During my leave of absence from my PhD thesis on Father Pavel Florensky’s Orthodox theology of same-sex love, I’m writing a small book entitled Our Life in Christ: Orthodox Spirituality for Gay Men. Here below I offer a few excerpts that I hope will contribute to the debate between Father John Jillions and Edith Humphrey on the subject of sexual and gender diversity in human nature in light of Orthodox faith and praxis. I’m hoping the book will be ready for submission to a publisher before the new year.

For reference, Jillions’ and Humphrey’s relevant blog posts in chronological order are found here, here, and here. I recommend that you read them before the present offering if you have not already.

SS. Theodore of Tyre and Theodore Stratelates (14th century)

Holy Transfiguration Monastery (Zrze, North Macedonia)

Our Life in Christ: Orthodox Spirituality for Gay Men

In offering this little book to my gay Orthodox brothers, I extend an invitation to explore together what our common life in Christ might look like. This anthology of brief reflections addresses many of the themes specific to our lives as gay men and how we might transform them into His life. The Orthodox Church knows, not individual spiritualities, but a single spirituality embodied uniquely in a multiplicity of persons, each of us according to our station in life, in communion with the whole body of the Church past, present, future, and in the age to come. In its essence, if not in every detail of its praxis, the spirituality of the hesychast, the monk and the nun, the partnered and the unpartnered, the person of same-sex, dual-sex, and opposite-sex orientation, the transgender and the cisgender, the intersex, the genderqueer and the genderfluid, comprises but one spirituality. Orthodox spirituality is inseparable from the experiential nature of Orthodox doctrine, our triadology, christology, pneumatology, anthropology, cosmology, soteriology. The Church’s spiritual tradition flows like a living stream from our conception of salvation as becoming more fully human, more fully ourselves, more fully divine by grace, to the measure that the Spirit transfigures us more radiantly into the image and likeness of God shining forth from the human face of His divine Son.

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In her spiritual tradition the Church gives us a canon of life, as it were, not in any legalistic sense of rules and regulations, but in the holistic sense of a measuring rod to guide us step by step, signposts along the way for all Orthodox Christians, adapted to the personal realities of each as we walk side by side on our shared path to God. John Donne wrote four hundred years ago that no man is an island unto himself. How profoundly we know this to be true, who in baptism have put on one and the same Christ and in the Holy Mysteries become one body with Him and one body with one another in Him.

Our canon of life possesses an unwritten lexicon. This consists of foundational terms familiar to all of us in the Church, embedded in liturgy, prayer, the writings of the saints. Certain of these have become poisoned for us gay men and our other LGBTQ siblings because relentlessly weaponized against us. Their distortion provokes trigger reactions in many of us whose Orthodox life has been crippled by spiritual PTSD after years of pastoral abuse at the hands of the Church’s bad faith actors, especially among the craven episcopate and celebrity clergy, online, in print, in person, in synodal proclamations to cheap applause, in interviews with television personalities of dubious IQ and mouths agape. For our own sanity, we have little choice but to abandon the fundamentals of Orthodox spirituality so egregiously misrepresented. One of my hopes for this book is that we might reclaim these terms together and reinvest them with their properly positive connotations.   

Two of these conspicuous for their weaponization are closely intertwined: repentance and asceticism. Yet, correctly understood, they form the bedrock of life in Christ for all Orthodox Christians, our infinitesimally small but indispensable human effort in collaboration with the bottomless ocean of uncreated grace indwelling our souls and bodies at every moment. We are not passive recipients of our salvation, but coworkers with God.

Repentance and asceticism have little to do with individual acts of “penance” and nothing at all with a guilt complex and its suffocating scrupulosity. Drawn to the luminescence of the Gospel’s upward call to become God by grace, we embrace repentance and asceticism as a new ethos of life, a continual change of mind and heart, the renewal of our innermost selves, the blossoming of love for God, neighbour, and self, the deepening of prayer, the growth of humility, the discovery of the heavenly kingdom within us and among us, the purification of our bodies and minds, the transformation of the stubbornly resistant, self-centered ego into the effulgent likeness of divine self-emptying.         

