Reclaiming the Lost Self
My sexuality and spiritual have always been closely allied in my life, bound together around the poles of ecstasy and shame. They also constitute my earliest memories: By the age of four, I had been indelibly impressed by the image of my cousin’s body beside me in bed and the strange but powerful attraction to him I felt; and I had been enthralled by the power of my grandfather’s Southern Methodist preaching and singing and wanted to share it.
Just before I turned ten, I had a conversion experience in which I went down to the altar in expulsive, sobbing tears, to surrender my life to Christ. I was filled with a conviction of God’s love for me and my unworthiness of it. The ability to surrender, to go down and publicly acknowledge my sinfulness, and thereby be open to grace, was itself an act of grace. God only knows how we sometimes can let it in, and sometimes shut the door.
That experience, and the conviction it brought of God’s unconditional love, remained a pivotal experience of my life, a divining rod by which all other events and claims were to be evaluated.
By the age of fourteen, when it became clear that there was no place for my real sexual interest in the world, the polarity between sexuality and spirituality became a chasm which I couldn’t imagine being bridged, especially by God. My sexual self became filled with shame and so I stored it away; my persona, which was all that was good, acceptable and rewarded in the world, contained my spirituality. Thus there was no room in my theology or spiritual practice for sex, except as a cause of remorse, confession and self-hate. I became adept at dividing my thought and feelings and words between what was spontaneous and shameful and therefore to be suppressed, and what was acceptable in society. While thus killing my self slowly on the inside, I was successful by conforming on the outside.
The church, whose mandate is the saving of souls, was united with society in condemning mine. If God is the one you turn to when everyone else lets you down, what do you do when you’re told that, on this issue, not even God is there for you? What kind of spirituality can you have when your core self is buried in shame? The very tools by which you learn to live in the world and survive in such a situation *(denial, repression, sublimation, etc.) are barriers to the experience of grace, because the heart from which all feelings flow has already been condemned for its longings. I managed the conflict by making major splits in my personality, separating body from mind; good-me from bad-me; sex from intimacy; the open, personable me from the secret, shame-filled, sexual me; and of course, God from sex.
There is an essential connection between sexuality and spirituality and the intersection is the self. If faith claims I’m loved unconditionally, “just as I am,” and that the One who loves me is the one “unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid” (Methodist Collect), then there is an intimate connection between my sexuality, my natural spontaneous loving movements, and my spirituality, which is the point of contact with the great Lover. But under conditions of homophobia in the church and society, what should be an embracing polarity between sexuality and spirituality becomes a split in which both energies are buried by shame. There can be no vital spirituality when the core sexual self is in shame. But in college and seminary in the ‘60’s, I understood nothing of this.
In college I had tried dating women. In seminary I didn’t even try. Although two people I knew wrote theses on homosexuality, there was no discernible hint that it had personal meaning for them, and no one said, before an exchange of sexual interest, “I am one.” In 1966 the topic was still unspeakable and the activity, as far as I knew, was something you did in the dark.
What is so extraordinary and painful, as I remember those years, is how unspeakable my feelings were. I remember two people I was very much in love with. I spent hours and hours talking about everything under the sun except what I was feeling toward them. I was best man for one of them and cried as I left him and his bride in their honeymoon suite. When I finally got up the nerve to talk to the other one about my attraction to him, he immediately said we shouldn’t see each other any more because obviously this was a disease. He had been trying to get rid of it for thirteen years in psychoanalysis, and it would be better for us not to “act it out,” he said, doubtless quoting his shrink. Seldom did I have sex with anyone who could talk about what we were doing and how we felt about it. In spite of my growing acquaintance with ordinary, successful and educated gay men, the real meaning for me of my homosexuality was in the dark and dingy theaters of Times Square.
Halfway through seminary, I was at a crisis point: I had in no way resolved my sexuality. I thought there was no place for me in life, much less the ministry, if I really lived a homosexual life style.
I took a year off from seminary and worked at a small New England college, teaching and directing the student union. During that year, I dated a woman, somewhat casually, and was satisfied to say goodbye until we spent several days together in the Maine woods at the end of summer, when I had sex with her for the first time. Another ecstatic experience! For three days I floated above the world! I was convinced this was a sign to me from God that my sexuality would be resolved, the doors of heterosexuality opened, and I could be a “normal” person. I returned to seminary, and we continued to date between Maine and New York.
I wanted a family desperately. I knew I wanted to be a father; I was less sure I wanted to be a husband. My former lover urged me to marry and have children if I could. When I went for psychotherapy to deal with my conflict, and the therapist said to me in a would-be enigmatic way, “Seek first the kingdom,” I assumed this meant, “If you really love God, you’ll marry.”
So, one week before Stonewall, I got married and was ordained into the ministry in the United Church of Christ. Active first in the civil rights movement (which for me at that time meant black civil rights; I was only vaguely aware that it might have something to do with my rights as a gay man), then the anti-war movement, I sometimes used this as something I could feel unequivocally committed to, in contrast to the conflict I felt about my sexual urges, cries and longings. I discounted the body and certainly sexuality, telling myself that my petty desires were nothing compared with the real issues of napalmed babies in Vietnam. It was only when it came time to be absolutely on the front line as chair of Maine Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam that I trembled inside from a moral uncertainty. My heart was filled with shame: who can storm the barricades and lead others to do so when there is an ever-so-slight doubt: I am bad, so who am I to tell the government they’re wrong? My shame about my homosexuality weakened my moral fortitude and clouded my confidence in my own judgment.
Over a period of years, I made all the right moves in upwardly mobile parish changes, successful to the point of having two children, a station wagon, a golden retriever and vacations on the coast of Maine. Inwardly, I was a mess, constantly in emotional conflict, wanting to be somewhere I wasn’t, with someone I wasn’t, yet not willing to leave.
I tried to manage this conflict by drinking. From the very first, my anxiety over my relations with my wife was managed by Cutty Sark. The God of heterosexuality held forth in my life with the aid of some not-so-holy spirits. I drank to maintain outward appearance and squelch inner urges, to suppress feelings and to have them. The more I tried to suppress my desire for men, the more I felt driven to seek men, often in potentially compromising and dangerous situations.
I loved family life. I loved my kids. I loved my wife, but no in the right way. So I felt like a total misfit; I was a stranger in a strange land, but no one knew except a couple of friends and my therapist. I was caught in a trap of my own making, but, like the monkey caught by holding onto rice in a coconut shell, I couldn’t let go. I jogged around the Central Park reservoir feeling like I had to decide which arm to cut off, the right or the left, family or true self.
