Freedom, Glorious Freedom
The Spiritual Journey to
the Fullness of Life
For Gays, Lesbians,
and Everybody Else
John J. McNeill
Published by Lethe Press at Smashwords
© 1995, 2009 by John J. McNeill.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for brief citation or review, without the written permission of Lethe Press. For information write: Lethe Press, 118 Heritage Avenue, Maple Shade, NJ 08052.
www.lethepressbooks.com
lethepress@aol.com
Book Design by Toby Johnson
Originally published 1995 by Beacon Press
Rereleased 2009 by Lethe Press, 118 Heritage Avenue, Maple Shade, NJ 08052.
ISBN 1-59021-148-0 / 978-1-59021-148-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
for first publication
McNeill, John J.
Freedom, glorious freedom: the spiritual journey to the fullness of life for gays, lesbians, and everybody else /John J. McNeill, p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8070-7936-7 (cloth)
ISBN 0-8070-7937-5 (paper)
1.
Gays—Religious life.
2. Homosexuality—Religious
aspects—
Christianity. 3. Twelve-step programs—
Religious
aspects—Christianity. I. Title.
BV4596.G38M65
1995
26l.8’35766—dc20 94-15723
CIP
Christ still sends me roses. We try to be formed and held and kept by him, instead he offers us freedom. And now when I try to know his will, his kindness floods me, his great love overwhelms me, and I hear him whisper, Surprise me!
Ron Hansen, Mariette in Ecstasy
Table of Contents
Preface
to the 2009 Edition by Rebecca Mertz
PART 1: Gay Spiritual Maturity
Introduction:
The Gay Spiritual Journey
Chapter
1: Freedom of Conscience and Gay Maturity
Chapter
2: Freedom of Conscience and the Catholic Church
Chapter
3: Discernment of Spirits
Chapter
4: A Case History of Discernment of Spirits
Chapter
5: My Personal Experience of Discernment
PART 2: Coming Out: The Three Stages Of Homosexual Holiness
Introduction:
The Gay Self And The Catholic Hierarchy
Chapter
6: Creating the Authentic Gay Self: The Three-Stage Process
Chapter
7: The Second Passage into Intimacy with Another
Chapter
9: Coming Out Through a Public Rite of Covenanted Union
PART 3: Twelve-Step Spirituality
Introduction:
A Means of Liberation for Lesbians and Gay Men
PART 4: The Gay Love Of God And God’s Love Of Gays
Introduction:
Homosexuality And The New Testament
Chapter
12: God’s Love Of Gays
Chapter
13: The Special Nature Of The Gay And Lesbian Love Of God
Epilogue:
Emerging from the Heart of the World
Maurice
Blondel: The Philosopher of Freedom
The
Church and the Homosexual: Its Condemnation and My Response
by Rebecca Mertz
By the time my friend sent me Freedom, Glorious Freedom, my mind was completely closed to anything that claimed to discuss Catholicism and homosexuality. I had become so disillusioned with both sides of the debate that I had begun to think that there really was no place for homosexuals in the Church. Every book, or article, or blog I came across was filled with either willful ignorance regarding homosexuality or had “thrown the baby out with the bathwater”–equating spiritual liberation with spiritual indifference. It took me a week to even read the back cover of the book.
I was raised in a very conservative Catholic family and followed that up with attending the Franciscan University of Steubenville. All the while, I was aware that I was a lesbian from the age of about 5 (of course I went through various stages of articulation, denial, guilt, etc). Franciscan University of Steubenville is a safe haven for conservative Catholic extremists. There I encountered men and women who thought that it was sinful for women to work outside the home, people who defended the shooting of abortion doctors, students and professors who were skeptical of the Church’s progressions since Vatican II–and the list goes on. Not all of the population was this extreme, but there was a stagnant devotion to orthodoxy that made anyone who questioned the Church’s teachings immediately suspect. During my time at Franciscan, I fought constantly with myself, with people around me, and with my idea of the Church.
By the time I graduated, I had read everything I could get my hands on in the university library that dealt with the moral theology of homosexuality. But none of this answered the questions of my heart: could I live a life of celibacy in accordance with Church teachings, or could I break the rules and live as a lesbian? Thankfully, I had life-saving encouragement from friends who I’d come out to, and one friend in particular finally articulated to me that I could not discover the answer to my questions with my head, but that I had to use my heart. Only my heart could help me to decipher what was right for me. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to sufficiently answer every theological argument, but I could achieve a sense of peace with myself that could only come from following God’s will.
Somehow I persuaded myself that I could still be an active Catholic while also being a lesbian. I knew that to live as a Catholic meant keeping my sexuality under the surface–I might be able to tell my friends, but I could never be “out” in the Catholic community. This seemed to be an acceptable compromise to me, because deep down I accepted the fact that the Church “had a point”–that there must be something wrong with being a lesbian, even if I didn’t know what it was. I thought I had accepted myself, but in reality, it was impossible for me to ever have a healthy romantic relationship because I still felt so ashamed and afraid of my sexuality.
Around this time, I got very involved with the Communion and Liberation movement (which was small but vibrant in Steubenville) and reading the work of Fr. Luigi Giussani really helped me to accept and love myself in the face of God’s immeasurable love for me. I realized that I could no longer live in the closet. Right around the time I was ready to come out to everyone–not just my close friends–I had an experience of real rejection and loss. A close friend, whom I had come out to a year before, decided that she had changed her mind about homosexuality and that she disapproved of it. She said that she had come to “agree with the Church.” I had lived with her and been the nanny of her children (all the while, she knew that I was a lesbian) for a year after college, and she asked that I not have any contact with her or her family from that point on.
