Ascension: 43rd-anniversary Mass
My name is Bryan Cones, a longtime member of this community, and once, along with Jill, Jerry Bleem, and others a part of our liturgical ministry. I am now a presbyter in the Episcopal Church, and currently serve St. Augustine’s in Wilmette. It’s a real gift to be back here again, presiding in this community of those who share the priesthood of Christ.
When I left Dignity to continue my discernment I eventually found myself at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which has generally been known as the church’s “queer” seminary, where Carter Heyward, a prominent lesbian theologian, among others, have taught. When I got there I took a class in “queer theology” only to discover that the majority of what we learned I already knew—primarily because of the ministry of this community to me. There were new things to be sure, but I found that it was here that I learned not only about myself as a gay man, but also something about the experience of being a lesbian woman, even of the experience of bi and trans and intersex persons. That wasn’t “book learning” though— it was the willingness of this community to share together the “truth of our lives” as Christians and as Catholics, a point I heard Chris Pett make on NPR after Cardinal George’s death.
Being “queer,” though, captured my imagination as I thought about Dignity. Depending on our generation, that word may be more or less helpful. I notice nowadays that many younger people adopt “queer” to describe themselves, usually as a refusal to identify as male or female, gay, straight or bi. For them to be “queer” is to refuse a label, or to make it a verb, to “queer” the either/or that society often demands of us. By doing so, we open up a space for new diversity.
And yet, isn’t Dignity, more than 40 years on, a “queer” community? Hasn’t this community always refused to be pinned down, to be one or the other? Hasn’t this community always insisted on the great “both/and” that defines the Catholic tradition at its best?
When I look closely at this community and our history, I see that insistence on holding this space “between” either/or: First, an insistence on being both “gay” (usually men) and Catholic, and eventually the inclusion of lesbian women as well, and then even more the inclusion of bi and trans as well, though I imagine that our members who identify that way would encourage us to keep working on that. And we’ve always had straight members: many of them have been and are leaders in this community.
Once this community celebrated this liturgy in a “Catholic” space, eventually having that right stripped from it. And so this community had to “queer” what it means to be in “Catholic space”—discovering that it is wherever we are. Perhaps worshiping in this Methodist home has even broadened for us the meaning of Catholic. That is certainly true in the ordained ministers invited to lead this assembly: I count presbyters from three churches here: Roman Catholic and RC Womenpriests, Old Catholic, Episcopal.
And then there is human relationship, with marriage long celebrated in this community as open to couples regardless of gender. And we have celebrated the many ways we have created families at that very font. And we have all along also affirmed the many life-giving relationships that appear in our communities, from the Defenders in the leather community, to the lifelong friendships and families of choice, and the single lives many have lived, all of which this assembly has sustained.
Perhaps each of us can think of other examples of the way, over its 43 years, this community has refused to be nailed down, refused to surrender the queer and Catholic wisdom of both-and.
