Our Bodies, Our Souls, Ourselves Pt II

Note: This is part II of a devotional homily I wrote for a queer Christian retreat.






“Whatever other reasons we have for coming to such a place, if we come also to give each other our love and to give God our love, then together with Gabriel and Michael, and the fat parson, and Sebastian pierced with arrows, and the old lady whose teeth don’t fit, and Teresa in her ecstasy, we are the communion of saints.” - Frederick Buechner





“But God has composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” -1st Corinthians 12:21-27





As loving members of the Body of Christ, how then are we to live? And what do we as LGBTQ+ Christians have to uniquely offer to our brothers and sisters, both in the church and outside of the church? In thinking about these questions, I am reminded of the words and witness of the saints. The term “saint” has often been obscured by debates between denominations, but at its core, the saints are simply the body of Christ throughout the ages and today. The church often focuses on particular holy people from the past who did great things for God, but we are also a part of the great story of God’s redeeming work in the world. We are all the communion of saints as we seek to bring about God’s Kingdom on earth.





In working to become our best selves, we can be inspired by one another. Each of us has different gifts to bring to the table. Each gift is essential. In another passage, Buechner suggests that “the grace of God means something like, ‘Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are, because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.’” I deeply believe that this grace holds true at every level of our being. God has created us with our unique identities (sexuality, gender, race, background, etc). And God has also created each of us as an irreplaceable soul. When we can bring our best selves to the work of helping one another, we are joined in spirit and in action by those who have come before us. So many followers of Christ who, like us, chose to live their faith boldly into action. We have a lot in common with those saints, perhaps more than we realize. Like the Apostles, we have each been called by name to follow Jesus and “to proclaim good news to the poor”. Like the early Christians, many of us have weathered persecution and emerged stronger than ever. Like the holy hermits, we continually pray in love for one another. Like the theologians and doctors of the church, we are unveiling the endless Mysteries of God’s truth and grace in ways that the church has never seen before. As emerging saints and members of the Body of Christ, we will stand together, guided by the love of God and supported by one another. And it is my hope and trust that we will not rest until all of humanity is brought to God’s loving table, where everyone will be given an equal part in the Kingdom, where we can all rejoice in the God-given beauty of our souls and selves.

Our Bodies, Our Souls, Ourselves Part I

Note: The following is the first part of a devotional homily/series I wrote for a queer Christian retreat





An Invocation to the Holy Spirit


(St. Symeon the New Theologian)


Come, true light.


Come, life eternal.


Come, hidden mystery.


Come, treasure without name.


Come, reality beyond all words.


Come, person beyond all understanding.


Come, rejoicing without end.


Come, light that knows no evening.


Come, unfailing expectation of the saved.


Come, raising of the fallen.


Come, resurrection of the dead.


Come, all-powerful, for unceasingly you create,


refashion and change all things by your will alone.


Come, for your name fills our hearts with longing,


and is ever on our lips.


Come, for you are yourself the desire that is within me.


Come, my breath and my life.


Come, the consolation of my humble soul.


Come, my joy, my glory, my endless delight.





“By this everyone will know you are my disciples, if you love one another”


-John 13:35






“The strangeness of the phrase ‘To make love’ strikes me now and reminds me of that aphorism of St. John of the Cross, ‘Where there is no love, put love and you will find love.’”


-Dorothy Day, “The Long Loneliness”





Let’s talk about incarnation. In the grand sense, the term is most often used to talk about Jesus coming to earth. God became flesh, took on a body, and dwelled (the Greek term σκηνοω means roughly “to pitch a tent”) among us. But I think there is value also in reflecting on how we are also embodied people who are incarnate of God. The Church has sometimes undermined the value of the human body in service of honoring “spiritual” things over “worldly” things. In the midst of this rhetoric, it can be easy to forget that God created our bodies, and God has called them “very good”. Even through our human failings and sin, we remain as image-bearers of the God of the universe. Christ’s birth into a human body made our bodies radiant. By living through each stage of human life and death, Jesus renewed the cycle of human living and infused it with God’s divinity. By rising from the dead, He destroyed the power of death and sin in our lives.





