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Minetras Hay Alma, Hay Esperanza
Where There Is Life, There Is Hope
A presentation to the National Association of Catholic Diocesan Lesbian and Gay Ministries,
Palm Springs, CA, September 25, 2003
By James L. Empereur, S.J., Ph.D.
(Sung) Let us bring the gifts that differ, and in splendid varied ways, sing a new church into being, one in faith and love and praise.1
The engaging words of Dolores Dufner could well be the musical motif of this conference where we explore the wellsprings of hope, certainly for those Christians, gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgendered, but also for those who have fashioned their ministries for those of a different sexual orientation. But we also want to open those same wellsprings for the whole church. As the theology of hope of the 60’s and 70’s taught, hope is not limited, hope is not only for the hopeless, hope is also for those who do not yet know that they are in need of hope. Hope is nether optimistic, nor pessimistic. It is realistic. And so our hopes at this conference are not narcissistic. We bring gifts, gifts that differ. We present them in splendid varied ways but it is to sing a new church into being.
In March of this year, the bishops of the American Episcopal Church accepted a report entitled, “The Gift of Sexuality: a Theological Perspective.”2 This report recognizes that human sexuality, although a wonderful gift is a complex one. This great and mysterious gift can also be the cause of pain. And yet is it God-given: given not only as an “aid to intimacy and pleasure,” not only “designed as a means of procreation,” but to make present a “self-sharing and mutual fidelity that images the divine life.”3 The report then continues:
We also recognize there is a range of sexual identities among human beings, and a portion of the population experiences itself as having as homosexual orientation. As Christians, we affirm that persons of all sexual orientations are created in the image of God, and they are full members of the human family. The church vigorously denounces discrimination and violence based on sexual orientation and we call upon all members of our society, and especially members of the Body of Christ to honor their baptismal vow to respect the full humanity and dignity of every human being.4
We look forward to the day when all the parts of the Body of Christ will be able to embrace such a statement unambiguously and effectively. One of the gifts that gay/lesbian communities bring to the whole church of Christ is the challenge to delve more profoundly into its traditional understanding of human sexuality and to see that the issue of homosexuality must be accompanied by a matter of “justice calling for redress of grievances and violence suffered by homosexual persons at the hands of both church and society.”5 But more than that, it will be in the exploration of the so-called “problem of homosexuality” that all who belong to the various households of faith may find the deeper unity that binds them together. And so in an ecumenical spirit we can make our own the prayer, which concludes the report to the Episcopal bishops:
Guide us, O God, in our continuing consideration of human sexuality to be responsive to and respectful of all persons, their ideas and experience. Convert and empower us to listen penitently and, with humility, to speak honestly with one another. Set our disagreements within the mutual knowledge and love, which we experience in you as Holy Trinity. Whenever we experience fear, anger, or mistrust with one another: give us new hope and consolation in your never-failing love for your children. In all things, let us submit our ideas to your thoughts, our desires to your will, and our actions to your purpose. In our diversity as members of the Body of Christ, help us find our way: through Jesus Christ, Our Redeemer. Amen.6
“Trust the goodness of creation, trust the spirit strong within, dare to dream the vision promised, sprung from seed of what has been.” These lyrics of the hymn are the theme song of gay/lesbian spirituality: that they show forth God’s love under a face which would never come to expression were there no gay/lesbian people. It is a spirituality that emerges from the passage that gays and lesbians have made to their inner worlds, another passage to intimacy with others based on the intimacy with themselves in exploring their own inner geography and a further passage to create a more justice-oriented world. This last passage is made possible by the vision that comes from trusting their strong inner spirits.
