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The sermon I wish had been preached at #ERLC2014

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A reflection by Lindsey

I have been a participant in the gay Christian conversation for 14 years. Sometimes, it’s a conversation. Sometimes, it’s a debate. And most of the time, it’s a lot of pontificating. I’ve been in environments where people have been actively seeking orientation change and healing from sexual brokenness. I’ve eaten many a meal with LGBT Christians waiting eagerly for the day when they would meet their same-sex spouses. And, hopefully unsurprisingly, I love talking with other people about celibacy and how LGBT people can show Christ to the world through living celibacy. Certain voices are well-known, and you can almost guarantee what a particular speaker will say. Yesterday, Albert Mohler addressed the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission 2014 Conference on The Gospel, Homosexuality, and the Future of Marriage. When I saw on Twitter that Mohler had opened up his Bible to Romans 1, something in me went off and I tweeted:

For an LGBT Evangelical Christian, these conversations are absolutely predictable. As a former Evangelical, I’m well aware of this. Yet, as I threw around the list of the Scriptures in my head… Romans 1, Genesis 3, Matthew 19, Genesis 1… some different thoughts took root in my heart. In following the same order of the Scriptures, I arrived at a very different place than “Don’t be gay.” Although I no longer consider myself an Evangelical with a capital E, I know far too many LGBT Christians screaming out to the Evangelical Church. This post is an offering to friends within Evangelical traditions and anyone else who finds it helpful. It’s deliberately written to have a preacher’s tone, and I hope you can imagine it being delivered by a sort of unknown, robust voice that carries some authority. Like any message delivered at a conference, it’s bound to miss the mark in a number of ways. In many ways, I’m trying to preach to my 22 year old self who desperately needed assurance that God had not abandoned me and had a plan for me in the part of the church I recognized.

Without further ado, I offer to you the sermon I wish had been preached at ERLC2014.

Hello, my name is Lindsey. I’d love a chance to get to know you more. I’ve been doing my best to follow Jesus in the company of friends since 1996. My faith journey began in high school and underwent significant growth in college. I met virtually all of my college friends through Intervarsity: I loved learning more about encountering Christ through intelligently reading the Scriptures and seeking to apply them to my life. I learned that following Christ is costly but that Christ alone offers the only form of life that could possibly be worth my everything. Now that I’ve introduced myself, let’s pray before we dive into God’s word.

Heavenly Father, you know each and every one of us. You created us, called us to be your own as sons and daughters in your eternal kingdom. You delight in us. You have fashioned us according to your image and likeness. Give us the confidence that we are, first and foremost, your children. Father, with the confidence that we are loved deeply and completely by you, we ask you: Search our hearts and know us. Try us and know our thoughts. See if there be any grievous ways in us, and lead us in the way everlasting. Amen.

We’re gathered here to talk about the Gospel, homosexuality, and the future of marriage. We come from many places, but we’re here because we’re deeply concerned about how we live faithful lives in Christ. I speak to you today with a firm conviction that each and every one of us here present longs for an authentic relationship with Christ. With that in mind, I’d like to acknowledge publicly the gay, lesbian, and bisexual Christians I know who have decided to attend this conference, as I know you braced yourselves for great hostility. I don’t know any transgender Christians in attendance tonight. If you are here, I’d love to meet you. I cannot fathom the depths of your courage. Tonight, I feel compelled to walk down a well-trodden road through the Scriptures. I do hope you’ll hold out for what I have to say because I hope to use incredibly painfully familiar passages to mark out a road far less travelled. For the sake of our LGBT brothers and sisters, I’m going to let you know that I’ll walk through Romans 1, Genesis 3, Matthew 19, and Genesis 1. I hope you’ll take a deep breath, and I invite you to trust me even though I’ve given you scant reason to hope that I’ll say something different from what you’ve already heard. God has set this message on my heart. And l implore your forgiveness for any ways I fall short.

