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<\/a>What would I know about vocation? I\u2019m 28, a faithful Catholic and gay. A little explanation of that last part: It would be more accurate to say that I have same-sex attraction than that I\u2019m gay. My attraction to men is deep and, as far as I can tell, permanent, but I\u2019m celibate. I sometimes use the word \u201cgay\u201d as a convenient shorthand, but it carries a lot of political and even theological baggage, and doesn\u2019t really apply to me, because of my celibacy and for other reasons that I\u2019ll try to make clear below.<\/p>\nThe upshot is that I\u2019m unmarried and likely to remain that way. I\u2019m not discerning a vocation to the priesthood or the religious life, either. I\u2019ve been there, done that, and I\u2019ve let the Lord know he can do whatever he wants with me \u2014 up to and including sending me to Calcutta or the Bronx \u2014 but that if he wants me to be a priest or a monk, he\u2019ll have to do something drastic. I\u2019ve spent a long time checking my internal compasses, and none of them point in that direction.<\/p>\n
So what then? I know what not to do: Don\u2019t believe the gay activists, don\u2019t water down the faith, don\u2019t pretend homosexual actions aren\u2019t sinful. Don\u2019t have a boyfriend; don\u2019t get married. Don\u2019t, don\u2019t, don\u2019t. But nobody ever had a vocation that consisted in not doing something. Marriage, the priesthood, the religious life \u2014 these involve definite actions, definite commitments.<\/p>\n
Parched, despondent<\/strong><\/p>\nI\u2019d like to give a road map to people like me \u2014 I mean not only other men and women with SSA, but everyone called to the single life \u2014 but it\u2019s difficult to make a map when you\u2019re still on the ground. At least I\u2019m not lost in the desert any more, parched and exhausted like I was through my teens and early 20s. I\u2019m heading toward civilization now, or better yet toward Zion, but there\u2019s a lot of rugged landscape between here and there. The best I can do is to tell you where I\u2019ve been and what I\u2019ve learned.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s good to start on the edge of the desert. I\u2019ll pick age 14, because that\u2019s when I first started thinking of myself as gay. At the time, I understood exactly two things by the word. The first was that I was totally, irrevocably different from other boys. The second was that being gay and Catholic meant a long, dreary life of self-repression. So I believed at the time.<\/p>\n
That was the beginning of my vocation as a professional sufferer, a position I held until somewhere in my early 20s. The darkness gathered around me, and I let it in, and was even proud of it. My suffering meant I was deep, sensitive and tragic. I don\u2019t mean to downplay the experience; when I call it a desert, I\u2019m being poetic but I\u2019m not exaggerating. This was Death Valley in July, except when it was Antarctica. But in more literal terms, the darkness consisted of these things: intense self-consciousness; near-constant feelings of isolation; pervasive regret at what I considered a wasted past; an absolute inability to live in the present; and terror at the prospect of the long, lonely future.<\/p>\n
The technical name for the condition is despondency. I call it despondency, rather than depression, because depression is a state of the mind, the emotions, and even the body; whereas despondency is a state of the will. It comprises a particular response to depression. Depression doesn\u2019t necessary constitute a roadblock to one\u2019s vocation. Despondency does, because we are judged on the basis of what we do rather than what we feel.<\/p>\n
What I was doing was precisely nothing, because that was all I believed I could do. That\u2019s what despondency is. I thought I was doing something, namely living through the suffering that I believed was my vocation, that I even believed God wanted for me. And maybe I was justified in believing these things, given the premises I had accepted. It\u2019s just that my premises were very, very wrong.<\/p>\n
Leaving behind self-pity<\/strong><\/p>\nIn the middle of my desert I encountered a different set of premises, from a variety of sources: mostly my spiritual director, Father T, but also from good books (\u201cGrowth Into Manhood,\u201d by Alan Medinger), good organizations (People Can Change), good experiences (three months in Peru), and good friends (you know who you are). Up until that point I had believed that the statement \u201cI am gay\u201d is the same sort of statement as \u201cI am male\u201d or \u201cI am human.\u201d Homosexuality was supposed to be an essential, rather than an accidental, part of me, just as deep as gender or species, or deeper.<\/p>\n