James Alison, author of Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay writes:
My own story has been one in which I knew at some level, since the wrenching experience of falling in love with a school colleague when I was nine years old, that the word of God was one of love. But as I grew I was unable to allow myself to hear it in the depths of my being. Those depths were utterly prisoner to the voices of hatred which formed us as gay people, the lynch shout of the school playground, magnified into adult tales of horror at the sort of people we are becoming, and canonized by an ecclesiastical voice which has been so tied up in all this that it has been incapable of discerning between the voice of the world and the voice of God. And so it says love, and do not love, be, and do not be.7
This puts any homosexual person in a theological bind. Alison says that this bind destabilizes the gay person. “It means that our lives are not real lives, our loves are not real loves, our attempts to build stable and ordered relationships have no real worth, our hearts and minds can only produce sick fruit.”8
But theologians and writers on spirituality are overturning such negative views today. A wellspring of hope flows from their deeper reflections on how God’s own loving manifested in creation is made available in the diversity of the forms of loving. It is true that all are called to love themselves. Of the gospel injunction to love God as one loves one’s neighbor as one loves oneself, the most difficult part is to love oneself. For there is always the question of where does authentic self-love begin and where does selfishness end? Christian gays and lesbians like all the faithful are summoned to these ways of loving if their gathering in Jesus’ name is not to be a travesty. But how to do it? How can one love when one has experienced abuse, if not physical or sexual, then emotional or religious? What gay/lesbian person has not heard at least implicitly that they are a mistake in the order of creation? How often they have been poisoned by what Richard Young calls “toxic shame”?9 How many gays and lesbians fall into the category of “shame-based” because they feel defective at the very core of their existence? We know how often they try to compensate for their supposed defects. The common one is remaining in the closet to the point of compromising one’s integrity. Equally common is returning to a second closet of the often self-destructive and further alienating practices of the gay subculture.10 But the most demeaning and dehumanizing way of responding to this shame is told in a story as related by James Alison of a priest working in a medium sized city in a medium sized Latin American country who befriends some boys in their late teens and twenties who hang around the city’s main plaza. These gay young men were available for sexual experiences with or without payment. The priest had hoped to help these young men understand that their lives were worthwhile and that the degree to which they can feel loveable they will avoid their “destructive emotional patterns and forms of behavior.”11 Then Alison writes:
It did not take long for my friend to discover something which in retrospect should not have thrown him as much as it did. He was by no means the first priest to know the boys in the square. On the contrary, some of the priests of that city were well known to one or others of the boys. And these priests tended to know the boys more as customers than as friends. What the boys also knew but shrugged off with a certain worldly weariness, was that it was the priests who were the strongest in denouncing the evil and sin of homosexuality from their pulpits—in fact the only ones who bothered to mention the issue.12
Alison notes that his friend became a threat to this ecclesiastical establishment and he was forced to leave.
So where is there hope is so much disfunctionality? How can gays/lesbians show forth God’s expansive love in such debilitating structures? In fact, there are an increasing number of wellsprings of hope because of the people who trust the spirit strong within, in the words of the hymn. For some it is spiritual direction, for others it is various forms of holistic work, for some it is what the late Kevin Gordon called “the sacrament of coming out.” For others like Pat Collins it is applying the spirituality of Thomas Merton to gay spirituality. Richard Young suggests a still untapped source, spirituality centered on creation itself.13 One need not be a follower of Matthew Fox to center one’s spiritual life on one’s own humanity as part of the whole created world.
It is interesting to note how theology in the 20th century had moved. At the beginning of that century we were still enmeshed in a worldview dominated by so-called objective, but certainly scientific and impersonal understanding of our relationship with God, e.g. grace as a thing, sin as an action, and salvation as a static afterlife. Then with the great theologians of the 60’s, Rahner and Schillebeeckx to mention two catholic ones, there was the turn to the subject and the central beliefs were interpreted anthropologically, that is, how they find meaning in terms of our interiority. We understood doctrines in how they related to our existence. Then there was the movement to language and how our world is structured by the way we use our language and our language uses us. We live in a world of language because language precedes us. We live and move and have our being in language. We know that an infant isolated from all human contact cannot develop properly as a human being. Now there is the turn to creation, not unlike the church of the New Testament and post New Testament times. Here we see ourselves as part of a larger encompassing mystery, not a mere cog in some large machine only occasionally oiled by a distant God. In the previous ways of reflecting on God and the world we as humans were at the center. This was often ecologically detrimental to non-human creation. Now we see ourselves as part of a large symphony of a diverse universe contributing to working out that world to which God is directing us.14 Each one of us contains the whole cosmos because we are instances of a larger cosmic sacramentality. I have just completed a book with a colleague showing how this comic sacramentality is being recovered at the present time. Fortunately, this sacramentality, which was lost in the history of the church, was retained in the Hispanic cultures in their popular religion. This last theological turn is echoed in the words of the hymn, “Trust the goodness of creation.”
