Love is an Orientation: Elevating the Conversation with the Gay Community
Andrew Marin
InterVarsity Press
Published: March 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8308-3626-0

If you were to meet Andrew Marin (and providing you have some experience with Evangelical culture), it might strike you that he looks, acts, and talks like the epitome of a twenty-something Evangelical guy.  His hair is cut pretty short.  When I heard him speak, he was wearing long khaki cargo shorts and an oversized striped polo shirt.  He is effusive and outgoing in mannerisms, and when he speaks, he loves to interject words like “awesome” and “pumped up” into his emotional-wallop-packing anecdotes and series of simple, Bible-verse backed points.  Stock Evangelicalish phrases seem to work their way un-self-consciously into every other sentence.

In his own words (paraphrased from what I remember), he is what his large Evangelical church in a (quite) affluent Chicago suburb raised him to be: an outgoing, straight, conservative, Bible-believing alpha-male.  And he doesn’t just appear to be this.  He truly is this, and he fully claims it.

So… this has all been just to set up some tension over everything else I want to say about Andrew Marin, his eight year of work in the GLBT (gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered) community, and especially his new book published by Intervarsity Press, “Love is an Orientation: Elevating the Conversation with the Gay Community.”  For those who don’t know me, I grew up very Christian and very Mennonite, went through a lot of pain figuring out my sexual orientation, am gay, and currently approach the church and the Bible with a lot of ambivalence over whether they’re fundamentally good or bad (and whether they lead one toward Christ or kill any possibility of actually encountering Christ.)  Add that to the tension.

Let me give you the one-sentence-ish summary of Marin’s biography (which takes most of a chapter in the book): he grew up a homophobic Christian who called everyone a fag; best friends came out of the closet and shocked his worldview; moved into Boystown (neighborhood where many gay boys live/hang out in Chicago) and started spending all his times with gay people in gay places; hasn’t stopped doing so for eight years.  He started the Marin Foundation to do something that seems to have never been done (at least, never for real) in the Evangelical church before: approach GLBT people to learn about their lives and build a lasting, committed relational bond for talking about God.  The rest of the book tells you stories about the people he met, lessons he learned, and a number of principles the church has to adopt to move from violent non-productive opposition to the GLBT community into productive, fruitful, authentic, relational, and loving sharing of the Gospel with GLBT people - and by “sharing” he doesn’t mean “telling” as in “I know something you don’t”, he means “you’re experiencing this and I’m experiencing this.”  You know - sharing.  (If you can’t tell already, I believe Marin is doing something truly extraordinary in his work and in this book.  I think it’s going to be very important in Evangelical and conservative-ish Christian circles.)

If you are someone who care about the church and also longs for any sort of progress in a positive direction on the church’s obsession with the gays (or… maybe I should say… overwhelming amount energy focused on the issue) I would put this book at #1 on your priority of books to read.

I won’t directly summarize the book - and I don’t want this review to be taken as a direct representation of exactly what Marin’s thoughts are.  Rather, this is my version of the core of his message.  By some coincidence, he happened to be speaking at a nearby Mennonite church the week after I finished reading the book, so my impressions are also based on his presentation that I heard there. If you’re interested in the specifics, read the book.

He recognizes a poisonous situation in the current state of affairs between the Evangelical church and the GLBT community: one of two polarized sides, each with certain rigid orthodoxies, typified by certain simplistic answers to simplistic questions (”Is homosexuality a sin?”  “Can homosexuals change?”  “Are they born that way?” “Does the Bible teach homosexuality is wrong?”) which serve as markers of tribal identity for immediately placing a stranger into their appropriate tribal identification.  For someone who might on a superficial level seem to communicate in streams of Evangelical cliches, his analysis of the linguistic manifestation of this polarized state is very subtle and quite astute.  One of the pillars of his approach is to destabilize the basis of these simplistic polarizing questions.  There’s an interesting analysis in the book of Jesus’s answers to close-ended questions.  WWJD.

He calls on the church to take upon itself responsibility for ending the cultural war between itself and the GLBT community.  He calls on the church to use the true, freedom-in-Christ-centered Gospel as its tool to end the war.  He even, I think, calls the church to take responsibility for being the originators of this culture war: his thinking goes - “since we have spent so many years defining entire humans beings by the singular aspect of their sexual behavior, is it any surprise that they have formed identities based on their sexual behavior?”  He calls for an entirely new way (new in GLBT/Christian relations) of defining others’ identity, one based on claiming that all people’s true identity is in Christ.

