Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality (12 page)

But until that day, we groan in faithful anticipation. We long for the end of longing, the end of our loneliness.

O
VER A PERIOD OF SEVERAL
years, I went on a search to find books that would describe my experience as a gay Christian (I wanted to know I wasn’t alone) and help me know how to keep living it. Lining the Current Issues shelf of my local Christian bookstore were numerous paperbacks suggesting ways churches could stand up for traditional marriage in the public square and soundly refute the arguments of liberal gay rights activists, but these books seemed removed from my situation. Over in the Pastoral Counseling section were nearly as many volumes proposing various therapeutic regimens that just might “cure” those experiencing same-sex attraction, but these talked mostly about something—the “gay lifestyle”—which seemed distant and benignly irrelevant to me. The offerings at the Barnes & Noble across the street didn’t give me much help either. Instead of proposing to rescue homosexual Christians by changing their orientation, the memoirs and volumes of pop psychology I found on the Self-Help shelves there promised to rescue homosexual Christians by
showing them how to jettison their repressive morality and live out their true identity. In neither case did I find anyone writing as if they knew about the paradoxical, pain-filled journey I was on.

But then I found Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Hopkins (1844-1889) was an English convert to Roman Catholicism. After studying at Oxford, he became a Jesuit priest, moved to Ireland, and became one of the greatest poets in the history of British literature, influencing such greats as T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden and changing the face of modern poetry.

What is less well known, but what many of his biographers acknowledge, is that Hopkins wrestled for decades with what today would be called homoerotic inclinations or same-sex attraction. As Frederick Buechner notes in his deeply moving book
Speak What We Feel, Not What We Ought to Say:

All his life he was troubled by the feelings stirred in him at the sight of male beauty. Temptation was everywhere, and in his diaries he takes frequent note of it—a glance from another man that lingered a fraction of a second too long, a beautiful boy in the choir at Magdalen, “looking with terrible attention at Maitland” or at students walking in Christ Church meadows, the charm of some street child seen from the hidden vantage of a shop door.
¹

During his undergraduate days at Oxford, Hopkins became friends with a fellow student named Robert Bridges, with whom he carried on an extensive correspondence throughout the brief span of his life. (Bridges eventually published Hopkins’s poems after his death.) Bridges had a distant cousin named Digby Mack-worth Dolben, who came to Oxford for a visit as a prospective student in 1865. Hopkins was twenty at the time, and Bridges
introduced Dolben to him, hoping Hopkins could show him around Balliol College, where the younger Dolben wanted to become a student eventually. They spent only a few days together, touring Oxford, and never saw each other again, but as Buechner puts it, “In one sense or another Hopkins seems to have lost his heart” to Digby Dolben.
²

For three years, Hopkins wrestled with intense desire for Dolben—as well as guilt over what he understood to be the shame involved in this desire. His diary records nights of remorseful fantasizing about his relationship with Dolben, his wild thoughts trailing on against the warnings of the priest who had heard his confession. The biographical details are sketchy, but it seems that at some point, Hopkins may have even attempted to communicate at least something of his feelings to Dolben. In any case, there is a point in Hopkins’s life where there seems to have been a falling out between him and Dolben, and Hopkins heard nothing more from the young man he had grown so fond of. As he summed it up in a letter to Robert Bridges, “I have written letters without end to [Dolben] without a whiff of an answer.”
³

Soon word reached Hopkins that Digby Dolben, at nineteen years old, had died in a river trying to save a child from drowning, and Hopkins was left alone again—alone with God—to work out the seething tangle of his longings and desires. “Either he had never found the courage so much as to tell Dolben how he felt, or, if in some way he possibly did, he had all but destroyed their friendship in the process,” writes Buechner.
⁴
To Hopkins, in the aftermath of Dolben’s death, God soon felt as unreachable as Dolben had when Hopkins sent letter after letter in countless, fruitless attempts to make contact. In wrestling with his own
unreturned affection, he felt a darkness descend, and a desperate streak of fear, depression, and loneliness runs through many of his poems.

