Defiant joy - A queer reflection for Advent by Fr. Shannon Kearns
Shannon TL Kearns is a transgender man who believes in the transformative power of story. As an ordained priest, a playwright, a theologian, and a writer, all of his work revolves around making meaning through story. He is the co-founder of QueerTheology.com, where this reflection was first published. Re-published here with permission.
THE THEME of the third week of Advent, the beginning of the Church’s year when we prepare to celebrate the coming of Jesus at Christmas, is JOY. This extract from a blog post on QueerTheology.com challenges us to claim our joy as beloved queer children of God.
There is a defiant joy in queer/trans lives and stories and communities. We hold to it and claim it and revel in it. Even when times are hard. Even when the world is dangerous. This defiant joy is our strength and power. It’s our hope. It’s our resilience. And it’s beautiful.
So often the LGBT Christian movement (let’s face it, really, the gay Christian movement) is miserable and mopey. It’s that way because instead of claiming their queerness they have framed their identities in reaction to the conservative church. All of their theology and Bible work takes the conservative way of reading the Bible as they only way. It takes the conservative church’s rules as they only acceptable rules. And it sets itself up to be miserable because it expects that only a sober and serious and mopey gay will get any respect.
Which is why the work that we do at QueerTheology.com is so powerful; it starts from a completely different place. It says that there are other ways to read Scripture. That we don’t have to play by the conservative churches’ rules or argue via their talking points. We are not fighting to be let in or for scraps from their table.
Instead we are claiming our space and place and saying God is among us, out here, on the margins. God is in our defiant joy and resilience. God is in our queer readings of Scripture. God is in our rupturing of binaries. God is in our anger and our grief but God is also in our dancing and our singing. We don’t have to be mopey and sad. We can have pride and walk with our heads held high. We can revel in our identities and in our bodies. We can claim it all as the gifts from God that it is.
And because of that, everywhere we go, people will see our defiant joy and want to be a part of it. People will see relationships built on health and communication instead of fear and shame. People will see us talking about sex and our bodies and marveling at the good thing that God has made instead of us loathing and hating both our bodies and our sexuality (like so many of the gay Christian movements teach us to do).