Category Archives: Family

Celibacy Involves Family — Madonna House

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As you may have noticed, we’ve gotten a little off our normal posting schedule this week. Our apologies! We’re eagerly counting down days to the Gay Christian Network conference in Portland. We hope to see many of you there. We thought this week would be a good opportunity to share a bit about the workshop we gave at the 2014 conference. Many people approached us after our workshop wanting to hear more about how we experienced living in a celibate partnership. We were totally caught off-guard but decided to experiment with blogging about our life together. At the 2014 conference, we presented a workshop called “Celibacy Involves Family” where we discussed how celibate people maintain and craft meaningful family ties. Our goal in this post is to share a bit of what we talked about in that workshop while simultaneously featuring Madonna House, a Catholic lay association of the faithful, as part of our celibate profiles series.

The purpose of our workshop was not to make an argument for celibacy, but to support people currently living, discerning, or interested in celibacy as a temporary or perpetual way of life. A secondary purpose was to show an example that counters the misconception that celibacy is marked by a life of loneliness and misery. People who attended our workshop had diverse perspectives, and some attendees were straight allies and non-celibate LGBT people interested in learning how to be more supportive of celibates.

We began the session by asking what words, images, and associations do we think of when we hear the word celibacy. We collected responses to this question on a large sheet of paper, and then repeated the process focusing on the word family. Words like unsupported, singleness, misunderstood, isolation, outsider, sexually frustrated, loneliness, and oppression filled the sheet dedicated to celibacy and words like children, commitment, intimacy, quality time, belonging, community, love, affection, and safety filled the sheet dedicated to family. It didn’t take long to see that people tended to have more negative associations with celibacy and more positive associations with family.

Workshop participants's association with celibacy

Workshop participants’s association with celibacy

...and with family

…and with family

We then suggested a four-part framework for thinking about family that included family of origin, family of choice, proximate family, and distant family. Family of origin means the family in which one is raised. Family of choice is compromised of the rich relationships one makes a conscious effort to maintain and often pulls on a person’s network of friends. Proximate family are the people you are physically close enough to share rhythms of daily life while distant family are the people who live much farther away. We used this framework to ask four organizing questions:

  • How do we strengthen ties with our families of origin?
  • How do we build our families of choice?
  • How do we cultivate a way of life with our proximate families?
  • How do we honor connections with our distant families?

After we asked those questions, we dove into discussing how the Madonna House Apostolate provides insights into living these questions out as celibate people.

Madonna House was founded in 1947 by Catherine de Hueck Doherty and her husband Eddie. The main house is located in Combermere, Ontario, Canada and has smaller branches in places around the world. The Madonna House is a lay association of the faithful recognized by the Catholic Church, which means that it is compromised primarily of lay members. Madonna House focuses on serving others through hospitality and charity. All members have made commitments to celibacy. The family of Madonna House has a diverse membership, including male and female lay apostles, male and female applicants, and priests — all hailing from many different countries. Additionally, there are associate bishops, priests, and deacons who do not live at Madonna House but are affiliated by their support of Madonna House’s mission. Year-round, male and female visiting volunteers and working guests stay at and engage in the work of Madonna House, although these people are not formal members of the Apostolate. Catherine Doherty once described Madonna House in the following manner: “Our spirit is that of a family, modeled on the Holy Family of Nazareth, which was a community of perfect charity and love.” At Madonna House, which Sarah has visited, one finds plentiful examples illustrative of a rich family life.

Though Madonna House lay apostles live in community year-round rather than with their families of origin, this celibate family encourages connection with members’ families of origin. Members visit their families a few times each year. Families of origin are invited to ceremonies and can participate in the community life as working guests. Additionally, families of origin assist in planning end-of-life care and funerals for their loved ones who have become Madonna House members. Remembering and honoring the origins of its members is an integral part of Madonna House life as well. The spiritual life of the community involves practices of both Eastern and Western Catholicism, and efforts are made to integrate important cultural customs associated with holidays and feasts.

