Chris: This Is Me

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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.

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New Design for Spiritual Friendship

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As should be fairly obvious if you are reading this (and have ever read a post at Spiritual Friendship before), we have dramatically altered the website design.

When Wesley and I created Spiritual Friendship in April of 2012, we weren’t really sure what we were doing. We’d been privately discussing a bunch of the ideas we’ve talked about here, and a number of our friends encouraged us to talk about them more publicly. At the time, we weren’t sure how much interest there was in our ideas. The reparative therapy/orientation change model that had been used by Exodus International still seemed to be more or less the default approach in orthodox Christian circles. So, with some trepidation, we decided to start a blog. Because we weren’t really sure where this was going, we just chose a default WordPress template, and started tentatively putting out posts.

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Celibacy and Healing

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When I was an undergraduate, I read two of the most important ex-gay books of the time: Coming Out of Homosexuality by Bob Davies and Lori Rentzel, and Straight & Narrow? by Thomas Schmidt.

Coming out of Homosexuality was 208 pages long, and offered three chapters devoted to topics related to heterosexual dating and marriage. They then turned to the topic of those who remain single:

We have taken a detailed look in the past several chapters at different aspects of moving toward heterosexual relationships in terms of dating, engagement and marriage. This is an appropriate place to reaffirm the validity of being single.

The majority of former homosexuals are single, even those who have been out of same-sex immorality for many years. Some left homosexuality while in their late twenties or older and simply have not found a suitable potential spouse. Others have been married previously and hesitate to initiate a new marriage. Some are content in their singleness and feel no desire to begin dating. Whatever the reason, the Bible assures us that singleness is a positive thing; it should not cause us embarrassment or shame.

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The Gift of Celibacy

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[This is the second in a series of three posts on celibacy. The first was What Does Genesis 2:18 Really Teach?]

I’m frustrated with a lot of the way many Christians talk about “the gift of celibacy.” There are some unbiblical ideas that often creep in, and I think we’re missing some big pastoral issues. Given that I’m bisexual rather than gay and still pretty young, I’m not talking so much about my own experience as that of others (both gay and straight) whose experience is being ignored.

I don’t see how “the gift of celibacy” entails not dealing with sexual temptation or with loneliness. Paul never says that in 1 Corinthians 7 – he just says that he can maintain self-control, which is not at all the same thing. We recognize that being given the gift of marriage doesn’t make everything easy. Marriage comes with a lot of difficulties, and there’s a lot of focus on how to help married people deal with them. When celibacy comes with difficulties, it often seems our only focus is on getting people married. Few people seem to take seriously the idea that someone with a healthy sex drive could be called to celibacy. Our surrounding culture is deeply opposed to celibacy, and many Christians tacitly or explicitly agree with this attitude. In Protestantism, some of these attitudes stem back to the Reformation, despite the Bible’s clear teaching that celibacy is a higher calling than marriage. (This is not to say that all Protestants dismiss the Bible’s teaching on celibacy. For example, John Stott was himself celibate for his entire life but was a respected leader. However, anti-celibacy attitudes are common within Protestant culture.)

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Souls Knit Together

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Justin Taylor points to an excerpt from an article by Michael A. G. Haykin, the Patristics scholar, on biblical images for friendship:

The Bible uses two consistent images in its representation of friendship.

The first is that of the knitting of souls together.

Deuteronomy provides the earliest mention in this regard when it speaks of a ‘friend who is as your own soul’ (Deut. 13:6), that is, one who is a companion of one’s innermost thoughts and feelings.  Prominent in this reflection on friendship is the concept of intimacy.  It is well illustrated by Jonathan and David’s friendship.  For example, in 1 Samuel 18:1 we read that the ‘soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.’  This reflection on the meaning of friendship bears with it ideas of strong emotional attachment and loyalty.  Not surprisingly, the term ‘friend’ naturally became another name for believers or brothers and sisters in the Lord (see 3 John 14).

The second image that the Bible uses to represent friendship is the face-to-face encounter.  This is literally the image used for Moses’ relationship to God.  In the tabernacle God spoke to Moses ‘face to face, as a man speaks to his friend’ (Exod. 33:11; see also Num. 12:8).  The face-to-face image implies a conversation, a sharing of confidences and consequently a meeting of minds, goals and direction.  In the New Testament, we find a similar idea expressed in 2 John 12, where the Elder tells his readers that he wants to speak to them ‘face to face.’ One of the benefits of such face-to-face encounters between friends is the heightened insight that such times of friendship produce. As the famous saying in Proverbs 27:17 puts it, ‘Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.’

