Got this in:

Hello John,

I am an abusive man. I have found many books and websites for abused women. Could you post some suggestions for any abusers who find your website? I admitted my abuse a couple of months ago. I started counseling just last week. I have also found a life skills course that I am taking. I am hopeful that I can change.

Are there any other suggestions that you can make that would help me? I read your book on the seven reasons why women don’t leave [here], I also read your article on giving women space [here]. They were both very helpful to me.

My wife is taking our children and moving out at the end of this month. I am very ashamed it took me ten years to listen to what she said to me and hear it. Thank you very much for reading and responding to my message. I would be very grateful if you would take time to answer me; it would mean more than you can ever know. I look forward to reading your article. Regards,

Dear guy:

I like the sound of this letter; it feels like you’re sincere. But you’re a wife abuser. And when it comes to communicating humble and heartfelt remorse, wife abusers make Academy Award-winning actors look like braying hacks. Baseless calculated emotional manipulation is the stock-in-trade of the domestic abuser; they lie like birds sing. So chances are that your letter is written in ink mixed with bullshit—or, more likely, that you sincerely meant the letter when you wrote it—because your wife is finally leaving you, and that’s really bad for you—but that you are no more likely to actually do the work that it takes to change than an angler fish is likely to use the bright light it dangles over its choppers to help smaller fish find their way in the dark.

But I’m going to assume that you really do want to change. I hope you do. Because of the letter you sent me written by your wife (which I sure the freak hope you sent with her permission), I know that she is a strong, smart woman who, despite you, loves you. It’s up to you to determine whether that love turns out to be a blessing, or continues to be a curse for her and the children who should depend upon you to keep them safe and protected.

If you’re doubting it, please do know that you can utterly, radically, and completely change.

And do you know what it would take for you to become the man whom you and your family need you to become?

It would take two thoughts. That’s it. Two. You have, hold within you, and be willing to explore two thoughts, and the life you now lead begins to dissolve. Two thoughts stand between who you are and who you want to be.

And you’ve already had one of those thoughts! And that thought is this: I’m a monster. I’m an asshole. I’m a cretin. I’m a disgrace. I have failed at life, in every way that matters. I’m a terrible husband, and a reprehensible father. I’m an awful man.

That’s it. That’s the first thought you have to have in order to begin to change. Because that thought is how you objectify who you are. That thought—if you really have it, if you really feel it, if you let it really become the truth for you that it is for your wife and children—creates a separation between your habitual self-serving ideas about yourself—between your lies to yourself about yourself—and the honest, real truth about yourself.

That thought is the moment that your path branches off into a whole new direction. That new path is the one you want to take. But you can’t go to a new place unless you’re first very clear about the place you’re starting from. And the place you’re starting from is rotten. It stinks. A pig would flee it.

So you need that unvarnished, unadorned, unembellished fact about you to be true for you. Get that truth—hold it, own it, believe it, know it—and you’ve got yourself a whole new horizon.

The next thought you need to have—the one you will have if you’re ever going to change, the one thought toward which all of whatever therapy or counseling you get will be leading you—is that you are one angry motherfucker.

You are blind with rage. To your bones you are pissed off. You have been so angry for so long that you don’t even realize how much your entire life—everything you are, everything you think, everything you feel—is processed through that dark filter. Anger is the tap-root from which you draw your sustenance. It’s the air that fills your lungs, the very blood in your veins. Anger informs everything about you. It defines your existence.

You don’t live at all. What you do is fight.

You. Are. Fighting. All. The. Freakin’. Time.

You have been fighting all of your life because, when you were much too young to do anything to stop it, someone constantly, persistently, and terribly hurt you.

And as sure as the sun is hot that someone was one or both of your parents, and/or an older sibling.

As a child, and most likely as a baby, you were, in one way or another, tortured. You were threatened. You were beaten. You were always made acutely aware that you were in real and mortal danger.

And because of that you were in shock.

Which means you went into survival mode.

You did what all kids in that horrible circumstance do; you did the only thing you could do. You sublimated.

In response to what was happening to you, you automatically and instinctively split your mind.

You took all the information about your life that you couldn’t handle, and sunk it down beneath all the information about your life that you could handle.

And on top of that terrible foundation you started building the broken house in which you’ve lived ever since.

But at the deepest levels of your consciousness, you never forgot what was beneath the floorboards of that house. You never forgot the unspeakable wrongs done to you.

You know what happened. You know what they did. You know the terror they instilled in you.

Some of it you remember with your mind, yes. But most of it you remember in a more primal, purely emotional way.

And if you believe anything in this world, you better believe that you’re extremely angry about what was done to you. You’ve always been angry about it. You were enraged about it from the moment it started happening. You knew it was wrong. You knew it was evil. You knew you didn’t deserve it.

But you took it. You had to. You had no choice. You were a child.

And now, all these years later, look at you. Look at what you do.

You hit your wife. You probably hit—and you most certainly terrify—your children.

You’re doing to them the same thing that was done to you.

And the only reason you’re doing that is because you’ve forgotten what you probably never consciously knew in the first place, which is that in your basement—at your foundation—is this righteous anger that’s been haunting you probably since before you even had any appreciable consciousness. Your anger is primal to you that way.

Friend: you’re not mad at your wife. You’re not mad at your children. You’re not mad at the world. You’re not mad at yourself.

You’re mad at whomever fucked you when you were a kid.

That anger you must deal with. If you don’t, it will just keep on dealing with you.

And the only hard part about dealing with that anger is in finding it again. That’s it. That’s your whole challenge. You have to tear up those floorboards. You have to pry through that base layer. You have to put on a hard-hat and some thick canvas gloves, get down on your knees, and start digging down beneath your house until you hit that black, thick, hot layer of raw anger that’s long been flowing and percolating beneath everything you are.

