Reverend Miak Siew

But I still kept running away until September 11 happened. And there was a very profound experience then. I was affected because I had a few friends who were working in New York, and I was wondering about their safety. The fortunate thing was that they were safe; they weren't affected. They weren’t in the Towers when it happened. But it weighed on me a lot. I felt a connection with the loss and with the senseless deaths. 

Back then, I got a message going around that a group of people were doing a candlelight vigil at the botanical gardens across the road from the United States Embassy. My friend and I decided to go. We wanted to do something. We didn’t know what to do but taking part in the candlelight vigil was what we thought we could do.

So we gathered maybe about 15 people. And I led, but I felt more than ‘led.’ I felt as though the words were placed on my tongue to speak; to speak to why we were gathered together, that we were all in connection with one another, and with the losses on the other side of the planet. We felt it, too. 

We were separated with less than six degrees of separation. We all knew someone affected by September 11, and we didn’t know how it would pan out and impact the world in the future. We sang the only hymn I knew and had memorized, “Amazing Grace.” We observed a minute of silence. After that, I felt a profound sense of God, of the Divine, saying, "It’s time for you to come back. I’ve never rejected you. Stop running away." 

And that began my journey reconciling my faith and sexuality. And through the years, even up to the point where, in 2007 I decided to quit my job and head to seminary. I wasn’t the person that I would think would be called to become a pastor. I was a snarky gay man. And if you can think of those whose words can slice people and draw blood…my friends knew to not “piss Miak off because he’s not someone who you want to offend. He can be very snarky.” It was a nice way of putting it because I’d had a string of boyfriends, but nothing stable. I was more like the Samaritan woman by the well in the Bible, the woman who’d had five husbands. The man she was with was not her husband. Her character resonated with me a lot. 

And I kept struggling because I felt a call. And then I went crazy. Why would I want to be the one doing it? There were other people in church who were a lot more qualified and who were people I considered holy. And it was through the seminary process, talking to the late Reverend Yap, talking to a few people in church, who confirmed my own call. Reverend Yap was very encouraging. One of the leaders of the church laughed in my face, and then he apologized. He said, “It’s so ridiculous, it cannot but come from God.” 

Looking back, it was also that transformation of who I was to who I am today. It was the kind of transformation that the Divine can have in our lives. From a person who could be snarky, who used words to hurt, to a person who uses words to heal, to push for peace. That journey is one that I am very humbled by…that, and how God works in all the little minute things in our lives.