Epilogue: A Word to Readers

For one reason or the other, you’ve read Yielding to Yes – and you’ve now reached its end. 

The question is: What now?

Where to go from here?

I'd like to offer a brief closing word to a few specific readers: the Christian, the Queer person (and/or the religiously traumatized person), and the Human.

First, to my Christian reader:

To the degree that you are not indifferent to what I have written here in my story, whether by compassion — or by way of resistance, fear, or opposition — my invitation to you is: be curious.

Be curious with yourself as to why you have the impulse to respond in the manner that you do.

What is being stirred?

What tensions do you notice arise within yourself?

As a reminder, your religious particpation is not neutral - it is either helping or hindering our individual and collective work to create a more integrated world.

For many of us, we have never had the occasion to stop and consider the contours of our own faith and its larger impact on the world and those around us.

But this paradox alone warrants a kind of critical self-reflection - for without such, we very well may be joining many others in history who have unknowingly incited overt violence and suffering all in the name of God, Christian faith, and a certain pre-supposed moral superiority.

It is not lost on me how terrifying it is to consider an alternative way of viewing the world, yourself, or your faith, particularly one that is outside of the way you have likely always viewed things.

It is not lost on me how terrifying and grievous it can be to be confronted with an illusion.

But I’m convinced that part of what it means to truly love something is to learn about it.

That the due diligence of devotion is inquiry.

If the thing is worthy of devotion, after all, I wager it will stand up to inquiry. I wager it won’t be threatened by it, rather it will welcome it - for if it’s worth its weight, the inquiry will only reiterate its worthiness of devotion, not detract from it.

And so, if you find yourself resistant to what I am suggesting, my invitation to you is to be curious why.

Are you really free, or are you just afraid?

Henri wrote:

The [religious] man who never had any religious doubts… probably walked around blindfolded; he who never experimented with his traditional values and ideas was probably more afraid than free.^[1]

I’m not asking you to give up your Christian faith, to abandon Jesus, or to “worship satan.”

I hope it’s clear by now: I’m inviting you to the opposite.

I’m inviting you to trust God and his grace and the security of his Love enough to investigate, to question and to doubt.

I’m asking you to be courageous enough to wonder, even if only temporarily, if you have perhaps any reason at all to be less certain than you always have been.

Any disillusionment you experience in your “suspension of certainty” is not antithetical to the very thing you are already likely searching for: namely belonging and intimacy with God.

Rather it is a doorway directly to it.

This has certainly been my experience (and the experience of the mystics of centuries past.)

So - if Yielding to Yes has stirred anything within you, especially as it relates to your Christian faith, whether by compassion or resistance, I invite you to listen to at least one podcast episode produced by the Center for Action and Contemplation.

The episode is titled “Christianity is Many Things,” and it is a helpful place to begin the kind of religious self-reflection I’m inviting you into.

It is a rich conversation that attempts to see, acknowledge, and hold the full reality of what Christianity has been historically and what Christianity has the potential to become in the future - the good, the beautiful, and the ugly - and it offers an invitation to consider how we might reclaim Christianity as a vehicle of integration, liberation, and love in the world.

You can find and listen to the episode on Spotify or on the CAC's website here.

Besides this podcast, I invite you to check out my papers (which are now available on the Papers page), specifically my Christian Spirituality Paper, which documents the history of the Evangelical Deconstruction Movement; my Theological Ethics Paper, which evaluates two ethical frameworks within Christianity and their implications for today; as well as my Spiritual Guidance and Soul Care paper which differentiates between helpful versus harmful “Christian” responses to human suffering.

Finally, I have also compiled a Resource Page with a curated list of resources ranging from books, to podcasts, to music and even organzations for those who wish to engage deeper with some of the themes and ideas from Yielding to Yes. You will find many other resources there that you may find helpful.

Now, dear Christian, I leave you with a poem by Rumi:

Come!
Take a pick-axe
And break apart
Your stony self.
The heart’s matrix
is glutted with rubies.
Springs of laughter
are buried in your breast.
Unstop the wine jar
Batter down the door
to the treasury
of nonexistence.
The water in your jug
is brackish and low.
Smash the jug
and come to the river!