Finally, what had developed into alcoholism began to affect my work. I dreaded facing it, not just because I liked drinking, but because I knew that, having got into and sustained my marriage with the aid of these other spirits, if I gave them up I would have to face myself in a way I still had not done.
After ten years of marriage, within a single month, I told my wife I was alcoholic and gay. She didn’t believe me and said I was just telling her things like that to upset her. She didn’t want to face the truth anymore than I did.
It still took a while to decide that leaving the marriage was necessary. It took a long time for me to believe that I was okay enough, loved by God not only in spite of being gay, but in spite of breaking up the family. Finally, I came out and left the marriage because I was tired of being dead inside.
I had to change therapists and my notion of God. In my mind from the beginning, my marriage and ordination were linked: God was heterosexual-affirmative and homosexual-tolerant. Yet, when my therapist suggested that God would approve of me more if I stayed in my marriage, I knew he was wrong. Spelled out baldly, I knew that was justification by works, and that if my childhood conversion experience meant anything, it meant God accepted me as I was, gay or straight, alcoholic or not, minister or not: unconditional grace. The polarity between by sexuality and spirituality had begun to revive; I was learning acceptance of my body, sometimes with the help of strangers, and I was learning a new, incarnational view of spirituality, which affirmed my innate bodily urge to love. It was time to “let go and let God,” to “turn the results over,” and to accept other simplistic slogans which my intellectual orientation fought tooth and nail.
I was terrified of some legal barrier being placed between my daughters and me. I was afraid of losing job, community respect, professional support, love of all my family and friends—in sum, of winding up bereft and alone in the world. Fortunately, none of those fears of catastrophe have been realized, though the nature of all my relationships has deeply changed.
The hardest part, almost harder than the initial separation, was telling my daughters about my being gay. Coming out to anyone is always a test of the relationship; when it came to my own kids, I had to trust that they would still believe in the love they had already known more than the fears or prejudice that might be aroused. At the same time, I had to be ready to deal with a negative reaction from them. Except for this issue, however, we had a history of openness and honesty, which was crucial. My secret was eating away at me, making me less available to them emotionally. “Dad, you seem preoccupied,” my older daughter said that first Christmas eve after the separation. After being so closeted for so long, I was not about to live the same way in the most important relationships of my life.
I sat them down and said, “I don’t know whether you’ve picked it up or not, but there’s something about myself that I want to tell you: that is, that I’m gay.”
Both girls said they hadn’t known anything and started crying. The eleven-year-old said, “Well, you’re my daddy and I love you anyway.” The thirteen=year-old said, “I love you too, but I hope you won’t embarrass me when I bring friends home, or kiss men on the street, or feel you have to make public speeches about gay lib, but on the other hand, you can’t go back in the closet, so I guess you have a problem.”
We continue to talk about the issue periodically as they go through their own coming-out process of having a gay dad. It has forced them into a deep level of consciousness not only about themselves and me, but also about the dynamics of social prejudice of all kinds. Our relationship has in fact deepened and strengthened, not always smoothly, through this process. My younger daughter lives with me full-time, the older one part-time.
Coming out to the rest of my family met with more mixed results. My sister’s first response was concern for how much pain I carried alone all those years before I told her. She wished I could have shared it with her sooner. My mother consistently affirmed her love for me, but returned all the books I sent on the subject unread and refused to go to a PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) group nearby.
A couple members of my extended family have always been racist as well as homophobic and sexist. My mother would tell me about such remarks plaintively, as if she didn’t know what to say. I wrote her back, reminding her that I had been raised all my life to be proud of my mentally and physically handicapped brother, and to defy anyone who ever looked the wrong way at him. During all that time, I told her, I carried within me the shame of know that there was no one in my family who would take a similar stand on my behalf in the face of anti-gay remarks, and now it was being proved true. I then sent letters coming out to my aunts, uncles and cousins. I got no response from any of them; it was as if all those letters had been swallowed up by the post office—or had never been sent. This silence, offering tolerance based on invisibility, blares out the truth of my position in the family: We only want you as we have known you, there never was a place for you as a gay person in this family and there never will be. However, the letter gave my mother the occasion she needed to confront others’ homophobic remarks.
What is coming out like?
The peeling away of a banana to get at the succulent, hidden fruit?
The budding of a flower which nearly died form lack of water and sunlight?
No such niceties. For me, coming out has at best been like the peeling of an onion, as layer by layer of false selves, my fear-filled identities, my external validations, are pulled away until I wonder if there will be any me at the center. From a spiritual perspective, it has been an introduction to the refiner’s fire.
I think it happened like this: In order to come out, personally and professionally, I had to be ready to stand alone, to declare who I am without waiting for others’ approval. This seized autonomy, departing so from my entire previous way of living, set in motion the profoundest questions about who I am as a person that go far beyond my gay identity. To decide to live as a free, self=-affirming person, is to subject every relationship, every commitment, allegiance, every assumed value and habit, to question.
I thought, when I confronted my alcoholism, that all I needed to do was stop drinking. When I came out, I thought al I needed to do was tell the truth about what I had been denying. In both instances, however, to take the matter seriously means, “How’d you like to change your life?” I was prepared for some rejection in the world. I didn’t realize that coming out was the mere beginning of an internal revolution of a far greater magnitude than the outward changes.
Coming out means facing the central conflict within the self of the true, spontaneous, natural self that got buried in shame and lies underneath layers and layers of a false self erected to manage life in the outside world. It is therefore an exercise in consciousness expansion in every direction.
Descent: Like diving for pearls, coming out requires going deep within to reclaim the true self that got buried, lost and denied. To get to it, you have to move through a lot of murky water, then mud, then crud. The murky water is the uncertainty, the lack of consciousness because of family’s and church’s and society’s denial of the true self. To go through that murky water is to cut through and challenge everything you ever learned about who you are, which got confused with who you should be. The murkiness is the confusion between true self and false self. Pain and joy are the only touchstones; recovering the true self requires allowing oneself to feel again, because deep and true feeling was avoided.
There are also some guides into, and through, the murky waters. All those who have gone ahead in the reclaiming of lost selves—especially blacks and women- who, by words and examples, helped to lead the way. The downward ascent is a direct confrontation with one’s internal authority; to get to the true self, it must be wrested from those who whom it was surrendered: mother, father, sister, brother, clubs, churches, professional groups, society, friends, et al. al. This internal confrontation affects, and is affected by, external relations in the outside world. The declaration of one’s self as gay requires loyalty to a higher Self than the most intimate family connections (which are often threatened by the revelation); it is in service to the same higher loyalty of which Jesus spoke when he asked, “Who is my mother and who is my sister and brother?”
