nathandale's Open Salon Blog

The Bible Says A Lot Of Things

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:02:12 -0500

I think that if I was given the option of only watching television once a year, the single thing I would choose to watch would be Treehouse of Horror, the Simpsons Halloween special. That show has been my favorite since I was in the fourth grade. I’ve been with it through up and down, funny and unfunny, and for my money the show is at its best every year at Halloween.

One of my favorite lines in the entire run of the series comes during an episode of Treehouse that parodies the Salem Witch Trials. Predictably, Marge Simpson is accused of witchcraft, and for a trial is taken to the edge of a high cliff, from which she will be pushed. Chief Wiggum figures that if she isn’t a witch, she’ll fall to an honorable Christian death; if she is, she will use her evil powers to save herself, at which point she is ordered to report back “for torture and beheading.”

Ever the voice of reason, Lisa Simpson rushes in and asks, “Doesn’t the Bible say, ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged?’”

“The Bible says a lot of things,” Wiggum replies. “Shove her.”

I don’t get confronted about my “sinful lifestyle” as often as you’d expect, especially given the fact that I live in Oklahoma. Mostly this is because I avoid any situation wherein I’d be forced to interact with someone who wants to debate this issue with me. The whole experience is so awful and Kafkaesque, like suddenly finding oneself on the surface of Venus, all poisonous air, unbearable pressure, and all that heat. I mean - who needs it? “Meh, the Bible says a lot of things.”

I got an e-mail from an old friend the other day. I’d let him read some of the stuff I’ve been writing of late, and he responded back that he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to put together these odd-fitting puzzle pieces - believing something so deep that it goes to the core of who you are and why you’re in the world, but finding that most of the people who share that belief also seem to think that you have to change something that you don’t think you can, or to live your life without companionship.

“Sometimes I think the only way to have true peace is to turn away from being gay,” my friend wrote. “But could I be happy? I don’t know.”

For me, the path toward something resembling peace necessarily had to involve turning away from trying to be straight, or, more to the point, turning away from my intense idolatry of being good at things. Conquering homosexuality was, for me, like a final in Jesus Class, the one thing I saw standing between me and something like a diploma: if I could get on top of this one major struggle in my life it would signify that I was Okay.

Let me be as clear as I know how to be:

I.Am Not.Okay.

And I LOVE being good at things.

I may have accidentally, a long time ago, confused the accolades I got from my parents and teachers with - and I’m just saying it’s possible that I did this - love. At six years old or so I might have unintentionally started to think that being good at things would mean that I wouldn’t have any problems whatsoever, and, conversely, that the way to avoid having problems was to avoid doing things I was bad at.

Well, you can see the problem.

When you grow up being great at things, and then convert to Christianity, wherein our failure is presumed, is Step One, then you end up kind of flailing about. And boy, did I flail. But the other great thing about Christianity - about life in general really, and I learned this early on as well - is that it’s not always so important to be good at something as it is to look like you’re good at something.

This is what the Pharisees did. They managed to look great at believing, at following God’s Law, and, they presumed, God. Then Jesus had to come along and just kick the living shit out of all of that, by telling them that God didn’t care if they were following the law if their hearts were all mucked-up inside, if they treated other people, especially the poor, like dirt to be wiped off their shoes.

It was kind of the same way with me. I got pretty good at being a Christian. I sort of considered myself Jesus’ press agent on the small southeastern campus where I earned a bachelor’s degree in - what else - religion and philosophy. I wrote about Jesus in the campus newspaper, I talked about Jesus with whomever would listen, and I carried a Bible around with me. Everywhere.

I figured out my opinions and beliefs on every issue, and by some miracle it seemed that God had already come to those same conclusions. Hallelujah! I led small groups and youth groups and prayer groups. I was a missionary for two months in another country. I really thought I was doing pretty great.

Oh, except, you know. I liked boys.

