Hi Deacon Jim ...
I really do not have more time ... others need me. Out of respect for you I will answer your question as best as I can. But please ... there are many others who can articulate responsible dissent on the issue much better than I.
Nobody in this thread is arguing for polygamy ... a social construct that was O.K. for Abraham. Personally, I view argumentum ad absurdio reductionist arguments as simply a means to deflect attention from what is at the heart of the issue: what constitutes a marriage?
I am becoming involved in contemporary gay struggles – both for reasons of ongoing personal integration as well as the cause of social justice and the rights of suffering minorities. The interior pain and societal rejection experienced by gay persons speaks to the contemplative heart since we deeply believed that the suffering required for sanctity in a secular age must originate with the pain of the world. We may counsel creative disobedience at the level of pastoral care. When custom and law systematically conceal rights and truth, then the Holy Spirit inspires men to carry out actions that violate custom and law in order to bear witness to truth.
Michelle is 51 years old, schizophrenic and had a hysterectomy. Hence, we have no children ... which in God’s infinite wisdom is a good thing given Michelle’s capabilities. We do not have procreative intent as some Deacon suggested we must ... for such magical thinking is cruel.
What makes our union sacred is the love and respect that we have for one another. Our union has been fruitful. Over 100 hundred men and women like us have discovered sustainable faith - measured as one year of abstinence from drugs and alcohol - in our Catholic Worker home. We raise alcoholics and drug addicts ... who through the grace of God have died to self and have been born into a new life. Miracles are happening here. For it is love that cures.
The rationalization of heterosexual procreative intent coupled with “complimentarity” is a twentieth century exclusionary “natural law” logical invention that does not conform to the reality of many people.
The heart of Jesus gospel is about loving relationship. Catholic marriage laws are really quite beautiful ... for they speak of self-sacrifice for the sake of the other ... our purpose in being ... to learn how to love. Therein lies the truth in the law.
It is sad that many of the same people who accuse gay culture of being promiscuous also oppose an institution that would enable gay people to enter into committed, stable unions sanctioned by society.
Encouraging gay couples to enter into committed and stable unions will benefit society. It is ironic that the supposed “protection of marriage” seems to focus more on the prevention of new loving unions rather than the nurturing of existing unions.
Some claim that same-sex marriage cannot achieve the same level of complementarity that exists between a man and a woman. This ignores studies that have found same-sex and heterosexual couples to be equivalent to each other on measures of relationship satisfaction and commitment.
Some claim that same-sex marriage will threaten the very fabric of society by changing the notion of what constitutes a family. However, they fail to explain exactly how the inclusion of same-sex marriages will negatively impact society at all. In this day and age there are already many non-traditional families which are nonetheless stable and healthy.
Some claim that same-sex marriage will undermine marriage between a man and a woman. This certainly does not afford gay people the dignity they deserve, and implies that they are second class citizens whose unions are somehow inferior to those of their straight brothers and sisters.
Some claim that same-sex marriages will pose a threat to children who are placed in the care of a gay couple. Many gay people have conceived children. And, it is important to realize that adoption and same-sex marriage are two entirely different issues. With adoption, the primary concern is always determining what is in the best interests of the child. A child should never be placed in the care of any couple (gay or straight) because the couple “deserves it”. Overall, the research indicates that the children of lesbian and gay parents do not differ markedly from the children of heterosexual parents in their development, adjustment, or overall well-being
Gay persons’ spiritual journeys are unique, different from those oriented toward the opposite sex. Both the crosses borne and the gifts received and given into the world are different, valuable and necessary for the on-going evolution of humanity. Same-sex oriented souls are unique images of the ever-creating God. Whether by nature or nurture or a combination of the two, a minority of persons have always been created in this way – including some of the world’s greatest leaders and artists. This does not mean, of course, that one’s sexual orientation defines one’s interiority. It is, however, surely one of the most significant determinants of human identity. One cannot enter paths of spiritual growth only by dealing with one’s own sexuality.