A creation centered spirituality for gays and lesbians would be built on four main pillars.15 (1) All creation is good and is to be honored and enjoyed. Any depreciation of gays and lesbians, whether by themselves or others is injury inflicted on creation itself, distorting its beauty. Spiritual growth here means moving beyond shame-based consciousness to a cosmic consciousness where all of God’s gifts of affirmation, beauty, wonder and delight are available. Out of these delights gays and lesbians can learn to trust their inner authority.
(2) The cross in indispensable in Christian life. In the face of homophobia and discrimination gays and lesbians must have a theology of the cross. After the fashion of many Eastern spiritualities gays and lesbians are encouraged not to avoid the darkness that invades their lives, but to go through it. In my book, Spiritual Direction and the Gay Person,16 I referred to Constance Fitzgerald’s work on the dark night of the soul for women. I substitute the word, gay, for woman in this quote.
Although the God of the dark night seems silent, this God is not a mute God who silences human desire, pain, and feeling, and gays need to realize that the experience of anger, rage, depression, and abandonment is a constitutive part of the transformation and purification of the dark night.17
And I also referred to these words of Morton Kelsey:
The idea sometimes heard today that darkness can be avoided and we should find God only in joy and celebration, in peace and comfort, is grave delusion that perhaps reveals our present lack of experience. We are apt either to begin this way in some darkness and depression or be caught up by it somewhere along the way. Celebration is fine and comes after deliverance. Beforehand, celebration is often hollow, false and naïve.18
(3) Gays and lesbians are to love creation of which they are a part and they are to face the shadow side of their lives. This will free them for that which moves beyond the narrow confines of their own world. They are free for a prophetic role. All Christians are called to prophecy. Gays and lesbians in particular call into question anything that continues the stranglehold of shame or the endless pursuit of approval from the outside. Along with prophecy comes creativity. Creativity not only in the aesthetic realm but also in being able to redefine oneself. This creativity is translated into finding sources for the spiritual life, in finding ways to make it possible to move beyond worship, which is dull and oppressive. I wrote:
Gays and lesbians are called to find liturgical services or to create their own ritual expressions where they can have a place where they can communally discern forms of injustice so as to move to greater liberation. Here they will experience their true liminality. Here the sexually dispossessed take possession of their sexuality. Here the sexually poor become sexually rich.19
(4) Gay/Lesbian’s spirituality moves to interconnectedness with others and with creation itself to bring about transformation. John McNeill has shown by examples the many ways in which gays/lesbians have contributed to community and to human development by their service. He writes, “Gays are the oil that keeps the whole machine running smoothly. This is so true that if, suddenly there were no gay people, the human community would be in serious jeopardy.20 Sisters and brothers, out of such a spirituality gays and lesbians can sing Trust the goodness of creation, trust the spirit strong with in, Dare to dream the vision promised, spring from seed of what has been.
Again, Dolores Dufner’s lyrics: “Summoned by the God who made us, rich in our diversity, Gathered in the name of Jesus, Richer still in Unity.” The gay/lesbian experience is increasingly in the church an important source of theological reflection for it brings to the community a distinct religious sensibility. Theology recognizes that gays and lesbians reflect the richness of God’s own loving and that their very presence fills up with greater wholeness the beauty of humanity. In fact, one can say that God had to create homosexual people lest humanity miss the diversity and multiplicity that creation is and how it expresses God’s own multiple way of loving. We too glibly separate things in a dipolar way as if when we have said male and female we have exhausted the meaning of human sexuality, especially in the area of differentiation. Studies today indicate that the matter is more complex than that.21 Although these theological reflections may seem too abstract and distant to be a source of hope for any homosexual person or for any of you here present, yet it is encouraging, enlightening and even exhilarating for the Christian community as a whole. For here we have the church through its reflection, whether unarticulated in the lives of its baptized members or through the explicit working of its theologians coming to a new consciousness about itself, its baptismal and eucharistic spirituality and its mission of raising up all humankind to its highest potential. What is taking place in the reflections of the church, usually without encouragement from religious leaders, will have consequences by enriching theology itself, freeing it from its past commitments and presuppositions but also for the spiritual freedom and flourishing of the lesbian and gay members of the church. Whenever the church pursues its intuitions and the challenges brought from the culture there is an enrichment that is a cause of hope for us all, although much of this will come to fruition in a later generation. But we must ask: Is not being generative one of the most powerful sources of hope for any of us? I am hopeful that the time is beginning when the gay/lesbian influence in theology and spirituality will be as cogent and obvious as are the feminist dimensions of theological reflection and the feminist critique of scripture. It would a source of hope for those who pursue the Catholic faith with intellectual integrity if the bookshelves, courses, and preaching benefited as much from gay/lesbian perspectives as they have from feminist, womanist or liberationist ones. Just as there are those who consider homosexuality as the major church problem in the first part of the twenty-first century, I see homosexuality as a door to the sacred which offers more and even distinctly new ways of living out the baptismal character.
