Of Men and Mary Page 14

  So many little miracles began to enter my day-to-day walk in the Spirit: prayers answered, internal visions, confirmations. It was a wondrous time. My life, my attitudes, my understanding of everything was radically shifting; my perception of reality metamorphosed and broadened, my values turned upside down and inside out. So many truths were dawning on me, so many long-held misconceptions about Christianity disappearing, my old cherished notions overthrown. My love for the God who saved me was unbounded. Every Sunday when I knelt at Mass, what an emotional time it was, with deep surges of repentance sweeping over me. Frequently, I would feel “touched”—anointed by the Holy Spirit, and tears would roll down my cheeks, especially when the priest consecrated the Host. At that time, I had no conscious idea that Christ truly became present in Holy Communion, even though I had joked about cannibalism all those years earlier. When I was later instructed on the divine nature of the Eucharist, it came as no surprise, confirmed, as it was, by those spiritual glows at consecration.

  On Friday, October 15, that year, I was formally received into the Church. There was no need for baptism. I was christened as a baby in the Anglican faith of my parents and the Anglican baptism is valid in the Catholic Church. A few days before Christmas, in a private ceremony with the Bishop of Auckland, I took “Francis John” as my confirmation name. The occasion was quite unannounced. I had been helping assemble the crib scene before the altar, repainting a host of angels and the Bethlehem backdrop, when I had glanced up at the Tabernacle and saw this momentary image of a white dove hovering there. Seconds later the church door opened and Fr. George’s housekeeper appeared. “Run home and get changed, Chris,” she said, “the Bishop is coming to confirm you!” It was the most perfect, deeply meaningful Christmas I had ever celebrated. I had this overwhelming sense of belonging. I had truly “come home.”

  For several years afterward, I enjoyed a tremendous “honeymoon” period with the Heavenly Bridegroom. Anna grew more trustful that my faith had genuine roots and was not just another passing phase. I was taking my home life with the children far more seriously, and we were attending Mass as a family each Sunday. For me, it was daily Mass according to Fr. George’s prescription for eradicating thirty years of contamination: “Your principal weakness and greatest foe is sensuality,” he said, “so you need the daily healing touch of the Divine Physician.” During my initial conversion to Catholicism, I had resigned from radio and started work at a home for sixty disabled people, recently opened in our suburb, only walking distance from my front door. This lasted for four years, until Anna was suddenly hit by a debilitating illness, which left her weak and confined to bed for six months, and we resolved to sell our house and return to the wider support of family in Christchurch.

  It was while my father, in his late seventies, came to live with us after our shift back south that several things culminated. I was keen to cultivate greater family dynamics, encouraging Dad as a grandfather and trying to close the gap between him and me, but it was intensely difficult. I had arranged for a special Mass to be prayed for the healing of the family tree, and this happened, as it turned out, on my mother’s birthday. Quietly then, I did some detective work and located her whereabouts. I met her for a lunchtime coffee, and we exchanged many words. It was so good to finally put a face to the mother I had never known, to scotch all those stupid fantasies that she was perhaps a famous actress or suchlike. I recognized some of my own characteristics in her and experienced a real sense of identity, that I was more like her than my father. As we parted, I gave her a sketch I had made of Jesus and his Sacred Heart that she tucked in her handbag, and smiling, she said, “I love him too!” Then she said: “This is the only meeting we will ever have. My husband is forbidding me to see you again.”

  To hear this crushed me with disappointment, but I said nothing. I was saddened that she would never meet or know her four grandchildren. “Her loss,” said Anna later that evening. No sooner had I told her what my mother had said that I felt an incoming tide of depression, wave after wave, washing over me. The old black dog was back on the horizon, circling once more, closing in on me.

