A few years ago, I was asked to give a short reflection for a small gathering of Side B folks, or LGBTQ+ Christians committed to what is often called a “traditional sexual ethic.” What follows is an edited version of that reflection.
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Several years ago, many of my friends read through Tish Harrison Warren’s book, Liturgy of the Ordinary1, including a chapter titled, “Sitting in Traffic: Liturgical Time and an Unhurried God”. The gist was this: followers of Jesus are able to understand and relate to time in a peculiar way. We human beings hate waiting. In much of the modern West, we treat time as “a commodity that [we] control, manage, or consume,'' rather than a “a gift from God, a means of worship” (p. 108). We get caught up in finding our worth and value in how well we manage our time—how productive we are—and when we sense time has been misused or wasted, it makes us feel worthless. When we feel time has been lost, we feel lost.
For followers of Christ, however, time does not revolve around us, but around an eternal God who loves us; we belong to a grander story that he is writing in the world, weaving together all our individual stories into an epic of creation, fall, redemption, and glory. The regular rhythms of the liturgical calendar—Sabbath, the Lord’s Day, Advent to Christmas to Epiphany, Lent to Easter to Pentecost, even Ordinary Time—they point beyond ourselves to the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, and through that, to a different understanding of time. As Warren writes, “Christians exist in an alternate chronology” (p. 105). She describes her discovery of liturgical time like this:
It gave a transcendent shape to my life. Time was no longer arbitrary—an academic calendar, a marketing ploy, a back to school sale, a Labor Day blowout, a national holiday, a sports season. Now time was sacred. It was structured by worship. It marked the church as a global, alternative people. Time had shape and meaning. All of a sudden, time was a story. And I could live in a story (p. 106).
When we give up control of our time and realize we are embedded in a larger story in which we are assured of redemption and resurrection, our waiting can become sacred and full of hope.
But as we read that chapter together in a room tucked away in a corner of the church where we met, I had mixed feelings. On the one hand, I needed these words, and knew God had brought them into my life at the exact right time. But when Warren quoted one of her wise friends later in the chapter as saying, “I always felt like I was waiting for the gift. But I’ve come to see that the waiting is the gift” (p. 110-111), I admit that I felt bitter.
In Search of Lost Time
I want to make it clear at the outset: I am an impatient person, guilty of all the vices Warren describes, and I’m sure y’all could also confess your own guilt when it comes to struggling with patience. Our hearts stand as internal obstacles to relating to time rightly, and we are responsible for our own sin. But I think Queer folks have additional, external obstacles in our relationship with time; our experience of time is also peculiar, but in an especially painful way. I know I cannot speak for everyone here, so your mileage may vary with what I am about to say, but for many of us, our younger years were so characterized by shame, secrecy, and isolation, that now we feel held back.
Some of us built elaborate facades that were designed to distract the world from our real selves, only to discover years later that God has called us to break them down and build again from a new, authentic foundation. We spent so much energy trying to imitate others rather than find out who we are. As we build we feel, down in our gut, that we have lost so much time.
Some of us feel like teenagers again, because we kept all our adolescent processing to ourselves, while our non-Queer peers went crazy, made mistakes, and learned from them, all with the implicit (and oftentimes explicit) support of their families, churches, and communities. Adolescence demands to be experienced again, no matter how old we happen to be now, and there is no future milestone—like turning 18, 21, 25—after which we can say we have arrived. Having to work through all this angst, all these crushes, all this painful insecurity now feels like misusing our time.
Some of us are not entering into vocations that our culture considers necessary “stages” of maturity: marriage, raising children. It is not only the explicit questions comments we get, but all the subtle reminders too: seeing peers dating, having children, getting married, getting invitations to celebrations with or without a plus one (either way is difficult), the barrage of marriage- and sex-focused media. Many of us feel like we have been relegated to a kind of limbo: just wasting our time.
In short, the closet has stolen time from us, and it still wastes our time even now. So we may find it especially difficult to wait patiently, no matter how much of a gift it is supposed to be. The allure of being able to make the best use of our time (or to attempt to cheat time, getting more done in less time) is especially strong for a people who feel like we have a lot of time to make up.