This truly good news has a lot of implications, but I want to focus on a few in particular. How might this more holistic view of the body help us live together in relationships? Dorothy Day, a Catholic activist, writes, “We have all known the long loneliness, and we have learned that the only solution is love”. John Zizioulas, a contemporary Orthodox theologian, talks about love as the core of our being: “True being comes only from the free person, from the person who loves freely - that is, who freely affirms [their] being, [their] identity, by means of an event of communion with other persons.” Love comes in many forms, from platonic to romantic/sexual and all the shades in between. The witness of creation and Jesus coming to earth suggest to me that not only are we deeply loved by our Creator, but that we are created for love. As body and soul combined, we are blessed to support each other through love expressed in many ways. Physical affection, emotional intimacy, spiritual sharing. One of my favorite things about our community is that we are on the whole not afraid to be physically affectionate with one another. I think we have a lot of love to give to a world that is so often scarred by loneliness. Honoring each other’s God-given bodies and personhood, we can begin to reach out across the space between our souls and embrace one another with God’s love.

Metanoia, Privilege and the Activist Faithful

So I've had some thoughts rattling around my head about how I as a person of faith can better integrate my spiritual side and my activist side, and I thought I would try and arrange them in order on the page in case they're helpful to anyone else.

With that in mind, let's talk about privilege. First and foremost, I acknowledge that as a cisgender white male, I am probably the least qualified to point out where I benefit from societal privilege and racism. But because I believe it is especially important for those of us "on top" (so to speak) to acknowledge our complicity, I'm going to try anyway.

Privilege, as many know, is something most white people have to some degree (some obviously more than others). I have privilege by being white in a country where people of color continue to be subject to injustices and prejudice. I have privilege by being male in a culture that gives better opportunities and the benefit of the doubt to men. I have privilege as a cisgender person in a society that hyper-regulates necessary resources for trans people and only consistently upholds the identities of cis people. Common wisdom says that privilege is a reality we as people who benefit from systems of oppression need to acknowledge and work to dismantle where we can. At the same time, we need to recognize that until we reach a perfect society, we will always in some ways be privileged and profit from other people's pain, whether we want to or not.

To a certain extent, everyone has to simply grapple with their privilege and make the conscious decision to accept it, push aside any feelings of guilt and figure out what to do next. But it occurs to me that for those of us who identify with a faith tradition, there may be resources to help us come to terms with the process.

In the Orthodox Christian tradition, there's a strong emphasis on the concept of metanoia ("meh-TAH-nee-ah"). This word is frequently translated as "repentance", but it has a deeper meaning that that word doesn't quite encapsulate. At its core, metanoia is a change of the nous, the mind/heart perceptive part of the self that deals with self-image and understanding of human and divine identities. We are encouraged to change our hearts and minds, not just by apologizing for sin, but also by making steps towards a greater change in our lives.

It occurs to me that this may be a useful way of looking at privilege and the process of dismantling privilege. Metanoia is a never-ending process, a process which leads us into theosis ("The-OH-sis"), or divinization. By transforming our hearts, we become more and more like God until we are charged with God's Energy and light, becoming both our truest selves and in a small way, gods ourselves. Like metanoia, theosis is a never-ending process. Perfection is not static, but dynamic. As such, there is no "end point" where we will be perfect and unable to change, but rather a pattern of growth and movement towards greater goodness.

To that end, when we as privileged activists are at times discouraged by how we play into unjust systems, I think it may be helpful for us to think of growth as an ongoing process. We can never completely "get rid of" our privilege, just as we can never become perfect people with no room for change. But as we engage in our own transformation and lift each other up, we can begin to break down our biases and shortcomings, our flaws and the things that keep us from participating in the process of justice.