Hope and Homosexuality
October 14, 2011
Leonard Klein
An Orthodox friend has a T-shirt that says, “Wow, suppose it’s all true!” The “all” of course is the Christian Gospel and its ultimate promise of resurrection and everlasting communion with the Holy Trinity. If it is all true, if Jesus is risen, and if following him leads to that everlasting communion, then the impact on our lives will be vast.
The impact will even touch sex. That proposition is increasingly incomprehensible to souls nurtured by the toxic soup of post-modern sentimentalism. In that fog sex is a free-floating good to be used to the most gratifying effect by a disembodied self casting about for meaning, affection, and joy. It has become a right, indeed an entitlement. Any interference with the attainment of that entitlement, even the publication of discouraging news about the results of the sexual revolution, is out of bounds in large segments of our culture. Sexual freedom and self-expression just cannot be bad or dangerous or illusory. If increasing numbers of female undergraduates show signs of depression, it cannot have anything to do with the sexual anomie into which the society has delivered them. Sex is nearly the most important thing, but it cannot be thought to have any real affect on the person.
Those who know Christ know differently. Those who know themselves to be on pilgrimage to the Kingdom of God know that sex, as important as it is, can no more define us than can power or money, ethnicity, or politics. Those whose eyes are open to the truth of God can see what the culture dare not imagine.
Wesley Hill believes that it’s all true, and in his little book, Washed and Waiting, he has offered a look at what it is like to be a young homosexual man who believes that the most important thing is to follow Jesus. He is utterly forthright, his book poignant, thoughtful, and engaging.
As the title indicates, he understands himself as a baptized Christian on pilgrimage to the Kingdom. He is “washed,” and he is “waiting.” His Christian faith runs deep, nurtured in his Evangelical family and firmly held through his teens and early adulthood. His growing awareness of his same sex attraction is laid out with honesty. The confusion and pain are all there. He provides a window for heterosexuals, men in particular, on the experience of homosexuality. He wants us to understand, and he succeeds. Among the most moving of his stories is his account of dancing at a wedding with a lovely female friend and simply having no awareness of her “sexual value,” the very apt term employed by Blessed John Paul II in his early work Love and Responsibility. What he regrets is not male swinishness but the capacity to appreciate her fully as a woman with or without sexual intent. He realizes again that he cannot marry and simultaneously regrets his corollary struggles to relate to men.
As a faithful Christian, he will not accede to the promise of sexual relief that entering the lifestyle would offer. It will not provide the love and acceptance for which he longs. Nor can he imagine living at odds with the clear teaching of Scripture.
Scripture is not an enemy that inflicts sexual frustration on him. Rather, it provides a liberating perspective on love. The Church, he learns from the New Testament, is for Christians the principal locus of love. Neither marriage nor “committed relationships” can bear the freight laid upon them by post-modern sentimentalism. His cultivation of friendship, pastoral relationships, and partnership in prayer is exemplary. Homosexuality has required him to nurture his faith and examine his psyche, and his quest for faithfulness makes the book a significant piece of Christian spiritual literature. His is the story of a soul.
It is a soul with the longing to be loved and with vigorous sexual appetites. But it is a soul that believes that only God in the end can meet the deepest longings of our hearts. Finding his color on the politically correct rainbow and expressing it to the full will not take away the sense of brokenness he describes. He could adopt the common enough view that God just wants everybody to be happy and then suit himself. But he sees through that temptation and commits himself to celibate Christian discipleship. In two short chapters he examines as models Henri Nouwen and Gerard Manley Hopkins, who shared his struggle.
The turn to Catholic writers for models betrays a deficiency in Protestantism. There is essentially no positive role for celibacy. The model of Jesus, John the Baptist, and Paul has not yet enabled even biblically serious Evangelicals to shape a theology that would affirm celibacy as anything more than a regrettable alternative to more-or-less mandatory marriage.
Wesley Hill understands that, as a faithfully Christian homosexual man, he is not in the only category of people who are not called to sexual activity. Because sex is not a free-floating good but a component of the call to marriage, celibacy must be the norm for many people. Homosexuals who disavow the active homosexual lifestyle for the Kingdom of God are in a vast and excellent company. Hill is certainly aware of this and touches the issue several times. He is also aware that marriage and parenthood carry their own burdens. Neither marriage nor the rejection of marriage guarantees happiness. Sexual intimacy is not a certain cure for loneliness or for anything else that goes wrong in the tragedy and comedy of human existence. This context of his celibacy needs further reflection. I expect and hope there will be a book that will push the matter forward, much in the mode of Dawn Eden’s The Thrill of the Chaste. He has perhaps begun the process with some exegetical reflections near the end on how God glorifies us.
For the glory that is set before him he has chosen the narrow way. The burden of that yoke is lightened again and again by friends and prayer, by faith and most of all by hope. His choice is not easy, but he is credible and engaging, washed and waiting with hope for the healing that none of us will fully know this side of the Kingdom.
Leonard R. Klein is a priest and the Director of Pro-Life Activities for the Diocese of Wilmington, Deleware. He was a Lutheran minister for 30 years and is married.
RESOURCES
Wesley Hill, Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality
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Comments:
10.14.2011 | 4:31am
Gil Costello says:
"... sex, as important as it is, can no more define us than can power or money, ethnicity, or politics." This true statement is where the deconstruction of the lie of sexual identity begins. And in the light of understanding this, we must eventually conclude that there is no such thing as a "homosexual man". There are some men afflicted with same-sex attraction, but, as is obviously the case with the courageous Wesley Hill, it does not define them.
