(Preorder the book<\/a>!)<\/p>\n In my post on celibate partnerships<\/a> I noted that \u201cthe more unusual your vocation, the more actively you should seek out spiritual guidance from an outside party.\u201d But of course there\u2019s a catch-22 here: The weirder your vocation, the more you need spiritual direction; and the weirder your vocation, the harder good direction is to find. In both my book and the partnerships post I spoke mostly to the person seeking direction. In this post I\u2019ll try to speak mostly to people in positions of spiritual leadership: priests, spiritual directors & spiritual fathers & mothers, mentors, pastors\u2026 if strangers come to you for ongoing help in their walk with Christ, this post is for you. (And it\u2019s actually for all Christians, since many of these points will be applicable to the ways friends can help one another walk with Jesus as well.)<\/p>\n To me the most important point is that the list of vocations is not fixed. Vocations emerge in response to social context\u2013nobody was a Sister of Life in 1800\u2013and they fade as the contexts in which they emerged begin to disappear. There are no more beguines in the last beguinage<\/a>. So the fact that a vocation is new\u2013incorporating elements of older and more-developed vocations, but banging them together in weird new collisions\u2013shouldn\u2019t automatically make it suspect.<\/p>\n Moreover, even old vocations need to be lived differently<\/em> in new social contexts. Robin Darling Young\u2019s vow of friendship<\/a> didn\u2019t mean what it might have meant three centuries ago, because her social world viewed it differently. If someone\u2019s life is primarily shaped by love of friends, by being a godparent, by becoming a part of a family as an \u201cunofficial aunt,\u201d the challenges they\u2019ll face are different now from what they would have been back in Don Corleone\u2019s day.<\/p>\n What all of this suggests to me is that people need the freedom to explore. Human beings desperately need to give and receive love. We need vocation as much as we need food. And yet once you identify yourself as gay or same-sex attracted, far too often your spiritual director will be super afraid of anything which looks like it\u2019s stepping off the safe path. People have been cautioned against having close same-sex friends, against any form of physical contact including hugs, against anything which might be misunderstood by other people (aka literally every human action\u2013five seconds on the internet will tell you that you\u2019re constantly being misjudged, because globalized culture is awesome?), against, against, against.<\/p>\n The \u201csafety first\u201d approach is not safe<\/em>. I talk about this in-depth in the book, so for now I\u2019ll just say that fear of making mistakes or setting a toe out of line makes people crazy, it drives them to despair, and it cuts them off from that love of other people which, quite often, is how we come to understand God\u2019s love.<\/p>\n That doesn\u2019t mean that gay Christians never act imprudently. There are times when we really need a spiritual director to suggest that we\u2019re not acknowledging obvious temptations; we may be creating a fantasy vocation which is exactly what we want and then demanding that other people play the roles we\u2019ve assigned them, for example. We may be naive about the power of sexual desire, or about the realities of sexual difference. (\u201cOh, we talk for hours every night, but I\u2019m sure he just sees me as a friend\u2013I mean, he knows I\u2019m a lesbian,\u201d said Jill, but Jack murmured to himself, Someday<\/em>\u2026.) But in order to know when these things are happening you need to know the actual, specific person\u2013not just the fact that he or she is gay.<\/p>\n The most important thing in any spiritual direction is deepening the directee\u2019s relationship with God. That relationship will often flow through and into relationships with other people, so helping the directee clear away the debris of ego and fantasy which can block those channels is another big part of the director\u2019s task. But none of this requires that the directee act normal. The directee doesn\u2019t have to be that marketing demographic, the \u201csingleton,\u201d with a personal watermelon and a brownie in a mug<\/a>. (Yeah, I\u2019m not over the mug brownie. So tasty, yet so creepy!) She can create a \u201cchosen family,\u201d and live out devotion and commitment in a society which expects her to be drifting and alone.<\/p>\n So here are some bullet-point guidelines which strike me as useful:<\/p>\n * Deepening love of God often leads us to connect with other people. Devotion to God often bears fruit in devotion to others.<\/p>\n * Vocation needs to be viewed holistically. A situation can present certain temptations, e.g. to lust, yet still be best overall<\/em> for someone\u2019s spiritual life.<\/p>\n * You don\u2019t have to understand why a person\u2019s way of life works for her; if you can see that, over time, she is growing toward God, something<\/em> is working. But the more you listen the more likely you are to understand what God is doing in her life.<\/p>\n * For lots and lots of gay or same-sex attracted Christians, our biggest spiritual needs have nothing to do with lust and little to nothing to do with our sexual orientation. I\u2019m going to do a whole post later in this series on how everybody sexualizes celibate gay Christians, and acts as if our whole spiritual lives (good and bad) revolve around our orientation, so for now I\u2019ll just say that \u201cI\u2019m gay\u201d tells you basically nothing<\/em> about the kind of direction someone needs.<\/p>\n My own first spiritual director was super great about this, by the way. I learned much later that he and I take really different approaches to Ye Olde Gaye Questionne, but he listened<\/em> to what I was saying and accurately identified the areas in my prayer life, my moral<\/a> life, etc, where I needed guidance. The only aspect of my sexual orientation I think we ever talked about was the pressure of being a professional homosexual, a poster gay.<\/p>\n