And into that stream you must jump. You must let that terrible darkness wash over you. You must swim against it, and trace it back to its source; you must swim with it, and see all that it has done to compromise the quality of your life.

You must, in a word, process all of that anger. You must experience it as an adult in a way that you couldn’t as a child.

You call it what it is.

You give it back to the assholes who gave it to you.

You finally rid yourself of it.

Again, none of this is too difficult. It’s not scary. They don’t own you anymore. You don’t have to fear them anymore.

You will win this. Or, at least, you can if you want to.

To change your life—to make of yourself what you would have become if you hadn’t been raised so unnaturally—the only thing you have to do is go back; find your fear; acknowledge the legitimacy of that fear; register the anger in you that fear engendered; go down and find where for all these years you’ve been keeping that mighty anger; fearlessly walk into that anger; feel that anger; feel all of that anger; and then walk away from the dry ashes it will become once you vaporize it through the power of your simple and concentrated awareness of it.

That’s it. That’s your job. Do that—find a therapist to help you do that—and, if nothing else, you can save yourself.

I wish you all the luck in the world with this. I wish it for you, your wife, and especially for your children. I know that you can become the father to your children that they need you to be. You recover from this—you actually change into the man you were born to be—and you’ll have given them a model that will serve and inspire them for the rest of their lives. You’ll have proven that nothing can prevail against the power of love.

So lately we’ve been discussing God and human suffering, God and evil, God and “natural” evil, and a Christianity that works.

One thing that I never seem to get around to making clear in such conversations is that I have zero interest in converting anyone to Christianity, be it “my” version of the faith or otherwise. Why would I? As long as your beliefs don’t in any way contribute to the oppression of others (such as, oh, gosh, I dunno—gay people or women), then what you believe is nobody’s business but yours.

Business I do accept as mine, though, is defending the sheer, clear, tight-as-a-frog’s-butt rationality of what I believe. As a logical construct, core Christianity has always been as solid as a Roman arch. It is simply not vulnerable to the accusations of being intellectually untenable. And I must admit that I find exasperating the constantly proffered assumption that it is.

If it’s true that God exists (and the chances are exactly even on that either way; so choosing to vote that there is a God hardly represents a failure of reasoning), then the traditional, old-school, Gospel-based story of Jesus Christ is perfect. It works. It makes sense.

It’s just … genius, to say the least.

God made and sustains us and the world in which we live; God gave us free will; an inevitable consequence of free will is guilt (because being free to make so many choices means that we necessarily make a lot of bad, wrong, and selfish choices, for which—what with our being imbued with a conscience, and all—we are then bound to feel guilty); guilt and shame are the first and most enduring cause of human suffering; God yearns to relieve our suffering; God’s love for us also prohibits his violating our free will; God simply appearing to all people simultaneously and announcing that he/she is real and that Everything Is Going To Be Okay would eradicate human free will (since free will is grounded in the unknown open-endedness of life); God needs a way to at once preserve our free will and demonstrate in the strongest possible way that he/she is real and that Everything Is Going To Be Okay (which is to say that we are all fully and absolutely forgiven for our sins—meaning that we no longer have to feel guilty about them); God incarnates him/herself as Jesus Christ; since Jesus Christ is mortal, anyone has grounds for choosing to believe that he was not, in fact, divine; human free will is minimally, and only temporarily, compromised.

And voila. Perfection.

To boil it down to its absolute essence:

God → us → free will → guilt/shame → suffering  → Jesus → Jesus on the cross → forgiveness  →  reconciliation → peace. (And, for an extra-special bonus, the Holy Spirit!)

Two thousand years later, and here we are. A lot of people believe that Jesus Christ was God made mortal who came to first prove that he was God (raise people from the dead much?) and to then, in about the most dramatically unforgettable way possible, absolve us of our sins. And a lot of people don’t believe that.

Which of course is cool. We all have the right to believe what we want.

But say what you will about the core story of Christianity, you can’t say it doesn’t make sense. If you start with the reality of God, then the story of Jesus Christ follows, as inevitably and naturally as can be. The basic, unadorned, unembellished story of Christianity is so perfect that I personally don’t see how anyone could have simply made it up.

Sure, much of what people have done with Christianity is ridiculous and disastrous. But that’s just people screwing up. Given the inevitably negative byproducts of free will, that’s only natural.

I don’t like a lot of what Christianity has become, and feel compelled to do my best to help bring it back to what I believe it was meant to be. And just because I don’t put a lot of energy into selling the core of what Christianity is doesn’t mean that I don’t recommend the Christian way. I most certainly and unreservedly do. But I also understand and respect why anyone who thinks that believing in Christianity would in any way limit their free will or compromise their identity would flee from it like a rabbit from a lion.

A while back I became frustrated because I couldn’t find a Christianity that I could really get on board with. To my mind, the Christianity on the left was too tenuous, while the one on the right was too … rabid. I didn’t want a Christ who was essentially an inspired social worker who got jumped by the authorities, and I sure didn’t want the one who had been twisted into serving the craven needs of bigoted, power-crazed, fear-mongering misogynist homophobes.

I was stuck! A Christian without a Christianity!

So I hunkered down for a month and wrote the document below. It expresses the Christianity that I have believed to be true since the moment of my conversion experience.

In February of 2012, I and a small group of people who had read and liked my mini-manifesto quietly started a Facebook page called Unfundamentalist Christians. We put my document under the page’s What We Believe tab, and then just … sat back to see what happened. I personally did almost nothing to promote that page, because I did not want to influence its growth. I didn’t care if it grew; I just wanted the theology available for people like me who might want it. But if it did grow, I wanted to make sure it did so organically.

