Do You Believe?

When sister Kathleen wrote to tell me, shortly before she, Mom, Carol, Megan, and I were to meet for a few days of camping in Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park in the summer of 1989, that she was a lesbian, I guess I was not too surprised. Kathleen had never expressed a romantic interest in any man. She had never seemed bent on cultivating men as lovers. Although she had many good friends who were men, she had never, as far as I knew, been involved with them sexually. But I had rarely stopped to think about it either way. Many women I knew did the same. They were in no hurry to commit themselves. One afternoon, Kathleen and I sat alongside the Tuolumne River and talked. It soon became apparent that Kathleen, like many other gay people I had known, didn’t ask to have same sex feelings. She didn’t wake up one day and decide to be gay. It was more of a journey, really, a journey that began many years ago, its origins steeped in an impenetrable tangle of environment, culture, and genetics. It seemed that in stating her lesbianism, Kathleen was simply giving voice to who she had been all along. She had never changed from straight to gay, nor had she always been gay. She was just being Kathleen. I’d never be able to separate Kathleen the woman from Kathleen the lesbian, nor would I ever be able to distinguish Kathleen my sister from Kathleen the human being. Kathleen will always be everything she is. As will I. However, as I did in a letter I wrote her after I received hers, I told her that afternoon on the river that I still could not fit her lesbianism into my worldview. It was heartbreaking. About four years after that summer, I decided to write an article about my experience dealing with Kathleen’s lesbianism. I described how she had made me aware of it, I shared some parts of our conversation on the river, and I talked about my continuing unrest about the situation. I recounted our childhood together, how much I had loved Kathleen growing up, how much I had loved her sparkle and grace. How much I cared for her. How I loved her as my little sister. At the end of the article, however, I was forced into ambivalence. Yes, at this juncture in my Christian journey I had problems with who Kathleen had become. But yes, I would always love her. Without really intending to, I therefore echoed one of the most tiresome, at least to me, tropes in Western Christianity: “love the sinner, not the sin.” After accepting my article, the editors of Daughters of Sarah invited Kathleen to write a response. They would publish both pieces together. Kathleen’s response criticized, rightly so, my ambivalence. She observed that despite the extent to which I had questioned whether, in light of her disclosure to me, my theological convictions were still appropriate and true, in the end I came right back to where I started. Nothing had really changed. She added that my words to her in Tuolumne had wounded her deeply. It was hard to disagree. Much has changed in the over thirty years since our articles were published. I no longer worry about who Kathleen is: she is who she is. And I no longer fret unduly about her destiny. Today, Kathleen and I are the best of friends. I am so thankful. A couple of summers ago, we backpacked together, just the two of us. Does God love Kathleen as she is? He does. Would he love her more if she were not gay? He would not. God’s love transcends all human boundary, disposition, and choice. Unfortunately, although this makes such love unspeakably wonderful, it also renders it enormously puzzling. I’m still left trying to measure the immutability of divine love against the unchanging fact of human freedom. Am I slipping? Am I backsliding? I don’t think so. I am simply venturing more deeply into the heavily ambiguous character of Christianity and Christian scripture in a fractious world. As I observed in my look at Psalm 139 and my thoughts on Marsha Stevens and her “Come to the Waters,” if God’s goodness extends into the lives of every human being, it seems as if it must extend into the lives of those who are born with the sort of structures or dispositions that might birth romantic feelings for members of their gender. Faith demands that I therefore admit that, over and against all dictum, mandate, and proclamation, I will never understand the precise exchange between human form and divine purpose. And that I walk in a peculiar epistemological muddiness. I may have the mind of Christ, but I am also a flawed human being. Sure, I wrestle with some of the eternal eventualities which we will all one day face, but I am more convinced than ever of the ability of God’s love to make sense of them. I can’t see this resolution now; I can only trust that it will, one day, come. That it will come, as will everything else about God, in the expression of his continuing presence. But this doesn’t necessarily make things any easier. Christianity is not a formula, nor is it formulaic. It is an encounter with God. And God speaks to all of us differently. This is not to condone universalism; it is just to say that, regardless of what we may think, only God knows the individual human heart. That is the wonder, that is the glory. It’s also the frustration. As faith, even as it upholds certainty, will always be certainty’s counter: Ecclesiastes 3:11 all over again.