And like a good little soldier, I went to war with those desires: I prayed them away. I asked others to pray them away. I read books, I went to a counselor, I gave myself the blood pressure of a 55-year-old man, and, at the age of twenty, I completely, entirely burned out.

The great thing about prayer, the really, really wonderful thing about prayer is that it only really works when you stop thinking you know what to pray for. So, fatigued with my struggle, having beaten myself into a state of total, utter submission - oh, and not that nice sounding kind of submission; this was the kind of submission that you get when you’ve held on to something for so long that it has dragged you all over Kingdom Come - I just prayed, “I don’t know. Help. Help. Help. Please Help.”

And nothing happened. Or, that is to say, nothing happened on my timeline, which is to say, nothing happened right that minute. No windows opened in my soul, no light descended from Heaven, no angel knocked on my door; there wasn’t even a perfect song on the radio or a verse from the Bible, randomly opened to an arbitrarily-chosen page.

But what did happen is what always happens when we really, truly surrender: there was just a tiny little bit more air, more room to breathe. I felt like I should tell a prayer group that I was a part of what I was going through. And so I did, and two of the guys in the group told me that they struggled with the same thing, that they lived in this same hot, cramped space that I did, and I could see that they were suffering the same way I was.

Then, out of the blue, two other men I knew confessed to me that they were dealing with homosexual attraction, neither one of them knowing that I was dealing with it as well. They just needed someone to talk to, and something guided them to me.

I started writing copiously. My journal filled up. A legal pad I carried with me filled up as well. Then I left the pad somewhere and a guy from my fellowship group found it, came by, and said he’d read it, accidentally, and that he was struggling with homosexuality, and could we go for a walk?

I saw all this suffering around me, my own confusion mirrored back at me, these guys trapped in this same ugly old soup. What I saw in their eyes broke my heart - I saw Sisyphus, pushing the rock up the hill only to have it tumble back down again. I saw pointlessness.

After awhile I got it. I got that being good at being a Christian is an illusion. I got that I could spend my whole life trapped in this cycle, or that I could safely step out; not only that I could step out, but that I should, that this was where I was being led. The mirrors, the other people I’d met who were wrestling with this shadow, pointed the way out for me.

Now of course it went terribly; of course I screwed it all up and if I could do it all again I’d so it so much differently. Who wouldn’t? But I know in the deepest, truest part of me that God wanted me away from that cycle of beating myself up, being good, falling, feeling, beating myself up again, always wishing the feelings away. I got that I was meant to feel, and fail, and fall, and learn how safe I am all the while.

And you know what? I’d say, about ten percent of the time, I still get it. The Bible says a lot of things. One thing it says is that with God, we’re always safe. So we can flail and fail and fall and feel and dance and love and be, safely.

Growing

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 08:02:01 -0500

Every winter almost does me in. February is my least favorite month, so awful every year that I start dreading it as soon as the Christmas decorations come down. I don’t know if I get Seasonal Affective Disorder or what, but something about how winter seems to really dig its claws in deeper every year, how there’s never enough light or warmth, always gets me down.

Up until the New Year the cold weather and all its accoutrements are festive - snow and sweaters and chilly air go together nicely with trees, and eggnog, and lights strung up outside the house. But take all that down and all you have are short, dark days. Leaving for the office in darkness and coming home in darkness. Cold that penetrates bones so deeply that the only way to warm up is with a bath so hot you’re pretty sure it’s going to leave you sterile.

Winter is awful, and every year I feel I’ve just barely survived it. That’s why I always order twice as many seeds as I need - I always start my garden at least a month too early just to remind myself that life happens, that winter won’t last forever and take us all down with it.

All my favorite of Jesus’ parables use agricultural imagery. This might be that I am the spawn of farmers, on my dad’s side, and that I was an adolescent before I ate store-bought vegetables with any regularity. Some of my best memories of my childhood home in western Oklahoma are of eating fresh vegetables right out of the dirt, fresh peaches off our trees and strawberries, blackberries and blueberries right off the vine.

These memories, combined with my desperation near the end of every winter, led me to start a vegetable garden in my backyard.

