Living the Truth in Love: Pastoral Approaches to Same-Sex Attraction by Janet Smith & Fr. Paul Check

Author:Janet Smith & Fr. Paul Check [Smith, Janet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781681496689
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2015-08-31T05:00:00+00:00

Two Priests

When I had been Catholic for about fourteen years, I finally started spiritual direction, something I should have done much earlier. I started direction because I knew I needed to quit drinking and had been unable to do so without outside help. Unsurprisingly, once I got used to the luxury of having a regular confessor, I didn’t want to give it up! I have been sober for a little over three years but still gain so much from direction. It’s a place where I can be known, welcomed, and shown mercy—another kind of foretaste of heaven.

Neither of my spiritual directors have focused on my sexual orientation. It comes up sometimes; I’ve talked with my first director about the stresses that come from being a public face of gay celibacy, for example. But I’ve been—yet again—so lucky that my directors have not viewed it as their job to change my orientation or persuade me to stop calling myself gay. They’ve focused primarily on my prayer life. They’ve listened to me, rather than viewing my own account of my sexuality, friendships, or vocation with suspicion. And they’ve trusted that if they help me to pray and worship, then God can do the rest.

Too often, the only area of gay people’s spiritual life on which other Christians focus is our sexuality or chastity. “Sanctification” has been defined solely in terms of becoming more chaste—or even becoming heterosexual—with other areas like humility, honesty, and solidarity with the marginalized, or even love of Christ, being ignored. My own spiritual directors didn’t make this mistake. Even when I brought to them problems with chastity, they didn’t focus on my sexual orientation but asked about my overall vocation: How was I praying? How was I living? How did I view God? When I sinned or even when I was tempted, could I pray that my weakness would prompt deeper humility and help me be merciful toward others?

The old-school confession “box” has many virtues. One of its great virtues is that it makes manifest the spiritual reality that Confession creates an enclosed “space”—even on the battlefield, or the site of an accident, or a contemporary “reconciliation room”—in which the penitent encounters Jesus in the person of the priest. The offices of my spiritual directors, with their armchairs and knickknacks and the occasional semi-domesticated cat, became havens for me where I could meet Jesus. They were places of peace in the midst of the chaos of cultural controversy.

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