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My God is definitely not a bully.
My God is not a bully.
My God is not a bully.
I'm Colleen. It's been kindof a life-long journey for me reconciling my faith to my
sexuality because I identify as a lesbian. I was almost 16 years old, walking home from
school one day, when I suddenly became aware in my own mind that I had these feelings for
women, for my girlfriends, that I didn't have so intensely with boys, guys that I dated
and I immediately knew, just from my own subculture that that was not okay and I needed to bury
it. And that I tried to do. And it was actually not until I was in college, toward the end
of my college year I first heard about a person who was raising her family and living in a
loving relationship with another woman. And I was shocked and it took me some time to
process that.
And then I was in seminary when I met the first person that I was a friend with who
was other than heterosexual. And so these things were swimming around inside of me.
I was hearing words about acceptance of people who, regardless of their gender or ***
identity at the seminary, and yet I was very frightened living in a rural area about how
I could be who I was, particularly because I was clergy.
And so I buried and stayed away from that part of myself and tried to deny it because
I was coming under another whole level of secrecy by becoming a clergy person in the
denomination I'm in.
Um, it was really not until about the year 2000, and we're talking about having started
in 1968 as a 15-year-old, and coming to the year 2000 that I began to decide that I needed
to be my authentic self because I was really being, just squelched. I was just losing my
sense of self under all these other identities and I knew by that time that there were people
who were allies in my denomination, people at annual conferences who spoke out about
inclusion of all peoples in all levels of the church. And I found myself, in my own
work, preaching to myself and to my congregation more and more all the time just about Jesus
and what Jesus did in the way of justice how he was always including and reaching out to
the people at the margins and bringing them into the center of the room and challenging
the way things were happening. And I know I was trying to convince myself that who I
was was okay.
So I took a leave from the church to begin to explore a little bit of what it would be
like for me to be in a relationship that felt really connected in the way that I hadn't
experienced before. And then in that relationship, I tried to figure out I could connect my sense
of call to God with my sense of myself as a lesbian. And I tried to do two different
worlds at the same time, driving 40 miles to my place of work and coming home to live
my authentic self with my partner.
And it was at the time that she was killed in a car wreck that I began to realize that
I couldn't live the secret thing anymore, it just wasn't working for me. And when I
really decided to come before my credentialing board and tell them who I was, and to be okay
with myself as a person of faith, and to not even allow that credential to have more weight
than my own authentic self, that I really came into my own.
I, uh, that's just my story. It took a whole lifetime and in some sense, it's still carrying
on. The more people that I am able to come out to about who I am, the more freedom I
have to be who I am in the world, to have a voice for justice for other people, as well
as myself, and to be able to claim that I am proud to be Christian and a lesbian.