Monthly Archives: October 2014

Changing Course, or Changing Tone? Recent Shifts in Pastoral Responses to LGBT Christians

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The news cycle has a funny way of repeating itself. We first had the idea for a post on this topic several months ago when many Evangelical Christians were grappling with the implications of generous spaciousness and perhaps offering a “Third Way” when providing pastoral care for LGBT people. This morning we awoke to news regarding the midterm report from the Synod on Marriage and Family in the Roman Catholic Church. The Catholic Herald has called the document a “pastoral earthquake,” suggesting that there is a great deal of anxiety among the faithful about whether spiritual directors are changing course in one way or another.

On our blog, we focus many of our comments on these issues on LGBT people who are living celibacy or interested in exploring the possibilities of celibate vocations. Our experience is that we have discerned calls to celibacy. We also affirm the experiences of LGBT people who choose celibacy out of obedience to their Christian traditions.

When a person is trying to live a celibate vocation, often he or she cannot find any kind of meaningful support for this way of life. Many Christians present marriage as the de facto vocation for all people. Finding books that positively and practically discuss friendship, singleness, and celibacy can be impossible in most Christian bookstores. We’re aware that many LGBT Christians who are trying to live celibate vocations feel like they need to go it alone or figure out this vocation with a general sense of “spiritual” support attained by participating in the spiritual life of the Church. We can empathize with our friends who wonder if churches just starting to celebrate same-sex marriages will have any interest in continuing to support LGBT people who want to explore celibacy.

Celibate LGBT Christians have been through the wringer when it comes to finding spiritual directors. Some people counsel us (broadly, not the two of us specifically) to give up our celibate vocations, to stop denying ourselves sexual experiences, and to explore the possibility of sexually active same-sex relationships. Other people counsel us to give up all LGBT language and avoid any other actions that straight, cisgender Christians might consider scandalous. It’s difficult for us to find trustworthy spiritual directors. So many pastors default to using auto-scripts, especially around topics of sexuality and vocation. The search for a helpful, compassionate, and rigorous spiritual director often feels like a quest for a diamond in the rough.

It’s hard to think of other places outside the Church where the divide between “rigorous spiritual direction” and being an absolutely insensitive jerk is so thin. Speaking candidly, we know that there congregations we’d never visit because the pastor has made it abundantly clear that he is incapable of seeing anything good in an LGBT person. It’s amazing how many people assert that being LGBT is synonymous with having sex outside of marriage. As with many misunderstandings, it seems there’s a break-down in communication.

Relative to everything we’ve stated, people across gamut of Christian traditions — Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox — are anxious about how their pastors might change their approaches to LGBT issues in the near future and long-term. People wonder, will their pastors follow trends of affirming, celebrating, and even advocating for same-sex marriage? Will their pastors make it clear that every person should find his or her identity exclusively in Christ and that any identification with words like “gay” must be avoided at all costs? Will the pastors take approaches of refusing to engage in any of the controversies?

When spiritual directors shift course, or simply shift tone, it’s worth considering what approaches they are moving away from and what approaches they are moving toward. There’s a troubling tendency among conservative Christians to assert that any change is going to have its inevitable end in moral relativism and/or spiritual death. In reality, many Christians change tone on these issues because repentance is part and parcel of the Christian life. If pastors do not consistently wrestle with how they approach tough pastoral questions, then they are not doing their duty as pastors. Tough pastoral questions are considered tough because a pastor walks away wondering, “Did I really do the right thing there? What would I do if I encountered a similar situation in the future? How did I consider the unique circumstances of this situation?” We’re confident that any pastor reading this entry could reflect back on times where he or she truly wanted an opportunity for a do-over.

Our situation as a celibate LGBT Christian couple is certainly uncommon. We’ve been so grateful to meet pastors who can affirm our desires to grow into the fullness of faith in Christ. However, when we consider the moves for more space in some traditions, we can’t help but be afraid of reactionary impulses within our own Christian tradition. We wonder if we constantly push our priest to his very limits, especially as our pastoral care needs get more complicated with Sarah’s health problems. We do our best to talk to our parish priest, to pray with him and for him, and to consider his counsel carefully even if we end up pushing back on some of it. Additionally, we both seek direction from our individual confessors. Amid the screeching of the culture war, we can’t help but feel like we and our priests walk on a razor’s edge.

