Monday, September 30, 2013

Guest Speaker

These are my prepared remark (which may be subject to revision) if I am ever invited to speak at my old college.

*****

Hey, how are you all doing today at the start of a new quarter?  Good?  Good.  Do they still take attendance to make sure you actually go to religious talks?  Well, that's good too.  It's wonderful to live in a system with such faith in the transformational nature of its fundamental ideas and practice, is it not?  I kid, I kid.  Well, I probably don't actually.  You should ask them why the daily practice of your religion is assumed to be so unappealing sometime.  Or better yet, ask yourself.  Either way, it seems like it would be better to ask yourself why it is necessary to corral an entire generation into actually practicing the religion that has theoretically been the center of your lives since you were children and is theoretically supposed to be the center once you are pushed out into the world without RAs and deans to check on your daily practice.  I mean, if you're going through the motions of a religious practice you don't find meaningful, would not both parties be served by that feedback?  You might be better off finding a practice that DOES mean something and your school might have to ask themselves why a religion defined as universally transformative doesn't seem to grab anyone anymore?  Or is this just me reading into something that isn't there?  Just me?  Okay.  What do I know anyway?  I'm just some guy.

*coughs*  But that's not what I came here to talk to you about.  Well, it is, in a way, but I didn't mean to start with such a cold slap to the face.  "You're doing you religion wrong!" I say.  "Well, thanks for being such a gracious guest," you might reply.  I should be gracious.  I want to be gracious.  But I admit I find it challenging.  Not very long ago I once sat where you sat, and I admit some elements of the school system frustrated me then too.  Well, when I say not that long ago, I mean 15 years, which isn't long ago for me, but is probably considerably longer for you when viewed from the slo-time field all youth are trapped in.  This is just an illusion of course, soon enough time will start slipping faster and faster until you want to grab the edges of your time bubble and beg it to slow down.  But you won't be able to grab hold to anything, just metaphorical air, and before you know it, you'll be 35, on the verge of the first of many happy mid-life crises and wondering how you got to be 40 pounds heavier and so far off track of the life you were expected to have.  And, if you're sitting in that pew and buried as deeply in the closet as I was at your age, you'll be emerging from said closet as well, blinking in the light of a new and confusing dawn, wondering how the hell you would do something as damaging and hurtful to yourself as pretending to be something you're not, for people who don't know what they're talking about for all these years.  As a side note, to anyone who IS gay and closeted and terrified and feeling trapped, there are more like you than you know, and if you email me at the address I asked to be put in the program today, I can introduce you to other Adventists who find themselves stuck in the same situation.  Ya'll would not believe how many gay Adventists there are out there struggling to reconcile being gay and being Adventist.  I don't know if you've noticed so far, but accepting the openly gay into the church has been kind of a hard sell so far.

But where were we?  Oh yes, the closet.  How could a good Adventist boy like me get trapped in such an unhappy place?  I know it must seem like the fault of the devil, or some-such, but it is really that hard to believe?  Growing up in this church, on what day are you told you are first a sinner?  It is the day you are born, is it not?  I mean sure, we look like innocent babies, mostly interested in warmth and milk, but what we really are, are desperate, born sinners with a crippling milk addiction.  That is the proper frame, is it not?  We are born to do bad things, and constantly tempted to do bad things, and it is only by the grace of Jesus that we are forgiven, and momentarily granted the relief that comes from knowing we are good to get into heaven.  Right up until our next sin.  Which might be tomorrow.  Or maybe it's now, as any of a million unclean thoughts flits its way through your head as some dinosaur from the distant past drones on and on about something or other in an assembly you don't really want to be at.  Really, you think of me as a dinosaur? Honestly kids, I'm only 37.

My point, so bluntly made, is that this religion teaches you, from day one, to hate yourself for being a sinner.  They never use quite those words, but the net effect of what you are taught is to believe, in the deepest core of your being, that you are WRONG and you'll have to be killed for being so awful, and the only way to remove this feeling is to beg an authority figure for a hit of sweet, temporary bliss in the form of forgiveness of real, deadly sin.  Deadly, because God'll kill you if you don't get right.  If you don't go through the motions, if you don't fall into line, if you don't go to worship 5 days a week, if you eat pork, if you wear jewelry, if you swim on a Saturday, if you do anything more heretical than clap awkwardly at a concert, if you think lustful thoughts when your crush walks into a room, if you're a dude and you want to kiss a dude, and if you think those things and do those things without forgiveness, without throwing yourself on the mercy of the court daily, you're gonna die.  And your parents are going to cry, and you're going to burn forever.

And I'm sorry, but the people you love are lying to you about all of this, all of these reasons to hate yourself.  Although don't be too mad, most of them are just repeating the lie their fathers told them.  The first lie is that you're wrong from the day you're born.   The second is that your have to grovel in despair over crimes both real and imagined, before authority, human or heavenly, to feel right. To be good.  I do not mean to imply we are all born good either, of course.  We are born to make mistakes.  We are born to be selfish, we are born to be compassionate, we are born in the tension between our darker desires and the better angels of our nature and living with other people born the same way.  So yes to be a jerk is in our nature, but so is being kind.  Isn't it weird that someone would tell you to focus solely on the one, and not the other?

