BY THE GRACE OF GOD, QUEER
A queer take on traditional iconography of Our Lady of Czestochowa, created by Elzbieta Podlesna. The artist suffered detention and death threats for her use of this imagery.
During my junior year of college, I was introduced to the work of the medieval Muslim philosopher Ibn Sina through a class on love in pre-modern literature. Our first assigned reading of the semester was his Treatise on Love, which posits that every form on earth has a perfect ideal, and the nature of the soul is to strive towards that perfect ideal. That striving is the definition of love, and all forms of love are ultimately a source of joy because they bring the substance or creature closer to the perfection God intended when God created.
This conception of love made a deep impact on me from the day I read it as an unsuspecting college student taking the class because it was taught by a favorite professor. It proved invaluable to me as a graduate student who could finally see clearly enough to answer the question “Am I queer?” with a resounding “Yes.”
When I came out in graduate school, I was a step closer to becoming the creature God created me to be. I was absolutely certain that my realization gladdened the heart of God, because I knew something about how God made me that I had not known before, and I blessed God for giving me so much love to share.
The reactions I received from my friends reinforced that feeling of becoming myself — I was met with joy and congratulations and celebration, and, in the case of one friend, a text message along the lines of “if [name of mutual friend redacted] tells you I owe her five bucks because you came out before the end of the year, don’t listen to a word she says.” In fact, several of my friends responded with a variation on “I’m so happy you finally realized!” which was immensely comforting as a newly-out bi woman who couldn’t shake that last bit of worry over not being “queer enough.”
Nearly all of these friends sharing their encouragement and rejoicing with me came into my life through some faith-related avenue: Catholic school, diocesan church camp, my parish choir, congregations both past and present. I had, and continue to have, many examples of what queer Christians can be, and it is from these people that I have learned what queer Christianity can look like. My faith helps me understand my queerness, and my queerness helps me understand my faith.
For me, the fact that I am queer is about far more than who I might fall in love with (although it definitely is also about that). It is about making norms completely irrelevant. Queer identity does not seek to be understood through comparison to so-called “normal” (heterosexual cisgender) behavior or identity, but is the creation of each person who claims it. The perspective shift that came with realizing that “normality and deviance from it” will not help me understand myself, my neighbors, or the world, has given me a deeper understanding of grace. Just as queerness is unconcerned with what is normal, grace is unconcerned with deserving.
One of my favorite prayers is the Prayer of Humble Access, said right before Communion: “We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy. Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.”
I know this prayer is not everyone’s cup of tea, but I personally find it immensely comforting. I am a finite creature who, like Saint Paul and John Mulaney, frequently finds myself saying, “I also don’t want to be doing what I’m doing.” How could I possibly be worthy to approach the altar of the infinite, boundlessly Good being who made me? By immediately following the fact that “we are not worthy” with the fact that “thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy,” the Prayer of Humble Access suggests that God’s mercy renders the question of deserving irrelevant. We do not ask to be made worthy before we approach the altar; we ask for grace, and as Jesus promised, we receive it.
One of my more dramatic encounters with grace happened the summer I was a church camp counselor. The priest who was with us for Intermediate Camp (older middle schoolers) wanted to focus that week on the Catechism and beginning conversations with the campers about Confirmation. We had campers for whom that one camp session was the only week out of the year where everyone called them by their real name and correct pronouns.
As the staff sat in rocking chairs on the front porch of the main building, discussing lesson plans, I turned to Fr. Stan and said that as we taught these campers about the next step toward becoming adults in the eyes of the Church, we needed to be as clear as possible that God is involved with the Church, but the Church is not God. It is made up of people, and sometimes people are wrong. “I’ve talked to these kids,” I said, “I know people have told them or are going to tell them that God isn’t going to love them the way they are, and if we do nothing else this week we have to tell them how wrong that is. So, if you could include that during launch tomorrow…”
“Oh, we’ll talk about it,” Fr. Stan said, “but I’m not going to do it. You are.”
