Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality (8 page)

I’ve spent a lot of time pondering this passage from Lewis. I’ve come to see more and more that it involves a reversal of perception, an alteration of values. Many might say that for me as a gay Christian to abstain from homosexual sex means that I’m choosing to prudishly, pitiably shelter myself from the only life worth living. Lewis turns the tables on this kind of an objection, audaciously claiming that, no, in fact, it’s the sexually active homosexual person who misses out.

But I’ve also come to see that a bold claim like Lewis’s works only if we accept the New Testament’s teaching that Jesus Christ is the measure of true humanity. “Behold the man!” cried Pilate at Jesus’ trial, speaking better than he knew (John 19:5). As Karl Barth declared, “This man is
man
.”
²³
Woven into the fabric of Christian theology is the insistence that Jesus Christ is the truest, most perfect, most glorious human being who has ever lived—and that those who want to experience true, full, rich humanness must become like him, must pattern their lives after Jesus’ humanity (Romans 8:29; Ephesians 4:20-24; Colossians 3:1-17).

“Jesus is the model of the fulfilled human being,” biblical scholar Walter Moberly writes. “The Gospels portray a compelling and attractive person, who engages seriously with people and is good company at a party. Yet all the evidence is that he lived as a sexual celibate.”
²⁴
It may come as a surprise in our age of personal gratification that Jesus never married and never had sex—with a woman or with a man. He never gave in to any lust. Although
he experienced every human temptation (Hebrews 4:15), he never sinned sexually. And yet he was the truest, fullest human being who has ever lived. Indeed,
precisely because
he never sinned, he was truly, fully human. From the Bible’s perspective, sin mars and stains humanity. But Jesus never felt that stain.

Does this mean that everyone who wants to share the true humanity of Jesus must be single and celibate? No. It does, however, shift the terms of our modern thinking about sexuality. It dislodges our assumption that having sex is necessary to be truly, fully alive. If Jesus abstained and if he is the measure of what counts as true humanity, then I may abstain too—and trust that, in so doing, I will not ultimately lose.

Moberly asks, “Are we willing to find our identity in Christ, and our appropriate lifestyle in faithfulness to him, rather than in the fashions of contemporary gay movements? And can we learn to recognize celibacy as a life-enhancing vocation of faithfulness to Christ?”
²⁵
Imitating Jesus; conforming my thoughts, beliefs, desires, and hopes to his; sharing his life; embracing his gospel’s no to homosexual practice—I become
more
fully alive, not less. According to the Christian story, true Christlike holiness is the same thing as true humanness. To renounce homosexual behavior is to say yes to full, rich, abundant life.

There was a time in my struggle with homosexuality when I felt that the world was caving in on me. I had been living in Minneapolis for only a few months, and I felt burdened—physically so, at times—by loneliness, confusion, and fear. During a brief visit back to Wheaton, Illinois, where I had graduated from college, I arranged to meet with my good friend Chris, and on a
cold winter afternoon, I told him how I was feeling and asked for his help.

Out of all the things Chris said to me in response that day, one sticks out. With compassion in his voice, he said: “Origen, the great Christian theologian of the early church, believed that our souls existed with God before we were born. What if he were right? I don’t believe he was, but imagine for a moment if he were. Imagine yourself standing in the presence of God, looking down from heaven on the earthly life you’re about to be born into, and God says to you, ‘Wes, I’m going to send you into the world for sixty or seventy or eighty years. It will be hard. In fact, it will be more painful and confusing and distressing than you can now imagine. You will have a thorn in your flesh, a homosexual orientation that is the result of your entering a world that sin and death have broken, and you may wrestle with it all your life. But I will be with you. I will be watching every step you take, guiding you by my Spirit, supplying you with grace sufficient for each day. And at the end of your journey, you will see my face again, and the joy we share then will be born out of the agonies you faithfully endured by the power I gave you. And no one will take that joy—that solid resurrection joy, which, if you experienced it now, would crush you with its weight—away from you.’

