Healed From What?

 A question was asked at the 65th Annual Session this week, and it is still standing.

Somewhere around two and a half hours into the livestream, in a pulpit draped in kente, at the 65th Annual Session of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, a preacher said something about the LGBTQIA+ community and healing.

I want to be careful here, because I have not sat with a transcript and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I know is what the room heard, and what the room heard traveled fast. Within hours, Rev. Dr. Brandon Thomas Crowley — pastor of the Historic Myrtle Baptist Church in Newton, one of the few openly affirming historically Black congregations in this country, and a gay Black Baptist preacher who has spent his ministry making that sentence sayable — posted publicly that the statement was homophobic. How dare you preach about liberation while denying the full humanity of others.

Bishop Rudolph McKissick answered. I'll quote him, because he said it in public and because the wording matters:

I don't normally comment on things but will not have my name disparaged. I made an affirming statement concerning the need for room for the LBGTQIA plus community. I am the least homophobic and have loving people IN MY CHURCH that serve. If I said something unaware of how it came across then it was unintentional. So perhaps the next time before you start bashing publicly you should send a note privately for clarity.

And Crowley asked him one question:

What do LGBT people need to be healed from?

That's it. That's the whole question. It has been sitting there unanswered for a day now while the convention goes on around it, and I have not been able to think about much else.

The word "healing" is not a soft word

We should be honest about what that word does in our houses.

Healing in Black church usage is not a gentle, therapeutic, everybody-needs-a-little word. It is one half of a fixed pair — healing and deliverance — and it belongs to a service with choreography we all know by heart. The altar call. The line. The hands. The naming of the thing. The expulsion of the thing. The break in the music when the thing has gone.

To say a person needs healing is to say there is something in them that is not them. Something that arrived. Something that can be made to leave.

So when Crowley asks healed from what, he is not being clever. He is holding up a diagnostic instrument, and it works immediately. Ask it of cancer, you get an answer. Ask it of grief, of church hurt, of what this country does to Black bodies — you get an answer. Ask it of a category of human beings defined by who they love and how they carry gender, and the sentence just falls apart in your hands, because there is no object to name. The only two answers available are from themselves and from you, and neither one can be said out loud in a convention hall.

Which is why nobody said anything.

The silence is the finding. That's the whole reason the question is dangerous.

In 2014 we did this louder

Twelve years ago, at COGIC's Holy Convocation, a young man named Andrew Caldwell stood before the delegates of an entire denomination and announced he was being delivered from the spirit of homosexuality. He said he would love women. He said he would not carry himself outside of what a man is supposed to look like. The room danced. The preacher invited others down for their own healing. The clip escaped the sanctuary and lived on the internet for years, and Black Christians who had never set foot in a COGIC service argued about it for months.

That was loud. What happened this week was quiet. Progressive. Pastoral in tone, from a convention that exists — exists, this is not decoration — because a group of Black Baptists in 1961 would not stay silent about freedom. The convention Dr. King chose when the other house would not hold him.

But it's the same grammar. Deliverance with better manners. Both rest on the same prior conviction: that the queer body is a haunted body, and that the sanctuary's job is to do something about the haunt.

I have come to believe that conviction is exactly backwards, and the book I'm writing is mostly an argument about why.

The queer body is not the haint

In the houses I come from, we don't say specter. We say haint.

A haint is not a ghost in general. A haint is the unquiet dead of a particular house. A haint is local. A haint has a grievance. She's not an ancestor — ancestors are fed and remembered and asked for advice. The haint is the one who was wronged, or buried badly, or never mourned at all, and who therefore will not go.

And because our people knew that the dead of a violent country don't stay put, we built technology. Haint blue on the porch ceiling. Haint blue on the window frames and the underside of the door. Blue bottles hung on a bottle tree to catch what comes at night. Salt at the threshold. That pale watery blue that reads to a restless spirit as sky, or water, neither of which she can cross.

Here is what I want you to notice, because it's the whole thing:

Haint blue does not lay the haint. It manages the haint.

It puts a barrier between the household and the grievance without ever touching the grievance. It says not in this room, not tonight. Everybody who ever painted a porch ceiling understood that. You paint the ceiling because you do not intend to dig up the yard.

Respectability is haint blue. That's my argument. It goes on at the threshold — the door of the church, the door of ordination, the door of who gets to hold a microphone. It's a coating, not a repair. It's genuinely beautiful, and it was genuinely protective, and I refuse cheap contempt for the people who invented it, because they were protecting something real from something real.

But it cannot make a grievance stop being true. And a hundred and fifty years of it has left us with a house where the haint is misidentified.