Second, to my Queer reader or the reader wrestling with faith or religious trauma:

I have encountered so many people in the past two years who are queer and who deeply fear that they are going to hell.

I have been there.

I know what it is like for your nervous system to live in a constant state of activation as you chronically feel unsafe in your own body. It is a miserable and exhausting place to be.

You never deserved to feel so unsafe.

To you, I say: despite how it might feel, your self-rejection is the only thing that threatens your estrangement to god and love and your access to belonging and community.

The sooner you can accept yourself, I promise, the sooner you can accept god’s love for you and discover true belonging.

And should you choose to remain within the boundaries of Christianity (which, for the record, I don’t think is always appropriate or necessary), I believe you can have an incredibly creative and critical function within the church.

Henri believed that LGBT people were not merely just to be tolerated by God and the Christian community but that they held an important vocation within the church. One biographer about Nouwen wrote:

Henri came to believe that gay and lesbian people, shouldering their own wounds of rejection and hurt, were a blessing to the Church. He even said gay men and women had a special vocation in the Christian community.^[2]

This is because, as some queer theologians understand it, queer people bear prophetic witness to the very value of human life itself. One queer theologian wrote:

From a spiritual viewpoint, gay men and women live in a situation in which they must constantly reaffirm the meaning and value of life or be thrown back into confusion, hopelessness, and estrangement. One of the greatest values gays offer to society [and the church] in a broken world is the sense of human value itself. ^[3]

Queer people’s courage to show up authentically in the world as themselves, even in the face of religious and social rejection, discrimination, and violence, bears prophetic witness to the integrative task all of us humans are called to.

I’m sorry for the ways you may have been taught to see your queerness (or your human condition) as a liability.

But I hope you will come to see it as the profound gift that it is, that it bears witness to the very value of human life and the mystery of god’s love for all people.

And please, for the love of god, go to therapy.

Religious trauma is real.

The degree to which you neglect the work of investigating its impact on your life is the degree to which your trauma will determine how you show up in the world and in your relationships for the rest of your life.

Confronting my religious trauma has been the hardest thing I have ever done, and it will be something I undoubtably continue to wrestle with for the remainder of my life.

But what I can tell you is progressive healing is possible, there is hope for increasing wholeness, and the work of healing is a tremendously worthwhile endeavor to pursue.

As Gretchen Smeltzer, an expert in healing repeated trauma, wrote regarding the value in the effort of healing:

You get to inhabit your life and your relationships more fully because you have worked hard to inhabit yourself and your history more fully. And you get to inhabit it more fully because all of the energy you have been devoting first to survival and then to healing can now be used toward your life in the present and your work toward the future.^[4]

And, make no mistake: your healing is a gift to the world, we all need your healing just as much as you do. She continued:

As you bring your full, integrated selves into the world, so much more is available to everyone. Your journey was a generous contribution and your hard work [to heal] is felt way beyond you.^[5]

So to you, I reiterate: Your queerness is a gift, and your healing from religious trauma is magic, both of which we all benefit from - please don’t rob us of either.

If Yielding to Yes has stirred anything in you related to religious trauma or queerness, I invite you to consider listening to a podcast episode from a show called Reclaiming My Theology.

The episode is titled “Reclaiming your Body from Purity Culture,” and it is a conversation with a spiritual director and embodiment coach that offers some very helpful language for the work of disentangling oneself from fundamentalist theology that often leads to the disembodiment of ourselves and a profound disconnect with our bodies. Confronting this is profoundly challenging and delicate work, but it is foundational to the endeavor of addressing religious trauma and this podcast can offer a helpful entry point to some of the dynamics involved. (NOTE: This podcast is wonderful for anyone who has been raised within purity culture, not just queer folk).

You can find the episode by clicking here.

Another podcast episode you might find insightul is the from the show You Have Permission and it is a conversation with two clicincal therapists and trauma researchers who discuss the unique aspects and challenges of what they call Complex Religious Truama. The episode is called "Complex Religious Trauma with Hillary McBride and Preston Hill." You can find the show on Spotify by clicking here.

