Perceiving the Pierced One: a Good Friday Homily

Christ Church Cambridge/ The Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard
Good Friday: Isaiah 52:13-53:12;
Psalm 22; John 18:1-19:42
Friday, April 22, 2011

See, my servant shall prosper;
he shall be exalted and lifted up,
and shall be very high.

…. he shall startle many nations;
kings shall shut their mouths because of him;

for that which had not been told them they shall see,
and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate. (Isaiah 52: 13, 15)

On Wednesday of this week in New Orleans, one year after the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that set off an environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, family members of the eleven people who were killed boarded a helicopter. Their destination was the graves of their loved ones. After several minutes, the pilot announced that they were flying over the site where the rig had sunk. Slowly, they circled so people on both sides of the aircraft could see site: a vast, unbroken ocean flowing beneath them. As the Associated Press reported, “the only indication that they were at the site was an announcement from the pilot." After they returned to shore, one family member, Arleen Weise, commented, “It was just a little emotional, seeing where they were,” she said. When “asked what went through her mind when she saw where the rig went down, Weise said, ‘Just rise up. I wanted them to come up, but it didn’t happen.’’’ This site of incalculable loss is like a lacuna, an open space that can only barely make visible the loss of their loved ones. They can only look upon its enormity, as if, as Paul reflects in the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, they have been “swallowed up by life.” How can one take in such a scene?

And yet that is precisely what we are called upon to do—or to try to do—on this day. Vast as the ocean, our readings yet bring into startling, unsettling relief the loss that draws us into the central mystery of our faith, lifting before our eyes a spectacle from which we may well want to turn away. For the one on whom we are invited to gaze this day is our beloved Jesus Christ, the one who poured himself out into our midst, becoming subject to appalling injustice and oppression, even unto death. Emptied out like water, he lived as one us and died an excruciating death high upon a cross. To ancient Christians, this most difficult day was paradoxically and quite literally one of up-lift. Thus the words of the prophet Isaiah—“see, my servant shall prosper, shall be exalted and lifted up, and be very high”—could be read incongruously to refer to none other than the crucified One. Our eyes turn to the One whose crucifixion, alone in the Gospel of John, is expressed as a kind of ascension, of being “lifted up” as a strange spectacle and source of healing (John 3: 14, 12:32). Behold the sheer incongruity at the heart of a day that Christians have dared to call “good.”

But there is a reason for this pronouncement. For by crossing the border between Creator and Creation, eternity and time, walking in our midst even to the point of becoming ensnared by the evils of empire, pierced by a Roman soldier’s spear (as only the Passion according to John describes it), Christ broke open what Letter to the Hebrews calls a “new and living way,” a new passage into God’s own heart (Heb. 10:20). The crucified One stands in solidarity with us in struggle and strife, has the ability to, as Hebrews puts it, “sympathize with” — συμ-παθῆσαι, literally to feel together with—“our weaknesses” (Heb. 4:15). Christ has engraved our deepest experiences of grief, rage, abandonment, horror upon the very heart of the divine. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) would wonder at this marvel, asking, “why should I not look through these fissures into the heart of the rock? The nails announce to me, the wounds proclaim to me that ‘God is indeed in Christ, reconciling the world to himself’”(61st Sermon on the Song of Songs). What Bernard saw in that heart above all was infinite compassion. Two centuries later Julian of Norwich (1342-1416) would also meditate upon these wounds, perceiving in the side-wound a safe refuge (Revelations of Divine Love, Long Text, ch. 24) and a passage from which human beings were born anew (Revelations, Long Text, ch. 60).

There is something almost unbearably peculiar – or peculiarly unbearable – about this day. It isn’t simply that we are invited to look up at the suffering and death of one whom we love, and who loves us so deeply. It is more even than that. What is beyond the pale is the matrix of meaning we are invited to contemplate, the multiple, layered lenses through which we are invited to view this story. Indeed, we are invited to read it, to perceive the pierced one, in intersection with our own lives and communities, our own pain, our own losses. We are invited to open our deepest struggles to the blinding transformation at the heart of the paschal mystery, knowing that all that we are, all that we have been, all that we will be, “is hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3). Amen.

The Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge

In-gathering Memoriam

As you no doubt have heard by now, the Reverend Professor Peter Gomes, a veritable institution at Harvard's Memorial Church, the Divinity School, and the broader University, died Monday evening from complications of a stroke he suffered last December. As tributes have poured in, story after story written, the sheer magnitude of his life and legacy overwhelms.

In this seismic moment for the University more broadly, and for religious life on campus in particular, the loss is keen for members of the Episcopal Chaplaincy because of our longstanding connection with both Memorial Church and with Reverend Gomes. A statement from Bishop Shaw of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts in this morning's Boston Globe says it well: “I always liked to call Peter the bishop of Harvard...I’m so grateful for his ministry, particularly to the Episcopal Church, and the way he encouraged so many in their vocations. He was a singular man, and I’ll miss the example of his deep commitment to the Gospel, his keen mind, and his outrageous sense of humor.’’

Meanwhile, as we wrestle with this loss, I am mindful that the Harvard community also recently lost senior Ilya Chalik, a History and Science concentrator and leader in the Hillel community who was also known to and mourned by members of the Episcopal Chaplaincy. It has only been two weeks since Ilya's death, and now this.

If you are wondering how to make sense of it all, you are certainly not alone. And at times like this, one of the most important things we can do is to bring our grief, our bewilderment, our numbness-- whatever it may be-- into community, particularly into spaces of worship, where it can be gathered together with that of others, collected and offered up. There is a moment in Thomas Cranmer's Eucharistic prayer that reads, "and here we offer and present unto you, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy and living sacrifice." That self-offering is an invitation to bring forward and lift up to God all of ourselves, all of the burdens we bring, our sorrows, our anxieties well as our triumphs and joys. All the complexities of who we are in the intensity of moments like this.

That kind of self-offering is certainly a major part of Peter Gomes's legacy. Article after article stresses not only his learning and articulateness, his courage and integrity-- particularly at coming out as a gay man in 1991 as the Harvard community grappled with a spate of homophobic harassment-- but especially his complexity, his uniqueness as a human being. As Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. put it on the New Yorker blog, "Gomes was a large, warm, and mischievous soul, who contained a multitude of identities, each worn with a certain roguish sense of irony....In an era of sometimes confining identity politics, Gomes continued to insist on his own freedom. Cape Verdean and Jewish; Virginia and Massachusetts; gay and Baptist; slave and free; a counselor to the powerful and to the powerless: Peter Gomes smoothly navigated his own Mayflower through this sea of identities, because he anchored himself to none." Or as Reverend Gomes himself put it, as quoted by the New York Times, , "“The oddest thing about being an oddity is that there are very few oddities like you.’’

So bring yourself-- all of yourself, however you feel-- forward, take your place alongside one another as we grapple and grieve together.

Tomorrow the Memorial Church gives us that opportunity with a vigil in memory of Reverend Gomes. After morning prayers at 8:45 a.m., the vigil will take place from 9am to 10pm. Throughout the day, the University Chaplains of all faith traditions will take turns keeping watch, carrying out this ancient tradition of presence. My turn will be at noon. The day will end at 10pm with a service of Compline: a peaceful night, and a perfect end.

On Vocation—Jesus Was a Carpenter First

During this season of Epiphany we celebrate the manifestation of Christ on Earth, and in particular the visit of the foreign Magi with their three—mostly impractical—gifts to the infant Jesus. Also during this time, Eastern churches celebrate Jesus’ baptism. Both of these moments mark the manifestation, or “epiphany,” of the second person of the Trinity as a human being in Jesus Christ.

But together, these two moments also mark a significant gap in what the Gospels tell us about the life of Jesus. John and Mark both entirely leave out any mention of a young Jesus, beginning their narrative just prior to his adult baptism. Matthew describes King Herod’s “Massacre of the Innocents” and the family’s flight to Egypt, but says nothing specifically about Jesus between the Magi and the River Jordan. Only Luke offers us any glimpse into the post-infant Jesus, relating how as a twelve-year-old he spent three days at a temple in in Jerusalem, listening and questioning the teachers, who were very impressed with his grasp of the material (Luke 2:41-50).

Also according to Luke, “Jesus was about thirty years old when he began his work” (Luke 3:23). That means that for thirty years of his life on Earth, the Word made flesh was doing something other than “his work,” or as the English Standard Version translates it, “his ministry.” So what the heck was he doing?

