more free, sometimes more searing and overwhelming. Gradually the intimacy and the ecstasy will become one. Gradually, too, we will begin to sense a quiet, abiding embrace in the foundation of our soul.
Spiritual maturity
In the maturity of the spiritual life, the sexual life, the human life, there is a peace, a surrender, and a still, abiding passion that runs gentle and deep. The fireworks are few; they accompanied the momentary collapse of the structures of self that allowed earlier tastes of the Mystery. Now these structures are simpler, softer, more saturated with the presence of the Divine. One thinks of the classic image of the old couple (at least as often gay or lesbian as straight) whose intimacy flows quietly, needing few words or thrilling experiences. They abide in and with one another, loved and known, knowing and loving.
One thinks too, of the wise old Indian Teacher to whom Ram Dass offered LSD in order to see what would happen. The teacher took it, smiled, and just went on sitting, meditating in unitive peace. He was already there.13
________________________
13 In the 1960s Ram Dass, with Timothy Leary, was one of the early experimenters with LSD. Disillusioned with the transitory nature of the experience it offered, he travelled to India in search of more abiding transformation. See Ram Dass, Be here now, Hanuman Foundation, New Mexico, 1971
Old age, of course, is not essential in spiritual growth.14 Randy Shilts, in his book, And the Band Played On, tells the story of Gary Walsh, a gay man in San Francisco who went through the different phases of ‘AIDS is a spiritual gift’ and ‘AIDS is an ugly curse’ to finally reach a simple, deep tranquillity before he died. On the day he died a friend told him of the effect he was having on others, that people were coming away from conversations with him ‘like pilgrims leaving a holy shrine’.
________________________
14 That remarkable contemplative, St. Therese of Lisieux, who died of Tuberculosis in 1897 at the age of 24, is proof enough of this.
Gary smiled his mischievous grin and interrupted her. ‘I got it, I finally got it’, he said. ‘I am love and light and I transform people by just being who I am.’ Gary recited the words carefully, like a schoolchild who had struggled hard to master a difficult lesson.15
________________________
15 R. Shilts, And the band played on, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1987, p. 425.
Many of us have seen such simple, human holiness first-hand in our friends and lovers. Many of us are growing towards it right now.
This holy, human maturity is based on our readiness to respond to the deepest challenges of learning, trusting, surrendering, loving, becoming open always to the embrace, but also to the painful emptying, to the showing and the withdrawing, allowing the shapes of longing to fail and fall away, leaving only ‘love-longing’.16 Becoming that which we taste.
________________________
16 Julian of Norwich, Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, Paulist Press, New York, 1978, p. 318.>
Conclusion
We must pay close attention, then, to our liminal experiences, our sexual desire, our orgasms, our loving communion, our spiritual life, our times of wonder and awe, our tastes of quiet, holy presence. We must pay attention to our Christmas mornings.
Equally, we must be open to our emptying and to the ‘school of love‘17 that is everyday life.
________________________
17 A Jones, Soulmaking, SCM Press, London, 1985, p. 1. This is an ancient term referring to the discipline of monastic life.
Most of all, we must listen to our longing, not simply our desire for this or that person, but to the longing that rises from the centre of our hearts and that leads us on and on through the years, into and beyond our loves, as familiar and profound as breathing. In the embracing and the emptying this centre will become our place of stillness and truth. In the moment of death, it is through this centre that our longing will pass, opening us to the ‘first Alleluia! of my eternity‘18 and to the eternal dance of desire with the Absolute Mystery of Love in whom we will be transformed from Glory to Glory!19
________________________
18 From the saying of Pedro Arrupe SJ regarding death. Quoted by John J. McNeil in his lecture, ‘Drinking from our own wells’, Berkeley, California, 1992. 19 St Gregory of Nyssa saw the life of heaven as an eternal progression into God as our desire is constantly kindled, fulfilled and rekindled at deeper levels. See, for example, his Life of Moses, quoted and translated by H. Musurillo in his From glory to glory: texts from Gregory of Nyssa, John Murray, London, 1962, pp. 142-148.
It is for this that we were born, it is this that we taste, it is to this that we are destined – lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, straight. It is our birthright.
Unnameable God, my essence;
my origin, my lifeblood, my home.20
________________________
20 Psalm 19, verse 14, translated by Stephen Mitchell , The enlightened heart, Harper and Row, New York, 1989.
And it all begins in the honest, earthy, human desire for love, for<</p>
sex, for communion and self-transcendence. It all begins in that
moment just before a small boy opens his Christmas present.
*
This essay was published in the anthology, Our families, our values: snapshots
of queer kinship, edited by Robert Goss, Haworth Press, Binghamton, NY,
1997.
Selective blessings that sully the faith
On Monday 27 October I was refused Holy Communion in St Patrick’s Cathedral because I am openly gay. Last Friday my sister rang me to say that the issue had been covered by Melbourne’s most popular newspaper cartoonist, Michael Leunig. ‘You know you’ve arrived when you make it into Leunig!’ she quipped. It’s a gentle enough cartoon – a priest holding the Communion plate asks a kneeling man if he is a ‘practising homosexual’. The man replies that he doesn’t need to practise, he has a ‘natural genius for it’. Like most Leunig cartoons it has a hidden depth.
Catholic moral theology has long condemned homosexuality because it is ‘unnatural’. However, more recent Church documents teach that homosexual orientation is ‘innate’ – or inborn – for many, that it is not chosen, that it is generally irreversible and that it may have a biological basis. Certainly this accords with the experience of very many homosexual people. Self-affirming gay and lesbian people have reached their sense of personal integration precisely by accepting that their sexual and affectional desires are deeply ‘natural’. We just have a ‘natural genius’ for it.
However, Catholic teaching also calls the homosexual orientation ‘an objective disorder’ and an ‘orientation to intrinsic moral evil’. Homosexual acts ‘can in no
