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eNewsletter 31 October 2002 |
Chi Rho Connection ************************* Contents:
1. 'The Journey is Our Home:' Sharing Our Faith Journeys, by Charles Coventry, Edinburgh, Scotland -------------------------------------------------- 'God answers all our prayers. Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes the answer is no. Sometimes the answer is, you've got to be kidding.' Welcome once again to the Chi Rho Connection, the electronic newsletter of Chi Rho Press. Thank you for passing this Chi Rho Connection on to others. To join our list, send an e-mail message to
ChiRhoPress-subscribe@yahoo.com. Direct all other e-mail to Adam@ChiRhoPress.com. See the end of this eNewsletter for a complete list of e-mail addresses at ChiRhoPress.com. -------------------------------------------------- 1. 'The Journey is Our Home:' Sharing Our Faith Journeys, by Charles Coventry, Edinburgh, Scotland -------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------- 3. 2003 Liturgical Calendar Published!
-------------------------------------------------- 4. Book of the Month: Come Home! -------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------
We are glad you are partners in ministry with us here at Chi Rho Press. We are eager for your comments, your suggestions, your assistance with selling our books, and your own purchases! And of course, we covet your prayers for this ministry. Grace and peace, Adam DeBaugh, Director
--------------------------- If you've received our Chi Rho Connection as a result of the good offices of someone passing it along to you (which we certainly encourage) and would like to receive it directly from us, please follow the directions at the end of our Connection to subscribe. Copyright 2002, Chi Rho Press, Inc. ****************************************** SUBSCRIBE: ChiRhoPress-subscribe@yahoogroups.com R. Adam DeBaugh, Director, Adam@ChiRhoPress.com. Visit the Chi Rho Press Website http://www.ChiRhoPress.com
Vol. III, No. 15
31 October 2002
2. Calls for Submissions
3. 2003 Liturgical Calendar Published!
4. Book of the Month: Come Home!
5. Adam's Last Word:
Jimmy Carter, former President of the United States and recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.
Please visit our Web site at http://www.chirhopress.com to see our entire lines of books, handouts, tchochkas, and stained glass.
We hope you are blessed by the spiritual insights found here.
To continue 'The Journey is Our Home' series, we have called upon Charles Coventry, of Edinburgh, Scotland.
Here is Charles' story of faith:
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I am connected with Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), Edinburgh, Scotland, which I found out about through a friend. I have been disabled since birth (cerebral palsy) and had very little contact with other children, my primary education was in special schools, a year behind others. When I did get into mainstream education (age 12) although I got qualifications for university entrance, I was never fully integrated because no attempt was made to integrate me into sports, and I was still that bit isolated.
There was pressure on me to have girlfriends, and ultimately, after graduation and in employment to get married and produce a family. This kind of teasing about not having girlfriends stopped having any effect on me after about 17. I had doubts about managing school teaching, controlling a class, and by extension, knowing what I had lost, about bringing up children of my own.
I failed to fit into ideals of manliness, first of all being frightened by pressure to smoke. I was expected to take up the pipe and cigars on special occasions like Christmas, but the fear of fire was part of my disability, I am partially sighted, so there was a real risk of being burned. I failed to reach the standards of alcohol consumption expected of a man, finding spirits impossible for me. When it came to shaving, the safety razor was impossible, and it was only after a serious accident that I was allowed to buy an electric shaver. Again, because of my partial vision, I can't drive, and after graduation I never got the right kind of job for long enough, and was last in employment in 1982.
My disability includes a severe numeracy problem, which extends to anything not a continuation of the school syllabus. I was always in trouble for this and it was after I was nearly convinced that I was mentally subnormal that I heard about the Transcendental Meditation technique. I learned and got the chance to leave home for further study in the Department of Celtic at the University of Edinburgh. I am in fact now a linguist and local historian. It was here that I also got the chance to learn to swim.
