"Queer as Faith"
by Nathan Gunter

Queer as Faith is a weekly column by Nathan Gunter.  Unconventional and thought-provoking, Nathan writes as a gay Christian struggling to live authentically in the real world.

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Week 14:
Rm W/A Vu

It was a year ago today that I arrived in New Haven, Connecticut, the back of my car full of everything I owned and my mind set on making a messy situation work. Four months later - well if you read my columns you know what happened with that.

So now here I sit in my new bedroom. Erica and I had been shopping around for a place to live - we'd both grown fed-up with the feeling of being stuck, of being 23 and living at home, and luckily we found Tim, who was more than willing to move out of his own parents' house and come live with us in our new duplex in Norman, Oklahoma. The best part: we're paying the same rent I paid for my broom closet in Connecticut, and we get to split it 3 ways.

It feels like a new beginning for me. Yesterday was my 23 rd birthday, and I finally feel like all the things about my life that've been so stirred up for the past two years are finally beginning to settle back down into some kind of recognizable order. Despite the fact that a great number of long-distance friends claim to feel like they don't know me anymore, I feel like I know myself better than I have in quite awhile.

I decorated my room with great care. It's become my own little space - my monastic cell, my studio, my writing office, my prayer space. The cross I bought in Assisi hangs above my head while I sleep, and at the foot of my bed are two framed cards with Japanese-style calligraphy - one reminding me to breathe, the other to exhale. A few pictures, a painting I bought in Venice, and my Wake Forest diploma help remind me of what is dear and what has shaped me up til now. My new bedspread is a mixture of black velvet and various animal prints; it's like something that would be on Jack McFarland's bed if he were having an affair with Elvis. The centerpiece - for me at least - is a tacky jeweled box that Liz gave me for Christmas. I've labeled it "God's Inbox." It's already filling up.

I feel like John Mayer - "the best of me is still hiding up my sleeve." I've spent the past couple years thinking I was out of step with me, like I had a purpose in life and then I lost it. Now I'm feeling like I just haven't found it yet, like I'm still waiting to discern exactly what it is I'm being called to do in this life. And of course I want it all to come together right away - that's how I work. I've never done life at a marathon pace - I'm more of a fifty-yard-dash kind of person. I finished hanging my last picture on my wall, and as I steadied it I called out to my roommates, "Okay, I'm ready for my boyfriend now."

Maybe I am. All the confidence that I lost through my recent trials has come slowly trickling back - I lost over 3 inches off my waist and began running and working out every day, I found I'm a kick-ass karaoke singer, and I even rode a rollercoaster for the first time, which was just about the most emotionally intense experience I've had in quite awhile. It was like every nightmare I've ever had come true; you get in, and you're going up up up and just waiting to fall. All my bad dreams are like that - they don't involve terrible things happening to me, rather they're about me knowing something bad is coming and just waiting, helpless. And yet, somehow, I'm glad I rode the buggery thing.

Things have stopped sucking long enough for me to step back and take a survey of my life and all the amazing things the Lord has been working on.

Anne Lamott says that anytime everything seems to go wrong at once in your life, it's because something wonderful is trying to be born, and you need all these things to keep you distracted so that whatever it is can be birthed without your interference. Maybe all of the crap I've been through the past couple years has been keeping my eyes off of whatever is happening now, so that I wouldn't try, in my extreme impatience, to rush whatever it is that's emerging as my life.

There's something to be learned about forgiveness in there, somewhere. I feel like all that anger and resentment I felt toward so many people got lost in the move. I packed it away carefully in a box, wanting very much to preserve it so that I could continue to believe the world really is all about me and that I'm just better than everyone. Because really, resentment, grudges - that's what they're about. That's why they hurt us more than the people we hold them against. We're punished not so much for the sin as by it.

Well when I got here and tried to unpack my resentment and anger (I had a great place for them on the wall between my college diploma and a picture taken on the night of my senior prom), I found that they'd been broken in the move, their pieces scattered and useless, and so I sighed a little - "Hm." - and threw them away.

Now. If you're like me, you're reading that going, "It's not that easy! They always come back! You may feel better now but that stuff takes years to deal with!" Well, not to abandon my usual mode as Captain Politeness, but you can all bite my ass. I do believe that when God changes our hearts, he or she does so slowly, carefully, so that we still have to have enough faith to believe that it's actually happening. If it happened all at once we wouldn't learn to trust in those dark times.

Several things happened after I did that. I was going through a box, looking for a picture to put in a new frame I bought. And I came across a stack of pictures of me and Rich. Then I remembered: back in December I threw these pictures angrily into this box, not quite brave enough to rip them up but still never wanting to see them ever again. And of course, when you've had your heart broken, the harder you try to get those kinds of things out of your mind, the harder they try to come back. It's like throwing a tennis ball against a concrete wall. If you'd just barely toss it, it would come rolling back and be a cinch to pick up. But you're so angry and hurt you keep throwing it as hard as you can, hoping it will just keep flying through the wall. And every time it comes flying back at you, its teeth bared and its mean little Chihuahua eyes glaring and bites you in the ass.

I leafed through the pictures and just smiled. I haven't looked at them in eight months or so, but that certainly doesn't mean I haven't thought about him. That inward part of me that would hear his name, or see his face or think about him and want to turn over every piece of furniture in North America, just didn't seem to be there anymore. Something inside me cramped and ached a little - it probably always will. But maybe forgiveness is not about not feeling bad about what happened, or trying to pretend it didn't rip me a new one emotionally, but acknowledging those things and still looking at those pictures and saying, "It's okay. What happened was messed up and wrong and painful, but it's over now and I'm not going to let it hurt either one of us anymore by holding a grudge." Then I put the pictures back where they were, in the box.

So I finished decorating the room, and some dear friends who are moving to Colorado gave me their upright piano to save them the expense of moving and tuning it. My dad came and helped me move it, and stood silently in my new house, and I waited for him to say something about how nice it was, or how I was finally grown up. He sat on my couch in my living room, looking around, and spoke:

"You guys may have too much stuff. Let's go eat."

But I let it wash over me, because he loaned me the money to move in here, and he probably called it right anyway; I've got boxes and boxes of stuff that I don't know what to do with. So I let it lay there, and my joy about the new house, and my newfound confidence as an actual rent-paying, cable-watching, piano-abusing, loved-intensely-by-Jesus adult dissipated his comment before it stuck to the walls and got in the carpet.

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