On Tuesday, Pope emeritus Benedict XVI sent a letter to an Italian newspaper. In response to a question about his well-being, Benedict wrote of the “slow waning” of his physical strength, and spoke with hope of his “pilgrimage toward home.”
“It’s a great grace, in this last, at times tiring, stage of my journey, to be surrounded by a love and goodness that I could have never imagined,” he wrote.
Part 2: What Heartbreak and Heartache Have Taught Me About Heart
The second time I fell in love was with a new friend I met during my last year in St. Louis. I’ll call him Brad. This time, I wanted to learn from my last experience and decided to dive head first into the feelings and try and embrace them as best I could. My friends and counselors had been showing me all the ways I had grown callous and dismissive toward my emotions, and they encouraged me to try a different approach than repressing them. I was threatened by my feelings, and so if they didn’t make sense, or if it seemed pointless to feel them, I would try and reject or repress them. As the wiser voices in my life knew, though, rejecting and ignoring them only made them fester. This time I decided that I was going to take these newly learned lessons in emotional congruence and let my feelings be rather than fighting them. I was moving away from St. Louis several months after meeting Brad, and so whatever happened, it would have a firm end when I moved to Chicago.
Part of expressing what I was feeling was finding language for it. Unlike my experience with Corey, I more readily admitted to a few close friends my attractions to Brad and would effusively share with those friends around me about the feelings. I was a man who had a crush on (and eventually fell in love with) another man—it seemed simple enough. I had no intent of pursuing anything with brad other than, perhaps, a lesson in increased emotional intelligence. Even after my experience of falling in love with Corey, I still felt that I’d never fully accepted the part of me that was romantically attracted to other men. My lust and sexual desires were all too familiar, but I still largely resisted and ignored the more complicated side of my attraction to other men. This side of myself longed for a deep, intimate connection with another person, which I had largely ignored or repressed. I knew that all of us long for love and connection and that self-sacrifice and deep love can exist in friendship as well as marriage. What I didn’t know was if there was some goodness in my romantic feelings for Brad that could be genuinely loving and selfless without having to be rejected altogether.
©️ Gregg Webb 2014
I believe that part of why I was so emotionally shut off to my own experiences was out of a fear of what those feelings might mean about me. They scared and threatened me because they weren’t as clearly rooted in sin as my lust was. My lust was selfish and grounded in my own pleasure, but my feelings for Brad felt more connected to what I believed was selflessness—the same feelings that lead someone to forsake father and mother and give over their life to the good of someone else’s. This self-giving and person-focused side of my attractions was what I wanted to begin opening myself up to in a way that I hadn’t with Corey. I wanted to try and be more open to the parts of these feelings that could be pleasing to God, like selflessness. My faith told me that I was called to resist lust for the same gender, but it wasn’t as clear to me if these other parts of my feelings for Brad could somehow be good. Continue reading
Part 1: What Heartbreak and Heartache Have Taught Me About Myself
How do you live with heartbreak when you were never supposed to fall in love? What happens when you fall in love with a friend and you don’t want to ruin a friendship? How do you find the goodness in loving someone even if those feelings are, at some point, also romantic? I still don’t think I really know the answers to these questions, although the circumstances of my life seem hell-bent on teaching me. Heartaches and heartbreaks have taught me about myself, about my heart, and about my community. These are lessons I’m slowly learning, and I hope that in these ramblings maybe you too will find some semblance of an answer. At the very least, you’ll find something that you can empathize with, because at some point, gay or straight, heartache and heartbreak happen.
Twice in my adult life I’ve fallen in love with a man. Early crushes may have happened before adulthood, nothing significant enough to write about. The first time I fell in love was for a writer I’d gotten to know through his blog. I’ll call him Corey. As much as I struggled not to fall in love with Corey, I eventually did. I was madly in denial about what I was experiencing because it felt so incongruent with my values and, in many ways, pointless. Hundreds of miles separated us, and he never reciprocated my feelings, so there were fewer kicks to the face emotionally that would have made the nature of my feelings more apparent to me.
©️ Gregg Webb 2014
Caught up in all of the heartache was fear. I feared what these feelings meant for me and for my future life as a celibate gay man. I couldn’t figure out which of the feelings I experienced were acceptable and which I was supposed to try and kill off. It took me over a year just to start finding language I felt comfortable with to describe what I was feeling. In many ways, because falling in love seemed pointless as a celibate gay man, I just wanted to forget about the whole thing altogether. My heart, and sometimes my dear friends, never really let me ignore it entirely, though I tried. It took Spotify listing my number one song of 2014 as “I Don’t Wanna Love Somebody Else,” by A Great Big World, for me to begin accepting that even the music I was (cluelessly) listening to somehow expressed what I could not. Experiences like the one I wrote about in “Forsaking All Others“ also helped me come to terms with my myself and slowly began to help me identify what I was feeling. Continue reading
I am speaking at University of Dallas tonight on “Friendship and Homosexuality,” sponsored by the Office of Campus Ministry. Given time limits, a talk like this can only briefly touch on topics which I have written about in much more depth here on Spiritual Friendship. This post provides a handy reference for people who heard my talk to read more about what I said. (And for those who weren’t able to make it to the talk, it still provides a handy reference to several important posts I’ve written over the years.)
