Changing Hearts and Minds in America's (Black) Church Communities

Last week, we experienced a watershed moment for African-American LGBTs and the black church in America.

It wasn't a million-person rally on the mall in Washington, D.C. It wasn't a sweeping new civil rights law. It was something smaller, but nonetheless profound. It was one sermon, preached by one man, in one church outside Atlanta, Georgia. Granted, Pastor Dewey Smith is a big deal. And the church where he preaches, House of Hope Atlanta, has 11,000 members and holds services in a 7,000-seat neo-Gothic cathedral.

What's profound about this semon is that a ray of light has pierced the darkness. Painful and honest words have been spoken, and the result has not been outrage from his congregation, but rather (from what we can see thus far) celebration.

Thanks to social media, Pastor Smith's message will now spread and reverberate. The conversation about gays in the African-American church will inevitably shift, if only a little.

 Whether or not we are believers, religion and organized religion affect us all. The church's influence on the larger African-American community is profound and cannot be denied.  

Will this sermon on a Sunday in July of 2015 be remembered as "the" tipping point? Probably, no. It's too soon for that. Other pastors will need to take up Pastor Dewey's message and carry it to their own flock. But I will believe we will look back on Pastor Dewey's sermon as seminal, akin to certain key acts of bravery and leadership taken by Dr. Martin Luther King and his peers. 

When I saw the video of the sermon (above) I was dumbstruck. I shook. There were tears in my eyes.  I knew something momentous had occurred. Yet, when I shared it on social media, the response was tepid. Here's an example of an exchange from my Facebook page:

• Paul Baswell i just don't get why its so important for you to change their minds? you live your way and let them 

  live theirs. its not a form of condoning its knowing were your prioritys should be. i just don't think you can change them. many are filled with hate not only for gay people but for almost anything they see as outside. plus there is far to much religious talk out side of ones community. i find much of what is presented in the media to be disingenuous manipulation.

  Like · Reply · 23 hrs
• 

  Ben Patrick Johnson It's important to change hearts and minds because we all affect each other profoundly through our attitudes and actions. Countless young gay people are mistreated in their own homes, abused or dismissed, in the name of God and Bible. By changing hearts and minds (something that is very much possible and doable) we can make life better for millions and diminish the sort of tragedy after tragedy we LBGT activists and care providers see on a daily basis. 
  
  As Evan Wolfson said of gay marriage, "There is no marriage without engagement." We have engaged people on that subject. Public opinion (overall) is now strongly in favor of same-sex marriage. But there are communities, like the African-American and some Latino communities, where the message is slow to resonate. One of the reasons is the stronghold of the anti-gay black (and, with Latinos, Catholic) church, where bigotry and non-acceptance is preached on a weekly basis.
  
  The solution? Work within the black (and white Evangelical) and Catholic church communities to promote tolerance and acceptance of not just gays but, as you note, traditional societal outliers of all stripe. Celebrating the words and actions of a pioneer like Pastor Dewey Smith will help us. As will efforts like the Institute for Welcoming Resources, a Minneapolis-based organization that develops programs church members can take to their clergy to help shift the message coming from the pulpit to one of inclusion vs. exclusion, empathy vs condemnation.

Today, I have been asking black friends, especially musicians, for their reaction and perspective. I'll probably update this post and include some of that in the days ahead. But I want to know what YOU think, how significant you feel the church is in current civil rights challenges for gays, Muslim-Americans and other disenfranchised groups, and how you feel we can best get the message of inclusion into America's church communities.

A brief hiatus that wasn't so brief

I haven't blogged in a long time. Two years almost. I could say "Shame on me," but shame is such a useless thing. I don't wish to invoke it. Instead, I'll simply say, "Here goes." (We can talk more about shame later. And shall. Especially in reference to my relationship. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

Maybe I should talk about why I haven't been blogging.

The simplest answer is I've been busy writing other things. Like the novel Splinters, which is about to be published by Dreamspinner Press. I also worked on a screenplay version of my novel If the Rains Don't Cleanse, which then got ditched after Hollywood producers optioned the novel and wanted a real screenplay written by a real Hollywood writer.

In addition, I lost access to this blog and every time I tried to log back in and post something, I hit a dead end and rather than keep trying to figure it out, I got distracted and moved onto something else. Like writing tweets for my Twitter page. Or sending endless Facebook pokes. Or smoking weed and playing with the cat. 

