Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality (9 page)

What resulted was a painting of “Christ with St. John the Evangelist, not in the characteristic poise of the Last Supper, where John reclines on Christ’s chest, but one of Christ sitting on a throne while John approaches him virtually bowing.” This icon, notes Ford, “became a metaphor for [Nouwen’s] own struggle and liberation. He placed it opposite his bed so it was the first thing he saw in the morning and the last thing he saw at night.” He now had “a visual aid enabling him constantly to say, ‘This is what I offer to you, Lord. I offer you all of these feelings, all of this confusion, and I want to remain celibate.’”
¹⁶

From the first time I picked up a copy of Nouwen’s
The Return of the Prodigal Son
to the time I happened on his biography one afternoon in a seminary library in Minnesota, I have felt an uncanny affinity with Henri Nouwen. My parents still have an audio cassette recording of me preaching a sermon to a congregation of stuffed animals in my bedroom when I was six years old; Nouwen, at age five, played the part of a priest, saying Mass with a toy altar and specially made child-size vestments.
¹⁷
Growing up, I was the morally upright oldest child, ever dutiful to my parents and mindful of my church’s expectations; Nouwen, too, fit
the role of the faultless older brother, never stepping out of line, always aiming to please. I came to realize that, from an early age, I had had a homosexual orientation; Nouwen also, later in life, arrived at the point of acknowledging to a select few that he was gay and had been so since childhood.

Loneliness, as I will try to describe more fully in the next chapter, has been a defining struggle of my life. I think it is probably rooted, in a profound yet mysterious way, in my homosexuality. And in this, too, I sense an astonishing resemblance between my experience and Nouwen’s.

In his classic work
The Wounded Healer
, Nouwen describes central, character-shaping desires he achingly experienced from the time he was very young until the day he died—desires for love, affection, companionship, permanent intimacy, life-giving community, a deep sense of belonging, a safe haven, a home. On the flip side, those desires, going unfulfilled, became wounds of rejection, alienation, and isolation. I know well these desires and wounds because, like Nouwen, I have lived with them. I
am now
living with them.

The wound of loneliness is like the Grand Canyon, Nouwen wrote, “a deep incision on the surface of our existence which has become an inexhaustible source of beauty and self-understanding.”
¹⁸
With this statement Nouwen gave voice to the truth of the gospel that, under God’s severe mercy, evil may be turned to good, pain and suffering may be redeemed and transformed, beauty may spring from ashes. “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28 NIV). Through the incision—though not beautiful in and of itself—we may glimpse the beauty of God.

Nearly two thousand years ago, Good Friday gave way to Easter Sunday, and at the end of history, when Jesus appears, death will give way to resurrection on a cosmic scale and the old creation will be freed from its bondage to decay as the new is ushered in. On that day there will be no more loneliness. The wounds will be healed. I expect to stand with Henri Nouwen at the resurrection and marvel that neither of us is homosexual anymore, that we both—together with every other homosexual Christian—are whole and complete in the fellowship of the redeemed, finally at home with the Father.

There are days when the knowledge that there will never be a place which I can call home, that there will never be a person with whom I shall be one flesh, seems more than I can bear, and if it wasn’t for you, and a few—how few—like you, I don’t think I could.

W. H. Auden, on his life as a homosexual Christian,

in a letter to Elizabeth Mayer, 1943

L
ATE IN THE EVENING ON
Easter Sunday, I slammed the car door shut, took a deep breath to try to calm the churning in my stomach (
Would I throw up?
I wondered), and stuck the keys in the ignition. I felt totally, eerily alone—isolated, unknown, unloved. This was the same way I had felt on what seemed like a million occasions before over the previous weeks and months.

I had just finished saying a “Minnesota good-bye”—a prolonged, chatty exit stretching from the den of the house to the front porch and lasting sometimes a half hour. There had been a party—my second to attend that day. After church in the morning, I had gone upstairs from my basement apartment to have
dinner with a man who wore many hats for me. He was my landlord, my pastor, the supervisor of my internship at the church, and my friend. His family was there too—his wife and four kids—not to mention the other friends and acquaintances who had been invited or who had just dropped in because they knew at
this
house there was always warm hospitality and good food. In the middle of this communal feast, I had been fighting despair.

Midafternoon I had ducked out and driven three blocks over to an old Methodist church building that now housed a food pantry and homeless shelter. In addition to working there two days a week, I led a Bible study on Sunday afternoons for several women who stayed at the shelter and came early to get off the street and drink Folgers coffee. Agitated, I limped my way through my chosen text, prayed with the women, and jumped in the car after a hurried, distracted good-bye. I felt sick, trying to close my ears to the roaring of that old anxiety I’d felt too many times to count. I turned the car out of the shelter’s back parking lot, coaxing my Honda past the potholes and gravelly cracks in the asphalt. I headed out of downtown Minneapolis and into the suburbs; the second Easter gathering I had been invited to was at a house several miles north.

