Mar 26, 2013

Coming Out and Coming In

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“Marfa?” He was six when he asked the question, all big eyes and enormous dimples. “You love my mom like you want to marry her, don’t you?”

A heavy silence ensued, head and heart and gut all swerving to a stop before I made words come out of my mouth. I tried to keep my face composed, as I looked at his mother and back at him.

“Yes. I guess I do.”

He broke into his most charming smile. “Well, she *is* single!”

We breathed again.

But “marry” remained a charged word as we worked out a plan for bringing our long-distance relationship into one location.  We believe in this God: The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore. (Psalm 121:8, NRSV) We craved what we kept calling “ordinary time,” to be together in all our comings in and goings out. Would we live on the down low, moving nearer to each other and letting people think of us as best friends? Or would we tell the truth, as clearly as a six-year-old, about our going in and our coming out?

We both grew up in church-attending households; we are both ordained ministers. One of us revered the institution of marriage despite past experience with the father of Mr. Dimples; the other — that would be me — felt some combination of romantic hope and workaday cynicism based on hers. As my mother’s best friend from childhood put it, I made “poor” marriages, as if the fault lay simply in the way I chose or lived them.

But in my late 40s, and after a long time trying to talk myself out of it, I admitted two things to myself: I didn’t like men that way, and I loved a very particular woman. It’s hard to make anything other than a poor marriage when you can’t make that connection of the heart. When my heart connected to Kathryn’s, it all made sense.

As a United Church of Christ pastor, I had long since declared myself an ally for LGBT rights. Now I found myself in the vulnerable position of needing those allies, from among my friends and my family. I found myself in the unexpected position of being the subject of court cases and statewide ballot issues; I found myself in the awkward position of hearing the words I had often preached and applying them to my own situation: you will find your salvation in becoming fully who God made you to be.

I believed it for other people; did I believe it for me?

I found I didn’t have a choice. Love moved me like a wave you can’t resist; you have to ride it or be bowled over by the surf. Keeping a secret from others, once I had admitted it to myself, didn’t feel right. Friends blessed me; my children, from mid-teen to mid-twenties, offered their unconditional love and support. After a period of prayerful discernment spurred on by Mr. Dimples’ query, we decided to make getting married our priority. We decided to come out to our congregations, and come in to the light, and let the rest of the geographical and vocational logistics fall into place from there.

All that involved not only God and two families and two circles of friends, but it also involved two churches. To the people of the North Yarmouth Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, who I left to be married, I send my love and thanks. Thank you for being so accepting and gracious; thank you for bidding me such an emotionally generous farewell despite mixed feelings about the parting itself. We know we could have stayed right there and lived in my home in Portland, where an elementary school student with two moms in the household hasn’t been interesting since about 1995. But the call, as we prayed and prayed further, came to make our lives in my wife’s home and in her church. To the people of Mechanicsburg Presbyterian Church (USA), thank you. The ordinary ways you have welcomed the minister’s new wife — including inviting me to join the Fellowship Committee — have made it clear we followed the right path.

Because we are very ordinary, even old-fashioned. We fell in love, and we got married in church. We had the resources to do it in a state where we could get a legal license, where going to apply for it was extremely ordinary. I pray the Supreme Court will move our nation toward a time when it is ordinary everywhere, when any two people who love each other can come in to a clerk’s office and ask for a marriage license. I pray my wife and I do honor to the support shown and the blessings offered, in our coming out and our coming in, as long as we both shall live.

Album Cover attempt

With our children, including Mr. Dimples.

(“Coming Out and Coming In” is also on the Huffington Post Religion page.)

Filed Under: Marriage, Marriage Equality ·
Oct 18, 2012

Old-Fashioned

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I’m old-fashioned. I grew up in a culture, both religious and family, that regarded marriage as forever. When my mother and father became engaged in 1949, her grandmother reminded everyone that there had never been a divorce in the family. She could only say that because they never told her about the beloved cousin whose marriage ended. My mother had broken an earlier engagement at her parents’ insistence because the man who loved her had been previously married to an English girl during World War II; his bride was too homesick to live here with him.

These sound like folk tales now, but they formed my view of marriage and divorce when I was a young woman. Marriage is forever, and if you should be so unfortunate as to get divorced, you will reside in limbo. Add on a layer of religious piety and you get the kind of nice girl (and I use the word deliberately) who marries the young man who asks her because clearly this is God’s hand working in her life and if only she will do her best to be a good wife, all shall be well and everyone will live happily ever after.

