“THE CONTEMPLATIVE ON her knees well knows the messy entanglement of sexual desire and desire for God,” writes theologian Sarah Coakley. If she’s right, then attending to what arouses us sensually can teach us something about how God lures us through our longing and, even, how we can attract God’s intimacy. This month, we’re exploring how queer theology can invigorate (dare I say, stimulate?) the anticipation we build throughout Advent. This approach may seem blasphemous to some who aren’t familiar with a queer-affirming lens ... and perhaps uncomfortable to some who are. Many of us are steeped in Christian body-denying theologies and moralities. We are uncomfortable meeting God in ways that are playful, erotic, unnerving, and always cognizant of power dynamics (though scripture is steeped with such sexual innuendo). Queer theology starts from (rather than argues for) not just queer affirmation, but queer celebration. It can expose the erotic dimensions of our sacred stories to reveal God’s wild and promiscuous desire for all creation.
December is a season for sending Christmas cards depicting the Holy Family — perhaps the most heteronormative image in the church year: A mom and dad stare lovingly at their beautiful baby. This static image can obscure the mess of desire, power, submission, and surprising gender fluidity required to incarnate this Holy Child. What moves in us as we ponder the design of different Christmas images that don’t shy away from this beautiful mess? What images help us face the wonder and terror of what it feels like to be undone and remade by God’s overcoming?
December 3
Transgressive Devotion
Isaiah 64:1-9; Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19;
1 Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:24-37
THROUGHOUT HISTORY, CHRISTIANS have described the intensity of Divine union using erotic language. Consider the mystics, depicted most famously in Bernini’s sculpture “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” (1652) in the tiny church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. Thousands of Christians pray with this saint each year — her heart pierced by an angel’s arrow, her face fixed in the permanent expression of what can only be described as a holy (and, frankly, epic-looking) orgasm. (Sidebar: Teresa of Ávila is also patron saint of headaches, just in case her devotees don’t feel up for prayer some nights.) Even Augustine, whom history has miscast as a sex-phobic prude, quipped in his Confessions , “Lord, give me chastity ... but not yet.”
Advent is the season of desire’s buildup. Scripture shows desire’s general shape. The prophet Isaiah reminds us that we wait on a God who makes the mountains quake and whose heat causes water to boil (64:1-2). What if we joined with St. Teresa’s ecstatic exploration or even Augustine’s playful repression to uncover the hidden ways we quake, shake, and get set afire? If we give desire’s general shape some intimate specificity, might we entice God to intensify and satisfy the longings we most need to embrace?
December 10
Just as We Are
Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13;
2 Peter 3:8-15; Mark 1:1-8
IN A PIVOTAL scene of the 2001 movie Bridget Jones’s Diary, Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) stammers awkwardly (as only white male English love interests can do) to the titular Bridget (Renée Zellweger), “I like you. Very much. Just as you are.” He doesn’t want to be with her despite her supposed faults; he wants to be with her because of them. Apparently, this is the height of straight romance in 2001, because Bridget’s friends are incredulous when she tells them: “Just as you are?! Not thinner? Not cleverer? Not with slightly bigger breasts and a slightly smaller nose?” Bridget (a modern spin on Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice ) reminds viewers that the unrealistic, patriarchal expectations put on women’s romantic lives still hold sway.
But who among us hasn’t felt unworthy of desire? These feelings might awaken in us when we hear this week’s epistle where, as God’s “beloved” await “his” arrival, they’re told to “strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish” (2 Peter 3:14). We can try to cover up these feelings with blanket promises that God wants us ... just as we are. But if we don’t grapple with the impossible paradox of being simultaneously unworthy and worthy — that our unworthiness is what actually makes us worthy — then it becomes nearly impossible to accept the impossible love God longs to give us.
