I’m reading a book by James Alison, a British theologian in the ‘Catholic’ tradition, entitled Faith Beyond Resentment: fragments catholic and gay. Alison’s approach to theology and Scripture, particularly related to how it is all actually lived out, amazes and challenges me. I heard him speak at last year’s Trinity Institute. The one thing I truly appreciate about him is that he admits he could be wrong – and that fact can has significant consequences. In fact, that is one reason he converted to Roman Catholicism from British Evangelicalism – within the Catholic theological make-up, there is the freedom to be wrong.
This quote comes from his personal experience in dealing with false accusations from some Roman church authorities as they tried to get him expelled from a theology teaching position in Brazil over his honesty about being gay and his calling upon the church to begin an honest and open conversation about this issue. He then recognized his own complicity in the “mechanisms” that lead the whole affair. (There was never any accusation of behavioral problems. He remained chaste. It all revolved around hearsay and the openness of his beliefs.) What follows is his reflection and change of mind and heart that came during a Jesuit retreat right after the incident. What he describes happening to him and his way of thinking and being can be applied to any of us, gay or straight, for it is the process of dying and of rebirth within God’s way of being.
Here is a quote:

“Where denial, mendacity and cover up are forces which structure a reality, the search for honest conversation is, of itself, the worst from of militancy…
“Well, my reply, while formally correct, allowed me to hide from myself something which my various accusers had perceived perfectly clearly: that I was myself on a sort of crusade, that I had a zeal, and that this zeal of a prodigiously violent force, powered by a deep resentment. In fact, I was wanting to create for myself, taking advantage of the ecclesiastical structures which sustained me, a space of security and peace, of survival. Thus I hoped to avoid what I had seen happen to gay people in country after country: social marginalization, destruction of life projects, emotional and spiritual annihilation. That is to say, my brave discourse was a mask which hid from me my absolute cowardice of soul, for I was not prepared to identify myself fully with that reality, which I knew to be mine, with all its consequences. At root, I myself believe that God was on the side of ecclesiastical violence directed at gay people, and couldn’t believe that God loves us just as we are. The profound ‘do not be’ which the social and ecclesiastical voice speaks to us, and which forms the soul of so many gay people, was profoundly rooted in my own being, so that, au fond I felt myself damned. In my violent zeal I was fighting so that the ecclesiastical structure might speak to me a ‘Yes’, a ‘Flourish, son’, precisely because I feared that, should I stand alone before God, God himself would be part of the ‘do not be‘. Thus I was absolutely dependent on the same mechanism against which I was fighting. Hiding from myself the fact of having despaired of God, I wanted to manipulate the ecclesiastical structure so that it might give me a ‘self’, that it might speak to me a ‘Yes’ at a level of profundity of which the ecclesiastic structure, like any human structure, is incapable. For the ‘Yes’ which creates and recreates the ‘self’ of son, only God can pronounce. In this I discovered myself to be an idolater. I had been wanting to negotiate my survival in the midst of violent structures, and negotiation in the midst of violent structures can only be done by violence. The non-violent, the blessed of the gospels, simply suffer violence and parish, either physically or morally…
“And then, at root, what began this whole process of beginning to untie myself from the idols I had so assiduously cultivated, what I had never dared to image, the profound ‘Yes’ of God, the ‘Yes’ spoken to the little gay boy who had despaired of ever hearing it. And there, indeed, I found myself absolutely caught, because this ‘Yes’ does not take the form of a pretty consolation for a spoiled child. Rather, from the moment it reached me, the whole psychological and mental structure by which I had built myself up over all the previous years began to enter into a complete collapse. For the whole structure was based on the presupposition of a ‘No’ at the center of my being, and because of that, of the need to wage a violent war so as to cover up a fathomless hole. The ‘I’, the ‘self’ of the child of God, is born in the midst of the ruins of repeated idolatry…
“But it was exactly this that, at last, I was learning. [from Col. 3:1-3] The whole of my previous life had been marked by an absolute refusal to die.”

Oh, if we all would be willing to die to self and to die to the systems of this world, and to allow God to bring rebirth and renewal to our souls, to our ways of being, to our voices and lives, we might truly be able to change the world – or at least be a sweet smelling fragrance to the stench of a pain-filled and dying world.