Really, these stories sound like fairy tales.

I never thought of them as being political.

But marriage is on the ballot in my state, Maine, again. It’s been three years since the legislature passed a measure allowing the issuance of marriage licenses to same gender-couples. It’s been three years since the governor signed it into law. And it’s been three years since a Citizen’s Veto petition ended in a narrow victory for those who did not want to extend this right to non-straight people. We’re trying again, this time going to the polls with a measure that would allow same-sex couples to marry legally in Maine. The Yes on 1 campaign has not focused on the legal benefits of marriage, but on the idea that love matters to all families. Television ads feature straight clergy, parents and grandparents affirming their support, saying they want their church members, friends, children and grandchildren to be able to have what they have. “When we were young,” says the woman married for 52 years, “we didn’t dream of a civil union or signing a piece of paper. We wanted to get married.”

Of course, same-sex couples are getting married in Maine all the time anyway. They just don’t have a civil license. They’ve made religious and emotional commitments, promises to love and cherish from now until there is no tomorrow. They’ve thrown beautiful parties and hired photographers and shared their news with the world. Their friends have “liked” their relationship status changes on Facebook. They’re already living as if the change has been made, even without the piece of paper.

In May I joined a Unitarian Universalist colleague to officiate at a wedding. One of her church members was marrying one of mine. It was the most touching, sincere wedding I’ve ever attended. My church member glowed with love, and her new spouse wore an expression of bemused delight. My part in the ceremony ended just before the vows, and as I went to sit down, my church member’s mother patted the seat beside her in the front pew. Soon, vows taken and new status declared, the couple prepared to descend from the chancel, and the organist broke into “Joy to the World”—the Three Dog Night version. Sara and Jeremiah were married!

When I was a young bride-to-be, living the fairy tale dream, an august Episcopal relative performed the ceremony. He told us then that a license didn’t matter. He could marry us without one, and it would be the same in God’s eyes.

Because of a complication around health insurance, Sara and Jeremiah married without a civil license. But they married.

It may sound like I’m making a case that the legal part doesn’t matter, but I’m not. I believe religious standards and civil standards can and should be different. I don’t want to have to perform a marriage for every couple, gay or straight, who might want a religious wedding before their reception at The Barn, a tenth of a mile down the road from my church. I don’t want to tell other pastors or priests what to do. I understand that some faith communities will choose to limit that exchange of vows in various ways: to members of their churches, or of their denominations, or to those who take a class or receive premarital counseling with priest or pastor. They have that right.

I want the right to do the same, to determine my willingness to marry a couple not based on their gender or orientation but based on their desire to make a faithful commitment to one another, in the eyes of God and the community of people who know them best.

My denomination, the United Church of Christ, voted at General Synod in 2005 to support equal marriage, but actual practices are left up to churches at the local level. This means we don’t always agree. In my own congregation there are people who have described to me their struggle with using the word marriage to apply to same-sex couples. If the law changes, then good Congregational UCC pastors will discuss the matter with their Deacons and work it out together. I suspect there are members who support the idea of equal rights, but hope it won’t have to be discussed in our church.

This has become personal as I move toward making a commitment to the woman I love. “I’m old-fashioned,” a dear member told me, affirming the goodness of my relationship and allowing that it would be fine for us to live together. “I just wish you wouldn’t call it marriage.”

But I’m old-fashioned, too. I can’t imagine calling it anything else. I’m getting married.

(Written for and cross-posted from There is Power in the Blog.)

Filed Under: Marriage, Marriage Equality, Orientation ·
Nov 6, 2011

Committed: A Love Story

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Committed: A Love StoryCommitted: A Love Story by Elizabeth Gilbert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

(By the author of Eat, Pray, Love–which I also liked.)
I enjoyed this book very much. The sociological and historical aspects of marriage weren’t surprising to me, but Gilbert arranged them in an engaging way, interspersing her personal story effectively.
In fact, I liked it better than Eat, Pray, Love, and I think it might be exactly because her personal story takes up less space. It’s having a conversation with an idea (Marriage), and although there is certainly emotional content, that’s only one part of the book. E,P,L was a little exhausting. You would think Gilbert had the only marital break-up ever in the history of the world. The sort-of sequel has much more perspective.
Favorite moments: the dinner with Keo and his bride; the story of Felipe’s arrest in the airport; the attitude of Gilbert’s young niece about the need to have a flower girl in order to make it a real wedding; the dog curled up between their feet when they finally took official, legal vows.
The book is, like marriage, mostly about heterosexual people, but Gilbert makes it clear that she thinks anyone should be able to get married, and that in fact the law has always had to catch up with what people are already doing. That’s encouraging.