So the next day I found myself standing in front of a pretty good sized group of middle schoolers, trying to get them to make eye contact with me as I said, “Listen to me, because this is going to be the most important thing you hear all week: there is nothing about you, nothing you can do, nothing, that is going to make God stop loving you. There is nothing you can do to make God start loving you either. God already does. God always will. Anyone who says otherwise to you is both deeply mistaken and not telling the truth.”
I still don’t quite know how to talk about the aftermath of making this little speech. I suppose it’s most accurate to say that I felt full of grace in a way I never had before. For a brief time I thought I might be called to the priesthood, though that did not turn out to be the case. This all happened three years before I was out, even to myself. The next time I felt grace like that was the first time I said the words, “I’m queer,” out loud to a friend and knew they were true. It felt like I was taking deep breaths of fresh mountain air after years of a stuffy room I didn’t realize I was in.
But speaking of being deeply mistaken and not telling the truth, back in March the Vatican decided, as it occasionally does, to remind us all that they don’t like queer people and are deeply unsettled by queer expressions of sexuality. (1) Just, you know, in case anyone had forgotten. In the Prayers of the People at my parish the following week we prayed that members of the LGBTQ+ community would know that they are loved and that they are welcome in church and to the sacraments. Everything contained in this petition is true and absolutely belongs in our prayers; it is effectively a shorter version of the speech I gave my campers. And yet, I found myself unsatisfied. Something about it felt incomplete, and after a bit of reflection I realized what it was: we didn’t pray that the perpetrators of the harm would stop.
This is an instance where praying for my enemies is surprisingly easy, because life for queer people would get a lot easier if the people, societies, and institutions that are hurting us would just cut it out.
In many ways I consider myself blessed to have been raised in the Episcopal Church. I knew openly gay clergy and laypeople from my early childhood onward, and I knew that my church community would collapse without them. Sacramental marriage equality became the law of the Church before I came out to myself, so I have always known that I would be able to be married in the midst of my community before the altar of God.
This experience is, of course, far from universal, even within the Episcopal Church. The camp I worked at is an Episcopal camp; my campers had been told falsehoods about God’s love at Episcopal parishes. I can count on one hand — one finger, actually — the number of times I have heard a sermon reference queerness or queer experiences that had nothing to do with the “gay rights debate” or any resulting schisms. (I remember catching the eye of a friend sitting across the quire from me, both of us frankly a bit surprised to have that part of ourselves recognized from the pulpit on a normal Sunday morning.)
This might just be me, but it also feels strange to hear “the LGBTQ+ community” prayed for as if it’s in the third person. I find myself singing Sondheim under my breath: “But I’m here.” (2) Queer people are part of Church’s first person plural, the great “we” that begins the Nicene Creed. I will readily confess that I don’t know if there’s a better way to handle this; there are of course many queer people who are not in the Church and when we pray for justice and right relationship I absolutely don’t want to leave them out.
I know God loves me. I want the Church to love me, in every last corner of Christendom. That is nothing less than my inheritance as a child of God. If you do not love my queerness, you do not love me. It is inseparable from myself, and inseparable from the grace of God as I see it at work in my life.
So let us ask, that we may receive, by praying for the grace that leads to true contrition, repentance, and amendment of life by those who cause harm to queer people and thereby sin against God and their neighbor. And let us give thanks for the grace we have been shown to know and love ourselves, and to love and accept the love of others.
Official Roman Catholic teaching endorses only procreative sexuality; at present queer sex specifically seems to receive the brunt of institutional condemnation, although historically that has not always been the case. For further reading on this subject I am delighted to direct you to “That’s Not What Sodomy is, but OK” by Dr. Eleanor Janega: https://going-medieval.com/2019/08/16/thats-not-what-sodomy-is-but-ok/. Heads up that things get a bit sweary; you may decide for yourself if that’s a feature or a bug.
The entirety of the song “I’m Still Here” is worth your time; personally I recommend any version recorded by Elaine Stritch.
