Tag Archives: intimacy

Musings on the Meaning of Celibacy

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Almost exactly four months ago, we published this post on questions to ask oneself if considering the possibility of entering a celibate partnership. Commenters on that post challenged us to think more deeply about our own questions, particularly #4: “Do I have an idea of what celibacy might mean for me?” We think this is one of the most important items on our list, and we hope that we’ll always be asking ourselves this question as we continue living our celibate vocations together. If you’ve been with us since the beginning of our blog 10 months ago, you’ve likely read our “Why celibacy?” and “Defining celibacy” posts. Newer readers may have seen our post from two months ago where we revisited these. If you’ve perused the “Celibacy and Vocation” section of our index page, you can probably tell that our understandings of celibacy and vocation are constantly evolving. When we launched A Queer Calling on January 16, 2014, our concept of celibate vocation lived in partnership was very basic. One of our original hopes for AQC was that God would use our blog to help us mature in our vocations. Ten months in, we’re already seeing that the question “What does celibacy mean for us?” doesn’t have a simple, consistent answer. As we look through old posts and comment responses, we notice that over time there have been shifts — mostly subtle, a few more dramatic — in how we discuss the same topics we began broaching in January.

We think the best example of this is how we conceive of the four core values of celibacy that we laid out during week 1: hospitality, vulnerability, commitment, and shared spiritual life. One of the criticisms we’ve received over and over again is that our definition of celibacy says nothing about sexual abstinence. That was intentional because at the time we began blogging, we took sexual abstinence as a given when discussing celibate vocations. It’s obvious that part of a celibate vocation is not having sex, so our questions ten months ago focused on, “But what else? Christian vocations aren’t reducible to ‘having sex,’ or ‘not having sex.’ Vocations are more than that. Where is the more in celibacy?” Spending almost a year pondering the four values intensely has brought us a lovely surprise: at this point, hospitality, vulnerability, commitment, and shared spiritual life are becoming as much a given for us as sexual abstinence was in the beginning. We find that we no longer need to set aside specific, intentional times to think and pray about these issues. This focus is happening automatically, every day, and is often woven seamlessly into other aspects of our lives. It’s present even during seasons when we’re blogging more about LGBT issues than celibacy.

Last night over dinner, we were talking about how our approach to hospitality has changed since we first began our life together. While we’ve always wanted to be available for friends and acquaintances who need us, we used to be a bit more selective about how we would offer hospitality. Our primary questions for extending hospitality were once, “Is meeting x need something we can do without much trouble? How will extending hospitality in this way force us to make adjustments to our everyday lives?” As we enjoyed our salads and sandwiches, we reflected on the fact that neither of those questions enters our minds much anymore. Instead, we’re thinking, “How can we be most welcoming to this person? What are the needs, and how can we help?” We’re observing more unity of mind in our relationship as we discern how to best use what we have to welcome other people. If someone we know needs a place to stay short-term or long-term, we don’t even have to discuss pros and cons: without saying anything, we are already in agreement that this person can live in our guest room and dine at our table for as long as he or she needs. If a friend living several hours away is in trouble and has no one local to reach out to, we’re on the road as soon as work is over that day: Lindsey is packing bags and Sarah is planning logistics, and neither of us has ever questioned whether we would go. “Hows” instead of “whethers” have come to dominate our discussions of hospitality.

We’ve noticed that as we’ve spent more time thinking (and blogging) about celibacy, vulnerability as become less painful and more freeing for both of us. Our conversations at home, with celibate and non-celibate friends, at church, and in our professional lives have deepened beyond imagination. Both of us have already shared far more vulnerably at AQC than we ever thought possible. When we began this blog, Sarah had absolutely no intention of writing anything too specific about Sarah’s history of sexual trauma, eating disorders, and addiction. Lindsey had never dreamed of being able to share anything about celibacy or LGBT issues with people from our own Christian tradition. Our attempt to live the value of vulnerability has opened dozens of doors for conversation. We’ve been contacted by family members who had no idea what we’ve experienced while coming into our own as gay adults in the Christian faith, former classmates who wanted to apologize for haranguing us in middle school and high school, people we met in graduate school who never quite new how to engage thoughtfully with LGBT Christians, and folks from across the globe who are trying their best to discern what non-monastic celibacy looks like. In contacting us, they have gifted us with their vulnerability. At this point in our lives, we see vulnerability becoming so much more natural in our relationship with each other, our friends, and even people we don’t know that well. We’re learning that living into the value of vulnerability allows us to give of ourselves more freely.

