The Call to Celibacy

St. Bernard Abbey Church

Cullman, Alabama

 During a week's visit in 2014.

I distinguish between the “gift” of celibacy and the “call” to celibacy, which I will come to later in this post.

The gift of celibacy is a debatable proposition. Is someone “blessed” with that gift or simply avoiding intimate relationships? Is it a rejection of God’s gift of sexuality and more broadly sensuality and embodiment, or a prioritizing of one’s energy and involvement and commitment?

The occasion for these musings is my morning prayer time reading of the recently released Love, Henri: Letters on the Spiritual Life by Henri J. M. Nouwen. Alongside his deeply profound spiritual insights and occasional religious bromides are the idiosyncrasies of a confounding personality.

I am quick to say that almost anyone’s personality, especially my own, can be considered idiosyncratic and confounding. But reading my friend Henri’s letters reminded me of how frustrating a correspondent and friend he could be!

From the beginning of the book, I missed the context of the letters, being one-sided. This is understandable, given the problem of permissions to use his correspondents’ letters. Editorially this is handled as well as it can be by italicized introductions, yet the larger picture will only be gained by researchers who read both sides of the correspondence.

But I can immediately give examples by referring to the three letters written to me, only the first of which is introduced by both my first and last name, a compassionate letter about the scourge of AIDS in my community (Dec. 20, 1985; p 113).

The last letter is also a kindly letter, but one that refers to the “busyness” of my and my then partner’s life, him as a professional HIV/AIDS activist, and me as a writer, editor, and LGBT Christian activist. “Thanks for telling me about your busy lives. Please slow down a little so that you can be more creative,” he writes (Dec. 26, 1995; p 337).

This is sweet, and speaks really to his own needs, as is revealed in the letter. But the context is his repeated challenge to me to give details of our lives in my letters, and so I did just that, only to be unnecessarily chastened to slow down! But this is a minor and petty concern.

What really troubled me was his letter of Oct. 22, 1986 (p 137) toward the middle of the book in which I seem to be questioning his celibacy and using him as a “good connection” to read a manuscript, which happened to be my first book, Uncommon Calling: A Gay Man’s Struggle to Serve the Church (on a later edition given its original subtitle, A Gay Christian’s Struggle to Serve the Church—the first publisher thought “gay Christian” would sound like an oxymoron at the time!).

I wrote two letters in response, but only mailed the second, less angry one, though both are in the Nouwen archives, to which I donated our correspondence at their request a few years ago.

Henri never helped me publish a manuscript, nor wrote any intros or blurbs for my books, nor did I ask him to do so.  I had sent him a copy of my manuscript because, as I say, he was always asking about my inner life, how I came to my choices, especially about affirming my sexuality in the context of my spirituality.

Subsequently I asked permission to dedicate one of my devotional books to him, as I felt he had contributed so much to my spiritual life, but he declined, describing the Vatican’s watchful eye, and only after his death was I bold enough to dedicate a later book to him, ironically (given his closeted ways), Coming Out as Sacrament.

Later he did give me advice about the content of my first book, suggesting readers would be more interested in my story than the story of the church dealing with homosexuality. I chose rather to tell both stories, as I considered my story only an instance of the church’s discernment process.

More troubling was the question of celibacy raised in his letter. I do believe there are those who truly have the gift of celibacy, and I support those who choose it as a spiritual discipline for a time or a lifetime. But my conversation with Henri around celibacy was about my Protestant view that professional ministers do best when their most intimate personal, emotional, even spiritual needs are met in marriage (and I include in this any intimate relationship) and family—otherwise they can sometimes look for that among the people they serve, crossing professional boundaries with personal needs, even demands.

For Roman Catholics, that’s partly why those with religious vocation congregate in religious communities, to meet those needs. But diocesan priests, of which Henri was one, can be at a loss for that kind of support. That’s why, I believe, Henri chose to spend the last ten years of his life in the L’Arche community in Toronto.

But there, the intensity documented in the book between Henri and his patient but straight friend Nathan is an instance of this. I had also experienced this intensity, and I kept my distance because that was not how I viewed our friendship. This is why Henri is distressed in the letter written to me in 1986.

Henri, so taken with his own needs in the letter, does not respond to the reason I had written to him, to tell him I had made the painful decision that it was time for me to resign as Director of the Lazarus Project, a ministry of reconciliation between the church and the LGBT community, a position I had held for nearly ten years. At the time, he was one of only three people I confided in about that decision.

We all stumble through life, we all overlook others’ needs in favor of our own from time to time, and I have wondered about my own inclination to write of this.  I loved and still love Henri, and am grateful for all that he was and is. I am still learning from him, as I am still learning from my parents and all my teachers, and I am grateful. And I am finding that, as I continue to read Love, Henri, his spiritual acumen deepened toward the end of his life.