Ironically, there was a period where I was journalling prolifically. This was during a period of depression I went through in late 2013 after breaking up with Marcos. It's been broadly suggested that to be a serious writer, one ought to write 1,000 words a day. There were a number of months in 2013 where I journalled 50,000 words or more. Most of it was dreck. I don't even want to go back and review it now. Those were not quality words. They were long laments. Lists of nothing useful. Meandering, circular repetitive ... you get the idea.

And then, in December of 2013, I met Mariano Tugas, now (spoiler alert) Mariano Johnson, on a trashy hookup website. We ended up dating instead of hooking up, I came out of my depression, we fell in love, and then he went batshit crazy for a little while (maybe I'll let him be the one to blog about that.) Eventually he got un-crazy and we got married. Now we live in a big house with way too many animals and we run around most days in our underwear and sing songs to each other, shouting from room to room,  fighting like angry lobsters. (Do lobsters fight? Do they get angry? I know they're red from asthaxanthin, not anger, but maybe they have tempers. I digress.) We tried healthy food delivery for a while but it was a bust. So now we order in pizza and Chinese food. Every day, I do voice-overs in my studio and write and post things on social media in the bedroom on my laptop. Husband sits around in the family room tending his four aquariums and attempting not to kill seahorses. (He is sometimes successful at not killing seahorses.) We burn incense. We alternately sneer at each other and sing each other's praises. We frequently run out of lube. 

There are people who want to make a reality TV show about my life. About our life. Which is kooky because I spend most of my time sitting here wearing reading glasses and typing on my computer.

.

That is, when I'm not floor-skating down the hallway in my socks with my husband or fighting with him. (Yes, I'm aware this is the second time in this blog entry I've mentioned fighting with my husband. I'm deeply in love with him, but I'm not going to pretend like things are hunky dory all the time. Except, maybe on TV, I will.) I can't see how our life would make for interesting television viewing. But I'm going along with the TV people, at this point. Because I love attention. And a part of me still feels like, all these years after the TV show Extra fired me as host at age 24, I still haven't gotten my fifteen minutes of whatever--Fame? Acknowledgement?

There are a lot of blank spaces to fill in. Underdeveloped parts of me, as a human being, and gaps explaining myself. (In a blog. This blog.) I'm working on both, the Benjamin and the blog. Maybe I'll talk about shame in my next blog entry. Shame is a motherfucker. And it plays more of a role in my life, and in husband's life (and thus in mine, doubly), than I wish it did. 

Sunlight disinfects. Let's drag some of this out into the light and see what happens.

I love you so fucking bad.

I love you so fucking bad that every minute of my life is now painful. I yearn to be free of you and in the same shudder I yearn to be one with you in as many ways as two people can, in screwing, crying and wailing, in the primordial awesomeness that is infatuation.

I love you so fucking bad that I suckle on the pain. I want to lie close enough to you, always, that I am continually aware of the smell of honey or sleep on your breath. I want to press close up against you at night. I want to meet each other in our dreams and make glorious love and fly and defy gravity. If we lie close enough, it might happen. I want to live in your skin and for you to live in mine, for there to be no separation between us.

I love you so fucking bad I want to cook for you then eat with you, cross-legged on the kitchen floor, feeding each other by hand. Though who needs food? You are my food. You are my water. You are my looking glass. I want to gaze at you and not need a mirror to see my own reflection.

I love you so fucking bad I want to be reborn as yours, indivisible with liberty and justice for none. Who needs liberty when you have the heroin that is the love I feel for you?

I love you so bad that I’ll do foolish things for you. I’ll lie and steal for you. I’ll lay myself down in front of your car tires if I think you might leave me. I love you so bad that when we quarrel, I feel as though I’m dying. I can’t breathe. I can’t think straight. I can’t put a sentence together.

I love you so bad that I’ll shout it to anyone who’ll listen. I’ll post it on Facebook, spray paint it on a wall, phone my mother and embarrass myself by going on about you for an hour.

This hurts too goddamned much. I don’t want to love you like this. I want to love you a little. But my love is large and dangerous. Its flames threaten to engulf us and burn us both alive.

Help Me Make a Micro-loan Through Kiva

I'm a Kiva lender. I work with Kiva.org to help alleviate poverty through micro-lending. I'm one of 700,000 who have made investments as little as $25 in food shops, vegetable co-ops, child care centers and the like, in places like Congo, Tajikistan, and Cambodia. It's a way to help bring political stability and quality of life to developing parts of the world, and do so with kindness instead of guns, drones, tanks or rhetoric. 