Because look at what happened this week. A man looked out at a room containing queer people and containing a century and a half of unconfessed church violence against them, and he diagnosed the people as the disturbance. Once you've misidentified the haint, every ritual you perform after that — however sincere, however loving — gets applied to the wrong object. You can lay hands on queer folk for the rest of your natural life and the house will still be haunted, because the thing that won't rest is not in that body.

It's in the yard.

"I have loving people in my church that serve"

I want to sit with that line, because I believe it, and because it is the most revealing sentence in the entire exchange.

It's true. It's true of nearly every Black congregation in this country. They're at the organ and on the praise team and running the media ministry and the youth department; they are the armor-bearers and the ministers of music and, very often, the person who taught the pastor how to preach. Everybody knows. Nobody says. We even have a phrase for it: serving in silence.

I don't think that phrase is a metaphor. I think it's an accurate description of a spiritual condition.

To serve in silence is to be a haint in the house you built. Present but unacknowledged. Essential and unnameable. Seen constantly, recognized never. Full access, no standing. Permitted to bring your gifts and forbidden to bring your life — which is the one thing church is actually for.

So when that arrangement gets offered as proof of innocence, what it actually reports is that the containment technology is working. The porch ceiling is holding. Nothing has crossed. That's not hospitality. That's a man describing his haint blue and calling it love.

And that is how somebody can say I am the least homophobic in complete sincerity minutes after telling a convention that a category of people needs healing. Both feel true from inside the house, because the house was engineered so he'd never have to meet the grievance directly. Haint blue works. That's the problem. It works well enough that you can stand under it your whole life.

About sending a note privately

There was another moment this month, and I want to name it because it clarifies by contrast.

On July 15, Rev. Marc Lavarin posted a single unattributed line: Riotous living disguised as progressive theology must be stopped. No names, no referent, a hundred-plus comments of people asking what he meant. I was one of them, and I was not gentle about it, because vague language like that comes at the expense of my life and my calling, and because a pastor with that much reach does not get to hide inside ambiguity while other people absorb the consequences of it.

To his credit — and I mean that — he came back. Days later he pinned a long clarification: the post was about character, not sexuality; he had missed an opportunity to engage people genuinely seeking understanding; he apologized to those who felt dismissed; and he said plainly that his own sexual ethics bend more conservatively though not narrowly, and that he understood this would be a deal breaker for many, and respectfully agreed to disagree.

That is further down the road than an appeal to intent. He named the miss. He gave up the ambiguity that was doing the damage. I want that on the record.

And I want to be equally honest that it still stops short, at a precise place. Clarity is not confession. A clarification says here is what I actually meant, and I regret how I communicated it. A confession says here is what I did to you, here is what I'm going to do about it, and you will tell me whether it's enough. The first restores the speaker's reputation. Only the second repairs anything.

Which brings me back to send a note privately.

The offense was proclaimed. From a convention pulpit. To a national body. On a livestream. And a word spoken at that volume cannot be repaired in a DM. Confession that happens at a lower register than the harm isn't confession — it's containment. It is a request that the grievance be moved off the porch and into a private room where nobody else will hear the sound it makes.

Send me a note privately is a request that the haint keep it down.

What I'm actually asking for

I'm not asking for a resignation. I'm not asking for a pile-on; there was plenty in that thread I wanted no part of, including the parts that went after the man's unrelated troubles, which convert a theological failure into a character referendum and let the theology off the hook entirely.

I'm asking for the ordinary furniture of our own worship, used correctly and in order.

Proclaim — publicly, at the same volume as the harm — that the Word became flesh. Not body. Flesh. The wild, sensuous, trickster Jesus Kelly Brown Douglas gave us. The Spirit of Acts 2 poured out on all flesh, uncontrollable, dragging together people who had no business in the same room. You cannot cast out flesh from a God who became it.

Confess — as a body, not a press release. Not addressed to queer folk as a request for absolution. Confess that we put parameters on the divine mystery and called it holiness.

Get educated by people you didn't hire. The wounded don't owe you a syllabus.

Act, and let the impacted steer. Your opinion about the sufficiency of your own repair is not evidence.

Make room for lament, and understand that your only job there is to listen. Not to explain what was really meant.

And forgiveness stays optional. I draw that line dotted in my framework on purpose. Nobody has to walk through it to get anywhere.

Then, maybe, celebration. Which is not tolerance and not a statement on the website. It's queer folk in the full life of the church without silence and without fear, and it requires the arbiters of respectability to be dispossessed of the authority to decide who belongs.

The convention adjourns this week. The question is still standing.

Healed from what?

Somebody up there ought to answer it. And if the honest answer is nothing — say that from the pulpit, at the same volume, before you go home.

I'm a daughter of the Black Church. I haven't left. This is from the book I'm writing, called Holy and Haunted, and the chapter it comes from is called "Discharge"