I owe much of my embodiment journey to the work of Dr. McBride as she really helped me discover the language and frameworks I needed to begin to come back home to my body. Highly recommend checking out her books and work.

Besides these episodes, you too can check out my Papers Page for other resources you may want to engage such as my Theological Ethics paper on Christian Morality and Sexual Minorities which may be helpful if you have enduring questions or concerns about the morality of queerness. Or perhaps my thesis may be of interest should you want to learn more about Henri Nouwen and the connection between his spirituality and sexuality.

Finally, on the Resources Page, you too will find many other resources related to religious trauma, healing, queer mysticism, and more.

And now, I leave you too with a poem:

As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit's deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all surrounding grace.
– Denise Levertov

Finally, to my human reader…

Despite the explicit connections Yielding to Yes has had to people who are Christian and/or Queer/Religiously Traumatized - my deepest hope was to speak to something ultimately much more human than anything else.

I see now more than ever that the transformative power of self-acceptance and psychological wholeness is not something that inherently belongs to any one religious community or that any “religious spirituality” (whether Christian or otherwise) has a monopoly on offering. In fact, I see now that, more often than not, religion is often the most significant hindrance or obstruction to people seeking to achive these fundamental human developmental tasks at all.

All this is to say - “being Christian” or even “being religious” in any form is not a pre-requisite or requirement to the kind of discovery of wholeness that I hope Y2Y offers a vision of.

What remains underneath it all is the truth that self-acceptance, and the integration of one’s totality, is inseparably linked to one’s psychological wholeness and, thereby to the wholeness of our communities, our societies, and our world.

There may be endless reasons to sequester or repress certain dimensions of ourselves or our experience; it may be too dangerous or damaging for one reason or the other, but according to Carl Rogers, the humanistic psychologist, this is ultimately the source of our deepest despair.

Referencing the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, he wrote of the individual dilemma each person is faced with in “becoming themselves,” saying:

The most common despair is to be in despair at not choosing, or willing, to be one’s self; but that the deepest form of despair is to choose “to be another than himself.” On the other hand “to will to be that self which one truly is, is indeed the opposite of despair,” and this choice is the deepest responsibility of man.^[6]

No matter how we arrive at it, we all exist in the ongoing tension of choosing either the despair that accompanies the ongoing abandonment of ourselves in exchange for some bastardized sense of belonging or the harrowing work of undertaking the courageous responsibility of inner integration and authenticity.

This is the work I hope to invite you, the human, to consider or to ponder.

It is risky, scary, and overwhelming work at times. But as Brené Brown, the renowned sociological researcher, wrote:

Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.

For you, if Yeilding to Yes has awakened anything in you, I invite you to listen to a podcast episode, too.

It is an episode entitled “The Shadow: Individuation, Wholeness, and Becoming Your True Self,” and it is a thought-provoking discussion on the work of self-acceptance and integration as viewed through the psychological theory of the psychologist Carl Jung’s work.

You can find this episode here.

You will also find some other resources of possible interest on the resource page for further engagement. And, of course, you are welcome to check out my papers if you are interested.

And finally, I leave you now with a reflection on the resource that art is in the ongoing struggle for integrity taken from a talk given by James Baldwin tiltled “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity.”

I’ve never been more convinced that the truest mystics in our modern midsts are the artists, for they bear unyielding witness to the real Truth of our lived existence and offer themeselves as conduits of generativity, revealing to us the doses of reality we often struggle to find the courage to accept - let alone see. Baldwin said:

It seems to me that the artist’s struggle for his integrity must be considered as a kind of metaphor for the struggle, which is universal and daily, of all human beings on the face of this globe to get to become human beings…. The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets. …. because only an artist can tell, and only artists have told since we have heard of man, what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it.

May we find the courage to tell the truth of our lives and our brief becomings - the stakes are simply too high not to try. And in so doing, may we re-discover the world as a much more spacious place than we could have ever dreamt of.

With gratitude,

Tim