By the Rev. Phil Hooper
Like many closeted young people, when I was a teenager, I would pray to God to make me anything other than who I was. The world around me said that being gay was a fracture in my soul that had to be sealed up; a distortion that had to be smoothed over; a wave of longing that had to be quelled. And so, I prayed, and prayed, and prayed some more to be like the others. I prayed to fit in; I prayed to desire the right things and the right people. I prayed that God would make me something more acceptable to the dominant culture so that I could have the things that same culture told me I should want out of life: a particular type of marriage and family and identity, all tidily enclosed in a white picket fence. I did not realize, then, that maybe I was allowed to want something else.
And now I thank God that it was a prayer unanswered. Not only because I have come to love and accept myself exactly the way I was made, but because I have begun to understand that the “fracture” of my identity was in truth a doorway—a doorway into humility, into compassion, and into deeper communion with God and every type of neighbor. I thank God for showing me that what some people deem distortion is, in truth, beautiful diversity. I thank God for the reminder that the Beloved Community is borne on a wave of longing unquelled—a wave of indiscriminate mercy, passionate solidarity, and all-encompassing love. The true sin is to wall ourselves off from it, to refuse to let it carry us toward one another.
Many of us know how easy it is to build walls, myself included. I am gay, but I am also a cisgender white man born in the United States; even having come out, my privileges abound, and they can tempt me away from the interdependence and vulnerability that Jesus reveals to be the shape of true salvation in this life and for eternity. How simple it would be to find the places where I am personally insulated from harm and settle into an unreflective tranquility rather than strive for the righteous, costly, expansive peace of God for all people. How comforting it might feel to paint a rainbow on that white picket fence and call it justice. But when I hear the voice of my Lord and Shepherd, I am reminded that in the Beloved Community there are no fences at all. I am reminded that Christ is the narrow gate, and I am invited to step through it and emerge beyond it into the liberative mystery that lies on the other side of self-interest. With God’s help, I will.
I am committed to helping build Beloved Community; to participating in the necessary work of racial reconciliation; and to facing and grappling with the wounds inflicted by my own inherited privilege precisely because my queerness is itself a wound—a precious, holy wound—that won’t let me forget the cost or the beauty of daring to say “I am” in a world that would often rather I did not. May I stand alongside all my siblings of color and my LGBTQIA2S+ siblings as they dare to say “I am,” too. May the fracture in my soul remain unsealed; and may the distortion of my being trouble the waters for freedom’s sake, and when I am tempted to hide or turn away, may that rolling wave of longing—longing for love, longing for justice, longing for God—carry me back to myself, to Jesus, and to my neighbor in order to begin again.
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The Rev. Phil Hooper serves as associate rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, Indiana. In August, he will begin his ministry as rector of St. Anne Episcopal Church in West Chester, Ohio.