I’m working on a new book, non-fiction this time: basically, it’s “Mudblood Catholic, the book.” Collecting my posts to date (mostly from my blogspot days of course), summarizing here, expanding there. I thought I’d share a selection of what I’ve written.
It’s easy to whinge about this and that problem, and be perfectly right about them, but if you don’t have hope that things can get better, you’re just picking at the wound. And it is really, really hard for me to hope that any of this is going to get better. Not impossible; but hope is, for me, one of the hardest things in the world. Because if you have hope, you can get hurt.
And I am really, really tired of getting hurt.
But there’s no way to avoid it. If you relate to human beings at all in this world, you’re going to get hurt; and if you don’t then you’ll get hurt far more horribly. To learn that a person or a group or a whole institution that you trusted has let you down, to be disappointed—it goes back to some of our earliest shocks of pain. The first time you were punished unfairly; the first time you told the truth and weren’t believed; the first time someone was mean to you for fun. We tell children that they’ll get over those things, but the truth is that very few of us do: we learn to belittle and ignore the wounds, which isn’t the same thing at all. As a rule, yes, with time, those early wounds do close up part of the way—but they also rot a little bit, leaving a strange mixture of callus and sore. It’s easier to pretend they’re not important than to admit that they still hurt sometimes. Because admitting that would take us back to that place where we were powerless and small.
Trying to believe there is a future for me as a gay Catholic, a future for all of us queer Christians in fact, is very hard work. I’ve watched several people whose faith, character, insight, and creativity I admire come, swiftly or slowly, to the conclusion that there wasn’t one. A handful, like Stephen, have left Christianity altogether; a larger number have adopted Side A beliefs, and many of them have left the Catholic Church behind as well. It’s left me doubting, at times, whether I’m up to this. If people like Lucy or Marina or Mark couldn’t hack it, who do I think I am?
I certainly don’t have a formula to offer for maintaining hope. The things that most people cite to me as encouragement, like Newman’s I do not ask to see / The distant scene, one step enough for me, fill me with horror. All that does is evoke the nightmare: each day following the next, never having quite enough love or purpose to live from (or quite enough lack of them to justify giving up), until the last day of my life arrives and I realize, too late, that it was all a mistake from the start.
Maybe if my faith were stronger I could make a better use of such advice. But maybe not. And the question is, in any case, academic, because my faith isn’t like that right now, and I need to be able to get out of bed and actually show up at Mass on Sunday morning, not argue about what I could in theory do if I were a saintlier person.
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