Freedom

Have you ever been so excited that you couldn’t get to sleep?  It’s Christmas Eve and you can’t stop bouncing up and down on your bed, knowing that soon and very soon you’ll get to gather round the tree and rip some paper to shreds.  Your best friend or favorite relative is on their way and you can’t help but watch the sky, knowing that their plane is up there somewhere.  You know you can’t make time go faster, but it’s almost your birthday and you have to savor those last hours of being this young before you get to celebrate the awesomeness that is you.  Sleep is important and you know you’ll barely be able to function on your big day, but that doesn’t matter; you’re wired and ready to go.  I had one of those nights last night.  Having fallen asleep some time around 2 PM (the nap time narcolepsy strikes again!), I was wide awake and anxious about, well, today.  You see, today could be the day that my life, as well as the lives of many others, changes.  And yes, of course, it is totally gay.

As I’ve mentioned several times, I want to be a pastor.  Yes, I know what my orientation is.  Yes, I do know what people say the Bible says, thank you.  I’m queer, I’m religious, get used to it.  Normally at this point in a blog post, I would go on to talk about how complicated, frustrating, or worrisome that is.  The general summary is that I like boys, I like girls, and I like the truth, so I’m not exactly keen on having to potentially lie in order to become an ordained minister.  I think that if you believe in a higher power so much that you can speak its truth (regardless of what that higher power is), you should also be able to speak the truth about yourself.  That brings up all sorts of sucky emotions because I want to be open and honest about who I am, but I also want a job and, in my denomination (Presbyterian if you were wondering), someone who is not single and chaste or married and faithful cannot be ordained.  Seeing as the church does not recognize gay marriage as a thing (comment for some stories on that), this means you have to either be married or abstinent forever.  As a big ol’ queermo, you can see my problem.  This is a big issue that affects many rainbow Presbys.  Or, at least it will have been.  Today, everything is set to change.

There’s been a vote going on to change the language of ordination to something that takes out that single and chaste or married and faithful bit.  Like, actually remove those words and replace them with other words that talk more about, y’know, Jesus.  If this change passes, then the Presbyterian Church (USA) will be like the Lutheran Church in no longer making homosexuality a reason to turn people away from ministry.  It’s been a very long fight, and the change needs 87 votes in order to pass.  At the moment, it has 86.

Today is the day they expect vote 87 to come in.

What does this mean?  Well, simply put, GLBT people will be able to serve as ministers in the PC (USA), assuming of course that they fit all the other criteria.  It means a lot more than that, though.  Big picture wise, it means that yet another church will allow those who feel called by God to honestly respond to that calling, regardless of who they love.  It means that we’ve taken one more small step to a world in which the stereotype of the gay bashing Christian will become a thing of the past, something to bury because it no longer exists.  It means that a denomination is actually going to give some of us a chance to show that it gets better.  Most importantly, it means that, at some point, if you walk into a church and the pastor is going on about equality and social justice and GLBT issues, that pastor might indeed be GLBT themself.  And they’ll be allowed to be honest about it.

Personally, this means I get to relax.  As a bisexual lady, I could have gone either way with the old rules.  I could marry a guy and live happily ever after in heteronormativity land (which, as you can tell by pretty much anything I’ve ever said on this blog, is not I place I tend to reside, even when men are involved).  I could marry a girl and either kiss my calling goodbye or doom myself to a life of lies (which, as you can tell by pretty much anything I’ve ever said on this blog, is not something I want to do).  Of course, I’m still fairly young with no prospects for marriage and I resent having to worry about my future partner when I can’t even tell you what I’m having for lunch today.  When that last vote comes in, that worry is gone. I don’t have to think about the dress/tux situation, I don’t have to figure out how to explain my life to this person I haven’t identified yet, I don’t have to think about this.  For the first time since I realized I wanted to go into ministry, I don’t have to worry about this.  I get to feel like everybody else.

Knowing all of this kept me up last night.  Sure, a change in the rules doesn’t mean things will suddenly be smooth sailing, nor does it mean that I still won’t have to fight.  Things aren’t going to become perfect overnight (see what I did there?), after all.  There’s still even a chance that today will go by and we won’t get that last vote.  It will come.  There are votes that are not yet in.  We are so close.  Life as we know it, as I know, could change today.  My entire future could be altered for the better.  The kids I work with could grow up in a church where they could hear God’s calling and answer it, regardless of who they love.  The country could see that there’s one more denomination that’s willing to say that queer is okay.  For this, I get excited.  For this, I lose sleep.  For this, I am thankful.