4.27.2013 BUTTERFIELD 6

CROSSING THE RUBICON

on august 17, 1999 i returned to my office after delivering a lecture to all
incoming graduate students.
the topic was to be of my choosing.
when the graduate school invited me,
i was a lesbian postmodernist.
when i delivered the lecture six months later,
i was a fledgling follower of Jesus Christ.
the lecture was entitled: 'the solomon problem'
i felt awkward and uncomfortable as i took the podium
and adjusted the clip on microphone to the neckline of my dress.
i was in process of growing out my butch haircut,
so every day was a bad hair day.
and the lecture was going to be a bomb.
in it, i would become a traitor and a turncoat.
to the lesbian community,
i would become the example of what not to be.
i could not have gotten through that lecture had R
not been there
in the six months since my conversion, he had become
my watchdog, big brother, champion, simultaneous translator
and best friend.
he cam to my lectures, to my classes, to my thursday night dinners.
he talked to my students and my colleagues.
he embraced my drag queen friends.
he translated my concerns to the session of our church
with a deftness and sensitivity that i still marvel at.
as i fingered my pages on the podium,
R gave me a firm thumbs up from his spot..
he was the only person who understood this
spiritual and professional schizophrenia that had quickly become
my new normal after conversion.
here is the talk...

lesson#3: it is better to be wrong on an important subject
than right on a trivial one,
as long as you are willing to learn from your mistakes.

this lesson got me through graduate school and, most recently,
became profoundly important for me
during the research of my second book.
i was studying the religious right from the lesbian feminist perspective
of the secular left,
and aside from discovering what i already knew,
that the religious right was manipulating religious commitments
in the name of capitalist consumerism and conservative political agendas,
i discovered something else,
something that i wasn't looking for
and something that changed my life -not to mention my research
-from the ground up.
i discovered that God isn't just a narrative we pick like summer berries
or leave for the next person;
nor is God a set of social conventions tailored for the weak of mind;
nor is God a consumerist social construct who exists in the service
of christian imperialist ideologies and right wing politics.
rather, i discovered that God through Jesus Christ exists,
the triune God of the bible exists,
whether we acknowledge Him or not.
i discovered that God wasn't very happy with me.

this brought me to the awesome realization that our living God
is in all of our life,
and that my 'success' as a professor was His blessing on me,
not my deserved and earned accolade.
i discovered, through what the bible calls
the renewing of our minds,
that what i had previously claimed as mine wasn't even about me.

this leads me to my point and the title of today's talk:
beware of the solomon problem of academic life.
king solomon, one of the many sons of david,
ruled over israel from 962-922BC
before solomon stepped into his kingship,
he asked God to give him an 'understanding heart..
to discern between good and evil I kings 3.9.
God gave him a gift of discernment unmatched
by any other figure then or now
on the condition that solomon never forgot the first commandment
(the commandment to honor God,
not the idols that bolster the autonomy of our own egos).
as solomon became rich and successful, he started to believe
that knowledge was something that he 'owned'.
something that he harbored inside of himself,
rather than what it was:
something loaned to him,
but something fundamentally located in
the radical Otherness of a holy God.
once he lost his anchor, he lost his wisdom,
and it all came tumbling down.
the biblical story does not stop here,
because the nature of a holy God is redemptive, not abandoning,
but that is a lecture for another day.
suffice it to say for today,
that solomon failed by thinking that all truth claims exist
in a contingent relationship to the self.
solomon's legacy offers a warning to all academics,
believers and atheists alike:
we all need to be anchored in something bigger than we are,
something bigger than the ideas currently generated within disciplines
and certainly something bigger than the
politics of our fields of study.

real learning , no matter how polished the moves or rehearsed the rhetoric,
is empty learning unless we who profess
are anchored in something bigger than we are.
choose with discernment and don't let the proclivities
of the here and now choose for you. (august 1999)

..at the time and place i delivered this,
i had just handed myself the proverbial pink slip.
only R knew how serious this was.
after ten years of coming out as a lesbian,
you would think i would have gotten used to the feeling of
peering over the edge of dignity and
choosing instead solidarity with the outcasts.
what was different this time was that in giving this lecture,
i betrayed my friends.
while the lecture itself was not bold,
because my friendships were bold and intimate and risky,
the lecture had impact.
this experience taught me a powerful lesson about evangelism:
the integrity of our relationships matters more than the boldness of our words.
because of who i was to the gay community,
this lecture had made its mark.

what kind of effect did this lecture have?
i might as well have taken out a highway sign that said,
'rosaria is no longer safe
-your secrets are out
-your cover is blown.'
while i gave the lecture i saw my exgirfriend and my lesbian and
gay supporting graduate students go stone cold in disgust and disappointment...

after giving my lecture..i returned to my office drenched with panic sweat.
i felt awkward wearing a dress
and the 'girl' shoes i was wearing hurt my feet
more than any marathon i had ever run.
R left for his office and so i faced mine alone-
i also faced a long line of students wanting to talk to me about what i just did.

the only person trough my office door that day
was an undergraduate named B.
B was a skinny boy, high on prescription medication for
ADHD, depression, bipolar disorder and who knows what else.
he had been flunking out of school since his first day on campus.
B was the president of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered
undergraduate student collective
and i was their faculty advisor.
B came to my office to fire me.
he was fuming.
his eyes were red with tears
and his face taut with fury.
'how dare you! how could you!'
he paced the length of my office,
..spike orange hair..red face..his anger distorted him.

