I THINK I KNOW NOW...
The question I have pursued over the last several years -- well, to be honest, have occasionally taken off the back burner over the last few years -- is this:What does it mean for me, a married leather-bound gay man, to take up my cross and follow Him?
I think I know, and felt I got a boost from something my wife said in church today: we are feathers on the breath of God, and the note that God blows on a reed flute -- our job is to fly where the breath lifts us, to be as true a note as we know how, with as little tremolo and quaver as we can manage.
But I would be interested to hear what the rest of you think.
Drew? Joe? Geek-boi?
Sean:
ReplyDeleteit is always helpful to get called on your pronouncements. Well, let's talk about "denying myself". I've tried denying WHAT I am, and that didn't work too well; I also cannot believe that that is what is meant, no matter how many people have been told it is.
I think that you have KNOW yourself to deny yourself; now I was here as a young man. I knew what I wanted, and I slept with a number of people, including one girl who really loved me, and who only slept with me because she loved me. I dropped her almost immediately for her pains. Thirty years later, I still can't believe that "I" did that -- I want so much to believe that I am a better, nobler person. Well, that's horseshit, isn't it?
It's knowing what serves Self alone, and giving it up. That was what I was trying to do as a result of my conversion. Being an extreme make-over kind of guy, I went all the way over to the other extreme and decided that if I couldn't trust myself, I would trust a bunch of laws, so I became a sort of Underground Catholic, particularly stupid because the people who midwifed my conversion had both left a narrow view of catholicity behind to embrace the totality of the Christian tradition. But I digress.
The question is: what serves Self? that is what we are called to deny. Taking up the cross means living a life for others; how I square my idea that being gay is my cross, and "coming out" is my pathway, and the fact that the suffering involved seems to be largely other people's, is the tar-baby I am currently wrestling with.
A feather does not have to know where it's going, it just has to trust the wind to carry it, whether it lands in a good place or not. Hope for a good place is not the same thing as faith in the Breath of God. And I know that I am probably a discordant note on that flute of Rumi's, but I can still try to be a true note and a steady note.
It's discerning what chord I have to be in that is the issue, isn't it?
Well, "whoever told you it would be easy?"
Cheers
The Troll