The Deaf Can't Hear

I hear the word “disordered” all the time when talking about gay people and I really would like for people to stop using it as if gay people are the only ones walking around disordered. We are all disordered because we all sin and all sins are disordered.

I suffer from anger, laziness and selfishness among a lot of other habitual sins and they are all disordered because they are not part of God’s plan for my life. They show themselves in all kinds of ways especially my snark and coveting of other people’s lives and material things (and babies). We are all marked by original sin. It is called Concupiscence.

Concupiscence:  is an ardent, usually sensual, longing. In Catholic theology, concupiscence has the name “Fomes peccati”, as the selfish human desire for an object, person, or experience.

If you are a human being then you have a desire for things that lead you away from God and that desire is at the root of every single sin of yours and mine. And it is a disorder. Not just gay people, but everyone.

It is always easy for us to justify our sins and find the reasons for them and then turn around and think the sinner next to us is really messed up. It may just be me, but even when I sit in the confession line I do it. I sit there listing all the ways that I have failed to love my neighbor and before you know it I’m looking at the person next to me and thinking “man, that lady seems grumpy, she must be….” And there goes my examination of my neighbor’s conscience. When I finally click then it just gets added to the list of my own sins.

It could be because of my own personal experience with people in my life who are gay. I have seen the pain that they go through, the fear of not being accepted and the tears that they have shed when people told them that they were going to go to hell if they didn’t “repent”. I know that words like “disorder” and “repent” all have meaning, true, unemotional meanings, but when someone has heard the people they love most use those words to attack them, then those words take on a different meaning. There is power in words. There is a reason that I flat-out say that I was a hoe, and that is because never will anyone make that obvious statement to me and it hurt me. Kind of like Fat Amy.

Not everyone is aware of why certain words hurt them. And if what we are saying is adding their wounds, then what good does that do? We feel good about proclaiming the truth even if that truth is said in a way that hurts someone else? And I don’t mean it hurts them because they are sinners and don’t want to hear that, I mean hurts them because someone used those words as weapons on them once before.

Jesus made things simple for people to understand without comprising the truth many times, mostly in parables. (one hint as to who exactly had an issue with that approach) It isn’t a new thing. None of this is new. People will twist anything to make it sound the way that they want, it’s what humans do. No matter what, it will get twisted. It’s been like that ever since sin was introduced to the world. We cannot worry about that really, it’s happening. Souls of those who don’t feel welcome into the one place where their hearts can rest are being lost every day. Instead of those of us in the Church being concerned about the Church teachings changing, or being twisted, we should worry about those who are walking around this world in despair who feel like they have nowhere to take that pain. I have lived in that darkness. I know people still living in it. I want them to come to the place where I found love like I’ve never known in my life. Do I want the Church to stop speaking the truth? No, I want them to be healed by love so that they can hear the truth. Sin makes us blind and deaf; you can’t speak truth to a deaf person and expect them to hear you. Jesus was capable of healing people, hearing their confession and forgiving their sins all at one time, but He is Jesus, we ain’t.

I hope that at the end of the day we all realize that we all want the same thing and that is for the lost to find God inside the Catholic Church and that the how is what we are debating. We will figure it out, one way or another Holy Spirit will figure it out, but for now, we just need to drink a little wine and laugh. Tomorrow will be a post on lipstick or kittens or something.