Are You Going to Hell?

First I want to give one good answer to the question so you'll have an idea where this is going. The answer is: not if God can help it.

I'm writing this to summarize a very good talk I heard this evening. The priest who gave the talk grew up in an era when there was a lot of preaching about how terrible hell is and about all the things that would get you sent there. (He told the story of the old Irish priest who was going on about the pains of hell. "There will be the gnashing of teeth," he said; and a little old lady asked, "Father, what about them that have no teeth?" and the priest thundered, "Teeth will be provided.") He, like a lot of others, couldn't take the constant reminders and threats, so at the age of fifteen, he stopped going to church.

In his junior year of college, at a university in Ohio, a new Catholic chaplain (Fr. Brennan Manning) came to campus and started having Mass at midnight every Saturday. Then 20, the speaker decided to check it out. The gospel passage for that Sunday was John 3: 14-21, and Fr. Manning focussed on verses 16 and 17, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him."

The chaplain's preaching on that text was very different from what our speaker (and I) had grown up with. We had known of a vindictive God, always on the alert for our sins and ready to send us to hell for them. But here's the truth instead: God's trying to save us, to bring us to heaven. That's because he loves us that much. And what's more he loves us just the way we are at every moment of our lives. He loves us when we're good, and he loves us when we're bad. He loves us when we're sinning; he loves us when we don't love him; and — just like every other lover — he wants us to love him so he can make us part of his life, share his life with us.

Often in the church we seem to think that we have to become good in order to love God, but that's putting the cart before the horse. It's when we love God that we are drawn to be good.

To add my own comment: I think in a number of cases when people reject God, it's not the real God that they reject — the one who loves them so much that he sent his Son to save them — rather they are rightly rejecting a false picture of God as one who seeks to condemn them.

Response to Howard

In a comment on my "Three Funerals … " post, Howard writes:

I'm 66, born and raised a Catholic like yourself, but no longer practicing. Please let us know how you continue to believe that the Church has the absolute correct teaching on homosexuality,(or most other doctrines on sexuality as well). You have evidentally done an excellent job in personally living up to those teachings on but obviously at great cost to yourself. I honestly don't know whether to admire you or consider you among the world's best suckers alive.

Fair comment and request, but a bit off topic for that post. So here goes.

In the first place, I think Catholic doctrine fits well with the biological function of the reproductive system (species continuation) and the sociological requirements of child-rearing (family unit). One could perhaps envision other ways to achieve the goals, but the Catholic doctrine of sex within marriage is the "organic," "no artificial ingredients" approach.

Beyond that, of course there is the theology of sex itself, which makes sense to me. The first of several commands to be fruitful and multiply comes in the context of the creation of humanity with the two characteristics of being male and female and in the image and likeness of God. John Paul II, in his "Theology of the Body," makes the point that being male and female is part of how humanity is in the image and likeness of God. It is in the marital act of a husband and wife that the two who have become one flesh give a bodily image of the enduring and creative love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (and also, as St. Paul says of the love between Christ and his Church). John Paul's teaching not only shows the sublimity, the divine meaning, of loving sexual activity between husband and wife, but also implicitly points out the failure of other sexual activity to measure up to the divine purpose in creation.

To me, it is not a problem to recognize that there is disorder in the world, both in the physical world and in the human spirit. Based on the foregoing, I do not have trouble seeing same sex attraction as one of the many forms of disorder in our world. So the Church's teachings on sex in general and homosexuality in particular seem to me to make good sense.

I have said a bit more in some earlier posts. On November 14, I made two posts titled "Belief and Orientation: Reconciling the Contradiction … " and on December 12, "Quitting." You might want to glance at those, as well as any others in the archive with the label "morality" or "sex." You might also want to check out the U.S. bishops' document whose url is in my "First Things First" statement in the left column of the front page of the blog. I think it gives a good exposition of the rationale for the Church's teaching.

As my banner says, this is all intended to provide an opportunity for discussion. If I can't persuade, I hope at least to promote understanding. So further discussion is always welcome.

As I indicate in the banner, what I post is for purposes of discussion. I hope to persuade, but if I don't persuade, I hope at least to bring greater understanding, as well as to deepen my own. So discussion of this post is certainly welcome.

Belief and Orientation: Reconciling the Contradiction II.

My homosexual orientation is something I consider a given. I don't profess to know exactly how it came to be. I have described here when it first manifested itself explicitly in my life at age 12 and how I came to realize what it was at age 16. I made unsuccessful attempts to change it, but eventually concluded that it was so strongly established that further attempts at change would be wasted effort.