Recognizing that razor’s edge, we think that many people confuse changing course with changing tone. Churches can teach on Christian maturity, vocations, sexuality, and relationships without sounding like drill sergeants or dictators. Pastors have options to help people grow towards Christian maturity that do not involve threatening to shun them at every possible opportunity or treating them as though their very presence is a liability to the community. It’s possible to talk with LGBT people rather than simply talking at us. As we sit back and read the midterm report of the Synod for Marriage and the Family, we can’t help but hope that maybe as a result of these conversations among bishops, celibate LGBT Christians who are part of the Catholic tradition will have an easier time finding compassionate spiritual directors. We wonder what things might look like if everyone encountered a church community that is capable of seeing the gifts they bring rather than assuming they are only present to create controversy.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

Choosing a Letter is Complicated

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A reflection by Lindsey

Today is National Coming Out Day, so we decided to modify our usual Saturday Symposium routine by starting with a bonus reflection for this week.

I have a love/hate relationship with National Coming Out Day. On one hand, I know many people who have used the day to be honest with family and friends about sexual orientation and gender identity. October 11 is still 6 weeks before Thanksgiving (unless you’re in Canada), and I appreciate how some people value having a bit of space for the dust to settle amongst family members before the holidays. On the other hand, talk around National Coming Out Day frequently assumes that once a person has decided to come out, disclosure is comparatively straightforward.

As Sarah and I have been blogging, I’ve noticed that many people feel comfortable assigning labels to my sexual orientation and gender identity based on things they have figured out about Sarah or things they assume about me given my first name. That bothers me because lesbian has never been one of the words I have used when it comes to my own sexual orientation. I can see why it’s easy to assume that I identify as lesbian, but it still bothers me when people do because labeling others assumes that you know more than they do about how they experience attraction and gender identity.

Beginning to come out is like getting on a roller coaster of self-understanding. I cued up to this roller coaster while I was part of a Christian community that asserted every person created by God is not only clearly male or female, but is also heterosexual. There was no such thing as a “gay Christian” because that was an impossible juxtaposition of terms. In 2007, I started meeting other gay Christians and found myself surrounded by people who understood why I hated the tradeoffs between trying to adhere to cisgender, heterosexual social norms and doing my best to follow Christ with my entire self.

However, any label comes with a script of its own. I felt blessed to be negotiating my journey in a community with Christians who could affirm different vocations. As a community, we robustly affirmed that people needed freedom to seek God’s direction. I have friends from a wide swatch of Christian traditions on the journey, and we negotiated various tensions associated with being an ecumenical community. My current Christian tradition has a rich history of exalting both married and celibate vocations. For a while, I was definitely most comfortable describing myself as a celibate gay Christian. It’s a clunky enough phrase that I only deployed it in specific situations. Most of the time, I didn’t have any need to say anything. Coming out was nicely personal, and I could make the decision whenever I felt the need to say anything. I worked on growing into my celibate vocation and became more and more comfortable in my own skin.

When you’re more comfortable in your own skin, it’s easier to identify when other people misread you in society. I started noticing that people were frequently misguided, even to the point of being patently wrong, when they tried to gender my motivations or experiences. I picked up on how the friends closest to me have always held me in a category of my own when it comes to gendered treatment. I’ve developed an absolute disdain for how many people use pronouns, and I become more and more aware of the reality that my own experiences of sexuality and gender are not always understood even in the gay Christian community. Unlike sexual orientation and vocation, gender is an entirely public reality. It’s difficult to know how and when to correct people about various things when gender is often used to indicate socially polite behaviors.

Choosing a letter can be especially complicated when people everywhere have expectations of what certain labels mean. Many people assume that if a woman is in a relationship with another woman, then both people are necessarily lesbians.  If you are a person who enters into an opposite-sex relationship, then many people assume that you were never a member of the queer community after all because you’ve realized that you’re straight. Using specific relationships to label people’s sexual orientations does a lot to erase bisexuality. Many people will assert that if you’re on the transgender spectrum but you’re not interested in any form of medical transition, there’s no way that you’re transgender. Very few people have any idea about what words work best when a transgender person is in a relationship with a gay person. Sometimes people don’t know the best language to use because they know that none of the available scripts associated with existing language fit their experiences.