At a time when official pronouncements from church leaders, especially as they are presented in the media with the tendency to pick and choose in search of sound bites, appear to restrict, reinterpret and narrow what positive aspects of the Christians tradition gays and lesbians may mine for their spiritual pathways, I find it encouraging that reflections are taking place which can provide new sources of hope for individual homosexuals as well as the creation of a new form of moral discourse. I give some examples.
Earlier this year the conference of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America’s seminary presidents published a volume called Faithful Conversations: Christian Perspectives on Homosexuality22 as a way of assisting the Lutheran Church in its present deliberations in those neuralgic areas of same-sex blessings and the ordination of active gay ministers. One essay in particular seemed to me to contribute to the discussion in the Catholic community. Martha Stortz, a former colleague of mine, believes that the ecclesiastical discussions on homosexuality have been misplaced. Marty writes that Christians are not beginning their discussions with their primary identity. “Christians find that identity in baptism, not in sexual orientation…”23 “In defining their primary identity in terms of baptism, Christians shift their primary loyalties out of the realm of the biological family and into the realm of the Christian community.”24 Her point is that what our culture considers a private matter, sexuality, St. Paul regards as community matter. What we do with our bodies affects the whole body of Christ. Sexuality is an ecclesial concern. It is not simply what happens between consenting adults. Sexuality is a gift and responsibility of the community. It is not simply an individual entitlement. It is important for communities to support the unions in their midst. She notes: “the institution of marriage needs help. In deed, as Christians have debated homosexuality with such passion and acrimony, they may have failed to celebrate, support and admonish the unions they have already blessed.”25. At a time when positions have hardened with one side invoking biblical condemnation of homosexuality and the fact that tradition has strongly, if not unambiguously, judged homoerotic actions as immoral, and others in counterpoint say we must honor the value the faithful and committed relationships among gay/lesbian Christians, Stortz opens the way for some common ground. At a time when some church leaders would wish that everyone stop talking about sexuality and that the homosexual issue would disappear, thus creating a demoralization for many who deal pastorally with gays and lesbians, Stortz brings some hope that we might have faithful conversations when she moves the discussion to another level. She stresses that “a Christian’s primary orientation is toward Christ.26 When Christians think about sexuality, Christ’s is the body they ought to think about.”27
Another example. In his “Notes on Moral Theology” in Theological Studies28 64 (2003: 127-150) this year James Keenan, S.J., reviews the considerable amount of literature in which Catholic theologians are reflecting on the morality and lives of gay and lesbian persons. What I find so hopeful is the critical engagement that is taking place in a variety of ways especially in response to statements coming from the magisterium. In investigating scripture, natural law, theological writings, and human experience these theologians in open debate are studying the lives not only of gays and lesbians but the church itself. Although one expects theologians to plumb the depths of ecclesiastical pronouncements in terms of all the scholarly tools at their disposal, it is heartening and encouraging to travel with them as they find more in the Catholic tradition that is supportive of Catholic gays and lesbians than many of us may get the impression from official and semi-official statements. Because we receive a different impression from the media, church leaders and often homilists, let me quote Keenan’s conclusion.