'how do you know that you are no longer a lesbian?
how do you know?' he demanded.
of all the questions that someone could have asked me at the time,
this was the one that i couldn't answer.
this question unsettled me and made me feel sick and dizzy.
i had no idea how to answer it.
Christ honoring words and ideas were nowhere to be found.
they weren't ready to come out of me.
my sense of truth was divided.
one truth was simply that
the word of God had gotten to be bigger inside of me than i was,
bigger by about the size of a hair.
the other truth was that, now back at work,
i started to feel like a lesbian again.
the summer break had helped me to establish new patterns,
but these new patterns were flimsy.
the patterns of mindfulness of a research professor
are well established and they extend beyond reading and writing.
because my scholarship and my personal life shared
a symbiotic relationship, the old patterns of mindfulness
started to creep back as i sat in my office chair.
i had always been both a professor and a lesbian at the same time.
my research supported what is called 'identity politics-
the assumption that the researcher holds integrity
when she also holds membership in the area that she studies.
research professors also enjoy being part of
a community of scholars.
i lost my community when God saved my soul.
and now i started to lose my nerve-and my faith.

i tried to stall B and so i asked him a question in return.
i said, 'B, how do you know you are a gay man?'

like a birthday balloon deflated by a pinprick,
B staggered and collapsed into my office chair.
slumped over and with tears in his eyes,
he fell silent for what seemed a long time.
then he said, 'rosaria, i'm a gay man because the GLBT
community is the only safe home i have,
a home made safe by you.
how could you not know this?
how dare you not know this!

although it replicated my own experience,
i was taken aback by his response.
and i certainly didn't fail to hear that i was
fingered in his sin.
i don't remember how i responded-right there in my office.
i think i covered his hands with my own as
he slumped in the chair and cried.
i remember that it was dark by the time he left my office
and that we agreed to talk again the next day.
i accepted my resignation from the student group that he chaired
and, later that week, from the other five that i advised.
i accepted my resignation from every dissertation committee
that i was on
and started to dig through my computer and hard files
to throw away the book project on the religious right.
i had to accept it: i was a failure.
by God's grace, He would not allow me to work in the way
that i had always wanted to labor.
i was no stranger to failure, but this was an odd failure.
at the infinitesimal core of this failure resided something that
i didn't at first recognize.
when i examined my feelings against the rugged cross,
i realized that this failure was wrapped in relief.
whatever was God's providence for me,
it was His to lay out and mine to obey.
no longer did i have to invent myself.

one week later, when the fall 1999 school semester came around,
i felt more ready to face the patterns and legacy of my past.
my church knew my struggles and surrounded me
with prayer and counsel.
i had been reading augustine's confessions
and was alert to the reality that God
had a ministry waiting for me.
i prayed that i would be strong for the task at hand.
yes, i was still a traitor and an example of what not to be.
but so too was paul the apostle shamed among the pharisees,
and i trusted that God would take my life
and make a place for me.

during this time, i lost my primary support person
-R left for seminary in pittsburgh.
he felt called to be a pastor, or so he said.
we agreed to continue to talk daily and support one another.
during the past six months, i had spent most of my time with him,
and while i was sad to see him go,
i really needed my time back to focus
on my new life as a christian professor.
we had started talking about the emotional attraction we felt
for one another.
i filed this away,
not really knowing what to do with this kind of information.
in the gay community, it is normal (and safe)
for gay men and lesbian women to bond in this way.
but i wasn't in the gay community any more.
was this still safe?
was this dangerous?

during this time, i also gained a powerful support person and friend-
vivian rice.
vivian was a professor at the university, a member of my church
and the wife of an elder.
vivian and i committed to praying together at least once a week
and talking daily for support and colleagueship.
with my church supporting me,
i felt ready to face the semester as an 'out' follower of Christ.

God did have ministry waiting for me in my classes.
the story of my conversion ran like wildfire
through the university community. instead of having fewer students,
i had classes that were over-enrolled with
students sitting on the floor  and in the aisles.
some students came for the carnival aspect,
but others came because God had put them where he wanted them.
amazingly, i continued to draw students from the
gay and lesbian community,
students who wanted to dialogue across differences.
i also drew students who were suicidal and chronically sick.
as a lesbian, i had always been an outsider.
but now i was a different kind of outsider,
and in my new status, God brought me a new crop of
hurting people.