Being a gardener requires so many of the things I am terrible at, namely, patience, diligence, and faith. It makes me crazy sometimes, because it’s all about the process, and all about the waiting.

Gardening is an act of faith, after all, which I think is why Jesus so often relied on its imagery in his parables. You take something so small that under any normal circumstances you wouldn’t even notice it, a seed as small and dark as a little period floating around in the palm of your hand, and you give it good soil, and enough water, sunlight and time.

I hate this. I want to put a seed in the ground, throw a little water down, and then have steamed zucchini on a plate. I don’t want to wait, and I certainly don’t want to tend. I’m hungry now! And no matter how much compost I throw down, no matter how much I crouch on the ground waiting for the little green shoots to crack the dirt, I have absolutely no control over the timing.

This is why you’ll find me, in the coming days of early spring, with the seeds in the ground and all the life happening where I can’t see it, four or five times a day staring intently at my little two hundred square feet of tilled-up dirt. I squat, I stand, I get down on all fours and squint, then stand back up again, wave my hands over the whole business, and shout, “GROW!”

There you have it: a picture of my spiritual life in action. Here’s another one.

I have a really good friend that I haven’t talked to in a couple of years. I think about him literally every day, but we just haven’t spoken. The last time we saw one another was slightly unpleasant, but to be honest that’s nothing new.

See, this old, old friend of mine sorta, kinda made my life a living hell for awhile there after I came out. A lot of people said some pretty scary and horrible things to me, and even worse things about me, but he was the worst on both counts. Still, I’m a pretty forgiving guy and I told myself to just let it all go. I’d have done anything to keep our friendship rocking along on its rickety tracks, and so I just didn’t think about how he was hurting me.

So a couple years ago, after a visit together went south, we didn’t call. He moved cities. I came back to my life, thinking eventually one of us would pick up the phone and we’d work through all the unpleasantness.

I kept picking up the phone and trying to dial, but each time I did so a movie played in my mind, a preview of the scenarios that could unfold when my friend picked up the phone. I’d backpedal and apologize, despite the fact that I felt I hadn’t done anything wrong. I’d claim total responsibility for the fact that we hadn’t spoken, despite the fact that I hadn’t received a call, and then we’d have a horrible, awkward conversation where I would explicitly assume responsibility for keeping our friendship alive.

Or:

I’d yell and scream and let out every grievance I had, every horrible thing I knew he’d said behind my back, and all the ways I’d felt wronged and belittled and hurt over the years. I honestly hadn’t realized any of that was still there; I’d been so desperate to cling to my friend that I had buried it all, put it down in the darkness and expected it to die.

But here it was, sprung to life, and I suddenly found myself walking around my house, speaking out loud TO NO ONE, berating my friend, airing my grievances.

Being crazy felt good for awhile; it felt good to let all this rise to the surface, to break through. It had been rotting down there with no light and all that heat, and I allowed myself to feel all these horrible, awful feelings. Then, I deleted his number out of my phone. Having it there felt like having a bit of plutonium in my pocket.

I’d love to be able to tell you that I cut the ribbon, that I let all my anger and resentment fly away. Truth is, I don’t really forgive my friend very much just yet. But I pray every single day for the grace to let go, just a little at a time. After all, if you don’t let go, you’re only going to get dragged.

So I’m trying. I haven’t called. I haven’t trashed him behind his back to our mutual friends. I haven’t let go, but I’m trying to. I’m standing over the bed, the place where I’ve put all these prayers, waving my arms over them and shouting, “GROW!”

I’m trying hard to provide good conditions for forgiveness to happen. I’m trying to let the sunlight in on all my hurt and sadness, to not listen to all these weedy voices of resentment and entitlement and moral superiority, but instead to pull them up when I see them.

Becoming a gardener has helped. Like writing it has helped me to slow down, to really look around at things and not be in such a hurry. I wait, and I wait, and I work the land, provide the conditions, and as if by some miracle, things grow. Sooner than you think there are vines, and flowers, and bushels of vegetables that you can share with the neighbors.