  Other unwanted feelings were resurfacing, too. My belief that God’s grace had healed me from same-sex attraction was proving to be an illusion. Such allurements and thoughts had simply been pushed underground in favor of the more pressing needs of providing for and raising a family. While every spare moment was keenly spent in pro-life interests and fostering devotion to the Rosary with a Fatima statue, which I circulated in our parish, I found myself distracted by second looks at handsome faces and disturbed by the sight of more and more exposure of male flesh in the media. I went to Confession to repent about these upsetting temptations without being specific. My ambiguous remarks could easily have been referring to women not men. “Maybe I just have a heightened appreciation for the beauty of God’s handiwork,” I suggested to the priest who chuckled. “Oh dear, you wouldn’t be laughing if you knew the full truth,” I thought. For seven or eight years since Anna and I had reconciled, I had kept everything firmly in place.

  I reached burn-out point in 1990. After a knee-cartilage injury and operation, I had opted for working temp jobs piecemeal, often from sunrise to midnight, dovetailing nurse-aide shifts with freelance writing for television and for a friend who owned an advertising agency. Understandably, with budgeting for a family of six, Anna was unhappy with the unreliability of an income that was far from a regular wage. All these issues eating at me, I retreated to the Redemptorist Monastery for a week’s break from everything, taking with me a young, homeless street kid, whom I had been supporting in his efforts to quit glue-sniffing. Unknown to me, Anna suspected I was back into old habits and was having a relationship with him. Nothing could have been further from the truth. I had met him one morning at the Cathedral when we were praying the Rosary for those “on the margins of our society,” and helping him seemed part of my Christian outreach.

  When I left home with a few clothes and some devotional material for the retreat, I had this overwhelming feeling in my spirit—a feeling I was trying to dismiss—that I was never going to return to the family homestead. Anna phoned me three days later at the monastery and told me she did not want me to return. She wanted a legal separation, a clean cut, no post-mortems. It was over. Eighteen years of marriage—gone! I was reeling at the prospect of legal separation, absolutely gutted. I sobbed and cried for two days in the chapel, and then my grief turned to anger. I had done everything in my power to make up for the first eight years as the miscreant—and this was the outcome for all my efforts! Today, I can understand Anna’s frustrations with me. She needed a solid steady sort of guy who brought home a dependable weekly pay packet, who did not suffer from all the inner tensions that frequently immobilized me. In truth, I was the fifth child in our family, a forty-something man-boy.

  My devastation was immeasurable. I had built my whole sense of belonging around Anna and my children. Overnight, my homemade insurance against a legacy of insecurities had been pulled from beneath my feet. It took marriage collapse, however, to force me to face the truth about myself, to confront with honesty my own limitations, my inability to cope with stress, my issues of abandonment by both parents, and of paramount importance, recognition and self-acceptance of my re-closeted sexual orientation.

  Several months down the line came the most terror-stricken moment of my forty-two years. At a family gathering organized by a family-court counselor, he encouraged me to disclose my darkest secret to all four children. “How do you feel about Dad now?” he asked, after my stark confession. My second eldest son, fifteen years-old at the time, sprang to my support and moved me to the brink of tears. Nathan didn’t hesitate. In a very matter-of-fact tone of acceptance, he said, “He’s still Dad.”

  Anna’s spurning, which duplicated my mother’s rejection, opened me up to the feelings I had been denying and sublimating for ten years. The hurt, the bitterness and anger—I had so much anger—gave rise to a rebelliousnes
s that laid bare a pet notion of mine, which had never been fully addressed, that a male soul mate would consummate my heart’s longing. At a city bus shelter one evening, such a person appeared to have crossed my path. His name was Matthew. We fell into talking, and when he caught the same bus as me and then alighted at the same bus stop, I was amused by this coincidence.

  Significantly, one of our first conversations was about the “so-called fairer sex.” Like me, Matthew was recovering from a break-up with a woman he had been living with, so together we seethed about how Western females had become so aggressive and so domineering, poor imitations of men. But Matthew was not spiteful by nature. Sweet and sensitive, he had a generous spirit and a heart of gold. I would share the next ten tumultuous years of my life with him.

