"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 15:
Learning to Understand

About nine months ago, I wrote a little column entitled “Bible Bar! Fights Appetite!” It managed to express something about which I felt passionately, and I laughed out loud at my own witticisms several times while writing it. In the months that followed, I received a few emails letting me know that others enjoyed both the sentiment and the humor, and I eventually came to regard it as one of my better pieces of writing.  Eventually it faded into my own personal literary history and began collecting dust on my online shelf.

In the interim so much happened that I all but forgot about that little piece. I landed a job of which I’m not especially fond but that pays the bills, I moved out of my mom’s house and into a duplex with my best friend Erica and a straight guy I barely know. I dated and began to be afraid for the lives of the guys I went out with, because they’d up and vanish on me after two weeks. No calls, no letters, no telegrams. I was worried that I was killing them in my sleep.

The night I got back from a vacation in Colorado, Erica asked me to come outside to help her carry some things in from her car. When I got out to the driveway, I found her staring intently into my eyes.

“Yes?”

“I have some news.”

My pregnant pause. Was I supposed to say “what?”

“I’m going to have a baby.”

And from that moment to this my life has been a whirling carnival ride, like one of those at the county fair; you’re pretty sure you’re excited, adrenalized, and having fun, but you also hear these faint squeaks and pops that you’re pretty sure mean the thing was thrown together in five minutes by underpaid, disgruntled carnie labor and you begin to worry for your safety. You picture what you’ll look like after the accident robs you of an arm and half your face and small children won’t look you directly in the eyes as they pass.

The house became a buzz of activity and emotion and backrubs during Leno. One of the first things I did was go buy a copy of “Goodnight Moon.” You see, this baby’s father was – shall we be charitable and simply say – less than invested in the future of his child. Erica said to me a few times, in tears, how alone she felt through it all and how frightened she was. When we told my mom about the situation, she asked me, “So, are you ready to be a dad?”

I wanted to say, “I’m not even ready to be me!”

I prepared myself for a mix of gay-unclehood and surrogate parenting. I couldn’t be a partner to Erica, nor she to me, in any capacity other than best friends. But I was willing and excited to be there for her and the baby for the next 20 years, should I be needed that long. We thought of baby names, bought some toys and clothes, drank government milk since we are so very, very poor. I took over taking care of the cats at the doctor’s request, and oh my hands grew sore from all those backrubs.

But I was never once tired. It is a true testament to God’s amazing grace that she empowered me to care for my best friend, because there are few, few people for whom I’d have been so present. All of my bad, negative thinking and tendencies were silenced and went AWOL, and I thought for awhile that that evil, bat-faced part of my brain might finally have died. I couldn’t force myself to worry. I was growing into the kind of person I don’t like to be around at all: nice, acquiescent, giving, and sweet. Who is this person?

Tuesday was when it all started to go pear-shaped. Erica complained of horrible pain and other, not-so-writable symptoms. They went on for a full day before her doctor advised her to make a trip to the emergency room.

This particular emergency room has seen too much of my face this year, always at night, and I think it’s the reason why I’m smoking. We took mom there twice: once after she hurt her foot in a fit of anger (she was angry at me), and once again after she had a seizure while at work. Now here I was again, sitting with Erica’s dad and our friend Sara while Erica and her mom spoke with the doctors and nurses.

Waiting in an emergency room is one of the saddest and funniest experiences you can imagine. As a teenager I spent every weekend for a year with my family in an ICU waiting room while my cousin slipped in and out of a coma. It was mainly just us there, and we ended up helping them decorate the waiting room. It was nice, and cushy, with couches and a remote for the television, and boy, was it quiet. Still. It truly was a waiting room. We waited for over a year until he died.

The waiting area in the ER shouldn’t so much be called a waiting room as a panicking room. Because that’s what you do. You panic. You watch the people stream in and out and silently, judgmentally gauge the seriousness of their condition versus the seriousness of the person with whom you came. It’s like comparing dates at a junior high dance. We couldn’t get the television to any channel except CMT, and the only thing even slightly appetizing in the vending machines were chocolate cupcakes and diet Coke. These are the ways you occupy your mind while you wait, and wait, and panic, and panic…

In the end, Erica lost the baby. I didn’t know how to feel okay about that, although several people have had pseudo-attempts at relief prepared for me like political speeches in a scandal. Reasons we should all try to feel better. Appeals to God’s sovereign knowledge. Every one of them made me want to go buy an Uzi.

