[Update: It is now public information that Brian has divorced his wife Monica, and affirms gay relationships. Like most other publications, Spiritual Friendship does not remove posts from our archive, even when the authors change their views. We maintain our view that marriage relationships should not be entered lightly and that all Christians are called to chastity and faithfulness, whether married or single. — Ron Belgau]

In high school, I would cry quietly in my bed. I felt like an outsider in my faith community. I felt a measure of rejection from my family. I felt confusion, shame, and insecurity about my sexuality. All of these added up to one simple feeling: I was lonely. So I wept and prayed every night for Jesus to show up, physically, in my room. He never did.

Throughout my twenties, I’ve gone through periods of asking for that same thing. The reasons have changed, as have the pressures and responsibilities of life. But that silent, desperate plea has not. Please, Jesus. Now. You did it for Thomas. Can’t you do it for me? Just for long enough to know that you’re really here; that my life really matters to you; that this painful obedience and denial is worth something immeasurable to you. But still he resists.

Loneliness persists.

I’ve had a thousand reasons why I’ve felt lonely over the years. When I was young, my dad left, so I felt lonely when I looked up at the family pictures in my friends’ houses. I played classical music and enjoyed musical theater, so I felt lonely when my friends met up after school for garage band sessions. I knew my sexuality was different, so I felt lonely when I couldn’t talk about that boy in the back of that class with my friends because not only was it weird to them; it was a black mark of a sinful disposition. As kids, our loneliness can feel insurmountable.

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Over at First Things today, I posted a summary of my 9-minute(!) talk last week at “Q Commons” at Gordon College in Massachusetts. Here’s a snippet:

I suggested that celibacy is an important reminder that love isn’t reducible to what we do in bed or over a candlelit table for two. It is a reminder that love exceeds the boundaries of the nuclear family. Celibacy is not about a heroic feat of willpower. It’s about giving up one way of expressing love in order to be able to love widely, profligately, indiscriminately. It’s about foregoing a spouse in order to love a community. It’s about giving up the possibility of children in order to become a spiritual father or mother in the family called “church.” It’s about being a little less entangled in the life of the world in order to be a little more free to celebrate the coming kingdom of God, in which none of us will be married and all of us will be spiritual friends with everyone else in the new creation that God will usher in. In the words of Ronald Rolheiser, “Celibacy, if properly lived, can be an important way to keep alive, visible and in the flesh, that part of the incarnation which tells us that when one is speaking of love, the human heart is the central organ.”

Please click through and read the whole thing! There’s a great quote from our own Eve Tushnet at the end.

[Update: It is now public information that Brian and Monica have divorced, and Brian affirms gay relationships. Like most other publications, Spiritual Friendship does not remove posts from our archive, even when the authors change their views. We maintain our view that marriage relationships should not be entered lightly and that all Christians are called to chastity and faithfulness, whether married or single. — Ron Belgau]

In the last few weeks, we’ve published a number of posts tackling different practical questions about celibacy, mixed orientation marriage, and committed friendship. Today, we’re introducing another mixed orientation marriage couple, Brian and Monica Gee. As with the Nate and Sara Collins interview we published last week, this post is taken, with permission, from an interview by Preston Sprinkle for his blog, Theology in the Raw. We’re grateful to Preston for being willing to share this interview with us, and encourage you to check out his blog.

Preston Sprinkle: Thanks, Brian and Monica, for being willing to answer some questions on my blog. Would you mind starting off by telling us about how you both met?

Brian Gee: Thanks for having us on the blog. We’re both nerds at heart, so it’s no surprise that we first met each other through our shared Biblical Greek and Orchestra classes at a small, conservative Christian college in California. For a full semester, we knew each other from an arm’s length, but we didn’t really get to know each other. I also didn’t know that by the end of that semester, Monica had developed a crush on me.

By that point in college, I had been out as gay (actually, at the time, I would have said that I was same-sex attracted) to myself and to a growing group of others for some time, and I wasn’t looking to date or marry. Based on my conservative theology and commitments, I generally assumed I would be celibate. I remember telling God that while I also wouldn’t outright dismiss heterosexual marriage, I wouldn’t consider or look for it unless he made it very obvious that it’s what I should do.

At the start of Spring semester of 2005, I had at least eight friends in a span of two or three weeks ask me if I had considered dating Monica. The night that the eighth friend asked me, Monica and I were both at a friend’s recital. Afterward, we were standing outside the recital hall when Monica came up to me and said, “Brian Gee, what makes you tick?”

At that point, I had started to pay more attention to Monica. I wanted to know what she was all about and whether or not God was actually taking my caveat more seriously than I had thought he would. When she asked me that question, I told her that I’d need more than a couple of minutes to talk about it. That question led to our first four-hour conversation where we both realized how we were probably meant for each other. I also started to experience something I very much was not expecting—attraction to her.

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I recently gave a lecture at the University of Notre Dame as part of its Theology on Tap series, sponsored by ND Campus Ministry. You can listen to the audio by clicking here.

Here’s the event description:

This is one of the talks that I gave for Trinity school for Ministry last weekend.

Beyond the Culture Wars: Listening to LGBTQ people in the Parish Today

I’ve been told that there are two types of people in the world. There are people who work from the particular to the general: they start with a single concrete example and then they work out from there, deriving principles along the way. A lot of contemporary writing, especially writing for women, is in this style. You pick up a woman’s magazine and the story almost invariably begins with a little slice of life, someone’s particular story, or a cute event that happened while the author was baking apricot crumble. There are other people who work from the general to the particular. They start with grand universal theses and then slowly focus in their particular area of interest. Everyone who has ever attended high-school knows that this is the way that we are taught to write the introduction to a formal essay. You start with a grand statement like “Star-crossed love has been a perennial fascination since first human beings began to tell stories around the fire,” and you end up with a tight, focused thesis like “Romeo was a trumped up playboy, and Juliet was a ditz.”

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In his most recent post, Kyle Keating draws attention to a post by Corey Widmer at the Gospel Coalition. In Traditional Sexuality Radical Community, Widmer discusses the need for churches to provide a more effective pastoral support to make traditional teaching on sexual ethics more plausible to those who are called to make difficult sacrifices.

In the same vein, but a Catholic context, I wanted to draw attention to the Preparatory Catechesis for the World Meeting of Families,  Love is Our Mission: The Family Fully Alive:

167. But if ordinary parishioners understood the rationale behind celibacy as a community practice, and if more domestic churches took the apostolate of hospitality more seriously, then the ancient Catholic teaching on chastity lived in continence outside of marriage might look more plausible to modern eyes. In other words, if our parishes really were places where “single” did not mean “lonely,” where extended networks of friends and families really did share one another’s joys and sorrows, then perhaps at least some of the world’s objections to Catholic teaching might be disarmed. Catholics can embrace apostolates of hospitality no matter how hostile or indifferent the surrounding culture might be. Nobody is limiting lay or ordained Catholics in the friendship which we can offer those who struggle.

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