This was really heartbreaking to me, as I had been treated like a member of the family. But even more heartbreaking was that I finally felt like I was experiencing something that was totally condoned by the Church, that I was at last waking up to the reality of what the Church taught about gays and lesbians. This friend had been the woman who told me that I had to learn my path based on my heart, not my head. But now she was retreating to the safety of the Church’s community, the Church’s theology–all of which was off limits to me as a lesbian. The Church had made that clear in several documents that I had read and re-read: there was no room for out lesbians or gays in the Catholic community. My friend had every right to want me away from her and her children, according to the Letter on the Pastoral Care of Homosexuals.
This experience was one of great heartache but also great clarity for me. I knew that my friend was wrong. The question “What Would Jesus Do?” was printed on everything from t-shirts to underwear that year, and I knew that Jesus would not ask me to stay away from him. This clarity gave me the strength I needed to come out of the closet to everyone. I never wanted to fear that someone would “change their mind” about my sexual orientation, or that anyone would unexpectedly find out about my lesbianism and reject me. I decided then and there to stop apologizing for myself.
That year I came out to my entire family, and they were amazingly loving and completely accepting. A year later I met my partner, Alexis. I couldn’t have asked for a more complete experience of human acceptance and love than what I have with her. But something was still missing. I often spoke to Alexis of my love of the Church, my faith in Christ, my longing to once again be part of a religious or spiritual community. I tried to consider other denominations but was disheartened. It felt like to leave the Church was to admit to them that they were right, that I didn’t belong there.
When I finally opened my heart to John McNeill’s Freedom, Glorious Freedom, I was amazed with what I found in its pages. Finally there was not just a tolerance or acceptance of homosexuals, but a book that articulates the gifts and blessings of homosexuality! John’s book articulated for me many of the phases that I had gone through as a gay Christian. Most importantly, he wrote about the theology of freedom of conscience and the discernment of spirits. John’s book confirmed for me that my heart-over-head reasoning was perfectly in line with these two traditions in the Church. He writes of the inherent desire for God within each human being, and the fact that this desire is evident in each person’s heart. Thus our hearts become capable of solving the most complicated moral questions simply by listening to the divinity within them.
At Franciscan University I had been told by my counselor, a psychology professor, that I could “be a saint, if only you conquer this gay thing.” This was a statement that stuck with me, however much self-acceptance I gained through therapy, friendship, or love. It wasn’t until I read John’s profound, intense theology of homosexuality that I finally believed that my sexual orientation was a spiritual gift, not a spiritual disability. This book made me feel like I was not kidding myself in still striving toward a Catholic holiness. John brings together so many sources of scripture, mysticism, and tradition that confirm and nourish who I am as a lesbian created by God that there is no question left in my mind. I am a Catholic as much as I am a lesbian. There is simply no deciding between the two anymore.
Even though John’s book helped me to accept and love the Church in spite of its obvious flaws, the contemporary Church still condemns me for my sexuality. The man behind many of the documents that John cites as evidence of the modern Church’s homophobia were written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger–now Pope Benedict XVI. But this brings me to the last and most important gift I received from John’s book: hope. By explicating a clear, Catholic, Christian theology in which God has created gay people to love Her/Him and each other, in which homosexuality is good, John helped to show me that I could develop an authentic trust in the Holy Spirit. Rather than approaching God as having betrayed and abandoned me by establishing a homophobic Church on earth, Freedom showed me evidence that it was in fact the other way around. “God” was redefined for me as a positive being, a loving creator who was rooting for me and not against me. This trust in my creator helped me to have some hope in the Church that I grew up loving. John outlines his “three profound hopes,” practical ways that the Church could actually come to accept homosexuals, bless our unions, and defend us instead of rejecting us.
Throughout history the Church has condemned many who would later become saints. Just a few examples are St. Thomas Aquinas (who was censured by the conservatives of his day), St. Joan of Arc (who was burned at the stake by Church officials), St. Ignatius Loyola (who was jailed during the inquisition because of his ideas on prayer), St. Teresa of Avila (also called before the inquisition) and, more recently, the now Blessed Mother Mary MacKillop was actually excommunicated in 1871. Spiritual and theological classics by such authors such as Erasmus and St. Faustina Kowalska were once on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Church’s Index of Prohibited Books. I am convinced that one day the Church will recognize the extraordinary importance of John McNeill’s work, his selfless devotion to the gay and lesbian community, his immense courage, and finally, his generous contribution to the vast historical dialogue that is Catholic moral theology. For now, those of us who find ourselves on the outskirts of Catholicism, the “stones that the builders have rejected,” can find comfort and hope not in the unjust restrictions and limitations placed upon us by the Church, but in Freedom, Glorious Freedom.
This book could never have been written without the support, encouragement, and assistance of my partner and lover of the last twenty-nine years, Charles Chiarelli. By his faithful and patient love, Charlie made me certain of what I say in this book through our own experience of gay love. He also worked alongside me for many years, preparing and proofreading manuscripts, patiently teaching me computer skills, and keeping me sane with his wry sense of humor.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to my sister, Sister Mary Sheila McNeill, for her continuous prayers and support for my ministry to gays and lesbians.
I also wish to thank Margaret and Larry Kornfeld, and Jack and Judy McMahon for their enthusiastic support, and for reading my manuscript and making many helpful suggestions.
All my retreatants at Kirkridge over the years deserve special thanks for giving me valuable feedback as I developed the ideas in this book, with special gratitude to Robert Raines and Cynthia Hirni.
