Sarx

HE NEW MILLENNIUM Brought me to several surprising changes all at once. My job at the California Institute of Integral Studies allowed me to take classes at a discounted rate so I used my benefit to finish my BA. The BA Completion Programme at CIIS spent a good deal of time discussing why it was that I’d not finished in the first place. I’ve compared this to group therapy: 15 people sitting in a circle, twice a month, discussing things that needed to change in order to let one finish. What changes in life had happened since one failed to finish? What was new now that caused one to want to finish were, before, one only wanted to run away?

At the same time, I was wrestling with the vocational discernment team at St Gregory of Nyssa Parish. Was I called to the priesthood? I’ve also compared this to group therapy: once or twice a month, 15 people sitting in a circle, discussing things that need to change in order to let one finish. Except where CIIS was group therapy, the Discernment Team felt like working with 15 therapists.

These two therapeutic processes played out in a complex way on my own internal dialogue which was, at the time, covering a number of mid-life issues. (I was 36 in 2000.) It felt like my life was looping itself (like it does today, to be honest). Somehow I had been dealing with the same set of questions since moving to SF in 1997 and it was all coming to a head. What was a relationship? What was GOd? What was I doing in Church? What was I doing in bars? What was I doing in bed? What was I doing at the altar? What was love? Why did men constantly treat me like a cute, huggable (but not dateable/marriageable) Teddy Bear? Why was I about as rootless as I could be?

The month I first moved to SF, I met a man in a bar. For the next 5 years we flirted off and on as he moved to Sacramento and then Seattle. Then we forgot about each other. We met, again, in December of 2002 – just as I was planning to move to Asheville, NC. Things continued to evolve and soon my own desire to leave SF was struggling with my desire to stay with RJ. My issues with theology and sex were coming up more and more and it was harder to deal with any of them.

While becoming Orthodox was, I still believe, the right thing, nearly all the rest of the decisions made in those succeeding months were based on my own unwillingness to communicate in-person with anyone. Writing was about the only method I had, but my blog had no audience – certainly not the people to whom I needed to talk.

Follow this: I needed to have several serious conversations over the course of two years, with my discernment team, my college classes, my partner, my confessor. But I was afraid to talk to them. So I used my website, my blog to vent. For example: for a while I had a “book blog” where I posted as-it-happened reactions to the books we were reading in class. These were filled with all the usual liberal arguments, all the usual clap trap about peace with no Jesus, love with no sin and sin with no guilt, so I vented a lot. At the same time my reaction to things in my parish community were much the same. But ididnt tell anyone. I was afraid they wouldn’t let me be a priest. But after converting to Orthodoxy – in a parish with several gay couples – I was, myself, continuing to struggle with the difference between things as they were and “things as they should be” in my head. Dating a man – then living with a man in my own apartment on Minna Street, wanting to leave, wanting to stay, wanting to have to stop wanting. I kept writing about the people I should be talking to… And got an audience of people that were also venting about the same people.

A curious transubstantiation took place.

The more I said the things my audience wanted to hear the more applause I got. The more applause I got the more I wanted to say those things. And wanting to say those things is the same as believing them. Life soon follows wanting. My own sense of self was changing. I wasn’t a conservative but I played on on the Internet.

This is the mindset (in hindsight) of the person who wrote “I was in Hell” whilst living in a passive agressive argument with his soon to be ex-lover in SF. (Please read all the follow-up posts and comments over there.) I earned $200 for this piece of writing, the only piece of my prose ever to get published-for-pay.

It’s interesting to note: “I was in Hell” blames everyone else for the choices and struggles I was making. That’s not very Orthodox. Not at all. But Frederica Matthewes Green called it one of the best examples of Orthodox Spiritual Writing she’d ever seen. Get that? It’s all your fault… But when I later discovered that it was my fault that I’m a self-centered ass… and that you are Christ, even if you’re dancing naked in a gay pride parade… she said my metaphor was weak. No one liked this article as much. Not at all.

So there I learned, right there. My crowd didn’t want to pay for me to be a sinner. They just wanted to pay for me to blame everyone else because it supported not their religion but rather their politics.

And, ironically, that was the beginning of my coming out.

My conversion was real. I’m still wrestling with that. But my conservatism was not. The slow, dawning realization that Red Staters had hijacked my Chrismation Process for their own purposes was a bit painful. What was real, what was not? What was chrismation? What was conversion? What was important? Questions are more important than answers, I think. I’ve been blogging my way through that since 2005.