God is Love, Love is God, Is God Love

In Sunday School yesterday, I made the point that God’s love might be a more pleasant description of Stephen Hawking’s Grand Unification Theory. We’re studying a book by Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest who is sometimes considered one of the most important writers about modern Christian Mysticism. I don’t think Rohr had Hawking in mind when writing “The Universal Christ,” but it seemed clear.

The roll call for my Sunday School class reads like this: Doctor, Doctor, Judge, Professor, Reverand, Reverand, Doctor, Judge, Doctor, Professor, Esquire. I’m the least educated, least successful person in the room. That works for me. It keeps my ego in check.

My personal Christianity is in crisis. I feel a strong need for leadership and seek it among those who risked the most for their faith. I feel like my congregation, Galloway Memorial, on Congress Street, is spiritually on pretty solid ground. However, it’s a downtown church with an aging, sometimes shrinking congregation, but it is still looking for new ways to be pertinent as a church. That’s where I am. I want to be pertinent to Christ’s mission on earth.

There are an awful lot of people who resent Christianity. They resent it because, frankly, Christians have been cruel to them. It bothers me that churches that advocate for exclusion and judgment of others are growing, while churches like mine, who open their arms and have opened their arms for quite a while, are shrinking.

That sends the message that the more exclusive you make Christianity, the more successful your congregation can be.” successful” here means more people sitting in the pews. That works pretty well for golf and tennis clubs, but it’s hard for me to swallow when compared to what Jesus did. A Jewish radical nailed naked to a Roman cross with a crown of thorns digging into his skull doesn’t sound to me like somebody interested in an exclusive club. I’m a bald guy; that idea of thorns digging into my bald pate makes me physically wince.

Since childhood, there’s a guy I know with a mustache who plays guitar but grew up to be a doctor that I always held up as a model of a “good christian.” He wants me to lose weight, so I’m self-administering these shots that are supposedly very effective at losing weight. Sometimes, the drug goes on backorder for weeks, so when they’re back in stock, I have to go through the whole acclimation process again. Getting acclimated to Zepbound is not all that different from a baby getting acclimated to solid food. I don’t need to describe it much more if you've been through that as a parent.

My plan yesterday was to find something I could eat that didn’t turn me green, then go back to church for a reception to send our Pastor off to his retirement. If I had to be a Methodist pastor for the last ten years, I’d probably want to retire, too. The grocery store near me has a cafeteria-style deli. It’s kind of a requirement for Southern grocers. They usually have three meats and five or six types of boiled vegetables. I thought boiled vegetables sounded like something I could digest, so I got green beans, turnip greens, and field peas.

While I was eating my lunch and checking my email, the Discord app on my phone rang. It was a boy I know in Texas. I met him through a theater discussion group, and we sometimes play Ark Survival Ascended together. Ark is a video game where you ride dinosaurs and fight heathens. He’s probably thirty-six or thirty-seven now but never really found his place in life. At thirty-seven, I felt the same.

“I need some advice,” he said. If he had wanted to play a game, he would have text-messaged me.

“I’m having trouble at work.” That part didn’t surprise me. My friend was very emotional and very sensitive. He is very gay and very effeminate, but living in Texas. I get the impression he’s learned to be timid in life as a means of self-protection.

“They won’t let me wear a dress to work.”

This business of drag, cross-dressing, transgenderism, multi-gendered, non-binary, none of that was on my bingo card for 2024. I know more about hair and makeup than most of these people, but I use it to make werewolves and vampires, not beauty queens. I don’t understand the vocabulary. I don’t understand the different levels and what it all means.

What I do know, what I feel very confident about, is that sexuality is a vital part of a person’s identity, and whatever I think of myself, whatever overblown egotistical ideas I have about the world, I do NOT get to choose somebody else’s identity. As a Christian, I don’t get to close off my heart to people I don’t understand. That’s not on his bingo card.

The first transgender person I ever met was in High School. They were a woman who believed they were a man. I don’t even know the accurate, friendly way to describe that. What I can tell you is that nobody ever spoke to this person, sat with them, or befriended them. I never saw them talk with somebody at lunch. Not even once. Whatever else was going on in this person’s mind and heart, they lived an isolated life surrounded by laughing “normal” children. Nobody should lead an isolated life. Even as a child, I recognized that was horribly cruel.

I wish I had the courage back then to do something about it, that I could have been man enough to say, “Hey! I’ll be your friend!” I didn’t, though. Without any prior exposure to this, their existence was just too alien to my own for my hormonally confused adolescent brain to grock. Reading “Stranger in a Strange Land” in high school, with this person ambulating around us but not among us, I understood there was a connection between the ideas Heinlein wrote about and what I was seeing. Still, I wasn’t mature enough to make it happen in action. I was not a good Christian, and I could have been.

In my defense, it’s really hard for me to talk to people one-on-one. When I was a child, it was because I stuttered. Now that I’m an old man, it’s because Bell’s Palsey made my voice weird. Those are both just excuses, though. The truth is, I’m just pretty timid when it comes to human interaction. That’s not an excuse. That’s an explanation.

I knew my friend in Texas sometimes cross-dressed. Telling me that was probably a test of our friendship. If I could handle that bit of news, we could hunt dinosaurs together. I couldn’t really tell if this was a career problem, an identity problem, or if people were bullying him. What was happening to him was alien enough to me that I couldn’t really understand it. What I could understand was that this was somebody in pain. This was somebody who wanted to talk to somebody to feel better abut their lives, and for some reason, I couldn’t understand; I was that guy.

I didn’t make it to Cary’s retirement reception. I hope he forgives me. I sat and listened to somebody I didn’t understand spill out problems I didn’t understand, hoping that if I did it long enough, it would be enough, and they’d feel better.

I had a drink with an old friend last week. We talked about, among other things, how the wrong kind of Christianity is growing, and the right kind of Christianity is shrinking, and where we are headed as a culture. It’s hard to talk about these things with other men because they will mostly defend whatever position they choose for themselves. It’s hard to have an honest conversation when you have a dog in the fight.

I smugly said that I didn’t intend to use twentieth-century ideas to solve twenty-first-century problems. I thought that was so clever and so brave. She laughed, then said, “Jesus would have you use first-century ideas to solve twenty-first-century problems. Are you ready to do that?

Women have a way of seeing things exactly as they are. She sure did. Was I ready to do that? I don’t know that I have a choice.

                              Riding dinosaurs through the jungle on the internet.