Author Archives: Sarah and Lindsey

A Few Thoughts on Celibacy and Socioeconomic Status

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A reflection by Sarah

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I was planning to write a post on celibacy and socioeconomic status. I’ve spent considerable time trying to pull my thoughts together on this topic and have decided that I’d like to explore it in bits and pieces over time. Not much has been written on celibacy and class issues, especially from within the gay Christian blogosphere, so while I see this topic as very important I don’t intend to tackle all of it immediately or even within the near future. Today, I begin by offering some brief, scattered thoughts.

In some ways, I feel as though I may not be the right person to write on this topic. Though I grew up in one of the poorest regions of America and my upbringing did involve some socioeconomic challenges we were certainly not the poorest people in Appalachia. As I type this, I can hear my mom’s voice ringing in my head: “You didn’t have it bad. You had more than a lot of kids in this county.” I wouldn’t contest that. It’s entirely true. I’m not writing this to get sympathy or to suggest that I’m an expert on class issues. That isn’t my area of academic expertise. I’m also not about to perpetuate the myth that poverty is bad. It isn’t. Life below the poverty line can be just as fulfilling as life above it. In my adulthood thus far, I’ve lived on both sides long enough to know. What compelled me to write this post is my observation that nearly all my friends who write on celibacy and LGBT Christian issues come from similar upper middle class or middle middle class backgrounds, and sometimes in our discussions I feel like the odd person out. The thoughts that follow come from that sense of difference.

Leading a richly connected life is a challenge for any celibate person, but for the person who has fewer resources, there’s additional difficulty. Staying connected with my family of origin is not nearly as easy for me as it is for some of my friends living celibacy. I do not have the resources to visit my parents, sister, and brother-in-law more than once per year if even then. Likewise, my parents do not have the resources to fly me back to my hometown even a few times a year, or to visit me where I am. This is further complicated by the fact that the nearest airports are two hours away from where they live, and the nearest interstate highway is an hour’s drive. It would be impossible for me to be present for every special moment that my relatives experience. I’ve not had the option of attending birthday parties, baptisms, and graduations for my younger cousins. I’ve not had the opportunity to visit my aunt who has survived two kinds of lymphoma since the last time I saw her. I had to miss the funeral of my favorite high school English teacher who inspired me toward both teaching and celibacy, and whom I considered a member of my family by default. I make choices regularly that result in a weakened connection to my family. Some of these choices are motivated by other factors, but socioeconomic issues play a significant role.

I would guess that social class also plays a role in a person’s discernment of how and within what context to live celibacy. In past generations, it was common for children from poor families to grow up and become nuns, monks, or celibate priests. I’ll admit to not knowing how common this is today, but everyone I know personally who has pursued one of these vocations has come from a more privileged background than my own. My friends who entered religious orders after giving away all their possessions have had the assurance of knowing that if their postulancies didn’t work out for whatever reason, they would be able to go home and live with their parents while getting back on their feet and reintegrating into the world. A serious concern that I took into consideration when discerning was my knowledge that I could not do this. I’m sure that my parents would never allow me to be homeless if I had absolutely no other place to live, but I knew as a college student discerning the possibility of religious life that I had to be absolutely certain of my calling to a specific community before joining because my parents would not have been able to foot the bill for a restart on adult life.

Similarly, I have to admit that my decision to live celibacy in partnership is — to an extent — socioeconomically motivated. Where I grew up, people marry early. A large percentage of my high school class married immediately after graduation. A few who went to college married after college graduation. And a few married while still in high school. Growing up in an area where employment is sparse and it can be difficult to make ends meet, I learned from an early age that the ability to marry someone simply because you’re in love is a privilege. I remember my mother telling me as a pre-teen, “Love won’t pay the bills. It’s good to be in love with the person you marry. But if you marry a man who can’t support you and your kids, you’ll be hurting for the rest of your life.” Where I was raised, it was expected that people would pair up and marry. The idea of voluntary celibacy was unheard of, and the rare celibate women in the community were viewed as “old maids.” The assumption was that these women had sought husbands and failed continuously along the way. I think these attitudes have multiple roots, but one of them is the simple fact that in poor areas it is hard, if not impossible, to make a decent living on one’s own with no support from a spouse or other family members. The “old maid” state of life is bemoaned partly because of the assumption that these women will have no one to take care of them in their old age because they won’t benefit from a husband’s savings. Setting the gender issues aside for the time being (that could be another post), if a person is poor or lower middle class, it makes sense to prepare for the possibility of having to support oneself financially but do everything possible to avoid that actually being necessary. This is just as true for gay people as for straight people. I know a fair number of folks in my hometown who are gay, whether they identify as gay or not, but willingly entered into opposite sex marriages because they didn’t see another financially viable option for their lives. I can appreciate this because I know that if Lindsey and I were not living our celibate vocations under the same roof, my expenses would be crushing. Many of my single celibate friends have trouble understanding that being able to live celibacy on one’s own, even with roommates who aren’t economically attached beyond rent payments, is a privilege.

