Does Loving Jesus Make Me Queer?

According to the fundies, Jesus and God make a big deal about homosexuality. You can’t go there or you’ll roast in hell, being eternally punished for loving someone of the same gender.

On the other hand, the Christians say that we’re supposed to look to Jesus as our one and only savior. If we love Jesus with our hearts, minds, and souls, we’re rewarded with everlasting life.

So logically I wonder if I love Jesus with all my heart, mind, and soul, does that make me some kind of queer?

Yep, that assertion may sound outrageous, but to me there’s a huge logical disconnect between what religious mouthpieces say about Jesus and God and what I hear from people who have had near-death experiences.

In a nutshell, NDErs bring back a vision of love. When they meet light beings, whether or not they identify that being as a Christ, you pretty much get Pepperland—all you need is love. You don’t get Blue Meanies.

But from many self-identified Christian mouths, you get Judge Judy style messages of exclusion, degradation, humiliation, shame, guilt, blah, blah, blah.

It’s taken me decades to figure out that I tuned out on God and Jesus primarily because I abhorred the man-made image of the deity. I was actually tuning out on religion, which is different from tuning out on Jesus/God. I saw most religion as hypocritical, preaching love but acting with a nauseating double standard.

After hearing NDEr after NDEr talk about how they revised their vision of reality as a result of their travels out of the physical body, I concluded that it wasn’t especially fair to tune out on God and Jesus because I thought so little of religion.

Taking a good long look at my life, I realized that for much of my life, women have been my inspiration. Women have been up close and personal and God/Jesus have been stuck way back on the top shelf of the spare room closet. I knew I wasn’t supposed to throw them away, but I disliked their style and functionality.

My parents never had a strong religious bent. Religion mostly symbolized sitting on hard wooden pews listening to the droning of uninspired voices. It was never my idea of a good time. So based on all my material world experience, the idea of loving God always translated in my mind to boring eternity.

Just recently as I have become more open to the idea of loving Jesus, primarily by reinventing my inner vision of who Jesus actually is, it occurred to me that I probably would have had a much different relationship with Christ had he been a she. So sue me—women have inspired me more than men.

This is what got me to thinking of the relationship, however subtle and unspoken, between Christian-inspired homophobia and males loving Jesus versus females loving Jesus. The picture I get of heavenly reunions using this model is women throwing their arms around Jesus and giving him awesome hallelujah hugs while males, being ever mindful of their naughty penises, give Jesus a hearty handshake.

I mean, what happens if you get a hard-on hugging a prophet or a god?

I would hate to think that an all-knowing, all-loving Christ would reject hugging men and relish hugging women. To me, that holy arrangement would be sexist. I would hope that a prophet or a god rises above the petty vision of sexuality proffered by too much mainstream media, including televangelists. I would hope that the god who invented sexuality in the first place has a much higher regard for his creation than the people who turn sex into something ugly.

Last December I heard author Howard Storm speak in Seattle about his NDE. During that otherworldly journey he met the light being he accepted as Jesus. It happened in 1985, and Howard still reels with emotions as he tells his story. The portrait of Jesus that emerged was of the quintessential lover of humanity who was hysterically funny. That makes me smile. It also turns out from Storm’s description that Jesus and the angels are big huggers, even male to male.

I know that we’re always tempted (by Satan?) to humanize our gods. It’s hard to see Jesus walking the aisles of Safeway with some clerk asking, “Are you finding everything you need?” It’s equally hard for me to think of him looking at loving same-sex couples and saying, “You know, there should be a Constitutional Amendment banning that kind of behavior.”

The amalgam of what NDErs report is that we don’t have a clue about the capacity of love that Jesus, angels, light beings, and God have for humanity. Jesus loves the worst of us as much as he loves the best of us (and, of course, what defines worst and best is up for grabs.)

That’s the kind of stuff that intrigues me.

According to the fundies, Jesus and God also really hate premarital sex. You can’t go there or you’ll roast in hell. If you follow that stepping stone to success but decide not to stay monogamous, even with your partner’s encouragement, you’re also destined for the wicked witch’s over.

The issue here gets expressed as sex, but that so often morphs into love. If you become committed to one person, you’re not supposed to be too loving with someone else, especially if there is any conceivable way it could ignite sexual passion.

That "stingy love" idea never much appealed to me either. There are just too many lonely, isolated people in this world. Some are single and feel trapped and some are married and feel trapped. They’re trapped because we frequently make it so difficult for people to relate with love and affection to each other.

Against that backdrop is the ideal that Jesus/God loves everybody equally. Now isn’t that an intriguing premise? Are we even close to understanding the significance of what that means?

I’ll pick up on that at another time!