10.14.2011 | 5:58am
Byron says:
Thanks for the inspiring review. Wesley Hill's uphill struggle puts me, as a heterosexual married man, to shame (and I agree also with Gil Costello that the terms 'heterosexual' and 'homosexual' are relative) . From an Orthodox perspective, human effort alone cannot rescue us from sexual sin, however necessary it is to the spiritual life - with God, however, chastity is possible. In a modern age that delays marriage and breeds alienation and loneliness, it seems more crucial than ever to further explore the spiritual potential and richness of celibacy.
10.14.2011 | 8:41am
David Nickol says:
What has been lamentably absent on the part of those Christians who insist that having a homosexual orientation means one is called to lifelong celibacy are examples of homosexual people of faith actually and openly living the life these Christians advocate. Wesley Hill is to be commended for having the courage to be such an example.
10.14.2011 | 10:42am
Randy says:
I can only go by what many priests say about celibacy. They say they consider it a gift. They might concede that earlier in their life it was a source of conflict, but by God's grace, they learned to appreciate giving a more universal and paternal type of love. That type of love is desperately needed (and appreciated) in this world too.
10.14.2011 | 10:46am
irksome1 says:
Authentic celibacy is the free choice to refrain from the goods of marriage. A homosexual man, having no authentic call to marriage, cannot properly be called to celibacy. His “sacrifice” of the goods of marriage is more akin to Cain’s offering or a sponge soaked in vinegar and gall offered to the Cross.
10.14.2011 | 12:01pm
jason taylor says:
There assuredly is a positive role for celibacy. A cleric who is celibate is sacrificing to show leadership to the flock.
Some people just don't find a match and that is that. And no matter how many times they are told "married people have temptations too" it sounds rather like an Oregonian telling a Bedouin that he is thirsty. A celibate cleric calling a single person to abstinence is impressive; because he knows what he is talking about.
Some people just don't find a match and that is that. And no matter how many times they are told "married people have temptations too" it sounds rather like an Oregonian telling a Bedouin that he is thirsty. A celibate cleric calling a single person to abstinence is impressive; because he knows what he is talking about.
10.14.2011 | 1:42pm
Robin says:
"[in Protestantism]there is essentially no positive role for celibacy. The model of Jesus, John the Baptist, and Paul has not yet enabled even biblically serious Evangelicals to shape a theology that would affirm celibacy as anything more than a regrettable alternative to more-or-less mandatory marriage."
I'm a Lutheran, and among the more confessional/traditional Lutherans, celibacy is considered a fine gift. It's just not one we talk about as much as Catholics seem to, but I have had many Lutheran pastors tell me that remaining celibate is certainly praiseworthy.
This is an excellent article, and very comforting. I'll definitely be reading the book now. Thank you.
I'm a Lutheran, and among the more confessional/traditional Lutherans, celibacy is considered a fine gift. It's just not one we talk about as much as Catholics seem to, but I have had many Lutheran pastors tell me that remaining celibate is certainly praiseworthy.
This is an excellent article, and very comforting. I'll definitely be reading the book now. Thank you.
10.14.2011 | 2:12pm
Jan says:
“Neither marriage nor the rejection of marriage guarantees happiness. Sexual intimacy is not a certain cure for loneliness or for anything else that goes wrong in the tragedy and comedy of human existence.”
True.
Christians need to understand their own traditions concerning sex and marriage. Celibacy has been the norm for a vast number of Christians since the beginning; it’s not only for Priests and monks. Adopting the prevailing cultural understanding of love, sex, celibacy, and marriage has been a disaster. Marriage and celibacy are equally worthy paths in the Christian life, indeed, if anything, celibacy has been seen as an even higher state.
The modern sentimental views of marriage, as well as the modern belief in sexual autonomy are heresies.
True.
Christians need to understand their own traditions concerning sex and marriage. Celibacy has been the norm for a vast number of Christians since the beginning; it’s not only for Priests and monks. Adopting the prevailing cultural understanding of love, sex, celibacy, and marriage has been a disaster. Marriage and celibacy are equally worthy paths in the Christian life, indeed, if anything, celibacy has been seen as an even higher state.
The modern sentimental views of marriage, as well as the modern belief in sexual autonomy are heresies.
10.14.2011 | 2:36pm
Brandon says:
Very well, irksome1, perhaps it's not a sacrifice so much as a cross to bear. Or thorn in the flesh, if you prefer. Either way, I fail to see how the analysis changes all that much relative to a call to God's holiness.
10.14.2011 | 3:28pm
GlennB says:
That Protestantism in general has no room for celibacy, for clergy in particular, and on the mission field all the more, cannot be denied. Marriage is an unspoken prerequisite for ministry. That Roman Catholicism, unlike Eastern Orthodoxy, makes marriage a disqualification for the call to ministry is also problematic (Paul refers to other leaders having wives and that he has foregone that right) and like the Protestant deficiency, relates to a theology of the body and sexuality, along with exegetical issues about qualifications for leadership. Protestants need to make room for those called to celibacy. Roman Catholics, as with indulgences, just might need to reconsider whether celibacy is indeed a Divine requirement for the priesthood.
10.14.2011 | 3:30pm
Don Roberto Hill says:
Thank you for your insights, Father. I will pray for Wesley. He has “raised his head above the transom, and the devil will be directing fire his way (God stand between us and evil! †).
I am with Mr. Costello: there is no such thing as a homozexual—though our current “culture” has wholeheartedly accepted this notion, it’s actually one of the most damaging lies of the malignant one. It is behavior and habit, often ingrained at an early age, but not an innate type. Mr. Hill danced with a fine girl and had “no awareness of her . . . value,” just as I have none of the value of lobster, and others (surprising as it is to me) of that of broccoli.
