Community as a Passion

by Jim Habegger

August, 1997

"We're going to live in a black neighborhood."

That was my then 21-year old daughter, in the plane, in August 1997. The white suburbanite family I belong to was on the way to live in the U.S. after 14 years in Martinique as pioneers for the Baha'i Faith. My then 19-year-old son, my wife, and I pondered a few seconds, and said "Yes, of course."

One of our central concerns, in trying to make ourselves useful in God's plan, is helping to bring together people who have been divided from each other by racism. None of us knew what good it might do for us to move into a black neighborhood, but we all felt called to do it.

After we moved in, we invited all our neighbors to an open house, and have tried in various ways to develop friendships with them. One neighbor comes occasionally to pray with us for the neighborhood, the children, and the world, and talk about what God is doing and our part in it.

My personal efforts have mostly revolved around getting to know my neighbors and joining hands with them in service to the community. For a while I went to the family resource center once a week, trying to make myself useful, and gave a class to teach elementary school children to make Web pages for their classrooms. I've helped two elementary schools with their Web pages. Now I'm reading to children and teaching them Origami once a week at an after-school center. My wife is teaching at one of the schools serving the poorest people, and mentoring two girls. I think her work could make as good a movie as "Music of the Heart."

Summer, 1999

"Looking for other people in the same dilemma to talk to."

This was in a religious discussion list, posted by someone who fell in love only with people of the same gender and who felt torn between romantic longings and religious beliefs. I don't remember how I came across it. I've been mildly interested in gay issues most of my life. I've known gays, and friends of gays, and my mother was very interested in them.

Searching the Web for people for her to talk to, and visiting Web sites, I learned about exgay therapy. The more I read, the more it horrified me. I started looking for people I could work with to give people with unwanted sga some better possibilities. That eventually led me to B-A.

I have a sort of Don Quixote complex impelling me irresistibly to gallop to the aid of people in distress, especially where I see injustice. First it was the people who lost touch with many dear friends when the GeoCities chat rooms were reorganized. I spent hours roaming the rooms looking for lost friends, and submitted ideas to GeoCities for ways to help them. Then it was the people with prize-winning and community-serving Web pages, who were shamelessly betrayed when their pages were carelessly sabotaged by the GeoCities Watermark. Now it's gays, all gays, whichever way they decide to turn.

My Journey

There's no history of homosexuality in my life. The experiences I think are most relevant here are the ones on both sides of the faith divide. Most of my life I've been practicing and promoting a way of life that includes rigorous observance of practices I've recognized as commandments of God. Simultaneously, for many years I suffered, sometimes excruciatingly and catastrophically, from doubts about my salvation associated with other people's views about me.

The earliest religious experience I remember was learning the twenty-third psalm and the Lord's prayer from my big sister. I have precious memories of reciting that psalm, and the comfort it brought me.

For several years while I was in elementary school, I attended children's classes at the Baha'i House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois. I don't remember specifically what we did. Mostly what I remember is how good it felt, and how much I loved my teacher. I know what children have always studied in Baha'i classes. Most of all how the different kinds of people in the world are all part one family, and how good it is that we're so different. About the prophets of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the other religions of the world, and their common service to one plan of God. About fellowship and collaboration with people of all races, nations, classes, and religions. About the equality of women and men. About the spiritual dimensions of life, and developing spiritual qualities and virtues. About practicing your occupation in a spirit of service as a form of worship. I see now that the values I clung to in high school in interpersonal relationships, that collided with dominant social conventions, came from that training.

Just before seventh grade I moved, and for several years had virtually no contact with the Baha'i Faith. I attended an Evangelical and Reformed church. I have fond memories of the confirmation class, the friends I made there, and the things we did together, including Christmas caroling and a summer camp. One memory of the classes that stands out is the time we discussed whether Jesus was really the Messiah. In fact, I was the one who actually asked the question, but I'm sure now I was just the first to see where the teacher was leading us. Of course we concluded that Jesus was truly the Messiah.