My Gay Marriage

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 18:02:49 -0500

“So, I have to tell you something,” I said to Brian.

“Okay,” he said.

“I have to tell you that I sorta hate weddings.”

“Yeah,” he replied. “Me too.”

“Not all weddings,” I said. “I’ve enjoyed all our friends’ weddings.”

“So have I.”

“I sorta just hate our wedding.”

“We haven’t had a wedding.”

“Well, no, but the idea of having one. I sorta hate it.”

“Yeah,” he said again. “Me too.”

And just like that, the love of my life and I decided that we were not Those Gays. Nothing against Those Gays. I hope that when Those Gays get married, they invite us to their wedding. We promise not to hate it. We promise to bring a good gift, something expensive off the registry. Something nice and tasteful that they don’t have to assemble later, after their Atlantis Cruises honeymoon (something else we will never, ever do).

It was convenient that we were having this conversation in Las Vegas, where I’d brought Brian to celebrate his 30th birthday. I booked us into the Paris Las Vegas hotel, and on our second day there we parked our butts by the rooftop pool and soaked up the sun for about six hours, after which we pigged out on crepes the size of basketballs. Then I took my husband to a fancy birthday dinner at the Eiffel Tower Restaurant.

My husband. We never did have a wedding, but he is my husband. There’s not another word I can really imagine using to describe who he is, to me. He’s the first thing I want to see when I wake up in the morning and the last thing when I go to bed at night. When I’m too tired to deal with what to eat, he goes out to get us food. He keeps my old beater of a car running and mows the lawn since my allergies prevent me from doing it. He’s my best friend and the person I’d rather spend time with than anyone else on earth.

I realized this quite suddenly after we’d been hanging out as friends for quite awhile. One night he met me at a gay karaoke bar I used to frequent, and we were laughing and chatting as usual. Several of my friends were there as well, and one of them beckoned me over and whispered in my ear.

“Is Brian single?”

I shrugged. “Yeah. Why?”

“I was thinking about asking him out.”

A cold chill went through me, like when I was a kid and I fell in a mountain stream in California. I think I coughed a reply, something like, “Oh,” and took a long, long swig of my beer. Then I think I sang some nice, calm little song from the Alanis Morrissette oeuvre.

Two nights later I pounced on him, in my way, and we’ve been together ever since.

At first it was fun to talk about a wedding. I had asked him to marry me, after all, by presenting him with a ring that was two sizes too big, which I later exchanged for one that was just one size too big. And he said yes. And we both cried; it was all very unlike us.

Then the reality set in that we were going to have to pay for this affair ourselves. And after participating in and attending friends’ weddings - and then watching those friends buy homes, get pregnant, and then get pregnant again - we were sort of over it.

For the longest time we just never talked about it. We could’ve afforded a wedding, really, albeit a small one; but we put our money elsewhere, like into decorating our home, slowly, and traveling. By the time we got to Vegas for Brian’s birthday the jig was up; we weren’t going to do this, and we didn’t really want to.

And so, we went to the TeNo store in Vegas and bought rings instead, simple little titanium bands to wear on our left hands. The sales clerk was an adorable little gay guy in his early twenties, and he took good care of us. Because in addition to being the type of people who don’t want a wedding, we also are clinically indecisive. This is another thing that makes the idea of planning a wedding seem like a special kind of hell.

Stefan was the guy’s name, Stefan the Sales Guy, or, as I began to refer to him, Stefan The Case Worker. He cooed over us as we chose matching bands, very plain and simple. When Stefan told us that we were cute together, it was like a benediction. Brian and I went and sat next to a fountain in the Wynn Hotel and exchanged rings, smiles on our faces.

For us, it was perfect.

