Dealing with oneself from the inside out.

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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