Uniting Network

the national network for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people, their families and friends within the Uniting Church in Australia.

from the Daring 98 conference

Singing a New Song in a Strange Land

The Opening Address by Rev Dr Dorothy McRae-McMahon, to the Third Biennial Conference of the Uniting Network, Re-imagining Love: Embracing Our Strength - Daring 98 Conference

As we re-image love, we are singing a new song about love and about God. What is our new song? Obviously, we are re-imaging love in that we celebrate same-sex love which moves beyond traditional friendship. If we explore that further, my guess is that we would find a re-imaging of considerable variety. We are singing many songs about the nature of love. It is my hope that we won't spend too much time on debating that variety in this conference.

I believe that the discussion which needs to take place on what precisely can be upheld as models for good and, indeed, Christian relationship is best not confined to our community. It belongs to the whole community, regardless of sexual orientation. I do not believe that this discussion took place in honesty and openness in response to our church's Sexuality Task Group Report. There were some modest attempts, but we are a very long way from really dealing with the questions which lie before us. The whole area of human sexuality – how it is best expressed, between whom and in what circumstances is a complex and ambiguous one.

There is so much dishonesty and hiddeness in our life as people in general that it feels almost too risky to enter the discussion at all. There is also a good deal of healthy dignity in not feeling we need to give each other entry into our private lives. If the discussion takes place at all,I would hope we would focus on what it is we value in human relationship and what we have experienced as bringing depth, self-respect and responsible, respectful caring for each other.

If I don't encourage this discussion to rise to the fore in our conference it is because, although it would be good for us on one level, I believe that it may also take us away from embracing our strengths at this point on our journey together. I also believe that it may well play into the hands of those outside ourselves who see the homosexual community as the source and centre of all interesting sexual peccadillos. In reality the heterosexual community is also full of diversity in its sexual activity and just as titillating in its sexual activities as we are if it is honest about itself.

What are some of our songs?

The love we claim for ourselves is an affirmation of the magination of God. This God has more than one idea about human sexual orientation. This God is probably pretty clever in designing things so that most people are heterosexual for the procreation of human life, but also liked the idea of a bit more variety. This variety stands as a critical comment on those who dare to think that they know the boundaries on the loving ways of God. Who can describe the love of God in full? None of us. It is full of surprises and delights.

The love we live out as Christians re-images what love might mean for the church. It calls the church to embrace a bigger vision of God's good creation and God's love for humankind. It invites it into a journey of discovery of new sorts of inclusiveness and love – to take the risk of engaging with us and finding that we too are the royal children of God and people with much to offer in the forming of human community. It invites us to give a lead which this church and, indeed, this country desperately needs at this moment – an envisioning of love which gathers in all sorts of people, which is generous and kindly, which moves us away from "user pays" heresies and which sees beyond separating stereotypes to the common humanness within us all.

We may need to re-image our own capacity for loving as we stand in the midst of the fire. I am not suggesting here that we may not feel the burning or cry out in our pain. I am not telling us that we must immediately forgive when we are abused and hated. I am simply suggesting that amazing gifts of grace are sometimes given to us for our re-imaging of love, gifts that we did not know could lie within us, grace which re-images love beyond where we thought we could go. If I have experienced that from any group of people, it has been from within the grace of Indigenous Australians.

We sing our songs in a strange land!

As I have shared with some of you, it struck me recently that we are trying to live from a theology of liberation when we should have a theology of exile running alongside it. In doing this, we do not fall from the Gospel call to claim the very ground of our liberation. However, if we try to live from that alone when the going is tough or holding us into a sort of stalemate, then I think we will be ill-prepared to embrace our strengths.

At the point when I found myself turning on my own sisters and brothers in the struggle, I realised that I was playing out the agenda of the enemy without and within. I was engaged in the self-destructive activity that almost always takes place when people are sustained in oppression. I realised then that this is the moment for me to work our what it would really mean to embrace our strengths and continue moving on, despite what our church, or anyone else's church may do, or not do.

Tonight I will reflect on what I see as our strengths and then suggest a few beginning ideas of how we could embrace our strength, that is, bring it together in good and gracious power.

So, what are the strengths in ourselves that we could embrace in this strange land?

Our vulnerability

This may be an odd quality to list as a strength, but I do it advisedly. I have learned from numbers of other tough battles that one of the qualities that opens us most to the re-imaging of love and to the sustaining of strength is shared vulnerability.
It is not by chance that the Christ hangs before us with arms outstretched in vulnerability, in brokenness and poured out life-blood. That, paradoxically is a way of travelling towards strength in risen life.
The sharing of our vulnerability and general messiness is the first requirement for us in surviving life in exile on the way to liberation.

Our survival through a journey of costly pain

Some of us barely survive and some of us don't survive at all. That is the tragedy and part of the reason for our struggle. However, many of us have survived and here we are, and there we are around our networks, with special gifts in understanding about how the costly way is walked. We have a march on much of the rest of the church in this. We have been refined in the fire. We know that costly pain can be survived and that there is a life which arises from it as we claim the Gospel in faith.

