Near the end of his narrative, Rauch says this:

And as I write these words, I have been married for going on three years. Married. The very word is a miracle to me. The young boy sitting on the piano bench structured his life, shaped his personality, twisted and then untwisted himself, around the certain knowledge that he could not love in a way which could lead to marriage; and so he grimly determined that he could not love at all. But he was wrong. He underestimated himself and he underestimated his countrymen even more. They and he have found a destination for his love. They and he have found, at last, a name for his soul. It is not monster or eunuch. Nor indeed homosexual. It is: husband.

Gaining the conviction that your love can find its place is a life-altering discovery, and it makes me think of an old post from Eve Tushnet, in which she mentions Rauch, among others:

I’ve written before about how I experienced some fairly intense childhood alienation of basically exactly that kind. I felt like I had no place in the world and couldn’t have one—shouldn’t have one, hadn’t earned love or self-respect. Becoming Catholic, I should say, was in part about accepting that I could be loved by Someone who genuinely knew everything about me. In order to be really Catholic you have to accept healing and love, and there are times when that’s very hard for me, still; it’s still somewhat baffling to think that I might be made in the image of God. (I mean, what does that make God?).

I have no real sense of why I associated that sense of alienation with my sexual orientation. One obvious possibility is homophobia; I certainly don’t remember ever hearing anything antigay until I was in junior high, and my parents had gay friends etc etc, but it’s impossible to prove that I wasn’t somehow affected by subtler and pervasive cultural bigotry. Anyway, point being, I’ve said many times that it was such a relief to come out to myself because it seemed like I could finally explain that alienation in toto; and because being gay wasn’t something I thought anyone should be ashamed of, I could finally put all of that unhappiness and sense of homelessness behind me! I don’t know that this relief is especially common for gay teens, but I do think a lot of gay people did have that childhood sense of intense separation, of being cast out.

And since virtually all gay people are raised by heterosexuals, the home in which we grew up doesn’t provide obvious models for the kind of relationships we want to form. It’s hard for us to know how our own love stories can fit in to our family story, the family model we grew up with. (Yes, I realize that a lot of straight people can say the same thing, but walk with me here for a moment.)

Gay marriage promises that, for those of us lucky enough to grow up with parents in a loving/good-enough marriage, we truly can fit our own futures and dreams into the family story we grew up with. We can step into our parents’ shoes. You all know that I think this promise is based on some really false beliefs about sex difference and family structure, but believe me, I feel the power and attraction of the promise.

And this longing for home is one reason the Church’s silences, clinical language, and general lameness w/r/t speaking to actual gay people is so frustrating. Because the truest and best alternative to the home promised by gay marriage is precisely the home promised by Christ, the loving embrace of the Holy Family. When I say that the cure for alienation is in kneeling at the altar rail, this is not especially believable if the actual Catholics you’ve known were clueless at best and bullying at worst.

Anyway, I continue to believe all the stuff I’ve said in prior posts about gay marriage, but I thought it was important to throw this out there as well. The longing for home is even more powerful to me, and even more beautiful, than the longing for honor which also animates the gay-marriage movement.

What Rauch is saying was so powerful for him—finding that his previously unnamable desires could be channeled and understood to have a place, a destination—is something several of us are trying to explore with regard to a theology of friendship. Rauch was not alone, as a young person, in believing that if he acknowledged his sexual orientation, then all hope for a “normal” life of love would be lost to him. I wonder what other possibilities might have seemed viable to Rauch if he had heard the Church clearly saying—and showing—that friendship, not just marriage and parenthood, is a recognized, honored form of love too.

(Cross-posted at Spiritual Friendship)

The response to this drawback was increased surveillance. For religious superiors,

it often seemed easiest to deal with the matter simply by prohibiting outright “particular attachments” in religious life. In later centuries, this prohibition became a commonplace of formation to community life and to the celibate ministry. In their understandable zeal to avoid the dangers of uncontrolled affectivity, the superiors seemed never to realize that they were courting an even greater danger, that of eliminating the human dimension of Christian love, reducing it to a kind of vague and ultimately abstract goodwill by which all are “loved” in general, and no one in practice. Worse still, in many cases they drove human friendship underground and caused it to be viewed as somehow incompatible with the Gospel or at least worthy of suspicion—an attitude whose nefarious consequences are still with us today.

Much of this is immediately relevant to those of us who are trying to develop a workable model of pastoral care for gay and lesbian Christians. Some are understandably worried about the temptations that can come with close friendship between two people who could potentially be attracted to one another, and in this way they resemble the religious superiors Brother John mentions here.