Let us turn to Romans 1, beginning with verse 19:

What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

Church, if we are going to have an honest conversation about the Gospel, homosexuality and the future of marriage, then we need to be frank: we have made an idol out of marriage. To be absolutely clear, God has imprinted His loving design on marriage. However, marriage is not the Gospel, especially when we consider how we present the Gospel to LGBTQ people both inside and outside the Church. How has it come to pass that Christians are better known for standing in a fried chicken line than we are for feeding the hungry? How has it come to pass that Christians are better known for resisting anti-bullying legislation in schools than we are for treating absolutely each and every person with the love of God? How has it come to pass that Christian parents are better known for kicking their LGBTQ children out on the streets than they are known for binding up the broken-hearted? How is it that 91% of young people between the ages of 16 and 29 who are outside of the church describe the church as anti-gay? These are our kids. And we are failing them. We are failing to show them the Gospel of Christ. We are failing to provide a broken world with hope of restoration and fullness, a promise that we Christians can only be fulfilled by uniting our lives wholly and completely to Christ.

We can find an important piece to this puzzle if we look at Genesis 3. Now, there’s a lot that can be said about Genesis 3 if we are talking about a broken world. Given our topic tonight, I’d like to zoom in on verse 16:

To the woman he [God] said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.

Now, let me first say something absolutely clear to the women gathered in the audience. This verse is not about you. This verse is not about your failings. This verse is not about your specific individual sins. This verse has been all too often wretched from its context and has been abused, completely and wholly and utterly abused by men seeking to demean women. We cannot have an honest conversation about the future of marriage if we deny the historic injustices of misogyny: and our churches have been anything but innocent when it comes to perpetuating the abuse of women.

At this point in Genesis 3, God delivers His judgment on the serpent, the woman, and the man. Some people will describe this passage as God cursing Creation. Yet we know that God, in infinite mercy and majesty, disciplines us as a father cares for his children. We also know that God wants all things to work together for our good and that He gives us good gifts. So here, in Genesis 3, we see that God has given the woman desire for her husband. The mysteries of attraction and marriage are both a blessing and a curse. No wonder it’s so easy for us to fail so miserably in areas of sexual morality!

Turning to Matthew 19, we read:

He [Jesus] answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

The important thing to note here is that Jesus is talking about divorce. Jesus ups the ante even further when he says, “And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.” Friends, brothers and sisters, if we’ve read the Gospels, we know that when Jesus says, “And I say to you” he is looking us right in the eye and telling us that we so easily miss the boat completely on the core issue. Marriage is a commitment that matters to Christ. It is profoundly important. Marriage reflects the world that God created, and marriage is good. Nonetheless, Christ knows that our fallenness we experience marriage as both a blessing and a curse, and he recognizes that sexual immorality has the power to destroy a marriage. That’s why we need to pray for those who are married in our midst: sin can enter in and destroy a covenantal bond. And that’s why we need the Cross because only on the Cross can Christ give Himself completely, fully, and freely to the church. Only through the Cross can Christ destroy the many forces of death that seek only to destroy God’s covenantal bond to His people.

The disciples know that Christ’s teaching on marriage is a challenging teaching. Let’s continue in Matthew 19:

The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”

And friends, here is where we really experience how we have made an idol of marriage in our society. We have made marriage an idol when we jettison its complement–celibacy. What is even worse is that we thrust this rejected way of life on gay and lesbian people expecting them to figure it out with no support when Protestants, by and large, have neglected the celibate vocation for hundreds of years. Could it be that God has whipped up such fury in the church about homosexuality so we can finally start to have honest conversations about the goodness of celibacy? Church, we need to be honest: do we even know what Christ was talking about when he said “there are eunuchs”? For my part, I have to wonder if there were people running around shouting at those on the margins of society, saying “Don’t call yourself a eunuch!” This passage from Christ is eerily reminiscent of how we talk about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in our cultural context. Moreover, we must be especially mindful that there are some people who do not feel like they can elect into a heterosexual marriage owing to any range of factors. How are we support these people who feel like celibacy is their only realistic option?

I don’t pretend to know the answer to that question, as I do not have the mind of God. Try as I might, I’m a sinner, I’m a fallible human being, and I know that the way of Christ is hard to find. I know that there is great promise in celibate vocations if for no other reasons than Christ was celibate, Paul was celibate, and so many heroes of faith in the modern world like Mother Teresa have been celibate. May God guide the journey, and may we have confidence to undertake this journey in faith.

