Date: Fri, 19 Jun 1998 14:44:53 -0400
From: Chris Ambidge <chris.ambidge@utoronto.ca>
Subject: *Integrator* files for 1993


INTEGRATOR, the newsletter of Integrity/Toronto
volume 93-1, issue date 1993 01 06

copyright 1993 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 ==

[93-1-1]
THE "COMING OUT" OF ST PAUL:  A Reflection on the Feast of the Conversion
     of St Paul  /  by Norm Rickaby

[93-1-2]
A GAY MAN SPEAKS TO GENERAL SYNOD  /  the words of Don Meen's address
     to the Sexual Orientation Forum

[93-1-3]
TREATMENT OF GAY CLERGY IN WASHINGTON DC  /  forwarded to us by
     Integrity founder DR LOUIE CREW

========


[93-1-1]
THE "COMING OUT" OF ST PAUL
     A Reflection on the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul

by Norm Rickaby


"Coming out" is a term which has a long history in the church and
before the start of the Christian era.  For example, in the Exodus
story, God called his people out of slavery in Egypt.  They came
out under the leading and protection of God's mighty arm.  In the
Gospel story of the raising of Lazarus, Jesus called his friend to
"Come out!" of the prison of his tomb.

In the conversion of St Paul, we have another kind of coming out
story.  Paul spent a good portion of his life - prior to his
conversion - living in a kind of closet.  On the road to Damascus,
he began his own journey of coming out and once again, it is the
voice of God calling him out.

For lesgay people, coming out is a pivotal moment in the growth
toward becoming whole people.  The term designates a shift in the
focus of one's life from hiddenness to openness, from self-hatred
to self-acceptance, from repression to release, from bondage to
freedom.  We share the experience in common, and it becomes a
point of contact for all of us.  We tell one another when and how
we came out.  We ask one another "Are you out to ... (your family?
your co-workers? your friends?)".  And yet, though we share this
common experience, it is a process which is unique and different
for every single individual.

For some, the process is long and gradual, moving slowly from an
inner suspicion towards full recognition of who one truly is
inside as opposed to the outward *persona* which the world
perceives.  Often there is an interior battle with this reality
because being lesbian or gay means being different from the
majority. Our society has carefully taught us that difference
means being unacceptable and inferior.

For others, there comes an early and full awareness of the gay
self and of the rightness of being that self.  These individuals
often tend to be the ones who burst out of the closet before the
door hinges can even be fastened!

Although, for a great many of us, the prospect of coming out and
the first steps of doing it can be fearful and painful, there is
such a healthful and liberating rightness about it that eventually
we move on to that time when we can hardly abide any situation in
which we cannot be fully who we are.

From time to time, at our Integrity/Toronto meetings, regret has
been expressed that no experience comparable to coming out exists
that straight people can have.  Despite the societal evil which
over the centuries has necessitated the gay closet, some would
wish that more people had an opportunity to experience the
liberating results of coming out.

The fact of the matter is, though, that within Christian life
there is something which compares to coming out.  That is the
conversion experience.  By conversion, I mean the process by which
an individual herself or himself comes to terms with the good news
of God's love revealed in Christ.  The person acknowledges it as
something having personal meaning and which will make a difference
in how life is lived.

Again, this realisation and acknowledgement happens in a variety
of ways to different people.  For some, it is a slow painful
process finally emerging into consciousness and then spoken aloud.
For others it is something they have always known and felt was an
important ingredient in their definition of themselves.

St Paul's "coming out" as a believer in Christ, I believe, shows
us a good example of one who struggled long and hard with the
inner realisation that there was something inside him that -
despite everything he had been taught to hold dear - was pulling
him inexorably towards the person and message of Christ.

In two major New Testament passages where the story is told (Acts
26 and Galatians 1), Paul speaks of how keenly he undertook the
battle to defeat those who were living and preaching the gospel.
He tells us that he was convinced that he "ought to do all that
was possible to oppose the name of Jesus" and how intensely he
"persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it."

Why such passion?

I would suggest that those of us who have lived with the repressed
knowledge of something within us pulling us toward our gay
feelings understand this.  In order to deny and suppress these
feelings, because we had been taught they were wrong, we spoke
loudly and passionately against homosexuality.  Many of us can
recall, to our bitter shame, the passion and persecution we used
in our attempts to deny the validity of the voice speaking within
us.

Paul had been carefully trained from his youth to believe that his
Jewish Pharisaic tradition was the only true way.  On the road to
Damascus, the voice in Paul's vision asks "Why are you persecuting
me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads."  What goads?
Clearly Paul, in the midst of his determined crusade against the
church, felt conviction and a sense of doubt concerning the
rightness of his position and the wrongness of the Christians'
position.  Possibly it was these inner goads which he was
attempting to subdue in his desperate activity to wipe out the
church.