On the other hand, there’s the problem of what Brother John calls the “greater danger”: how can we not leave gay and lesbian Christians prey to isolation, and how can we speak of celibacy not simply as something that makes wider love possible (as it does) but also as a discipline that allows for deeper love among a few? Ron Belgau’s recent post makes a start at answering these questions, highlighting the way that love among friends can become a training ground for loving others beyond that circle, ensuring that “love” doesn’t dissolve into sentimentality (“It’s easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one’s neighbor,” etc.). But more reflection—specifically on the practical questions of what this looks like “on the ground,” in the parish, outside of monastic contexts—is needed.

(Cross-posted at Spiritual Friendship)

It was only later, after seminary, that it occurred to me that our debate was, among other things, odd. We students interrogated each other, and each of us felt a (mostly self-imposed) obligation to settle “our position” on the matter. But in retrospect, I view that as strange—because whether women can be ordained to diaconal or priestly/pastoral ministry is not a question that can be “settled” by an individual Christian, even one who’s been to seminary and been ordained. Rather, that’s a matter for churches to decide. Even in the Baptist church to which I belonged at that time, it made no real difference what I as a seminarian thought on the matter; nor would it have made much difference if I’d been a pastor or elder there. What mattered is what my denomination had decided and whether I wanted to remain a part of it, working within its confines or else kicking against the goads.

Some of the current discussions I follow, and am a part of, regarding gay and lesbian persons in the church, remind me of those seminary discussions. I read blogs and talk with friends who are trying to decide whether they, personally, are “Side A” (i.e., believing God blesses and affirms monogamous same-sex partnerships) or “Side B” (i.e., believing that God calls gay and lesbian Christians to abstain from gay sex). Listening into these conversations and participating in them myself, I find myself dwelling more and more on how this way of framing the discussion marginalizes the communal, ecclesial context in which all Christian ethical judgments must be made. Now that I am a member of the Anglican Church in North America, it matters very little, in one sense, what I believe about same-sex unions. My church has rendered a judgment on the matter, and so my question becomes, “Am I willing to be submissive to that judgment or should I look for another church?” (Or the bigger question: “Why am I a member of the Anglican Communion and not, say, Catholic?”)

Or perhaps I could go for a bit more complexity and say, “Am I willing to (a) be submissive, (b) look for a different church, or (c) stay put and work for change?” If I harbored “progressive,” “Side A” convictions on homosexuality, I could see my role as an Anglican as akin to that played by James Alison or Andrew Sullivan in the Roman Catholic Church: to be a prophetic voice of dissent against an ancient prejudice. Or if I held “traditionalist,” “Side B” convictions in, say, The Episcopal Church, I could view my role the way someone like Christopher Seitz views his: I would be called to defend historic Christian teaching on homosexuality in a church increasingly unsympathetic to it. The one thing I couldn’t do, in any of the above cases, would be to behave as if my “personal” views on the question were the most important, decisive thing to focus on.

This, I take it, is not unrelated to the point Rowan Williams made, over and over and again, when he was asked about the apparent discrepancy between his own “private” inclinations to find some way to bless same-sex unions and the Anglican Communion’s opposition to such blessings. Shortly after he became Archbishop of Canterbury, Williams told Time, for instance: “I’m now in a position where I’m bound to say the teaching of the Church is this, the consensus is this. We have not changed our minds corporately. It’s not for me to exploit my position to push a change.” In other words, even the bishop who is primus inter pares cannot allow his convictions to be elevated unduly.

So where does this leave us individual gay Christians in our various churches? Certainly each of us must act. We cannot put our lives on hold. Even though our churches may take a long time to give us the counsel we need to act rightly, that doesn’t mean that we’re able to wait that long before we embark on life-altering courses of action. A well-meaning Anglican priest once said to me, “We don’t yet have the mind of Christ on the issue of loving, faithful same-sex partnerships.” Well, even if I believed that to be true, that wouldn’t remove the urgency of my own choice: should I pursue such a gay partnership or remain celibate? That’s not a decision that can be deferred indefinitely.

It is, though, a decision that can be recognized as not a matter for my own “personal” judgment only. Or, putting it a bit more precisely (and positively), if I am to act according to my conscience, I have to recognize that my conscience is in need of communal formation. As Alan Jacobs put it, writing about his decision to leave The Episcopal Church several years ago,

I believe that I acted according to what Cardinal Newman long ago called “the supreme authority of Conscience… the aboriginal Vicar of Christ.” For Newman, conscience is anything but “private judgment”: it is, rather, the testing of one’s own private judgments, and sometimes those of others, against Scripture and against the long testimony of the whole church of Christ. And if we test those judgments so, and invoke our consciences, we enter perilous territory: as Newman reminds us, the fourth Lateran Council (1215) affirmed that Quidquid fit contra conscientiam, ædificat ad gehennam—Whatever is done in opposition to conscience is conducive to damnation.

