Tag Archives: spirituality

Unlocking the Feast within the Fast

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A reflection by Lindsey

I received a phone call recently from a dear friend. She thought of me because it’s Lent and she doesn’t know anyone who loves Lent more than I do. Every time a friend mentions the Lenten season, I can’t help but smile.

My love of Lent began almost immediately as I started exploring Christianity. I was attending a Lutheran church that had regular Wednesday night soup suppers before a Lenten service series. The theme of the first Lenten series I attended was “Can you drink of this cup?” During the first week we received a small clay cup, and we received items to put into our cup during subsequent weeks. My cup is still on the bookcase in “my” room at my parents’ house. I immediately associated Lent with more communal gatherings and a focused effort to grow closer to Christ.

In college, I attended an Evangelical Protestant church that didn’t make a big deal about the liturgical calendar. Nonetheless, the community believed that God did awesome things when we took time to fast and pray. We started taking a 40 day period before Easter to pray for God to pour His blessings out on us as individuals, on our friends, and on our church. The pastoral team prepared various guides to encourage us to read through a chosen set of Scriptures and to suggest different faith experiments related to prayer and fasting.

Since that time, I’ve become aware of an ancient fasting tradition during the Lenten season that still lives in Eastern rite churches (Orthodox, Eastern Catholic, and some Protestant groups seeking to discover the early Church). The tradition exhorts people to abstain from meat, dairy, eggs, fish with a backbone, wine, and olive oil during penitential seasons and twice a week outside penitential seasons. Like many fasting traditions, it suggests a certain discipline around eating with the expressed intention of helping a person grow spiritually. The ancient wisdom has 2 other teachers: prayer and almsgiving. To be clear: I don’t consider myself to be a good student of any of these teachers. Yet I find that approaching the Lenten season with joy unlocks the feast within the fast.

I’ve found myself gradually shifting towards the Eastern rite fasting disciplines because my local church communities try to keep the Eastern rite guidelines around food. It’s been important to do so gradually because I had to learn to cook first. During the ordinary times of the church year, I rely on easy-to-prepare staple foods that use roughly the same ingredients. Each fast paradoxically presents a new invitation to deepen my appreciation of food. The year I was most observant in the dietary rules was the year I decided to avoid eating out at restaurants during the Lenten period. Having to go to the grocery store regularly caused me to experiment with different combinations of new grains, various vegetables, and beans. Last year, I discovered that avocados have a similar texture to cheese in a lot of dishes. Who knew? Sarah’s higher protein needs have spurred me onward to exploring previously uncharted protein categories of lentils, shrimp, and crab. I haven’t arrived fully yet, but I do enjoy trying. In “fasting” for a season, I actually haven’t lost any foods that I love: I’ve grown in my love for diverse foods, eating a fuller array.

Taking on a certain discipline as a community has a way of bringing people together as a family. You will always have the person who think it’s impossible to eat any foods that follow the guidelines, the person scouring the labels to determine if a particular item has any “forbidden” ingredients, the family quietly inviting lost newcomers to come over for dinner, the person who reminds you that the guidelines emerged during a different place and time, people sick of eating peanut butter and/or lentils, and folks eagerly swapping recipes. Sometimes the same individual falls into multiple categories.

The communal nature of the fasting discipline creates a lot of space for conversations. Looking at my own experiences as a guide, the feast of the Lenten fast can be found in community. No matter what Christian tradition I’ve been a part of, people have made time to come together, pray, and eat during Lent. I find it amusing that churches have more meals together during “fasting” periods than they do in “ordinary” time. Care to pass the guacamole?

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Growing Together in Virtue

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Several readers have asked us questions about how we find benefit from being together in a partnership rather than living as celibate singles. We’re not ones to sound our own trumpets, and we know that we’re very much works in progress. Over the time we’ve been together, we’ve learned a lot about ourselves as individuals, each other, and us as a couple. We think being able to make a commitment to be there 100% whatever life throws our way does help us grow together and individually. By attempting to cultivate virtues in our vocation together, we’re able to be more present, open, and respectful. We hope that in time we continue to grow towards holiness. Today, because we’ve been asked specifically about growing together in virtue, we want to present some ways we’ve seen virtues manifesting in our lives together thus far in our partnership.

