HOMOSEXUALITY & THE PRIESTHOOD

...Surely the fancy dancing two-stepper, the men walking into a restaurant with good cheer and fine looks, and the well-toned youth comfortably strolling the beach, experience the same sensations: the seduction of the right look and the right movement...

...There are many ways to talk about the path of discovery, but in this essay I will focus on the somewhat idiosyncratic interplay of three concepts: color, movement, and mystery...

...And in the deep silence and trembling power of insight, we finally opened our eyes and hearts and bodies and set forth on a different road...

...It was never the smoothest of actions, more a struggle with some odd, combative creature...

...As a gay boy I knew that sex and body were at the heart of my identity...

...It doesn't strike me as odd that I was not the only gay boy wanting to grow up to be a priest, but it rankles me to see my vocation reduced to a mere search for refuge from a hostile society...

...And, was there something special about me that I should become a priest...

...After all, deity was revealed...

...Yes, I was in denial...

...Other professions were full of pitfalls and hazards I could not negotiate...

...When you put on a cassock, you draped your whole body with this single action...

...It, too, is a public declaration of having lived on the edge, of having communed with a veiled and compelling force...

...We were drawn by two of the themes: the life of a priest, and how gay men liv-ing within the church deal with their sexuality...

...As a young boy I could not visualize myself in any other career than the priesthood...

...My mother never forced anything on me...

...Indeed, for a young boy fascinated with colors, a church that honored and understood the aesthetic and theatrical power of color seemed a perfect place to work...

...A vocation to the priesthood both brings immediate respect for you as an individual and sets you into a recognizable and respected role...

...I wanted to be an open member of the gay community...

...First we vested in the great clean colors of white and black, ample cloth folding over our light child bodies, a white surplice hanging over a long flowing black cassock...

...Indeed, this exercise helped me to fall asleep...

...In my imagination, the priest participated in a romantic movement, the mysterious love for the Other...

...While the priests kissed their garments before putting them on, our vesting was less formalized...

...It was then that I noticed the neatly ironed folds, saw the contrast of white over black, two strong colors that made each other stand out...

...For whatever reason, I was often at the altar...

...It made me think about the paths Samuel and I had taken, about the fact that we were both gay and called to the priesthood, about why many gay boys like us grow up to be priests...

...But when he had had enough, he acted with awesome might...

...The God of Israel had tried many times to edge the Egyptians into freeing the Israelites...

...When I left the Jesuits, a good friend called my at-tention to a passage from Saint Augustine's Confessions: "Aliud est de silvestre cacumine videre patriam pads, et aliud est tenere viam illuc ducen-tem...

...And as the cassock fell back down to your ankles, a young boy knew that he had stepped into another world, a slightly feminine world, a world where your walking and turning were the peaceful glide of a sacred corpus, a world where your body was less visible but where your movement was more noticeable...

...Yet we needed to climb the mountain first, to go high enough so we could see...

...How could I fit into the masculine world as I experienced it...

...Color is one of the many artifacts used, aptly or not, to help us create a sense of self...

...When Pope Leo I spoke with Attila outside the walls of Rome, it was God who persuaded the great marauder to spare the city...

...It was a Western shirt, something a cowboy might wear when he went into town...

...Seeing Priest drew me again toward an experience I had set aside many years ago...

...I don't want to overstate this, but I think it is interesting how the use of color often helps define who we are...

...And I know for sure that my gay orientation is an agenda item on the rumor mill...

...God changed his heart-or at least his mind...

...Still, vesting was a special kind of movement...

...My experience tells me that there was something else involved...

...It can speak of reverence or indifference, rhythm or cloddish-ness, an awareness of space or obliviousness to it...

...It is a struggle that starts with an awareness of difference, often an awareness that is accompanied by feelings of isolation and loneliness...

...Not as many people know that I was once a Jesuit...

...Hail holy queen, enthroned above...

...Most people at work know that I am gay...

...it became plaintive, and we spoke the words of children, distressed children in search of peace...

...The answer to the first question is easy...

...I carried with me a suspicion of society...

...And the red of the cloth made them stand out all the more...

...But when it had gathered, it could not be stopped...

...They were something to see...

...We all easily recognize that colors have significance...

...Their allure is all the greater in the mind and imagination of a young child...

...I remember that if you entered the church after the Blessed Sacrament had been exposed, you had to kneel before entering your pew...

...For me, and perhaps others, priesthood promised to be that land of peace...

...That discovery, however, generates a reaction akin to my coming out...

