Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality (11 page)

Perhaps one of the main challenges of living faithfully before God as a gay Christian is to believe, really believe, that God in Christ can make up for our sacrifice of homosexual partnerships not simply with his own desire and yearning for us but with his desire and yearning mediated to us through the human faces and arms of those who are our fellow believers.

“We must call into question any notion that the supreme expression of human love is found in marriage,” a friend once wrote in a letter to me.

The ancients did not contend this (consider Plato’s
Symposium).
And neither does the Bible. The Old Testament suggests that there is love between men greater than that found in marriage (2 Samuel 1:26). But so does the New Testament. According to Jesus, there is no greater love than the sacrificial love of one friend for another (John 15:13). Is it not peculiar that in writing the greatest discourse on love found in the New Testament, Paul chooses to put it, not with his discussion of marriage in 1 Corinthians 7 (here love is not even mentioned), but in the context of spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 13! And even when agape love is discussed in the marital context of Ephesians 5, it is
sacrificial love
that is the model for marital love—not the other way around. Marriage is a venue for expressing love, which in its purest form exists, first and foremost, outside of it. The greatest joys and
experiences God has for us are not found in marriage, for if they were, surely God would not do away with marriage in heaven. But since he has already told us he is doing away with it, we, too, can realize that the greatest things God has to give us are not to be found in marriage at all.

I remember praying once with a friend about my loneliness and longing for love. When we had ended our prayers, he reached out his hand and squeezed my shoulder, as if to say, “I love you, and I won’t let you go.” With that gesture and hundreds of others like it that I have received from fellow Christians, I have sensed God’s love in a way that perhaps I would not be able to in any other way. The remedy for loneliness—if there is such a thing this side of God’s future—is to learn, over and over again, to do this: to feel God’s keeping presence embodied in the human members of the community of faith, the church.

What if the church were full of people who were loving and safe, willing to walk alongside people who struggle? What if there were people in the church who kept confidences, who took the time to be Jesus to those who struggle with homosexuality? What if the church were what God intended it to be?

An anonymous Christian who struggles with homosexuality

Admittedly, entrusting our souls to the fellowship of the church, being open about our struggles with homosexuality and our longings for love, can seem to make loneliness worse, not better.

A heterosexual friend of mine, unaware of my sexual orientation, told me once about his friendship with a twentysomething Christian who was coming out of an “active” gay lifestyle. “I’m
trying to minister to this guy, to help him make this transition in his life, and he shows up to our one-on-one breakfast meeting one day with a bouquet of flowers for me,” my friend said, incredulous and embarrassed. I winced inwardly at his story. How many times have I made my heterosexual friends—the ones who know about my being gay and want to encourage me—uncomfortable in similar ways? Asking questions like this, I recoil from intimate relationships, fearing the discomfort and uneasiness of the ones who, as I know in my saner moments, most want to encourage me.

As I recounted in an earlier chapter, I still vividly remember the first time I talked with a vocational counselor about my homosexuality. I had just graduated from college a couple of months earlier and was entering a two-year ministerial apprenticeship program at a church in Minneapolis. The counselor told me pointedly, “I would hate for you to get to the end of your two years with your fellow apprentices and feel like you haven’t gone deep with any of them.” Then, in a question that has haunted me ever since, he asked, “Do you find yourself holding other males at arm’s length for fear that if you come to know them deeply and intimately, it will somehow be inappropriate or dangerous or uncomfortable?” Though I had never thought about it before, I found myself answering yes. My very longing for loving, affectionate, yet nonsexual, relationships with persons of the same sex had paradoxically led me to shrink back from those relationships.

Loneliness dogged my steps during the two years I spent in Minneapolis. I was deeply involved in my church. I taught classes there, went to prayer meetings, and spent hours in the homes of various members. I worked with the wonderfully affectionate and friendly staff of an evangelical Christian inner-city ministry
to the urban poor. I got to know several people who to this day remain my closest friends. In those two years, I felt more loved than perhaps I ever had before. Yet the paradox is that the same two years were among the darkest I have experienced in my life so far. I felt more insecure and lonelier than I had ever felt before. In the words of Charles Dickens, “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.”

I have a friend named Bill who has counseled me a couple of times. For many years prior to his current ministry as a pastor, he served with his wife, Tricia, as a missionary in Central America. Bill’s stories of dodging bullets (literally), exorcising demons, surviving sicknesses and natural disasters, sharing the gospel, and seeing people come to Christ are the stuff of the best edge-of-your-seat missionary biographies. He told me that when he and his wife returned to the States, their friends and supporting churches seemed to want to hear only about these larger-than-life experiences. “Tell us the good stuff,” they said to Bill and Tricia. “No one wanted to hear what my wife and I felt was the mystery of our missionary career,” Bill now says. “We loved our work, and at the same time we wished every day that God had never called us to do it. Our time on the field was the best time of our lives, and it was the worst time.”

Experiencing loneliness, perhaps especially if you are a homosexual Christian, Bill says, is similar. Loneliness can make your life painfully contradictory. You can be on a roller-coaster high one day and in the depths of despair the next. Sometimes you can experience both on the same day. Sometimes in the same moment.

Bill has told me about his current experience of being in a small group at his church. “I’ve probably never been more intimate
or bared more of my soul with any other group of people in my entire life, and yet I feel lonelier than I ever have in my life,” he says frankly. “I felt the same way when I first started my missionary work in Central America. The image that kept coming to my mind was of me standing outside a window, peering through the glass at a party going on inside. I wanted to be in the middle of the party, but no one saw me through the window.”

