Interview by Onna Young • Halifax • 2024-08-04
Robert Seymour Wright is a queer, African Nova Scotian social worker and sociologist, but his first calling was to the church. On the evening of Wednesday, August 7th, Robert will be preaching at Queer Spirit Church in Halifax.
Since 2010 he has worked developing what has become The Peoples Counselling Clinic. He was contributed to the development of the African Nova Scotian Justice Institute. He stepped down as executive director of both of this organizations in the Spring of 2024. He stays on as the Director Emeritus of the clinic and as a Special Advisor at the Institute.
Wayves' Onna Young sat down with Robert to talk about Queerness and having a calling to God and community.
First, your arc explains a lot of my next questions. When I sit in meetings of the Office of Anti-racism and Diversity, when asked about people working in the community, your name comes up a lot, and is celebrated across many communities. What is it about your approach that seems to bridge gaps where other people have failed in the past?
That's a fantastic question. I never really thought about it before.
Well, I mean, I identify as queer and black... and because I've taught university courses for a long time, probably since the 1990s.
When it comes to the queer community, I actually love queer folk and embrace the diversity of queerness
One of the things I say is that there are three qualities that a professor needs to teach in the 21st century:
- They have to have a mastery of their subject matter. You can't teach if you're a novice. I don't believe that as a teacher if your method is to pick up a textbook and stay two chapters ahead of the person that you're teaching, you can teach them anything. I think you have to be a master at what you teach. And I think that is part of my thing, the thing I lean into: to be an expert at the things that I teach.
- The second thing is that you need to actually have skills in teaching. Not every professor has that. Sometimes they have mastery in their subject matter, but they're just not, technically speaking, good communicators and educators. I think that I have some strengths there. I've worked with kids all my life, and when you work with children, you learn how to communicate authentically and not simplistically, but in a way that is comprehensible. With young people, even if you're teaching very complex things, you have to be understood, so I've really learned how to be understood as a teacher.
- The last quality of an effective educator is: you have to love the people you're teaching. I know a lot of university professors who actually hate young adults. They find them pretentious, annoying, greedy, needy or lazy. I say: if you don't love the people you're teaching, you shouldn't be a university professor. I think that that's been the key to my success, not just in teaching, but across my career. I've learned that I can communicate, and I actually love the people I'm working with and for, and that's true whether I'm working in a child welfare environment with people with very troubled families. I actually love those families, both the victims and the perpetrators. I love them both. If I'm working with civil servants, even if I'm fighting with them, I recognize that they are human beings and have families, and I actually can love the people that I'm fighting with, I have compassion for them.
When it comes to the queer community, I actually love queer folk and embrace the diversity of queerness. I embrace the diversity of race, I love people, all kinds of people from all over the place - so I think that that's the secret. I think that even the civil servants and government folks who are used to me giving them a really hard time, when I take the gloves off, there's no animosity. It's like, you know, we're in the ring fighting, but then when we step out of the ring, I give you a hug, embrace you and ask about your family and your kids because I actually love people and I think that that comes across, the love, the ability to communicate, and the fact that I've worked to become knowledgeable about some things.
What are your past relationships with the church? In my mind, love and spirituality and especially Christianity are synonymous.
Exactly. Yes, exactly. Take the Christian phrase or idea, "God is love." It's interesting how confused that can become.
The family I grew up in was not churchgoing, but we were in what I call the black Baptist tradition. We were black, which meant that only gospel music was played on the stereo at home on Sundays. We didn't go to church. My mother drank a lot; we were in a community where there was a lot of drinking and violence in the community.
My mother didn't take us to Sunday school, we were put on the Sunday school bus that came around in the neighbourhood and off we went. I was a curious churchy kid from a very young age.
if you don't love the people you're teaching, you shouldn't be a university professor.
When I was 13, I started attending the 7th-day Adventist church. There was something about that, that really grabbed me. I think it was the fact that the church and the preaching were very biblically centred, and that really resonated with me. Preaching was a large part of the Adventist worship culture. I joined that church and became quite integrated. I was a bright, churchy young kid, preaching on youth days by the time I was 14. My first experiences with preaching were so well received that I became a regular supply preacher in the churches around the Maritimes - Halifax, Bridgewater, New Minas, Truro and New Glasgow.
When I was 13, I started attending the 7th-day Adventist church. And there was something about that, that really grabbed me.
When I went to college. I did both my degrees at Adventist universities and became very much a leader, not just in the college community, but in the church community too; it was very natural for me.
Back then I didn't identify as queer. I married a woman.
My brother (technically a half-brother) Joe was gay. He died of AIDS in 1992, in his 30s. He was the oldest, 15 years older than I and a frequent babysitter in our home when I was a kid. I loved him. I knew he was gay. It didn't cause me any angst. From a very early age I knew that I could have "gone either way" but I don't identify as bisexual. I think what happened to me happens to many young people: there just can't be queerness, it can't be a part of their imagined reality.
