Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God (Matt. 5:8)

I was walking today and thinking about the sermon recording I just listened to from a few weeks ago, in which my pastor responds to the decision of the Lutheran National Assembly to allow practicing homosexuals in committed relationships to enter the ministry.  My pastor disagrees with this decision for all the standard evangelical reasons.  I also thought about my family, and the rigorous moral lifestyle in which I have, for better or worse, been raised.  Even exercise - such as the walk I was currently on - is part of the discipline handed down to my by my parents, and which I have now likewise come to embrace.  I looked at the greenery around me, as I passed well-kept lawns and gardens, and was struck once again by my recurring terror: that there is a natural explanation for everything, and that there is really no divine.  That we have constructed God in our own heads.  That we are imposing all kinds of unnatural, and indeed, physically and psychologically damaging rules upon ourselves by trying to follow the supposed moral mandates of a religion from 2,000 years ago.  To deny homosexual impulses?  Unthinkable... just as unthinkable as denying heterosexual ones.  Certainly it must result in all kinds of psychoses and delusions and disorders, not to mention the suppression of the physical structures of our bodies that are made for intimacy.  I realized once again how steep a road conservative Christianity is, and the fear that it really is not even true... that there is nothing behind the veil, nothing for which to discipline ourselves and control our desires... was nearly enough to crush me. 

I reached the end of the road, turned around, and headed back up the same street.  And there was a particular moment, as I passed a particular plant, when I was struck by the very strong impression that I need to let go of my sexual memories.  I, like every promiscuous homosexual, am a sexual sinner - not only in my thought life on so many, many occasions, but in my physical actions, as I lost my virginity this summer with three different guys in a series of sexual encounters.  Two months ago, I made the commitment that even though I do not feel assured that God is there, I am going to stop having premarital sex so that I can see Him if He is.  I had "repented" of my actions in the sense that I was now seeking, by Christ's help, to no longer continue in them - and yet I found myself continually going back to the memories, reanalyzing, reexperiencing, remembering.  It is true that my experiences taught me a lot about sexuality, and that through them I have come to see how frail the line between virtue and promiscuity really can be.  I analyzed the assumptions that go into premarital sexual encounters and contrasted them to the assumptions of sex within a Christian marriage.  It is hard for me, even now as I write this, to say that I wish my sexual experiences had never happened because they have allowed me to learn and grow so much - allowing me to identity with so many people from whom I had before felt separated by a great divide, and allowing me to ponder what a Christian response is the raging beast of sexuality within each of us.  But my memories have become a wicked thing.  I find myself reverting to them for sexual satisfaction, replaying the sexual maneuvers, touching myself in the places that stimulate me.  I've also slipped back into occasionally watching porn, as I can justify it in the same way that I justify mulling over my memories: "I learn so much about sex."  In that instant, as I walked, I saw that this needs to stop.  My sexual thoughts are crippling me from engaging in my once-dynamic spiritual life.  I need to stop and I need to let go...

A few blocks later in my walk, I felt a sense that I may be called on, perhaps many times in my life, to revisit my premarital sexual encounters in my mind and draw wisdom from them so that I can counsel others.  In that sense, God can turn what is broken in me into something beautiful and life-giving.  But I can't even count on that.  I need to recognize what I've done as the sin that it is - to confess with my face on the floor, as did the prodigal son, that "I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son" (Luke 15:21) - to weep that I have violated God's commandments and damaged my own body and emotions.  I can't claim, even in the tiniest corner of my mind, that it is good that I did what I did.  It's humbling and feels like going back to square one ("You mean I went through all this for nothing...?") - and yet I'm pretty sure it's the way it has to be.  

