Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality (10 page)

But with this option, perhaps even more so than with the first, it seems that the lack of the sort of relationship Hannah Coulter describes—a relationship of mutual desire—is even more searing. I once read the testimony of a homosexual Christian who found the celibacy option unbearable and, I think, eventually rejected it for a same-sex partnership of some kind. His words aptly express this keen sense of lack:

I do not want to live life on my own.…Much of my struggle comes from the thought that my lack of someone to love and be loved by must be lifelong. Even though God gave me some very close and supportive friendships, as indeed he has in the past, those relationships would inevitably end. People would get married, or move house, or move back to their home country on the other side of the world—and I would be alone again.
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A friend of mine was at a Bible study not long ago where a pastor confessed similar longings:

I used to be married to a woman, but after ten years our marriage fell apart as I realized I was gay and that that wasn’t going to change. I was pastoring at that time. Today I’m still pastoring, except now at a gay and lesbian congregation, because I’ve always felt called by God to serve in that capacity.

Like many of you I’m hoping to find someone I can share my life with. But it’s hard and it’s lonely. I know you can relate. I come home after work as late as I can into the evening, and then I stay up watching TV until eleven, twelve o’clock at night. You guys know what I’m talking about, right? I sit there in front of the television because I hate having to face an empty bed. I stay up and stay up until I’m so tired I know I’ll be out as soon as my head hits the pillow. That way I won’t have to lie there, awake and alone.

Sometimes I ask God about it. I say, “Lord, all my life I’ve served you. I’ve always pastored as you’ve called me to do. I got married because I was trying to do the right thing. I stayed with my wife for ten years, even though it felt like I was having sex with my sister. It felt so unnatural. And now after the divorce I’m still serving you in the ministry, and yet I have to come home every night to an empty apartment. Why, Lord? Haven’t I tried to do what was right? Haven’t I always sought to please you? After everything I’ve tried to do for you, why am I left
with this loneliness, with nothing but an empty bed to come back to?”
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As I write this chapter, I am still single and celibate. I have never experienced—and have no way of knowing if I ever will—an intimate relationship with a woman whom I desire and who desires me. How many of those in my situation feel lost and adrift in the world, as I do so much of the time, without someone, a lifelong partner, who
wants
them, who longs and yearns for them?

At a time in my life when I was feeling especially lonely, I wrote the following email to a friend:

The love of God is better than any human love. Yes, that’s true, but that doesn’t change the fact that I feel—in the deepest parts of who I am—that I am wired for human love. I want to be married. And the longing isn’t mainly for sex (since sex with a woman seems impossible at this point); it is mainly for the day-to-day, small kind of intimacy where you wake up next to a person you’ve pledged your life to, and then you brush your teeth together, you read a book in the same room without necessarily talking to each other, you share each other’s small joys and heartaches. Do you know what I mean? One of my married friends told me she delights to wake up in the night and feel her husband’s foot just a few inches from hers in their bed. It is the loss of that small kind of intimacy in my life that feels devastating. And, of course, this “small intimacy” is precious because it represents the “bigger intimacy” of the covenantal union of two lives. It is hard for me to think about living without this. Yes, I have dear friends—several who are so precious to me I truly do believe I would give my life for them. One of my closest is another single guy,
about my age. But I know that things will change. He will move away or get married, and the kind of relationship we have will change. We will still be friends, hopefully, but it will not be like a marriage. And don’t you think we’re wired (Genesis 2!) to want the kind of companionship that can only come through marriage?

The homosexual Christian who chooses celibacy continually, to one degree or another, it seems to me, finds himself or herself longing for something relationally that remains tragically, tantalizingly just out of reach.

According to Rowan Williams,
God
desires us. “Grace, for the Christian believer,” he writes, “is a transformation that depends in large part on knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as significant, as wanted.”

The whole story of creation, incarnation and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ’s body tells us that God desires us.…We are created so that we may be caught up in [the self-giving love of the Trinity]; so that we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God.

The life of the Christian community has…the task of teaching us this: so ordering our relations that human beings may see themselves as desired, as the occasion of joy.
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This is why, says Williams, sexual imagery occurs so often in the Bible as a kind of pointer to the transcendent reality of divine affection. Sexual desire—the flame of mutual longing between lovers—is a taste or analogy of what it must mean for God himself to yearn for a relationship with us.

I often wonder if coming to understand and believe that God does, indeed, desire us and that we are invited to return his desire might be the “remedy,” in some ultimate sense, for the loneliness and craving for love that I and other homosexual Christians experience on a regular basis. Leafing through the Bible, I find dozens of indications that God loves his people in precisely the way that Williams describes, and I ask myself: Could this be the end of my quest?

In the middle of a judgment oracle against the tribe of Ephraim, for example, God suddenly interjects: “Is Ephraim my dear son? Is he my darling child? For as often as I speak against him, I do remember him still. Therefore my heart yearns for him; I will surely have mercy on him, declares the Lord” (Jeremiah 31:20). Elsewhere God cries out: “How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel?…My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my burning anger” (Hosea 11:8—9).

