We want to help, too.

There was a terrible tragedy this week in the community that is Amy's faith home. Many people are stunned, and raw, and hurting. The nature of the tragedy has derailed some of the normal comfort measures available to people in response to their grief, but not all of them. The meeting house has been open daily for people to gather and sit in silence or speak as they feel the need to. A calendar has been established to organize food deliveries for the family that was most directly harmed. There have been conversations about how and when to help the children in the community understand and grieve what happened. Church is doing one of the main jobs of church: keeping people going when the world has turned upside down and fallen on their heads.

Amy spent hours on Friday cooking and baking. She and Dave and I helped set up at an event this morning that had already been scheduled and was definitely not going to pick up any last-minute volunteers. Our family sent a sympathy card to the storm-tossed family. Small but important things that will hopefully be helpful, seem to be appreciated, and that also help us during a difficult time by giving us something to focus on.

I've written before about the cost of excluding poly families when they suffer loss, but the reality is that those concerns are not usually at the forefront in my own life. What worries me more is people being blocked from helping. I think non-traditional people get an unfair rap for being self-centered. For making everything about them. What most traditional people hear is "oppression justice look at me blah blah blah." But we can't take soup to grieving people who fear they will be polluted by our presence. We can't help set up Christmas decorations in a sanctuary that sees us as a rejection of the Christmas message. We certainly can't teach in Sunday School when we are, by definition, transgressive deviants. We can't take the focus off ourselves when everyone keeps staring at us.

I am grateful beyond words that Amy's faith community accepts our entire family, so that we can care for our neighbors and brothers and sisters. I am grateful beyond words that my own church home accepts our entire family, so that I can serve on the Board of Directors and help run the sound board and give advice of dubious quality about volunteer coordination and ministry outreach, and have them hold everyone in prayer during this terrible time. To grieve in isolation is a terrible thing, as celebrating in isolation is a sad thing. And that is what all ministry boils down to. Offering comforts small and large. Throwing parties small and large. Keeping the world going, one day at a time.

Just don't call us transgressive.

A while back, I found a few articles where the authors analyze polyamory in the context of Christian theology. I will most likely read more if I find them, but so far, they're depressing me.

I should probably clarify that these articles are supportive of polyamory. But the arguments boil down to a rejection of the concept of boundaries and limits. Sometimes the argument is an affirmative one: God loves us without limit, so the fewer limits we place on our love, the more like God we are. Sometimes the argument is a negative one: The way you know you're liberated as God intends is if someone tells you that you're going too far.

The affirmative argument erases the reality of difference. People aren't God, and that's a good thing. People also aren't like each other, and that's also a good thing. I've noticed this argument seems more popular among Catholic writers. If I had the patience, I would read more deeply in the literature (such as it is) and see if my hunch is correct that it's due to Catholic ontology that sees priest, husband, wife, man and woman as existential categories more than linguistic labels. I don't think I have the patience. "Polyamorous is nearer to godly" is exactly as aggravating as "celibate is nearer to godly," and if taken seriously, it probably has the potential to do a lot more damage in people's lives.

The negative argument makes an idol out of transgression and seems more popular among Protestant writers. I don't think I have to read more deeply to know that "the system is corrupt and keeps us from what is good for its own benefit" can be traced straight back to Martin Luther, or that pride in transgression has more than mere echoes of the sectarian idea-slash-comfort-blanket that the world hates (only) those who love the truth. Along with turning morality and spirituality into hipster endeavors, this focus on transgression has several tangible costs.

First is the simple cost of human health and well-being. It isn't that every transgressive act is inherently harmful, or that incidental harm may not be outweighed by the benefits for some individuals. But in a culture of transgression, harm is inevitable and, in the extreme, glorified. Donna Minkowitz captures an example of this perfectly in her memoir/essay Ferocious Romance:

Then novelist Bruce Benderson gets up...to read a marvelously lyrical passage from his forthcoming novel about the changes in Times Square...He is a wondeful prosodist, but what he celebrates make me nauseous. The teenagers he loves to see renting themselves out to adults are starving, and homeless. Most of them are on the run from sexual abuse at home...The romanticism of danger and ugliness in his piece is as great as any romanticism the religious right could make of marriage. (43-44)

If the suffering of others is necessary for you to feel liberated, you aren't the oppressed. You're one of the oppressors.