He has a list of points/lessons/principles for the church to follow in making a transformation.  To be honest, I don’t have the book nearby right now, and I don’t really remember many of them.  If I was working as a Christian trying to understand and relate to the gay community (which I’m not), I’d go back and look at them.  I can tell you these things for sure:

1) Andrew Marin, more than any other straight conservative Christian who believes in a literal interpretation of scripture I’ve ever known, has a true understanding of GLBT people and their lives.  Maybe he’s spent too much time with us gays, actually - at his talk, some of his off-handed remarks about gay/Christian interactions were so straight-to-the-heart my partner and I spent half the time shaking with laughter, while all the sweet presumably straight Mennonites around us only smiled or mildly chuckled in a bit of vague confusion.

2) He’s committed his life to building a bridge between the GLBT and the Evangelical communities.  He’s spent all of his post-college life so far working with GLBT organizations, churches, and communities.  Check out his foundation’s website (google “Marin Foundation”) for all the stuff that they’re up to.

3) His book is powerful.

Some of his ideas are fundamentally Anabaptist: I think he even uses the exact phrase of “an upside-down kingdom”.  However, his ideas are also VERY refreshingly non-Anabaptist on another front: he has no instinctive obsession with making sure the church is a pure place that only the pure can inhabit.  He think people should be at church because it creates a place for them to practice and experience God’s love while they’re learning and allowing God to change their lives.

Okay.  This review is long.  But, now that I’ve talked as much as I can about Marin’s book and his ideas, I’d like to say what I truly think about him and his life.  I think the reason Marin stands out isn’t necessarily just because his ideas and language are fresh.  I think there’s this authentic spiritual core that he is living from - his words and ideas are only the fruits of this core.  He’s this very normal person, as I tried to describe.  Yet, in contintually submitting to what he understands as God’s calling to live as a link between two deeply polarized communities - and through empathizing with all the pain and suffering he’s witnessed in GLBT people’s experiences in the church yet contintuing on in hope and not despair - he has identified his own life and own path with Christ.  That was my main impression, overall.  He’s someone who is in the process of being transformed by following the path of Christ, the path of suffering, of being continually misunderstood, the process of giving up whatever he thought his life was and accepting instead the reality of what God is in his life.  I suspect that there are elements of his biography that are more complex and are darker that the breezy, simplistic stories he shares in the book - times of true despair and of having to give up his own identity.  Maybe this whole GLBT/Christian divide isn’t just a calling outward for him to change the word, but has also served as his own inward calling, to force him into identification with both the suffering and the love of Christ.

Maybe these are just words that don’t mean much either, this talk about giving up one’s life.  Thinking about it, I’ve heard these words before too, and usually they don’t mean too much.  So whatever.  Get the book.  If you’re into Evangelical-type things, it’s a major one, and people will be talking.  If you think a lot about the place of GLBT people in the church and all the current brouhaha over it, definitely pick it up.  Also - if you’re just really interested in someone doing something very unexpected, and exhibiting the beginnings of a truly amazing spirituality, look at it for that.  That’s most of what I want to say.  I have a lot more personal thoughts about what this book might mean for the church and for the GLBT community, but I’ll save those for the comments.

This is a very very simple little post put up way back when only a couple dozen people have heard about Pink Menno (my, times have changed!) meant simply to announce its presence for YARers who might be interested.  If you want to actually find out about Pink Menno, go to pinkmenno.org.  If you want to talk to Pink Menno directly, you can email pinkmenno@gmail.com.  I think a number of people have found their way to this post because it’s pretty high up if you google “pink menno”, and it seems to have attracted some non-YAR people looking for a place to share their hellfire & pinkstone.   If that’s you, please see the YAR guidelines & required reading, as well as the sermon on the mount (especially the beatitudes) - Matthew 5. That said, some good discussion has also happened, so I’ll leave this post up.

original post (March 4, 2009):

If you’d like to do something to help the Mennonite church become more LGBT-friendly, check out the pink Menno campaign. We’re organizing an effort focused on the convention in Columbus this summer to start a lot of informal conversations with people and show that queers are already a central part of the church - and that most people probably know a lot of us already.  And that we’re really very friendly and good and Mennonite-y.

Besides Obama’s victory, there was another vote that meant a lot to me on Tuesday, and left a lingering bittersweetness to the otherwise perfect night: Proposition 8 amended the California constitution to define legal marriage as exclusive to opposite-sex couples, overturning the decision of the Supreme Court and ending the right of California same-sex couples to the legal protections of marriage for the near future.

Initial reaction: rage. I found someone who expressed this very very well:

Ultimately, though, rage against injustice must energize something else, something life-affirming.

