Grace & Peace!
But remember that while someone may be doing something while being unaware that the thing they are doing is abominable and by being so told immediately realise or stop doing it, to tell someone that they are acting abominably when what it is they are doing is, to them, innate to their own being and sense of self then you will be striking deep and hard at their own self-identity. As such, most people will instinctively defend themselves against such an attack. What is required in such a situation is profoundly charitable language.
Not only that, but there are plenty of people who are same-sex attracted but who do not or will not engage in homosexual sexual activity who are often quite casually–but very regularly–lumped into the “abomination” category (partly because the abomination rhetoric is decidedly un-nuanced). As a result, these folks can often begin to understand their attractions as abominable since something about what they are or how they desire must be the abomination of which they’re being accused (otherwise, why would they be accused of it?). The result is that they become unable to distinguish between something that is disordered and something that is an abomination. Not being able to make this distinction, these people may get the impression that virtue is impossible for them or that otherwise well-meaning religious folks believe that virtue is impossible for them. The end is either shame and despair on the one hand or a souring towards religion on the other, neither of which are helpful, edifying, necessary or salutary.
When I first understood that I was attracted to other guys, I did not correlate that attraction to any particular desire for anything that I or anyone else would have understood to be an un-natural sex act. By their very definition, un-natural acts are not intuitive to anyone–it does not naturally occur to anyone that they should try them out. My attraction was of course physical and contained within it a desire for physical intimacy, but what I imagined that intimacy to be certainly did not look like sodomy. It had more to do with an intimacy of mutual
presence–of seeing and being seen completely. I can begin to articulate these things now, but then it would have been impossible to make even this beginning.
I mention all of this because the rhetoric of abomination to which I was subsequently exposed produced some rather unsavory fruits: 1) I came to understand myself as wicked in such a way that it was impossible for me to actually be virtuous–virtue was only ever something I could play at, never something I could actually attain, but it was nonetheless still incumbent upon me to try to attain it; 2) I came to understand the intimacy I desired as evil and subsequently came to fear and avoid all physical contact with others (even now, I’m incredibly conscious of when I touch others or others touch me in any social context); 3) I learned to identify my attraction to male beauty as little more than a desire for a repertoire of sexual acts of which I had hitherto been unaware–hitherto unaware, indeed, that such acts were even capable of being desired, let alone imagined.
I’ve since come to reject these fruits as poisonous, but coming to that rejection it took some time and was not without struggle, mishaps and mistakes. Indeed, I was only able to start a process of healing once I had done the following, by God’s good grace: A) I began to be honest with myself about what and how I actually desired as opposed to simply believing as true what others assumed about my attractions and desires, however well-meaning those others may be or have been; B) I began to explore alternatives to a rhetoric of abomination and shame–i.e., I played “What if…”: What if my attractions are not actually wicked? What if they can actually be productive of something good? If I assume that they can, indeed, be productive of some good, in what ways would I be enabled, empowered and responsible to live in order to foster that good? This new life I’m beginning to imagine…does it look more authentically human than the life of self-hatred and shame I’m currently living?
All of which is to say the following (and I suppose in response, too, to Coptic’s bolded question above): if you want people to change their lives, then you will need to imagine
with them the new life you would like them to live, and you will need to imagine it with them in such a way that it is instantly recognizable and desirable as something imminently and authentically good, true and beautiful–i.e., that it is better in real and discernibly present ways than what they have now. This requires, in part, being able to see them as
already being the sort of wonderful people you want them to be as opposed to assuming that they are the horrible folks you suspect them to be. I’m not sure if the rhetoric of abomination can do all that.
Under the Mercy,
Mark
All is Grace and Mercy! Deo Gratias!
