Finding a Place of Springs

One line from the Psalm in today’s lections (Psalm 84:5) actively leapt off the page and grabbed me as I read it: “Those who go through the desolate valley will find it a place of springs.” I had thought of this as God’s presence replacing/overwriting desolate valleys with springs of water, but things I’ve been reading lately make me wonder whether it, instead, means that the springs actually require the desolate valleys as raw material from which they may eventually well up in us.

I guess this needs some explaining. I’ve been reading the just released book Discovering the Spirit in the City (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010), for which my dear friend Raficq Abdulla has contributed a chapter. In addition to Raficq’s delightful essay [that goes without saying!], I found the contributions of Pádraig Ó Tuama and Mark Oakley to be profoundly moving. These two write with such compassion and grace, and seem particularly able to illuminate both the best and the worst of the human experience as we wrestle with the God we perceive as involved in and, perhaps, central to our being. I thought how wonderful and how valuable for the rest of us that there are such people who can enter so deeply into the experience of being human, and help us to see it in it’s fullness; from tragic to glorious, mundane to transcendent, and all things in between.

At the same time, I found myself reacting in frustration because they are both gay, and much of the compassion and vulnerability I sensed in them seemed to be bound together with the bitter pain of rejection and alienation they had both experienced in trying to serve God as a gay man in the Christian church. I’m not mad at them for being gay; I’m mad at the rest of us for not being more like them – so that not every damn time I discover someone who seems to fully embody the spirit of love that I believe to be God, they turn out, invariably, to be gay! I worry that then when I write, as in this blog, “Oh, these writers are great, you must read them!” people will just dismiss the recommendation with the thought that “They’re probably nothing special; those queers just stick together.”*

So, I had these frustrations in mind when I read the lections, and for the first time I thought, “Whoa! Maybe you can’t get to the point of being a ‘place of springs’ unless you actually go through the 'desolate valleys.'” Perhaps the thought is not so much replacing the desolation but transforming its essence into something beautiful and life giving.

Lately, in response to a recent spate of disturbing suicides, there has been a media campaign with the message “It gets better” (sponsored by the It Gets Better Project) and aimed at vulnerable gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender teens. The messages have been mostly oriented towards convincing desperate teens that their lives will be happier and much easier to navigate in the future – if they will only consent to stay alive long enough to find that out. Additionally, it may very well be these teens, who go through so much desolation in their bullied, taunted, dehumanizing valleys of despair, that will transform themselves into pools of living water for all of us in the future; our healers, priests, counselors, prophets and spiritual teachers – if they remain alive long enough to find their own unique "place of springs." For our own sakes as well as theirs, lets hope (and work towards making sure that) they do.

In the meantime, where are the desolate places in my own life that perhaps I can begin to transform into my own “place of springs”?

--AnnBarbie

*Whatever term one might ultimately create to define an appropriate demographic for me, because I am married to another woman people perceive me as lesbian. However, in this case I can’t claim the same early trauma that g/l/b/t youth generally experience, so I don’t feel that I writing about myself here.