Halloween: What Are You Supposed to Be?

My friend Samm held a giant party with her housemates on Halloween.

I had planned ahead for this, purchasing my costume well ahead of time. The Monday after I attended The United Church, I was feeling inspired by the clerical collars of Rev. DeGroote and his younger colleague. I had needed to purchase a black suit for myself back in June, when I served as an attendant in a friend’s wedding, so I thought I could easily add a black shirt with the square patch of white showing at its collar, and I would have an instant priest's costume.

I looked online and discovered that I could purchase a relatively inexpensive short-sleeved official priest's shirt from a company in Maine. Because some of the fields were optional on the online order form, I did not have to name my “seminary” or “congregation,” but the denomination field was mandatory, so I checked "other."

At Samm's party, most everyone assumed I was costumed as a Roman Catholic, but in my mind I had clothed myself as an Episcopalian. I would say this out loud, when someone would make a mistake and ask me how many "Hail Marys" I wanted them to say, or (more often) approach me and ask, "What are you supposed to be? A child molester?"

Mohammed was at the party, dressed in traditional Arab garb -- a long, floor-length tunic, sandals, and Saudi headdress. I demanded that he teach me the Arabic phonetics for the Shahada so that when party-goers would ask me to pray for them I could mix it up a bit. We got as far as the phonetics for "I attest that there is no god-entity but the Allah god-entity..." before getting distracted and not returning to the task.

Rachel was at the party too, dressed as some kind of product advertisement. She told me I looked strangely "right" in my priest's outfit, and I confessed that it actually felt kind of right -- very comfortable. We were standing in the backyard talking, and shortly I excused myself to go back into the kitchen and refill my glass of wine.

While I was pouring from the bottle I had brought, a drunk milkmaid I had never met before wandered up to me with her tits up to her chin and her empty glass waving back and forth under my nose.

I thought she might have tried to give me a sexy look, or something.

Pausing from my own glass, I quarter-turned and filled her glass for her.

"Thanks," she slurred, "What are you supposed to be?"

Puzzled that it wasn't obvious, I inclined my chin, in case my beard was obscuring my collar. I pointed to the square of white at my throat.

"Oh," she said, "You're a gay priest. That's funny."

Then she walked away.

The idea of me as a man of the cloth wasn't always so preposterous. I didn't grow up in a denomination that employed priests, but I took other types of godly men as my role models when I was a child -- various ministers, or the evangelical missionaries who would visit my church and church camp to talk about their work in Korea or Jamaica or Papua, New Guinea.

One of my earliest long-range forecasts for my future involved me and my best friend from church becoming missionaries together in Africa. I planned this out when I was probably 14, and Jonathan would have been about 16. The way I figured it, we would each marry a girl from the church and then the four of us would work as a team. The girls got swapped around in my imagination, but the idea of doing good work for God together with Jonathan remained a constant.

Missionary work would not be an option for a gay man according to how I grew up. Priests and ministers and missionaries are role models, right? And gay men? We just aren’t.

That’s why we shouldn’t be teachers or Boy Scout leaders or parents either. In fact, it would be hard to imagine a gay man in any role that could be considered admirable. All of our accomplishments are tainted because of our gayness.

The purpose of this life is to follow Jesus, and being gay is not following Jesus, so our lives are doomed until and unless we get serious about repentance and redemption. Who could admire the gays’ stunning refusal to address their sin? And who could want someone like that in a leadership position in a church?

Moses’ commandment to stone the gays to death doesn’t apply anymore, said my church, because Jesus brought the new covenant and freed us from the total insanity of Jewish law. But read Leviticus again, they would say. It definitely shows what God thinks of the gay folk, if under the old law He wanted us dead, right away, with impunity for the community that drives us out of the camp, pelting our bodies to pulp in the desert sand.

Moreover, though Jesus was silent on the gay menace, the New Testament nonetheless backs up the Old, with Paul assuring the Romans that men who flame with lust for one another will receive in their bodies the due penalties for their perversions.

In a letter to the Corinthians, Paul supposedly condemns gay men a second time, but as with Koheleth’s musing on his or her ephemeral life, the shades of meaning change depending on the translation you read. Of the four versions of the Bible on my shelf, you can choose between condemnation of:

1. The effeminate and abusers of themselves with mankind,
2. Male prostitutes and homosexual offenders,
3. Adulterers and homosexual perverts, or
4. Those who use and abuse each other and those who use and abuse sex.

At Christmastime, in 2003, after Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to recognize same-sex marriages, I sat in the pew at my parents’ church in Kentucky.

The preacher read Paul’s verse from Romans about the due penalty for perversion, and then he compared the situation for Christians in first-century Rome with the situation for Christians in 21st-century America.

He shouted: “It was a wicked world in ancient Rome. Wicked! Idolatry! Christian persecution! All manner of perversion! But with this thing in Massachusetts, it's just dark here in America. I don’t see how it could have been any worse in Rome than it is right here, right now.”

This was met with a chorus of amens from the men, and judgmental tsking sounds from the women, which was and is typical there -- but at least my parents’ church doesn’t produce a Hell House.

What's a Hell House? Hell Houses are the evangelical alternative to haunted houses on Halloween.

They work like this: Instead of witches stirring pots or zombies popping out of coffins, the scenes played out inside a Hell House depict all kinds of modern blasphemies and affronts to the evangelicals’ god -- as well as the tortured afterlife that the perpetrators of such blasphemies and affronts can expect to suffer for eternity. The theory (sort of a one-night reduction of what a lifetime of Sundays can teach you as an evangelical) is that if you are terrorized enough, that sometime before the end of the walk-through, you will have resolved to accept Jesus Christ and avoid the torment.