First, I shared a bit about my own story. This post tells a bit about how I started to realize I wasn’t attracted to women. You might say that I “backed” my way into the Catholic Church, first by recognizing the link between accepting contraception and accepting same-sex marriage, and only later recognizing the flaws of the “slow motion sexual revolutionaries” I grew up with in the Southern Baptist Church. This post, perhaps the most important for setting the stage for my later thinking about chastity, relates more about my experience of falling in love with a friend in college. An important theme in all of this is the difference between talking with and talking about.
Aelred of Rievaulx is one of the most important influences on my vision for the Spiritual Friendship blog. I’ve written about his typology of friendship, as well as the distinction between true and false friendship. With respect to Catholic teaching on friendship and homosexuality I’ve written about various Catholic documents that commend friendship for men and women with homosexual inclinations, as well as what the Catechism means by “disinterested friendship.” Another important influence on my thinking is Blessed John Henry Newman’s sermon on the “Love of Relations and Friends.”
I closed by reflecting on two experiences I had in France: seeing a painting by Gabriel Girodon depicting the martyrdom of the brothers Crepin and Crepinien at Soissons, and a pilgrimage to Lourdes I took 15 years ago with an older friend of mine who was dying of pancreatic cancer.
For those in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, I will be speaking at University of Dallas on Tuesday October 10, 2017. The talk will be at 6:30 p.m. in the Multipurpose Room, SB Hall, sponsored by the Office of Campus Ministry
From the event flyer:
The Catholic Church has frequently recommended friendship as a part of her pastoral care to same-sex attracted Catholics. In this talk, Ron Belgau will reflect on his own experiences with realizing he was gay and how a close friend helped him to choose chastity. He will also explain the Church’s teaching on friendship and homosexuality more clearly, and how the virtue of chastity “blossoms in friendship” (CCC 2347).
The speaker, Ron Belgau, is an internationally known speaker who lectures on Biblical sexual ethics and his own experiences as a celibate gay Christian. He is the cofounder, with Wesley Hill, of Spiritual Friendship, an increasingly popular group blog dedicated to exploring how the recovery of authentic Christian teaching on friendship can help to provide a faithful and orthodox response to the challenge of homosexuality.
In 2015, during Pope Francis’s visit to Philadelphia he and his mother, Beverley, were invited by Archbishop Charles Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., to speak at the World Meeting of Families about how Catholic families can better respond to gay, lesbian, and bisexual persons in their midst.
Hope to see you there!
A few months ago I was invited to become one of the contributors to a new Eastern Orthodox blog called Orthodoxy in Dialogue. At the time I had just written my post How Should We Then Live? which was a response to conversations around Giacomo Sanfilippo’s post on Conjugal Friendship. Giacomo is one of the editors at Orthodoxy in Dialogue and asked if I’d contribute from time to time. They are hoping to “provide a space for the discussion of topics relevant to Orthodox Christianity.” Some of those topics, will overlap with Spiritual Friendship’s ongoing discussions around the place of sexual minorities in the church. One of their recent posts, “Transgenderism” Isn’t a Thing is in the same vein of subjects we’ve written about here on Spiritual Friendship.
I recently published my first essay with Orthodoxy In Dialogue continuing the themes of How Should We Then Live and wanted to share with you all.
Most often, the rehashing and restating of the Church’s concrete theological positions grate against me. It pains me not because I personally disagree with its conclusions; rather, I find it lacking in practical advice or teaching that actually helps make sense of the life I’m called to live. Discussions around celibate relationships, committed friendships, life in community, sexual abstinence, and many others just don’t happen. I’ve found the Church leery of engaging in these gray areas for fear of somehow failing a test of “Orthodoxy.” Simply even engaging with the lived experiences of queer people in the Church is dangerous, or has the possibility of contaminating what is seen as “pure” theology.
I want to affirm the need for theological preservation, and for ancient truths to continue to have a place in the teaching of the Church. But the problem comes when it starts to feel as if I’ve been forgotten by the Church or reduced to a theological anomaly.
You can read the rest of the post here!