...Color...

...On a boy with the right shape, the surplice sat on square shoulders and formed an architectural covering over the soft, conical cassock...

...Once it was on, I would move to the full-length mirror to straighten everything out...

...He was more a leaf taken up in a great wind than an oak that remained rooted in one spot only to spin off seedlings...

...It is quite common to find a favorite color, to dress in it, paint our walls or houses with it, literally surround ourselves with it...

...The buttons were beautiful to look at and to touch, their color changing slightly in the light...

...The bows, the genuflections, the well-timed turns, the subservient presentation and movement of holy objects during the liturgy, all of these were part of a great sacred drama...

...And after seeing Priest I returned to one question I had not thought about for a long time: Why do so many gay boys grow up to be priests...

...I remember especially a devotion of my childhood, the veneration of the Virgin, the sor- rowful mother...

...Perhaps served so often because of my punctuality, or my willingness, or my surety with the Latin, or because I usually was paired with my brother...

...These days when someone gets to know me, they need to know about my two closets: one lavender, one black...

...Surprisingly, many of my contemporaries find it easier to understand that I am gay than that I once led a life in religion...

...no unique talent is required beyond a desire to do good...

...I was always proud to wear that shirt...

...there are colors which are appropriate for various organizations, military and religious, for example...

...Then the music changed...

...As a boy I was drawn to issues of the heart and of the mind...

...Every painter delights in creating mood and structure by juxtaposing colors of many hues and brightnesses within a composition...

...We find colors we think complement us: "I look good in blue," we think...

...But God's power did not have to be obvious, did not have to be like ordinary power...

...God's power was cloaked, often acted out by people he had chosen...

...In the newer cassocks, one had to reach down and pull up the hems of both sides in order to zip up the long zipper sealing you in...

...Ten years after entering the Jesuits, I left...

...For all of us, finding (or redefining) our place in society is a central challenge in our lives...

...The ritual, however, began before we walked out into the sanctuary...

...It was a life busy with activities that touched and changed the lives of others and, through them, myself...

...But every reason was rooted in my desire to participate in the great dance of life as a dancer, not as a chaperone...

...I have helped form a gay employee group and do work with a gay-sponsored charity...

...I knew it was a power that sometimes took a long time to gather into an active force...

...Introibo ad altare Dei, ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam...

...After the host was replaced in the tabernacle, the priest would process over to the Marian altar...

...And to the altar boy, they were something to feel...

...Yet it was a movement in which he never settled down into one solid, firm relationship...

...God didn't have to crush the Hun or his horde...

...I have struggled with these for many years, and I know the terrain...

...Needless to say, color can also be an essential component of disguise...

...our mother...

...Being gay is still being a searcher for love and intimacy, but being celibate and bound by a vow of obedience, living in a community of individuals not of your own choosing-that is like being a Vulcan, a creature of another species...

...He could be desirable and even loved, yet he could never be touched by another human being...

...Black is for mourning in our culture...

...Sometimes we take many steps wandering in circles atop the knoll, waiting to set out on our journey...

...I remember it occurring at the end of another greater devotion, the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament...

...Personally, choosing what I would wear each day was one of the pleasures of my childhood...

...All loving, all holy...we beseech thee, poor banished children of Eve...mourning and weeping in this vale of tears...to thee do we cry...

...When we do set out, it is often our bodies that force us to do so...

...it only emphasized other parts of sex‚ the visual parts, the flirtatious parts, the chivalrous parts, and the moral responsibility that the great lusty act of creation engendered...

...But for many of us, priesthood turned out to be merely the knoll, and real peace could only be achieved by pushing on toward a fuller understanding of our sexual identity...

...It took me thirty years to articulate the reason...

...But for some of us, peace never came until we extended our search along a different path, and that meant leaving our roles in the church...

...Thinking about colors became a daily ritual for me...

...Sometimes, I confess, just thinking about some piece of fabric made me happy...

...My life as a Jesuit was a time full of friendships, of intense learning and exotic travel, of troubling feelings of inadequacy and loneliness offset by moments of illumination and great joy...

...My youth was an era of cowboy fanaticism, and I loved to put on a red shirt with coral snap buttons...

...There is an energy force around ritual, and each particular ritual act contains that energy and directs it...

...I did not think that priesthood sought to annihilate sex...

...they can more easily comprehend that someone is gay than that he ever vowed (and kept) celibacy...

...Enough of that kind of change, and the world would be a different place, a world with room for people like me...