The second cost is the reinforcement of privilege. In a society where oppression takes the form of bullets and tear gas, death threats and harassment, lost economic opportunities and other impairments of basic life functions, it takes a serious amount of entitlement to lift any given sexual act or personal affectation up to that level. (Is it a coincidence that writers on transgression seem most commonly white, educated and middle-class-or-above? I don't think so.) It is certainly true that LGBT*, GRSM** and MOGAI*** folks--pick an acronym, any acronym!--can and do face immediately threatening oppression on a regular basis. But it happens when they're holding hands or interviewing for a job or wearing modest-but-"wrong" clothing or just sitting around doing nothing in particular, too. The kinds of behaviors sometimes dismissed as "assimilationist" by radicals aren't actually protective against bigoted people who want to disassociate themselves from, or punish, anyone who isn't straight and cis-gendered and monogamous.

The third cost is theological impoverishment. Jesus declared that the kingdom of God is among us. Liberal theology generally emphasizes the image of God present in all human beings, just waiting to be restored to wholeness. There is very little in the world that actually needs to be smashed for liberation to occur. It is true that systems and customs are capable of discouraging us from being in right relationship with each other, but they aren't capable of stopping us. And many people use established systems and customs fruitfully to  grow in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

So, no, my family is not transgressive. We are not part of any effort to dismantle monogamy or rise above social programming or maximize sexual expression. If other people feel called to those things and refrain from being jerks while doing so, then God bless. We'll be over here living our happily conventional life, polyamorous though we may be.

*LGBT: Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.

**GRSM: Gender, relationship and sexual minorities.

***MOGAI: Marginal orientations, gender alignments and intersex.

What trustworthy authority looks like.

Having a themed blog is a weird thing.

It probably looks like the only thing I care about is how polyamorous families are treated by American Protestant churches, since this blog is my current public face. (Except that most readers are coming from my Facebook feed according to the traffic stats, so, hi, guys!).  At the same time, I feel a certain amount of internal pressure to stay "on topic," and since I have a self-imposed posting cycle of a-week-give-or-take, I feel some guilt when my attention is consumed by something that seems incompatible with writing a post consistent with the blog's theme.

It's getting close to two weeks now that the police shooting and response to community uproar in Ferguson, MO has been that something consuming my attention. It is the defiantly corrupted authority on display that pushes me from grief to outrage. As one Los Angeles police officer conveniently says out loud for all of us to hear: "I'm a cop. If you don't want to get hurt, don't challenge me." Set aside for the moment that this advice works about as well as the advice for women to dress modestly if they want to avoid harassment by men (i.e., it doesn't). Set aside, too, that the white men speaking loudest for unconditional deference to the police overlap significantly with the white men who talk about "Second Amendment solutions" (i.e., their rhetoric jumps straight to resistance in the face of government action they perceive as intrusive). Focus on the narrow question of whether anyone claiming this kind of authority can be trusted with it. The answer: No. They can't.

For almost the entirety of my adult working life, I've held positions where I've been entrusted with authority. (I have written about the experience from time to time.) I've had the opportunity to watch colleagues and peers navigate their own relationships with personal authority. My five years in municipal government were especially illuminating in this respect. Here is what I've learned about trustworthy authority.

It is transparent. Whenever possible, the process and rationale for decisions is shared freely. When not possible, the reasons given for non-disclosure are clear and consistent. Almost always, the only acceptable reasons are "it would be illegal" or "it would go against generally accepted professional ethics" or "we're not sure ourselves." And you cite your sources.

It takes responsibility. When you have authority and bad things happen on your watch, it may not always be your fault, but it's always your responsibility. It is literally your job to make things right to the best of your ability. If there is never any progress, and the same bad things seem to keep happening over and over? It's your fault.

Its goal is stewardship, not dominion. Every exercise of authority must be directly justifiable by the benefit it brings to the people subject to it. Sometimes it takes time for that benefit to establish itself and bear fruit. But if it never comes? You're not authoritative. You're authoritarian.

It accepts condemnation. I won't lie. It sucks to be heckled, mistrusted, misinterpreted, accused, even hated. But there will always be people who think you're doing it wrong, or who find it expedient to act like they do. You have to keep doing your job right anyway. And you know what? Sometimes your critics are right. If you don't let them speak freely, you'll never learn when they are.

Everything about the situation in Ferguson shows the local police failing each of these conditions, miserably. And unfortunately, Ferguson is just one of many, many jurisdictions where the police are betraying the communities they serve. (In my opinion, Portland, where I live, is one of those.)

