If we walk in the light, as God is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, God's son, cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:7).
I write as the African-American pastor of a church formed in the contemporary intentional-community movement, which like the gay-lesbian movement partly exists as a reaction to the impoverished common life that prevails in North American churches.
Early in our 20-year history, I put my community to the test as a setting in which to entrust to others my personal struggles with homosexual orientation. Actually, this unfolded in a progression of self-disclosures in widening circles: the pastoral team of elders; my extended family household; our pulpit; therapy training groups; and finally, with my parents. My precedent would be followed by several other men who later joined our common life.
This was a sharp contrast to my prior experience of seeking help in the privacy of individual therapy and spiritual direction. I was discovering the body of Christ as a setting for "coming out," a crucial first step along the path to inner healing and reconciliation, but without the presuppositions of gay culture. This intentional community afforded me and others a way to break out of the confines of loneliness and shame into the footroom of redemptive love and recovered dignity. It was a walking in the light of fellowship toward healing and reconciliation.
Our therapeutic sophistication was limited, but not the possibilities for growth, which took place in the community and in those who had brought to it their struggles. The growth was the function of life-giving relationships fostered by the disciplines of community. Our initial response to homosexuality had been to emphasize change of orientation, but in time the importance of growth loomed highest in our priorities. In fact changed orientation was not even thinkable apart from active growth.
By growth I mean the development of God's life within us that moves us into authentic humanity. What we have learned in community life about growth has compelled us to redefine many assumptions that are commonly held in church and society about human sexuality. We too held most of them, if only unconsciously.
Take, for instance, the assumption that human personhood and identity can fundamentally be defined in terms of sexuality. This is implicit in the practice of defining oneself primarily as gay, lesbian, or straight. For us the mystery of human identity lies at the level of everyone's innermost being (the soul, Paul's alluded inner-person), where gender and sexuality are integral but not all-defining. Our essential identity unites and transcends its components. We see that truth getting lost in the current debate.
A corollary of the first premise assumes that personal completeness is a function of being genitally active. It is this assumption, often unstated, that underlies the rationalization of a sexual ethic endorsing genital expression outside of marriage. We find nothing to justify the belief that mature personhood is compromised by foregoing genital sexual expression. A costly form of self-denial, we would never ask it of our unmarried members apart from the resources of an intentional common life. We are saddened by the churches' attenuated courage to ask such commitment of their members.
The eroticizing of intimacy seems to follow inevitably on the foregoing assumptions. Intimacy with God, self, and others is the elusive grail of a society bereft of the kind of community that satisfies the habits of the heart. It is no surprise that the erotic becomes the content of communion, and that church and society simply mirror each other's narrow vision of intimacy.
When the commitment to growth is the priority of the community, I find that it offsets the need to eroticize intimacy. Some of the most painful failures in community (like infidelity) result from relationships that have run amok. The persons involved have been unable to achieve intimacy appropriately while trying to bypass the demands of growth.
At its best our community has endowed us with opportunities for a rich affective life of mutual care and inclusion, whether in friendships or extended "family" bonds. "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends." That is the best refutation I know of the narrow application of mutual love and intimacy in our culture, and I have seen it played out again and again in our covenanted life in Christ.
FINALLY, I WILL DARE touch on the assumption that homosexuality is not a dysfunction. I do not deny the personal and social investment I have in this. I know that I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and a first-born son whose father was not yet prepared for parental intimacy with his male child. As an African American, I also have some sisters who half-jokingly lament, "A good man ain't hard to find, but a straight one is."
I do not find consolation in the counsel to rationalize the homosexual option as normal, because that implicitly denies the reality and importance of the loss I grieve. The sisters' lament about the black male scene harbors a similar grief; it is an instinctive refusal to make peace with the rampant dysfunction that menaces our community. Homosexuality is seen as one such dysfunction that many of us believe will diminish with each gain in our collective growth and with each reversal of racism's systemic craziness.