  My world totally crumbled during the first year of our relationship. As I “came out of the closet” and gradually admitted to friends and family the new direction my life had taken—that Matthew and I were a male couple living together—I swung between gay pride and self-effacement, soaring emotions and despondency over my losses. A Christian counselor, who prayed with me during that time, commented that I was like someone who’d lost a great treasure. He was right. I was stretched on a torture rack between heaven and hell. Seeking to make spirituality and sensuality compatible bedfellows, I wanted “life in the Spirit” with God, and I wanted Matthew as well, because I felt so loved. My arguments went like this: “My lifelong desires are being fulfilled. Why should God want to come between me and this man? We’re made for each other!”

  But the eternal tussle continued. I had to explain away those convicting passages of Scripture. “The Old Testament references to fornication and the abomination of man-to-man sex are about promiscuity,” I’d protest, “not about loving gay unions as we know them in modern times.” To justify my lifestyle, I even began writing a whole book called, A Damned Fine Loving! “If you read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah,” I wrote, “you’ll see it’s about violent and inhuman gang rape. The men of Sodom were depraved and animalistic, their behavior an offense against love. And as for St. Paul’s remarks in Romans 1:27, let’s be honest, he’s homophobic, probably homosexual himself. . .” And so it went on. For a short spell, my conscience would be quieted, and then it would start up again.

  Despite my own spiritual struggle, Matthew was attracted to Catholicism. He was fascinated by the richness of its culture and had great admiration for Pope John Paul II (now St. John Paul the Great). Right from the start, though, I vowed I would never foist my beliefs on him, that I’d only speak about the faith if he asked questions. Which he did. Many times.

  Sadly, Matthew suffered from reoccurring psychotic episodes, and eventually I began to pray that God would somehow extricate me from my complex entanglement with him. On December 8 (the feast of the Immaculate Conception), I came across a leaflet in a Catholic bookshop, concerning Devotions to Jesus King of All Nations. The promise of “powerful and unprecedented effects” was attached to a novena of Holy Communions in honor of Jesus, under that title. The very next day, when I went to Mass and began to pray the novena, I was inundated with more doubts about my lifestyle. On the last day of the novena, I was in for the surprise of my life. Upon coming home after receiving Holy Communion, Matthew told me he had something serious to discuss with me. “I want to become a Catholic,” he said. “I want to go for instruction and be baptized.” I nearly fell over backwards, especially at the next piece of news: “I also want to receive Holy Communion, and that’s the tricky bit. I’m sorry, Chris, but we’ll have to end our sex life. I couldn’t possibly go to Communion and be sexually active. It had to come to this eventually, anyway. So how do you feel about celibacy?”

  I remembered all the times I had been to Communion while sexually sinning, and I could only admire Matthew’s stand. “He’s got more integrity than I,” I thought ruefully. Three days later, I went to a full and proper Confession. Heart in mouth, I wandered over to the rectory, but thankfully, the priest didn’t sound judgmental when I spoke about my homosexuality. Instead he acknowledged mildly, “So you’ve sinned with another man.”

  Matthew was received into the Church not long after we split up, and for four years I practiced celibacy, attending a weekly group called Courage, a worldwide, spiritual support network for those who experience same-sex attraction but wish to live chaste lives in accordance with the Church’s teaching.

  For the first time in my adult life, I was a single man and living alone, not needing to make compromises, not answerable to anyone but God’s Spirit and his directions. And then this hankering in me arose, a nagging daydream of sharing my life with someone again. Maybe it was because I knew the last vestiges of youthful vigor were on the wane. Maybe I was egged on by people around me who said I deserved to have someone to love. I had applied for an annulment, which the Church duly granted, freeing Anna to remarry, if she wanted. This she did. But for myself, I was too honest to pretend I could entertain such thoughts ever again. Although women seemed to be attracted to me, I could not possibly put another woman through the same hoops and heartache, as I had with Anna.