The open debate helps us to see, then, that the Catholic tradition is rich, human, and capable of being relevant to help gay and lesbian persons find moral ways of living out their lives and the way they are called to love. Gay and lesbian persons respond offering, from their experience, a variety of ways of imagining not only their own self-understanding, but also the way we are called to be Church. Like other groups of people who have been oppressed by, among others, the Church, they help us to see that by silencing and marginalizing them, we do harm to them, ourselves, the Church, and the gospel.29
I know that many gays and lesbians and sympathetic heterosexuals were dismayed by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith when it used the category of “objective disorder” to describe the homosexual orientation. It seemed to put gays and lesbians outside the order of God’s good creation. The sexual tendencies of heterosexuals even when distorted by concupiscence are still ordered to the good of the universe. But that cannot be said for gays and lesbians. The phrase, objective disorder, seems harsh to many. I would want to say to any gay or lesbian person that feels oppressed by such categorization that there is hope in the fact that the discussion in the church is dealing with that phrase in a way that not only calls for its reconsideration but is stimulating theologians to examine the more significant issues such as how we understand ourselves to be human, what does it mean for activities to be natural, and what is the importance of the evolution of the soul here. I am impressed by the work of such theologians as Jack Bonsor whose work takes the sting out of that unhappy phrase, “objective disorder,” and offers all of us the possibility of re-imaging ourselves in God’s sight. Gays and lesbians are not a mistake, a wrinkle in the divine plan but are rather a gift within the provident care of God. This is not the place to rehearse Bonsor’s argumentation except to note that he questions the validity of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s “declaration which is based on Aquinas’s understanding of how we know God’s eternal law. By pointing to an inconsistency in Aquinas’ reasoning Bonsor believes that a space has been opened to reconsider the use of the term, “objective disorder.” Even if one does not read these theologians or has no interest in following the intricacies of their arguments, it should be consoling to know that there are those who are striving to insure that human prejudice is not mistaken for God’s will.30
A final example. In a forthcoming book, Jesuit theologian, Paul Crowley of Santa Clara University brings the discussion to a new spiritual depth. He refers to this statement of the CDF in its 1986 “Letter to all Catholic Bishops on the Pastoral Case of Homosexual persons”:
Fundamentally, homosexuals are called to enact the will of God in their life by joining whatever sufferings and difficulties they experience in virtue of their condition to the sacrifice of the Lord’s cross. That cross, for the believer, is a fruitful sacrifice since from that death came life and redemption. While any call to carry the cross or to understand a Christian’s sufferings in this way will be predictably met with bitter ridicule by some, it should be remembered that this is the way to eternal life for all who follow Christ.31
In other words, according to the CDF the only spirituality possible for gay and lesbian Catholics is participation in the sufferings of Christ through chaste sexual abstinence. In Crowley’s summary of the Vatican statement the cross is the only route for one “who is beset by the paradox of a sexuality that is at once a part of God’s creation yet intrinsically disordered, for its establishes the bearer of the condition as a person with a tendency toward evil.”32 Crowley does not reject a theology of the cross for gay Catholics. Sexual suffering is a part of all lives and Christians need to understand theirs in terms of the cross. But to see the cross as the only possibility for gays and lesbians is to miss part of the central mystery of the cross, namely, that Christ freely accepted it. Rather Crowley sees that a spirituality of the cross for gays and lesbians must lead them beyond seeing themselves as victims. Their other way of loving, of being sexually, can help them develop empathy for those who suffer but who know nothing of the suffering of the gay person. From the other side, the sexual suffering of the married couple struggling with fidelity or of the divorced Catholic who is estranged from self can develop a sense of the paradox that many gay and lesbian Catholics live with. Crowley writes:
It strikes me that this kind of empathy is in keeping with a positively interpreted theology of the cross, one in which the Christian enters willingly into the crucible of life, through love. It is not simply a theology of self-denial based on the assumption that one’s inclinations are not only distorted but essential self-indulgent. Such a theology of empathy could lead to a deeper understanding of the Paschal Mystery as the empathy of God, an empathy into which God invites all Christians qua Christian, not only gays in some special sacrificial way. This is the empathy of the divine entry into the pathos of human existence in a tender way. This manifestation of divine empathy in the paschal mystery of Christ could also open up the theological imagination of the church’ teachers toward other ways of imagining human sexuality and more broadly, human nature which is, after all, originally established through and in God’ self-revelation in the God-man Jesus Christ. We could move beyond the dehumanizing effects of reducing sexuality to the human body and its functions or of reducing human nature to sexual identity, and open up its symbolic value as an icon of the divine tenderness.33
When the spirituality of gays and lesbians reach that profundity of spirit, they are definitely singing a new church into being.
