Any South African gay Christians on Tumblr?
So why are you now challenging God by burdening the Gentile believers with a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors were able to bear?
—Passage from Acts 15, New Living Translation
(Source: closerthanwethinktohome)
“As someone who is innately attracted to people of my own gender—regardless of my faith convictions and the behavioral decisions I make—the words sting like daggers. Worley suggests I belong in a concentration camp. Harris jokes that my father should have punched me when I played with dolls. (My father was much too wise, loving, and compassionate to do such a thing.) Rabon implies some kind of similarity between my attractions and bestiality.”
Three Lessons from Coming Out 2.0
The last several months have been a roller coaster, and, although there is still a long way to go, particularly with my family, I’m grateful that I’ve found some equilibrium in the last month or so. In reflecting on what these months have brought, I’ve started using the phrase “Coming Out 2.0.” My story (which you can read here) has been freely available for anyone to read for about a year, and I’ve been open with talking about my sexuality with friends and family for much longer. In one sense, I had already come out of the closet a long time ago, but that coming out was tempered by my tenuous hold on the traditional Christian position, that is, that gay Christians are called and empowered by God to live faithfully as celibate individuals in the church family.
My hold on that position slipped away several months ago. Initially I did not want to acknowledge that this had happened, but eventually I accepted that I now hold a (still tenuous) position on being gay which I prefer to call an “affirming” position. In other words, I believe gay Christians are permitted, affirmed, and blessed by God to live faithfully in a monogamous, lifelong relationship with another person of the same sex. When I first realized that I had arrived at this position, I thought I would keep it under wraps - in the closet, you could say. But, as many of us know, closets are life-sucking. So, I decided to begin “Coming Out 2.0,” sharing with my friends and family that I now hold an affirming position. Among the many things that could be written (and which I will write in the future), I want to share three lessons I’ve learned from Coming Out 2.0 in the last few months.
Coming Out 2.0 Involves a Lot of Explaining
Since I had already come out and dealt with the questions and concerns of friends and family, I expected the declaration of my affirming stance to elicit somewhat muted responses. I was wrong. I forgot that very, very few people around me have had to deal with the persistent questions and ambiguities of being gay and Christian. They heard my story once, probably wrestled with what the Bible says about being gay a little bit, and then continued on their way. After all, I held a traditional position which didn’t appear to threaten anyone’s current way of thinking. Those to whom I came out had little reason to wrestle with the theological and experiential doubts that I wrestle with daily. So when I came out with my affirming position, most people were surprised - even shocked. Although they had heard my story before, I had to tell it all over again, but in a different way. I had to draw attention to the questions and doubts which I had regrettably skipped over in past story-tellings. Coming Out 2.0 involves a lot of explaining, and I found the experience to be very mentally exhausting.
Coming Out 2.0 Feels Very Isolating
I may have been in a unique situation, since my only communities at this time in my life were my conservative church and my conservative seminary. But I think that for most gay Christians who go through Coming Out 2.0, isolation is a common feeling. In my case, it’s not that my friends or family abandon me. No, the sense of isolation is more subtle. Friends don’t leave, but there is a such large disagreement in the relationship that you feel internally distanced. No matter how many people say that they are there for you (though they disagree), for the most part the experience of coming out with an affirming view feels very isolating. My Christian communities had always been very accommodating of the “otherness” of me being gay. But with my affirming position I had introduced an “otherness” that wasn’t welcomed.
Coming Out 2.0 Demands Radical Trust in God
I never realized how selfish and self-reliant I was until I went through Coming Out 2.0. My security and identity had been too closely tied to my own ability to control my life and to sustain amiable relationships around me. Coming out as an affirming gay Christian challenged all of that. Through this season, I’ve learned how dependent upon God I truly am. Apart from the grace of God expressed through key situations, conversations, and events, I don’t know how I could have emotionally held everything together. Coming out with my affirming position has driven me to prayer and the devotional study of Scripture more than almost any experience in my life. I’ve faced the reality that I desperately need reminding of who Jesus is and what he has done for me. I desperately need the Spirit of God to give me wisdom and strength for every moment of every day. Coming out as an affirming Christian demands radical trust in God. Radical trust - while it sounds sexy in Christian books and blogs - is actually pretty terrifying. Throwing your entire person in dependence upon Jesus Christ without any assurance of what he will do is a scary, scary thing. But I’ve learned a little bit through the process, and that is that Jesus is good and trustworthy. I can trust him always.
So much of my future remains unclear, but one thing God has been daily reminding me is that he is both good and in control. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is the ultimate evidence for this. No obstacle or opposition is too big for me to face - not because in myself I am invincible but because I have God’s Spirit with me. He will never leave me to my own efforts and he will never abandon me to my worst critics. In the end, Jesus wins, and because of that, I have hope that things will get better. My life may not play out the way I had planned, but that’s okay. It’s not my story anyway - it’s Jesus’ story, and I’m just grateful to play a part. Coming Out 2.0 is just one chapter. Though it was difficult, it was necessary before entering the next chapter. I can’t wait to see what God has in store.
‘I have never met a more loving community in my life than the GLBT community. Obviously there are exceptions in any community, but in general I’ve found that GLBT people don’t care if you’re skinny, hairy, fat, pimpled, a millionaire or dead broke; there is room for everyone. All they want is to give the same love to others as they want to receive themselves. When I first immersed myself I was completely taken aback by the way I was treated. I was welcomed and included in everything, like I had belonged my entire life. I continued to experience this over and over, and the more it happened to me, especially at the beginning of my immersion, the more upset I became. Their actions were supposed to be me - I was getting out-Jesused by gays and lesbians! They put a bullet in my soul. To be honest, that was the furthest thing from what I thought would happen. I expected the exact opposite.’