Mark 6:3 tells us that Jesus was a carpenter: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary…?” (The Greek, “τέκτων,” can mean a craftsman of many different sorts, but whatever his craft, it doesn’t seem to have been, at that point, the saving of souls.) This explains the bumper sticker I saw the other day in a church parking lot, “My boss is a Jewish carpenter.” It doesn’t explain, though, why Jesus waited thirty years before beginning his ministry—his true vocation.

Last summer I conducted a number of interviews with political, business, and community leaders, asking them about the role faith played in their leadership and their lives. Many of the people I interviewed, and especially the people that seemed the most comfortable and the most “at home” in their jobs, hadn’t started out in their current profession. Instead, they pursued their first career on the basis of social pressure and a sense of what they felt they ought to do. In contrast, their second career fulfilled an inner spiritual obligation, and provided a sense of fulfillment missing from the first career—even though, in many cases, the sacrifices were far greater and the material rewards far smaller.

In my own life, I spent roughly ten years working in politics, mostly on campaigns. I found the work challenging and interesting—and it certainly paid well—but it sucked the soul right out of me. I ended up working as a hired gun for candidates I had little interest in and, occasionally, didn’t even think should win. Now, here at age 30, I find myself at divinity school, looking to find my own true vocation.

Ultimately, why Jesus waited until age 30 to begin his ministry may simply be one in a series of unanswerable questions. Of course, when compared with the many other great mysteries of God, this particular question seems somewhat insignificant. But as we consider our own lives, and the ways in we manifest our faith through how we live, it may help to remember that even our Lord didn’t get started right away.

If we find ourselves lost in a career that doesn’t fulfill us, one that doesn’t answer the voice of God calling us to be and do something more, we may still have time to answer that call. After all, even Jesus had a career before his calling.

Jeff Bridges worked for ten years in Democratic politics and is currently a graduate student at Harvard University's School of Divinity, where he also serves on the leadership team for Hope in Action Cambridge, a project of the Massachusetts Episcopal Diocese. Check out his website at jeffbridges.net

Advent 2: Of Locusts and Stumps

At dinner this evening, we all seemed to be sitting before the precipice that is reading period here at Harvard. Classes ended on Thursday, folks slid into this weekend with a sigh of relief, and now preparations are beginning for a week of paper writing, or for final exams that begin the following week. Some are writing three or even four papers. Suffice it to say, a lot of work looms. And the very idea that this is unfolding during Advent, a season that calls us to simplify and slow down, seems, as someone put it at dinner, somewhat cruel.

In a sense, I suppose the end of lectures last week marks a simplification of sorts (and with my lecturer hat on, I can definitely attest to the truth of that!), but finals more than takes up that slack. If anything, the other side of Advent that I dwelt upon last Sunday, its strange spacio-temporality of endings and beginnings, its newness erupting into the humdrum of everyday life, seems a more accurate reflection of what life is like this time of the semester. And while those who don't live by the academic calendar may not have final papers and exams in the next two weeks, they have plenty of other equivalent or worse deadlines and crunches-- 'tis the season.

In the midst of this crush, two images stand out for me from today's readings: John the Baptist's abrupt appearance on the scene, and the strangely hopeful image of the shoot growing out of the stump of Jesse.

First John the Baptist (courtesy of Matthew 3:1-12). In a way, his clothing and diet say it all: he wears "camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist and his food was locusts and wild honey." I think about this garb and what immediately comes to mind is a) it can't have smelled very good and b) it must have itched something terrible. And the food? Three words: locusts are bugs. Grasshoppers, basically. Sometimes they swarm (and this Discovery Channel article explains why, amazingly-- the image at top is from it), which makes me think of Indiana Jones saying, "Snakes... why did it have to be snakes?" And while I do realize that bugs are consumed in various places around the world, I have to say, no amount of wild honey could get me to eat them. But if bugs and itchy, smelly clothing are part of John the Baptist's prophetic demeanor, his message is this: prepare the way for the one coming after me. You think I'm startling? The one following after me "will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire."

Second, the shoot coming out of the stump of Jesse. We got this image twice-- once from the second reading, Paul's letter to the Romans, and once from the first reading, the prophet Isaiah (the whole passage is Isaiah 11:1-10):

"A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him,
the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might,
the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD."