Surely nothing can stabilize life more than grassroots economic empowerment. Take the economic leverage out of the hands of dictators and put it in the hands of the people. Then see what real, honest democracy looks like.


Simply put, Kiva ... works. Those seeking loans apply and submit their stories. Local orgs coordinate with larger orgs to complete the loan process and fund the recipients. They sign repayment guarantees on their honor in front of their families and communities. 


As a lender, you don't earn interest on these loans, but you have the tremendous satisfaction of knowing you've directly and vitally changed people's lives for the better. As a person of faith and follower of the Golden Rule, that's all the interest I need.


And I've had great success with Kiva! Since 2008, my Foundation and I have made twenty-one loans to small groups and individuals. Most of the loans I've chosen to fund are to women, or groups headed by women, and in countries and regions where women are typically oppressed or whose voices are not heard. I believe that when we empower women in this way, we make the world a kinder and better place.

As of today, every cent I loaned has been repaid. To me, this is remarkable -- think of the default rate in most lending situations. The result is that I currently have funds sitting in my Kiva account, waiting to be re-invested. I'd like you to help me choose where to allocate it. 

Here's what I'd love you to do:

• Visit kiva.org/lend and look at the current loan requests. These are heart-rending stories of real people who want to get ahead in life.
• Leave the name of the person or group who most appeals to you as a comment on this blog. Include a blurb about why it appeals to you, if you like.
• I'll pick the top three and make the investment on your behalf with my dollars. 
• If you are as inspired as I am by the whole process, you may become a Kiva lender yourself. It just takes a few minutes to sign up, and you can loan as little as $25.

I am really excited to see how this will go. PLEASE participate. It costs you nothing, and can help change lives!

The Longest Journey Begins with a Single Misstep

Since I was a child, my mind has churned with words, language, sound. Thoughts parade through my head at night. By day, the speed and intensity of what comes up sometimes keeps me from dealing with basic tasks effectively. Doctors have tried medication to calm my thought storms, but the treatments either don't work or dull me, dimming my light.

My thoughts fray and tire me, but without them I'm not truly myself. So I go on, crazy but oddly productive in ways that are valuable to me.

Puns, rhymes, peculiar associations come to me at the most random of times. In this instance, it was in the middle of the night. I woke with this sentence in my head:

"The longest journey begins with a single misstep."

I smiled at the play on words my subconscious had handed me, and began to wonder if it meant something or was just funny talk. As I drifted back to sleep, I tried to think of times at which a misstep might be an auspicious start to a long journey. I woke a second time, maybe an hour later, with what felt like the answer. I jotted down a few sentences on the writing pad I keep next to the bed. Here's what I've distilled from my scribbled notes:

Aeschylus, in ancient Greece, may be the first person credited with the idea that wisdom comes through suffering alone. Buddha spoke at length about suffering as a tool of transformation. In the Bible, God says “I have refined you, but not in the way silver is refined. Rather, I have refined you in the furnace of suffering.” (Isaiah 48:10)

C.S. Lewis, speaking also of the Christian perspective, wrote in the early 20th century, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

I got a letter from my sister Peggy last week in which she talked about Lent. She wrote about the sacrifices and hunger for which she and Catholics worldwide volunteer with the goal of spiritual transformation. There is deprivation, hunger, an acknowledgment of darkness so unflinching that it is almost an embrace. The suffering, in this instance, is willfully created and invited in. It's bracing--my sister described it as like being doused in cold water--but fortifying.

Secular voices have been divided on the point: Dale Carnegie wrote that discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success. But many of his contemporaries, and popular voices since then, have instead suggested ways to avoid adversity or inoculate ourselves against its ravages through positive affirmations, self confidence boosters, and a plucky, can-do attitude.

As I lay there in my darkened room, I thought about how this short term pragmatism--being able to blinder oneself and "keep a good perspective"--might conflict with what's ultimately best and most useful for us. By suggesting we champion adversity rather than allowing it and learning from it, have countless well-intentioned teachers stripped us of our most valuable lessons?

I then thought about what we showcase in our resumes. We highlight our successes, university degrees and achievements, hoping to be seen in the best possible light. We bury or minimize what we view as our trials and failures. Yet, if our goal is to present a global perspective on who we are, and our failures really tell the story more clearly than our cum laudes and awards, we are, ironically, leaving out the best parts of the story.