I’m going to outline here my current thoughts on all this, still pretty half-baked, as part of my process of coming to peace with the step backwards that PropH8 represents for gay rights. (By the way, I’m using the word gay to express things about the whole queer community in general just because it’s something I can talk about closest to my own experience.) Here’s are the suppositions I start with:

First, gay people (like everyone) exist as part of creation for a purpose. If we weren’t supposed to be here we wouldn’t be here. I can in no way define all the possibilities that are contained in what we as gay people can offer the rest of creation, but in my own reflection, I think it has a lot to do with creativity, with nurturing people/animals/places that are marginal & outcast, with being especially sensitive to spiritual life, with inventing & demonstrating alternate possibilities for patterns of living, with acting as a bridge between genders. I’m not saying that all gay people have these traits or that straight people can’t have them, but rather that (I think) gay people tend to have more natural proclivities toward these, and that they experience of being gay and the connections & relationships within the gay community offer a special fostering & blossoming of these traits.

I believe (or want to believe, choose to believe) in a vision like MLK’s “blessed community” where queer people’s talents and gifts play a vital, integrated role in the life of the community as a whole, especially in the arts, in spiritual life, in working with nature, working with disabled & marginalized people.

Our place goes beyond these roles too - I don’t think we’re just a “bonus” to humanity. I think that we are an absolutely essential element to society throughout history, destabilizing the rigid structures that would otherwise cage & consume everyone’s spirits. If it weren’t for us, hierarchical religious structures, strict gender roles, unbreakable prescriptive sexual norms, and all kinds of prohibitions on art & expression would be vastly stronger

So I think this is where queer people and those who are close to our community need to come back to as we move forward in our battle for equal civil rights. I think that one negative aspect of this battle is that, by being overshadowed by the role of the oppressed victim, we still deny and fail to realize our own potential good for the role we can play in society. Yes, we have been and are still under great (but dissipating) violence and oppression. To truly win free of this our hope and strength can’t lie in simply aspiring to have what everyone else has. We need to realize our true strength as a community and as individuals. Coming from this strength, our claim on legal rights will be undeniable, and the good we offer to society will overwhelm the effects of the violence of the past and bring everyone a bit closer to the blessed community.

Still… #@$% the bigots. I can’t completely let go of that sentiment either.

somasoul (starting in the middle of the post)

Society, whether black or white, seems to want:
Power
Sex
The appearance of monetary wealth.

The Christian needs to look at these things and find the Godliness in what prompts these desires:

Instead of power; servanthood. (Is that a word? Who cares.)
Instead of sex; mature relationships.
Instead of the appearance of wealth (keeping up with the Joneses); Monetary stability……food in the storehouse you might say.

If you, if we, get our shi….stuff straight and keep it straight, if we do it as a whole, vast social change follows because we alter the fabric of cultural worldviews.

But if you crave power; political power to end racism; monetary power to keep corporations in check…….

If you want sex with a stable partner, not mature relationships…….

If you want to keep pace with Joneses even with organic free-trade goods…

You won’t change anything.

The world ain’t changed by more of the same; even in the name of the greater good.

lukelm:

Somasoul, I’m kind of curious as to how you fit sexuality into the picture of empty vs. life-giving culture. I’m not sure I get the sex vs. mature relationships dichotomy. In my experience, sexual liberation and living a free, open sexual life (yes, definitely in the context of mature relationships and loving others) is essential - maybe even key, in my case at least - to spiritual liberation, and to fully be in touch with one’s own creativity and the healing power one possesses. I, at least, experience my sexuality (not just speaking abstractly here - referring especially to “getting it on”) as an expression of creativity, spirituality, and self-giving. I think you might be getting more at the objectification of bodies/genders that happens in our society, sex disconnected from relationship, in which case you certainly have a point. Yet you categorize “sex” as if it necessarily includes such negativity. I personally think young Christians of all persuasions, radical or conservative, have been fed a lot of falsehoods about sexual life - that sex itself is intrinsically something selfish, rather than a good part of ourselves, intimately tied to all our creative powers, a potential for joyful sharing with others.

somasoul:

luke,

I definetly have a disconnect with you on the issue of sexual relationships and sexuality. I had to read your post twice to get a grasp with what you’re saying and after thinking about it all day I cannot come to terms with it.

Open sexual relationships outside of marriage are clearly not God’s intent. Nor are homosexual relationships. But, I digress, this post is about neither.