As of this writing, the page has 12,500 members. The admin team of that page has done a phenomenal job with it. I’m as proud of what those guys do over there as I am of anything I’ve ever been part of.

I always had in the back of my mind that if the UC page ever grew to more than 10,000 members, I’d … do something with it, basically—if for no other reason than at that point I knew I’d be essentially morally obliged to. I never had any idea what I’d do, exactly. But I figured that, come the time, I’d know.

And sure enough, last week I thought, “Hey, it’s time for UC to become a group blog!” So I contacted a guy I e-know who works at Patheos.com, and asked him if Patheos would like to host that blog. He said they very much would.

Sweetness! So before too long, Unfundamentalist Christians will launch its new group blog on Patheos, where we will run the best content that we can find about the best Christianity that we can imagine. I will have tons of fun with this endeavor, because it will essentially be an online magazine, with me as its editor. And back when the Internet was just a twitch in Al Gore’s eye, I spent ten years as a magazine editor, which I loved. So for me this will be like coming home.

If you haven’t yet—or if it’s been a while—I invite you to read the Unfundamentalist Christian tenets below. Following the first version of the tenets are the same fiftteen points written in a style much more informal. If you like what you read (which of course isn’t the same as agreeing with its every point), we’d very much appreciate you “Liking” UC’s Facebook page.

Cool. Love it. Fun. Important. Onward. Upward. Also sometimes sideways, but whaddaya gonna do?

Here are our tenets:

1. Jesus Christ was God incarnate. He performed miracles; as a means of providing for the irrevocable reconciliation of humankind to God he sacrificed himself on the cross; he rose from the dead; he left behind for the benefit of all people the totality of himself in the form of the indwelling Holy Spirit.
2. Christ and Christianity are meant to be understood, appreciated, and experienced as galvanizing inspirations for living a life of love, compassion, fairness, peace, and humility.
3. The Bible is a collection of a great many separate documents written by different people in different languages over thousands of years. Properly understanding both the letter and spirit of the Bible necessarily entails taking into account the historical and cultural contexts that so exhaustively inform so much of its text. The size, density, history, and complexity of the Bible render unfeasible the idea that not one of its words reflects more man’s will than God’s. The spirit of God is inerrant; people—even those impassioned by the conviction that God is speaking directly to or through them—are not.
4. Anyone seeking to mix Church and State has failed to understand the nature and proper role of either. To incorporate into public policy any values, views, or practices that rather than being universal are exclusive to any one religious system is to betray the very spirit of democracy.
5. It’s not possible to read Paul’s New Testament writings and remain unmoved by his open heart, intellectual prowess, and staggering bravery. And yet Paul (who, after all, spent years zealously persecuting untold numbers of Christians) must remain to us a mortal man. It is therefore incumbent upon those who claim to seek the deepest knowledge of Christ to subject the words of Paul to the same kinds of rigorous objective analysis reasonably due the words of any man who presumes to describe the qualities, purposes, and desires of God.
6. Our use of masculine pronouns to describe God is strictly a matter of convention, a profoundly unfortunate necessity of the English language, which (to date) offers no satisfactory alternative. We are always cognizant, however, that God is neither male nor female, but fully encompasses all qualities of both.
7. The Biblical scholarship supporting the idea that Paul never wrote a word proscribing natural homosexuality is at least as credible and persuasive as the scholarship (if not typical Bible translations) claiming that he did. Any person who uses the words of Paul in the New Testament to “prove” that homosexuality is a sin against God has either never themselves researched the matter, or has simply chosen to believe one set of proofs over another. Though a lack of academic rigor is easily enough understood, we remain mystified as to why anyone who purports to follow Jesus would choose to condemn an entire population over choosing to obey Jesus’ two-fold injunction to love God and neighbor, which he himself proclaimed the Greatest Commandment of all.
8. It is much more reasonable—and certainly more compassionate—to hold that throughout history God chose to introduce himself in different ways into different cultural streams, than it is to believe that there is only one correct way to understand and worship God—much less to believe that the punishment for anyone who chooses any but that way is to spend all of eternity having the living flesh seared off his or her bones.
9. The question of whether or not hell is real is properly subsumed by the truth that a moment spent worrying if you’ll be with God in the afterlife is an opportunity missed to be with God in this life.
10. God’s will and intention is to forgive and teach us, not to judge and punish us.
11. The only person who should be actively endeavoring to convert non-Christians into Christians is God. Jesus does not need our help drawing people toward him. He does, however, need, or could certainly use, our help in making sure that people know that they are, just as they are, loved by him.
12. Getting a divorce is painful, and if at all possible should certainly be avoided. But in and of itself divorce is not immoral.
13. God does not want any woman “submitting” to anyone.
14. An all-powerful God and the theory of evolution are not incompatible.
15. The single most telling indicator of a person’s moral character has nothing to do with how they define or worship God, and everything to do with how they treat others.

