My Final Post in Dialogue w/Justin Lee About Relationships for Gay Christians

My Final Post in Dialogue w/Justin Lee About Relationships for Gay Christians July 20, 2015

here you go:

I’ve greatly appreciated Justin’s contributions to this dialogue. I don’t expect this to be “the final word”—and I’m sorry these posts have been so long!—but let me try to give a bit more of a sense of where I’m coming from. Here are five things.

What we long for. I generally write about the paths of love that are open to gay or same-sex attracted Catholics. That’s because they are so much more varied and more fruitful than I realized when I became Catholic. I wish people had told me that I would not be barred from intimacy, ecstasy, devoted love, lifelong care, or kinship; that I could find ways of pouring myself out in love for others and becoming a part of their “chosen family.”

But there are obviously pathways that are closed to me. Lesbians can’t be priests, for example. (Is that a joke? I always act like that’s a joke but it’s a toothy one.) I hope it doesn’t come across as disingenuous that I focus on the paths to which God does call gay Catholics and don’t spend as much time detailing the pain we feel because some paths of love are barred to us. I know it’s hard to believe this but I’m actually a really private person. I respect so much the people who have the courage to speak vulnerably about their own struggles with yearning for marriage, sex, or biological children, all of which I will not have unless something very weird happens.

Out of those three I feel the lack of sex most sharply.

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