From Tension to Flexibility

Over the years, my religious order has been using a certain framework for personal reflection that encourages us to take a deeper look at each of three different dimensions of our lives: the human, Christian, and my religious Order's spirituality. As a religious, I’ve always found that, when trying to reflect on my life in terms of these three perspectives, it is difficult to find the separation between them, because they all tend to blur into each other. This is also true of another particular dimension, one that I think has been an especially key aspect of my life throughout my life as a religious, which is the dimension of sexuality, or, more specifically in my case, homosexuality. This is a dimension that probably best fits under the human category, but as a gay Catholic, and as a gay religious, it clearly overflows into the Christian and my religious order's spirituality dimensions as well.

For me a central question, throughout my journey, has been: What does it mean to be a gay religious in a church that oftentimes comes across as being very unsupportive? A large part of my journey as a Christian and a religious has involved navigating the tension between this unsupportiveness and the fact that it was only through the ministry of the church herself that I was able to come to terms with my sexuality, and to embrace my sexuality as an important part of myself and a gift from God. I’m pretty sure that without the help of my religious order, who have been a very concrete manifestation of the body of Christ, i.e., the church, in my own life, it would have been very unlikely that I would ever have had the courage to own up to the realities of sexuality as I experience it. I even shudder to think of the decisions that I very well might have made if my Order had not come to be a part of my life. It is highly likely that I would be the unhappy father of an unhealthy family, and quite miserably married at this time, if it had not been for the loving acceptance and sense of understanding that I found in my religious community.

So, you can probably imagine how I’ve had to wrestle with this discrepancy between what the church has to say about sexuality as I experience it, and with what the church, the body of Christ at work in the world today, has actually done in my own life regarding this issue. At some point in my journey, I came to recognize that the church is something much greater than her individual ideas or whatever particular schools of thought are in vogue at any given time. At some point, I learned to appreciate that my religious vocation is fundamentally a call to work at the margins, which, as a gay Catholic, is exactly where I found myself. It is for these reasons, and most importantly because the mission of the church is ultimately rooted in a Gospel of love, above and beyond anything else, that the church was able to embrace me, as I am, in spite of any discrepancies that might arise between who I am and who some church members may think I should be.

This tension has been a constant rub for me throughout my years as a religious. Though at times it has been a great source of frustration, somewhere along the way I began to see it rather like a piece of sandpaper, whose constant scraping has actually been slowly polishing me and refining me, so as to make me a better brother to all of the world. It has helped me to understand that, though we religious are ever focusing on “the ideal,” the real substance of our lives together lies not in the ideal, but in the real every day situations where we live, and where things are rarely, if ever, ideal. Not that we should, for that reason, ignore our ideals, since these give us very important goals to work towards. But at some point, we need to have the humility to admit that we will never completely reach those goals, and that our life together as brothers will never perfectly manifest our ideals. Our task, then, becomes to love ourselves, our sisters and brothers whom we live and work with, our church, and the world at large, exactly as they are in the present moment, with all their stains, sins, homophobia, and prejudices of whatever kind.

This practice of having to hold the tension between the real and the ideal, which for me originally began with the tension of being gay in a church that, in spite of its rhetoric, is not always able to appreciate its own diversity, ultimately has proven to be a sort of ascetical practice that has helped me to become more patient, flexible, and understanding with others, as well as myself.

Peace and All Good,
Brother Sun and Sister Moon
Personal Reflection:

How do you live with the tension of being both gay and Christian? Parents of LGBT children how do you live with the tension? Feel free to share your story with us in the comment section below.