We, along with many animals, are highly neuroplastic. “Swinish” animals lack free will or the ability to influence their own futures; God has gifted us with the ability to alter and improve ourselves by repeated acts of free will. Mindlessly “expressing it [animal lust] to the full” has led uncounted souls to misery and death, and “post-modern sentimentalism” is another way of describing neo-pagan pleasure worship.
I am with Mr. Costello: there is no such thing as a homozexual—though our current “culture” has wholeheartedly accepted this notion, it’s actually one of the most damaging lies of the malignant one. It is behavior and habit, often ingrained at an early age, but not an innate type. Mr. Hill danced with a fine girl and had “no awareness of her . . . value,” just as I have none of the value of lobster, and others (surprising as it is to me) of that of broccoli.
We, along with many animals, are highly neuroplastic. “Swinish” animals lack free will or the ability to influence their own futures; God has gifted us with the ability to alter and improve ourselves by repeated acts of free will. Mindlessly “expressing it [animal lust] to the full” has led uncounted souls to misery and death, and “post-modern sentimentalism” is another way of describing neo-pagan pleasure worship.
10.14.2011 | 3:36pm
Sophia Mason says:
Quoting the aptly named "irksome1": "Authentic celibacy is the free choice to refrain from the goods of marriage. A homosexual man, having no authentic call to marriage, cannot properly be called to celibacy. His “sacrifice” of the goods of marriage is more akin to Cain’s offering or a sponge soaked in vinegar and gall offered to the Cross."
Surely you jest? Or you intend to provoke argument?
But if this is seriously your view, you will find a great many Christians, including myself, who disagree.
First, a rhetorical point. The sacrifices of persons (including, but not limited to, homosexuals) who are celibate in order to avoid sin should not be compared to the sacrifice of a fratricide EVEN IF the sacrifices are analogous. It is too easy for people to mistake the comparison of the offerings to a comparison of the offerers.
Secondly, a logical point. There is no real parity between the offering of Cain, which, as its outcomes clearly show, was not made in charity, and the offering up of any pleasure, sinful or otherwise, by a person who is attempting to love God and neighbor. Admittedly, the marital act is not something that a homosexual would take pleasure in--in that very limited sense, it might be fair to compare his giving it up to Cain's giving up the lesser fruits of the earth. But the other pleasures of marriage, the non-sexual intimacy and companionship, are tremendous natural blessings which the chaste homosexual forfeits of his own free will. This sacrifice should not be belittled, any more than the sacrifice of the abstemious ex-alcoholic is belittled.
Thirdly, a point of definition. You say that "A homosexual man, having no authentic call to marriage, cannot properly be called to celibacy." So an authentic call to celibacy entails a prior call to marriage? How come? By this sort of definition of authentic, one could only "authentically" give up chocolate if God had previously called one to eat chocolate, or "authentically" give up pot if God had called one to smoke pot. I'm pretty sure that in either case, however relatively innocent or grievous the addiction might be, God would have some pleasure in seeing it overcome, and consider the overcoming meritorious.
"Authentic celibacy" does entail giving up a good for a greater good--and usually, this means giving up marriage for a life of priesthood or consecrated virginity. But even by the strictest definition of "good" (a definition which might not include the pleasure of homosexual activity), the chaste homosexual is giving up the innocent good of companionship (which he could enjoy in a homosexual partnership) for the greater good of living the life of virtue (a life to which, btw, God calls everyone, whatever the particulars of their individual call may be).
One final note. It is a truism of the spiritual life that the sufferings that we cannot avoid are generally more profitable to us than the penances that we choose for ourselves. If indeed this is the case, then (all other things being equal) the homosexual who lives a celibate life out of necessity (as it were) could in some cases be actually MORE worthy of praise than the heterosexual who voluntarily consecrates his or her virginity to God.
~Sincerely Irked.
Surely you jest? Or you intend to provoke argument?
But if this is seriously your view, you will find a great many Christians, including myself, who disagree.
First, a rhetorical point. The sacrifices of persons (including, but not limited to, homosexuals) who are celibate in order to avoid sin should not be compared to the sacrifice of a fratricide EVEN IF the sacrifices are analogous. It is too easy for people to mistake the comparison of the offerings to a comparison of the offerers.
Secondly, a logical point. There is no real parity between the offering of Cain, which, as its outcomes clearly show, was not made in charity, and the offering up of any pleasure, sinful or otherwise, by a person who is attempting to love God and neighbor. Admittedly, the marital act is not something that a homosexual would take pleasure in--in that very limited sense, it might be fair to compare his giving it up to Cain's giving up the lesser fruits of the earth. But the other pleasures of marriage, the non-sexual intimacy and companionship, are tremendous natural blessings which the chaste homosexual forfeits of his own free will. This sacrifice should not be belittled, any more than the sacrifice of the abstemious ex-alcoholic is belittled.
Thirdly, a point of definition. You say that "A homosexual man, having no authentic call to marriage, cannot properly be called to celibacy." So an authentic call to celibacy entails a prior call to marriage? How come? By this sort of definition of authentic, one could only "authentically" give up chocolate if God had previously called one to eat chocolate, or "authentically" give up pot if God had called one to smoke pot. I'm pretty sure that in either case, however relatively innocent or grievous the addiction might be, God would have some pleasure in seeing it overcome, and consider the overcoming meritorious.
"Authentic celibacy" does entail giving up a good for a greater good--and usually, this means giving up marriage for a life of priesthood or consecrated virginity. But even by the strictest definition of "good" (a definition which might not include the pleasure of homosexual activity), the chaste homosexual is giving up the innocent good of companionship (which he could enjoy in a homosexual partnership) for the greater good of living the life of virtue (a life to which, btw, God calls everyone, whatever the particulars of their individual call may be).
