LITMIR.BIZ

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this stage I had been out for years. When people said hateful things about LGBTI people and justified it with the Bible, I believed it revealed more about them than the Bible. I had been part of public engagements with those who tried to change, exorcise or silence LGBTI people for years. Sometimes younger LGBTI people asked if they could learn the tools of engaging with people who wish us to be cured or quietened. I said I wanted to work for a world in which they wouldn’t need to learn how to defend themselves against such awful words. This was only 2014. The world is changing, for some. For others, it’s as dangerous a place as its always been.

      Let my people be.

      Once, when I was still ravaged with self-hatred and grief about my sexuality, I went to confession. I think I’d bought a copy of the Gay Times and I was feeling guilty for having looked at something that made me think of sex. I was feeling guilty, so I went to Mass and afterwards asked the priest if he’d hear my confession. We didn’t go to the confessional booth. He invited me into his office. He sat on one chair facing me while I confessed things that didn’t need to be confessed. When I was finished he stood up. He walked to the middle of the room. He pointed to the ground at his feet.

      ‘Kneel,’ he said.

      I knelt. He moved a little closer. He put his hands on his head and said the prayer of forgiveness. He pulled my head so close to his crotch that I could feel the heat swelling from his groin. I wondered if he could. It was a disgusting tableau of his own fantasy. I felt violated for this abuse of my own misguided scruples. If this is purity, I thought, I want none of it. The confession wasn’t a confession – it was a curse: live in fear of your own sexuality and you, too, might turn out a sorry fucked-up man.

      Let my people go.

      Recently I was working with a group of LGBTI people where the majority of the group were trans or intersex. I had been asked to lead the Bible study. We looked at the text where Jesus of Nazareth is twelve years old and is among religious leaders. He is astounding them with his insight. But they do not know how to believe that the truth can exist in this kind of human package. We, LGBTI people at a Bible study, asked a question: ‘What truths have we known about ourselves since we were young?’ People knew what it was to know themselves. They also knew what it was like for their insight to be denied. For decades. The Bible study lasted for hours. People spoke about the indigenous understanding they’d had about themselves since they could think. ‘I didn’t know the Bible could help us read our own lives,’ someone said.

      It can.

      One of the things that self-hatred does is to plant timebombs that can explode at later years. Twenty-five years after my exorcisms, I still remember the dates of them. Time heals some things. But not all things, and sometimes reminders happen. Some days I feel the shame I inhaled for decades swelling through me. Learning how to love a man – with body and soul – has taken time. And I rely on writing as much now as I did then. Poetry can save a life. Believing lies broke me down. I was in need of something better to believe in.

      I was in need of being believed.

      Last paragraph, I promise. When Pharaoh was persecuting the Hebrew people, their suffering rose to God like incense and God sent a messenger – Moses – to challenge the Pharaoh. ‘Let my people go,’ Moses said to Pharaoh. Whose people were they? Moses’? God’s? Their own? The people were a motley crew, united by the way they were hated by the powerful. ‘Let my people go,’ Moses said to Pharaoh. A people became a people because of their shared need to move out from a system that abhorred them. They were not perfect, that was never the point. They weren’t the ones with the problem, Pharaoh was. He thought he would last forever. He didn’t. He died. We barely remember his name. But we remember the people who built Zion. Their name is a blessing, a name that is built to welcome in the stranger, the outsider, the foreigner, the dispossessed, the downtrodden, the lowly and the lonely. ‘Let my people go,’ someone said to a person in power, and those under the power realised they were a people.

      They were not alone.

      Okay, definitely last paragraph. Back to the beginning. Let there be light. Let there be earth. Let there be dark. Let there be stars. Let there be waters. Let there be moonlight. Let there be insects. Let there be pleasure. Let there be fish. Let there be trees. Let there be plants. Let there be flowers. Let there be footballs. Let there be kissing. Let there be books of poetry. Let there be places for worship. Let there be music. Let there be mountains. Let there be drumbeats. Let there be justice. Let there be mighty rivers. Let there be freedom. Let there be integrity. Let there be truth. Let there be love. Let there be people. Let my people

      go.

      Believe me, I’m the last man to believe me. I believed

      in danger from the first day I could think. I learnt to

      speak by screaming – some of it aloud – and my first

      word in two languages was remember. Nobody taught me

      how to promise, but I promised. And it wrecked me.

      Remembering kept me hungry for decades and when

      I stood up against it, I ran, I flew, I panicked at its

      threats, I grew more frightened than I’d ever been.

      In the beginning was a word, I had heard, then I heard

      another word that made me listen, made me stand. Who

      said it? Not a man, that’s for sure; men were too busy

      teaching me their sure and frightened ways of purity.

      Who whispered it? Who said it? Who worked that word

      of wonder into me? Who freed me? Who believed me?

      I still ask for my mother’s prayers, and she for mine. I don’t pretend to know how any of it works, except that there is this place that we get to go where we lay down all of our pain, confusion, and limitation in the presence of a wonderous holiness who, like us, knows pain and loss.

       WINNIE

       How Do All the Parts Fit?

      The summer after I had graduated from college my family went to India. My parents, my brother and I did the classic tour of Delhi, Agra and Jaipur and then came home to Kerala in the south. We took a long train ride through Kerala and landed back home in Kottayam, where my mother is from and where I had lived for a few years as a child. It was a beautiful way to come home after a long time away. When we entered her home town, the driver asked to stop at his temple when we were nearby, so we did, and we watched him say his prayers. We too were going to stop at our church to offer our thanksgiving for safe return home.

      When we arrived at St Mary’s Syrian Orthodox Cathedral in Manarcadu, my father waited outside with my brother who was sick from the long travel. My mother and I went in together. She went to the front to pray and make an offering from all of us. I walked in and sat on the floor on a coir mat and watched her. I prayed as well. Well, actually, I just threw out my biggest question. How can my life work? How do all the parts fit? If I loved my family and this place so much, how could I be with them as an American, a queer person, a woman who felt called to be a priest?

      Then, as clear as day, I heard someone say, ‘Get up and walk.’ I looked around to see who was telling me to move, but there was no one nearby. I looked back at my mother and knew, for no reason I can explain, the answer to my question. I was going to be OK. My emerging self-­understanding was not a contradiction but an integration of identities that fit together just fine, in me.

      My mother came over and asked what had happened. When I did not reply, she showed me that I was sitting among grave markers laid flat on the floor. She explained that the one I was on was one of her ancestors, a priest in that church. I hadn’t known she had ancestors who were priests in that church.

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