Every National Coming Out Day, I hope that people experience freedom to be honest about the unique elements of their story. I pray that the conversations started today continue in love and charity. I recognize that opening a conversation on sexual orientation and gender identity can be hard work, and I respect people who make plans to begin a conversation today only to conclude that the conversation is still just too hard.

In the spirit of our usual Saturday Symposium questions: we’d love to hear about your experiences with National Coming Out Day. What does National Coming Out Day mean to you? Do you know anyone who has used National Coming Out Day to start a conversation about sexual orientation and gender identity with their friends and family? Have you encountered situations where a person’s experience does not fit into existing language about sexual orientation and gender identity?

We look forward to reading your responses. If you’re concerned about having your comment publicly associated with your name, please consider using the Contact Us page to submit your comment. We can post it under a pseudonym (i.e. John says, “your comment”) or summarize your comment in our own words (i.e. One person observed…). Participating in this kind of public dialogue can be risky, and we want to do what we can to protect you even if that means we preserve your anonymity. Have a wonderful weekend!

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

The Sounds of Silence

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Two weeks ago, we had the opportunity to attend a silent weekend for an immersive ASL experience. Lindsey found out about the weekend first and immediately forwarded the information to Sarah. There was no question in our minds that we would go. We registered ourselves so quickly that we nearly forgot about another obligation for the same day. Our sense of team spirit kicked in, and we decided that Sarah would attend the entire weekend with Lindsey joining in on Saturday activities. And what a weekend we had!

All participants of the silent weekend signed a pledge to keep our voices off. Even at the end of the retreat, no one used voice. We found ourselves imagining how each person must sound. It was actually quite fun to have that remain a mystery. The two of us took the pledge a bit further, swearing off of using English in any form as much as possible. We worked around the challenge of necessary “I’ve arrived and I’m safe” text message updates by sending along pictures. Taking a weekend to use non-verbal forms of communication exclusively challenged us to see the world a bit differently. If you’re a hearing person who hasn’t experienced silence often or at all, have you ever wondered what silence feels like?

In the silence, we felt energy. What would you do if you wanted to get a person’s attention without shouting? What if you wanted to get an entire group of people to pay attention? Over the weekend, we saw a great variety of strategies. Sometimes, things worked like phone trees with everyone getting the attention of 2 or 3 people immediately nearby. Other times, the facilitators would flick the lights on and off. Our favorite strategy was dancing around the room while waving both arms to say, “Hi! Hello!” In the silence, there was movement everywhere.

In the silence, we found community. Everyone present wanted each and every person to be successful communicating in ASL and meeting individual goals for the weekend. It didn’t matter that we have only been studying ASL seriously for a few weeks. People helped us to tell them our story of Sarah’s hearing loss and our efforts at developing alternate forms of communication. They identified the progress we’ve made in a few weeks and gave us insights into how this language works. We loved learning about classifiers and other grammatical concepts. Sarah also learned a heap of new vocabulary just by being immersed in the language for a few days. It was Lindsey’s first fully immersive experience, and Lindsey left Saturday feeling much better equipped to have voice-off conversations in ASL. In the silence, we could dialogue about our hopes, our fears, and our feelings as we negotiate the complex elements of rapidly progressing hearing loss.

In the silence, we experienced joy. When everyone had their voices off, Lindsey heard sounds that neither of us had ever noticed before. A smile after two people successfully move past a struggle to communicate has an up s sound when the air held as bated breath gets released through the lips. We observed that other hearing people try and carried themselves more lightly so they didn’t  unintentionally interrupt a conversation by stomping their feet. Lindsey heard clothing crinkling as people enthusiastically used their bodies in various ways to interact with the entire retreat community. And best of all, Lindsey heard the laughter of the group much more robustly. Sarah experienced joy in an entirely different way. On Saturday of the retreat, Sarah was having a particularly low hearing day. But for the first time, it didn’t matter. No one noticed because there was no expectation that talking with another person requires being able to hear. Our experience of silence that weekend was vastly different from Sarah’s other experiences of silence: it wasn’t terrifying or distressing. Instead, it was totally normal. It was the reality of that moment in time, and we embraced it. In the silence, we realized that being silent changes how a person interacts with the world. The silence is neither better nor worse than noise; it’s just different.