One final note. It is a truism of the spiritual life that the sufferings that we cannot avoid are generally more profitable to us than the penances that we choose for ourselves. If indeed this is the case, then (all other things being equal) the homosexual who lives a celibate life out of necessity (as it were) could in some cases be actually MORE worthy of praise than the heterosexual who voluntarily consecrates his or her virginity to God.
~Sincerely Irked.
10.14.2011 | 5:06pm
David Nickol says:
Gil Costello says: "And in the light of understanding this, we must eventually conclude that there is no such thing as a 'homosexual man.'"
Don Roberto Hill says: "I am with Mr. Costello: there is no such thing as a homozexual—though our current 'culture' has wholeheartedly accepted this notion, it’s actually one of the most damaging lies of the malignant one."
Please, please listen to Wesley Hill. Don't tell him he doesn't exist. Don't tell him he and other gay people are mistaken about what they feel—about what they KNOW.
Two excerpts from his book:
**********
By the time I started high school, two things had become clear to me. One was that I was a Christian. My parents had raised me to be a believer in Jesus, and as I moved toward independence from my family, I knw that I wanted to remain one—that I wanted to trust, love, and obey Christ, who had been crucified and raised from the dead "for us and for our salvation," as the creed puts it. The second thing was that I was gay. For as long as I could remember, I had been drawn, even as a child, to other males in some vaguely confusing way, and after puberty, I had come to realize that I had a steady, strong, unremitting, exclusive sexual attraction to persons of the same sex . . . .
Mainly, then, I am writing as one homosexual Christian for other homosexual Christians. I am writing for those who have grown up feeling like resident aliens and have struggled to know why. I am writing for gay and lesbian Christians who fear what their parents might think when they discover the attraction their sons or daughters have wrestled with for years. I am writing for those gay and lesbian Christians who married heterosexuals in the last-ditch effort to change their sexual orientation but who find their homosexual desires just as strong today as they ever were before. I have in mind all the gay and lesbian Christians living behind closed doors, desperately wanting to share their deepest secret with the churches they attend but feeling unable to. I am writing for people in their late twenties or even thirties or forties and beyond who, for the first time in their lives, are experiencing the awakening of homosexual impulses and desires and are scared to death as to what they might mean and how to deal with them. I am writing for gay and lesbian persons who have experienced stinging rejections from Christians but who nevertheless are convinced God wants them to try to live a pure and faithful lives within the flawed and often hurtful community of the church. I am writing for homosexual persons who have tried—and are trying—to "become heterosexual" and are not succeeding and wonder, for the umpteenth time, what exactly it is that God wants them to do.
**********
I can only imagine that Wesley Hill will find himself a lot less hurt by the inevitable criticisms of some gay-rights advocates who will accuse him of cooperating with the church in oppressing gay people than he will by his fellow Christians who have their own misguided theories about homosexuality and think less of him for being gay.
Don Roberto Hill says: "I am with Mr. Costello: there is no such thing as a homozexual—though our current 'culture' has wholeheartedly accepted this notion, it’s actually one of the most damaging lies of the malignant one."
Please, please listen to Wesley Hill. Don't tell him he doesn't exist. Don't tell him he and other gay people are mistaken about what they feel—about what they KNOW.
Two excerpts from his book:
**********
By the time I started high school, two things had become clear to me. One was that I was a Christian. My parents had raised me to be a believer in Jesus, and as I moved toward independence from my family, I knw that I wanted to remain one—that I wanted to trust, love, and obey Christ, who had been crucified and raised from the dead "for us and for our salvation," as the creed puts it. The second thing was that I was gay. For as long as I could remember, I had been drawn, even as a child, to other males in some vaguely confusing way, and after puberty, I had come to realize that I had a steady, strong, unremitting, exclusive sexual attraction to persons of the same sex . . . .
Mainly, then, I am writing as one homosexual Christian for other homosexual Christians. I am writing for those who have grown up feeling like resident aliens and have struggled to know why. I am writing for gay and lesbian Christians who fear what their parents might think when they discover the attraction their sons or daughters have wrestled with for years. I am writing for those gay and lesbian Christians who married heterosexuals in the last-ditch effort to change their sexual orientation but who find their homosexual desires just as strong today as they ever were before. I have in mind all the gay and lesbian Christians living behind closed doors, desperately wanting to share their deepest secret with the churches they attend but feeling unable to. I am writing for people in their late twenties or even thirties or forties and beyond who, for the first time in their lives, are experiencing the awakening of homosexual impulses and desires and are scared to death as to what they might mean and how to deal with them. I am writing for gay and lesbian persons who have experienced stinging rejections from Christians but who nevertheless are convinced God wants them to try to live a pure and faithful lives within the flawed and often hurtful community of the church. I am writing for homosexual persons who have tried—and are trying—to "become heterosexual" and are not succeeding and wonder, for the umpteenth time, what exactly it is that God wants them to do.
**********
I can only imagine that Wesley Hill will find himself a lot less hurt by the inevitable criticisms of some gay-rights advocates who will accuse him of cooperating with the church in oppressing gay people than he will by his fellow Christians who have their own misguided theories about homosexuality and think less of him for being gay.
10.14.2011 | 5:18pm
Mike M says:
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Kansas City has been indicted today for covering up child abuse by a priest. For those of you who are about to insist that this event is not relevant to the conversation, you might want to pull your heads out of the sand.
10.14.2011 | 10:45pm
Paul says:
Leonard Klein says:
"The turn to Catholic writers for models betrays a deficiency in Protestantism. There is essentially no positive role for celibacy. The model of Jesus, John the Baptist, and Paul has not yet enabled even biblically serious Evangelicals to shape a theology that would affirm celibacy as anything more than a regrettable alternative to more-or-less mandatory marriage."
