Chapel Talk: "Love and Pride"
(David Booth, St. Olaf College, Pride Week, March 6, 2008 / Archived video / Archived audio)
Text: Matthew 7
Judging Others
1 "Do not judge, or you too will be judged. 2 For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
3 "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4 How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.
6 "Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces.
Ask, Seek, Knock
7 "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.
9 "Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone?"
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My friends, I am very happy to be with you, and to offer some comments to celebrate Pride Week, and to see if there is some bread here, and not just stone. Let’s ponder our circumstances, where we are right here and now, for just a minute. We’re in Boe Memorial Chapel—a place of worship and reflection for St. Olaf College—a college of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
Those of you raised in, or familiar with a Lutheran sensibility know that in the thought of Martin Luther pride occupies about the lowest position as the most dangerous and sinful of human traits. For Lutherans, pride means a love of self so strong it blinds you about how things really are in the world, and it turns you from God toward yourself. The whole drama of salvation centers on the premise that pride must be uprooted, plucked out, and destroyed. The sinner mut be made to despair of his own self, and abandon boasting of her own goodness, before he or she is receptive to God’s mercy. So pride is the enemy of grace.
But “Pride Week” is a good thing—a very good thing, indeed. And so it seems we have what the philosophers call an “equivocal term”—that is, a word of great importance that means one thing in one context and another thing entirely in another context; a word with an emotional force that shifts accordingly. Let’s consider this double aspect of pride.
First there is a pride that is too much self-love. This pride asserts selfish claims at the expense of others, and tries to subject others to the will and judgment of one person’s, or one group’s, tiny ego. This kind of bad pride is all the worse when it is joined to the raw power of a majority social group of any kind.
Then there is a pride that heals a soul that has been wounded by hate and rejection—a pride that looks in the face of judgment and ridicule and says “Nevertheless! I am beloved. I have a worth that your arrogance cannot comprehend.” This pride is merely enough self-love to restore the self to its best possibilities.
The evolving nomenclature of “gay pride”points out something wonderful here. To talk about minority sexual identities we use a constantly expanding alphabet of designations. There was a gay civil rights movement in the 1960’s. In time gay rights advocates came to recognize that in the early days this movement focused too much on gay men’s political and cultural interests, so they gradually came to own up to the overlapping, but distinguishable, political and personal concerns of lesbians. The “G” and “L” for gays and lesbians gave us the wonderful acronyms PFLAG, and OLGA. But in these contexts “bisexual” people, and others with still more complex sexual identities, sometimes felt marginalized by gay and lesbian activists. And transgender and transsexual people were for a time excluded entirely from gay/lesbian politics—they were entirely too confusing for a gay/lesbian politics that, at the outset, really focused on trying to be seen as “normal.”
But finally this exclusion was recognized as incoherent and unfair, and so the alphabet grew to GLBT or, in our campus’s wonderful version GLOW, where the “whatever” seems to acknowledge that there can be no definitive listing and categorizing of minority sexual identities. This also is why to the letters GLBT was finally added a decisive extra letter: “Q” for queer.
“Queer” was and remains a word hurled in scorn at people with nonconforming sexual identities by defenders of a majority sexual regime. As hate speech, queer meant “you don’t fit in our familiar patterns, so in our sovereign judgment you may be discarded in ridicule and abandoned to violence.”
But as often happens with hate speech, there came a creative turning point in GLBTQ consciousness. Instead of accepting straight judgments and exclusions, queers began interrogating majority sexual norms. And it turns out normative, normal heterosexuality is eminently questionable. Advocates of the most “traditional” heterosexual forms typically say that proper, natural desire is defined by the difference between men and women. Women and men are each said to have a single, essential character. And it is said that by laws of nature and divine intention there is a single orientation of desire. So normative heterosexuality is a structure of rigid gender roles within which this single movement of desire is said to be possible. The roles of women and men are arranged hierarchically to legitimate masculine authority; desire is conflated with domination; violence is sexualized.
Lots of people have come to say, with good reason: “if that’s normal, I’m queer!” Queer is a political and personal posture of opposition and rejection. It is a critique of killing norms. It is a declaration that something true and beautiful exists which escapes the categories and standards of what is declared normal.
Now look at the patterns of pride as emerging queer identities confront heterosexual norms. Traditional, straight standards often manifest the “bad pride” in its most elemental form. These standards say “look at me, my desires, my identities, my relations. They are natural and divine and they are a law for everybody. What is uncomfortable for me is wicked and what is unfamiliar to me is an abomination.” This approaches idolatry, or self-love, of the kind that is the essence of pride.
In the over-bearing self-confidence of bad pride, the guardians of normal sexuality have heaped shame and self-loathing on sexual minorities to the point these become internalized as a permanent part of GLBT consciousness—especially the consciousness that lives in the secrecy and self-denial of “the closet.” So to be queer—and out, and loud, and proud—is merely to reject rejection. It is to reject the totalitarian pretensions of the so-called normal. That’s what this week on our campus is all about.
Queer consciousness says “in real difference—not merely the regimented difference of essential male and essential female, but real sexual diversity—there may be real goodness.” Because it is a holy and natural fact that there are many sexual identities and desires. Guardians of compulsory heterosexuality sound warnings about “deviance” and “pathology” and a “slippery slope.” But until someone can show there is real harm in a minority sexual identity or desire (and I don’t mean the harm of making straight people feel uncomfortable!) then it is past time to embrace and affirm that there is too much love in the world to fit it all in a single pattern of normative heterosexuality.
In religious terms, queer consciousness is a prophetic witness that challenges the self-worship embedded in straight values, and champions the real wealth and complexity of loves in the world. Also in religious terms, queer pride is a theological affirmation of the inexhaustible, unpredictable forms of love in a world that is itself the physical embodiment of divine love. Who among us knows how far divine love extends, and what forms it takes? Who, really, if they thought about it, would dare to say “I know the limit of possible loves and desires, and I am it”?
So the pride of pride week is the mirror image and the antidote to the pride of the sexual majority. It is the pride that refuses to be limited by an idolatrous construct. And the beauty of pride week is queers of all kinds, taking on the risk of ridicule, and trusting that the world is turning towards more love and more capacity to love.
But do not misunderstand or abuse this pride. Merely being queer is no license to do whatever you want. You do not get to be different in any way you want, just because you are being different. Resistance by itself is a position and a tactic, and a prophetic witness, but it is not an ethic. And offending straights is not automatically a virtue, even if challenging the smugness and arrogance of straight politics is. The pride I’m talking about is not just a reflexive habit of riling up straight people. The pride I’m talking about is the honest, brave, patient work of discovering and keeping faith with your own authentic self.
So some old time virtues are virtues even for queers who are full of righteous pride. For all of us, there is still room for ordinary humility alongside the fiercest queer pride. And there are the familiar demands never to exploit another person for your own pleasure, and never to destroy yourself in despair, but to insist on mutuality and mutually to demand self-respect.
In the end I think the watchword for queer life is probably the same as it is for straight life, even if this watchword is abused whenever straights set up themselves and their desires as idols. Love. For the natural companion of good pride is love—love that takes the other person as she aims to be, love that yearns for the other person’s own fulfilment, love that seeks the power that is the power of living well together and not the power of dominion. The pride of this week and this day, when it is matched by love, will turn the world around. This is my hope and my belief.
