On my experience as an LGBTQ ally at SAU

“Love keeps no record of wrong.” Since my departure from Southern Adventist University in 2016, I have pondered the words of Paul to the Corinthians as I worked through my feelings of sadness, hurt, and confusion, knowing that the kind of love Jesus offers us is liberating, and that liberation comes through reconciliation.

However, I have also pondered the Golden Rule. To treat others as I would want to be treated. I have resolved to tell my story, even though it records wrongs, as I would not wish for others to have had the same experiences I had as an employee of SAU.

I should first establish that I voluntarily left Southern after five years of full-time employment as a professor. I was not “invited to resign” nor did I depart on the grounds explained by other euphemisms. I left to take a job at another school because I was tired of fighting the same battles at Southern, tired of constantly feeling frustrated and that my job would be placed in jeopardy because of the marginalized students for whom I cared and advocated.

I would also like to establish that I did not grow up in the Adventist church. I was raised Catholic, attended primarily Catholic Schools and converted to Seventh-day Adventism when I was 23 years-old after attending an Adventist Church and feeling convicted at GYC in 2003 that a biblical faith was what I wanted to pursue for the rest of my life. I received my master’s degree from Harvard University and taught at a community college prior to joining the faculty of Southern in 2011.

For five years, I worked hard and taught students who were bright and generally hardworking and mission-minded. I adored so many of my colleagues and was inspired by their interesting research and their total dedication to student success. I was promoted to associate professor after submitting my portfolio for review. However, because I did not have a terminal degree, I would need to pursue one in order to be able to be eligible for promotion or apply for sabbatical. As fewer and fewer of my colleagues were being released of coursework to pursue terminal degrees, I began to consider different prospects for myself and my family. 

More importantly, though, I was finding the culture at SAU toward LGBTQ students deeply troubling on campus. I would estimate having at least one student per semester in one of my classes who self-identified as LGBTQ. These students were active in Campus Ministries and community service, were excellent students earning high marks.

And they often sat in my office weeping.

They were consistently harassed in the dorms, they said. They were maligned on social media. They did not feel safe engaging in campus-wide or in class dialogues or even in seeking counseling on campus for fear of being reported to their deans or their parents (were their concerns unfounded? I would like to believe so).

I could list a great many upsetting incidents to which I was privy as a faculty member on Southern’s campus, but these would not be productive and may only make me seem embittered. I did find the leadership of Former President of SAU Gordon Bietz to have a loving posture toward LGBTQ students. He welcomed them into his office and did not discourage them from meeting as group as he understood the need to be in solidarity with one another, although he made it clear to the LGBTQ group SHIELD that they would not be eligible for funding through the Student Association budget. (My time with current president David Smith did not overlap more than a couple of months.) I did not, however, find the leadership of some others on SAU’s Administration to be as loving toward LGBTQ students. I and another of my colleagues were warned not to invite the SHIELD students to gather for worship in our homes because of the message that might signal to the community.

Wrap your mind around that message for a moment. Replace LGBTQ with "struggling with disordered eating" or "homesick" or “sexually promiscuous” or “substance abusing” students and you will see the hypocrisy of the messaging around those to whom Southern’s faculty were encouraged to minister. It’s inconvenient when the tendencies, behaviors, or even the sexuality of people in a community do not align with one’s branding. I’m sure Jesus felt this profoundly true to his leading of the Twelve Apostles. But he loved and led and invested in and died for them anyway. 

One incident that highlights this hypocrisy most prominently was when I was departing Southern. As I was preparing to depart from my position (I had already cleaned out my office), a current student reached out to me and told me a story of an LGBTQ student who had just arrived on campus as a new student during the Smart Start summer session. This student had been so harassed by students he’d never met in the dining hall, blocked from moving through the cafeteria line and called “fag” tauntingly to his face, he was in a state of shock. He did not know a soul on campus and was already being harassed. I decided to make the faculty body aware of the terms of this incident, because, from my view, there didn’t seem to be any reason to hold it under my hat. If it was true, the community had a responsibility to respond. It if were falsely reported, the community needed to take stock of what the response should be if it ever did occur.

In sharing the alleged incident with the faculty via an online listserv, the response was overwhelmingly kind. Prayers and offers of support swelled via e-mail for the student and the faculty body was unilaterally sad to learn that a student had been mistreated. Then an elder male colleague (whom, I should disclose, I had never had a poor interaction with and who appeared to never know my name when I introduced myself to him, even after giving his daughter rides and working in the same building for five years) shot back. He said that reporting an allegation of this nature was patently wrong and that I was, “Unfit for higher education.” This was not the parting gift I had hoped for in leaving Southern. Nor was his complete lack of apology for excoriating me among my colleagues as “unfit.” Yet, I am grateful for the experience as it allowed me to experience what our LGBTQ students experience on Adventist campuses every day: being made to feel “unfit” by some administrators, faculty members, and peers who lack the compassion and wherewithal to love them well. In five years, I never heard a single LGBTQ student ask for any sexual promiscuity to be condoned. I never heard them asking for a change of biblical language or policy. I only ever heard them want to be loved: by their teachers, peers, and even by their parents. Sometimes they just wanted to meet as a body of students to discuss their lives on campus. Sometimes they were only asking for a forum.

