Today I thought to myself, “What’s a nice Jewish Lesbian like me doing in the pews instead of the streets for the Pride parade?” Until today I hadn’t taken a conscious look at my dwindling interest in the Pride parade. I knew it was partly based on not being able to stand the crowds and heat. But when I woke up today and chose Church over Pride, I had to wonder what else was going on. As usual, Mother Melissa’s sermon struck many personal chords. When she described Peter and Paul as “the one who denied Christ and the one who persecuted Christians” and asked “how we allow their stories to inform our stories,” I started to scribble down my thoughts.
Part of why it is remarkable for me to choose church hymns over political chants is that I have been a Lesbian/Feminist, Leftist and Jew long before I dreamed of stepping foot into church. My ancestors fled the Eastern European pogroms, and crosses were almost as scary to me as vampires. I grew up with no knowledge but many prejudices—about the Christian faith and the people who I thought were strange enough to believe in it.
Hearing Carter Heyward speak in 1980s Boston was for me a huge cognitive dissonance. She was a progressive, a lesbian, and… a PRIEST! But I didn’t think of her again until years later. I thought she and the nuns who lived among and were murdered along with the poor and oppressed in El Salvador were exceptions to what I perceived as monolithic, narrow-minded Christianity.
In 1991 or so I visited St. Paul’s with my partner Marilyn. While I still had barely one toe in the door, the music, mystery and warmth here began to slowly wear down those steel gates around my heart and imagination. I soon realized that I was not welcomed at St. Paul’s in spite of who I was, not judged or made an exception for. Rather, I was invited to bring every facet of myself, and to become—at my own pace and with all my insecurities and misgivings—an integral member of the patchwork community of faith. Feeling at first like a foreigner, I began to humbly realize that, just as I knew that Jews are not a homogeneous group, Christians came in many stripes (even rainbows), and that the ones at St. Paul’s had open minds and welcoming hearts! The scales fell from my eyes.
As mental and spiritual barriers began to dissolve, I realized that my politically correct community in college, always on the alert for ways to overcome prejudice and make a better world for all, was far more scrutinizing and narrow-minded than the folks at St. Paul’s. To this day, being out as a Christian is far more difficult among lefties, liberals and other Jews than being out as a Lesbian. And I understand where they’re coming from, since it’s where I came from. (And the mainstream image of Christianity is still something I’m loathe to associate myself with.) There’s my Peter.
And how does this relate to Gay Pride, and prejudice? So often society bases its fears and judgment about the “gay lifestyle” on the images we see in the media from the flamboyant Gay Pride Parade—the most over-the-top expression of who we are as a people. Just as the images of scantily clad leather daddies with whips, or drag queens dancing in high heels at Pride do not describe most GLBTQ people, what I thought I knew of Christianity was also the most extreme and superficial expression of it. Many of my assumptions about Christianity were learned from observing televangelists, Anita Bryants and Jerry Falwells. Just like Paul, I severely judged the very people I ended up breaking bread with.
We are all much more than our sexual orientations or belief systems. Being a Lesbian, a Christian AND a Jew means I end up feeling pulled between alliances and unsure how to blend my identities on Sundays (and every other day of the week). But what continues to astound me is that I know with deep certainty that coming to this church grounds me in who I am and connects me with a loving God more than being anywhere else.
Today, after church and the Parade, I went to the Pride Festival with Denise Minard, who I met on Palm Sunday many years ago. She coined the description “EpiscoJewLesbian” for me. As we pinned on rainbow crosses with pink triangles, I half-seriously said, “But people will know we’re Christians!” We visited information tables, sat in the sun, then walked back to the parking lot at St. Paul’s, where acceptance is so taken for granted that it’s barely worth mentioning.
Being all of who we are, sharing our joys, longings and struggles with one another, and not limiting our identities with names or assumptions may well help usher in an age of liberation that surely disciples of all faiths (or no faith) would welcome.
Barb Levy is webmaster at St. Paul's and has her own graphic arts business.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Prologues
by Robin Allan Jones
I love prologues. “Two houses, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona, where we lay our scene . . .” “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York . . .” I love prologues so much that I wrote one for myself. In our recent production of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church’s Umbrella Theatre Company, Noah Way Out, the play begins with a prologue that tells of the nearness of heaven to the medieval imagination. And so, I enjoyed the exquisite pleasure of uttering the opening lines, savoring that surge of adrenaline that ignites the story: “The medieval era, the centuries in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire . . .” It does seem awfully full of brass and tympany for what was purported to be a “screwball comedy,” but were it humanly possible, I’d make a career of reciting prologues. Because for a moment, I was cast a quarter of a century back into my youth as a college theatre student, reliving the ineluctable joy as the lights would fade up, the opening lines were declaimed, and the fluttering off-stage visceral nervousness would be pushed aside as I anticipated my first entrance.
Equally, I suppose, I love the beginnings of novels: “Call me Ishmael . . .” “It was the best of times and the worst of times . . .” The beginnings of novels and plays are like those magic words on old maps: Terra Incognita “Land Unknown.” “What country, friends, is this?”