The closet, the way I mean it, is not just a personal choice to keep part of ourselves a secret (I know some of us have to fly under the radar, for a lot of reasons; please don’t hear me say that you are obligated to come out if it is unsafe or unwise for you). What I mean by the closet is a system that is hard at work to keep us hidden, trapped, and ultimately, to end us. The closet does not care what we believe about sexual ethics, or whether or not we strive to live faithful lives; it only wants us gone. And, reinforced by individuals and churches and communities over many years, the closet has distracted us, turned us inward, stalled us, kept us stuck.
And so many of us are, very normally and understandably, frustrated and impatient. All of us are here because, in some sense, we have escaped the closet, but it can still affect us now: we may feel that because so much of our time has been taken from us, it is now our responsibility to prove our value and worth with how we spend the rest of our lives, and that we may have to work twice as hard to get half as far as our non-Queer peers.
In his 1988 book-length exploration of Oscar Wilde and gay identity, Who Was That Man?2, Neil Bartlett wrote that “[t]here is a very specific gay sense of history in which nothing really happens until such time as you identify yourself as a gay man.” This thought really resonated with me as I think back on my years in the closet. Those years before I was out feel unreal, feel a bit like death. So part of me empathizes with Warren when she writes about traffic, how she is frustrated by feeling what little downtime she had planned for the day slipping away from her, and how patience can be difficult. But another part of me—the bitter part—thinks, how trivial all that is, when I am mourning the death of years of my life.
The Closet is the Grave
A few years ago, I was listening to a sermon by a pastor friend of mine on the three traditional enemies of the soul: the world, the flesh, and the devil. His sermon dove into how each of these enemies are at work to distract, discourage, and destroy followers of Christ. I want to suggest that from our vantage point as Queer Christians, the closet is a system that those three enemies of the soul all work to perpetuate.
First, the world. Among the lies and temptations put forward by the world are unbelief (that this world is all there is) and idolatry (that things created by God to draw us into relationship with him—like marriage, sex, and yes, time—are worthy of our worship). These are some of the lies that, with the support of our communities, forced us into the closet in the first place. If we submit to these temptations, then managing our time becomes an ultimate concern, and lost time becomes an ultimate failure. We will end up working ourselves to death to make up for all the years the closet has stolen away from us—time we can, in one sense, never get back.
Second, the flesh. Among the lies and temptations put forward by the flesh are illicit desire (desire for the wrong things, or inordinate desire for good things) and false pride (not the kind of healthy self-love and risky joy we celebrate every June, but the kind of pride which claims that we are in the place of God). Lust and inordinate desire for sex and marriage—sometimes pushed on us by our communities—has often kept us ashamed and in the closet, and even now can still keep us mourning our lost youth, how our bodies used to look and work. If we submit to the flesh, then pursuing celibacy (or marriage!) becomes the epitome of wasting our time.
And third, the devil. Among the lies and temptations put forward by the devil are obsessive self-focus (taking our focus off of Christ and looking only to ourselves instead), despair (hopelessness), and self-hatred (actually working to destroy ourselves). These are the lies that seem to me to be the most characteristic of the closet. The most effective use of the devil’s time is to delegate—to get us to do the job for him by keeping us focused on ourselves, trapped in shame, wishing we did not exist. The devil wants us to feel hopeless at the prospect of lost time.
All this to say, the closet is the grave.
As a side note: this is one reason why I think so many of us struggle with solitude, time spent alone with God—because it reminds us too much of the closet. Solitude can feel like isolation rather than communion, and so we can tend to avoid it and become ungrounded, dissipated in trying to fill our lives with other people. We can become bottomless wells of need, overwhelming others with desires that they categorically cannot fulfill, and when that does not work, numbing ourselves with distractions. The closet can make us hate quietude, stillness, our own company, and make us obsess over securing intimacy that seems precarious. Not only can solitude feel like wasting time, it can also feel like relational death.
The Resurrection of Time
So as followers of Christ, we know that our time is not our own, but belongs to a God who cares for us and who will ultimately redeem and resurrect us, so we are able to wait with patience and hope. But as Queer people, we are faced with a unique system of lies and temptations, the closet, which is oftentimes reinforced by our own siblings in Christ. How might the gospel answer our peculiar questions, and the specific lies we are tempted to believe regarding our relationship with time?