- Andrew Marin, Love is an Orientation, p.166.
Advent Calendar - Rowan Williams
He will come like last leaf’s fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould,
the soft shroud’s folding.
He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
opens on mist, to find itself
arrested in the net
of alien, sword-set beauty.
He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
and penny-masks its eye to yield
the star-snowed fields of sky.
He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.
(via furnaceofdoubt)
para phusin / contra naturam?
Judge for yourselves; is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered? Does not nature[φύσις] itself teach you that for a man to wear long hair is degrading to him, but if a woman has long hair, it is her pride? For her hair is given to her for a covering. (1 Corinthians 11:13-15)
ἐν ὑμῖν αὐτοῖς κρίνατε: πρέπον ἐστὶν γυναῖκα ἀκατακάλυπτον τῷ θεῷ προσεύχεσθαι; οὐδὲ ἡ φύσις αὐτὴ διδάσκει ὑμᾶς ὅτι ἀνὴρ μὲν ἐὰν κομᾷ, ἀτιμία αὐτῷ ἐστίν, γυνὴ δὲ ἐὰν κομᾷ, δόξα αὐτῇ ἐστίν; ὅτι ἡ κόμη ἀντὶ περιβολαίου δέδοται αὐτῇ.
“A significant point, underemphasized in Roman Homosexuality as in many other studies of Greek and Roman sexuality, is that (unless I have missed something) nowhere in the texts surviving from classical antiquity do we find a universal, unconditional condemnation of same-sex desire among males as such. The desire of some men to be penetrated is ridiculed, scrutinized, problematized, written off as perverse or unnatural, and the most austere voices within the philosophical tradition (such as those of Plato in the Laws or of Musonius Rufus) condemn as “against nature” the act of penetrating a male, on grounds ranging from the conviction that it treats him like a female to the belief that animals do not do it. But none of these philosophical texts condemns, questions the naturalness of, or otherwise challenges the normality or even normativity of males’ desire to penetrate other males; a fortiori, then, the phenomenon of male desire for male is not being scrutinized.”
- Craig Williams, Roman Homosexuality (2010) p. 263 [2nd Edition].
The book [Roman Homosexuality] aims to sweep away the remnants of a previously widespread view of Rome as bastion of an aggressively macho heterosexuality in opposition to Greece with its prominent tradition of pederasty. In C. S. Lewis’s popular philosophical reflections on The Four Loves we find an especially trenchant formulation of this strong misreading of Roman culture.
“This is not to say that Friendship and abnormal Eros have never been
combined. Certain cultures at certain periods seem to have tended
to the contamination. In war-like societies it was, I think, especially
likely to creep into the relation between the mature Brave and his
young armour-bearer or squire. The absence of the women while you
were there on the warpath had no doubt something to do with it. In
deciding, if we think we need or can decide, where it crept in and
where it did not, we must surely be guided by the evidence (when
there is any) and not by an a priori theory. Kisses, tears and embraces
are not in themselves evidence of homosexuality. The implications
would be, if nothing else, too comic. Hrothgar embracing Beowulf,
Johnson embracing Boswell (a pretty flagrantly heterosexual couple)
and all those hairy old toughs of centurions in Tacitus, clinging to one
another and begging for last kisses when the legion was broken up …
all pansies? If you can believe that you can believe anything. (p. 75)”
Apart from their open homophobia (“abnormal”; “contamination”; “creep in”; “if nothing else, too comic”; and of course the climactic “pansies”) and offhand masculinization of the reader (“while you were there on the warpath”), these are jarring words in a text that lauds charity as the greatest of all loves, written by one who preaches a religion that asks its adherents to believe a number of remarkable things. Equally striking are the elision of Greece (“certain cultures at certain periods”) and the explicit invocation of Rome along with Lewis’s own England as paradigms for a staunchly heterosexual manliness. Although these words were written in the 1950s, the assumptions underlying them were shared by many throughout most of the twentieth century (how far back this view of Rome can be traced would be the subject of another study).
- Craig Williams, Roman Homosexuality (2010) pp. 253-4 [2nd Edition]
LBGTQ* Appreciation Post
Vintage Gay Men & Vintage Male Friendships
Odd Man Out: Changing Beliefs
One of the things I adore about my mother is the way she adamantly refuses to let Santa die. Now that we have a third generation of children in my family, it makes sense to perpetuate stories about a jolly, round man who brings presents through our chimney, but there was a long period before the…
“By the end of the novel, Sebastian and Cordelia are also living stunted and sad lives. But, as happens so often in the fiction of Evelyn Waugh, a throwaway phrase contains the core of the novel’s meaning: “happiness doesn’t seem to have much to do with it.” For Waugh, the notion that the life of faith ought to lead inevitably to worldly prosperity and what the pop psychologists call “wellness” is both unrealistic and dangerous. In a fallen world, afflicted by evil and stupidity, happiness can never be a gauge of fidelity to God. To think otherwise is to confuse happiness, with its bourgeois connotations of comfort and freedom from any burdens, with blessedness, or what Catholics call the “state of grace”. Catholics, Waugh believed, have always clung to the foot of the cross, profoundly and intuitively aware of what the Spanish philosopher Unamuno called “the tragic sense of life”.”Gregory Wolfe, qtd. here
