Paul Leroux turns to spirituality to reconcile his sexuality.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth …
—Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”
I can pinpoint precisely “where it bent in the undergrowth,” and I stood at a crossroads, faced with a life-altering choice “that has made all the difference.” It was 1970, when I turned 14. Two key events occurred that fateful year.
One Sunday, after Mass, I browsed through a bookrack at the back of my parish church. There, I discovered the writings of two 16th-century Spanish mystics, Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, both of the Discalced Carmelite order. I read them in the classic English translation by Edgar Allison Peers. (My major in Spanish still lay ahead of me in the not too distant future.)
“The Way of Perfection”, “The Interior Castle”, “The Ascent of Mount Carmel”, “The Living Flame of Love” … They appealed to my youthful idealism and inspired me to the loftiest vision of service to God. I saw myself one day becoming a cloistered, contemplative monk.
In a way, this is not surprising. I have always been an all-or-nothing, either-or type of person. I have always given myself totally to every endeavor, every area of my life—my pursuit of academic excellence, my work as a translator, my involvement in the community, my efforts as a creative writer.
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But, in late summer of that year, I had sex for the first time with an older man. From that moment onward, my sexuality and spirituality never ceased to clash and collide. That bitter struggle has now spanned four decades, my entire adult life.
I fought a seesaw battle for the next four years. Increasingly, I was mesmerized by the siren song of male physical beauty all around me. More and more, I felt my soul slipping inexorably away from my possession.
Needless to say, I was wracked by guilt, not only for committing what my church regarded as a mortal sin, but for falling so far short of my high-minded, heavenly ideals. Frequent recourse to the confessional did little to ease my conscience, since I yielded almost immediately thereafter to my more earthly, carnal urges.
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Truth to be told, my spirituality always had a strongly sensual component. I breathed deeply the heavy, sweet fragrance of incense permeating a church. I listened avidly to the sonorous and majestic phraseology of the Mass, said in Latin until 1965.
Religious art appealed to my nascent aesthetic sense, especially the medieval and Renaissance paintings that illustrated our family bible, and an illuminated manuscript of Paul’s teachings on love in Corinthians 13. I also never wearied of the stirring strains of Handel’s “Messiah” or Bach’s uplifting “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desire”.
But these were permissible pleasures, time-honored, officially approved ways to draw closer to God. My longing for another man was of an entirely different kind. I knew instinctively that my gay sexuality was “wrong” in the eyes of the church.
Ironically, even my beloved John of the Cross, a saint and a Doctor of the Church, used homoerotic images in his religious poetry. Teresa of Ávila’s piercing by a fiery arrow, symbolic of her mystic marriage with Christ, also strangely resembled an act of sexual penetration.
♦◊♦
By 1974, I had sadly renounced my dreams of entering a monastery. I came out of the closet and left the church altogether. For 25 years, I went about my life as though I did not believe in God. I embraced my newfound identity as a gay man, and reveled in my sexuality with wild abandon.
But it was never enough. Not the countless, quick, anonymous encounters. Not even the two cases where I related to a man on a deeper, more emotionally intimate level. Saint Augustine spoke truth when he wrote, “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”
I will admit that my experience of a grand, sweeping passion rekindled my wish for a greater, higher love. Indeed, during that period, I wrote dozens of sonnets that were often couched in religious imagery. It was the only way I knew how to express the intensity of my feelings, which culminated in what I could only call a “burning bush” experience.
It was, of course, out of the question for me to revive my boyhood dream of a vow of celibacy. But I did feel the need to reconnect with the faith community I had left behind and, if possible, to reconcile my sexuality and spirituality.
Alas, it was not meant to be. I spent four years closely involved in various forms of ministry at my archdiocesan cathedral. Devoutly, I attended Sunday services, received the sacraments, administered communion, sponsored several catechumens (candidates for baptism), and read from the Bible at Mass.
A heated public debate then arose about same-sex marriage in Canada, and the church and the gay community became polarized over this issue. Caught in the crossfire between the two, I had to choose. In 2004, I left the church again. A year later, I legally married the man who had shared my life for a quarter of a century.
There was no way, it seemed, that I could keep one foot in both the church and the gay community at the same time. If I kept my sexuality in abeyance, I could continue to be a practicing Catholic. If I sought to discuss matters of faith and spirituality, I was “persona non grata” among gay men.
As a result, I have found myself a virtual pariah, shunned and outcast on all sides. I had made, first my sexuality, then my spirituality, the sole focus of my life. In both instances, my identity foundered, like the house built on sand in the gospels.
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Yet both aspects of my nature are vital and essential to my sense of self. I cannot truly be whole and complete unless I can somehow weld them into an integrated personality. Without one or the other, a part of me will forever remain hollow and empty, bleak and cold.
I share in the heartrending cry of Heathcliff, in the 1939 film Wuthering Heights:
Take any form, drive me mad, only do not leave me in this dark alone where I cannot find you. I cannot live without my life, I cannot die without my soul.