In one of the sonnets he said was “written in blood,” Hopkins pictures his prayers to God “like dead letters sent / To dearest him [Dolben?] that lives alas! away.”
⁵
Gone, if he ever had it, was any kind of serene, childlike faith. Hopkins looked at human life and saw brokenness; the world is “bent,” as he described it in one poem,
⁶
and man is born for the blight of death.
⁷

Hopkins felt keenly his own personal share in the world’s brokenness and death. “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day,” he wrote describing one of many sleepless nights. Then, addressing his own “heart”:

What hours, O what black hours we have spent

This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
…But where I say

Hours I mean years, mean life.…

I am gall, I am heartburn.
⁸

In another place, he paints a similarly bleak picture of his isolation and despair. “No worst, there is none,” he says, meaning there is no darker place he can journey to, no state of mind more tortured or troubled. “Pitched past pitch of grief,” Hopkins says of himself in a typically puzzling expression.
⁹
Bookish and morbidly introspective, he felt that his mind was a treacherous valley full of ledges that could give way at any moment, plunging him into black despair that others who had never experienced it might find easy to mock. But not Hopkins. He could not laugh it off or shrug his shoulders. He hung on to his sanity like a climber gripping
a narrow crack in the rocks with his fingertips. If you can see through the difficult syntax, the window into Hopkins’s soul that the following lines open is haunting:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small

Durance deal with that steep or deep.
¹⁰

Near the heart of this despair for Hopkins were the struggles facing homosexual Christians that I have tried to describe in this book: the struggle to be faithful to the gospel’s “terrible decree” that we must hold in check our strongest urges and not engage in homosexual activity; the struggle to
belong,
to find the end of loneliness; and the struggle with shame, with nagging feelings of being constantly displeasing to God.

As a Jesuit priest, Hopkins knew, like Henri Nouwen after him, that his homosexual feelings should not be indulged, that he could not remain pure and faithful as a Christian and at the same time enter into a homosexual relationship. And this realization—whether he understood it as a call to true and beautiful humanness, or whether it felt like a burden from a cosmic killjoy, we may never know—brought loneliness: “To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life / Among strangers. Father and mother dear, / Brothers and sisters are in Christ not near,” Hopkins confessed.
¹¹
It brought shame too. As Buechner expresses it, “Throughout [his] brief relationship [with Digby Dolben], Hopkins apparently had a sense of guilt about his feelings for him. He notes in his diary that it is dangerous to think about him, and if his name came up in conversation, he quickly backed away from it.”
¹²

For several years now, I have kept a book of Hopkins’s poems near my bedside. What keeps me coming back to his poetry is, of course, the similarities between our life situations: he was a Christian, as I am; he wrestled with homoerotic attractions and inclinations, as I do; and he (apparently) longed for purity, experienced an unshakable loneliness, and yearned to hear the divine accolade that would unravel his shame and inferiority—all things that I feel and experience on a regular basis. But most of all, I keep coming back to Hopkins because in the midst of his struggle, he saw God and came to know the comfort of Christ and the Holy Spirit—and he wrote about this vision of God and experience of Christ in a way that continually refreshes, strengthens, and emboldens me for the journey toward wholeness.

Hopkins knew better than many that God isn’t tame or safe. True, he is merciful, but his mercy has sharp edges. God judges sin and transforms sinners in a way that often feels as if it is ripping apart our deepest selves. Hopkins also knew that even on our loneliest roads, when the valleys are so shadowed that day feels like night, God is watching, rejoicing over every inch gained, gazing down as the Author who cares about every twist in
his
story.

One of the most moving stanzas Hopkins ever penned was an unconventional hymn of praise to the triune God who is fiery and shocking like a bolt of lightning in a stormy sky but who is also—at the same time—tender and nurturing like an infatuated Lover. Paradoxically, it is precisely
in
the fierce lightning—
in
his “dark descending”—that God’s loving mercy is best seen:

              Be adored among men,

       God, three-numberèd form;

    Wring thy rebel, dogged in den,

           Man’s malice, with wrecking and storm.

