“Don’t put Catholic on your dating profile, you’ll scare everyone away.”
“Don’t lead with being queer, you don’t know who you can trust in a new church.”
These are two pieces of advice I’ve received from well-meaning friends against labeling myself. Fair enough; risk lurks in these “coming outs.”
Labels can divide. They bring about assumptions, biases, and stereotypes—conscious or unconscious. Left alone, they miss the contours, the nuances, the messy contradictions of a person.
Labels exist beyond our control. When using a label, I connect myself to a word with a life of its own. The word “queer” encapsulates this unpredictability. The term has been reclaimed by young people to speak proudly about non-normative categories of sex and gender. But for an older generation, “queer” can still hold the power of a slur that was used to denigrate and thus elicit a strong reaction.
Labels—as with all language—are a communal and cultural phenomenon. LGBTQ in the United States does not equate to the usage of “two-spirit” in indigenous communities, or “takatāpui” in New Zealand or “bakla” in the Philippines. Mere translation fails to account for the unique histories and contexts of these words.
This matters in a global church and world.
Yet here I am, making a case for labels. I’ll do so by way of theology.
Why do we need theology? Why do we speak of God?
My first answer to this question came from the late Rev. Michael Himes at Boston College, who writes about God as an “X” in algebra. The letter “X” is used as a stand-in for what we do not know. And yet, he purports, we must say something. We cannot remain silent about this thing so near to ourselves, so important. We must find “the least wrong way” to speak about God.
My most recent answer came from Karl Rahner, S.J., one of the most prolific and influential theologians of the 20th century, who writes about God as mystery. For Rahner, any attempt to know or speak about God must be grounded in the knowledge that God is always more than we can grasp, articulate, or theologize about.
Words fail. Concepts fall short. And yet, any theology requires that we attempt, with great courage and ultimate humility, to speak about God anyway.
We must hold these two poles—the courage to speak and the humility to know that speech is inadequate—in constant tension. I believe the same to be true when it comes to labeling ourselves and others.
Speak with courage
Labels attempt to communicate, to categorize and to make sense of the world. They can enact self-expression or self-determination. Labels can connect us to community, belonging and understanding. At their best, labels help us be seen, known and loved as we are.
My Catholicism, I joke, is the most radical thing about me. I have historically put qualifications around it. I’d say, “I’m a feminist, queer, leftist, Catholic,” all too cognizant of the assumptions and baggage people bring to the label. But as of late, I simply describe myself as Catholic, without caveats. In doing so, I claim the Catholicism I practice as valid.
My queerness, however, is no less risky in the judgment it can provoke. The church’s historic and ongoing marginalization of LGBTQ folks is well documented. Yet I have come to embrace the label queer, with its openness and blurry edges, its lack of specificity. It allows for my own continual self-discovery and invites others to get to know me beyond the label, to ask another question, even if that question is simply “what does that really mean?” And in not shying away, I claim that I belong within this church.
Listen with humility
Labels speak to our truth, but not definitely so. They remain incomplete and inadequate. We must not let labels be the end of the conversation but the beginning. Can we use labels to spur encounter?
I believe so.
Last year, I ran a workshop for a group of 80 Catholic religious sisters. My task was to lay the groundwork—through education and conversation—for thinking about Catholicism, justice and the LGBTQ community. The leadership team warned me in advance that the group ranged in both knowledge and opinion on these topics.
“Proceed with caution,” they told me.
How to bridge this gap? How could I engender openness and avoid provoking further entrenchment?
I returned to a maxim from my hospital chaplaincy: touch what is in you. How do you connect and empathize with a patient whose experience seems unimaginable, who is going through something you never have? You draw upon the part of you that knows something about what the patient is experiencing. The specifics will differ, but if you can touch an emotion that links up to theirs, connection will follow.
What do these sisters know about feeling unseen? Judged? Misunderstood? This is the bridge to connection. Touch what is in you. I asked: How does using the label Catholic or sister represent who you are? How does it fall short? Is there a gap between how you understand it for yourself and how others understand it?
They had a 20-minute conversation with their table and then we had an open mic for questions, comments and concerns. I wasn’t sure what to expect. They shared:
Sometimes I go ‘undercover’ as a sister, I don’t want people to know because they will treat me differently or not be as comfortable with me.
Older people really respect me as a sister, but young people don’t understand it at all. It means nothing to them; the label is met with confusion.
I’m so proud of being a sister, but sometimes I don’t use the label, because I know it will make me inaccessible to people.
I’ve found that if I’m building a long-term relationship with someone, I have to tell them I am a sister up front, because otherwise they feel so deceived, and it entirely breaches the relationship if they found out later. They feel lied to.
When I identify as a sister, I know I stand as a representative. People will end up bringing their hurt from the Catholic Church, their shame of how it’s impacted them. People will make assumptions about me: that I believe things that I don’t or that I will judge them.
I was floored. One woman after another took the mic, sharing from their own experience, drawing on their own emotion. Defensive exteriors cracked open. Connection bloomed. Perhaps, one said, we do have a way to understand what the LGBTQ community may feel, how painful it is, and why we must commit anew to solidarity.
During lunch, a few women approached me to confess their initial resistance to attend the workshop based on its title (and my own). Each then proceeded to enact the solidarity they had just discussed, asking about what being queer, what being Catholic, meant to me.
I surprised them. And vice versa. And the surprise I experienced revealed my own pre-determined assumptions of these women labeled “sister” and how I expected them to respond.
Labels are necessary. But we cannot base our solidarity, our love and our willingness to be church on fully understanding every other person in this global community. Instead, could we draw upon our own experience of labels, in their power and their inadequacy, to find compassion for another who remains “other”? From this place, we may begin to listen to others with humility.
So let’s not give up on labels. Instead, let’s hold the tension of the both/and. Courageously claim a label and listen with humility, so we never stop asking: Who am I? Who are you? Who is God?
