September 30, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

Dear sister Joan just brought me an article form the September 3 Time magazine about Mother Teresa, the 1979 Nobel Peace Price Laureate who died ten years ago this month. Apparently she desired that her personal correspondence be destroyed upon her death. Fortunately for us her letters have been saved. They reveal a unnerving testament of doubt, from a woman revered for her service and piety, who agonized for 50 years that she could not sense God’s presence in her life.

“I have no Faith — I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart—& make me suffer untold agony.”  [Mother Teresa, undated prayer to Jesus]

Many of us have trouble deeply grasping that doubt is part of faith, rather than its enemy. Doubt is like the grayish underside of a glossy green leaf, or the proverbial cloud which conceals the silver lining. Twenty centuries have come and gone since the life of Jesus of Nazareth — the man whom his gospelers confidently tell us was not only wholly present to God but in whom God was fully manifest to all. And in all this time of changing, growing, yearning human experience, feeling/knowing the presence of God remains a great black hole for human spirituality. And even the pious seem to slip quickly past that prayer in which Jesus feels God’s abandonment: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Mother Teresa founded, in 1948, and devoted her life to the Missionaries of Charity. She is a contemporary symbol of the human yearning for the Divine, and the outpouring of faithful love given in the hope that—somehow—through human charity and compassion God’s presence will fill the void. People will believe because they witness or grasp or sense or feel The Almighty in the midst of the pain, sorrow or emptiness.

Now we must understand a different Mother Teresa than the one we thought we knew: she doubted profoundly. She agonized deeply over the silence of God, the absence of Jesus, almost from the beginning of her ministry in the slums of Calcutta. Yet she remained faithful, serving in the midst of horrible poverty, despair and disease. Like the mythological Sisyphus she continued to push a heavy rock upward against an unmoving mountain of human suffering. For thousands of other people, Mother Teresa herself was a symbol, a heavenly sign, a manifestation that proves Divine Love really rules this world beneath its gritty and sorrowful mask. But in the very midst of being what she believed God wanted her to be, Mother Teresa felt alone.

Trained in theology, I have always thought I should somehow shrug off emotions and feelings because they do not fully convey spiritual truth. Just “feeling” God’s presence is sentimentality, after all. Liturgies and music, candlelight and prayers are so much spiritual “mood making” if there is no reality behind them. Even though I have hoped people would feel God is with them, beside them, behind them, within them, in all that they face in life, feelings alone do not reality make. Is God there for us, really, or are we spiritually whistling in the dark?

In my own life, I have known or sensed the presence of God most fully and deeply and richly through other people. I have met individuals and communities in whom there is radiance, compassion, faithfulness, energy, commitment, calm, and purity which is so overwhelming that I just know that God is with them and in them. Almighty God is not those individuals, but is fully manifest through them. I long to dwell in the midst of a spiritual community which is so completely absorbed in the divine presence that anyone who witnesses the spiritual depth within will waken and will come to faith.

Yet I know perfectly well all this is metaphor. All that I could do to bring this about is nothing more than manipulating spiritual “special effects.” I cannot bring out or reveal God’s presence in us any more than I can trigger an embryonic heart to start beating, or awaken a human mind lost to Alzheimer’s. I cannot live a life so admirable as to merit the Nobel prize, let alone decree that the world shall be at peace and all people shall treat one another with respect.

But, from within my own black hole of spirituality (that pulls from all sources yet gives off very little light), I also know that wherever and whenever I witness even the smallest movement of one human heart toward another, or participate in the awakening of even slightest consciousness —through acts of compassion, forgiveness, will — God is within that: creating it, sustaining it, redeeming it.

Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?” Jesus answered him “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come and make our home with them.” — John 14:22–23

A generation ago a mystical Jesuit professor of mine mused about the differences between Christians — those who live for God, those who live with God, and those who live in God. The saintly Mother Teresa spent (gave, used up) her life living for God to alleviate suffering and to show mercy as Christ has taught us to do. It now seems that in spite of all her faithful piety and prayer over a lifetime she was unable to live with God in a spiritual unity like the great mystics of history. Yet I sense that all spirituality is only transparency or availability on our part. We can only open ourselves to God —whether we sense the Divine surrounding us or not. We are unable to know with certainty that we shall live in God, but only that God will be in us when we serve others.

— Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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September 29, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

“The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you.’” –1 Corinthians 12:21

“The liberal cannot say to the conservative, ‘I have no need of you.’” – Dan Hooper

I have avoided any mention of the beleaguered Episcopal Church in the U.S. Until the election and consecration of New Hampshire Bishop V. Gene Robinson in 2003, who paid attention to the Episcopal Church?

More than a little affected, rich, and loaded with a disproportionate share of gay people, if you didn’t have fastidious tendencies and English roots, what the Episcopal Church did wouldn’t matter much to you. I admit, I went through seminary with many Episcopal friends, and enjoyed faintly contrived sophisticated conversation over glasses of properly-aged sherry.

“Lutherans,” it has been said, “are saved by faith, Roman Catholics are saved by good works, and Episcopalians by good taste.”

The election of Bishop Robinson changed all that, as the Episcopal Church revealed that it has a spine (unlike numerous other Protestant denominations which shall remain nameless). But the controversy has not quieted down, as it becomes more and more evident that some conservatives within the denomination want to do major back surgery to remove that spine. And then there is the worldwide communion to deal with.  Sadly, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has already been co-opted. (But I am not in agreement with much of the public whipping he was given recently by retired New Jersey Bishop John Shelby Spong whom, I feel, is grand-standing in order to continue to sell stuff on his web site.)

This weekend an errant conservative, Bishop Robert Duncan in Pittsburgh, announced the formation of Common Cause Partnership that seeks to circle the conservative wagons and probably form an independent province of the world wide Anglican communion. Ecclesio-politically, I’m not sure how this improbability could exist. For Anglicans and Catholics, loyalty and obedience to Bishops is one of the absolute guarantees of church unity. To have competing bishops is some kind of Christian “overlay zones” like area codes would create a genuine farce of orders.

Duncan’s new group purports to consist of not only parishes but dioceses which are profoundly angered by the presence of a homosexual in the House of Bishops. But how can an entire Diocese of the Episcopal Church hurl itself out of communion with the whole body? I am imagining an entire wing of a major hospital that walls itself off from the rest of the facility in order to practice alternative medicine! Or a right arm amputating itself because it does not approve of where the left hand has been. If a diocese —say, the Pittsburgh Diocese— did withdraw, would not the larger body simply have to establish another one in the same geographic area by the same name and issue a cease-and-desist order against the wayward Bishop to stop claiming to be authentic?

Some of this feels strangely like the skirmishes by which the Eastern and Western churches excommunicated one another in 1054 A.D., or the antics that fueled the Protestant Reformation of the 16^th Century. Only this time, Common Cause Partnership seems like an Episcopal Counter-Reformation. Besides, there is already a previous break-away Anglican Church of North America, isn’t there?

But, oops, when I did a quick Google search. . . . there is the Orthodox Anglican Church in the USA. In fact, I thought I remembered the correct name, only to discover at Anglicans on Line no less than 74 other Anglican organizations “not in communion” with Canterbury.  At least six of them have formed in the last ten years, and many more in the 20th century.

It’s almost as bad as Lutherans. Or Presbyterians, or Baptists. Well, not that bad.

It seems Christians are genetically disposed to disagree, and when they disagree, inclined not to listen to or speak about their differences with compassion and open hearts, but simply to insist on their own way, regardless of the damage done to our witness to the world.