I wish to acknowledge also, all the wonderful lesbian and gay couples I have met over the years through various professional, spiritual, and personal events: Virginia and Debra, Philip and Dan, Joe and Duffey, Bill and Joe, Dick and Jerry, to mention only a few.
And last, and certainly not least, I wish to express special gratitude to Pat and Bruce for creating the Chiron Rising family and for giving us the opportunity to encounter so many genuine, loving gay couples including Denny and Mac, Dave and Bob, Bill and Tom, Bill and Dave, and many others.
While doing research for this book, I discovered that the Sanskrit root of the word for “freedom” has two interdependent meanings. First, it means to be a free (not a slave) member of the household of the master. Second, it means to be loved by the master. Anyone in the household that the master loved became a free member of the household because of that love. Anyone who was not loved was a slave member of that household.
I find the insight that comes from this double meaning of the word freedom very profound. It is love; it is knowing that we are loved; it is by living in an atmosphere of love that we humans are genuinely freed. The child that knows it is loved is free to play and to develop in a healthy way. We adults, if we are fully conscious of God’s love for us, are psychically free to mature and to play life to its fullest in the presence of a loving God. Love creates the space in which freedom flourishes. It is this interrelationship between love and freedom that will be the primary focus of this book.
The title, Freedom, Glorious Freedom, is derived from a famous passage in the writings of Paul: “For the whole creation is waiting with eagerness for the children of God to be revealed. It was not for its own purposes that creation had frustration imposed on it, but for the pur-poses of him who imposed it—with the intention that the whole crea-tion itself might be freed from its slavery to corruption and brought into the same glorious freedom as the children of God” (Rom. 8:19-21).1
Throughout my childhood I read that verse without com-prehension. I did not feel free or loved because of my religious beliefs; I was raised in a religion of guilt, shame, and fear in relationship to a god of fear. It took a long process with the help of God’s grace for me to liberate myself as a gay man from that god of fear and be able to discover on a personal level the God of love, revealed by Jesus. Now, thanks be to God, I can make this statement from Paul my own: “For what you received was not the spirit of slavery to bring you back into fear; you received the Spirit of adoption, enabling us to cry out,” ‘Abba, Father!’ The Spirit himself joins with our spirit to bear witness that we are children of God” (Rom. 8:14-17). To be free, then, is to be aware that we are members of the household of a loving God.
This is the third book I have published on gay theology. In some sense the entire trilogy deals with freedom and liberation. The first book, The Church and the Homosexual, was a quest for intellectual freedom from the homophobic thought patterns of the past and a positive effort to arrive at an understanding of homosexuality as a gift from God, to be lived out and enjoyed. The second book, Taking a Chance on God: Liberating Theology for Gays, Lesbians, and Their Lovers, Families, and Friends, dealt more on the psychological level and was derived from my own personal struggle to free myself from all the wounds of homophobia in my psyche in order to live out my gayness with joy and gratitude.
This third book deals with the presence of the Spirit of God, the Spirit of love, in our daily experiences, and how, through commu-nion with that Spirit, to arrive at the “glorious freedom” of the children of God. The first part of the book deals with freedom of conscience and discernment of spirits. These ancient teachings of the Christian church have a special urgency for lesbian and gay people who need to free themselves from all homophobic authorities and deal with God on a direct and personal basis. The second part deals with the liberating process of coming out of the closet seen as a spirit-filled effort to achieve the glory of God by becoming fully alive as gay people. The third part deals with twelve-step spirituality as a spiritual process of liberation from all addictions in order to experience the love of God in its fullness. The fourth part deals with the problems that gay people have in becoming aware of God’s special love for them and also the unique qualities present in a gay person’s love for God.
The focus is shifted in the epilogue. In this section, I am expressing a philosophical vision, looking both to the past and to the future, of how gay liberation fits into the Spirit-directed evolution of human history. This section is unavoidably intricate at times, so I ask the readers’ patience and tolerance. I am convinced that such an overview of the teleological movement of the great dialectic in history is essential to a full understanding and acceptance of the role of gay liberation in history.
After more than twenty-five years of ministry with lesbian and gay persons, as both priest and psychotherapist, I am convinced that a unique spirituality, special and vibrant, is springing up in the gay community. It is a spirituality totally compatible with a life of gay sexual love and intimacy. As Scripture says, “the stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” (Mark 12:10) on which God, with divine humor, builds the faith community. God’s special presence to the gay community and the unique graces which are enabling gays and lesbians to build a vibrant and mature, autonomous spirituality are not just gifts meant for the gay community alone. When God pours out special blessings on one segment of the community, those blessings are meant to flow out and be shared by the human community at large. This is the reason for my subtitle: The Spiritual Journey to the Fullness of Life for Gays, Lesbians, and Everybody Else.
I frequently thank God that I was born in time for this historic period of gay and lesbian liberation. I am grateful to God also for the blessing and grace to have been able to be almost totally engaged in ministry to gay and lesbian Christians for this past quarter century.
The enormous response I have received over the past many years from lesbians and gay people who thank me and God for the grace of liberation they found in my books has been a clear witness to the fact that the Spirit of God has used me to bring true liberation and spiritual growth to hundreds, even thousands, of my gay brothers and sisters. I am truly grateful to God for being allowed to play that role. My prayer and my hope are that, with God’s grace, this book will prove a source of liberation into holiness for all those who read it.
