a-queer-seminarian - Tumblr blog

[a-queer-seminarian]

This war has to stop. Israel is stopping aid from getting into Gaza and people are starving.

[a-queer-seminarian]

typo correction in id ^ *identify the deeper need

[a-queer-seminarian]

Bit telling that for years and years evangelical religious extremists have been allowed on university campuses with their bullhorns and horrific imagery where they harass students into physical altercations and when students complain to the university’s administration they just shrug their shoulders citing freedom of speech but when those same tuition-paying students start protesting against war and genocide they call SWAT

[a-queer-seminarian]

students at Emory university in Atlanta set up a solidarity encampment that lasted all of three hours before the Atlanta Police department and Georgia State patrol came and forced them off the quad. They threw tear gas into the crowd, shot students with rubber bullets, and tased students. multiple students and faculty have been arrested including freshmen and tenured professors. friends of mine were tear gassed and had their belongings taken by the police, other friends have been arrested for "disorderly conduct" and are currently at the DeKalb county jail, where they'll likely be held overnight. the selections of which students have been arrested and which haven't are transparently racist and targeting black students. students from Morehouse and other Atlanta colleges were arrested as well. I'll update this post with more information as soon as bail is posted but they're still processing the people who have been arrested. if you can call the school or donate to the bail fund please do, and you can follow stopcopcity and emorystopcopcity on Instagram for more information. this isn't the first time Emory has called the cops on student protesters - just last year they called in the apd to shut down another solidarity encampment for stop cop city. stop cop city has lost traction outside of Atlanta but the fight to stop cop city and the fight to free Palestine cannot be separated from one another.

[a-queer-seminarian]

im noticing that for a lot of americans “free palestine” has been an ideological motto and symbol rather than them actually believing in their heart that freedom is attainable and necessary

[a-queer-seminarian]

FUCK YEAH COLUMBIA UNI STUDENTS!!!!!!

[a-queer-seminarian]

"The abolitionist's task is clear—to prevent the system from masking its true nature. The system dresses itself up: we undress the system. We strip it down to the reality: the cage and the key. We demystify. We ask the simple but central political question: 'Who decides?' We raise the moral issue: 'By what right?' We challenge the old configurations of power. We begin to change the old, begin to create the new."

Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists, Prison Research Education Action Project, 1976

[a-queer-seminarian]

Lavender for queers, poppies for Palestine — solidarity is a garden, our roots are intertwined, and none of us are free till all of us are free 🌱

A better pic now that it’s fully finished! See more angles below the readmore + the WIP i’m just starting now that incorporates more communities into the design

It took the cricut nearly ten full minutes to “print” this larger design; I have a feeling it’ll take like 50 hours to complete sewing it 😅

[a-queer-seminarian]

Hold the fuck on no way WW3 jokes are trending on Twitter when this is an extremely serious situation that’s threatening to destabilize an entire region. No way everyone’s gleefully looking at this as if it’s the grand show finale they’ve been waiting all along. There is no fucking way

[a-queer-seminarian]

*Shows up to your fundamentalist church looking Like This with a backpack covered in rainbow pins* hiya :-) where’s the queer group meeting in here? :-)

[a-queer-seminarian]

Oh god oh fuck i accidentally showed up at a very conservative church looking Very Queer, asking the front office where my gay little group is having our meeting 🤣

[a-queer-seminarian]

lowered my mask momentarily to take a sip from my water bottle with its “God loves Their transgender children” sticker on it and almost did a spit take when I noticed the person next to me on this plane is watching Fox News

[a-queer-seminarian]

cw alcohol

.

I accidentally broke sobriety in the funniest way possible — my wife & I were staying over at Ye Olde Church Lesbians’ house this weekend (note: every affirming congregation has at least 1 older lesbian, or more often a sapphic couple, who holds the whole church together; it’s the way of things)

& they headed to church early, so we helped ourselves to breakfast. I saw they had maraschino cherries in the fridge & got excited because I JUST read a great poem about maraschino cherries, so I opened the jar and popped two in my mouth.