If I am a Christian, then I belong (like it or not) to the Body of Christ. By virtue of baptism, I am no longer “my own person”; in belonging to Christ, I also belong to the other members of his body, the church. And so, these days, I find myself less and less interested in asking where each gay Christian, myself included, “stands” on the question of the morality of gay sex. Instead, I want—even, or precisely, as an Anglican—to explore the question Eve Tushnet, a Roman Catholic, raised recently: is there a way to see my own convictions as somehow less important than the matter of my membership in the church of which I’m a part?

(Cross-posted at Spiritual Friendship)

When Frank and I returned early evening that Saturday to our apartment in the Village, I was still shaken. By 2003 Frank had been with me for twenty-two years. Our partnership was repeatedly tested in the fire of social defiance and in the emergency room with family members and each other. Characteristically, Frank spoke not a word. He put down the bags with clean laundry, pulled me against him, and held me tight. Frank’s grip was so firm that his Parkinson’s got his arms wedged hugging me. We were caught, locked, immovable. We laughed. The sinews of our attached muscles held the love that bound us through the tight spot with Marie [Giannone’s sister].

I was home. I was in my faithful friend and partner’s shelter.

I chose this excerpt almost at random. Virtually every chapter is filled with similarly tender moments of quiet intimacy.

It’s these kind of glimpses into gay life (among other things) that make it hard for many Christians today to imagine that there could be anything wrong with being gay. You can’t read a memoir like Giannone’s and easily draw evidence that having a long-time sexual partner of the same sex diminishes one’s life. On the contrary, Giannone’s partnership with Frank was precisely what enabled him to care for his dying mother and sister, and what sustained him when they were lost.

And this is the reason comparisons of homosexuality to other sinful behaviors often ring so false. Homosexuality is like racism? If that’s the case, then why are the fruits—hatred and alienation in the latter case, humanizing care and love in the former—so obviously different?

The traditional Christian proscription of same-sex sexual partnerships does not require us to draw such specious comparisons or to say that there is nothing good at all in gay partnerships. On the contrary, even Karl Barth, who uncompromisingly rejects homosexual partnerships as out of step with the Creator’s intention, writes that such unions are often “redolent of sanctity” (Church Dogmatics III/4, p. 166) because they are about the struggle to give and receive love. In his essay for First Things yesterday, Aaron Taylor made this point very effectively.

I also think here of the passage from C. S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy in which he reflects on the homosexuality he witnessed at his boarding school in his adolescence.

People commonly talk as if every other evil were more tolerable than this. But why? . . . If those of us who have known a school like Wyvern dared to speak the truth, we should have to say that [homosexuality] was, in that time and place, the only foothold or cranny left for certain good things. It was the only counterpoise to the social struggle; the one oasis . . . in the burning desert of competitive ambition. In his unnatural love-affairs, and perhaps only there, the Blood went a little out of himself, forgot for a few hours that he was One of the Most Important People There Are. It softens the picture.

According to Lewis, a misdirected expression of eros may still be seen as a seeking after truth, goodness, and beauty. And Christian faith can and must acknowledge that, even as it seeks to point eros to its real fulfillment in Christ.

(Cross-posted at Spiritual Friendship)

Throughout much of Christian history, the notion that gender differentiation is part of the image of God (“male and female as the image of God in stereo”) has occasionally surfaced as a marginal voice, but it has never occupied a significant place in the Christian understanding of the imago Dei. The reason is a simple one. If both male and female must be present together in order to fully constitute the image of God, then those who are single do not fully reflect the image of God. This runs deeply against the grain of many passages in the Bible. But even more important, the New Testament clearly proclaims that Jesus is, par excellence, the image of God (e.g., 2 Cor. 4:4; Col. 3:10; 1 Cor. 15:45). Unless we are to postulate an androgynous savior, something the New Testament never even contemplates, we cannot say that the image of God requires the presence of both male and female. It is far better to interpret Genesis 1:27, which insists that both male and female are created in the divine image, to mean that all the dignity, honor, and significance of bearing the divine image belong equally to men and women. We need not delve into the entire debate about what exactly the image of God signifies. For our purposes it is enough to say what is not signified by the divine image: gender complementarity.

One theologian Brownson singles out for criticism is Karl Barth, for whom, Brownson says, “a complementary understanding of gender is essential to the image of God.” Brownson thinks this understanding of the imago Dei would require each person to be married to a member of the opposite sex in order to fully become a divine image-bearer.