I'm unclear as to the meaning here. But if the author means that Evangelicals fail to affirm the value of celibacy then I think this is from having spent little time in their churches. Most Evangelicals read the relevant passages in St. Paul as affirming that singleness for the sake of devotion to God is something like the first best and marriage a second best--for any given person, all other things equal. Luther and Calvin did not so read St. Paul. But the almost every sermon I've heard in an Evangelical church on this topic fails to follow Luther or Calvin. Indeed, such sermons are frequently at the opposite end of the pole.
"The turn to Catholic writers for models betrays a deficiency in Protestantism. There is essentially no positive role for celibacy. The model of Jesus, John the Baptist, and Paul has not yet enabled even biblically serious Evangelicals to shape a theology that would affirm celibacy as anything more than a regrettable alternative to more-or-less mandatory marriage."
I'm unclear as to the meaning here. But if the author means that Evangelicals fail to affirm the value of celibacy then I think this is from having spent little time in their churches. Most Evangelicals read the relevant passages in St. Paul as affirming that singleness for the sake of devotion to God is something like the first best and marriage a second best--for any given person, all other things equal. Luther and Calvin did not so read St. Paul. But the almost every sermon I've heard in an Evangelical church on this topic fails to follow Luther or Calvin. Indeed, such sermons are frequently at the opposite end of the pole.
10.15.2011 | 12:40am
David says:
Thank you for this beautiful article. I myself am single and celibate and regret to say that the Protestant tradition does in fact leave precious little room or respect for those of us who have chosen to remain single for the Kingdom of God. In that spirit I embrace this man and his writings for he is indeed in good company with so many of our most precious saints throughout all ages.
10.15.2011 | 3:10am
Gil Costello says:
I have been obsessed with what constitutes identity since childhood when the Caterpillar asked Alice, "O...R...U?"
We adopt many peripheral identities throughout our lives for various reasons, most of them economic and social. These are all ephemeral, and for a Christian there can be only one identity of substance: missionary. For every Christian to be a Christian must go out into the world spreading the good news. Paul said he was willing to wear any garment (peripheral identity) to fulfill being his real identity. And this should be true for all Christians.
A Christian can take on the identity of attorney after passing the bar exam for economic, social and other peripheral movements, but he will not be who he is if he adopts "attorney" as his identity of substance. A Christian has one identity: missionary, living in Christ and he living in us, and that identity is fulfilled in how one is gifted and called.
A gay identity is adopted to move around as freely as one can in gay culture to fulfill sexual desires, and one can mistakenly come to believe that he is gay in substance in this adventure, not recognizing the peripheral/utilitarian nature of the identity. But once a Christian embraces his true identity in Christ, all other identities must at some point be recognized for what they are, peripheral, fulfilling desires or needs. And once a person has chosen not to pursue same-sex desires, there just isn't any reason to hold onto a gay identity anymore.
We adopt many peripheral identities throughout our lives for various reasons, most of them economic and social. These are all ephemeral, and for a Christian there can be only one identity of substance: missionary. For every Christian to be a Christian must go out into the world spreading the good news. Paul said he was willing to wear any garment (peripheral identity) to fulfill being his real identity. And this should be true for all Christians.
A Christian can take on the identity of attorney after passing the bar exam for economic, social and other peripheral movements, but he will not be who he is if he adopts "attorney" as his identity of substance. A Christian has one identity: missionary, living in Christ and he living in us, and that identity is fulfilled in how one is gifted and called.
A gay identity is adopted to move around as freely as one can in gay culture to fulfill sexual desires, and one can mistakenly come to believe that he is gay in substance in this adventure, not recognizing the peripheral/utilitarian nature of the identity. But once a Christian embraces his true identity in Christ, all other identities must at some point be recognized for what they are, peripheral, fulfilling desires or needs. And once a person has chosen not to pursue same-sex desires, there just isn't any reason to hold onto a gay identity anymore.
10.15.2011 | 5:41am
joe says:
depressingly conservative, as so often here. "we must eventually conclude that there is no such thing as a "homosexual man". There are some men afflicted with same-sex attraction" just as "we must eventually conclude that there is no such thing as a "heterosexual man". There are some men afflicted with other-sex attraction" (which in that case they may licitly indulge in wedlock).
10.15.2011 | 5:09pm
Don says:
What people usually mean when they say no one is a homosexual, is that no one is born a homosexual. We're all either male or female (with an occasional partial or full hermaphrodit). A child begins by identifying with the mother; between 1 1/2 and 3 years of age a boy will gradually identify with his father ---unless the father or some other male on offer as a role model pays no attention to him, or is brutal, or a milksop, or abuses him sexually, or anything else that causes the boy to reject the male image offered. He can't then identify himself as masculine. As he becomes sexually aware, he frequently will seek out in other men the masculinity he has never been able to identify in himself. Thus, the preferred term is "same-sex attraction" rather than homosexual.
10.15.2011 | 5:21pm
Nancy D. says:
There is a difference between Sexual Love and sex for Love is not possessive nor does it serve to manipulate.
10.16.2011 | 2:47pm
Anndria says:
I honor Wesley for his courage and the people around him for being so cooperative. Certainly if Wesley was able to manage this issue then there is no reason why others can't. It's just a matter of choice and dedication to God.
10.16.2011 | 6:15pm
Gil Costello says:
David Nickol,
I was thinking about all our peripheral identities, mostly utilitarian masks we wear in negotiating the fulfillment of our wants and needs, whether practically functional or obsessions (what we now call addictions, which amount to anxiety-ridden attempts at accessing heaven on earth on our own terms absent what is prescribed by God in his absolute love for us all).
