Articles & Papers

DEALING WITH DIVERSITY: Confessions, Convictions, and Commitments

By Toinette M. Eugene
Originally published in Open Hands, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Winter 1996)

To deal with diversity is to accept an open invitation to be as inclusive as possible in developing welcoming and reconciling communities of faith. To deal with diversity is to enter into covenantal choices that can bind us together as congregations whose confessions, convictions, and commitments honor the differences which enhance us as uniquely Christian human beings. “Dealing with diversity” is a lifestyle that renews us in ways that lift us out of the status quo and into the sacred spaces where we know ourselves to be transformed and transforming in an era which desperately needs conversion and change.

Confessions

True confessions are good for the soul. They are vitally important for the religious community as we reclaim identity and integrity in an era when complicity and conspiracy are symbolic of the sickness and sinfulness of our American society. What we seem to have lost is something as simple as respect—for each other, for the earth, and for the kind of values that could hold us together. Most of the social, economic, and political issues we now face have a spiritual core. Rapidly changing demographics and our ingrained habits of racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism will create increasing cultural polarization unless we begin to confess our common humanity and equality as children of God. The insatiable momentum of our consumerism will ultimately poison both our environment and our hearts unless we learn to confess and to reclaim our right relationship to the earth, its diverse cultures and peoples, and its abundance.

Because I deal and struggle with diversity in painful and poignant ways every day of my life—not because I want to but because I have to—I need to begin by confessing who I am as well as who I want to be. I confess that my significant academic degrees were received, and my dissertation was written, in the School of Hard Knocks. As Zora Neale Hurston (premier African American anthropologist and “rumored to be lesbian” author in the literary era of the Harlem Renaissance) would say, “Ah done been in sorrow’s kitchen and ah licked de pots clean.”1

How many of us can confess to this? Can we say with conviction that we know the taste of disappointment, despair, deprivation delivered only and intentionally because of religious denomination, race, class, gender, or sexual orientation? Can we taste it? Can we smell it? Can we feel it? Can we choose to be in solidarity with it? That means taking it up—the way one reverently picks up a fallen flag...or takes up an old rugged cross.

I confess that even saying this makes me feel a little uncomfortable. I feel more than a little bit like one of the old ladies of my home church, a black Roman Catholic Church in Oakland, California. Whenever I go home to preach, I greet the Mothers of the Church, those wizened and wise old women who have grown down and smaller with the passing of the years because they have borne the heat and the burden of the day. I look forward to an exchange with Mother Camille who always says to me, “Why, Chil’, Girl, how you all doin’?” and I say, “Well—just fine, Mother Camille. And how ‘bout you?” And she looks me in the eye, and she says with a straight face, “Why, Baby, I’m somewhere between ‘Lord, Have Mercy!’ and ‘Thank You, Jesus!’”

As I seek to say something about “Dealing with Diversity,” the oppressions and ideologies of dominance, the abuse of power, privilege, and the abuse of persons which universally occurs within the interstices of sexism and heterosexism, of racism and classism, of rampant consumerism and capitalism, I confess that I am somewhere closer to “Lord, Have Mercy” than I am to “Thank You, Jesus.”

I need to confess that I am black and that I am also by birth and academic training and denominational tradition, a western Christian. Because of that, I have inherited—and sometimes even handed on like bread gone stale—the pernicious dualism that western Christianity has held sacred between sex and God, between sexuality and spirituality, body and spirit, pleasure and goodness. By literally splitting us in two, the dominant ideology of western Christian culture has rendered us flattened facsimiles of fully human beings. We have been stripped—spiritually, physically, emotionally, and intellectually—of our capacities to delight in ourselves, one another, the creation, and its holy wellsprings. Lord, have mercy!

I confess that I am a self–avowed Catholic Christian, a black, lesbian woman, made in the image and likeness of a mighty good God. I confess that because of who I am and whose I am, like Zora, I am no longer concerned about whether some folk count me “out” or “in” the official ranks of the church or the academy, or of polite or politically correct seminary faculty, or within the fold of respected civic society. My primary interest, spiritually and intellectually, is in empowering people—beginning with myself—to live a life that is characterized by justice/love, in mutuality, in right relationship.2 Thank you, Jesus!

