"Looks about half full," I say as I hand the dipstick to Mark.
I'm awkwardly perched on the wing strut of a Cessna 172 under
a drizzly Northwest sky. I tighten the fuel cap and climb down
from the wing, then walk around to the other wing and climb up.
After checking the oil level, looking for water in the fuel and
inspecting the control surface linkages, we strap in and go through
the pre-start checklist. The engine rumbles to life, and we taxi
out to the runway. We go through another checklist, then Mark
opens up the throttle. We're off, down the runway and into the
battleship gray sky.
As we fly over an open field at the end of the runway, I remember:
Almost a decade ago -- long before Mark and I became friends and
began to fly together -- another friend, whom I will call Jason,
and I lay side by side in that same field, our hands behind our
heads, watching the summer stars.
"Think there's Someone out there?" he asked.
"Yeah," I replied. "I think so."
We were both at a spiritual crossroad, existentially troubled,
grappling with the Jekyll-and-Hyde reality of life outside Eden.
For several years I had doubted the Christian faith with which
I had grown up. Scientific evidence about evolution made it difficult
for me to accept the Bible, and modern psychology made the church's
sexual morality seem out of date. At the time, I was breaking
free from my parents and resented God's authority even more than
the kind imposed by adults. Jason's doubts were more about the
problem of evil: How could a good God allow so much meaningless
pain and suffering? How could one believe in a God who let innocent
children die?
But as we both wrestled with these doubts, we also felt that
the alternatives offered shallow answers to life's deepest questions:
Does God exist? What is the meaning of life? How should we deal
with death? The highest wisdom of modern philosophies seemed to
be "eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die."
And so we lay in this field, where the dry grass prickled our
backs and the sky stretched overhead, and talked about these questions
and about things ephemeral as well.
A distant humming caught our attention, and we sat up. Far away
to the east, a small constellation of blinking lights banked toward
us, then hung stationary in the night sky, gradually growing brighter
as the noise rumbled louder and louder. We sat, arms hugging our
knees, watching. Details materialized out of the darkness: the
skeletal arms of the landing gear reaching down from the wings,
the ghostly outline of the cockpit windows. And then several thousand
pounds of aluminum, a few dozen passengers, and two powerful turbine
engines roared about 30 feet over our heads. We quickly craned
our heads around and watched the plane settle onto the runway
behind us. As the adrenaline rush passed, we lay back in silence,
needing no words to share the thrill we felt.
This wordless communion stood in sharp contrast to our awkward
first meeting the previous fall.
"I'm terrible at this social-mixing thing," I had said to a
face I knew slightly, the sort of acquaintance you nod at in passing
on campus. We were standing by the food table at a party, trying
to make small talk.
"I don't like it that much either," Jason replied, creating
an instant sense of solidarity. We were two sane introverts amid
the mixing, extroverted crowd.
Balancing a plate of chips and vegetables in one hand, holding
a plastic cup in the other, we moved off to find a corner where
we could chat. We spoke awkwardly of this and that, stumbling
through the weather, the food and such topics as "So, what do
you want to be when you graduate?"
"An aeronautical engineer," I said.
"A pilot," Jason said.
In memory, the party becomes a vague blur, like farmland from
30,000 feet. Yet the light in his eyes and the image of his hands
illustrating maneuvers in the air between us remains.
Hours later, as the party died around us, we left and found
an empty stairwell, where we kept talking until the night was
almost gone. Short on sleep, we parted on the promise to meet
again.
* * *
"Nervous about the speech?" Mark asks, breaking into my reverie.
"Yeah," I reply.
If you'd told me during my teens that I would talk to a group
of gay Catholics about why I believed in celibacy, I wouldn't
have believed you. In high school I had my career mapped out as
a gay-rights activist. During my senior year, I made it to state
semifinals with a speech favoring gays in the military.
Yet God has a way of throwing curveballs. In my late teens I
was talking with friends, making fun of Catholic sexual ethics
("every sperm is sacred" and all that). Then the thought struck
me: The sexual revolution may be easier than Catholic teaching,
but does it make people happier? I thought of families I knew,
broken by divorce. I thought of my friends' dating dramas. I thought
of my mother's work with AIDS patients. But I quickly shoved all
such thoughts out of my mind, because even to think them was intellectual
heresy. An educated, postmodern person would no more become a
Catholic than he would join the Flat Earth Society. I went on
trying to be modern, but with the same uneasy feeling I have whenever
my car is running rough and I can't afford a mechanic.
Was I searching for God? Not really. I had plenty of gods: romance,
academic success, money and power, just to name a few. I wasn't
looking for One who said, "Take up your cross and follow Me."
God, however, was looking for me. In those days I had no car,
which forced me to walk from place to place. During these walks,
I became more and more aware that God was walking with me. I didn't
see or hear anything, of course, but I knew I was not alone.
This worried me, because I didn't want Judeo-Christian morality.
