Guest Opinion: Christmas: A queer migration story

^{What’s your best Christmas memory? I grew up in Michigan, and have lived as an adult in New York, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Minnesota, all places where snow and cold and winter are an integral part of the story.} I remember the weather, but more tangibly I remember the people. Memory is the primary lens through which I perceive it. And my most intense memories are from right here in the San Francisco Bay Area. I love the stories of Christmas past, and every year I pray that this one – the one I’m having – will be the best one ever. Usually, that is true. Healthy nostalgia doesn’t lock us in the past. It brings the present into sharper focus. This year I especially long for Christmas comfort and joy.

A recently released podcast, “When We All Get to Heaven,” has rescued sound archives from 40 years ago from the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco, where I was the pastor in the 1980s and 1990s. I recently heard my much younger voice speaking to a congregation held in the grip of AIDS (before we called it more widely HIV). More than half of the people there were HIV infected, and we were all HIV affected. The virus threatened not only our life expectancy, but also diminished our ability to sustain hope. At that time, the typical trajectory between diagnosis and death was less than a year. I offered the solace of the ancient Christmas story, and paired it with the words of queer poet W.H. Auden, who wrote these words in his Christmas oratorio, “For the Time Being,” at a dire time in world history 40 years prior:

We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.

Hearing the recordings for the first time in years did trigger some sadness, but it brought back a visceral memory of the collective strength and solidarity that helped us get through those painful times. When we lit candles and sang “Silent Night,” we fervently believed in the power of the ancient story to empower us, and it did.

It’s such a clearly queer story that I find it hard to believe that so many people tell it without being changed by it. Joseph and Mary are an unwed couple, and most churches would chastise, if not exclude them, on that basis alone. A cruel and unfeeling government orders a census that requires them to be dislocated from their home, which makes them migrants during Mary’s pregnancy. There are heroes: Mary chooses her destiny in a story of bold defiance of social convention. Her cousin, Elizabeth, coaches her into letting joy be her guide, rejoicing with her. Angels bring messages of encouragement; only those living on the edges of society are able to hear them, and enjoy the celestial music that eludes the perceptions of people in power. An innkeeper offers the homeless couple a shelter, however modest, which brought back memories of the first queer youth shelters in the Castro, opened in the winter months, despite the heartless opposition of some neighbors. A chosen family is surrounded by love and light, and their divine qualities are seen by strangers from the East, who did not share their faith or culture. These magi, whose gender is not specified in the Christmas gospel, could well have been as startling in appearance as modern day queens like the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

Christmas has always been a story for outsiders. If it doesn’t shock you in some ways then you aren’t really paying attention to it. It’s a story that doesn’t end at the manger. The evil tyrant Herod orders a massacre, forcing the family to seek asylum in Egypt, leaving all that is familiar in order to seek a better, safer life in exile. How many of us have had to flee even family or home in order to have the freedom humans deserve in order to self-determine their destiny?

Many churches in places seeing Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity have created nativity scenes that capture what was happening then and translating them into stark reminders of what is happening now. St. Susanna Catholic Church in Dedham, Massachusetts, has garnered the attention of both government and religious authorities. The Archdiocese of Boston has demanded the removal of the church’s outdoor display featuring an empty cradle with the sign “ICE was here.” Its admonition that, “The people of God have the right to expect that, when they come to church, they will encounter genuine opportunities for prayer. ... The display should be removed, and the manger restored to its proper sacred purpose” entirely misses the point of this very queer migration story. The Christmas story is too powerful to surrender the interpretation of it to religious authorities who are afraid to challenge people in power. It’s time for people who are moved by this story’s true meaning to reclaim and proclaim it.

Christmas has an inevitable and irresistible power to stir hope and action. My Christmas came early at a secular event on World AIDS Day at the National AIDS Memorial Grove in San Francisco. Despite an edict from a modern-day imperial palace not to observe the day, hundreds of us gathered there, glad to still be alive, in many instances its own miracle, and we recommitted to our promise to see an end to HIV/AIDS in our lifetime, even as we see the terrible effects of the canceling of USAID medical assistance abroad and the callous dismantling of our health care system in our country.

I felt Christmas hope stirring again witnessing the thousands participating in the annual procession for Our Lady of Guadalupe on International Boulevard near my home in Oakland last week. This was a defiant show of resistance and strength, powered by faith.

And last week at the annual San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus concert in San Francisco, I felt it tangibly in my body as the queer angel choir performed a verse of “Silent Night” in American Sign Language. Memories flooded my entire being as they enacted this ancient story, using only their bodies to convey their joy. When we’re singing about a long-ago baby in Bethlehem, we must also care about the suffering children in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel as well as everyone vulnerable to gun violence.

Find a place to celebrate your body and your spirit this Christmas. Derive strength from the example of resilient words becoming flesh, light candles alone or with others, and claim your Christmas joy. Queery Christmas and Justice New Year!

The Reverend Jim Mitulski, a gay man, is the pastor of the open and affirming Congregational Church of the Peninsula UCC in Belmont, California. It will have a Christmas Eve service Wednesday, December 24, at 9 p.m. For more information, visit ccpeninsula.org.