“Right now gay teens hear a robust ‘Yes!’ from the mainstream media and gay culture. From the Church, they hear only a ‘No.’ And you can’t have a vocation of not-gay-marrying and not-having-sex. You can’t have a vocation of No.”
— Eve Tushnet, The Botany Club: Gay Kids in Catholic Schools, The American Conservative (via wesleyhill)
“I often hear that it’s okay for the Church to require (most) priests to be celibate, since they chose that way of life, but it’s cruel to require celibacy of gay people since we didn’t choose to be gay. This isn’t a good way to think about vocation—you don’t always choose what God is asking of you, and it’s rare that the greatest sacrifices in your life are the ones you chose entirely freely.”
— Eve Tushnet, The Botany Club: Gay Kids in Catholic Schools, The American Conservative
“It seems to me that one major purpose of a Catholic educational system is to help young people discern their vocations. Heterosexual teens desperately need this guidance, in a world of premarital sex and the anchorless, alienating endless-summer of ‘emerging adulthood.’ And gay teens need it too. They need to know that God is calling them to love and to be loved: to form devoted friendships, to care for their families, to serve the suffering, to dedicate themselves to God in ascesis and prayer, to serve God and the Church through artistic creation, to teach. They, too, are being called to increase the love, beauty, and joy in the world.”
— Eve Tushnet, The Botany Club: Gay Kids in Catholic Schools, The American Conservative
i need a fighting chance if i’m gonna struggle well with this. but right now, and for so long now, i can’t see how i even stand a chance at all.
“If God exists for our happiness and self-fulfillment, validating our sovereign right to choose our identity, then opposition to same-sex marriage (or abortion) is just irrational prejudice.
Given the broader worldview that many Americans (including Christians) embrace—or at least assume, same-sex marriage is a right to which anyone is legally entitled. After all, traditional marriages in our society are largely treated as contractual rather than covenantal, means of mutual self-fulfillment more than serving a larger purpose ordained by God. The state of the traditional family is so precarious that one wonders how same-sex marriage can appreciably deprave it.
Same-sex marriage makes sense if you assume that the individual is the center of the universe, that God—if he exists—is there to make us happy, and that our choices are not grounded in a nature created by God but in arbitrary self-construction. To the extent that this sort of ‘moralistic-therapeutic-deism’ prevails in our churches, can we expect the world to think any differently? If we treat God as a product we sell to consumers for their self-improvement programs and make personal choice the trigger of salvation itself, then it may come as a big surprise (even contradiction) to the world when we tell them that truth (the way things are) trumps feelings and personal choice (what we want to make things to be).”
— Michael Horton, Same-Sex Marriage Makes a Lot of Sense, White Horse Inn Blog (via sungyak)
“A couple of years ago I received a poignant email from a man who said, among other things, that he did accept the Church’s teaching and was trying to live up to it. But he still wondered: What happens if I change my mind? What happens if, years from now, I look back on my celibate life—will I regret it? Will it seem like an enormous waste?
I think it depends. If one’s celibacy is purely rule-following, then yeah, once you no longer believe the rules I think probably you’ll regret the sacrifices you made to follow them.
But if you pour out your love for others in friendship and service, if you offer your struggles and your need for surrender as a sacrifice to Christ, if you love God and those around you as deeply as you can in the best way you understand right now—I think even if you change your mind later, that won’t be something to regret. One of the biggest truths about love is that it’s never a waste of time.”
— Eve Tushnet, Yay Denver, home of happiness! (a guest post on Spiritual Friendship)
“[T]here’s a huge variety of paths out there and people need to find the ways of being Christian which work for them. They don’t need to conform their self-understandings to the most common or easily-intelligible ones available. I gave the example that other people often talk about my ‘struggle’ with homosexuality, and that—while perhaps this is just me preferring femme metaphors to butch ones!—I don’t think of it as a struggle at all. I think of myself as needing to surrender more to God, rather than to fight harder for chastity.”
— Eve Tushnet, Yay Denver, home of happiness! (a guest post on Spiritual Friendship)
“[I]nitially I conceived of my task, as a lgbt/ssa Catholic, as basically a) negative (don’t have gay sex) and b) intellectual (figure out why Church teaching is the way it is). I now think of it much more as the positive task of discerning vocation: discerning how God is calling me to pour out love to others.”
— Eve Tushnet, Yay Denver, home of happiness! (a guest post on Spiritual Friendship) (via wesleyhill)
NORA: [F]acing the truth is so much easier than all the time and energy it takes to run away from it.
— David Marshall Grant and Clifford Olin, “Breaking the News” (Season 4, Episode 2), Brothers and Sisters (via hours)
“[A]ll your grief and suffering and exile will one day be redeemed, and become part of what we call the gospel.”
— Sam Wells, But Even if Not (a sermon preached at the Divinity School Baccalaureate in Duke Chapel on May 12, 2012)
by: Anna Kamieńska
translated by: Grazyna Drabik and David Curzon
Tell me what’s the difference
between hope and waiting
because my heart doesn’t know
It constantly cuts itself on the glass of waiting
It constantly gets lost in the fog of hope
(via hours)
if only things were simpler.
“In The Mustard Seed Conspiracy, Tom Sine emphasizes that we ask the wrong question if we search for God’s will in our lives. He says that we should instead see what God is doing in the world and become part of his program.”
— Marva J. Dawn, Keeping the Sabbath Wholly: Ceasing, Resting, Embracing, Feasting (via schizophreniatic)
