As
Moses came down from Mount Sinai carrying the two tablets of the Covenant, he
was not aware that the skin on his face was radiant from speaking with God.
When Aaron and the other Israelites saw Moses, they were afraid to approach him
because of the radiance of the skin of his face. Only when Moses called to them
did Aaron and the leaders of the community come near, and then Moses spoke to
them.
Later, all the Israelites gathered around, and Moses gave them the instructions
he had received from Our God on Mount Sinai. When he finished speaking to them,
Moses put a veil over his face. Whenever Moses entered the presence of Our God,
he would remove the veil until he came out again, and when he would come out
and tell the Israelites what had been commanded, they would see that the skin
on his face was radiant. Then he would put the veil over his face again until
he went in to speak with God.
Exodus
34:29-35
Moses represents butch
patriarchy that leaves no place for me – a man who would lie with another man
as with a woman. Yet, Moses experience on Sinai is thoroughly queer in his
knowledge of God and of public repudiation.
This is Moses second trot to
the summit. On his first trek up great spiritual things happened. The lightning
and thunder of revelation and inspiration shook the ground and dazzled the sky
with brilliance. Filled with the ways of God, Moses returned to the people of
Israel. But his own experience of God, like that of queer folks, was dismissed
even before he had a chance to speak it.
The public had already chosen
the idol or frozen metaphors of God. In this culture, there was no place for
Moses and his new spiritual understandings.
Queer persons or at least
religious queer folk – arguably the queerest, as in "odd," of the
queer - face the same silencing. We are rebuffed by those who worship frozen
texts and cold idols of the god of compulsory heterosexuality.
The lack of queer images of the
Sacred in most religious dialogue is disquieting. But more painful is the
silence and non-existent voice to speak of queer religious experience and queer
spiritual insights. Like Moses, the experience of our Sinai is refused before
it can be expressed, and we dash our experience to smithereens, rejecting our
own relationship and our own received revelations of God. Yet, like Moses, God
calls us back to Sinai – to our transgender-bisexual-gay-lesbian mountain tops.
From Moses, we learn that as
sexual and gender diverse people we cannot, we must not wait on others to
legitimate our own experience of the Sacred. Those invested in their idols will
not give space or thought to the God who is in the business of continual
revelation. As Moses did, we need to quarry our own tablets for writing. We
must claim our own venture with the Sacred in the face of an obstinate
religious tradition.
Like Moses, when we continue to
enter into the Sacred, our faces shine! Since it is our faces, the shine has a
fabulous queer tinge, reflecting nothing other than the queer shine of the face
of God.
