A couple of weeks back I shared a popular Atlantic article about the decline in church attendance with our church council. The next day our church administrator said to me, “You know what’s missing from that Atlantic article? Women’s work!” I’ll admit to a certain level of blindness on this front. I’m a man and so I always have to be intentional, or be called out, so as not to overlook the issue of gender in institutional contexts.
As an 87 year old woman, I appreciate being kept in the ‘know’ by a Pastor who is so progressive and well educated. The Lutheran Confessions are a wealth of information for me and remind me how much the Lutheran church which I have loved and worshipped in my entire life has evolved especially the ELCA Synod. Good Shepherd is a Godsend for me and my husband and we feel very fortunate to be able to worship on Sunday even though we can’t be as active as we were in our church in Denver. Thank you Pastor Clint, keep writing.
Years ago, I was a single gay man, raising his teenaged straight nephew in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco. It used to be called Eureka Valley, but that was long before my time living there. I resembled in color and height the working-class Irish immigrants who settled the the rolling hills a bit more than a half century earlier.
But the rest of that crew and their bars had long since pulled up their stakes and headed to pasty glens in Marin and Sonoma counties north of the City. By the time Harvey Milk and Dan White called the Castro and Mission District their respective homes in the 1950 and 60s, white flight was in full bloom.
During the 1980s, the neighborly fabric that clothed us had been woven and sewn by a large, skilled presence of lesbians who came in all shapes, sizes, colors, ages, drag, spiritualities, and histories. They were our memory and comforters as HIV/AIDS paraded itself as victor over gay and bisexual men, who had been swallowed whole by the very ground of this safe haven. It was the work of lesbian women that kept us whole.
I would like to call the Castro the church of lesbian leaders during the decade or so I considered it home for my nephew and me in the City, named for the mendicant friar Francesco. As a doctoral student and post-doc fellow at UC-San Francisco, there were many late afternoons when I depended on lesbians, who owned a string of small businesses on Castro from Market Street south to 17th, to answer phone calls from me about my nephew's whereabouts. Sadly, I could not wait at the station for him every day as he returned from middle or high school. I was often delayed on the UCSF campus.
Since his pattern was to exit the MUNI/BART stop at Milk Plaza, walking south toward our apartment in the 300 block of Eureka, I called one shop after another to ask if he had passed by already and when that was. Many times, he was in one shop or another where he was fed pastries and milk, so I had a minute or two to hear about his studies, homework, and give instructions about dinner preparation. Seldom was he out of school for more than three hours before I arrived home.
These good women parented Roland as much as I, and often they did it with less authoritarian overlay than my custom. Roland knew at least fifteen men who lived with AIDS who lived within a half block of us. He helped grocery shop for them, pick up their mail, listen to their physical complaints, and learn how to be present without platitudes or advice. Maybe he learned these skills from watching me. But I prefer to say he awoke to himself in the Castro--that's how God knit Roland in his mother's womb. He attended their funerals, where he always sat next to one of his lesbian mamas. They often had prepared food for him and me and enough for the vagabond assembly at our meals after funerals.
Roland also discovered more catechesis of Christ from these women who were among what they might consider Nones and Dones today. My brief anecdotes fit well with the ways Michael Plekon paints of the community as church in his 2021 Cascade Books monograph, 'Community as Church / Church as Community.' I cite Michael's book because its fourth chapter, "More Resurrection: New Identity, New Life, Simplicity, and Back to the Table," reminds me of the tent or clothes I said the Castro lesbians had woven and sewn for us. Give thanks to the Holy One, for all that is good.
As an 87 year old woman, I appreciate being kept in the ‘know’ by a Pastor who is so progressive and well educated. The Lutheran Confessions are a wealth of information for me and remind me how much the Lutheran church which I have loved and worshipped in my entire life has evolved especially the ELCA Synod. Good Shepherd is a Godsend for me and my husband and we feel very fortunate to be able to worship on Sunday even though we can’t be as active as we were in our church in Denver. Thank you Pastor Clint, keep writing.
Years ago, I was a single gay man, raising his teenaged straight nephew in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco. It used to be called Eureka Valley, but that was long before my time living there. I resembled in color and height the working-class Irish immigrants who settled the the rolling hills a bit more than a half century earlier.
But the rest of that crew and their bars had long since pulled up their stakes and headed to pasty glens in Marin and Sonoma counties north of the City. By the time Harvey Milk and Dan White called the Castro and Mission District their respective homes in the 1950 and 60s, white flight was in full bloom.
During the 1980s, the neighborly fabric that clothed us had been woven and sewn by a large, skilled presence of lesbians who came in all shapes, sizes, colors, ages, drag, spiritualities, and histories. They were our memory and comforters as HIV/AIDS paraded itself as victor over gay and bisexual men, who had been swallowed whole by the very ground of this safe haven. It was the work of lesbian women that kept us whole.
I would like to call the Castro the church of lesbian leaders during the decade or so I considered it home for my nephew and me in the City, named for the mendicant friar Francesco. As a doctoral student and post-doc fellow at UC-San Francisco, there were many late afternoons when I depended on lesbians, who owned a string of small businesses on Castro from Market Street south to 17th, to answer phone calls from me about my nephew's whereabouts. Sadly, I could not wait at the station for him every day as he returned from middle or high school. I was often delayed on the UCSF campus.
Since his pattern was to exit the MUNI/BART stop at Milk Plaza, walking south toward our apartment in the 300 block of Eureka, I called one shop after another to ask if he had passed by already and when that was. Many times, he was in one shop or another where he was fed pastries and milk, so I had a minute or two to hear about his studies, homework, and give instructions about dinner preparation. Seldom was he out of school for more than three hours before I arrived home.
These good women parented Roland as much as I, and often they did it with less authoritarian overlay than my custom. Roland knew at least fifteen men who lived with AIDS who lived within a half block of us. He helped grocery shop for them, pick up their mail, listen to their physical complaints, and learn how to be present without platitudes or advice. Maybe he learned these skills from watching me. But I prefer to say he awoke to himself in the Castro--that's how God knit Roland in his mother's womb. He attended their funerals, where he always sat next to one of his lesbian mamas. They often had prepared food for him and me and enough for the vagabond assembly at our meals after funerals.
Roland also discovered more catechesis of Christ from these women who were among what they might consider Nones and Dones today. My brief anecdotes fit well with the ways Michael Plekon paints of the community as church in his 2021 Cascade Books monograph, 'Community as Church / Church as Community.' I cite Michael's book because its fourth chapter, "More Resurrection: New Identity, New Life, Simplicity, and Back to the Table," reminds me of the tent or clothes I said the Castro lesbians had woven and sewn for us. Give thanks to the Holy One, for all that is good.