Then, the next week, California passed Proposition 8. I was devastated. Here in Oklahoma we passed a Constitutional Amendment in 2004 that defined marriage as between one man and one woman (as opposed to, say, four men and three women, or two men, a pile of dirty laundry and a ham sandwich). It wasn’t a surprise when Oklahoma did it; but California was meant to be the great hope; if we’re not safe from discrimination in California, then where?

To be honest, I simply don’t understand why anyone cares whether or not gays can get legally married if they’re not gay themselves. I know the popular conspiracy theory is that if gays get married then they’ll have to teach school children that being gay is okay, and a lot of parents don’t want their kids learning about that stuff at school. Apparently it’s much easier to wage a national political campaign than it is to write a note to your kid’s teacher asking for your child to be excused during those discussions. Who knew?

When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher got mad at me and a bunch of other kids for being excused to attend our school’s Gifted and Talented program during what she considered a very important lesson. She dragged us out in the hallway and reamed us out, as if we’d been given a calendar and told to block out the time we’d like to be gone.

She pointed her finger in my face and said, “You know what, Nathan? You’re too smart for your own good. You’re going to end up killing yourself before you’re 18.”

I was in my mid-twenties before I told anyone that she did that. But in light of that event from my childhood, it seems to me that this nation’s parents have a lot more than homosexuality to worry about when it comes to what their kids are learning in school. After all, most of us spent a whole lot of time trying to recruit ourselves - and having other people recruit us - out of homosexuality, and that never worked. What makes anyone think we could recruit pre-pubescent kids in, even if we wanted to?

WHICH WE DON’T. Just for the record.

What we do want is for the great politically active Christian mass to apply the Golden Rule and treat us as they’d want us to treat them if the tables were turned. What many of us, myself included, want is for all of us believers to set aside what amount to petty political and theological differences and work together on the work of the Kingdom: feeding the hungry, for instance, who number in the millions just here in our own country, or leaving a better environment than the one we were left.

But to be honest, in a pinch I’d take just being left alone. I’d take not being blamed for 9-11 and the general moral decay of America. I don’t see where scapegoating all us gay and lesbian folks is a good museum exhibit of the Fruits of the Spirit as described in Galatians 5, or any of the virtues set out in the Sermon on the Mount. I don’t see what Proposition 8 accomplished except to reinforce the idea in so many gay and lesbian people’s minds and hearts that Christians - and, by proxy, God - hate us.

It was an honor to be included in the GCN film "Through My Eyes," and I think that if you haven’t seen it yet, you absolutely should. I think when you watch that film - well, not when you watch my part, but the rest - you see stories of people who really wrestled with this image of what it meant to be gay. The image we all wrestled - and many of us still wrestle - with is one of ourselves as fundamentally displeasing to God in a unique way that heterosexuals are not. They can cry “love the sinner, hate the sin” as much as they like, but there aren’t any ballot measures defining gardening as sowing only one type of crop in a field or making it illegal to wear more than one type of fabric at a time. No one wants to make it unconstitutional for straight men to hit their wives, and that’s a way bigger threat to marriage than me and Brian and our little uneventful life.

What Brian and I realized, during that wonderful conversation in Las Vegas, was that we already have a marriage, no matter what the law says, and that a wedding at that point just felt superfluous. We hang out with other couples - straight couples, mostly - and we worry about money and make each other laugh. We are, as a couple, who we want to be, and we pray that we learn to be better at loving each other.

Maybe someday we’ll be allowed to get legally married. Maybe when that happens we’ll have a wedding. Or - not a wedding, a party. No tuxedos or complicated dresses. No expensive presents.

Brian will fire up the grill, and everyone can bring a six-pack of beer or some of their grandmother’s potato salad. There will be flowers blooming, and music booming, and we’ll standing the backyard, blinking up at the sun, thinking to ourselves how wonderful and rare it is when any two people find love worth fighting for.

