I Get To Say So

"I don't doubt the sincerity of many Christians who condemn gays publicly and work to deny them civil rights, but it is now time for all Christians to take full responsibility for the harm done by their beliefs, the harm to individuals including their own children, and the harm done to those they condemn for their religious reasons."

-Anne Rice

In our lessons
Where I would listen with rapt attention
and allow myself to be molded in your image
You would tell me that people could sincerely believe they were right
and be sincerely wrong.

It's a bitter sort of irony
that it never once occurred to me
or you
to turn this around on our
exclusive
dogmatic
closefisted
closeminded
beliefs.

We could be (are) sincerely wrong.

You can't tell me now that your sincere belief that God's word says being gay is a sin
means
that you're absolved from the consequences your beliefs have wreaked on others

those horrible, heartbreaking, suicidal consequences,

and I get to say so.

Your beliefs don't get you off the hook
while you put the rest of the world on one. 

source: The Naked Pastor

Mother's Day

"Just as God is our Father, so God is also our Mother."

-Julian of Norwich

As someone who has never celebrated the holiday, because my own mother left, this truth is profound.

Don't take the Motherhood of God away from the Motherless because it seems heterodox. Don't say it's less important than the Fatherhood of God, that even if true, it's less important to emphasize, or worse, that it would be dangerous and confusing.

Because it's just as important. It's just as real.

And the confusion happens when we stuff our ears from contemplating its reality because it seems foreign to us.

Don't tell the hurting that they can't be a good judge of theology because their pain is clouding their judgment.

Because God is for the Hurt and SHe becomes the Hurt.

If theology is not for the broken, and the perspectives of the hurting and abused and the abandoned cannot help shape it
form it
point out the areas where it lacks empathy
where it favors the blessed over the broken

then theology is for nobody.

Either Jesus came for the fringe, the outcast, the outlier, the abused,
or He came for people who didn't need Him to begin with.

God comes for the abandoned.

And becomes everything to them

that they never had.

Taking that away from someone
is the most sinister form of heresy
I've witnessed.

"For my father and my mother have forsaken me,
    but the Lord will take me up."

"Can a woman forget her sucking child,
    that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb?
Even these may forget,
    yet I will not forget you."

"So God created human beings in his own image.
    In the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them."

“You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you; you forgot the God who gave you birth.”

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

Radiance

This is that tenuous space
where the ocean meets the inky blackness of the night
and you don't know if you're the light shimmering on the waves
or glowing in the sky.
Either way
you're radiant.

What The Tall Oaks Taught Me (i.e., Where I Shamelessly Copy The Format of a Mary Oliver Poem)

"Yes, you have years of hard work
ahead of you--

fears, faults, and baggage to overcome--

you don't get there all at once,
in a rush.

You take one breath
then the next.
Then you unfurl your branches.
Then drop your seeds to the ground."

A Poem About Blood, Water, and Diamonds

I chipped at each brick with the raw weight of my tears until the wall had turned to dust, and I stood in an open beach with no path, no plan,
just baptized ashes swirling at my feet
and my now dry eyes
wanting to see more
and my now parched throat
wanting to taste more.

So I did the next thing I knew to do
and it was to cry, bleed, and sweat
the help
and the hope
I wanted to bring
to the open wound at the center
of this world
that always 
drips blood in time with our own heartbreak

(so you must know then,
it never stops bleeding).

I plunged that sanguine depth
and found the diamond
I lost at sea
when the teachers told me
to throw myself away
in exchange
for...

I forget what it was
they promised
because it never came to pass.

But oh,
the things we've lost in those waves-
even the things we thought we never had
because we were told they weren't ours to hold-
have a way of floating back
into arms fatigued
from trying to survive in the waters of life.

"Hello,"
I whisper with a smile and trepidation
to the small stone
cradled just beneath the water
glimmering with life and expectation
as it shivers in my hands.
"It's so lovely to be near you again."