Entries in Life

My friend Jim has a couple of good posts on listening to people from the “ex-ex-gay” movement.

I think he is right: the Church does need to hear from people who have tried to convert from homosexual to heterosexual — especially those Christians who believed they could “convert” their sexuality from being gay to being straight. We need to listen especially closely to those men and women who have sincerely attempted to alter their own sexual orientation and failed.

Most importantly, those of us (and, yes, “us” includes me) in the Church who believe that homosexual relationships are sinful need to listen.

Before I tell you what I hear, let me explain a bit about where I'm coming from.

It is no surprise that there are a lot of confused people out there. And by confused, I don't mean the men and women who are homosexual. No, I mean the people who think that being a homosexual is, in and of itself, wrong. There is nothing wrong with being gay.

I would go further, though, and say that if you are not actively seeking a relationship with God, then you are not better off in a straight relationship than in a homosexual one. The primary concern is our relationship with God. Everything hinges on that.

In fact, morality doesn't matter. Morality plays no role in our relationship to God.

This should be clear enough from story of the Publican and Pharisee that the Orthodox begin each celebration of Great Lent with.

The tax-collector was the morally disreputable person in Jesus' day — the person everyone knew was doing wrong, cheating them out of their hard-earned money. In his place, I can imagine a gay man, someone all conservative Christians would “know” is a sinner.

The Pharisee stands there proclaiming his piety, ridiculing the tax collector. Likewise, I see many conservative Christians holding themselves up as moral examples, making a very public display of their moral superiority. They kick and scream when they feel they've been wronged — when someone has stripped their courthouse of the Ten Commandments or a crèche — and loudly condemn those whose sins are more public.

The answer is not to hide your sin, not to be discreet about it. “All have sinned” and no one persons sin is any less or any more than anyone else's. No one is perfect. No one can exalt themselves above another or look down on another. Jesus told us as much when he said it was the tax collector, not the pharisee, who went home justified.

Which means, of course, that I'm no better than the most flamboyant, promiscuous gay man. In fact, I have no right to comment on anyone else's sin.

I'm reminded of the story of Abba Sisoes from the fourth century:

Considered to be a very holy and venerable man, many drew near to Abba Sisoes while he was on his death bed. In his last moments, he saw choirs of angels and archangels, not to mention prophets, Apostles and saints. Wondering what was going on, those gathered around him asked, “With whom are you speaking, Abba?”

“With the angels,” he replied, and indicated that he was seeking to do penance before he left this life for the next.

Knowing his holiness, one friend said to him, “You have no need for penance, Father.”

Abba Sisoes replied, “I have not yet begun to repent.”

Here is someone no one thought could be condemned, yet, truly embodying the spirit of the publican, he felt he had not yet begun to repent.

At this point, I hope I've made myself clear: I am in no position to proclaim my own piety or tell others that they are condemned.

So what does this all have to do with listening to “ex-ex-gay” people?

One thing I hear is a gay man (Peterson Toscano, founder of Beyond Ex-Gay) who struggled for almost 20 years and spent over $30,000 to become “straighten” himself out. It didn't work.

At this point, it sounds like a bad Scientology tale.

The first thing that comes to mind (and Peterson says as much) is the obsession with sex. Since the focus is on sex continually, it heightens the awareness and temptation. In another video, Peterson even says that he had more sex when he was trying to “de-gay” himself than he has since he gave it up.

But that part of it, obsession with sex, seems to be a part of American Christian culture. Witness sites like Book22.com (a Christian sex-toys web store), or Christian sex toy parties, or even Exodus International's methods — at least, those Peterson describes.

The focus is on sex. Sure, we pay lip service to putting God before all else, but the idea of a married couple voluntarily abstaining from sex? That would be unheard of! Lifelong voluntary “marital fasting” that some saints of the Orthodox church undertook seems impossible and ridiculous to us. As one person described this fasting:

Rather than repudiating the legitimate pleasure taken in eating and in marital relations, fasting assists us in liberating ourselves from greed and lust, so that both these things become not a means of private pleasure but an expression of interpersonal communion.

