Category: Courage

Edge of Our Seats

7/7/2012

We’re now on the edge of our seats waiting for resolutions D002 and D019 – the transgender nondiscrimination resolutions – to come to the floor of the House of Bishops (HoB). Since the Ministry Committee passed these two days ago we have been waiting for them to turn up in the HoB—they are on the supplemental calendar for day 2, and since the Bishops are a bit behind in their calendar, they haven’t come up quite yet. TransEpiscopalians sat in the HoB gallery last night and this morning, and will be back when the bishops go into open session at about 3:15pm.

Our work here has been buoyed by some wonderfulpreaching.  Yesterday Bonnie Anderson, President of the House of Deputies, preached an inspiring sermon based on the readings for the feast day of the martyred Czeck Reformer John Huss (c. 1369 – 6 July 1415).  You can watch the video and see the text here.  Her theme was courage:

“Courage animates all our virtues-honesty, confidence, humility, compassion, integrity, valor. Without courage, all these virtues lie dormant. There is no prescription for teaching courage. You may have noticed that courage 101 is not taught in school, or even in college, or even in seminary.”

She continued,

“I can vividly remember the first time I stood up for something. I bet you can too. That memory becomes the story of a defining moment that is incorporated into our spiritual selves and becomes a cornerstone of our morality or our moral courage. If we are to reflect on our life, each of us can probably name today, events and people who helped to shape our moral courage. Moral courage defines us at our core and prompts us to act in spite offear.”

I left the service strengthened for the day ahead.  As we did yesterday, several of us readied ourselves to testify at a committee hearing.  This time it was D022, a “Churchwide Response to Bullying.”  I spoke in support of it in my capacity as an Episcopal Campus Minister.  Before the day was out, the committee had reported it out tothe House of Bishops.

Then this morning Bishop Michael Curry of the Diocese of North Carolina, assigned the lection in celebration of the life of the novelist and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, preached a soul-stirring sermon on how being a prophetic Christian requires a certain kind of insanity. Watch and/or read it here.  Citing the gospel passage from June 10th(Mark 3:20-35) in which Jesus’ family comes to find him and declares him “out of his mind,” Bishop Curry proclaimed,

“forgive me for saying it this way,but Jesus was, and is, crazy! And those who would follow him, those who would be his disciples, those who would live as and be the people of the Way, are called and summoned and challenged to be just as crazy as Jesus. So I want to speak on the subject, ‘We Need Some Crazy Christians.’”

I couldn’t help myself—I just had to tweet, to share, what I was hearing.  Over the next several minutes my twitter account posted:

·     #GC77 nervous re: voting on #Trans people in ordained & lay ministry? remember this morning's sermon: 'we need some*crazy* Christians.'

·     #GC77 Rt Rev Curry preaches it in a.m.Eucharist: 'we are called to be *different*'. #TransEpiscopal

·     Bp Michael Curry: 'We need some *crazy* Christians to change this world in the name of Jesus.'... 'Think different.'#GC77

·     'the ones crazy enough to think they can changethe world do.' May this Convention be transfigured by the Bps witness #GC77

And all of this crazy talk made me free associate:

·     As Seal put it, 'cuz we're never gonna survive unless we get a little crazy' #GC77 #TransEpiscopal

I haven’t been able to get the Seal song out of my headsince (and now it’s in yours… sorry).

After the service I flipped over my name tag and wrote

*Crazy* Christian

As I left the worship space I found myself wondering, will the bishops make the connection between Bishop Curry’s inspiring message and the trans nondiscrimination resolutions? Are they willing to be “crazy” enough – as some may well deem them within this church and beyond– to embrace the ministries of its transgender members, lay and ordained? Are they willing to take that leap?

This morning TransEpiscopal members and supporters sat inthe HoB gallery. The bishops did not quite get to our resolutions, but we return to the gallery now with hope in our hearts.

- The Rev'd Dr. Cameron Partridge

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Celebrating Victory, Pursuing Truth

1/20/2012

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On this bright January morning, as the hour of 11am neared, I emerged from Boston’s Park Street T stop, turned left and began walking up the hill toward the State House. Today (or rather, at this late hour, yesterday) marked the ceremonial signing of the Transgender Equality bill here in Massachusetts. This legislation, first filed in 2007, passed on November 15th, and officially signed on November 23rd, adds gender identity and expression to the state’s existing hate crimes law and the nondiscrimination statutes in the areas of housing, employment, education and credit. In a fitting twist, the week of its official passage was also Transgender Awareness Week, a time of educational and community events leading up to the eleventh annual observance of Trans Day of Remembrance on November 20th.