But it’s important to see that this is not the conclusion Barth himself draws. Rather, Barth thinks that single people, the widowed, and those who are divorced are still, in their unmarried state, image-bearers. Why? He answers (in Church Dogmatics III/4 §54, with my emphasis added):

It belongs to every human being to be male or female. It also belongs to every human being to be male and female: male in this or that near or distant relationship to the female, and female in a similar relationship to the male. Man is human, and therefore fellow-human, as he is male or female, male and female. But it certainly does not belong to every man to enter into the married state and live in it. The decision to do so is not open to each individual, and there are reasons why it is open to many not to do so. Even then they are still men and therefore male or female, male and female.

What about Brownson’s Christological point—that Jesus was, par excellence, the image of God and yet not “present together” as male with female? For Barth, it is crucial to recognize that Jesus’ celibacy was not a rejection of community—or “co-humanity”—with women (as the Gospels attest, for example, in Luke 8:1-3). As Christopher Roberts summarizes,

On Barth’s terms, sexual difference is still theologically significant for those not called to be part of a couple—such as Jesus. On these terms, it is essential to Jesus’ humanity that he have a relationship as a man with women, but that is not the same as to say that Jesus required a wife or consort. To be celibate rightly is also to declare a choice in response to sexual difference, and Barth would have us regard that Christ’s chastity as a single man is as much a response to sexual difference as marrying. Barth does demand that one must live in encounter with others in the sexual sphere, but that encounter could take the form of a celibacy that upholds chastity between male and female in the community.

Thus, it is not enough to point to Jesus’ celibacy and say, as Brownson does, “If both male and female must be present together in order to fully constitute the image of God, then those who are single do not fully reflect the image of God.” On the contrary, at least according to Barth, those who are single are, in a profound way, “present together” as male and female, not just male or female.

(Cross-posted at Spiritual Friendship)

(One of the most moving parts of my visit was hearing a student give a testimony about being gay and Christian and wrestling with what that means for his future—celibacy? marriage? community? Afterward, it was hard to avoid tears as student after student came up and embraced him. I thought of Brandon Ambrosino’s story and how these kind of loving expressions often fly under the radar in our public debates about sex and marriage but are no less sustaining for going unremarked.)

The first talk I gave was on “Renewing Friendship,” and I borrowed a lot of ideas from folks like Alan Bray, Ben Myers, and Eve Tushnet.

Several students approached me afterward with comments and questions, but one question in particular stood out. A student recounted to me a conversation he’d had in which his friend questioned whether Christianity really has room for friendship, since the Christian ideal seems to be an unconditional love that perseveres in loving even when the beloved becomes (or remains) unlovely. How is that really friendship rather than simply blind goodwill? How does that kind of love actually respond to the particularity and unique dignity and value of the friend him- or herself? If Christian friendship is unmerited, then it’s not really friendship.

(In a way, this objection is the counterpart to Samuel Johnson’s worry about friendship: “All friendship is preferring the interest of a friend, to the neglect, or, perhaps, against the interest of others… Now Christianity recommends universal benevolence, to consider all men as our brethren; which is contrary to the virtue of friendship, as described by the ancient philosophers.” The friend of the student I spoke with thinks this “universal benevolence” is problematic for Christianity, whereas Johnson think it’s precisely what recommends Christianity over and against Greco-Roman ideals of “friendship,” but their thinking about Christianity and friendship is strikingly similar.)

This is a fascinating question, and the answer, I suspect, has to do with the way Christian love among friends is indeed unconditional and persevering but also, at the same time, a love that never gives up precisely because it’s responding to the unique worth of each person who is made in the image of God and for whom Christ died.

In my Christology class yesterday, we discussed the following passage from Augustine’s commentary on the Fourth Gospel:

God’s love is incomprehensible and unchangeable. For it was not after we were reconciled to him through the blood of his Son that he began to love us. Rather, he has loved us before the world was created, that we might also be his sons along with his only-begotten Son—before we became anything at all. The fact that we were reconciled through Christ’s death must not be understood as if his Son reconciled us to him that he might now begin to love those whom he had hated. Rather, we have already been reconciled to him who loves us, with whom we were enemies on account of sin. The apostle will testify whether I am speaking the truth: ‘God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us’. Therefore, he loved us even when we practiced enmity toward him and committed wickedness. Thus in a marvelous and divine way he loved us even when he hated us. For he hated us for what we were that he had not made; yet because our wickedness had not entirely consumed his handiwork, he knew how, at the same time, to hate in each one of us what we had made, and to love what he had made.

I said to my students that this paragraph is remarkable for how it holds together both the unmerited gift quality of God’s love—God loves us in spite of the unloveliness and misery of our sin—but in so doing God restores us to our original created dignity, what he first planned for us to be and has never stopped loving in us.