When I got there, the party was slowing down. It had been going on since lunchtime. Now people were starting to leave, while those who stayed were forming small groups to start games of Scrabble and Boggle. I ate some leftover ham and watched, feeling worse by the minute. It felt as if I were on the outside of a set of giant glass doors. Looking in, I saw people on the other side relating to each other in life-giving ways—laughing, talking, sharing, lending one another their ears and hands. They were
clumped in tiny circles of three and four or paired in couples for conversation. And no one seemed to notice me on the outside of the doors, staring in hungrily, wanting to be part of the relating but somehow unable to enter.

It was late and way past dark when I left my friends’ house. How strange is it, I thought as I backed out of their driveway, that I just spent the whole day with people—some of whom I would count among my best friends in the world—at two Easter dinner parties and a Bible study, and I still feel so desperately, utterly, helplessly lonely? On the interstate heading back into the city, I prayed out loud in my car, “God, help me.
Please
. Let there be a breakthrough tonight. I need your healing and help.”

When I finally got back to my apartment, I was shaking slightly, and a knot had formed in the pit of my stomach. I had worked myself into a mild state of panic—I felt like a poster child for OCD, a cross between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Anne Lamott—by the time I had changed out of my Easter Sunday clothes and into something more relaxing. I tried sitting on the bed, then on the sofa in the living room, but I couldn’t get comfortable. Nauseous, I tried to pray and pull myself together. Finally, I picked up the phone and called a friend who has seen me in this state more times than I care to remember. “Hey, it’s me,” I said weakly and tried to put this inner turmoil into words once more for him. As we started to pray together on the phone, I broke down. The hot tears weren’t really a relief; they were mainly a reminder of the buckets I had cried in the not-so-distant past, and they also raised the haunting question I was trying frantically to answer: How long will this last? How do you find relief from this kind of crushing loneliness? On Easter—Resurrection Day—I felt like I was in a grave.

The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm…is part of our inconsolable secret.

C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”

All the people I love, I trust, I want to be around, all of them answer, with varying volume, “yes” to the following basic question: “Will you be there for me?” I’ve come to believe it’s the question that houses all my other questions, fears, and longings.

Jeremy Clive Huggins

“All our lives we’re searching for someone who will take us seriously. That’s what it means to be human,” a friend of mine once mused. Whether heterosexual or homosexual, people are wired, it seems, to pursue relationships of love and commitment. Maybe it’s possible to be more specific: it seems that we long for the experience of
mutual desire
. We’re on a quest to find a relationship in which we can want someone wholeheartedly and be wanted with the same intensity, in which there is a contrapuntal enhancement of desire. For many people, entering into this kind of relationship means stepping into a new world of radiant wonder and breathtaking beauty. The tingly, life-changing sense that
I am wanted!
and
I want another person in return!
makes everything look fresh and bright.

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, expresses it this way: “To desire my joy is to desire the joy of the one I desire: my search for enjoyment through the…presence of another is a longing to be enjoyed…[Romantic] partners ‘admire’ in each other ‘the lineaments of gratified desire’. We are pleased because we are pleasing.”
¹
Relationships of love show both partners that they are lovable.

Music, poems, stories, and films say the same thing all the time. I remember sitting with a roommate in our apartment living room once, just after a girl he had been hoping to date turned him down. Her rejection had hit him pretty hard, and as he and I talked about it, he gestured toward his impressively large CD collection. “Just think—most of the songs on all these albums are either about wanting love, finding it, finding the end of loneliness, and it being the
greatest
thing in the world, or else they’re about losing love, love being unrequited, and it being the
worst
thing in the world.”

In Wendell Berry’s novel
Hannah Coulter
, the title character describes how she first fell in love with Nathan, the man she eventually married. “To know you love somebody, and to feel his desire falling over you like a warm rain, touching you everywhere, is to have a kind of light,” she reminisces from the vantage point of her old age.
²
“The knowledge of his desire and of myself as desirable and of my desire would come over me” without warning, she said.
³

Hannah reflects:

A woman doesn’t learn she is beautiful by looking in a mirror…She learns it so that she actually knows it from men. The way they look at her makes a sort of glimmer she walks in. That tells her. It changes the way she walks too…It had been a longish while since I had thought of being beautiful, but Nathan’s looks were reminding me that I was.
⁴

Movies, too, express this deeply human longing for relationships of mutual desire. I still remember the first time I watched Zach Braff’s
Garden State
, a powerful film that probes the depths of the ache for genuine love. Andrew Largeman is a young actor
living in Hollywood making B-grade television shows. After his mother’s death, Andrew, or “Large,” returns home to New Jersey and meets Sam, a quirky, painfully blunt, astonishingly
alive
girl whom he gradually falls in love with. During the course of a long weekend, they share their secret fears and hungers with each other. “You know that point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore?” Large asks Sam as they take an evening swim together. “All of a sudden,…that idea of home is gone…Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.”

