By Ann Fontaine

Sunday, October 12, 2008 was the 10th anniversary of the death of Matthew Shepard. Many churches and others are holding memorial services and recalling the terrible events of the weeks prior to his death. Wyoming, where I live, is searching its conscience once again about how this son of our state was cruelly beaten and left to die tied to a fence post on the prairie. As I read the news articles and essays about this event I wonder about how a man becomes a myth. I wonder if the Matthew known by his parents, family and friends is slipping from their hands and hearts.

Today, as I read an essay by someone who attended the funeral, I see that already the location of the funeral no longer matters. Details are unimportant in the construction of a myth – only the things that build the myth. The details still matter to those who were there, who actually knew Matthew as friend, cousin, son, nephew. Details like the name of the church and the town of the service does not matter to the wider world. The local church, however, still reverberates with the decision to host the service. The town saw the horror of those who hate gay men embodied in a group of church people who stood outside in the park across the street. As the adults and children held up their explicit and hate filled signs – others from the community dressed as angels and held up their huge white wings to shield the family and other mourners.

Not long after Matthew’s death I was talking with his uncle. He was saying that he often did not recognize the person who was already being spoken of as a saint by those whose need to have an icon was stronger than the reality of the person. Matthew Shepard was a young man, a college student, fun and loving and trying out life and all that it offers. Now he is forever the young gay male, beaten and left to die, the embodiment of all the fear of living in a world that still kills those who only want to live and love as others are allowed to live and love.

Is this icon-ization a bad thing or is it inevitable? Is it good to have a focus and an example when working to change society? Is it good for those who fear to have their fears externalized? Does it matter that the details are lost in the mythmaking? Do those who were close to the event lose something in this process or can they privately hold on to the one they knew in life? Do they give over their Matt to the larger community and find peace and healing in the work that is done by his story?

Sometimes I wonder, is that what happened to Jesus?

The Rev. Ann Fontaine lives in Wyoming and keeps the blog what the tide brings in. She is the author of Streams of Mercy: a meditative commentary on the Bible.

By Martin L. Smith

This has been a summer of pilgrimages for me. I have crossed the Euphrates to meditate in Harran—the city where Abraham and Sarah settled before risking the further move to Canaan—on the way faith calls us to pull up our roots. I have prayed alongside pilgrims at the shrine of Job in Sanliurfa, who were weeping silent tears as we descended to the spring linked with his legend, meditating on the place of loss and suffering in our spiritual journey. I have shared my joy with throngs in Konya praying at the tomb of the most beloved mystic of Islam, Jalaluddin Rumi, now the most read poet in the world, eight centuries after his death. But I have planned a further pilgrimage. As you read this I will be in Berlin, where I intend to spend some time in prayer at the memorial to the gay victims of the Holocaust, dedicated just a few weeks ago.

It is agonizing to recall the fate of the gay men who were condemned by the Nazis to torture and devastating forced labor that killed most within months. But this is what most people don’t know; when the camps were liberated by the Allied armies many surviving gay inmates were not set free. The ‘liberators’ jailed them. Hundreds continued in prisons until they were deemed to have ‘served their time,’ years after the war ended. They were truly the forgotten.

During my training as a guide to the Holocaust Museum here in Washington, I remember the impact of the testimony of an old German man, who had survived torture in five camps, several years in the prison to which he had been immediately consigned after the camp was liberated, and then upon release made the journey home to his mother. She took him in, but never once asked—she didn’t want to hear what she suspected—where he had been all these years. These men were consigned to oblivion without recognition or restitution until recently.

Perhaps my pilgrimage will strengthen me to keep on trying to answer a common question: why is there so much at stake in the dispute about gay folk and their lives that it threatens to split the church and deepen the rift in American society? Here are some of the responses I have been working on: it isn’t really about sex, it’s all about power. It feels safer to wrangle about sex acts and tease out the sticky threads of disputed interpretations of Leviticus and the authority of the Bible than it is to talk about systems of privilege.

I remember my eyes being opened at a gathering of Christian leaders some years ago who were tackling the issue of racism. A distinguished academic made great headway demonstrating that racism was not merely a matter of individuals having negative feelings to those of a different race. The issue was the system of unearned privileges enjoyed by white folk. Gradually, most of the participants seemed to get it. They couldn’t absolve themselves by claiming personally to have no negative feeling towards persons of color. What they needed to reckon with were the hundreds of ways in which simply being white entitled them to all sorts of preferential treatment, privileges and perquisites.

It was a powerful turning point, and as lunchtime approached the participants were feeling good about the shift in perspective they were gaining. The session was ready to end earlier than scheduled, so the lecturer offered to add a supplement. “Let me use the final half hour before lunch to demonstrate how the same is true of heterosexism. What society is wrestling with in coming to terms with the gay and lesbian minority is not really homophobia—the nexus of negative attitudes towards them—but heterosexism, the maintenance by straight people of the system that awards them multiple, automatic advantages.” The lecturer illustrated her argument with a sample of these privileges, ranging of course from marriage to the right to display affection in public. Suffice it to say that many people in the audience were acutely uncomfortable that she had made this additional case. It’s far easier to talk about prejudice, because we can disclaim it, than about unearned privilege and power which just a little reflection makes undeniable.

My pilgrimages are a resource for gaining the strength to continue in the church. Because our real struggles are about relinquishing monopolies of power and influence, surrendering unearned privileges that are systemically entrenched, we are in for a protracted process of judgment and conversion. There are no short cuts. When everyone is sick of talking about sexuality, then we might get down to breaking the last taboo and learn to make real analysis of how power is so unequally distributed, in defiance of the Reign of God and the manifesto of the Beatitudes.

Martin Smith is well-known in the Episcopal Church and beyond as a priest, writer, preacher and leader of retreats. Through such popular works as A Season for the Spirit and The Word is Very Near You and in numerous workshops, lectures and retreats, he continues to explore a contemporary spirituality that encourages a lively conversation between new knowledge and the riches of tradition.