A Paradox of Grace

I met her in church; she was reading Isaiah as if she expected the prophecies to be fulfilled in our hearing. The next week we went out for breakfast and discovered mutual tastes in food (home fries), poets (Henry Vaughan), and politicians (Mario Cuomo). Since then we have shared books, music, academic deadlines, and romantic crises. She turns up at my door to talk, and we commiserate about sleepless nights and slammed doors and long, angry silences over the phone.

In return for her faithfulness, I try to give her the steady, unblinking affection that few people in the church would accord her if they knew she is a lesbian. I am straight and I am married, but I am also a Catholic feminist, and so I know something about life at the margins. The sheep down at this end of the sheepfold sometimes have to fend for ourselves; we have learned to recognize each others' voices.

And yet, and yet. I read scripture, I read the spiritual Fathers, I read Aquinas, and the answer always comes out the same. Whatever else she may be called to, my friend is not called to a sexual partnership. The call from the beginning has always come to women and men.

God's creating will not only invites human beings to mirror in marriage God's own covenant faithfulness, but also makes them collaborators in the very act of creation. The most intensely private of pleasures is ordered by God to a radically public end: the incarnation of that first basic community we call family. To be united as one flesh, male and female engage in a mutual self-emptying, and in turn God exalts them, empowering them to conceive children -- God's image stamped anew on the world.

For those unable or unwilling to enter into heterosexual marriage, God has ordained a life of faithful abstinence. So scripture and tradition testify.

But what sort of God would create people to love and to serve, only to deny them any hope of sexual fulfillment? Why would the Creator adorn us with gifts for intimacy and fidelity, and prohibit their use? It seems only a cruel God would carry out such a hoax, and we know our God is a God of mercy.

But not every human desire, however good in itself, is part of God's will for humanity; we have too much experience in this fallen world to think that whatever is human is good. Trusting in the Word of God that does not return empty, nor leave God's fallen creatures barren, we ask what God's redemptive purpose might be.

The key to reading God's purpose lies close at hand. By raising up communities in which the married and the celibate enjoy equal dignity, God has effected the liberation of many persons who otherwise would have languished outside of an institutionalized cult of fertility. In a mysterious paradox of grace, celibates no less than married persons yield their fruit in due season.

My aunt, a teacher for 36 years, recently received this tribute from one of her young students: "Sister Cecilia has had many children. I know because I am one." Cecilia and all her sisters in history -- lay and religious, widowed and single, nurses, mystics, abbesses, theologians -- show what God can achieve through communities where identity is grounded finally not in sexual function, but in grace.

The lives of single women and men manifest a pattern of self-emptying and exaltation, embodying the Lord's own suffering and transformation. Here, if anywhere, lies the answer to our question: The painful contradiction of a life of desire and denial may be reconciled only through the cross of Jesus.

Homosexual Christians today receive a sharply challenging form of our common gospel call: to lose our lives that we might save them. To reject the empty promise of self-gratification requires humility, courage, and the grace of a compassionate community. But to those who can follow him in the way of costly sacrifice, the Lord promises they will have life and give life, and give it abundantly.

Jesus re-created his own friends and followers into a new family, a family in which mother and sister and brother are those who hear the Word of God and do it. In the churches today, we must ask the Spirit to renew us, to transform us into that new family of Christ. United no longer by inheritance or bloodline or race or sexual practice, we long instead to be united at the table of the Lord, feeding on God's Word that alone fills the void and satisfies our hunger.

Regina Plunkett Dowling was chaplain at St. Joseph College in West Hartford, Connecticut when this article appeared.