In dealing with diversity, in reaching for the reconciliation of God’s people, I confess that I must be accountable with and to those others who are also committed to justice/love for all. I may not always live out this value evenly or very well. Most of us do not. But the commitment is honest and strong. The promise that draws me to people who seek justice/love is that they will remind me that, even when I believe I am being so inclusive in my work, inadvertently someone is usually being left out because of my limitations. To that extent, I am helping hold unjust power in place even in my honest outpourings for justice/love. I confess that I need to be more inclusive still. Lord, have mercy!

Finally, I confess that I am able to stand more closely in solidarity with those whose radical politics and spirituality I have come to trust: those who know that we meet the Sacred in relation to one another and who understand that any power that we or others use in ways that are not mutually empowering is abusive. I look to such radical women and men, of whatever color, religion, class, sexual preference or orientation, to confirm in me a joyful commitment to live responsibly in this world. Thank you, Jesus!

Dealing with diversity means more than just welcoming or recruiting people of color. It means dealing with and honoring human differences, confronting the racism, classism, elitism, and liturgical literalism that limits our pro–action and reaction. It means dealing with whatever limits our ability to listen longer than we claim our right to speak. It requires the confession that “It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, Oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer!” Lord, have mercy!

Community Query

1. What do we need to confess?

Convictions

Because of my confessions, I stand convicted, not as a criminal, but by the love of God for me and for all who struggle to deal with diversity, to honor diversity, to utilize diversity as a way to enter joyfully and completely into the kindom of God. To be convicted is to be convinced, to be sure, to know that the truth (though it may make us weary) can also set us free (Jn 8:32)! I have three convictions about the ways members of different races, ages, classes–people who are also gay, lesbian, and bisexual–can lead us in our struggles to deal with diversity as we seek mutuality, long for equality, and work for justice/love.

Conviction 1: Sexuality is relative. It is more than coincidence that the gay, lesbian, and bisexual liberation movement is occurring in a time and culture which is passing from a scientific myth of Newtonian absoluteness to that of Einsteinian relativity. There is a relativity about sexuality that is not well served by those who, like Newton, feel they can confidently know the unbending "laws" of nature. Plato (working out of a Newtonian world view) said that homosexuality was unnatural because animals "didn’t do it." However, Plato did not know what animals naturally do and not do sexually. Two prophetic gifts from the gay, lesbian, and bisexual community will be to teach humility to those who presume to know exactly what is and is not "natural" and to teach that what is natural varies with different groups, cultures, racial/ethnic values, and traditions. Sameness does not necessarily bring about solidarity or satisfactory solutions.

Members of different races, ages, classes—people who are also gay, lesbian, and bisexual—can lead us in our struggles to deal with diversity

As Alfred North Whitehead (working out of an Einsteinian world view) put it, "the laws of nature develop together with societies which constitute an epoch."3 Part of the Einsteinian epoch we are moving into will be an acceptance of the relativity of sexual lifestyles. With this acceptance, a new awareness will occur: The essence of human sexuality is in establishing faithful relationships and in the quality of right relationships, not in absolutist laws and principles a la Newton. Meister Eckhart (the medieval mystic) taught that "relation is the essence of a thing."4 This relational spirituality corresponds beautifully with Einstein's teaching on the scientific theory of relativity.

Conviction 2: Faith is built on right relationships, not self-righteous institutions. Because lesbians, gay men, and bisexual persons have not been widely welcomed into ecclesiastical institutions, those who have remained have had to look beyond institutions for answers to our questions of faith: What matters? Does anything matter? A well of creativity can be tapped from persons who have learned to live marginally in institutions. They could be a powerful force in revitalizing very stolid institutions.

Conviction 3: Difference is a basis for creativity. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual persons stand as witnesses to how people can indeed be creatively different and equal. As minority people, (the "Poor of Yahweh," known in the Old Testament as "anawim"5), they have the potential to be more creative because they have touched nothingness in their being emptied and because they have been made painfully aware of their being different. The recovery of the body as spirit and the reclaiming of a more sensual spirituality and a less product–oriented love are particular gifts of the gay, lesbian, and bisexual community to the church at large. By not splitting body and soul and by not equating sexuality exclusively with procreation (as Augustine did), they allow for the energies of the Spirit to flow once again. They overcome dualisms that neither Jesus nor the prophets ever imagined, allowing passion in its proper place so that compassion might be born. By removing sexual expression from the dominant culture's productive motif, as if sexual love needs to be justified by having babies, they—like the author of the Song of Songs—can teach our society and churches to pause long enough to savor life and its divine delights.

