The wooing of Bethlehem
I can’t understand those folks who claim they’re never angry with God. Given how unkind the universe is, how does one perfectly maintain a balanced and mild temper with the One who runs it? Is it dishonesty – either to others or with themselves – to say they never grumble during the trials of life? Think of all the bad moods and the frictions of social interaction, maladies of body and mind, crippling losses of what we hold dear and hefty crosses that we must bear – surely such purported resignation is fiction. No complaints whatsoever? Pardon my skepticism. Or perhaps these people are tepid and pay little in the way of cost for shallow lives that are lacking in sacrifice. They endure light burdens with equanimity, aiming and grasping for mediocrities. Or perhaps (I cringe to think) they abstain from griping because their placid souls are ones of saints-in-the-making. Their lives are an iconography of perseverance and, knowing full well how cruel human life is – a howling void that’s empty of everything but affliction – they offer to the Almighty every tear they shed as if each were a jewel paid in tribute to their rightful sovereign. Our Lord shouldered His cross for us and so, out of love, imitation, and communion with Him, they shoulder theirs with a hymn in their hearts, eyes shimmering with holy ambition and fixed on their own personal Golgothas.
But I am none of these. I bemoan my pain and struggles as did the old prophets and psalmists, with verbose blatancy. The perennial bloom of grief coupled with a divine indolence in spite of the billion prayers the faithful pray compels me to bellow at the object of my worship, whose universe sometimes seems so much to imply His absence, or at least His indifference and incompetence. But I confess that while the sum total of suffering does impress me (treated as an abstract; no one can fully comprehend it), I’m much more moved and absorbed by my own distress, selfish brat that I am. Such gives me enough to snarl and fume about, laying out a great banquet for the gluttony of my fulmination. And, unlike those complaining in the Scriptures, my diatribes are set at a lower bar: they would whine and lament away but conclude by invoking the divine will, whereas I first invoke my own and then remonstrate at God.
In such a state was I in, surly and self-piteous, when I heard the midnight Christmas Mass of 2022. A fog of confounding disappointment, all-too recurrent in my several years as a Catholic convert, had descended upon me once again. It’s the kind of spiritual state that nudges you to wonder if perhaps the whole enterprise of faith is a delusion, while at the same time buttressing faith’s solidity enough to maintain the reality of God so that you can resent Him. What was the source of my displeasure, the spirit of my bitter petition for redress of grievances against Heaven, surging and resurging like the rhythms of the liturgy itself? In summary, it was the padlock I have to keep on my zipper. I happen to be a gay man and so in context of my conversion in 2017, one can contemplate all possible meanings of the phrase “lifestyle changes,” and not be troubled in comprehending that such a paradigm shift would be painful and of a protracted duration. That my former recreations are prohibited by Scripture and Church teaching was evident, but the rationale behind the prohibitions was as inscrutable as the date of the Second Coming. (I found the natural law arguments on this subject provided by the Church to be dubious at best, and to some extent, still find them so today.) I had little in the way of positive ethical grounds for my chastity except for the fiery mouth of hell that I imagined yawning underneath me, and any succor from above that I continually begged for to maintain such chastity was pretty scanty. And every so often it seemed to me that given its complicity in crimes too horrible to mention or to forget, perhaps the Catholic Church was not the most fit to legislate on matters of sexual morality. It was my cursed lot to wander a desert whilst bearing a load of guilt for having thirst. I had a cumbersome cross to carry and was smote by a knout ever in swing. So, for about three years, I would yo-yo between resolution to fight the uphill battle of continence, only to crumple into despair and rebellion, giving the finger to God and hating Him for His bumbling efforts to fashion and then regulate human nature, and then indulge my inclinations at my own leisure. This led to a greater darkness in my soul which, when I could endure it no longer, would drive me to repentance and the cycle would begin all over again.
In such a dark state I found myself as the minute hand on my watch ticked inexorably towards Christmas morning. For about a week or so I had been stewing my private heresy, and though I was in no mood to be joyful, I still kept the obligation to hear Divine Service on this the second-most important feast of the holy calendar. Also, because I like to sing and enjoy the songs appropriate to the season, I came to church with a friend and his parents a half-hour early for the carols. God’s house began to fill with song and my spirits slightly rose against my will.
Ancient tunes that rhyme and rhapsodize the Christmas story, inviting us all to Bethlehem to see the King without a crown, with a manger for His throne and no palace but the stable, with livestock and shepherds for courtiers – the holy romance began to overpower my surliness, desperately though I wished to resent God. For thirty minutes, tenderness laid a brutal siege to my hardened heart and I tried mustering every defense I knew of for repelling sentimentality (the experience was similar to enduring the duress of being tickled while trying not to laugh). One can contemplate the ridiculous folly of attempting to resist the coaxes of the very thing you’re singing praises about and to. My glowering stubbornness really stood no chance, and the final assault came in the form of the Mass’ opening hymn, “Oh Come All Ye Faithful.”
The organist let loose a massive storm on her instrument and, on the second of the English verses, the procession with its cross borne aloft made its way down the aisle, as our pastor Father Steve, carried upon a cushion the small figure of the baby Jesus which was to be the ultimate occupant of the nativity scene to the right of the altar. Arriving before it, he censed it and placing the Infant in His bed of straw and knelt before the Lord. More incense was dispersed on the manger display, at the congregation, and upon the altar. By this time, we were singing the final verse in Latin. Though the clouds of perfume were irritating my nose and throat, I knew what was instead causing my eyes to water.
