“Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, so I chose to tell myself a different story.” – Cheryl Strayed
If you’re anything like me, you’ve got a fair share of fears. And if you happen to be a gay Christian, a number of those fears surface when you’re open about your sexuality in the context of a Christian community. While I might not base my theology on the words of Cheryl Strayed, I resonate with her desire to tell a different story than the one my fears impose.
Dear Freshman Matt,
Let’s just get this out of the way: I’m not going to send you the winning lottery numbers for the next five years. Please. You should have thought about the possibility of receiving letters from your future self before you signed the Community Covenant.
Also, you’re gay.
Surprise!
I came out to one of my friends recently. We’ll call her Jane. As had often happened, I took forever to get it out, but after a certain point I just told her something like, “There’s a secret that I’ve had for a while that I want to tell you.”
She nodded her head up and down, smiling tenderly, and responded, “It’s ok. You can say it. You can just say it.”
So I told her I was gay.
Recently there has been a “coming out” pandemic amongst celibate gay Christian bloggers. First Matt Jones—previously known as “Jordan” but now blogging under his own name at A Joyful Stammering (and Spiritual Friendship)—went public about his identity. Then Catholic blogger Steve Gershom revealed to the world that he is actually Joey Prever.
For two reasons, this trend is good news for both the Church and the world. The first, as Matt Schmitz points out, is that given the increasing acceptance of homosexual relationships in the West, the Church can no longer expect its teachings on sexuality to be credible if they are presented merely in syllogisms. If gay people are to be convinced that the Church has something to say that is worth listening to, that message will be best received when it comes from gay Christians themselves, and is shown forth in their lives. If the Church wants to speak credibly about homosexuality it must be prepared to speak “in the first person,” just as it has recently made an effort to teach the truth of Christian marriage by canonizing married saints and encouraging first-person experiential accounts of living out the Church’s teachings on marital love.
This is the fifth in a series of posts looking at my Catholic Faith, and how it relates to my life and my sexuality. Click to see the first, second, third, and fourth installments.
Some of the best responses to my coming out have come from those who listened receptively. They take in what I have to say and seek to understand as best they can. In some ways, my coming out has changed very little in my relationships with others. I am the same man that I have always been. Most of my relationships have neither taken a radical redirection nor experienced a great rupture. So things have more or less remained the same.
Yet, everything has changed. It’s like a man who has always loved music and then learns musical theory. He loves the music, as he had loved it before, but his love is, in some ways, entirely different. He loves not only that music is beautiful, but he loves the particularities of that beauty that he had not seen before: its profound order, the development of a musical score, the genius of a composition.
This is the second in a series of posts looking at my Catholic Faith, and how it relates to my life and my sexuality. Read the first post here.
In 2012, The Observer ran a series on the experiences of gay and lesbian students at Notre Dame. Senior Sam Costanzo came to Notre Dame with the same hope that I suspect many other gay students had brought to Catholic universities: that it “would be a school where he could come to terms with his sexual orientation as it related to being a practicing Catholic.” Like many others before him, Sam was no longer a practicing Catholic at the time the article was published. This is a common story, and it’s a story that I understand. When you’re gay, coming to terms with being a Catholic is an extremely difficult journey, a story that is rarely told, and when it is told, it almost always ends with a broken relationship with the Church.
Often, when gay and lesbian men and women can’t find a place in the Church, they feel that their only option is to leave, and they walk out of the Church, often accompanied by their friends and family members. This could have been my story. Given the frequency of this story, it is perhaps something of a miracle that my life is developing in a rather different direction.
This is the first in a series of posts looking at my Catholic Faith, and how it relates to my life and my sexuality.
For a time now, I have been engaging in intense self-reflection, considering the direction that my life seems to be taking and the ways in which I can develop as a Catholic and as a human being. It seems to me that many Catholics today are confused about their relationship to the Church and its teachings about sexuality. Many are unsure of whether they can find a place in the Church. They feel alienated by misunderstandings, confusions, misrepresentations, unjust caricatures, and unfounded discriminations.
I count myself as among these Catholics. And I’ve realized that, if I am going to get past these obstacles, it is time for me to be open about myself and to reach out to others who are like me.
The main point of this post is the firm and frank admission: I’m gay.
Spiritual Friendship 