The Loop

Fri, 5 Feb 2010 18:02:43 -0500

If you want to see hypocrisy in action, just catch me behind the wheel of a car. I’m like a maniac. A maniac who drives like a little old lady and gets really, really self-righteous about it. I don’t speed, I don’t cut people off in traffic, and I don’t do that really terrible thing that some of you do where you know - you know - that your lane is about to end, but instead of merging over you speed around the rest of us and expect the person at the front of the line to let you go ahead of them. All I can say is that someone in your car better be having a baby. The head better already be out, too.

See? Just thinking about it gets me riled up.

Now. I’m willing to allow that some of the people who act horribly in our daily lives are like that one car - the one car in all of creation - that is carrying a crisis case to a hospital. But mostly I just assume that everyone thinks that where they have to be is more important than where I have to be, and that sorta gets my goat. Cars are dangerous things; drive carefully and courteously, and if you’re afraid that Home Depot will be out of all the good flowers before you arrive, say, or if you’re late to church, well - you’re listening to the wrong music in the car. Put on something a little more mellow - K.C. Clifford, perhaps - and chill out.

Cars are dangerous objects that can be used to kill or hurt, and like all the rest of you - well, not you - I wield mine with reckless abandon from time to time.

Words are the same way. As a writer I don’t have the luxury of taking words for granted, which is a problem when you have things like deadlines, and readers, and people who need your words the way I need the words of writers I admire. I could be starving or facing eviction, but if there’s a new Anne Lamott book or David Wilcox album out, I’ll find the money. At the heart of it I am a writer because I am a reader, a listener - I crave the shared experiences that words give us because I need to know I’m not alone. I share my story and all the grace I’ve been given, hoping it will come back to me.

That’s why I’m always so surprised when some religious whack job twists off and says something off-the-wall about gay and lesbian people. I’m surprised because those words really do have an impact, and even as a lover of words I am never sure what that impact is.

I live in Oklahoma, okay, so where I live it’s almost everywhere you look. Anita Bryant, she of late-1970’s-anti-gay-crusader-fame, lives and has offices just blocks from where I live and work. Sally Kern, the Oklahoma state legislator who became an internet anti-celebrity in 2008 when she was recorded making all kinds of inflammatory and untrue claims about the “gay agenda,” is my best friends’ state representative. They didn’t vote for her, but there you have it: democracy.

Usually the way I deal with people like this is to laugh at them, because honestly, to take them too seriously would cripple my ability to live in this world. Part of the problem that Sally Kern and Anita Bryant and James Dobson have is that they do take it too seriously, this idea of an army of homosexuals descending on America, forcing everyone to get gay married and surrender their two-year-olds to the “gay agenda.” Their chronic seriousness doesn’t allow them to step back, to get a sense of perspective and peace about the whole situation. This makes them crazy, which in turn makes them funny.

Still, we can’t write them off entirely as nut jobs. No matter what schoolyard chants our parents may have taught us, words do hurt - they cut and leave scars that don’t heal with time and vitamin E.

To wit: not long after I came out I was sitting in silence with a friend of mine. We worked together in a job that occasionally required us to sit and wait for long periods of time. We’d gone to get some food to pass the time, and we were eating in relative quiet. Out of nowhere my friend looked up at me and said, her voice shaking and angry, “I am traumatized by the fact that you’re gay.”

I can still hear it as clearly as if she were standing next to me today, repeating it over and over.

These voices get in our heads. I think that a huge portion of our thought lives consist of them, these things we have heard about ourselves and the world and God, on loop. They’re all saying different things, in different tones, and they’re hard to turn off. They’re the voices of our teachers, of the adolescent friends and schoolmates who said mean crap to us to assuage their own blistered egos. They’re the voices of our parents, the culture, and the harshest, meanest part of ourselves.

We all have known people who did not understand the simple truth that this looped tape is not, in fact, the voice of God. I didn’t understand that for a long time, and even now I must remind myself of it at least three times every day.

We’ve all had plenty of people who said awful, crappy things to us and who claimed to be doing it in the name of God. It’s funny how we can take something completely awful and then proclaim God’s blessing on it, thinking that makes it okay. The awful things some Christians - Sally Kern, for example, or me - say to one another or to the world. A whole lot of Contemporary Christian music.