One turning point I remember in my faith journey is wondering how our consciousness could continue after death, if it's an activity of our brains. Someone whose opinions I took very seriously said "What makes you think it does?" That gave me a lot to think about, and from that time I moved steadily towards atheism, possibly assisted by Ayn Rand, arriving some time in my first or second year of college. Even as a confirmed atheist, I never lost my admiration for Jesus, as I knew Him from the gospels. I knew that some people were doubting His very existence, but I never believed that ordinary people could invent a character that could affect people across 2000 years the way He affected me. It puzzled me why He would indulge people's superstitions about God, but I trusted Him to have good reasons.

I admired Baha'u'llah in the same way, with the same questions, and the Baha'i Faith was still my favorite religion because of its social implications. From my first year in college I had two books with Baha'i writings, which I devoured, in search of practical applications. I also read some other books which opened me up to the possibility of the universe being designed by Someone or Something. Baha'u'llah's words about Christ increased my reverence for Christ, and devotion to Him.

Christians whose only spiritual interest in others is saving them always annoyed me. I'll refer to them here as "salvation-minded Christians." They seemed mean-spirited, superstitious, and obnoxious. Some of the tracts about the devil, and going to hell if you didn't do this or that, seemed obscene to me. Those people seemed like alien creatures to me. I wanted to be at one with all the people of the world, but with them I couldn't see how it could ever be possible. One thing I especially liked about the writings of Baha'u'llah was that they gave me hope of reconciling with salvation-minded Christians. Baha'u'llah seemed to understand everything they were talking about, and to uphold it, without scorning the human mind and offending my sense of justice the way they did.

I became friends with a member of Campus Crusade For Christ, and had some discussions with him about the plan of salvation. Eventually that led to me inviting Christ into my life. I remember that the hardest part of entrusting myself to Him was the fear of becoming like those Christians who offended me so much. That was the ultimate test for me of my trust in Christ. Unexpectedly, since then I've never felt alone the way I used to. I sometimes feel alone in my pursuit of some interest or other, but never Completely Alone.

Another turning point I remember in my faith journey was in 1969, at Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City, Florida. I was still studying the writings of Baha'u'llah, and trying to practice whatever I honestly could. I had advanced fairly well in my understanding of what it could mean to talk about God. I admired very much the work of the Baha'i community, and wanted to support it, but was held back from joining by doubts about some of the claims of Baha'u'llah, as I understood them. Most of all the claim that the return of Christ was fulfilled with the appearance of Baha'u'llah. I wasn't sure just what Christ meant in talking of His return, but what Baha'is were saying about it seemed to me to be really stretching things.

One day I was reading something in the writings of Baha'u'llah, and suddenly I recognized the voice of Christ, as I had come to know Him from the gospels. Not someone imitating Christ. Christ. That's how it felt to me. I think it would be futile to try to substantiate it. That's my description of what happened to me. I exclaimed, "It is Him, it really is Him."

I wrote a letter to my mom: "What do I do to join the Baha'i Faith?" I dropped it in the slot at the post office, then went to get my incoming mail. There was a letter from my mom: "By the way, if you ever come to your senses and decide to join the Baha'i Faith..." with an address of someone to contact. That person put me in touch with someone in Tallahassee who invited me to a public proclamation at the University of West Florida. For some reason I hesitated to go. I decided that when I went to the mess hall to eat, I would invite someone at the table go with me, and if he agreed, I would go. The person I met and invited agreed to go, and he afterwards became the second best companion I've ever had.

At the proclamation in Tallahassee, at the entrance to the auditorium:

"I'm looking for Dr. H. Do you know him?"

The woman I was later to discover was Mrs. H. replied with an amused smile, "Yes, I do," and took me to meet him. She introduced me to him, then he introduced me to her, and to their children, one of whom, Patty, is now my wife.

