First Aid
(c) Melina Magdalena 2006
On Friday I got my Certificate in First Aid for Centres and Schools, all part of the process towards teacher’s registration in South Australia. The full-day course was held across town, and I arrived much earlier than I’d anticipated. Only one other participant was in the room when I looked in, a young woman who smiled at me from her seat. I took a seat beside her, careful to leave a seat between us in order to observe the social norms.
The course was made up almost entirely of women – new teachers and child care workers, and experienced teachers who had allowed their first aid certificates to lapse. No one sat between the young woman and me, but the last student to arrive, a young African man, sat to my right, and was my companion for the rest of the day.
The woman on my left was an ordinary white Australian woman in her early twenties, blonde, cheerful, somewhat plump and sure of herself. The one who came a few minutes later and sat on her left was the timid brunette type; thin, round-shouldered and still in braces.
They knew each other; whether from Uni they weren’t sure, or maybe it was from their church circles. I listened as they went through the verbal ping-pong, which established the shared contacts and experiences that would enable them to share their time and their table for the rest of the day.
One came from the country, the other from the hills. One attended a church where she was the only person her age in a congregation of over 70s. The other lives quite a distance from the church she goes to, but it has about 90 people of her age group in it. It transpired that she was already married, so I suppose she attends the young couples services.
I tuned out at this point, feeling there was much less possibility of common ground between us than there had been, and turned my attention to my copy of the first aid manual to see what the latest recommended treatment is, for snakebite in Australia. Then they began to discuss something that sounded more interesting.
The people in their churches are considering a split, a division of the old order and the new. They talked in vague terms – their mutual understanding meant it was not necessary to go into detail with each other, but I broke into the conversation at that point asking, “What are the issues?”
It was the bolder one who answered of course; the other one for all I know could herself be a latent lesbian. “The Church has decided to allow gays and lesbians to preach, and they’ve made this decision without consulting the people. We’re all against this of course. Not that we’re against gay people, we just don’t want them teaching us. And the thing is, practicing gays and lesbians are now going to be allowed to be ministers in our church.”
I looked her in the eye for a long moment, wondering what to say in the face of her blunt certainty. The ugly division she enunciated was raised in the air like a fiery cross. I could no longer see her words as a scaffold that could be used to attempt to bridge the distance between us. I allowed silence to fall. The moment ended, and I turned back to the first aid manual.
What irony that I, a feminist lesbian Jew, felt I had any reason to defend my Christian friends whose lives are impacted by the ordinary brutality of such reasonable people? Had I not that day already gone out of my way to breach the zone which excluded me, in order to seek training from the Red Cross, a supposedly neutral humanitarian organization which has existed for over 70 years but only last month voted to include Israel and a non-Christian, non-Muslim symbol to be displayed on its flags? *
On another day I would have felt vulnerable, excluded and resentful to be forced to keep such company. I guess my skin has thickened in the face of repeated similar incidents in which the assumptions of wider society that I am Christian and heterosexual impinge upon certain aspects of my identity that are often better left concealed.
It is unfortunate though, that having gained my first aid certificate, I still have no balm at my disposal to administer first aid to the torn hearts and minds of those around me who have no hope of belonging, simply because they can’t conform to the heterosexual norm.
I wanted to ask these two young women
1) What exactly are you afraid that gay and lesbian ministers will teach, given that their role is to represent the church you all belong to?
2) What do you mean ‘practicing gays and lesbians’? How is their teaching and preaching going to be any different whether they are sexually active or celibate?
3) How can it be, that you claim your church has excluded the opinions of every person who belongs to it, when in fact the church has worked for years through its own organization in order to reach this decision?
It seems to me that a human being who has chosen to enter the preaching profession is likely to be fairly convinced of his or her faith, and to feel inspired and moved in order to want to work as a minister under the shelter of the church that harbours this faith. Sexuality and religious conviction do not compete with one another, and nor are they mutually exclusive. They are two separate, sometimes overlapping aspects of identity.
Surely gay and lesbian people are not beating down the doors of churches in droves to demand they be admitted and accepted? As usual, ignorance and fear is disproportionate to education and experience.
I have heard Christians argue that the purpose of the devil is to lure human beings from the path of righteous heterosexuality into the ways of evil homosexuality. People who believe this will argue that advocates of the gay and lesbian ministry exist for the sole purpose of leading more Christians astray, to embrace an evil non-heterosexual lifestyle. They might add furthermore to their arguments that gays and lesbians who are convinced of their sincerity and faith, have been blinded by the devil in order to fulfil the devil’s aims, and that they are therefore not sincere, not faithful and not true Christians, but followers of evil.
I do not know how to converse with such people, and I don’t wish to associate with them. There is no room for dialogue, when I wish either to persuade them of my point of view, or to exclude them from my world, in exactly the same way they hold out only these options to me. The difference between us is that I have no ambitions to destroy them for their beliefs.
It is not something of a red herring, a distraction and an excuse, to focus upon ministers of religion who happen also to be not heterosexual, as harbingers of evil? To my way of thinking, there is no lack of evil in this world. Whom does it serve, to spend copious amounts of our time in casting suspicions upon our friends and neighbours, and to sit in judgment of their love?
·http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5104680.stm BBC News, 22 June, 2006 “Red Cross votes to admit Israel”, accessed online, 29/7/2006
·http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19640099-28737,00.html The Australian, July 1, 2006 “Schism looms over gay clergy”, accessed online, 29/7/2006.
·http://members.ozemail.com.au/~unitingnetwork/history1.html Chronology of the UCA Sexuality Debate accessed online, 29/7/2006.