There is signage in the Hulsey Wellness Center on Southern’s campus that greets all who enter. It says, “Fit for Eternity.” It has often struck me as clever, though egregiously inaccurate. We are all -- regardless of sexual orientation, diet, language or creed -- abysmally unfit for Eternity. It is only through the matchless love of Christ that we can be made whole, that we can be made well, that we can be deemed fit to share in the bounty of his riches. I cannot wait for the day when he would only speak the word to make us - you, me, and all my former students - fit to share in his glory.

I am wishing the current graduating class a happy graduation weekend and want to encourage them to continue to go forth as lightbearers, and to never be afraid to love others well. 

Six Years a Southerner

"Looks like Michelangelo is getting a bath," said the dad, bending over the grate where his offspring had wedged an action figure into a ground sewage stream. "Do y'all understand how this happened?" One of the funniest scenes during our time in the South played out within the first month of our arrival, some six years ago. Loverpants and I still laugh when we walk by this spot in front of the Tennessee Aquarium, a destination that is the heart of Chattanooga's renaissance as a Southern city. We think how the aquarium houses pods and plants and all manner of sea and river creatures. It also the little-known bathhouse of ninja turtles.

My own immersion into the South was almost as abrupt as Michelangelo's. We arrived to our rented ranch house on three acres and felt the distinct awe of our new rural-burbia life, waking up to the sounds of cows mooing when only days prior, we had known only tinkering shopping carts rattling down city blocks, the siren cry of ambulances so familiar we barely noticed. We were soon introduced as newcomers to my workplace. We were awkward and unwieldy. Baby Girl couldn't find her sleep groove for weeks. I couldn't find time to lesson plan. Loverpants couldn't find an office space to lease. Little Man couldn't find his walking feet.

But then we did. We found ourselves doing life in the South as people who worked and churched and bought Aretha Frankenstein pancake mix to make at home on Sunday mornings. The difference, I think, is that finding a rhythm is not the same as finding a fit, which is how I would classify my time in the South. Just because Michelangelo is placed in the gutter and he stays there doesn't mean he belongs there.

I have not found belonging in the South. This is not a criticism of the South, just a witness to my experience. Mercifully, though, I have found pockets of being known and that has been the great treasure of my life here.

Belonging in the South, specifically in a more junior city, specifically in a conservative religious community, requires a certain extroversion that eludes me. Small talk is currency in this environment where one mills in small concentric circles of interconnected folks. I am allergic to small talk so I am most likely to enter into conversation with, "I cannot freaking believe I am buying sex ed talk books for my kid already," rather than preferred pleasantries about the weather. There is also a pervasive lack of directness that is borne of the aforementioned interconnected network. If good fences make good neighbors, then a lack of fencing can lead to a superficial neighborliness. Being authentic, after all, is a liability. And being authentic in one social circle where any misdeeds in one patch might bleed into another can leave us defenseless. The need to "play nice" at the expense of addressing conflict or wrong behavior is something I've observed too often. My natural bent is to be as direct as possible, even if it is hard. So whenever I have found others willing to join me to climb the chutes and slide down the ladders of directness, I have desired to call those people my kin.

There are a whole host of other aspects that I have found so foreign about the South (The expression "might could." The frequent use of styrofoam in restaurants. The lack of sprinkler parks in spite of the heat much of the year). But if I dwell on these things then I fail to see the good and to celebrate the great things about the American Southeast (Publix Grocery Stores, hallelujah! The lushness of spring. Savannah/Tybee Island. Charleston. Birmingham. Nashville. Memphis. Crepe Myrtles. Sitting in the bleachers for Used Car Night at a minor league baseball game in the fall). There is so much to adore about this region that has been our home for six years, this city that has, at turns confused and enchanted us.

We will return to the Northeast from whence we came, with children six years older, with wisdom poured like a fine wine aged six years. And we will be glad for the friends we have made, the places we have served, the houses where we have worshiped.  We will count it all a blessing to not only have gotten wet but to have been fully immersed like Michelangelo in the sewer, with passersby asking if y'all knew how it happened.