PART 1
Gay Spiritual Maturity
Introduction
The Gay Spiritual Journey
Recent insights developed in the field of psychology have undermined the traditional premises of the Catholic Church’s teaching and pastoral practice concerning homosexuality. We now know that homosexuality is not just a question of indulgence in lustful behavior, as most Church documents obviously presuppose.1 It is an orientation that is probably, at least in part, genetically determined. An orientation is a way of thinking, feeling, and responding that goes to a person’s very essence. A gay orientation is not something that can be chosen. We are born gay! Our gayness is part of God’s creative order. To claim, then, that homosexuality represents an “orientation to evil,” or is the “result of original sin,” as did recent Church documents, is to see God as cruel and sadistic. I for one would much rather believe that the Church is wrong than that God is evil. Further, there is no scientific evidence that homosexuality is a changeable orientation. One can no more change one’s sexual orientation than one can change the color of one’s eyes from blue to brown. There is no way a gay person can become heterosexual. One can deny and repress one’s gayness and undertake heterosexual behavior, but only at a great price both morally and psychologically. Those who attempt such conversions rely heavily on the cultivation of self-hatred and the worship of a god of fear.
Since we gay people were born into an unchangeable gay orientation, we must live out that reality to the best of our ability. We have a desperate need to understand our lives and experience in a positive spiritual context. We need to hear the stories of others who have undertaken the gay spiritual journey with its unique perils and opportunities. It is my firm belief that the future of the Christian churches and a revitalized faith in the God of love lies not only in the base communities, the communities in Central and South America formed by the poor who attempt to discern from their own experience what God’s will is for them, but also in the gay and lesbian faith groups here in North America and around the world. This is nothing new. Those familiar with gay and lesbian history are aware that spiritual leadership has always come in great part from the gay community in every culture and time.
Anthropologists note that in many primitive cultures gays play a strong role in spiritual leadership. For example, in Native American tradition, the berdache or the heyoehkah, who gave spiritual leadership to the tribe, was usually drawn from its gay members.2 Gays and lesbians have also played a leading, if hidden, role in Western monastic tradition. John Boswell has documented that contribution, pointing out that some of the most effective and saintly of monastic founders, such as Saint Aelred of Rievaulx, were gay men.3 Granted that the homosexual or lesbian orientation is unchosen and unchangeable, what should be the psychological and spiritual path to psychic and spiritual health for lesbians and gays?
Freedom of Conscience and Gay Maturity
What Is Maturity?
A healthy maturing process is the process by which we separate off from our dependence on parents, family, and religious authorities and become autonomous adults, make our own choices, and take responsibility for them. Maturity is defined as the ability to live one’s life according to one’s own insights and feelings and no longer live in a continuous effort to meet the expectations of others. Theologian Sebastian Moore has even gone so far as to say that “living your life to meet the expectations of others” is a form of sin. On both the psychological and the spiritual levels, maturity means the ability to discern what is the true self and to find the courage to act out that true self.
In his book on the spiritual journey of the poor in the base communities of Central and South America, Gustavo Gutierrez, a Peruvian liberation theologian, expresses this same understanding of spiritual maturity. The title of his book We Drink from Our Own Wells derives from a famous saying of the medieval monk, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux: “Everyone has to drink from his [or her] own well.” Spirituality, Gutierrez writes, is like living water that springs up from the very depths of our own personal spiritual experience.1
D. W. Winnicott, a famous English child psychologist, wrote: “Every child knows in its bones that in its wickedness lies hope; in its conformity and false socialization lies despair!”2 Winnicott meant that most children remain hopeful that they will be loved and respected even when they do not conform to parental expectations. But if a child believes that the only way it will be loved is by conforming to the expectations of others and hiding the real self in a closet, it has already despaired of life. Many of the clients in my psychotherapy practice remember a secure, joyful childhood, which came to an abrupt end when they discovered that their spontaneous feminine self or, if they were lesbian, their spontaneous masculine self was totally unacceptable to their parents. The rest of their lives they spent an enormous amount of their psychic energy trying to suppress that unacceptable feminine or masculine dimension of the real self.
One of my clients shared with me his most intense childhood experience of shame. At a family get-together, he dressed up as a ballerina and, playing ballet music on the stereo, danced into the parlor expecting to entertain his family and receive their approval and admiration. He became, instead, painfully aware of his family’s shock and revulsion. From that day on, he undertook a process of denying and suppressing everything feminine about himself. He became convinced that the feminine part of himself, which was an essential part of his real self, was somehow evil and unlovable—even to God. He cultivated a religion of fear to help him keep that feminine self repressed.
Maturity for a gay person must include coming out of the closet, just as spiritual maturity must include coming out of the closet with God. We must risk that we can be loved by God just as we are. We must “take a chance on God.”
Freedom of Conscience
A central Christian teaching, going back to Jesus himself, is without doubt of utmost importance to lesbian and gay Christians. It is freedom of conscience. This teaching is based on Jesus’ promise to his followers to send them the Holy Spirit who will dwell in their hearts.
At the Last Supper, Jesus promised: “I shall ask the Father and he will give you another Paraclete [the Greek word means “advocate”] to be with you for ever, the Spirit of truth whom the world can never accept since it neither sees nor knows him; but you know him” (John 14:16-17). Jesus further declared: “I have said these things to you while still with you; but the [Advocate], the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you” (John 14:25-26). The title “Advocate” which Jesus gives the Spirit means a “lawyer,” one who speaks with us and for us, one who will plead our cause.
Paul, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, sees the gift of the Spirit as a fulfillment of this prophecy of Jeremiah:
Look, the days are coming, Yahweh declares, when I shall make a new covenant with the House of Israel when those days have come… I shall plant my Law, writing it on their hearts. Then I shall be their God and they will be my people. There will be no further need for everyone to teach neighbour or brother, saying, “Learn to know Yahweh!” No, they will all know me, from the least to the greatest… since I shall forgive their guilt and never more call their sin to mind. (Jer. 31:31-34)
Notice that Jeremiah foresees the new covenant where every human from the least to the greatest will have direct access to a God who dwells in their hearts. This access to God will not be the privilege of a few who are gifted with extraordinary intelligence, or ritual rank, or even holiness. The Holy Spirit is a thoroughgoing respecter of democratic process. There is no hint here that one must go to authorities in order to inform one’s conscience; God directly and immediately informs our conscience, including those of gays and lesbians.