My last item of reflection for the day is a link I see amongst socioeconomic status, education, and discernment of a celibate vocation. It’s often assumed that upper middle class Americans are more educated and intellectually capable than poor and lower middle class Americans. There’s a grain of truth in that: generally, people from upper middle class backgrounds have far greater educational opportunities and far more space to spend time discerning vocation. When you come from a lower socioeconomic class, you learn quickly that getting through life is about making the best possible plays with the cards you’re dealt. If you’re dealt a bad hand, it doesn’t matter. It’s what you have, so you accept it and work with it. There’s no expectation that in the course of life, you’ll move up from a pair of twos to a full house. In my senior year of college, I came to realize that vocational discernment is about both what you desire and what God is calling you to do in life. Before, I had always thought that how you lived your life was simply a matter of getting through each day and letting the chips fall where they may.

It seems to me that within the current discussion of LGBT celibacy, there’s a pervasive assumption that every gay person has the privilege of spending time in thoughtful vocational discernment, reading and learning about historic Christian models of marriage and celibacy, and asking the tough questions of sexual ethics. If you’re not from a solidly middle class family who can provide for most of your major needs in college, graduate school, or young adulthood general, it’s likely that you don’t have the spare time to devote to these intellectual pursuits. While I’ve always been an egghead, I can also say that during my early and mid 20s I was far more concerned with the tips I made as a bartender than I was with the finer points of Church teaching about sexuality and vocation. Yes, this was true even of me as a theology student, and I’m still convinced that my opportunity to attend graduate school at an expensive Catholic university was more about luck than my intellectual ability. For poor and lower middle class people, vocation is not about discernment, decisions, or morality. It’s about going to or looking for work every day and putting food on the table. Celibacy has minimal connection to either of these. Sometimes, I wonder if more people from poor communities would recognize a natural inclination toward celibate vocations if they had the same space for discernment as folks from more privileged backgrounds.

These thoughts are only a beginning to a more thorough treatment of this topic. I’m hoping that at least some of them make sense or will at least initiate some interesting discussion. As a final note, I realize that my own experience of life will naturally differ from the experiences of other people who have been poor or lower middle class. Any generalizations in this post should be taken as rooted in my personal experience and not with the intention to make assumptions about others. I look forward to discussing more with you in the comments.

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.

Saturday Symposium: Seeking Rest Amidst the Culture Wars

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Good afternoon, folks. Hard to believe it’s November already! It’s a bit dreary and chilly where we are, so we’re spending the afternoon indoors with a late breakfast of chocolate chip pancakes. We hope you’re able to find quiet and rest this Saturday if you’re feeling as exhausted as we are after the past week.

Let’s get on with our weekly Saturday Symposium question:

How this works: It’s very simple. We ask a multi-part question related to a topic we’ve blogged about during the past week or are considering blogging about in the near future, and you, our readers, share your responses in the comments section. Feel free to be open, reflective, and vulnerable…and to challenge us. But as always, be mindful of the comment policy that ends each of our posts. Usually, we respond fairly quickly to each comment, but in order to give you time to think, come back, add more later if you want, and discuss with other readers, we will wait until after Monday to respond to comments on Saturday Symposium questions.