Busting, bursting out, breaking down, out forth: The decision to be who one is sets in motion changes on the horizontal level of external reality; likewise, changes on the external level set in motion the descent (some people start one place, some another; some are pushed by incidents, others are pulled by love, etc.). Confrontation with the internal authorities and the external authorities go back and forth, leading to fuller integration of internal and external self. This is where family crises, job crises, violence, breaking up of relationships, breaking down of all identities that were based on the false self, and the consequent awaking to one’s unity with all oppressed people, happens. The self that one was becomes too small to contain all that one truly is. What had been an identity based on fear had created walls of fragile security that also set one apart from other marginalized o people. This bursting the bounds of the false self, the collective identity, creates bonds with others who have suffered from systemic oppression. Sometimes this change, of course, is not chosen so much as it is suffered; one experiences a breakdown of old identities, old ways of being, that in fact is a falling apart; it is not really a “going crazy,” however, as it is the failure of an old way of life making way for a new one.
Through work in Adult Children of Alcoholics and codependency, I have become aware of how inter-related my difficulty in coming out was with my origins in a dysfunctional family. I had buried not only my sexuality, but also any sense of “I”-ness apart from what others needed me to be. What had seemed niceness and passivity was the repression of an entire feeling self, with dreams and hurts and angers too long ignored, and a voice that was afraid to speak. Hidden amid resistance to my gayness and cloaked in professional care-taking was a resistance to my being anything other than the family role I had accepted, consisting primarily in being oriented toward others, with no apparent needs of my own. I began to see to what a global extent I had been trained to be “my brother’s keeper,” since I grew up taking care of him from his birth with cerebral palsy. I took care of others instead of having my own self; I thus rejected my own authority, rights and powers.
In collusion with family, church and society, I betrayed myself, and I have to take responsibility for my near self-murder. To understand how this happened, I have to step outside those organizations and institutions, including my family that rewarded me for my self-betrayal.
Debt was fact of life in the closet where because I wasn’t free simply to be I felt I deserved compensation and so spent foolishly, ultimately going bankrupt. Losing my gold American Express card and all other good credit accoutrements has forced me to learn that I am enough “just as I am”—an old familiar tune. The shame involved in losing good credit status in this society pushed me to question the source of the shame, and led me into a radical critique of our consumer society.
Ascent: Parallel with the other movements, one discovers that the God one knew and gave allegiance to is too small. Combined, as that God was with the false self and the collective identities, that God has to go.The vertical direction of the spiritual crisis has to be challenged. In fact, by whatever name—God, Goddess, Higher Power, Ground of Being, Transcendent Other or whatever—one’s ultimate authority has to be confronted just like every other authority. We may even challenge the notion of vertical, of “looking up” to anyone or anything, and be forced to imagine new ways of relating the More of our lives, to that which unites our true selves backward and forward in time and space.
In this confrontation with the old, something new will be created that is crucially different from what went before: What is new will emerge from the assumption of the worth and validity of the true self, and the assumption that the true self’s experience is a necessary recourse in the construction of the new, rather than something to be denied and scorned. What is new will be both freer and scarier than the previous God, because that God was erected to give one a sense of control over life; the new emerges with letting go of such control, surrendering to a deeper and broader vitality.
Under conditions of alienation from my body, I tried to live as if it didn’t count. As I began to challenge my inherited assumptions in theology and psychology, my body became a means of grace. A new poignancy was added to the words of the Eucharist, “This is my body. Take and eat….Take and drink. The Eucharist became sexual, and sex became holy in a way DH. Lawrence and William Blake would have approved of. The reuniting of my split-off parts, the healing return of wholeness began.
Having already gotten one doctorate in pastoral counseling, I was stuck at this period in a would-have-been dissertation for a second one (another sign of my non-acceptance of myself). As I explored that stuckness, I discovered the profound extent to which, in my desperate need to make sure God was on my side, I had spent my entire life in a codependent relationship with God, preoccupied for forty plus years in trying to be a good boy, and trying not only to gain acceptance from God for my sexuality, but then trying to convince the church and society that being gay was okay with God, too, I had spent my entire life, whether denying or affirming my homosexuality, trying to “get it right” vis-à-vis God, for fear that otherwise, the grace I had experienced as a child would no longer be there. While to most people this would appear to be simply good discipleship, it began to appear to me more clearly a case of being run by fear A child who is truly confident of his parents’ approval and love will not spend his time constantly asking for confirmation, but will, in that confidence, explore the world. This is precisely what I had not been able to do. I had spent my entire lifetime trying to make sure I was doing the right thing. I didn’t feel I had a self apart from the confirmations I got from the religious and professional establishment.
So I dropped out of the Ph.D. program and began to focus on whatever was coming up from within me, which turned out to be poems and stories. This feels much freer and more faithful to grace that the apologia I had been so chronically engaged in before.
What have I learned from my coming out experience?
I have learned that being yourself is the most difficult thing in the world, and that my mind is an indefatigable producer of diversion from my true self, thus confirming John Calvin’s claim that the human mind is a perpetual factory of idols
I have learned that my gayness was only the tip of the iceberg of my fear-filled self, and that, once that was opened up there was a host of other parts of myself—parts capable of greed, rage pride, envy, sloth, etc., which did not conform to my carefully-cultivated-in-the-closet-nice-guy persona.
I have learned—the hard way, as they say—the power and privilege of credit card status. Without it, though you may leave home, the world does not recognize you as legitimate. In most places nowadays a driver’s license with your picture on it is not enough to prove who you are, you aren’t real until you are “backed up with a major credit card.” Had I stayed in the closet, I would have continued along a much more socially acceptable path, and never learned the vicissitudes of living without credit. Internally, I have been able to see, by virtue of being on the other side, the extraordinary ways to which almost every social and interpersonal relationship is predicated on purchasing power and how difficult it is to sustain relationships with a large financial income discrepancy between people.
I have learned that finding and following your unique task-the thing to do which only you can do wand without which the world will be just that much poorer—that finding and following is, like finding the true self, most difficult and subtle. It carries such fear with it that most people settle for economic and emotional comfort. To “follow your bliss,” as Joseph Campbell urged, is extremely disquieting. Many of us gave up such hope long, long ago, and traded in creativity for survival.
