Gathering Fragments

“I live in two worlds.”

I said it aloud to a friend as we sat visiting after an event attended by a number of gays and lesbians. She thanked me for coming, and said how much it meant to them for me to show up in support. This set me to reflecting aloud with her about my two worlds.

In one world I work with church people: Good, wonderful, caring people who attend worship services and come to Bible studies. They participate in the youth group, sing in the choir and volunteer for mission projects. They come to me worried about illness, fearful for their teenagers, wondering about their faith. They report their successes and joys and ask for prayers.

My other world is Queer. That’s their word. My friends in this world include:

• The parents whose son just came out and they’re afraid and confused.
• A closeted executive who in public gives me a subtle, secret smile as if to say “thanks for understanding.”
• A teenager cautiously trying out the church again.
• A couple pledging their absolute love and loyalty to one another.
• A transgendered woman trying to figure out how to be engaged to a man, and what it means to love.

These aren’t ‘church folk’ for the most part. They’ve been hurt by church folk, or fear they might be, so they keep secrets and stay away. They hang out at support groups, Club Q, coffee houses or safe places on campus, but they have the same worries and fears and hopes as people in my straight world. They support charities and hold fundraisers, gather for potlucks and encourage each other. They celebrate their successes and anniversaries, console each other in their breakups, and grieve with each other.

They, too, come to me worried about illness, fearful for their teenagers, wondering about their faith. They’re not in church, but they’re hungering for meaning and for something of the Spirit, so I counsel them and pray with them. I try to stand with them and advocate for them when they ask. I identify myself as an ally.

These two worlds don’t intersect much. They exist side-by-side, much like parallel universes. I have the privilege of seeing both, moving between them, living in two worlds.

I wonder, sometimes fear, what my church-world friends would think if they knew my Queer-world friends. Many know I’m involved, of course; but few of my friends from one world have met those from the other.

Then my friend said, “You dance a delicate dance.”  That could mean a precarious, even dangerous, balancing act, and it might be true. But the way she said it, it sounded more like a graceful ballet; a delicate dance in two worlds; a pirouette at the threshold between.

The late Irish poet John O’Donohue commented on thresholds as those places and experiences in which we are open to new understandings, new possibilities for life and transformation. These are the experiences and encounters that open doorways into new ways of thinking and being, portals – or at least windows – into another world. There’s energy here at the threshold … and mystery. It’s often not clear what direction I should go or exactly what’s expected of me. It’s an unfolding adventure with a lot of uncertainty and some risk, but here I learn about issues, people and myself. Here I dance.

Later when I told another friend this story, he spun a reflection on the strength of a dancer:

I know what takes to be a delicate dancer. I am married to one. It takes years of training, and great inner and physical strength. It requires concentration to balance and maintain balance, and a delicate tension between physical strength and gracefulness. The dancer must continually practice the disciplines in order to maintain her ability to dance.

Sometimes the dancer suffers injuries, but the determination to persevere is so strong that he will push on toward healing and recovery. There is a passion and a beauty to the grace-filled dancer. It shows in those who continue to dance the delicate dance through life.

I’m growing in my understanding of this dance. I confess that it doesn’t always feel very delicate – I’m still learning the steps. In fact it often feels clumsy, stumbling – hardly a dance at all. I am clear, though, that here is a threshold that beckons, and I have a sense that it is God who is beckoning me. So I pray for the strength and grace to dance this dance. I give thanks for friends in both worlds who help me see the way, and I invite others to join me.

Rev. Stephen Griffith is Minister to the Community at Saint Paul UMC, Lincoln, Nebraska.

A note on the word “queer:” My GLBT friends have mixed reactions to using the word.  Some choose the word deliberately as a way of including those who don’t fit precisely in any category – gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender – but who also know they don’t fit it the conventional straight world.  Some use it as a social and political statement.  Some identify themselves as “gender queer,” by which they mean they defy conventions of dress, behavior and role, whatever their sexual orientation. Others in the LGBT community are uncomfortable with the word, and see it as counterproductive in their campaign for acceptance by the larger society.  They remember it as an epithet equivalent to the N word, and they often resent the use of the word, even by insiders who apply it to themselves.  I have chosen to use it because it is used by most of the LGBT people I work with, and it captures the sense of not fitting in.