This week’s Saturday Symposium question: You’ve probably noticed that our writing has been a bit more angst the past couple of weeks because of situations that have arisen both at church and in our personal lives. It’s never fun to feel so much angst inside, and we really don’t enjoy writing with such frustration. After finding ourselves unwittingly caught in some intense culture war battles recently, we’re looking for space to experience rest in the coming week. We’re wondering: what do you do to seek peace and rest when you’re absolutely worn out from interacting with the culture wars on a regular basis? Where do you find calm amidst the storm when it seems that there’s a battle waiting for you around ever corner? These questions are just as relevant for allies as for LGBT people, so we’re interested in hearing from anyone who has thoughts.

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!

Blessings,

Sarah and Lindsey

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.

I do not want to be the “gay Christian” anymore

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A reflection by Lindsey

There are times when certain kinds of conversations seem inescapable. In the aftermath of the Extraordinary Synod on the Family and the ERLC conference on the Gospel, Homosexuality, and the Future of Marriage, I find myself caught in a fire fight. Like many fights in the culture war, it concerns an entirely small territory. There’s a 3-letter word that gets in the way of other people’s ability to see my humanity. I don’t know anywhere I can go to possibly escape the fight. Even trying to hide out at home doesn’t shield me from people’s callousness.

I remember my first interaction with the word gay. I was 14 years old, and Kevin Kline had a starring role in the movie In and Out. Please take a couple of minutes to watch the trailer.

I remember having an uncomfortable sinking feeling in my stomach. One day, I’d have to deal with someone else making a public declaration of “Lindsey’s gay.” And then I’d be caught in an awkward limbo, feeling unable to deny the accusations and too afraid to confirm them as true. The word gay is an oddly expansive cultural signifier. When other people call you gay when you’ve not said that you actually are, they are usually suggesting that you flaunt gender norms so strongly that you’d rather couple with a person of your same sex. When other people call you gay, they are considering you a particular kind of person rather than suggesting you have a fondness for specific sex acts. Playground bullies have all sorts of vulgar language to use when it comes to sex acts that they employ liberally.

Fast forward 17 years later and I’m still feeling caught in that limbo. We have people who proudly proclaim, “I love Jesus too much to call myself a gay Christian.”

But, what happens when other people in the church foist a label upon you to justify their mistreatment? What happens when people cite simple matters of hair style, clothing choice, preferred forms of sentence structure, subconscious ways of holding one’s body, and most common vocal ranges used when singing in order to declare that you’ve never given your life to Jesus, that you don’t care about the ways of Christian morality, and that you certainly have never been a part of Christ’s Church?

I long for the day when I can simply go to church, say my prayers, search my heart with the safety of knowing that I am God’s child, determine how to participate best in the sacramental life of the Church with the help of a trusted confessor, and enjoy in fellowship with all those gathered. I long for the day when people assume that I’m doing my absolute best to unite myself fully to Christ seeking support from the teachings of my Christian tradition. I long for the day when I am truly treated “just like everyone else.”

The people who tell me that I just need to find my identity in Christ fail to realize that Christ is at the very core of my identity. They also fail to realize that He alone has kept me alive even during the seasons of their most aggressive, hostile, and repeated attacks of telling me that there’s no way I exist. When I was a teenager trying to sort through why everyone else treated me as though I was impossibly different, I hadn’t had one moment of sexual experience. I was just being myself without concern for the fact that, as Lindsey, I’m quirky. As I’ve grown older, I’m stuck with a hard reality that when I look at the lives of my married friends, their relational lives are distinct from mine and there’s nothing I can do about that. The only people who seem to understand this difference are those who can appreciate that not everyone is called to heterosexual marriage, and not everyone has a pattern of relating that consistently points to the marital vocation.

A lot has changed since I was 14 years old. I can’t imagine how my life would have looked differently if I would have known that Sally Ride was gay. I’d be hard-pressed to identify a more significant childhood hero. I admired Sally Ride even more than I admired Neil Armstrong, and that’s saying something. This week, Tim Cook has decided to speak clearly about the simple fact that he’s gay. What he says here really resonates with me:

Being gay has given me a deeper understanding of what it means to be in the minority and provided a window into the challenges that people in other minority groups deal with every day. It’s made me more empathetic, which has led to a richer life. It’s been tough and uncomfortable at times, but it has given me the confidence to be myself, to follow my own path, and to rise above adversity and bigotry. It’s also given me the skin of a rhinoceros, which comes in handy when you’re the CEO of Apple.

