MyOutSpirit.com Gay Spirituality Blog

Fred Phelps and Family - You're Loved

{from Azariah Southworth, http://azariahspeaks.blogspot.com/}

In May 2010, Ray Boltz and I were in Long Beach, CA  as part of our national tour, "Living True." So was the Phelps family of Westboro Baptist Church. 

The Westboro Baptist Church is primarily made up of the Phelps family. They're famous for protesting American soldiers funerals and gay events, such as the one Ray and I were attending. Their signs such as, "God hates fags" and "Thank God for dead soldiers" has infuriated people all over the world. So much so, there is a pending Supreme Court case, which if it doesn't go in their favor, would limit or even silence their hate speech. 

I heard the Phelps family would be in Long Beach the same weekend as Ray and I. When I woke up that Saturday morning, I heard shouting outside my hotel room. I went over to the window and pulled back the curtain. There they were, ten stories below me, with their infamous signs in tow. 

I immediately became excited. I've wanted to meet the Phelps family for years now. There were so many things I've thought about saying and doing to them. However, since my transition from a faith based in fear to a faith based in love, I no longer had the desire to do any of those things anymore. 

Instead of responding to them out of fear, I could only think of how I could respond out of love. But what would that look like? 

I found a corner store nearby and bought five bottles of water. I figured it was warm that day and they might be thirsty. 

Estranged son of Fred Phelps, Nate Phelps, has recently started speaking out about his experience of growing up in the Phelps family. In a exclusive interview with The Standard, Nate revealed his father, Fred, would physically beat his mother for hours and also abuse the children the same. 

When I saw them outside my hotel window that Saturday morning, I no longer saw people who hate me because I'm gay. I saw victims of Fred Phelps. I saw people who have never experienced unconditional love and are controlled by the fear of going to hell. 

As I approached them, I grew nervous, but went up to each one and asked, "Are you thirsty?" All of them said no, as I thought they would, "Well, if you get thirsty, here is some water. It's warm out, you need to stay hydrated." Before I walked away, I attempted to look at each of them in the eyes and tell them, "I want you to know, you're loved." Only one of them responded to that... Mara Phelps. 

With her soft spoken voice she told me that we must obey all the laws of God or face his judgment. I asked Mara, "When was the moment you experienced the love of God?"

Mara looked down then up again at me and said, "I don't even know if God loves me." 

It was then I reassured her that God does love her. I then shared with her the moment I experienced the love of God which has changed my life. Mara listened, I thanked her for listening and one last time looked at her in the eyes and said, "Mara, you're loved." 

If it wasn't for God's love transforming me, there would have been no way I could have done anything more than join in with the 50+ counter protesters and yell back at these victims of Fred Phelps. It is only because of the unconditional love of God continuously transforming me that I could respond in love to their extremely hateful message. 

That Saturday morning, I made a new friend... her name is Mara Phelps and God loves her. 

Be love, 
Azariah Southworth

To LGBT Youth: It Gets Better

“It gets better” is the theme of my new video message to LGBT youth. 

I made the video as part of the It Gets Better Project, a new website where LGBT adults can share stories of hope with LGBT youth.  Straight allies -- including President Obama -- also make messages of support there.

The project was founded in September by gay author Dan Savage in response to the recent suicides by gay teenagers who were harassed for their sexual orientation.  It grew quickly, reaching 1,000 videos, 100,000 supporters and 10 million video views. 

In my video I recall how mean boys yelled “lezzie” at me in school when I was growing up in Iowa.  But even worse than the bullying was the loneliness.  But life got better. I grew up and I’m still together with the wonderful woman who was my college sweetheart.  We came out as lesbians to our families and on the job, and the world didn’t end.  In fact, it got better!  For me it also got better because I realized that there is a God, and God loves me just as I am.  I became an openly lesbian minister and author.

Many GLBT youths can’t picture what their lives might be like as openly queer adults.  The “It Gets Better” videos allow them to see with their own eyes that they can have a future with love and happiness.

I also signed the “It Gets Better” pledge: “Everyone deserves to be respected for who they are. I pledge to spread this message to my friends, family and neighbors. I'll speak up against hate and intolerance whenever I see it, at school and at work. I'll provide hope for lesbian, gay, bi, trans and other bullied teens by letting them know that ‘It Gets Better.’”

To take the pledge, see more videos or submit your own video, visit:
http://www.itgetsbetterproject.com/

See my video, click the image above or click here
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This was written by Kittredge Cherry, a lesbian Christian author who blogs on LGBT spirituality and the arts at the Jesus in Love Blog.

Giving Emerging Ethical Leaders a Voice

{Chris Stedman, NonProphet Status}

This post originally appeared on Tikkun Daily. 

