An Easter Closet

All you see is darkness.  Your eyes are open and ... now your eyes are closed. Can you tell a difference? No. Because there is no light in here. I mean, there is a little bit of light.. maybe it forms a circle? or a rectangle? You wonder if that must be a way out because you can see something blocking it.  You can sort of see ...something. But it's so far away, or is it so close?

You can taste nothing, none of the richness you have only ever dreamed about.  You yearn to use your tongue, your teeth. In here, there is nothing for you to taste, to eat, to gulp.  In this dark place, you dare not even shout out ...

...because there's nothing to hear either.  The silence is so thin, yet so weighty.  There is so much of it.  What would happen if you break it? What would happen if you said your name aloud? How about if you whispered instead of shouted. In here, is there a difference? Who can hear your soft whimpers and your anguished cries?

And if anyone can hear you, does hear you, how do you find them? It's so dark, there are walls all around you, keeping you in one place, stuck.  There is no clear way forward. You stumble all around,  unsure of what steady stronghold exists for your feet. I wonder if you feel any at all, or if you just trip over and over,

face on the ground. Inhaling dusty and musty kickings-up of whatever may happen to line this space.  The scent of old-ness, clogged-ness, stuck-ness filling your nostrils, seeping into your lungs trying to give you life.. but can they?

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And then God rolled away the stone in front of the tomb. Jesus came out. Jesus came out into new life, into resurrection, into his fullest self.

Or, did God open the closet door? Did you come out? Did you come out into new life, into resurrection, into your fullest self?

~*bL0gging*~

There it is. The top of my tumblr dashboard.  This is my favorite social media platform and you'll never catch my denying it.  Although the first rule of tumblr is very similar to the first rule of fight club, tumblr is quickly becoming a safe haven for the marginalized and a platform for social justice bloggers. (It is also my #1 source on the internet for pictures of cute kittens.) I can post whatever I want of my own original content, and reblog the witty Iquips, photos, and musings of others.  Scrolling through tumblr is one of the ways I read real stories of real people.  Of course, I wondered what is being said about sex-positivism.

There were many photos.  Nude photos. People reclaiming their bodies. Bodies that had been told were not *whatever* enough: skinny enough, tan enough, fair enough, muscled enough, whatever.  There were personal stories about ways people experience sexuality in the world.  Sensuality and (deemed by some as) explicit content was revered, allowing those to be things to celebrate and share in safe spaces.  Some people responded to things like intimate violence and opened up about the ways sex has been very negative in their lives.

There were famous quotes, celebrities and authors speaking out about the ways bodies should be respected.  Some were critiqued for their behavior, designated as sex-negative or sex-positive.  The sex-positive movement was critiqued for being whitewashed, still shaming and excluding people of color, trans*folk, people who are asexual, and forgetting the sexual trauma experienced by too many people.

I scrolled through pages and pages and pages of tumblr and didn't see one mention of spirituality.  Not once was God mentioned in an affirmative way.  None of the work of my classmates and colleagues appeared.  Where is the mention of The Color Purple?  Where are the reflections on a sermon someone heard that conveyed a sex-positive message? Where is the Song of Songs?  Where are there photos of people in collars at protests and marches and rallies?  Where is the prophetic witness?

The work of the church needs to happen in a manner that is so bold, so transformative that people will talk about it.  We need to do work that will make social justice bloggers go nuts. Not just pastors-- if you are a parishioner who wants your children to have accurate and appropriate sexual education, approach your pastor about the Our Whole Lives curriculum.  Talk about these issues in adult education classes.  Let your values live in the organizations to which you decide to donate your mission dollars.

I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called. [ephesians 4:1]

Jesus Christ Superstar?

Last week, I watched Jesus Christ Superstar with my pal Kelsey.  (for homework! #realMDivlife)  It was later in the day and I was a little sleepy, so I decided that the best way to make sure I stay awake was to make every exaggerated claim about the sexual messaging in the film.  For example the hats in this photo are obviously a phallic commentary on the male-dominant power of the Pharisees.

As the evening went on and the sleepier I got, everything became a metaphor for sexual interaction.  The claims I was making got more and more ridiculous.  We laughed and had an awesome time. For homework!

As I've been thinking about it since our movie night, I have been feeling exceptional gratitude for the ability to have studied feminist and queer theory both in college and in seminary.  Whenever I encounter a piece of media, I can read it for its implications and messages that are laced with varying degrees of subtly.  While the vast majority of the comments I was making about Jesus Christ Superstar were very exaggerated, the same knowledge base I had to make those observances is the one I use when I analyze a Cosmo and see them claim that the best (read: only) way to be a woman is to be a heterosexual fair skinned woman whose goals are weight loss and increased male sexual pleasure.

And then I began to wonder about the women, the people, who don't have access to the kinds of formalized education to which I had access. I found myself praying for the lay leaders, the community centers, the after-school programs, the teachers, the pastors, the anyone who can take some of the responsibility for the sexual education of young people.

Sex and (hetero)sexuality wouldn't govern the majority of social exchanges if individuals were equipped and prepared to recognize the way sexuality moves in their own lives and how to appropriately express that in the public sphere.  A first step is talking about it, developing a common language around sexualization and making that accessible.  As an emerging leader in the church, I am eager to be part of this conversation.