I have to wonder if conservative Christians who tell me not to identify as gay are trying to ensure that I build that rhinoceros skin. I can’t help but wonder if people say “Don’t identify as gay” in an effort to really say, “There’s no way these hateful and hurtful comments would get to you…. unless of course, you are, you know…. living immorally.”

It’s much easier to assert that gay people are 100% opposed to Christ than it is to appreciate that “gay” and “LGBT” are used frequently as broad umbrella terms to communicate something of a shared social experience. In reporting on the experience of celibate gay Christians, Vanessa Vitello Urquhart wrote, “Make no mistake—celibate or not, these people are a part of the LGBTQ community. They share the same fears we do, experience the same stigma, and have felt the same tension, between hiding and safety on one side and openness and self-acceptance on the other, that defines the LGBTQ experience in 21st-century America.”

If you as a conservative Christian want to end my need to find value in the descriptor “Gay Christian,” please tell the Church to stop persecuting those of us who do not fit cleanly into heteronormative molds, and stop making excuses for people who behave uncharitably toward us. When you tell me that the only place I should discuss my sexual orientation and gender identity is in confession, you’re actually reinforcing the norms of the judgmental world I know as a gay person. You’re telling me that I need to hide something even though I’ve come to seek Christ, the person who knows me more intimately than I know myself. I’d welcome it so much if I could walk into a church, pursue Christ with you, and share how he is guiding and directing me to leave my unique mark on this world that has not yet fully been redeemed.

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.

On Otherness, Alienation, and “Don’t Say Gay”

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A reflection by Sarah

Last night, I dreamed of myself lying on an operating table, wide awake as my own blood pooled in my open body and began to drain from it. The surgeon loomed over my torso, aware of my consciousness and abject terror but unable to see that I was dying. He tugged at my innards, working calmly and methodically, remarking several times along the way that he understood my pain but cared too much about my wellbeing to try a different protocol. Then, I woke up.

Once again, I’m writing a post on a day when we don’t usually publish. I’m doing this not to be dramatic or whiny, but because during the past four days I’ve reached new levels of spiritual exhaustion, and while I’ve attempted to reach out to others for support I still have a profound sense of alienation. As I write, I feel as though I’m bleeding out spiritually and no one from within my tradition is noticing — least of all, those whose counsel I have trusted and respected since before my conversion. And all of this began with quibbles over a three-letter word and its impact upon straight, conservative Christians.

I’m not about to give you a detailed defense of why the word “gay” is an acceptable layer of identity for a Christian who is exclusively attracted to people of the same sex. There have been several brilliant blog posts written on this topic already. I find more resonance with some of these than others. If you’re a straight Christian who is wondering why gay Christians find the word “gay” so important you should begin by reading these items by Joshua Gonnerman, Wesley Hill, Melinda Selmys, Jeremy Erickson, Julie Rodgers, Brent Bailey, and Eve Tushnet. In the future, I would like to write my own post that delves more deeply into the compatibility of “gay” as a cultural identity with “Christian” as my most important identity, but for now I’ll just link Lindsey’s and my post on why we call ourselves a celibate LGBT Christian couple and a past reflection of mine where I talked about gayness and Christian identity on a very basic level. I’ll also be completely forward in admitting that my thoughts on this topic need more time to marinate before I can articulate a full defense of the term “gay Christian.” Anyway, moving on…

I’ve noticed an increase in language policing lately, both in my parish and in the blogosphere. A couple of days ago, I found this blog post by Matt Moore who claims that he “loves Jesus too much” to refer to himself as a gay Christian. While I respect Moore’s own personal story for what it is, his post smacks of condescension, implying that same-sex attracted people who identify as gay love Christ less than those who don’t. (Gay Christians who read it and were left with a similar impression as mine should be made aware of Andrew Asdell’s response piece.) Reading Moore’s post was especially painful this week because I was (and still am) incredibly emotionally raw from a conversation that Lindsey and I were involved in after church on Sunday. If you’ve been reading our posts recently, you’re probably already aware that we’ve had some challenging experiences related to acceptance within our parish. Most people have come a very long way and are slowly coming to embrace us as part of the community, and for that we are grateful. Given that, you might be wondering, “What’s the problem? People are starting to welcome you. What more do you want?” To put it bluntly, the problem is that because we are being welcomed any instance of unwelcome we attempt to address is thrown back in our faces, blamed on the fact that we identify as “gay.” This is true even when there is some acknowledgement that Person X or Person Y was behaving inappropriately toward us.