  Through my network of friends and my work as a community caregiver, I met James, a fellow believer, although not Catholic, a very special, sensitive man. It took eighteen months of regularly seeing each other before we moved into a townhouse together. I became heavy-hearted, disappointed with myself for breaking the long record of celibacy. Feeling tearful one morning, I clearly heard God’s voice resonate within me, saying, “I understand your needs.” I took this as confirmation of his approval, rather than simply hearing those words as the Lord’s compassion, spoken in a consoling tone mingled with sadness.

  God would have to literally “shake” me out of my self-deception. In the pre-dawn of Saturday morning, September 4, 2010, a powerful 7.2 quake struck forty kilometers from Christchurch. Our lives were turned upside down. The seismic activity continued daily, aftershocks by the score. During those uncertain months, I hung a Miraculous Medal around my neck after reading Mary’s promise to St. Catherine Labouré to swiftly come to our aid, and each morning I prayed, just as she asked: “O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee. Sweet Mother, I place this cause in thy hands (three times).” By then, disquieted by the events around us, and weary of bargaining with God about my tendencies and needs, I became consumed by a fervent desire to revert to celibacy and to return to the sacraments of the Church.

  I wept from time to time before the Lord in the Tabernacle and began to recall how wonderful it had once been to be so close to Jesus. I was regaining my spiritual eyes to see that homosexual sex was wrong. This conviction deepened, and I knew I needed help from above to somehow engineer such a life-changing choice.

  When the second more deadly earthquake delivered its fearsome blow to Christchurch weeks later, an upward thrust two and a half times greater than gravity, the city was left in ruins with 185 people killed as buildings collapsed. Our home was unlivable for three weeks, trashed and without power or water. James stayed elsewhere temporarily; I joined an old friend in her undamaged apartment. It was Lent. I knew what I must do. After a six-year relapse, I was filled with nervous apprehension as I approached the confessional. My voice suddenly choked with emotion, I unburdened my sins to the priest and repented. That was it. No turning back now, ever again. The next day, it seemed as though years had fallen from me like scales. It is difficult to describe or explain this sense I had of feeling lighter, younger, spiritually renewed and somehow returned to an earlier state of soul. I broke out in smiles. It felt so amazingly good to be pure, to be chaste, to recover my innocence through absolution.

  The decision to reinstate celibacy was an option James had always made provision for in the initial terms of our relationship. Although surprised and a little wounded at first, he met this news with exceptional understanding and with a maturity that has left me grateful, relieved, and full of admiration. James and I remain close companions who still sh
are the same home, and he continues to accept and encourage me in this fuller commitment to my Catholic faith. No longer hampered by compromises or excuses, I can embrace life and the sacraments now with a clear conscience.

  Such a tremendous amount of healing has gone on for me in the innermost parts of my being over the past two decades. Ten of those years were spent in counseling therapy, where the core of my problems began to unravel. First my father’s death, then my mother’s, also brought a degree of closure. Of course, the mainstay of my healing process has been the sanctifying graces available through the Lord’s living legacy to Holy Mother Church: in the sacraments, most especially the Eucharist.

  True healing began for me with the honest realization and admission that my inclination to same-sex attraction was, and is, "intrinsically disordered,” just as the Church in her wisdom teaches. This truth has increased in clarity over time, as the Divine Physician has restored order to my heart and mind. None of this means, of course, that I, myself, am intrinsically disordered. In fact, today I know that I am, indeed, a new creation: more of a pilgrim than a prodigal, a happier and more integrated person, with a deep sense of peace that other people seem to notice.

  A friend of mine surprised me recently by saying, “You are such a great inspiration to people!” I told him I had no idea. It never occurred to me. He wanted to understand what made me so committed to my faith, but a precise answer to this is difficult to pinpoint. I guess that when you’ve lived to the full all that the world has to offer—all the devil’s false promises—and then come to experience the Lord’s saving love, everything changes. I now know beyond all doubt that I am greatly loved by him—and that is the most wonderful knowledge in the world! I am not some hapless microbe awash in an evolutionary void!