How has my coming out affected my notion of, or relationship to, God/church/Christ/sacraments, etc.?
I resist my obligation to translate everything about my experience into Christian language and symbolism because that is precisely the felt obligation which I have assumed all my life and which is of the essence of codependency. Nothing is real until it is fitted into the pre-set formula to please a Parent. In codependency, my experience is never real, never valid in its own right, its own language, its own terms, it is only valid when it has been translated into, or analogies have been found with, the language and thought structure of the inherited tradition, the conclusion will always be some formulation of “Credo in unum deum, et filiis patris, et spiritus sanctus…et ecclesiam….” All new theology becomes apologetics, there is no kerygma. To assume the language and thought forms of the tradition and canon, and to make all subsequent experience contingent on that or deferential to what has gone before, is to lose the authority and power of the new and to retreat into safe stolidity.
I feel so wounded and betrayed by the years of service to and self-incrimination by the heterosexual assumptions of Christian theology and the church, that, like an abused child, I am wary of all adults in authority, uncertain whether and whom to trust. The church which conveyed to me the message and experience of unconditional love simultaneously was my accuser, leaving me with the profoundest ambivalence about all things named “Christian.” I based my entire life and all my fundamental decisions on the best knowledge and awareness I could muster, I took seriously the command to deny my self. I denied my basic impulses to serve what the church had defined (and still largely does) as good and valuable—i.e., to be heterosexually married forever—and learned only too painfully late that in so doing I had betrayed not only my self, but deceived those dearest to me. I feel jerked around, betrayed, toyed with and humiliated, a fool for having trusted.
It is not enough, therefore to revise certain aspects of church ethics, especially about sexuality, or to say it’s okay to be gay after all; there is something fundamentally wrong with a perspective that requires self betrayal and surrender to a collective form of wisdom and authority for acceptance. This is the antithesis of grace. A radical winnowing is required, not merely the putting of a bit of new wine into old wineskins.
Let us begin by recognizing that the notion of God is a problem, not an easily understood answer. God is a problem for me, on at least three levels: the metaphysical, the question of authority, and the patriarchal and sexist assumptions reflected in the very structure of traditional language.
I will always be a Christian in the same way that I will always speak English. I may learn other languages, but English is my native tongue and all others will be secondary, learned, rather than part and parcel of my brain, blood and bones. Similarly, I will never be able to think in other terms as spontaneously and naturally as Christian ones. My entire psyche and soul is Christian-language-structured. I cannot not think this way. Creation, redemption, crucifixion, resurrection, Eucharist, incarnation, Jesus, body, blood—these words will always carry a certain energy for me—and with it, the assumptions about the universe.
I am a Christian: I believe in the crucifixion and the resurrection as polarities of human existence. I believe in the death of the ego as prerequisite to the birth of the new self; I believe in the incarnation of God’s very beingness in the midst of the weakest and lowliest of creatures, and the ultimate failure of injustice (more than I believe in the triumph of righteousness). I believe in the sacrament of Holy Communion, the veritable presence of salvation in the biting into and swallowing of our brokenness, the opening of the self to love beyond our own fear of love. I believe in the virgin birth as signifying the possibility of innocence, new beginnings, amid our otherwise calcified defenses, i.e., our sin, our self-made poisons, our prisons and destructions.
But to get to the point where, after all the demythologizing, deconstructing and decoding, all this comes alive, is not only tiresome and enervating, but makes me wonder whether the entire enterprise isn’t too misguided, too far off base to bother with.
What is my alternative? Humanism? No, not if by that one infers a one-dimensional view of humankind, a final reliance on reason. I believe the world is sustained, if it is at all, by God. But we can’t talk about God very well, nor very much; silence and meditation, much self-reflection, and much being known by compassionate and fearless others is required.
I have not gone to church for some time. I does not seem to address my spiritual needs, as I understand them, in spite of my local church and denomination being strongly gay-affirmative. My spiritual needs are mostly met in personal meditation, social protest, writing, self-care (such as massage, personal therapy, swimming, walking on beaches or in woods) and conversations with people who seem to share my journey.
As I review the last few years’ events, and the unlayering of my identities as a heterosexual, married, upwardly mobile parish minister completely with credit lines, I know that what has been lost has been prerequisite to gain. Though I cannot say I “have a self” in the way Kierkegaard meant, I do believe I am no longer denying the self that is seeking its true form.
Inwardly, I feel like I have entered a cloister, exchanging a clerical collar and a therapist’s tie for a monk’s robe and a vow of silence if not chastity. In a paradoxical way the recovery of my own self and voice has led me to an inner silence and listening, rather than speaking. Who I am and where I am going is less clear now than at any other point in my life.
And that is just fine.
[i] This article was originally published in Amazing Grace: Stories of Lesbian and Gay Faith. Malcolm Boyd and Nancy Wilson, eds. Crossing Press, 1991.
Just before I turned ten, I had a conversion experience in which I went down to the altar in expulsive, sobbing tears, to surrender my life to Christ. I was filled with a conviction of God’s love for me and my unworthiness of it. The ability to surrender, to go down and publicly acknowledge my sinfulness, and thereby be open to grace, was itself an act of grace. God only knows how we sometimes can let it in, and sometimes shut the door.
That experience, and the conviction it brought of God’s unconditional love, remained a pivotal experience of my life, a divining rod by which all other events and claims were to be evaluated.
By the age of fourteen, when it became clear that there was no place for my real sexual interest in the world, the polarity between sexuality and spirituality became a chasm which I couldn’t imagine being bridged, especially by God. My sexual self became filled with shame and so I stored it away; my persona, which was all that was good, acceptable and rewarded in the world, contained my spirituality. Thus there was no room in my theology or spiritual practice for sex, except as a cause of remorse, confession and self-hate. I became adept at dividing my thought and feelings and words between what was spontaneous and shameful and therefore to be suppressed, and what was acceptable in society. While thus killing my self slowly on the inside, I was successful by conforming on the outside.
The church, whose mandate is the saving of souls, was united with society in condemning mine. If God is the one you turn to when everyone else lets you down, what do you do when you’re told that, on this issue, not even God is there for you? What kind of spirituality can you have when your core self is buried in shame? The very tools by which you learn to live in the world and survive in such a situation *(denial, repression, sublimation, etc.) are barriers to the experience of grace, because the heart from which all feelings flow has already been condemned for its longings. I managed the conflict by making major splits in my personality, separating body from mind; good-me from bad-me; sex from intimacy; the open, personable me from the secret, shame-filled, sexual me; and of course, God from sex.
