Email From the Closet

A reader writes:

I am married, a father of two, and am homosexual. I am faithful to my wife and have never taken a male lover. The only individuals that know the truth have been my confessors and a few close friends. Life has been a struggle at times, and I might have made different decisions had the opportunity presented itself.   That said, I love my kids and my wife and am blessed with a good life. 

Sometimes, when I read your blog, I feel as if you would consider me a hypocrite. There is such arrogance in the gay community, and sometimes I sense that you feel morally superior at least to those who have not chosen the open path you did. I could be wrong. That said, I support your vision for the gay community, and I appreciate your blog for shedding greater light on these issues. My children fortunately won’t have to experience the shame that I was forced to endure as a young man bearing this dreaded secret. I don’t merely teach my girls compassion, but acceptance, and in time, I will tell them about my own personal journey. I feel no need to hide it anymore, although I realize that there are dangers to my openness. Sometimes it seems that society can accept either gay or straight but they can’t handle the graduated middle. We are hated by both sides. 

I can only hope that one day, there is neither jew nor greek, slave nor free, gay nor straight, that the Church will come to understand the true complexities of human sexuality and foster genuine and moral ways to live out one’s life authentically. Soldier on.

I hope the church hierarchy will one day see this as well. It can be so afraid at times. The actual church – the people of faith – have already moved forward on this. As for the notion that I regard the closet as something to which I am morally superior, I really don’t. One reason I have long opposed outing is that I don’t thnk it’s possible to know the full internal conscience of another human being, and the judgment he or she has made. Life is complicated. Only God knows. Who are we to judge? The point of the gay rights movement, to my mind, is not to promote the concept of being gay, but to enhance the possibilities for all people to be truly themselves. In the end, who you are is so much more than sexual orientation; but it cannot exclude such an orientation, of whatever kind, if it is to describe us adequately.

Rove Involved?

I never thought he’d be dumb enough to leave a pixel trail. But here’s the latest from the U.S. attorneys’ scandal:

New unreleased e-mails from top administration officials show that the idea of firing all 93 U.S. attorneys was raised by White House adviser Karl Rove in early January 2005, indicating Rove was more involved in the plan than the White House previously acknowledged.

The e-mails also show that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales discussed the idea of firing the attorneys en masse weeks before he was confirmed as attorney general. The e-mails directly contradict White House assertions that the notion originated with recently departed White House counsel Harriet Miers, and was her idea alone.

Uh-oh.

More Wow

A reader writes:

Reading "The Big Wow!" reminded me of two other takes on consciousness, the universe, and connectedness, so to speak. One notion comes from the Tao Te Ching (52):

In the beginning was the Tao.
All things issue from it;
all things return to it.

The second notion is termed "process thought" or "process theology." It is a theory of God formulated in modern times by Alfred North Whitehead around 1925 and carried on by, among others, Charles Hartshorne, student of Whitehead, and David Ray Griffin. My take on it is rudimentary. Griffin states the following:

"[N]ature is comprised of creative experiential events. The term ‘events’ indicates that the basic units of reality are not enduring things, or substances, but momentary events. Each enduring thing, such as an electron, an atom, a cell, or a psyche, is a temporal society, comprised of a series of momentary events, each of which incorporates the previous events of that enduring individual."

My understanding of process theology (also called naturalistic theism) is that God is – and becomes – the repository of all these experiential events. In Hartshorne’s words,

"How can I know what it will mean to posterity that I now listen to Mozart for an hour?  Perhaps nothing of any significance.  And this applies to much of my life.  But there is One to whom it may mean something.  For while God is already familiar with Mozart He is not already familiar with the experience I may now have of Mozart. . .

In this sense we can interpret ‘heaven’ as the conception which God forms of our actual living, a conception which we partly determine by our free decisions but which is more than all our decisions and experiences, since it is the synthesis of God’s participating responses to these experiences.  It is the book which is never read by any man save in unclear fragmentary glimpses; but is the clearly given content of the divine appreciation."

To date, of my studies regarding the problem of evil, process theology comes closest to providing me a view that I can live with – that is, a view of God that I can live with. Otherwise, I once again slip into agnosticism.