I am now 32 years old, and describe myself as lesbian, feminist and a Christian. I am also, as of Easter 2000, a Catholic. It is hard to be a Christian in the lesbian community, and hard to be lesbian in the Christian world. This page will hopefully describe how I got to this point in my on-going journey. So.. if you're sitting comfortably.. I'll begin.
I was raised in an agnostic household - my parents left me and my younger sister to make up our own minds about religion and the like. I became a christian when I was 12, through the Christian Union at my school. Part of it I think was the friendship and acceptance I found there. But I got "sucked in" with all the enthusiasm of a new convert. At age 15 I discovered the house church/charismatic movement, got baptised in water and with the Holy Spirit, started speaking in tongues, and totally immersed myself in the Christian sub-culture. I read only christian books, listened only to christian music, had only christian friends, and church and church meetings took up almost all of my free time (I shudder to think of it now, but I guess on some level, it was the refuge/escape I needed from my family then).
I never dared think about sexuality - the churches I went to considered homosexuality a sin - I even have a tape of one sermon where it is included in a list of "abominations in God's eyes" just above bestiality and below incest.
So I had boyfriends, even had sex with two of them.. And this is where it would be so easy to say that it "just didn't seem right", but that wouldn't be the entire truth. There was a lot of other stuff going on in my life, especially with regard to sex. Things in my past had left me feeling like sex was all that I was good for, and that if I wanted someone to like me, then I had to relate to them sexually. This affected my relationships back then with men, and also carried on into my relationships with women, until I was able to identify it, and start working on finding other ways of valuing myself, and putting sex in its proper place. The main turning point that started me thinking about sexual preferences - specifically my sexual preferences - came around 1991. I was working on getting my life together; had started a university course in speech pathology and things generally were looking up. I'd also left the fundamentalist church, and had found refuge in a place called Holy Joes.
Holy Joes (which I kept on attending on a semi-regular basis until I moved away from London) is a group of Christians who have pretty much all come from evangelical backgrounds, and found themselves feeling more and more isolated in their churches. It was started by a guy called Dave Tomlinson, who used to be a real big leader in the UK Charismatic movement, until he saw that a lot of people were isolated by the "subculture" thing, or were leaving because of the church structure/the worship/the fact that they had questions that they were told they couldn't ask...
So it's a church for people who don't like church. They meet in a pub on a Tuesday night (for anyone in the London area who wants to visit, it's the Bag of Nails pub, near Victoria station. Meetings start around 8pm and go on til closing time); people sit round with their pints, those who smoke, can; if you don't like the discussion, you can go into the main bar of the pub (We meet in an upstairs room), if you want to get another drink at any point, you can... the only main rules are that we respect other people's views, and listen to whoever is speaking at the time. Evenings vary betwen debates; Bible Studies and "sacred space" worship times. It's a place where you can say anything.. ask anything, and no one will look at you in horror, or say "as a christian you shouldn't be asking that". For more details, and an up-to-date(ish) programme of events, see their small, but perfectly formed web page. Dave's written a book called "Post-evangelicalism" which pretty much sums up my faith for a long time, and the journey I have been through.. I don't know if it's available worldwide, but if you can identify with any of what you've read so far, then I recommend you try to get hold of it. It's published in the UK by SPCK/Triangle Press. Holy Joes has been a real lifeline for me on this journey, and for many others as well.
Anyway, back to the story :)
In 1992, a person who had been a friend, a mentor and an inspiration to me died, suddenly of an asthma attack, the day after his 42nd birthday. I went to his funeral, and remember clearly sitting in the church, which was packed with people mourning but celebrating their faith, and thinking "I don't want to believe in a God who would do this sort of thing, and who would take away someone as incredible as Steve Fairnie. OK. I don't believe it any more"... it was that cold a decision.
So, the next step of thought was "I'm now going to go out and do all the things that I've wanted to do for aaaages, but haven't because I thought that God would strike me down"... so I went out, had my tarot cards read, my horoscope charted, and I phoned the lesbian and gay switchboard and talked to a real live lesbian!
The impulse to do that was more of a realisation of something that had been growing inside me for a long time... that when I was watching films, or reading books, it was the lesbian scenes that intrigued me, that aroused me... that I could imagine myself with another woman.. that I wanted to know what it was like. It captured my interest, and connected with a deep inner part of me in a way that the heterosexual bits never did, despite all my trying.
And that was the start of my coming out process. For the first year or so, I deliberatly ignored anything to do with Christianity. My first lover was into tarot reading and witchcraft, and mind games... so we didn't last too long as a couple... but long enough for me to realise that this was the piece that had been missing from my life. I guess that you could almost say that after that I became a "fundamentalist lesbian", as I got more and more involved in lesbian action and politics. And yes, for a time, I only listened to "women's" music, I only read lesbian books... but I did keep the same circle of friends I'd had the years before.. the Holy Joes crowd, even though I wasn't going to their meetings. That stopped me having nothing but lesbian friends.