I keep thinking that I am entitled to intimacy... that what is so natural on a physical and emotional level is something that even God could not withhold from me.  That is not, however, the case.  What we actually deserve - all of us - is death.  We do not deserve anything good, and yet God surrounds us with goodness every day which is utterly the product of His grace.  When people question me, I always say that I intend to marry, and even that I do not think I am intended for celibacy.  I still think it is likely that I will marry.  But I now see that I must follow God completely whether I marry or not.  I must "offer [my] body as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God... [as my] spiritual act of worship" (Rom. 12:1), and even if I were to receive nothing in return besides God, that must be enough.  What delusion has convinced me that anything but God can satisfy, that anything but God is necessary?  There are many Christians who have very little, who are persecuted daily, who never marry, who suffer hunger and disease... and I believe that they have found God to be more than sufficient.  Is it to be different for me?  It is only after I have given God all that I am that I can hope to give myself in any appropriate way to my physical husband, if God sees fit to give us to each other.

I have recently become friends with an atheist, who tries to convince me that experiences of transcendence are nothing more than psychological phenomena, the response of the human subject to the infinity of the universe.  My friend can sense, I think, that I have been teetering on the edge of evangelicalism, weighing out whether I will embrace it - with all its steep moral standards and demands for personal action - or relax my stance into, if not a denial of the divine, a more 'natural' position which will allow me to be more in touch with the world (including my own intellect and sexuality).  I am once again convinced, however, that the road to life is the narrow one.  I want to learn to love God with my whole heart, soul, mind, and strength, so that the chastity I offer Him is not merely a reluctant attempt to curb desire, but an offering of my whole body on the alter of worship.  Every believer, gay or straight, is called to this obedience.  The question of whether God is real is still there... still haunting me... and may continue to haunt me until the day my faith becomes sight... but I must, for now, purify my heart (Matt. 5:8).

The leap of faith

Today I created a Pandora station of Christian worship music.

I found myself, as expected, chortling at some of the predictable rock chord structures.  I found at least half of the lyrics cliche.  I shook my head over some sloppy theological wordings.  I questioned whether we Christians, by listening to music like this, are simply deluding ourselves into believing in God's existence and active presence in our lives, just because it makes us feel better.  But I kept listening because there were some lyrics that were not cliche...  some moments in the songs that were truly beautiful... some quotes from Scripture that grabbed me and took me out of myself into the experience of worship.  Having sought Christian music in an act of faith, I in turn found my faith strengthened as I encountered God - a reality outside of myself and my own mental processes. 

It occurs to me that my attempt to gain better perspective on my life by "taking a break" from regular Scripture reading and worship may have been a huge mistake.

I have a love-hate relationship with Soren Kierkegaard, as I find some of his ideas and categorizations compelling and others to be rather off-target.  A friend who is not a believer recently asserted that "Kierkegaard is the only way to go [for believing in the Christian God]."  I responded with, "So you think that all that's left for us is the ol' leap of faith, eh?"  The idea makes me uncomfortable.  Regarding Kierkegaard's concept of a leap of faith, the Wikipedia article summarizes his assertions as follows:

 "Faith is not a decision based on evidence that, say, certain beliefs about God are true or a certain person is worthy of love. No such evidence could ever be enough to pragmatically justify the kind of total commitment involved in true religious faith or romantic love. Faith involves making that commitment anyway...  [Kierkegaard] argues that doubt is an element of faith and that it is impossible to gain any objective certainty about religious doctrines such as the existence of God or the life of Christ. The most one could hope for would be the conclusion that it is probable that the Christian doctrines are true, but if a person were to believe such doctrines only to the degree they seemed likely to be true, he or she would not be genuinely religious at all. Faith consists in a subjective relation of absolute commitment to these doctrines."