And, I promised, I’d finish with Genesis 1.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. … So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. … And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

God created us in God’s own image. As we go out into the world, whether we are married or unmarried, LGBT or straight, weak or strong, let us remember that we are created in God’s image. May God grant us the strength to be image-bearers so that we reflect Christ in all we do and say.

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.

“Why do you call yourselves a celibate LGBT couple?”

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Almost daily, we receive inquiries about why we use words like LGBT and queer to describe ourselves, stern rebukes for our preferred terminology, or both. Many people caution us about how these words can be applied politically, contending that we shouldn’t be surprised when people react negatively to us because we insist on referring to each other as partners. We’ve addressed the questions as they come up, on our About page, and in our Frequently Asked Questions. But because we’ve noticed a recent increase in this type of reader correspondence, we want to provide a reasonably comprehensive answer as to why we think LGBT and queer are helpful terms for describing ourselves and our relationship.

Before we go any deeper, let us offer some important clarifications. The only places we discuss our experiences as a celibate, LGBT, Christian couple are this blog and with select groups of friends. We’re open about being partners if and when a person asks, but we value privacy in our daily lives. At church, we go very simply by Lindsey and Sarah. People are aware that we are partners without our needing to say anything. We don’t walk around with LGBT tattooed on our foreheads. However, members of any parish we ever visit tend to assume that Lindsey is gay the instant Lindsey walks into a room. Sarah frequently receives different treatment when socializing individually versus socializing with Lindsey present.

So why do we use the language we use on the blog?

We use LGBT because we are both LGBT people. We’re surprised that straight people take issue with this point continuously. There are a lot of blogs existing at the intersection of faith and sexuality. It would be false to assert that no one cares about how the Church responds to LGBT people: it’s one of the most discussed and debated issues of our time. However, we find it remarkable that despite so much work to explain sexual orientation, many heterosexual Christians insist that being gay necessitates having gay sex, and that if one is not having gay sex, then one is not gay. Neither of us came out as LGBT because of an appetite for gay sex. Both of us came out because we realized that this terminology provides useful context as to how we experience our sexualities.

Many people who adopt LGBT language do so to communicate that they experience the world differently than folks who are straight and/or cisgender. For us and others, it’s not about sex at all — it’s about a sense of otherness that encompasses far more than the question, “What kind of person pings up my sex drive?” Feeling different or other can be both a blessing and a curse. Lindsey realized comparatively early that Lindsey was not the same as other children. As a child, Lindsey couldn’t be bothered by gender norms and had a recognizably different deportment than most kids. Lindsey’s parents did a great job at helping Lindsey pursue any and all interests while allowing Lindsey ample freedom for self-expression. At 20, Lindsey started developing sexual attractions. It was hard for Lindsey to make sense of these experiences. Eventually, Lindsey realized that Lindsey had no desire for a heterosexual marriage and was not called to monastic life. When Lindsey met other LGBT Christians, Lindsey finally met people who could relate deeply to Lindsey’s own experiences.

Sarah grew up assuming that being attracted to girls instead of boys was an unusual though irrelevant experience. Because of cultural expectations, Sarah spent all of childhood and the vast majority of adolescence thinking that every young woman (except nuns) eventually met a young man to marry, marriage was a requirement for leading a full adult life, and one’s sexual attractions had little to do with the decision to enter a marital vocation. But as an older teenager, Sarah realized that Sarah had no desire to marry a man and would find heterosexual marriage a miserable and draining way of life. Equally important, Sarah had a powerful model of what a purposeful non-married life could look like in a favorite high school teacher, Ms. Chafin. All the while, Sarah had been growing in awareness of Sarah’s sexual orientation. In continuing vocational discernment, it was Sarah’s attraction to women that drew Sarah toward celibacy in the first place. The sense of a personal calling to celibacy came when Sarah could appreciate the nature of Sarah’s sexuality.