An abomination, the Bible called it, to lie with a man as with
a woman. Those who did so without repenting, Paul said, would
not enter the kingdom of heaven.
There was, I hoped, some mistake here. So I tried to explain
to God why a gay relationship would be okay. I pointed to the
Old Testament's King David and Jonathan, whose love was "greater
than the love of women." For weeks God listened silently to my
slowly evolving theories on the subject. Then the silence ended.
I hesitate to say that God spoke. I heard no words. Yet a thought
landed in my mind with all the force of a bomb. "Love," it said,
"is not the same as sex." It does not seem so profound in hindsight,
but it was a great shock to my teenage self.
It was in the aftermath of this earthquake that Jason and I
met at the party. As I walked home that morning, I wanted to make
him the protagonist of an epic novel about the early days of flight
or to sculpt a statue of him (very Michelangelo, very David)
and put it in the center of town. For the umpteenth time since
I had turned 15, I had fallen for another guy.
Unlike many previous crushes, this was not just physical desire.
What did I want? I think the most honest answer would have been
"to be near him forever."
We soon discovered, as we spent more and more time together,
another common interest: arguing politics. Conveniently, we took
opposing sides.
He dreamed of a military career, and when he heard about my
speech on gays in the military he lost no opportunity to tell
me why they should not serve. I, in turn, spared no effort in
convincing him that he was behind the times. Week after week we
would tackle the argument, from every angle, often late into the
night. One evening in November we were once again debating The
Topic. "Doesn't the concept of two men holding hands weird you
out?" he asked.
Then he reached for my hand.
My body froze. Don't show any emotion! Remember
to breathe! I tried to keep my face a mask as I explained
that my personal feelings about whether or not two men holding
hands was weird did not factor into the question of whether gays
and lesbians could honorably defend their country. Fairness, I
said, isn't about how comfortable people feel -- the idea of my
parents having sex might weird me out, but that doesn't mean we
should discriminate against them.
"But aren't you totally weirded out by two guys cuddling?"
Jason persisted.
Then he laid his head against my chest, where presumably he
could hear my heart racing out of control. We sat like that for
the next couple of hours -- he maintaining that homosexuality
was disgusting, while I maintained that, whether it was disgusting
or not, we should not discriminate against those who happened
to be gay or lesbian.
The next day, he went out of his way to reiterate that he was
not gay.
"I never said you were," I replied, choosing my words with some
precision.
The strange dance continued. One night a couple of months later,
we watched Out of Africa, his head again resting on my
chest.
"Have you ever thought about becoming a missionary?" he asked.
"Sometimes," I replied, not quite truthfully.
We talked, long after the movie had ended, about getting a plane
and doing missions in Africa, but I was far more interested in
the idea of being with him than I was in bringing the Gospel to
remote tribes. Were we searching for God? Perhaps, but my heart
resisted more than it searched, and I feared above all that this
love would be the first thing nailed to the cross.
Meanwhile, life went on. We built a radio-controlled airplane,
and after weeks of gluing balsa wood together we took it out for
its first flight. He took the controls. The plane rose into the
air, climbed a hundred feet or so, stalled and spun into the ground
-- a complete loss. To this day Jason and I debate whether the
crash was due to my failure as an engineer or his failure as a
pilot.
* * *
The Cessna hits a pothole in the air, jerking my attention back
to the present. A glance at the instruments: We are moving at
autobahn speeds, half a mile above the traffic that winds slowly
along Highway 101. We are extremely safe, I remind myself, safer
than we would be on the highway -- and yet the jolt of turbulence
is a reminder that a few seconds of inattention at the wrong moment
can be deadly. That is why there is a rigid structure to the freedom
of flight: training, checklists and regulations. Yet this structure
sets us free to fly above the constraints of roads, land and water.
The reality of flight seems very different from my early dreams.
I did not fall in love with flying because, as a boy, someone
took me aside to explain the Federal Air Regulations. Yet Mark
and I fly safely these days because those regulations protect
us. Without that structure, the reality would not be more like
my dreams, but less so -- deadly tailspins were no part of the
romance of flight that Jason and I shared as we lay side by side
in the moonlight watching the planes land.
Now, as then, I think our friendship was a good thing. Even
a decade later I have many powerful memories of those days, recollections
too big for my mind, recollections that spill over into my heart
and gut. In the long conversations we shared about life and about
God, I began resolving the doubts that held me back from deeper
faith. In addition, loving him taught me a lot about loving God.
This should come as no surprise: Like all human beings, he was
the image in flesh and blood of the God who numbers the stars
and calls each of them by name.
Therein, however, lay the danger. Precisely because there was
so much good in our friendship, I could make him into an idol.
Would I honor God by putting his commands ahead of my desires?
Or would I, as I was strongly tempted to do, put my desires for
the relationship ahead of God's will? Was I willing for Jason
to put God first, or did I want to be number one in his life?
