The Book of Queer Prophets. Группа авторов
perspective, any act of faith can seem an imprisonment. Only those who have already lived behind those bars know that the opposite could just as easily be true, that faith may in fact save you from a more profound imprisonment. Much as I love my new freedom, I can find it vexing and alienating, too confusing, with too much emphasis on the individual at the expense of others. I find myself longing for the easy faith of my childhood. Unlike Amber, I don’t know what it is to learn to love freedom by degrees. I was thrown into it, just as many young queer people of faith were thrown into it against their will, yet unlike the well-adjusted queer Christians I’ve met, I don’t feel like banging on the church’s door to demand re-entry and reform. The last time I attended my father’s church I had to rush to the bathroom to prevent a panic attack. I hated how physically weak it made me, the way I had to squat on the toilet seat so no one would see me, knees trembling. Even in the midst of conversion therapy I’d never betrayed such a moment of weakness. I hadn’t been weak when it really mattered, and I’m still proud of that. I’d gotten out by being strong. But freedom has made me weak. I’ve tasted the air outside, and going back inside for even a second feels claustrophobic. My friend Ashley, who shares a fundamentalist background (many of my close friends belong to this club), refers to church claustrophobia as the Sue Bridehead effect, referencing a character in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure made famous for embracing religious orthodoxy after a lifetime of freethinking. For the majority of the novel, Sue the freethinker is irresistible and alive; at the end of the novel, Sue the saint is off-putting and tragic. Ashley and I both fear an ending like Sue’s – to be suddenly reeled back to fundamentalism after too much freedom. So we remain outside, spellbound by the physical acts of faith we see in the world around us, compelled to draw nearer despite our phantom pain.
Recently, my mother has begun phoning me to talk about her own pain. This pain consumes most of her day and, as a preacher’s wife who often misses Sunday services on account of this, causes her a great deal of stress. Fibromyalgia leads people to experience pain more intensely than others, and anyone unfortunate enough to be diagnosed with this condition must contend with a public that often considers it junk science. My father’s congregants haven’t always believed that her pain is real. Many still don’t.
‘How do I make them believe me when they haven’t felt the pain themselves?’ she says. The question is free of any irony. She really wants to know why a faith community might be incapable of believing in something outside of their own lives.
As my Puritan novel progresses, I tell my father of a recent trip I took to Stockbridge, Massachusetts to do research. My father and I share few interests, so early Church history has become our conversational sweet spot. I tell him of the churches visited, the eighteenth-century houses. But my language is too academic for him. He’s drifting from our talk. Mine is the language of a person no longer living his faith. I don’t mention my husband, Shahab, to him, or the night the two of us spent in an inn converted from an old Shaker mill overlooking a creek, or the happiness we felt as we sat beside the water the next morning in the flimsy plastic chairs that almost tipped over, alive and healthy and relatively young. I don’t tell him that sitting there beside my husband was like church for me, that our partnership has been act of faith that continues to challenge and astound and enrich my life. He’d find all of these details incompatible with the image of the boy he raised. He’d tell me he’d pray for me. If I told him how much it hurts to hold back the details of my life from him, he’d never recognise my pain as real. So after a long silence he asks if I’ve found a church. He asks it in the same tone he used years ago when wanting to know if I had enough money to get by. He asks me this question as if he isn’t the one most responsible for the loss of my faith, as if he’d never inflicted any damage, because, according to him, he was trying to protect me from sin and death. It’s the same voice I hear after a book talk when a well-meaning Christian asks, in a voice filled with earnestness and none of the self-awareness empathy demands, ‘You do know that God still loves you?’
Oh, but I do know, kind Christian. I remember the feeling of being loved so well. I still hear this love in my father’s sermons, which I listen to on occasion via his church’s website. Always there’s a call for repentance near the end, the altar call. Those in despair may find God’s love, always lying in wait for the sinner. No matter how many sermons my father gives, always this call, this plea which feels as though it’s directed at me. No matter how many miles away, I feel the power of this call. I want to walk up the aisle and feel those worshippers’ hands on my back once again and, even if only for a moment, return to my faith. I want to walk into the heart of a dark forest and feel my soul ascend to the plane of unspeakable glory.
I, too, have kissed the water with my trembling lips, but no one has ever cured me.
My queerness is a compass, a spiritual marker:
This way home.
After church, I head home and straight into my bedroom, where I close the door and stare at my black body in the mirror. The pastor spoke of God creating all of us in his image and I wonder how that can be true, as I examine my burgeoning breasts, my expanding hips, the black of my skin. The white girls at school give me looks loud with disgust and the white boys steal stares at my chest. I wonder if this is what the pastor meant: God created us to be examined, pored over, misinterpreted. I turn away from the mirror, confused, with no hope of a clear answer. I’ve long stopped listening to the voice inside my chest that I once thought was God, but which turned out to be an amalgam of every negative thing anyone has ever said to me, forged into a pithy little knife: You are not worthy. I know that isn’t true. Even amid my disenchantment and my confusion, I can see my own beauty and know God would never say such things to his children.
How, then, to reconcile what is said with what is true?
When we look only to those around us to interpret what is written, much is lost. As I look back on my relationship with the Bible and my relationship with God, I now understand why the two have often been in conflict. To look at both literally, as others frequently do, is to miss the point of God altogether. That both are taken literally is seen in the conflict of blackness and queerness. Queerness is seen to sully the black body, the black body to make queerness dirty. To hear people explain to me how my body and my desires fall just outside the bounds of God’s love is to be deafened to the quiet yet persistent voice within that says, You are a triumph. God is an abstraction wrangled into words and stuffed into the cage of pages.
What if we let God run free?
To let God run free, I stepped out of the walls of the Church and into the expansive ministry of my queer black body. My black body is a feat of exquisite engineering. My cocoa-bean skin is a honeytrap for the sun. My wide hips are designed for birthing and for loving. My almond eyes feast and see. My bones and muscles bear the weight of a purpose bigger than myself and carry me forward when I don’t know how. My queerness is numinous and radiant. It connects me to a struggle for liberation that goes far beyond the physical confines of this life, into planes and spaces that I cannot touch or see but that I can feel. My queerness is a compass, a spiritual marker: This way home. Each explains and yet cannot explain the other. Each requires a faith beyond comprehension, a blind trust in futures promised but not always delivered. Each defies literal interpretation, demands to be enjoyed in the abstract.
Isn’t that God?
To centre our ministry in these monuments we call bodies is to then reject a force-fed image of God as man, as white. It is to reject the God beaten into us by the coloniser, and to exorcise a benevolent white Jesus sacrificing himself on the cross for the sins of the brown people. It is to sing praises for calloused hands and beating hearts, to recognise the spirituality inherent in survival and to see God glisten in sun-kissed skin. It is to look in the mirror with awe, to worship at the altar of our ancestors and to call forth a gospel that sings from parched throats raw