On being a grumpy protester in the Easter pageant

My pastor has asked me to lead a scene in our Easter pageant and I am grumpy about it. It’s not that I don’t like Easter pageants or directing. I’m just ill-equipped to direct this one. Work is kicking my tail, my husband has been traveling, and my kitchen is a revolving door of kindergarten shoebox dioramas. I am exhaustion covered in glitter glue. The pastor has recruited dozens of people to take part in a silent motion stage performance of modern day resurrection scenes. The enthusiasm surrounding this Easter pageant is infectious and the opening scenes are always very powerful. But when I get an e-mail with our rehearsal schedule, I just want to drop out. I want to stay home and watch “The Great British Baking Show” on Netflix, even though I know how every season ends.

Alas, my kids are gunning hard to be in the pageant this year. Every other year I demurred thinking the day would be too long for them. My son has campaigned very hard for the last month to play the part of “Bearded Guy.” He settles for a Syrian refugee boy, but continues to ask when he is going to get to wear the beard every 4 minutes. My husband can only make part of the rehearsals due to his work schedule. This does not help my grumpiness. Nothing can help it. Not even our pastor who is is all of a twitter about this Easter pageant.

The pastor and his family are the saltiest salt of the earth and I will follow them to the ends of the earth. But this play rehearsal, y’all. It is feeling a little extra. When we arrive at rehearsal, the pastor sells the idea of each scene to us. He is especially excited about scenes reminiscent of the recently released “Hacksaw Ridge,” the trailer from which he pulled the music for the opening.

We divide into groups and try to figure out how to portray the action. We’ve been given a skeletal script, basic notions of what we’re trying to represent. I know a few of the other actors in my scene, but I’m not entirely sure what we are supposed to accomplish and how this is supposed to play out in the seconds we’re given. The basic plot is that we are a bunch of political protesters holding signs with pithy political messages. We square off in two formations, showing angry, violent opposition to the other formation of political protesters.

Some of the actors have a vision of how we can assemble and I defer to them. Others don’t know where to enter; others are concerned that they won’t be seen. My son keeps wandering out of his scene to tug my shirt and ask me when he’s going to get his beard. For three nights in a row, I am somewhere between Syria and Washington DC, surrounded by soldiers being lowered down Hacksaw Ridge on Okinawa. None of this makes sense--especially our political scene which ends when two angels appear. Enter: cherubs. Then, the protesters throw down our political signs, hoist a huge American flag, and hug one another. Two teenage girls even snap a selfie, political opponents no more! I glance at the other scenes and I can recognize the true beauty that rises from the ashes of refugee camps and tragic school bus crashes and wartime heroics. But our scene just feels hokey.

At the end of practice, I make sure the American flag we use as a prop isn’t left on the ground. I drape the flag over a church pew. As I arrive at rehearsal each successive night, the flag has been folded neatly and lovingly into a triangular formation. It becomes my obsession, keeping the flag lifted and not falling on the stage where it can be trampled.

As the final rehearsal finishes, I am proud of my little group of protesters. We have worked hard to get our scene right. As the angels emerge from out of the darkness, we’re all in position and the flag is where it needs to be. The “Hacksaw Ridge” trailer music queues like nightmare on loop. I don’t know how we are going to do this for 13 consecutive performances. I text our pastor and his wife. “When do we get to debrief about this?” The pastor replies that the best part of this is not the performance but the chance to build community. I feel bad for being one more grumpy church lady he has to deal with.

We are up at 6a the day of the pageant for makeup. My hubby and kids are sponged and dusted with cocoa powder and make for convincing refugees. My pack of protesters are outfitted in our best patriotic garb: tattoos, bandanas, red trucker hats that say “Make America Great Again.” In between scenes, I get to know the protesters who are students of nursing and psychology; single mothers and new drivers; socially liberal singers; former members of the police reserves who just like to carry guns.

I am barely awake for the first few performances but by 11a.m., the church is packed to standing room only. Cheers cry out for Desmond Doss as he climbs Hacksaw Ridge to save “just one more,” and it all comes crashing down on me and the tears come and they just keep coming. The flag that we raise and the ladder that the soldier climbs are not mutually exclusive as symbols go. In fact, they are the same. This is not mixing religion and politics--trust.

Christ came to save us all: the tattooed and the trucker hatted; the schoolbus driver and the new teen driver; the gun-toting soldier and the refugee. He would not let one fall to the ground without regarding it as precious. Not a sparrow falls without his notice. In the same vein, this flag that we revere, the one we cannot let fall to the ground, is one for which blood was shed so that all could enjoy freedom. What could be freer than love? Freedom and love are regularly compromised and trampled on the battlefield for our hearts, but the war has already been won by the One.

We throw down our signs as we throw down our crowns. And his name shall be Emmanuel, God with us. photos by Andy Nash.