…..they were moonshine-steeped maraschino cherries 😂

btw anyone interested in the cherry poem should check out Padraig Ó Tauma’s podcast; he read it there back in February! 🍒

[a-queer-seminarian]

i want to make a sewing piece with flowers from different liberation movements — e.g. lavender for queers, poppy for Palestine...

anyone have information on flowers linked to other movements / cultures? For instance, Black liberation or Latin American / Indigenous liberation?

[a-queer-seminarian]

cw religious transphobia, Catholic trauma, plus a weird dream involving violence and bombs lol

had another of my dreams about my childhood church last night — probably prompted by the latest shitty Vatican publication condemning "gender theory" :/

...the document doesn't have much new in it, just more of the Roman Catholic Church's usual bullshit with slightly different language. but God i'd take fundamentalism's look-even-slightly-closer-and-it-falls-apart cognitive dissonance any day to the very carefully ordered logic of Catholic bigotry. i always feel physically ill reading through these Vatican documents because the language is so "loving" and "reasonable" — at least for me as someone who was raised into the Catholic logic system; some deep core of me resonates to this specific pitch and aches.

It's like they know exactly what language to use to shatter me — this time it's language about the Infinite Dignity of human beings, which is something i deeply believe in! It's heart-language for me. Tell me queer folk are "intrinsically disordered" or "demonic" and i can mostly scoff it off as outdated unscientific bullshit. But tell me queerness is on par with fucking WAR and POVERTY and XENOPHOBIA in attacking human dignity and that hurts.

...but they also, of course :/, bring in abortion — but also, in a surprising twist, surrogacy??? — as attacking human dignity, and that thankfully snaps me out of my spiral a little bit. Like seriously?? you think all forms of surrogacy violate the *checks notes* child's "right to have a fully human (and not artificially induced) origin..." and the recognition of "every dimension of the dignity of the conjugal union and of human procreation."

It reminds me that the Catholic condemnation of queer sex is like, one level in a house of cards where you take out one piece and it all collapses: the logic they follow to condemn queer sex and extramarital sex requires that they also condemn contraceptives, and priests getting married, and yes, surrogacy and IVF too. To become lax about any one would send the whole logic tower tumbling --

Okay now i'm just ranting incoherently lol. the dream:

my dream was actually kind of interesting? it's the first one where instead of me being scared about my own safety when suddenly finding myself back in my childhood church, i was scared for everyone else —

i was running home trying to escape some kind of violent attack unfolding in a city center (idk the details don't worry about it lol), and realized i had to cut through saint raphael for the fastest route home. so i entered, only to realize the sanctuary was packed full with people in the middle of Mass. (it's the old sanctuary, the one i grew up with, rather than the new bigger one built back in like 2014)

so i'm trying to slink behind the pews so they won't notice me -- and then i suddenly realize someone is up in the choir loft with a bomb. everyone is clueless except for me. i don't want to alert the person with the bomb that i've seen them in case it prompts them to attack, so i start speaking urgently to people in the pews nearest me. some listen, some tell me to shut up, Mass is more important than whatever danger i think is there. very few get up to hurry out the nearest exit. but i keep trying, going pew to pew to warn people, getting closer to the front.

and there is father tim, about to begin eucharistic liturgy at the altar. i'm about to race up to him, to warn him, to beg him to tell everyone to flee, when the person in the choir loft finally speaks. i don't remember what he says, but he hurls the bomb. finally everyone is running for the exits, but it's too late to get everyone out. they'd ignored the violence in their midst far too long.

i don't remember what happens after that except that i get out, get across the street, and turn back to look upon the crumbled mess of my childhood church, one side entirely exploded outward, people soot-streaked and bleeding hobbling from a smoking doorway, shouting.

idk, it just feels symbolic somehow. Catholics who are either very happy with the queerphobic poison the Roman Catholic Church espouses, or who at least shrug and ignore it so as not to rock the boat and cause discomfort / risk their own standing in the church, seem to think they won't be harmed by that poison too. Very "i didn't think the tigers would eat my face" meme-esque. They are happy to let it seep into every crack and crevice in their churches, to swallow it with their Communion wine, to spread it among their children.