In my view, Henri had less the “gift” of celibacy than the “call” to celibacy. He strongly believed in his calling as a Roman Catholic priest, and celibacy for that tradition comes with the territory, as tough as that can be.  He rightly bristled at the notion of a correspondent that he had not prayed hard enough for healing to “re-orient” his sexuality (Oct. 11, 1988; p 188)!

It would be good if the Roman church could adopt ancient Celtic practice or contemporary Orthodox and Protestant practices of allowing both marriage and celibacy in the professional ministry.

The Presbyterian Church, where I spent most of my professional life eking out a non-ordainable living, confused celibacy and chastity, demanding the latter of LGBT people. But chastity is “purity of purpose,” and that is a good spiritual discipline both within marriage and as a single person.

I have learned as much about myself, others, and God in my sexual community as I have learned in my spiritual community. I have needed both to learn compassion, that which ultimately unites us, I believe, to God.

Related Post: Henri’s Wound with a View

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Copyright © 2017 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Henri's Wound with a View

Henri & Chris

Today is the 20^th anniversary of Henri Nouwen’s death.

Not long after Henri’s death I received an e-mail from a colleague quoting “the gay theologian Henri Nouwen.”

This is what Henri feared, that his many insights into life and the spiritual life in particular would be seen through a narrow lens, and thus too readily dismissed by Christians suspicious of sexuality and homosexuality.

One who, in one of his earliest books, wrote of the minister—by which he meant every Christian—as “the wounded healer,” later wrote in a journal of self-addressed “spiritual imperatives” that happened to be released on the day of his death:

People will constantly try to hook your wounded self. They will point out your needs, your character defects, your limitations and sins. That is how they attempt to dismiss what God, through you, is saying to them. --The Inner Voice of Love, p 99 

When I began leading workshops and retreats on Henri’s life and writings as a way of handling my grief at his death, I did not readily talk about this side of Henri because he did not do so himself.  But by the time Michael Ford interviewed me for his outstanding “portrait” of Henri, Wounded Prophet, it was clear that he already knew and was dealing sensitively with this hidden aspect.

Yet when I ran an article by Michael about Nouwen’s “hidden legacy” in a quarterly magazine I edited, I received an irate letter from a reader—a pastor—who took me to task for “outing” Henri. I replied pastorally to her, explaining that his homosexuality was already public, and that the article was intended as homage, not exposé.

The L’Arche community of Daybreak in Toronto invited me to write a chapter on Henri’s sexuality for Befriending Life: Encounters with Henri Nouwen. I wish now I had made their request clear in the chapter, lest readers think I had initiated the theme. Members of his community believed I would handle the issue sensitively rather than sensationally.  And indeed, I suggested in the article that Henri’s emotional upheaval was more about his hunger for “a particular friendship” than simple sexual desire.

I recounted a conversation I had with Henri in a Toronto diner about his Uncle Anton’s death. Also a celibate priest, Henri said those gathered for his burial were sad, but not overly so. “When I die,” Henri confessed, “I would like to have someone at my grave whose life is radically altered by my death.”

Readers and reviewers alike have often puzzled over the great anguish in Henri’s writings, and a few have even suggested that a celibate life as a gay man could not be the only cause of his angst. There must be something deeper, more buried, they say.

Though that may be true, they miss the point that being gay in the Roman Catholic Church (and indeed any church of Henri’s generation) and being gay in a homophobic world, is the larger issue. When your worth is questioned in every relevant church statement and repeatedly by those in pulpits, pews, politics, and polling places, there is a greater, deeper wound to the soul that is hard to bear.

And like other closeted LGBT people, he was probably plagued by “would they still like me if they knew?” regarding his readers—and he had such a need for affection!

Henri’s conviction that a minister (again, every Christian) was to offer one’s life to others also distressed him, in that he could not offer his struggle publicly, while a few—not me—challenged him to come out for the sake of LGBT Christians.  I didn’t because I believe coming out must always be an individual’s choice.

For Henri, I believe, this provided him a “wound with a view” to the wounds of others, one of the reasons he was drawn to the outsiders of our church and of our world, just as Jesus was.

An irony is that three things that drew me to Henri in 1973 readily revealed this. One was an essay, distributed to Henri’s spirituality class, by Ashley Montagu, who attended to the gravely disfigured so-called “elephant man” long before the story was popularized on stage and screen. Another was an essay written by Henri himself, “The Self-Availability of the Homosexual,” about gay peoples’ need to be ourselves in all settings for our spiritual and psychological health. And the third was a tape of his first lecture for the course on loneliness, something he struggled with in most of his writings.

These three things drew me to drop a church patristics course to take Henri’s class, the notes of which became Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life, which he considered, of all his books, the closest to his personal Christian experience. And it began a friendship which lasted till his death on September 21, 1996, and bears fruit in my own life and writings to this day.