To be clear, we are not claiming to be victims or martyrs. We are members of the Body of Christ, just like every person at our church, and our stories matter. Our lives matter. No one in our Christian tradition would argue otherwise. Many would likely cite how much they love us and care about our lives as their primary reason for admonishing us to find identity in Christ and reject terminology that’s easily associated with sin. What goes unnoticed — sometimes willfully ignored — is the spiritual toxicity of this admonishment when it’s offered to gay Christians. We’re all different, and it’s true that some Christians with same-sex attraction don’t find it helpful to use the word “gay.” I don’t advocate forcing anyone to use the same language as I use for myself. I believe that the best way to understand a person’s individual needs is to have a candid conversation with that person. In that spirit, here is what I have to say to Christians who think policing LGBT language is a good idea:

If you tell me to turn away from the word “gay” because it keeps me from finding my identity in Christ, you are refusing to believe me that the most sacred, treasured layer of who I am is my identity as a follower of Christ. If you tell me this in one breath and state in the next that I’m an exemplary person (which is far too high a compliment for me), you’re sending me mixed messages. Is something in my behavior leading you to question my commitment to Christ and my willingness to make sacrifices in order to follow him? If so, why are you calling me exemplary? Cognitive dissonance much?

If you imply a hope that at some point in my spiritual journey I will grow out of using the word “gay” and come into a holier form of identity, you are not hearing me when I tell you that understanding myself as “gay” has only increased as Christ has drawn me nearer and nearer to himself over time. You are communicating to me an assumption that people only begin to see themselves as gay when they have fallen away from God. That is not my story. Though I have been through periods of living as an especially bad Christian, I had never yet been sexually active at the time when I came out as gay. If I thought it would do any good, I would explain in detail how much I’ve changed for the better since coming out. I would tell you how strange my family and peers thought I was as a child, how I began to notice in the 3rd grade that my perception of beauty was different from that of other girls, and how at that age I experienced my first crush on the teenage girl playing the lead role in a community theatre show. I’d fast-forward to the 7th grade and tell you how baffled I was to realize that the feelings I had for other girls were the same feelings all my female friends had for boys, and how I dated the same boy throughout high school to force myself into opposite-sex attractions that would never come. I would tell you how devastated I was when we broke up because I truly believed that he was the only person in the world who would put up with such a freak. Then, I’d detail my journey of self-acceptance. I’d glow while sharing with you the peace and connectedness to Christ that I felt when I could finally say, “I’m not a mistake. I’m just gay. God didn’t mess up when he created me.”

If you say that my using the word “gay” might cause a weaker brother to stumble because the majority of straight people think all gay people are sexually active, you are making excuses for my brother’s sin and asking me to take responsibility for it. This tells me that you care more about my brother’s welfare than mine, and you’re not fully willing to remind my brother that behaving hatefully and judgmentally toward others is a sin. Or perhaps you’re willing to talk to him about this — now that I think about it, you probably are. But you’re still blaming me to an extent for another person’s moral failing, and frankly I have enough moral failings of my own to keep track of without worrying about someone else’s. Not that I want to be a source of scandal, but obsessing over other people’s neuroses is not spiritually healthy. And let’s be honest: people in the Church have a nasty tendency to be scandalized by things that are not scandalous, then respond by scandalizing the person who was supposedly the source of scandal in the first place.