I have long admired the wording of the New English Bible for St. Paul’s famous “love chapter”, 1 Corinthians 13:

Love is patient; love is kind and envies no one. Love is never boastful, nor conceited, nor rude; never selfish, not quick to take offence. Love keeps no score of wrongs; does not gloat over other men’s sins, but delights in the truth. There is nothing love cannot face; there is no limit to its faith, its hope, and its endurance. – 1 Cor. 13:4–7

How I would commend this spirit of love to warring denominations!! It’s probably too late for the Episcopal Church, however, since so many of the factions are still causing frictions over loyalty to the Prayer Book of 1928, they probably don’t like the New English Bible of 1976 very much either.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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September 28, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

In any conversation about fundamentalism, it is easy to argue about or make fun of their strict beliefs and manners: Biblical literalism, punitive rejection of sin and sinners (”hate the sin, beat up the sinner”), the dramatics of being born again and again, the political clout and cozy relationship with the Republican party, etc.

What is less often talked about openly is pain. Especially, the pain for those who have been raised in Christian sects or fundamentalist denominations who cannot stand the pain any longer. They suffer an enormous spiritual dissonance, often cannot make another Christian home, and go through a protracted period of depression, anger, etc. They have been abused as truthfully as Catholic children have been abused by predatory pedophiles in that church.

Only in the last few years have I really had to “face the music” with recovering fundamentalists. A number of gay men, especially, who have been curious enough about our ministry have trusted us enough to draw near. Some have stayed around; two in particular now refer to their former religion or former church in a tone of relief. Others cannot seem to snap out of the spell they have been put under, an after the initial curiosity has worn off, they disappear.

But where to? Back into the fundamentalist fold, the arms of a dysfunctional community that will eventually smother or strangle them spiritually?

David L. Rattigan runs a blog and a web site, www.leavingfundamentalism.org that has some very helpful material. Rattigan claims now to be a liberal Christian, and discloses his personal pilgrimage into and out of charismatic Christianity here. His pain included intellectual dishonesty, the lack of ability to spiritually perform what others expected or demanded (speaking in tongues, healings, prophesying), and the legalism and judgmentalism of fundamentalist Pentecostalism.

In one of his humorous writings, “I was wrong: God admits defeat and changes policy,” Rattigan parodies the supposed retreat of God from grace and forgiveness in Christ as a failed experiment over the last two thousand years, in the form of a news release about a fundamental change in Divine policy.

Excited seminary undergraduates in Louisville took to the streets yesterday afternoon to throw stones at passing sinners in celebration of the surprise decision. “This is a historic day,” a young sophomore told us proudly as he ducked to avoid a flying rock, apparently aimed at a transsexual standing a few yards away.

The greatest pain I have witnessed is in the lesbian/gay, bisexual and transgender community. Millions of us at some point in our early lives dug more deeply into our faith traditions, trying to (a) conform to other people’s expectations of goodness and uprightness; (b) find God’s promised love and limitless blessings; and (c) seek release from our feelings of inadequacy, shame, and sinful sexual inclinations.

But what we found was that we could never conform enough to other people’s views of holiness or perfection, that we were not released from our innate sexual orientation no matter how hard we tried/prayed/repented/abstained/hated ourselves, and that fundamentalist legalism always withheld or blocked God’s promised love and blessings. Others put conditions on God’s love that — if we only could hear the Gospel itself in all its clarity — God does not put on love, forgiveness and grace.

Maybe the only way in which the Gospel will ever be heard in this world is if Christians stop trying to booby-trap the compassion and love of God. (Rattigan now chuckles about fundamentalist warnings of “greasy grace” and “easy believism.”) The bottom line: Christ will come to any and all, out of his goodness and grace—if only we will get out of the way and stop trying to inflict pain on others in order to goad them to come to him.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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September 27, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

Tonight I was fixing and tuning a couple of handbells for the bell choir at church. On Sunday, we will be playing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” which sounds really joyous when rung out by handbells.