All the gay friends and associates I encountered along the way to my conversion were persons I loved and cherished for what they uniquely brought to the world, not for their sexual favors, but for the gifts that are from their loving hearts. One particular associate, Gerardo Velasquez, who died of AIDS in 1992 at the young age of 33, I had encountered when he was age 21 when he was a founding member of a very influential punk band, Nervous Gender, and he impressed me as a beautiful soul, not in any hampered by his sensual good looks, and he remains one of the most beautiful souls I have ever encountered in this world. God certainly took him home.
One night he and I and two other persons mainlined a large quantity of pure LSD 25 (it did not produce any weird wiry side-effects). Not long after injecting the hallucinogen we took our clothes off and moved from room to room in Gerardo’s family home where he had all kinds of artistic labs (and he was a creative genius). None of us experienced any sexual urges that night: we all just bathed in the artistic expressions and accompanying conversations that were generated by Gerardo's beautiful light as a unique and loving human being. And at one point I looked into Gerardo's eyes set in that perennial smile of his, and it was a solid affirmation of what I had always sensed emanating from his being, love.
In Gerardo’s creative adventures (he was part of a highly experimental and what I considered an intellectual aspect of the punk movement) he and his creative partner, Edward Stapleton, had artistically fetishized cultural modes of S&M, understanding that political movements like Nazism were but mere, although devastating, projections of the degrees of sadomasochism inherent in the lives of all of humanity (Elvis Costello sings, "Two little hitlers will fight it out until one little hitler does the other one's will").
Liliani Cavano (the director of "Francesco") explored this phenomenon in reverse in her film "Night Porter", with the two equally great actors Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling, where two persons caught up in the horror of Nazism (one a sadist, the other a masochist), years after the war discover that their sadomasochism is endemic to the human condition, and that there is some honor involved in not projecting it onto innocent persons, especially in political movements that cause widespread devastation (and in our time, sex education classes), and in succumbing to their mangled sexual impulses as persons, not politicos, they construct games around their sexual mangledness. And this is what early on I admired about the gay subculture: an openly honest (among themselves) acknowledgement of their mangledness that they creatively imbued with meaning for survival purposes, and in this creative adventure, love, although limited, was kept alive. And out of this we got great works of art, like Tennessee Williams' "Suddenly Last Summer" and the genius filmmaker Fassbinder, who gifted us with so many great films related to gay sub-culture (I think now of "In a Year with 13 Moons" and "Fox and His friends"). And honest documentaries, like "Paris is Burning" that revealed the games of sexual identity involved with the art of fashion.
I am appalled first and foremost with the lie of the "normalization of gay culture" which is inflicting untold damage on the youth of our culture. "Gay and Lesbian" films is a case in point: saccharine attempts at normalizing gay culture which results in suffocating the real creativity of gay artists, where real love does abide, regardless how mangled its expression. The days of honest gay filmmakers is disappearing. Where is the next Fassbinder or a John Waters? Instead we get liars like Cameron Mitchell, all advancing a cause of normalcy when the truth of gay culture is far from normal.
I can live with honest men and women who love the only way they know how. But I cannot abide in notions that lie about those ways of life.
Even the films that explore honestly the sadomasochistic impulse are disappearing. There will be no "Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997)".A film where a man hammers a nail through his penis artistic? Yes, a brutally honest film where Flanagan acknowledges that his self-inflicted pain is to have one up on a God that has inflicted on him incomprehensible suffering, a post-modern Job in some respects. There is not a false note in this film, and at its end we love him dearly, the real man inside a dilemma of profound suffering.
The argument I continually make is that gay culture is a culture of death, as are all sex liberationist cultures, especially the mainstream one that afflicts us, but the loving and artistic souls that inhabit it are like you and me, sinners all of us, striving from a genuine place of love and creativity to make it as meaningful as possible before checking out, and this is where we agree. Where we disagree is you believing that a culture that is ultimately headed towards disease and death should be inflicted on the unsuspecting, the innocent, especially the young, in an effort to normalize what cannot be normalized, or, rather, what cannot lead to life more abundantly.
I was thinking about all our peripheral identities, mostly utilitarian masks we wear in negotiating the fulfillment of our wants and needs, whether practically functional or obsessions (what we now call addictions, which amount to anxiety-ridden attempts at accessing heaven on earth on our own terms absent what is prescribed by God in his absolute love for us all).
All the gay friends and associates I encountered along the way to my conversion were persons I loved and cherished for what they uniquely brought to the world, not for their sexual favors, but for the gifts that are from their loving hearts. One particular associate, Gerardo Velasquez, who died of AIDS in 1992 at the young age of 33, I had encountered when he was age 21 when he was a founding member of a very influential punk band, Nervous Gender, and he impressed me as a beautiful soul, not in any hampered by his sensual good looks, and he remains one of the most beautiful souls I have ever encountered in this world. God certainly took him home.
One night he and I and two other persons mainlined a large quantity of pure LSD 25 (it did not produce any weird wiry side-effects). Not long after injecting the hallucinogen we took our clothes off and moved from room to room in Gerardo’s family home where he had all kinds of artistic labs (and he was a creative genius). None of us experienced any sexual urges that night: we all just bathed in the artistic expressions and accompanying conversations that were generated by Gerardo's beautiful light as a unique and loving human being. And at one point I looked into Gerardo's eyes set in that perennial smile of his, and it was a solid affirmation of what I had always sensed emanating from his being, love.
In Gerardo’s creative adventures (he was part of a highly experimental and what I considered an intellectual aspect of the punk movement) he and his creative partner, Edward Stapleton, had artistically fetishized cultural modes of S&M, understanding that political movements like Nazism were but mere, although devastating, projections of the degrees of sadomasochism inherent in the lives of all of humanity (Elvis Costello sings, "Two little hitlers will fight it out until one little hitler does the other one's will").