I would like to say I had an epiphany that helped me understand
perfectly what I needed to do and why, but all I had were two
vague intuitions: God seemed to exist, and the Bible seemed to
prohibit sex between two men. Whenever I tried to ignore them,
my conscience would nag me. So I tried to obey what God seemed
to be saying, even though I felt little assurance and feared that
obedience would be very lonely.
And God threw another curveball: Obedience actually deepened
friendship. Jason and I had been drawn together by our shared
passion for airplanes and by our search for meaning amid the confusion
in life. The emotional drama of "he loves me, he loves me not"
was a distraction that threatened to tear the friendship apart.
More important, however, obedience brought an inner peace and
rest in God that had been missing from all the years of my heart's
restless hunt for love. Instead of fighting against the growing
awareness of God's presence, fearing interference in my plans,
I began to welcome that presence and seek to be guided by it.
Saint Augustine says that God gives the law to educate desire.
Out of the hopes, dreams and desires of my heart grew actions
-- actions that would either help love grow or tear it down. When
we built our radio-controlled airplane together, we did not get
someone to teach us how to fly. The result was that our dream
was destroyed less than a minute after takeoff. But when it came
to our friendship, I tried to obey God's law, with much happier
results.
A couple of years after we met at the party, Jason went to the
East Coast while I remained at the University of Washington. To
this day, we stay in touch. His doubts, nurtured by disastrous
turns of fortune's wheel, have grown into a full rejection of
God and a deep frustration with life. My baby steps into obedience
have born fruit in a deepening inner peace and a growing hunger
to know God's will for my life.
My last year in college, in an attempt to make sense of what
I had learned about Scripture and sexual ethics, I wrote an 80-page
essay and gave it the bold title The Joy of Celibacy.
I showed it to my friend Matt, a Catholic who also struggled with
same-sex attraction and had chosen to be celibate. He said that
several sections of my essay were reminiscent of Veritatis
Splendor. I asked him what that was, and he told me it was
one of the pope's encyclicals. After I'd sorted out what an encyclical
letter was, I looked it up.
It was as deeply rooted in Scripture as any theological reflection
I had ever encountered -- not something my Protestant upbringing
had led me to expect in the Catholic church. I was particularly
struck by the way the pope taught the moral duties of the Christian
life without ambiguity, while remaining open to seekers and all
people of good will. He offered an attractive blend of grace and
truth.
At this point, I began to be a Catholic fellow-traveler. I did
not think of being received into the church, but I did become
more and more interested in Catholic theology. Then, shortly after
finishing school, I began to go to Mass (one of the first Masses
I ever attended was at Notre Dame's Basilica of the Sacred Heart).
I rapidly fell in love with the Mass, and in January 1999 I was
received into the Catholic church, taking Francis of Assisi as
my confirmation saint.
I was drawn to Francis because of his desire to be an instrument
of God's peace. When it comes to homosexuality, some Christians
show little mercy or compassion. Virtually all men and women with
same-sex attraction I have talked to have painful memories of
vicious condemnation at the hands of Christians. I prayed that
I, too, would become an instrument of God's peace.
And now I am on my way to tell my story for Seattle's Archdiocesan
Gay/Lesbian Ministry. I know that many of those in my audience
will reject Catholic sexual ethics to one degree or another. I
could try to quote the catechism or expound natural law. But I
did not embrace the Catholic church because I thought the world
didn't have enough rules.
But I do continue to come back to something C.S. Lewis wrote:
"If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering
nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that
Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are
half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition
when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants
to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what
is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too
easily pleased."
I let out a sigh. "I keep struggling with how to express the
positive side of obedience," I say to Mark, gesturing at my notes.
"One thing you might mention," he says.
"What's that?"
"You know how sometimes you just want to forget about God, forget
about the struggle and just 'feel good'? So you tell yourself
that it's normal, that everyone's doing it, that you're only human.
And maybe it does feel good for a few minutes. But afterward you
feel awful because you know in your heart that what you did was
wrong."
I nod my head. As a teenager, I thought my straight friends
could not possibly understand what I was going through. But with
Mark, I have found that the differing details of our struggles
and temptations are much less important than our shared desire
to follow Christ. For him, discipleship demands purity in his
relationship with his girlfriend; for me, it means celibacy. For
both of us, it is a path that demands struggle, sacrifice and
self-control.
He continues, "With following God, it's the opposite: You have
to fight. And the fighting can last for hours, even -- off and
on -- for a lifetime. But God's peace will last forever. And even
in this life nothing compares with the joy and peace of overcoming
temptation. But it's really hard to keep that perspective, because
lust is right there, and we can't see eternity."
But seeing is not necessarily believing. We are half a mile
above wind-swept water, without visible means of support, flying
as free as birds.
Ron Belgau is a member of Courage, a Catholic organization
promoting celibacy for persons with same-sex attraction, who has
spoken on chastity around the country. He was for several years
a member of the Steering Committee for Bridges Across the Divide
and also served on the Steering Committee for Seattle's Archdiocesan
Gay/Lesbian Ministry.
(July 2004)
