The Naked Truth

Have you ever had a dream where you were naked in public?

I had one of those last night, but there was a twist. In my dream, I arrived at the scene of a terrible car accident. I followed my Red Cross emergency respondent training -- checking the scene and discovering two victims. The driver of the car, a woman, had been thrown clear of the car and was lying on the sidewalk with terrible injuries. Inside the car was a baby whose skull appeared crushed and who seemed dead to me. There was no one else around so I used my cell phone to call 911. Then I began to attend to the injured woman. In my dream that's when I realized that I was completely naked.

I had to make a choice: would I stay and attend to the wounded until help arrived, or would I flee the scene and find some clothes? In my dream, I made what I think was the right choice. I stayed to help, risking scandal and personal humiliation in order to make sure that the injured woman was cared for. Later in the dream, as if to vindicate my decision, the "dead" baby inside the car turned out not to be dead after all. He emerged from the car as an unharmed, fully grown adult. In other words, life was emerging from the wreckage of death.

Oddly, though, at the end of my dream I got no credit for tending to the wounded woman. The police implied that they were going to prosecute me for indecent exposure. So the dream ended on a disconcerting note. I was still going to have to pay a price for doing the right thing. In other words, my dream was teaching me something about the true principle of sacrifice.

After all, if Hollywood had written the Gospels, Jesus would somehow have been able to save humanity and miraculously avoid being crucified in some dramatic, by-the-skin-of-your-teeth ending. We typically want to believe that good can conquer evil without a price having to be paid. Very often in real life, however, as in my dream and as in the Gospels, the hero gets punished. I think that's what my dream was trying to warn me. If you want to do the right thing, prepare your mind and your soul. There's a price to pay.

The particular nude symbolism of this dream drew my attention to a phrase in the Gospel of Mark I read this morning that I'd never noticed before. In chapter 10, when blind Bartimaeus calls out to Jesus from the side of the road, after Jesus invites him to approach, the text continues (v. 50), "And he, casting away his garment, rose, and came to Jesus." I'm not sure what if anything Bartimaeus was wearing underneath the garment he cast aside. But the wording of the text was not "casting away his outer garment." The totality of the phrase "casting away his garment" suggests that this impoverished beggar was casting away his only piece of clothing in the world in order to stand before Jesus utterly naked and vulnerable.

This theme of casting aside one's covering is reinforced earlier in the chapter, when Jesus says, "How hardly shall they that trust in riches enter into the Kingdom of God!" (v. 24). When the disciples are "astonished beyond measure" at this saying (did they trust so much in riches?!), Jesus offered the analogy of the camel and the needle, invoking -- in at least one major exegesis of this text -- the image of unloading everything one possesses, in order to get down on one's knees and crawl through a small opening.

When Jesus explains to his disciples that "to sit on [his] right hand and on [his] left hand is not [his] to give," he then drives the point home by explaining that "even the son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister" (vs. 40 & 45). In other words, the way of Christ is not about having, not about possessing, but rather about giving up.

Jesus' teaching that "whosoever shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein" (v. 15) speaks both to the passivity and acceptance that saving faith requires, but also to the vulnerability. A child comes into the world naked. And so when blind Bartimaeus rose to receive the Kingdom -- in the form of healing from Christ -- he too cast aside his garment and received it naked. It seems significant that Bartimaeus' willingness to be vulnerable was a demonstration of precisely what was required in order for his eyes to be opened, in order for him to perceive the world as it is, in order to receive truth.

When we truly serve, we put ourselves on the line. There may be good we can do safely, behind the lines, not risking ourselves. But there will eventually come a time when we realize that we can't do enough unless we are willing to risk it all. To save lives, sometimes we will have to bare it all.

People of Paradox

Terryl Givens describes Latter-day Saints as "people of paradox," because he sees Mormon culture straddling numerous irreconcilable contradictions, such as authoritarianism and individualism, intellectual certitude and intellectual insatiability, the sacred and the mundane, and exile and integration.

To illustrate one such Mormon paradox, Bro. Givens offers a couple of quotes by Brigham Young:

I am more afraid that this people have so much confidence in their leaders that they will not inquire for themselves of God whether they are led by him. I am fearful that they settle down in a state of blind self security, trusting their eternal destiny in the hands of their leaders with a reckless confidence that in itself would thwa[r]t the purposes of God. (Journal of Discourses 9: 150)

Yet that same Brigham Young who insisted that the purposes of God would be thwarted by too great a confidence in one's spiritual leaders, also once wrote, after wrestling with doubts about the Prophet Joseph's financial dealings,

Though I [knew] that Joseph was a human being and subject to err, still it was none of my business to look after his faults.... It was not my prerogative to call him in question with regard to any act of his life. He was God's servant, not mine. (Journal of Discourses 4: 297-298)

Givens points out that critics as well as adherents(!) of Mormonism all too frequently focus on one side of a Mormon paradox to the exclusion of the other side. For instance, disgruntled anti-Mormons would eagerly seize on the latter Brigham Young quote as proof that Mormons believe in mindlessly and blindly following their leaders. But to do so would fail to take into account the totality of Mormon faith, which includes an uncompromising commitment to individual freedom of conscience and the Mormon sense of obligation to work one's salvation out for oneself. Both seemingly irreconcilable tendencies -- the authoritarian and the individualistic -- are profoundly Mormon.