Instead, I took a day off of work to spend by myself. It was the first wintry day of the year, rainy and cold and appropriate. I sat outside on my back porch, smoking Marlboro Lights, wrapped up in my pea coat and trying to figure something out. Rehearsing speeches and magazine articles. Trying to figure out how to be a hero, then trying to figure out how to keep from lighting another cigarette. Trying to figure out how long I could sit out here before pneumonia set in. Finally I did the only thing I could do: went to see Erica at her parents’ house. I lay in her bed and we watched Friends and Will and Grace, and she took my hand and we lay there, holding hands, watching TV, saying nothing. Each of us silently trying to figure out…something. Me working so hard to be present and failing miserably.

Friday I came home after work and checked my email. In my inbox, along with all the Howard Dean messages and daily devotionals from the Cathedral of Hope, was an email from a man named Tom Ciola. The subject line: “Bible Bar.”

I clicked it with some enthusiasm, thinking it was a letter from a reader wanting to tell me thanks for being so witty and wise and unconventional. My left ear filled with choruses of self-aggrandizement and I began rehearsing what I would say in my magazine interviews.

The email read as follows:

Nathan,

Some people find things like "Bible Bar" inconsistent with their belief
system, while others find things like "Gay Christian" inconsistent with
theirs. So I guess we're even.

Tom Ciola
Developer of the Bible Bar

I rolled on the floor, my body convulsing in paroxysms of laughter. I thought I might rupture something. I managed, in my laughter, to make a mental note of where the nearest phone and exit seats were located, and tried to remember my blood type. I called Justin, who publishes the column, and we had a great laugh over the whole situation. My friend Jimmy came to the house in that moment and I explained it to him and we laughed. He had come to comfort me about the horrible events of the week, and here I am, rolling on the floor with laughter. “Here, meet some of my other personalities.”

Jimmy hit the nail on the head in describing the situation, which is what I like about him; he’s really good at doing that. He said, “And what can you say to that? He captured the exact spirit of what you wrote in those two sentences.” I briefly flirted with the idea of never calling him again.

I didn’t know what to say. But I felt grateful to the situation, if not to Tom Ciola himself, for lifting my spirits at the end of one of the worst weeks in my history. I felt it deserved a good epilogue. But what to say?

Later, I was doing some tearful thinking over a couple of Bud Lights about Erica and praying to God that she would be comforted. When she’d told me she was pregnant, I’d put a piece of paper with her name on it in “God’s Inbox.” That night, I took it out and put six exclamation points after it and put it back in, right on top. Okay God, just so you know it’s really serious.

Then out of nowhere I began to laugh. Tears had already filled my eyes and yet I began to laugh, and it suddenly dawned on me how very funny it was that my little column somehow, somewhere got to this man. That I’d prayed – on paper, in public – that this man, who had emailed me, would be broken and bruised at God’s feet praying for mercy. And now, this man, this Tom Ciola, was probably praying the same for me. And it seemed, somehow, that we both were. Well, I was, anyway. And maybe it was just some subconscious comfort-thing, but I like to think he was too.

So I guess my prayer boomeranged on me. And when I realized that, I knew that there was only one thing that needed to be said to Tom Ciola. I sent this email:

Tom,

Maybe someday we’ll both learn to understand.

Nathan

Maybe that’s all there is to hope for. Maybe all we can pray is that as grow, and as things happen, that we learn to understand a little bit more about why the things that have happened, and that are happening now, are important and in some way, that all things really do work for the good of those who love God, and that he’s up there and right here turning all our bad situations, our hypochondria, our “shitty first drafts,” as Anne Lamott says, into something worthwhile.

I went outside to look around at things, and it was dark and warm, and I didn’t cry anymore after that. I didn’t answer the phone when I knew friends were calling with words of comfort, not at first. I didn’t get the phone trees running. I just prayed, and prayed, and waited, and waited.

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