Love and Christianity
Brush Your Blues, Shikeith Cathey, 2017
Let's talk about love.
When I was a child and then a teenager growing up in Lagos, Nigeria, and sitting in Christian gatherings, I heard the sentence, "God is love" so much. I heard, "You are made in the image and likeness of God," "You are carefully and wonderfully made," and "God is a loving God." And those sentences made sense to me. They felt good, and they resonated deeply within me. In the stories and teachings of the Bible, I could see that the core message was love. Beyond everything else, when I stripped it back to what it was saying in its simplest essence, it was talking about love. And that felt good to me. I wanted to be love. I wanted to be it in the world. To exude it and to be a vessel for it. In my younger years, I couldn't always articulate that, but I could feel it strongly, and it seemed very simple to do. Through empathy, through compassion and by understanding that anything a human being is capable of, I also am capable of because I am human too, it allowed me to remain in a mindset where I could see myself in other people very easily. And thus, show love. By doing that towards others, I was also doing it to myself.
In almost all countries and communities of African or African descendent people, religion is a dominant way of life for many people, and being LGBTQ is at best viewed as a non-existent way of being, or at worst, defined as "insidiously taboo" on the basis of (Christian) religion. I always wondered why. For places and amongst people who practice a religion that preaches love, why is there such a poor show of love? As I grew up and listened closely to what I was being taught about the messages the Bible apparently held about LGBTQ people and how God felt about them, there was a feeling of unease that arose within me. Something about that messaging felt off to me. It felt odd. There was such a glaring contradiction because this message at its core was filled with and driven by fear and hate, and that confused me deeply. It didn't feel good. It encouraged no empathetic questioning that led to understanding. It encouraged no compassion for those that are persecuted for their difference. It encouraged no love. The thing God is apparently.
The teachings I received went on and said those who were part of the LGBTQ community were flawed and inferior, and bad and evil. And that made even less sense to me than anything ever had. So I asked myself, “Do I believe God is loving or hateful?”. I decided that I believed God is loving. So, if God is a loving God, why would a loving God create in his image and likeness people that are flawed and inferior, and bad and evil? I had to think about it, and I resolved that I don’t think a loving God would. So maybe human beings must be misunderstanding? Because LGBTQ people are here on earth, and continue to be here and have always been here in the mix of all other human beings since the dawn of time– so maybe they aren't flawed? Different, yes. But not flawed or less than. And what is wrong with difference? The earth is full of difference and variety. I look at nature and can see this so evidently. Maybe the difference is good. And then, I had another thought. What if, just maybe, just perhaps, this loving God continually sends forth LGBTQ people to help all humans love in a richer and bigger and more expanded way?
If love is the core message of Christianity and that's the goal, shouldn't we as human beings be looking for any way to do and be that? Shouldn't we be so stubbornly determined to love through whatever means and past any personal judgments? That our desire to love makes any and everything else null and void? Shouldn't we always aim to be the love that God is? Shouldn't love outweigh all?
