Brene Brown – Peculiar Faith

The Freedom to Belong

“For freedom Christ has set us free.”

That wonderful declaration from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians (5:1) sounds like it was crafted precisely for this July Fourth holiday weekend—an ancient religious endorsement of Independence Day!

The lectionary assigned that text for the last Sunday in June, which for many is also LGBTQ Pride Sunday. Would Paul have endorsed that celebration, too?

“For freedom,” Paul says, “Christ has set us free. “

Whatever Paul meant by “freedom,” I doubt he was thinking about armed revolution against a monarch or living as sexual libertines. He certainly would not encourage us merely to do whatever we want; after all, always following the whims of a fickle desire is just another form of enslavement (as anyone recovering from substance abuse would quickly note).

I’m imagining Paul had a very particular kind of freedom in mind, the freedom God embodies in Jesus, which God likewise calls the Church to embody through the power of the Holy Spirit: it’s the freedom to love without fear; to embrace others without anxiety; to live with an abundance of grace, and laughter, and joy without ever worrying whether or not there will be enough.

Paul would not have imagined a life without constraint whatsoever and instead probably thought of “freedom” as more like a capacity, the ability to receive the abundant life that God intends for all. In that sense, spiritual practice is in large measure a process of decluttering, of clearing out space for that life, removing whatever stands in its way or blocks us from even seeing it. That’s the work of the Holy Spirit—freeing up room for God’s own life in us.

For that kind of freedom, Paul says, Christ has set us free.

Being “set free” for the sake of “freedom” does seem a bit redundant—unless we are not yet free to follow freedom. Many years of trying to live faithfully as a Christian has shown me how certain cultural assumptions usually interrupt the divine flow of love and grace: assuming, for example, that I must earn abundant life by working at it; or insisting that the harder I work for it the more of it I deserve; or worrying that others might steal it; or imagining that I’m surrounded by rivals and thieves whose very existence poses a constant threat.

These common assumptions keep me shackled, holding me back from the freedom to live—for freedom I must be set free.

I noticed this a bit more clearly by pondering what else the lectionary assigned for that same Sunday from Luke’s account of the Gospel. It seems to me that the “cultural assumptions” I just named are lurking around that unsettling story from Luke (9:51-62).

Luke opens a tiny first-century window in that story on a longstanding ethnic hostility between Judeans and Samaritans. Those first-century characters usually framed their hostility as a religious conflict—Judeans were constantly critiquing the Samaritans for not worshiping properly; this was so irritating to the Samaritans that they apparently refused to receive Jesus in their village.

This moment qualifies as a bit more than mere “irritation”; two disciples of Jesus, James and John, actually want to call down fire from Heaven to consume that village!

As often happens, naming a conflict as “religious” usually masks something deeper—religious rivals often emerge from a stubborn anxiety about one’s own goodness and worthiness: I can’t feel good about myself unless I feel bad about you; to live with confidence as divinely favored, others must live as divine exclusions.

It takes a lot of work to sustain those distinctions. Eventually, the time and energy required to maintain a system of the “favored” and the “excluded” builds up, breaks down, or explodes.

Just such a moment happened quite dramatically on a late June night in 1969 at the Stonewall Inn in New York City. It was a moment of protest that marked a turning point for what became known as “gay liberation.” When I first learned about that moment, I imagined people who look mostly like me carrying posters in a parade; that’s not what happened.

On that night fifty-six years ago drag queens of color and homeless gay youth fought back against the humiliating brutality of New York City police officers at a gay bar. The rage had been building for decades, and it finally blew up. Those brown and black drag queens actually ripped parking meters right out of the sidewalk and refused to be arrested yet one more time just because of who they were.

That’s a powerful image of being liberated from shame and embracing one’s own God-given dignity—and that’s why we now celebrate a whole month dedicated to Pride.

“For freedom,” Paul says, “Christ has set us free.”

Roughly five years ago, a gay activist by the name of Alexander Leon posted an observation on social media that very quickly went viral; it resonated so deeply with so many of us—thousands of people started reposting it.

Paraphrasing his insight, Leon noted that queer people “don’t grow up as ourselves.” We grow up playing a version of ourselves, a role on stage that sacrifices authenticity to reduce the risk of humiliation and violence. “The massive task of our adult lives,” Leon notes, “is to identify which parts of ourselves are truly us, and which parts we created for our own protection.”

