Knowing the Divine in the Trinity and Queer Time

Today’s post is from guest contributor Barbara Anne Kozee, who is a doctoral student in Theological Ethics at Boston College and holds an M.Div. from Santa Clara University. As a Queer Catholic, Barb researches sexual and family ethics, queer feminist theology, and political ethics. Follow her on Twitter: @barbkozee.

Today’s liturgical readings for 5th Sunday of Easter can be found here.

The liturgical time between Easter Sunday and Pentecost is one of my favorite periods because of its mystery, liminality, and incompleteness. As a community, we have joyfully witnessed to the resurrection, and we wait in anticipation for the coming of the Holy Spirit. Our trinitarian identity is in the process of becoming—what could be more queer!

Equally as mysterious are the readings that we return to during this time, which are not always chronological. For example, in today’s Gospel reading, we return to Jesus’ last discourse in the Gospel of John, his final messages before the beginning of the Passion narrative. In this way, we actually return to Jesus’ comforting words to his fraught disciples before his death and resurrection. In them, Jesus stresses that he will be known to them, and to us as Christians, in a new way, through the gift of  the Holy Spirit. These readings show us that liturgical time in our church is not linear or progressive.

I think this “neither here nor there,” non-linear approach to time has important meanings for how we are to live as Catholics, and I think that Queer Catholics are particularly knowledgeable of this way of living.

Sandra Schneiders, IHM, a renowned scripture scholar, writes that knowledge in the Gospel of John is not intellectual or informational, but rather it is the kind of knowledge one has of a friend that makes one say, “We know each other intimately.” So, in today’s Gospel, Jesus asks of his friend, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?” In this question, Jesus is pained by not being recognized by his closest friends. He struggles to comfort them, impaired by language’s limitation in describing divine insights about the Spirit-filled world that is to come.

Queer Catholics can resonate with this type of struggle to articulate divine insights to those around us about our lived experiences and ways of being in the world. Why do we stay in the church? What does believing mean, and is it compatible with queer identity? Like many, I am always struggling to find ways to better relate answers to these questions so that others in our church can come to know about queer faith and life.

Queer time celebrates the lifetimes that exist in single moments and the beauty within counter-cultural timelines, outside of time defined by our productivity or efficiency. Memory, justice, and embodiment become especially important community values for this reason. Likewise, in this in-between and non-linear liturgical time, in the already of the resurrection and the not-yet of the dispensing of the Spirit, I invite us to reflect on and celebrate the ways in which we are always on pilgrimage together. We journey to know what it means to be a trinitarian church, a community that celebrates the in-dwelling of the Spirit and the continued, mysterious presence of the resurrected Jesus. We are never fully complete, always in liminal motion.

Queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz writes that we can feel queerness “as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.” I look toward the queer horizon within our Catholic Church, glimpses of which are possible within the current synodal process. Yet, I am also beholden to the radical present moment and the queer people around me, whose spiritual knowledge reminds me that the Spirit is always already at work in our daily lives. Jesus in our Gospel today does not want us to miss his message about the abiding nature of God all around us and in each other.

Jesus is on queer time, and our Catholic liturgy invites us to be there with him, too.

—Barbara Anne Kozee, May 7, 2023