The Senate Reading Room, where today’s signing took place, was packed with observers, a joyful crowd savoring the celebration. Lawmakers were clearly also buoyed, as their inspiring comments demonstrated. “You have no idea how beautiful you are as you stand here beaming,” said state Auditor Suzanne Bump. “Remember that you are powerful,” offered Senator Brian Downing, followed by fellow Senator Sonia Chang Diaz: “it's days like this that remind us why we ran for office... Thank you for reminding us [legislators] of our own power, in addition to showing us your power.” Representative Byron Rushing, who joined Representative Carl Sciortino in co-sponsoring the bill from its very first days, declared, “this hasn't just been a discussion of gender identity but of the identity of Massachusetts, and hopefully it will become a discussion of our national identity.”

In his Episcopal Church context, as a longtime member of the Diocese of Massachusetts’ deputation to General Convention– Deputy Rushing inspires us to pose that question of church identity. Faith communities can ask, and indeed are asking, what do we stand for as people of our respective traditions? In the Episcopal Church we might well ask—and have asked at the 2009 General Convention and various diocesan conventions before it– what does it mean to declare in our baptismal covenant that we strive for justice and respect the dignity of every human being? In 2009 the Convention passed resolutions putting The Episcopal Church on record in support of transgender equality in the civic sphere (D012 and C048), and pledging within our ecclesial life to make administrative forms accessible to gender identities beyond male and female and to protect transgender lay employees from discrimination (D090 and D032, respectively). As our collective conversation continues, we might allow the varied lives of transgender as well as intersex people – communities and individuals whose lives are textured not simply by complex embodiments of gender but also by race, class, sexuality and ability-- to deepen our understanding of the human person. How do we interpret and live out the mystery of being created in the image and likeness of God?

At the signing this morning, I was reminded of a startling moment in the November 15 debate that I watched on my laptop. Representative Sciortino was speaking movingly in support of the legislation when he began to describe the Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) held at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul the year before. He made a point of detailing the apology that my bishop, the Right Rev. M. Thomas Shaw, had offered on behalf of Christians who had condemned trans people and in the process had “misrepresented God to” us. The apology had been stunning enough in its own right, but to hear it reported, in some sense repeated, on the floor of the House of Representatives, was positively astounding. As I sat there dumbfounded—actually, calling out to my partner to come see this!-- receiving these words afresh in an unimagined context, I was reminded of a strangely parallel moment at General Convention three years earlier. The Convention had managed to pass D012, the Trans Civil Rights Resolution, on the same day that the Massachusetts Judiciary Committee was holding a hearing on its own Trans Equality legislation—an earlier version of what has now finally passed. As a team of trans people and allies worked toward the resolution’s passage in Anaheim, a fellow Episcopalian in Massachusetts learned about it (on his laptop, while waiting to testify in the stultifying heat) and shared it in the course of his testimony three thousand miles away. The Episcopal Church supports this bill, he was proud to be able to say. It all came full circle.

Also on my mind today were the words (viewable here as blurry video), offered by Bishop Shaw at this year’s TDOR. Speaking at the end of the program, he welcomed us to the Cathedral and then offered a word of gratitude that felt almost like a meditation: “because of your honesty, because of your integrity, because of the way you so pursue the truth of your identity, you tell me about the nature of God, because that is how I think God is. And so I thank all of you not only for the way that you enlighten my understanding of God but how much you preach to the rest of the world about courage, and about bravery, and about truth and about perseverance of identity. We owe all of you a huge debt of gratitude. Thank you.”

I got the sense people were both honored and stunned by his words, working to digest and contemplate them— I know I was. His comments about perseverance in pursuit of the truth of identity—language I had not heard him use before— reminded me of words from the Gospel of John that I first really took in at a middle school summer Bible camp: “you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” (Jn 8:32).

From this chair, at the end of this day, looking out at the striking vista of falling snow, it strikes me how the process of knowing the truth and being freed by it is both lifelong and communal—by turns grueling and wondrous, and inextricably relational, even as it is distinctive to each person.

An important truth about the MA trans equality law is that it is far from perfect: it does not include protections in public accommodations—access to public gender segregated spaces. Everyone was resolved to come back and get that done. And as I think about how far we have come, how much more free we are than we were just a few short months ago, I know that what we need more than anything else is the will, the support, the conviction to keep pursuing the truth.

- The Rev'd Dr. Cameron Partridge

Cross-posted at Walking with Integrity

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Edge of Our Seats

Celebrating Victory, Pursuing Truth

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