Yet to this day, as I pen these words, I still find myself, body and soul cruelly sundered apart, wandering the desolate moor of my fractured life.
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When I was a young boy, before the Second Vatican Council allowed the use of the vernacular—the language of each diocese—the Mass always began with the Latin version of Psalm 43.
In later life, as a gay man struggling to integrate my sexuality and spirituality, I could identify with verses 2 and 5: “Why dost thou cast me off? Why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy? … Why art thou cast down, O my soul? And why art thou disquieted within me?”
It is my enduring hope that, someday, for me and others like me, verse 4 will come to pass: “Then I will go unto the altar of God, unto God my exceeding joy.”
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—Photo eisenbahner/Flickr
Growing up your orgasmic potential is where the meaning of maturity gets really interesting. Befriending and relating to our erotic selves is a lifelong process that expands our relationship to pleasure and matures our access to and experience of orgasm. Like millions of other women, I learned from Betty Dodson who was the first to describe the variety of orgasmic experiences that occur throughout our lifetime. Her groundbreaking work: Orgasms for Two, based on over thirty years of teaching, remains a classic guide for how orgasmic experience shapes us throughout our lives.
i keep this link handy for when the topic comes up
http://www.soulforce.org/pdf/whatthebiblesays.pdf
It’s a 26 page biblical analysis on homosexuality written by a homosexual reverend.
I am familiar with the gay response to the perceived condemnation of the Bible. I think both gays and fundamentalists make the mistake of focusing on specific verses of Scripture, and not seeing the Bible as an organic whole. I also think my difficulty lies, not so much in failing to meet the standards of the Church, as in failing to meet my own standards and, more importantly, God’s. I am not proud of the choices I have made, the paths I have taken, the ways I have lived my life as a gay man. But I am not ashamed… Read more »
Paul, this is such a profound reflection of the tension between personal and corporate faith, and personal and societaql sexual identity. It is no mistake that your spirituality and sexuality are so closely tied. Passion is the fuel of both. I love the Frost poem you opened with. And in it, I remind you of the hope it offers: I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. The path you chose, has made… Read more »
Hi Roger … “Corporate faith” is an intriguing choice of words, since “corporate” comes from the Latin “corpus”, and the Church professes to be the Mystical Body of Christ. “Passion” also has an interesting etymology. The Latin deponent verb “patior, pati, passus sum” means to suffer. Passion often involves just that — suffering for and because of whom and what we love most. As for Frost, I’m at the middle stage: “And knowing how way leads on to way, / I doubted I should ever come back.” Warm regards, Paul
Thanks, Paul – stay the course……
Paul thank you for this piece. I find it so amazing that sexual orientation pushes some Catholics to feel hatred where, as our priest has said many times, “Jesus loves us all AS WE ARE.”
Here is a column I wrote on this topic: https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/gaycatholics/
Hi Tom … Your Father John looks to be a Franciscan, by his habit. So was Father Mykal Judge, gay himself, who died ministering to those involved in the tragedy of 9/11. I was not so vocal. I tried to witness in a quiet way, by my presence and example, to the possibility of a gay man being a devout Catholic. I ended up witnessing in another way–by leaving the Church in protest over its use of the pulpit to promote a political agenda. I wish things could have been different, and I could have stayed. But it wasn’t meant… Read more »
I could really feel your earnest seeking in this beautifully written article, Paul. You articulated this difficult dilemma so masterfully, it felt like poetry to read it. Thank you for that! I don’t know what kind of alternative faith communities there are in Ottawa, but in NYC we have a place called Sacred Center New York. It is interfaith and focuses on our shared humanity and raising ourselves UP to our highest natures, all in a highly celebratory manner.I brought my Mom to service with me there one Sunday and when she glanced around at the hundreds packed into the… Read more »
Hi Lili Bee … I don’t see myself as starting a movement, much less a church. (Not that I haven’t always secretly wished for followers and an impact on society and history.) I’m just trying, at this point, to make peace with myself and my God in the time left to me in this world, after spectacularly failing to do so these past five decades. I hope my articles for The Good Men Project, and the new focus of my own blog, represent positive steps in that direction. Warm regards, Paul
Perhaps, seek your spirituality less in the church and more in god. Forgive me if I seem forward, but you say your connection is with god, but that you long for him when you’re not partaking in churchly activities. A church is not god. It’s a house of man. I understand you fascination with the artistic beauty that follows religion, I, myself actually lie somewhere between athiest and agnosic, but I too have found myself caught up in the wonder of it all. But it’s not god. There’s no reason for you to be fractured. Your god made you and… Read more »
Thank you, Mia, for your comments. I seem to be tending more these days toward individual relationship with God, and a faith based on Scripture, as opposed to the teachings of the Church. Yet, man being a social animal, it is natural to seek community, to be more than a “church of one”. The word “religion”, in fact, literally means to bind or tie together. Perhaps I will find that sense of community elsewhere. Thanks again for writing!