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Wednesday, June 9th, 2021

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

Week Twenty-Three: The Holiness of Human Sexuality

Incarnational, Queer Love

Presbyterian minister Mihee Kim-Kort came to identify as queer [1] after she was ordained, married, and a mother. Once considered a pejorative, “queer” has been reclaimed by some LGBTQ people to describe themselves—and it reflects many attributes of a Christian incarnational view of the world! Although challenged by many of her preconceived ideas of what was acceptable to church and society, she has chosen to live and minister authentically as a queer Christian. In this passage describing queerness, she captures the heart of an embodied faith that celebrates love and sexuality.

Christian history is full of stories of love and passion for God. . . .

This kind of passion . . . is what fuels love and action, where “desire carries that life.” [2] Desire coaxes and draws out, leads and pushes, pulls and compels us to live and love out loud. The cliché slogan Make Love, Not War makes sense. There is something profoundly revolutionary about lovemaking as a way to reject making death. It’s resisting the darkness and destruction of life, of light and love. And while it’s protesting, resisting, and surviving, it’s also creating and making life in response to forces that would take away life. It’s more than surviving; it’s creating, thriving, flourishing.

What I realize I need and want to be a part of is a kind of work that cultivates the expansiveness of love. I dream often of the kind of world we could have for us, for our children, if we weren’t so concerned with regulating, disciplining, and closeting love all the time. If anything, it’s absolutely clear that this world needs more love. Rather than focusing so much energy on categorizing and classifying sexuality and making it conform to narrow representations, I long for our world to encourage lovemaking, to spark in those around me a desire to love ourselves and love each other into more life and love. [Richard here: This is the true sense of the Greek word eros, which describes any movement toward life. Eroticism then is to connect, to make contact, to desire; it’s when there’s that capacity to somehow get out of the self, to give yourself to another, and to receive them.] Because if there’s anything I’ve learned about love, whether experienced among family, friends, or my children, it is that it is contagious and expands exponentially. It overflows the cup. Once released and liberated, it changes everything. . . .

Queerness . . . always tends toward a dynamic generosity, a grace that allows for mistakes and failures, because our lives are richer when we hold all of what is human. . . . A queer spirituality transgresses the boundaries of how we live, move, and breathe through this world. It is truly embodied, and rooted in flesh-and-blood bodies, bodies that are surprising and show up as icons and words. It is also rooted in the body of Christ, in God-with-Us, in the continuous blurring of transcendence and immanence.

[1] “Queer” is an adjective used by some people whose sexual orientation is not exclusively heterosexual. Once considered a pejorative, queer has been reclaimed by some LGBTQ people to describe themselves. The word may also be used by individuals who identify as non-binary. In academia, queer theory is a growing field of study in many departments. Visit glaad.org for a glossary of LGBTQ terms.

[2] Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology (Routledge: 2000), 125.

Mihee Kim-Kort, Outside the Lines: How Embracing Queerness Will Transform Your Faith (Fortress Press: 2018), 209–210, 4, 211.

Image credit: Jenna Keiper, Impressions (detail), 2020, photograph, Bellingham.

Image inspiration: In its rainbow of colors, human sexuality can be many things: delicate, powerful, mysterious, beautiful. How might we foster a healthy relationship with the holy gift of sexuality?

Prayer For Our Community

Loving God, you fill all things with a fullness and hope that we can never comprehend. Thank you for leading us into a time where more of reality is being unveiled for us all to see. We pray that you will take away our natural temptation for cynicism, denial, fear and despair. Help us have the courage to awaken to greater truth, greater humility, and greater care for one another. May we place our hope in what matters and what lasts, trusting in your eternal presence and love. Listen to our hearts’ longings for the healing of our suffering world. Please add your own intentions . . . Knowing, good God, you are hearing us better than we are speaking, we offer these prayers in all the holy names of God. Amen.
Listen to Father Richard pray this prayer aloud.

Story From Our Community

My sexuality has always been a great grief to me. The teachings in the Daily Meditations that we are “healed by our wounds” and that the way forward is not power and confrontation, but re-identification with our True Self is bringing about peace and healing. Thank you for these insights, which I wish I had had 40 years ago.
—Andrew W.
Share your own story with us.

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Explore Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations archive at cac.org.

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