Beyond saying sweet, past telling of tongue,

Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm;

       Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung; Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.
¹³

Gradually, Hopkins came to see that his battles with despair and darkness were somehow included in God’s loving purposes. Although he addressed God as the “terrible” one who had laid “a lionlimb against me,” scanning “with darksome devouring eyes my bruised bones,” Hopkins moved to a point of confidence that God was indeed merciful in the very moments when he seemed most ruthless. Hopkins, “frantic to avoid thee and flee,” as he says to God at one point, discerned a divine
purpose
behind his struggle. Why did he have to wrestle in the ways that he did?

That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.…

His heart “would…cheer.”

Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, foot trod

Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year

Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
¹⁴

The “hero” Hopkins mentions here is God. The poet has finally come to understand that God’s purifying work of separating the wheat from the chaff, of refining and sifting Hopkins’s faith, is for God’s own “cheer,” God’s pleasure—and Hopkins’s. When it seems that no one is watching and Hopkins is alone, there
is
Someone there.

God, lover of souls, swaying considerate scales,

Complete thy creature dear O where it fails,

Being mighty a master, being a father and fond.
¹⁵

Elsewhere, Hopkins pictures lonely souls like himself as the “interest” or inheritance of Christ. Christ

…eyes them, heart wants, care haunts, foot follows kind, Their ransom, their rescue, and first, fast, last friend.
¹⁶

To engage with God as a homosexual Christian, as Hopkins did, is to find God in Christ to be ever-present, always watching, with ruthless, relentless, transforming grace. And one day, beyond all hopes, that grace will accomplish the ultimate transformation—changing human beings with broken sexualities and a thousand other afflictions into shining, everlastingly alive children of the resurrection.

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal
diamond,

Is immortal diamond.
¹⁷

To please God…to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness…to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.

C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”

The tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—[will] be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

1 Peter 1:7

N
OT LONG AGO
I
WAS
at the wedding of two good friends. After the ceremony and dinner, the band at the reception started playing, and the men, removing their tuxedo jackets and blazers and taking the hands of the women next to them, began moving onto the dance floor. Some people continued eating dessert and sipping
coffee, and I lingered with them, since I had come single and had never really learned to dance.

But one of my old college friends whom I had spent the last few minutes chatting with wasn’t going to let me stay seated. “Come on,” she said playfully, smiling in awareness of my awkward feeling. “Karis needs a dance partner!” She led me by the hand as we threaded our way through the beautiful round tables in the reception hall, now piled high with dirty dishes and empty wine bottles.

Karis was a girl I had known a little, never well, when we were in school together; now it was time to try to dance with her, I guessed, a bit nervous. “Karis, this is Wes,” my friend introduced me. I felt even more awkward. I had forgotten how beautiful Karis was. Her light eyes were flashing as she smiled mischievously, and her black hair fell in loose curls just above her shoulders. She was wearing a dress with spaghetti straps that showed plenty of her lightly tanned neck and shoulders.

“I should warn you, I’m not great at this,” I said after Karis had led me onto the dance floor. “No worries,” she said, “I’ll show you how it goes.” “Put your right hand here,” she instructed, reaching for my hand and placing it on the small of her back. Step by step, she tried to teach me as my mind wandered. We danced for a while, experimenting with different steps as the music changed.

Next to us, several feet away, was another couple. They were good—
really
good—dancers. Full of energy. They were laughing and moving in sync with the groove. I couldn’t take my eyes off the guy. I started to feel dazed and a little queasy as Karis and I kept dancing. Finally, perhaps sensing my frustration, Karis suggested we take a break. I stepped off the dance floor, relieved—and very confused.

A couple of days later I explained to my friend Chris over breakfast what had happened. We danced, I said. I was with this beautiful girl. I was holding her hand and touching her back. Her dress was thin and showed every curve on her body, I said. I could feel her sweating through the dress, and, inches from her face, I could see every exquisite feature she had. “And, Chris,” I said, “I
felt nothing.
No attraction. No awakening or arousal of any kind. No sexual desire whatsoever.”

Chris nodded. He knows my situation backward and forward and wasn’t fazed by what I was telling him.

