Grace & Peace!
Michelle, I admire your convictions and wish you only good things in your continued walk with Our Lord. However, as a Christian who also happens to be gay, I think your 4 conclusions are anything but conclusive. I hope you’ll welcome this discussion of them. And I hope you’ll also enter into the discussion knowing that I’m not trying to change your mind, only offering a different perspective. I respect your position, though I clearly disagree with it. Here’s why:
- God calls EVERYONE to celibacy. For some that will be a lifelong celibacy; for others, it will be until they find their husband or wife and get married. For some married folks, they might have to re-enter a time of celibacy due to illness or other issues. Someone is obviously called to lifelong celibacy if they are called to the religious life, but also if they do not ever get married, for whatever reason. “Inclination” has very little to do with the calling, any more than “inclination” has anything to do with whether you should hit your neighbor over the head.
I think you’ll find that not even the Roman catechism agrees here. The universal call is to chastity, not celibacy. There is a difference, and while subtle, it’s significant. Celibacy describes a habit of behavior. Chastity is a disposition of the will. You can be celibate and yet sin against chastity. You can be chaste, but not celibate (as most married couples are). Moreover, celibacy is not a degree of chastity, but just a possible manifestation of the commitment to chastity, and one that is not necessarily good for all men at all times.
The Roman catechism understands chastity to be reflective, in part, of the complete integration of a person’s sexuality. It understands it in this way because it sees sexuality as key to an individual’s capacity for healthy and good human relationships. Being chaste is a way of describing a way of being in the right and appropriate loving relationship with everyone around us.
To insist on celibacy over chastity appears to prejudice a forensic view of sanctification–if we behave properly, we will change. That may be true in some circumstances and in some traditions (Confucianism seems to advocate this way), but it doesn’t leave much room for grace as understood in Christianity.
There are enough difficulties with trying to make the catechism’s view of homosexuality as a disorder jive with it’s understanding of chastity (i.e., if homosexuality represents an objectively disordered sexuality, can it be said that chastity in the sense of right relationship is even possible for a homosexual if their relational capacity is fundamentally broken?), that prejudicing celibacy over chastity serves to exacerbate an idea of Christianity that is less about life-giving grace and more about appearances of virtue, or appearing to follow the letter of the law.
- Having same-sex attraction is a cross. Jesus was pretty clear about taking up your cross and following Him. Didn’t say anything at all about how you feel about it, whether it’s fair, or if you’d rather of had cancer or alcoholism as your cross.
Perhaps, but not necessarily in the way you suggest. Christ’s saying that we must take up our cross occurs within the context of his announcement that he will suffer at the hands of the religious and social powers that be. He states to his disciples that he will be an outcast, and, moreover, that he is casting his lot with the outcasts of the world by consenting to suffer the death of an outcast. He is saying that he will occupy the space of the scapegoat, and it will be revealed that he will make that particular spiritual (and social) desert into a place running with living water. And he tells his disciples that this is their role, too: to identify with the outcast, like he does. To take up the cross. To follow him.
In this sense, taking up the cross describes not an accident of nature or nurture which we would like to indulge but shouldn’t–it describes where we are called to position ourselves in relation to the powers (of the world) that be: the outside, the marginal, the exile, the criminal, the light in the darkness against which the darkness rages. When Jesus tells the healed Gerasene demoniac that he must return to his people and cannot come with him, Jesus is saying to him, “take up the cross–go into the place of exile that your world has made for you, and show them that I have made that place a place of healing. Show them that exile, now, has no meaning. Show them that they can no longer use your misfortune as a way of understanding themselves as fortune, your insanity as a way of being sane, and that if they wish to use you as a scapegoat and outcast once again, that they will find me, the Lord of Life, already occupying that position and making it fruitful.”
In this alternative understanding, homosexuality is not a cross to bear. But attitudes toward homosexuals could represent a cross that a homosexual must bear–
and we, as Christians, are called to bear it with them.
[CONTINUED…]