According to Denis Haack,
Garden State
is a movie about young adults asking the question: In the end, will anyone be there, truly there, for me? Is there anyplace I can call home? Haack writes, “As love blossoms between Large and Sam, they feel the stirring of hope. ‘Safe,’ Large tells her, ‘when I’m with you I feel safe—like I’m home.’”
⁵

Toward the end of the film, the two sit together in the airport, minutes before Large’s flight back to California is scheduled to depart. “You’re not coming back, are you?” Sam asks, afraid it’s over. “This doesn’t happen often in your life, you know,” Sam says, meaning “this kind of love.” They had found it in each other. So why was he leaving? In the film’s final scenes, Large sits frozen on the airplane, waiting for the departure from the gate. Why? he wonders. Abandoning his seat, he rushes off the plane seconds before takeoff to find Sam crying and bewildered at his sudden reappearance. He couldn’t leave, he says. What could be more important than knowing and being with another human person through the good and the bad? “This is it,” Large says. “This is life. And I’m in love with you, Samantha. I think that’s
the the only thing I’ve ever really been sure of in my entire life.” “I know [it hurts],” Sam acknowledges. “But that is life. If nothing else, that’s life, you know? It’s real. Sometimes it hurts. But, yeah, it’s sorta all we have.” Love—two people desiring one another and being desired—is life, according to
Garden State.
Love is all we have.

As Rowan Williams points out in his moving essay “The Body’s Grace,” the crucial question for the church to ponder in regard to its homosexual Christian members is: How can gay and lesbian believers come to know this kind of love, this awakening of joy and delight, which is the experience of mutual desire? Is there any legitimate way for homosexual Christians to fulfill their longing—a longing they share with virtually every other human person, both heterosexual and homosexual—the longing to be desired, to find themselves desirable, and to desire in return?

For reasons I described in chapter 1, I do not think the option of same-sex, erotically expressive partnerships is open to the homosexual person who wants to remain faithful to the gospel. Which leaves the gay or lesbian Christian with few options, it seems.

There is the possibility that a homosexual Christian—while remaining a homosexual—might choose to marry a person of the opposite sex. I have a friend who is gay, a Christian, and has been married for over three decades to a remarkable woman who knew from the beginning what she was getting into. My friend still experiences only same-sex attraction, but he has remained faithful to his wife. Somehow, they make their marriage work, despite not having sex. Such an arrangement is possible, and many gay and lesbian Christians have chosen this option.

But for those who go this route, the experience of mutual desire is often frustrated in a way that it would not be for most heterosexual Christians who marry other heterosexuals. The homoerotic impulses of one or both partners complicate matters, and desire may turn cold. A pastor friend once told me about a homosexual man he knew who got married and who, on the first night of his honeymoon, sat in a chair in a hotel room while his new bride sobbed on the bed. The man’s desire for his bride’s body was not what he had hoped, and instead of delighting in her desirability, the bride grieved her husband’s sad realization.

I recently talked with a friend, Lisa, who, when she became a Christian, opted out of her lesbian lifestyle. Shortly thereafter, she met a fellow Christian, Stephen, who had left a promiscuous gay lifestyle after converting to Christianity and had just been diagnosed with AIDS. She fell in love with him, and he proposed marriage to her. But her pastor refused to marry them. “It would be like writing you a death sentence,” he said to Lisa. Another pastor, however, agreed to perform the ceremony, and they were married.

When we talked, I said to Lisa, “Because of my own situation and my strong desires for a relationship, I’m very curious about your experience.” I asked her about day-to-day life with Stephen. Then: “Can I ask you about sex? How did both of you satisfy your desires in your marriage?”

“It was awkward and difficult,” Lisa told me candidly. “We didn’t have sex very often,” she admitted.

Stephen died from AIDS three years after being married to Lisa. “Just before he died, he told me—we had a very open, honest relationship with each other—’Lisa, I’m just now beginning to notice and be attracted to women’s breasts.’”

Surely, in such a marriage, where one or both partners are gay and continue to struggle with homoerotic desires and temptations, there can be a kind of rupturing or handicapping of the mutual desire that ought to characterize marriage. In Lisa and Stephen’s case, for example, there were emotional and physical desires on Stephen’s part—unchanged longings from his hardwired homosexual orientation—that remained frustratingly present and unfulfilled as he tried to love Lisa well. These were desires she couldn’t fully understand or satisfy, and thus Stephen experienced a sort of loneliness, as I’m sure Lisa did also, though in different ways.

Another option open to homosexual Christians who remain committed to the gospel is celibacy.
^*
6
Those of us who live day in and day out with the disordered desires of a broken sexuality can opt to live as single people, fleeing from lust and fighting for purity of mind and body in the power of God’s Spirit.