 

And here is the more informal version of the same document:

1. Jesus Christ was, and is, absolutely real. He performed miracles (not hard when you’re God); he sacrificed himself on the cross so that everyone could be forever reconciled with God; he rose from the dead; he left behind, for everyone, the indwelling Holy Spirit.
2. Christianity is supposed to be all about living a life of love, compassion, fairness, peace, and humility. Period.
3. The Bible isn’t just one thing. It’s a bunch of writings done by a ton of different people over about a zillion years. It’s poems, songs, history, allegories … the whole thing is just crazy dense. To really grasp whatever you’re reading in the Bible, you have to know something about the time and culture that part of it was written in. Also, the people who wrote the words that eventually made it into the Bible were just people. Through the Holy Spirit, God was definitely working through those people as they wrote. But it only stands to reason that not every single word that made it into the Bible is exactly what God would have preferred. People who make the actual words of whatever translation of the Bible they’re using more important than the message of the Bible overall are totally missing the point.
4. Church and state should always be separate. Nothing else can be fair to all citizens.
5. Paul rocks, no doubt. He was a genius. But it’s Christianity, not Paulianity.
6. God’s not male or female. He’s both. He’s all. People who need God to be a “he” need to let it go.
7. The only way to think being gay is a sin is to never actually know any gay people.
8. No one religion contains all of God.
9. If you’re worried too much about the afterlife, you’re not worried enough about how you’re living this life. Living a life of love means not having to worry about hell.
10. God wants to forgive and teach us, not judge and punish us.
11. God can handle converting people. Our job is to love people.
12. Divorce is awful. But the idea that God wants anyone to continue suffering in a terrible marriage is ridiculous.
13. God doesn’t want women “submitting” to anyone.
14. Evolution being true doesn’t mean there’s no God. The two aren’t incompatible.
15. What really matters most about a person isn’t how they define God. It’s how well they treat others.

The question people most often ask me is, “How can I believe in God, when so many innocent people suffer?” Those who ask it typically want to believe in God, but feel that the fact of innocents suffering leaves them no choice but to remain in their skepticism.

So the question begins with the assumption that God does not exist. It says, “I do not believe in God. Reconcile for me God’s existence with the suffering of innocents, and then perhaps I will.”

Those who already believe in God, such as myself, come at this question in a slightly different way. For us the question is, “Why does God allow innocent people to suffer?” While that question seems identical to the first, it isn’t exactly.

This second version of this question—the believer’s version of it—has an answer. Once one chooses to believe in God (a choice no more or less reasonable than the choice to believe there is no God), the problem of innocents suffering is resolved.

The alpha and omega of that resolution is trust. Speaking personally, I trust God. In every sense of the word, I believe in God. I believe that God is beneficent, merciful, and kind. I believe that God is, in a word, good.

So I start by taking to heart what John the Divine tells us (at 1 John 4:8): God is love.

In addition to being love, God is eternal.

As the Christian view of reality has it, the essence of every person—their spirit—is also eternal.

If a person is eternal, then their time here on earth, when compared to their total time of existence, lasts about as long as a hiccup.

So we have God, who is eternal; and we have each of us, also eternal. And during the time that we are alive on earth we are separated from God.

And during that time of separation, a lot of terrible things can happen to us.

But inevitably comes the day when death arrives at our side, takes our shaking hand, and leads us back to eternal God.

And when that happens we are reborn into our eternal selves.

When that happens we are comforted. We are restored. We are saved.

When that happens we will, from the vantage point of eternity, see and understand what we cannot possibly now. We will then see that everything is always working toward the good—no matter how bad whatever is happening here on earth might seem to us at the time.

When we are with God in the afterlife, we will know that all, after all, is perfectly fine. That everything is okay.

As Paul the Apostle put it: “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”

To be clear, none of this means that I’m okay with anyone suffering. I’m not, and fully embrace my moral obligation to do all that I can to alleviate any suffering that I can. And I certainly do not believe that it is God’s will that anyone suffer. What I believe is that God allows people to cause suffering in others, because his love for all of us prohibits him from violating the free will of any of us. (For more on this, see Why Does God Allow Evil to Exist?)

Relative to eternity all human suffering is over in the blink of an eye, and the moment we pass from this life to the next God comforts and restores us. (For we are all suffering innocents.) That is what I believe. I believe it because I believe that the figure known to history as Jesus Christ was God incarnate. And to believe that, I have only to locate within myself the special, expansive, integrated-with-the-universe feeling that we all have inside of ourselves, and identify it as the same Holy Spirit about which Jesus (in John 14) said:

And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. … the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things, and will remind you of everything I have said to you.

I connect The Good within me to God, accept the story of Jesus Christ as true—and voila: I am no longer so burdened by the suffering of others that I become hopeless, bitter, and pessimistic. Instead I am able to proceed with hope, peace, and the joy that comes from knowing that the show we’re all in now is only the beginning, and that the best is yet to come.

(Believing in the best of Christianity does not mean that I must also accept—much less believe in—the worst of it. To prove that I wrote the sixteen tenets for the group Unfundamentalist Christians.)

If

your mother

was caustic,

toxic,

abusive,

vindictive,

twisted,

dangerous:

If she was irresistibly drawn

to making much too clear

that her unhappiness—

her pain,

her dysfunction,

her drama—

was more precious to her

than you could ever be,

so that as a child

you

had to live your life

frightfully and desperately

scrounging

for whatever

fundamentally unacceptable

version of love

you could squeeze from her,

then this Mother’s Day,

while others

(as you imagine; as we all imagine)

are basking in the warmth

of their exemplary mothers,

you close your eyes,

and say a prayer

for two mothers:

the one you never had,

and the one she never had.

And then say a loving prayer

for yourself,

for the child

raised too alone.

And then open your eyes—

and there is the world,

beautiful again.

And

fuck ‘em.

Fuck ‘em all.

Because you are still here,

and you are not done yet.

I’ll never forget October 15, 2011. That’s the day I received in my email this press release:

Methodist Group to Perform Gay Weddings

In unprecedented move, network of 900+ bypasses denomination’s ban
to reach out directly to LGBT people

A group of over 900 United Methodists in New York and Connecticut today announced their intention to make weddings available to all people, gay and straight, in spite of their denomination’s ban on gay marriage. The announcement marks the kick-off of a project called We do! Methodists Living Marriage Equality.

