Barbara Ohrstrom

ohrstromb@gmail.com

Religious Teachings I Wish I Had Known

I sat on the narrow edge of a hospital cot, holding my twin brother’s hand, rubbing his

back. He was screaming, and he had been for hours. Agony ripped through me at my brother’s

anguish. I needed to take a break, but whenever I moved away from my brother’s tiny cot, he

yelled louder still. Why hadn’t he lost his voice?

Why hadn’t he slept? Why weren’t the doctors coming to give him something—anything

—to give him the rest he so desperately needed? He had been awake all night, as had I. As soon

as dawn had cracked, I had bundled him into a cab and taken him to the hospital. This was the

second of his so-called psychotic breaks—apparently, the drugs he took to keep the HIV virus at

bay a little longer interfered with his brain function.

I waited in the tiny, cramped room, on the little emergency room hospital cot while my

brother screamed. Finally, early that evening, Bill was admitted. A volunteer was assigned to

watch him as he had been “caught” trying to gouge his wrists on the metal edges of the bed. I

left, bought hamburgers at Johnny Rockets, and retreated to my home, my brother’s screams still

resounding within my ears. Amidst the screams, I had deciphered broken statements, only two

of which had been clear. He had shouted he was “going to hell,” and when I had tried to comfort

him and tell him he was not, he was a good man, he had shrieked even more loudly he was gay,

so he was going to hell.

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I had not known my brother was afraid of hell because he was gay. My brother was

proud of being gay, never hiding it and disdaining the closet. What caused this terror? Was it

the “activists” who flaunted their signs, “God Hates Fags,” “AIDS is God’s Punishment” and all

the variations therein? Was it my adoptive mother, who often quoted Billy Graham, or my

adoptive father, who taunted him for being a “Flower Boy?” Was it the kids who screamed

“Queer”! whenever he walked by the summer he lived my sister in Boston? Bill had dismissed

all that with his usual élan, dismissed the lot of them as ignorant homophobes. As for my

adoptive parents, well, had he not been gay, they would have rejected him for something else.

Maybe, though, Bill’s dismissal was the front he presented. Maybe he never told anyone

how much the daily (and often subtle) hatred and rejection he endured hurt him. My brother was

not a masculine muscle builder. He was a ‘queen.’ Handsome. Dignified. But a queen,

nevertheless. He didn’t “pass.” This meant the small New Hampshire hamlet in which we grew

up—no, the entire state--was forbidden to him. It was no wonder he loved cities, and no wonder,

out of all cities, he loved San Francisco best, but even San Francisco could not defeat religious

homophobia.

Bill hadn’t been to the church in which we were raised in years, and that church, though

strictly Christian and Yankee, had never explicitly emphasized the teachings used to justify fear

and hatred of gays. I don’t recall a single instance where our minister said anything as hostile as

some fundamentalists now said—no ‘fags are going to burn,’ or ‘AIDS cures homosexuality,’ or

anything like that. In fact, he never even cited that oft abused section, Leviticus 18:22, “You

shall not lie with a man as with a woman; it is an abomination,” or the story of Sodom and

Gomorrah in Genesis. Out of all the people I know who are gay, my brother had appeared to be

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the last person to fear hell or believe it existed, but his agony this past evening made it clear that

religious insult, unlike secular homophobia, had damaged my brother’s spirit.

When I was coming out, I had struggled mightily with the very same issue: would I be

wrong in the eyes of God if I were gay? This question was perhaps the hardest for me to resolve

in coming out: I feared God’s judgment, and if I did not exactly believe in hell as a place filled

with the flames of Satan, I certainly feared being exiled and separated from God, and more

importantly, from the loving kindness of Jesus. I didn’t want to be outside the spiritual family--

that very thought brought on a searing pain in my heart that ran even deeper than the pervasive

fear. My coming out process had stretched over three years because I could not resolve this

question to my satisfaction.

For me, finally, in this one regard, a dream brought me peace. I had dreamed Jesus had

come to me and said that love was the holiest command, that the who of love was not significant

at all; it was the fact of love itself that made one spiritual or not spiritual. As a woman, and as

one who has suffered greatly, I find Jesus a compelling figure. I suspect this is true for many of

us. Jesus loved children. He loved Mary Magadelene. He fought for outcasts and lepers and

unpopular sorts. Poor people who were plaintive and expressive about their spiritually,

financially, and emotionally impoverished conditions had their needs met when Jesus arrived.

His compassion is his hallmark, as is his indignity at the hypocrisy of those in power. Certainly

Jesus represented true spirituality to me much more than the church fathers or theologians

themselves ever could.

Jesus filled me with luminescence and love in that dream. The joyful feeling remained

even after I awoke. I looked at the same playful, Winnie the Pooh walls of my tiny room, the

same narrow futon resting on the broad, splintered planks of the old floor. But the bright

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sunlight streaming through the high window seemed pale to me after such a dream. I was filled

with hope and deep happiness. I never thought twice about whether God would approve of my

homosexuality after that dream.

