Sally Sarratt and Maria Swearingen

My two years in New York was a transformational time. It was the first place that I could imagine the possibility of being a person of faith and a person who loved someone of the same gender. It was the first place I had seen it, the first place I had seen queer people in church, period. And a church that said, “This is good. You are wonderful. You’re the beloved of God.” And that was back in I996, so it’s been a while ago now, too. 

I say that one of the reasons my own vocational journey has made such a very big circuitous route is that I needed to have time to make room for myself. To describe faith, or my experience of God—it has just kept expanding. And in that expansion, I find room for myself, too. 

It was really and truly the encounter with Maria that made it very clear to me that, yes, this is love like I’ve never experienced before. This whole circuitous journey came together at once. In that, I knew love, and I had a far more profound sense of my own calling.

That longing, that vocation, that calling towards people, towards questions of faith, accessing wisdom, all the different words for it; I think those things were happening at the same time and then it just all just started to come together. And these things don’t make sense, they don’t fit together. I don’t know how to live into all of it, to the fullness of myself, and yet….

You know you get pricked alive by love too, right? Pricked open. Yeah. One of the very first things that Maria ever declared to me was, “You have a pastor’s heart.” So, it was this being seen and known in the fullness of self, which I think is part of what the whole point of faith and religious experience is—to be fully human and to encounter others as fully human.

Probably the most significant time I relied upon faith was in the process of coming out to family, coming out to myself, making sense of how that shaped identity, and future, and vocation, and calling. I was in seminary at the time. I was both relying on a God that I hoped would be up for it and also sort of relying on a God I hadn’t met before. Like there was a new and brewing conception of God being formed while I was also relying on that God. So, it was a strange and wondrous time.

Sometimes I joke that everyone should have to come out of something just to see what happens to the soul. Just to kind of  jiggle things up. It was a deeply spiritual process to face myself; to face that wall of uncertainty of others. Like, where will this go? Where will this not go? What will be lost? In there, I have deep and profound experiences of all of it: of great loss, of great gain, of great joy, of great heartache, and I think all of that in its own way is fortifying for the soul. 

A friend and colleague taught us a helpful re-frame for coming out. It is to imagine it as ‘inviting in’ instead of ‘coming out’ because it changes the locus of gravity and power. When you’re coming out, it’s just this never-ending revolving door of anxiety: “And I’m gonna come out now…. And I’m gonna come out now.... And I hope it goes well.... And I don’t know if it will….” This is versus inviting in, saying, “This is my life, and this is the force field of my life. And I'm telling you that I trust you enough to welcome you into it.”  

And that was a pretty cataclysmic moment for me—that shift of language—to understand it. It still is coming out. There’s still vulnerability and anxiety, but like shifting it to re-centering myself as sort of the locus. And saying, “Actually, I’m inviting you in. And you may accept or reject that invitation. Please keep me posted. RSVP. But this is your invitation into my life.”

The capacity to love is just the most bizarre and wondrous mystery. It can be wrenching, but wow, is it incredible when we find that centered place that we can love from and be loved by. I have the capacity to be a participant in giving life to people. It’s pretty mind-boggling when we take long enough to reflect on it. I see that expressed in life and marriage with Sally, in deep and abiding and consistent and unexpected ways over and over again. When I’m counseling a couple who are thinking about marriage, or are going to be married, I talk about what it means to try to choose or build a life with someone who helps you fall in love with the world.