As a writer, I embrace secrets and untidiness in the lives of the characters I create. In the mid 1990s, I wrote a book manuscript called Splinters. It was about a deeply troubled middle American family, and the title was drawn from the same basic notion chasing me, now, in my dreams--that it's our scars and the shards of life that lodge beneath our skin which tell our story more honestly and rewardingly than the frilly parts.

So, I'm going with Aeschylus, Buddha and the architects of Christianity who believed slogging through the painful crap in life--and letting that be our finest teacher--far preferable to assiduously avoiding suffering through a process of anesthetization.

But if this is such great advice, why don't we heed it as a matter of course?

Because it is freaking difficult. It's making the conscious choice to chew on glass when there is milk and honey at the ready. It's remarkably counter-intuitive. It requires a willed reworking of our natural tendency to shy away from pain and make a dash for the arms of comfort.

What is the longest journey? To me, it is the one from here to enlightenment, to spiritual transformation. And without a costly misstep, or suffering, that journey can never even begin.

A Valentine to my cat. Yes, seriously.

I've always had a thing for animals. But my cat Teddy and I have a particularly good relationship. To be fair, he seems to have a good relationship with nearly everyone, human and animal alike. He got the name "Teddy" at the shelter because his temperament is more Teddy Bear than cat: he's cuddly and extremely tolerant, and seems designed to hug. You could probably put a broad bow around his neck, like an actual Teddy Bear, and he wouldn't object.

Since I'm the human he spends the most time around, I am the prime beneficiary of both Teddy's delightful qualities and his occasional quirks and oddities. (Oddities like his extra-long incisors, which scrape the insides of my elbows when he presses his face in the crook of my arm as we lie on the sofa reading. His teeth leave fine scratches that turn gently, allergically pink before fading.)

Teddy the cat is unflappable and Buddha-calm. You could light a firecracker next to him and he'd barely react, parade a marching band through the room and he's look up, but you wouldn't get more enthusiasm than that. The dogs chase after him, and half-maul him, putting his head in their mouths, slobbering on him and batting him around. Teddy is remarkably permissive, allowing quite a bit of torment before batting the dogs on the nose sharply to dismiss them, sending them yelping off to their crate in the kitchen.

I used to feel badly for Teddy, almost wanting to apologize to him for the indignities he suffers at the dogs' enthusiasm. But he's clearly okay with it. As with everything else in this world, he takes their silliness in stride, sometimes grumbling to me about it briefly in funny cat-talk, but otherwise allowing what is to simply be.

One of the more endearing things he does is purr himself to sleep when he lies curled with me in bed. Whichever way I'm turned, he positions himself in the "be spooned" position, with his spine pressed against my chest and his head tucked under my chin. When I roll over, he climbs over me and reorients himself in a mirror of our slumbering poses a moment before.

At first I didn't understand that the funny sound Teddy made, sometimes for many minutes nonstop, was purring. It sounded metallic and wheezy. I thought it might be asthma, or even pneumonia. I asked the veterinarian about it. He laid a stethoscope on Teddy's chest, listening intently and looking serious for a few moment. Then he smiled, slipped off his stethoscope, and handed Teddy back to me.

"Your cat doesn't have a respiratory problem," Mr. Johnson, the veterinarian told me with a chuckle."He's just unbelievably happy."

I love you, Teddy. You're the best shelter kitty ever.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Dad

Decency Knows No Political Party

I admire anyone who stands up for equality. But I particularly salute those for whom taking a stand is risky and may cost them personally and professionally. It touches my heart that some of the most moving and eloquent advocates for LGBT equality, lately, have come from within the ranks of the GOP.

It's important that we support these courageous people. While nationally we've passed the magic 51% number as far as acceptance (presumably making it a good long-term bet for ANY politician to support us), Republicans still fight uphill within their own party. And coming out in support of LGBT equality can have negative consequences for them at the ballot box and in contributions NOW, in current election cycles.

Meet my hero of the day -- Maureen Walsh, Republican State Senator from Walla Walla. Listen to her beautiful words on the floor of the Washington Senate Tue during that legislative body's debate over same-sex marriage.

And let's remember Maureen, financially and otherwise, when she's up for re-election, whether we typically vote Democrat or Republican. Because decency and justice know no political party.