Yet the problems of the world press close. In our parish, my older member is still on a ventilator in the hospital. Our friends down the street are still homeless and spending every night on the sidewalk, rain or not. The globe is still warming. Senator Larry Craig has reneged on his promise to step down from public office for being a pervert. (Yes, I think it is a perversion to hold up high moral and family values and then position oneself as a bathroom solicitor for anonymous sensual encounters.) The war in Iraq still drags on, and George Bush wants another $200 billion just for next year to stay a course which cannot make for peace or democracy in that shredded land.  Every week more people die horrible deaths.

And by order of the Vatican, three nuns in Arkansas have been excommunicated because they subscribe to an order which is apparently led by a strange cult based in Canada, the founder of which believes she is the Virgin Mary reincarnate.  People continue to lose sleep and lose faith as the Catholic Church loses huge sums of money over priests who did things a lot worse than acting like the Queen of Heaven.  But really!

What is the matter with us? Us, the human race? Why are we so distracted, so torn, so full of conflict? Why can’t we rise about our meaner, selfish emotional needs to live nobly?

But who am I to talk? In my own congregation, we have many problems, and occasional conflicts or misunderstandings. With the world the way it is, and our own failures and pettiness, how can we ring out an “Ode to Joy” when a “Prelude to Disaster”might be more appropriate?

Perhaps this is what is truly meant when we speak about “Living by Grace.” We must live as if the grace of God is filling the world, controlling the world, re-directing the world away from its own destruction toward a higher purpose. We must live as if we are evidence of God’s grace in action. We must sing our odes to joy, however difficult to perform, knowing that cynicism is far too easy to hum along with. We must live our way into the world which grace will make if all of us keep faith with God.

— Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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September 26, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

A professor at PLTS years ago said that “integrity means your whole life is made from one piece of cloth.” His thought stuck with me. I suppose because at that particular moment I was living a double life: a Lutheran seminary student struggling to keep up with graduate studies and two part-time jobs, and a lonely, emerging gay man trying to understand myself. Looking back at the two lives I was living, I really needed to know what happened that put me in such straits.

If life should be “knit from one piece of cloth,” it is not to be a patchwork of whatever scraps we have on hand, to put our so-called lives together.

Easier said than done. How does one put together a life? It is not like, at the outset, we can design the kind of human being we intend to become. Infants are 100% dependent upon adults. Children are impressionable. I was impressionable as a tot. So were you. Life impressed us, but it was the life we were actually living that made the dents, the impressions, day after day, not the life that we shoulda/coulda/woulda lived.

Some people can honestly blame their parents, their dysfunctional environments and upbringing and catastrophic experiences that warped them, twisted them or shaped them into what they are as adults. But many of us blame, to some degree, just because it’s a way of blowing off or deflecting self-criticism. “It was my hard, unforgiving dad. It was my alcoholic mother. They made me screwed up.” Yada yada ya.

The truth is that all of us have many opportunities for mid-course corrections. We have many chances to look inside and see if we are the people we wanted to be, or the people that we could be if we’d stop making excuses for our own failures or weaknesses.

Then we can blame the culture, if we need to blame something. Our times and our culture do not encourage reflection or inner maturity of any kind. In our culture, we are merely “customers” or “consumers” (to those who have something to sell to us), we are “constituents” or voters (to politicians who have something to sell to us), we are “unchurched” or “prospects” (to preachers who have something to sell to us), and we are “clients” (to lawyers, estate planners and undertakers who have something to sell to us). I could have a lot of fun playing out those metaphors even more.  The culture as a whole is trying very hard to get control of impressionable people, if we allow it to define us.

But the point is we can’t look to pop culture, celebrities, the media, elected officials, or even most religious gurus to help us define ourselves, re-invent ourselves or even understand who we really are inside. We have to look to ourselves.

I quoted Jesus (from John 3:7) a couple of days ago: “Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’” Spiritual re-birth is the process of starting over from the inside out, so that our lives have the integrity we cannot have otherwise.