Does God’s keeping presence experienced through the human faces of the church ultimately spell the end of loneliness? Yes, I believe so, in some eventual sense. But on this side of the fullness of God’s new creation, the ache remains. The loneliness has not yet come to an end.

A year before his death, after having written countless books on the spiritual life, after having lived for several years in the L’Arche Daybreak community and having found there the most profound experience of human community he had ever known, Henri Nouwen wrote in his journal about his “inner wound that is so easily touched and starts bleeding again.…I don’t think this wound—this immense need for affection, and this immense fear of rejection—will ever go away.”
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During my first year after college, I lived in a basement apartment with a roommate whom I never got to know well. Two friends whom I did know well and came to love, however, lived several blocks away in an apartment together. On many long, quiet, lonely nights in my apartment, I would imagine the fellowship, the brotherhood, the camaraderie, the laughs, the serious talks, the intense discussions, the inside jokes, the small intimacies that I was sure my friends were experiencing every night. Why was I only able to look through the window at the party
on the inside? That year—and countless times since—I have pondered the question that haunts me still: Why do I so often feel agonizingly, desperately, hungrily
outside?

Over and over again, I come to friends and ask, in a thousand direct and indirect ways, “Do you really love me? Are you really committed to me? Do you really like me? Do you desire a relationship with me?” I asked a close friend once if he would still love me after he gets married. “Will I still be able to call you in the middle of the night to talk and pray?” I wanted to know.

For some, even those who have immersed themselves in the life of the church—and certainly for me—no relationship seems to satisfy this yawning hunger to be known, to be loved, to be inside some nameless space that remains frustratingly, confusingly closed.

As a senior in college, I read an interview published in
Christianity Today
with Christian counselor Larry Crabb about his healthy, decades-long marriage. “Are there any continuing frustrations in your marriage?” the interviewer asked.

“There’s something in me that’s very needy, yearning, craving,” Crabb replied. “I want [my wife] to be curious about me in ways she isn’t always.”
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A friend of mine, Tim, had recently gotten married, and several weeks after his honeymoon I called him and told him about this interview. “Do you ever feel like Larry Crabb?” I wanted to know, “or am I the only one?”

“You’re not the only one,” Tim answered. “When I get home from work, it’s great. My wife is there to greet me, and she always asks about my day.”

I sighed dramatically into the phone.

“But the problem,” Tim went on, “is that then I’m wishing she’d ask
ten more questions!
I’m always wishing she were more curious about me. I’m always feeling like I want her to know me better.” Finding the end of loneliness, it seems, is complicated.

For we homosexual Christians, committing ourselves to the church and looking for the presence of the risen Jesus in the human faces of our fellow believers, pursuing intimacy with this community, refusing to hold friends of the same sex at arm’s length in the midst of our confusing loneliness, doesn’t always—or even often—remove or lessen the loneliness; it merely changes the battleground. Instead of fighting loneliness alone in a car on an empty driveway or an apartment bedroom on Easter nights, we’re on the phone with a fellow Christian. Instead of staring at a TV screen late into the night, we’re at a church potluck, helping our married friends keep an eye on their kids. In the end, as the Indigo Girls lyric has it, “We’re better off for all that we let in”—including all the pain we let into our lives when we open up our souls to the fellowship of the church. That pain is better than the pain of isolation.

Coping with loneliness as a homosexual Christian requires a profound theology of brokenness, I think. Alluding to Romans 8:23 (“We ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies”), Richard Hays sketches the outline of what such a theology might look like: homosexual Christians who battle constant loneliness are “summoned to a difficult, costly obedience, while ‘groaning’ for the ‘redemption of our bodies’ (Romans 8:23). Anyone who does not recognize this as a description of
authentic Christian existence has never struggled seriously with the imperatives of the gospel, which challenge and frustrate our ‘natural’ impulses in countless ways.”
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I have come to realize my need to take the New Testament witness seriously that groaning and grief and feeling broken are legitimate ways for me to express my cross-bearing discipleship to Jesus. It’s not as if groaning means I am somehow doing something wrong. Groaning is a sign of my fidelity.

The poet Hafiz counsels:

Don’t

Surrender

Your loneliness so quickly.

Let it cut more

Deep.

Let it ferment and season you

As few human

Or even divine ingredients can.
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Or as Paul told the Corinthians, we must not lose heart. “For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Corinthians 4:16—17). Our hope is focused on God’s glorious future, in the light of which the affliction we now carry—a disordered sexuality and the loneliness that goes with it—will appear slight and momentary. Elsewhere Paul put it like this: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time”—including the longings for affection and the fears of rejection that come with our broken, bent condition—“are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18).

Pondering this coming glory transforms a theology of brokenness into a theology of resurrection. C. S. Lewis saw clearly how Paul used the word
glory
to point to God’s future in which we will at last receive “acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things.” What of my feeling of being on the wrong side of a giant set of glass doors? In God’s future, Lewis says, the “door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.” He adds:

Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honor beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.
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But not only will we be summoned inside the circle of communion with God in Christ; we will embrace and be embraced by the renewed humanity whom he has made perfect in his presence. On the last day, “Humanity in the presence of God will know a community in which the fidelity of love which marriage makes possible will be extended beyond the limits of marriage.”
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