I will suggest this: if the closet is the grave, then coming out of the closet is resurrection, when what we thought was dead, like our lost time, is made alive again. Again, I am not saying that all of us are required to come out publicly or to live loudly; all I mean in “coming out” is breaking the power of the closet and being welcomed into a community (like this one) in which you can be both known and loved—a taste of resurrection life.
The death and resurrection of Jesus is both a divine interruption of time as we understand it and the true fulfillment of time; it forces us to concede that time does not belong to us, and God, who is outside of time, does with it what he wants. It breaks us of our habit of thinking of time as a closed system, that “this is all there is”, and that our time in the closet is lost forever. It opens us up to the possibility that grace works retroactively, and that our lost years can also be redeemed and resurrected. Time is neither God nor a closed system, but a means of encountering God, an avenue.
Our flesh has been crucified with Christ; both wrong desire and false pride will ultimately be, and are even now progressively being, defeated. Our longing to recover our lost time is both thwarted and exceeded in the hope of resurrection. Our fleshly longing for younger bodies to spend on our passions is crucified, but our deepest longing for life that lasts forever is met with the promise of eternal, abundant life.
The devil is like the thief, who “comes only to steal and kill and destroy,” who wants to convince us that those years in the closet are lost forever, and nothing good can come out of them now (John 10:10 NRSVUE). But the resurrection of Christ shows us that situations which appear to be hopeless are not as they seem. When the devil is bent on destroying us, keeping us trapped in despair, or getting us to destroy ourselves, Jesus offers us life. “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10 NRSVUE).
In dying, Christ entered the closet for us, and in rising, he came out and destroyed the closet from the inside out.
In the midst of the seemingly hopeless system of the closet, God promises to work a resurrection miracle. The crucifixion of Christ has turned out to be his coronation, his resurrection a reversal of all our smaller deaths; God is powerful enough to turn our worst experiences into something beautiful. We might be able to say, looking back on all our lost time, like Joseph said to his brothers who sold him into slavery, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good” (Genesis 50:20 NRSVUE).
Back to Liturgy of the Ordinary. Warren writes:
God is at work in us and through us as we wait. Our waiting is alive and purposeful. My friend Steven, the farmer-prophet, reminds me that a fallow field is never dormant. As dirt sits waiting for things to be planted and grown, there is work being done invisibly and silently. Microorganisms are breeding, moving, and eating. Wind and sun and fungi and insects are dancing a delicate dance that leavens the soil, making it richer and better, readying it for planting (p. 111).
Waiting—and solitude—can actually be part of the means, the fuel, the nutrients through which we can come to experience resurrection life. Jesus says that “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24 NRSVUE) Sure, this impacts how we wait now, and that is important, but I think it also affects the way we can think about the past. Those years that feel like dead weight—they will not stay dead, but can become the fertile soil out of which something glorious can grow. When we hand that time over to God now, in the present, it can be resurrected and transformed.
To be clear: this is not to say that the closet is good. God is not bound to use the closet to grow and shape us, and the more work we can do to dismantle it for future generations the better. But when we place the years we thought were wasted into the hands of God, when we give up our control of our time, what was dead can be made alive again. Death itself has become a fertilizer, and the grave has become a garden—so who is to say that something glorious cannot come out of the closet?
One last quote by Warren: “Redemption is crashing into our little stretch of the universe, bit by bit, day by day, mile by coming mile. We have hope because our Lord has promised that he is preparing a place for us. We are waiting, but we will make it home” (p. 114). To that I will add, even the time we thought was gone forever is not beyond redemption’s reach, and can be made new again. To borrow an image from the prophet Joel, all the years the locusts have eaten will be restored to you (see Joel 2:25-32).
Beloved, eternity demands all your years: the roots, the branches, the whole resting flock of your secrets, all those starry nights you thought were wasted with wanting, the nights you were in love, every moment, even if it means you have to hold them one more time in your hands to give them up.
Nothing will be lost, and all will be transformed.
Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2016)
Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1988). Although I should admit that I found the quote in J. Bryan Lowder’s excellent 2015 Slate article on gay (male) identity, “Can You Be Homosexual Without Being Gay? The Future of Cruising, Drag, and Camp in a Post-Closet World,” an article that has had a tremendous impact on me!
The section on solitude is so good. I just finished the solitude chapter in Nouwen's Clowning in Rome, so your piece adds a different layer onto his work for me. Thanks, Grant, for sharing this!