It is essential to make clear one often undifferentiated point. Sexuality is not simply genitality. Sexuality is about intimate relationality. It shapes the way every person exists in relationship to the rest of reality. As such, one’s sexual orientation is a significant qualifier of both the kind of inner life and relational life which a person develops. Sexuality is about one’s identity, not one’s lifestyle.
Soul is who one is in the very core of one’s being. The human soul is one’s unique, personal identity. It is the inner reality which joins spirit and body into an integrating embodied spirit. Soul is not a ‘thing’ one ‘has’ – or ’saves.’ One ’saves his/her soul by discovering that the soul is what one is. And who one is a unique image and likeness of God. Spiritual journeys spiral both upwards and downwards into soul and the principal metaphor for spirituality is The Journey.
The real journey in everyone’s life is interior. On that journey same-sex oriented persons need to learn to stop looking primarily outside the self to find one’s identity and truth. No longer should one look principally to others – either heterosexuals or homosexuals – to define one’s identity and to prescribe how one should act. Being and identity are discovered on the journey into one’s interiority.
Thomas Merton taught that “if you really want to know what the Will of God is for you, then simply honestly listen to the deepest yearnings of your own heart, and believe that expresses the Voice of God for you.” Merton wrote that the transformation of human consciousness which “will seek to transform and liberate the truth in each person, with the idea that it will then communicate itself to others.”
The transformation of both persons and society was dear to Thomas Merton’s heart. As a contemplative social critic, his words about discrimination toward Afro-Americans might be used appropriately to decry the rampant contemporary discrimination against gay persons by both society and church. Merton complained that one of the grave problems of religion was “the almost total lack of protest on the part of religious people and clergy, in the face of enormous social evils.” He judged the mentality of the clergy to be “not in touch with reality.” They dealt only with “abstract dilemmas.” He called upon the conscience of the Catholic layman to play a positive and decisive part in moving persons to see and remedy the great social disease of racial discrimination.
Is not the same true today? With regard to gay discrimination in our time, many in ministry seldom grasp the gay situation from within the reality of that experience – - possibly because too many mature and responsible gay persons remain closeted regarding their sexual orientation and perhaps some of these are clergy themselves. Too often, at best, both those in ministry and others try to deal with injustices toward gay persons from partial and inadequate understandings of human nature. This is what is meant by the dominance of heterosexism which does not include and accept same-sex orientation as one of the equal but different ways humans are being created. Stereotypes of gay persons – like stereotypes of “Negroes” in Merton’s times – do not help the gay and straight quest for the True Self.
Why, in this particular crisis is there so much hatred and so dreadful a need for explosive violence? ... as long as white society persists in clinging to its present condition and to its own image of itself as the only acceptable reality, then the problem will remain without reasonable solution.
Honest, non-prejudical dialogue is essential. To achieve this, non-violent protests by gays and heterosexual people in the pews may be required in order to accomplish what Afro-Americans’ “acting up” did in the 1960’s: awaken the conscience of the white man to the awful reality of his injustice and of his sin, rooted in the heart of the white man himself.
A Catholic approach to gay relations would assume that people are essentially equal in dignity and are “correlative,” mutually complementing one another. This would be true for gay and straight people were it not for the sin of homophobic injustice which prevents this complementarity from being appreciated and realized in a society in which heterosexuality alone is considered to be the acceptable sexual orientation and norm.
Today some people are slowly learning to tolerate and even accept same-sex oriented persons as equal human beings. But few seem aware of the gift which those who are same-sex oriented offer to everyone, namely, a gift of a larger imagination about human identity and human relationships.
All spirituality is a search to become a full a human being as possible. Merton wrote: “To be holy is a question of appreciating where one is in life and learning to foster the vital connections that are already operative.”