Also, our commitments to each other, our Christian tradition, our faith community, our family of choice, and other people in general have grown in complexity and breadth since January. At the beginning, we really didn’t know what we were doing. We had been a couple for a little over a year, we had discerned vocations to celibacy lived in the world, and sensed that God was calling us into celibacy in partnership together. We were unsure of how this would manifest. How would we honor the commitment we have to one another, and what would be the best terminology for describing that? Would the people who had been telling us that we’re nothing more than “marriage without the sex” turn out to be right? As our relationship developed, would it come to look more like marriage, monasticism, or neither? The uncertainty hung over our heads like heavy rainclouds even though we had spent years independently pondering celibacy, marriage, and vocation. It has become clear to us over the past few months that we don’t need the perfect label to describe our mutual commitment or the commitments we have to God and others. For some things, there are no words — only wonder and mystery. We’ve learned that word choice isn’t what solidifies our willingness to be there for each other through thick and thin for the rest of our lives. We’ve also learned that as other people interact with our community of two in whatever ways they will, we don’t necessarily require language to describe our commitments to them either. A friend moves into our guest room for an indefinite period of time: does that make him a “member” of our community? Is he now part of our family? Another friend lives several hours away but is as emotionally and spiritually close to us as a brother: who is he to us, and how does that fit in with our vocation? We don’t worry about these things anymore. They’re distractions. Living celibacy is teaching us what it means to have faith that God — not humanity — is who truly makes vocations and relationships what they are.

The spiritual life we share began as a shared prayer rule. At the beginning of our relationship, we made a commitment to say Matins and Compline together every day, even if that meant one of us was reading while the other was driving to work. We experienced difficulty in honoring and appreciating the two very different spiritualities we bring into our current shared Christian tradition. Sarah’s inner Catholic and Lindsey’s inner evangelical had more than a few clashes at the beginning. As we’ve grown in our vocation, we’ve seen that a shared spiritual life involves significantly more than a daily prayer rule and debates over which variety of Christian music should blast from the car radio. Over time, we’ve experienced greater ease in discussing spiritual matters. We never hesitate to share openly about our personal spiritual lives with one another. Talking about our different experiences of sin and the graces of confession no longer has to be a theological debate and in hypothetical terms. These days in our home, “I’ve been struggling with x lately,” is met more often with, “I know and I’ve been waiting for you to talk with me about that,” than, “Really? What’s going on?” We’ve come to greater unity of mind when it comes to dealing with problems at church as well. We used to spend significantly more time thinking through dozens of possible approaches to troubled relationships with other parishioners and even more for broaching complicated issues with our priest. As it is now, we come to a sense of oneness very quickly most of the time when such issues arise. And if we’re in the midst of a difficult conversation with someone at church, we don’t have to wait for privacy to ask each other how to do better next time. We’re becoming a proficient team when it comes to managing the toughest parts of interaction with other humans.

When we started writing this post, we didn’t realize it would get lengthy this quickly! But we also wanted to touch upon a couple of other issues. This morning before publishing the post, we asked each other, “What do you think God is using our shared celibate vocation to teach you right now?” Lindsey’s answer focused on caregiving — that acts of providing and caring intimately for another person are not and should not be confined to marriage. We can both see how living celibacy is teaching us about the larger need for Christians (especially in the West) to rethink the artificial boundaries our societies have created around acts of care. Sarah’s response focused on the countercultural nature of celibacy — that an abundant Christian life in the world does not require marrying and having children, and that often, marriage has a way of locking people into certain cultural expectations. Celibacy poses challenges to the expectations our societies have for “responsible” adults, and it puts Christian traditions face to face with the idol we’ve made of marriage. We would like to delve more deeply into both these topics in later posts.