Do American police always screw up? Hardly. But authority is not an area of life where it is acceptable to look at aggregate results and dismiss a minority of abuses as a statistical cost of doing business. These aren't errors by sports players or a till that doesn't balance out at the end of the day or a student who gets a C in one class. These are people's lives and livelihoods harmed or completely destroyed. No trustworthy authority is okay with that or tries to deflect attention from its responsibility.

I could tie this all back to church authority and polyamorous families. Oppression is, after all, rather dull in the predictability of how it plays out. But it would trivialize the impact that police brutality and lack of accountability has on people's lives, especially Black people. Sometimes the only respectful thing to do is to go off-topic.

Robin Williams, depression and me.

I've been uncharitably irritated with pretty much all the different responses to Robin Williams' death this week. I agree that it is very sad, that people should be more educated about and understanding of mental illness, that everyone should appreciate the love and respect they have from people near to them, and that having suicide hotline information at one's fingertips is a sensible and sometimes life-saving precaution.

And yet. I'm irritated.

I first showed symptoms of clinical depression in high school. They intensified in my young adulthood; I was hospitalized for observation for about a day when I was 19, and for about a week when I was 23. When I was 29, I took a month-long leave of absence from work to deal with a particularly nasty depressive episode. And throughout the first half of my 30's, I became pretty convinced that I wasn't going to live into old age. I have a stubborn and more-or-less all-encompassing sense of personal responsibility, so I figured I would most likely see my son (my one child at the time) into adulthood, arrange my affairs so the people depending on me would be taken care of, and then help establish and enter the equivalent of hospice care for the suicidally depressed.

Which brings me to irritation #1: suicide hotline information. The thing about suicide hotlines is, they work. I can speak from personal experience. But after enough depressive episodes, I learned that survival doesn't actually solve anything. The suffering is still waiting to return. Even today, at 41, when I can easily be described as "happy" by any objective standard--plus my own personal subjective one--it is a very rare day that I don't have at least a few minutes of existentially threatening despair. If anyone ever doubts the nature of mental illness as an actual disease, sit down with me for an hour or so, and I'll tell you all about the effect that varying my meds dosage or departing too much from my daily routine has on me. I am whole, but I'm never going to be healthy, barring some unexpected scientific breakthrough.

Which brings me to irritation #2: "Think of how many people love you and would be devastated to lose you!" I can't speak for every depressed person's experience of depression, only my own. And my experience is that a depressive episode is physical and mental torment. I can only compare it to the experience of bitterly fighting with someone you love dearly, wanting to stop and make up but neither of you able to, but the person you are fighting with is yourself. You can't go to a movie or hang out with friends or take a hike in the woods in order to recover and restore some perspective. There is no escape. And that is tiring. With other diseases, there is some acceptance of the idea that sometimes, enough is enough. The person with cancer decides not to undergo another round of chemotherapy. The person with heart disease decides not to go back for open-heart surgery again. Do they believe themselves to be unloved? Will their loved ones not grieve their loss? No. They're just ready to stop suffering. The analogy is all kinds of incomplete--treatments for depression aren't generally invasive with debilitating side effects, and I have no idea what "informed consent" could actually look like for someone in the grips of a depressive episode--but the principle remains that medical choices belong to the person who's actually sick.

Which brings me to irritation #3: the idea that Williams' death is an ideal opportunity for conversation and education. People have been killing themselves forever. Famous people have been killing themselves forever. The conversational opportunities are always there, and the imperative to be informed has always been there. It feels indecent to me to appropriate a man's death and turn it into enlightenment theater, where some of us talk and some of us listen and In The End, We've All Learned Something.

Which brings me to irritation #4: the shock and surprise at Williams' death. It's unclear whether he was ever diagnosed with a condition that carried a significant risk of suicide along with it, but anyone who ever watched an interview with him knew the man had struggled at many points over the years. In any case, according to the CDC, there are tens of thousands of suicides in the United States every year--and dozens of suicide attempts for every one that ends in death. (Apologies for my unrigorous reliance on a single report from 2012, but I doubt the statistics vary enough year by year to make my vague description of them wrong.) It's not common, but it's not exactly rare, either. Depression is a disease that sometimes leads to people trying to kill themselves, and some of those efforts are fatal. It's heartbreaking, but altogether believable.

