Refuge Needs Your Help!

To recap the situation: Refuge is the LGBTQ and ally students' safe space at Eastern University, a Christian college outside of Philadelphia. Last month, the student government voted almost unanimously for Refuge to be recognized, the administration didn't feel comfortable with that decision, and formed a committee basically to determine whether to uphold the students' decision. Refuge leadership went before this committee yesterday, and it did not go well.

So now they're asking folks to write letters in support of Refuge's place on campus (from anyone and everyone - yes, you!), and send them to either Bettie Ann Brigham or Daryl Hawkins in student development at 1300 Eagle Road, St Davids, PA 19087 - the sooner the better!

Please help if you can - it's so important for students to have this safe space on campus to be their authentic selves.

Making History

On Monday morning this week, the Student Government at Eastern University voted for Refuge to become an official, school-sanctioned club on campus.

The vote was 11 Yes, ZERO No, and 4 Abstained.

As I've written before, I personally have a lot invested in the success of Refuge, and I am so very proud of the students Sanctuary Collective has been supporting there. They're celebrating their success tonight, and it's a well-deserved celebration!

My alma mater is one step closer to being a safe place for LGBTQ people to study and thrive in community. Take heart from your successes, friends, and keep up the good work.

The Divine Scoundrel

When we think of Biblical villains, scoundrels, vixens…questionable people,

Our knee jerk reflexes are often

Judas, Pilate, Pharaoh, Delilah…

 

You know, all the people we were taught were really sinful and bad in Sunday School.

 

However…what about GOD…YHWH…Elohim?

 

Perhaps a bit sacrilegious…escandaloso…profane.

 

As we read the stories of our faith,

We encounter a GOD who has done

some very “mysteriously holy good” things such as:

Destroying cities…wiping out whole communities of people…

smiting two boys for offering the wrong smoke…

sending plagues…hardening hearts…

giving leprosy to a woman who complained…

allowing the chosen people to be enslaved, tortured, and exiled.

 

It is this messiness and not so pretty face of GOD that

invites us to appreciate the divine humanity, confusion, and “amazingness”

within the one called  “I am.”  

 

The Almighty is complicated, quirky, and screwed up…

 

Just like me. 

 

Afterall, we are all made in GOD’s image.

 

Perfection is not the absence of flaw,

but the willingness to find and reflect GOD in the snarky and faithful.

 

It is this Divine Scoundrel who invites us and challenges us

into the trenches to wrestle with counter-narratives that go against hegemony and the status quo of

abelism, heteronormativity, whiteness, thin-ness and all the other isnesses;

to risk the scandal of widening the circle of celebratory acceptance and radical inclusivity by sitting at

the table to share with  the person living with AIDS, a person addicted to drugs …

a person who disagrees with us in our

theology, sexual ethic, political stances, or cultural practice. 

The scandalous divinity that created us, made us in HER image not to be comfortable

but to be just, to be prophetic …

to stand in sacred, sassy, social solidarity advocating for those who are raped by

society, our churches, our schools, our legal system, and by us. 

 

For despite all the power, wrath, and vastness,

GOD took the time to create me, stick with me, abrazarme, carry me, drag me…

 

Gave me a voice and the ability to create scandal not for mere shock value

But to be a partner and lover in creating justice and sanctuary.

 

Mi DIOS risked scandal by loving me and loving through me; and SHE would have it no other way!!!

 

Amen!!!

Healing and Hope

I do not know when I decided to become an activist—I think I was seduced by the idea of working both within and outside of myself, fighting for love in the open, explosive sense of the verb. Like most activists, I have a very personal, vested interest in my work. I am a queer person and I work to further the rights for and understanding of queer people, specifically at Hope College—a small, Christian, liberal arts college in Holland, MI.  The personal is political to me, in the sense that I cannot engage “the issue” in an academic sense only, and I prefer to classify the topics of gender and sexuality as personal and relational. 

All too often, the struggle for human rights feels like war to me, attacking or defending.  But who am I fighting? I label this person with words like “conservative,” “fundamentalist” or “close-minded.”  Recently, I have been invited to rethink this approach.

 

The day before I left the Sanctuary Collective discipleship gathering in New York, I lost a friend in a plane crash. 

Continue Reading Healing and Hope

Voicing Through Otherization

Spick ... Pansy ... Freak ... Sicko ... Sinner

Reffy ... Rafter ... Wacko ... Abomination ... Loonie

Faggot ... Disordered ... UnAmerican … Not human

 

As a Latin@ and queer person of faith who is flat-footed, slightly over weight, has a balding head, suffers from anxiety, depression, and possibly sleep anemia, and who precociously defies labels and categories that have been pastorally coerced onto my body, mind, soul, and voice –

these words are not new to me, but have followed me throughout my life. 

 

They have been spoken to me and about me by family, friends, colleagues, teachers, pastors, news-casters, politicians, therapists, celebrities, total strangers. 

 

There have been times that these combinations of orally expressed hurtful letters (along with many many others not written here) have been uttered by me to others and even to myself. 

 

These labels, names, misconstrued identities, paradigms, distorted realities

are used to silence me … to other me … to de-member me … to de-voice me. 

 

However, it is these same words that have challenged, thrust, and wrestled me into voice.

It is because of discrimination, misappropriation, and misconception;

it is because of homophobia, transphobia, religiophobia, and latin@phobia--

it is through my marignalization by words spoken and powerfully unspoken by society, the church, the academy, cultural institutions, education systems, the media that I have come into my own unique and prophetic voice with pride, chutzpah, vulnerability, and faith. 

 

It is an ongoing spiritual and literal vocal chord re-memberment and stimulation that only a few years ago… it took many scars, tears, sweat, blood, and questions to live in the tension and peace of integrating body, mind, soul, ruach, and voice … it has taken me a while to come into and claim my own as my own.  This process and journey has just begun and will not end. 

 

By not being celebrated for living, loving, and laughing beyond the norm,

I have found my evolving authentic spirit and begun learning how to sing and proclaim my warrior chant, even when I am off tune or key.

 

It is my wrestling with isness and isms,

Of living in the in between spaces of competing yet complementing identities

that I have come into voice and active presence-filled silence.

 

Though the journey is just beginning, I am able to embrace and be Queer, American, Cuban, El Salvadoran, Catholic, Spanglish, catholic, Ecumenical, Mujerista, Eccentric, Imperfect, Curvaceous, and share a distinct quirky laugh that the world either likes or doesn’t like.

 

By messages that have sought to dis-engage me, I have begun learning to re-engage, re-claim, re-own, re-rant, and re-embrace mi lucha, mi voz, mi DIOS, mi vida.