In this moving and challenging testimony, Wesley Hill talks about his struggles with homosexuality, loneliness, Auden and Christian community. A taste:
I am drawn to these haunting confessions of Auden’s because I, too, am a homosexual Christian. Since puberty, I’ve been conscious of an exclusive attraction to persons of my own sex. Though I have never been in a gay relationship as Auden was, I have also never experienced the “healing” or transformation of my sexual orientation that some formerly gay Christians profess to have received. But I remain a Christian, a follower of Jesus. And, like Auden, I accept the Christian teaching that homosexuality is a tragic sign that things are “not the way they’re supposed to be.” Reading New Testament texts like Romans 1:26-27 and 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 through the lens of time-honored Christian reflection on the meaning and purpose of marriage between a man and a woman, I find myself—much as I might wish things to be otherwise—compelled to abstain from homosexual practice.
As a result, I feel, more often than not, desperately lonely.
...
In the subsequent, post-New-Testament era of the Church, whenever Christians took on vocations of celibacy, they did so most often in community—in monastic orders, for example. Those committed to a life of sexual abstinence recognized that such a commitment would best be undertaken not in isolation but with others and would be sustained by the rhythms of corporate worship and the mundane tasks of providing for one another’s daily needs.
Worth a read.
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