Cif beliefCatholicism This article is more than 13 years old

My gay Catholic life

This article is more than 13 years oldAnonymousIn the actual experience of loving my partner, I knew that our love was good

In Catholic high school I aced all my classes, as had my brothers and sisters before me. At home, I scanned the reading material at hand – the National Review, the Moral Majority newsletter, and the Hillsdale College newsletter – and watched Firing Line with my father. I attended a Reagan campaign rally on the picturesque green of my New England hometown. In our home, Reagan, Buckley, and Falwell enjoyed a kind of trinitarian status. Wanting to attend a Catholic college or university, as had three of my four older siblings, I set my sights on the University of Notre Dame, applying there and only there.

At Notre Dame I majored in theology and held an office in the campus pro-life group. As a student there I had my world expanded exponentially, albeit still within the Catholic bubble. At Notre Dame I came across more permutations of Catholicity than I had ever imagined existed. On or near or passing through campus was a dizzying array of personalities and schools of thought and service groups and periodicals. Focolare, Opus Dei, Lawrence Cunningham, Jean Porter, Richard McBrien, Michael Buckley, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Waldstein, the Thomas More society, Crisis, NCR, the National Catholic Register, Commonweal, Lefebvrists, Marianists, millennialists, Lonerganians, Thomists, Balthasarians, the theology of the body, Feminists for Life, Comunione e Liberazione, Community of Sant'Egidio, Holy Cross Associates, high mass in the Basilica, Wednesday night masses in the chapel of Farley Hall ... like I said, dizzying. One Thursday night I would be out to a fondue dinner with a friend and her father and a conference-attending Joseph Fessio, SJ (who fixed his traditionalist gaze on me and said, "So, just how bad is the Theology department these days?"). The next morning might find me crashing a professional conference on medical ethics – sitting in the back row, taking it all in – before heading off to hear a speaker on liberation theology over at the Centre for Social Concerns. During my time at Notre Dame a professor I asked to be my confessor steadily tried to bring me along from a stunted spirituality centred on self-discipline (I was very, very good at that) to a more expansive and far more challenging spirituality centred on the daunting gospel command to love – really love – God and neighbour. I left campus with my diploma and a handful of awards, one of them for being the top theology student. I hated leaving, and told everyone I felt like I had just started getting to the good stuff.

After a couple of weeks I drove my fondue friend to an order of female hermits in New York whom she was considering joining, and headed to the L'Arche community in Toronto, Canada, to live and work among the developmentally disabled. Daily Mass was again part of the mix, this time with Henri Nouwen as celebrant. When Henri was gone a few of us tried our hand at lay preaching. I'd like to think I did a passable job. After two years at L'Arche, not able to shake that "but I was just getting to the good stuff" feeling, I requested a deferral of admission to law school in order to continue theology studies. Fellowship in hand, I relocated to Boston and found my intellectual home in the work of Karl Rahner. Two years of studying theology and nothing but theology – and getting paid for it! – well, that was as sweet a deal as I had ever come across.

During my years in Boston I dated a couple of guys, one of them a former seminarian and fellow theology student. He and I attended a talk by Andrew Sullivan, then the editor of the New Republic and an out gay Catholic. I sat and listened, and knew for the first time with a semblance of peace what I had come to know in recent years in more conflicted fashion: that I was, and would always be, a gay Catholic.

I met my future partner some years later at a party thrown by a priest. The months that followed were excruciatingly difficult. It is one thing to be a gay Catholic, another to take the step of dating. I realised I would never have an answer for those who say, "God will give you the strength to bear whatever burden you have. He will give you the grace to be a faithful, celibate, gay woman. You need only pray and fast." If I protest and say that I have prayed, I did fast (every Wednesday, for years!), my continued existence as an unrepentant gay Catholic simply provides them with their own ready answer: "You need only pray and fast more". And who can disagree with that? I am reminded of the words of Rahner as he pondered embarking on the writing of his massive tome Foundations of Christian Faith:

"For a Christian, his Christian existence is ultimately the totality of his existence. This totality opens out in the dark abyss of the wilderness which we call God. When one undertakes something like this, he stands before the great thinkers, the saints, and finally Jesus Christ. The abyss of existence opens up in front of him. He knows that he has not thought enough, has not loved enough, has not suffered enough."

I don't disagree that I have not thought enough or prayed enough or suffered enough. Neither, for that matter, has anyone.

I do not take the teachings of the church and its 2000 years of accumulated wisdom lightly. I never have. But in the actual experience of loving my partner, I knew that our love was good. It was as simple as that. Our love as we experienced it was a flowering of our faith, and not its undoing. This was so overwhelmingly apparent that I was immediately suspicious of my own self. The possibilities for self-deception are infinite, I knew. And I was sure "I know that our love is good" was right up there with "It seemed like a good idea at the time" as the phrase of choice of love- and lust-addled adulterers and sundry other kinds of sinner. But at the end of the day, one is left with oneself, one's conscience (however formed), and the stirrings of the spirit. At the time I listened over and over again to a jazzy rendition of the Quaker hymn "How Can I Keep from Singing?" and decided, ultimately, to sing.

A longer version of this article first appeared in Commonweal magazine

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