I am in Portland, Oregon this weekend for the fortieth reunion of my graduating class at Lewis & Clark College. It has been a long time since I visited Portland, but it looks about the same to me even though I’m well aware of the phenomenal growth the city has experienced in just the past few years—let alone four decades. One thing that surprises me, although I’m sure it shouldn’t, is the substantial and substantially visible gay and lesbian population. It looks like Portland is a good place for lgbt people to live. I have seen that confirmed all through the weekend’s events as well. I suppose it makes sense that people I know would be lgbt affirming people. But on the other hand, I don’t remember it that way from college days.
Of course, as we discussed over and over at yesterday’s events, the early 1970s was a different time. The overriding feature of the era was the war in Viet Nam, and that’s pretty much how we all remember it. We brought the college to a brief halt the day after the shooting at Kent State. We remember the day Roe v. Wade decision was announced by the US Supreme Court. We remember LBJ’s passing almost as well as we remember Nixon’s demise. It was a tumultuous time altogether.
I kept trying to articulate to my friends last night how it was that I felt in those days about my sexuality, and I didn’t really succeed at saying it quite right. I probably won’t get it right here either. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t out, although I wasn’t. And it wasn’t exactly that I didn’t know, because I think I did. It was more that it didn’t have a name or an existential reality for me. I didn’t know just exactly what sort of thing it was so I couldn’t quite imagine what to do with it or about it. Coming to terms with it was more a matter of understanding than anything else. But as I tried to articulate this, what I kept coming back to was the idea that it was visibility that was critical for me. After college I went to graduate school at Indiana University, and then took up my first job at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In both places my work and my social life were predominantly in the context of the music community, and gay people were prominent in that community. It was as I met attractive men with engaging personalities and watched them socializing together and listened to their stories that I began to understand my sexuality. And once I understood, then I was able to begin to explore. Well, maybe all of that should have happened in my adolescence, but it didn’t—not in those days.
I do remember coming out clearly. I won’t tell that story here, but I will recall that it was not thunderous or calamitous at all, except maybe in my own head. I remember that my friends and even co-workers greeted the news with smiles and understanding (not a few hinting they’d known all along). I felt like I had been welcomed to my own reality. Except that, by shifting my existential being just a tad, I had entered an entirely new dimension. And I would say now, looking back, that that was just exactly what happened.
There are two powerful stories about shifting dimensions in the scripture appointed for today. In 1 Kings 19 we have the wonderful story of Elijah’s search for God on the mountaintop and in Luke 8 we have the story of Jesus casting out demons called Legion. Both are pretty dramatic stories. The Elijah story narrates a theophany as God comes near preceded by wind, earthquake and fire—but it is the “sound of sheer silence” that announces, if you will, the presence of God.
The magic of theophany is in their metaphorical power. As revelation they tell us directly about the experience of God. But as reflection they allow us to look back into our own lives for the moments when God drew near. Wind, earthquake and fire—that reminds me of the time of seeking before I came out. In 1 Kings it keeps saying that there was wind but God was not in the wind. I think that’s about right. There were powerful forces buffeting me but God was not in the forces. God was in the sound of sheer silence that was left after the disruption ceased. God is always near, and God is always tending to us even in those powerfully life-altering moments. And we can find God’s real presence in the silence, when we set aside the disrupting distractions.
In Luke 8 Jesus casts demons out of a man who has so many his neighbors have shackled him. So powerful are these demons that when they are cast out they land in a herd of swine who promptly leap into the sea. It reminds me of the lonely nights and the emotion-filled times that preoccupied me before I came out. And when I had come out, it was as though the demons had not only left me but, indeed, run off into the metaphorical sea to drown. My life was healed because I was no longer cast out, but in the warm smiles and understanding hugs of my friends I was made free. This is the power Jesus shows us. We have the power to be healed if we can give up the deceptive disrupting distraction of letting demons overpower the reality God has made for us. God has made us lgbt in God’s own image. As Jesus says, we are to continually declare how much God has done for us.
There is one more tantalizing passage in today’s scripture, in Galatians 3 where Paul catalogs the dichotomies of human existence and says they no longer matter, we all are free in Christ. And we are free in Christ because we are one in Christ. We are one in Christ because we all are the children of God, made in God’s own image.
In the U.S. we’re holding our breath waiting for the Supreme Court to announce decisions on same-sex marriage. It is a little bit like huddling in the cave waiting for the wind and earthquake and fire to pass. Whatever they decide, remember that God is in the sound of sheer silence, looking for you, waiting, for you.
* Proper 7 (1 Kings 19:1-4, (5-7), 8-15a; Psalm 42 and 43; Galatians 3:23-29; Luke 8:26-39)
©2013 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.
Dimensions of Reality: glbt Christian spirituality 