After my parents died I came to understand that I am gay, and this was confirmed by subsequent experiences. I found a gay swimming group and it was through this that I heard about MCC. Not only in MCC, but in all the gay groups I have become involved with, I have found acceptance as a human being, a swimmer, and Gaelic scholar, not a specimen of cerebral palsy. It was because most church people latched on to my disability that I was very suspicious of religion. At school I was used as a moral example of goodness to the rest of the pupils, and it was only later, when I could be sure of not being pestered with magic cures derived from literal interpretation of the New Testament, that I had anything to do with the church.
As long as nobody asks about my marital status, I don't really need to come out, and in a place like Edinburgh it is quite easy to find gay groups. Outside of university circles, straight people tend just to talk about how their marriages and families are going, but in MCC and my other gay groups, although there are gay dads, even if I ever find a partner, and could never be a parent, it doesn't seem to matter to gay friends. I'm just another member of the group, a swimmer, and Gaelic scholar. One of my swimming sessions happens to be at a time which means that for most of the year I can't make the MCC service, but when I apologized for this at MCC, they just said that my swim still counted as a kind of worship.
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a. Faith Stories for the column, 'The Journey is Our Home:' Sharing Our Faith Journeys. If you would like to contribute the story of your faith journey for inclusion in 'The Journey is Our Home,' please try to limit your story to 500 words.
b. Reviews of Books. Whether published by Chi Rho Press or any other publisher, we are looking for book reviews. What have you read recently that has inspired you? What do you think other LGBT Christians would benefit by reading? Please don't forget to include the full title, author, publisher, ISBN number, date of publication, and price of the book. Word limit, 400 words.
c. Inspirational stories are always welcome, but not the stuff that is already making its way around and around and around the Internet. How about coming up with your own original inspirational story?
d. Link of the Month. What are the Internet Web pages that are most helpful and interesting to you? Submit the complete link and your brief description of what it is and why you are recommending it.
e. Finally, your letters, suggestions, comments, criticisms, and contributions are always welcome.
Please send your submissions to Connection@ChiRhoPress.com.
Chi Rho Press is pleased to announce a brand new Liturgical Calendar for the coming church year. Our newly designed Liturgical Calendar is packed with useful information for planning worship and preaching in the local church for each Sunday and Holy Day of the Church Year. It is intended for use by pastors, musicians, altar guilds, teachers, theological students, and anyone using the Church Year as a basis for worship or education. The Liturgical Calendar is spiral bound so it can lie flat for easy use, in a new, larger 8 ½" x 11" format.
Order your copy of the 2003 Liturgical Calendar today! $9.95 each, six or more copies for $7.95 each.
Come Home! is perhaps Chris Glaser's best book. It is divided into five sections, each with five chapters. The five sections are entitled, 'Welcoming God's Acceptance,' 'Receiving Our Inheritance,' 'Discerning Our Call,' 'Making Our Witness,' and 'Declaring Our Vision.'
Bishop John Shelby Spong called 'Come Home!' 'powerful, sensitive, and provocative. . . . Glaser stands inside his own humanity as a gay male and hears the word of God through the Bible. Christians, gay and straight, needthis book if we are to be the body of Christ.'
This is a brilliant and important book by perhaps the best-known Gay Christian writer in the U.S. today.
The Rev. Carter Heyward called 'Come Home!' 'an enthusiastic compelling testimony to the power of faith in the lives of many gay and lesbian Christians.'
Virginia Ramey Mollenkott said, 'If courage, honesty, and insight are beautiful, then this is one beautiful book. . . . I rejoice that in this book all the gay men and lesbian women who have been robbed of their spirituality are issued an urgent invitation: Come home!'
'Come Home!' by Chris Glaser offers a vision of faith, hope, and affirmation inviting gay men and lesbians to come home to their spirituality through Christian faith and community. Order your copy today!
Come Home! is available for $19.95 each, $14.95 each for six or more copies, plus shipping and handling.
I shall put on the brown monk's robe I bought a few years back at Maryland's Renaissance Festival and hand out candy to the children who will wander up to the front door of Tawdry Tower, my little town house.