Regarding building family of choice, Madonna House excels at creating ways to welcome new people into its family. Every person, even the newest guest, has a job for each day. Daily work performed by both members and guests benefits the entire Madonna House family and the surrounding local community. For guests who decide to explore a deeper commitment to Madonna House, spiritual direction and opportunities for prayer and discernment are available. All members of Madonna House participate in continuing spiritual, intellectual, and practical formation. When a person decides to become an applicant, he or she is welcomed to the family with a cake that symbolizes one’s continuing life with the Madonna House family. After one’s time as an applicant has come to an end, he or she may decide to be fully integrated as a member of Madonna House, making a 2-year commitment with promises of poverty, chastity, and obedience. This commitment can be renewed a second and a third time before a member is able to make final promises — a lifelong commitment to the Madonna House family.

The proximate family of Madonna House is not only members and guests, but also people in the local community who seek out Madonna House for prayer and assistance. There is a thrift bookshop and clothing store on site where people in the local community can come and find necessary items priced for pennies. As for cultivating a way of life amongst proximate Madonna House members, the community is organized by a shared spiritual life, practical daily work, and shared community time. Each of these facets creates opportunities for the family to bond. Members are expected to be able to give and receive brotherly correction. The community gathers several times a day for communal meals, daily recreation time, daily prayers, and Mass.

Madonna House has an extensive network of people in its distant family. Honoring connections with distant family members frequently means maintaining ties with families of origin. As mentioned previously, family members of lay apostles are frequently welcomed as working guests. During Sarah’s time visiting Madonna House, Sarah heard many stories from members about their past and present relationships with their parents, brothers, sisters, and cousins. Members living at the main house also honor other Madonna House members in different locations. In front of the house stands a direction post that lists all Madonna House field houses by having signs that point toward each.

After discussing the Madonna House example with workshop attendees, we asked them to consider again the four questions we asked at the beginning. We spent time in both small and large group discussion. We concluded by providing a list of reflection questions before asking people to share as they felt led.

For those readers who want to play along, we ended our workshop with the following questions geared towards exploring how people living celibacy might facilitate a rich family life:

  • With whom do you have meaningful relationships?
  • How do we discern what kinds of relationships we need given a particular season of life?
  • How can you find models for living a celibate life?
  • How does your faith inspire and encourage you in living a celibate life?
  • What pathways might be available to you for repairing and strengthening your relationships with your families of origin?
  • What might prevent you from building a family of choice?
  • What fears do you have about cultivating a way of life within your proximate family?

We hope that you’ve enjoyed seeing a bit about what we presented at the 2014 conference. This year, we’re presenting a workshop on Celibacy and the Church. As was true last year, we are not interested in making an argument for celibacy. We are interested in helping celibate Christians, people who are exploring the possibility of celibacy for themselves, and other Christians and churches who want to support people in celibate vocations. We’d love to see you!

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.

Fighting Tradition

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Today we’re featuring the voice of our friend who wishes to use the name Tom Merrick. Tom grew up as a gay Christian in an Evangelical Protestant home. We’ve enjoyed getting to know Tom over the past several months. At the beginning of December, we were incredibly distressed to learn that Tom’s father had told Tom he’d no longer be welcome in his parents’ house. We wanted Tom to share his perspective about living as a celibate gay Christian, entering into a celibate partnership, and dealing with his family. As always when reading guest posts, please keep in mind that everyone’s story is different, and the experiences, perspectives, thoughts, and theological ideas presented by the author will not necessarily match completely with ours. For this guest post specifically, we would like to clarify that the word “tradition” can have different meanings depending upon the context. Tom uses the word “tradition” in reference to how fundamentalist evangelical Protestants have approached questions of faith and sexuality. 

A reflection by Tom Merrick

“Tradition, tradition!” goes the debut song of Fiddler on the Roof. Tradition tells us who we are and what God expects of us. It defines us. And sometimes it binds us.

Tradition, not Scripture, holds that one cannot be gay and be Christian. Tradition says being gay is a choice. It says gay people are unacceptable to God.

That is Tradition. And breaking with Tradition means breaking with God.

That lie I have battled against. And I lost that battle.