In an unprecedented move in any major religious denomination, We do! is not only bypassing the formal rules of the church, but also reaching out directly to LGBT groups in New York and Connecticut to let them know about the new network. This morning the group published a list of all its members: clergy members who will perform weddings for gay couples, lay members of the denomination who support them, and congregations who have adopted policies to formally make weddings available to all couples.

“We refuse to discriminate against any of God’s children and pledge to make marriage equality a lived reality within the New York Annual Conference, regardless of sexual orientation or gender expression,” the group declared in statement called A Covenant of Conscience and signed by 164 clergy members, 732 lay people and six entire congregations. In all, 73 congregations within the New York Annual Conference (NYAC) are represented among the signers. NYAC is the regional church body representing United Methodist congregations from Long Island to the Catskills and in southern Connecticut. The full list of signers, as well as the text of the covenant, is here.

“My ordination vows require me minister to all people in my congregation,” said Rev. Sara Lamar-Sterling, the minister at First and Summerfield United Methodist Church in New Haven, CT. “This is about pastoral care, about welcoming all people, but especially the marginalized and the oppressed, like Jesus did.” Lamar-Sterling and her clergy colleagues are risking their jobs and their careers by taking this stand, but they say their integrity as pastors leaves them no choice but to refuse the church’s mandate to discriminate. Over the years, many individual United Methodist clergy have defied the church’s ban, but the We do! project marks the first time an organized network of clergy has done so, and done so with the support of many hundreds of lay members of the church.

“The recognition of the full humanity, sacred worth, and equal rights of gay and lesbian people is crucial to the civil rights struggle of our time. Gay, lesbian, and straight United Methodist laity and clergy are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” the Covenant of Conscience states, citing Martin Luther King’s famous Letter from Birmingham Jail. “The continuing denial of full access to all the rights and privileges of church membership in the United Methodist Church is causing deep spiritual harm to our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters and is a threat to us all.”

The United Methodist Church Book of Discipline, the rulebook that governs the country’s third largest Christian denomination, states “Ceremonies that celebrate homosexual unions shall not be conducted by our ministers and shall not be conducted in our churches.” It is one of several anti-gay provisions of the church, which since 1972 has declared “the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.” The church General Conference meets quadrennially to revise the Discipline and the issue of LGBT exclusion has been hotly debated at each General Conference in the last 40 years. The next General Conference will be April 24 through May 4, 2012, in Tampa, Florida.

The We do! project has been over a year in the making and has been followed by similar efforts in 11 other conferences within the UMC. All told, over 1,000 clergy in 19 states and the District of Columbia have signed a pledge vowing to extend their ministry to all couples seeking the church’s blessing for their relationships. The growing pastoral movement has caused a stir within the church and is expected to have reverberations at the upcoming General Conference.

We do! Methodists Living Marriage Equality is sponsored by Methodists in New Directions (MIND), a grassroots organization working in the New York Annual Conference of the UMC dedicated to ending the church’s prejudice and discrimination against LGBT people. It is co-sponsored by the NY Chapter of the Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA), an organization bringing people together to work for peace and justice in the church and the world. Both organizations are independent of the United Methodist Church. More information on the initiative is available on the MIND website.

“What a story!” I thought excitedly. “I must snag an interview with this Reverend Sara Lamar-Sterling!”

My heart quickened at the thought of probing into the mind of this renegade Christian leader, this bold iconoclast, this trailblazing visionary who was willing to defy authority, buck convention, and let the chips fall where they may.

Every journalist dreams of the day when a cutting-edge, paradigm-busting, career-making story falls right into their lap.

And that day had just arrived for me.

One hour later I was still strategizing about how to use my extensive network of media contacts to land an interview with Rev. Lamar-Sterling. Then I realized that I could just pick up the phone and call the number on the press release.

“Would you like to talk to Sara?” said the friendly lady on the other end of the line. “I can give you her cell number if you want. Do you have a pen and paper?”

Did I have a pen and paper? Was she serious? Was she not aware that I am the ultimate crack reporter? It was like asking Superman if he has a cape.

Moments later I had the fiery dissenter herself on the phone. I steadied myself. This was it. History was calling, and I was poised to take its message.

Now, I like to begin my interviews with high-profile, controversial social mavericks by zinging at them a question that shoots directly into the very heart of the issue at hand. Sure, some see my hard-hitting, uncompromising interview style as abrasive, even bare-knuckles brutal. And I’m not gonna lie about it: my direct, in-your-face questions cause a lot of would-be media darlings to crumble like a mummy’s cookie.

But you know what those questions get me that a lot of those starry-eyed “reporters” don’t get with their namby-pamby questions? Real answers, that’s what. Answers from the heart. Answers from the gut.

Sure, a lot of time those answers come through tears. But, hey: if you can’t take the heat, don’t stand in the spotlight. That’s my motto.

By way of unleashing my first jaw-dropping uppercut, I said to Rev. Lamar-Sterling, “So, are you bummed about probably having to spend all of eternity in hell?”

The reverend burst out with a laugh so hearty the phone almost fell out of my hand. Once the major swell of her hilarity had subsided, she said, “Oh, that was a good one! No, no, I’m not worried about anything like that. Hell is a creative idea dreamed up by Dante and his friends.”

Oh. Well. Okay. Not exactly how I’d expected that to go. Still: pretty edgy thing to say!

She sure did sound nice. Which, I knew, could mean only one thing: she was a pro, a veteran of the PR wars who knew a thing or two about artfully manipulating the media. But I wasn’t just any fawning TV-show host come to lob softballs a toddler could knock out of the park.

