BLOGGING-THOMAS

The following is a contribution to the ongoing series of lay homilies by members of St. Thomas’ Parish at the weekly Sunday evening Taizé Eucharist reflecting on the journeys that have brought them to this parish.

Wayne Floyd, March 21, 2010

As a child growing up in the pre-civil-rights world of the Deep-South, warm spring nights like tonight were often occasions for deep prayer.  I would lie on my back on the thick mat of St. Augustine grass in our small town front yard, look up at the stars winking through the leaves of the huge pecan tree overhead, and fervently pray that a spaceship would come down and take me to a galaxy far away, where I was sure I had been born, only to be inadvertently lost and abandoned in Mississippi.

At the tender age of ten or eleven, maybe I had read too much science fiction in the library where my mother worked, and where I spent many an afternoon after school reading whatever I could find to feed my precocious imagination.

Or perhaps I already felt somehow in my heart what I couldn’t really name until I was almost out of high school — that there was something inherently wrong with any child having to grow up shaped by an apartheid world, originally shaped by life on cotton plantations worked by slaves, and still into the 1970s subject to a system of racial segregation that had changed little since post-Civil War Reconstruction.

Intuitively, I knew something was wrong, although as a lower middle-class white child, I had no inkling just how wrong things were – often entirely dependent on the color of one’s skin.  I never once visited a house on the black side of town.  And little did I know that some of the parents of the children I went to school with all week, or to church with all day Sunday, were supporters, if not organizers, of the states’ rights segregationists who engineered the continuing separation of the races … and enforced it by violence, if necessary.

I knew something was wrong when from the church pulpit ministers preached God’s love for all, but denied entrance to the blacks (who outnumbered whites in my hometown almost two to one) not just for Sunday worship, but even for the funerals of people they had worked for, and sometimes cooked for, cleanup up after, and provided nursing care for up to the time of their deaths.

Later I was to discover just how ordinary a thing it is for adolescents of all sorts to see themselves as strangers-in-a-strange-land, aliens lost in an adult world that seems to have no idea whatsoever who they are.  This entirely natural sense of awkwardly-adolescent, newly-awakening self-identity was wrapped up at the time, however, in the entirely unnatural social conventions of segregated Mississippi and the entirely indefensible hypocrisies of a form of Christianity that had all but given up its ability to stand as any sort of prophetic witness against injustice.

As I matured into young adulthood, I slowly learned that my sense of alienation from much of the culture and religion that had raised me made it impossible for me to stay any longer where I was.   And so I gradually moved away from the Deep South, geographically and socially, and away from the United Methodist Church that had been the cradle of my earliest and fondest spiritual awakenings.

I first came to be able to name the things I was running away from – the brutalities of the Vietnam War, the atrocities of attempts to wipe out the civil rights movement by intimidation and violence, and the inabilities of the Christianity I had known thus far to help me make sense of any alternatives, either for myself, or for my country.

All I really knew to do was to flee. So I ran away from it all.  Facing an imminent draft into the Army, and having failed to secure alternative service in a Mississippi National Guard unit, I accepted what I at the time saw as my only other alternative, an offer of a full scholarship to Candler School of Theology, the United Methodist Seminary at Emory University.  Now I’m very aware of the ironies of fleeing rural Mississippi only to wind up in urban Atlanta, thinking I’d escaped ‘the South’; or leaving life in my local Methodist Church only to wind up in a Methodist Seminary; or that I chose to shift my allegiances to the Episcopal Church while I was earning my M.Div. in an entirely ‘Methodist’ place.  But that’s another homily.

Let me just say that, as a still-very-wet-behind-the-ears twenty-two-year-old first year seminarian, I learned some powerful and lasting lessons right away.  I’ll stick to my Big Five, and be brief about it.

First, although I had expected my teachers to answer all my barely post-adolescent questions, I discovered instead that what they had were not all the answers, but far better questions than I had ever dreamed.

Second, I learned that racism and intolerance of all sorts of human differences aren’t something a Deep Southerner can easily simply turn away from; it is a disease from which I would always be in recovery.