And earlier version of this post and two others were requested and first appeared on the British publisher Darton, Longman, and Todd’s blog on Henri Nouwen for the 20^th anniversary of his death.

My book on Henri: Henri’s Mantle: 100 Meditations on Nouwen’s Legacy.

Pleases support this blog ministry by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description or by mailing to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. Thank you!

Copyright © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Monastic Vows

Thank you for the record number of visits and responses to last week’s post, “Married at Last!” and the “likes” and comments on Facebook about my birthday and our wedding!

I am passionate in my admiration for the contemplative life. I could not have done what I have done as a gay activist both in the church and the culture were it not for my morning prayers and personal retreats, times to bask in God’s unconditional, overwhelming, and transformational love.

And I have always had a rather romanticized desire to be a part of a monastic community. I believe I could handle most of the vows required of monastics.

I’ve got poverty down, having been self-employed doing free-lance church work, including writing and speaking and editing, for most of my career, and now writing a free weekly blog with a large readership whose donations so far this year total just $850.

And the vow of stability required by some monastic communities would also be within my reach, being an introvert and a creature of habit as well as being loyal and steadfast.

Those who know me or have read my books may find this difficult to believe, but I could even handle celibacy or chastity.

But to take a vow of obedience would be for me most challenging of all.

In birth order theory, being the youngest of my family, I would be the revolutionary, the rebel, even the prodigal. While I’m not quite all that—after all, I’m the only child of my parents whose vocation has been upholding their Christian faith—yet I am a progressive Christian, which means I resist being told what I have to believe and how to behave!

What helps me is understanding that the word “obedience” itself comes from a root word meaning “to listen,” and I’m pretty competent at that, not only as a pastor and friend, but also as one whose prayers are more about listening than speaking.

One could say that the Christian vow of “obedience” is much like the Buddhist concept of “mindfulness.” Jesus commanded us to “watch,” or “watch and pray,” as he asked of his disciples in Gethsemane, seeking always God’s will and God’s way and God’s commonwealth.

Years ago, I found myself praying to God, “Bring me closer to you,” but then I quickly added, “But not through anything bad.” Much of spiritual intimacy is predicated on suffering, when spiritual intimacy is provided to alleviate suffering. Jesus healed the masses with his hands and his words, words that reminded them of God’s benevolence, giving us life and love, mercy and grace.

My mother was the first to encourage my reading of monastics, just as she did much of her life. But it was not until the 84^th and final year of her life that she told me, “You know, I’ve always believed God loves us all, but I only recently have come to believe that God loves me personally.”

Surprised, I said, “Mom, haven’t you been reading all my books?!”

For her, this was a kind of a spiritual “arrival.”

It may just take me 84 years of life to fully believe it myself.

Find out how to support this blog ministry by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description. Thank you! Donations of $100 or more will receive a gift signed copy of my book, Communion of Life: Meditations for the New Millennium.

Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

A Valentine to You Readers on Our First Anniversary

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. 

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, and tomorrow is the first anniversary of this blog, so I thought I’d write this “Valentine” of appreciation to its nearly 200 subscribers and those additional readers who made more than 26,000 visits to “Progressive Christian Reflections” since February 16, 2011. Thank you!

Most of us know that Valentine’s Day, as we know it, owes much of its evolution to the entrepreneurs who wanted another holiday to sell cards, gifts, romantic dinners and occasions. But if yesterday you gave the one you love a card that said, “Exchanging cards on Valentine’s Day to show one’s love is a mythological ritual invented by capitalists and nothing to celebrate,” I would imagine you probably would have slept alone!

In an apparent play for sympathy from a spurned lover, a kind of Valentine found its way not long ago onto a marquee of a shut-down fast food place near our home. Due to weather and vandals, eventually only its central message remained: “That which is essential is invisible to the eye.”

“That which is essential is invisible to the eye”—love, faith, hope. The famous love chapter, 1 Corinthians 13, concludes, “Now faith, hope, and love abide, these three, and the greatest of these is love.”

Many people equate love with the infatuation we may immediately experience when we “fall in love” or when we “accept Jesus.” In The Cloister Walk, Kathleen Norris reports a Roman Catholic nun’s profound talk on celibacy. I was surprised to find in that context a near-perfect explanation of true love. She said, “I found that love starts when you see the real person, not the one you invented.” She learned this in the context of once becoming infatuated with a priest, and concludes, “I learned from this experience that it isn’t ‘how good you are’ that matters—I was still full of a romantic desire to be a ‘good nun.’ … What matters is not that you’re good but that you trust. I had trusted God…to see me through this.”

Love starts when you see the real person, not the one you invented. This is as true of God as it is of a person. Progressive Christians don’t love God less because we search for the essential; rather we trust God more.

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