Part of that craziness is the surfeit of reasons that black folk have been given for hating ourselves: for being the wrong color, for living at the wrong end of the social ladder, for being so often powerless in the face of one's oppression, for being a victim, or simply for being. With the added stigma of a different sexual orientation, some blacks can find themselves driven to the extreme edge of rage and self-destruction.
Given this flood of assaults on our most basic dignity, it seems inconceivable to many of us that the dynamic shadings of sexuality are not predominantly the function of the health of one's inner and outer environment, rather than a hereditary inevitability.
In fact the ghetto gay community focuses the contradiction of being black in America perhaps as does no other sector of African America. This is as true of its self-directed violence as of its creativity -- from Saturday night razor attacks to Sunday morning choir music. The black homosexual suffers a unique loneliness because of the intense homophobic antagonism among blacks. It makes being labeled "a fag" a sentence to isolation. Such are the contradictions of our collective victimization.
Any black homosexual choosing to be openly gay risks a double jeopardy that I doubt exists for the white gay. If only in the bluntness of personal ads placed in artsy tabloids by "GWM" and "GWF seeking only the same," the barriers of race and class await the black gay. Few blacks can afford the price tag of the materialism that pervades gay culture, and even when they can, they will never enjoy secure acceptance by their non-black counterparts in a culture that defines attractiveness in fiercely ethnocentric terms.
As a result the black gays who venture to adopt the agenda of the gay movement are almost inevitably faced with eventually belonging to no one. Never fully accepted in the white community, uncloseted black gays have little to return to in their own ethnic community.
The psychic and spiritual anguish of someone in that limbo is unimaginable. A black pastoral colleague recently described to me the straits of a member of his church who is HIV positive, and who recently exited the gay scene. I heard echoes of rage against God, self, and the black church, but also against the mainstream gay agenda this person had adopted. This person now feels betrayed by it as cynical and deceptive, especially for blacks. The pastor is helping his friend to explore healing, to get to the roots of his woundedness, and to fill the spiritual void in which he had been living through forgiveness and new vision.
If such suffering is to be responded to, what healing alternatives can our churches initiate that remain faithful to our inherited biblical ethic? How can the black church especially show leadership in this question? The voice of its pulpit can be as forbidding and merciless as any I have heard.
The astounding spread of recovery groups for almost every known dysfunction may point the way. Church-based recovery groups adapting the spirituality of the 12 Steps can supplement therapy and well-tutored pastoral counseling as a direct ministry to the homosexual who wishes to pursue a choice other than the gay option. Their confidentiality certainly enhances their prospect of safety; their mere presence can help any church strengthen its common life.
Christian community has been my best resource in learning to grieve the loss and pain of my own childhood wounds, and to confront the havoc they have made of my sense of self-worth, my capacity for intimacy, and the enjoyment of my male sexuality. Here I have had access to the treasury of resources that is subsidizing my growth in matters such as greater self-acceptance, risking intimacy, pursuing marriage and parenthood, and rediscovering my father's love.
From the perspective of the predominantly white, well-educated, wealthy, and politically-armed gay/lesbian movement, these observations may come across as hackneyed etiology and unresolved denial. The liberal religious mainstream has long since fixed on the less controvertible issue of inclusive justice, and uses it to rationalize the homosexual option. Both perspectives increasingly discredit the witness of others who dissent from that consensus, including homosexually-experienced Christians.
I offer my thoughts as one such dissenter. From my perspective the impetus throughout the churches to ratify the gay/lesbian imperative seems to mask our apparent inability to offer a dynamic alternative to gay culture. In saying so I hope that the church in our day will more fully live a resource that belongs to all of God's people: the mystery of common life in Christ and its capacity to bring a healing reconciliation out of our brokenness.
Ron Spann was pastor of Church of the Messiah, an Episcopal parish in inner-city Detroit, Michigan, when this article appeared.
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