Maybe my irritation is just part of my own sadness. I don't know. I do know that church--not simply Christian faith, but the ritual and practice and community of church--is what sustained me and gave me both the motivation and the strength to find the place of wholeness I'm in today. There is a non-trivial chance I would have died without it, and it is not optional for keeping me grounded now. So if one wishes to tie this post in to the blog's topic of polyamorous families in the church, there's the connection. You never know what the cost of excluding someone may turn out to be.

What really matters.

Alanna Gallagher was six years old when she died, murdered by one of her neighbors.

Her funeral was held in the church her family had attended for years, where she ordinarily "would be singing on top of her lungs with her hymnal upside down...because before she could read she had the hymn memorized." Her mother, stepfather and biological father shared happy memories and said goodbye to their baby girl.

And, totally beside the point, her grieving parents are a polyamorous family.

I remember when it happened. There was a lot of fear that her home life would be sensationalized, that cruel busybodies would make her family's burden even heavier, that some might even blame her death on her parents' "lifestyle." And, sure, you never want to read the comments on an online news article. But for the most part, what her family got was support. Support from the police, support from their community, and support from strangers on the Internet.

Because when a little girl dies, it doesn't matter who is having sex with whom. It doesn't matter who sleeps where. It doesn't matter whose model of Biblical marriage is more persuasive. It doesn't matter how sturdy Western Civilization is, or isn't.

What matters is that the moral fabric of the universe is torn and stained. Even when death comes for a child from natural causes, it's wrong. And for that child's family, it is world-shattering.

For Christians, church is where we generally go when our world has been shattered. We know the people there, who love us. We know the stories we will hear, which sustain us. We light candles and sing songs and keep breathing, one minute at a time.

Calvary Lutheran Church was the church for Alanna and her parents. They were out to their friends, their brothers and sisters. Because they had done hymns and potlucks and Sunday School together, they could do death together too. Because that's how it works. Nobody wants to come out at a funeral. Nobody should have to. God forbid that anyone has to be in the closet at their own child's funeral. Can you imagine?

I can. I can imagine having to choose between sticking together as a family and collapsing into the arms of my faith community. I couldn't choose. I would simply break, and never be whole.

I was so grateful for the pastor, staff and members of Calvary Lutheran Church. I thought about writing them at the time. But I didn't, because this tragedy wasn't about me. It was their little hymn-belter torn away from them, their sister and brothers crushed. They deserved their privacy.

But now, all you mainline churches worried about your image, your respectability, your own fear and revulsion--whatever it is that keeps you from welcoming and embracing polyamorous families--think for a moment about Alanna's parents left alone in the worst days of their lives. Think about Alanna herself, living her short life without hymns and Sunday School and the love of her community. How can you think about such things, remain unwelcoming, and still call yourself the Body of Christ?

I'll leave the last word to Calvary Lutheran's pastor, Phil Heinze:

I’m not saying “come and see” all the things at Calvary, like worship that is well done, consistent Gospel preaching, emphasis on education, multiple opportunities to be together, the café, Bible studies, social ministry that makes a difference and changes our world one person at a time, dynamic youth and children ministry, etc. etc.. No, what I am saying is “come and see” the people of Calvary, people committed to following Christ, willing to take risks, open to others, people who listen and learn and love.

Thank you, Rev. Heinze. And thank you, Calvary Lutheran.


---------------------

I don't have comments enabled on this blog, but I welcome feedback via this convenient Google form.

Showing your work.

One of the flurry of books published around the time that Gene Robinson was elected bishop in the Episcopal Church was a collection of Methodist essays called Staying the Course. I don't remember that much about it--it was a pretty standard re-hashing of already worn arguments--but one small piece has stuck with me to this day. One author plaintively insisted that reformers who wished to appeal to knowledge found outside of the Bible needed to specify what sources were going to be newly authoritative: the Journal of the American Medical Association? Something else?

At the time, I thought it was just a sad example of missing the point entirely, an attempt to cling to the idea that all the right answers are written down somewhere. Theology was maybe negotiable. Epistemology wasn't. Recently I've been wondering, though, if there isn't actually an important point buried among the mess.

Liberal American Protestants, for the most part, aren't going to point at the Bible and tell you to stop doing something because the Bible says not to. They may tell you that the Bible says to do something, like love your neighbor, and therefore you shouldn't do something else, like use them solely for your own sexual gratification. They may appeal to holiness, but rarely to purity.