There is an essential connection between sexuality and spirituality and the intersection is the self. If faith claims I’m loved unconditionally, “just as I am,” and that the One who loves me is the one “unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid” (Methodist Collect), then there is an intimate connection between my sexuality, my natural spontaneous loving movements, and my spirituality, which is the point of contact with the great Lover. But under conditions of homophobia in the church and society, what should be an embracing polarity between sexuality and spirituality becomes a split in which both energies are buried by shame. There can be no vital spirituality when the core sexual self is in shame. But in college and seminary in the ‘60’s, I understood nothing of this.
In college I had tried dating women. In seminary I didn’t even try. Although two people I knew wrote theses on homosexuality, there was no discernible hint that it had personal meaning for them, and no one said, before an exchange of sexual interest, “I am one.” In 1966 the topic was still unspeakable and the activity, as far as I knew, was something you did in the dark.
What is so extraordinary and painful, as I remember those years, is how unspeakable my feelings were. I remember two people I was very much in love with. I spent hours and hours talking about everything under the sun except what I was feeling toward them. I was best man for one of them and cried as I left him and his bride in their honeymoon suite. When I finally got up the nerve to talk to the other one about my attraction to him, he immediately said we shouldn’t see each other any more because obviously this was a disease. He had been trying to get rid of it for thirteen years in psychoanalysis, and it would be better for us not to “act it out,” he said, doubtless quoting his shrink. Seldom did I have sex with anyone who could talk about what we were doing and how we felt about it. In spite of my growing acquaintance with ordinary, successful and educated gay men, the real meaning for me of my homosexuality was in the dark and dingy theaters of Times Square.
Halfway through seminary, I was at a crisis point: I had in no way resolved my sexuality. I thought there was no place for me in life, much less the ministry, if I really lived a homosexual life style.
I took a year off from seminary and worked at a small New England college, teaching and directing the student union. During that year, I dated a woman, somewhat casually, and was satisfied to say goodbye until we spent several days together in the Maine woods at the end of summer, when I had sex with her for the first time. Another ecstatic experience! For three days I floated above the world! I was convinced this was a sign to me from God that my sexuality would be resolved, the doors of heterosexuality opened, and I could be a “normal” person. I returned to seminary, and we continued to date between Maine and New York.
I wanted a family desperately. I knew I wanted to be a father; I was less sure I wanted to be a husband. My former lover urged me to marry and have children if I could. When I went for psychotherapy to deal with my conflict, and the therapist said to me in a would-be enigmatic way, “Seek first the kingdom,” I assumed this meant, “If you really love God, you’ll marry.”
So, one week before Stonewall, I got married and was ordained into the ministry in the United Church of Christ. Active first in the civil rights movement (which for me at that time meant black civil rights; I was only vaguely aware that it might have something to do with my rights as a gay man), then the anti-war movement, I sometimes used this as something I could feel unequivocally committed to, in contrast to the conflict I felt about my sexual urges, cries and longings. I discounted the body and certainly sexuality, telling myself that my petty desires were nothing compared with the real issues of napalmed babies in Vietnam. It was only when it came time to be absolutely on the front line as chair of Maine Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam that I trembled inside from a moral uncertainty. My heart was filled with shame: who can storm the barricades and lead others to do so when there is an ever-so-slight doubt: I am bad, so who am I to tell the government they’re wrong? My shame about my homosexuality weakened my moral fortitude and clouded my confidence in my own judgment.
Over a period of years, I made all the right moves in upwardly mobile parish changes, successful to the point of having two children, a station wagon, a golden retriever and vacations on the coast of Maine. Inwardly, I was a mess, constantly in emotional conflict, wanting to be somewhere I wasn’t, with someone I wasn’t, yet not willing to leave.
I tried to manage this conflict by drinking. From the very first, my anxiety over my relations with my wife was managed by Cutty Sark. The God of heterosexuality held forth in my life with the aid of some not-so-holy spirits. I drank to maintain outward appearance and squelch inner urges, to suppress feelings and to have them. The more I tried to suppress my desire for men, the more I felt driven to seek men, often in potentially compromising and dangerous situations.
I loved family life. I loved my kids. I loved my wife, but no in the right way. So I felt like a total misfit; I was a stranger in a strange land, but no one knew except a couple of friends and my therapist. I was caught in a trap of my own making, but, like the monkey caught by holding onto rice in a coconut shell, I couldn’t let go. I jogged around the Central Park reservoir feeling like I had to decide which arm to cut off, the right or the left, family or true self.
Finally, what had developed into alcoholism began to affect my work. I dreaded facing it, not just because I liked drinking, but because I knew that, having got into and sustained my marriage with the aid of these other spirits, if I gave them up I would have to face myself in a way I still had not done.
After ten years of marriage, within a single month, I told my wife I was alcoholic and gay. She didn’t believe me and said I was just telling her things like that to upset her. She didn’t want to face the truth anymore than I did.
It still took a while to decide that leaving the marriage was necessary. It took a long time for me to believe that I was okay enough, loved by God not only in spite of being gay, but in spite of breaking up the family. Finally, I came out and left the marriage because I was tired of being dead inside.
I had to change therapists and my notion of God. In my mind from the beginning, my marriage and ordination were linked: God was heterosexual-affirmative and homosexual-tolerant. Yet, when my therapist suggested that God would approve of me more if I stayed in my marriage, I knew he was wrong. Spelled out baldly, I knew that was justification by works, and that if my childhood conversion experience meant anything, it meant God accepted me as I was, gay or straight, alcoholic or not, minister or not: unconditional grace. The polarity between by sexuality and spirituality had begun to revive; I was learning acceptance of my body, sometimes with the help of strangers, and I was learning a new, incarnational view of spirituality, which affirmed my innate bodily urge to love. It was time to “let go and let God,” to “turn the results over,” and to accept other simplistic slogans which my intellectual orientation fought tooth and nail.
I was terrified of some legal barrier being placed between my daughters and me. I was afraid of losing job, community respect, professional support, love of all my family and friends—in sum, of winding up bereft and alone in the world. Fortunately, none of those fears of catastrophe have been realized, though the nature of all my relationships has deeply changed.
The hardest part, almost harder than the initial separation, was telling my daughters about my being gay. Coming out to anyone is always a test of the relationship; when it came to my own kids, I had to trust that they would still believe in the love they had already known more than the fears or prejudice that might be aroused. At the same time, I had to be ready to deal with a negative reaction from them. Except for this issue, however, we had a history of openness and honesty, which was crucial. My secret was eating away at me, making me less available to them emotionally. “Dad, you seem preoccupied,” my older daughter said that first Christmas eve after the separation. After being so closeted for so long, I was not about to live the same way in the most important relationships of my life.