If it is true, as Gutierrez writes, that "the spirituality of liberation will have as its basis the spirituality of the anawim,"6 then the issue of First and Third World liberation, of feminist, womanist, mujerista, and male liberation, of North American as well as Latin American liberation, of white as well as black, brown, red liberation cannot be joined without the sexual anawim being listened to. When a society can allow for differences, it will–as historian John Boswell demonstrates the medieval church did–celebrate creative rejuvenation because of the presence of the anawim people in its midst. Perhaps it is not too late to begin to listen to those who represent the anawim in our midst.

Community Query

2. Of what do we stand convicted?

Commitments

Having made my confessions and named my convictions, I next must offer my commitments. Commitments, promises, covenants, and communities develop best in the context of gratitude and thanksgiving for all that is and for all that might be in a future full of hope (Jer 29:11). In a spirit of gratitude to the members of the lesbian, gay, and bisexual community, I offer five commitments as we seek to deal with diversity as welcoming congregations.7

Commitment 1: To be in solidarity with the homosexual and bisexual members of welcoming congregations because you have been teaching us in the church “a hermeneutic of suspicion.” For far too long the church and its academy has been uncritical of its own assumptions in doing theology. However, anawim people, the faithful diverse and different ones so loved by God, have been teaching us a more healthfully suspicious theology. Those of us who are "different" in race, in sexual orientation, and in downwardly mobile class diversity, have taught us, for example, to distrust sincerity as a validating criterion for theology. Some of us used to think that when some Christians found homosexuality contrary to God's will on biblical grounds, their sincere use of the scriptures should be respected, even if we disagreed with their conclusions. Some of us have come to believe that this is like saying that when white folk sincerely ground in the Bible their convictions that persons of color are inferior, we ought to respect that sincerity. Even the Southern Baptist Convention is getting over that old colorphobic chestnut!8 Sincerity and elaborate uses of scripture are no guarantee of freedom from homophobia or of racism. We are, all of us, afflicted with those diseases. Anawim folk have taught us to be more creatively suspicious as well as subversive in doing theology.

Commitment 2: To be in solidarity with gay, lesbian, and bisexual brothers and sisters because you have made the church more aware of its Christian tradition. For example, in pressing the question of blessing unions, you have made some of us more aware of our frequent errors in understanding the Christian tradition of marriage. So many have thought that clergy actually perform marriages and that churches have a special power to create a valid marriage. This is not so. Some of you have reminded the church that only the covenant of two persons with each other and with God creates a union. The church has the opportunity to bless, celebrate, and support a union. However, it is the covenanting process that creates a marriage, not the church or the clergy or a wedding service or a license. That applies to gay and lesbian unions as much as it does to those of heterosexual people.

Commitment 3: To be in solidarity with the folk who emanate out of the homosexual and bisexual margins of our almost monocultural western Christianity because you have shown us a bigger church than the one we once knew. In quantitative size, this anawim group is a statistical minority. However, in qualitative size, we are no minority because we are large and making the church larger. We have had many reasons and many occasions to vote with our feet and leave the church. Yet we have stayed because we believe that the gospel is for everyone. We have stayed because we still bear the hope that the church might be yet larger in stature, larger in the size of its soul, bigger in its integrity, greater in its ability to entertain a rich variety of persons, fuller in its strength of spirit to enable all people to realize their destiny to freedom, uniqueness, and worth. I thank God for this revelation and vision of a bigger church.

Sacred clowns–God’s anawim people–do things backwards!