Jesus wasn’t having any of this kind of behavior. He stood between a woman and the people who wanted to stone her and said to them, in essence, that just because they thought that God condoned what they were doing didn’t mean that they shouldn’t take a moment in their holy fervor and think about their actions. They were going to kill a woman for sinning - sinning - something every person does every day. They were singling her out because her sin - adultery - stuck out in their minds as something particularly awful and abhorrent. The truth was that no one in that crowd was any better than she. Not one of them had the right to throw a stone at her, no one except for Jesus that is, and He took mercy on her.

I’ve had some truly difficult things said to me in the name of Jesus. Some of them were things I needed to hear, said lovingly by people who knew me and my journey. Some of them were harsh and unfeeling and discompassionate and coming from nowhere near the vicinity of the Holy Spirit. One guess which words made it into The Loop. One more guess which of those two things have more often come from me.

We’re called - listen up, Sally Kern - we’re called to spend our short time on this earth taking care of one another, but more often than not we choose to beat one another into submission, and our words are our stones.

We’re called to love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Our words matter because they turn into other people’s thoughts. They get sucked up into the interior worlds of the people we care about, and when they’re there we don’t have any control over them. Most of us can’t go on CNN and say we were taken out of context, and as Christians we most certainly can’t say whatever we want just because we feel, in the moment, that we’ve been appointed by God to do so. I think that’s what all that “test the spirits” and “pray constantly” stuff is about.

What’s great about being a Christian is that it presumes that we are going to fail. I can more or less promise you that on my next outing to the store, on any five-minute journey through midtown Oklahoma City, I will question a fellow motorist’s parentage. I will make insinuations about his or her past or current drug use and helpful suggestions as to where he or she can place that cell phone when he or she is done using it. This is precisely why I don’t have a Jesus fish on my car.

Our failure is presumed, and forgiven, gone into the wind like it was never there to begin with. The Christian story starts with failure - with Original Sin, with bad words and bad news and bad faith. It ends somewhere else entirely, somewhere safe and redeemed, gentle and secure. In the middle we get to do this dance, this awkward two-step with the Holy Spirit, while the music goes on and on.

Welcome! (Back).

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:01:35 -0500

It has been almost three years since I last wrote an essay about my life as a gay Christian; for four years I had a column at the web’s best resource for gay Christians - gaychristian.net. Now I’m here at Open Salon; frankly this is because here, I can use the foul language of which I’m so fond.

Look; I never said, nor will I ever say, that I’m a good Christian.

I could attribute my absence to the events of the intervening time: I earned a graduate degree in writing, I got a full-time job that pays actual money, I adopted a dog, I started a garden and finished four novels (none published, yet). But none of those things would have been reason enough not to write about my awkward, club-footed pilgrim’s progress.

Look, I’m just going to level with you: I have almost no idea what it means to be gay, to be Christian, or to marry those two terms together in some kind of meaningful definition of myself.

When I first came out in 2001 – my official story is that the timing had absolutely nothing to do with our last President’s rise to power – there were a lot of very concerned people, good Christian people, who told me they worried I’d start to define myself solely by my sexual orientation. God knows I’ve known some people like that.

That same year I met a freshman at my university who introduced himself to me like this: “Hi, my name is J----, and I’m from gay hell, a.k.a. Kansas.”

So I could more or less see where my Christian friends were coming from. It’s off-putting when a person’s entire self-definition seems to come from being gay, as if that’s the only aspect of their existence that matters in any appreciable way. I think it’s off-putting because being gay is, at least in part, about sex, and really, most of us spend so little of our time actually having sex that to orient our lives around it seems maybe a little backward. At the very least, I think it’s fair to say that you don’t want to think about most of the people you know having sex any more than you want to think about them going to the bathroom.

Oh, I’m off to a ripping start, aren’t I? WELCOME BACK.