Thomas Merton was deeply aware that God deals with human beings in and through their vulnerability, their wounds. It is at the point of what may appear to be one’s powerlessness that divine power can act to make one whole. Heterosexist and homophobic assumptions and attitudes have created what has been termed “The Gay Wound” – i.e., internalized homophobia. At this time in history, homophobia is the single most defining element in … gay consciousness. It is not being gay in itself that is a wound but the stigmatization of gayness.
Gays are socialized to imagine, feel, act and be different by straights who, in the past, have set the standards for “normal” sexual orientation and interpersonal relationships. Environments and structures established by society and church have implanted within gay people a sense of being a misfit and an alien. This, in turn, can create a profound self-loathing in the gay soul which very often leads to self-destructive behaviors and the unhealthy stereotypic acts which negatively characterize the gay population among straights. One of the deepest issues plaguing gay men is inner-directed hate. Yet such suffering can become the gateway to deeper truth and healed wholeness.
Gay spiritualties must take into account that, at least until recently, this negativity is the point from which most gay persons have begun their life journeys. Because of this deep wound, same-sex oriented persons often spend a disproportionate time consumed by sexual orientation issues. Others are simply presumed to be oriented toward the opposite sex. No one has to struggle, in this culture, with an orientation toward the opposite sex. The same-sex oriented, on the other hand, must engage this inner reality as something making him different. In the process more focus is often placed on questions of some unique “lifestyle” and special genital behaviors than on a quest for one’s unique human identity. Gay persons too readily come to experience their identity as primarily erotically focused as well as erotically different from others.
A distinction is necessary. How much of this is due to an un-integrated sexual identity in those who are same-sex oriented? And how much is related to the broader narcissistic damage caused by societal homophobia which then leads to sexualization as a compulsive behavior as an attempt to stave off the feelings of emptiness in the core self. The latter influences all persons, regardless of one’s sexual orientation.
As Andrew Harvey, a gay contemplative writer says, “From the deepest wound of my life grew its miraculous possibility… transforming the pain of self-betrayal into self-discovery. Had I not been so wounded, I wouldn’t have constantly hungered and searched, certainly not with the intensity I have.” Such a wound can be a “cut in” that becomes a “breaking out.”
How heal the gay wound? Through personal and communal prayer and through sound spiritual companioning, gay people may be opened to non-judgmental attentiveness to their whole being. In so doing, those who are same-sex oriented can become aware that the wound is in one’s ego personality – or in Merton’s terms the “false self” - rather than in the depth of one’s soul where the True Self resides. This is God within, present as the center still point of the self. I do not regard being gay as a central, defining characteristic. Gay is just an awareness of one’s unique identity.
Perhaps one might say that the core of one’s self -the True Self – needs to be extracted from all of one’s psychic modalities (thinking, willing, feeling, remembering, imagining, including sexual orientation) in order to free it to infuse those various modalities rather than those modalities themselves becoming the ultimate basis of personal identity. All of the above - including being gay – are mere descriptions of the self, not the real self.
To make part of oneself the magnet for the whole of oneself is what Merton calls living out of the false self. This would mean living out of only one’s partial self and partial truth. The truth of who one IS – the “I AM” of us all – is larger than any single modality and description. Indeed, it is more than all of our many modalities combined. In Christian terms, this is the self found in and through Christ. It is the self God is creating us to become from the inside. We simply become who we are.
Merton puts it this way: “At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will.”
In Christian terms the True Self is the self which is found “in Christ” in which Spirit merges and meshes with spirit. It is the person of whom St. Paul speaks when he says: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, woman nor man, slave nor free. All are one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3, 28) One might add to Paul’s parallelisms that there is “neither gay nor straight, married nor single.” In Christ all are whole and all are one.
Such growth from self-hatred toward self-appreciation is what may happen when someone Comes Out from hiding one’s true sexual orientation from self, others and God and begins to Come In to one’s truth. Those who have successfully Come Out and Come IN feel full of something never experienced before: a sense of power. That power is caused, in part, by freeing the energy previously used to deny and disguise oneself.