The first lie is that making a mistake damns you for all eternity.  The second lie, is only authority can forgive a mistake.  In my experience, on a practical level, the first person to forgive after a mistake is yourself.  The second is whoever else your mistake might have harmed.  And then you clean up your mess, attempt to repair any damaged relationships, and then learn from what you did wrong.  And then doing it all over again when you fall down again.  Phenomenal cosmic powers are typically not a necessary part of that equation.

 The first and second lie, is that your mistakes are not just mistakes, they are violations on a universal level that will destroy you and everyone you know if the correct rituals are not followed.  They are an exaggeration of natural human behavior around making, correcting and forgiving mistakes.  They are normal guilt and empathy turned into an obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The third lie is a contradiction.  The third lie is that all sinners are equally sinful and all sins can be forgiven and that some sinners are more sinful than others and not all sins can be forgiven.  The third lie is that Jesus loves you, except when you're WRONG and then he has to hate you, and that you can be welcome in a church full of sinners, except as a sinner, you are not welcome.  The third lie is that your body is a temple, and you must tend it, and it's okay if you don't tend it really.  The third lie is that all are sinners are welcome children of God but that only the gluttons, the liars, the gossips are children of God.  The third lie is that the holy spirit will guide you in telling you which sins are worse than others, which mistakes are sins and which are not, and that you never need to be taught the difference between your ingrown, emotional and cultural biases and the influence of the holy spirit.  The third lie is that only God can judge and that the church and the elders and the rest of you have to do some supplementary judging in the meantime.

It is not hard to go into the the closet, when you are told you're wrong every day.  It is not hard to go into the closet when you are told again and again that all sins are equal, but some sins are worse than others.  It is not a big step from, "I'd better not tell anyone I had a pork sandwich last night," to "I'm a guy and I'd better not tell anybody I wanted to kiss that handsome guy last night."  It is not unreasonable to hide, when you know your sin is one that God may forgive, but no one else in your community will.  It is not unreasonable to despair, when your entire community is governed by rules which humans must necessarily break in the course of being human, and that the rules your nature makes you prone to break will be punished, and the rules their nature makes them prone to break will not be.

 "Oh Betty, you shameless gossip, Jesus loves you, give us a hug."

"Oh H, you shameful faggot, Jesus isn't about loving other men, you gotta get out of here."

It's not hard to lose passion for your religion, when you people say "Jesus loves you" in a way that clearly means, "Jesus only loves people like me."

I would assert today, that the reason you need an attendance system to keep young people in a spiritual practice day-to-day, is that there is a core contradiction between the message of Jesus and the behavior of the church.  Your mouth says, "yes, come, there is love and room for all." and your hands say, "Well, except for the gays, and other unclean.  Hanging out with you freaks may have been fine for Jesus, but it won't fly here."

And so rather than admit that the church may have some work to do in reconciling its practice and structure with the message and behavior of Jesus (or may, in fact, be irredeemably broken as long as those who are in charge remain in charge), and rather than admit that there are things in your church that do not make sense, and preaches a lot of mixed messages which cannot all simultaneously be true, which leads to genuine confusion and unhappiness in the lives of its members unless they just stop thinking about it and go with the flow,we all smile and nod and go through the motions, pretending nothing is wrong.   And those of you with the socially acceptable sins can stay and worship, and those of us who have to hide more of ourselves than we're comfortable with, slowly fade away until it feels like we can breathe again.

I went into the closet for the same reason young Adventists fall away from the church every generation:  They can't reconcile what they were taught with their actual lived experience of the world, but they're not ready to alienate their friends and family.  So they and I smile and wave while slowly backing away.  And, if they're anything like me, they don't return because they find more beauty, truth and love outside of the Adventist church than they ever found within it.  No, the devil did not make me say that.

So, in closing, before I am chased out of here with pitchforks and torches, I would like to encourage you NOT to fade away from the church.  I encourage you to run way from it as fast as you can.  If this church embodies everything that is good about the world, then I encourage you to practice it whole-heartedly.  Conversely, if the practice and teaching of this church don't resonate with you, please don't fade away.  Please RUN AWAY towards something better.  There's no reward and quite a bit of pain in pretending to believe something you do not, and pretending to be something you are not for years and decades at a time.  There's no virtue in practicing something you believe to be a lie.  It doesn't matter what your parents say, it doesn't matter what the church says, if you don't want to be here, if this is not who you are, if you can't be who you are, and love the consenting adult you love and still be accepted as fully human and loved as the next person in this community . . . then you have to go.  Run fast.  Run far.  Run hard.  Keep searching.  But get away.  Get some space to breathe and be yourself.  I promise you there are more beautiful and wonderful and truthful things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Adventist philosophy.

For instance, they have a fancier hand-clap out there that they call "dancing."  It's pretty great.

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