Читать книгу The Courage to Be Queer - Jeff Hood - Страница 7

Theology is based in story. In stories we find the epicenter of queerness. No two stories are exactly the same. In the midst of the pursuit of meaning, most of us look to the world to give us answers. We place our person in categories and identities to define who we are and what God is.1 The sinfulness of such a method is that it assumes that the meaning of the self or God comes from somewhere other than within. We are unique queers created in the image of a God who is queer beyond our normative constructions.2 God the Queer lives in our queer stories. The Queer is always connected to our own experiences. How could the Queer not be? We all exist and seek meaning from within our own person. In this life, we will never know the eternal fullness of the Queer within, because we don’t have the knowledge of eternal fullness of the meaning of past, present, or future, but we never stop seeking. Queering consistently unsettles in order to point to something far beyond our normative constructions. In our unsettling exploration, we begin the journey to become the fullness of the Queer in whose image we are made.

Though no two explorations are ever the same, this project is intended to offer the reader an example of what a radical queer orthodoxy grounded in the self can look like when we take the discovery and experience of the Queer within and apply it to Scripture. There will be those who question my emphasis on Scripture; I don’t blame them. Throughout my life, I have seen Scripture used to normatize, manipulate, and control. For those who are skeptical, I invite you to think about this project as an exorcism. I am queering the fundamental religious text of my spiritual tradition in order to shake the demons out. Queering is a means of exorcism. We exorcise the normative, or sin, in order to remove all obstacles to the Queer. We begin with the normative obstacles in our own experiences. I can think of no more normative of an obstacle in my life to the Queer than Scripture.

The queer approach I take is an invitation for others to join me. I seek to encourage others to explore and interact with the queer moments in their lives to create queer lenses that can help them better understand themselves and the world around them. When we begin to allow the self to be queered and we work to queer the world around us, we start to create honest community and social change based on difference rather than normative constructions of sameness. In queering the world, we begin the process of removing all obstacles to the Queer and each other. Though my story and exploration are queer to me, I long for this project to provide exemplification and inspiration for others to begin their own queer theological explorations. In the unity of the exploration of our queerness, I believe we can excise the demons in us and resurrect the Queer in our world.

—Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood

February 2015

1. The use of the term “we” throughout this project does not mean that I assume all readers are in agreement with me. I use it out of a sense of formality and as an invitation for readers to “think with” me on this theological journey.

2. A constructive understanding of this identifier will be discussed further into the introduction.