A few visits later, I joined the Baha'i Faith. That was the beginning of my calvary of struggling with the view of salvation-minded Christians that I'm not saved, that I don't really know Christ. By this time my study of the writings of Baha'u'llah had convinced me that there really is such a thing as eternal life, and that we do have a choice to make, with Dreadful Consequences if we choose wrong. To the best of my knowledge and understanding I had chosen right in following Baha'u'llah, but according to all salvation-minded Christians I ever met I had chosen wrong. I'm never willing to scornfully dismiss other people's points of view, no matter how incontrovertible mine seems to me, or how ludicrous and contemptible theirs. I always feel a sense of responsibility to look for the truth in other people's views, including the view that I'm wrong.

For about the next ten years I worried off and on about the meaning of salvation and whether I had thought the right thoughts, said the right words, felt the right feelings, and/or taken the right steps, in order to be saved. This happened more or less often, depending on my encounters with salvation-minded Christians. Every soul-saving group had its own gimmick for convincing others they hadn't truly been baptized yet. Even bona fide, baptized, born-again Christians weren't safe. You weren't really baptized if you weren't immersed. It wasn't true baptism if you didn't speak in tongues. If you were really saved you'd have the same arrogant assurance of your salvation as your evangelist. They hit the jackpot with me. "There is no other name..." "No man cometh unto the father but by me..." "Whoso addeth to the words of this book..." False prophets, wolves in sheep's clothing, another gospel. You name it, I got clobbered with it. I went over it all again and again, combing the Bible and the words of Baha'u'llah, praying and meditating. I'm very happy with all the things I learned in the process, but it was agonizing at times.

Some time around 1980 I had a crisis which I think was an outgrowth of all this. For a period of many months I was literally paralyzed for hours on end, nearly every day, unable to move because of internal debates about what I should be doing. I didn't dare talk to anyone about it, not even Patty. I was terrified and ashamed of what was happening to me. I still don't know how to explain it to anyone. I think I eventually talked to Patty and to my mother about it, in vague terms.

I finally developed a personal program of prayer, study, and making notes about my internal debates, and gradually came out of it. Since then I haven't agonized any more about my salvation, although I still give full consideration to what other people say about it.

History of my thoughts and feelings about gays and homosexuality.

The earliest thing I remember is hearing the words "homo" and "queer" used jokingly among my friends in junior high school. For example, if one guy got too close to another, the other might say "Get away from me, you queer!" I don't remember anyone thinking anyone really was gay. Certainly I never associated someone being called "queer" with sexual relationships. I just thought of it as a guy being mushy with guys.

Maybe I'd better explain my ideas at that time about sex in general. When I was going to school, everybody was still pretending to disapprove of "going all the way," outside of marriage, with varying degrees of disapproval from one person to another for necking and petting. Girls were understood to want to save something for marriage, and guys were understood to want everything now. Of course every guy expected the girl he married to be a virgin. There were two kinds of girls, girls who would "do it," and girls a guy might want to marry. I'm talking about the popular mythology, not necessarily what everybody really thought.

It was understood that a guy would try to get a girl to have sex with him by trying to make her think he loved her and always would. A nice girl, if she had sex at all, would do it only with the guy she thought was her one in the world.

My dating behavior was partly influenced by the complaints I'd heard from my big sister about what octopuses boys were. The thought uppermost in my mind when I started dating, as far as sex was concerned, was not to be an octopus. As a result, I never so much as held hands with a girl until my second year in college. That meant that whenever I fell in love in high school, it was without the slightest possibility of sex in mind. I didn't even fantasize the slightest eroticism with the girls I fell in love with. Romance and sex were entirely and irrevocably dissociated in my mind.

This dissociation extended to my thoughts and feelings about gays. I didn't at that time associate being gay with same-gender sex. I knew that sometimes boys masturbated each other, and I knew about oral and anal sex, but I didn't connect them with being gay.

It was the same way later, when I sometimes heard my mother, an amateur freudian therapist, talking about gays, who were some of her favorite clients. I thought of gays as men who only fall in love with men. I'm not sure I ever thought of lesbians at all. The only connection I made between gays and sex was that I knew some women like being around gay men because they don't have to worry about warding off advances.

All this was before I ever heard about any of the social issues, so I never did any deep thinking about gays and homosexuality.