In the Acts of the Apostles on Pentecost Sunday, Peter recalls these words of the prophet Joel: “I shall pour out my Spirit on all humanity. Your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your young people shall see visions, your old people dream dreams. Even on the slaves, men and women, shall I pour out my Spirit” (Acts 2:17-18; Joel 3:1-2). Once again the emphasis is placed on the democratic nature of the Spirit.
At the Last Supper, Jesus informed his disciples that it was necessary that he should go away in order for the Spirit to come: “Yet you are sad at heart because I have told you this. Still, I am telling you the truth: it is for your own good that I am going, because unless I go, the [Advocate] will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you…. However, when the Spirit of truth comes he will lead you to the complete truth” (John 16:6-13). Why did this Spirit only come after Jesus’ death? Because as long as Jesus remained alive and present, his disciples had their center of authority outside themselves and were not, therefore, totally responsible for their actions. They were striving to meet the expectations of someone else. They had not yet become fully creative and responsible adults. We have instances in the New Testament where Jesus sent his disciples out to preach and heal in his name, and then supervised how they performed, much as a supervisor would monitor a present-day social worker at the beginning of her or his career (e.g., Matt. 10:1-33).
But after Jesus’ death his Spirit became what Paul saw as the source of the… glorious freedom of the Children of God. “The proof that you are sons [and daughters] is that God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts: the Spirit that cries, ‘Abba, Father’; and it is this that makes you a son [or daughter], you are not a slave anymore” (Gal. 4:6-7). Paul clearly understood that the good news of the Evangelium, the gospel message, is exactly this message of our freedom: “Christ set us free, so that we should remain free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be fastened again to the yoke of slavery” (Gal. 5:1-2). Paul had the same understanding of freedom as found in the Sanskrit root of the word. The pagans are not free but slaves in relation to their gods because they relate to their gods in a spirit of fear. But Christians are free because their God is a God of love who has adopted them into his family. “All who are guided by the Spirit of God are sons [or daughters] of God; for what you received was not the spirit of slavery to bring you back into fear; you received the Spirit of adoption, enabling us to cry out, ‘Abba, Father!’ The Spirit himself joins with our spirit to bear witness that we are children of God. And if we are children, then we are heirs, heirs of God…” (Rom. 8:14-17). Here again he expresses the theme of an escape from enslavement to the gods of fear: “But formerly when you did not know God, you were kept in slavery to things which are not really gods at all, whereas now that you have come to recognise God—or rather, be recognised by God—how can you now turn back again to those powerless and bankrupt elements whose slaves you now want to be all over again?” (Gal. 4:8-11).
Paul continually repeats the theme that God’s Spirit dwells within us and, if we ask, will empower us: “… the Spirit too comes to help us in our weakness, for, when we do not know how to pray properly, then the Spirit personally makes our petitions for us in groans that cannot be put into words…” (Rom. 8:26). There is a yearning and a longing deep in our psyche which is not just that of our ego but that of the Spirit of God dwelling in the depths of our spirit. Maurice Blondel gives a philosophical expression to this same theme in his philosophy of action: “Our God dwells within us, and the only way to become one with our God is to become one with our authentic self.”3
With the death of Jesus, then, and the coming of the Spirit, the apostles received a challenge as well as an opportunity to mature. As Paul expressed it: “... until we all reach unity in faith and knowledge of the Son of God and form the perfect Man, fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself” (Eph. 4:13). They had to give up the security of a provident leader; they had to find out what God wanted from them from within themselves and their own experience. It was only after the coming of the Spirit that the apostles found the courage to leave the security of their closet (the upper room) and go out into the world as responsible adult agents of the Spirit. In like manner, in our spiritual life, we gay people must pass from a passive, dependent role to an active, creative one. We have a special need to become mature, self-motivated, autonomous people, no longer passively dependent on outside homophobic sources for a sense of our identity and well-being. We must not let our enemies outside ourselves define us; we must let the Spirit of love that dwells within our hearts define us.
It is this understanding of the role of the Holy Spirit that gives me great consolation during those times when the Church reacts to its gay members in ignorance and even downright hostility. We gays should be thankful to God for creating a humanly fallible Church. We are intensely aware that if our parents had been infallible we could never have matured to become autonomous and responsible adults. We would spend our lives saying, “Yes, Mother,” “Yes, Father.” We would never develop our own capacity for independent judgment and, consequently, never feel personally responsible for our actions. God blessed us with finite and, consequently, fallible parents. It was precisely when and where our parents proved fallible that we were challenged to take distance from their authority, then make our own choices and be fully responsible for them.
In a similar way, we are dependent on the fallibility of religious authorities in order to develop an adult freedom of conscience. When we gays and lesbians discover that we cannot follow the fallible teachings of our religious authorities without destroying ourselves, then we are forced to search out what God is saying to us through our experience and take personal responsibility for the choices we make. I believe that the Holy Spirit is using the fallibility of the religious authorities to guide the Christian community into a new level of maturity and responsibility necessary for the spiritual growth of the human community in today’s world.