Spiritual growth is a uniquely personal thing. Not private. Not lonely: We don’t go it alone, because after all the Spirit of God is with us in the process of spiritual growth. The indwelling spirit works within and upon our own spirits to re-form us (reform us), to re-weave our lives as if from one piece of cloth.

But spiritual growth is personal and unique for each of us. It is the one thing about life for which we must accept full responsibility. If we have outlived the failures and the foibles of our parents, our upbringing and all the damage that adolescent peers have inflicted on us, we still have this incredible opportunity before us, like an open door, to change. To become. To grow. To seek integrity and to live it out.

God is with us. I am not talking about religious practices and customs. I am talking about deeply personal and interior growth, in that place in the human heart where God really dwells and works with us to become the people we are meant to be. You can do it. God help you.

— Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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September 25, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

This morning’s Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times reviews Rufus Wainwright’s Sunday concert at the Hollywood Bowl.  He re-created the 1961 Judy Garland concert at Carnegie Hall (for the last time, after doing it in New York, Paris and London).  It sounded like great fun—even as the reviewer acknowledged that Wainwright admitted a certain nervousness about it.

I don’t follow showbiz very closely, so paying attention to out gay singer/actor/composer Wainwright wasn’t high on my list.  But Gay.com has an undated interview with Wainwright that set me thinking:

[Interviewer Jack Shamama:] In a recent New York Times article entitled “Rufus Wainwright Journeys to ‘Gay Hell’ and Back,” you chronicle your struggle with drugs, your subsequent mental collapse and a recent trip to rehab.  Has that gotten you into any trouble — with your label, maybe?

Wainwright: No, not trouble with the label. I’m in dangerous territory in terms of the Right using the term “gay hell” as a brand of shampoo for gay people.  I understand that concern.  But I do believe that every gay man knows exactly what I’m talking about.  Anyone who thinks there isn’t a side to gay life that’s not dangerous with a drug culture that sort of forgets about the last 20 years is fooling himself.

Well, no, I’m not fooling myself.  I may have been in a sub-cultural fog not to realize fully that drug abuse has tripped and brought down so many others.  As a guy without an addiction problem, I naively wonder about why everyone who “makes it” in entertainment seems to follow the same downward path, to say nothing of the huge majority of gay men who are so easily seduced into drugs.  Do we need to have one tragedy after another—first HIV, then crystal meth—like a bad two-act play?

Wainwright’s affinity for Judy Garland is unfortunate.  She died in 1969 of a drug overdose after nearly 20 years of drug-induced health problems.   The outline of Wikipedia’s article on Wainwright is literally a 1-2-3 progression:
“1.1 The early years
1.2 Rise to fame
1.3 Addiction.” Uh oh.  From the article:

Wainwright became addicted to crystal meth in the early 2000s and temporarily lost his vision to overuse. [emphasis added.]  His addiction reached its peak in 2002, during what he described as “the most surreal week of his life.”  During that week, he played a drug addict in a cameo role in “Absolutely Fabulous”; spent several nights partying with the president’s daughter, Barbara Bush; enjoyed a “debauched evening” with his mother and Marianne Faithfull; sang with Antony of Antony and the Johnsons for Zaldy’s spring 2003 collection; and, throughout, experienced recurring hallucinations of his father . He decided shortly after that he “was either going to rehab or I was going to live with my father.  I knew I needed an asshole to yell at me, and I felt he fitted the bill”.

Seeking guidance, he telephoned his friend Elton John, who persuaded him to check in to rehab at the Hazelden Foundation in Minnesota.  He detoxed and underwent therapy at the facility; he has neither confirmed nor denied his current sobriety.

Two years ago, I told our interfaith gay/lesbian clergy association I didn’t know of anyone in my church with a crystal meth problem.  They didn’t believe me. That has now changed, sadly.  As a pastor, I face an overwhelming challenge:  to communicate unconditional love, but at the same time to communicate rejection of crystal meth.  But to admit, or even tout, that I never did have a drinking problem or a drug problem doesn’t win any admirers.  They may even revoke my gay card.

