Too Many Flags to Fit

 “A boy like that will kill your brother
Forget that boy, and find another

One of your own kind, stick with your own kind”
- WEST SIDE STORY

This Sunday was Flag Day in the U.S. We have an enclosed porch with the ability to fly eight flags, which I do only on special occasions. Besides the American and Episcopal Church flags, which I fly on most nice days, I have a bunch of others, representing my partner’s and my varied ethnicity, places we’ve been, and some (like Wales) that I just have because visually it’s a cool flag. I have a vague sense of the major holidays in these various countries, as well as seasonal fillers to trot out when appropriate. We may the only people in New Jersey with Mardi Gras flags, for example, but I have attended the real thing in Louisiana many times and think observing it with gusto is a great way to usher in Lent.

Since my youngest sister married, it occurred to me that — just among my siblings and our partners — we now don’t have enough spaces to represent everybody’s background completely. Besides our own Italian, Lebanese, and Polish roots, some of which our spouses share, we have connections to Germany, Peru, and various British isles. I guess we can’t have everybody over at once, or someone’s going to feel slighted when they pull up to the house.

With that in mind, I saw with pleasure that a blogger whom I discovered recently, Joe Kay, had a piece from last year republished today by Sojourners. “From This Day Forward… or Backward” starts out by describing the pressure Kay experienced from his family to marry someone just like them: Eastern European and Catholic. There was a tremendous fear that “the old ways” would be lost if this purity was not preserved. As he put it:

“To so many people, my relationship wasn’t about finding someone who fit me — it was more about me finding someone who fit them.”

My family has one pretty homogeneous narrative: my mother’s mother’s mother came from Poland as a teenager, quickly married a Polish man, and lived for most of her life in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where it was (and may well still be) possible to get by while speaking and reading only Polish. When my grandmother was of age, she also married a Pole, and her two siblings who married did likewise (in fact their spouses were also siblings, children of another family from the neighborhood).

My dad’s background is somewhat different. When my Italian-American grandfather brought his Lebanese-American wife to live with his Italian-immigrant parents above their grocery store, the two women both continued to do what they did best: cook amazing meals, each in her own kitchen. In fact, my grandmother was among the few people whose cooking my great-grandmother would eat besides her own.

There was some initial resistance, however, on her folks’ part: Italians, in that age of Mussolini, were viewed with an extra layer of the suspicion that most immigrant groups faced, and the Lebanese compensated for their share of discrimination by playing up their political and cultural association with the French. Once they proved themselves, however, both my grandfather and my cousin’s husband (also Italian) were adopted as part of the tribe.

My parents’ disparate backgrounds did not, as far as I know, cause any strife for their respective families , and neither did they impose any such restrictions on us (our mindset is pretty much Hey, another food to try!). As fate would have it, my sisters still all married Catholic men, two of whom are at least part Polish.

I guess by choosing another dude (and a WASP, to boot!) I wandered furthest from the field of what anybody might have expected from me, but I am grateful to say none of this has been an issue for anybody in my extended clan, including that same Polish grandmother, who is now 94. Thus I had tremendous sympathy for what Kay experienced.

This kind of concern still exists, even in the ethnic soup that is New Jersey. Some cultures prefer to associate only with their own, and to not do so can trigger suspicion and displeasure. An Indian friend’s family took a long time to get used to the idea that his lovely wife, also Indian, was not of their religious tradition; and a young Italian guy I dated briefly told me that if were to ever meet his family, I should not disclose my mixed heritage, the fact that I grew up in another town, or that I was no longer Catholic. And that was just to describe me as “a friend”! I never did end up meeting his family, as there was no way I was going to keep up that charade.

On June 12, we recalled a milestone in our collective recovery from such fear: 48 years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that the state had no interest in preventing people of different races from marrying. Since 2003, the precedent this ruling set has been employed in the case for marriage equality for same-gender couples. As we approach the expected ruling that may finally put that struggle to rest (at least on paper) I’m grateful to my kin for embracing the relatively newfangled idea that a relationship is primarily for the people who are in it. As Kay said it:

“If someone really cares about you, they’re going to want to know whether this other person makes you laugh, helps you feel loved, brings out the best in you, and challenges you to grow. Does being with them bring you joy? Does your relationship bring you a deep experience of love? It does? Great! Congratulations! I am so happy for you! You are truly blessed.”

Would that it doesn’t take another 48 years before same-gender couples achieve the same degree of normalcy those of mixed race, ethnicity or religion are at least starting to achieve. In the meantime, as I look forward to empanadas joining the pierogi, insalata caprese, and tabbouleh on the table at family gatherings, I am glad that there is always room on my family’s mental porch for another flag, even if the real one can’t hold it.

"... Then You Have No Share With Me"

"I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt-offerings and grain-offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."