Freedom of Conscience and the Catholic Church
The Catholic Church teaching on “freedom of conscience” was most recently restated in the counciliar documents of Vatican II:
Humans have in their hearts a law written by God. To obey it is the very dignity of the human; according to it we will be judged. Conscience is the most secret core and sanctuary of the human. There, we are alone with God, whose voice echoes in our depths. In a wonderful manner conscience reveals the law which is fulfilled by love of God and your fellow humans. In fidelity to conscience Christians are joined to the rest of humanity in the search for truth, and for the genuine solution to the numerous problems which arise from the life of the individual and from social relationships.1
Conscience is described here as the voice of God speaking to us immediately from within our own consciousness of ourselves, without need of external mediation. A human’s freedom to follow one’s conscience is seen as the source of her or his true dignity. It was the inspiration of these words of the Vatican Council that led the gay Catholic organization at its first national meeting to choose the name “Dignity.” This freedom is understood not as an anarchic principle but, on the contrary, as the only true foundation for real community and the only valid ground for a solution to social problems and relationships. According to this teaching, gays and lesbians also have direct access to the Spirit of God and God speaks to them directly in their experiences.
This doctrine of freedom of conscience is the best kept secret in the Catholic Church. Sometimes the hierarchy gives it a nod, only to vitiate it by maintaining that only an informed conscience is free and that it is their God-given right to be the sole informers.2 With these words Pope John Paul II sets aside four decades of philosophical and theological work on how to put together respect for human autonomy and freedom with a corresponding respect for the law of God. Pope John Paul II is expressing an understanding of moral life as based on an objective rational reading of God’s law revealed in nature. He is trying to remove all relativism and subjectivity from moral judgments and come up with absolute and definitive moral rules independent of human subjectivity and experience. The result is a repudiation of freedom of conscience and in its place a claim to an infallible authoritarianism (see Appendix 3).
Every time the Church tries to exercise what is popularly re-ferred to as “creeping infallibility” it tends to issue authoritative statements that are out of touch with the experience of the people of God. This is especially true in the area of sexual ethics. The hierarchy seems more concerned with preserving the authority of the institution than with promoting the true happiness and well-being, both psychological and spiritual, of the faithful. Veritatis Splendor is another example of this attitude. The result is that the faithful, following the guidance of the Spirit within, are “nonreceptive” of authoritative teaching.
The Church seems almost paranoid in its reaction to criticism. For example, it sees “manipulation” and “conspiracy” when Dignity asks for dialogue and a reexamination of the traditional teaching on homosexuality. Back in 1968 when the majority of experts on the Pope’s Commission recommended qualified approval of artificial means of birth control, the Pope disbanded the commission and issued Humanae Vitae, reiterating traditional prohibitions. The result was an enormous drop in respect for and dependence on Church authority. Polls in 1993 show that 85 percent of married Catholics have made a decision in conscience to make use of artificial means of birth control in their sexual lives. As Bishop Francis Murphy of Baltimore points out: “In its discussion on the regulation of birth, the pastoral letter (Humanae Vitae) does not grapple with the important issue of the non-reception of the teaching of the magisterium.”3
The reactionary stance of the Church hierarchy seems to imply that tradition is equivalent to God’s will. There is no room for new insight or for the work of the Holy Spirit “leading us into all truth.” For the hierarchy, God’s will is manifested only from the top down, and the Church has no need to listen to what the Holy Spirit has to say in and through the lives of people who are attempting to live according to the Church’s teaching.
According to the press, when Pope John Paul II made a recent visit to the United States, he came with over fifty prepared talks. He was so busy giving prepared speeches, usually scolding and critical in tone, he did not have a moment to listen. But why should he listen? As the Vatican likes to put it: There is no such thing as the American Church; there is only the Roman Church in America. So there is nothing for the Pope to learn from the unique quality of the Spirit’s action in the Church in America.
Yet, I believe, there is something very unique about the American Catholic Church. It is perhaps the only Church in the world where a large percentage of the laity are so well-educated in theology, that they are, in fact, frequently better educated in their faith than are the clergy. When Cardinal O’Connor, for example, addresses a major theological issue, he sounds like an Irish-American politician. When, however, Governor Mario Cuomo addresses that same issue, he sounds like a well-trained theologian. While Catholic universities train laity to be critical thinkers, seminaries have rapidly become schools of indoctrination that discourage all thinking and suppress all dissent.
Archbishop Rembert Weakland observed that the glory of the Catholic Church in past ages was its willingness to enter into dialogue with the new insights of science and rethink its traditions in the light of these new insights. Today, the great challenge to all the churches is to rethink Christian traditions concerning sexuality in the light of new insights coming from psychology and sociology. Such a process has begun in the American Church (e.g., the recent Presbyterian and Lutheran reports on human sexuality) and has led to a readiness to reconsider women’s roles in the Church and the meaning of homosexuality and a readiness to undertake new, more compassionate ministries to sexual minorities. It is precisely these new initiatives that the Vatican means to crush out and stigmatize.
What happened to the effort made by the American bishops to write, over a period of ten years, a pastoral letter addressing the issues of women in the Church, is a perfect example of the Vatican’s suppression of new insights. The United States bishops began auspiciously by listening to women, some 75,000 of them, in 140 diocesan consultations. They consulted the experience of many whose talents and aspirations are unjustly overlooked, especially in the Church. The committee brought the listening process into the public domain and opened a dialogue that cannot be dismissed or ignored. This process raised awareness of women’s concerns with the Church, not only in the United States, but in a number of countries around the world. The first draft of the pastoral letter clearly reflected the concerns of women and made several important steps toward recognizing their legitimate issues. For example, the letter called on the Church to acknowledge its sins of misogyny, seek God’s forgiveness, and apologize to women. It also called for opening all positions of power in the Church to women and keeping open the debate on ordaining women to the priesthood. But then reactionary forces took over and, with the cooperation of Rome, rolled back the process so that every progressive insight was eliminated by the fourth draft. Bishop Murphy speaks of “the kind of harmful pressure being exerted by Rome on the legitimate process of discernment underway in the Catholic church in the United States…”4
The most serious objection that Vatican officials raised was their rejection of the consultation process used by the Committee on the Women’s Pastoral. They asserted that “bishops are teachers, not learners; truth cannot emerge through consultation.”5 In many instances, the difficulties the committee ran into with Rome are identical to the problems the gay and lesbian community experiences in its effort to establish dialogue with the Church. In light of this impasse between the American Church and Roman authority, we must reflect on the nature of the maturing process and the relation of a mature person to institutional authority.