But “temporarily losing his vision to overuse”?  Are people nuts?  If we don’t communicate to our own that crystal meth is evil, it is like watching a war unfold in which all our comrades drop like flies.  It doesn’t take a crystal ball.  What is the point of LGBT rights in a culture where so many people won’t need any civil rights, or culture, because they are killing themselves?

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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September 24, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

Today I was re-arranging my books in the study. The LGBT books take about 3 shelves. It surprised me to find a number of titles that fit together so closely: Ron Eichberg’s Coming Out: An Act of Love, Christian de la Huerta’s Coming Out Spiritually, Chris Glaser’s Come Home!, O’Neill and Ritter’s Coming Out Within: Stages of Spiritual Awakening for Lesbians and Gay Men, and Kaufman and Raphael’s Coming Out of Shame: Transforming Gay and Lesbian Lives.

I probably have more related titles somewhere.  These are enough to make the point, that gay men and lesbians have more to do than just announce and start enjoying their new consciousness of belonging to a sexual minority. Coming out entails a huge amount of psychic and spiritual homework:  to understand myself deeply, to make peace with my differentness, to prepare myself for battle with homophobia, to survive in a hostile world.

Hostility to LGBT people seems to be on the decline in the last few decades . . . until we remember that:

• well-funded right-wing groups are working tirelessly to deprive us and prevent us from exercising civil rights;
• hate crimes in general are declining somewhat but hate crimes against sexual minorities continue to rise;
• very few cities and states in the U.S. and few nations in the world provide the relative tolerance we experience now.
• well-known and well-funded religious leaders continue to espouse extremely vile attitudes against LGBT people—among them ex-preacher and televangelist Pat Robertson, Anglican archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, and the current pontiff Benedict XVI, and of course many Muslim leaders.
• earlier historical periods of tolerance gave way almost overnight to periods of bigotry and extreme intolerance.

Coming Out of Shame is an extremely compelling although densely-written book.  Kaufman and Raphael are absolutely right in calling shame “a sickness of the soul.” But that does not mean a sinful state of being from which one must repent.  Shame is a condition most often imposed from the outside and then internalized.  Numerous components of shame are “assembled” inside of us.

“The principal forms of shame are discouragement, embarrassment, shyness, self-consciousness, inferiority, and guilt.”

Do any of these shoes fit you? We hold ourselves back because of shame. We set ourselves up for unnecessary failure.  We worry about pleasing people for the wrong reasons (”the best little boys in the world.”)  We self-eliminate in contests where shame could be used against us.  I know of several cases within the Church where keen and gifted persons withdrew their names from consideration for jobs where they could have done wonderful work, because of the reality that they could be exposed, shamed, destroyed, if their sexuality ever came to light.

And shame is one of those “gifts” that keep on giving until we learn to deal with our interior selves and to extract ourselves from shame. Until we come out of it.

Shame does not confirm guilt. Shame may be caused by the actions or reactions of other people toward us. But their actions or even reactions are not necessarily evidence of something objectively wrong in us or our behavior.  Our cross to bear is that we are still, in this 21^st century, expected to feel shame for things as immutable and ordinary as who we are, and how we were “wired” by our Creator. What appalls many right-wing fundamentalists (and energizes them politically) is that out-lesbian and gay people do not exhibit any shame.  Right-wing political action is an attempt not only to deprive us of liberties and rights but to re-shame us and drive us back into closets where we would remain alone and ashamed of ourselves.

National Coming Out Day is Thursday, October 11. “Take your next step” out of your closet.  The Human Rights Campaign has resources for you to create your own National Coming Out Day Video.  And HRC has a downloadable 23-page Guide to Coming Out.

But the reality of our lives and our times tell me there is a lot more homework to do after you come out. In some ways, the real coming out experience is only superficial unless it is a complete spiritual re-birth from the inside out.

“Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’”—Jesus, John 3:7

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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September 23, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

I am someone who often straddles several communities.

Sometimes I stand between sexual minorities and heterosexuals. Sometimes I am between the “churched”—traditional people of faith—and the ordinary people out there who have no relationship to faith or to church communities. There is some overlap, and many varieties in between.

But years ago someone said “Those who sit in the middle of the road get sideswiped from both sides.” Is that me? I feel like the traffic of life is zooming by on both sides, among people who are similar to me but unknown to one another. I am brushed, tweaked, winged by strangers.

Recently I had a near miss in traffic, when another driver came roaring up out of an underground garage. As I swerved to avoid him, he stopped, but I was sure he had dented or scraped my car’s side. We both stopped our vehicles right away; I got out to check for damage. He hollered “no contact!” and was in a rush to drive off. Fortunately he was right.

Cars should not be sideswiped. But maybe people should! It is as if these different communities I mention live in close proximity with one another, but remain strangers, like skew lines whose planes never intersect. No contact. Except that I am sometimes in the middle.

A visitor comes to a church and walks in the door, looking for something. Not certain what she or he has stepped into. The majority of people who “go to church” regularly are not strangers to each other. But to the outsider, those insiders seem like a clique, a tight-knit group. A clique is defined as a “exclusive circle of people with a common purpose.”

But the insiders are not exclusive—really, they’re not. It’s just that the outsider who comes in doesn’t know that, and it may not be obvious that insiders mean to be open, to communicate some of the things that are important to them and to offer the promise of so much more, for God’s sake, to newcomers.

The members of a church don’t know anything, yet, about a visitor, either. He or she may seem stand-offish, private, unwilling to give his last name, fill out a visitor card, get involved even by shaking a few hands or staying a few minutes to chat over a cup of coffee.

Why do people remain strangers to one another? As an “insider” I sort of blame “us” most of all. We may not know who comes knocking, entering, checking out our spiritual community. We may not know what strangers and newcomers are looking for. So of course we don’t know, right off, whether we are what they’re looking for.

But the truth is, people who come looking are not looking for us, exactly, but for a sense of the Divine, an experience of awe, a movement of the spirit. We might not be the answer to their questions, but the Spirit has given us opportunity—opened a window through us—by which the stranger may experience both God and the warmth of Divine Love expressed.

The two groups of humanity are, as it were, “sideswiped” in an experience that is not quite a collision or an intersection. If only those who have unconditional love to offer would let the Spirit speak through them to those who don’t yet understand unconditional love. And if only those who are searching, thirsting, hungering for something deeper in the company of kindred spirits, would trust us enough to be touched (sideswiped?) by the encounter.

Trust is a dear commodity these days. It’s hard to turn it on, like a faucet, for total strangers we encounter. We seem to prefer “no contact!” even when the people whose lives we brush by or sideswipe might be the very people whom God means to bring together. And, it just might be God who is sideswiping us through these wonderful encounters with people we don’t know yet.

“Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it.” — Hebrews 13:2

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September 22, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

Recently I’ve been to see Confessions of a Mormon Boy by Steven Fales. We’re trying to get a group together to go see it while it’s at the Elephant Lab Theatre in Hollywood (through September 30).

Mr. Fales’ true story is funny, sad, moving and in some ways overwhelming. It is fair to say that Fales is also a strong and capable actor, since in a solo performance he must keep his audience’s attention for 90 minutes. “Mormon Boy” never bores—or even slows down, for that matter. It will leave you laughing, gasping, crying, stunned.

Why the story is most compelling is that Fales was caught in the same web in which many other fundamentalists of other religious stripes have been caught. It might as easily be entitled “The Best Little Boy in the World.” It is a life that many of us might have lived, or actually lived.

But the darker side is what happens to Fales after he is expelled from his church, and his marriage crashes and burns. This too raises the usual existential questions for someone of faith who, discerning one’s sexuality, becomes unhinged from all the connections and supports of life-before-coming-out. “If anything and everything I do as a gay man is horrible and offensive to God, and I’m going to burn in hell for it anyway, then I might as well have the biggest fling I can.”

