“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy if anything can.”
~ Thomas Merton in a letter to Dorothy Day
About five years ago, I began learning to love people who are gay. I wasn’t good at loving gay folks before that, mostly because I hadn’t taken the time to really get to know any gay folks. I had acquaintanceships but no friendships. While as an editor I was willing to take on issues like human trafficking and pornography, it felt a lot safer not to take on the issue of sexual diversity, especially sexual diversity in the church!
Most people are scaredy cats. Some of us are afraid to take a stand, preferring to stay on the sidelines and hoping for the best. Some of us are afraid of offending, so we cater to those around us and never really figure out who we are, what we believe, or why. Others of us attempt to overcome our fears by taking control, raising our voices, and making sure everyone knows how we feel—and why we’re right—about everything.
Of course, God has given us a prescription to combat our fear—perfect love! Yet we often don’t appreciate, trust, or even give a try to the remedy. But God is gracious.
When I moved with my family into an urban neighborhood 16 years ago, I harbored visions of our home as a central gathering place for kids. We’d have an open-door policy, and all would be welcome—the latchkey kids, the troubled kids, the loners, the losers, the brokenhearted. In these visions the windows of our home emitted a Thomas Kincaidian glow, and love was triumphant.
Then the kids came over—in droves. Real kids, loud kids, sassy kids, some of whom had absolutely no training in what I believed to be “proper behavior” for a visit to a neighbor’s house.” They climbed on the furniture, explored the refrigerator, raided the fruit bowl. At first I was too afraid to say anything lest they feel unwelcome. Then I became angry. Spiritual arteriosclerosis set in, and eventually I ended up screaming shrilly (was that my voice?) at a big group of kids out in my yard, “Get off my property!” (Neighbors down the street heard me and phoned to commiserate.) I felt humiliated, defeated, and distinctly unchristian.
Then I stumbled on something else by Thomas Merton that hit home (quite literally) and that I have never forgotten. A firm believer in the art of hospitality, Merton wrote that when we invite someone into our home, we must not hide our values, convictions, or way of living. If we do, we are offering our guests a kind of ghost house from which the true spirit of the owner has been withdrawn.
My reluctance to share with the neighborhood kids my expectations not only prevented them from knowing their hostess but also resulted in them becoming unwelcome in my home. My desire to be “nice” robbed them of the opportunity to learn about me and robbed all of us (initially, anyway) of the chance to enjoy a mutual embrace. I not only hid who I was but I also lacked the kind of curiosity about my guests that would have helped me better understand where they were coming from.
My desire to be “nice” robbed all of us of the chance to enjoy a mutual embrace.
This is applicable to other kinds of hospitality as well. Many of us are afraid to let “outsiders” in—sometimes because we fear offending them with our views, sometimes because we don’t want our neat little world to be altered or challenged in any way. But inviting those with differing theological and/or sexual orientations into our hearts does not require us to relinquish who we are. However, it does require a certain amount of stretching and inconvenience. We need to move the furniture around to make room for our guests; we’ll need to offer up for scrutiny what’s in our fruit bowl. We need to ask questions and try to see things through the lens of their experience. We’ll be challenged to relinquish the labels that have helped us keep certain people at a safe distance. We may want to hold on to our right to be “right,” but that is simply incompatible with hospitality, love, and unity.
Remember Jesus’ prayer that “they may all be one, Father, even as you and I are one”? We can’t genuinely have unity unless we practice hospitality, and we can’t practice hospitality without giving up some of our own idols of control and “correct theology.” When we open our hearts to others, life gets messy. Sometimes both the fruit and the furniture begin to migrate in ways we never could have anticipated. This is called growth. God loves us enough to allow us to experience this discomfort.
In 2012 I attended for the first time the annual conference put on by the Gay Christian Network (now Q Christian Fellowship). Although I’d been in active dialogue with gay Christians for about a year by that time, this was still uncharted territory for me. Worshiping God with 400 gay people, I was struck by the beauty, faith, and joy that filled the room. I heard the stories of Christians who know something of God’s grace that I have not yet been forced to discover. I reveled in the diversity of the Christian gay community and spoke with dozens of believers who told me, “I just want to serve God; whatever God wants for me is what I want for me.” I was deeply moved by the creativity, intelligence, and graciousness of the leadership.
But when the largely pro-same-sex-relationship crowd gave a standing ovation to a speaker who made it clear she does not believe God approves of same-sex relationships (but was advocating for and loving gay folks anyway), I knew I was on holy ground. Talk about hospitality! As tears flowed down my face, a straight woman standing near me grabbed my arm and said, “There’s going to be a revival in the church, and it’s going to start in the gay community.” If she had said that to me even a day earlier I would have said she was crazy. But on that day, I believed her. And I still do. We have so much to learn from gay Christians as they wrestle authentically with their faith and their sexuality in ways that most of us will never have to.
We have so much to learn from gay Christians as they wrestle authentically with their faith and their sexuality in ways that most of us will never have to.
How (and whether) the larger church deals with this community will say much about the resiliency, vitality, and relevance of the body of Christ in today’s world. Will we embody Christ for our gay brothers and sisters, loving and encouraging them regardless of how we read the Bible? Will we listen to and learn from them? Will we lay down our litmus-tests (and our need to be “right”) and love them as Christ does?
Kristyn Komarnicki has gained so much from having her beliefs and assumptions challenged that she is finally learning to relinquish her need to be right. One of her favorite TED Talks is by “wrongologist” Kathryn Schultz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (HarperCollins, 2011).
CSA’s Oriented to Love dialogues, which help Jesus-lovers from a wide variety of sexual/gender orientations and theological convictions to listen to (and learn from) each other in love, are offered multiple times a year.