Liliani Cavano (the director of "Francesco") explored this phenomenon in reverse in her film "Night Porter", with the two equally great actors Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling, where two persons caught up in the horror of Nazism (one a sadist, the other a masochist), years after the war discover that their sadomasochism is endemic to the human condition, and that there is some honor involved in not projecting it onto innocent persons, especially in political movements that cause widespread devastation (and in our time, sex education classes), and in succumbing to their mangled sexual impulses as persons, not politicos, they construct games around their sexual mangledness. And this is what early on I admired about the gay subculture: an openly honest (among themselves) acknowledgement of their mangledness that they creatively imbued with meaning for survival purposes, and in this creative adventure, love, although limited, was kept alive. And out of this we got great works of art, like Tennessee Williams' "Suddenly Last Summer" and the genius filmmaker Fassbinder, who gifted us with so many great films related to gay sub-culture (I think now of "In a Year with 13 Moons" and "Fox and His friends"). And honest documentaries, like "Paris is Burning" that revealed the games of sexual identity involved with the art of fashion.
I am appalled first and foremost with the lie of the "normalization of gay culture" which is inflicting untold damage on the youth of our culture. "Gay and Lesbian" films is a case in point: saccharine attempts at normalizing gay culture which results in suffocating the real creativity of gay artists, where real love does abide, regardless how mangled its expression. The days of honest gay filmmakers is disappearing. Where is the next Fassbinder or a John Waters? Instead we get liars like Cameron Mitchell, all advancing a cause of normalcy when the truth of gay culture is far from normal.
I can live with honest men and women who love the only way they know how. But I cannot abide in notions that lie about those ways of life.
Even the films that explore honestly the sadomasochistic impulse are disappearing. There will be no "Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997)".A film where a man hammers a nail through his penis artistic? Yes, a brutally honest film where Flanagan acknowledges that his self-inflicted pain is to have one up on a God that has inflicted on him incomprehensible suffering, a post-modern Job in some respects. There is not a false note in this film, and at its end we love him dearly, the real man inside a dilemma of profound suffering.
The argument I continually make is that gay culture is a culture of death, as are all sex liberationist cultures, especially the mainstream one that afflicts us, but the loving and artistic souls that inhabit it are like you and me, sinners all of us, striving from a genuine place of love and creativity to make it as meaningful as possible before checking out, and this is where we agree. Where we disagree is you believing that a culture that is ultimately headed towards disease and death should be inflicted on the unsuspecting, the innocent, especially the young, in an effort to normalize what cannot be normalized, or, rather, what cannot lead to life more abundantly.
10.17.2011 | 2:06am
HTimeus says:
Wes Hill's story is my story. Just replace Southern Christian upbringing with an ethnic Catholic upbrining. I just finished his short gem of a book and I am thankful for the fresh perspective on a situation I've thought was uniquely mine for over a decade. His book's title painfully, but precisely describes my perpetual struggle.
Hill's terms for a homosexual person have been the clearest I've encountered. It's not encumbered by preconceptions about human nature. It represents real members of the church that need more than primers on chastity and family values. Hill and I represent a few who've prioritized the gospel message over our intense physical and emotional struggles and continue to make the hard choices that defy both the conventions of the gay rights movement and conservative Christianity. We do no one favors in belittling the few and difficult options left for homosexual men and women. It only makes rejection of the gospel easier.
Hill's terms for a homosexual person have been the clearest I've encountered. It's not encumbered by preconceptions about human nature. It represents real members of the church that need more than primers on chastity and family values. Hill and I represent a few who've prioritized the gospel message over our intense physical and emotional struggles and continue to make the hard choices that defy both the conventions of the gay rights movement and conservative Christianity. We do no one favors in belittling the few and difficult options left for homosexual men and women. It only makes rejection of the gospel easier.
10.17.2011 | 9:22pm
Gil Costello says:
Identities become all-important for a variety of reasons. Not a few biblical commentators have speculated that when Paul writes about the thorn in his side it referred to same-sex attraction. It certainly may have been that. But he recognized the thorn itself not as an identity, but as a gift from God that humbled him into a continual embracing of his true identity as a child of God, a child of God sent on a mission (as was the Son, whose identity is also mission). In other words, a mission as a child of God is one’s real identity.
In our time the most difficult identity to throw off is one where we have experienced a persisting form of victimization: we hold on to it sometimes with a vengeance, and I trust that that has much to do with our identifying with the suffering servant. Just as Caesar’s image was stamped on the coin, so is God's image and likeness stamped on our souls, especially how God is revealed in the Passion. But the image and likeness of God in the Passion is not complete without the image and likeness of God in the Resurrection, where His mission is fully revealed: sin and death and Satan are defeated. This is what is meant by being born again in spirit. How we are beaten down in false images of ourselves that strive for the good on their own terms, where our passionate suffering takes place, serves to guiding us through the narrow gate where we learn our true identities in the defeat of our false ones, and at the end of time we will be given new names that affirm absolutely our new identities in Christ.
In our time the most difficult identity to throw off is one where we have experienced a persisting form of victimization: we hold on to it sometimes with a vengeance, and I trust that that has much to do with our identifying with the suffering servant. Just as Caesar’s image was stamped on the coin, so is God's image and likeness stamped on our souls, especially how God is revealed in the Passion. But the image and likeness of God in the Passion is not complete without the image and likeness of God in the Resurrection, where His mission is fully revealed: sin and death and Satan are defeated. This is what is meant by being born again in spirit. How we are beaten down in false images of ourselves that strive for the good on their own terms, where our passionate suffering takes place, serves to guiding us through the narrow gate where we learn our true identities in the defeat of our false ones, and at the end of time we will be given new names that affirm absolutely our new identities in Christ.