If you tell me that “gay” is an inappropriate word for a Christian to use for herself, you are communicating to me that there is nothing that makes my experience of life different from straight people’s experiences, and that any discrimination I face in the Church is not real. You may not be intending to do this, but you’re creating more space for even greater hostility by minimizing my experiences and telling me that offenses I experience must be projections of past hurt onto a current situation. In saying that I might encounter less hostility if I stopped identifying as gay, what you’re really telling me is that the easiest way to deal with discriminatory behavior is to ignore it and tell myself that I’m no different from anyone else. Bring on the pat answers and generic solutions for real instances of cruelty: “Someone talked about you in uncharitable ways at coffee hour? If you stop saying ‘gay,’ maybe he won’t do it anymore.” Reminds me of my fourth grade science teacher who advised that if only I’d cut off my long hair, maybe little Justin wouldn’t be so tempted to yank at my braid every five minutes.

If you are worried about what words I use to describe myself when I don’t even use them at church anyway, you are telling me that celibacy is not enough. Our Christian tradition teaches that sex ought not to take place outside of marriage, and marriage was intended to unite one man and one woman in an eternal commitment that is open to children. Okay. My partner and I are celibate and draw much of our model of doing life from monastic patterns of living. Our relationship does not include anything that our Christian tradition teaches as reserved for marriage. The tradition recognizes two types of vocations: married and celibate. We’re trying our best to figure out what a celibate life in the world ought to look like, and I think we’re not doing too terribly considering that non-monastic celibacy is a relatively new topic for discussion. Why isn’t that enough? How is it that I can be making every possible effort to live into the vocation to which God has called me, and a three-letter word has the power to diminish what I’m doing? Somehow, I just can’t see Jesus caring as much about the word “gay” as Christians do.

If you will not even consider my words when I tell you that I see being gay as a kind of “otherness” that is just as beautiful and valuable as other kinds of human differences, you are denying my experience of life. You are denying that I exist. This is perhaps the most detrimental, alienating, soul-crushing aspect of shaming a gay Christian for how he or she self-identifies. No, it doesn’t help to tell us that we do exist, but as people made in the image and likeness of God, not as gay people. I’ve yet to hear a convincing argument that gayness couldn’t possibly be a kind of otherness that is good and meaningful. Until I do hear one, I’m going to continue saying that straight Christians ought to listen to those of us who describe our experiences in this way. Not to suggest that racial minorities experience life in remotely the same way as sexual minorities, but saying to a gay person, “We’re all the same in Christ” is like saying to a black person, “The Church should be colorblind.” Try telling a black person that there is nothing good in the black identity, a poor person that there is no good in the poor identity, a Deaf person that there is no good in the Deaf identity, or an addict that there is no good in the addict identity. Try telling a Russian, Romanian, or Greek person that there’s no good in any form of ethnic identity. The reactions would not be pleasant. By telling me, “Don’t say gay,” you are attempting to strip me of a different yet equally meaningful cultural identity.

If you insist that “gay” means only what you — a straight, conservative Christian — think it means, you are closing yourself and your parish off from a vibrant, committed, faithful group of people who are eager to serve Christ. Instead of showing us love, you’re showing us the exit. You are telling us that you would rather we bleed out on the operating table than give us the support we need to heal from past wounds that other Christians have caused. You’re implying that policing the language of the LGBT community is more important to you than leading LGBT people to Christ. Don’t you realize that there are LGBT people who would love to be part of your church community if only you would help us with our real spiritual problems and stop assuming that the gay identity is a spiritual problem? You need to know that even celibate gay Christians feel unwelcome at church — even forced out — by your inability to consider how we understand identity. It might be easier to think after we’ve left, “They’ve fallen out of the faith. They’ve gone back out into the gay lifestyle because they love their homosexuality more than they love Christ.” I don’t know a single gay person who has left church because of a desire to have sex. Not one. But I know hundreds who have left because of alienation.