We give each other space to process difficult questions and life issues, but we’re also learning how to support each other effectively during these times. As we grow in our capacity to love one another and God, we experience moments of compassion that were not as present earlier in our relationship. We notice each other being able to extend empathy in new ways when one of us is faced with a challenging situation. When Lindsey suddenly lost a job in December 2013, we began managing a great deal of additional stress and uncertainty. Job loss is hard for any number of reasons: there’s a blow to a person’s confidence, financial stresses go without saying, a job seeker needs to put significant energy into the search even before getting the first email reply back, a family has new questions about what kinds of job searches are honestly in bounds, people ask for lots of support from extended family and friends, etc. It would be all too easy for Lindsey’s frustration to bubble up into anger and for Sarah’s full schedule to produce exasperation. However, being together has helped us stay the course. Sarah can help Lindsey decide when it’s best to put more letters out there and when it’s best to wait and see if a solid lead is going to produce a favorable outcome. Lindsey can help Sarah manage affairs of the house even amid completing job applications. We can remind one another that God is at work even when we seem lost. Sarah gives Lindsey a listening ear to process what is happening. Lindsey can always remember to greet Sarah with a hug. Together, we can offer one another a kind of emotional stability that makes trusting God easier. Sarah can read Lindsey and discern when advice would be welcome or when it’s best to practice compassion.

We have made a commitment to cultivate charitable speech toward one another, even when it doesn’t come naturally. That includes when one of us is having a bad day, when we’re arguing, and when we’re feeling impatient with each other. In all our friendships and other relationships, there are times when it seems easier and even more cathartic to express thoughts and feelings forcefully and indignantly. We think most people probably experience moments when it feels better to sound off like a bullhorn than to communicate difficult emotions with kindness, and we know this is true at times in our interactions with each other. Sarah often becomes irritated at Lindsey’s tendency to leave empty soda cans and bottles lying around the apartment, and it doesn’t help that Sarah considers Lindsey’s soda habit annoying in and of itself. Therefore, it takes little effort for Sarah to announce snarkily, “I’d like to see one evening when I can come home and not have to pick up a soda bottle in the living room!” In the same way, Lindsey finds it frustrating how frequently Sarah forgets that it’s her job to clean the cats’ litter box. It can be tempting for Lindsey to remark, “You can’t ever seem to be responsible with this.” It’s much more of a struggle for both of us to challenge ourselves toward kind, loving communication that addresses problems while also extending grace and empathy, but we make a daily commitment to doing so anyway. We don’t always get it right, but the more we practice saying, “I know you’ve had a busy day, but could you please take a few minutes to clean the litter box/tidy the living room?” the more natural it becomes for us to use charitable language in our relationship and also in our interactions with other human beings.

We encourage one another to say “yes” and “no” in healthy ways. Like many other people, we both oscillate between thinking that we can conquer the world and wanting never to get out of bed ever again. Learning how to say “yes” and “no” in healthy ways involves cultivating humility. When Lindsey lost a job, it was easy for Sarah to spring into action and look for extra work everywhere possible. Lindsey nudged Sarah to consider that the only real solution was both of us earning an income. We consistently urge each other to attend to our mental health, acknowledging whatever limits we may encounter. Like many couples, we have times where one of us is very excited about doing something when the other has serious misgivings. We have learned to balance when it’s time to compromise and when it’s time to advocate for our own needs. Frequently, extroverted Sarah wants to stay out far longer than introverted Lindsey can handle. We’ve learned to communicate about our different needs. Sometimes Sarah will take a moment to people-watch, sitting on a quiet bench to give Lindsey a few minutes to recharge. Other times, Lindsey will see that Sarah has a significant energy need that can only be met by getting around a lot of people. We have learned a lot about each other’s complexities that affect our preferences for social activities and activities together. Just as Lindsey needs to sit on a quiet bench to re-energize, Sarah also needs to sit calmly for a bit with her inhaler before venturing outside in cold weather to ward off any asthma attacks. In both circumstances, we need to be able to say and hear “yes” and “no,” and talk about disagreements that may arise. Learning to say “yes” and “no” in healthy ways has shown us quite a bit about cultivating patience.

We are learning to offer correction to each other lovingly. Caring about another person means helping him or her grow. Open and honest communication means acknowledging when you’ve said something hurtful. We’re quick to apologize when we have offended one another and try to observe a general rule of not going to bed when we are still in conflict. We choose to continue communicating in love even when we’re exhausted, frustrated, and overwhelmed. When Sarah gets overwhelmed, Sarah can be very terse and critical. Lindsey has learned how to highlight these communication patterns in a respectful way that enables Sarah to make appropriate changes. Since Lindsey is an engineer, Sarah knows to watch out for when Lindsey slips into “engineer mode,” trying to fix all the problems. Sarah is able to nudge Lindsey from a space of “fix-it” to a space of listening. We’ve learned when it’s best to encourage the other to sit down, stay still, and talk more openly about what is going on with us. Regularly practicing empathy for one another helps us grow in charity, a growth that affects the wide array of our relationships with others.

