexual orientation is a prohibited ground of discrimination". Since that time, the "necessary measures" have still not been taken. We know only too well that people *still* fear loss of employment, denial of housing or access to services because of their sexual orientation, or perceived orientation. Please have your government act immediately to fulfil this long standing promise to protect the rights of our friends, neighbours, parents and children by means of an amendment to the *Canadian Human Rights Act*. We do not ask for "special rights", but only a guarantee that our equality with others is protected. Sandy Tipper Norm Rickaby Co-conveners ======== End of volume 91-5 of Integrator, the newsletter of Integrity/Toronto copyright 1991 Integrity/Toronto comments please to Chris Ambidge, Editor chris.ambidge@utoronto.ca OR Integrity/Toronto Box 873 Stn F Toronto ON Canada M4Y 2N9