I was not willing to stay closeted to my church.
It was after divorcing my wife that I came to terms with being gay, being queer. It's interesting that it didn't cause me a lot of angst. I moved back to Halifax, and my church really just engulfed me and wanted me to get fully engaged again, and I did for a while.
But within a year, I realized there was no integrity in this: I'm a spiritual leader in a church, and if I were out of the closet, they would not accept me, and I was not willing to stay closeted to my church. So I met with my pastor, and I told him that I was gay and that I would be stepping down from all leadership roles. And so for maybe 18 years, I have had limited involvement in the church and very limited involvement in church leadership. I've been without a spiritual home since then, visiting churches, but not really finding a home.
All of my experience with preaching and teaching is in a church culture that doesn't accept me. I wasn't affiliating with other churches until fairly recently when had my own... I wouldn't call it a crisis, I'd say I've been wrestling with God about what is the call.
I am a faithful person to answer calls to service in the community and my practice, but I've been ignoring the call to my spiritual life. Over the last little while, I have been answering it. So I've preached a couple of times: I preached at St. Andrews and I helped out with the Pride Place project that they are developing there. I've preached at my friend Greg Kerr's United Church in Hants County. And, I wanted to reach out to Arla [at Queer Spirt Church] to say it's time.
I'd say I've been wrestling with God about what is the call.
Although you can hear in my voice how hesitant I am, I can't ignore this call in my life anymore. I'm afraid, literally afraid to commit, to say, "yes, I'm going to lean into service and answer the call and ask the Queer Spirit Church to help me find my way." I'm afraid to say that out loud. And although, I've just said it out loud to you, Onna, I'm still afraid.
It's a scary thing to say. I know that I've heard you say that you felt your queerness robbed you of your opportunity for service.
Yeah.
Getting back to that seems really deeply important to you. I was just wondering what kind of messages you would have for other queer people who, despite their past negative relationships with what is, quite frankly, just at this point, church politics not a matter of faith.
I believe that we are creatures of the creator, and we were created in whatever shape, colour, ethnicity, orientation, capacity that the creator intended. Whatever the shape of our existence is, it is a gift of the creator to us, a gift that is not designed for us. It is a gift for us to be alive and to be joyful and to have experiences of love and joy. We have been gifted life, and we have to figure out what our purpose is.
If you can sing, then that's a gift, and you sing in order to share the gift. If you can run, that's a gift; you run with other people, and you train people, and you engage in sport and recreation and support the health of other people. That comes through the gift that you've been given.
Even though I grew up in a faith community that didn't affirm my sexual orientation, I wasn't confused when I came out. Being queer must be a part of the gift that I have been given, and how do I share that? How does it become part of the gift, that I give to others?
So I think that we have to find that spiritual gift that is our sexual identity, orientation and sexuality. That's a gift that we need to explore and find how to honour. If we think of it that way, we can understand that whoever we are, we are acceptable to the divine, that the creator has made us this way and that we have a place on the planet. We have a place in the hearts of other people, a place on the social policy agenda of our government, and a place in the church.
all spiritual traditions and all spiritual philosophies and all religions have been perverted by the larger culture to serve its ends.
The call on my life right now is to explore that truth and expound that truth and deepen my own understanding of it as it applies to my own life.
How much do you think the call of the self, of our queerness and a call to God come from the same place in yourself? To truly know yourself is to know God. Are those the same skills to figure out your spirituality in a world where most spirituality goes against the cultural norm?
Absolutely! Remember that all spiritual traditions and all spiritual philosophies and all religions have been perverted by the larger culture to serve its ends.
So, for example, I say this: capitalism is inconsistent with any deep, authentic spiritual tradition that I have come to understand. And yet capitalism has co-opted Christianity and other faiths to its purposes. I think that every person has to ask themselves the question, "if I am a creature of the creator and I am in relationship with all of the rest of creation, is the exploitation of other people and this world consistent with my spirituality?"
I must struggle to figure that out.
When I came to terms with being queer, I didn't rail at God, "How could you make me queer? I've got this perfect life that, I'm in the church, I'm doing it!" Instead I said, "Aha. What are you trying to tell me now? What new frontier are you challenging me to accept in myself and my understanding of the creation?" So I had to embrace the truth of my queerness.
That's my journey now and I think it might come out a little bit on Wednesday.
Robert will be at Queer Spirit Church on Wednesday, August 7th. QSC services are held on the first Wednesday of every month; doors open at 6pm, the service starts at 6:30, and fellowship, coffee and cookies follow.
Robert's professional counselling website is robertswright.ca.