We’ve both experienced periods of extreme anxiety and discomfort because of the ways other people have tried to label our sexualities. Sarah grew up in a geographic area where young people would typically marry straight out of high school or in some cases, immediately after graduating college. When Sarah began to reach “marrying age,” Sarah couldn’t help but notice how family conversations became more and more about Sarah’s future husband. No one particularly knew or cared to know about how Sarah was experiencing sexuality differently. Coming out created space for Sarah to feel at ease among loved ones. Even being referred to as an abomination resulted in less anxiety than pretending to be someone Sarah was not. Early in Lindsey’s coming out process, it became apparent that many of Lindsey’s acquaintances believed sexual orientation could only have meaning if one was having sex. When reading Rob Bell’s Sex God, Lindsey had an epiphany that one could focus one’s sense of sexuality on a broader pattern of relating to the world — that there was more to sexuality than sex itself. Immediately, this made sense to Lindsey, who had experienced a great deal of frustration when talking with other Christians who could only discuss sexuality in terms of marriage. No one among Lindsey’s Christian friends in college seemed to have space for the idea that God might call people to live celibate lives — overseas mission work being a possible exception.

When it comes to our life together, we frequently say that we’re building the plane while flying it. We don’t have a lot of models upon which to build. We often hear people discuss three principal ways of life: marriage, monasticism, or living as single persons in the world. Discovering our vocation as celibate partners has involved a good deal of trial and error. We recognize that our vocation is unusual, and it is for this reason that we refer to it as a queer calling.

Some people would say, “Just get over yourselves already! You’re single people living in the world. You’re friends. You’re housemates! You don’t need any other language.” However, the same honesty that drove us towards using LGBT terminology for ourselves encourages us to call out some ways our life together differs significantly from the single people we know. The following observations are in no particular order.

Financially, we are interdependent. We share quite literally every penny. We don’t have an arrangement that is simply “Let’s each pay 50% of the rent and utilities on the apartment” or “Let’s keep our incomes completely separate.” We consider every cent we earn to belong equally to both of us. When we save, it’s an investment in our future as a pair, not in our futures as individuals. We share car insurance and health insurance, and have committed to taking on each other’s debts as our own. Before we met, not only did both of us have student loans but Sarah also has an enormous amount of medical debt. We don’t know any sets of “friends, roommates, or housemates” where one person would willingly and gladly take on joint responsibility for the other’s medical bills that reach six figures.

Our strongest sense of team spirit probably comes in the realm of looking after one another’s physical and mental health. Sarah has had an extensive medical history that Sarah managed solo before we met. Now we work on tackling issues together. Whether it’s making sure Sarah’s rescue inhaler is refilled or discerning a proper course of action for Sarah’s Meniere’s disease, we are committed to walking through the issue every step of the way as a team. We’ve mentioned before that Lindsey is learning American Sign Language alongside Sarah so that we can make sure we never lose the ability to communicate and that Sarah is never left out of any conversations. One person at our church said to Lindsey a couple of weeks ago, “Wow. You’re going above and beyond the expectations of friendship here. Sarah is so lucky to have a friend like you.” The truth is, we see such a commitment as an integral part of our relationship. This is not the sort of commitment that would be expected in a close friendship.

We share our spiritual lives intimately, and we’re committed to helping one another towards holiness. We can offer each other a new sense of perspective that comes from the day-in, day-out realities of doing life together. Both of us can tell when the other person is experiencing spiritual lows. We’re constantly reminding each other about the various aspects of the Gospel that are so important to keep our lives in context. While its not impossible that friends would do this for one another, we see it as an essential part of our daily living that we’re committed to maintaining for the rest of our lives — not merely a season of being “roommates.”

We share our emotional lives 100%. We have an absolute commitment to being honest with one another about all things. We share our highs, lows, triumphs, defeats, frustrations, joys, and everything else no matter how hard it is to discuss. We do have deep, emotionally intimate relationships with friends, but none of those relationships has the exact same sense of vulnerability as does our relationship with each other.

We share physical space and love being in each other’s presence. We go out of our way to share time with each other. Currently, we’re excited because Lindsey’s work schedule allows us to share our commute on most days. We have always made it a point to share dinner together, even when our schedules do not cooperate. And if one of us were to need to relocate for whatever reason, the other would go too. There would be no question about this, no matter what challenges were involved. Our commitment to each other does not end at an annual apartment lease.