We encourage each other to enjoy life. Faith, hope, and charity are three often-named theological virtues. We’re both predisposed to taking life rather seriously. We have a lot of responsibilities on our plate. Lindsey knows Sarah is an extrovert and benefits from having fun around a lot of different people. Therefore, Lindsey is constantly on the lookout for different social activities to share with Sarah. Similarly, Sarah knows that Lindsey finds a great deal of enjoyment during special times at home. Lindsey enjoys the occasional excursion to one of our favorite nearby markets where we can find an interesting culinary experiment in the making. We’ve learned that enjoying life together produces hope, even when things look very dark.

In closing, we are not trying to present ourselves as models of sanctity and faithful living. We wanted to share some of the positive fruits we’ve seen in our relationship thus far, noting how these fruits help us live more fully into our first calling of putting on Christ and imaging Him to the rest of the world through our lives. We pray that God continues to help us grow closer to Him through the relationship we have with each other.

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.

Expectations of Perfection

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As LGBT Christians in our late 20s and early 30s, we’ve seen many differences in the way people are urged to develop healthy senses of sexuality. Throughout our own journeys in uniting faith and sexuality, we’ve observed time and time again the way many Christian traditions assert that if an LGBT person is sincerely a Christian, then he or she simply will not make any mistakes in the area of sexual morality. This line of thought might come from a belief that it’s adequate to tell a faithful, LGBT Christian to avoid every appearance of evil and give no further counsel.

Why might cisgender, heterosexual Christians expect LGBT Christians to be perfect? Perhaps these expectations come from cisgender, heterosexual Christians trying to get their heads around the idea that “Yes, it is possible to be a gay Christian.” People willing to extend a gay person the benefit of the doubt at times draw what seems to be a razor-thin line that differentiates the “good” gays from the “bad” gays. “Good” gays don’t have sex. When some conservative Christians draw these lines, anything less than perfect abstinence falls short and is understood as evidence that the Holy Spirit is not at work in the life of that gay “Christian.” Here, we see indications of a bit of neo-Pelagianism creeping into the forefront: a faithful gay Christian should be able to provide ample evidence of faithfulness because that person is capable of reigning in his/her sexual energies.

An unhealthy obsession with perfection enters because the LGBT person trying to live a faithful life in the Church zooms in on doing whatever it takes to prevent sexual sin, no matter how extreme. This kind of expectation puts insurmountable pressures on LGBT Christians and leads many of them down the road of questioning their commitment to Christ, their suitability to be in a church community, and their right to continue to draw air. LGBT Christians live on a spiritual fault line where one action has the potential to separate them from the Church. The expectation of perfection creates indescribable fear where they can become terrified to talk with their spiritual mentors, dreading interactions as one would dread a terrorist attack. LGBT Christians can develop practices of rehearsing their parts of the conversation when approaching spiritual direction, if they go at all.

To cope with this pressure, LGBT Christians can acquire a lexicon of various code-switching phrases to try to discuss sexuality safely… but may consistently feel under attack when a member of the clergy decides to read more into that choice of words than the person intended. For example, if the LGBT Christian is talking about concerns involving a close friend, some spiritual directors might assume the person has a sexually active relationship without ever asking if this is the case. Additionally, we’ve noticed that many spiritual directors are more comfortable with particular lexicons. These spiritual directors might encourage people to say they “experience same-sex attraction” rather than saying that they are “gay” or “lesbian,” sometimes going so far as to tell them, “Identifying as ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ is denouncing your identity in Christ!”