The first time I remember thinking seriously about gays and homosexuality was when someone who was thinking of joining the Baha'i Faith was hesitating because of the prohibition against sex outside of heterosexual marriages. She wasn't lesbian, but she had friends who were gay, and this law seemed to her to be terribly unfair. I did a lot of thinking about that, and wrote an essay about it for her. She was apparently satisfied and finally decided to join. I won't try to reproduce that essay here, but there are some things I remember about it that show I was leaning towards equality from the very beginning.

1. There was nothing in my essay about sga being defective in any way. From the very beginning I never saw sga in itself as a problem or a symptom of a problem. I suppose it was at that time that I became aware that all the feelings I've ever had for women, I sometimes have for men. At that time I didn't try to confirm my capacity to be sexually stimulated by a man's body.

2. I didn't assume that anyone who really wanted to could learn oga. I understood that for a lot of people, giving up same-gender sex would in practice mean giving up sex altogether for life, and I agreed that it was a lot to ask, and did seem unfair.

Fast forward to the mid eighties. I learned that a friend of mine was gay. About all this meant to me was that Patty could be more comfortable with him than just about any other man, and that I associated some of the things I like about him with his homosexuality. We both loved his company. The only trouble I know of that he had with other people was that another couple we knew never invited him to their house. We never talked about the social issues surrounding gays.

Later when he decided to give up sgb, I offered him some of my ideas about how he might be able to acquire oga. By this time I had become more aware of a connection between being gay and having same-gender sexual relationships. He said that he didn't doubt that, in purely sensual terms, he could enjoy sex with a woman. The problem was that it wouldn't mean anything to him. That put a different light on things for me. I realized that suggesting he could learn oga was a little like telling someone whose girlfriend just broke up with him that he could learn to love someone else! Even so, most of the implications of that were lost on me at the time.

Years later, after my arrival in the U.S. and my initiation to the Web, someone I was corresponding with talked about the way gays had been blamed for some scandal about people getting AIDS through blood transfusions. That may have been what originally inspired my research on the Internet that eventually led me the SOS I described above, and later to Bridges Across.

After that SOS, I agonized a lot over the plight of people with sga who disapprove of homosexuality, and who think there's something wrong with them. I wanted desperately to find some way to reach them and reassure them. I started working on some Web pages to help them affirm their same-gender love and practice their heterosexian convictions at the same time.

The next development in my thinking was when I first learned that people were debating about job discrimination against gays, and marriage for gay couples. I hesitated a few seconds, or possibly even a few minutes, over the question of allowing sgb-affirming gays to be teachers, for example, before realizing how ludicrous it would be not to. Marriage was more of a struggle. It seemed unthinkable to support the idea of same-gender civil marriage. It seemed almost like recanting my faith. To explain how I overcame this, I'll use an example from mathematics.

I'm very skilled in mathematics, but I sometimes make mistakes. There are times when I can tell my result is wrong, even though I can't find any mistakes in my work.

It was the same way with civil marriage for gay couples. No matter how incontrovertible it seemed to me, according to my theories, that gay couples shouldn't be allowed to marry, something told me there had to be something wrong somewhere. I went over and over it, and couldn't find my mistake. Finally, I just did what some people call "taking a leap of faith." I prayed for guidance and protection, and simply willed myself to accept civil marriage for gay couples. Since then I've found what I think are very good reasons for people with conscientious objections to homosexuality to favor the elimination of gender considerations from civil marriage laws.

Some time before I started at B-A, I explored the NARTH site, and it nauseated me. Apart from the case studies in homophobia I found there, I've never agreed with trying to get rid of a person's sga, or trying to change a person's orientation. My thoughts revolve around making the best of human capacities, and there I see people trying to undermine human capacities. It seems like the opposite of what's needed even for someone who wants to give up sgb. I can't think of any reason for anyone trying to get rid of sga, that doesn't offend me. NARTH was clearly doing things abhorrent to me, and I imagined that the ministries were doing the same things. My visit to a local ministry, and what I learned from Carlton and Sonia, changed my mind about the ministries, although I've never been able to find out everything I need to know to be completely reassured.