The lie is simple: sex with commitment is okay. As with all believeable lies the truth must be included. Commitment is good but……marriage is God’s will for most; celibacy the alternative. Sex outside of marriage was not appropiate in Judaism and was assumed included in statements like “Sexual Immorality”. In 1 Thess Paul tells us to be content with his own wife and not be lustful like a heathen.

Again, my post wasn’t even about that.

My post was simple, a Godly view of sex is the only thing that can disrupt the social norms of culture. Buying into the lie of pervasive or even temporary-long-term commitment sex with a partner justifies any type of sex outside Biblical principals.

“I, at least, experience my sexuality (not just speaking abstractly here - referring especially to “getting it on”) as an expression of creativity, spirituality, and self-giving.” (Does this “getting it on” is okay or vice versa?)

I have no idea what this means, especially as a Christian. The Bible doesn’t support the concept of “sexual liberation=spirituality” and such a concept is largely foreign to traditional or modern Christian thought.

And with all due respect; I tend to think that the classical Christian thinkers, Christian thought throughout history, and the pillars of Judaism and nearly all denominations of Christianity are right on this one. Call me crazy.

TimN:

Song of Solomon 4:1-16 (NIV)

Lover

1 How beautiful you are, my darling!
Oh, how beautiful!
Your eyes behind your veil are doves.
Your hair is like a flock of goats
descending from Mount Gilead.

2 Your teeth are like a flock of sheep just shorn,
coming up from the washing.
Each has its twin;
not one of them is alone.

3 Your lips are like a scarlet ribbon;
your mouth is lovely.
Your temples behind your veil
are like the halves of a pomegranate.

4 Your neck is like the tower of David,
built with elegance ;
on it hang a thousand shields,
all of them shields of warriors.

5 Your two breasts are like two fawns,
like twin fawns of a gazelle
that browse among the lilies.

6 Until the day breaks
and the shadows flee,
I will go to the mountain of myrrh
and to the hill of incense.

7 All beautiful you are, my darling;
there is no flaw in you.

8 Come with me from Lebanon, my bride,
come with me from Lebanon.
Descend from the crest of Amana,
from the top of Senir, the summit of Hermon,
from the lions’ dens
and the mountain haunts of the leopards.

9 You have stolen my heart, my sister, my bride;
you have stolen my heart
with one glance of your eyes,
with one jewel of your necklace.

10 How delightful is your love, my sister, my bride!
How much more pleasing is your love than wine,
and the fragrance of your perfume than any spice!

11 Your lips drop sweetness as the honeycomb, my bride;
milk and honey are under your tongue.
The fragrance of your garments is like that of Lebanon.

12 You are a garden locked up, my sister, my bride;
you are a spring enclosed, a sealed fountain.

13 Your plants are an orchard of pomegranates
with choice fruits,
with henna and nard,

14 nard and saffron,
calamus and cinnamon,
with every kind of incense tree,
with myrrh and aloes
and all the finest spices.

15 You are a garden fountain,
a well of flowing water
streaming down from Lebanon.

Beloved

16 Awake, north wind,
and come, south wind!
Blow on my garden,
that its fragrance may spread abroad.
Let my lover come into his garden
and taste its choice fruits.

The dream was pretty funny, actually. I found myself forced to sit in a kind of revival-style worship service, surrounded by male friends from my hometown, kids my own age. I realized that we were all gay (in my dream), and that this was a service to try to convert us (to holiness and heterosexuality, I guess) The service built to a kind of altar call. A line of young men (who I recognized as older boys from my hometown) were marched in to surround us “sinners” and all assumed a kneeling position of prayer - they were to serve as beacons of virility and heterosexuality and virtue while we responded to the call. Defiantly, I got up and tried to make my way to their line and assume their same posture, to show that they had no exclusive claim on prayer or virtue. One of them got angry and pointed me back to my seat. There, still defiant, I again tried to assume their same kneeling prayer posture. It was very awkward to do on the edge of my chair, and I wasn’t sure I was getting the arms quite right, and I worried that I looked really fairy-ish doing it and that it wasn’t really helping my cause.

This is all related to the draft of a book that I received yesterday. I submitted one of the chapters to it. It’s a compendium of writing about the gay issue in the Mennonite church, with writers from a great variety of perspectives being published here. It should be pretty decent and interesting book (I’ve just leafed through it so far), if you care about the church’s conversation (or lack of) on the issue. My deal is that I’m struck and surprised by the force of emotions that hits me when I really re-engage with the institutional church and its representative voices on these issues. I think I’m just beginning to comprehend how deep currents of something like rage still run in me. My instinct is always toward reconciliation, valuing everyone’s individual story, speaking calmly and warmly to those on the other side of the issue, not letting it divide us, being a peacemaker, etc. Nonviolent principles, generally. I think they’ve born some good fruit through the time I’ve tried to engage things in this way.