This idea comes from the gay rights movement, but an awful lot of Christians believe it too. It is utter poison. If gay is what I am (or \u201cwho I am,\u201d as the saying goes), then Catholicism really does require a mode of existence in direct contradiction to the deepest parts of me. That didn\u2019t make sense to me, because I had always understood the Christian life as the only thing that could fulfill the deepest parts of me. But I was still trying to believe both things. No wonder I was lost.<\/p>\n
If, on the other hand, my homosexuality is a part of me, rather than being my nature \u2014 something I have, rather than something I am \u2014 then things are different. It became apparent that I could change. I don\u2019t mean stop liking men and start liking women. I mean everything else: my self-imposed vocation of suffering, my self-pity, my self-isolation, my chronic fear and regret and loneliness. Next to those things, a little celibacy isn\u2019t too bad.<\/p>\n
Ongoing journey<\/strong><\/p>\nI discovered that I had a lot of work ahead of me. But I also discovered that there was something worth working for.<\/p>\n
This space is too small to tell about my journey out of the desert. I only want to say that it is possible, that it didn\u2019t take as long as I thought, and that it\u2019s good to be out. And I want to say a few things about what comes afterward; what a vocation entails, and how the single life can be one.<\/p>\n
When I was in the desert, I thought that the journey out of it would only end when I was dead. That\u2019s true, sort of, because no place on earth is final; our hearts are restless until they rest in God. But I didn\u2019t expect ever to be doing this well, and I didn\u2019t expect to have to figure what to do with myself besides feeling bad. Some gay activists build their identity around being gay; I had built mine around melancholy. When the melancholy started to dry up, the temptation was to sit still and tell myself I had arrived.<\/p>\n
But just as surely as negative action (not-having-sex, not-getting-married) doesn\u2019t constitute a vocation, inaction doesn\u2019t constitute a vocation, either. The universal vocation is the call to love, and love always involves action \u2014 not nice feelings, not happy dreams, but doing real things for real people.<\/p>\n
I look at the married people I know, and at the priests and monks and nuns, and what I see is that they constantly spend themselves. Self-donation isn\u2019t something they do on weekends, or when they have the time. It\u2019s the air they breathe. I look at them and I see grains of wheat, falling deep into the ground and bursting open into fruitfulness. Celibacy doesn\u2019t mean not being fertile; it just means bearing a different kind of fruit.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s one difference between me and them. For them, there was a moment beyond which they were definitively no longer their own. Vows were made, rings were exchanged, rites were performed; they are different now.<\/p>\n
Is something like that necessary for me? I don\u2019t know yet. It might be easier if it were. There\u2019s something to be said for leaps of faith, for making vows and closing off options. I have options. There\u2019s Opus Dei. There\u2019s the Franciscans \u2014 third order, of course. Or I could just keep doing what I\u2019m doing: saying my morning offering, uniting my prayers and works and joys and sufferings to those of Jesus, trying to live in the presence of God.<\/p>\n
But whatever I do, I can\u2019t live for myself forever. The grain of wheat has to die and be buried if it\u2019s going to bloom. God brought me out of the desert, but he has a destination in mind, and wherever it is, I haven\u2019t arrived. I\u2019m just getting started.<\/p>\n
Steve Gershom, a pseudonym, blogs at <\/span>stevegershom.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Steve Gershom (a pseudonym), the author of the following essay, is a faithful Catholic who has abandoned the homosexual life-style. Gershom affirms many points made earlier on the AOI Observer: the term gay, or even homosexual describes behavior and should never be construed ontologically, as a constituent of self-identity; homosexual actions are always sinful; the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11172,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1784],"tags":[11,1244,1683],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11171"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11171"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11193,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11171\/revisions\/11193"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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