“The worst of it,” I continued, “is that while I wasn’t attracted at all to this stunningly beautiful person who was my dance partner, I couldn’t stop looking at the guy dancing several feet away from me. I
did
notice him. I noticed his
body,
his moves. Chris,” I said, “I was attracted to this guy. All I could see and desire was another guy across the room while I’m dancing with this girl. This is so frustrating. This is what it means to be gay, and I would give anything to change it!”

The year before that breakfast, on a cold, gray, late-winter afternoon, I had told Chris about my homosexuality. He and I had been good friends for a while before that time, and I had needed support—again—and decided it was a good time to share with him this part of my life that was causing me so much grief. We talked for hours that afternoon. I read to him excerpts from my journals, told him story after story about my journey, and asked a lot of questions about how to live as a Christian with these nearly overwhelming desires. He listened patiently, asked questions of his own, and pulled books off his shelf to read me things he thought might throw fresh light on the issue. He cried
and prayed for me and in the end gave me one of the best hugs I’ve ever received.

That day I tried to explain to Chris the sense of brokenness, the shame of feeling “this is not the way it’s supposed to be” with my body, my psyche, my sexuality. “Sometimes I feel that no matter what I do, I am displeasing to God,” I said. “Even after a good day of battling for purity of mind and body, there is still the feeling, when I put my head down on the pillow at night to go to sleep, that something is seriously wrong with me, that something’s askew. I feel in those moments that my homosexual orientation makes God disappointed or unhappy or even faintly upset with me. Of course, the really frustrating part is that I can’t just turn off this orientation like a spigot. I can’t choose not to be gay. Does that mean I’m locked into this feeling of being constantly unacceptable to God? Can I ever really please him?”

Henri Nouwen, as I’ve already mentioned, struggled long and hard with myriad insecurities as a homosexual Christian. One of them was this hunch that he was damaged goods, broken beyond mending, permanently locked into a pattern of desire that made him regularly, constantly unsatisfying to the One he most wanted to please. Michael O’Laughlin writes:

One component of Henri’s psychological issues was a real sense of shame, a feeling that there was something wrong with him that he couldn’t correct. The origins of these feelings are obscure, but there was one factor that certainly exacerbated his sense of unworthiness: Henri was a gay man, and he grew up in a time and place in which this could not be acknowledged.…Henri grew up believing that he was different from other people,
and thinking that this difference was so terrible that it must be kept a secret.
¹

For Nouwen, one of the main questions in his struggle to live well before God as a homosexual Christian was how to deal with this sort of shame. It is also my question and, I suspect, the question of many others who share our condition. Can we gay and lesbian Christians who experience no change in our homoerotic desires live in the joyful assurance that our lives are satisfying to God? Can we who remain homosexually inclined actually please God?

I have talked to enough heterosexual Christians about their desires and attractions to know that many of them consider their sexuality to be a glorious gift, and rightly so. Because God designed human sexuality, it is part of his good creation; he has sanctified it through redemption and means for it to be celebrated and enjoyed in the context of monogamous marriage.

But married heterosexuals are, of course, able to identify moments when God’s gift gets stained, marred by lust—sexual desire that is fixed on a man or woman other than their spouse. And singles, too, experience lust by entertaining erotic thoughts and feelings for potential partners or spouses.

Dallas Willard helpfully defines
lust
as “looking
to
desire”—looking at someone other than a spouse
in order to
indulge in sexual fantasies. “That is, we desire to desire. We indulge and cultivate desiring because we enjoy fantasizing about sex with the one seen. Desiring sex is the purpose for which we are looking.”
²

This purposeful looking—the “second glance”—is different, Willard says, from “looking
and
desiring.” Looking
to
desire is intentional, willful. Looking
and
desiring is natural, reflexive,
part of the experience of a God-designed and God-given desire for intimacy with someone of the opposite sex; it could happen at any time, in any place—as you drive down the road and see a billboard, as you place your order at a restaurant, as you browse the shelves at a bookstore.

When we only
think
of sex with someone we see, or simply find him or her attractive, that is not wrong, and certainly is not what Jesus calls “adultery in the heart.” Merely to be
tempted
sexually requires that we think of sex with someone we are not married to, and that we desire the other person—usually, of course, someone we see. But temptation also is not wrong, though it should not be willfully entered.
³

Looking
and
desiring, according to Willard, isn’t sinful; it’s what you choose to do with the desire that determines whether the first look will turn into cultivated lust.