Expectations of perfection may also emerge because many providers of pastoral care tend to view sexual sin as a type of sin that is around forever and must always be carefully contained. Some of this attitude may stem from how Christian traditions emphasize purity and virginity, especially when encouraging youth to wait until marriage before having sex. Any sexual sin in an LGBT person’s life can lead to extreme consequences within his/her faith community. Once as a young college student, Sarah sought counsel from a priest about how to develop a healthy relationship with a woman after they had experimented with some above-the-waist touching. The priest provided a stern directive that Sarah should never speak to this woman ever again and avoid her in every situation possible because Sarah’s salvation was at risk. Within the same week, one of Sarah’s heterosexual male friends sought advice from the same priest after engaging in sexual intercourse with his girlfriend. Sarah’s friend later told Sarah that the priest’s counsel was simply, “Obey the Church’s teaching that sex is reserved for marriage, and avoid situations like this one with your girlfriend in the future.” When LGBT people have spiritual directors bellowing over them that failure to be perfect endangers their salvation, it should come as no surprise that LGBT Christians can become so focused on trying to be perfect that they begin to hate themselves for being human.

Cisgender, heterosexual people can (and should!) encounter a lot of grace in navigating questions around sexuality, gender identity, and gender expression. Most LGBT Christians are not so fortunate. Part of adolescence involves exploring, finding yourself, and figuring out how to get up when you fall down. No one expects a teenager to have instant control over the hormones raging through his or her body, and everyone can acknowledge the need for gracious support as young adults work to discover themselves in Christ. There’s a certain collection of behaviors that we tend to associate with people at different stages in sexual development. It’s good to match our words of advice with a healthy understanding of a particular person’s likely stage in sexual development. LGBT people need to be afforded the same courtesy as cisgender, heterosexual people. To expect LGBT Christians to prove their faithfulness over and over and over (and over….) again by remaining without sexual sin is to tie up heavy burdens on people without any willingness to lift a finger to help them manage the load.

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 “Gift” of Celibacy

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The gift of celibacy is mysterious, alluring, and evasive. Sometimes it seems very easy to speak of the “gift of celibacy” while at other times, we find ourselves struggling for words to describe what we’re experiencing. We’ve never had a great reveal in which God has shown us everything that celibacy is, could be, or will be for us. We certainly have never experienced a sense that we were called to live a celibate life from the instant we were born. In the best moments, we catch glimpses of the Kingdom of God within our celibate vocation. In the worst moments, celibacy can seem like a bit of a fool’s errand. Vocations are like that, with moments of up, down, and everything in between. We’ve caught glimpses here and there, which reassure us that God cares about guiding and directing our way as the Good Shepherd.

The gift of celibacy is a divine mystery. The gift of marriage is equally a divine mystery. We’ve both benefited from seeing celibacy lived out in a range of contexts, yet no context can be exactly the same as our context. As much as we can learn from our favorite monastic communities, we still need to find our way in our lives. At times, Lindsey has been lead to specific Scriptures like Luke’s account of the sending of the seventy to find a vision for a celibate way of life. We’ve reflected deeply on core values that we think reflect the essence of living celibate lives. But we are also deeply aware, sometimes painfully aware, that while many Christian traditions have resources to help people navigate practical concerns associated with the gift of marriage, there’s not much out there for people trying to cultivate the gift of celibacy.

We have shared before that we feel God has called us to a celibate vocation together. We’ve often felt resourced by God as we’ve pursued this path. We might even say that we feel like God has given us the gift of celibacy. However, being given the gift of celibacy doesn’t mean that it’s easy to pursue this pathway in life. Both of us have had to discern how exactly God is calling us to live. On one level, we know that “celibacy” is a part of how we’re supposed to live. On another level, that direction creates more questions than it can possibly answer. Why do we feel so strongly that we’re partners, that we’re a team, and that we’re family? Why does language that communicates our life together seem impossible to find? What do we do when we realize that we know people, close friends even, who are waiting in the wings to hear us pronounce that our journey into celibacy proved unworkable for us? How do we create space to say, loudly and clearly, that living a celibate vocation is not about avoiding sex? And all this says nothing about the day-to-day stressors associated with taking air as human beings.

Together, we have been exploring the gift of celibacy together for over a year. We have a sense that there are certain key virtues that lay at the heart of a celibate vocation. We have tried different experiments to cultivate virtues like hospitality, spiritual maturity, and humility together. Some experiments have proved more fruitful than others. One great way to cultivate humility is to learn when to call an experiment a failure or even counter-productive! We’re not perfect, and we do not pretend to be for an instant. Our friend Stacey recently shared that her pastor signed off on his emails with “Stumbling toward Christ with you,” and collective bumbling about seems to definitely describe our assorted experiments. We can’t tell you why eating dinner together every night has stuck while trying to pray particular daily office prayers together has continually bounced. We don’t know why we’ve found it easy to converse non-stop while driving in the car together but find it next to impossible to select a movie we both enjoy. We’re amused that we’ve managed to host overnight guests more easily than having tea with local friends. Life is funny sometimes.