In the silence, we experienced the beginnings of healing. The silent weekend provided us with a blessed 48 or so hours of feeling understood and loved. We met lots of people: others who have lost their hearing, family members, interpreting students. For the first time ever, we met people who could say to us, “I get it. I really do. And it’s not always going to be so hard.”

The past several months have brought about many challenges for us, and it has been difficult for us to find spaces where others appreciate those for what they are rather than assuming what they must be. While we’re deeply appreciative of all the emotional support that friends and readers have extended to us, Sarah has been surprised at how often we’re told, “I’m so sorry about the hearing loss. That must be frightening,” and how infrequently our loved ones see that vertigo–not a hearing problem–is the disabling part of Sarah’s Ménière’s disease. Being wiped out and flat on the floor for hours at a time is what keeps Sarah from living fully, and in some ways the hearing loss itself is a blessing. It’s been hard for us to talk with others about this because the vast majority of people we know see deafness as a disability rather than a different but equally valuable way of life. Granted, Sarah is experiencing some grief over not being able to interact with the hearing world in all the same ways as before, and is still figuring out how to cope with feeling stuck between two worlds. But we’re finding that there are positive aspects of hearing loss. Sarah has begun to notice visual details more acutely, and is also starting to recognize that there are wonderful nonverbal ways of being an extrovert. We’re taking in mounds of information about Deaf culture that we never would have known otherwise. And learning ASL is so much fun. It’s not a chore or an obligation. At the silent weekend, all of this was accepted and valued. There was no “poor deaf girl” or “you’re such a hero for facing this” rhetoric. We were just two regular people existing with other human beings and letting the silence apply its balm to our souls.

Because of our experience at the silent weekend, we’re noticing with every passing day that silence is a gift from God. Hesitant as Lindsey was at first about learning ASL, we’ve begun to develop a love of silence. We have our own silent evenings at home now, and those are some of our most precious times together. We love going out in our city and being able to hold basic conversations with each other from across large rooms and in environments with lots of noise. Though we couldn’t have imagined this before we actually went, our silent weekend experience was not simply a resource or a practice session. It was the start of a new adventure in our life together as a family.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

The High Cost of the Conventional Sexual Ethic

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A reflection by Lindsey

I’ll admit it; I’m a child of the 80s. Courtesy of Nancy Reagan, I learned how to “Just say ‘No.'” The slogan taught me that any number of choices I could make as a teenager where peer pressure might be an issue. Drugs? Just say no. Alcohol? Just say no. Sex? Just say no…

Somehow, some way, “Just say ‘No'” snuck into how Christians have taught their kids about sexual ethics. This now-conventional sexual ethic asserts that sex belongs exclusively in a marriage. If a person is tempted to have sex in any other kind of situation, he or she should just say no.

Before I go further, I’d like to point out that I’ve intentionally used the word conventional to describe this kind of sexual ethic. I chose the word conventional because I think that both traditional and progressive sexual ethics can, and should, have much more substance. Christians across the theological spectrum consistently extol the virtues of saving sex until marriage. We know strong advocates for same-sex marriage who also deliver consistent messages about the importance of saving sex for marriage.

I’ve noticed that many adults will default towards presenting the conventional sexual ethic when talking to teenagers. I get that it’s all too easy to portray teenagers as hormonally-driven maniacs, but truth be told, teenagers are human. Everyone has their war stories about surviving puberty. The “crazy teenager” trope goes a long way in helping people make sense of a few very confusing years in life. However, reducing sexual ethics to a tweet rarely does anyone any favors. Teenagers can handle complexity. Just as teenagers are growing physically, they are also developing their abilities for ethical reasoning. When we fall back on the conventional sexual ethic, we’re unintentionally communicating that white-knuckled abstinence suffices as responsible use of one’s sexuality.

The conventional sexual ethic posits that all questions of sexual morality boil down to obedience. Even as I think about the Scriptures used to justify the conventional sexual ethic, I can’t help but hear the guilt and the shame associated when the only Scripture cited is:

“Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body. Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.”