So that means there needs to be evidence of harm connected to a prohibited activity in order for the prohibition to be credible. And evidence, as Wikipedia has made a matter of popular cultural knowledge, must have its sources cited. Opponents of egalitarian polyamorous families have not, to my knowledge, bothered to do so.

(It's called a lit review! Your local public library can help you find one, or even to make your own! Of course, then you might encounter the work of sociologist Elizabeth Sheff, who hasn't found evidence that outcomes for kids in poly families are worse than in monogamous ones.)

Which leaves me with an appreciation for that conservative Methodist's frustration. This post has actually taken me twice as long as it usually does,  because I have had to keep walking away from it when my blood pressure gets too high. Engaging conservative arguments is fairly straightforward. There are rules about what counts and what doesn't, and conservatives have to stick to those rules or else admit that that the entire foundation of their worldview and ethical systems is as full of sinkholes as Florida. Not that such admissions are a common occurrence, but there's a certain peace of mind that comes from watching someone reduced to saying "Nuh-UH" or "la la la I can't hear you."

Liberals, though. Liberals! So used to being reasoned and reasonable. So complacent and self-satisfied. They base their opinions on critical thinking and empirical evidence, thus, if they have an opinion about something, it is only natural that the lines of thought and empirical evidence must be out there somewhere. Why go through the bother of actually confirming them? So redundant.

I exaggerate. A bit. Maybe. But for religious communities that don't look to tradition, written revelation or a designated authority to provide definitive answers to uncomfortable questions, it is not only irritating but a failure of religious obligation when the conversations that could lead to answers are anything less than deliberate and comprehensive.

But it's such a *pretty* map.

In my opinion, there is no American theologian writing today who is more important than Fred Clark, better known to many as the Slacktivist. He has a gift for finding and explaining the simple truths at the heart of questions that people more commonly politely pretend are complicated.

Clark's formation in the heart of evangelical America means he natively understands its culture, psychology and theology. His insistence that he has every right to stand as proudly as ever as an evangelical Baptist, no matter what the gatekeepers say or do, is a welcome counterpoint to the many de-conversion narratives out there, among Christians and former Christians alike. One happy consequence of this stand is that his readers--well, me, at least, but I don't think I'm alone--never get the sense that he is letting himself off the hook when he critiques that faith community.

There is one post by Clark, "Let Us Reason Together," that I return to over and over again, not only in the context of theology, but in every aspect of life where we are required to assemble facts together in an interpretive framework. Politics, science, family dynamics, self-examination, cooking, putting together Ikea furniture, anything. The experience he turns into a metaphor is the difference between a map--an authoritative source--and direct observation:

So there I was, at the end of what was, undeniably, a dead end street, consulting a map that claimed otherwise. It was something of a Groucho moment: "Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?" I sided with my own two eyes, thus accepting the principle that reason and experience were essential considerations for evaluating the meaning and application of the text.

(Clark links this epiphany to the basic idea of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. I think it's also helpful to link "text" here to the broader understanding, as in semiotics, that text "can exist in any medium and may be verbal, non-verbal, or both." It can even be unconscious, so long as a message is sent and received. But now I'm really digressing.)

I usually say I became a Christian around late 1999, early 2000. It was a fairly classic born-again experience. My heart was strangely warmed, and for once I embraced it, after many years of giving faith in general a serious case of side-eye. Being me, my first reaction was to read all the things. What did other Christians have to say about this being-a-Christian thing?

I soon discovered two main competing "grand narratives" that spoke to my heart. One was the contemporary American evangelical narrative of the fervent individual believer, armed with Scripture and prayer, trusting that God will use these tools to give clear answers to all questions that arise in daily life. The other was the historical Catholic narrative of the Church and its magisterium, stewarding the sacraments and the deposit of faith, offering a safe harbor for all who seek God.

Inconveniently, they were (and are) both wrong. Empirically so, through my own direct observation. The Catholic vision of the Christian life relies crucially on an understanding of natural law that has little relationship to the diversity of behavior found among animals, including humans, in actual nature. (There's a reason that Pius X declared modernism to be full of heresy.) The evangelical vision of the Christian life relies crucially on a willful ignorance of the development of the historical faith and practice of Christians over thousands of years.

It's remarkable, really, how many arguments--not just theological ones, and not just from conservatives--boil down to either "because human nature" or "because we've always done it this way." And how often the ample evidence to the contrary is ignored, rationalized away or flat-out denied.


---------------------

I don't have comments enabled on this blog, but I welcome feedback via this convenient Google form.