“Are you afraid that for taking the stand you have,” I asked, “you might lose your job?” Boom. Shot fired, right on target. I couldn’t wait to watch her squirm.

“Lose my job?” said Lamar-Sterling cheerily. “For doing this? No, that’s not a concern. There are many steps that would have to happen in order for any of us involved in this to actually lose our positions within the church.”

Wow. There was really no getting around it: a lesser reporter than I would have found her apparently unflagging good cheer a tad challenging.

“But that could happen, right?” I asked, with an air of conspiratorial subterfuge that I hoped she might find contagious. “You could lose your job, couldn’t you?” I imagined her in tattered clerical robes, walking the mean streets of New Haven, CT, sadly holding out to passers-by a battered brass collection plate.

“Well, I suppose losing my job is in the realm of possibilities,” she said. “But it’s not anything I’m afraid of. In any account, the much bigger picture, for we who have come out in favor of marriage equality, is the fact that gay and lesbian people are excluded and discriminated against every single day of their lives. That’s what really matters here. They’re the ones really bearing a risk out in the world. Compared to theirs, our daily risk is much smaller.”

That was it.

I gave up. This woman was clearly the greatest pastor in the history of niceness.

In my final effort to inject into this story at least some grit, I said, “Did you have to put together this movement in secret?” Sneaky priest, featured piece is an old adage of journalism. Probably. Somewhere.

“In secret? Gosh, no. We’ve been openly working on this for years. We’ve always been very open about talking about this, and about sharing our purposes and goals, and collecting signatures and so on. It’s all been very above-board. A great many people within the Methodist church believe in marriage equality, and so we’ve just been honored to facilitate and advance that conversation. And through initiatives like ‘We do!’, we look forward to doing a great deal more of this in the future.”

“How did your own church react to your doing this?” I asked. I pictured the congregants of her church up on their feet, screaming, railing, gnashing their teeth, brandishing rolled-up church bulletins they’d fashioned into short-lived but menacing torches.

“Oh, they love it. They’re a reconciling congregation, so they’ve been very excited about the whole project. In fact, I actually had to slow them down a bit. I had to explain to them how this is a process, how we needed to work within the larger body of the New York Annual Conference, to bring everyone along at the same time. But they’ve been absolutely supportive of this every step of the way.”

I asked Rev. Lamar-Sterling about where the “We do!” movement fits within the larger body of  Methodists. So she explained to me how there are different “conferences,” or regions, of Methodists, across the country, and how each, reflecting the sensibilities of its citizens, is necessarily dealing with the issue of marriage equality in its own way, and at its own speed.

“The same sort of thing we’re doing here in the NYAC is currently going on in eleven other Methodist conferences,” she said. “The difference is that while their efforts are geared toward clergy only, ‘We do!’ involves clergy, laity, and congregations. That’s what makes what we’re doing so exciting. ‘We do!’ is a strong collective of faithful Christians people who have come together to affirm that a gay and lesbian couple have as much right to the sacred bond of holy matrimony as anyone else.”

She then explained about how The Book of Discipline, which constitutes the law and doctrine of the United Methodist Church, is a living document, and not, as she put it, “a baseball bat for hurting others,” and how every four years (starting in 1784!) representatives of all the Methodists get together, talk about what’s in The Book of Discipline, make whatever changes or adjustments to its text are voted necessary, and then publish a new edition of the Book.

Boy, these guys really put the organized in organized religion. It’s all so … well, extremely democratic.

(Fact break: In the United States, The United Methodist Church ranks as the largest mainline denomination, the second largest Protestant church after the Southern Baptist Convention, and the third largest Christian denomination. As of 2007, worldwide membership was about 12 million: 8.0 million in the United States and Canada, 3.5 million in Africa, Asia and Europe. So. There’s that.)

“Ultimately, I and others who believe in the sanctity of marriage equality would like the language of The Book of Discipline to be changed to reflect full affirmation of gay and lesbian equality,” said the reverend. “But will those changes be made this year, or next? They very well might. But either way, it will ultimately happen. I’m confident that Christ will guide the United Methodist Church to become the welcoming, just, and reconciling church it was meant to be.”

I asked if there was anything final she’d care to say.

“I would like everyone to know that all people are created in God’s image; all are sacred,” she said. “God’s love is not discriminatory, or selective; it does not include some, and exclude others. It is for all. I want gay and lesbian people to know that they are welcomed in the United Methodist Church. Come, join us, as we, along with you, say, we do!”

 * * * * *

As I later reflected back on my conversation with the good reverend, I fell asleep. I dreamed I was a Jimmy Olsen-style reporter, pitching the story of the “We do!” movement to the editor of a big New York newspaper.

“Over nine hundred!” I told him. “That’s a lot of Methodists!”

The man who had probably been called “Chief” since he was in diapers was sitting on a leather high-backed chair behind a wooden desk you could land a helicopter on. He wore his usual outfit: gray slacks held up by suspenders over one of the white shirts he must have bought with the sleeves rolled up. The old man was cantankerous, sure, his edges so rough you could practically use the air around him to sand wood. But dammit, he was fair. And he knew the business inside out. The man had ink flowing through his veins.

“Look, kid,” said the Chief, speaking around his well-chomped cigar. “I’m not saying this is no story at all. But it isn’t exactly a five-ton reptile stomping down the middle of Broadway, is it? What you have here is a bunch of Christians who looked into their hearts, found God telling them that gay people have the same right to have their relationships blessed by Him as straight people do, who then organized themselves into a group that reflects that belief. That’s what’s happened here, right, kid?”

“Well, yeah, it is, basically.”