Entering this journey with intentionality and passion is what it means to become true, whole and holy for all persons in every age. Thomas Merton wrote of this with great clarity and beauty: “For me to become a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self. Trees and animals have no problem. God makes them what they are without consulting them, and they are perfectly satisfied. With us it is different. God leaves us free to become whatever we like. We can be ourselves or not, as we please. We are at liberty to be real, or to be unreal. We may be true or false, the choice is ours. We may wear now one mask and now another, and never, if we so desire, appear with our own true face. But we cannot make these choices with impunity. Causes have effects, and if we lie to ourselves and to others, then we cannot expect to find truth and reality whenever we happen to want them. If we have chosen the way of falsity we must not be surprised that truth eludes us when we finally come to need it. We are called to share with God in creating our true identity.” Honesty is the path.
What might this call toward the True Self mean for the unique spiritual journeys of gay persons? Gay spiritualties can open people to understand and experience inner realities and the innate attractions and loves of the soul as a blessing rather than a curse. Many gay persons are forced to live closeted, untrue lives both by the homophobia which permeates our culture and our churches as well as by gay persons’ own internalized homophobia. Such self-hatred poisons the journey toward one’s own unique reflection of the image and likeness of God an may block the inner and outer freedom required to create with God one’s true identity.
This “falseness” is not unique, of course, to those who are same-sex oriented. Merton wrote: “Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person; a false self.” He believed that we come to realize that true identity is not that which appears on the surface. Who we really are is not the mask we wear or the role imposed by our upbringing and our society. No, we are much more than that. In fact, much of what is on the surface is not truly us at all.
This is sound spiritual insight for gay persons. It encourages leaving the closet of imposed deceptions, roles and masks of the false self created by heterosexist and homophobic definitions and expectations. But regrettably, at least some gay people can then become trapped in another closet created by gay people, namely, the gay sub-culture. This becomes the “second closet.” This “lifestyle” can trap persons in uncommitted and irresponsible promiscuous behaviors and/or materialistic consumerism. Gay spiritual growth involves moving beyond both of these false selves which are simply new forms of imprisonment.
A new ghetto of prescribed places, behaviors, images and stereotypes can replace the original closet for subculture-oriented gay persons. While there is clearly a value in safe places and joyous and comfortable sharing with like-oriented persons, the danger is that this can become a new kind of isolation and separatism. Mature spiritual growth leads rather toward integration of the whole of creation. It is not a closet imposed by heterosexism but rather one freely chosen by same-sex-oriented persons for the sake of security and the avoidance of those engagements with heterosexuals which could stimulate mutual growth of all persons. Gay spiritualties need to be especially attuned to this second false self and its entrapments. Like everyone, gay persons need to transcend the cultural location of the ego personality, false self, and discover it more profoundly in the True Self.
We can encourage those who live largely in the gay sub-culture to let go of models of gay existence and live into the richness of the moment. Sex and social relationship is not enough – eventually you will be driven into spiritual awakening. Awakening is the recognition that there are many planes of consciousness and that you exist on them all. You are limiting yourself incredibly to define yourself only in terms of the physical / psychological planes, as if they were absolutely real. If what people want is food and sex, let them have that, and see if they can get along with that only, and without meaning.
What to do about the falsity and illusions created first of all by heterosexist and homophobic attitudes and values and then by the gay sub-culture? How to avoid or exist from this second closet? Merton’s words seem applicable: “The difficult ascent from falsity toward truth is accomplished not through pleasant advances in wisdom and insight, but through the painful unlayering of levels of falsehood, untruths deeply embedded in our consciousness, lies which cling more tightly than a second skin.” It is like peeling away the layers of an onion – tears and all!
After living or trying to live the lies of the first closet due to experiencing years of homophobic self-hatred, many joyously Come Out into the light of gay identity and self-affirmation with others who share the same sexual orientation.