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard well-meaning married people telling unmarried people something to the effect of, “Seriously, Christ bought your body through his death on the cross. Surely, you can wait until you’re married before you have sex.” For such people, sexuality morality is nothing more than checking the boxes that you’ve lived your life rightly and noted your various indiscretions. This line of thought makes it incredibly difficult for people who have followed the rules as they’ve entered into their marriages. The conventional sexual ethic zooms in on how unmarried people should conduct themselves rather than helping married people understand various mutual sacrifices that should define marriage.

The conventional sexual ethic can create an environment where legalism prevails. If you’re a Christian teenager growing up in a community that emphasizes the conventional sexual ethic, being a good Christian can be measured by two things: 1) having a daily quiet time to connect with God, and 2) saving sex until marriage. Everyone understands why praying every day can be hard, but very few people have space to talk about why it might be difficult for some to just say no to sex. These churches assume that everyone is getting married. If you mix the conventional sexual ethic with a view that marriage is necessarily between a man and a woman, you are likely to default to a simplistic variant of mandated celibacy for LGBT people.

When I think about how Christians might want to talk about sexual morality, I keep going back to the idea that all people are created in the image of God. It’s hard to see the image of God in every person you meet. I’m consistently jarred by the fact that God has made every person in God’s image. It’s a message that sticks with me, especially when I reflect on my reactions to this particular advert dedicated to the theme:

It’s so easy for churches that teach a conventional sexual ethic to call attention to how various people of every stripe have simply made “bad choices.” Sometimes I wonder if we frame everything in terms of individual choice because we’re not quite willing to look into the mirror to see where we personally fall short. A conventional sexual ethic can go a long way in helping people feel like they are “good” Christians who are doing all of the “right” things.

Seeing everyone as being created in the image of God should have considerable effects of how we decide to treat people we meet. We can reflect on how Christ’s love was so expansive that it included people on the margins of society. In the Kingdom of God, we find space not only for people who love and serve the world through their Christ-centered marriage but also for celibate people who love and serve the world differently.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

Don’t Throw out Compassion with the Cotton Candy

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A reflection by Sarah

“Christianity isn’t supposed to be easy. If I wanted light and fluffy pseudo-Christianity, I would’ve stayed in my former denomination.” Rarely does a week pass without my hearing  this at coffee hour on Sunday. In my Christian tradition, particularly in parishes where the majority of members are converts, there’s no shortage of people who view other Christian traditions negatively. Since becoming part of this tradition, I’ve heard much from others about the deficiencies of their former denominations and very little about the positive and formative aspects of their time in those denominations. I can appreciated the stories of folks who have trouble identifying anything good about their prior Christian experiences. That’s not my story, though I do my best to take in other people’s narratives and express empathy. But I’ve noticed that when phrases like “light and fluffy pseudo-Christianity” enter the conversation, anxiety mounts within me. I become tense and have difficultly engaging further beyond, “Yes (nod)…uh-huh (nod)…that sounds like a challenging experience (furrowed brows).”

For a while, I had trouble putting my finger on what was making me so uncomfortable. Last month, it occurred to me that I have a similar response to, “True Christianity has no room for fluff” as I do to the assertion that childhood behavior problems, insufficient work ethic, and even crime would decrease if only people would “hit their children like they used to in the old days.” I hear these opinions expressed, and something inside me hurts. I also become fearful, and from that point on I have trouble imagining myself ever opening up to the other person about the difficult aspects of my own life.

But why is this? Certainly, I agree with the basic idea that Christianity is (or should be) demanding. It should be challenging. Choosing to follow Christ requires far more of us than showing up for an hour or two on Sunday and putting a few dollars into the collection basket. Growing closer to God means examining all our actions and relationships, making sacrifices that come at high costs, and giving up false beliefs that may feel very comforting. I agree with all of this. I’ve also heard my fair share of homilies that have left me feeling as hungry as I’d be after eating cotton candy for dinner — many within the context of my former Christian tradition. I’ve always come away from those disappointed and exasperated. It does me no good to go to church every week and hear only, “God loves you. You’re a good person. We all need to love ourselves more.” However, I reap no greater benefit from being smacked across the face every week with reminders about each item on my very long list of shortcomings, or my pathetic failures at resisting passions.

