I’ve Been Waiting For This For Decades
Literally. Via Box Turtle Bulletin… A Christian writer who takes his anti-gay bible passages seriously, actually notices the elephant in the room…
Another thing about the homosexual/Christian “issue” is that it seems to me that we Christians should be clear on the fact that asserting homosexuals should stop acting homosexual necessarily means asserting that they should spend their lives never knowing the loving intimacy with another that straight people enjoy and know to be the best and richest experience in life.
If I were gay, and I lived and behaved in the way most Christians (understandably!) defend as biblical, I would live alone. I wouldn’t wake up every morning next to my wife. I’d never hold hands with my wife. I’d never kiss my wife. I’d never cuddle with my wife. I’d not know the profound pleasure of every day growing older with my wife. Remaining as sinless as possible would, for me, mean never knowing love of the sort that all straight people, Christian or not, understand as pretty much the best thing life has to offer.
Again: I’m not saying that it’s manifestly absurd and even cruel to suggest that everyone within a broad swath of our population spend their lives in emotional and physical isolation. I believe in the tenets of Christianity as ferociously as any Christian in the world. All I’m saying is that, as far as I can tell, we Christians (insofar as we ever speak with one voice) are saying that it is morally incumbent upon homosexuals to spend their lives in emotional and physical isolation. I hear a lot of Christians asserting that gays and lesbians should stop acting like gays and lesbians. But I never hear anyone saying the unavoidable follow-up to that — saying what that really means — which is that gay and lesbian men and women should spend their lives never experiencing what people most commonly mean when they use the word “love.”
This is what I’ve been waiting to see…someone who believes the bible categorically forbids same sex relationships admit what that really means to gay people. Not babble that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Not witlessly deny that there is ever any fulfilling, romantic, body and soul and spirit component to same sex relationships. But honestly and seriously look at what denying intimate romantic love to gay people does to their lives, to their inner lives, to their heart and soul. To our spirit.
Someone who is at least willing to both see human beings when they look at us, and honestly acknowledge the hell we are being put through for the sake of these biblical passages, can be talked with.
52. Bruce Garrett – April 16, 2008
Thank you Mr. Shore. I’ve been waiting for literally decades to see a Christian writer make this connection. Usually it’s just quickly glossed over. I think the reason why is pretty obvious.
When my mom passed away a few years ago, I inherited her diaries. We never discussed my sexual orientation…it was a Don’t Ask Don’t Tell household. I was, like her, raised a Baptist, and the time of my coming of age coincided, not coincidentally, with the period of my leaving the faith. What I expected to read in her diaries from that time was grief over my slow but steady walk away from our church. But no. Grief there was, but it was almost exclusively over how the bright and cheerful son she once had turned into a moody, sullen, angry young man. It makes me cry to read those entries.
When you take the possibility of love away from someone…what do they have left? Think about that, the next time you see an angry homosexual.
53. John Shore – April 16, 2008
Bruce: Perfectly said. Just … perfect. And what a touching, heart-wrenching story.
Liberal Christians like Fred Clark have never had any trouble acknowledging the spiritual potential of same sex love. But they’re not generally biblical literalists. Hopefully I’ll see more of this from those in the coming years. The people who don’t care and just don’t want to know have had the stage for far too long.
April 17th, 2008 at 7:13 am
I think this comment from his next blog entry is even more interesting: If my gay friends, whom my life experience tells me can no sooner stop being gay than I can stop being straight, have to go to hell after they die, then I’m going with them. Too many gays and lesbians have been too good to me in this life for me to leave them behind in the next. I won’t do it.
This is a heterosexual Christian who openly admits that, on the basis of scripture, he considers homosexuality to be sinful -and yet he’d rather spend eternity in Hell with us than eternity in Heaven without us.
April 17th, 2008 at 9:24 am
Wow…that’s just…amazing. He must be really struggling with this. I really feel for him.
I count my blessings. I could have easily grown up to be a biblical literalist considering the household I grew up in, and ended up…I dunno…in and out of Ex-Gay programs maybe, and generally hating myself and who knows what else. But somehow I didn’t. I fell in love with the stars at an early age and began devouring books on astronomy and from there to nature and science and ever since my thinking about God and my relationship to my creator has always been grounded in what I saw in nature and my theology such as it is, goes along the lines of "When the bird and the bird book disagree, believe the bird." I never took the bible literally and have always felt free in conscience and spirit to embrace the wisdom I see in it and discard what makes no sense. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live…right…whatever…
But I can’t point to any moment in my life where I made a conscious decision to reject the idea that the bible is the Literal word of God. I had this gut level understanding ever since I can remember walking outside at night and looking up at the stars that the literal word is up there in the dazzling night sky and there on the ground under my feet and the birds in the trees and the scent of the blossoms and there in the light of the rising sun. So whenever I read the bible I always had this sense that I was reading how people understood God to be, but not necessarily how God was, and whenever I read anything that was ugly or stupid or mean I just reckoned that had nothing do to with God and just glossed over it. God made the bird. Humans write the bird books and humans are not infallible.
Maybe there is a life after death…I have no idea. But the idea of Hell, like the idea of original sin, is cheap and petty and ugly and completely unworthy of that which could create space and time, let alone the birds and the bees out of nothing. Humans have an almost bottomless capacity to hate. I simply cannot believe that of anything capable of creating a soul. So I don’t believe in hell. But I have seen a small portion of the hell humans can make for each other and that has convinced me that Jesus was absolutely right about this: We have to love one another.
April 17th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
[...] This isn’t just posturing, this man really believes in Hell, Capital ‘H’. Tavdy pointed me to this follow-up post over at John Shore’s blog in the comments to This Post. This man is really struggling between his love for his gay friends and what he honestly believes about God and for once I can look at this and believe it’s real and not some sort of empty posturing and that’s entirely because you can see he really does view gay people as human beings and not a bunch of faceless scarecrows with the word SODOMITE pinned on them. What decent person could accept entry into paradise, knowing that so many other good-hearted, decent, loving people are going to burn for eternity simply for loving someone of their own sex, and being loved by them? But then…what kind of person even conceives of such a thing to begin with? God didn’t invent Hell. Human beings did. [...]