I sat them down and said, “I don’t know whether you’ve picked it up or not, but there’s something about myself that I want to tell you: that is, that I’m gay.”
Both girls said they hadn’t known anything and started crying. The eleven-year-old said, “Well, you’re my daddy and I love you anyway.” The thirteen=year-old said, “I love you too, but I hope you won’t embarrass me when I bring friends home, or kiss men on the street, or feel you have to make public speeches about gay lib, but on the other hand, you can’t go back in the closet, so I guess you have a problem.”
We continue to talk about the issue periodically as they go through their own coming-out process of having a gay dad. It has forced them into a deep level of consciousness not only about themselves and me, but also about the dynamics of social prejudice of all kinds. Our relationship has in fact deepened and strengthened, not always smoothly, through this process. My younger daughter lives with me full-time, the older one part-time.
Coming out to the rest of my family met with more mixed results. My sister’s first response was concern for how much pain I carried alone all those years before I told her. She wished I could have shared it with her sooner. My mother consistently affirmed her love for me, but returned all the books I sent on the subject unread and refused to go to a PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) group nearby.
A couple members of my extended family have always been racist as well as homophobic and sexist. My mother would tell me about such remarks plaintively, as if she didn’t know what to say. I wrote her back, reminding her that I had been raised all my life to be proud of my mentally and physically handicapped brother, and to defy anyone who ever looked the wrong way at him. During all that time, I told her, I carried within me the shame of know that there was no one in my family who would take a similar stand on my behalf in the face of anti-gay remarks, and now it was being proved true. I then sent letters coming out to my aunts, uncles and cousins. I got no response from any of them; it was as if all those letters had been swallowed up by the post office—or had never been sent. This silence, offering tolerance based on invisibility, blares out the truth of my position in the family: We only want you as we have known you, there never was a place for you as a gay person in this family and there never will be. However, the letter gave my mother the occasion she needed to confront others’ homophobic remarks.
What is coming out like?
The peeling away of a banana to get at the succulent, hidden fruit?
The budding of a flower which nearly died form lack of water and sunlight?
No such niceties. For me, coming out has at best been like the peeling of an onion, as layer by layer of false selves, my fear-filled identities, my external validations, are pulled away until I wonder if there will be any me at the center. From a spiritual perspective, it has been an introduction to the refiner’s fire.
I think it happened like this: In order to come out, personally and professionally, I had to be ready to stand alone, to declare who I am without waiting for others’ approval. This seized autonomy, departing so from my entire previous way of living, set in motion the profoundest questions about who I am as a person that go far beyond my gay identity. To decide to live as a free, self=-affirming person, is to subject every relationship, every commitment, allegiance, every assumed value and habit, to question.
I thought, when I confronted my alcoholism, that all I needed to do was stop drinking. When I came out, I thought al I needed to do was tell the truth about what I had been denying. In both instances, however, to take the matter seriously means, “How’d you like to change your life?” I was prepared for some rejection in the world. I didn’t realize that coming out was the mere beginning of an internal revolution of a far greater magnitude than the outward changes.
Coming out means facing the central conflict within the self of the true, spontaneous, natural self that got buried in shame and lies underneath layers and layers of a false self erected to manage life in the outside world. It is therefore an exercise in consciousness expansion in every direction.
Descent: Like diving for pearls, coming out requires going deep within to reclaim the true self that got buried, lost and denied. To get to it, you have to move through a lot of murky water, then mud, then crud. The murky water is the uncertainty, the lack of consciousness because of family’s and church’s and society’s denial of the true self. To go through that murky water is to cut through and challenge everything you ever learned about who you are, which got confused with who you should be. The murkiness is the confusion between true self and false self. Pain and joy are the only touchstones; recovering the true self requires allowing oneself to feel again, because deep and true feeling was avoided.
There are also some guides into, and through, the murky waters. All those who have gone ahead in the reclaiming of lost selves—especially blacks and women- who, by words and examples, helped to lead the way. The downward ascent is a direct confrontation with one’s internal authority; to get to the true self, it must be wrested from those who whom it was surrendered: mother, father, sister, brother, clubs, churches, professional groups, society, friends, et al. al. This internal confrontation affects, and is affected by, external relations in the outside world. The declaration of one’s self as gay requires loyalty to a higher Self than the most intimate family connections (which are often threatened by the revelation); it is in service to the same higher loyalty of which Jesus spoke when he asked, “Who is my mother and who is my sister and brother?”
Busting, bursting out, breaking down, out forth: The decision to be who one is sets in motion changes on the horizontal level of external reality; likewise, changes on the external level set in motion the descent (some people start one place, some another; some are pushed by incidents, others are pulled by love, etc.). Confrontation with the internal authorities and the external authorities go back and forth, leading to fuller integration of internal and external self. This is where family crises, job crises, violence, breaking up of relationships, breaking down of all identities that were based on the false self, and the consequent awaking to one’s unity with all oppressed people, happens. The self that one was becomes too small to contain all that one truly is. What had been an identity based on fear had created walls of fragile security that also set one apart from other marginalized o people. This bursting the bounds of the false self, the collective identity, creates bonds with others who have suffered from systemic oppression. Sometimes this change, of course, is not chosen so much as it is suffered; one experiences a breakdown of old identities, old ways of being, that in fact is a falling apart; it is not really a “going crazy,” however, as it is the failure of an old way of life making way for a new one.
Through work in Adult Children of Alcoholics and codependency, I have become aware of how inter-related my difficulty in coming out was with my origins in a dysfunctional family. I had buried not only my sexuality, but also any sense of “I”-ness apart from what others needed me to be. What had seemed niceness and passivity was the repression of an entire feeling self, with dreams and hurts and angers too long ignored, and a voice that was afraid to speak. Hidden amid resistance to my gayness and cloaked in professional care-taking was a resistance to my being anything other than the family role I had accepted, consisting primarily in being oriented toward others, with no apparent needs of my own. I began to see to what a global extent I had been trained to be “my brother’s keeper,” since I grew up taking care of him from his birth with cerebral palsy. I took care of others instead of having my own self; I thus rejected my own authority, rights and powers.
In collusion with family, church and society, I betrayed myself, and I have to take responsibility for my near self-murder. To understand how this happened, I have to step outside those organizations and institutions, including my family that rewarded me for my self-betrayal.