What this comes down to is a very simple question: how are terms like “partnership” defined, and who has the right to define them? It seems unreasonable to us that straight, cisgender, conservative Christians — many of whom are married — should be the sole determiners of what constitutes partnership, celibacy, and gayness. Ultimately, we are not seeking to prove to you that we are indeed a celibate LGBT couple rather than “single housemates who both have same-sex attraction.” Our relationship is ours to define. It takes a great deal of entitlement to tell another person, “I know who and what you are better than you do.” It’s vastly inappropriate, and we would never assert that we know better than a married couple what marriage is, better than a monk or nun what religious life is, or better than a single person what the celibate single vocation is. We do understand why questions about our ways of identifying will naturally arise because of our unusual situation. All we ask is that all our readers show us the same basic respect that we show them in providing space to share share stories and learn from one another.

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.

Grieving What My Vocation Is Not

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A reflection by Sarah

When I was in college, I listened to vocations speakers frequently. Every talk I heard emphasized how God calls people to their vocations because he cares about our happiness and our ability to use our gifts to serve the world around us. The speakers stressed how vocational discernment shouldn’t be terrifying since God is speaking to our hearts, and all we need to do is listen and obey. Since vocations are gifts given by God, they emphasized, there is no need to be frightened by the prospect of discerning vocation.

Lately, I’ve been reflecting on that time in my life. I remember how terrified I was of discerning vocation despite all of those reassurances. What would happen if I made the wrong decision? Surely there were people who were supposed to have been married but who entered monasteries. Likewise, I thought, there must be married people who have experienced a call to monasticism, but chose marriage instead. What would happen if I turned out to be one of those people who would make the wrong choice? Would I be miserable because I hadn’t properly discerned God’s will for my life? The vocations speakers that I heard sounded so incredibly peaceful and full of joy when talking about what God had called them to. I thought, “If they are so happy, then they must have properly and perfectly discerned God’s call. They are so lucky to have discerned their vocations correctly.” As I recall these thoughts now, I see that I had an underdeveloped view of vocation and discernment at the time. I’d assumed that if a person was happy in his/her vocation and had discerned what God’s will truly was, then he/she would never experience any grief over what might have been if things had turned out differently. I was naive enough to think that once I figured out what God was calling me to, he would remove any inkling of desires for a different way of life. While I’m absolutely confident that doing your best to follow where God leads will ultimately lead you to joy and union with God, I believe now that grief along the way is frequently part of the process.

I’ve heard people suggest that because there is a significant part of me that desires to be a mother and to have children, that it would be better for me to leave the committed celibate relationship I have with Lindsey and seek out a heterosexual marriage. Sometimes it’s even been suggested that Lindsey is selfish for preventing me from finding a husband and marrying. I find these notions ludicrous for several reasons, but two in particular. For one, the people who make such comments are not considering the likelihood that, as a lesbian, I would be miserable in a heterosexual marriage even if that marriage did provide me a way to become a biological mother. However, there’s a deeper reason that I find these comments troubling. They imply that vocations should be able to meet all of our desires for every good and holy thing. If you desire something and it is a holy desire, this line of thinking asserts an automatic belief that God is calling you to it. I think this idea is hugely problematic.

No matter what vocational pathways we take, following Christ costs us something. We all make choices that prevent us from making other choices. [Economists are able to talk about “opportunity cost” with good reason.] When a person decides to pursue a vocation to marriage, that person is giving up the possibility of entering any kind of celibate vocation (unless his/her spouse reposes and their children have become adults). When a person decides to enter a monastery, he or she is giving up the possibility of being married and raising a family. We make choices and do our best to allow God to lead us rightly. That’s the nature of discernment. Both celibacy and marriage are good ways of life, but neither enables a person to do everything. At this point, the question is, “Is it okay for a person to grieve what his or her vocation is not?” Is it acceptable for a married person to grieve aspects of the celibate life that he/she will never know fully in this lifetime? Is there something wrong with a celibate person who is experiencing sadness over not being married or having children? I would argue that not only is this sort of grief okay, but that it’s entirely normal.

