Remarks from The Very Reverend Winnie Varghese

I am very honored to be with you today.

Among you in this distinguished congregation.

Your distinguished leadership and history.

In these extremely complex and troubling times.

I remember this story from the poet and professor at Barnard, June Jordan who after the 9/11 attack, went to a mosque that following Friday at Noon. Sat alone. Didn’t speak to anyone. Didn’t know anyone. A queer black poet activist among a grieving and terrified community, already under attack and about to be targeted from then to now as a political tool of the powerful –impacting generations of families, of lives –

She wrote that she sat there not knowing what else to do.

Solidarity is often that small.

Letting our small bodies courageously cross boundaries

Before we even have words

Maybe we will never have enough words

But we can refuse to be separated

Insist upon seeing all of the truth of the many

--whose lives are caught up and defined by the actions of a few

Of course, the tension in these small actions

-- is that we are Americans, most of us

People with enormous influence and power on this planet

And if we exercise it, enormous power in this democracy.

When I was told I would be called to be the 12^th Dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, I tried to imagine as ambitiously as I could what I would need to occupy that role as well as I could.

I wondered, would Anne Morriss and Frances Frei help us with organizational strategy and leadership. Frances Frei does things like change workplace culture at Uber. Absolutely out of our league, but I wondered.

I had first heard them on Debbie Millman’s podcast and sought out their work afterwards. Exactly what I needed to be thinking about to take a great unfinished, medieval cathedral in New York City, a hulking shrine to the sacred and ordinary in Manhattan to become its most robust self –I thought.

They would never return my call. I thought.

Who am I to call the Harvard Business School and ask for help with ultimately, a church.

When Anne visited, enthusiastically agreeing to help us, she brought with her a book of edited by Susanna Heschel, essays written by her father Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel entitled Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity. Of course, you will know of the documentary of the life of Rabbi Heschel of similar title.

The magnificent title is from Rabbi Heschel’s claim in a letter to then President John F. Kennedy that the Civil Rights Movement required of him “Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity,” appealing to his vanity, as well as his formation in Roman Catholic Moral Theology –the natural order of things is justice, and we are built to desire it, to work for it, to find it to be the vision God grants us in rest, the animating quality of our living –

Just to be clear about what I’ve said, the atheist Jewish lesbian podcaster’s guests, the two lesbian (and I assumed secular) Harvard Business School professors, who were engaged to help one of the world’s largest cathedrals figure out the numbers, brought the Indian queer Episcopal priest, a book on morality in public life by a rabbi.

Putting me back, exactly where I belonged.

What must we do but proclaim the loudest, most tender solidarity

With those who require us to risk justice that they may breathe another day

The desolate upon our streets and everywhere

Tender bodies

Ours.

Theirs.

The framework of justice.

For people like us to imagine and create.

My family is from Kerala in India

I come by my optimism honestly.

Probably like some of you I come from a community of traders from ancient times, connected to the world through sea borne trading via trade winds and the desire for beautiful things –tasty things. Peppercorns, rice, silk, cotton, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon –we have those things or can get them easily

The scholarly debate is whether the first Jews come to Kerala in the time of Solomon or after the fall of the second Temple.

My community’s story of origins is that Thomas the disciple of Jesus the Jewish teacher comes to our community, because his community is already settled there. He comes to the Jewish community and in Kerala begins to tell the story of a man recently murdered by Rome, Jesus, and his mourning mother, Mary –and their friends.

There was a continuous Jewish community in Kerala until a certain point in the organizing of Israel, when everyone was invited to return –with the unfortunate impact in Kerala of erasing the peopled history of a wonderfully diverse religious co existence in Kerala: Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Jain –over the generations. The oldest synagogues and mosques outside of the Middle East are in Kerala.

When I began to understand myself as a queer person.

I wondered how I would carry my pride of culture with me

Without the actual reality of community around me.

It was clear in our community

That if I did not marry into my community

I was leaving it

I disappear from the lineage.

For any of you wondering what happens to you

Or to your children or grandchildren

May I remind you that our traditions teach us that

You are beautifully and wondrously made

You are. They are. Exquisite. God’s delight.

Please always remember.

And the me who thought I would disappear

The me who had been taught by our superficial, consumerist, nihilistic society that the adjectives before American in my name were my only identity –the hyphens and commas that felt like division, the only way to live if I am not a white protestant man –that idea is trash. We are not divided humans –we are rather filling in with words the spaces left empty by an agenda-ed restricted understanding of belonging.

We are not less than.

We are more than.

The richness of us, of the ones in your family are making a new way.

Of the ones that break open a new space where there had been a firm wall.

I come from sea faring people

Traders and Bankers for sure but also

Adventurers

Collectors

Seekers

Wanderers

My community has become, at its worst, insular, defensive, protective –seeking a respectability the world will never grant them, building up a vision of the past, that never was and will never be.

The gift of queerness in my life is also its greatest pain

I am alone

We are alone

But

With a voice

To tell the story of us

And in that telling,

We are gathered again

Tender bodies

Broken

Sitting with one another

Letting one another know we are here

We are ready to listen

To celebrate one another

On the streets of this great city

Or from a great historic pulpit like this one or the Cathedral’s

Queer as the day is long

What should it matter that we are still here

But we are

And I thank God for it and for you.

And it actually changes the fabric of things

The sparkle in the warp and weft

Of us

We see differently

Let us love the world together

And seek its justice with Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity

Risking everything for love.