Debt was fact of life in the closet where because I wasn’t free simply to be I felt I deserved compensation and so spent foolishly, ultimately going bankrupt. Losing my gold American Express card and all other good credit accoutrements has forced me to learn that I am enough “just as I am”—an old familiar tune. The shame involved in losing good credit status in this society pushed me to question the source of the shame, and led me into a radical critique of our consumer society.
Ascent: Parallel with the other movements, one discovers that the God one knew and gave allegiance to is too small. Combined, as that God was with the false self and the collective identities, that God has to go.The vertical direction of the spiritual crisis has to be challenged. In fact, by whatever name—God, Goddess, Higher Power, Ground of Being, Transcendent Other or whatever—one’s ultimate authority has to be confronted just like every other authority. We may even challenge the notion of vertical, of “looking up” to anyone or anything, and be forced to imagine new ways of relating the More of our lives, to that which unites our true selves backward and forward in time and space.
In this confrontation with the old, something new will be created that is crucially different from what went before: What is new will emerge from the assumption of the worth and validity of the true self, and the assumption that the true self’s experience is a necessary recourse in the construction of the new, rather than something to be denied and scorned. What is new will be both freer and scarier than the previous God, because that God was erected to give one a sense of control over life; the new emerges with letting go of such control, surrendering to a deeper and broader vitality.
Under conditions of alienation from my body, I tried to live as if it didn’t count. As I began to challenge my inherited assumptions in theology and psychology, my body became a means of grace. A new poignancy was added to the words of the Eucharist, “This is my body. Take and eat….Take and drink. The Eucharist became sexual, and sex became holy in a way DH. Lawrence and William Blake would have approved of. The reuniting of my split-off parts, the healing return of wholeness began.
Having already gotten one doctorate in pastoral counseling, I was stuck at this period in a would-have-been dissertation for a second one (another sign of my non-acceptance of myself). As I explored that stuckness, I discovered the profound extent to which, in my desperate need to make sure God was on my side, I had spent my entire life in a codependent relationship with God, preoccupied for forty plus years in trying to be a good boy, and trying not only to gain acceptance from God for my sexuality, but then trying to convince the church and society that being gay was okay with God, too, I had spent my entire life, whether denying or affirming my homosexuality, trying to “get it right” vis-à-vis God, for fear that otherwise, the grace I had experienced as a child would no longer be there. While to most people this would appear to be simply good discipleship, it began to appear to me more clearly a case of being run by fear A child who is truly confident of his parents’ approval and love will not spend his time constantly asking for confirmation, but will, in that confidence, explore the world. This is precisely what I had not been able to do. I had spent my entire lifetime trying to make sure I was doing the right thing. I didn’t feel I had a self apart from the confirmations I got from the religious and professional establishment.
So I dropped out of the Ph.D. program and began to focus on whatever was coming up from within me, which turned out to be poems and stories. This feels much freer and more faithful to grace that the apologia I had been so chronically engaged in before.
What have I learned from my coming out experience?
I have learned that being yourself is the most difficult thing in the world, and that my mind is an indefatigable producer of diversion from my true self, thus confirming John Calvin’s claim that the human mind is a perpetual factory of idols
I have learned that my gayness was only the tip of the iceberg of my fear-filled self, and that, once that was opened up there was a host of other parts of myself—parts capable of greed, rage pride, envy, sloth, etc., which did not conform to my carefully-cultivated-in-the-closet-nice-guy persona.
I have learned—the hard way, as they say—the power and privilege of credit card status. Without it, though you may leave home, the world does not recognize you as legitimate. In most places nowadays a driver’s license with your picture on it is not enough to prove who you are, you aren’t real until you are “backed up with a major credit card.” Had I stayed in the closet, I would have continued along a much more socially acceptable path, and never learned the vicissitudes of living without credit. Internally, I have been able to see, by virtue of being on the other side, the extraordinary ways to which almost every social and interpersonal relationship is predicated on purchasing power and how difficult it is to sustain relationships with a large financial income discrepancy between people.
I have learned that finding and following your unique task-the thing to do which only you can do wand without which the world will be just that much poorer—that finding and following is, like finding the true self, most difficult and subtle. It carries such fear with it that most people settle for economic and emotional comfort. To “follow your bliss,” as Joseph Campbell urged, is extremely disquieting. Many of us gave up such hope long, long ago, and traded in creativity for survival.
How has my coming out affected my notion of, or relationship to, God/church/Christ/sacraments, etc.?
I resist my obligation to translate everything about my experience into Christian language and symbolism because that is precisely the felt obligation which I have assumed all my life and which is of the essence of codependency. Nothing is real until it is fitted into the pre-set formula to please a Parent. In codependency, my experience is never real, never valid in its own right, its own language, its own terms, it is only valid when it has been translated into, or analogies have been found with, the language and thought structure of the inherited tradition, the conclusion will always be some formulation of “Credo in unum deum, et filiis patris, et spiritus sanctus…et ecclesiam….” All new theology becomes apologetics, there is no kerygma. To assume the language and thought forms of the tradition and canon, and to make all subsequent experience contingent on that or deferential to what has gone before, is to lose the authority and power of the new and to retreat into safe stolidity.
I feel so wounded and betrayed by the years of service to and self-incrimination by the heterosexual assumptions of Christian theology and the church, that, like an abused child, I am wary of all adults in authority, uncertain whether and whom to trust. The church which conveyed to me the message and experience of unconditional love simultaneously was my accuser, leaving me with the profoundest ambivalence about all things named “Christian.” I based my entire life and all my fundamental decisions on the best knowledge and awareness I could muster, I took seriously the command to deny my self. I denied my basic impulses to serve what the church had defined (and still largely does) as good and valuable—i.e., to be heterosexually married forever—and learned only too painfully late that in so doing I had betrayed not only my self, but deceived those dearest to me. I feel jerked around, betrayed, toyed with and humiliated, a fool for having trusted.
It is not enough, therefore to revise certain aspects of church ethics, especially about sexuality, or to say it’s okay to be gay after all; there is something fundamentally wrong with a perspective that requires self betrayal and surrender to a collective form of wisdom and authority for acceptance. This is the antithesis of grace. A radical winnowing is required, not merely the putting of a bit of new wine into old wineskins.
Let us begin by recognizing that the notion of God is a problem, not an easily understood answer. God is a problem for me, on at least three levels: the metaphysical, the question of authority, and the patriarchal and sexist assumptions reflected in the very structure of traditional language.