That's also why it is no better to focus on the first Brigham Young quote to the exclusion of the latter. Yes, Latter-day Saints are called to wrestle to find truth on their own, and to test and prove all things. Yes, it is our prerogative to question our leaders if called upon by conscience to do so. But we also need to learn to exercise faith, to sometimes walk without knowing, and to sustain and trust the Lord's anointed. Both sides of the paradox are what makes Mormon faith. And a commitment to take both sides of the paradox seriously is what makes Mormons. When do we insist on freedom of conscience, and when do we accept the surrender of faith? There is no easy answer to that question.

In reading Givens' analysis of what it means to be a Mormon, I find myself simultaneously anguished and comforted. Because to be gay and Mormon is to find oneself not merely straddling the various Mormon paradoxes, but to be literally torn apart by them. Perhaps that is the greatest source of discomfort for straight Latter-day Saints when confronting their gay sisters and brothers: because our flesh and bones and the spirits that reside in them are painful, tangible reminders that there's no comfortable resolution of the contradictions at the heart of their faith. We are the embarrassing reminder that -- just when they thought they could settle on a nice, easy, pat answer -- the big questions are still waiting at the threshold, with maws open wide to swallow it up.

I am anguished by Givens, because to read his account of Mormonism is to be reminded of all the sources of my greatest pain. But I am comforted by him, because to know that is also to realize that I stand where I need to stand. Not on one pat side or the other, but at the center where all the great truths that define us as a people messily collide. Sometimes I am so full of light and joy and hope, I know nothing will ever be able to touch me. But sometimes I feel so heartbroken I wonder how it is possible to take one more step forward. And I also find Givens comforting because he helps me to understand how both experiences of the paradox of my existence are not only possible but inevitable. And how that is a good thing.

So what are the paradoxes of being a gay Saint?

The Saints are a body-affirming people! Through modern-day revelation we understand that acquiring bodies so that we could become more like our embodied Heavenly Parents is a major if not the major purpose of creation; that in the union of spirit and matter is the fullness of joy! Latter-day Saints understand the sex-drive within this framework as having a divine purpose: to unite individuals within family organizations that will play an eternal role in the creation of worlds and the everlasting expansion of God's dominions and glories! Yet, gay saints are told the opposite. Our gay bodies don't have a role to play in the kingdom; we are told we must abstain from everything that Latter-day Saint kingdom building is about. Our bodies must become "dry trees" (Isaiah 56:3).

So in a religious culture that celebrates the bond between body and spirit, we find body and spirit caught in a war, a conflict, a place where there can be no earthly rest, where we are told there can be no resolution in this life, only in a life to come when God supposedly restores our proper heterosexual bodies to us, instead of these faulty gay bodies we have.

We are told that there is eternal gender, and that our eternal gender requires men to bond with women and women with men for all eternity. But we recognize that it's not just our bodies that don't seem to fit that paradigm. Because we experience all the spiritual aspects of love for members of the same sex. It is not just in bodily lust we experience our sexual orientation. It is in our spirits as well. If there is an eternal gender, we're not sure that ours is what we are told it must be.

So we are caught in Givens' "individualism" vs. "authority" paradox with double force. Do we prioritize the self-knowledge that wells up from our spirits, from our souls, from the intersection of body and spirit? Or do we prioritize the messages about us that are given us by the culture, by the doctrines we are taught, by our leaders, which don't seem to speak to us, to the condition we know so well because it is in between our joints, in the marrow of our bones?

Like the Saints in history, we're in a kind of exile. Exiles within exiles. We sit in the same pews, we serve and worship the same God. But our own brothers, our own sisters, our own mothers, our own fathers do not know us. They do not know the silent anguish we experience. They do not know why we cry in Sacrament Meeting.

We so often have to choose between being in silent exile, experiencing the ultimate kinds of loneliness. Or "coming out of the closet" (coming out of Babylon?) only to be exiled again by Saints who don't or won't understand us.

We want knowledge, we want understanding. We begin by struggling to know ourselves, know who we are, why we are the way we are, what grand purpose it serves. That's why we are killing ourselves. For lack of knowledge, for lack of purpose. Without vision, the people perish, and we have been without vision too long.

Yet we are told we can't know. So we wrestle angels and demons in the darkness between not-knowing and knowing.

Sometimes it seems that the Gospel doesn't work for us. It doesn't speak to us. And yet it does... It speaks to us who are lost more profoundly, more urgently, more truthfully than it does to those who are "found," to those who are comfortable, to those who have all the answers they need.