A couple of weeks ago, Stacy and I visited the Stonewall National Monument Visitors Center in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. It was the site of the 1969 Stonewall Riots that galvanized the gay rights movement. An interactive exhibit of books with journaling pages invites visitors to write responses to different prompts on each book’s cover. These are the instructions:
Choose a book whose prompt resonates with the essence of your queer identity or allyship.
Let the prompt serve as your compass, guiding your thoughts and memories.
Inscribe your reflections within the sacred pages of the book, entrusting us to share it with fellow travelers.
Pause to absorb the stories they’ve shared with you.
Depart, knowing your words have woven strands into the tapestry of our collective journey.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s quote from his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” about “the inter-related structure of reality” came to mind, about all of us being “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” The collective journey resonated with me and drew me to pick up the book with this on its cover: What does it mean to be an ally?
I read a few responses others had written: “Being an ally means standing up for the LGBTQ community.” “It means not judging people based on their sexuality.” Then, with the precursor that I am a pastor of an Open & Affirming Christian church in College Station, Texas, and have been so for nearly 20 years, I wrote, “Being an ally means being in solidarity with my queer siblings (showing up and standing up); listening to and learning from them; valuing and honoring them; and putting the words of Jesus into action: no one knows greater love than this, that they lay down their life for their friends.”
It felt good to weave my strand into the tapestry of our collective journey, and I wondered what others who might read my words would take from them.
When I placed the book back on the shelf, I noticed (again) one whose prompt jumped out at me, but that I had passed over. It’s prompt: What does it mean to be queer?
In retrospect, I see that prompt as an examination of my discipleship with Christ. Do I know what it means to be queer? To an extent, I can never know simply because I am a straight cisgender person. But to another, one that I feel Jesus invites us to explore, I should know. That latter extent is my Christian call to empathy.
The children’s messages in our worship services will sometimes end with a repeat-after-me prayer that says, “Dear God, thank you for sending us Jesus.” Jesus was sent not only to live among us, but to be in solidarity with us, and to empathize with our lived experience. This is the foundational power of the faith that we practice: God in Christ empathizes with the human condition. The Creator of all that is good feels the array of experiences and identities that make up the tapestry of our collective journey. This includes knowing what it means to be queer. This is divine empathy as exemplified by the Christ we follow.
I don’t know what I might have written if I had chosen to open that other book with the prompt about what it means to be queer. With a renewed pledge to lean into empathy as a requirement of my discipleship with Jesus, I might start with this: “I don’t know what it means to be queer, and I will never fully know; but I am trying. And I will continue trying, because I cannot follow a Savior out of gratitude for his empathy with my life without also following him out of sheer joy for the empathy he has for my queer siblings and everyone on this collective journey. I pray this effort at empathizing with my neighbor will be a good strand woven into that tapestry that reveals the very image of God in all its beautiful fullness.”
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