This shoot is the messianic prophecy-- this image suggests this messiah emerging from a previous generation, the tree of Jesse the father of King David. But more specifically, this emergence opens out just when all seems lost-- hence the stump. The passage goes on to say that this bursting forth of hope will unfold in ways that confound expectation and change rules both social and natural: wolves lying down with lambs without temptation to eat them (not, needless to say, equivalent to me and locusts), a little child leading a band of erstwhile enemy animals, a nursing child safely playing over the den of a poisonous snake. And further, as our Kellogg Fellow Zack Guiliano emphasized in his sermon at the divinity school on Friday, this same messianic figure balances the scales in favor of the "poor" and the "meek," judging and deciding "with equity," even "strik[ing] the earth with the rod of his mouth," and finally "kill[ing] the wicked" with "the breath of his lips." Isaiah envisions a series of harsh judgments, a righting of injustices that create a world in which enmity and danger are subject to radical reconciliation.

When Paul takes up this image (Romans 15:4-13), he goes right to the bottom line: hope. The shoot improbably growing out of the stump of Jesse is to him a sign of "the one who rises to rule the Gentiles," in whom "the Gentiles shall hope." Hope on the heels of chaos, hope that brings with it "all joy and peace in believing." This is the hope that gathers momentum, growing from a mere spark in the night to the full glow candle, that it may yet grow to full firey stature.

This is the hope that accompanies us this week, as we all dig in, making our way into the final stage of the semester, and into the rest and joy coming to us at Christmas.

Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge

Advent I: Alert in the Threshold

After returning from a family Thanksgiving weekend away, I offered this sermon last evening at the chaplaincy:

Advent 1: Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44
Cambridge, Massachusetts, November 28, 2010
Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge

Welcome to the threshold that is Advent. Today, the first Sunday in this season of watchfulness, falls for us here in the United States at the end of Thanksgiving weekend: a time of plenty and need, of origins and colonizations, of mythologies and counter-mythologies. Since at least the end of the Great Depression, this weekend has also been a threshold of its own, framed as the gateway to holiday consumer spending, and an economic barometer of the season to come. And now, as the highest volume travel weekend of the year amid the increase of counter-terror measures, Thanksgiving has intensified the liminal—or in-between—space of airports with such innovations as body scanners and “enhanced pat-downs.” Having now passed through the threshold of TSA screening twice in the last few days, I resist the urge to render today’s Advent message as a liturgical code orange or red and, rather, wonder what it might mean in my various contexts, with their distinctive pressures, to practice watchfulness. How indeed do our various contexts—from our families to our friends, colleagues and church communities – call us to practice watchfulness in the threshold of Advent?

At least one answer to that question, I suspect, is that we are being challenged to watch the watchfulness of our various contexts. In other words we are called to check pernicious and unjust forms of watchfulness that our worlds may take up out of fear of the thresholds in which we stand. Particularly in a cultural matrix that experiences border territories as dangerous, as vulnerable spaces to shore up against intrusion, I wonder how we can learn to practice a watchfulness grounded in the certainty that thresholds can be spaces of holiness, places of peace, even vehicles of grace? I wonder, how can we unmask the anxieties that plague the border territories of our lives, and help reveal and cultivate thresholds as spaces of strength and of growth.

In fact, we stand today at one of the great hinges of the liturgical year, the top of the liturgical clock, if you will, when we begin our sweep once more through the great cycle of readings, prayers, and music. The liturgical year is a narrative of narratives—a cohesive sequence of stories laden with productive incoherences and narrative gaps, calculated to catch our lives up into its cosmic sweep. Advent launches us into this cycle with a message that we – or at least the muzak at CVS — might presume to be straightforward hope and expectation, of looking forward to Christmas. But what Advent actually launches us into—and with which it frames the entire liturgical year—is much more strange and jarring. For starters, the theme of cosmic endings is still with us. And since Episcopalians are not known for exuberant exclamations of eschatology, you may well be sick to death of it and perplexed that here at the beginning of Advent, a term that literally means “coming” or “arrival,” this theme of endings has not gone away. From the macro view of the liturgical year, today is indeed the alpha to last week’s omega (the Sunday of Christ the King), but alpha and omega turn out to be co-present. Ending and beginning strangely bleed into one another at the onset of Advent.