In our time together, we have connected deeply with Christ. We have shared here that we experience an unmistakable presence of joy. There is something about how God has placed the two of us together that just seems to work in our lives. But, our life together would fail to reflect the fullness of Christ’s life if we did not find ourselves joining in with Christ’s pain. We have been profoundly impacted by the reality of the broken world around us. We have hit our limits in being able to bind up the wounds of the other, learning that frequently the only option we have is to listen to each other share our individual pain, cry together, and present that pain to Christ. We have watched close friends spiral into depression and isolation. We have tried to discern how best to pray, how best to be present, and how best to give counsel. We have experienced a sobering reality that people can sometimes take our words as the “answer” and wind up pursuing incredibly self-destructive paths. We’ve also experienced the pain of being misunderstood and misrepresented. We have had our story dismissed as meaningless, deceptive, destructive, and even dangerous. For every ounce of human encouragement that we’ve had to pursue this way of life together, we’ve had to navigate a pound of biting criticism. That can be incredibly difficult, especially when the criticism can rock us to our core. Yet, time and time again, as we enter that core, we find Christ willing to meet us again… and again… and again…

And perhaps that’s what the gift of celibacy is all about in the first place. The gift is given in such a way where Christ promises to be there in the absolute darkest moments, shining His divine light.

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

Choosing Celibacy: Why I’m Glad I Waited

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A reflection by Sarah

There’s a story that celibate gay people are supposed to tell with regard to how and why we became celibate. It’s little more than a variation on the ex-gay narrative that dominated the discussion about LGBT people in the Church until recent years. It goes something like: “I lived the gay lifestyle, was a slave to promiscuity, did a lot of drinking and drugging, and then years later, realized something was missing from my life: Jesus. I repented, began seeing a Christian counselor, and ultimately God helped me to stop having sex.” That’s not the story you’re about to read. That story, excepting the substance abuse bit (a topic I might address in the future), is not mine.

Lately, I’ve been seeing a certain type of popular article emerging on the Internet: different riffs on the theme, “Reasons I’m Glad I Married Young.” I have a number of friends who married immediately after high school graduation (some during high school) and many more who tied the knot during college or within a year of graduating. My younger sister met her future husband in college and married last June, just three weeks shy of her 23rd birthday. My parents were high school sweethearts and married two months after my father’s college graduation. I have no opposition to people embracing the vocation of marriage at early ages if they feel so inclined. I’m happy for my friends who have felt called to this pathway, and I wish them many joyous years of life with their spouses and children. But reading articles like this one and this one tends to evoke a consistent reaction in me: “I’m glad I waited until my late twenties to choose celibacy, and to begin a celibate partnership of the forever kind. I’m glad that I did not commit to this vocation at an earlier age.”

At this point, you might be perplexed. To many, celibacy seems like a default condition in life. It’s the temporary state that traditional Christianity teaches a person is supposed to maintain until marriage. It only becomes permanent once a person reaches his/her marriageable expiration date and becomes a bachelor or old maid, or less often, once a person embraces a call to religious life. Many view it as the state of life for those who are too young to have sex, those of age who are simply waiting for Mr. or Ms. Right, and those who don’t have a prayer of ever experiencing sexual activity in their lifetimes. And if you’re young, society tells you that you’re supposed to avoid the last category at all costs. If you’ve been reading any of our other posts, you’re probably well aware that Lindsey and I don’t see celibacy this way. We believe that celibacy is as much a commitment to a way of life as is marriage, and that in order to make such a commitment, either as a single or with a partner, one needs to be prepared.

I wasn’t born prepared for celibacy any more than my sister was born prepared for marriage. In fact, if someone had told me as a teenager that I would eventually end up living a celibate lifestyle, I would have thought that person was a few apples short of a bushel. Even by age 19 when I had begun to consider the possibility of a monastic vocation, celibacy was still more of a faraway possibility than a realistic pathway for working out my salvation. During my time as an undergraduate and, to a lesser extent, as a master’s degree student, I visited several monasteries and attended a number of retreats aimed at vocational discernment. There was something about the way nuns loved and gave selflessly to the world that captivated me. The witness of several sisters I had known personally spoke to my heart in a way nothing ever had before. But I never could conceive of myself actually becoming a nun.