I lost when I came out to my parents and my father counseled me to get reparative therapy to become straight, refusing to think anything but that being gay is a choice. After a long, agonizing call where I tried to convince him otherwise, I cried. I screamed. I overturned tables and desks and chairs in tortured agony, despair, and rage. All because I could not fight Tradition.

I retreated into myself, feeling abandoned, betrayed, hopeless. I drank, figuring a hedonistic lifestyle condemning me to hell was all I could do. That was, after all, what Tradition said gay people did.

I wrote, attempting to hide my writing from my parents, who were unwilling to accept me. However, they discovered I was writing, and I spent another hopeless night trying to reason with my father. But Tradition said otherwise, and, again, I lost the battle.

I found hope in a small online community of gay Christians, who welcomed me in with open arms. I found acceptance and subsequently retreated further from the unaccepting parents I lived with.

And I found love for the first time. I fell in love with a fellow man, who loved me in return, and showed me more about Christ’s love than I could have ever understood. I learned to accept myself. To look at my reflection in the mirror without seeing myself as ugly or wounded. I found what it meant to support and be supported in rough times.

But such could not be endured by Tradition. So my father confronted me about this man I loved. And again, I lost the battle with Tradition.

Two weeks before Christmas, my father asked me to choose. Choose him and Tradition, or the man I loved. I broke with Tradition and he asked me to leave.

Tradition won that battle. The stupid Tradition found nowhere in the Bible that any not straight are hateful to God. The Tradition that says cast the unrepentant from your home to their life of rebelliousness.

And so Tradition won. I spent Christmas estranged from my family and living with the man I love. And I find myself trying to make sense of a world where Tradition reigns supreme and causes me to lose the family I love. I struggle to know how I should feel or what I should do. And I try to make ends meet in the real world of job searching, loan payments and car troubles, all in a new city and environment.

Tradition has won today. But maybe someday it will lose. And maybe someday Tradition will not ruin a family like it has mine. In the meantime, I will retreat, mourn my loss, and look forward to the day when Tradition no longer defines and binds peoples’ minds and hearts.

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.

Healing from Spiritual Abuse

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The day after Thanksgiving can be difficult for many LGBT people. Holidays can bring up a flood of memories, good and bad. Reflecting on one’s year to identify places where one feels grateful can also lead to recalling some particularly painful moments. This year, we’ve been acutely aware of our own relationship with our church especially as it has developed while we’ve navigated various challenges around Sarah’s Meniere’s disease. We’ve dealt with a cascade of memories from previous pastors and churches where we’ve felt cast aside by Christians who have found us too inconvenient in one way or another. Many people of all sexual orientations and gender identities have experienced waves of sadness, despair, and despondency on the heels of spiritual mistreatment from members of their churches and/or members of their families. Because most people are off work and many are with family members who are not part of their daily lives, the day after Thanksgiving sometimes becomes a day of thinking through issues of spiritual abuse.

Let’s begin by acknowledging that spiritual abuse is a difficult topic for many. Every person’s experience is unique, both in kind and in degree. A defining feature of spiritual abuse is that a trusted spiritual guide conducts himself or herself in a way to control, coerce, and manipulate others. Depending on one’s spirituality, these guides can be formal leaders of churches, parents, older family members, or charismatic personalities. Mary DeMuth has an older post detailing 10 ways to spot spiritual abuse, and we think that her observations that purveyors of spiritual abuse distort views of respect and create a culture of fear and shame are especially on point. In today’s post, we’d like to talk about some specific ways we’ve been able to find some healing from spiritual abuse, recognizing that integrating our faith and our sexualities as LGBT Christians has been a significant part of our journeys.

Trusting our spiritual sensibilities. Spiritual abuse can be so dangerous because it’s all too easy for an abuser to cause a person to doubt his or her perceptions of the world. We’ve had to learn that despite what abusive people have told us, our spiritual sensibilities are reasonably accurate. When we find ourselves in places of wondering if something is abusive, there’s likely something to that wondering that needs further exploration.