We’re grateful for all the lessons God has been teaching us as we strive to live our celibate vocations, and we’re awaiting eagerly what is to come. Circling back to the question at the beginning of the post: each day we see increasing evidence that, “Do I have an idea of what celibacy might mean for me?” is not truly a “yes or no” question. It’s a question that requires continuous and thorough self-examination in order to respond honestly. And our answer has become more organic and dynamic than either of us ever could have dreamed.

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.

“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.

Don’t Throw out Compassion with the Cotton Candy

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A reflection by Sarah

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Counts as LGBTQ?: Relationships that Break the Mold

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Most of the time when we’ve heard the topic of mixed orientation marriage come up in the LGBTQ Christian context, discussion turns to the ex-gay movement and its history of demanding that gay people change their sexual orientations and prepare for opposite-sex marriages. The focus remains on how mixed orientation marriages rarely last for the long term and usually lead to anguish for both spouses and their children. Names like John Paulk arise as examples of how detrimental mixed orientation marriages can be. We are in complete agreement with friends who speak out against shaming LGBTQ people about their sexual orientations/gender identities and using this shame as a tool to manipulate people into marrying partners of the opposite sex. Our hearts go out to everyone who has suffered as a result of the ex-gay movement’s emphasis on marriage as a goal, or even a “cure” for homosexuality. Yet at the same time, we think mixed orientation marriage and other “unusual” relationship arrangements are important to discuss for other reasons. One of these is the fact that stories of people who choose mixed orientation marriage freely, or end up in an opposite-sex (or same-sex) relationship by happenstance, don’t get much airtime.

We’re interested in this topic and believe it is relevant to discussions of celibacy because we’ve observed similar kinds of assumptions about mixed orientation couples, celibate couples, and celibate singles. The most troubling of these are: 1) we’ve followed our particular vocational pathways for no other reason than a belief that same-sex sexual activity is sinful, 2) we want to deny/excise/cure ourselves of being sexual or gender minorities, 3) we are the new ex-gay movement, and 4) we look condescendingly and judgmentally upon LGBTQ people in sexually active same-sex relationships. The two of us are well aware that our story makes other people uncomfortable. One reason for this is our motivations for choosing celibacy, while religiously motivated, did not originate from beliefs about sin. Another is that we use LGBTQ language to describe ourselves even though we are celibate. Others find this mind-blowing. Today, we’d like to introduce you to two other stories that also challenge assumptions about what it means to be LGBTQ.

Several weeks ago, we came across two articles about couples that challenge prevalent ideas about what it means to enter a mixed orientation marriage, or relationship that is something other than marriage. One of these is about a mixed orientation relationship specifically, and the other is about a relationship that isn’t exactly mixed orientation but raises similar questions as the first article. Around the end of July, we read about EJ Levy who is a lesbian engaged to a man. In the article she wrote for Salon, she details the difficulty people in her life have experienced with accepting her continuing self-identification as a lesbian. She speaks to the misconception that if she loves and wants to marry her fiancé, she must actually be bisexual:

I know plenty of people who identify as bisexual; I am not. The term simply doesn’t apply. I am not, as a rule, attracted to men. I simply fell in love with this person and didn’t hold his gender against him. That won’t change because of our vows, any more than my eye color will. My fundamental coordinates are unaltered.

She goes on to quote Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson, explaining that being gay has nothing to do with an individual’s partner. Regardless of how you feel about Robinson, the point he makes here is an important one that many LGBTQ people (especially those of us who are younger) wish others could understand:

“Gay is not something we do,” Robinson says, “it’s something we are.” It is not about whether you “practice” (though that makes perfect!), or whether you have a partner, or what you do with that partner, or even that partner’s gender (as any gay person trapped in a het marriage knows). It is about who you are, how you experience the world, the eyes you look through, the skin you’re in.