“I got news for ya’, son: that ain’t news. That’s Methodists being methodical. What you have is a story about meetings. It’s a story about schedules, procedures, conferences, rules of order. It’s about purposeful conversation, intentional reflection, collective discernment. It’s about that vast, invisible matrix of undulating forces that, slowly but surely, has always worked to evolve the body of Christ on earth.”

Suddenly the Chief was transformed into a radiant figure emanating a bright golden light that filled the room.

“Who are you?” I whispered.

Spreading his (or her?) arms wide as it expanded, rose in the air, and became too bright for me look directly at, the figure said, “I am the Lord your God. The story of gay people and my church is still being written. Pity those too blind to see how happily that story must end, how inevitably all will know that I created and equally love gay people, straight people, and everyone in between.”

As suddenly as it had appeared the figure and its light vanished, replaced by the Chief once again sitting behind his desk.

“Now get out there and find me a story I can use,” he said. Bending over the papers on his desk, he grumbled, “Extra points if it involves a live dinosaur.”

I will be including this essay in the upcoming revised edition of my book UNFAIR. As you may know, I’m asking readers to help me proofread such essays. If you would, please leave any mistake you find in the text above—spelling, punctuation, syntax, anything at all—as a comment below. (Once I’ve incorporated your suggested changes into the text itself I may delete your comment, by way of keeping a clean and focused pathway for those wishing to comment on the post itself. I know that can seem really obnoxious; thanks for understanding why I might do it. And thanks so much for your help!)

An extremely timely and relevant update to this post is the story of Methodist pastor Thomas Ogletree, who earlier this week penned for The Washington Post, Why I disobeyed the United Methodist Church’s unjust teaching on same-sex marriage.

I’ve recently been invited to a couple of gay weddings. So—what with being Christian and all—I asked myself the famous question, “What would Jesus do?” (Which I don’t too often ask myself, actually, since Jesus could, for instance, raise people from the dead and turn water into wine, whereas I can barely drag myself out of bed in the morning and/or turn water into coffee. Safe to say many of His options are none of mine.)

Wondering what Jesus would do if he were invited to a gay wedding naturally led me to the New Testament. And therein I found these quotes from Jesus himself:

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices — mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law — justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel. [Matthew 23:23-24]

and

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to. [Matthew 23:13]

and

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are. [Matthew 23:15]

and

Love your neighbor as yourself. [Mark 12:31]

When I next went looking for anywhere in the Bible where Jesus says anything—and I mean anything—about homosexuality, I learned that Jesus spent about as much time talking about gay people as I do talking about the belly-buttons of seahorses. Of course, it’s entirely possible that Jesus did say many crucially informative things about gay people, but that when he did so no one around him happened to have handy an ostrich feather, sappy stick, or whatever it was they used for pens back then. Which would make sense, actually. If you’ve spent any time at all reading the New Testament, you know that Jesus’ disciples weren’t exactly Johnnies-on-the-spot. They were just normal, everyday guys.

Which I think is kind of the whole point. Jesus sure did love him some everyday people.

Throughout the New Testament, the only kind of people with whom Jesus consistently takes frightful exception are the very “teachers of the law and Pharisees” whom we see him dressing down in the passages above. One thing that often gets lost in our ideas about Jesus is the degree to which he is exactly the wrong person to piss off. And you don’t have to spend a lot of time in the New Testament before you understand that the only kind of people who seem to ever truly anger Jesus are those who put religious dogma above what he most clearly stood for, which was God’s love.

Around Jesus you can whine, lie, shift your loyalties, be late, be greedy, be too ambitious, be stupid, be a coward, be a hypochondriac, constantly complain, fall asleep at every wrong moment—you can do nothing right, and it won’t in the slightest way seem to offend him.

But you put dogma ahead of love? You transmogrify God’s law into a justification for denying God’s love?

Then yikes, man. Then you’ve got yourself a problem no one in this world wants.

I’m not sure how exactly we came to so often consider Jesus the soft and dreamy, namby-pamby type. (Not that there’s anything wrong with being namby-pamby! I have an uncle who’s namby-pamby!) But it’s hard to believe that it came from the accounts of Jesus we have in the Gospels. That’s just not the guy on those pages.

Jesus is scary when he’s riled. And the only people who rile him are those who, in his own name (what with him being God and all), set themselves up as sanctimonious judges of others.

I think I better go to the weddings of my gay friends. I’m scared not to. While it’s certainly true that in many of his parables it’s unclear what exactly Jesus was saying or meant, he didn’t even almost waffle about his “Love your neighbor as yourself.” In conjunction with “Love the Lord your God with [everything you've got],” he very explicitly declared that to be the greatest commandment, the one upon which hangs “all the law and the prophets.”

How in the world am I supposed to argue with that? Talk about having God eliminate your options.

So I’ll attend my gay friends’ weddings, in the exact same spirit gay friends of mine once attended my wedding. And if it happens that in the course of either of my friends’ weddings or receptions I find myself wondering if I’m doing the morally correct thing, I’ll be sure to remember the first miracle of Jesus’ recorded in the Bible. I’ll remember what he did do.

I’ll remember that Jesus turned water into wine.

At a wedding.

I will be including this essay in the upcoming revised edition of my book UNFAIR. As you may know, I’m asking readers to help me proofread such essays. If you would, please leave any mistake you find in the text above—spelling, punctuation, syntax, anything at all—as a comment below. (Once I’ve incorporated your suggested changes into the text itself I may delete your comment, by way of keeping a clean and focused pathway for those wishing to comment on the post itself. I know that can seem really obnoxious; thanks for understanding why I might do it. And thanks so much for your help!)

Image by Dan Wilkinson.