Since I think God created sex as a way for us to be an image of his creative love, I find entirely reasonable the teaching of the Catholic Church that my same-sex attraction goes in a direction inconsistent with the meaning of sex. In the word the Church uses, my sexual appetite is disordered. Not my fault: I didn't choose it. Not God's fault any more than any other disorder in the world: he permits it, but I don't think he miraculously intervenes at our conception or some later time to say, "Zap, you're gay." Not anybody else's fault, because nobody else intended it either.

But if God loves me, am I not as much entitled to the joy and the pleasure of sexual activity as any heterosexual person? In a word, no. I have to go back and give some more of my beliefs. I believe that God's love for us is shown most clearly in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that if there was ever a possibility for perfect happiness on this earth, sin destroyed it, and all of us have to put up with some elements of pain, suffering, and sorrow in our lives. Some people get dread diseases, some people lose loved ones to death at times or in circumstances that are especially painful, some people are homosexual. I believe that Jesus calls me and all his followers to take up our cross daily, that is to accept the suffering and sorrow which we cannot overcome, and that somehow it gets joined to what he did to restore to us the everlasting joy beyond this life which is God's plan for us.

In other words, I don't think God is obligated to give any of us happiness in this life. I think we should be profoundly grateful in the first place simply for our existence, and then for whatever happiness we do experience on this earth.  I look forward to eternal joy.

I can see that I may have missed out on a lot of happiness because I have chosen to act in accordance with my beliefs. To do otherwise, I would have had to change my beliefs (not easy to do), or to try to tell myself that I had changed my beliefs when I hadn't, or to behave contrary to my beliefs. But I also think that I had problems other than my choice to be celibate, and that those problems also contributed in considerable degree to my loneliness through much of my life. I really believe that with support, such as that offered by Courage, which did not exist when I was growing up, and with counseling and therapy if necessary, it is possible for a homosexual person to find emotional intimacy and true happiness in a loving "Platonic" friendship or friendships.

So how do I explain myself? I see no reason to believe that I am entitled to sexual fulfillment. I see myself as one whom God loves infinitely and unconditionally. I see my homosexuality as merely one instance of the mystery of why God lets pain, sorrow, and struggle exist. I cannot explain the mystery, but I cannot let that mystery drive me away from God. It's a matter of accepting creation as I see it. I live my life in the joy of God's love and in the sorrow of an imperfect world and in the hope of a life extending beyond this earthly existence where the pain of this existence is vastly outweighed and makes it all worth it.

I hope this answers the anonymous commenters question. I hope it doesn't sound too preachy, but how else can I say what I believe when it happens to be what my church teaches? How can I leave my beliefs out of it? I hope it tells other readers why I choose not to engage in conduct which they think is not at all wrong.

Belief and Orientation: Reconciling the Contradiction I.

An anonymous commenter asks, "How do gay people with strong religious beliefs explain themselves to one who sees this as an impossible contradiction?"

I hope most of what I post here has some connection to that question, but I'll try to say something directly responsive to the question as I understand it. And I take it the contradiction in question is between the strong religious beliefs and being gay. For starters, it seems to me that there are three different things in play here. There is my orientation. There are my beliefs. And there is my conduct.

I think that my beliefs are dependent on faith, which in turn I consider a gift from God. In other words, it is not something that is demonstrable in the way a mathematical proposition or a logical syllogism is. It is possible to say that I find none of it absolutely self-contradictory, and that a lot of it seems to me to make sense. But I have no illusion (as I once did) that I can prove it in such a way that any honest person would be compelled to accept that everything I believe is true. So it's about faith, and you've got it or you don't. I don't mean to be cavalier, just to say that my beliefs are based on a faith which tells me many things which you may not agree with if you don't start from the same or similar faith. So first I will say some of what I believe, not to tell you what you must believe, but to tell you about myself.

I believe that the world was created by God out of love and that God loves all of us and wishes to share his joy with us in a life which extends beyond the limits of our earthly existence. I believe that God has let us come to know of his love for us and how we can live now and forever in his love. I believe that we can use our intelligence to help us understand what he has revealed. I believe that the Bible shows us God progressively revealing himself to human beings in ways adapted to their ability to comprehend. I believe that all morality is not arbitrary but what God, in his love knows is best for us.

More specifically, I believe that human sexuality is part of God's loving creation. I believe that God created sex to enable us to be a physical image of his loving act of creation, and in doing so to experience a taste of his joy. I believe that engaging in sex in a way which precludes the procreation of new human life falls short of what God gave it to us for. But since homosexual activity cannot procreate, I believe it is one way in which we can fall short of what God gave the gift for (and, btw, "falling short" is the meaning of the Greek word which is usually translated "sin" in our Bibles).

I also believe that God gave us the Bible as his word in human language, and that the Church has been given God's help so it can correctly interpret God's word to us. So I did not make up my beliefs on my own but found them in the teachings of my church, and found them credible.

This is getting kind of long. I'll give another post or two to deal with orientation and conduct.