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Asceticism as a way of life entails a gradual taking off of the old man and putting on of the new, a reorientation of our relationship with God, our intimates and acquaintances, those we encounter in passing, the hungry and the homeless with hands outstretched along the wayside of our comings and goings, the racially, socially, economically, and politically marginalized, our own selves, our speech, our emotions, our money and possessions, our food, our clothes, our bodies, the bodies of others, our sexual desires. It has nothing to do with a desiccated moralism, with self-hatred or conversion therapy, with the too often fatal torture of trying to become someone or something we are not. Authentic asceticism refines our inward and outward selves and makes us aglow with the image and likeness of divine love for all.

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For us Orthodox, the mystery of human sexuality is rooted in something deeper than catchphrases from either side of the affirmation versus condemnation chasm. The sexual dimension of human nature falls within the scope of theological anthropology, that is, what it means theologically to be human. This, in turn, shapes our spirituality as Orthodox gay men.

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To reduce sexuality to a soulless catalogue of dos and don’ts, cans and cannots, misses the fundamental point. Likewise missing the point is the false question of what “causes” same-sex attraction. What causes opposite-sex attraction? A newborn is neither gay nor straight, but thrives on sensual stimulation from skin contact with everything indiscriminately, from people of all genders to the family pet. Our hierarchs and pastors will do well to expand their knowledge of the interface between genetic, environmental, psychological, evolutionary, and other factors determinative of a person’s developing sexuality from conception to full awareness.

The faux piety of modern Orthodox anti-intellectualism notwithstanding, the Church’s tradition admits of no dichotomy between “sacred” and “secular” knowledge. All knowledge comes from God, whether empirical or theological, scientific or religious, through human exertion or divine revelation. Our theological inquiry into human sexuality cannot be undertaken in ignorance of, or in opposition to, the witness of the empirical sciences, psychology, queer theory, ethnography, personal experience. These shed light on the Church’s theology and vice versa in a fruitful symbiosis, yet without our theology becoming subservient to them.

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The healing of our sexuality of whatever orientation leads, not to its obliteration, but to its increscent transformation into the likeness of divine eros.

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An integral dimension of human createdness seldom addressed by Orthodox theology is the indivisibly dual nature of our creation as unique persons. In one sense, the human race in its entirety and each of us personally were created with our first parents in the Garden. At the same time, God creates us as individual social subjects from the union of a particular ovum and a particular sperm, in a particular social, historical, cultural, and linguistic matrix, within a particular complex of variably intersecting forces that shape our persona moment by moment, consciously, subconsciously, unconsciously. We who are created by God create ourselves from the natural and nurtural raw materials, as it were, that He gives us from the beginning of life in the womb until the completion of our time on earth. The unfolding of our lives day by day constitutes an act of self-creation in continuum with, indeed in collaboration with, our unceasing creation by God. Here we are speaking of the natural sequence of every human life, independent of religious belief or unbelief.

This lifelong process of self-creation necessarily entails choices, of which we gay men have no need to exculpate ourselves. We choose to be gay inasmuch as we love ourselves for who we are. We choose to be gay inasmuch as we would choose not to become straight if we could. We choose how to live our sexuality, whether in abstinence, serial encounters, polyamory, or monogamy. We Orthodox gay men choose to be gay inasmuch as we embrace with joy the spiritual authenticity of our sexuality and its grace-filled potentiality transfigured in Christ.  

This is not to deny the reality of sin and the need for redemption. Nor do we ignore that love is love, but lust only a shadow of love. In the fallen conditions of human life, the indelible imprint of the divine image in our souls and bodies inclines as much to take wrong turns as right turns, to commit sin as to do good, to miss the mark as to hit the mark. The divine likeness remains beyond the reach of our natural capacities.

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The Church’s spiritual praxis places us continually in the presence of God who is always already present. We seek the One who is already here. We each stand before God as the first among sinners, not because we are gay, but because the spiritual man sees his own transgressions and does not judge his brother. God comes to us, not in fireworks or religious euphoria masquerading as grace, but in a still, small voice. Little by little, without knowing how or when, we ourselves start to become the very presence of God glimmering in the tiny corner of the universe assigned to each of us for a time.  

Giacomo Sanfilippo is an Orthodox Christian, PhD candidate in Theological Studies at Trinity College in the University of Toronto, and founding editor of Orthodoxy in Dialogue.