The Hell House model as an evangelical alternative to a possibly-Satanic Halloween has gotten popular enough to support a cottage industry by the New Destiny Christian Center in Colorado, which continues every year to sell its pre-packaged version of a Hell House kit to churches across the country.

The kit includes props, instructions, and scripts for the actors to follow. And it's not just the useless, futile, tragic lives of gay men that are depicted. New Destiny encourages including young women who choose abortion, drunk drivers, domestic abusers, and teenaged ravers on drugs. Visitors watch the tragic consequences of the wasted lives -- women bleeding to death after killing their babies, promiscuous girls getting raped and committing suicide, and gay couples wasting together of AIDS -- all while being mocked by the demons who are transporting them to Hell.

"We don't do it to scare people,” one pastor at a church in Texas told his local CBS affiliate last week. “The scary part about the Hell House is the reality that we portray. That is the scary part."

That’s not what’s scary to me.

Ramadan, part four (Jews and Unitarians)

I walked to Shabbat services on Friday, carrying the vegetarian dish I had prepared for the potluck in a canvas bag slung over my shoulder, while listening to a sermon from my sister's non-denominational Christian church on my iPod. It occurred to me that I had heard about groups of Orthodox Jews who would forbid carrying my shoulder bag to services, and I made a mental note to investigate later what the deal is with carrying things on Shabbat.

The group I was joining for the evening is a gathering of mostly twentysomethings and early-thirtysomethings who have formed their own self-led congreation. There is no rabbi, no cantor, no ark, no giant Torah scroll. Members of the congregation take turns leading the service, or introducing the guest speaker, or leading the clean-up effort after the potluck. There is no synagogue; the congregation meets in another organization's space, which it has over time outgrown, and is now looking for a larger venue, perhaps the basement of a local Unitarian church.

I had accompanied my friend to services once before, on a night when the congregation sat in a circle, and the songs were accompanied by a guitarist. Last Friday was different; it was an a cappella service, with the chairs arranged in rows facing east. I own a kippah, acquired on a previous visit to a more traditional synagogue that required one, but I do not tend to wear it to my friend's congregation, because they are not required. A quick survey of the room revealed that about 10 percent of the men and maybe 50 percent of the women were without kippot.

The kippot issue is a good one to illustrate the spirit of my friend's congregation. They welcome all, and they also want to respect tradition. The group therefore offers a basket of kippot for attendees who have arrived without one, and who prefer to wear one. Originally, this basket was placed on the table next to the prayer books. However, my friend informs me that there were those who felt this placement might mistakenly imply an enforced pro-kippot stance on the part of the congregation, and so the basket was moved to the floor. This placement struck other congregants as disrespectful, and now the kippot basket resides on a chair next to the prayer book table.

Bare-headed, I selected a seat at the very back of the room, and my friend sat with me through the musical portion of the service, until she needed to step forward to introduce the guest speaker (a representative from a local nonprofit organization that provides low-income women of color with free child-care). My friend introduced the speaker by reading a poem written from the perspective of a woman who was present when Moses descended from Sinai. The woman had not written down her story, said the voice of the poem, because her hands were always full of children. Her voice, said the poem, is like the vowels of the Torah -- missing but implied. It is up to us to fill in her voice.

The guest speaker provided background on her organization and offered congregants the chance to sign up to provide child-care for those in need. She connected her organization’s mission to the poem, describing the child-care opportunity as a way to take children out of their mothers’ hands long enough for them to participate fully in public life in a way denied to the women at Sinai and beyond.

By chance, on Sunday, two days later, I heard another stirring sermon on themes of gender and race, delivered by a professor of Politics and African-American studies from Princeton University. I had decided to attend services alone at a Unitarian church about three blocks from my apartment, and it turned out that day that the Unitarians were also welcoming a guest speaker.

The guest preacher/professor began her sermon with these words: "I am a cradle Unitarian. My mother was a white woman who was raised as a Mormon, and my father was a black man who shared a room at Howard with Stokely Carmichael, so for our family, in the 1970s, in northern Virginia, there was no other place for us to worship, but in a Unitarian church."

She went on to preach from a children's book (Edwina, the Dinosaur Who Didn't Know She Was Extinct), after noting that one of the things she loves about being a Unitarian is "You can preach on whatever text you want!"

Her message was what I have come to expect from a Unitarian service -- a blend of social justice exhortations, encouragements toward optimism in the face of despair, a reminder of the Unitarian commitment to embrace everyone, and a few somewhat understated liberal political messages, including jabs at current conservative leaders and candidates, and props for the current hope of the Democratic party.

I know that I have heard Unitarian ministers talk about God before, but I do not recall the guest professor invoking a deity in her sermon. The core of her message, it struck me, was deeply humanist in its outlook, and this message was underscored by her sermon's structure. Periodically throughout the first 2/3 of the sermon, after describing a human-caused tragedy that reflects negatively on our nature as people (the public whipping of an innocent black woman in turn-of-the-century Ohio, the failure of government response after Hurricane Katrina, etc.), the professor would utter a string of negative pronouncements, such as "Democracy is dead" or "There is no benevolent spirit of love and life to answer our prayers."

When her sermon turned a corner toward a more hopeful outlook, she modified those negative pronouncements from earlier, making them more positive. "What if democracy is only bruised," she asked, for example.

When it came time to reverse the assertion that there is no benevolent spirit to answer our prayers, she phrased her modification like this: "We are the ones who are here to answer each others' prayers."

I enjoyed her sermon immensely but was feeling shy when services were over, so although the professor and the church's minister both stood together on the outside steps to shake hands with the congregants as they exited -- he in his black robe and sash, and she in her sleeveless hot-pink shift dress and three-inch pink heels -- I slipped out a side door and avoided them.