Again, the words of the hymn: “Draw together at one table, all the human family, shape a circle every wider and a people ever free.” Shape a Circle Ever Wider, a book by Mark Francis, now the superior general of the Viatorians, is about inculturation. It is an analysis of how richness and diversity is multiplied and enhanced as they find a home in different cultural contexts. There are many definitions of inculturation. To keep it simple we can say that it is linked to the term, contextualization. The success of inculturation projects is their ability to fulfill felt-needs so well that the needs are no longer felt. In others words, how the gospel grows in and out of a specific cultural context. I have written:
Our shared common humanity does not erase (these) cultural differences.
For instance, those from an ethnic group which tends to deny the presence of homosexuality in their group and /or which places primary importance on heterosexual marriage and having children may find it more difficult to come to terms with their homosexuality and/or coming out to family members.34
There is a growing body of literature, which is devoted to homosexuality among Latinos (although less among Latinas). The major issues are when is someone a homosexual, the relationship of machismo and homosexuality, that is, the active and passive partners in a relationship, and gay rights. Much of the writing is still centered on some of the stereotypical differences between the Hispanic and the Anglo-American cultures. Some Latinos despise homosexuals as men who refuse to prove their manhood. Also, among Latinos/as only the one who is seen as receptive in the sex act is considered homosexual. Some times the man in the dominant position, the bugarron, actually enhances his machismo through his sexual activity with another man. Not much attention has been given to lesbianism, probably because Hispanic society “grounds its sexuality on the macho desires, repressing feminine sexuality. Tolerance of lesbians is partly due to their unimportance to the macho’s construction of sexuality. They simply have no space in the dominant construction.”35 Although Hispanic theologians are beginning to deal with homosexuality in the Hispanic world more is written by non-Latinos. Perhaps, this talk by a gringo illustrates the point. This conference seeks to remedy this conspiracy of silence. It is our hope to shape the circle ever wider inclusive of all ethnic groups.
Accepting one’s homosexuality is difficult for anyone in Western culture, but for Hispanics it has been particularly problematic.36 The gay Latino man threatens the macho male because it subverts the latter’s own understanding of masculinity as well as femininity. And Latina lesbians may not fit easily into a stereotype of mother and wife. But if there is to be a deepening of spirituality for Hispanics, both male and female, there will need to be a greater acceptance and integration of the homosexual Latina/o into the larger Hispanic cultures. What James Nelson says of ministering to gays/lesbians in the church applies equally to those who minister to Latinos/as.
Effective pastoral counseling and support for gay persons is crucial. By training, profession, and calling the clergy should be those to whom gay people might turn in complete confidence. At present it often is not so. Lack of sufficient information, lack of insight into the problems that gays confront in a hostile environment, and lack of deep understanding and acceptance concerning their own sexuality remain formidable problems with many clergy. And this constitutes an important agenda item for theological education.37
Some of the issues that are applicable to all gays and lesbians may be magnified in the Latino community. For instance, when gay men and women internalize such labels as “sinner,” “sick,” or “unnatural,” it can cause a sense of shame and guilt. In a culture where shame already is an obstacle to fuller human growth, such labeling has an increasingly oppressive effect. Here gays and lesbians need a supportive community. If they cannot find it in the church they search for it in bars and bathhouses. Nelson notes that when the community can help the person in the coming out process and help them celebrate their lives a great deal of energy drain in the form of scrupulosity and internalization of negative attitudes is avoided. The church can help Hispanic gays to celebrate religiously their sexuality.
