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In a time where we are bombarded by the yelling talking-heads of CNN, FOX and MSNBC, and stories reflecting nothing but hatred and misunderstanding between every "group" on the face of the earth, it's nice to read that atleast a few people made the small effort to see the human beings behind their demographic walls.
A No-Bash Bash For Gays and Evangelicals
By Marc Fisher
Caryn Liniak and Kelli Bass weren't close when they worked together
at Samaritan Inns, a faith-based group that helps the homeless. But they
were friendly enough to sense a big gap in their conversations. So
Liniak was grateful and moved when Bass came to her to say, "I have a
girlfriend, and I want to talk to you about it."
"It was obvious that she was judging me, and I was judging her," says
Liniak, who is 26 and an evangelical Christian who believes that "it's
God's will for a man and woman to be together."
Bass has friends who are gay and friends who are evangelical
Christians. In general, the two groups stay very much apart. Last Saturday
night, Bass, 27, and some of her friends, including Liniak, gathered people
from both worlds for One Big Dinner in the basement of All Souls Church
on 16th Street NW.
About 40 people, most in their twenties and thirties, about half gay
and half evangelicals, half from the city and half from upper Montgomery
County, spent two hours laughing and chatting about jobs and families,
stresses and joys.
No table fell silent. No one got angry. No one condemned anyone else.
By the end, most wanted to know the date for the next dinner.
Probably no definitions of sin were revised, but that wasn't the
point. "We're not asking anyone on either side to change their beliefs,"
Bass says. "I just want to see if we can relate to people and choose to
see that that is bigger than our differences. I sat through an
hour-and-a-half sermon the other day on sexual sin, and I very definitely felt
the target of that, but I want to look above that."
So did Karl Jones, who left a job at the National Gay and Lesbian Task
Force in part because "to work there, we had to kind of dehumanize the
people we were working against -- that happens all too often in
identity politics. I was filled with so much hatred for people working against
my cause that I couldn't even see people as human." He moved on to a
job at an anti-hunger foundation.
Outside work, he searches for bridges. He's an organizer of Guerilla
Queer Bar Takeovers, in which Washington homosexuals go out en masse to
a straight bar to dance, drink and -- gadzooks! -- converse with the
regulars. The events have become so popular that barkeeps routinely
invite the group back.
Even as Jones and Bass were drawn toward their own sexes, they stayed
close to the conservative Christian world. Jones's brother graduated
from Oral Robert University, and Bass went to Clemson, where some of her
closest friends were evangelicals. Couldn't their worlds meet?
At One Big Dinner, many settle for metaphor rather than direct debate.
A hearty discussion of city vs. suburbs serves the purpose at one
table. At another, young people from both groups take a quick lesson in sign
language, practicing the gesture for the verb "to like."
Across the room, a teacher at a Christian school speaks of her dismay
over evangelicals who shield themselves from other ideas. "We shouldn't
be seeking to affirm our own opinion," says Jocelyn Jones. "Christians
should be willing to hear any idea, and if there's an absolute truth,
it will shine."
That was an openness beyond what some gays had anticipated. "These are
people who hate us, and we really don't know why," says Karl Jones.
When he approached gay friends about the dinner, some jumped at the idea,
"but a lot were very reticent because they have deep wounds from
growing up."
Jocelyn Jones understands such reservations. A former dance student,
she was once friends with a gay schoolmate for three years without
telling him "that as a Christian, I didn't believe it was right to lead a
gay lifestyle. In an effort to accept him, I cut off an opportunity for
him to accept me, and I've always regretted that."
At the dinner, there is more talk of music and work than of sin and
morality. But quiet conversations about faith, love and politics sneak
in. "I would call homosexuality biblical sin," Liniak says, "but I'm
aware that I'm a sinner--I sin every day -- so I'm not different from them
in God's eyes."
That may not be sufficient foundation for friendships to blossom, but
it's good enough for one dinner -- at least for those who choose to
look for what they might have in common.
Comments
This is a really interesting article and although I WANT to believe that these dinners are held without judgement and prejudice I find it hard to believe that it doesn't serve some agenda. Will the fundamentalist Christians walk away with a genuine respect and truly acknowledge that the similarities far out number the differences? Is this just a self-serving event on the part of the Christians to be able to say that they count gays and lesbians in their circle of friends and acquaintances and to then differentiate("he's mexican but he's doesn't act like a mexican" OR "he's gay but he doesn't act like one").
I can see that I am taking a very slanted bias on this. I am aware that my own prejudices and suspicions of the far right (and, really, of organized religion in general and the catholic church in particular) prevent me from completely being open to the positive possibilities that encounters as the ones described in the article might foster. This is my struggle.
And yet I find myself involved in a project (The Mysteries) that in its original forms reeked of christianity and intolerance. It has been a tremendous struggle at times to find a way into these myths and stories in a way that honored the stories but also honored my personal relationship (or lack of relationship)to them. What I have found is that these stories and myths written thousands of years ago are precisely that - STORIES and MYTHS. For some they hold divine truth and knowledge; for others they provide guidance; and, for some, they are but ancient explanations for things that needed explanation (much like the Greeks invented Apollo to explain the movement of the sun).
And, yet, in my struggle to make peace (as it were) with these stories I find them wholly inspiring and exciting. And I find that our entry into these stories in our production of The Mysteries honors the spiritual and divine as well as the scientific, the intellectual and the humanistic. It acknowledges those with complete faith and it also honors those with no belief.
In fact, the epilogue of Part 2: THE PASSION ends with essentially a slight paraphrasing of 1 Corinthians 13 (funny that an agnostic like me is quoting from the bible!) which eloquently describes what the basis of all that we do should be: LOVE.
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful;
It is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
It does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect;
But when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away.
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.
So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Edgar Landa | May 25
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