“What qualifies you to do this?” I asked myself as I rode the train home one day to write my first contribution to the Washington Post’s On Faith last year. I listened to the wheels rumble beneath me, looked at those sitting around me, and knew I was headed in a new direction.

I was 22-years-old, an atheist, and a seminary student. Though I don’t believe in God, I decided to go to seminary because I wanted to find a way to bridge the divide between religious and secular communities. The summer after my first year at seminary I began interning at the Interfaith Youth Core, an organization that aims to mobilize a movement of young people positively engaging religious pluralism. The organization’s founder, Eboo Patel, maintained a blog for On Faith and invited me to submit a guest post for it.

At the time, I was beginning to recognize that the organized atheist movement often talked about religion in ways that created more division instead of less. As an atheist, I was frustrated by what I saw as a total lack of interest from my fellow atheists in respectfully engaging religious identities. So I sat down and wrote about it.

As I was working on my essay, I began to browse the rest of the site. On Faith features a panel of contributors that are among the most respected and knowledgeable experts in the fields of religion and ethics. But I didn’t see many blogs on their site by people who weren’t already established as authorities. I wondered if I was actually qualified to write for the website.

After my submission was posted, I started getting some unexpected feedback. “This is exactly what I think, but I didn’t know anyone else agreed with me,” wrote one reader. “Thank you for saying something our community really needs to hear,” wrote another. These readers happened to be young people.

I hadn’t thought that there were others who felt the same way I did, let alone other young people. I talked to a friend who maintained a blog of his own, and he suggested I create a blog to continue sorting through this issue.

I started NonProphet Status, and suddenly became a part of a larger conversation on the issue of religion and atheism. The blog quickly began to get traction in interfaith and atheist circles, and soon I was being asked to speak at conferences, received invitations to write in other venues, and watched my blog views grow from week to week. I, a young seminary student with a small but growing vision for respectful engagement across lines of secular and religious identity, suddenly had a platform.

Emerging leaders in formation, especially young ones, deserve to have a voice. In a time defined by deep political and religious divisions, we need to hear from those who will shape our ethical future. The current American discourse on religion and ethics is primarily defined by established leaders – ministers, rabbis, academics and journalists. While their perspectives are invaluable, this leaves an entire population of important stakeholders without a platform: the up-and-comers.

To remedy this, the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue (JIRD) has engaged with the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions to establish State of Formation, a forum for up-and-coming religious and ethical thinkers to draw upon the learning that is occurring in their academic and community work, reflect on the pressing questions of a religiously pluralistic society, and challenge existing definitions and assumptions.

State of Formation will be a community conversation between emerging leaders in formation. Together, a cohort of seminarians, rabbinical students, graduate students, activists and the like – the future religious and moral leaders of tomorrow – will work to redefine the ethical discourse today.

In a recent Wired interview about his book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, author Kevin Kelly said that the best settings for creativity and innovation are diverse and collaborative. “Ideas aren’t self-contained things,”said Kelly.”They’re more like ecologies and networks.”

Let’s cluster our ideas and make an ecology for emerging leaders. The idea that got me writing – that the religious and secular can find common ground and work together – is just one of many out there that addresses the ethical dimensions of our pluralized society.

Chris Stedman is the Managing Director of State of Formation at the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue™. Chris received an MA in Religion from Meadville Lombard Theological School at the University of Chicago, for which he was awarded the Billings Prize for Most Outstanding Scholastic Achievement. If you would like to nominate an emerging ethical or religious leader to be a Contributing Scholar to State of Formation, the application form can be found here.

Honoring the gay saint of 9/11

A gay priest is considered a saint by many since his heroic death in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.

Father Mychal Judge, chaplain to New York City firefighters, responded quickly when Muslim extremists flew hijacked planes into the twin towers. He rushed with firefighters into the north tower right after the first plane hit.

Refusing to be evacuated, he prayed and administered sacraments as debris crashed outside. He saw dozens of bodies hit the plaza outside as people jumped to their deaths. His final prayer, repeated over and over, was “Jesus, please end this right now! God, please end this!”

While he was praying, Father Mychal was struck and killed in a storm of flying steel and concrete that exploded when the south tower collapsed. He was the first officially recorded fatality of the 9/11 attack. Father Mychal was designated as Victim 0001 because his was the first body recovered at the scene. More than 2,500 people from many nationalities and walks of life were killed. Thousands more escaped the buildings safely.

After Father Mychal’s death, some of his friends revealed that he considered himself a gay man. He had a homosexual orientation, but by all accounts he remained faithful to his vow of celibacy as a Roman Catholic priest of the Franciscan order.