All Christians have probably internalized some negative attitudes towards sex. Homosexuals have probably done it more than heterosexuals because of cultural prejudice and hostility. This negativity has been intensified for Hispanic homosexuals because their culture, as so many other cultures, has a specific cultural prejudice and hostility. It would not be unreasonable to take the various conflicts that U.S. gays of European origin experience in a homophobic atmosphere, such as fear of sex and intimacy, the threat to heterosexual males by homosexual men, and lack of cultural support for situations of enduring commitment, and multiply them for the Latino gay person. If the churches are to benefit from the leadership gifts of their homosexual members, in particular, their Hispanic gay members, and if the churches are to exercise a ministry to the world in terms of these members then they must take seriously the challenge of James Nelson.
Churches should help lesbians and gay men to affirm and to celebrate their homosexuality. It is just as natural to them as is heterosexuality to other persons. And it is just as significant to their wholeness as is heterosexuality to those oriented in that direction. For the church to believe and act in this way would truly be prophetic witness to a homophobic society.38
If ministry to gays and lesbians is to help them overcome the injustice of their impoverishment in relation to their sexuality, then the ministry of gays and lesbians to the larger church is one of justice. Their very vulnerability in relation to their sexuality that requires that they give up an illusion of invulnerability shows that there is “power and redemption in vulnerability that institutions, including the church, do not come to a realization about easily.”39 The world and the church need the experience of those who have learned to love themselves and can relate with others in ways that move beyond the male domination of the female or that are overly focused on genitality and reproduction but rather are based on the mutual delight in each other. Healthy gays and lesbians know with whom to relate in this way because these are precisely the barriers they need to overcome in order to claim their own goodness and that of their sexuality. Integrated and committed Hispanic gays ands lesbians are preeminently qualified to witness to the ministry of justice to the larger church. Their cultural origin with the tradition of male dominance, machismo, and sexual stereotyping presents them with the possibility of being wholesome mediators of God’s love to all people.40 That is surely the hope of Dolores Dufner when she wrote; Draw together at one table, all the human family, shape a circle ever wider and a people ever free.
Mientras hay Alma, hay esperanza, where there is life, there is hope. Where there is giftedness, there is life. It is the particular gifts that gays and lesbians bring to the Christian community which respond to the challenge in the hymn text: “Bring the hopes of any nation, bring the art of human race, weave a song of peace and justice, let it sound through time and space.” A list of the gifts that gays and lesbians are bringing to the Church would include: providing new paradigms for sexual integration and examples for overcoming dualisms which have inhibited our spiritual growth, helping the large church to understand how the erotic has healing qualities, how it shapes our relationships and provides energy for us to move in a more committed way. Other gifts that come to all of us from gays and lesbians are that by their marginal lives they become missionaries to a homophobic world, which means that we need not divide ourselves off from our feelings and live disincarnate lives, that we need not prove our worth through our accomplishments, that fear of sexuality and pleasure need not turn into anger and violence, that we can let go of control of our lives and not feel compelled to have children in order to assure ourselves of a future.
These are some of the gifts with which spiritual direction with gays and lesbians will be concerned. As I have written:
It may be that more time in the sessions is spent on issues of hurt, pain, suffering, integrating one’s sexuality with one’s bodiliness, or dealing with one’s inner call to love and what religious denominations ask of their gay and lesbian members. But the giftedness of being a homosexual must be ever present like background music. However, if my experience can be accepted as a proper source of information here, then more time in spiritual direction with gays and lesbians will be devoted to their issues as human beings rather than as gays and lesbians specifically. What distinguishes men from women, one race from another and gay/lesbian from straight is not the most significant part of us. Still, for gays and lesbians to grasp fully the humanity they share with heterosexuals, it will be necessary for them to dwell in all the possibilities of their giftedness.
Spiritual directors, by recognizing and calling forth the homosexual giftedness of their directees, call them out of their tombs. Hopefully, the journey that the director and directee make together will make it possible for the gay person to move out of hiding into the light and to move from unfreedom to freedom. The whole work of spiritual direction with gays and lesbians is encapsulated in the cry of Jesus as the still bound Lazarus emerges from the darkness. “Desatenlo y dejenlo caminar.” “Unbind him and let him go.”41 And so we end where we began and if you know the words and melody of Dolores Dufner’s lovely refrain, please join me. Let us bring the gifts that differ, and in splendid varied ways, sing a new church into being, one in faith and love and praise.