Thinking along these lines is, I suspect, the answer to those who are skeptical about the practice of Christian friendship. It is not that Christian friendship is blind to the unique, unrepeatable, supremely valuable identity of each friend. But by loving with a radically committed love that will never give up on the other, even when the other becomes unlovable, Christian friends imitate God who loves not only creatures made in his image but loves fallen creatures and only thereby makes us lovely in the wake of our ruin.

(Cross-posted at Spiritual Friendship)

It was an especially rich conversation, but for now I just wanted to mention one thing my friend said that struck me as profound and helpful. My friend began by admitting that she really struggles with what’s become a standard gay Christian testimony: “God made me this way and wants me to flourish, so God must want me to be true to myself here.”

At this point in the conversation I was prepared to start talking about a theology of the fall and original sin and analyze theologically what might be problematic with this particular way of framing the issue. But my friend said simply (and here, of course, I’m paraphrasing from memory and trying to capture the spirit of our conversation), “I can’t help but think about that story in relation to my daughter with Down syndrome. Did God make her this way? Well, I certainly believe God providentially ordered it. Does God want her to be just the way she is? Yes! And yet she is hindered and suffers in obvious ways because of Down syndrome—so ‘no’ as well. Does God want her to be herself and for us to help her live to her full potential, Down syndrome and all? Yes! And yet we hope that the suffering that is part and parcel of Down syndrome will not be true of our daughter when God raises the dead.”

Then my friend said, “I don’t know if you think that’s a bad comparison with being gay, but it certainly gives me pause when I hear someone say, ‘God made me this way and wants me to be happy.’ On the one hand, I think, Yes, absolutely! God wasn’t taken by surprise or thrown for a loop when you discovered you were gay. On the other hand, I think, just as in the case of Down syndrome, it isn’t always easy to draw a direct line from what God providentially orders to what may be called straightforwardly ‘good.’ Is Down syndrome ‘good’? Well, my daughter is one of the best things that’s ever happened to me… and yet, and yet… Is being gay ‘good’? I know that I am glad my gay friends are who they are… and yet, and yet….”

Obviously, this raises more questions than it answers. Nonetheless, I found the analogy with Down syndrome to be a particularly suggestive one and worthy of more reflection.

And I found myself recalling this conversation with my friend yesterday when I read about Daniel Mattson’s concern with my and others Christians’ willingness to describe ourselves as gay or lesbian. Mattson’s basic point is one I wholeheartedly agree with: “ontologically speaking, my core identity is as a man, made in the image and likeness of God.” This is because God’s creation of humanity as male and female reveals our being and vocation, notwithstanding the fact that the fall causes some of us to perceive it otherwise. Mattson goes on: “This truth about who I am, stitched into my very embodiedness as a man, supersedes any subjective experience I might have of ‘feeling (or being) gay,’” and I agree with that too. I especially like the way Fr. Richard John Neuhaus put it: “In the Christian tradition, being true to yourself means being true to the self that you are called to be.” For those of us who experience same-sex attraction, that means that our truest “self” isn’t disclosed to us by our sexual desires; rather, the “self” to which we’re being conformed is revealed in the Genesis story of creation and—ultimately—in the fulfillment of that story, in the person of Christ himself, the true image of God and the one whom we’ll eventually resemble (Philippians 3:20-21).

What I think Mattson obscures or confuses, however, is that ethics and pastoral theology needs to speak two languages, not just one. Of course we need to be able to speak the language of creation. Our embodiment as male and female is a given, and this sexually differentiated gift will be healed and redeemed, not discarded, in the eschaton (as Beth Felker Jones has recently explored so helpfully in relation to Augustine and Calvin). But on the other hand, we must also speak the language of fallen experience. When Mattson writes that his “true orientation is towards women, my true sexual complement,” he is eliding the distinction between our created sexual difference and gay and lesbian people’s experience (“orientation”) of being attracted to the same sex. Mattson’s argument thus makes it difficult for same-sex attracted Christians to speak clearly about their unique trials and needs vis-à-vis their opposite-sex attracted fellow believers.

Likewise, when Mattson says that a “homosexual ‘orientation,’ no matter how strongly it is subjectively experienced within our person, does not exist within God’s blueprint for humanity,” again I think he misses a crucial distinction. If “God’s blueprint for humanity” means God’s original creative intention, then I agree with Mattson that experiencing a homosexual orientation falls outside that blueprint. In other words, I think if there had been no fall, I wouldn’t be gay.

It’s equally vital, though, for pastoral theology to speak of God’s sovereign, providential care for the world as we know it—the sinful, broken, fallen world. Under God’s sovereign care for that world, we need to be able to say to gay and lesbian people that their sexuality may become an occasion for them to experience God’s grace. They can thrive under God’s care, even if their attractions to members of the same sex don’t diminish or change. And they can also find their same-sex attraction itself to be the thing that is taken up by God and used as the means to draw them out of themselves, as Eve Tushnet, for instance, has described here.