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Intrinsically Disordered? How Not to Talk About Homosexuality

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If there is one thing we can learn from Pope Francis’s recent comments on gay Christians, it is that style matters. Francis said nothing other recent popes haven’t said, but the winsome way he said it earned him a hearing from many for whom Catholic teaching on homosexuality is considered toxic.

Many Catholics have expressed disquiet with the form in which that teaching has been presented in recent decades, and in particular with the Church’s oft-repeated claim that homosexuality is “intrinsically disordered.” Less has been said, however, about what the Church might say instead of this.

As Eve Tushnet points out, “you can’t have a vocation of not-gay-marrying and not-having-sex.” It’s important not to reduce what the Church has to say to gay people merely to its teaching on sex. But while not-having-sex is only a small part of what the Church has to say, it is worth thinking about how it could be better presented, given that the ham-fisted way in which this particular teaching is presented often causes significant damage to the Church’s relationship with the gay community.

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It Gets Better for the Chaste, Too

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Matthew Vines has assigned my book, Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality, as one of the core texts of his new training program, The Reformation Project. Matthew disagrees with my conclusions in the book, but he assigned it so that the participants in the program could hear from a gay person who’s trying to live within traditional Christian teaching on homosexuality.

These participants have noted, though, how much I talk about the difficulty of living within the bounds of traditional Christian teaching. There’s a lot in the book about my experience of loneliness, drawing on Henri Nouwen’s powerful writings on that theme, and those descriptions have caused Matthew Vines’ readers to wonder if my experience is typical of gay people who choose to pursue celibacy. Or, more precisely, I think, it’s caused them to wonder if I am baptizing a particular experience of shame- and guilt-induced loneliness and calling it “faithfulness.”

Two initial responses come to mind.

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Language, the Person, and the “Identity Problem”

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Matthew Schmitz’s recent post on First Thoughts (“Evangelicals Oppose Gay Marriage, Now More than Ever”, Wednesday, July 10, 2013) noted that First Things has become the venue of choice for discussion of the pastoral issues concerning celibate gay Christians, one which has now (happily) come to include a first-person perspective.  The exploration of the terminology used by the Church about the personal status of homosexuality has formed a major thread in this discussion, and has brought forth many articles.  On the one hand, Daniel Mattson has written some pointed pieces arguing that the Church condemns describing a person as ‘gay’ or ‘queer’ (e.g. “Why I Don’t Call Myself a Gay Christian,” “Homosexual Orientation, or Disorientation?” and “In Defense of the Church’s Challenging Language on Homosexuality“). On the other hand, Joshua Gonnerman has written an explanation of how the omission of a word from the original Latin has led to a misreading of the English text of Homosexualitatis Problema.  This would form what one might call the “general argument about identity terms.”

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Spiritual Friendship on Social Media

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We’ve now added a Spiritual Friendship Facebook page, a Twitter account (and even a Google+ page!) for those of you who prefer to interact on those platforms. At the moment, we’re just sharing links to Spiritual Friendship blog posts through those accounts, but will be exploring more creative ways of using them as we move forward. If you have any suggestions for how to make use of these platforms, please let us know!

What Does Genesis 2:18 Really Teach?

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A frequently misinterpreted verse in the Bible is Genesis 2:18, where God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (ESV).  From the immediate context, where God creates Eve as a helper for Adam, many people understand the state of being single to be “not good” and marriage as the only real solution to loneliness.

Common as this interpretation is, it cannot be squared with the full witness of Scripture.  Take Matthew 19, for instance.  After Jesus had just finished making an argument from Genesis about divorce, the disciples assert that it is better not to marry.  If the common understanding of Genesis 2:18 were correct, Jesus would have immediately brought it up.  He didn’t, but instead basically said that it can be better to remain unmarried, just not for everyone.  He mentioned three categories of people who would remain celibate, only the third of which would have any explicit choice in the matter.  (See Seeds of Celibacy for a reflection on this last fact.)

The only way I can reconcile Genesis 2:18 with Matthew 19 is that “being alone” and being married are not the only choices: there must be a third option.  This makes a good deal of sense even in the context of the Genesis passage: after all, Adam was not merely single, he was the only human being on the face of the planet.  It was through his relationship with Eve that the world was populated.  In the New Testament, the Church plays a significant role as family for all believers.  In my current situation and life stage, I find that fellow believers do fulfill this role for me, because I do have meaningful companionship and support from my Christian brothers and sisters.

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