Scott Isebrand: Scott Isebrand lives and works in New York City. A graduate of Yale Divinity School, he joined the Tribe in 1995. This review was originally published in White Crane Journal (#45). It is reprinted with permission from www.whitecranejournal.com online.
“Being gay is not an accident . . . it is a calling.” I read these words and quietly gasped with joy. I was on the train to New York City passing the time by reading “God's Gay Tribe.” The book is only 60 pages. I could easily finish it before getting to Grand Central Station.
Yet the book's careful prose, often poetic in its simplicity, inspired careful reading. And why not? After all, little masterpieces deserve to be contemplated while read, like a devotional, like a gospel.
Tribe begins: “This is the lesson on crossing the sands. Remember it. . . I am a gay woman who has made that perilous and lonely journey through the sands more times than once. I have a spiritual obligation now to tell the story. [Gay men and women], more than most people, have a desperate need to pass this kind of wisdom on; too much of it has been deliberately buried, too much lost in the silence of our lives.”
Exclamations of recognition escaped my mouth as I read, surely convincing the passenger in front of me that I was having some sort of religious experience. In a way, I was.
The good news in Tribe is that to be gay is to be more than different, to be gay is to be different for a reason. To be gay is to be so by heavenly design; it is to be set apart, Ritley asserts, by God.
Many gay men and women will cherish her message as liberating and inspiring. Ritley notes in an early section, “Because coming out involves the discovery… of one's identity in a sexual context, all things connected with it are apt to be wrongly classified as unspiritual in the gay person's mind.” She continues provocatively: a gay person's “moment of insight” into his or her sexuality, and very personhood, may take place “in a gay bar while coming out.”
So what? Such an event is still fully spiritual in character, despite its setting. . . [We must recast] common gay experience as spiritually significant.
The gay bar as revival tent? As temple? As church? Bold, and, I was willing to believe, true! Ritley had me hooked. I would be late for my New York appointment. I sat in the terminal and finished the book.
“I really can't read [Tribe] without . . . well, tearing up. It really is very moving and inspiring, said Wayne Eley. Eley is President of Beloved Disciple Press, a small publisher in New Haven, Connecticut, which is publishing Ritley's essay as the book, God's Gay Tribe: Laying the Foundations of Communal Memory. “It is not an apology; it doesn't quibble with arcane Biblical texts. It does treat coming out as a transfiguring experience and develops it in a manner suggestive of being born again.”
Unlike recent autobiographical pieces such as Mel White's “”Stranger at the Gate or many of the essays in the remarkable “Wrestling With the Angel,” Ritley's writing evokes the tenor of devotional literature without the heaviness of a prayer book. Her words carry an authority springing from both the intense variety of her spiritual adventure and the depth of her pastoral insight.
Ritley is humble when speaking about herself. She understates, “I've had a spiritually adventurous life.” She was raised in an ethnic community in
Cleveland and spent more than a decade as a teacher, writer and spiritual director in a liberal Islamic religious tradition. Later she worshipped with the Quakers and eventually found her way to the Episcopal priesthood. She currently serves as a priest at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, simultaneously pursuing further theological education at nearby Graduate Theological Union.
In addition to Tribe, Ritley has written an autobiographical chapter in “Amazing Grace: Stories of Lesbian and Gay Faith” (eds. Malcolm Boyd and Nancy Wilson).
While Tribe stresses coming out as spiritually significant conversion, it also takes up the concern for community and communal memory, as the subtitle states. Ritley picks up on a theme promoted by Yale Professor John Boswell, who died of AIDS in late 1994. The gay community does not have a communal memory of a past; it must begin constructing one immediately.
Ritley writes, “we may be born into the tribe, but we are not raised in it . . . We must tell the stories, weave the legends, paint the icons of another
family of saints whose lives will give us light . . . This is the . . . essential ministry of gay-to-gay, the only way in which, some day, we will be able to make God's gay children free.”
Tribe is also a book with tears. Tears of anguish, tears of recognition, tears of relief, and tears of joy. The book begins with a quote from Judy Grahn's “Another Mother Tongue”:
The day I saw a poster declaring the existence of an organization of Gay American Indians, I put my face into my hands and sobbed with relief.
“Gay is a universal quality, like predicting the weather.” But, Tribe ends with tears as well. The last section of the book harkens back to Ritley's days in Islam as she weaves in allegorical language the story of Hashad the Fool.
Hashad joins a Caravan which is crossing the sands. He awakens one night to discover a fire in the inn where the Caravan is staying. He rushes in and out of the fire and finds the Master of the Caravan, who weeps with pain for the members of his caravan who are unaccounted for. But Hashad knows where they are, and leads the Master to them, passing again through the fire.
Ritley writes, “For it is this, you see, that Hashad the Fool was born for: to place his hand in the hand of God, and to pass and repass and repass through the fire, until the fire has lost its power to burn, and until he has learned to dance in the fire to dry the tears of God. . . We [gay men and women] are all this Hashad . . . who begins the journey of his life without the slightest recognition of where he is bound.”
Ritley declares that we did not choose the fire, but it is the only way through to our freedom and the freedom of others still trapped inside. She concludes, “We are God's fools, God's gay people, called to bear God company on this impossible journey . . . God help us all.”
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