“Wesley,” Chris said, looking me in the eye, “wouldn’t you say yes to the journey if you had had that conversation with God?” I nodded, and Chris’s grew stronger, his eyes flashing deep care and concern, “But you
have
had it, in a sense. God
is
the author of your story. He is watching, supplying you with his Spirit moment by moment. And he will raise your body from the dead to live with him and all the great company of the redeemed forever. And
the joy you will have in that moment will be yours for all eternity. Can you endure knowing that? Can you keep walking the lonely road if you remember he’s looking on and delights to help you persevere?”

Your struggle isn’t a mindless, unobserved string of random disappointments, I heard Chris say that day. And faithfulness is never a gamble. It
will
be worth it. The joy then will be worth the struggle now. In the end, I think that is how I am learning to live faithfully as a homosexual Christian.

I
FIRST HEARD THE NAME
Henri Nouwen when I was in high school. I knew only that he was a Catholic priest and a popular writer on Christian spirituality when I picked up an illustrated hardcover edition of his
The Return of the Prodigal Son
at my local public library.
¹

Ostensibly a meditation on Jesus’ parable found in Luke 15, Nouwen’s book is more than a simple Bible study; in it Nouwen explores his own relationship to God through the lens of Rembrandt van Rijn’s seventeenth-century painting
The Prodigal Son.
(A Dutchman, Nouwen spoke often of the affinity he felt for the work of artists such as Van Gogh and Rembrandt, who were also from the Netherlands.)

Nouwen describes in the introduction to
The Return of the Prodigal Son
how he traveled to St. Petersburg, Russia, and stayed for hours at the Hermitage Museum, sitting in front of Rembrandt’s masterpiece, taking in every detail and gradually coming to identify with each figure—the rebellious younger son, the dutiful older brother, and the compassion-filled and welcoming
father. As a result, he was able to inhabit Jesus’ parable more fully, and the story became for him a kind of arc he could use to trace his own spiritual journey.

When I read Nouwen’s book for the first time, I was at the height of adolescence, insecure and full of questions and confusion. Growing up as the firstborn son in my family and attending a fundamentalist church, I had always played the part of the respectable, straitlaced role model. By the time I was sixteen, I had already expressed to my parents that I thought God might be calling me to full-time Christian ministry. At our church, people looked up to me as the one who led summer Bible studies and planned spiritual retreats for the youth group. Beneath the public persona, though, my interior life was a swirl of secret desires and fears. When I read Nouwen’s portrait of himself as the older brother in Jesus’ parable, I realized with a sense of mingled shock and relief that he was describing me:

I often wonder if it is not especially the elder sons who want to live up to the expectations of their parents and be considered obedient and dutiful. They often want to please. They often fear being a disappointment to their parents. But they often also experience, quite early in life, a certain envy toward their younger brothers and sisters, who seem to be less concerned about pleasing and much freer in “doing their own thing.” For me, this was certainly the case. And all my life I have harbored a strange curiosity for the disobedient life that I myself didn’t dare to live, but which I saw being lived by many around me. I did all the proper things, mostly complying with the agendas set by the many parental figures in my life—teachers, spiritual directors, bishops, and popes—but at the same time I often wondered why I didn’t have the courage to “run away” as the younger son did…
I know, from my own life, how diligently I have tried to be good, acceptable, likable, and a worthy example for others. There was always the conscious effort to avoid the pitfalls of sin and the constant fear of giving in to temptation. But with all of that there came a seriousness, a moralistic intensity—and even a touch of fanaticism—that made it increasingly difficult to feel at home in my Father’s house. I became less free, less spontaneous, less playful, and others came to see me more and more as a somewhat “heavy” person.
²

Later in high school, I read more from Nouwen. I learned that although he had been a professor at both Yale and Harvard Divinity Schools, he had chosen at a crisis point in his life in 1986 to give up a prestigious teaching post and accept a call to serve as pastor in residence at L’Arche (“The Ark”) Daybreak community, a home for persons with mental and physical disabilities, in Richmond Hill, Ontario. According to his biographer Michael Ford, Nouwen’s decision to go to Daybreak “emerged from his own need for a community and for a home he had never found in the United States.”
³