Let’s be sure not to stumble over the word “queer” in Leon’s insight; that word does not refer only to those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. It can refer to anyone who recognizes a mismatch between inner-self and outer-world—hasn’t everyone felt that at least once? Some of us feel it every day.

LGBT people have illuminated these dynamics of modern life in which we try so hard to fit in that we scarcely even know who we really are. Conformity for the sake of safety is soul-killing—and this was James Baldwin’s point back in the 1960s when he referred to the notion of “double consciousness squared,” the complexities of not only living as a gay man in straight culture but also as a Black man in white America.

These complex dynamics take not only time to untangle but also a community of care in which to do it. For LGBT people, finding a safe religious space to do that work feels like a miracle—quite seriously, miraculous. Religion, after all, is what prompted so many of us to adopt safety mechanisms in the first place, just to survive.

So even though St. Paul would not have understood “Pride month,” he would surely endorse whatever it takes to liberate ourselves from merely surviving, even just “fitting in,” and instead living for the kind of freedom that makes room for the fruits of the Spirit.

Those fruits were also part of the passage from Paul’s letter to the Galatians on Pride Sunday, and they include what seems far too often overlooked in movements of social change: joy.

Everyone needs not only a community of care for the arduous and lifelong process of unlearning and truly embracing who we are, but also a community of joy. It’s actually impossible to be joyful when you’re trying to “fit in”; joy springs instead from belonging, from the conviction that one truly belongs for exactly who they are.

This, it seems to me, makes LGBTQ Pride Month much more than only “welcoming the formerly excluded.” Creating and sustaining a genuinely inclusive community of faith offers a compelling witness to the wider world of that crucial difference between “fitting in” and “belonging”—and thank you, Brene Brown, for that compelling distinction!

Most of us learn very early on what it takes to “fit in”—usually hiding aspects of ourselves that we think others won’t like, or that we’ve been told are unacceptable. Belonging, by contrast, is being loved for exactly who we are, and knowing it.

Belonging sets us free to show up as we are and to learn how to love others in the same way. Belonging to Christ Jesus, Paul says, enables us to live like that, fruitfully, in the Spirit, with love, joy, peace, kindness, and generosity.

Here’s what I think Pride Sunday urges: do not waste any more time, not one single minute, on trying to “fit in.” Life is far too short for that and we don’t have the time for it.

Instead, let’s pour that energy into creating a communities where all of us can learn how to belong to each other, with love and for joy; this alone would take us quite a long way down the road toward the world’s healing, and not a moment too soon.

So, stand firm, Paul says, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

For freedom Christ has set us free.

“There is Joy in the Presence of Jesus,” Rebecca Brogan

Shameless Living and the Sign of the Serpent

John does something very strange in the otherwise very familiar third chapter of his account of the Gospel. What John does is so strange that most people just skip right over it on their way to what is likely the most well-known verse in the entire Bible—John 3:16 (which we can still see people holding up on placards in football stadiums).

For God does indeed love the world, as the sixteenth verse declares, and yet in the two verses before that one, John’s Jesus refers to his own death on a cross by comparing himself favorably to a serpent, and for the sake of life.

The research I did on this strange passage more than fifteen years ago turned out to be life-changing for me. It shaped my second book (Divine Communion: A Eucharistic Theology of Sexual Intimacy), and I am convinced that this passage holds the key to the kind of healing love the world today so desperately needs.

Some textual sleuthing is in order to get to the heart of the matter here, and that involves taking some steps back into the Hebrew Bible—back to the equally strange story of Moses in the desert that many Christians heard this past Sunday in concert with the passage from John. And then back further still to the Garden of Eden in Genesis.

That’s the textual trail I tried to map from the pulpit this past Sunday, the fourth in Lent. And the image that ties all of it together is of course the serpent.

In ancient Mediterranean societies, the symbol of a serpent enjoyed multiple and interwoven meanings. A serpent sometimes symbolized eternity, with depictions of a snake eating its own tail to signal the circularity of infinite time. Serpents could also symbolize healing, as the shedding of a snake’s skin signified the promise of renewal.

These ancient societies also knew very well that snakes can be dangerous and deadly. That mix—whether of danger and healing, of both risk and renewal—that mix shows up in the old aphorism about how to soothe the effects of a hangover—what you need is a “hair from the dog that bit you.”

That insight also contributed to the development of modern vaccines. And the insight is just this: that which causes the disease also provides the cure.

