and meaning.
At the age of twenty-five, I found my way to Boston, where I lived The Question of faith and started getting some answers. Along the way, I decided it was safe to be baptized—I was finally convinced I wouldn’t be sent to the gas chamber, and I wanted to belong. Moreover, I wanted to be an ordained minister. After years of struggle, I felt pushed in the direction of seminary, and every door seemed to open without a key.
My first semester at Union Theological Seminary in New York City was a wrestling match with God. Exhausted from taking on someone bigger and stronger than me, I found myself walking down Forty-second Street one day in January asking God to let me go. And then it happened. Suddenly, a voice called out to me from within me saying, “I’m not going to let go of you.” “What do you want with me?” I asked. “I want your life,” the voice answered. “Why me?” I responded. “Why not?” the voice replied. At this point, I realized that something was happening and I needed to stop and pay attention to this voice. I went into a nearby McDonald’s restaurant, ordered my usual cheeseburger, fries, and coke and began frantically scribbling down a conversation with this voice from within. The voice called me by name, identified itself as God, confronted me with my own issues and private wounds, contradicted my theology, answered lots of questions, called me to the ordained priesthood, and reassured me when I protested. The voice said, “I brought you to New York for a reason, to look beyond yourself and those like you. . . . I want you to celebrate my Eucharist. . . . You must feed my people. . . . You will guide people to come to me through this and other acts. . . . You will help people to love each other and me. . . . You’ve changed; why can’t others. . . . It’s a loving revolution, so be my hands and my mouth, not your own.”
In the course of the conversation, I questioned why the voice was talking with me, and it responded, “Because you’ve been asking for it.” It was true. I had been asking, begging, even challenging God to be clear with me, to help me answer The Question. And here I was—on a cold January afternoon, sitting in a McDonald’s restaurant on Forty-second Street in Manhattan, having this private conversation with a voice. At the end of our time together, I asked, “If you’re inside of me, then how can you be God?” The voice replied in words I’ll never forget, “What’s so special about me is that I’m inside of anyone and everyone who wants to know me. And, if the world would hear me and follow me, my kingdom would come.” With that comment, the conversation ended. I got up and walked home in quiet amazement, wondering if I had really spoken with almighty God. Like Mary, I kept silent and treasured these words, pondering them in my heart.
A few days later, one of my professors, Dorothee Soelle, told our class that faith is a two-way street: it is both a gift from God and our decision to accept the gift. I didn’t know if I had talked with God, but in a letter to a friend I wrote, “If I don’t accept the voice of God on faith now, I don’t think I’ll ever get a more direct message.” The Question was finally beginning to be actively addressed.
From the moment I left the McDonald’s, I was determined to follow the voice wherever it would lead me. It led me to a summer internship at Trinity Church on Wall Street. It took me to Bronx Youth Ministry and St. Margaret’s Church in the South Bronx where I was sponsored for ordination. Following graduation from seminary, it invited me home to the suburbs to begin my ordained ministry at Christ Church in Ridgewood, New Jersey. It then called me to become Rector of St. Paul’s Church in Paterson, New Jersey.
For over a decade, I had the privilege of serving a community of “all sorts and conditions” of people who gather for worship, service, and witness in a glorious historic landmark church located in a poor neighborhood in one of our nation’s old industrial cities. During my twelve-year tenure, the congregation became incredibly diverse. We were black, white, Hispanic, and Asian. We were native born and newcomers from many lands. We were young, old, and in-between. We were gay and straight, married and single, bisexual, and even transgendered. Some of us dressed up for church; others came in blue jeans. Some members of our church had beautiful homes in lovely neighborhoods; others lived on the streets. A number in our company had large investment portfolios; but most of us got by from paycheck to paycheck or welfare check to welfare check. Many of us took freedom and citizenship for granted; but some knew all too well its precious price. There were those among us who worked in the judicial system; and there were others who had done time in the system. We had students and their teachers, employers and their employees, doctors and their patients all sitting in the same pews. St. Paul’s became a living testament that “the things which divide us from each other may be overcome in the oneness of God.”5
At St. Paul’s Church, God frequently interrupted me with glimpses of the holy from the edge. Over the course of my time as pastor of that old church, I met the Risen Christ over and over again. S/he wandered in and out of our sanctuary, shelter, food pantry, and even my office day and night, sometimes in disguises that I found disturbing and threatening, and on other occasions, humorous and inviting. The work was hard but rewarding; the pain of the community was great, but so was its joy.
People ask me why I stayed at St. Paul’s so long. My answer is simple. I hadn’t been called to leave, and how could I leave when Christ was lurking in the shadows bidding me to remain? As the larger church and society became more polarized over issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, and creed, St. Paul’s Church remained a community of faith where we had the opportunity to make a difference, to demonstrate that we could live together in all of our diversity because God had bid each of us welcome and called us to build a better world.
When I was ordained, my bishop and hero Paul Moore said to our deaconate class: “All you have to do is love them, really love them. That’s all you have to do.” It was the best and most challenging advice I ever received. Love in the public context of the church is never easy, especially if you’re gay or lesbian. How does one obey Jesus’ command to love those who hate you, especially when those who hate you say, “We love you and that’s why we want to save you from your sin.”
I learned the lesson of “love the sinner but hate the sin” the hard way in the fall of 1995 when once again I was confronted with The Question of claiming myself or passing. I am a lesbian who is not called to a vocation of celibacy but has been called to the vocation of ordained ministry. Remarkable as it might seem, somehow, some way, my sexuality about which I’ve been relatively open (everything is relative) since I was in my early twenties, did not get in the way of my ordination process or parochial ministry. I always handled it with discretion, but I was always truthful and honest about it, answering questions when asked and volunteering information when it seemed appropriate. I guess I was lucky, or perhaps God simply had another idea in mind.
My friend and fellow Union alumnus Barry Stopfel wasn’t so fortunate. His ordination became a subject of debate within the Episcopal Church, and his ordaining bishop Walter Righter became the subject of the second heresy trial in our denomination. I knew that this trial was not just about Barry or Walter. Rather, it was about all of us who were gay and lesbian, and all those who stand in solidarity with us. In the words of singer-songwriter Holly Near, “It could have been me, but instead it was you.”6
For many years, I had said that if on a given Sunday, everyone who was gay or lesbian could turn purple in church, the issue would be over. When the threat of a heresy trial became a reality, I realized this vision of purple was not going to be the case. God was not going to do our labor of liberation for us. No, God was calling us to do our own work. In my humble opinion, it was time for all of us gay and lesbian clergy who were in positions of power and relative security in the church to come and make public witness about being gay, being Christian, and being called by God to be full participants in the church.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ commands us to pick up our crosses and carry them. The cross of being denied full inclusion and open participation in church and society because one is gay or lesbian