Hallowe'en is a linguistic corruption of All Hallows Eve. The evening before All Hallows Day or All Saints Day, November 1. Christians inherited, or rather co-opted Hallowe'en from the Pagan celebration of Samhain, the day on which the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest.
All Saints Day is an especially wonderful day in the life of the church. Our new Liturgical Calendar says about the Feast of All Saints, 'The tradition of remembering all the saints together dates to the early history of the Church, which affirmed 'the communion of saints' as the mystical Body of Christ,transcending both time and space. Even when no one is visibly with us in our prayers and our spiritual path, we are surrounded by their presence and inspired by their witness. All the saints, some famous and some known only to God, answered God's call in their life in their own unique way. This collective feast reminds us that each of us has our own special gifts, and we are each called to DO something holy for God.'
The next day is All Souls Day, Nov. 2, about which our Liturgical Calendar says, 'In some traditions there has been a distinction between remembering theofficial canonized saints on All Saints Day and commemorating those whose names are not on any calendar, but are cherished as models of faith, or are dearly loved family and friends. They, as well, are part of that great 'cloud of witnesses' who encourage us in our spiritual journey.' In Mexico this is la Dia de la Muerte, a popular Mexican holiday of remembering and honoring the dead.
However you honor the saints who have gone before us and your own well-loved friends and relatives who have passed away, this is a special time to reflect on the Saints who have inspired us and the Souls who have loved us.
Friday evening, I will be attending an All Saints Day event at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Washington DC with my friends Bill and Bob. Bill and Bob are great Anglo-Catholics and major royalists with whom I spend Christmas day every year. The St. Paul's Parish Choir with orchestra will be performing the Lord Nelson Mass by Franz Josef Haydn. Not a bad way to mark All Saints Day, I figure. And I will reconnect with my high Anglo-Catholic roots. A Suffragan Bishop from New York will be preaching and a retired Bishop will be celebrating the Eucharist so it will be a high old Anglican time of it!
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In the United States next Tuesday is also Election Day. I encourage all our readers, as I do every year, to vote! This is an especially important election, with the entire United States House of Representatives and a third of the United States Senate up for re-election. If you think that your vote doesn't matter, you are sadly in error. The last election showed the United States to be almost perfectly divided between those who voted for Democratic and Republican candidates. The division was so sharp, and the Electoral College system we have of electing the President, that Mr. Bush won the Electoral College votes (thanks to the intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court majority appointed by his father and Mr. Reagan), even while Mr. Gore won the popular vote by half a million votes. With the control of both the House of Representatives and Senate in the balance, your vote is very important.
Please don't forget to vote Tuesday!
*****
The GLBT community lost a good friend with the death of Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. He was a man of integrity and nobility, unabashed by the trappings of high office, wearing the same rumpled suits he had worn as a professor at Carlton College, and keeping his self-effacing good humor. A man of principle, not to be trifled with, Paul Wellstone was a political hero in a time when politics is filled with charlatans, cads, the greedy, the vain, and the unprincipled. He will be missed.
In his stead, the Democrats have named former Senator and former Vice President Walter Mondale to stand for the Senate seat vacated by the death of Paul Wellstone. 'Fritz' Mondale is another friend of the LGBT community. His wife Joan is a potter and created the first pottery baptismal bowl and pitcher for the new building built by the Metropolitan Community Church of Washington DC.
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Autumn is here in the Washington DC area. A long drought is being moderated by days of rain and the leaves are changing here. Things seem to be relaxing with the passing of summer into autumn. Perhaps the capture of the hunter/snipers that have plagued our community for three weeks in October has helped the overall mood. But it is a good, mellow harvest time. I hope you are all blessed and filled with love and joy as we begin to prepare for the year-end holiday season.
Please take a moment this weekend to honor and bless all those faithful saints and loved ones who have gone before us. And Americans, don't forget to vote next Tuesday.
R. Adam DeBaugh, Director, Adam@ChiRhoPress.com.
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