“Heterosexual Christians know that if and when temptation comes and they begin to lust, at least they will be desiring someone of the opposite sex,” I said to my friend Chris on that winter afternoon when we talked together. “It’s true that even their lust isn’t pleasing to God. But at least they’re attracted to the sex God originally planned for human beings to be attracted to!” For me and other gay people, even when we’re not willfully cultivating desire, we know that when attraction does come—most of the time, it could be as unlooked for and unwanted as it was for me that day on the dance floor at my friends’ wedding reception—it will be attraction to someone of the same sex. And in those moments, it feels as though there is no desire that isn’t lust, no attraction that isn’t illicit. I never have the moment Dallas Willard describes as “looking
and
desiring” when I can thank God that
he made me to be attracted to women. I have only a looking and desiring that causes me to groan, “God, help! I would love to say thanks for my sexuality, but I don’t feel like I can. Every attraction I experience, before I ever get to intentional, willful, indulgent desire, seems bent, broken, misshapen. I think this grieves you, but I can’t seem to help it.”

For many homosexual Christians, this kind of shame is part of our daily lives. Theologian Robert Jenson calls homoerotic attraction a “grievous affliction” for those who experience it,
⁴
and part of the grief is in the feeling that we are perpetually, hopelessly unsatisfying to God.

One spring break during college, I flew to England to visit my friend Todd, who was a student at Cambridge University at the time, and his wife, Katie. One night in Todd and Katie’s house, as Katie was upstairs putting their two kids to bed, Todd and I stood in the kitchen washing dishes together and talking.

Sometimes you can look back on your life and know that certain moments changed your perception of the world, your take on life, your experience of God. For me, that night was one of those times.

“Wes, I’ve got to tell you something,” Todd said in the middle of our conversation, his hands dripping soapy water. “I’ve just reread C. S. Lewis’s essay ‘The Weight of Glory,’ and I think I’ve realized something I’ve missed for years in my Christian life: The climax of our joy in God, our joy in our salvation, is going to be the moment when we finally see Jesus face-to-face, and he commends us, honors us, praises us for the lives we lived on earth.” Todd paused for a moment, gauging my reaction, and went on:
“Lewis saw this so clearly. I don’t know why I never saw it before in his essay. But it’s right there, plain as day.”
⁵

Todd was right. Most of “The Weight of Glory” essay (originally a sermon) is Lewis’s elaboration of the moment when God will glorify his people. “It is promised…that we shall have ‘glory’…fame with God, approval or (I might say) ‘appreciation’ by God,” Lewis writes. “Nothing can eliminate from the parable the divine
accolade,
‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant.’”
⁶

Lewis points to what in Scripture is called “the day of the Lord”—the last judgment, the great assize—as the time when God will give us this glory.

It is written that we shall “stand before” him, shall appear, shall be inspected. The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses, shall actually survive that examination, shall find approval, shall please God. To please God…to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness…to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.
⁷

“Since reading Lewis, I’ve started to see this theme of glory and praise for us from God everywhere in the Bible,” Todd said to me that night in Cambridge. He stacked the last of the dripping dishes on the rack to dry, and we went into the living room. Opening a Bible, he pointed out text after text in the New Testament I had seen a hundred times before but had never really paid attention to.

“Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now
hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart,” Paul counseled the Corinthian Christians (1 Corinthians 4:5), and adds: “Then each one will receive his commendation from God.” There it was, crystal clear.

“For it is not the one who commends himself who is approved, but
the one whom the Lord commends,”
Paul wrote to the same Christians (2 Corinthians 10:18, italics added).

To the Romans he wrote, “A Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter.
His praise is not from man but from God”
(2:29, italics added).

According to John’s gospel, Jesus accused his opponents of not desiring this God-bestowed praise. “How can you believe,” he asked, “when you receive glory from one another and do not seek
the glory that comes from the only God?”
(John 5:44, italics added).