I think that Kierkegaard is onto something, but is not telling the whole story.  I have had many doubts recently regarding whether the Christian faith is intellectually defensible in the face of the possibility of complete naturalism.  Over the past days, I realized that I apparently have a choice: I can hold out apart from God and read and search until I find answers, or I can worship Him while I seek to understand.  The former implies that I step away from my life of faith in the hope to attain "objectivity."  The latter, I now see, is the only way to life.  And while I believe that this choice to worship is a sort of a "leap of faith," since it is my intellectual struggles which have brought me to this crisis and are not yet completely answered, I think that Kierkegaard's conception of this process is like a snapshot taken from one angle of our experience: the angle of the "wager" we seem to engage in when we choose whether or not to believe.  The other angle is that God is drawing us to Himself.  God gives us faith and the ability to respond to Him in worship... and it seems that if we harden our hearts to Him, we open ourselves up to all kinds of evil.  It seems to have happened to me in my search for "objectivity."  I am now, by God's grace, making the other choice: the choice to worship and obey.  It is rather comforting, in truth, to know that the question of whether or not I have faith is not completely up to me.

I have heard many times in church that God alone is worthy of our worship.  Today, however, it means something.  The choice to love a man, a particular man amongst a world of other men, seems to me rather arbitrary and to have a discomforting amount of chance involved.  If I had moved to such-and-such city after college instead of to Rochester, if I had gone to a different college, if I had chosen to not go visit so-and-so, if I had choosen one seminary for graduate school over another, I would have met different men.  And do we "fall in love" with each other simply because we have needs which need to be met?  Because the other person is kind to us, touches us, validates us?  No man is perfect, and different men will have different strengths and weaknesses which make them more or less "worthy" of admiration.  If loving God has the same amount of arbitrariness and chance involved, I am reluctant to stake my life on God's reality.  But I have been looking at it all wrong.  God absolutely has no need of us, and yet our need for Him is not something we have dreamed up in our own heads.  It is when we ache for Him that we are most in touch with the universe.

I almost slept with someone on Thursday night, before leaving to go visit Wheaton.  It was the second time that week, with the same guy, that I'd faced that temptation.

"What shall we say then?  Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?  By no means!  How can we who died to sin still live in it?  Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?" (Romans 6:1-3)

The sermon was on these verses this morning at College Church in Wheaton, where I was visiting for the weekend.  It was one of the hardest sermons I've ever heard, and the one I most needed to hear.  The pastor said that if you've never asked this question, you may have never understood the Gospel... and yet if you continue to ask this question, it shows that you also may not understand the Gospel.  That you have not truly "repented and believed."

It's so easy to rationalize sleeping with someone.  Especially if you are only planning to do it once, and then get your life back under control.  "These desires are natural."  "What we're doing is natural."  "I want you."  "God will forgive."  (That's the message of the Gospel, right?)  "Too much emphasis is placed on virginity in our Christian communitites... premarital sex is no worse than anything else..."  "I have denied my body for my whole life until now, and I'm tired of it."  "Everybody does this..."

But sleeping with someone is serious.  Just like continuing in any sin, after having been redeemed by Christ, is serious.  It is making a mockery of what He has done for us.

I think we think of becoming holy as something boring, as reeking of conservative dress and pious language and teaching Sunday school.  We need our a cannon blast to shock us out of these lies... to help us to see that it is in becoming more like God that we become more ourselves, more how we were intended to be before we were corrupted.  Having been saved through Christ's death, we can become like God.  This is a miracle, a mystery to be taken hold of with all our strength.  Not wanting sin to be removed from our lives is like a cancer patient not wanting the cancer removed from their body. 

We will never become perfect in this life, but I need to be more intentional about fleeing sin and pursuing God.

"Jesus, your name is power, breath and living water..."

"If you can't say something nice..."

"... don't say nothing at all."  And that's what I've been doing.  I'm not going to spill my guts now, either... INFJ's are very careful about that, very guarded of their inner selves.  Because to share your inner self and be rejected or ignored is almost the worst pain imaginable.  I'm trapped inside my head and it's awful...  I'm going to leave everybody I love and it bites... I'm going to give myself up to serve God, but God and I are barely on speaking terms right now.  It's too many last times at once, the end of too many eras, the collision of too many desires.  The exhaustion seizes control.