Beginnings are always loaded with potential, with promise; beginnings are always the undiscovered country; beginnings always have implied ellipses trailing them because we keep close to our hearts the promises of the imagined what-could-be.
What’s not so hot are the words “The End.”
In the period that we rehearsed and launched Noah Way Out I, as one of St. Paul’s liturgical ministers, shared the honor and joy of serving at the baptism of possibly one of the most beautiful children I have ever seen. This child took to the baptismal water like a baby dolphin. One suspects a mermaid in the pedigree, and this baptism had all the thrill of “Once upon a time . . .” But in that same rehearsal course of time I also served as a liturgical minister, this time at the Cathedral, for the funeral of a friend. This was a thudding, sad, emptiness-leaving, too-soon “The End” for a woman loved by just about everyone who ever knew her, leaving a story of unfulfilled potential without a denouement. I am certain my own sorrow over this still bleeds along the courses of the cracks in the concrete floor of St. Mark’s.
Endings are like that. Rare is the movie that ends as well as it begins; common the novelist who will tell you that the book on which he tapped out “The End” was not the book he intended to write, and there is always a part of us that wishes Romeo and Juliet could live for eternity happily ever after.
But life in the Church is about funerals, not just baptisms, and it’s about everything in between. It is as much about “death do us part” as it is the delectable seduction that leads to “I do.” While I may find that endings make me ache with hollowness, the fact is, we as Episcopalians celebrate every minute of the human experience. We ceremonialize all the landmarks as we recapitulate the terrifying steps to the Cross, and by this celebration, this reliving of the ages of humankind, we honor those landmarks, and we warrior-like look our endings in the eye.
My bedraggled cast and crew, beset by weather, desertion, and delay, eventually brought Noah to his rainbow ending—it would seem our Episcopalian God is not content to have us simply ride the flood; He insists we row and hoist a tattered sail. But as Carlos Castaneda has Don Juan Matus point out: “The warrior laughs and laughs.”
Robin Allan Jones wrote and directed the Umbrella Theatre Company’s Noah Way Out
I love prologues. “Two houses, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona, where we lay our scene . . .” “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York . . .” I love prologues so much that I wrote one for myself. In our recent production of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church’s Umbrella Theatre Company, Noah Way Out, the play begins with a prologue that tells of the nearness of heaven to the medieval imagination. And so, I enjoyed the exquisite pleasure of uttering the opening lines, savoring that surge of adrenaline that ignites the story: “The medieval era, the centuries in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire . . .” It does seem awfully full of brass and tympany for what was purported to be a “screwball comedy,” but were it humanly possible, I’d make a career of reciting prologues. Because for a moment, I was cast a quarter of a century back into my youth as a college theatre student, reliving the ineluctable joy as the lights would fade up, the opening lines were declaimed, and the fluttering off-stage visceral nervousness would be pushed aside as I anticipated my first entrance.
Equally, I suppose, I love the beginnings of novels: “Call me Ishmael . . .” “It was the best of times and the worst of times . . .” The beginnings of novels and plays are like those magic words on old maps: Terra Incognita “Land Unknown.” “What country, friends, is this?”
Beginnings are always loaded with potential, with promise; beginnings are always the undiscovered country; beginnings always have implied ellipses trailing them because we keep close to our hearts the promises of the imagined what-could-be.
What’s not so hot are the words “The End.”
In the period that we rehearsed and launched Noah Way Out I, as one of St. Paul’s liturgical ministers, shared the honor and joy of serving at the baptism of possibly one of the most beautiful children I have ever seen. This child took to the baptismal water like a baby dolphin. One suspects a mermaid in the pedigree, and this baptism had all the thrill of “Once upon a time . . .” But in that same rehearsal course of time I also served as a liturgical minister, this time at the Cathedral, for the funeral of a friend. This was a thudding, sad, emptiness-leaving, too-soon “The End” for a woman loved by just about everyone who ever knew her, leaving a story of unfulfilled potential without a denouement. I am certain my own sorrow over this still bleeds along the courses of the cracks in the concrete floor of St. Mark’s.
Endings are like that. Rare is the movie that ends as well as it begins; common the novelist who will tell you that the book on which he tapped out “The End” was not the book he intended to write, and there is always a part of us that wishes Romeo and Juliet could live for eternity happily ever after.
But life in the Church is about funerals, not just baptisms, and it’s about everything in between. It is as much about “death do us part” as it is the delectable seduction that leads to “I do.” While I may find that endings make me ache with hollowness, the fact is, we as Episcopalians celebrate every minute of the human experience. We ceremonialize all the landmarks as we recapitulate the terrifying steps to the Cross, and by this celebration, this reliving of the ages of humankind, we honor those landmarks, and we warrior-like look our endings in the eye.
My bedraggled cast and crew, beset by weather, desertion, and delay, eventually brought Noah to his rainbow ending—it would seem our Episcopalian God is not content to have us simply ride the flood; He insists we row and hoist a tattered sail. But as Carlos Castaneda has Don Juan Matus point out: “The warrior laughs and laughs.”
Robin Allan Jones wrote and directed the Umbrella Theatre Company’s Noah Way Out
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