On this peculiarly liminal day, we receive a series of readings that urge us to celebrate and to pay attention to our location. Now is the time, proclaims the prophet Isaiah, the Psalmist, Paul and the gospel of Matthew. The Psalmist calls all the tribes of Israel to go up to Jerusalem to celebrate a day of gladness, of peace and of prosperity. Isaiah envisions a day when all the nations will stream to God’s holy mountain, to a height higher than any other, to learn the ways of the holy one. In this sacred time and place God will become the great arbiter, fashioning harmony in place of strife, reforging weapons of warfare into implements of peace. In the fourth century of the Common Era, the Christian theologian Athanasius of Alexandria interpreted this prophecy through the lens of the Incarnation, transforming it from a future vision to an accomplished reality and a sign of judgment against those who continue to wage war. “By His own love,” Athanasius proclaimed in On the Incarnation, Christ “underwent all things for our salvation” in order to usher in peace. Athanasius found it incredible, in light of the Isaiah vision, how various nations can continue to be “mad against one another, and cannot endure to be a single hour without weapons.” Against this impulse, he argued, the “teaching of Christ” is meant to transform such impulses from warfare to husbandry, from arms raised against one another to hands lifted up in prayer. But what requires watchfulness and elicits legitimate warfare is evil itself, the evil that works upon the very psyches of human beings, intensifying anxieties, inciting inter-personal conflicts and inflaming inter-national strife (On the Incarnation, Ch. 52).

The Apostle Paul issues a similar warning when he declares in our reading from Romans, “you know what time it is, how now is the moment for you to wake from sleep.” Having just summed up all the commandments with the call for love in the verses just prior to ours, Paul is calling out, “the night is far gone and the day is near.” In Paul’s mind, we stand in a cosmic perch akin to those early morning moments when the moon has set, the stars are fading and the sun is preparing to rise. His call to “put on Christ” evokes the foundation of our baptism, the moment of our full incorporation into the body, when our humanity is clothed anew with the one who, as Athanasius put it, “became humanized that we might be deified” (On the Incarnation, ch. 54). In this threshold moment, Paul calls upon us to activate that clothing, to be strengthened by it, as if by armor. But while Paul’s watchfulness grounds us in the threshold in which, he assures us, we know that we stand, Matthew reminds us how much we don’t know, how suddenly and unexpectedly the reign of God will break in to the order of the world as we know it. Nothing we can do can truly prepare us for this in-breaking. The parousia or great arrival—the Advent of the Son of Humanity—is unexpected because it is, by definition, unexpectable. And so the awareness we must cultivate is grounded in both expectation and humility. This threshold is not one that can be mastered, controlled or even, ultimately, known. It is an awareness in the face of profound uncertainty and ambiguity that must be lived, or better, practiced.

One of the moments of our fall semester that suddenly erupted upon us was an awareness rash of suicides across the country among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) young people. For those of us who have long been aware of the increased risks in this community, what was surprising about this moment was not so much that it happened but that it happened in the full glare of the spotlight, and how national awareness seems to have been increased because of that attention. As you know, the Chaplaincy was one of several groups that co-sponsored a rally and a vigil in support of the LGBT community on October 12th. And Harvard was one of a number—probably hundreds—of university campuses across the nation that held events that week. As I stood on the steps of Memorial Church with a large group of faculty, staff, and students at that vigil, wearing both my hats as Chaplain and a Lecturer, I felt as though we were all standing on a threshold, a simultaneously terrifying and holy place, a space in which people had come together to offer one another reassurance and support, determination that what was happening had to stop. When we stand together in this way, and particularly when Christians witness our support for the LGBT community, we begin to transform the legacy of judgment, condemnation and conflict to one of support, hope and growth.

And so here at Advent I, at the beginning of the liturgical year, and even at the top of the three-year rotation of readings we begin in the Revised Common Lectionary that we share with most major Christian denominations, we are invited to be alert in the threshold. Amid whatever ambiguities and intersections we may carry with us, whatever strange permeabilities may pervade the borders on which we stand, and particularly in the face of whatever anxiety or even terror such thresholds may generate in ourselves and in others, the message of Advent is to be alert and to cultivate peace, indeed, to be watchful for the sake of peace. And so may we be alert to, and prepared to combat, the ways in which the anxieties generated by borders can cause people to dehumanize one another, and indeed to cultivate widespread injustices. May we watch for reversals of pruning hooks and plowshares into spears and swords. May we be ready to be an agent of the in-breaking of God’s reign in the here and now, not simply the bye and bye. May we open ourselves to participation in what Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King, and Verna Dosier alternately termed the Dream of God. And even as we prepare the way for this justice-making, may we watch our assumptions, expecting God to invite us into a world we can only begin to imagine. But most of all may we stand together today in awe and expectation, understanding that this threshold on which we stand is holy ground. Amen.