December 17
Canticle of the Turning
Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; Luke 1:46-55; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8, 19-28
WHEN MY SPOUSE and I wed, we walked the aisle to the “Canticle of the Turning,” a hymn based on Mary’s Magnificat in Luke 1, played by our friend Mick on acoustic guitar. No Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” on organ for us! Resisting how our culture valorizes romantic love — especially heterosexual romantic love — with weddings personalized down to the couple’s most minute preferences and at astronomical costs, we entered the chapel praying, like Mary, that God would use our insignificance, not our specialness, to God’s glory. Mary’s prayer declares that God uses what is lowly and insignificant to bless the lowly. My spouse and I wanted our life together to do the same.
Unlike Mary, I can safely say that my spouse and I have not lived up to our noble justice-oriented goals. The years have taught us that wedding vows are more often aspirational than achievable. (If you don’t believe me, ask any married person how much they cherish their spouse when their spouse has a cold.) Yet, with Mary, the two of us pray that God might bless our union in the places where it does not live up to our aspirations, rather than in the places where it does. And may that same blessing be for the building up of God’s topsy-turvy kingdom, not only for the two of us as we build our life together.
December 24
Consent at Its Core
2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16; Psalm 89:1-4, 19-26; Romans 16:25-27; Luke 1:26-38
GOD, IN GOD'S power, uses Mary’s lowliness in Luke 1:26-38 to bless the entire world. How do we hold this tension with the social and historical context that we read from now? We know that powerful men usingless powerful women is wrong, consent can be coerced, and we still have no idea how to talk about women’s agency in such situations.
Christians often ignore any similarity that Luke’s annunciation story has to other divine impregnation myths (such as Leda and the Swan in Greek mythology), and thus completely avoid any question of divine rape or sexual pleasure. We believe God is good, so we refuse to engage the former (though some feminist theologians name this scene as Mary’s #metoo moment). If we admit the possibility of sexual pleasure, though, just how good is God? Queer theology’s boundary-pushing playfulness might be helpful here.
When the angel tells Mary not to be afraid, that “the Holy Spirit [She/Her] will come upon [her]” to create life in her womb (Luke 1:30-35), queer theology might help us expose rather than hide the power differentials to expand our understanding of Mary’s consent and submissive agency. Mary’s submission is a prototype for the Christian’s submission to God in prayer — with consent at its core. Picturing Mary naming the Divine/human power differential head on as the Spirit approaches her, and even deploying it toward her own pleasure, helps me navigate my own prayerful consent to God’s agency intermingling with my own will. After all, if Mary’s submission was as good for her as it was for the world, then wouldn’t we want God to be that good to us also?
December 31
Christmas Cards
Isaiah 61:10 - 62:3; Psalm 148;
Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:22-40
THE PROMISE OF Christmas is a promiscuous one. In Isaiah 61, the prophet confirms God’s marital union with Israel (see verses 10-11), while also claiming this union’s fecundity to be the revelation that will draw wider circles of humanity into it. Preparing to bring God’s exiled lover home — to return Israel to its rightful chosen place in Jerusalem — Isaiah preaches not just the restorative but also the universalizing moves God’s preparations will create. The New Testament is full of marital metaphors too!
So, here’s a Christmas card I’d like to see: Snap the photo just as Simeon proclaims Jesus as the one in whom God’s promiscuous salvation is fulfilled (Luke 2:30). Catch the Holy Family’s reaction: Mother and stepfather look upon Christ “amazed”: Really? Our kid? Are you sure? A trick of the light catches the wisp of the Holy Spirit’s fingers as She caresses the virgin’s lapis robe. Joseph jostles for a moment with the Father—there’s tension there. Donor or daddy? It will take centuries of fighting and creeds to figure that one out. A single branch holds up this family tree, with one wild olive shoot grafted into and through it. Who knows how many more shoots await to take hold under this promiscuous promise. Quick, snap the picture!
Natalie Wigg-Stevenson, curator of the online resource “Transgressive Devotional” and author of Transgressive Devotion: Theology as Performance Art, teaches at Emmanuel College in Toronto.
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