Pathological Religion and Spiritual Maturity
Developmental psychology has made us very much aware of the gradual process by which the child separates off from the parent and achieves separate identity and relative autonomy. Dysfunctional families that make a pathological use of their authority can disrupt this process and undermine the maturing process for their children. The child needs the gradual failure of the parents to respond perfectly to its needs in order to grow up successfully, separate off, and become a mature, independent, autonomous human.
Contrary to psychological wisdom, the pre-Vatican II Church liked to pose as infallible, having the perfect answers to all questions. This overemphasis on authority can easily lead to “pathological” religion. Pathological religion has much in common with the dysfunctional family. It relies on fear of punishment to obtain obedience; it uses guilt as a subtle lever for manipulation and control. It fears freedom and cultivates blind, unquestioning obedience. Even normal doubts are punished and repressed because they are seen as threatening. As an illustration of a pathological interpretation of religious faith, consider this advertisement sponsored by the Knights of Columbus Religious Information Bureau. The advertisement appeared originally on October 24, 1965, in the New York Herald Tribune (this date was just before the end of the Second Vatican Council).
What faith does for the catholic man!
He sees in his religion, first of all, a means to the salvation of his immortal soul. But it also has a more immediate and urgent purpose—to teach him how to live!
The Catholic man does not have to invent his own theory as to the nature of God. He doesn’t have to set up his own code of ethics for his relations with other men. He doesn’t have to formulate personal standards of moral and social behavior… or make his own distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad. All these problems are resolved for him by his belief in God’s revealed truth… by the clear instructions found in the gospel of Jesus Christ… by his acceptance of the Sacraments dispensed through the Church for the nourishment of his soul…
The Catholic faith is identified here with total immaturity, passivity, blind faith, and obedience. Catholics are urged not to think or reflect or use any of our God-given skills. The Catholic depicted here is one who sees his or her duty as giving blind obedience to Church authority and not accepting responsibility for his or her actions. I like to refer to this kind of believer as the “Eichmann Christian.” Karl Adolf Eichmann, who sent thousands of Jews to their deaths in the concentration camps, did so, he claimed, in good conscience because he was brought up to believe that his only responsibility was to be obedient to legitimate authority and never to question it.
Fortunately, the distortions of faith in this advertisement were corrected in many of the documents of Vatican II. For example, in the document The Church in the Modern World, issued in 1966, lay people are urged to accept their responsibility to apply Christian principles in the area of their expertise:
Laymen (persons) should also know that it is generally the function of their well-formed Christian conscience to see that the divine law is inscribed in the life of the earthly city. From priests they may look for spiritual light and nourishment. Let the lay person not imagine, however, that his (or her) pastors are always such experts that to every problem which arises, however complicated, they can readily give him (or her) a concrete solution or that such is their mission. Rather, enlightened by Christian wisdom and giving close attention to the teaching authority of the Church, let the layman (person} take on his (or her) own distinctive role.6
According to this document the lay person’s role is to be the mediator between the Church and the world, having the responsibility and corresponding right to determine how the message of the Gospel applies to the complicated problems in the field of his competence.
Vaclav Havel believes that the development of a free conscience will be essential for competent political leaders in the future:
Soul, individual spirituality, first-hand personal insight into things, the courage to be himself and go the way his conscience points, humility in the face of the mysterious order of being, confidence in its natural direction, and, above all, trust in his own subjectivity as his principal link with the subjectivity of the world—these are the qualities that politicians of the future should cultivate.7
Many voices have been raised seeking a reform in the way authority is used in the Church. Among them is Sally Cunneen, a feminist theologian and seminary professor. In Cunneen’s book Mother Church: What ‘the Experience of Women Is Teaching Her, she explores the changes which would occur in the Church if it tried to live up to its ancient image as mother. She points out that the primary task of a good mother is not to dominate her children but to empower them: “The questions that a good mother asks and her ability to listen to the answers are themselves part of a mutual conversation of empowerment. The ability to hear the truth of a child’s criticism at any age is essential to the mother’s understanding and her growth in virtue.”8
Cunneen sums up the pain as well as the value of such communication:
In the course of raising her children, the loving mother must allow for the possibility that her children will despise her. She must gradually disillusion them so that their idealization of her and their belief in her power and magic will disappear. Her children must finally see her as she is and come to recognize their own strengths. Surely this process of enduring feedback is essential to a Church that is… not only a holy mother but a church of sinners as well. She has need to hear the whole truth in order to disillusion her children about her perfection so that they might be better enabled to serve God in this world. 9
Another voice calling for “conversion” of the Church is Ladislas Orsy, S.J., theologian and canonist. In his article “The Conversion of the Churches: Condition of Unity, A Roman Catholic Perspective” (America, May 30, 1992, p. 484), Orsy asserts that the essential condition for ecumenical unity among the churches would be a “conversion” of the Roman Church. That conversion would be a new recognition of the power of the Spirit in the laity:
Conversion can take on a very concrete meaning. It can mean a radical “turning to the people”—the recognition of the power of the Spirit in the laity, the acknowledgment of their sacred character, the granting to them of a greater share in the operations of the church. It ought to mean the establishment of institutional structures guaranteeing that their concerns are listened and attended to by the hierarchy.