I had found my way home to my God at last. The gay and lesbian issue had been settled

by my dream. Any other problems or fears I had that originated with the Bible had been settled

by pushing the Bible right out of my consciousness and my relationship with God.

Yet all these years later, here was my brother, who I had thought had settled this very

question regarding gay and lesbian acceptance by God, screaming on a narrow, emergency room

bed. With the suddenness of an imploding building, one cornerstone of the edifice of my entire

spiritual framework collapsed; my strategy of ignoring the Bible no longer sufficed. The

suffering my brother and I had experienced came precisely from the literal interpretations of the

Sodom and Gomorrah story and Leviticus 18:22.

I think, like a lot of gay people, that the Bible terrified me. A part me always wondered,

well, the religious zealots who scream Leviticus 18:22, or Sodom and Gomorrah, or the Letters

of Paul – are they right? Does God condemn gays and lesbians? Instinctively, I felt the Bible

could not be right; God could not be that particular. However, the Old Testament God WAS that

particular – witness His anger when the Israelites made a Golden Calf. God was fussy, and God

was a punishing force who thought nothing, apparently, of killing the village to save it as He had

destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah to save it from the evil ones he found there. Yes, supposedly

every last man who inhabited Sodom was evil, but murder everyone, including the women and

children? And yes, every last man in Sodom who wanted to rape the angels in the form of men –

was evil, but each of them was evil because each of them was a rapist, not gay, right? (In fact,

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stating these men were gay is actually an interpretation because the text itself does not make this

claim.)

Now my brother’s screams and my suppressed anxieties and doubt regarding the Bible

made a potent elixir that drove me to search to find IF I connected with the divine, or did my

lesbianism leave me out of the circle? And IF I connected, and could connect, and had

permission to connect with Divine, how did I do that? Looking back now, I see this question

intersects with what I believe is the universal human need—emotional, physical, intellectual--to

find unity with the Divine, to find spirituality, to create meaning.

My dream and my instincts told me my deepest need to find complete unity with God—a

need I believe I share with all peoples—was acceptable, and my unity with Divine did not rest

within the confines of the church. My body and heart, in other words, were safely on the path

and in the arms of the God Who existed within me. This, however, was not enough, for I needed

to feel comfortable and safe in my mind and in my emotions, in all the aspects of my self and of

my search for Divine: body, heart, mind, and emotions. And my emotions and mind were not

convinced I could be part of the human family. Feeling as if the community of Christians, angels

and God included, had rejected me because I am a lesbian had infuriated, wounded, and terrified

me. Now, my brother’s terror had reawakened that same old terror in me. And that terror within

me rested within my ignorance of the Bible, despite having been raised Christian and having

attended church each week of my childhood.

Where did the Bible come from? Who wrote it? Lurking within me rested the fear God

Himself had chosen the men who had written it, making it impossible to ignore the prohibitions

against homosexuality. If it were true I should literally interpret the Bible, then my instincts,

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dreams and wishes would not make me part of the human family that is privileged to join God,

for as far as I knew, despite communing with nature, the Bible was the path to God. Wasn’t it?

Suddenly, I felt as starved for knowledge as those Israelites wandering in the desert felt

deprived of water. By facing my terror and ceasing my lifelong rejection of the Bible, scholars

such as Elaine Pagels could give me information about and from the Bible that looked like a road

map to what I needed: relief from the terror, and yes, the rage. The relief from that terror rested

in what facts my mind could unearth, and that meant investigating and understanding the very

text I had rejected because of its inherent homophobia and support of, apparently, all parental

authority—the Bible.

I discovered not only did we not know who wrote the Bible, but the Bible was actually a

collection of oral histories transcribed onto scrolls, and those scrolls had been copied onto more

scrolls until around 1000 to 900 BCE, which was when these scrolls were collected, compiled,

and make into one book. The original Bible does not even exist – there was no original text,

there were just copies of copies of compiled scrolls. So the Bible came to us like a game of

telephone, where people can’t even keep straight one sentence for five minutes.

Not only that, but the Bible started out it a form of a language which doesn’t exist any

more—ancient Hebrew. And it went onto to Aramaic, the language of Jesus; ancient Greek,

another dead language; Latin, also a dead language; Middle English, a languishing language, and

finally English.