I wanted desperately to keep gays away from programs that devalue sga. Besides the harmful emotional effects, I think the expectation of losing sga, and the expectation of changing orientation, are enough in themselves to explain the failure rates of those programs. I'm still hoping for that to change, and still looking for ways I can help it change. I think a person who values her sga, and her relationships with other gays and whatever gay communities she's been a part of, will be in a much better position to learn to manage her sexual relationships the way she wants to and even eventually to have a happy and successful marriage with a person of the other sex.

Some of the discussions at B-A have made me aware that what's being promoted by gay rights advocates, especially what they're promoting for public schools, is likely to lead to unfair treatment of people with conscientious objections to homosexuality. I'll do whatever I can to alleviate that, but I don't consider it an excuse for anyone to oppose any efforts for gay equality, including those involving the public schools.

My position on social and moral issues:

As far as public policy is concerned, I think it's wrong for any policy to be designed to discriminate against gays.

As far as faith communities are concerned, I want the disagreements to be worked out within each community in accordance with the provisions of that community for conflict resolution, without external interference, including harassment. Personally I think any discrimination based on orientation alone is wrong for any community. I'm not opposed to churches defining marriage as strictly heterosexual, but in most cases I think it's hypocritical in view of the way they've accommodated frivolous marriages and divorces and other abuses of marriage.

I don't think there should be any more interference with healing ministries than with any other religious outreach, but I think they're wrong to single out homosexuality as a problem in itself. I don't agree with devaluing sga, or trying to change a person's orientation, but I think people should be free to make their own decisions about that and not have them made by others. I think the ministries probably serve some people better than anything else available.

As far as the morality of homosexual relationships is concerned, in my view it would be wrong to make any categorical statement about it. Some Baha'is may do so, citing Baha'i writings about marriage, sexual prohibitions, and chastity, and letters from Baha'i institutions responding to questions about homosexuality. I endorse those writings and those responses, but I maintain that in my view it would be wrong to make any categorical statement about the morality of homosexual relationships. If two people are enjoying sexual pleasure together, knowing they're both women or both men isn't enough for me to know it's wrong.

Some Baha'i principles that I do think are relevant to social issues surrounding gays are justice, the elimination of prejudice, the equality of women and men, consultation, the complementarity of science and religion, universal human fellowship and companionship, the development of human virtues and capacities, making the best of our diversity to be all we can be together, the social role of families, and the education of children.

Here are some of the ways I apply Baha'i writings on marriage and chastity:

I'm working to spread the knowledge and love of God. I'm practicing and promoting permanent marriage, and responsible and competent parenting, in all families, including those formed by gay couples. I'm working for better recognition and support of all families, including those formed by gay couples. I'm working to strengthen all families, including those formed by gay couples, and make better use of their capacities. I'm practicing and promoting volunteer work with children and youth. I'm working for the equality of women and men. I'm working for gay equality. I'm working to promote appreciation of gays, their relationships, and their distinctive cultural contributions. I'm working to dispel common myths about love, marriage, romance and sex. I'm working for every person on earth to have everything she needs to develop her capacities and combine them with those of others in fellowship and service. Those are some of the things I think will best serve my beliefs about God's recommendations for sex and marriage.

Why gays?

I don't know. It seems to be much more than a passing interest this time. It seems to be a genuine calling. Is it because my mother was so proud of befriending some of them? Is it because of my same-gender attractions, which I've always thought are common to everyone, whether they recognize them or not? Is it because it was such a deep concern to some people I've known? Is it because it's such a challenge to combine unqualified equality with shameless heterosexism? Is it because of that lonely SOS in a mailing list? I don't know. I only know it won't let go.

Economic activity

I've worked most of my life in computer programming and help desk, but in 1999 I started working as a grounds worker, partly in connection with my ideas about economic justice, and partly for my health.

Jim

text © 2000 Community Jim ("Apprentice")