- On the metaphysical level, Paul Tillich identified the problem nearly forty years ago as the problem theism: the only real God is not a being amid other beings, but is being-itself. This makes all naming of God, all addressing of God, irrespective of gender ascription, a misnomer, and all language that attributes personality, including personal agency, archaic, opening the field of everyone’s personal or collective projection To speak of or to God as if God were a person is necessarily to connect us to the internalized meanings from the church’s exclusively heterosexual assumptions and to projections and transferences from our personal history—all of which must be articulated into consciousness There is no free access to God by simple name: To say “God” is to throw us into a complex of meanings and assumptions which must be carefully examined.
- I believe that this is entirely biblical, consonant with Exodus 3:14, where YHWH eschews naming as a human attempt to pre-empt YHWH’s freedom. The calling up God as if “God were a name, or a noun or pronoun or had an address, rather than being a symbol, makes us no more enlightened than totemists. Such language, in which key areas of our experience are projected out, rather than identified within, leaves us disconnected from our bodies, the earth, other animals, the sky and the sea. Such language necessarily brings u into what Tillich called the “subject-object scheme,” in which God is one being among others. If God is not that, not an object among others, then how is speech to our about god possible? The debate about God’s gender amid such a question seems to me like the shifting of chairs on the Titanic: I am no more interested in calling God mother than I am in calling God father We must recover the no-thingness of God. No spirituality or theology will work for me that does not honor—IN THE WAY IT USES LANGUAGE—the utter transcendence of God. I do not know if it is even fitting to ascribe action of motivation or intention to God; I am not sure that there is any cosmic intention in the universe or that being is headed toward, or in the service of, anything except its own becoming.
- In order to initiate the revolution toward self-acceptance, we gay people have had to deeply value our personal experience, to learn to value our innermost feelings, intuitions, perceptions and longings, and to value this experience as more determinative than any external authority. No speech about God therefore can be meaningful unless it is deeply rooted in personal experience. No concept of God can be authoritative that does not drive from our experience both of suffering and unconditional acceptance. All speech, therefore that suggests a premature bending of the knee, or a worship of something beyond what we have personally experienced as true, is suspect. What is authoritative is not something “out there,” neither a concept of deity nor in writings, which, by having survived a group process, are called canon and dogma, nor in a male-dominated institution. What is authoritative is the reality of our own experience, especially our experience of that peculiar brand of unconditional acceptance in the face of suffering and oppression which we call grace.
- This brings us to the level of associated patriarchal and sexist meanings to God language In order to affirm my gayness as a primary mode of being in the world, claiming my particular mode of attraction, awareness and sensibility, I have had to expand my understanding of God. And what is expanded is not simply a new inclusive slot for gay people, following, however so slowly behind slots for women, African-Americans and other “minorities” so-called by the white people who wrote most of what we call Christian tradition. Instead of a hierarchy with ascending and descending levels of being and concomitant notions of more/less, better/worse, higher/lower—notions that serve to rank human differences—we need to see, accept and affirm the entire panoply of differences in creation—the notion not of hierarchy into which we may now count ourselves invited on a subordinate scale, but an inexhaustible variety of human modes of being, perceiving, creating and experiencing.
- I have been forced by my gay experience to confront not only sexism and heterosexism, but also patriarchy as a whole. It is patriarchy that feels compelled to control sexuality and to subject all people to sexist and heterosexist males. Witness the most recent threats of excommunication to people supporting abortion rights. We must question our every impulse to put something—some idea, notion, or concept—into the emptiness of being-itself. Recent physics, as always, is suggestive: Just as there is no irreducible matter, but only clusters of energy indifferent forms, so there is no “god,” no object, no personality, beyond what theologian John MacQuarrie said we are brought to, namely, “being has the character of grace.”
I will always be a Christian in the same way that I will always speak English. I may learn other languages, but English is my native tongue and all others will be secondary, learned, rather than part and parcel of my brain, blood and bones. Similarly, I will never be able to think in other terms as spontaneously and naturally as Christian ones. My entire psyche and soul is Christian-language-structured. I cannot not think this way. Creation, redemption, crucifixion, resurrection, Eucharist, incarnation, Jesus, body, blood—these words will always carry a certain energy for me—and with it, the assumptions about the universe.
I am a Christian: I believe in the crucifixion and the resurrection as polarities of human existence. I believe in the death of the ego as prerequisite to the birth of the new self; I believe in the incarnation of God’s very beingness in the midst of the weakest and lowliest of creatures, and the ultimate failure of injustice (more than I believe in the triumph of righteousness). I believe in the sacrament of Holy Communion, the veritable presence of salvation in the biting into and swallowing of our brokenness, the opening of the self to love beyond our own fear of love. I believe in the virgin birth as signifying the possibility of innocence, new beginnings, amid our otherwise calcified defenses, i.e., our sin, our self-made poisons, our prisons and destructions.
But to get to the point where, after all the demythologizing, deconstructing and decoding, all this comes alive, is not only tiresome and enervating, but makes me wonder whether the entire enterprise isn’t too misguided, too far off base to bother with.
What is my alternative? Humanism? No, not if by that one infers a one-dimensional view of humankind, a final reliance on reason. I believe the world is sustained, if it is at all, by God. But we can’t talk about God very well, nor very much; silence and meditation, much self-reflection, and much being known by compassionate and fearless others is required.
I have not gone to church for some time. I does not seem to address my spiritual needs, as I understand them, in spite of my local church and denomination being strongly gay-affirmative. My spiritual needs are mostly met in personal meditation, social protest, writing, self-care (such as massage, personal therapy, swimming, walking on beaches or in woods) and conversations with people who seem to share my journey.
As I review the last few years’ events, and the unlayering of my identities as a heterosexual, married, upwardly mobile parish minister completely with credit lines, I know that what has been lost has been prerequisite to gain. Though I cannot say I “have a self” in the way Kierkegaard meant, I do believe I am no longer denying the self that is seeking its true form.
Inwardly, I feel like I have entered a cloister, exchanging a clerical collar and a therapist’s tie for a monk’s robe and a vow of silence if not chastity. In a paradoxical way the recovery of my own self and voice has led me to an inner silence and listening, rather than speaking. Who I am and where I am going is less clear now than at any other point in my life.
And that is just fine.
[i] This article was originally published in Amazing Grace: Stories of Lesbian and Gay Faith. Malcolm Boyd and Nancy Wilson, eds. Crossing Press, 1991.