A couple of years ago Elizabeth Scalia said all this much better than I could. And the apostle Paul provides the theological bedrock for such a view when he says both that his “thorn in the flesh” is a messenger of Satan (“outside God’s blueprint”) and that it is precisely the way in which he encounters the grace and power of the risen Christ (2 Corinthians 12:7-10). If you asked Paul whether he should identify as a “strong, whole person” since that’s the way God made him to be, and the way he will be in the resurrection, or a “weak, thorn-pricked Christian” since that’s the way he experienced his life, I expect he wouldn’t have accepted the alternative. “Both,” he might have answered. Or, “It depends on what you mean.”

To go back to the (imperfect) analogy with Down syndrome, I worry that a perspective like Mattson’s would only be able to say one thing to my friend about her daughter: that a disability is not part of God’s original plan for humanity and that therefore we shouldn’t use a term like “Down syndrome” because God never intended people to identify themselves by their fallen conditions.

But Christian theology can’t be content with that perspective. The gospel insists that we must also learn a second language—the paradoxical, hard-to-speak language which says that things outside of God’s blueprint may become the precise means by which God teaches us the love of God and neighbor we might not otherwise learn. We must say both that this world is “not the way it’s supposed to be” and that Christ’s “power is made perfect in”—in, not outside of—“weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

(Cross-posted at Spiritual Friendship)

Jeff, the author, is gay, and I found it especially interesting when, near the end of the book, he reflects a bit on what kind of church he himself is drawn to. First, he says this about a parish of the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) that he visited in Nevada:

One of the wonderful things about the Metropolitan Community Church is that it has always focused on those (many) people whom the broader church alienates. Pastor William explains it beautifully when he describes his approach to those who have been alienated by the community of faith. “You give them constant doses of the truth, the truth that is based in love that is unconditional,” he says. “You love them until they can hear that they are lovable. You love them until they know nobody else can define who they are. You love them until they can process their pain without reliving their pain.” The MCC home page affirms this, boldly proclaiming: “Empowerment.” “Hope.” “Bridges that liberate and unite voices of sacred defiance.”

Yet this plan never mentions God. While the denomination has clear roots in Christianity and most MCC congregations are more overtly Christian than the San Francisco one, faith does not seem to be its unifying element—sexuality does. Perhaps it has become more a network of community centers, where gays and lesbians can gather and talk about the things of the spirit and the soul, whatever religious system they may subscribe to. Which is nice, but for me, it’s not church. And while I don’t want alienation or exclusion when I’m in the pews, I’m also not there to celebrate other people. I thought the whole point was to celebrate God.

Jeff contrasts his experience at the MCC congregation with his visit to Highlands Church in Denver, which he describes as trying to balance “an evangelical bent with full embrace of gays and lesbians without being a totally gay church.”

The name Highlands strikes me as particularly apt given an accusation often directed at more liberal churches: that they go for lowest-common-denominator, people-pleasing theology, something that [the pastors] Mark [Tidd] and Jenny [Morgan] have strived to avoid. “This church is deeply Christo-centric,” Jenny says. “What I mean by that is that the foundation of this church is the person, the work, and the teaching of Jesus Christ. His death. His resurrection. The belief that he is coming back. That he was and is God.”

I challenge her on this point, because nearly everyone says that they focus on Christ; it’s just that they differ on what this means and what this demands…. But what’s compelling is their argument that they are not trying to build a community of convenience.

Reading Jeff’s reflections here caused me to ponder again how many of us young gay Christians are looking not only for love and acceptance but also for truth (not that love and truth are ever finally separable).

I was recently with a group of gay Catholics (none of whom dissent from Church teaching), and one of the things that deeply impressed me was how, because of their acceptance of their Church’s doctrine, they weren’t expending much energy in trying to figure out what they ought to believe about sex and marriage. Their question wasn’t, “What must Christianity say about homosexuality?” but rather, “Given what Christianity does say, how can we live into that teaching in a way that’s life-giving, humanizing, loving, etc.?” Their focus was on how to make the celibate life beautiful. One of them asked me (in so many words) if it was hard to be gay and celibate in the Anglican Communion, where sexual ethics are hotly debated at the moment and there is no consensus. “Surely that must make your life harder, not easier,” he said. And reading Jeff’s account of his visit to Highlands, I thought again about this conversation I had and how many of us—including Jeff and me, it seems, in our very different ways—are looking for some clear convictions in our churches within which we can flourish. (I happen to belong to a parish of the Anglican Church in North America where I do receive clear guidance on sexual ethics, as well as pastoral care, but my Catholic friend is of course right that my Communion is fractured over just this issue at present.)