And yet here I am again waking up at 5 a.m. with rage dreams when I’m forced to truly encounter the real voices of exclusion in the church… in the case of this book, a group of middle-aged (and older) straight men pontificating on this “issue” and how to deal with “them.” But of course - they’re just calling to mind powerful forces from my past. My anger really isn’t about the exclusion of me now as an adult, but about all the violence that was directed against my child-self and my fragile adolescent self when I was completely open and vulnerable to everything the church had to say. I feel (maybe? it’s my metaphor, anyway) like someone who’s been physically abused forced to put her story up beside the abuser, who’s still mouthing off the exact same words he’s always said, and the words are still entirely about HIMSELF.

Whew. So, my problem is that a large part of me is still trained by being a good Mennonite boy (that’s a GMB) when it comes to such things. And I guess Mennonite boys just suppress their anger - at least that’s what this one has always done. How can such anger ever find its place in the world/life? What is its purpose (assuming that all things are meant to work for good if used in the proper way)? It seems like such a force for violence, for destruction, for breaking relationships. I believe in nonviolence, reconciliation, and relationship-building - and pragmatically consider them the most effective strategies for change. I don’t want to direct anger at individual people and cause them pain or harm. Yet - it’s the voices of individual people who collectively (and mostly unconsciously) create the abusive force that I rage against.

I want to know if anyone else has had such rage/anger in their lives, and how they learned to make it a part of themselves, despite the GMK training. I don’t want to be split in two (that was kind of the whole point of coming out in the first place), and I’m afraid that suppressing it is just a way of disengaging from the issue rather than working toward anything positive. What does someone who believes in nonviolence do with rage?

I’ve been rolling those words over in my head and trying them on for size; young is pretty easy, I guess - more the Anabaptist Radical part. I feel a little different than those who I consider my peers in this stage of faith. If I can attempt to draw a generalization first - a number of us might have been through similar phases of a childhood and teenage faith that was uncomplicated in its ability to answer all questions about the world and God, with reference to the Bible and church teachings/tradition; then for one reason or another entered a deconstructive phase where the internal inconsistencies of that faith, new thoughts and discoveries and ideas, worked a sea change on our souls and worldview; and are now working to recover/recuperate the foundational principles of the faith in a way that we can live with integrity. Maybe not - maybe that’s just me. But anyway… another generalization: one of those foundations that I think YARs (I’m using that acronym already!) in such a time of reconstruction rather consistently build on is the call to a life of faith in action, love in action - building/working/doing to address systems of violence or oppression present in the world. It’s a piece, a strand, of that original uncomplicated faith that has continued to grow.

All of this generalizing is leading up to what I sense as somewhat of a difference in the way this reconstruction has been for me. From the original faith of my childhood for me the piece or strand that has felt most continuous has been the personal relationship with God/the Divine. I felt as a teenager that I had a personal Lord and Savior in Jesus, and this isn’t something that I lost, but something that has rather evolved into an expanding sense of the Divine’s presence. For a way of working in the world toward community, justice, and peace, it seems that a young Anabaptist might return to the very roots and essence of his/her tradition - thus the Anabaptist Radical. But what for me, who returns to the contemplative aspect of faith? Rather than the quest for an essential aspect of my tradition, it has been a great expansion of sources of inspiration, since the essence of contemplation and connection to the divine doesn’t have any boundaries by religion or tradition. The saints and mystics of India have been central to an expansion of my sense of the presence of God, the poetry of Rumi, some medieval Catholic mystics.  I appreciate AngieLederach’s post on her responses in living with liturgy and the mass. Not that I’m considering becoming high church! - although I did cry the first time I was present at mass at the basilca of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.

I still feel the call to work for social justice in my life (that’s a struggle right now, as the value system at the medical school I’m at now is centered on intellectual prestige as the only acceptable guide to a career) - but at the center of my spiritual life is a kind of inner song of constant connection and awareness of the eternal, and radical acceptance of all aspects of the world, of life.  Yes, that’s the essence of the path I’m describing: faith that has grown primarily into inner spiritual life, compared to faith that grows into action in the world.
So… maybe what I’m asking is… have I found a different way of being a post-good-Mennonite-kid than Young Anabaptist Radicalism?  Did contemplatives ever even have a place in Anabaptism?

In any case, I feel quite at home on this blog.