We have lived on the margins

Years ago, I think it was Mary Daly who said the best place for people to live was on the margins. We are people who, even though we may live and work closer to the centre of things, still cannot really move from the margins in our essential existence at this point in history.
This connects us with the Christ who inhabits the margins and co-habits with the marginalised.
It also gives us a connection with all other marginalised people – not as a claim that we have experienced their marginalisation, just as no-one else can claim to have experienced ours, but a special strength as those who have come through "the ordeal".
It may help us to understand why other marginalised people may be self-destructive and unable to travel with us because of the added cost.
It may be that we can model a solidarity of human struggle which cuts across those barriers between marginalised people.

Our faith is hard-won

I reflected recently that we are the part of the church which often has a hard-won faith.
Not for most of us the natural flow towards a viable flow which is the birthright of many church members.
Not for us the assumed celebration of the church community when we share that we too are people of faith.
Not for us an easy travelling with Scripture and a God who is more often than not represented to us as punishing and rejecting.
And yet our faith survives in power and truth. Therefore it survives in less dependant mode – a stripped back to the essentials faith which will withstand the whirlwind and the storm and, yes, even the exile.

We are people who, because we live in exile, can create many things out of very little.

People in exile are usually starved of the resources which are taken for granted by those who live at home.
They are cut off from the normal supplies.
They live with less of the environment of "security, safety and stability" (to coin a phrase)!
However, sometimes I believe that those who are less involved with procreativity might have an extra share of other forms of creativity.
I also believe that when ones lives off the fat of the land, so to speak, one's creativity and resourcefulness becomes dulled.
I would even go as far as saying that, while it is no justification for oppression and abuse, those who suffer often produce from their suffering the best in creativity.

I am referring here to our capacities for poetry, stories, songs, dances, drama and visual arts.

I am also referring to our capacity to organise ourselves without staffing, funding and the status of recognition. Let us never underestimate ourselves!

We have each other

Here we are a motley lot, but with a huge capacity for creating the best forms of human community.
Indeed, we can be the church in the diaspora if we choose.
We can live together as we are calling the church to live with us and have the confidence to make our life full of pastoral care, inclusiveness and sacramental life.
We can be the word for each other.
We can commit ourselves to doing this, even as we do not let go our commitment to be part of our rightful home in the wider church.
If I say this it is because when in exile, it becomes perilously easy to begin to build your life on the issue of your separation rather than your belonging.
Those who make victimisation as the focus for their life together actually give power to those who exclude them by sustaining their own victim life.

What can we do with all these strengths, these songs for the sustaining of our life?

Bring them together in a variety of networks

The very nature of our life is determined by the need of many of us to stay hidden. It would be great if we could all come out together, but I would be the first to say that only each one of us can determine that very personal journey. No one else can know what is a stake for us and what the level of our support may be in any situation. Heaven knows we have enough judgement to deal with from others without adding this judgement of each other.
Given this situation, networking is both critical and complex. I believe that we need circles and circles of networks, like ripples in a pond.
There will be some which are open and expressed in the material which we publish or the statements from the Uniting Network.
We are gradually creating and finding Internet sites for public access to information and support. This Conference will go onto the Net courtesy of Wal.
Some people will be able to tap into the e-mail Network after sufficient introduction.
We each will have our small connected groups which we can keep informed and we can create more of those with intentional connections – as liaisons with the more open community.

We can discover our hidden gifts

Who is good at gathering people and sustaining networks, both technologically, administratively and pastorally?
Who can write, act, sing, draw, paint, sculpt?
Who are good communicators, adult educators, group facilitators, conflict resolvers, Biblical scholars, theologians, and liturgists?
What do you offer into our life together?

We can compete as little as possible, for the good of us all

This is a mighty hard thing to achieve in the best of circles. In communities of people who are given little recognition in the first place, we often long for standing and recognition and, of course, the power that comes with that. I know a lot about that tempting journey myself! And yet, there is so much to do, there is room for us all.

We can celebrate our life and tell our many stories

In creating liturgies, rituals, newsletters, Biblical resources and reflections and a major resource for the church. This major resource, which could be used by churches overseas as well as here, could be a book in which we gather together theological reflection, Biblical stuff, stories, art, songs poetry, just little thoughts and sayings.

It could be a project for ourselves which becomes a celebrating of our authentic life in the time of waiting.
I believe that we could do it, publish it and use the proceeds for our own cause.
I would be happy to give some time and energy to the editing.

We can constantly re-instate the theology of the eschaton.

This is a theology which comes from the absolute certainty that in Christ our battle is already won.
We do not need to be messiahs, saviours of the world.
It does not mean that we wait for a dramatic intervention by a powerful God (nice though that might be!). It rather means that we are unique and important participants in the revealing of what is already achieved.
We can act, work, pray and engage in the struggle for this.
We can also rest, play, party, sing and dance because the battle is already won.
We can do it and we will, sisters and brothers.

We are standing on the ground of the very Gospel of Jesus Christ and that is never defeated.

Dorothy McRae-McMahon
Re-imagining Love: Embracing Our Strength.
Newtown, Sydney, June 1998.