Andrew Tatusko started following me on Twitter. i checked out his blog and enjoyed it. So i began following him on Twitter. He seems to be a really kind and cool guy and we share the same illness, Lyme Disease. So, when i found a post he had written at Queer Messages, my respect grew even more for this great guy! His vulnerability in sharing his journey and how he came to his conclusions make a poignant story. This is beautiful and gives me hope for people, even Rick
Warren! i certainly could relate to what he said his sister went
through with finding healing and peace! Thanks, Andrew!
"Why I Am Gay Friendly"
I hated gay people.
This was a sentiment often covered up by statements like, “I am
being compassionate for their eternal status with God”, or “Hate the
sin, love the sinner”, or “God did not create us to have sex with
people of the same gender”. I was a harbinger of repentance, of purity,
and of chastity for those who had succumbed to the whims of desire, a
fallen culture, and the poor misguided choice of the psychologically
needy to seek out someone of the same gender to fulfill their dark
sexual desire. I had a very clear and indubitable assumption that a
“practicing” homosexual could not receive Christ and those who believed
they had, were deceiving themselves. After all did not John say, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us”?
But these were statements to absolve me of my own guilt. The truth
is that I hated gay people because they were a disease to the world and
the the Church. Gay people were pedophiles, sexual addicts, and the
source of the AIDS epidemic - something God must have brought upon us
to make us aware…of them.
Then my sister came out and everything began to change.
As with many in my position, there was a clear period of mourning.
At first it was because my unconditional love for her was in clear
conflict with what I believed to be the Truth of the Bible and what God
had clearly revealed to humanity regarding our behavior, and how we
ought to respond to the act of salvation that Christ performed. Her
lifestyle did not fit within my picture, and I had to find a way to
resolve the conflict.
It took me a while to reach the point where I could even say that I
still loved her, but I did not love her lifestyle and could never
affirm it. Homosexuality to me was no better than an addiction. Sure
addiction is a disease and no one chooses to be addicted to
anything. But a choice has to be made at some point to engage in
behaviors that lead to addiction. And addiction comes as a result of a
lot of environmental variables that make it more likely. However, it is
this very connection between addiction and homosexuality that caused me
to doubt my idea of what homosexuality was for me at the time.
You see, my sister was a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. My
family is loaded with people who have self-medicated in order to
compensate for chemical imbalances and too much stress probably as a
result of mild OCD issues and clinical anxiety. I literally watched her
walk the path of self-destruction and pain as an addict. What I did not
know is that her own struggles with her sexuality were participating in
her sense of pain and not helping her situation at all.
Her recovery from addiction was accompanied by her coming out.
Learning that these two events were irreducibly related was not easy
and was very hard for me to visualize. Her own psychological well-being
depended in large part on her reconciliation of her sexuality with her
identity. Rather than her coming out being a sign of self-destruction,
it was a sign of healing - evidence that she was OK with the world. I
could either reject that evidence even though it was obvious and clear,
or accept that evidence as valid and change my picture of Truth. The
latter would allow me to love my sister unconditionally, the former
would constrict my love for her with self-imposed conditions.
I had to reconcile my understanding of unconditional love with the
conditions that lead to my sister’s own healing process from years of
pain and addiction. So the question slowly moved from How can I love
her and hate her sin?, to How can I love her for who she is? And it was
this question that forced me to accept and radically change my
world-view to see that homosexuality is not a sin, but a gift.
If God truly is love, and if my sister could find love, is not God
an active participant in that love too? If my sister could receive
Christ, truly and only after coming out, does that not suggest that
homosexuality is not an aberration of nature, but as integral to the
fabric of our world as heterosexuality? See, the evidence that the love
of God can be released in the context of homosexual love, or what I now
prefer to call gender-neutral love, forced me to change my ideals just
as the clear evidence that evolution is real and the universe is 13.5
billion years in the making forced me to change my ideas of what
Genesis really must mean.
After 10 years of struggling with the question, my sister is now
entering her candidacy to be a minister of Word and Sacrament in the
Episcopal Church. She asked my wife and I to participate in her
exchange of vows with her partner as witnesses. My wife and I are the
only ones in either family to have been there for that ceremony in
Toronto. Her sexuality has been a witness to the redemptive power of
God’s love, not the myth of a God who will punish persons who have
sexual orientations other than heterosexual.
Not to affirm the presence of God in her relationship, is to deny
the very existence of God for if God is love, God is with them and
creating them to be better servants of the Kingdom now, that it may
become fulfilled in our midst.
__ __ __
About The Author:
Drew Tatusko is an academic administrator and instructor at Mount Aloysius College in Cresson, PA. He has an M.Div. (1999) and a Th.M (2000) from Princeton Theological Seminary.
He lives with his wife, two sons, two dogs, two cats, and the
occasional foster dog in Duncansville, PA. He graduated from
Westminster College (PA) with a B.A. in religion (1996). He is
completing his Ph.D. in Higher Education from Seton Hall University and
posts frequently to his blog Notes From Off-Center. He is currently an elder at his church, an affiliate with the PC(USA).
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