Whenever the Church tries to exaggerate its authority and undermine the autonomy and individual responsibility of its members, then providentially, God lets it fall flat on its face. The result is that all of us see that “the emperor has no clothes” and we become personally responsible to discern spirits, exercise our freedom of conscience, make a personal choice, and accept full responsibility for that choice. We should thank God, then, every time we see evidence that God is granting the hierarchy in today’s Church the grace of fallibility.
Discernment of Spirits
Though the Church may fail us, each of us can have a direct and unmediated experience of the Spirit of God in our own personal life of prayer and contemplation, especially in our experience of mutual love. This personal experience is the only unpolluted water from which we gay people can drink. All messages mediated to us by our Church, our family, and our culture are for the most part polluted waters—polluted by homophobia. How do we gays go about “drinking from our own wells” in our spiritual life? By learning the ancient spiritual discipline called “discernment of spirits.” God will speak to each of us directly through our experience, as long as we open ourselves and seek to learn God’s will for us.
In this practice God speaks to us directly, not through our intellect, but primarily through our feelings. To discern spirits is to listen to our own hearts. Our God dwells within us and the only way to become one with our God is to become one with our authentic self. If any action we undertake brings with it deep feelings of peace, joy, and fulfillment, then we can be sure that what we are doing is right for us. To be able to discern spirits we must have made a total commitment of ourselves to God and be willing to do whatever God asks of us.
We gay and lesbian people should take heart from the example of Paul. He confronted the hierarchy of his Church on the question of submitting gentile converts to Jewish law, after he had made a personal discernment: “The question came up only because some… have furtively crept in to spy on the liberty we enjoy in Christ Jesus and want to reduce us all to slavery. I was so determined to safeguard for you the true meaning of the Good News, that I refused even out of deference to yield to such people for one moment” (Gal. 2:4-6).
On another occasion when Peter refused to eat with gentile converts because they did not follow Jewish dietary laws, Paul speaks of “opposing Peter to his face, since he was manifestly in the wrong” (Gal. 2:11-13). Obviously, Paul was able to trust not only his own experience but also what he heard God saying to him through his own discernment process—and he had the courage to act on those insights no matter what price he might pay!
In a modern-day courageous act of discernment, Bishop Francis Murphy of Baltimore has stated: “I am personally in favor of the ordination of women into a renewed priestly ministry. I believe this issue to be as important as the issue Paul raised with Peter, namely, the admission of Gentiles into Christianity. Women’s calls, as well as men’s, should be tested. Justice demands it. The pastoral needs of the church require it.”1
Applying St. Ignatius’ Discernment
With his extraordinary psychological genius, it was Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, who drew up the “Rules for the Discernment of Spirits” as the central part of his Spiritual Exercises. Ignatius’ practice of discernment began when he was carried home on a stretcher for a long convalescence after his legs were smashed by a cannon ball. He had only two books to read during his long weeks in bed. One was a life of Christ and the Saints, the other was a book of romantic tales. After reading the romances, Ignatius would daydream about winning the hearts of the women of the Court. Although he derived some pleasure from these daydreams of romantic conquest, he was aware that afterward he felt emptiness and sadness. However, after reading about the great Saints, he would daydream about outdoing them as a knight in the service of Jesus Christ. These dreams filled him with a sense of peace and joy that would last for a long time.2
Ignatius discerned from this that God was calling him into the service of Jesus. So, leaving his armor at the feet of the Virgin Mary in the monastery of Montserrat, he entered into a cave in Manresa and spent ten months in prayer. During those months, Ignatius claimed he was taught by God and distilled what he learned from his own personal discernment into his book The Spiritual Exercises.3
At the heart of the Spiritual Exercises was the discernment in one’s heart of movements of consolation and desolation. The signs that we are living open to God’s action Ignatius called “consolation”:
By consolation I mean what occurs when some interior motion is caused within the soul through which it comes to be inflamed with love of its Creator and Lord. As a result it can love no created thing on the face of the earth in itself, but only in the Creator of them all. Similarly, this consolation is experienced when the soul sheds tears that move it to the love for its Lord— whether they are tears of grief for its own sins, or about the Passion of our Lord, or about other matters directly ordered to his service and praise. Finally un-der the word consolation I include every increase in faith, hope and charity, and every interior joy that calls and attracts one to heavenly things and to the salvation of one’s soul, by bringing it tranquility and peace in its Creator and Lord.4
The opposite of consolation Ignatius called “desolation”: if our action brings with it deep feelings of sadness, depression, anxiety, and discontent, then that is a sign that what we are doing is wrong for us because it contradicts God’s spirit within us.
Discerning Spirits in Our Hearts
Notice that all the texts on discernment speak of the location of the Spirit as “in our hearts.” Both the Holy Spirit of God and the spirit of evil take up their abode in our hearts. The biblical distinction between heart and head is a distinction between feelings and thought. What is in our hearts can be discerned only by listening closely to our feelings. However, the reason why discernment may be a difficult practice for many gay people is because they have suppressed their feelings. Feelings are like a bowl of spaghetti, you can never get only one strand. If you allow yourself to feel one feeling, all the other feelings will be pulled in with it. You cannot experience the feeling of love without being ready to experience anger as well. The only way to suppress one feeling, for example, anger, is to suppress all feelings and try to live in your head.