When Christians react against cotton candy Christianity by emphasizing rigor and the reality of sin, sometimes a danger emerges. It’s akin to taking too many vitamin supplements and avoiding all carbs in an attempt to be extra healthy. Acknowledging and repenting of sin are essential components of the Christian life, but fixating on these and forgetting about compassion also leaves us unhealthy. I’ve see this happening quite a lot in Christian communities that have rejected a steady diet of junk food in favor of, “You’ll eat what the tradition sets before you and be grateful for it.” Unkindness and coldheartedness toward the sufferings of others are far too easy to frame as “challenging them to live more fully into the tradition.” Especially if those others represent life experiences foreign to one’s own — perhaps life experiences that symbolize ideological positions one opposes — it’s less complicated to dismiss them in favor of pat answers containing the correct theological buzzwords. Cue self-righteousness and vainglory.

As I ruminate on this, I keep coming back to the possibility that all-vitamins-no-carbs Christianity is somewhat classist. (Soon, I’ll be writing a piece on LGBT celibacy and socioeconomic status. Stay tuned.) It assumes that everyone lives and has grown up living a comforted, middle class, white, suburban American lifestyle and struggles with a tendency to resist Christianity’s more rigorous demands. It assumes that if given the choice and both options were equally Christian, everyone would naturally gravitate toward parishes and traditions that serve cotton candy because it’s pleasant and requires no sacrifice…thus, the need to reinforce awareness of our failings and our need to overcome passions.

I think the primary reason that rantings against cotton candy Christianity evoke fear in me is my upbringing was very different from that of most people I’ve attended church with as an adult. There was absolutely nothing soft or comforting about the Christianity of my childhood. The majority of my home county’s population was (and still is) part of the working poor, or lower middle class at best. My parents worked their fingers to the bone for every dime my family had. I don’t want to overplay our financial state because many families had only a fraction of what we did, but I can say without hesitation that as a child my opportunities were minimal when compared to what my suburban Midwest and East Coast friends had at their fingertips from birth. It was inconceivable to think that any Christian in my home county viewed Christianity as light and fluffy: there was nothing light and fluffy about life itself. I remember that when talking with other seven-year-olds about God after Sunday school, I heard “God tells me when I’m bad” and “God tells us to give everything up” arising regularly. I can’t imagine my childhood self ever being ignorant of the reality of sin. If a local pastor or priest had offered a homily proclaiming, “God just wants us to love ourselves more,” he would’ve been laughed away from the ambo or shouted down as a heretic. It wasn’t until graduate school that I encountered cotton candy Christianity at all.

Many people who grew up like I did don’t benefit much from reminders about the rigor of true Christianity. I’ve always struggled with scrupulosity and am hard enough on myself that even the most traditional of priests often tell me I should show more compassion to me. I don’t intend to compare my sufferings with those of others, but some of my own difficult life circumstances such as sexual abuse, addiction, eating disorders, depression, and chronic illness have only added to this beat-up-on-myself tendency. My own scrupulosity coupled with my congregation’s clear rejection of fluff regularly leaves me afraid to share my whole self with other Christians. Part of this is my problem, and I hope to continue working on that with God’s help. Still, I think others bear some responsibility. When a person is already well aware of all failings within his or her first thirty years of life, offering a few quips from the Church Fathers about the passions can come off as callous. It can also leave that person feeling unwelcome, unworthy, and unloved. When fighting a particularly tough battle in life, being alone isn’t ideal…but when your brothers and sisters direct their clubs and maces toward you while insisting that it’s the enemy they’re beating, going solo can seem preferable.

“If Christianity is easy, then you’re probably not doing it right.” I heard those words from the local bishop while on a retreat during college, and I believe he was right. But I’d like to suggest that this also applies if your version of Christianity is all sin and no salvation, all fasting and no feasting, all rigor and no compassion. There’s nothing unorthodox about embracing a suffering brother or sister and assuring him or her, “I know what you’re going through is difficult, but I’ll be here for you. I’ll pray for you and help you in whatever way you need. You shouldn’t have to bear this on your own.” Speaking of God’s mercy to a person who needs comfort does not require adding the disclaimer, “but God is wrathful too.” Giving up junk and fluff does not mean filling yourself with vitamins and rejecting every food that has even one common macronutrient with cotton candy.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.