I think my adorable, caring, Jesus-loving friends needn’t have worried about me coming to define myself primarily as gay. If anything, the opposite has happened: the way I think of myself in practical terms has very little to do with being gay. It’s just this part of my life, this one thing about me, like the garden or the dog or the job or the dream of being a writer.

Being gay for me means that I have a husband, a man I love with all my heart, and that I send money and prayers to defeat that awful, awful Sally Kern, and Prop 8, and “Don’t Ask.” Other than that I don’t know, I don’t give it much thought. I have wonderful, supportive friends, family and coworkers who know and love Brian, and we don’t get hassled for being overly affectionate in public because it’s not like us to be overly affectionate in public. The problems that we do have are pretty great ones. A healthy, wonderful thing has happened: I’ve developed a sense of perspective about being gay and now it has its rightful place in my mind and identity.

As to my faith, I’m not entirely sure what has happened. To describe my faith as “just another aspect of myself” would be disingenuous, because I don’t think that being a Christian is – or should be – just another identity label.

That said, I have even less to say about how my relationship with God shapes me because it’s a relationship that’s deeper than words can go. When it comes to faith I’ve become more inclined just to listen, and wait.

This is so contrary to my personality that it’s not even funny. I’m not a listener, or a waiter. I’m a freaking writer, for God’s sake, someone who likes to talk into the void, and I’m about as impatient as it is possible to be. Add to that the fact that I have a degree in religion and philosophy, that I dropped out of divinity school, I devour books on theology and spirituality and that I have one or two pretty strong opinions, and it’s hard for me to just listen.

I got to spend some time last summer at the highest point in Oklahoma, a tall outcropping of volcanic rock called Black Mesa that is only 1,200 feet from the small border my state shares with New Mexico. Brian and I hiked to the top of the Mesa with a good friend. At the top I sat on the edge of a rock face looking out over the ancient plain below. It was perfectly silent – not a whisper of wind, no chatter of birds or humming of insects. It was if the world was sitting perfectly still.

It was one of those moments where the veil was down. Time stood still and everything was perfectly quiet. In moments like these I find myself anticipating something huge – God finally waving His wand or whispering a three-word Secret that will allow me to float along through life with a beatific smile and a bright halo over my head.

As a young man my faith was marked by deep impatience. Every prayer session was marked by a sense that any moment God would – or should – reach down and make me Victorious over all that vexed me. I figured I’d struggle with this or that sin or challenge for awhile, then I’d experience a miracle healing, and my life would finally begin. Of course, this never happened and at some point I realized that my desire for miracle healing was less about faith than it was about no longer wanting to be dependent. I wanted God to come down and fix me so that I didn’t have to feel broken anymore, so that I didn’t have to be constantly reminded of my need for Him.

That day on the Mesa I felt my dependence, I felt small and suspended in something greater, something so great that in its reach I should be of no consequence, and yet here I was, this great prairie and its unending blue sky filled with something at once transcendent and imminent. I didn’t ask for anything, I didn’t wait to be struck by some bolt of religious inspiration. It was quiet, God was near, and for once that was enough.

That experience has stuck with me as the model of what my life as a Christian is supposed to be like. As a young believer I prayed about every inconsequential decision – where to have lunch, what classes to take, what music to listen to. My head was filled with the endless chatter of a nervous mind, and I over-spiritualized it all. I had no sense of perspective about any of my thoughts or inclinations. I began to see all of life as this nonstop spiritual warfare. It was exhausting.

Miraculously, I grew. I learned how to trust, just a little, just enough. I stopped worrying that it was my job to save the world, or myself, or anyone at all. I let go just a little, and then later, just a little more, and I’m still learning to let go. I haven’t arrived, but I’ve stopped expecting to, and that’s huge.

So now, I listen. I wait. It drives me crazy, but in a way that is contrary to every nervous and sick impulse I have, and this makes me think it’s the right thing to do. I only know enough about what it means to be a Christian, to walk with Jesus, to get me through today, through this moment, and while that never feels like enough, it always is.