I remember as a young Catholic being taught about the gifts of the Spirit in my confirmation classes and worrying that I would somehow start bleating another language as the Bishop slapped my cheek.
In high school I had sort of poltergeist things going on in my life. Things moved, the temperature in my bedroom was sometimes frigid, sometimes not. There was a general sense of heaviness and pressure. It took prayer to be able to fall asleep and it took more than a year for the whole business to end but I ended up with an increased sensitivity, a kind of consciousness of spiritual things.
Baptism in the Spirit happened in college and I did bleat another language. I broke all my records because I believed secular music was demonic. I left the Catholic church because of doctrinal differences, (which today mean nothing to me.) The rest of my undergraduate college experience was inside the context of a religious community called Chi Alpha which was a sort of campus outreach of the Assembly of God Church.
I spent graduate school as a member of a full-gospel church, a year of it engaged to a wonderful woman who intelligently backed out of our engagement because I didn’t demonstrate physical burning for her. (I hid behind the thought that demonstrating physical desire was lustful and fleshly. Really, I was just gay.)
I went to New York City to work with a church in the Bronx. I saw myself as a tent-maker missionary teaching at City University of New York and working to build a church near-by. The senior pastors of that church were “Four Square” ministers, associated with the folks in Los Angeles. I was ordained by that local church in 1987 and given the title of Pastor of Education.
In 1990 I attempted to step-down from the ministry because the temptation to indulge in homosexual thoughts and furtive behavior was overwhelming. My resignation was not accepted and I left, for a short sabbatical. I figured a few months of self-examination would be enough to “straighten” things out. I interpreted the verse in 1 John where it says that upon my confession, God would be faithful to forgive me and cleanse me from unrighteousness as literal and kept waiting for it. I confessed the desire constantly, tried to avoid even committing any deed even in my heart and rebuked every demon I could think of.
Here’s what it came down to. As a gay man, I was doomed and destined for hell and there was nothing I could do about it—I had tried. There was nothing that God seemed willing to do about it. Yet, as a Christian, I was saved and destined for eternal life in Christ. It occurred to me that if I were doomed, I’d always been doomed and since I also was a new creature in Christ, if I had to go to hell, I’d be the only voice praising him from the pit. At that moment, I was freed, not from my homosexuality but from the role of hell in my walk with God. No longer having to think about dodging hell has given me the freedom to truly experience God’s grace.
But then what was I to do? The Christians didn’t want me around as a gay man and with only a few exceptions, the gay folks didn’t seem interested in Christ or his teachings. I stepped out of one closet and into another. I aligned myself with the metaphysical community, began learning about other belief systems. I used words like “universe” instead of God and got along nicely with them.
Every threshold I crossed, Jesus was on the other side waiting for me with a broad smile and open arms. In my thinking God got bigger and bigger and bigger. In 1995, I went to work at AIDS Project Los Angeles creating a program we called Living Skills. We had social, educational, recreational and even a few direct services for people living with symptomatic HIV infection. There were 2000 people in my program participating in some 36 activities every month. One day, when I realized how literally anointed the program was, I saw the hand of God touching those lives in a real way and I understood at that moment, for the first time, that God didn’t forgive me for being gay, He MADE me gay.
Also in 1 John, we read that if someone says he loves God but hats his neighbor, he is a liar. Jesus summed up the whole law and the prophets by saying that we should love God with our whole heart, mind and spirit and we must love our neighbors as we do ourselves. The key, my dears is loving ourselves first because if we don’t, we have no real way of loving our neighbors and thus our claims of loving God are rather hollow. I love who I am. Yes, I love being gay. I love being a Christian.
I admit, until recently, I avoided Christians because I didn’t want to engage in the kind of question and answer time that usually resulted when they discovered that I am gay and Christian. Now, I believe God is prompting me to take up the cloth again and be the minister he ordained in 1987. I don’t pastor a church. Perhaps I will someday but for now, I’m pretty busy. I blog. I host meetings of open-minded Christians. I speak occasionally and offer myself as kind of a man before the firing squad for churches or groups that are open-minded enough to even discuss the issues of gay people in the church.
I am very excited about this on-line community.
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