have plenty of devils, but not the gay kind.
Anyway, religion was in my bones. I liked some of the rhythms of Catholicism, and I liked some of the promises of Protestantism. I went to summer camps, I made friends, I prayed that God would hide me from the fires of hell, I avoided masturbation, I never told a soul I was gay, I hoped it would all go away. When I was eighteen, I joined a missionary organisation. I had no skills to offer, but they didn’t seem to mind. The missionary organisation’s dialogues bringing Catholic and Protestant people together to talk carefully about difference were so groundbreaking that it launched me on a career in conflict resolution.
But more of that later.
‘Have you ever been involved with the following?’ the Missionary Application Form asked. It presented four categories: alcoholism, drug addiction, occultism, homosexuality. These days I note how homosexuality was something to be involved with, rather than a way of being human. It didn’t occur to me to lie. It didn’t occur to me that I was stepping into a diabolical little closet that would take decades to break from. It didn’t occur to me to imagine that there might be something better.
I told you I didn’t know that I was allowed to imagine.
The first week in the missionary organisation, an exorcism was arranged. People shouted loudly at the devil in me. I cowered down and prayed for it to end. There were two more exorcisms. When those were deemed unsuccessful – whatever was in me was still in me – it was decided that if I was to continue in the organisation I should go to Reparative Therapy. Reparative Therapy is a misnomer. It is neither reparative nor therapeutic. It is not accountable. It has no professional standards, no professional supervision, no framework and no sociological analysis about why a person would have ‘unwanted same-sex attraction’. I had been told that if I indulged in my homosexual tendencies that I’d lose my faith, family and friends and spend an eternity in hell. Of course I wanted rid of this pestilence.
‘Let my people go,’ Moses told the Pharaoh.
I had accidentally stumbled into a love of the Bible. Somewhere along the way, I learned that the Bible was less a manual for keeping out of hell and more a library for the living. Whatever the future, it told stories of people who had the courage to live now: these people survived genocides; they gave God new names when the old names stopped working; they changed; they survived; they made rituals to mark the horror that had broken them. One of them called God a ‘deceiving stream’, but still wept in prayers. In this vast landscape of language there was an argument about what God meant, and that argument welcomed all kinds of people.
Including me.
Quietly, I began reading the Bible like it was poetry. When I read it like this, it opened up. I couldn’t tell anyone. It was my secret. I kept a book in which I wrote my own engagements with the Gospels, my own considerations of the lives and loves of the characters in the text. I felt like it was a record of blasphemy, but when I read those journals now, it reads like a prayer of the desperate in the face of the devil.
It worked.
‘Let my people go,’ Moses told Pharaoh. Pharaoh had seen the Hebrew people and believed that they were the problem. So he decided to get rid of them. He blamed the people he hated by projecting his hate onto them and making them the problem, not him. It’s an old trick. Change them and everything will be OK. For years I was the them. I believed I needed to change. I believed the lies that the pharaohs around me told. If homosexuality were indulged, it would wreck families – it would mean the end of love, it would wreck a childhood, it would cause death. I was a person under the thumb of a frightened pharaoh, and I believed all his damned lies.
Let my people go.
Here’s how the Reparative Therapy went: the therapist told me it was my mother’s fault; he told me it was my father’s fault; he told me gay men are like cannibals because they want to consume the very thing they wish most to become; he told me that Jesus had watched me during the times when my homosexual condition was developing; he told me I needed to do homework. He had his qualification displayed in a frame on the wall; it was from a group with Christian in its name. I wondered about a university of love; he told me to fantasise about the bodies of women I knew in order to stoke the heterosexuality within me. I told him I wouldn’t do that; I queried his methodologies; he got angry at me; he told me my deepest problem was language; I realised that he was making everything up; everything; everything. I stood up; I left; I was free and frightened and exhilarated.
And I had nobody to tell.
At the time it felt like an excommunication. I still loved the Church. (I still do, sometimes.) I didn’t love the Bible. (I do now). I felt like I was all alone. I knew a few gay people – men who #struggledwithahomosexualorientation. I knew that I was no longer one of them. I was on my own. I felt like I had no people. I felt like I’d fallen off the edge of the holy and was now plunging deep into the abyss of sin. I had never kissed a man. It would be years before I would. I was not fantasising. I was not masturbating. I was free. I was burdened. I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t know where to turn. Sometimes I’d walk outside the gay resource centre in Dublin and look at the men walking in, coming out. I’d wonder if they were keeping secrets. I’d wonder if any of them feared God the way I feared God. All the while there was a tempest in me. It was loud, it was distracting. I stopped being able to sleep well. I began to need more time alone. I prayed, and I prayed that I could be released from God. I went on a retreat at a monastery in France in order to leave God behind. It was Easter. God was about to die. I felt like the only way I could live was by leaving everything behind, but I had nothing to go towards. In the death of God, a monk helped me find God. I watched as I saw something new emerge: resurrection. Not of God. Of me. I began writing. I have not stopped.
Language can be a saviour.
I’m soon to be forty-four. Half my life ago I had begun to come out to myself and I was haunted by God and holiness and horniness. One of the benefits of isolation is that you begin to rely on whatever it is that’s around you. I read everything I could. I snuck books about inclusive theology into the dorm room I shared with four other men. I hid it under my mattress. I wrote about everything. I began to rely on the Irish and the English and the French I knew in order to search out new language for old things that had broken me. I began to question everything.
I believe God is a good question.
Had I known it, there were shelves of books that would have done all of this for me, but I didn’t know that. I felt like I was digging down into the foundations of the texts that had frightened me before. I sought out scripture scholars. I heard them say that the Bible is a vast library of brilliance written over 1,400 years by authors who’d have disagreed with each other’s ideas of what the word God meant. God is a long-stretched muscle in the minds of people over millennia, someone said to me,
and the imagination opened.
Years later, when I was given a job as leader of the Corrymeela Community, Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation organisation, I received some public attention. I had been named the most senior out gay religious leader in Ireland by a journalist. The usual things happened: I got messages that I was an abomination, I was told I was damaging Christianity, strangers said horrible things about me, acquaintances wrote horrible things about me. Most of those things didn’t hurt. Some did. But something extraordinary happened. Twenty people got in touch. These twenty people were from small churches and prayer groups all around the north of Ireland. They had heard disparaging sermons about me and Corrymeela. They had heard that Corrymeela was definitely not a Christian witness to peace and reconciliation because Corrymeela had had the audacity to give a gay Catholic man the role of leader. They had heard it as a terrible thing. But they were all gay themselves. The sermons meant to warn people away from association with us served as a signpost to isolated LGBTI people. Those people got in touch. I invited them round. We cooked. We talked. They had all been through reparative therapies, so-called healing prayers, exorcisms, insinuations that they were a threat, little hints that girls who became girlfriends were abandoning God’s best for them. We became a community. I had never wanted to be a parent. I realised now: I had always wanted to be a lioness.
My