But this young man is struggling to stay celibate and alone:
Perhaps the greatest unresolved question of my life is, How can I give and receive love, how can I experience intimacy and mutual self-giving commitment, if I am not permitted to marry a person of the gender to which I am attracted?
With every year that passes, I realize more and more that I don’t want to live life on my own.
More than anything, I would like to have a life partner. But I keep circling back to the conclusion Nouwen arrived at: fulfilling that desire seems impossible, so long as I continue looking to Scripture to guide my moral choices.
When I quoted earlier from W. H. Auden’s letter to Elizabeth Mayer, I stopped mid-sentence. Here’s the full quotation: “There are days when the knowledge that there will never be a place which I can call home, that there will never be a person with whom I shall be one flesh, seems more than I can bear, and if it wasn’t for you, and a few—how few—like you, I don’t think I could.”
Jesse Lava responds here. I understand the struggle. For 23 years it was my own. And then love, etc. broke in.
The Dish 