“Love Makes Family”
By Reverend Kyndall Rae Rothaus and Captain Alivia Kate Stehlik
K: Good morning, I am Reverend Kyndall Rae Rothaus
A: and I’m her partner, not-reverend Alivia Kate Stehlik. Marta asked Kyndall and I to speak this morning, the weekend that the Springs typically celebrates Pride. In the spirit of Pride, we are going to share with you a bit of our story and our love and the way it has evolved into what we think is a pretty amazing, albeit unconventional, family.
K: In fact, we think the unconventional part makes it even better.
A: Using the word unconventional might not actually even begin to scratch the surface of our story. I’m a transgender woman, a lesbian, active duty Army Officer, with an 8 year old son who I co-parent with his other mom, his step-dad, and Kyndall.
K: I’m a gay Baptist pastor with an adopted two-year-old named Leila, and recently I welcomed back into our home my former foster daughter, who is also two years old. We are a two-toddler home, which means our house is always a little nuts.
A: We are also both divorced, so starting a serious relationship again was scary. If either of us were going to try this committed relationship thing again, we wanted to do it well. We wanted to be good to each other, no matter the outcome . . .
K: For me, divorce erupted my old notions about marriage and family. Doing things the “expected way” hadn’t worked out for me at all. So somewhere along the way I decided to throw away the script and write my own life. Once I started questioning, I felt freer to explore everything. What is marriage? Why does anyone want one? Do I want one? What is family? What is love, really? Am I actually attracted to men? Or did someone just convince me that I was supposed to be attracted to men and not women? Etc.
A: For me, it wasn’t the divorce, per se, that blew up my notions of marriage and family. I was raised as the oldest boy in a homeschooling, fundamentalist Christian family. I was so far in the closet that I didn’t even know the closet wasn’t the whole house! We had a long, dense book in our house growing up titled something like “Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.” I’m pretty sure I read it through cover to cover at one point. In coming out as transgender, I have had to do so much work simply to figure out who I am and how to exist in the world. Simultaneously, I have been trying to re-work and re...own what “biblical” might mean, or what it might mean to be a Christian as a trans woman and a lesbian.
K: It is funny to me all the people I’ve heard argue against same-sex marriage in favor of “biblical marriage.” I wonder if they’ve read the Bible? Of course, what they mean is the one man/one woman marriage we are familiar with today that looks very little like any of the families we see in the Bible. Families in the Bible are messy and usually involve, like, at least twelve children and multiple wives. So, when I comb the Bible for a good example of family, I’m not looking for a mom, dad, 2.5 children and a white picket fence. I’m looking for a familial bond that exemplifies Christ’s love, no matter the makeup of the characters.
In fact, when Marta suggested the theme for this Sunday was “Love Makes Family,” I thought of Ruth and Naomi, the story of a daughter-in-law and a mother-in-law. Even though Naomi encourages Ruth to return to her biological family, where she will almost certainly fare better than she will with Naomi, Ruth refuses to leave. She “clings” to Naomi, the Bible says, which is the same word used in Genesis 2 to say that a man will leave his father and mother and cling, or cleave, to his wife. The bond between Naomi and Ruth is tight, and their story is highly unusual. In those days, it would have been super uncommon for a widowed woman to go live with her mother-in-law. Heck, that’s pretty unusual in today’s world too. But given the patriarchal society in which they lived, women were utterly reliant on men for support. In a situation like this, everyone would have expected Ruth to return to her father’s house for her own safety and wellbeing. They would not expect her to live with her mother-in-law. And she doesn’t just live with her—she freaking moves to another country with her! By all accounts, Ruth’s decision was unconventional. Talk about throwing out the script and writing your own life! Her family would certainly not have understood. They would have thought Ruth was making a very bad choice. But because of her love for Naomi, she chose it anyway. She left behind her family, her home, her security, her friends, her community—everything—to follow Naomi.
A: That reminds me of a conversation I’ve had many times with my best friend, Vanessa. During one of our many walks on deployment we realized that one of the things that seems to bring us the most misery is trying to do the things that are supposed to make us happy. That is, that there’s this...cultural/societal set of expectations that we all do because we grew up being told (both explicitly and implicitly, by a variety of sources), that these things would make us happy: get a college education, have a good job, meet, marry, and stay married to a nice girl or boy, have a couple kids, family vacations at the beach, and split the holidays between your family and your in-laws. And while that seems to really, truly work for some people, for so many of us it doesn’t – and not just in the LGBTQ community. LGBTQ folks just have to question some of the foundational things in life so we start questioning everything else, too.
K: I think it’s safe to say that when it comes to our lives and our love, we’ve definitely thrown out the script. What is the original story you would say we’ve been writing instead?
A: While Ruth and Naomi certainly don’t appear to have a romantic relationship, I think there’s something really important about their relationship that mirrors a conversation we had early on in our relationship. In one conversation that I’ll always remember, we ended up coming to the conclusion that for us to call a relationship successful, for us to want to get married again, we needed to be more committed to each other than to the institution of marriage itself. To clarify a bit, the most important thing for each of us was to support the other person becoming their best self. Ideally, that would lead us closer to each other. But if for some reason that weren’t true, we would want to find a way to continue to support each other’s growth with love and grace, even if it meant the end of a marriage or a change in the relationship. We need to be our best selves, our kids need us to be our best selves, and so does the world. We can’t hope to be agents of good in the world if we aren’t able to grow into the best versions of ourselves. At times, that’s scary – it means holding on more loosely. But it also is so beautiful.
K: The whole idea of being more committed to the person than to the institution reminds of that time when Jesus was healing people on the Sabbath, and the religious leaders are mad that Jesus is breaking the Sabbath. Jesus’ response is: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” The way I see it, marriage was made for people, not people for the marriage. So, while we do plan to get married, we will be making vows to each other, promising to support the other person’s fullest potential and growth. The vow isn’t to marriage itself. The vow is to love one another, and love is bigger than marriage.
A: It is bigger, and it’s different. To me, it’s like a Venn diagram. There is some overlap between marriage and love. But there are clearly marriages without love, and love without marriage. We want to move into where those things overlap, but our commitment isn’t to stay in the marriage circle – it’s to stay in the love circle, whether or not they overlap.
K: Of course, I’m hoping we hang out in the overlap for a good long while. Forever even. :)
A: Me too! So whether you find yourself comfortable in a traditional family, or so far away from tradition that you don’t remember what that even looks like, may you remain forever in the love circle. It’s big enough for all of us. Amen.