The second thing I hear is the singling out of this particular sin. As Peterson says: “I thought I couldn't be gay and a Christian.”

While all Christians are called to live pious lives, many of us struggle with a particular sin or temptation. Sometimes, we sin and are not aware that what we do is sin. So, again, the focus on homosexuality, singling it out for special attention and treatment, and not on whether or not homosexuality is a sin, is where we're going wrong.

Consider the advice that St. Theophan the Recluse gave to a young girl: When confronted with a thought to pursue some sin, don't fight it. Don't grab onto it to beat it into submission. Instead, let it pass and immediately pray the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner!”

By turning our attention to God instead of the thought to sin, we redirect our energy. Note, also, the parallels between the Jesus Prayer and the prayer of the Publican.

Finally, and probably most controversially, it makes me wonder about things that we universally agree are wrong today, but that, at the time the New Testament was written, weren't seen as huge sins.

Slavery, for example. I see no evidence that new Christians freed their slaves or started treating them humanely. I also know of no restrictions on ordaining slave owners.

Yet, today, we see any kind of slavery, not just the brutal kind sometimes practiced in the early American South, as universally wrong.

So what's the point of all this? What have I found from listening to this ex-ex-gay man?

Well, to be honest, I haven't learned anything. I have taken the opportunity, though, to think through my prejudices and to clarify them a bit. Peterson deserves our compassion: he has been ill-served by a church that tried to take him down a road he simply couldn't travel — by a church that made his sexuality more important than his relationship to God.

The focus should, as always, be on God, not our sin.

In response to a NYT article about Mark Driscoll's Mars Hill church, my friend Jim writes "I personally find it a bit of a mystery that some people find comfort and hope in that sort of theological framework".  By contrast, I can totally understand it.

I understand it, but disagree with it.  My experience as a Christian, and a little healthy doubt, has lead me to reject my one-time fascination for hard-core, predestined-from-the-womb Calvinism.  But, while I'm not comfortable with a Calvinistic god who is completely arbitrary -- one who has no real way of showing love -- I doubt an individualized god who looks like a friendly neighbor who practices a "live-and-let-live" philosophy.

It seems the Mars Hill congregation does not want a god who will smile on their imperfections, but what they've been offered, what they've found to fill their "God-shaped hole", is indeed not anthropomorphic.  It is true that anthropomorphizing God, making him like our tolerant neighbor, is dangerously wrong-headed.  But just because we have an incomprehensible god does not mean that we have a view of the right one.

A hint of what is so attractive about this "New Calvinism" can be found in Dostoevsky:

Taking freedom to mean the increase and prompt satisfaction of needs, they distort their own nature, for they generate many meaningless and foolish desires, habits, and the most absurd fancies in themselves. (source)

Mars Hill parishioners have pursued this false freedom and found it wanting.  Naturally, they turn away from that.  Of course, we are always in danger of following the wrong leader, but especially so when we feel weak and are offered something that looks unbending.

By way of contrast, I offer this quote from Father Stephen.  His whole post is an excellent defense of un-individual, Trinitarian Christianity, but this is quote seemed most relevant:

An excellent example of this occurred once in an inquirer’s class I was teaching before I was Orthodox (I was an Anglican priest). I was teaching a class on Christian morality and offered as authoritative the traditional teachings of the Christian faith in matters of sex and marriage, etc. One of the couples in the class seemed upset by my presentation and asked, “What right does the Church have to tell me how to live my life?” I admit that I was stunned by the question, if only because of its honesty. I gave them a short answer, “Because you are raising my children.” The complete answer has more depth, but I thought they might find it helpful to consider that the world included someone other than themselves.

(Found this sitting in a queue from a while back.  For some reason, I posted this on LiveJournal, but not here. Now is a good a time as any to get it out of my system.)