Speaking of alienation, that’s the emotional space I find myself in at present. In the spirit of our value vulnerability, I’ll admit that right now the idea of setting foot in church makes me feel hatred toward myself and anger at God and the Church. I don’t understand how it’s possible that the Church has failed so miserably to minister to such an expansive group of people. It makes no sense to me that even the best parish experiences I’ve ever had have come along with undertones of authoritarianism, spiritual abuse, and stubborn refusal to hear the cries of wounded parishioners. I don’t see why it’s so difficult just to be loving, and to reevaluate one’s approach when someone else points out, “I know you’re saying x, y, and z out of love, but these assumptions are causing harm to people who are different from you.” I have no idea what I’m going to do this Sunday, or any Sunday in the near future. When the options are 1) risk triggering depression and addiction in order to receive the Body of Christ at Liturgy, or 2) spend Sunday at home with Lindsey, God, and the angels and saints in our prayer corner, the decision is not straightforward. I have no intention of apostatizing. I love Christ far too much, and no matter the negativity I experience at church I simply cannot stop loving him. But I might need to be an inactive non-communicant for a bit. At the moment, it may be the best survival strategy I can pull together.

(In case anyone is about to tell me that I should “just go to an open and affirming church,” read this first. Also, stay tuned. Lindsey will be reflecting tomorrow on the same topic I addressed today.)

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.

Some thoughts on chastity

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We’ve been talking a lot about welcoming LGBT people who attend Christian gatherings. In the last week alone, we’ve talked about welcome in Christian traditions generally, Catholic and Evangelical traditions, and in specific local church communities. We’ve hit a record for the number of first-time commenters in a week (welcome!) and sheer volume of long comments (we’re working on responding, promise!).

As we’ve been talking about welcoming LGBT people, we’ve noticed an uptick in commenters with concerns about what LGBT Christians are actually doing. Pressing further, we have discovered the principal concerns are about lust and sexual conduct. Some readers have asked us directly to write more about chastity. We don’t want to minimize the importance of sexual morality in the Christian life, but the line of thinking that fixates on sexual behavior distorts chastity by diminishing it to genital obedience. For Christians, living chastely requires that we fix our eyes on Christ, so that we can devote our whole selves to following him. We are called to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our mind, and with all our strength. Therefore, chastity requires thoughtful stewardship of our bodies, our minds, and our hearts.

We’ve noted before that many people think first about chastity by trying to draw lines around what counts as “sex.” Defining chastity with a legalistic “Just say no” approach does not do anyone any favors. Our bodies are so much more than our genitals. Our capacity for human connection extends in myriad forms. A triune God made us for relationships with each other. Scripture bears witness to our need to conduct ourselves chastely not only in family relationships but also in relationships with our neighbors. Cultivating chastity requires that adults help children develop a healthy sense of bodily autonomy, touch-oriented people grow in their understanding of what various forms of physical contact communicate, spouses learn the nuances of mutual submission to one another, and we learn to love our neighbors as ourselves.

One of the hardest tasks for any Christian is to cultivate a chaste mind. Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk prescribed this course of action should we desire to acquire the mind of Christ:

“Let thy mind fast from vain thoughts; let thy memory fast from remembering evil; let thy will fast from evil desire; let thine eyes fast from bad sights: turn away thine eyes that thou mayest not see vanity; let thine ears fast from vile songs and slanderous whispers; let thy tongue fast from slander, condemnation, blasphemy, falsehood, deception, foul language and every idle and rotten word; let thy hands fast from killing and from stealing another’s goods; let thy legs fast from going to evil deeds: Turn away from evil, and do good.”

This exhortation starts with purifying the mind from vain thoughts, but Saint Tikhon provides further wisdom. We can make every effort to keep our mind off of evil. In our prayer life, we constantly bring concerns to God that reflect evil in the world, but we strive to follow the Psalmist’s example and think on how God is at work to restore all things. Thinking about our prayer life reminds us that our tongues make our invisible thoughts visible. We cultivate chastity by speaking kindly, compassionately, honestly, and directly.

As we work on developing chastity in our own lives, it seems to us that chastity’s true home is the heart. We are drawn by our heart to love the world around us. A heart that is full of the love of God strengthens the body in order to extend its hands and its feet in meaningful service. Service is a tricky aspect of chastity. When people serve, it’s easy for them to become disillusioned and jaded, especially if their service is motivated solely from an intellectual sense of obligation. When actions flow from a heart captivated by God’s love, Christ-centered forms of service can be particularly life-giving. It seems to us that chastity, rightly understood, involves cultivating virtues that allow people to reflect the image and likeness of Christ more fully.

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