But there is more to learn and still more falseness to face. Gayness is not a lifestyle but a unique way of a whole variety of persons being in, of and for the world. The illusions of the gay lifestyle must be confronted. Merton, quoting C.G. Jung’s Spiritual Disciplines, wrote: “People will do anything no matter how absurd to avoid facing their own psyches. Somewhere else Jung wrote: “Where lies your fear, there lies your task.”
Merton could be describing persons caught in the limitations of the gay sub-culture when he wrote: “This false, exterior, superficial, social self is made up of prejudices, whimsy, posturing, pharisaic self-concern and pseudo dedication. The false self is a human construct built by selfishness and flights from reality. Because it is not the whole truth of us, it is not of God. And because it is not of God, our false self is substantially empty and incapable of experiencing the love and freedom of God.” The false self is an idol to which the True Self says: “I will have no strange gods before me.” Whether the gay sub-culture thumbs its nose at straight lifestyles through separate constructs of bars and bathhouses, promiscuous pursuits and effeminate posturing or whether gay assimilationists imitate in exaggeration the straight values of materialism and consumerism, neither can be, in the long run, an authentic path toward the True Self. Both prove to be illusory treks, ultimately unsatisfying. These phases need to be both moved through and then beyond.
What can gays – caught in these double closets, the untruths of two cultures – do about the false self? Merton says the false self is annihilated neither by being denied, ignored nor by being uprooted and cast out. We are as sick as our secrets. The true reality must be named for healing and wholeness to happen. Merton says that the power of the false self is diminished in the person first of all by being acknowledged as truly a part of ourselves and accepted. He adds that its power is diminished “as it is integrated into our conscious selves as truly a part of who we are. In this way, over a lifetime, the true self gradually emerges. We are healed of the fracture between the false self and the True Self by discovering the presence of God, the True Self, within our consciousness.”
Merton puts it this way: “The Christian is left alone with God to fight out the question of who he really is, to get rid of the impersonation, if any, that has followed him into the woods.” Yet, Merton contended, “We can’t really find out who we are until we find ourselves in relation to other people.” We are not isolated individuals. We are persons and he held that “a person is defined by a relationship with others.” This is the way “out of the woods.”
Perhaps Merton’s quotation from Gandhi may apply here: “A person who realizes the particular evil of his time and finds that it overwhelms him, dives deep in his own heart for inspiration, and when he gets it he presents it to others.” The realization of one’s true identity “means that we become transformed from within by God’s inner Presence in order to become like God, living in God, seeing as God sees, loving as God loves all creation – with compassion. God does it in us, not we.” At least not the “we” of the false self, the ego self, the socially constructed self.
Here lies the importance of the sharing of gay spiritual journeys with others: family, friends and particularly with other gay people. Particularly after the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion in New York City, those who are same-sex oriented began to form communities to discover the self through a relationship with others of the same orientation. No longer was gayness simply a closeted group of individual sinners with disgusting yet discreet and private behaviors. It was Gay Life “in your face” in open communities of solidarity and compassion, especially in the light of the AIDS epidemic. The gay population began to be less the victims of history and more subjects of that history. Gay persons began more and more to decide together what gay experience means through dialogues, publications, organizations and the arts. But some of those decisions may have lead into the second closet of a segregated and illusionist gay lifestyle rather than the promised land of liberty and connectedness with all people.
Coming In, then, is more about the deeper core. It is about the soul’s essence more than about one’s experience. In this discussion I have raised questions of gay identity and gay purpose. Who is the gay person? What, if anything, is unique about the soul of a same-sex oriented person?
This calls for journeying both through and then beyond the more familiar issues of sexual and genital behaviors, interpersonal relationships and unions, AIDS, human rights, ethics, church teachings and societal attitudes. Coming In means moving into the depth of the soul where sexual orientation is not seen as a curse but a divine blessing.