View all my reviews

Filed Under: Books, Marriage, Marriage Equality ·
Aug 13, 2011

Amazing Grace: a beautiful video

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The wonderful and gifted Nhojj, whose work this is, performed at the launch party for RAW, the book of poems (including three of mine) linked in the sidebar. I’m bowled over by the beauty of the images and his music as well. Love is love. We all have God’s Grace, abundantly, but thanks be to God there is more grace being shown by people to people in the fullness of who they are.

Thanks to Ron who sent me the link!

Filed Under: Grace, Marriage Equality ·
Jul 11, 2011

Marriage and Other Acts of Charity

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Marriage and Other Acts of Charity: A MemoirMarriage and Other Acts of Charity: A Memoir by Kate Braestrup

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m a big fan of Kate Braestrup’s. We both live in Maine, but we’ve never met, despite some near misses and one email exchange. I’m looking forward to hearing her speak at a panel on marriage offered by Bangor Theological Seminary this fall. She’ll present alongside Marvin Ellison, professor of Christian Ethics and author of “Same-Sex Marriage,” which is on my “to read” list.
Not surprisingly, I approached a book on marriage cautiously. I’ve just been burned, and I must admit to feeling like a pretty massive failure after being divorced for the second time. I used to say I could grant anyone *one* mistake…but here I am after two, reading the book of a woman who loved and adored her late first husband and who has an apparently happy second marriage. And I recognize how hard I worked to tell the story of my second marriage as a happy one. Blog readers saw me doing it and if you caught the underlying angst, you were more honest about my life than I was with myself.
Braestrup’s book, like “Here If You Need Me,” weaves her personal story with her work as Chaplain for the Maine Warden Service along with stories from the Bible. I remember reading “Here” with delight in the summer of 2008, loving the way these pieces came together. Despite my initial qualms about the topic, I had similar feelings of delight reading this book.
I will say, it’s pretty heteronormative. You have to wait to page 186 to get any mention of the relationships between same-sex couples. I guess that surprises me, because while she’s living in the law enforcement world, she’s also a Unitarian Universalist, and I would have expected her experiences to be a little broader. Perhaps because it’s outside her experience, she doesn’t feel she has the expertise? To be clear, she does speak in favor of gay marriage, although that explicit endorsement comes not in the body of the book but in a few questions she answers after even the Postlude.
Despite that caveat, which is really about my interest in what will happen around marriage equality here in Maine in the coming year (there’s a hope to get it back on the ballot or in the legislature in 2012), I’m an enthusiast about Braestrup and highly recommend this funny, touching, readable book.

View all my reviews

Filed Under: Books, Marriage, Marriage Equality ·
Nov 5, 2009

My Cup of Hope

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Light Princess came downstairs this morning as the kitchen counter TV, tuned to the news, blared a commercial with Christmas music.

Offended, she exclaimed, "It's not even Thanksgiving yet!"

I agreed. "I got a Christmas cup at Starbucks yesterday."

I prepared for her disgust, but instead she smiled.

"Well, they sort of put me in a good mood, so I guess it's okay."

And it was true, that on a morning when I felt discouraged, my first response to a Christmas cup was to cry out, "No! It's barely November!!" But then I noticed the words on the cup, which include "Wish" and "Joy."

And the first one I saw was "Hope."

Some of us might be about up to here with the idea of hope. We hoped and hoped all last year, and we rejoiced on Election Night, but on the other side of the country, people felt then the way my friends and I feel now.

It's possible that word got to bound up with a human being, one who doesn't share my position on the issue of marriage. I mean, he really, really doesn't. 

Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help. (Psalm 146:3, NRSV) 

I don't like thinking of this verse in reference to a President for whom I voted. It felt like a *great* verse six years ago, when we were going to war and the colleagues in my preaching group were still trying to figure out how to talk about it in a sermon. He even acted like a prince, that President–in my opinion–but I see how inclined we are to make them into princes, all of them, even if only the ones we prefer. Princes or fools or mustachioed villains, however we dress them in our minds, do not put your trust in them. They cannot manifest our hopes single-handed. They may not share them. They may not even care about them.