Advent was over: the Messiah had come. God, all too eager to propose and realize a paradox, did a very un-divine thing and assumed humility by clothing Himself in human nature. He could’ve been born and have lived as the emperor of the world – such an exalted station would still be infinitely below His dignity as Supreme Being – but He went further by taking on poverty to be born in the Iron Age equivalent of a parking garage. The Creator and ruler of the universe is now one of us, an equal heir to all our toil, weakness, suffering, and struggle; not so much fated, but voluntarily decided on being tortured to death for our sake. He will be the Savior of all, the Judge of all, but first the Servant of all. He enters intimately into our lowly human condition and, working from inside such lowliness, makes all things new.
He is here – God is personally present on earth – ready to involve Himself in every aspect of our existence, especially our pain and travail, a fact that re-dawned on me with a staggering illumination and grew into an urgent but consoling sunrise as the Mass continued. I successfully curbed the impulse to weep as while I have no scruples about crying per se, I prefer to refrain from doing so in public, yet the emotions which began as a steady trickle in my soul surged into cascades. Had I been alone, I would have sobbed. For despite my three years of oscillating frustration and rebellion and mortal sin, I had advanced too far in the spiritual life to doubt the truths and implications of the Christmas story, nor could I spurn the beauty of it. Whatever gratification I wanted to give to my libido (or to my heart, pining for companionship) I never wanted to abandon the faith and, for probably the four-dozenth (and final) time, I accepted that I could not have both proper religion and erotic love.
But this was no question of merely singling out a basic and powerful desire within, ripping it out and discarding it to leave myself bleeding and to carry on forever with a weight of emptiness and no consolation. The One who commands us to pick up our crosses and follow after Him is also the same One who bids us to come unto Him, all we who are weary and heavy-laden, so that He may give us rest. I recalled then (as I will always be able to recall for the rest of my life) an experience that took place some months before that Christmas Mass, when in a state identical to the one I’ve been describing, I was desperately seeking – or rather, demanding – answers from Heaven concerning this great matter of my sexuality. As I mentioned above, the commandments of Scripture and Church, along with the natural law reasoning framed up to justify them, just were not computing and my attempts to obey such problematic precepts at the expense of my happiness and peace of mind were coming up pretty short. So, I prayed the novena to Our Lady Undoer of Knots, hoping against hope to get a resolution to my dilemma.
On the eighth night I got a response, but like so many of the answers we get for the questions we pose to God, they are not the replies we would like or expect. They are a kind of divine side-stepping which shifts our focus to more important matters and which may show us that we might be asking the wrong questions in the first place. I received no revealing insight into Christian ethics, nor were any gaps in my understanding filled in. God made no attempt to inform me of why I must deny my desires and live a celibate life aside from saying, “Please. Please do this for me, Michael.” There were no commandments, no injunctions, no threats of eternal punishment: merely the request of a lover to His beloved. And I knew that this was God communicating to me directly as, in offering up my prayers and looking at the crucifix hanging on my wall, my entire being was slowly but steadily flooded with a delicious and ineffable peace. All my anxieties, all my dreads and confusions were hushed by the flow of gentle majesty streaming from Heaven. This is not the sort of state and experience that just happens to one out of the blue, or that even happens when beholding a lovely sunrise on the way to work or in harking to the chords of a beautiful piece of music. This is a kind of serenity that transcends any natural faculty for responding to loveliness or glory. It is the calling card of God; instantly recognizable and forever unforgettable to the human understanding, whether one has just first experienced it or has known it several times, as I have done. And though it was no locution – no audible voice – this entreaty was expressed in pure thought that originated entirely outside of my mind; it made contact with my mental processes which instantly understood it and translated it into English for me, but it was utterly foreign to my brain. I have never known a sweeter alien presence.
It was a perfect moment, and though I have no children and can’t know for sure, the experience may be analogous to a parent holding and gazing upon their newborn for the first time. The cosmos halts for you out of respect, and there is nothing but serenity and the calmest joy. Such beatitude was mine when Love Itself made this request of me, without explanation and without command. I initially accepted – as only a psychopath would refuse in such a situation – but it was only a matter of time when I relapsed again and again over the course of several months. However, by the middle of the summer, my frustrations and rebellions began to ebb until this last resistance that I am describing, which died that Christmas. Since then, I initially merely resigned myself to celibacy, then grew to accept it, then to embrace it and all the happiness and freedom that has attended it. It isn’t as though difficulty has fled my life – as no life can ever be without it – but the life that I have been offered by God and which I finally chose to take on has brought me great joy and fulfillment, and the difficulties (which to me seem far less onerous than those which are suffered in a marriage) I can bear with patience, that is, when I choose to be patient.
The remembrance of that perfect moment of God reaching out to me and inviting me to take a step forward into an obscure future, bereft of what I greatly cherished but pregnant with blessings that I might one day realize, allied itself to that early Christmas morning with the celebration of the beauty and glory of God’s humility and earnest thirst to be involved with humankind. His incarnation, His life, His passion and death emphatically underwrite the privilege He has to legislate and direct our lives, for He lived as one of us and has our very best interests at heart, inscrutable though His grand means and purposes are. When we scream for an answer for the reasons why we suffer as we do – whether in general or particularly when we suffer by following Him – no clarity is revealed to us, no lacunae in philosophy are glowingly filled in. Instead, He shows us nail-scarred palms and a back ravaged by whips. He is no stranger to agony nor is He callous to the hardship He asks us to endure for His sake, and He offers a life that can unfold a meaning to our struggles and pain in the course of time, trophies of honor to display alongside the treasures of joy and fulfillment we accumulate along the way of following after Him. His right to tell us how to live our lives – or rather, as in my case, to urgently plead that we heed His requests – was first purchased at Bethlehem, not by conquest or by the arrogant boasts of Herculean achievement, but in the tenderness and frailty of birth and infancy. His humanity means that we are never alone in our human plight, His suffering means that ours has a purpose, and His resurrection and ascension mean we are never at a loss for triumph and life in abundance.
