Queer as Faith is a weekly column by Nathan Gunter.  Unconventional and thought-provoking, Nathan writes as a gay Christian struggling to live authentically in the real world.

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Week 12:
The Little Golgi Body Who Could

I've been thinking about my body a lot lately.  At some point my unemployed boredom turned into fitness dogmatism, whose main tenets have been me at the park every day running two and a half miles, me resisting the siren's song that is Taco Bueno, and me even subscribing to "Men's Health" magazine.

But the running's been the best.  There's something about it I really love, which is funny, because most of the time when I'm actually doing it, I'm thinking about how much longer until this is over?  Still, when I'm done I find I can breathe more easily (turns out exercise is the best antihistamine there is) and that I have a bit more energy throughout the day.  Eventually I will be able to fit into those Banana Republic corduroy pants I got for Christmas.  I might even manage to look halfway decent in a bathing suit before summer.

That's all beside the point, of course.  (Join me in a chorus approving my tacit vanity: Of coooourse!)  Genetically I'm prone to heart disease, adult onset diabetes, and a whole host of other potential problems and I'd just as soon head them off at the pass.  That really is the main reason.  I swear.

So it's got me thinking about my body and how it works, because really, I have no idea.  I made it through high school and college without learning a single thing about human anatomy (except what I saw on ER), and so now I'm a bit in the dark as to how this all works.

Then, this past Sunday, I went to church and got an anatomy lesson.

I went to church in downtown Oklahoma City, where the pastor preached about the miracle that is the human pancreas.  Apparently it's about the single ugliest organ in the human body, no one ever thinks about it, and none of us could live without it.  "You might want to be the heart or the brain in the body of Christ," he said, "but it might turn out that you're the pancreas."

I immediately began to wonder.  Certainly I'm not pancreas material.  I'm not even sure they're hiring for gall bladder right now.  Perhaps to liken my role to a part of anatomy was a mistaken and potentially dangerous venture, because then a horrible thought hit me: I'm a Golgi Body.

Golgi Bodies, from what I remember from high school biology, are these tiny little buggers inside cells.  There are literally trillions of them in your body, so if one were to magically vanish you probably wouldn't even notice.  The crazy, mean little part of my brain that gets off on its own pain (this part of my brain is on Satan's payroll), it started whispering, "Yeah. You're a Golgi Body."

Phase one: Bargaining.  No one wants to be a Golgi Body, or a mitochondria, or a cell membrane.  I do want to be the heart!  At least let me be a lung!  Okay, how about a blood vessel?  A thumbnail?

Again, probably too much anatomy symbolism for anyone's good.  But it got me wondering, what is my place in the church?  The church, the Body of Christ, as a corporate entity, is established in the blood of our Savior.  That means that those of us whose relationship with God is established by Jesus' blood are all members of the Body.

Including me.  Including you.

But where do we fit?  Gay Christians, especially, I think, really wrestle hard with this (or, we should).  I know that in my own experience, and in the experience of most of the Christians I know who've come out of the closet, you find that many of your typical inroads to the life of the church are suddenly less like highways and more like obstacle courses.  It's so easy - far too easy - for us to think of ourselves less as members of a Body than as just lonesome Christians, kind of out on the fringe, hanging out with the cuticles and hair follicles.  Holding on so we don't get washed off in the shower.

We're not called to that.  The Body needs us.  "The eye cannot say to the hand, 'I have no need of you,' nor again the head to the feet, 'I have no need of you.'  On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honourable we clothe with greater honour, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect" (1 Cor. 12.21-23 NRSV).

The church needs every believer, simply because Jesus says so.  If Golgi Bodies like me start dropping out because we feel useless, pretty soon the Body is going to start to look pretty sickly.  It can be so tempting, I know, because from the fringe you can see outside to where things can look a lot less scary.  But like the Body can't survive without us, we can't survive without it.  We're symbiotes.  We need each other.

So maybe we need to reconcile ourselves, as a church, as a Body.  Admittedly, such a step seems miles away…maybe even impossible.  But when Jesus assures us a place in His family, in His Body, we can't let ourselves decline the offer and the responsibility just because some stupid sodding skin cells don't seem to want us around.

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