This is the full text of a chapter from my book-in-progress, Our Life in Christ: Orthodox Spirituality for Gay Men. We published excerpts from this chapter in August of last year.
Born this Way! Not a Choice! Love is Love!
Rallying chants like these arise in reaction to the oppression we and our other LGBTQ siblings often endure from family, social circle, faith community, society, the state. They foster a bond of community among queer people by reaffirming the social and religious legitimacy of who we are. We know they convince no one within or outside the Church whose heart is hardened against us.
For us Orthodox, the mystery of human sexuality is rooted in something deeper than catchphrases from either side of the affirmation vs. 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.
We can parse our anthropological doctrine succinctly: first, the creation of the human person in the divine image, with the vocation to acquire the divine likeness; second, the fall of man from his primordial innocence; third, the inextinguishable goodness of every human person; fourth, the permeation and action of uncreated grace in all things created, human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate; fifth, the reciprocal movement of incarnation and deification, that is, of God becoming man by nature so that man can become God by grace; and sixth, the co-seating of man within the inner circle of the Holy Trinity in a mode of being equal to God, the meaning of Christ’s ascension into heaven and sitting in His inseparable divine and human natures at the right hand of the Father. From these, our life in Christ springs and flourishes.
To reduce sexuality to a soulless catalogue of dos and don’ts, cans and cannots, misses the fundamental point of how our erotic impulses, even in our fallenness, reflect the mystical image of divine eros implanted in our souls and bodies “in the beginning.”
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 orientations and gender identities 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.
The assertion that we are born gay, or created gay by God, gives voice to many of us having no memory of not being attracted to other boys or men from a very early age, in our crushes, our fantasies, our dreams, our desires, our experimentation with other boys, our first kiss. Most of us can attest to becoming aware of our attractions by age five or even younger, long before we can “choose” a “lifestyle.” Anyone who denies the reality of childhood sexuality has selective amnesia.
Nonetheless, to insist on our birth or creation as gay dismisses discourses around nature vs. nurture and essentialism vs. social constructionism, scientific evidence, the absence of sexual orientation in newborns, gay men who recall becoming flushed as young boys in the presence of both attractive males and females, the fluidity of sexual orientation in queer theory, men who speak of becoming gay after being straight, men who identify as gay but have sex with women, men who identify as straight but have sex with men; and finally, the premise of Orthodox anthropology that we always already know ourselves only in our fallen state. In every aspect of the human condition, not just the sexual, none of us is as God created us to be.
Our first parents were brought from nonexistence into being in an innocent state of incompleteness or not-yetness insofar as not fully deified. From their natural progression in deification, they fell. Our not-yetness has become our fallenness. The whole of the human race has become afflicted with the disease of sin and death. Out of the depths of divine love undiminished by human sin, God has become man to heal and save us as the Physician of our souls and bodies. The healing of human nature begins with Christ’s incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension into heaven, and sending of the Holy Spirit. It actuates in each of us personally in baptism, chrismation, and the Eucharist, members of one another in the ecclesial body of Christ as we await together the fulness of healing in the resurrection on the last day.
The healing of our sexuality of whatever orientation leads, not to its obliteration, but to its increscent transformation by grace into the likeness of divine eros.
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, a fact for which we have no need to apologize. 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, casual 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 fallen natural capacities.
Yet, for the human will in collaboration with divine grace, all things are possible.
ORTHODOXY IN DIALOGUE 