You will be found

Author: chris_basson

I spent years as a young queer person learning to distance myself from the church. At numerous critical points in my journey into queer identity the message from the church was clear: You can’t be here and be queer.

I fought for years with my deeply devoted father about the question of what it would mean for our relationship, which was unusually close for a father and daughter, when I began to come out. In the end we spent decades yearning hopelessly for reconciliation when the division in our faith based beliefs drove us to argue so hard and so long that distance became the only way to love one another.

The ache was crippling.

As a queer person, speaking about religion is often tacitly forbidden – not because of censure but because of deep pain. So many of us have suffered unspeakable harms at the hands of religious bigots who forced us into the closet or worse and the discussion of faith always ends up being painful and filled with the shrapnel of complex traumas.

For the longest time I did not speak to the issue or the people involved because of the pain they have caused running so deep. This meant that for too long this religious trauma never really got addressed and my father went to his grave without ever really resolving this dispute with me.

The hardest part was knowing that deep down he always tried to find his way to me. There just never was a way or a place for us to find middle ground between my right to exist as myself and the church’s stubborn refusal to admit me as I am. That healing work took a very very long time…but I did eventually heal my heart and find my way through that trauma back to my faith.

That trauma festers in so many of us, and more than anything the deep suffering I have seen born out of the current epoch and its drift towards deeper authoritarianism and harder rejection of the rights of queer people moves me to seek action and community in an attempt to find my way through this grief and hurt.

I believe that my own lived experience of these harms really gives me a good sense of the underlying emotional landscape that moves our current political discourse and I recognized a desperate need for queer spaces to begin to concern themselves with the spiritual health of their communities as a spiritual outreach ministry.

Overwhelmingly that work has been the domain of other denominations, with the Abrahamic religions largely neglecting to make themselves significantly seen in their efforts to offer safe harbour to those most wounded by the advance of authoritarianism in the world.

Though the process of coming out as a Queer Christian cost me a great deal, both personally and professionally, I would not change my path no matter where it might lead me. There are some very powerful and hateful people who believe I shouldn’t even be allowed to live.

What happened to me should never happen to anyone and it presses upon me the need to ensure that no other young person of faith in our community is ever called to choose between who they are, who they love, or who they worship.

To anyone in the community who feels like they are drowning under the waves of a system that is doing it’s very best to destroy us mentally and emotionally, know that you are not alone. No matter how many times they mock us or try to degrade us for who we are and what we believe, we are not reduced by it one inch.

There is nothing we are not worthy of, and no one can question our human right to live freely in our society and express ourselves in all the many ways God has made us unique. Keep shining your light.

You will be found.