soon to be forty-four. Half my life ago I had begun to come out to myself and I was haunted by God and holiness and horniness. One of the benefits of isolation is that you begin to rely on whatever it is that’s around you. I read everything I could. I snuck books about inclusive theology into the dorm room I shared with four other men. I hid it under my mattress. I wrote about everything. I began to rely on the Irish and the English and the French I knew in order to search out new language for old things that had broken me. I began to question everything.
I believe God is a good question.
Had I known it, there were shelves of books that would have done all of this for me, but I didn’t know that. I felt like I was digging down into the foundations of the texts that had frightened me before. I sought out scripture scholars. I heard them say that the Bible is a vast library of brilliance written over 1,400 years by authors who’d have disagreed with each other’s ideas of what the word God meant. God is a long-stretched muscle in the minds of people over millennia, someone said to me,
and the imagination opened.
Years later, when I was given a job as leader of the Corrymeela Community, Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation organisation, I received some public attention. I had been named the most senior out gay religious leader in Ireland by a journalist. The usual things happened: I got messages that I was an abomination, I was told I was damaging Christianity, strangers said horrible things about me, acquaintances wrote horrible things about me. Most of those things didn’t hurt. Some did. But something extraordinary happened. Twenty people got in touch. These twenty people were from small churches and prayer groups all around the north of Ireland. They had heard disparaging sermons about me and Corrymeela. They had heard that Corrymeela was definitely not a Christian witness to peace and reconciliation because Corrymeela had had the audacity to give a gay Catholic man the role of leader. They had heard it as a terrible thing. But they were all gay themselves. The sermons meant to warn people away from association with us served as a signpost to isolated LGBTI people. Those people got in touch. I invited them round. We cooked. We talked. They had all been through reparative therapies, so-called healing prayers, exorcisms, insinuations that they were a threat, little hints that girls who became girlfriends were abandoning God’s best for them. We became a community. I had never wanted to be a parent. I realised now: I had always wanted to be a lioness.
My people.
By this stage I had been out for years. When people said hateful things about LGBTI people and justified it with the Bible, I believed it revealed more about them than the Bible. I had been part of public engagements with those who tried to change, exorcise or silence LGBTI people for years. Sometimes younger LGBTI people asked if they could learn the tools of engaging with people who wish us to be cured or quietened. I said I wanted to work for a world in which they wouldn’t need to learn how to defend themselves against such awful words. This was only 2014. The world is changing, for some. For others, it’s as dangerous a place as its always been.
Let my people be.
Once, when I was still ravaged with self-hatred and grief about my sexuality, I went to confession. I think I’d bought a copy of the Gay Times and I was feeling guilty for having looked at something that made me think of sex. I was feeling guilty, so I went to Mass and afterwards asked the priest if he’d hear my confession. We didn’t go to the confessional booth. He invited me into his office. He sat on one chair facing me while I confessed things that didn’t need to be confessed. When I was finished he stood up. He walked to the middle of the room. He pointed to the ground at his feet.
‘Kneel,’ he said.
I knelt. He moved a little closer. He put his hands on his head and said the prayer of forgiveness. He pulled my head so close to his crotch that I could feel the heat swelling from his groin. I wondered if he could. It was a disgusting tableau of his own fantasy. I felt violated for this abuse of my own misguided scruples. If this is purity, I thought, I want none of it. The confession wasn’t a confession – it was a curse: live in fear of your own sexuality and you, too, might turn out a sorry fucked-up man.
Let my people go.
Recently I was working with a group of LGBTI people where the majority of the group were trans or intersex. I had been asked to lead the Bible study. We looked at the text where Jesus of Nazareth is twelve years old and is among religious leaders. He is astounding them with his insight. But they do not know how to believe that the truth can exist in this kind of human package. We, LGBTI people at a Bible study, asked a question: ‘What truths have we known about ourselves since we were young?’ People knew what it was to know themselves. They also knew what it was like for their insight to be denied. For decades. The Bible study lasted for hours. People spoke about the indigenous understanding they’d had about themselves since they could think. ‘I didn’t know the Bible could help us read our own lives,’ someone said.
It can.
One of the things that self-hatred does is to plant timebombs that can explode at later years. Twenty-five years after my exorcisms, I still remember the dates of them. Time heals some things. But not all things, and sometimes reminders happen. Some days I feel the shame I inhaled for decades swelling through me. Learning how to love a man – with body and soul – has taken time. And I rely on writing as much now as I did then. Poetry can save a life. Believing lies broke me down. I was in need of something better to believe in.
I was in need of being believed.
Last paragraph, I promise. When Pharaoh was persecuting the Hebrew people, their suffering rose to God like incense and God sent a messenger – Moses – to challenge the Pharaoh. ‘Let my people go,’ Moses said to Pharaoh. Whose people were they? Moses’? God’s? Their own? The people were a motley crew, united by the way they were hated by the powerful. ‘Let my people go,’ Moses said to Pharaoh. A people became a people because of their shared need to move out from a system that abhorred them. They were not perfect, that was never the point. They weren’t the ones with the problem, Pharaoh was. He thought he would last forever. He didn’t. He died. We barely remember his name. But we remember the people who built Zion. Their name is a blessing, a name that is built to welcome in the stranger, the outsider, the foreigner, the dispossessed, the downtrodden, the lowly and the lonely. ‘Let my people go,’ someone said to a person in power, and those under the power realised they were a people.
They were not alone.
Okay, definitely last paragraph. Back to the beginning. Let there be light. Let there be earth. Let there be dark. Let there be stars. Let there be waters. Let there be moonlight. Let there be insects. Let there be pleasure. Let there be fish. Let there be trees. Let there be plants. Let there be flowers. Let there be footballs. Let there be kissing. Let there be books of poetry. Let there be places for worship. Let there be music. Let there be mountains. Let there be drumbeats. Let there be justice. Let there be mighty rivers. Let there be freedom. Let there be integrity. Let there be truth. Let there be love. Let there be people. Let my people
go.
Believe me, I’m the last man to believe me. I believed
in danger from the first day I could think. I learnt to
speak by screaming – some of it aloud – and my first
word in two languages was remember. Nobody taught me
how to promise, but I promised. And it wrecked me.
Remembering kept me hungry for decades and when
I stood up against it, I ran, I flew, I panicked at its
threats,