Soon after Nouwen arrived at Daybreak, the community assigned him to care for a twenty-five-year-old named Adam Arnett, who suffered from epileptic seizures and could not speak or move without help. Nouwen shared a house with Adam and four other persons with disabilities. “Henri’s job, like that of the other four assistants, was to live with the handicapped and carry out a range of duties, most of them alien to him,” writes Ford.
⁴
Every day, Henri would wake Adam, dress him, bathe and shave him, make breakfast and help feed him, brush his teeth, assist him in getting into his wheelchair, and push him out of the house
and down the road for the program Daybreak had scheduled for him, most of which consisted of therapeutic exercises.

“[Adam’s heart], so transparent, reflected for me not only his person but also…the heart of God,” Nouwen wrote in a book about his relationship with Adam Arnett that I also read in high school, soon after finishing
The Return of the Prodigal Son
. “After my many years of studying, reflecting, and teaching theology, Adam came into my life, and by his life and his heart he announced to me and summarized all I had ever learned.”
⁵
Through Adam, Nouwen felt that he learned “what it must be like for God to love us—spiritually uncoordinated, retarded, able to respond with what must seem to God like inarticulate grunts and groans.”
⁶

Nouwen’s strange choice to leave the halls of the Ivy League academy and take on the slobbery, thankless job of caring for a “vegetable” like Adam made a profound impression on me when I read his account of it. In reaching out to Adam and finding his own life immeasurably enriched in the process, Nouwen proved the truth of Jesus’ words: “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:35). “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).

For several years, all I knew about Nouwen was what I had read in these two books,
The Return of the Prodigal Son
and
Adam: God’s Beloved
. Then one afternoon, I was in the library at Luther Seminary in St. Paul and noticed a new biography of Nouwen. I picked it up and started to read, still standing in the lobby near the “new arrivals” shelf. I remember vividly the shock and ache I felt in my stomach, as if from acrophobia or a sudden lurch, when
I discovered that Henri Nouwen had been a celibate homosexual and, as a result, had wrestled intensely with loneliness, persistent cravings for affection and attention, immobilizing fears of rejection, and a restless desire to find a home where he could feel safe and cared for.

The author, Michael O’Laughlin, Nouwen’s friend and student, wrote, “He had a deep need for love and acceptance that no relationship seemed to satisfy…[He] even [feared] that friends would forget him or just disappear from his life.”
⁷
As I read, I felt as if a perceptive counselor were diagnosing
my
condition. At the time, I was going through one of the most tension-filled periods of wrestling with homosexuality that I had experienced up to that point in my life. I felt isolated, tormented, and, worse, numb to whatever love, affection, and support my friends and church family were trying to extend to me. Realizing that Nouwen had struggled with the same longings and fears I was experiencing—and that he had struggled with them all his life—I felt simultaneously that a weight was lifted off my shoulders and that I had a long road still ahead of me with no end in sight.

I left the library that day determined to find out more about Nouwen’s homosexuality and loneliness. That night I wrote the following in my journal:

What I read in Nouwen’s biography is so shockingly accurate to the state of my heart so much of the time, it is almost painful to read it. It feels like it’s publishing my heart for people who pick up that book to read. It expresses my “inconsolable secret.” Many times I am seized with terrible doubts and fears—mostly about my friends’ love for me, whether it is solid or not. I sometimes feel like I am on a
roller-coaster ride from joy to turmoil. It seems that hardly a week goes by without at least one night of black despair. Like Nouwen’s, my anxiety is most acute in my relationships with friends, particularly my closest ones. I, too, seem to have a very deep need for love and intimate communion and deep knowing of another person and exposing my heart and soul that no relationship seems to satisfy.