- AMOS 5:21-24

It's days like this that it's embarrassing to be a Christian.

How am I supposed to be a proud member of the institution whose ranks include a woman who compares waterboarding (a brutal form of torture), to baptism, our most sacred and widely-recognized sacrament? 

How am I supposed to seek unity or concord with a self-proclaimed archbishop in our own "civilized" country who -- when pressed -- refused to condemn the draconian new laws in Africa and Nigeria that not only make the simple condition of being gay (which is not something one chooses) a criminal offense punishable by arrest, abuse and (in some places) death, but compels the entire populace to take part in a witch hunt against the same, or face similar mob justice?  

How do I accept the leadership of the titular head of my own church, who would use very shaky evidence of a connection between mass murder in a country torn by civil war and the progress western churches have made on sexual and gender justice, as a rationale for keeping his own province in the past as the country around them moves forward, further cementing its increasing irrelevance?  

How do I explain this to the people I encounter (either LGBT themselves or just  believing in equal rights) who have a deep (and deserved) distrust of religious institutions in general and the church in particular?

The simple answer is, I can't.

I hereby declare myself "out of communion" with those who would use Christ and the Bible as a weapon against those around them. I concede that what is broken between us cannot be fixed. You can't be taken seriously when using "Biblical authority" as a rationale for endorsing continued persecution and murder.   If you don't see the defense of one vulnerable member of the human family as equally important to another, then -- frankly -- I'm not sure what Gospel you're reading, but it's not the one I know. 

Your "Christian cred" is hereby null and void here at the Church of Me if you think sinking to the level of torture is the way to make terrorism stop, and then glorify it by comparing it to the joyful initiation into the Body of Christ.  You cannot wash away another's sins while there is blood on your hands.

I cannot control what my denomination or the communion of which it is part does or says, or fails to.  Archbishop Welby claims that Christians might suffer at the hands of the intolerant if the church continues to move forward.  I fail to recall an instance where Christ promised the road of discipleship would be an easy one.  I am blessed to live in a place where we have grown so used to feeling included that we take it for granted, and a large part of the conversation is reminding those who "got theirs" that there is still work to be done.  I urge my similarly comfortable brothers and sisters to look at the world and the church outside your doors, pick up the rope and help us soldier on.

I only know that -- for me -- I can no longer be at peace with the notion that others identify me as part of an institution that is capable of what I've seen done in its name. I will continue to bore and annoy people by talking about it as long as I have a voice. I wish our leaders would put the radical inclusion that Christ preached ahead of politics and the facade of unity, an altar at which fairness and progress have been sacrificed so many times. I thank God for the opportunity to break bread with prophetic voices like the Rev. Winnie Varghese, the Rev. Canon Susan Russell, Louie Crew-Clay, and Jim Naughton, who have spoken truth to power many times when it was inconvenient or even dangerous to do so.  They are the reason I have found it possible to stay at the table when my head and my heart have told me to walk away.

We have much to be grateful for, and I know on one level that what we are seeing is the inevitable "growing paints" of progress.  But for today, I can't help but believe that the Almighty looks down at our folderol, especially at this time of year, and shakes his head, wondering, "when will they ever learn?"

Buyer Beware! The Episcopal Church is "No Longer Christian"

Did you get the memo to take the cross down?

In today's edition of Fundies Behaving Badly, one Michael Youssef of "Leading the Way Ministries" and the Evangelical Anglican Church of the Apostles in Atlanta (Both? Ambitious guy!) opined in an American Family Association newsletter that the Episcopal Church became officially "no longer Christian" when the Right Rev. M. Thomas Shaw, Bishop of Massachusetts, witnessed the marriage of Katherine Hancock Ragsdale (dean and president of Episcopal Divinity School) and Mally Lloyd (Shaw's Canon to the Ordinary) at St. Paul's Cathedral in Boston, an action which Youssef describes as a "defiance of church cannons" (sic). Right Wing Watch has the full story.

I always thought of 'piskies as peacenicks, actually, and thus was surprised to learn that we had cannons. Nevertheless, if we do, then it was rather brave of these folks to stand up to them.  Assuming he meant canons, at the most recent General Convention in 2009, the decision he refers to -- which we were pressured into by Canterbury -- was reversed and bishops were given "generous discretion" to meet the pastoral needs of their constituents.

Meanwhile, in the business world, a splinter church like this that used the word "Episcopal" or "Anglican" in its name could be sued for trademark infringement on the grounds that the public could get confused into thinking the defendant was an agent of the larger organization publicly associated with those words.  I'm fairly certain no formal communion exists between Mr. Youssef and the Present Occupant at Lambeth, nor our own Presiding Bishop and Flying Ace.  If the famous clothier could make an (ultimately unsuccessful) case of deliberate deception against aberzombie.com, surely the same is true here.

Watch out for those cannons!