I think one of the reasons I didn’t settle into a celibate vocation earlier than my late twenties is that I spent years pondering how God could be calling me to a way of life that would bring me grief as well as joy. In having to choose just one way of life, I’d certainly miss out on something great found in a different vocation. If any one of those vocational pathways would involve sadness over aspects that were not a part of that particular pathway, how was I supposed to experience the deep and profound joy all of the different vocations speakers referenced in their talks? I came to see that taking the plunge into any vocation has its risks. Once you give a vocation a try, you risk finding out that it fits…or that it doesn’t. It was a huge risk for me to say that I was committing to celibacy, especially after having been in non-celibate relationships. It was an even greater risk when I decided that I was going to commit the rest of my life to a celibate partnership with Lindsey. I can’t get over how much we experience joy, both as individuals and together.

Nonetheless, I have to be real about the fact my vocation is not just joyous moment after joyous moment after joyous moment. There are times when I feel the emotional pangs associated with sensing that God is not calling me to certain things I’ve felt somewhat drawn to in the past. For me, the one that is especially trying is knowing that I will never be a biological mother. There is a part of me that absolutely aches with desire to carry a child in my womb. Some days it’s very hard to cope with that reality. But I’ve realized that not all of my desires — even for good things– are what God is actually calling me to. I don’t think it’s bad that I have a strong desire for motherhood. It’s not a problem to be remedied. The fact that intuition tells me I would make a good mother does not mean that my call to celibacy is less real. It also does not mean that my relationship with Lindsey is going to end because I’m not getting everything I could possibly want out of life, or that Lindsey and I should try to brainstorm solutions for me to become a mother.

I believe that if you experience this kind of sadness, it’s healthy to sit with the feeling and allow it to be. Another lesson I learned in my 20s is that life isn’t about being happy. It’s about seeking union with God, and that search involves the entire spectrum of emotions.  Sorrow, frustration, anger, and grief are not maladies to be cured. When I find myself feeling a bit overwhelmed because of what my vocation is not, it’s beneficial to pray about what it is and can be as Lindsey and I continue discerning throughout our lives together. It’s also helpful to be thinking about other ways I can direct my desire for motherhood. My greatest comfort is in knowing that Christ and His Holy Mother are here waiting to embrace me anytime I’m grieving over anything at all…and knowing it’s okay to let them do just that.

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.

Defining Celibacy, Revisited

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In one of our very first posts on this blog, we took some time to define celibacy. We offered a working definition of celibacy that centers on vulnerability, hospitality, shared spiritual life, and commitment. Not surprisingly, many commenters have been pushing back against our definition of celibacy for months, offering some variant of 1) those characteristics are/can be true of anyone living a Christian life or 2) non-celibate people certainly display those characteristics as well. It’s tricky for us to say how our practice of these values as celibate people is distinct from how non-celibate people can practice these same values. We share a strong disapproval of stereotypes of celibate vocations, and we’re concerned about doing the same thing if we were to discuss how these values manifest themselves in non-celibate relationships. We don’t see ourselves as qualified to tell married people (or even other celibate people) how they live or should live the four characteristics in our definition. Nonetheless, it’s worth revisiting how we define celibacy in response to some of the comments we’ve received.

To begin, it’s important to note that we understand both celibacy and marriage as vocations people enter into as adults. Part of living into one’s vocation is maturing in how one participates in the world. We’re sure many readers can bear witness to how marriage forced them, or others they know, to grow up in some profound ways. We believe that making a commitment to a celibate vocation also spurs a person towards maturity. Since both vocations provide a sort of proving ground for becoming an adult, we shouldn’t be entirely surprised that they challenge people to exercise certain values. If you flip through the New Testament, you’ll find a lot of different lists of what values increase when a person commits himself or herself to Christ. Vulnerability, hospitality, community, and commitment happen to be the four words we’ve chosen to call out relative to our experience of the celibate vocation.