Giving ourselves permission to take space away from abusive conversations, people, and environments. We’ve learned the importance of acknowledging toxicity. Taking some space allows us to get perspective on events, and we’ve cultivated a range of space-taking strategies. Some of our preferred space-taking strategies include changing the subject, talking with different people after services, visiting a different church within our Christian tradition, attending informal (or formal) retreats with people we trust, or choosing to stay home. Using space-taking strategies can help us get to the point where we can consider specific spiritual counsel against the broader teachings of our Christian tradition. Noticing places of contradiction and asking further questions can be a great way to deepen our own understanding of our Christian tradition while also countering possibly abusive counsel when we’re ready to reengage particular conversations.

Remembering that we have supportive friends in our communities. So many spiritually abusive people try to control situations through manipulating information and preventing people from checking in with one another. During seasons where we’ve felt as though we have been in communities that actively try to prevent friendship, we’ve learned to flee. Sometimes it’s better to end up seemingly alone for a bit than it is to continue in a place where every relationship is monitored. After feeling safe enough to lift up our heads, we’ve realized that we still have friends around us. During seasons when we feel spiritually isolated, we are so grateful to learn that we still have good friends who are willing to let us know when they are concerned about one or both of us spiritually, to talk with us about spiritual questions, and to offer counsel after we’ve asked for advice. We especially appreciate friends who can help us separate the wheat from the chaff in any given situation.

Finding therapists who respect our religious beliefs and tradition. We recognize that there’s a difference between what we can talk about with our friends and what we are better off discussing with a therapist. There’s no shame in saying, “I can’t get any perspective whatsoever in this situation, and I don’t know what to do next.” Awesome therapists are awesome because they understand the complex dynamics of abuse, guilt and shame and can help people see through the fog. When we look for therapists, we look for people who are knowledgable about our specific concerns and have capacity for building solid therapeutic relationships with us. We’ve found it more helpful to be upfront that we want therapists who respect our Christian tradition rather than seeking therapists who are part of our tradition.

Slowly relearning vulnerability. In all honesty, relearning vulnerability has been one of the hardest things to do. Spiritually abusive people seem to exploit vulnerability in just about every way possible. So many spiritually abusive environments mandate a “Tell all” approach that constantly causes people to cast pearls before swine. We’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on vulnerability and how vulnerability can draw us into relationships with others. It’s been important for both of us to take time to practice identifying our own needs and be selective with strategies to meet those needs. As we seek spiritual direction, we work actively to build relationships with potential spiritual directors where we feel confident that they understand a bit about why we feel called to our particular vocations and that they are willing to learn with us along the way.

Becoming aware that we have a role in educating others about our specific vocations. For us, a huge part of healing from spiritual abuse has involved appreciating how our experiences as LGBT Christians influence our vocational pathways. There are times when we feel strong enough and grounded enough to make a concerted effort to educate others about the relational lives of celibate LGBT Christians. We’ve accepted that many people don’t know much, if anything, about either celibate vocations or the process of discerning celibacy. We’ve also accepted that many straight Christians frequently do not know other LGBT people, even though that’s been changing rapidly. We found that reflecting regularly on celibacy and celibate partnership helps us answer questions that our spiritual directors might have about our vocations. Because of our own experience with spiritual abuse, we try hard to avoid educating other people about other vocations but we’re happy to share about our own vocations in a supportive environment.

Healing from spiritual abuse is a long-haul process. We’re still working through a number of concerns in our own lives that are both past and present. As always, we welcome any respectful discussion in our comment box!

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.

Celibacy, Family, and Caregiving

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A reflection by Lindsey

Certain events have a way of etching themselves into one’s memory. I remember one day last April when Sarah was headed to work. We were finishing a conversation from earlier that morning as Sarah drove. Sarah had the phone on speaker in the passenger seat. I knew Sarah was approaching work and was only a few minutes away, but I was slow to get off the phone. Next thing I knew, Sarah was stammering frantically about another car speeding around the corner, seconds from impact. I heard the awful crunching sounds of a car accident. Less than 3 minutes later, I was driving with haste while hoping Sarah would call me back so I could pinpoint exactly where the accident occurred.