We've got to find our hope in other places. 

I start with my kids. They are 23 and 19 and 14, and two of them voted, and all of them are angry. They're learning a hard lesson that other Christian people did not hear the gospel the same way they heard it in this house and in the churches that formed them. It makes no sense.

LP will go tonight to the big GSA meeting where LGBT students and their straight allies from many schools will gather to unpack what has happened.

For my No on 1-voting neighbors and the onlookers from away who don't reckon these things from a faith perspective, it's almost easier. They can shut out the religious voices, or try to, and make plans for the next campaign. They don't have to figure out a way to talk to the ecumenical colleagues at the next community event or clergy group meeting.

My friend, RevFun, went to see a priest yesterday. God, he's brave. He's braver than I am. He wanted to tell a priest how this felt and why it was wrong.

I know the priest he went to see, not as well. I've met him once. I wonder if he felt equipped to have the conversation. I wonder if any of them do.

My friend E wrote a beautiful reflection on the power of the widow who gave her mite, and another E wrote he would "watch the sun come up tomorrow, and go back to work repairing the world. Who's in?"and my musical colleague J used Facebook to share his feelings about how this experience led to deeper self-acceptance and my friend B simply said in a status update, "B W is not going away…"

We are all in some way part of the United Church of Christ, and we are motivated by our understanding of the gospel message that we are to love God with all our hearts and all our souls and all our minds and our neighbors as ourselves. Make no mistake about it.

That's my cup of hope this morning. I put no faith in princes, but in the next generation and in the people of God, who are not going away.

Filed Under: Faith, Friendship, Marriage Equality, Politics · Tagged: , ,
Nov 4, 2009

The Morning After

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The Roman Catholic Diocese loaned its Public Affairs Director to the campaign against marriage equality, and last night he claimed to have been the little guy going up against the big guy.

There is a huge irony in people who suffered discrimination for being Catholic or for being Franco-American claiming their "little guy" roots as they work together to deny rights to another class of people.

It is, dare I say it, un-Christly.

(And in its definitions of traditional marriage, laughably un-Biblical.)

But these are the people whose Supreme Leader would deny women's call to ordained ministry, who is eagerly waiting to scoop up disaffected Anglicans around the world.

Don't be deceived. This attitude toward LGBT people is also an attitude toward women. It's institutionalized, and it's unloving.

My job this morning after is to find a way to love people who hate and fear.

Because love never fails.

I believe that. I have to believe that.

Four years ago we defeated a people's veto similar to this one, aimed at overturning a new law extending anti-discrimination rights to gay people. It was not the first campaign for, and against, those rights.

And this will not be the last effort to extend the right to marry to all people.

I'm angry this morning, but I believe that it's a message of love that will win in the end. And so I will pray, and get mad, and pray again. And strive to love.

Filed Under: Marriage Equality · Tagged:
Nov 3, 2009

No on 1

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No on 1 vote earlyIt's Election Day.

Everyone in my family who is going to vote has done it already. We won't be going to the polls in person. In my case, I gave up my "vote on election day" heroism to show my support for the "Vote Early" effort mounted by the No on 1 campaign. The organizers understood that their supporters were young and did not have a voting history yet, that they had turned out for a Presidential election last year but might not be as likely to get to the polls within a certain window of time in this Off-Off Election Year.

I mailed my absentee ballot almost a month ago.

I marked the No on Question 1 carefully. There were other matters on the ballot, but this is the one driving my participation.

When Pure Luck and I decided to get married, we didn't have to ask anyone's permission. No one said, "You two have already failed at this marriage thing. Forget it!" But we had. No one said, "Hmm, a woman with three children and a man with none, that seems odd. Forget it!" But that's who we were. No one asked, "Are you sure you have proper judgment about who you are marrying this time?" Because it didn't work out so well the first time, for either of us, even though we married perfectly fine people in all other areas.

No one had the right to keep us from marrying the person we loved.

All we had to do was get the paperwork in order and find someone willing to officiate and sign the license.

There may be something to be said for making people work harder to have the rights we have. We can inherit each other's money and make medical decisions for one another. No one can keep us apart in the Emergency Room. No one can make us testify against each other.

But there is no justification for making it harder based on the anatomy of the people we love.