Arguably, one of the most famous lists in Scriptures is found in Galatians 5 where Paul lists the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. (We took this list from the ESV, and the wording of your preferred translation might differ.) We would be hard pressed to think of any Christian we know who does not display these fruits of the Spirit to some degree. In all honesty, we’ve seen again and again that the children in our parish frequently do the best job at displaying these fruits. Neither one of us has any predisposition for searching out ways our fellow Christians fail to display the fruits of the Spirit. We’re much more prone to ask ourselves the question, “How can we cultivate good spiritual fruit?”

We think making a commitment to one’s vocation involves making a decided choice to cultivate spiritual fruit in specific ways. For us, our celibate vocation has challenged us to commit to the practices of being vulnerable, extending radical hospitality, forging a shared spiritual life, and opting into this way of life with 100% of ourselves. We learned about these practices by prayerfully observing as other people have lived celibacy. Many of these people are monastics who live in communities of various sizes. We don’t regard ourselves as having any particular authority on celibacy, and we are still discerning our vocation as a community of two. Individually and corporately, we have seen how the practices that define our celibate vocation have borne good spiritual fruit. For example, praying together about how to support Sarah’s health has helped Lindsey experience peace even in some exceptionally trying times. Sharing our thoughts vulnerably with one another and building a shared spiritual life has encouraged Sarah to exercise greater faithfulness in talking with God throughout the day. Because we share so vulnerably with one another, we know each other’s weaknesses and can challenge the other to choose the way of Christ in a much wider range of circumstances than ever before.

What strikes us as we consider the uniqueness of our way of life is that each practice connects with every other practice. These values are a package deal. With God’s help, we try to keep them going strong 100% of the time. As humans, we fall short of that goal often. Nonetheless, our eyes remain fixed on this particular path. But drawing a clear line that divides our celibate vocation from every other non-celibate person is next to impossible. Throughout time, there have been billions of married people sorting their values in ways that makes sense to them. It would be rather presumptuous for us to assert, “There has never been a married person who would describe vulnerability, hospitality, a shared spiritual life, and commitment as core values of a marriage.” We’ve never tried to make a claim that all celibates live one way and that all married people live in a wholly distinct way. There are places of unavoidable overlap in values that may manifest differently in individual couples. For instance, we know many married couples who regard welcoming children into their family as an essential aspect of their vocation. Welcoming children is a form of radical hospitality even if our friends rarely would use the word “hospitality” when describing why they are so committed to welcoming children. We do our best to avoid celibate triumphalism. It would be wrong to highlight how a monastic community in Guatemala runs an orphanage and overlook an untold number of married couples called to practice a similar ministry. We’re also entirely averse to writing anything on this blog that amounts to “We’re awesome because we do x, y, and z.” It’s difficult to say what God has called us to because of the way the tasks fit uniquely within our celibate vocation rather than because we’re better Christians for doing them.

The spiritual life rarely has neatly defined limits even as Western society has collectively howled for divisions and separations between “opposites.” Offering a working definition of something does not necessarily mean rendering it wholly distinct from all other things — even things in seemingly opposite categories. If you want to make Lindsey super irritated, try asserting that STEM disciplines are completely separate from the liberal arts disciplines. We have spilt so much ink since the Enlightenment trying to establish clear categories of difference. However, there is value in recognizing BOTH/AND constructions. Both men and women are people and bear God’s image. Both clergy and laity have important roles in the life of the Church. Both celibacy and marriage are vocations. We all live in the tension of being both sinner and saint. Recognizing the commonalities between things previously regarded as disparate deepens our appreciation of a world created by a God who is limitless, mysterious, beyond definition.

Our definition of celibacy fits snugly into the place of both/and. If how we live our vocation inspires non-celibate people to be more vulnerable, to practice more hospitality, to steward a communal spiritual life, and to consider making authentic commitments to one another, then perhaps it is bearing some good fruit. More to the point, as celibate people living in the world, we’re constantly inspired by non-celibates who make these values work amidst the craziness of life. If we recognize ways that our life looks different from other people’s lives, those differences likely stem from the fact that everyone is different. God isn’t up there in heaven shouting down to us clearly if some values are inborn and others need to be cultivated within our vocation. Truth be told, we can all grow towards Christ. And as long as we fix our eyes on Christ and pattern our lives after His example, we should be rejoicing that our lives look similar.

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.