In many ways, I desired what the sisters had, but every time I visited a community and started to head home afterward I thought, “This way of life isn’t for me. There’s something about it that just doesn’t fit.” I attempted to discuss this with friends, spiritual directors, and other people I trusted. Everyone seemed to have the same set of questions: “Is it the celibacy thing? The fact that nuns can’t have sex? You can’t see yourself living a life without sex, can you?” Though I knew all along that it wasn’t the “not having sex” part that was bothering me, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what the problem was. The way the sisters cared for each other and the people they served, the spiritual life they shared in community, the generosity that was so apparent in every moment of every day at the monasteries…though I’d had a couple of less-than-pleasant monastery visits, in general I could think only of the positives. Still, it was all too easy to reach the premature conclusion that if I didn’t feel called to join a religious community, God wasn’t calling me to a celibate vocation after all.

In the midst of all my monastery adventures, I was also engaged in another type of exploration. Though I can now remember being attracted to other females from as early as age 8 or 9, the idea that I might be “one of those girls who likes other girls” hit me hard for the first time around age 17 when I was a senior in high school and was dating a boy. It took me a few years more to realize that “lesbian” was the most fitting term for describing my sexual orientation, and slowly I began dating other women. My first sexual experience with another woman came during my senior year of college. The relationship I had with this person was significant on many levels, and I’ll always value the ways in which our emotional intimacy helped me to learn about loving and being loved. Throughout most of my twenties, I pursued a number of romantic relationships, many of them having a sexual element. Some were more serious than others, and some included aspects that I am not proud of, but I can say with confidence that each of these women had something to teach me with regard to becoming more fully human and coming to understand Christ’s love with greater intensity. I struggled a great deal with the conflict between my positive experiences of love shared with other women and my perception of the celibacy mandate I heard constantly from clergy and lay members of the Church. While I am now grateful for the celibate vocation I eventually committed to cultivating in partnership with Lindsey, I am also thankful for many aspects of the intimate relationships I experienced before making this commitment. Those two feelings are not mutually exclusive.

All things considered, why am I glad that I waited to choose celibacy? The answer is simple: because when I did choose this way of life, I was ready to embrace it fully—its beauty, its mystery, and its challenges. Taking the time I needed to mature and prepare for this vocation was absolutely necessary–even though during the process, I wasn’t always aware of that for which I was preparing.

When Lindsey and I first decided to become partners, all the missing pieces from my active vocational discernment period began falling into place. The notion that celibacy might be the way God was calling me to live reemerged, and this time it made sense in a way it never had before. It no longer felt like a distant possibility or an order handed down from a tyrant. The very first hour we began to envision what life together might look like, I remembered wise words I had heard from a nun during a monastery visit eight years prior. I had asked Sister Elizabeth, “When did you know for sure that God was calling you to this vocation, and in this specific monastic community?” I’ve never forgotten her reply: “I knew when I visited the monastery and felt an unmistakable sense of joy.” From day one of my partnership with Lindsey, there has been no expression more fitting than “joy” for what we experience together—whether we are taking an exciting road trip, praying Compline, visiting our favorite cupcakery, wringing out laundry due to the washing machine’s malfunctioning mid-cycle, or arguing because of a misunderstanding. But even as powerfully as I feel that joy now, I am equally convinced that if I had attempted forcing myself into celibacy within the wrong context for me or at a time when I was not prepared, profound depression and emptiness would have been the most likely result.

I am glad I waited to choose celibacy because I believe it is a gift—or at least it can be. Waiting allowed me the opportunity to listen as God gradually, in His own time, invited me to discover it and begin unwrapping the layers. Waiting also gave me several years to reflect and reach the conclusion that celibacy is not simply the default state for the unmarried—that it is a way of life one must actively choose, and defining it as “the absence of sex” limits the meaning of all celibate vocations. All too often, Christians encourage celibate LGBT people to forget the experiences of their non-celibate pasts, viewing these as times of sin to be regretted and pushed aside. I believe this approach is unhealthy and detrimental to the development of a mature spirituality. Because I waited to choose celibacy, I am able to look fondly upon all previous stages of my emotional, spiritual, and sexual development and know that each period of my life thus far has brought with it new wisdom, insight, and lessons taught by others far wiser than me.

The decision to embrace any vocation is just that—a decision, and one that requires careful thought and formation within the context of a supportive community. Sometimes, I wonder what might happen if the Church were to take as much responsibility for guiding and directing those God calls to celibacy as it does for those God calls to marriage. But perhaps that’s a question for another time.

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.