Queer people have understood this for years: For many of us, long before we “came out” as gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender, long before we had a partner to mirror back to us love and chosen identity, we had to choose ourselves. We had to consciously decide who we were and embrace it, aware that we experienced the world in a manner often at odds with the dominant culture, our lives informed by desires different from what we’re told ours should be. That doesn’t change because a partner does.

Another aspect of this article that we found interesting is that the author does not seem to have any religious reasons for entering a mixed orientation marriage. If she does, she chose not to discuss those in the article. By the way this article reads, it is clear that the author is supportive of sexually active same-sex couples. It seems highly unlikely to us that her marriage has anything to do with denying or hating her own sexuality.

A few weeks after reading Levy’s piece, a friend passed along this article by Mike Iamele at  MindBodyGreen. Mike self-identifies as straight, yet a couple of years ago while he was struggling with a serious illness, he happened to fall in love with his roommate and best friend, Garrett. He says:

We had no idea how to make this work. We had no idea if this even could work. Sometimes we still don’t. It took time — years even — to figure it out. But it’s a relationship. None of us know what we’re doing. We just try and negotiate and compromise. And, little by little, you become just another boring couple.

So, yes, I’m an otherwise straight man in love with a man. But I would never reduce Garrett down to just being a man. Because he’s more than that. He’s a pharmacist and a good cook and a great cards player. And I love him for all of those reasons and so many more. I love him for who he is, not what he is. We’re more than our gender. We’re more than one attribute. And sometimes we need to remember that.

We’re sure there are many people who would be quick to label Mike and Garrett as “gay.” Others might say that even if they aren’t gay, their relationship is a “gay relationship” simply because they are not an opposite-sex couple. Mike says nothing about the couple’s sex life, and he and Garrett have no obligation to explain this aspect of their relationship to anyone else. Yet several comments our own Facebook friends made when we posted his article on our personal pages included variations of, “Are they having sex? If they aren’t sexually active, they’re not a gay couple. They’re just close long-term roommates. If they are sexually active, then they’re gay even if they say they’re otherwise straight.” The broader question that emerges here is, how do we discuss our own identities and the identities of others in ways that make logical sense but don’t force people into boxes? Mike states:

We have this myth of identity — that who we are is the summation of a lot of choices we made in the past. That we’ve got a map for the life we’re supposed to lead, and we’ve got to stick to it. But that’s assuming that we’re all static beings, and that’s not how people work at all.

In every moment, we’re changing and evolving and growing. In every moment, we’re reconstructing our identity. We’re not defined by our decisions from two years ago. We’re not even defined by our decisions from two minutes ago. We’re defined by who we choose to be in this very moment.

We’ll never be “figured out.” Over the course of our lives, we’ll constantly be transforming into a more and more authentic version of ourselves. Our preferences will change. Our passions will change. And we have to be brave enough to choose the thing that makes up happiest in each individual moment.

When I chose to tell Garrett that I loved him, it didn’t matter if it didn’t fit my identity. It didn’t matter if it didn’t fit my sexuality. It just mattered if it brought me love. In truth, that’s all that ever really matters.

We have a lot of empathy for Mike and Garrett because of our own frustrations with labels — not only how others have tried to label us, but the ways we see others being labeled as well. As Sarah wrote in one post, defining labels rigidly can undercut mystery and stifle personal and spiritual growth. We can also identify with Mike and Garrett’s experience of falling into a loving relationship by happenstance, and being brought closer together by one partner’s need for extra support during a time of illness. It’s not only the unusualness of our relationship, but also the way our relationship began that often leads others to describe us in their terms instead of our own.

You might be thinking, “These relationships are minorities. They don’t represent many LGBTQ people.” But how do we know this? That a particular kind of story hasn’t been told often doesn’t mean it is uncommon, or that it is unimportant. And isn’t the LGBTQ community known for giving space to those whose experiences of sexual orientation and gender identity are minority experiences?

We’re interested in reading your thoughts on relationships like these and how they fit (or don’t) into the identity labels currently in use for describing sexual orientation and gender identity. We would also love to hear from others in relationships that don’t quite fit the mold in one way or 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.