Third, I discovered that most of my fellow students, and many of my professors, had fled the same things that I had, and that one of the things that bound us together was the commonality of our life-journeys.

Fourth, I experienced the deep humanity of the faculty who taught me, who could lecture to us on John Wesley, or pastoral care, or the Undivided Trinity by day, only to stay up all night drinking beer at a student keg-party, arguing about who had had the greatest impact on the human race, Jesus Christ or Bob Dylan?!  Those were the 70s – you probably just had to be there to understand!

And fifth, I learned that there were deep wells of wisdom in the Christian tradition that I had only begun to fathom, and that some of the wisest voices were those who in their own times had wrestled with questions similar to mine, and had discovered in their pilgrimage through life how to hear God’s voice speaking from the midst of the whirlwind of change and confusion that are an endemic part of the human experience.

One of these was the man we know as St. Augustine of Hippo, from whom the grass in my childhood front yard had indirectly gotten its name.  He was a fourth century north African Christian who lived in times as turbulent as our own.  Augustine’s life spanned the time of the fall of the Roman Empire, a time of civil, and cultural, and religious turmoil we should have little trouble imagining – whether we look back at the upheavals of the 1960s or just look down the street at the Capitol this evening, at the rancorous and uncivil demonstrations by protesters who during the past two days have been hurling at U.S. Congress members racial and homophobic slurs that have not been heard in public in decades.

Augustine wasn’t thought of, however, as a saint in his own day.  He was a headstrong young man who was initially controlled by the ambitions of his mother.  He fled from her to the arms of a mistress with whom he had a child.  Then he fled from Christianity to try every other religion and philosophy that he could find – the creation-hating Manichees, the secrecy-laden Gnostics, the other-worldly neo-Platonists.

Augustine had come to understand something I had recognized only slowly in my own life – how important it is to flee away from what distorts our humanity and community, and yet how difficult it is to run towards something that is any better.

In the volumes of writings known as his Confessions, Augustine tells of a discovery that was to change his life.  It came when he realized that the point of life isn’t to find the answer to all of the questions, or arrive at the right destination.  The point is the journey itself, for it is one that God has placed us on, indeed a journey God has been on as well.  And so our humanity is not a simply a moral journey away from things that we or others find objectionable; life is mainly a pilgrimage towards the very reason why we’re here.  As Augustine put it far more eloquently: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

It was in conversation with St. Augustine that I came to value the restlessness that I have felt since I can remember.  And I learned to trust that wherever that restlessness leads me, it doesn’t lead me away from God.  For God is in the journey itself. God made me to long for my creator.  And the restlessness of my heart is the sign that I am still on the way there, being pulled and tugged Godward, by God’s own desire for me.  It is the pull and tug of God that has brought me here – by however circuitous a path – to be a member of St. Thomas’ Parish.  It is the lure of God that pulls us together as a church community further into the reaches of Lent, drawing us all towards the mystery of Easter.

I still think occasionally about my childhood fantasy of being taken away by aliens to a world where there were no unfulfilled longings.  I’m glad now, however, that God’s answer to that prayer was NO, because God had a better question to ask me, the question of who I am, and whose I am.  It is a question answered only by journeying with God, until at last we rest with God forever — which, of course, will be where we’ve always been, however long it takes some of us to realize it.

Lay Homily given at the Taizé Worship Service by Jeffrey Weisner on 3/7/2010

Like many musicians, I am not a fan of public speaking – it makes me incredibly nervous, so please be merciful as I speak.

I’d like to speak for a moment about what being here at St. Thomas means to me in my own faith journey.  That thing more than anything else is the gift of being ordinary.

Like lots of people who grow up gay, I felt different than others from an early age.  But I suspect that, even if I had been heterosexual, I would have still been a bit of an outsider.  I was a shy, chubby nerd, and I’m sure the sight of me gamely hauling my gigantic double bass around my high school was more than enough to assure me oddball status.

The powerful desire to fit in, to belong, to have a community, a home, has haunted me in various forms for much of my life.  Many people deal with these feelings by trying to conform to what they think will make others like them.  Some others cope with these feelings by declaring themselves special, embracing their outsider status and redefining the norm as “boring.”  I have tried both of these methods at various times in my life.  In fact, I think that almost all of us have used these two methods on occasion as we navigate our way through life.