Commitment 4: To commit to, and thank God for, members of the homosexual and bisexual communities who have chosen to become sacred clowns. There is an ancient tradition of the sacred clown—indeed, of Christ as a clown.9 And in the Native American tradition, the heyoehkah (sometimes negatively described as the berdache) were sacred clowns, honored in the tribe for their important and special functions of healing, and for their work as shamans.10 They were those in the tribe who did things differently, who challenged people's thinking and shook them up, who kept them from becoming rigid. They were called "contraries" because they did some things backward, did things contrary to what others considered normal. I thank God that we have been shown by anawim people, in their contrariness, a heyoehkah response to AIDS. When the so–called normal response was fear and panic, sacred clowns danced backward and responded with love and compassion. When the world was talking about dying with AlDS, you were helping people to live with AIDS. When the "normal" response was to isolate, you drew people into community. When most people said that AlDS is not about us, but about "them," you said, "This is about us all; our whole planet is sick and has acquired an immune dysfunction." I thank you for dancing the dance of the sacred clowns.

Commitment 5: To lift up the power and potential of liberating love to heal us all of our limitations, to forgive us of our sins, to reconcile us to ourselves, to God, and to the “other,” whoever and however different from us they may be. H.L. Mencken once described the Puritan as the one who deep down had a nagging sense that some people, somewhere, might be enjoying themselves. Well, I have a nagging sense that all of us are sinners. All of us are broken and need healing. Our sin, however, does not lie in living out our sexuality or in our particular sexual orientations, whatever they may be, but in our estrangement from love. My final commitment in dealing with diversity is to reiterate and to reinforce the need for all of us to find prophetic, radical, subversive ways to live and love in right relationships, with justice/love, wherever we are.

Community Queries

3. What are our commitments?

4. How shall we respond?

Liberating justice/love can teach us and comfort us in our efforts to deal with diversity, with confessions, with convictions, and with commitment. Carter Heyward insists that:

• To say “I love you” is to say that you are not mine, but rather your own.
• To love you is to advocate your rights, your space, your self, and to struggle with you, rather than against you, in our learning to claim our power in the world....
• To love you is to be pushed by a power/God both terrifying and comforting, to touch and be touched by you. To love you is to sing with you, cry with you, pray with you, and act with you to re-create the world.
• To say “I love you” means—let the revolution begin!...11

Source

This article is adapted from a longer speech given at the Fourth National Convocation of Reconciling Congregations, July 13-16, 1995, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Copyright 1995 by Open Hands. Original speech is available on videotape from RCP. 312/736-5526.

Notes

1 For rumor, see Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), p. 88. For quote, see Mary Helen Washington, “Zora Neale Hurston: A Woman Half in Shadow,” I Love Myself When I am Laughing …And Then Again When I am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, Alice Walker, ed., (New York: Feminist, 1979), p. 19.

2 The terms justice/love, mutuality, and right relationship are richly expanded upon by Carter Heyward in Touching Our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989).

3 Cited in Donald W. Sherburne, A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 93.

4 See Matthew Fox, Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart Creation Spirituality in New Translation (Garden City: Doubleday, Image, 1980); and Fox, Meditations with Meister Eckhart (Santa Fe: Bear, 1982).

5 See A. Gelin, The Poor of Yahweh (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1953). Also Ps 9:18; 82:3-4; and Zeph 3:12.

6 Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, trans. Sr. Caridad Inda and John Eagleston (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1973), p. 207f.

7 This list is derived and adapted from James B. Nelson, “I Thank God for You: A Sermon for Lesbian and Gay Awareness Week at United Theological Seminary,” in James B. Nelson, Body Theology (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1992), pp. 183-189.

8 See “The Era of Collective Repentance,” U. S. News and World Report, July 3, 1995, pp. 10-11, and “SBC renounces racist past,” Christian Century, July 5-12, 1995, pp. 671-672, for reports on apology offered by the largest Protestant body for “condoning individual and systematic racism in our lifetime,” a scene strikingly reminiscent of the apology four years ago by the Dutch Reformed Church to black South Africans for having provided religious justification for apartheid. Archbishop Desmond Tutu accepted that apology.

9 Henri J. M. Nouwen, Clowning in Rome: Reflections on Solitude, Celibacy, Prayer, and Contemplation (Garden City: Image, 1979).

10 Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon, 1992), pp. 197-200.

11 Carter Heyward, Our Passion for Justice (New York: Pilgrim, 1984), p. 93.

Toinette M. Eugene, Ph.D., is an associate professor of Christian social ethics at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary and a member of the graduate faculty of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

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