Nouwen wrote often about loneliness and his craving for affection, circling back to that theme in book after book, as if fingering a wound that never quite healed. On one trip to Latin America, for example, he jotted down the following in his journal:

What I am craving is not so much recognition, praise, or admiration as simple friendship. There may be some around me, but I cannot perceive or receive it. Within me lies a deadness that leaves me cold, tired, and rigid…I attended a small workshop about the basic meaning of being a Christian, but little of what was said reached my heart. I realized that the only thing I really wanted was a handshake, an embrace, a kiss, or a smile; I received none. Finally, I fell asleep in the late afternoon to escape it all.
⁸

Later, in another place, he wrote similarly:

Once, when I felt quite lonely, I asked a friend to go out with me. Although he replied that he didn’t have time, I found him just a little later at a mutual friend’s house where a party was going on. Seeing me, he said, “Welcome, join us, good to see you.” But my anger was so great at not being told about the party that I couldn’t stay. All of my inner complaints about not being accepted, liked, and loved surged up in me, and I left the room, slamming the door behind me. I was completely incapacitated—unable
to receive and participate in the joy that was there. In an instant, the joy in that room had become a source of resentment.
⁹

Nouwen’s biographers describe how, ignoring international time zones, he would call friends around the world in the middle of the night and want to talk through—for the umpteenth time—his desperate fear of being alone and his longing for companionship and intimacy. Full of energy and passion, Nouwen would be soaring one moment—like the trapeze artists with whom he had a lifelong fascination—on an emotional high, waving his big hands in animated dinner discussions or lectures, only to crash into a depression in the privacy of his bedroom later. Strangely, he was haunted by a fear that no one would show up for his funeral.
¹⁰
Philip Yancey notes that in lectures and books on the spiritual life, Nouwen “would speak of the strength he gained from living in community, then drive to a friend’s house, wake him up at two in the morning, and, sobbing, ask to be held.”
¹¹
Toward the end of his life, he even chose to undergo a form of therapy that involved him being physically embraced in a nonerotic context.
¹²

As I have sifted through more articles and books about his life since that fateful day I spent at the library in St. Paul, I’ve come to see that Nouwen’s struggle with loneliness, like mine, was deeply rooted in his homosexuality. Probably
because
he was gay, Henri Nouwen “longed for intimate relationships yet recoiled from them out of fear where they might lead.” Yancey writes:

I have known several people in ministry who struggle with issues of sexual identity, knowing themselves to be gay and feeling trapped, with no acceptable way to admit it, let alone express it. I know of no more difficult path for a person of integrity
to tread…[Nouwen] was a celibate homosexual…[With that knowledge] I go back through [his] writings and sense the deeper, unspoken agony that underlay what he wrote about rejection, about the wound of loneliness that never heals, about friendships that never satisfy.

Nouwen sought counseling from a center that ministered to homosexual men and women, and he listened as gay friends proposed several options. He could remain a celibate priest and “come out” as a gay man, which would at least release the secret he bore in anguish. He could declare himself, leave the priesthood, and seek a gay companion. Or he could remain a priest publicly and develop private gay relationships. Nouwen carefully weighed each course and rejected it. Any public confession of his identity would hurt his ministry, he feared. The last two options seemed impossible for one who had taken a vow of celibacy and who looked to the Bible and to Rome for guidance on sexual morality. Instead, he decided to keep living with the wound. Again and again, he decided.
¹³

Nouwen was only six years old when he realized that he was attracted to members of his own sex. During a stint at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, when he was in his early thirties, “he became more acutely aware of his homosexuality, which he saw as a disability, and it started to disturb him greatly.”
¹⁴
The small circle of friends who knew his secret struggle sensed a “constant tension at the heart of Nouwen’s personality between being a priest—and a famous one at that—and living with the painful knowledge of his sexuality, which he described as a handicap, another cross to bear.”
¹⁵

During the time he was teaching at Harvard in the early 1980s, Nouwen sought help at a Catholic center in New Orleans
that offered counsel and support to gay and lesbian persons. While there, he met an iconographer who had painted an icon of Saint Francis for him the year before. Would it be possible, Nouwen asked, for the artist to make him a second icon? Nouwen wanted something that would aid him in his struggle to be faithful to the church’s rule against homoerotic behavior, something “that would help him consecrate his homosexual emotions and feelings to Christ.”