Through the Old Testament prophets, God portrays his love for Israel with the imagery of desire. “When I passed by you again and saw you,” Ezekiel records God saying to Israel, “behold, you were at the age for love, and I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your nakedness; I made a vow to you and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Lord God, and you became mine” (16:8). The Lord “will rejoice over you with gladness,” Zephaniah assures God’s covenant people; “he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing” (3:17).

The New Testament, too, depicts God’s longing for his people—now clearly including Gentiles in addition to errant Israel. Jesus pictured God as a father scanning the horizon for
even the faintest clue as to the whereabouts of his runaway son. “While [the son] was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). Paul, meditating on such an extravagant display of grace, exclaimed:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world.…In love he predestined us for adoption…the riches of his grace…he lavished upon us.

Ephesians 1:3-4, 5, 7, 8

When the earliest Christians spoke of their experience of God’s love, they described it as just that—an experience, with a profoundly emotional quality. “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit,” wrote Paul (Romans 5:5). “You have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (8:15—16). “Though you have not seen him,” another early Christian wrote to fellow believers, “you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory” (1 Peter 1:8).

In some profound sense, this love of God—expressed in his yearning and blessing and experienced in our hearts—must spell the end of longing and loneliness for the homosexual Christian. If there is a “remedy” for loneliness, surely this must be it. In the solitude of our celibacy, God’s
desiring
us, God’s wanting
us,
is enough. The love of God is more valuable than any human relationship.

And yet we ache. The desire of God is sufficient to heal the ache, but still we pine, and wonder.

When I was in college, I had lunch with a wonderfully eccentric history professor who dressed like Indiana Jones, leather jacket and all. Prior to his current profession, he had been a pastoral counselor and had talked with his fair share of gay and lesbian people. In the college dining commons, I described for him the case study of a counseling session I had just read. It was about a Christian woman who had wrestled with lesbian desires for most of her life and had finally sought help. The counselor whom she talked with had written about his experience of trying to help, and I had found in his write-up an especially clear statement of God’s desire and yearning affection. Rather than looking to other women to satisfy your craving for affection, the counselor had told the woman, you should redirect your gaze to Jesus, whose love is better than any other. Allow Christ to fill the void. Don’t try to alter your basic desire for love (an impossible task), he had said, but just change the object of your longing. Shift your affection from women to Christ.

“What do you think of this advice?” I asked the professor. His answer surprised me.

“It sounds too spiritual,” the professor said bluntly, between bites of tuna melt. “It seems as if the counselor told the woman to replace ‘lesbian love’ with ‘Jesus love.’ But doesn’t that downplay the differences between these two loves?”

I nodded interestedly, and he continued: “In her desire for other women, the counselee wanted human relationship. She wanted to know and touch and see and be involved with another human person, whose facial expressions she could read and whose embrace she could rest in. But the counselor suggested she look
to Jesus, who
is
human, yes, but who relates to other humans through his Spirit now that he no longer walks the earth. The lesbian woman could not touch Jesus. She could not look into his eyes and see his face. Nor would it be appropriate, if she could see him, for her to gaze into his eyes in that way.”

“So what
should she
have done?” I wondered out loud. “Where
should she
have looked for the affection she wanted?”

“I think we need a more robust understanding of how necessary human community is,” the professor mused in response. “It’s no use trying to be more spiritual than God, you know! God is the one who created humans to want and need relationships, to crave human companionship, to want to be desired by other humans. God doesn’t want anyone to try to redirect their desire for community to himself. God is spirit. Instead, I think God wants people to experience his love through their experience of human community—specifically, the church. God created us physical-spiritual beings with deep longings for intimacy with other physical-spiritual beings. We’re not meant to replace these longings with anything. We’re meant to sanctify them.”

“So what would you have said to this woman?” I asked.

“Well,” he paused. “I might have said something like this if I were counseling her: ‘The problem with your lesbian desires is not that you’re desperately craving human love (though we must not overlook even here the deceptive possibility of idolatry). The problem is that your good desire for human love is bent, broken—like all human desires to one degree or another. You need to be re-socialized into the human community of the church. Your desire for sexual relationships with other women needs to be transformed, so that nonsexual relationships with men and
women in the body of Christ in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit become life-giving to you.”

I left the lunch table that day with a new paradigm, and in the following months I found that Scripture seemed to be pointing me in the direction the professor had indicated.

When Peter complained to Jesus once that he had left many human relationships to follow him, Jesus minced no words in his rebuke:

“Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands [and could we add
homosexual partners?]
for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life.”

Mark 10:29-30

Jesus was referring to the community of his followers who would, after his resurrection, become known as “the church.” Those who must sever their most cherished ties in order to follow Jesus—or those who must give up creating those ties in the first place—are not ultimately giving up human companionship. They are trading what seems to be the only satisfying relationships they have or could have for ones that will prove to be at once more painful (because of all the myriad effects of sin) and most life giving.

One of the most surprising discoveries I made in the weeks that followed my lunch with the eccentric history professor is that the New Testament views
the church
—rather than marriage—as the primary place where human love is best expressed and experienced. In the Old Testament, marriage was viewed as
the solution to loneliness (Genesis 2:18, 24). Now, however, in the New, “the answer to loneliness is not marriage, but rather the new-creational community that God is calling into being in Christ, the church marked by mutual love, as it is led by the Spirit of Christ.”
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