Liz grew up in Arkansas but considers both Arkansas and NYC to be home in a deep and even spiritual sense. Her mom was a musician and public school and her father was an executive with the Red Cross and other disaster relief organizations. She currently lives in NYC with her two sons. Liz enjoys movies, theater, reading the print edition of the NY Times with a cup of coffee. She is a priest, while deeply devoted to her traditions, considers Pride Sunday her highest holy day. So much so that she has marched in Pride nearly every year for the 25 years she has lived in the city. When asked how she identifies within the LGBTQAI+ community said, "I identify as a cis-gender lesbian striving at all times to be as fabulous a queer girl as I can be."
Liz Edman has been a lifelong Episcopalian and her faith has been shaped by the evangelicalism of her father's parents and her youth in Arkansas. "Christianity is both something I inherited and something that is innately (a) good fit for me." Liz finds Jewish theology and worship to be quite moving and gets a lot out of just being in the midst of an interesting, smart, and deeply faithful community.
Liz comes from a line of journalist and preachers, which means she was raised up to be committed to speaking the truth plainly. It meant to her to tell the truth even if it made you unpopular. Speaking the truth plainly and at all cost was an important part of what it meant to serve God faithfully in Liz's family. Because of this strong teaching, Liz never really struggled with a sense of her queerness and faith being at odds with one another. She didn't struggle with a sense of failing God or having fallen into sin. The reason she gave for this, "And I know that this is because my family communicated to me that telling the truth was the most important thing, and that the second most important thing was to be myself, to be the person God had made me to be.
An instance in which her faith and being queer made her life difficult is when the church asked Liz to lie about something that was really important. She came of age in the 1980’s and for a long time took for granted about ordination as an openly gay woman. Liz figured that she could be ordained if she hid or wasn’t loud about her sexuality. But this was something that Liz never once considered doing. “Again, that has everything to do with what my family had taught me: that telling the truth was a crucial part of how we show reverence to God. So how could I lie in order to be ordained.” In 1996, Rev Elizabeth Edman was told by the diocese she was being taken out of the ordination – partly due to her wedding and partly because, as an AIDS chaplain, she was speaking a language of faith that felt unfamiliar to people in the church. These patients in this inner city hospital had been so burned by churches and would shut down if traditional church language was used. Liz felt split into two and felt awful inside. 13 years after Liz entered the ordination process, she was finally ordained as a priest because of a newly-elected bishop Thomas Ely of Vermont. Thomas had saw the damage done by the church to queer people and was determined to move his diocese in a healthy direction.
Faith has made life easier for Liz to deal with. Sometimes it is intensely challenging because God sets the bar high with things like honesty and compassion. Liz admits that she has failed in these areas and isn't by any means perfect. God has sustained her through some of the worst experiences she has had in the church in regards to being a queer person and trying to be apart of the church.
In Chapter 3 of Queer Virtue Liz says, "Once a religious community steps in to tell you what to believe about yourself, what to hope for, what hope is, it is very hard to put those ideas down." I asked Liz (as someone who has had a religious community do those things) how do you put those ideas down and what her definition of hope was. Liz gave some amazing answers.
First and most important thing is to dive inside yourself, take a good look at your own soul and work to cultivate a sense of your own self-worth. She does warn that it is work. You will get to know yourself and have to get honest. Find something inside yourself that you like and find something inside yourself that you love. It is especially good if you can involve another human being. Listen hard to the positive messages and don't try to push them away. Instead plant them like seeds into your soul.
I can't do her explanation of hope justice without just straight quoting her answer. This is what Liz said about hope: "Hope is knowing that there is some part of you that is healthy, that will survive whatever cruelty or hardship (that) comes your way. To have hope, you have to know yourself. You have to be honest about yourself. And being honest means that you do the hard work of putting down all the crap that other people have said about you. This is not easy to do, and I don't for a second mean that it is. It is hard work. But it is also some of the most important work you can do. Because deep inside yourself and in the inner workings of your best, most life-giving relationships --this is where you will find God. And knowing God there, in that way, is the surest antidote to the spiritual poison of false, queerphobic preaching."
I asked Liz what would her advice be for someone struggling to accept their own “queer identity” and belief in God and trying to reconcile their identity and their belief. She said that the idea that there is something about queerness that is at odds with faith in God is a big, noxious lie that has done some terrible damage to beautiful queer souls. “A queer person has to discern an identity within themselves. They have to tell the truth about that identity even when doing so puts them at risk. They have to find others who are discerning a similar identity, and build community together. Then as a community we have to look to the margins to see who is still struggling, and do something about that.” Pay attention to the ways that your queerness calls you to be exactly the person Jesus has called you to be. Stop Fixating on the clobber passages, put them aside – she says. However, look at the passage(s) that captures the heart and soul of the faith to you. Your verse(s) will not necessarily be the same as others. Liz says, “You are a child of God, and God knew what she was doing when she made you this way.”
Liz would like our allies know "Every single one of us was created to reflect something of God. The way we learn about God is for each of us to be able to name ourselves and our experience of God, and really listen to each other, really empower each other to speak. Your truth, my truth, all of our experiences must come together to help us understand who we are, who God is, and who God has created us all to be. So let’s not aim to be “tolerant” or “inclusive.” Let’s aim to forge relationships of dignity and love and deep respect, journeying towards God together."
In closing Liz has a love letter she wanted me to share with you all. So here goes...
Dear Beloved Queer Folx reading Brian’s blog:
I have something to ask of you, an invitation if you will. Consider this a call, a challenge, and a heartfelt request. We have work to do. We have wounds to tend, damage to repair. And we also have a mission that God has planted in us by making us queer. It is our job to celebrate God as the fabulous, beautiful, life-giving force that She/He/They are. God is complex, and our lives are complex, and I am absolutely convinced that God made us in order to force humanity to grapple with the complexity of spiritual truth.
So when you are trying to figure out some aspect of your own faith, or some part of the Bible, dive deep. Don’t settle for easy answers. When you go looking for God, you are treading on native soil. It is not ground that someone else owns. It is yours. It is ours. And in the same way that we know we need to claim our own lives and value our own souls, we also need to claim our own relationship with God and value our spiritual traditions as we have come to understand them.
Be brave. Be intrepid. Be yourself, in all your strength and beauty. Be proud of the spark of the divine that lives within you, and share it with the world.
This comes with wild blessings and so much love,
Liz
The Rev. Elizabeth M. Edman
Liz Edman is an Episcopal priest and political strategist. She is the author of Queer Virtue: What LGBTQ People Know About Life and Love and How It Can Revitalize Christianity (BeaconPress, 2016). Liz has lived and worked on the front lines of some of the most pressing issues where religion and sexuality meet, serving as an inner city hospital chaplain to people with HIV/AIDS from 1989 to 1995 and helping craft political and communications strategies for marriage equality efforts. In 2017, she partnered with Parity to create Glitter+Ash Wednesday, a project to increase the visibility of progressive, queer-positive Christians and to explore Christian liturgy through a queer lens.
Her writing has been featured in Salon.com, The Advocate, LGBT Nation, and Religion News Service. She has been interviewed for feature and news articles in the Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Sun-Times, and Religion Dispatches.She lives in New York.
People can sign up for Liz's mailing list and can contact her through the Queer Virtue website: www.queervirtue.com.
Liz is the bomb! Thanks for this wonderful interview. I enjoyed learning more about her story, and appreciate the concluding letter. Great work!
ReplyDeleteThank you Suzanne!
Delete