But Paul had the encounter which forever changed the direction of
his life.  It now became clear to him that everything he was
taught, everything he grew up believing, everything he had fought
for must be questioned in the light of his own experience.  He
faced head on the fact that there was another way to look at
things - and having looked, he would never again be the same
person.  Paul had taken that crucial first step, the one that
everyone must take before coming out to anyone else.  He had come
out to himself (as a believer in Christ).

Next Paul began the ongoing and lifelong process of coming out to
others (the church calls it witnessing).

There are two different versions of what happened after the
vision.  In the book of Acts, we are told that Paul went directly
to Damascus and there a disciple named Ananias came to him.  In
Galatians, Paul is said to have gone for a time into Arabia and
then returned to Damascus for his first encounter with the
believers.  In either case, he did what someone beginning the
coming out process ought to do - he first related his experience
to others who would understand and identify with what had
happened.  Later, having gained the positive support he needed
from the community, he found the strength to tell others who he
was and how he had come to wholeness by facing the truth.

It is interesting to note that another similarity between the
coming out of lesbians and gays and the coming out (conversion)
into faith shows up in the reaction of the hearers of the news.
"Why can't these people keep quiet about this thing?  I don't mind
so much them being ...(lesbian, gay, Christian)... but do they
have to make such a big deal about it? Why do they have to flaunt
it?"

It's really tough to keep quiet about good news.  That's what the
Christian saints down through the years have discovered and it's
what our lesgay saints have discovered, too.  What we can learn
from the conversion of St Paul is that it is the Holy Spirit who
calls to us "Come out!"

The message is clear.  Come out of your closets lesbian and gay
people.  Come out of your closets Christians.  Come out of fear
and bondage to freedom and life!

[The Feast of the Conversion of St Paul is celebrated on January
25]


========


[93-1-2]
A GAY MAN SPEAKS TO GENERAL SYNOD
   the words of DON MEEN's address to the Sexual Orientation Forum

[DR DONALD MEEN is past President of Integrity/Vancouver.  The
Primate introduced him to Synod with these words: "Donald lives in
Vancouver where he works as a clinical psychologist in a hospital
and in a community practice.  He holds a doctoral degree in
psychology from the University of Manitoba and has been a life-
long member of the Anglican Church.  He has been in a fifteen-year
relationship with his partner Kevin, and lectures and writes
frequently on his experience of being a gay person within the
Church.]


MY NAME IS DONALD MEEN.  The Church is being called at this time
to creativity and maturity in its sexual theology.  Gay and
lesbian Christians have a gift to offer which, we pray, will
further this development as our spiritual path to wholeness, to
holiness, which we have named "Coming Out." It is a coming-out in
wholeness into the world after our going-in to alienation, fear,
loneliness, and self-rejection, in the midst of which we have met
our God and have experienced in the fullness of our being that we
are loved.  Transformed, we strive thereafter to know God's will
for us in this time and place in history.  And out of our
gratitude, we commit ourselves to the liberation and wholeness of
others.

My journey began forty-four years ago in northern Alberta.  Born
to Margaret and Ted, themselves children of pioneers, people
willing to risk and daring to hope.  The latest of many
generations of Anglicans, I experienced the Church as warmth,
colour, music, friendliness and belonging.  My favourite hymn was
*Jesus loves me, this I know* ..., and for years I did not doubt
it.  I was blessed with a healthy family with parents who valued,
trusted, and encouraged me.  They protected me in early life from
pathological religion, that which is based on fear and guilt in
the service of control.  My knowledge of God as loving, trusting,
and uplifting was on a collision course with the anti-gay messages
I received, and in part internalised as I grew older.  It became
clear to me as a child engaging in children's sexual play that the
warm, exciting, good feelings I felt were so much more for friends
who were boys than for those who were girls.  I understood this
was different, but these feelings went unnamed.  As the years
progressed, the innocent joy of my sexual play was eroded.  My
culture gave me a name for my feelings, and very clearly said,
"These are bad, and you are bad for having them."

As most gay and lesbian people do, I entered my dark night of a
child's soul.  I could share my innermost feelings with no one,
lest I slip and reveal myself.  I could turn to no one:  not
parent, or church, to protect me from the assaults of my culture.
It was a time of self-hatred and deep loneliness.  Yet through
these years, there was still *Jesus loves me, this I know*... For
so many years, I prayed fervently that God would fix me and make
me normal.  As an adolescent, I was angry at God.  "You love me,
but you make me suffer.  You are loving but cruel.  I gave myself
to you to be changed, and you seem not to hear my cries." And
still, God did not change me.

If you wonder why gay and lesbian Christians are insulted by the
facile, "Just give yourself to Jesus and he'll make you strait",
consider this:  we did, and He didn't.  And don't offend us
further by saying we didn't pray hard enough, long enough, or use
the right words, or believe strongly enough.  It's not for you to
make these judgements.

