Notes Toward A Queer Gospel

I think it’s time to write down what I’m up to in these spiritual posts, particularly the theological ones—and why I think and hope they may be of some use, especially to queer people who remain attached to Catholic-Christian ways of living and feeling. 

First of all, we queer people aren’t sheep; we’re goats. We don’t belong in the sheepfold. But that doesn’t mean that God rejects us. In fact, he speaks to and through us all the time. He calls us. Unlike some of the institutions that claim to speak in his name, he accepts us, and loves us. And the fact that we are marginalized in the institution is actually our gift—just as Jesus was marginal in the official religion of his day. 

The outsider offers a special gift to the church, in every age. And in every age, the church has difficulty with that, hates that fact, rejects and tries to eliminate that very source of uncomfortable truth, exactly as the righteous ones of Jesus’ day rejected him.

So we matter, not only as people, but also as a continual, and holy, religious phenomenon: the mission of the perpetual outsider, bearing a truth that officials don’t want to hear.

That’s the necessary starting point.

**

And then there’s a key word: respect. 

We (I’m shifting to the first person plural here, because I’m not alone in this regard)—we seek respect from the Institution—and that’s what we offer. We listen to it, although we may disagree; and we ask it, in its turn, to listen to the voice of our experience. Our experience of prayer; our experience of both love and loss—and loss, properly lived, is another mode of love. Our experience of living our sexuality as an identity, not a disorder. 

We offer our experience of the light and grace that we receive from a Spirit that is far, far greater than our own particular understandings—and certainly greater than the limited understandings of the institution and its most belligerent stakeholders.

We’re sinners, like all human creatures. And we’re also brothers and sisters of Christ, who is both the son of God and son of Mary. 

**

Hence what I call the queer gospel—and I think that the gospel of Jesus is deeply queer. 

What does that mean?

The phrase isn’t all that radical, and it certainly isn’t scary. 

It means that the gospel is beyond convention and that it is not heterosexual—or, to use current language, “cis-gendered”. It’s open to all sexual identities just as it has been open to all nations and languages from the start (Pentecost). 

And it’s open to all faith traditions: you don’t have to be a baptised Christian to live a holy life in Christ. Neither do you have to be a believer: you can be agnostic. It doesn’t matter. What matters is a god-centred way of life that is rooted in prayer, open to life experience and expressed by love.

Listen up, Evangelical so-called Christians! 

**

So then, the key question: how is one to live?

Fundamental to the long tradition of Judeo-Christian spirituality—and therefore to any life rooted in prayer—is the confidence that everything that comes my way is either willed or permitted by a loving God. 

That constitutes a radical approach to life. 

It means, first of all, that what appear to me as trials and hardships and sufferings are not “sent” to punish, or test, or try me. They’re “permitted”, as opposed to “sent”. 

As life events they simply are. They are part of the dance of time, and they’re shaped by the existential DNA of existence—which is the language of God, and which binds together both life and death, inseparably. So the Creator is responsible for the design; but that doesn’t mean that somewhere up in the clouds a father figure with a white beard is saying to himself, “I think Jeremiah needs some humility, so I’ll send him some really hard shit today.” 

The events themselves are neutral. There’s a flood and my house is inundated: a disaster for me and my neighbors, and maybe there’s loss of life—but it’s not personal. It’s cause and effect. Human activity may amplify the cause and magnify the effect, but it’s not an event sent to warn or punish or correct. 

However, I can choose the way I respond to the event. I can choose to reach out and help the afflicted. In Catholic teaching, I can choose to embrace my own suffering and offer it for others. 

I can choose, therefore, to transform a morally neutral event, which is calamitous, into a means of grace, into something holy—into an occasion for providence. And that’s where the life of the living God comes in. That’s one way—there are others—in which the neutral event that is part of the DNA of existence is turned into the mercy of God.

Because, for the believer, the loving God who set the system up and didn’t just walk away—like the god of an eighteenth century deist, who wound up the existential clock and never interfered again. Rather, he (or she or it) animates creation with his mystical breath, keeping it all alive. And that same loving God is also continually inspiring human beings to act in ways that personalize and transform the impersonal event that simply happens (the afore-mentioned flood) into love—another word for providence. 

In the same way, for those of us who believe in the efficacy of prayer, a living Creator, working within the patterns and structures of this living creation, may intervene in response to someone’s prayer; may shift necessity, alter probability, influence another actor, change the timing and sequence of events in some large or tiny way—so that the tornado takes a slightly different path, or the comet fails to hit the earth. Such events and non-events appear to us as flukes or accidents or we may not notice them at all—but they’re interventions, the effects of love. 

(That begs a question, of course. If God could have altered the path of the tornado—why did he fail to do so? It’s a good question, and one of the possible answers is the one I just gave: because no one asked him to do so. Prayer is a responsibility that we don’t take seriously enough.)

**

In the Genesis story, the creator gave the first humans the task of tending the garden—a responsibility that becomes more and more urgent in our era, as climate change reveals the disastrous results of our own failed stewardship. 

The traditional view of “stewardship” means caring for nature, farming and cultivating it, respecting the earth and its bounty, along with all other living creatures—rather than plundering it and destroying them. However, that traditional understanding of stewardship carries the implication that nature is there for us to use; that we’re in charge; that we are the masters. The current crisis of climate change has revealed the shortcomings of that human-centred, and ultimately selfish, approach.

True stewardship means service, not mastery. And what I’m talking about here goes a step further into the moment-by-moment life of faith, where everything that I personally experience is either willed or permitted by a loving God. If willed: thank you; I give you glory; I learn; I bow before you. If permitted—the same thing, but in this case, by my own private act of love, in accepting the event, however painful, I can transform what is merely neutral into providence. I can collaborate with God in making all things new. 

That’s the life of grace, and I think it’s our task, as conscious beings.