Reaching out and embracing the True Self cannot be done alone. Spiritual companioning is essential at this stage in the inner and outer liberation of gay people. This is particularly true because of the double closet and trap of gay illusions. Such spiritual sharing is a privileged meeting of hearts. Built on trust in the bond of the Spirit of God, two persons come together in faith to hear the story of the workings of the Spirit in the life of one of them. For the person who shared her or his experience of God, there is always the moment of ’stepping out on the water’ as one begins to speak of what is most sacred in life. The listener, who is companion on the journey, is called to receive that sharing in trust and love, with encouragement and support, and, at times, with the invitation to challenge to further growth, even at the cost of pain and suffering.
In the process of spiritual questing with a companion or companions, gay people discover what Merton understood so well. “The perfect person is not the one who has it all together – the one who has ‘arrived.’ No, perfection is never such a possession of the person. It is not a matter of achieving some impossible and inhuman saint like condition, but of being fulfilled as the person we were created to be. Perfection is rather a pursuit, ever moving forward deeper into the mystery of God… and each fulfillment contains in itself the impulse to further exploration.”
Becoming whole, finding one’s True Self, means, for all persons, discovering “that there is a deep underlying connection of opposites. This is uniquely true for gay people given the difficulties they face in coming into communion with the True Self. It means passing through the bewildering wilderness of the false selves which are both assigned by others and constructed by same-sex oriented people. A gay person on a spiritual journey may well understand from painful yet rich experience one of Merton’s most profound statements: “We must contain all divided worlds within ourselves.”
Merton’s words about the stages of the human spiritual journey have particular applications to the divided worlds which exist both within and around gay persons. He wrote: “In the first part of our life, our psychic energy flows outward in the construction of our social role or persona. The more rigid the society, the stronger the mask – till we get so far out of touch with our true self that a neurosis may develop which stops the outward flow of energy. Our psychic energy then seems to be damned up, it returns to us and often we find a reintegration more in tune with our deepest selves. This permits us to experience and reach an inner unity, which is the noblest effort man can make for his own good and for the good of all men.”
Gayness is a gift. Spiritual journeys are, indeed, for the good of all, not just the one on the quest. And gay journeys today can be a great gift to all of humanity at the close of the twentieth century. Gays have a unique function in registering the cruelty and craziness of patriarchy and working to transcend it. We’ve had a false masculine presented to us, an ideal of control and domination that is really a frozen hysteria, a condensation of fear and panic. It has nothing to do with the real masculine. A Real Man is a whole person!
A sense of the gay mission in culture may sound somewhat rhapsodic but, if there is even some measure of truth to it, it is profoundly challenging.
C.G. Jung suggests, too, a unique quality in the interiority of those who are same-sex oriented which could be a great gift for humanity at the close of this violent, competitive and materialistic century. It is the capacity for the primordial Sacrament of Friendship. Often he is endowed with a wealth of religious feelings which help him bring the ecclesia spiritualis into reality, and a spiritual receptivity which makes him responsive to revelation.” Little wonder that so many in spiritual ministries are same-sex oriented persons!
Gay spiritual journeys, then, begin with a Coming Out which then can open toward a deep Coming In to the identity of a soul whose partial truth is gay. But, in the end, one’s identity and one’s sexual orientation is more than simply for something for oneself. One must Come Out Again for the sake of others, indeed, all creation.
Gay people and homosexuality are essential components of creation – for the religious, part of God’s plan – and concealing these components dishonors the creator and shrouds the fullness of creation itself. By revealing and celebrating even the most minute aspect of creation, we make the Creator evident and the universe even richer. I believe we are here to reveal a further dimension of the diversity of life, and, in so doing, jolt our fellow human beings into celebrating life’s differences.
This awareness that the gay gift is for others is important in order to avoid the pitfall of explicit or implicit narcissism in gay people. There must be a return into the rest of the world for the sake of all humanity, indeed, all creation itself. Gay people may have a unique mission at this time in history to help humanity expand its imagination about what it means to be human and to be in loving relationships. Such broadening and deepening in the human imagination - personally and collectively – can lead all beyond the binary systems and dualisms which so constrict humanity at the end of this millennium.
