It's in the hands of their god

I find myself mildly interested in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's 2009 Churchwide Assembly being held in Minneapolis this week. They're grappling with the question of gay clergy and celibacy. A double-standard is currently in effect, whereby clergy in monogamous same-sex relationships must be celibate. It seems likely that the ELCA will vote to equalize the standards for both gay and straight clergy. Also up for discussion is the acceptance and recognition of long-term monogamous gay couples.

I'm slightly interested in this because I grew up as a Lutheran and attended for many years a little church on the shores of Lake Superior. It was actually a huge part of my life during my teens. While I hated the seemingly forced attendance of confirmation classes, I found a calling, so to speak, within the church choir, where through voice I found access to untapped stores of emotion and extrapersonal experience which, at the time, I attributed to the presence of divinity.

The ELCA is fairly laid-back, even for Lutherans. We had a female pastor growing up, practiced open communion, and felt comfortable with the doctrine of Justification. While I didn't understand very much about theology even into my early teen years, I basically went to church with a warm feeling that while there was a hell, no one was in it; basically, as long as you tried, you'd go to heaven. And even if you didn't try very hard, Jesus would reveal a Truth to you, and that was inescapable. To be taught all this by a big round lady pastor was pretty sweet.

But this entire edifice, built on faith and mystery and ritual, crumbled in the span of one Sunday morning. I was 17 years old. And I was in love. With a boy. He was younger than me, and neither of us were out, and our relationship was constrained by these limitations, and I burned for him, I ached constantly in the weeks between our brief visits. It was torture to be away from him and ecstasy to be with him. It was love, and it had more colors and more chords than any of the psalms I belted out from the loft above the congregation on Sundays.

Back then, the ELCA had another meeting about what to do with gay Lutherans, and it had a different outcome back then (this was the mid-90s). I remember our congregation sent a representative to the meeting, and he returned that Sunday to stand at the pulpit and report back on what happened. "Our church is safe from them," he said.

At that moment I became of aware of my identity, embossed on me in the negative. "Our church is safe from them." Them. That is me. I am them. The church is safe from me.

I was sitting in the loft and looking out over my church and it suddenly dawned on me that I was sitting in a contradictory position.

I knew my love; I knew it was real. And I knew that it was good. That was what won out that day.

Everything dissolved that morning, the tapestries fluttered to the ground, the flame went out, the wine turned sour. That morning I left the church and it was just a building. It was just wood and stone, with no more authority to command than the lake it sat beside.

I've never been back.

So it's with mild interest I'm following the story in Minneapolis this week. Almost fifteen years ago, had they reached the decision they seem to be close to reaching this week, I wonder if things would turned out differently for me.

...I'm suddenly remembering something else, a minor blip during a momentous first year away from home at college. I won a scholarship. A gay scholarship. From a gay Lutheran organization. I remember the ceremony, claiming, only half-heartedly, that I was still a Lutheran but knowing deep down in my heart that it wasn't true. The man who presented the award was in his late fifties, white hair, utterly kind, shook my hand, seemed proud and happy that I was gay, seemed to be one person, at least, who was celebrating the contradiction, smiling at it as though it wasn't really there. Funny I would just happen to remember that.