However, I think the truth about each of us is far more complex than either of these two answers.  We are each special and unique, and our faith encourages us to remember that God created each of us and loves us just as we are.  But we also have to come to terms with our own ordinariness.  We need to see that our problems are generally no greater than anyone else’s problems, and that our gifts, careers, goals and relationships are fundamentally no better that anyone else’s.  It is this ordinariness which is the thing I most love about St. Thomas.  We have services which, yes, are always special and wonderful.  And of course we all know in our hearts that the St. Thomas choir is the best, that our preaching is the most inspiring, that our liturgy is the most inclusive.  But I think that the truth is that a lot of our life here is actually not extraordinary. Our preachers do the very best they can, our musicians play and sing with all the talent they can muster, our various committees work hard, but can we really say that the same thing doesn’t happen at other churches all over the city, the nation, the world?  We like to believe that we are special people for having given our time, our money, our attention to this place, and in a way we are.  But others all over the world do the same for their churches, their communities, their families.

And it is this sense of ordinariness, of comfortable averageness, that I love about St. Thomas.  And as with many who come through these doors, I have struggled to find a place in my life where I can be ordinary and average.  I love being able to know that I can stare at the same stain on the ceiling every time that I come here, and that the same person will ask me the same questions about how my week went every Sunday after the service.  The things that I love about St. Thomas, and yes even the things I don’t love about it, will hopefully be here for me each week.

This is why I feel that, while I have attended and even belonged to other churches and other congregations in my life, St. Thomas is the first true church home that I have ever really had.  The ordinary acceptance of me as a person that St. Thomas offers gives me the space I need to grow in my faith and life.

The irony of all this is that I know that it is the struggle and extraordinary efforts of many people over many years that has obtained for me the gift of St. Thomas’ ordinariness.  The “radical” half of the phrase “radical hospitality” that is so much a part of what happens here acknowledges that truly giving a home and a safe space to everyone will come at a cost, and one of the most important parts of St. Thomas is the presence of people who have been willing to pay that cost.  But even so, it’s good to remember that all that striving and sacrifice is only a means to an end – the end of being able to, in ways both unusual and common, draw each of us and our community closer to God.

The most amazing experience of the ordinary that St.Thomas has given me has been the chance to have an ordinary marriage.  My husband Silvio and I were married by Nancy Lee last Fall, and one of the greatest gifts I got from that experience was our marriage counseling sessions with her.  After many of them I often reflected on the fact that the questions that she asked of us and the conversations that we had were almost certainly the same questions and conversations that she had with other couples that she had married, gay or straight.  And why not?  Our marriage is not extraordinary.  We face the same questions and struggles that most couples do.  But in a world where some feel that our marriage is literally capable of bringing down Western civilization, it is a source of enormous grace and spiritual strength to have our love and commitment be so matter-of-fact to everyone here at St. Thomas.

Some of us attended the opening dinner for our new capital campaign last night in this very room.  If you didn’t, you may in some other way be connected to this campaign or to the broader conversation about our future here at St. Thomas. Capital campaigns can tend to be laden with references to our specialness and importance, and indeed, who wants to give lots of money for something ordinary?  If we do build a new church building here at St. Thomas it will indeed be a truly special thing in many ways.  But my hope for all of us is that we’ll seek to humbly remember the simple and the ordinary as we press forward with the extraordinary things that we hope to accomplish here.  Lent is a time that God gives us to remember how unimportant lots of the things we concern ourselves with in this life really are.  We fast and smear ourselves with ashes to remember, among other things, what our bodies are really made of and how weak they are.  We pray in order to remember that God hears everyone equally regardless of social status.  And we give alms to remember that we have what we have only by grace. In fact, as Jesus says today in the Gospel reading, if we presume that those who suffer more and have less than we do somehow deserve what they get, we are misunderstanding the core of the Gospel itself.  The ordinary rhythms of life and liturgy here at St. Thomas are as much a path to God as are the holidays, concerts, and building campaigns, and having a chance to listen to those rhythms is something I am thankful for everyday.