Which brings me to my main disappointment with what Jeff has written. There’s a chapter in his book on celibacy, and it follows the story of Kevin, a man in his fifties who is a Christian, gay, and celibate. Near the end of that chapter, Jeff writes:

Before I met Kevin, I thought of celibacy as an extended period of inaction that follows a choice, albeit a monumental one. If you could describe it as an act, it would be one of rejection, of pushing away sex and intimacy. There were certainly moments during my time with Kevin where I felt what I think is one of the worst, most condescending, most damnably judgmental human emotions: pity. But I came away from St. Paul [Minnesota, where Kevin lives] humbled. I realized that, if anything, Kevin’s lifestyle was not one choice but an active and constant series of them: the choice to resist his desire for companionship and closeness with men; the choice to set aside his perceived physical wants in favor of his perceived spiritual needs; the choice to sacrifice his earthly happiness for the eternal joy that he is convinced has been promised to him by his God. To him, celibacy hasn’t been an act of fencing himself off; rather, it has been one of opening up, of embracing the sanctuary that he believes his Lord provides.

On the one hand, I appreciate the unflinching honesty of this. Celibacy is often profoundly difficult, and those of us who adhere to the traditional Christian sexual ethic do ourselves no favors if we try to downplay the ascesis it demands of gay Christians. Jeff’s book manages to portray Kevin’s celibacy realistically, I think, and that is a good thing. But by closing his chapter with a description of Kevin’s celibacy as “the choice to resist his desire for companionship” and as “the choice to sacrifice his earthly happiness”—well, I think readers will be left to conclude that this is the primary experience of celibate gay Christians and that celibacy could never be as companionable and joyful as it must be to defeat isolation.

And I don’t have an argument to the contrary. I want to be careful not to place the blame squarely on Kevin (or Jeff) here, since part of the difficulty of practicing celibacy in our time is that we (Protestants, at least) inhabit church cultures that don’t imagine ways for celibate people to belong in the way we easily imagine married people belonging. I can say, however, that I want to live a celibate life that is full of friendship, loving service, and joy and that, in some measure, I am finding such a life with the help of the communities and parishes to which I’ve belonged and currently belong. And I can point to some other friends of mine who also want to live just that kind of life and are also finding that it is possible.

But they (we!) continue to need inspiration and encouragement. As Sarah Coakley has said, quoting St. Gregory of Nyssa,

[W]e cannot believe it unless we see it lived. [Gregory] writes, “Any theory divorced from living examples… is like an unbreathing statue.” And there, perhaps, lies the true challenge for us today: the counter-cultural production—not of film-stars, sports heroes or faithless royal families—but of erotic “saints” to inspire us.

May God give us such saints. And may God give them the courage to come out and talk honestly about their experiences of celibacy, and may God gives our churches the grace to support them as they do so.

(Cross-posted at Spiritual Friendship)

Moltmann drew on Elie Wiesel’s story (found in Night) of the dying boy in Auschwitz, hanging from a gallows. Someone in the crowd witnessing the execution said, “Where is God?” And another voice replied, “He is there, hanging on that gallows.” God is dead, in other words. Or if God is not dead, he deserves to be. Moltmann takes that story and says, in effect, “Yes, that is exactly right. God has come to Auschwitz, through his death in Jesus Christ. God has suffered with us. God has died with us.” Only such a God—only a God who suffers—can be believed in.

If you wish to read the Gospel of Mark that way, then many people, Moltmann included, think that you need to marginalize Luke’s Gospel. Hans Urs von Balthasar, while, in my view, treating these issues far more subtly than Moltmann, saw this clearly. Luke’s Gospel has no cry of dereliction. Instead of screaming out in agony, Luke’s account has Jesus’ final words as: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” And therefore, it seems, Luke’s Gospel isn’t as well suited as Mark’s is for meeting the challenge of protest atheism. Here’s von Balthasar: “Christ’s cross… must not be rendered innocuous as though the Crucified, in undisturbed union with God, had prayed the Psalms and died in the peace of God.” In other words, we cannot continue to allow Luke’s version of the story to be read alongside Mark’s as though a harmonization were possible. At least, not anymore. Not after the Holocaust.

How should one respond to this approach? I still remember stumbling across, several years ago, a critique of Moltmann and von Balthasar’s reading of Luke’s crucifixion account that stopped me in my tracks. This is from the biblical scholar Walter Moberly’s book The Bible, Theology and Faith:

[O]ne should not so romanticize the process of moral and spiritual struggle that the Lukan depiction of Jesus as one who maintains apparent serenity and trust amidst suffering is downgraded; as though an anguished and in some ways vacillating struggle for faith is intrinsically superior to a steadily trusting faith; or as though a steadily trusting faith did not involve its own kind of moral and spiritual struggle.

