Well, I hope so. Flying, for me, is not easy and not cheap. When Joan comes with me, it's even more not-easy and not-cheap. But we did it, and at least the flying part was surprisingly smooth. Going through an airport with a wheelchair assistant is MUCH easier than going through an airport in real time. I'd have paid a lot for that service but I didn't have to, it was free. (Minus tips.) In case I haven't said anything on here about how much I love Southwest Airlines, I love Southwest Airlines. If I had to fly any other airline I don't think I'd ever leave the state.
And the festivities were good, too. There were something like 40 people there, including my dad's 2 surviving brothers. (Uncle Jonny died some years ago but I'm sure he was there in spirit.)
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| My dad (left) and his two remaining brothers. |
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the Methodist Church decided last week to firmly lock down their current ban on gay and lesbian pastors, as well as a ban on affirming same-sex marriages (which are legal in all 50 states). Which, as they're a religious body, is their business, I guess, but what a slap in the face to ten percent of their potential converts, to say nothing of those who are already hanging out in their buildings. I'd wager they already have gay pastors, many of whom may even be married to a member of the opposite sex. And I'm sure those pastors, and maybe others, may have blessed same-sex unions, whether in the church or outside. My pastor did, when Joan and I got married, before the Lutheran Church had codified its Official Position (and before it was legal, even in California, which should tell you how long ago this was). And so on this finest of fine days, I bring you the story of Why Jen No Longer Runs With a Lutheran Street Gang. And you should feel honored. I don't tell this story to just anybody, you know.
I grew up in the Lutheran Church. It was a weird way to grow up. I lived in Utah in the early 70s, when it was about 90% Mormon, and that made me an oppressed minority, of a sort. If we'd have stayed in Utah, I probably would have been fairly devout, except that I didn't believe in God. When I was a kid I made many attempts to force myself to believe in the Big Guy, and managed only to get myself confused, or wind up with a headache if I tried it long enough. And I eventually figured out that it is not possible to force yourself to believe a thing. "You can't pray a lie," as Mark Twain famously said.
I had, of course, several Bad Experiences With Religion. I could give you the details, but they're really not that important. So when I got to be a teenager, I quit going to church. This occasioned World War Three, which lasted from approximately the time I turned sixteen until I moved out of the house, by which time all participants were thoroughly tired of it anyway. (That's the way the next war will end, folks. He who gets tired and goes home first loses.) Then I grew the rest of the way up, graduated from college, moved to California, and lived a perfectly fine nontheistic life until I ran into this total stranger in a used bookstore and started what seemed like an innocuous conversation.
Considering it was a pivotal moment, it's amazing that I remember so little about it. It had something to do with a book, and whether or not I had read it, and a rather astute comment about literature in general that made me raise my eyebrows and pay attention to this guy. I asked him what he did for a living, thinking he must be a professor or something, and he told me he was a Lutheran pastor. I mean what are the odds. A person could almost believe a twist of fate along those lines was occasioned by a Supreme Being. Almost. But not if you were me.
Being a sport, however, I thought I'd check out this guy's church, First Lutheran Church in San Diego, California. As it turned out, they fed meals to the homeless, and they had an acupuncturist come in and treat people for free, and once in a while they were able to do the same with a doctor, and they had a charitable organization that was doing political stuff to address the problem of homelessness in San Diego, and oh yeah, they had this church over there, too, and if you wanted to come in on a Sunday you could hear some good music and maybe learn something.
So I started hanging around with this crowd. I mean, why not. I still didn't believe in God, but I think I faked it fairly well. I sang in the choir, joined in the occasional Bible study (and always managed to turn the conversation around to ancient UFOs), became one of those ladies with the clipboards who are in charge of this and that. (Warning: If you ever go visit a church, for ANY REASON, do NOT let anyone hand you a clipboard. Ever. Not even if they say, "Here, hold onto this for a second.") And while all this was going on, I met and married Joan, gay marriage became legal in San Francisco for ten minutes, Clinton became President, "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" was back in the charts some 20 years after it came out, the Y2K bug came and went, and it was an interesting time to be alive, okay? Oh, and the Westboro Babtist Church came and picketed us one day. Which was kind of cool. You're nobody until you've been picketed by the Westboro Babtist Church.
This brings us up to 2002, approximately, which was the year of the big Lutheran synod convention. One of the matters on the agenda was whether gay people could be pastors. Officially, there wasn't a position on that yet. There were stipulations that a pastor should be either married, or celibate, but the issue of gayness hadn't been discussed. The church was already more or less fine having gay members, the pastor officiated at Joan's and my wedding, certain congregations were calling themselves "Reconciled in Christ" and were actively welcoming gay people, and it really didn't seem like that big a deal to go a step farther and say, sure, gay people can be pastors.
Well, you can probably guess what happened. Roughly the same thing that happened at the Methodist convention, only different. It was a close vote, but that doesn't really matter a whole lot. And suddenly I was out in the cold; not because I didn't believe in God (again, I was faking it pretty well), but because I didn't have the right gonads to be married to Joan.
I mean, okay. It was about whether or not a person could be a pastor, and I didn't want to be a pastor, so what was the big deal? Well, for one thing, I had wanted to be a pastor at one time. (Probably because my first crush, at the tender age of eleven or so, was a pastor.) For another, the Church was taking a group of people, arbitrarily selected, and saying, "Nope. You're not good enough." And when a person looks at the history of the Church, you'll find that they did this very thing over and over again. I mean, examples abound, and most often they involve, "Can black people be accepted as _____ in the church? Can women? Can Nova Scotian emigres who hop backward on one foot under a full moon every January?" And the answer, while it might eventually become Yes, always started out as No.
By the way, by the Church I don't just mean the Lutheran Church. I mean the entire body of Christianity, from the few folks who survived the fall of the Roman Empire to the massive quantity of professed Christians we have today. And upon looking at this stuff, and the Great Universal No, I realized I just flat out couldn't stand under that banner anymore. Ever. At all. For any reason.
I always felt like I more or less got cheated out of Christianity. After all, the Lutheran Church reversed itself on the issue of gay pastors in 2009, and everything has evidently been chummy since. But I was gone by then.
There is a happy ending here. There are twists and turns through Paganism and Unitarian Universalism before I fetched up against a group of Viet Namese Buddhists who cared not one hang if you were gay, straight, black, pink, North, South, Nova Scotian or even ugly as long as you could meditate for twenty minutes at a time. Or, for that matter, if you believe in God; belief in a supreme being is not a big tenet of Buddhism. And I like being a Buddhist, but I sort of miss being a Lutheran. The way you might miss a certain color that's on every wall of your house, and then you move to a new house where the walls are a different color, and you suddenly realize that the first color is gone and you can't get it back. It was my church too, people.
Well, I guess the Methodists will carry on, or else split up into more than one church. I only know one Methodist pastor (Hi, Charles!) and practically no Methodist devotees, so I don't really know how things are shaking out. I expect many people will leave. I expect some people, thanking God (so to speak) that SOMEbody is standing up for "traditional values" (which are neither traditional, nor values), will come back, or join for the first time. But one thing is for sure; the question will keep coming up, because love wins. Maybe not every day and maybe not every time, but love does win.
It didn't win today, though. And that's just sad.
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