Over the weekend, I wrote a long email to Rod Dreher in response to some things he had said about the Nashville Statement. This morning, he published it on his blog, along with some responses of his own. Although I don’t agree with everything he said in response, I will think through what he has to say before responding in more depth. In the meantime, I share my letter and encourage you to check out his responses. At the end of this post, I’ve also included several important points from online discussion of the letter, from Rod Dreher, Justin Taylor, Matthew Schmitz, Denny Burk, and Dan Mattson. I am grateful for the thoughtful discussion I have seen in response to the letter.
Dear Rod,
I’m writing in reply to your response to criticisms of the Nashville Statement. Although some of your other responses, like the email from Chris Roberts and the piece on the cost of the divorce culture, addressed some of my concerns, I think it would be helpful to explain my worries about your response in more depth.
In the first place, I was surprised by this post because, when I read The Benedict Option, I was particularly impressed with your analysis of the sexual revolution in Chapter 9. You spelled out the ways that it has not only corrupted the surrounding culture, but has also penetrated into the church, undermining many Christians’ faith. Like Russell Moore’s 2014 keynote on “Slow Motion Sexual Revolutionaries,” you spoke prophetically of the ways that Christians have been co-opted by the sexual revolution. You made clear that we need to recover a distinctly Christian way of thinking about sexuality and living in sexual purity. Your whole book is about how we need to stand apart from the anti-Christian ethos of modern culture, and do better at building community practices that enable us pass on the faith, catechize, and keep us from turning into moralistic therapeutic Deists.
But there are two ways of distancing ourselves from the ethos of the broader culture.
The first—which I understood you to be advocating in The Benedict Option—is a repentance which recognizes that we have been drawn away from God and into worldly ways of thinking. We need the purification that can only come through asceticism, and so we seek the encouragement and accountability of other Christians to be faithful and to pass on the faith.
The second, however, is to become a self-righteous clique, whose members don’t call each other out, but instead focus on blaming all their problems on those outside the clique, whether other Christians who fall short by the clique’s standards, or non-Christians.
Gregory Coles’ Single, Gay, Christian releases today. Go buy it.
Writing a review for my friend Greg Coles’ new book is a bit like taking a photograph of the Grand Canyon… using an old-fashioned camera… with a cracked lens… and overexposed film. It is doomed to fail utterly at the task of representing the experience of actually journeying with Greg as he relates his personal story of how he discovered that God could love gay people like himself, like me, and like others. For this reason, as well as due to the genre of Greg’s book (memoir), my comments here will not follow the pattern of a standard review, but will be instead a somewhat stream-of-consciousness reflection on how I was personally impacted by Greg’s story.
Gregory Coles is the author of Single, Gay, Christian, a memoir about faith and sexual identity that will be released tomorrow (August 22) by InterVarsity Press. He’s also a piano player, a baker, a worship leader, and a PhD candidate in English, not necessarily in that order.
In my ideal world, being gay and celibate wouldn’t occupy a great deal of my thought life. (Not-having-sex doesn’t take very much time, after all…)
I’m not saying that I never want to think about being gay. It’s an important part of my experience of the world. The ways I’ve encountered Jesus, the dreams I’ve given up for him, the joys I’ve discovered along the way—those things are all indelibly informed by my sexuality. I face different challenges and enjoy different opportunities because of my same-sex orientation. The last thing I want to do is scrub away my life’s particular details with a bottle of Clorox and a sponge.
But if I had my way, I would think about gay celibacy the same way I think about my career options, or what I should have for dinner, or whether I want a pet ferret. I would think about it the way I imagine that straight people think about being straight, as if it’s simply part of life. It wouldn’t need to be a stentorian shout or an embarrassed whisper in the chambers of my mind. It would just be. It would be normal. It would be banal.
One thing that has always struck me about Rosaria Butterfield’s story is how different it is from my own. By Butterfield’s account, she initially dated men and had a few bad experiences. She did not start to date women until her late twenties, after becoming involved in feminist academia. From her telling, it seems it was less a matter of pursuing relationships with women because she was naturally attracted to them, and more a matter of rebellion against traditional ideas. And indeed, Butterfield describes her primary sin issue as rebellion against God’s design.
Contrast this with my own story. As I’ve discussed before, I first started to realize that I was attracted to other guys around puberty, though I was in denial about it for quite a while. I was horrified and ashamed over this, because I was committed to following Christianity and never bought the revisionist arguments about sexual ethics. As a result, my primary response was to try to rid myself of my feelings for the same sex. A lot of my questions and difficulties came from the realization that my feelings just weren’t changing, despite my best efforts. I certainly had (and still have) some struggles with sin in terms of things like lustful thoughts, but I’m a virgin, and I never got into porn.
Why should we expect that the same approach that worked for Butterfield would work well in my situation?
It’s definitely true that there’s a single Gospel for all believers. Nonetheless, we usually recognize that people in different situations will need different approaches to bring this same Gospel to bear in their lives. Continue reading
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