The charismatic, elderly priest was a long-term member of Dignity, the oldest and largest national lay movement of LGBT Catholics and their allies. Father Mychal voiced disagreement with the Vatican’s condemnation of homosexuality, and found ways to welcome Dignity’s AIDS ministry despite a ban by church leaders. He defied a church boycott of the first gay-inclusive St. Patrick’s Day parade in Queens, showing up in his habit and granting news media interviews.

Many people, both inside and outside the GLBT community, call Father Mychal a saint. He has not been canonized by his own Roman Catholic Church, but some feel that he has already become a saint by popular acclamation, and the Orthodox-Catholic Church of America did declare officially declare him a saint.

The above icon is “Holy Passion Bearer Mychal Judge and St. Francis of Assisi” by Father William Hart McNichols.  It shows Father Mychal with St. Francis of Assisi as the World Trade Center burns behind them. They hold out a veil to gather and help people who cry out in times of violence and terror. In the text accompanying the icon, Father McNichols describes Father Mychal as a Passion Bearer who “takes on the on-coming violence rather than returning it… choosing solidarity with the unprotected.”

Father McNichols is a renowned iconographer and Roman Catholic priest based in New Mexico. After earning a Master of Fine Arts from the Pratt Institute in New York, he studied icon painting with the Russian-American master Robert Lentz. Like Lentz, he paints icons with contemporary subjects, as well as many with classical themes. Some of his icons express compassion for people with AIDS, based on his experiences working at an AIDS hospice in New York City in the 1980s. Father McNichols is one of 11 artists featured in “Art That Dares: Gay Jesus, Woman Christ and More” by Kittredge Cherry.

For more info on Father Mychal Judge, visit his Wikipedia entry or the Saint Mychal Judge blog.

Image credit: “Holy Passion Bearer Mychal Judge and St. Francis of Assisi” By Father William Hart McNichols

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This is cross-posted at the Jesus in Love Blog, where it launches a new “GLBT Saints” series. Lesbian Christian author Kittredge Cherry will write about saints and holy people of special interest to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) people and our allies on appropriate dates throughout the year.

Ride the Kosmic Wave to Colin's Blog...

By Joe Perez

One of my favorite new (to me) queer spiritual blogs is Spirit Under Transsexual Cover, a blog by a surfer of Kosmic waves. According to Colin's Zaadz profile, he's a 36 year-old Gemini who lives in Portland, Oregon. A Truth seeker, spiritual explorer, and radically full being. He considers himself a transman (genetically XX with a deeeper resonsnace with the male side of the gender spectrum). Here's more from his profile:

I am currently exploring Buddhism (mainly Soto Zen, but Theravada and Tibetan, too), Vedanta and Yoga, as well as developmental and integral psychology. I see my future including an offering of myself and my experience as a psychotherapist and writer; graduate school is on the horizon. My life has been profoundly influenced by many things: living as a queer person in America, the writings and talks by Ken Wilber and Ram Dass, kirtan with Krishna Das and fluffy kittens. My spirit is fed by spreading love. I see each person as a unique flower, whether that flower is in full bloom or is wilting from the illusion of separation and all the related suffering.

Recent posts by the transman include an embedded musical post (by the artist Creed), quotes from the Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist sacred text on "The Chief Purpose of Being Incarnate", a great image post called "The Mirror of 2", a take on musician Bjork, a post on his suspicion of plastics, and insights from a holotropic breathwork seminar.

The longest reflection is "Integral Living: A Practical Guide to Remembering Joy and Resting in Equanimity," a notable contribution on the integration of depth psychology with Buddhist spiritual practice. But it's really not as heavy as that description sounds. Check it out for the insights into community, practical tips on forging a life that makes sense, and just for fun.

It's hard enough to be real and bring your light shining out in the real world. In some respects, it's even harder in the virtual world, where there is a great possibility to recoil in fear, shyness, and concern for privacy. Because he shares his light with others so that others can enjoy his special gifts, come what may, in my book that makes Colin one of our bright shining lights.

Ubermensching Nietzsche: An Encounter with the Void

By Keith Adams

Perhaps the most dramatic moment in all classical music is the opening of Also Sprach Zarathustra, the half-hour tone poem by Richard Strauss, more familiarly known as the opening theme from "2001: A Space Odyssey." It also is a perfect piece of music to describe what I term my encounter with the Void, which happened the week after I came back one of the most stressful events of my life. I didn't know this at the time, but I was transitioning from an adulthood of chronic depression through to complete recovery. Lying along the way I would also find spirituality, but also, unfortunately, probably due to both the stress and the use of lexapro, getting jailed by the LAPD and spending three days in a psychiatric ward and getting a diagnosis of being bipolar (now under complete control through drug treatment).