Refusing to Forget-- Stigma and the LGBT Suicides

A week ago today I made my way from the Episcopal Chaplaincy building on Garden Street, through the chill evening to Harvard’s Memorial Church. As I rounded the corner by University Hall, the light of over two hundred candles flickered ahead of me on the steps that face Widener Library, the same steps from which the liturgics of commencement are enacted every spring. This was a vigil to mark, cry out against and be galvanized by the recent rash of LGBT suicides across the United States over the last several weeks. This series of events, and the unprecedented public conversation that has circled about them, has been devastating to many in the Harvard community, particularly LGBT and allied students.

I came to this vigil to represent the Episcopal Chaplaincy (as indeed Episcopal Chaplains across the country have been responding to this rash of violence), which was one of several co-sponsors of the event, and to reach out to LGBT students across the University at this difficult time, letting them know that they are not alone. Voices of people of faith too often stoke the broader cultural dynamics of violence at the root of all of this, and it felt important to be visible as an Episcopal priest standing against that violence. I was also present as a Lecturer currently teaching—and having previously taught—a number of LGBT students deeply impacted by the rash of suicides. Though I’m not sure how many other chaplains were present (there was at least one other), I know I was far from the only professor or staff member there, and that sense of institutional solidarity and support moved me.

But it was also personally important to me to be there as someone who has experienced that broader culture of violence as a member of the LGBT community. Following the example of previous speakers, I spoke in the brief open mic period at the end of the vigil of coming out. In my case, I explained, I happen to have come out twice—first, my sophomore year of college as gay, and then in graduate school as a transgender man (I transitioned from female to male in 2002). I spoke of the importance of community, real community based on authentic relationships, and how important it is right now to reach out to one another across the borders—particularly of faith traditions — that too often separate us.

Two days before the vigil, the combination of the Sunday lectionary readings and the rash of suicides already had me thinking about what it was like to be a young person struggling with the intersection of faith and social stigma. The theme of leprosy in the readings inspired me to open my sermon with a story of how, when I was in fifth grade, I stumbled upon a library book, Damien, the Leper Priest about Damien de Veuster, a Roman Catholic priest (recently included in the new collection Holy Women and Holy Men) who had served a community living with what is now called Hansen’s Disease. Damien went to this shunned community, fought bureaucrats to get them basic living supplies, built them a physical infrastructure (water supply, housing, etc), bound up their wounds, worked to de-stigmatize the disease, and ultimately contracted it himself, dying as a “leper among lepers.” This was the one book report I did that year that really meant something to me. There was something about the shape of Damien’s ministry in relation to the dynamics of social stigma that rocked my ten-year-old world. It didn’t hurt that as a gender nonconforming kid, stigma was very familiar to me.

The intersection of stigma and faith emerged in another recent Harvard event, a Divinity School panel entitled “Queer Youth and Religious Debates Over Sexuality." When I arrived, I was struck first of all by the Harvard police who stood guard at the doors to the room where the panel was held. Even in its absence, this visible reminder of potential disruption felt overbearing; I could feel it actually raising my heart rate as I listened. While all the remarks were moving, I was struck particularly by those of Professor Mark Jordan who spoke of how “the fights about [LGBT youth] often try to claim them for one camp or another — either religious or queer, but rarely both.” This is one of the peculiar challenges for those of us who are indeed, and have long been, both.

And so as this moment of grief and anger— here at Harvard and far beyond—begins to fade from media coverage, we must refuse to forget this episode. I don’t want any of us, whatever our age, sexual orientation, or gender identity, to lose sight of the violence—psychic and physical-- that underlies and emerges from the workings of stigma in all its forms. I'm particularly cheered to read the several statements that communities and individuals across the Episcopal Church have made (see Episcopal Cafe for a collection of them)-- reading them makes me grateful for the support I received as a young person, and galvanized to continue extending that support here and now.

Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge
Interim Episcopal Chaplain