41. November Blahs

I am not a big fan of November.  As a matter of fact, it is my least favourite month… it’s that sort of limbo stage between autumn and winter.  All the leaves are off the trees, and the grass is turning brown, but there’s no snow yet.  Everything just looks like a barren wasteland.  Yesterday I was excited because there was snow on the ground, but this morning it rained and now it’s just dead outside.

Can you tell I’m not in the greatest of moods?

Of course, it doesn’t help that my mom and I are at loggerheads again.  The frustrating thing is I feel so emotionally worn out by it all that I get off the phone and I’m crying and I’m angry, but I really can’t tell you why.  I mean, I can tell you that my mom and I just fought, I might even be able to tell you the general gist of what we fought about, but I can’t really tell you why we were fighting… if that makes any sense.  Yesterday I was talking to a friend and I started to cry about it and she, of course, asked me why I was crying and I said “I have no words, only tears”… which is either really poetic or really cheesy, I can’t decide.  Regardless, it was exactly how I felt.  Thank goodness she didn’t push it because I think I would have completely broken down on her.  

Anyway, I actually have something relevant to this blog to share.  I’m going through a bit of an insomniatic phase, so I’ve been listening to a lot of sermons online – yeah, I know, I’m a bit of a freak.  I’ve been specifically listening to sermons by evangelical gay-friendly preachers – cause, well, there aren’t any in Ottawa that I know of, and I am just interested to hear the sorts of things they have to say.  I found a few sermons on GayChristian.net on their sermons page – if you are going to head over there, the sermons by Roy Clements are very good… not that the talk by Ralph Blair isn’t good, it’s just not a ‘sermon’ per se… it’s more of a lecture.  I actually really enjoyed Roy Clements’ sermons, and went to his webpage and listened to a bunch more (his webpage seems to be down right now, hopefully it will be up again soon).   I’m sure many conservative Christians will find this hard to believe, but I found myself feeling quite convicted listening to his sermons – they’re not about ‘gay stuff’, he’s just a good preacher who happens to be gay.  Apparently Roy Clements was quite well known and respected in the UK as an evangelical preacher before he came out, left his wife, and entered into a ‘celibate friendship’ with a man.  (I’m not sure if it’s still a celibate friendship, but everything I’ve been able to find about him uses that phrase so…).

Another thing I listened to one night in the wee hours was the presentation given by Tony and Peggy Campolo discussing this issue.  They are on opposite sides of the issue, Peggy is Side A, Tony is Side B… and he is probably the most purely Side B straight Christian I have yet to encounter.  Most of them are actually Side X when you get right down to it – they think that we really should try to be straight, but until then (or, you know, if it doesn’t work or something) we should just be celibate.  Anyway, it actually is a good presentation, and one I wish more people would listen to, if only to hear how people can disagree and still be civil to each other… or how someone can take a conservative stance without being homophobic.  

Anyway, after listening to the presentation the other night I realized that I was listening to a presentation given before a mostly gay audience, and I’m sure that shaped the tone of what they had to say, so I went looking for a presentation given before a straight Christian audience.   I didn’t find a page with the two of them debating again, but I did find a talk that Tony gave at a national pastor’s conference on “Struggling with the Gay Issue”.    It is much longer than the presentation that he gave with his wife, but it was comforting to hear him say pretty much the same thing to a group of straight people that he said to his gay audience.  He was actually kind of harsh with his straight audience, calling out a lot of the hypocrisy that drives me nuts, as I’m sure it drives many other gay people nuts.  

No real insights or anything, I thought I’d just share some of the things I’ve been listening to recently.