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DOWN ON MY KNEES\u2013I WANT TO TAKE YOU THERE<\/strong>: It was genuinely odd reading the reactions to my \u201cRomoeroticism<\/a>\u201d piece. Maybe the weirdest thing, for me, was the recurrence of the idea of \u201cstruggle.\u201d People seemed to think I\u2019d bared my heart, shown y\u2019all my hardest fight. This is just not true, and I think maybe it\u2019s important to say that.<\/p>\n

There are at least three reasons why maybe you shouldn\u2019t assume that a gay Catholic\u2019s gayness is her *~*struggle*~*.<\/p>\n

First, please don\u2019t cover my face with your heart<\/strong>. Other people\u2019s impersonal sympathy can really become a sticky blanket you just want to throw off. I don\u2019t mean at all to denigrate the compassion and prayers people promised in the IC comments. It\u2019s just that you all might be over-reading me, you know? <\/p>\n

If I don\u2019t say something is the big hard awful struggle of my life, maybe it isn\u2019t<\/em>. Maybe I need your prayers more for something else. Maybe your compassion has some element of unintentional <\/em>refusal to listen. <\/p>\n

I think the thing many gay Catholics\u2013even and especially those of us who do attempt fidelity to Church teaching\u2013find most frustrating is simply that no one really listens. People project a lot of interpretations onto us and ignore the ways we challenge those projections. So I\u2019m \u201cself-hating,\u201d or I\u2019m \u201cstruggling,\u201d and neither one<\/em> of those descriptions really sounds like my actual life.<\/p>\n

Second, there might be a better metaphor.<\/strong> I\u2019d use the metaphor of surrender. I\u2019m not struggling against a thing; I\u2019m surrendering to a Person.<\/p>\n

Now, I\u2019ve noted before that I like femme metaphors better than butch ones! So there may well be gay Catholics for whom the \u201cstruggle\u201d metaphor sounds more like how they feel day-to-day, and I\u2019m not meaning to say my metaphor is better. I\u2019m just saying my metaphor is mine<\/em>, and it helps me understand how to live as a gay Catholic who is basically grateful and joyful. Other people will have other metaphors. All I want is for straight Catholics to let us pick our own metaphors, rather than assuming it\u2019s the one they\u2019ve heard most often.<\/p>\n

And third, let my heart rest here.<\/strong> Let me choose metaphors which suggest that it is in the Catholic Church, in the Mass, in the sacraments, where I truly find my place in the world. Let me say that this isn\u2019t where I struggle. It\u2019s where I \u201cfeel like\u2026 home<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"