But it is poisoning them, all the same. We are just the canaries in the coal mine, dropping first. The queerphobia, the misogyny, the scandals buried under the rug — these warp their ability to experience the Divine, to recognize God's activity in their midst.

The bomb is already activated. Some of them applaud it, almost worship it. Others ignore its quiet, patient tick. And they push out all the queers, all the survivors of church abuse, all the people with pregnancies that will literally kill them, who are desperately trying to help them shut off the damn bomb before it's too late.

[a-queer-seminarian]

fingers in his lacunae sunday

[a-queer-seminarian]

Today is Easter Sunday. Today is Trans Day of Visibility. Today is day 176 of genocide.

This year the lectionary gives us Mark's account of the Resurrection, with its fearful cliffhanger ending — an empty tomb, but Jesus's body missing. And isn't that unresolved note fitting?

In the face of so much suffering across the world, it feels right to be compelled to sit — even on this most jubilant of days — with the poor and disenfranchised in their continued suffering.

Mark's account:

Just days before, the women closest to Jesus witnessed him slowly suffocate to death on a Roman cross. Now, now trudge to his tomb to anoint his corpse — and find the stone rolled away, his body gone. A strange figure inside tells them that Jesus is has risen, and will reunite with them in Galilee.

They respond not with joy, but trembling ekstasis — a sense of being beside yourself, taken out of your own mind with shock. They flee.

The women keep what they've seen and heard to themselves — because their beloved friend outliving execution is just too good to be true. When does fortune ever favor those who languish under Empire's shadow?

Love wins, yet hate still holds us captive.

I'm grateful that Mark's resurrection story is the one many of us are hearing in church this year. His version emphasizes the "already but not yet" experience of God's liberation of which theologians write: Christians believe that in Christ's incarnation — his life, death, and resurrection — all of humanity, all of Creation is already redeemed... and yet, we still experience suffering. The Kin(g)dom is already incoming, but not yet fully manifested.

Like Mark's Gospel with its Easter joy overshadowed by ongoing fear, Trans Day of Visibility is fraught with the tension of, on the one hand, needing to be seen, to be known, to move society from awareness into acceptance into celebration; and, on the other hand, grappling with the increased violence and bigotry that a larger spotlight brings.

The trans community intimately understands the intermingling of life and death, joy and pain.

When we manage to roll back the stones on our tombs of silence and shame, self-loathing and social death, and stride boldly into new, transforming and transformative life — into trans joy! — death still stalks us.

We are blessedly, audaciously free — and we are in constant danger. There are many who would shove us back into our tombs.

And of course, the trans community is by no means alone in experiencing the not-yet-ness of God's Kin(g)dom.

Empire's violence continues to overshadow God's liberation.

The women who came to tend to their beloved dead initially experienced the loss of his body as one more indignity heaped upon them by Empire. Was his torture, their terror, not enough, that even their grief must be trampled upon, his corpse stolen away from them?

The people of Gaza are undergoing such horrors now. Indignity is heaped on indignity as they are bombed, assaulted, terrorized, starved, mocked. They are not given a moment's rest to tend to their dead. They are not permitted to celebrate Easter's joy as they deserve. They are forced to break their Ramadan fasts with little more than grass.

Those of us who reside in the imperial core — as I do as a white Christian in the United States — must not look away from the violence our leaders are funding, enabling, justifying.

We must not celebrate God's all-encompassing redemption without also bearing witness to the ways that liberation is not yet experienced by so many across the world.

This Easter, I pray for a free Palestine. I pray for an end to Western Empire, the severing of all its toxic tendrils holding the whole earth in a death grip.

I pray that faith communities will commit and recommit themselves to helping roll the stones of hate and fear away — and to eroding those stones into nothing, so they cannot be used to crush us once we've stepped into new life.

I pray for joy so vibrant it washes fear away, disintegrates all hatred into awe.

In the meantime, I pray for the energy and courage to bear witness to suffering; for the wisdom for each of us to discern our part in easing pain; for God's Spirit to reveal Xirself to and among the world's despised, over and over — till God's Kin(g)dom comes in full at last.

"The Empty Tomb" by artist He Qi.