But somehow God didn't let go of me (and ten or more years of christianity can't be thrown away in a matter of months). At Pride I picked up a leaflet from the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), and, six months later, I phoned the number there. I think that the impulse was one of wanting to get back to something that had been so important to me for so long - without wanting to lose what I had only recently found. So I talked to Rev Jean White at the MCC, and she lent me a copy of Troy Perry's book "Do Not Be Afraid Anymore". So I read, studied, and began to pray again. I went back to the Bible, and started to look at the differing interpretations of the passages that I had previously only ever heard used to condemn homosexuality.
And slowly, gradually, I began to see that it was possible to be Lesbian and Christian. That my sexuality was a part of me, a part that God created and intended for good. I became a regular worshipper at MCC, and enjoyed their use of inclusive language, and let myself dare to believe that God can be seen as feminine as well as masculine. I started praying to God as "she" (and to someone from a fundamentalist background, that is almost heresy!), and found that I was able to feel a new closeness to God, and was aware much more of "God-in-me". And as if to confirm the rightness of my path, a month after I started attending MCC, my wildest dreams came true when I met a beautiful woman who was also lesbian and a Christian. And we have been working on a relationship ever since, with ups and downs, good times and scary ones, but all the while trusting that God has brought us together.
I'd say it was that combination of the intellectual reasoning, and the incarnational experience that brought be back to using the word christian to describe myself and my faith. And the encouragement and spirituality of my partner that kept me growing. I left MCC in the end because I felt that I wanted to worship as part of the whole family of God - a church which consisted solely of lesbians and gays, while affirming for a while, felt as if it were missing an awful lot. I ended back at Holy Joe's for a while, and then, mainly through the influence of my partner, found myself looking seriously at the Catholic faith.
The first impetus for this was the warm and loving welcome I received when I first went to church with my partner - the church she has been part of for many years. The priest gave me a huge hug, and simply said "Welcome home." And that's what that parish has become for me. Home. The joy of worshipping alongside my partner, her constant encouragement for me to become my best self, being a part of the music group there, making friends ... I'm running out of words, but "home" sums it up best.
I've also found the Catholic Community at the university where I am now to be nothing but welcoming and accepting. Even if the priest doesn't agree with my choices, his concern is for my spiritual well-being, and he's certainly become someone I respect and admire and like over the years.
I think that the final thing that really made it feel right was a growing understanding of the sacraments. That the presence of God isn't something that you have to try and feel, or believe in hard enough - Jesus is present at Mass because He's promised he will be. No matter how full of faith I'm feeling, no matter how much even the priest believes... God is there. And I can feed on him. It's incredibly reassuring, especially after so many years of trying desparately hard to 'feel something' during wosrhip services. This doesn't depend on me. It's all God's doing.
When I understood the teaching of the Catholic Church on conscience, the final piece fell into place. The Church has always said that, when it comes down to it, you will be judged on your conscience, and how well you obeyed that. Now, it's up to us to inform our consciences - by knowing what the Bible says, what the Church teaches, by prayer... but also by knowing what science and psychology are discovering, and what people we respect have to say on the issue ... and, as such, I can say that in my relationship with my partner, we are both obeying our consciences and doing our best to live our lives centred on God, knowing that all our love, all our life, comes from him. And we both always are open to the idea that we might be wrong. So far, we have seen God work through us as a couple, and, if we are to judge by the fruits of our relationship, then we are to judge that it is good.
I can't begin to list the blessings that we've seen from our relationship, both individually and together as a couple. We're both musicians, we co-write together, we make a great team ministry wise (I'm good at being patient with people, and listening to them, and accepting them right where they are. She's slightly more inclined to be directive, but has great insights and ways of communicating them, and ways to move forward and get unstuck.) I love her, she has brought nothing but growth and goodness and God into my life. She brings out the best in me, and I hope I do the same for her. That's why some of the hurtful comments sting: I can't imagine calling our love "intrinsically disordered" or "a moral evil". As far as we can see - we fit eachother.
Together in church, we work on the "meat before idols" principle - while we know that we are living in good conscience before God as much as possible, other people may feel differently. In the same way as Paul encourages those who are OK with eating meat offered to idols not to do it in front of people who don't feel that Christians should be doing this, we also try, where possible, not to be obvious about the nature of our relationship in front of those who might be offended. This isn't about shame or hiding - pretty much all of our friends know the nature of our relationship… and if some people in the church are wondering about why I've been coming over to visit my "good friend" for seven years now… well, I think a lot of the time, people see what they want to see.
I hope that what I have shared here has been helpful, or, at the very least, thought provoking. If you have any comments, please email me. I look forward to hearing from others on this journey. There's some very good resources at Bridges Across: a web project which aims to bridge the divide between christians on this issue. It's not about convincing anyone that they're wrong or right - it's about listening respectfully to eachother's truths.
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