I couldn’t envisage anyone else living locally who knows Sarah well enough to be useful in a similar situation. Once I got to Sarah, we realized we needed to move Sarah’s car to a safe parking lot and take Sarah to the emergency room to be evaluated. While en route to the ER, I asked a bunch of questions to learn what happened. This proved useful after Sarah was triaged to the head of the line but then started to suffer clear symptoms of a mild concussion. I had watched Sarah’s memory go in and out. As I lingered in the waiting area while Sarah was being taken to a bed, Sarah began texting me with questions like, “What happened? Where are you? Why does my head hurt?” I found it comparatively easy to decide that I could be most helpful by sitting with Sarah through the doctor’s evaluation. It was not my first ER vigil with Sarah nor has it been my last.

Even though many people agree that caregiving is an integral part of family life, many fail to appreciate how caregiving deeply connects celibates to one another. On the one hand, I can appreciate the lack of understanding. I’m 31 years old and generally a healthy young adult. It’s all too easy for me to conceive of “health problems” as “things you deal with as you start getting older.” In my immediate circle of friends, chronic health challenges are comparatively rare. On the other hand, caregiving has been a central component of the life I share with Sarah. I understand that people deal with “people things,” and I do my best to avoid shaming anyone who happens to need extra support at a given time. I consider it a deep honor to help people with eating disorders feel safe while eating dinner and to accompany Sarah and others on various healing journeys. Such a sojourn connects me more deeply with my own humanity. I’m more likely to pray for my own needs when I’m praying for others.

To be able to provide care for another person, one must permit that person to be vulnerable. Vulnerability opens a mysterious door to intimacy where the connections defy easy categorization.

We’ve shared about how we draw a lot of inspiration for our life together from monastics. I’ve spent the last seven years trying to get to know people living in a number of monastic communities. Monasteries are great places to find people who can model purposeful celibate living that includes caregiving. Someone at virtually every community I’ve visited has taken it upon himself or herself to tell me a personal caregiving story.

Talking about caregiving as LGBT person is risky. I’ve spent many years in ex-gay ministries that blasted any form of caregiving as a place ripe for “emotional dependency.” Some people within addiction recovery culture have been quick to label me “codependent” or an “enabler” that seeks to protect Sarah from natural consequences of destructive forms of behavior. These people fail to realize that I constantly reflect on what good caregiving is and how it taxes my energies, rigorously question my own limitations, and try to help Sarah locate additional support resources when needed.

All of this causes cognitive dissonance for others when they realize that Sarah is a part of my family. People understand the value of putting family first and appreciate the importance of being there for one’s family in any range of circumstances. It’s worth noting that nearly all of the monastic communities I’ve visited describe themselves as a family, especially as it relates to the demands of caregiving.

Many people object to our using the word family to describe ourselves. At one point, a reader accused us of launching a “hateful attack” on true families for referring to ourselves with this term. Some people assert that there’s no way that we can be family because we’re celibate. Other people assert that we should talk about our relationship principally as a friendship and avoid the word family so as not to confuse and mislead. We wonder what these people would say to an elderly monastic in need of care. Should an aging nun be shipped off to a nursing home as soon as she needs more regular care? Or should she be able to rely on her monastic family? Is there any Christian who would object to this nun’s considering her monastic sisters to be her family? We wonder if Christians have taken any note of celibate LGBT singles who regularly express concerns about their potential needs for caregiving, either now or in the distant future. Continually, I’m struck by the interconnectedness of caregiving and loneliness: when one doubts whether one has the freedom to receive care from others, one is much more likely to feel lonely.

Caregiving is a tricky process. When caregiving is done rightly, it draws us into meaningful relationships with those for whom we provide care. Vulnerability gets negotiated such that one person isn’t always having to make the hard disclosures. Handled rightly, vulnerability becomes trust. I’d contend that only in an environment of trust can true caregiving happen. Serving others in love and humility and allowing others to care for us is transformative. Somehow, every rightly orientated care response draws us into healthy forms of interdependence where we become that much more alive to Christ’s work on earth. Every day I find myself praying for the wisdom to provide Sarah with true care that is sourced from how God loves each of us. In so doing, I become that much more human.

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.

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.