That insight found its way into that rather strange story from the Book of Numbers (21:4-9) where the ancient Israelites are wandering through the desert and they stumble into a nest of poisonous snakes, the bites from which make many of them ill and some of them die. God instructs Moses to make a bronze image of a serpent and to lift it high upon a pole so everyone can see it. All those who looked at it were healed.

Some have suggested that this story from Numbers led to the familiar image we still see today of a snake wrapped around a pole as a symbol for the medical professions and healthcare; here again, the key insight remains: that which causes the disease also provides the cure.

Going back to the third chapter of Genesis, we encounter yet another serpent. That story of Adam and Eve in the garden is so familiar that most people miss exactly what that serpent said to Adam and Eve.

Standard readings of that chapter from Genesis frame it as a story about humanity’s guilt and our need to be forgiven for our sin. I embrace that way of reading the story, but it’s not the only way to read it. By focusing so much attention on sin and guilt, the modern Church has left virtually untouched the epidemic of shame and violence.

This was the life-changing insight for me years ago when I was researching these texts, to understand the difference between guilt and shame.

Guilt attaches to something I have done, a mistake or an offense which I can confess and for which I can seek forgiveness. Shame, by contrast, attaches to my sense of self and who I am, usually in quite physical and bodily ways.

Guilt says, “I did something bad”; shame says, “I am bad.”

Social psychologists and sociologists have been urging us to notice for quite some time now just how pervasive shame is and just how severe are its consequences. (Be sure to read Brene Brown on this and watch her videos.)

Shame can make us dangerous to ourselves (in patterns of isolation and alienation and addiction and self-harm) and also dangerous to others (when we project our own shame on those who are different from us, or whole communities, or other species, and then treat them with hostility and violence).

Take all of this back into that ancient story of a garden where a serpent persuades human beings to eat forbidden fruit. If you eat it, the serpent says, “you will be like gods.”

The essence of this temptation is to suppose that being human isn’t good enough; that how God made us is flawed; that who we are is fundamentally bad.

That’s a lie; it’s simply not true. The ancient storyteller in Genesis insists that what God makes is good, and is indeed very good (1:31).

When Adam and Eve believed the lie, they tumbled into the spiral of shame, with the results today’s psychologists would easily recognize: they hid from each other; they hid from the wider world of the garden; and they hid from God. And in the very next story, Cain kills his brother Abel.

Shame isolates and shame kills.

And so, John’s Jesus says to Nicodemus: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up for the sake of unending life.”

Just as Moses lifted up the serpent…

Why just like that?

Because, if being human is the cause of our distress, then the truly human one—and that’s what that title “Son of Man” means—then the Truly Human One will be the source of our healing. After all, that which causes the disease also provides the cure.

Here’s one of the key pivot points in my own theological development that these interlaced texts provoked: shame cannot be forgiven; it can only be healed. And in that moment of realization, I remembered the Australian aboriginal story about the rainbow serpent, who created the land and the humans to inhabit it.

The rainbow, the serpent, the associations with sex and sexuality, bodily shame, and growing up gay: I still have trouble threading all of this together with the words of a logical sequence. But somehow I came to know this: embracing that which caused my shame would be healing; it would save me.

The grace of God provides forgiveness when we’re guilty.

The love of God provides healing when we’re ashamed.

That’s likely enough, more than enough, to ponder. And still, I can’t stop thinking about that distorted desire and the tormented urge to “be like gods.”

Humanity’s godlike aspirations and ambitions have led to unspeakable pain: the dynamics of racism and white supremacy; misogyny and the denigration of women, which leads quickly to the oppression of LGBT people; stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and enough nuclear warheads to obliterate humanity many times over; the relentless decimation of ecosystems and plundering of the environments that give us life—all of this, I’m absolutely convinced, and an ancient story about a serpent in a garden illustrates, is rooted in the corrosive effects of bodily shame.

Our salvation as a species and for the sake of this precious Earth may very well depend on the most robust and fulsome reading possible of that one chapter from Genesis, and in concert with that famous chapter from John: being fully at home in our own bodies without shame; fully at home on Earth without any guilt; and fully at home with God without any fear.

The world can scarcely name what it so desperately needs from today’s churches: spaces where we are free to love fiercely and live shamelessly and for the sake of a world in pain.

That great work begins and returns often to what Jesus wanted Nicodemus to see: God so loves the world that God forgives our guilt and heals our shame.