Holiday Musings

[Something I wrote to a fellow gay-librarian who, like me, is basically unchurched.]

I was one of those odd ducks who was raised agnostic. My parents rebelled from their Southern small-town Methodist upbringing (they were born in 1932 and 1933, respectively) so my brothers and I never went to church except on a very few occasions when visiting relatives and the one summer they made us go to Sunday school (while they stayed home and read the newspaper...)

I converted (Presbyterian) after marrying Janet and belonging to very progressive, inclusive, social justice oriented churches in Ann Arbor and Atlanta was a very good thing. I stopped being a regular churchgoer after I came out, partly because back in those days it was more important to go out on Saturday evening and sleep in Sunday morning, partly because I never found a church that seemed quite right (MCC tends to be Much Too Charismatic for me, mainstream churches -- even those with big gay congregations -- still tend to assume that "you're just like us, marriage and monogamy, right, just 2 guys or 2 girls instead of 1 of each," i.e., they just don't get it...)

Any more I say I'm "Presbyfaerian," half Presbyterian, half Radical Faerie. I don't do dogma; I just know that the Universe, including us, is made out of love, and that love endures forever, and that my consciousness, in some form I can't imagine, will survive my body. (I'm also well aware that this thought system probably arises from my mammalian nature and that if I'd been hatched I'd probably have a very different point of view!)

And, yes, I like the lights.