10.17.2011 | 9:35pm
Gil Costello says:
When my wife left me and I became the primary caregiver for my child (she was age 5 then, and is 26 now) I decided not to confuse her by entering into relationships with women, but to instead help her over time to understand in love why her mom abandoned her. This required celibacy on my part. And it was miraculous, for the celibate life became not a burden, but a great blessing.
10.19.2011 | 11:06pm
Gil Costello says:
Once we Christians as a culture embrace as truth the lie that sexual identity is anything other than peripheral, of no substance in eternity, we not only end in inflicting on children who experience same-sex attraction a cruel destiny determined by sex liberationists like Kevin Jennings, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, we also, on a larger scale, contribute to a crisis of undifferentiation (“all sexual acts have equal value when guided by intimacy”), what Nietzsche saw as crucial in the dismantling of Judaic-Christian culture, a Dionysian Way.
“Homosexual Christian”, “Transgender Christian”, “Bisexual Christian”, “Heterosexual Christian” (irrelevant that it is not an aberration in nature) and “Omnisexual Christian” are all false Christian identities. A Christian simply cannot be reduced to a particular of his/her gestalt identity made in the image and likeness of God, especially ones that destine a person not only towards confusion, but towards destruction, and destructive identities do not reside in the Love that is God, for they exist to move a person into sin, the absence of God.
Hans Urs von Balthasar in “Love Alone is Credible” (pp 119-121) explains his version (in contradistinction to Kant’s) of the Christian categorical imperative: “…to enter every situation as a representative of the whole [my emphasis] and for the comprehensive idea of love…by virtue of which absolute love, as a ‘duty’ that transcends every individual ‘inclination’ [including sexual & why a required celibacy would not be experienced as an affliction that robs a person of anything] is elevated and ordered to itself, with the implacability of the Cross of Jesus Christ, and with the severity and burning flame of the living Christ himself…Wherever the gap between absolute love and the lovers pointing to it diminishes through some sort of ‘identity’—in terms of pietistic, or mystical, or spiritual, or Joachimite Theology [which includes a pietistic theology of sexual identity]…the love revealed by the Bible immediately loses its credibility. In this case, the decisively Christian element t [its gestalt] would be threatened or even eclipsed by the general anthropological element…[Said Christians] would be seeking their own glory, however surreptitiously, and they would be coming in their own name…The saints [and we are all called to sainthood] are lost in the depths of God; they are hidden in him. Their perfection grows not around the center of their ego [which would include obsessively lamenting their afflictions wedded to resentment], but solely around the center of God, whose inconceivable and incalculable grace it is to make his creature freer in himself and for himself to the extent that he becomes freer for God alone…The sole credibility of the Church Christ founded lies, as he himself says, in the saints, as those who sought to set all things on the love of Christ alone.”
I understand the unbearable angst (in the absence of a special grace) experienced by those still not extricated from the matrix of the lie of sexual identity, and in that angst oftentimes seeking a synthesis of a Sexual and Christian identity, but this would be a compromise of faith, and there can be no compromise, not even to be kinder and gentler.
Every Christian heretical movement is birthed in a desire to make the image and likeness of God over in one’s own image and likeness, and it matters not how many authentic Christian elements are kept on board, and the desire to do this is ultimately rooted in a determination to establish on one’s own creaturely terms what constitutes good and evil.
“Homosexual Christian”, “Transgender Christian”, “Bisexual Christian”, “Heterosexual Christian” (irrelevant that it is not an aberration in nature) and “Omnisexual Christian” are all false Christian identities. A Christian simply cannot be reduced to a particular of his/her gestalt identity made in the image and likeness of God, especially ones that destine a person not only towards confusion, but towards destruction, and destructive identities do not reside in the Love that is God, for they exist to move a person into sin, the absence of God.
Hans Urs von Balthasar in “Love Alone is Credible” (pp 119-121) explains his version (in contradistinction to Kant’s) of the Christian categorical imperative: “…to enter every situation as a representative of the whole [my emphasis] and for the comprehensive idea of love…by virtue of which absolute love, as a ‘duty’ that transcends every individual ‘inclination’ [including sexual & why a required celibacy would not be experienced as an affliction that robs a person of anything] is elevated and ordered to itself, with the implacability of the Cross of Jesus Christ, and with the severity and burning flame of the living Christ himself…Wherever the gap between absolute love and the lovers pointing to it diminishes through some sort of ‘identity’—in terms of pietistic, or mystical, or spiritual, or Joachimite Theology [which includes a pietistic theology of sexual identity]…the love revealed by the Bible immediately loses its credibility. In this case, the decisively Christian element t [its gestalt] would be threatened or even eclipsed by the general anthropological element…[Said Christians] would be seeking their own glory, however surreptitiously, and they would be coming in their own name…The saints [and we are all called to sainthood] are lost in the depths of God; they are hidden in him. Their perfection grows not around the center of their ego [which would include obsessively lamenting their afflictions wedded to resentment], but solely around the center of God, whose inconceivable and incalculable grace it is to make his creature freer in himself and for himself to the extent that he becomes freer for God alone…The sole credibility of the Church Christ founded lies, as he himself says, in the saints, as those who sought to set all things on the love of Christ alone.”
I understand the unbearable angst (in the absence of a special grace) experienced by those still not extricated from the matrix of the lie of sexual identity, and in that angst oftentimes seeking a synthesis of a Sexual and Christian identity, but this would be a compromise of faith, and there can be no compromise, not even to be kinder and gentler.
Every Christian heretical movement is birthed in a desire to make the image and likeness of God over in one’s own image and likeness, and it matters not how many authentic Christian elements are kept on board, and the desire to do this is ultimately rooted in a determination to establish on one’s own creaturely terms what constitutes good and evil.
