Building Holy Relationships

Building spiritually-grounded spaces that honor the worth and dignity of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people demands of us a willingness to transform both ourselves and how we conceive of our relationships with one another. This is hard work not only for those who are challenged by LGBT relationships but also for LGBT people of faith. All of us are stretched to move beyond the cultural messages we’ve received, messages that often serve as a mirror for how we see ourselves. We are also required to push beyond what is comfortable. Push to see how we’ve barricaded ourselves from one another out of fear of judgment and rejection.

In an age when the marketplace defines so much of who we are, how we spend our time, how we present ourselves to the world, how we engage in friendships and sexual relationships, it is essential to have alternative spaces where our humanity is valued over our status or productivity. Creating welcoming spaces in our congregations and communities does this by requiring us to stay committed to one another when we are not particularly loveable or beautiful, when we are at our most vulnerable and raw.

By keeping this basic commitment to being authentic and in community, it is impossible to limit our understanding of who deserves our love. For me, this has meant that I’ve had to expand how I conceive of what relationships are sacred. I’ve become aware recently, for instance, of the gifts my single friends have given to my understanding of holy relationships as their love for their friends challenges the insular nature of our culture’s fixation on sexual relationships modeled on the nuclear family.

Jesus asked us not just to love our neighbor but also to love our neighbor as ourselves. To do this requires tremendous risk. We cannot get there by easy altruism but only by personal transformation in the company of others. There can be no more holy work than this, and I am blessed to be part of a movement that is engaged in it.