As for Christianity, the entire Bible was essentially a Jewish document. I had not

completely comprehended the ramifications of Jesus as a Jew, and that the disputes between

Jews and Jesus-lovers were actually ‘intrafamily’ disputes in that all parties involved were

actually Jewish. Furthermore, Christianity had to be ORDERED into existence, as it were, by

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Constantine, and the early Christians had plenty of disputes to the point where certain Gospels

were suppressed and kept out of the Bible! Not only that, the fight between the Gnostics, who

believed God resides within us and each person had his or her own pipeline to God, and those

who wanted to keep the church hierarchal in the sense one needed an intermediary to get to God

the Father settled on the side of the church; i.e., Roman hierarchy of political power. The

Gnostics, on the other hand, had organized their worship services to be run on a rotating basis by

persons within the community who were not more powerful or learned than anyone else in the

congregation! The Gnostics were the Roman churches’ first victims of purges, and the purges

included discrediting, imprisoning, and murder. Not only that, the purges included getting rid of

texts such as the Gospels of Judas, of Thomas, and of all people, Mary.

And I returned to the homosexual prohibitions contained within Mose’s law; i.e., the

Torah or the first five books of the Bible. In Genesis, I reread the story of Lot in which the drive

of the men to rape the male angels was so great the men clawed at the wooden gates that barred

them even after the angels blinded them. However, in Judges 19, the same acts are described

except the victim is a woman, raped so violently by the male Benjaminites that she dies, and both

passages emphasize the guests are under the protection of their hosts. What do these passages

really mean? Is the one a condemnation of homosexuality, or are the two a condemnation of any

refusal to welcome and shelter a stranger?

Leviticus 18:22 is another one of the sexual laws supposedly against homosexuality;

however, the entire book of Leviticus establishes the laws of the Jewish people and, in so doing,

gives the Jewish people an identity separate from the other peoples and religions in the region.

More specifically, the beginning of Chapter 18 iterates “…you shall not do as they do in the

land of Canaan….You shall do my ordinances and keep my statutes and walk in them.” Given

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that 18:21 forbids child sacrifice to Molech, the Ammonite deity and given its proximity to

18:22; it is entirely feasible 18:22, rather than condemning homosexuality, could be another law

forbidding worship to any other god in order to further establish the identity of the monotheistic

Israelites. (Homosexual sex and orgies were part of deity worship during that time).

For those within the faiths who believe persecuting gays is wrong, more teaching must be

done. Just as the Israelite slaves needed Moses, a prince and an ‘outsider’ who experienced

freedom, to lead them into liberation, we gay and lesbian people cannot lead the congregations

away from such virulent homophobia ourselves, for perhaps we cannot imagine true religious

acceptance. We have been denied welcome for too many centuries. The toll of murders and

beating, hate speech and teasing, inquisitions and rejections has torn our imaginations and

broken our spirits. Whether we defy religious bigotry—as did my brother—or agonize over it—

as did I, we do not know true acceptance from the majority of the religious communities; e.g., in

a bitter irony last year, Jews and Muslims joined, bound together at last by their hatred of gays

and lesbians, and protested against a gay and lesbian rights parade in Jerusalem.

I needed and, clearly, my brother needed leaders of faith who believe this irrational

hatred is not what is significant or even accurate in the Torah/Old Testament to do more than

utter “homophobia is wrong.” I needed to know and understand the Bible wholly and in context,

and if that teaching means a more complex reading of these sacred texts and an inclusion of

sociological and archaeological evidence, then that is surely what God intended.

By not learning the truth of these texts–they were written by people, they are products of

their times, the prohibitions were a reaction against, in part, other cultures which threatened to

engulf and absorb the Israelites–my minister and others did and do not just deny acceptance,

respect, and equality to gays and lesbians like me and my brother. I was denied the full and true

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richness of the Bible, and the ability to truly learn and understand the roots of Western culture, of

Judaism, of Christianity and Islam. For example, not teaching that God started out as an

imperfect, not omnipotent, God who makes mistakes (consider Job) and needs forgiveness just as

we humans do makes it a lot harder for any of us to forgive ourselves or others. For if God is

imperfect too–and certainly the Old Testament God is gripped by vengeance, rage, and pettiness

at times–then that means we too–all of us–get to be imperfect. We get to make mistakes without

the harshness of blame, castigation, self hatred.

Understanding the Bible and the context of the Bible can help bind us together in our

human condition. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of our focus on Biblical text singles out one

particular type of ‘sinner’ over another is that this focus represents victory for the spiritual illness

of separation over our human longing for unity with each other and with Divine. For the soul,

filled with acceptance and peace, longs for binding, for oneness, and the Bible, if we read it

correctly, is one text of several that can show us that path. That’s why people should not focus

on Leviticus 18:22—not because it is distorting the text, not because it is homophobic and

painful to gays and lesbians and their loved ones, but because doing so separates us from one

another when God is calling us to be one.

I wish I could have expressed all this to my brother. I wish I could have shared this

knowledge of history and Biblical contexts, hard won as it was, but more significantly, I wish I

could have comforted him, not only to ease his terror that day, but to ease the terror that beat

within his breast each day that brought him closer to his death. For he did die, you see, and he

died without knowing his terror was misplaced and unnecessary—and what a terrible waste that

is.