Coffee cup fresh in hand, this morning I settled in to start reading Treatise on the Gods, by the incomparable H.L. Mencken. The book’s first chapter, “The Nature and Origin of Religion,” begins with this:

The ancient and curious thing called religion, as it shows itself in the modern world, is often so overladen with excrescences [gross outgrowth, disfigurement] and irrelevancies that its fundamental nature tends to be obscured. When we hear of it in everyday life, it is usually in connection with some grandiose pretension by its priests or practitioners or some unseemly row or scandal among them, religious only by courtesy. It is employed by such pretenders as a sanction for moral theories, for political and economic dogmas, for reforms (or the opposition to them) in laws and manners, for social protests and revolutions, and even for purely private enterprises, including the commercial and the amorous. … In America it is used as a club and a cloak by both politicians and moralists, all of them lusting for power and most of them palpable frauds. Some of the most bitter religious controversies of this age of hatreds … have had little to do with religion, properly so called. But it serves so conveniently to give a high dignity and authority to this or that faction, otherwise plainly in want of a respectable case, that it is constantly lugged in by the heels, to its own grave damage and discredit and the complete destruction of common sense and common decency. The fact, no doubt, accounts at least partly for the slowness with which some of the capital problems of mankind approach solution, especially in the fields of morals and government: their discussion is often so contaminated by pseudo-religious considerations that a rational and realistic dealing with them becomes impossible.

Gah, man. What a total Donny Downer.

I’m so going back to bed now.

Got this in:

Hello, Sir!

I’ve read through your work, and especially liked your 2+2=5  post. I have a problem that makes me very sad, and I can’t change anything about it, so I followed your advice in that post, asked for peace, and got some! Except it was temporary relief … Maybe I asked wrong?

It’s a girl! Yeah! I’m a 26 year old man worried about a woman! I really don’t know what’s wrong with my head. We knew each other for years and decided to date. Relatively hands-off stuff, too (just in case I was more tempted towards her body instead of “her”). But she decided she has better things to think about and went on her way.

You’ve probably heard of this exact issue a million times and you’ve probably heard everyone say the same thing. Still, I have to say it for myself. John—this really hurts. It doesn’t stop and it doesn’t go away. I was very happy to have her around. Somehow, I’ve linked my self esteem to the acceptance of women. Or just that one, I don’t know. Basically, she’s gone and she isn’t coming back. Can you teach me or tell me how to just be okay with it? You know… like someone who isn’t a pussy? Thanks for reading!

Like someone who isn’t a pussy. I know I should have edited that out; I know it’s essentially derogatory toward women. But sometimes you just … leave the knotholes in the wood.

Anyway, here we go.

Dear Brokenhearted Guy Who Wrote Me This:

You are boned like a fish filet. There’s no cure for a broken heart. You just have to suffer through it.

Wow. Many minutes later, and I can’t think of one thing to add to that. The truth is the truth.

Whoo-hoo! Easiest blog post ever!

Ahh, good times. For me, anyway. But not for you, letter-writer. For you now, life is bound to be just one suckofractoimplosive moment after another. One time, when I had my heart seriously broken, I went deaf for a week. All I could hear was this non-stop roaring static in my head. I was actually deaf. I’d watch people talk, and know they were talking, because they were looking right at me, and moving their lips and hands, and all I could do is dumbly stare at them and wait for them to either give up, start slapping me around, or call for medical help.

God, it was so awful. Especially once I got my hearing back, and had to once again realize that people never say jack worth hearing.

See? I was in high school when that happened to me—and boom, just like that, I’m back in that same frame of mind that … well, in my case, had me wandering the streets in the middle of the night wondering why, if there really was a God, he wasn’t employing a little of that famous mercy of his, and having somebody run me over with a car.

Can you imagine? Your heart is so broken that you take the fact that you’re still alive as evidence that God is either not there, or so derelict in his duties that he may as well not be?

Man.

Love sucks. It’d be better if we were all born robots.

And of course you can imagine a heart so broken you wish you were dead. Everyone can imagine feeling that way. Because everyone has felt that way. Everyone has had their heart broken like a china cup on the Titanic. It’s like taxes. You can’t escape it. It’s the rule of life: crawl, walk, talk, socialize, have love stomp your heart like Tyrannosaurus Rex on a gerbil, grow old, die.

Anyway, friend, sorry you’ve had your heart broken. Try not to drink too much.

Lately some of you have been kind enough to call me the love child of Dear Abby and Dan Savage. But can you imagine Dear Abby going, “Dear lovelorn in Ohio: The main thing is to try not to drink too much. Sincerely  yours, Abby.”

Now Dan would say that. Which is why people love him.

Actually, there is one thing that immediately came to mind when reading this letter. It’s something that I would say to anyone with a broken heart. It’s a truth no one could possibly put better than the ridiculously awesome Alfred Lord Tennyson, who wrote:

‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

And there it is. The rest is silence. Until your hearing returns, anyway.

I’m just now settling in to write John’s Monthly Newsletter. If you don’t know, I do two e-newsletters: John’s Prayer for the Week, which every Monday morning I go into the deepest possible meditative state before writing and sending out to subscribers, and the monthly, in which I share about developments in my personal life and do a giveaway.

In this month’s newsletter I’ll be boring people  sharing about my recent forays into yoga, juicing, the world of organic produce, conga drumming—and also why, two days ago, I was suddenly so embarrassed at the gym that I literally couldn’t move. And I’ll be giving away a copy of Pure Drivel, the bestselling collection of comic riffs by Steve Martin.

The content of both newsletters is exclusive to them; I don’t publish any of it anywhere else. To subscribe to either/both emails, go here (or just … look below this post). You can unsubscribe any time with the click of a button. Thanks, friends. See ya’ all on the flipside.