In university, I dated women, as do most gay men prior to their
more fully coming out.  Like most of us, I like women.  I admire
my women friends.  I enjoy their company.  I appreciate their
perspectives, and I feel much affection for them.  But I have
never felt that special longing for intimate communion which I
felt for certain of my male friends.  Studying psychology, I
encountered the contributions of social science to understanding
human sexuality, and I concluded that, regardless of the source,
all knowledge is revelation of God's truth.  I learned about
sexuality identity, its development and components, the influence
of socio-cultural factors in defining male and female sex roles as
it varies across time and culture, the continuum of sexual
orientation from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively
homosexual and all the points between.

The religious understanding I came to was that God has not
intended everyone to be heterosexual, and we ought not to expect
some sort of conformity to average human-ness, but we can rejoice
in the variety of God's creation.

Furthermore, we have a new norm for humanity, and that is Jesus
Christ.  I found myself over this time being more troubled at the
promise and celebration of love in the church.  I felt excluded
from what I could see around me were the primary human experiences
of love:  that between spouses, and between parents and children.
The desire grew in me for an embodied intimacy, greater than the
love of friends or family, or care for the disadvantaged or
troubled.  Nor love in the abstract, but incarnated love, with
full communion of spirit, mind, and body, with a real, human,
beloved other.

I made my last attempt to change orientation by undergoing
aversion therapy, and I was cured -- of ever doing violence to
myself again.  And I learned:  God never calls a human being to do
violence to himself.  God never calls a human being to hate
herself.  As John McNeill says, "Only good theology will result in
good psychology, and good psychology in good theology." So I took
a chance on God and on love.  After so many years, I accepted
God's answer to my prayers, "I made you as you are; I love you as
you are, and I made you to love.  I leave the details to you."

I left the church and became involved with men and women at the
beginning of the gay and lesbian liberation movement in Edmonton.
We were a justice-seeking community, alternately afraid and bold,
supporting and challenging one another, reaching out to other gay
and lesbian people with words of hope and affirmation.  Through
the agency of these real flesh-and-blood people, I found myself
again capable of loving, and worth loving, being restored to
wholeness.

This did not come about without grieving.  My losses: my mother's,
my father's losses:  losses of dreams, of social acceptability, of
safety and security, of acknowledgement for my loving
relationships:  losses of opportunities to use my gifts and
talents, and of the chance to be a father.

Why do we bristle at "love the sinner, hate the sin"?  Our
orientation is an aspect of who we are; it is about our being and
our personhood.  Hate my sexual orientation and you hate me.
Neither can I hate my sexual orientation while loving me.  And
what part of self to hate:  that which has at its core the drawing
of a person into the most intimate communion with another, and
through that into communion with God.  I believe it is God, the
cosmic Lover's abiding purpose for humankind that we should
realise our intended humanity as human lovers.  Our embodied
sexuality is essential to this.

My partner, Kevin, and I will soon celebrate our fifteenth year of
life together, and I can't fully express the significance of this
relationship to me.  Because of him, I have returned to the
church.  With him, I feel a closeness, a vulnerability, a
vitality.  He is committed to my well-being; I know it, and I am
to his.  We have learned about the sacrifices one makes for one's
beloved, and our lives are forever entwined.  I know we mediate
God's presence to one another, and I pray that, through our
covenantal relationship, we, individually, and as a couple,
mediate God's presence to others.

May I finish with some words from John McNeill, who says, "The
progressive revelation of God's self as Father, Son and Holy
Spirit represents a progressive identification with and
interiorisation of the divine presence in our lives, first as
Parent, then as brother and fellow-human being.  Finally, God
comes to us as Holy Spirit of love who now dwells within us.  With
the New Covenant, God writes the law deep within us on our hearts,
and as a result, every human being, from the least to the
greatest, will be able to find the will of God within himself and
her experience.  Gay and lesbian people especially need a direct
experience of God's love, in order to receive the spirit of
reconciliation at the deepest levels of our being.  In order to be
able to accept and love ourselves and each other, to believe and
accept God's love for, and acceptance of us, even at the very
moment the church condemns us and our loving in God's name." Amen.


========


[93-1-3]
Treatment of Gay Clergy in Washington DC
forwarded to us by Integrity founder DR LOUIE CREW

I received this message from a dear friend in Washington early in
October 1992:

The Rev Jim Holmes, associate rector of St John's, Lafayette
Square, has been named rector of St Thomas', DuPont Circle.  St
Thomas' is where Integrity meets.  There was speculation as to
what the new rector would do about Integrity when she or he was
chosen.  However, Jim Holmes is openly gay and lives with a lover.
A brief biography of the lover was included in the letter sent to
the parishioners announcing the selection.  This is the way
lesbian and gay people and their relationships should be treated
in the church, but as we know, this is rare.  We are so lucky to
have Ron Haines as our bishop.


========


End of volume 93-1 of Integrator, the newsletter of Integrity/Toronto
copyright 1993 Integrity/Toronto
comments please to Chris Ambidge, Editor
        chris.ambidge@utoronto.ca   OR
Integrity/Toronto Box 873 Stn F Toronto ON Canada M4Y 2N9