That last line—and the possibilities it opens up for thinking about doubt, anguish, and perseverance—is, for me, the memorable one: a steadily trusting faith may involve its own kind of moral and spiritual struggle. What might that mean?

Moberly’s reading suggests that when Jesus prays “Into your hands I commit my spirit,” that is not a Pollyannaish serenity talking but is rather a trust born out of the struggle of Gethsemane, so that even as Luke narrates that moment of faith, the account of Jesus’ sweating drops of blood on the previous night (Luke 22:39-46) hasn’t been left behind. Read that way, Jesus’ apparently unwavering faith entails, rather than masks or downplays, his agonizing struggle. And if that interpretation is at all along the right lines, then Luke’s portrayal may have its own message to speak to the Ivan Karamazovs of the world.

Pieper writes: “The concept of the status viatoris is one of the basic concepts of every Christian rule of life. To be a ‘viator’ means ‘one on the way.’ The status viatoris is, then, the ‘condition or state of being on the way.’ Its proper antonym is status comprehensoris. One who has comprehended, encompassed, arrived, is no longer a viator, but a comprehensor.”

Following Aquinas, Pieper places hope in between the vices of both despair and presumption, and this seems to me to offer those of us who are gay and Christian a useful opportunity to pause and evaluate the way that we conceive of our own “station” on the way.

We hear a lot from a certain corner of the Christian world about “victory” and “change” and “healing.” Since I’ve already mentioned the temptation this kind of discourse flirts with—the temptation to “triumphalism” or what Pieper would call “presumption”—I won’t repeat that here. Suffice it to say, I think the real spiritual and theological danger of this kind of “victorious Christian living” talk is an avoidance of the “state of being on the way.” It’s an expectation that the kingdom of God should be here fully now, without our having to endure its slow, mysterious, paradoxical unfolding until the return of Christ.

On the other hand, though, I’m equally troubled by a lot of “affirming” gay Christian discourse for precisely the same reason. What I have in mind is the Lady Gaga sort of approach: “God made me this way. Now I’d be untrue to God’s gifting if I chose a path of self-denial instead of a path of self-expression.” This way of thinking about our sexuality and our Christian faith is, I think, just as “triumphalist” as any reparative therapy narrative. It too believes there’s no need to wait, to endure, in anticipation of a kingdom that has arrived in Jesus, yes, but is not yet here in all of its fullness. It too may avoid the status viatoris by claiming that “it gets better” now. And it fails to interrogate and thereby complicate same-sex desire in its rush to accept it as part and parcel of God’s good creation. (As Chris Roberts observes, perhaps the real Achilles’ heel of this view is its “impatience for [eschatological] joy.”)

How might the debate over the status of gay relationships among Christians look different if we all, whatever “side” we’re on, held to a view of the Christian life that acknowledged, with Karl Barth,

We need not expect that life leads to sitting and possessing—in no sense, at no moment. We cannot remain standing; we may not; and we ought not even once wish to do so. Whatever awaits us on our way is under no circumstances our goal. Even the most important, the beautiful, the tragic moments of our lives, are only stations on the way, nothing more. Saying farewell: that is the great rule of this life. Woe to us if we reject this rule, if we want to remain standing, calling a halt, and attaching ourselves to a particular station. There is nothing left for us but to acknowledge this saying farewell, becoming obedient to it. “Here we have no lasting city” [Hebrews 13:14].

I think, on the one hand, adopting this perspective ought to lead “traditionalist” Christians to value celibacy more highly than they have, because celibacy, for many of us, is a form of waiting. It’s our testimony with our bodies to the fact that we haven’t arrived, we’re on the way, we’re viators. And by the same token, if they were to adopt the point of view Barth and Pieper articulate, “affirming” Christians would have to abandon their current rhetorical strategy too. No, finding a gay partner and a welcoming community won’t usher in the eschaton in the way you seem, at times, to think it will. No, everything won’t “get better”—not necessarily. No, our deepest desires—the way we were “born”—is not in need of unqualified acceptance and affirmation (since there is, sadly, this bum deal called original sin). And no, even having such acceptance won’t exactly lead to an easy, comfortable peace on this side of God’s future.

I’ll close with one more quote from Barth:

Homeless in this world, not yet at home in the next, we human beings are wanderers between two worlds. But precisely as wanderers we are also children of God in Christ. The mystery of our life is God’s mystery. Moved by him, we must sigh, be ashamed of ourselves, be shocked, and die. Moved by him, we may be joyful and courageous, hope and live. He is the origin. Therefore we persist in the movement, and we call, “Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

To which I say, Amen.

(Cross-posted at Spiritual Friendship)