Churches have been part of this campaign, on both sides of the question. One side, those opposed to same-sex marriage, has focused on fear. The other side, the side I'm proud to be part of today, has focused on love. And so I ask people of faith in Maine, will you vote today based on fear, or on love?

If love is your answer, vote No on 1.

Filed Under: Marriage Equality · Tagged:
Sep 24, 2009

Vote Early

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No on 1

We're in the midst of a campaign to preserve our new law allowing same-sex marriage in Maine. Out-of-state money and ads remade from the Prop 8 fight in California claim to represent Maine Values, but our side is fighting back with good ads and strong volunteer efforts.

I volunteered at the Marriage Equality phone bank the other night. I say this not to garner praise; it was a pretty small contribution of time and effort, all things considered.

But here's what I found fascinating.

We were calling identified supporters (mostly true) to ask them to vote early. This is a strategy devised to boost turnout, since many of the supporters of same-sex marriage are not people who have a history of voting regularly. Maine traditionally has good voter turnout, but this is an off-year election, so it's clear the get-out-the-vote effort will matter a lot. Southern Maine organizers of the campaign have devised a script and a philosophy that works for younger, urban voters who, quite honestly, are the most likely to get busy on Election Day and forget to go to the polls.

My call list, however, was to small towns on the coast and in more interior sections of Maine. And I'm here to tell you that Maine Values in those small towns include going to the polls to vote. The idea of voting early seemed absurd! Absurd. If I live three doors or three blocks from the polling place, in a town with no traffic, in a town where I see all my neighbors when I go to vote, why would I want to vote absentee?

Now, the advantage to the campaign is clear once it's explained. Every week the Secretary of State will publish a list of those who have voted, and the Marriage Equality campaign will cross-check that list with its list of identified supporters and stop calling those who have voted. It both helps with "turn out" and allows the resources to be turned in other directions, to undecided voters.

So, I got the message I preached, and this morning, I applied online for an absentee ballot.

If you live in Maine, and you are planning to vote No on 1 (yes, I know that's counter-intuitive, but that's the way you need to vote to support same-sex marriage here), please consider clicking here and requesting an absentee ballot. Please think about voting early.

And if you're related to me–Pure Luck and Snowman will both be voting absentee, if they remember to request their ballots–just do it. Thanks.

Because whenever and however you do it, voting is a Maine Value.

Filed Under: Marriage Equality, Politics · Tagged: ,
May 12, 2009

Can Anyone Withhold?

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(Thinking about Easter 6)

While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God. Then Peter said, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” So he ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then they invited him to stay for several days. (Acts 10:44-48)

It’s still the Easter Season for a few more weeks, and at this time of year we get stories of the early church, from the Book of Acts, instead of a Hebrew Bible reading each Sunday. The Acts of the Apostles is sort of an adventure book about the early church, rather than a CNN-type documentary. It conflicts with accounts in the epistles, and we have no way of fact-checking it. But it brings us those famous and modestly well-known first Christians and gives us a sense of who stands behind our faith.

Peter had to come around to accepting ministry to the Gentiles. Despite what Jesus told the disciples about taking the gospel to the wider world, Peter feared the different and the “unclean” until a dream taught him to know better.

I live in a state where the legislature and the governor last week made marriage legal for any two people who love one another, reaching the conclusion that we cannot withhold civil rights from people who have received love just as others have. This gradual process, not quick enough for some and too fast at any speed for others, continues to unfold. We’ll have a challenge to the law, a collection of signatures on petitions, which may lead to a referendum with a campaign for and against the measure.

I wonder how it felt for Peter to baptize the Gentiles that day? Was he happy? Thrilled? Solemn? Simply busy making sure they were all included?

It’s selfish, but my first thought on the passage of the law was about myself. When, I wondered, will I have the chance to perform a marriage ceremony for couples who could not have had one before? I thought about couples I know, committed couples, couples whose commitments have been blessed by other pastors, but who could not attain the rights and privileges my husband and I got very easily when we decided to marry. I wondered if they would even care about having a church wedding, if there has already been a ceremony of blessing and commitment?

God, you see, already recognizes their relationships.

When I got married the first time, my Cousin Jack told us that the marriage license and the wedding ceremony in church didn’t really matter to each other. It’s merely a convenience that your pastor can sign the piece of paper and make it all legal.

This is one convenience I will be happy, thrilled and solemn to offer, when the time comes.

Filed Under: Acts, Easter 6B, Marriage Equality · Tagged:
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