The recent revelation that Mother Teresa was a doubting Thomas almost the entire time she worked in India but yet remained faithful shows the lie that Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens would like to promulgate: belief in God is comforting.  (And here, I thought we were still struggling with Catholic Guilt.)

While I've no doubt that some believers gain primarily comfort from their belief, the religion that Jesus teaches isn't very comforting at all. "If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you."

And, of course, any Mennonite knows that Martyrs Mirror is filled with stories of people who endured a great deal of suffering. My own children have listened to the lives of many martyrs in the Orthodox lexicon of Saints, Nikolai Velimirovich's Prologue -- so many that whenever they hear the Emperor Diocletian's name mentioned, they can tell you the end of the story.

Perhaps some people make Christianity out to be a nice bedtime story, but anyone who pays attention to what Jesus said or what Paul wrote knows that any comfort offered isn't the whole story: we are called to live sacrificially.

Which is exactly what Mother Teresa did.

What strikes me most among discussions like this one is the idea that Mother Teresa had an obligation to announce her doubts to the world.  "She's a public figure" the thinking goes "and she kept this from us?"

Well, no, her struggle with doubt or the lack of God's Presence was her own and she kept it between herself and her spiritual confessors.  If she wanted to announce her doubt and be done with it, she could have done that without making her life any more uncomfortable.

Mother Teresa was doing something completely foreign to most of us.  Jack Welch was a better humanitarian.  Mother Teresa was not a humanitarian and Christopher Hitchen's was right to discredit this notion of her.  Jesus said "You will always have the poor" and Mother Teresa understood this to mean that we should be more concerned with loving the poor and having compassion for them than with giving them a handout.

"You take care of their tomorrows, I take care of their todays," she said.

Secularists who don't know Mother Teresa won't appreciate the way she chose to use her money.  Evangelicals won't appreciate her Gospel.  Atheists see her doubts as her hypocrisy.

But there is something else going on, also.  She identified with the poor in the same way Christ identified with us.  She emulated his compassion.

And of course isn't that the whole Problem of Evil all over again?  As Judas pointed out, the money spent on the perfume Mary poured on Jesus feet was a year's wages -- surely there was a more practical use for it.  Surely Jesus could have done more than forgive sins, couldn't he?  He was God, after all, shouldn't he have done more?

Mother Teresa is someone many people can admire from a distance.  Most will be repulsed by her, though, if they take a closer look.  She shows us exactly why true religion isn't comforting.

“Forgiveness is the final form of love.” — Reinhold Niebuhr

I went and saw “As we forgive those” tonight. It is an amazing account of the process of reconcilliation that some people in Rwanda are going through. The documentary focused on two different genocideres and the reconciliation that they sought with the surviving members of their families they attacked and murdered.

Two women whose families had been killed struggled to forgive the men who had killed their families. The process of reconcilliation in “As we forgive those” covered what happened after the Gacaca courts.during reconcilliation workships run in cooperation with the Prison Fellowship in Rwanda.

One of the projects the former genocideres participate in is building homes for victims of their crimes. This is especially poignant since they often destroyed those homes during the genocide.

(I have to admit that I only saw the last part of the movie. The listing of screenings gave a contact email and said it was being shown by Church of the Apostles in Fayetteville, NC. I sent an email, got a response, found the date posted on the site was wrong, and got a showtime. But no location. So I naturally assumed it was at the Church of the Apostles. No one linked to their website. If I had gone to the website — or even known it existed — I would have realized it was showing 20 minutes
away from the church. Anyway… if you post information, make sure it is all connected.)

Besides the excellent message of reconciliation instead of retribution, the Church of the Apostles seemed to be using the film as a sort of evangelism. The minister.stood up after the film and said, essentially, “See what Christians are doing? You might have a bad
impression of the church, but We ain't all bad!” I thought it was a bit too pathetic.

Still, I think this is a great film for any church to show or sponsor. And it's great for people outside the church, too. The message is universal.

