Notes: Living a Life of Chastity

Panel Notes from Outreach23

Photo by Grant Hartley. Central Park in New York, NY.

A couple weeks ago, I had the honor of sitting on a panel at the Outreach conference titled “Living a Life of Chastity”; in it, panelists shared about their pursuit of chastity, and I shared about my experience as a celibate gay Catholic. The conversation was impossible to predict and ended up being pretty free-flowing and wide-ranging, but I did prepare some notes (a brief personal account of my life of faith and journey into the Roman Catholic Church) to which I occasionally referred. What follows are those notes:

I grew up in a small town in Northwest Missouri, in an evangelical church and family context: my parents had brought me and my siblings to our local Southern Baptist church every Sunday and frequently on Wednesdays as well, and faith was quite simply woven into my life, such that I could not really understand my life without it. I discovered I was gay when I was around thirteen, and this kicked off a years-long reformulation of my faith that reached a climax at the end of high school, when I came out to my youth pastor and a few friends on a summer mission trip. This set me up to experience a radical revitalization of my faith in college, during which I became involved in an evangelical campus ministry that convinced me, maybe for the first time, that God loved me—and not in an abstract and theoretical way, but really loved me, liked me, even. Over the next several years I increasingly came to see being gay as a strength, not a weakness—a blessing and flower, and not just a burden or thorn. I spent the rest of my college years involved in that campus ministry, and devoted several years after graduation to working for that ministry in Southern California.

Upon returning to the Midwest to pursue a deeper theological education at a Presbyterian seminary near St. Louis, several threads of my life converged and I began to take my first steps into the Catholic Church. One of those threads was a longing for a connection to history and tradition. I had grown up with a pervading Sola Scriptura influence, and the understanding that the Christian life was a matter of applying the biblical text in a straightforward way to modern life. My time as a Religious Studies major in college had convinced me that the truth was a lot more complicated, and I wanted to situate myself within a bigger story: the story of God’s continual involvement with his people through the life of the Church. Another thread was aesthetic: I had long been interested in the riches of beauty in the Catholic Church, a beauty that invited me to engagement, contemplation, and immersion (and seemed, perhaps strangely, to be connected to my gay sensibility as well). I wanted to involve myself with that beauty. And the path to the Church was well-lit by the lives of saints. I had read Wesley Hill’s book, Washed and Waiting, and been struck by the brief biographical sketches of two gay Catholics, Henri Nouwen and Gerard Manley Hopkins; later, I read Paul Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own, and found additional encouragement and strength in the witness of Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day (the latter of which I ended up choosing as my patron).

But also significant was the theme of sexual ethics and chastity: I felt drawn into the Catholic Church because I wanted to make sense of the relationship between my sexuality and my faith. In my faith community growing up, gay people had almost never been discussed, and when they did come up, it was with hushed tones or derision. Gay people were “those people over there” who were engaged in something unspeakable, never people “in here” who genuinely desired to know and love God. At the end of high school, after realizing that I was one of “those people,” my image of gay people began to change; over my years in college, as I grew in my faith and took baby steps into the broader LGBTQ+ community, I began to try to fit these pieces of my life together in a more cohesive way. 

I had long been convinced of one aspect of Church teaching regarding sexuality: that sex should be reserved for the covenant of opposite-sex marriage. But that was it—I had no idea what my life could look like as a person who was and is almost exclusively attracted to the same sex, no positive vision for celibacy, and honestly, no realistic view of marriage. I simply had a list of rules that I was supposed to follow, without much of a unifying thread behind them. Straight folks, in this way of thinking, had it easy: marriage was open to them, which would solve all their relational issues and let them have the intimacy they want any time they want. Gay folks had to suffer with overwhelming loneliness—unless God miraculously “fixed” us. This story (thankfully) fell apart as I matured in my faith and my sexuality, and I began to search for a different story.

One of the big attractions to the Catholic Church for me when it comes to chastity and sexual ethics was the presence of celibate role models: priests and religious mostly, but also lay celibate folks. It seemed that there was a social and cultural role for celibate people in the Catholic Church that did not exist (at least as prominently) in my church growing up—there were one or two people in my home town area who had never been married and seemed content to be single, but these were definitely the exception. It felt like a huge relief to not have to explain my celibacy to people, to be in a community in which people had a category for the unmarried life, one in which celibacy even afforded a kind of respect and admiration.

I was also attracted, strange as it may seem, to Church teaching regarding sexual ethics, and in particular the “seamless garment” approach which had implications not just for same-sex sex, but also contraception, and marital sexuality: it was a vision of sexuality that called everyone to chastity, rather than simply trying to usher people through the threshold of marriage so that they could enjoy as much sex and whatever kind of sex they wanted. Don’t get me wrong, it was painful to be forced to reckon with the idea that certain kinds of sexual intimacy were off-limits for me, but it was comforting to know that I wasn’t especially “on the hook” for chastity. The self-righteous resentment I had felt over the years—toward straight folks whom I felt “had it easy” when it came to chastity—began to slowly dissipate.

And finally, the Catholic tradition seemed to have a robust spirituality for celibacy that I found extremely attractive, in part because it has so often woven together celibacy, asceticism, monasticism, and same-sex love. Over the past several years, certain parts of the tradition have become especially dear to me as I think about and process through issues of sexuality and chastity: the Cappadocian Fathers, especially Gregory of Nyssa (he has some really wacky thoughts about celibacy, sexuality, and gender that have been fun to explore), and the Cistercian Fathers, especially Aelred of Rievaulx and Bernard of Clairvaux (whose extremely high evaluation of celibacy and same-sex friendship and gender-bending mystical commentary on the Song of Songs have really captured my imagination). 

Coming to see celibacy as a path toward greater freedom and intimacy with God, rather than a necessary evil because I’m gay, helped me to really come to love my life. I think of one of the etymologies of St. Isidore of Seville that I have found instructive: the words ``celibacy” and “celestial” come from the same Latin root, caelum, which means “the heavens”. Celibate folks are caelobeatus, or “blessed in heaven,” because their lives are images of the lives of the angels, who according to Jesus “neither marry, nor are given in marriage” (Matthew 22:30 NRSVUE). This means that celibacy can be a representation of our future resurrected state; celibacy now is an image of the glorious life all will live in the resurrection. This helped me to understand celibacy as something radical, even radically queer—something expansive and freeing rather than a restrictive straightjacket.