Merton’s words about the creation of new human values out of love seem to speak of this mission. “The Law of Love is the law that commands us to add new values to the world given us by God, through the creative power that He has placed in us – the power of joy in response, in gratitude, and in the giving of self.”
St. Paul (Galatians 3:28) wrote of the Holy Spirit’s overcoming such dualistic divisions among humanity: master-slave, Jew-Greek, male-female. Overcoming those divisions is a very slow historical process that has been going on over centuries. But today, I believe, the gay spiritual movement has emerged out of the heart of the world to play a decisive role in overcoming this final division. Scripture says that the stone that was rejected will become the cornerstone. The gay spiritual communities are being called by God to play this ‘cornerstone’ role. The only way, however, that gays can play that role is to overcome their fears and have the courage to come out of the closet. Gays must model in a very public way their ability to balance the masculine and feminine dimensions within themselves.
Gay experience can also become redemptive for others as they bring to the fore the importance and the delight of the human body in responsible, reverential and relational ways. Christianity has suffered from a body-negative mentality for too long. A spirituality which ignores or denigrates the body was unacceptable to Thomas Merton since this would block the total response of healthy and fruitful living. “The ’spiritual’ life thus becomes something lived ‘interiorly’ and in ‘the spirit’ or worse still in the ‘mind’ – indeed in the ‘imagination’. The body is left out of it, because the body is “bad” or at best ‘unspiritual.’ But the ‘body’ gets into the act anyway, sometimes in rather disconcerting ways, especially when it has been excluded on general principles.”
Persons gifted with an orientation to their own sex and who join the journey “out and in and out again” will undoubtedly experience the searing flames of life. But this is a necessary and inevitable purgation of the unique “untruths” which have been given to and assumed by gay people. As Merton wrote, surrendering to the fire of the Spirit within – the True Self – is essential for all human growth. Poetically he described all human souls as being like wax, wax waiting for the seal of one’s true identity to be impressed upon them. By themselves souls have no identity, he believed. “Their destiny is to be softened and prepared in this life, by God’s will, to receive, at their death, the seal of their own degree of likeness to God in Christ. And this is what it means, among other things, to be judged by Christ. The wax that has melted in God’s will can easily receive the stamp of its identity, the truth of what it was meant to be. But the wax that is hard and dry and brittle and without love will not take the seal; for the hard seal, descending upon it, grinds it to powder. Therefore if you spend your life trying to escape from the heat of the fire that is meant to soften and prepare you to become your true self, and if you try to keep your substance from melting in the fire, – as if your true identity were to be hard wax - the seal will fall upon you at last and crush you. You will not be able to take your own true name and countenance, and you will be destroyed by the event that was meant to be your fulfillment.”
Persons are not known by intellect alone, not by principles alone, but only by love. It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who He is, and who we are. It is only this realization that can open to us the real nature of our duty, and of right action. To shut out the person and to refuse to consider him as a person, as an other self, we resort to the impersonal “law” and to abstract “nature.” That is to say we block off the reality of the other, we cut the intercommunication of our nature and his nature, and we consider only our own nature with its rights, its claims, it demands. And we justify the evil we do to our brother because he is no longer a brother, he is merely an adversary, an accused.
To restore communication, to see our oneness of nature with him, and to respect his personal rights and his integrity, his worthiness of love, we have to see ourselves as similarly accused along with him ... and needing, with him, the ineffable gift of grace and mercy to be saved. Then, instead of pushing him down, trying to climb out by using his head as a stepping-stone for ourselves, we help ourselves to rise by helping him to rise. For when we extend our hand to the enemy who is sinking in the abyss, God reaches out to both of us, for it is He first of all who extends our hand to the enemy. It is He who “saves himself” in the enemy, who makes use of us to recover the lost groat which is His image in our enemy.” ~Thomas Merton to Dorothy Day 1962
Peace,
Stephen