...When people learn that I was a Jesuit, I can see flash past their eyes two central questions: Did I enter the Jesuits to deny my gayness...

...This was not a genuflection...

...I had learned from her how colors complemented each other...

...The body can be a delight to the eye, not just the hands...

...I knew I was more interested in dolls than sports, more comfortable playing with girls than boys, more enchanted by music and dance than by collecting baseball cards or torturing frogs...

...Mystery has power...

...By cloaking a sexed object one can tone down the immediacy of hormonal impulse, or redirect its energy into another form...

...I said that I wanted to be in charge of my own destiny, to choose by myself where to live and with whom to live, that I had no vocation...

...Ritual has power...

...I was an altar boy, serving nearly every day...

...It is not at all surprising to me that I, and many others like me, gravitated to a career that would allow us to bring harmony and understanding into the hearts and minds of others, as well as ourselves...

...And movement speaks sex...

...Within these sacred robes, an altar boy's body became a stage prop...

...Having a priestly vocation set all that fear aside...

...Even a young, shapeless youth could feel in his flesh that his movement was grand and dramatic...

...I am a forty-three-year-old gay man who began adulthood as a Jesuit...

...I left because I wanted to become an independent, sexual being...

...Movement...

...Anxiety attacks, or strokes, or changes in weight, or sexual desire, or an overwhelming sadness, or the entry of a loved one can push us off the knoll...

...I had known for years that I could still be a man and be a priest, but as a priest I would be a man whose body performed a more stylized movement, never the twisting, sinuous, and unpredictable movement of sex with another...

...If he could not father a family, he could lead a community...

...Movement is an expression of what is going on inside...

...And it is a career open to everyone (at least every male...

...Red is a color of lust-or martyrdom...

...Next, one slipped on the surplice, pulling it over like a sweater...

...Color communicates, and is one of the tools that people employ for both fitting into society and for defining themselves...

...Each selection had its own emotional signature...

...d Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam...

...It was different from every other change of clothes...

...At the time I used many other words to explain leaving...

...True, many priests who are gay speak of honesty, integrity, openness, courage, self-respect, acceptance, and love within the priesthood...

...I wanted a lover...

...Still, he would not be alone...

...Having created the right wardrobe was as gratifying to me as climbing a tree was to my brother...

...That awareness of difference kept me thinking and wondering, speculating about why I was different...

...In a Catholic culture, stating you have a vocation is like draping yourself in the perfect color...

...Now I often find myself wondering about it all...

...It is part of a dance, an ancient and honorable choreography...

...And he could do that proudly as a man...

...But it was not the path that I could remain on for the rest of my life...

...The answer to the second question requires more reflection...

...Declaring a vocation brought me into harmony with my future life, just as my choosing of wardrobes as a young child had prepared me for each new day...

...For gay children, finding that place can be a frightening journey...

...I knew that the power of what took place in the sanctuary was not like the power of armies or presidents or corporations or even principals and teachers...

...she gave me the freedom to wear whatever I wanted...

...There was something calming about it...

...But you cannot eradicate that essential attribute...

...Perhaps for me the choice of wardrobe allowed a similar sense of achievement, providing a way to bring harmony into one aspect of my life...

...Before I went to bed, I studied my wardrobe, matching shirt and pants and socks...

...In the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, the consecrated host was displayed in the monstrance, prayers were said, songs were sung, there was much incense, the priest wore an impressive cope, a gold cape that hung over his shoulders...

...For an outsider-for gay children-stating you have a vocation is a way to turn the tables on society...

...Role models are few...

...I know my desire for priesthood had a lot to do with repression and misdirection, but it also had to do with discovery and bravery and growth, perhaps even grace...

...Such discomfort or physical expectation can propel us out of our leisured walk and onto the path toward peace-a more harrowing route...

...You had to get down on both knees and bow your head, as if you were a peasant entering the presence of a monarch...

...I cannot offer the results of a sociological or psychological study, but I can offer my experiences, experiences that may resonate with those of others, in whole or in part...

...It always speaks sex because a body is always a sexed thing...

...An appreciation of color is a key element of a painter's natural talent as well as a skill to study and acquire...

...I would translate: "It is one thing to look at the land of peace from atop a wooded knoll, and another to take up the road leading there...

...M ystery...

...Mass was the ballet of my youth...

...Color can be a kind of tool that gives palpable expression to and helps shape our interior identity...

...A gay child knows, even if he cannot articulate it, that his struggle is in the heart and in the mind...