I started writing about why I wasn't a creationist, but, the more I thought about this, the more I thought of giving a more encompassing apophatic description of myself.  I could just call myself an Orthodox Christian, but so many times we have pre-conceived notions for what words mean that a simple label isn't going to tell you anything about who I am.

(I've run into the same problem with my friends that I met in my political activities.  I'm a registered Democrat, but I'm not at all in favor of defending Roe v. Wade.  At some point, I'll have to address my political views in an apophatic manner .  But this should give you a good idea.)

My faith in a literal six-day creation first began to waver in high school.

At the time, some people around me were convinced that you had to believe the Genesis account was literally true.  Otherwise, the thinking went, how could you believe anything in the Bible?  Something didn't seem right with that.  I can choose to believe whatever I like.  Believing in something doesn't make it so.  There's nothing in the text to indicate that Genesis is meant to be a factual, historical account of creation.

The only reason I could find that people thought Genesis account was factually accurate was their standards for understanding scriptural truth.  Father Stephen explains this much better than I ever could when he talks about Scripture as an Icon, so for a fuller explanation, read him, but in a world obsessed with facts and figures, Christians immersed in rationalism look to scripture to provide some straight-forward plain talk.

When the "plain meaning" of scripture doesn't coincide with our observations of the world (what we commonly refer to as science), Christians of this sort have a choice: ignore what their senses tell them about the world, or start to pick and choose which parts of the Bible to believe.

I have a hard time ignoring my senses.  Complicated attempts to explain away observations are, well, too complicated to be believed (Occam's Razor).

Fundamentalism, conservative evangelicalism, and any other sort of Biblical literalism is out the door.

Where could I go?  One place I didn't feel comfortable with was that strain of Protestantism commonly known as "Liberal Christianity".  If we consider Protestants as a straight line with biblical literalists on the right and liberal Christians on the left, then, on the far left, there isn't even any need to believe the Nicene Creed.  These would be  the sort who think the Jefferson Bible isn't that bad.  It was just another man's interpretation of the sacred text.

Perhaps I'm just too much of a traditionalist, but I couldn't do that.  My faith includes a belief in the resurrection.  Over time, I've come to understand the resurrection not as a "Get Out of Hell Free" card, but as an act of Love by which God empowers us to be fully human.  I can't ignore my faith.  And I don't think scripture is just a matter of interpreting text.  Christianity is about relation with God, not figuring out what I think Scripture means.

My personal history comes into play here.  I have a lot of trouble with condemning all Catholics -- something some fundamentalists seem fine with -- so I ended up associating with quite a few in New Orleans (a very Catholic city), dating a couple, and, finally, marrying one.

That obviously influenced my path.  I dabbled with Catholicism, but ended up being too Protestant.  And now I'm too Orthodox.  I simply don't think any one person (even a Bishop, or Pope) can be considered the final word on what God has to say.

So I'm not Catholic.

Around the time I became Orthodox, the "Emergent Church" began to grow.

I've said before that I think people interested in the Emergent Church would find a lot of what they're looking for in the Orthodox Church.

Take, for example, this post on War or Jim's post on Biblical Narrative.  Both could benefit from the traditional Orthodox understanding of the Old Testament that focuses on the types of the Old Testament without attempting to justify the atrocities there.

But they'd have to give up something: their individual pursuit of Truth.  I've been thinking about this since my friend Jim (who I hope can forgive me for pulling this quote out of context) wrote earlier this week "Maybe I don’t go so far - as Matthew seemed to have no problem with doing - as to use the word fulfillment".  Orthodoxy, by contrast, is entirely about fulfillment and completely embraces the Gospel.  The resurrection is the beginning and end of everything.

I guess, in the end, you could say I am not a biblical interpreter.  I long ago grew tired of debates about the scripture's meaning and worrying about what I thought about the Bible.  These days, I struggle enough with simply trying to fast, pray, and love my neighbor.  These simple actions, commended to us by Christ Himself, are more than I can manage without worrying about what Just War or Evolution vs Creation.