That absurdity has wrenched spirituality out of the hearts of so many LGBT people. Lives become pointless and aimless in an unchecked progression of promiscuity, alcohol and substance abuse, disease, cynicism and spiritual death. It might sound as if I am joining sides with Pat Robertson or James Dobson here, but the truth is, what causes the downward spiral for so many people is not being who they are: being lesbian or gay or whatever, it is society’s knee-jerk rejection, fear and phobia. Because of prejudice and bigotry, whole classes of people are thrust out, kept on society’s margins, until they find other ways to survive without respect or restraint.

I don’t believe, of course, that virtually any intimate sexual expression earns God’s wrath, just because of the gender of one’s partner, any more than I would say “anything goes” is just fine. It falls to each of us to work out our own ethics in regards to sexuality, so that our sexuality is integrated in our whole lives in healthy ways. Fales’ story can be described as a tale of “fall and redemption.” What makes it most compelling is that it is a true story, and his own redemption is not a dramatic device. He teaches us a lesson for life from his own life education.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

Posted in Fundamentalism, Hollywood, Ecumenical Issues, LGBT Christian, Faith, Coming Out, Spirituality, Ex-Gay | Print | No Comments »

September 21, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

Two days ago I went to the doctor again, to one of the urology surgical staff. If was the first full follow-up since my laparoscopic radical prostatecomy in late June.

I feel fine, with just a few residual side effects that are fading in to memory, thank God. But let’s cut to the chase. I went yesterday to hear the results of the blood test the week before.

After prostate surgery there is only one thing that’s really important: the PSA blood count. The Prostate Specific Antigen test of a blood sample is the most important number for all men to watch if you’re over 40. Have this checked as part of your blood panel and complete annual physical. In the 18 months before I was diagnosed, this PSA number had risen from 4.3 to 5.8— a smoking gun to a urologist. The PSA count led to a biopsy which led to the cancer diagnosis.

Would there be any further sign of the “smoking gun”? With the cancerous gland removed, the number should be extremely low. If it were not, it might be evidence that not all the cancer had been removed with the gland—that it had already escaped or migrated within the body. It might mean further treatment, such as chemotherapy.

It would be a lie to say I was not worried. I had some advance warning of the seriousness of this number, since the Kaiser Permanente health system did not post it with my other lab results on the web site (online I can log in, make appointments, see lab results, send messages to a doctor, etc.). Yes, the doctor said, a PSA test like an HIV test is not posted online; you have to make an appointment to get the results. He said the test “takes interpretation.” The real reason is that it could be devastating to find this out from a computer, not a human being, if it is bad news.

Thank God the number came back as less than 0.1, the lowest level that the test can detect.

I had said before that all of this—from diagnosis to surgery—is still “sinking in” to my consciousness. As if my own mortality had never really occurred to me before! But there is something else that still needs to “sink in” to my whole mental, psychological and spiritual framework. That is what it really means to thank God. And is that not part of what “living by grace” means?

Instead of a mere cliché or figure of speech, to say “Thank God!” is an expression of joy and hopefulness, gratitude and finitude. We are not congratulating ourselves, after all. We live because God gives us life. Life is a gift. I have little control over how long my life will be. Except for the obvious choices I could make to shorten it (unhealthy practices, addictions, suicide), I have no control over the number of days God is giving me on this earth. Every day I need to say “Thank God!” in a new way that startles and refreshes my own soul. And it needs to “sink in.”

For this day, O God, I thank you. For the grace of my life and my health, for aging and maturing, for hopefulness and uncertainty, for all that life brings, and for its question marks, I thank you God. For the energy I have today, and the promise of tomorrow, thank you, God.

Posted in Faith, Living by Grace, Health, PRAYERS, Spirituality | Print | No Comments »