______________________
1 All quotations from the hymn, “Sing a New Church,” published by OCP are the text by Dolores Dufner, O.S.B., copyrighted by the Sisters of St. Benedict, 1991.
2 Report of the Theology Committee of the house of Bishps of the Epsicopal Church adopted by the House of Bishops on March 18, 2003 at Kanuga, N.C. Check website of the Episcopal Church.
3 Ibid., p. 4.
4 Ibid., p. 4.
5 Ibid., p. 7.
6 Ibid., p. 11.
7 (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2001), p. 94.
8 Ibid., p. 99-100.
9 See his article in Presence: An International journal of Spiritual Direction, (January 1996) “Directing Battered Spirits: Creation Spirituaoity and Hope for Gay and Lesbian Religious Professionals,” p. 39ff.
10 See unpublished article by Patrick Collins, “From Illuisons Toward Truth: Thomas Merton’s ‘True Self’ and Gay Spirituality.”
11 Faith Beyond Resentment, p. 211.
12 Ibid., p. 211.
13 See the prvious two references to Young and Collins.
14 See “The Longest Journey: Growing in Wholeness and Holiness” by Fran Ferder, fspa, Ph.D. in Communication vol. 26:2 (Summer, 2003), p. 10.
15 These four points are inspired by Richard Young’s four spiritual paths for gays and lesbians that he in turned bases on Matthew Fox’s, Original Blessing (Bear and Company, 1983).
16 (New York: Continuum, 1999).
17 See her article, “Impasse and dark night of the soul” in Women’s Spirituality: Resources for Christian Development, edited by Joann Wolski Conn (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), p. 306.
18 Transcend: A Guide to the Spiriutal Quest (New York: Crossroad, 1981), p. 92.
19 Spiritual Direction and the Gay Person, p. 106.
20 Freedom,Glorious Freedom, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), p. 81.
21 See “The Erosion of Sexual Dimorphism: Challenges to Religion and Religious Ethics,” by Christine E. Gudorf in Journal of American Academy of Religion vol. 69: 4 (December 2001): 863-891.
22 Edited by James M. Childs, Jr. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003).
23 See her article, “Rethinking Christian Sexaulity: Baptized into the Body of Christ,” p. 59.
24 Ibid., p. 63.
25 Ibid., p. 76.
26 Ibid., p. 73.
27 Ibid., p. 63.
28 64 (2003): 127-150.
29 Ibid., p. 150.
30 For Bonsor’s work see these two articles: “An Objective Disorder: Homosexual Orientation and God’s Eternal Law,” in Horizons 24/2 (1997): 193-214 and “Homosexual Orientation and Anthropology: Reflections on the Category ‘Objective Disorder’” in Theological Studies 59 (1998).
31 See page four of the unpublished manuscript: A Dark and Dangerous Problem: Homosexuality and the Cross in Catholic Teaching.”
32 Ibid., p. 7.
33 Ibid., p. 28.
34 Spiritual Direction and the Gay Person, p. 170.
35 For this section see Introducing Latino/a Theologies by Miguel A. De La Torre and Edwin David Aponte (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2001) especially page 158.
36 The following several paragraph are taken from a yet unpublished manuscript Light From Light: A Recovery of Cosmic Sacrametalty by James L. Empereur, S.J. and Eduardo Fernandez, S. J. See chapter six: “The Ministry of Leadershipo in the Hjispanic Community.”
37 Embodiment: An Approach to Sexuality and Christian Theology, (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1978), p. 206.
38 Between Two Gardens, (New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1983), p. 122.
39 See Empereur, “A Lesbian and Gay Spirituality: The Life and Liturgy of DIGNITY in DIGNITY US Journal, vol. 24:1 (Winter, 1992).
40 Here concludes the material from Light from Light
41 Spiritual Direction and the Gay Person, pp. 172-173.
Copyright 2003 by James L. Empereur, S.J., Ph.D. All rights reserved.
Reprinted with permission of the Author by
www.GayCatholicForum.org
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