"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 18:
My Toilet Runneth Over: A Christmas Miracle

Well, Christmas came again this year, despite my prayerful pleas for months that it wouldn’t. In addition to the fact that my day job strands me in the world of retail forty hours a week and I’ve been coming home too tired to write daily, I was looking at a big ticking time bomb of a holiday season. I was dreading it.

See, things have been pretty stressful the past few….year. And the drama seems to have been amped-up the last couple months. My housing situation kind of fell apart in November and I found myself moving to a new apartment and a sort-of new job. My mom lost her job of the past ten years, both my grandfather and one of my aunts developed potentially fatal diseases, and I’ve been so hard up financially that I’ve been buying groceries with quarters. I was looking for a big holiday payoff, you know, one of those magical Christmas miracles that teaches me the true meaning and gives a much-needed jump to my two-sizes-too-small heart.

Truth is, as we rounded Thanksgiving and headed full-throttle for the Christmas season, I seemed to get crabbier and crabbier. I managed to squeeze in a couple more bad dating experiences – each one makes my standards go higher and higher until they’re damn near unattainable – and as things got bleaker financially and politically I began to think maybe I should start carrying around some Valium, or at least a paper bag to breathe into.

It all piled up on me one day on my drive to work, two days after it had snowed several inches in Oklahoma. It was the day they caught Saddam, and the pictures of him with his Bad Santa beard were all over television as I did my ironing. I was thinking about how wrong, how terrible everything has been getting, and all of a sudden the crack in my windshield grew from a six-inch annoyance on the passenger side to a fault line that crossed the entire driver’s side. Now, you know me and my bad nerves. And my fear of breaking glass. I watched the crack in my windshield grow and all of my muscles tightened up, my mind raced with thoughts of how I’m going to pay for a new windshield – or worse, a new car – and my eyes began to water. Without any prompting from my brain, my foot left the gas pedal and I found myself going 30 miles per hour on one of OKC’s more frightening thoroughfares.

I realized that that windshield is like my life. It really does have the potential to fulfill one of my greatest fears – that of getting in another incident with glass and being even more scarred – and I’m just kind of waiting for it all to come caving in. I mean, what else bad can happen? That day at work someone asked me about my new year’s resolutions. I said, “If 2004 isn’t better than 2003, I’m gonna kick its ass.”

No one ever really prepares you for this part of life, and I both envy and loathe those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, although I’m suspecting most of you do. Well, not you…I’m sure your life is fine….but there are those of us who go through times when it just seems like everything is going wrong, and then right in the middle of it all they dump Christmas on you and tell you to be happy, to buy presents, and to celebrate. I mean, honest to Pete. Celebrating Christmas.

I have friends and family members who it seems to me have lost all hope. The desk in my bedroom was a gift from my cousin, who inherited it from our great-grandmother. When I got it there were three – count ‘em, three – stickers advertising funeral homes stuck to it that my great-grandmother had placed there in her final decade. One of my good friends is known as “Bitter David,” because the boy simply never has anything nice to say. I’m so scared of becoming known as “Bitter Nathan,” of being old and gray-headed and living to 100 like members of my family tend to do a lot, and having absolutely nothing to live for. I’m scared that I’ll be four times as old as I am now, and the only thing I will have ever done will be the things I’ve already done today. I’m scared that I’ve run out of adventures and stories and moments where I touch grace, and that the rest of my life is going to be devoted to staying out of the poor house, or the rehab center.

Hence my increased crankiness as the Christmas season approached.

But little things started happening that made me think that maybe I wasn’t totally doomed, that a rain of frogs really wasn’t just around the corner. I’ve been making friends – new friends – for the first time since I can’t remember when, and as a result my apartment, which happens to be conveniently located near the gay district in Oklahoma City, has become a popular hangout.

Our barren dwelling became suddenly furnished when a lesbian couple from my church donated to us a couch, a dining room table, and a hutch. I even discovered that I’m beginning to like my job, despite my fears that I’m going to be forty and still selling suits to the CEO’s of the heartland and still scared of paying my rent. My mom even got a part-time job.

I try to focus on the positive. I try to see redemption in all the chaos and disaster, and that’s just about the hardest thing there is to do. Wallowing is comfortable, for awhile. Maya Angelou once wrote that self-pity, at its beginning, is as soft as a feather bed. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable. I felt my self-pity – and my heart – beginning to harden just like Pharaoh, and so I decided to do something about it.

Well, sort of. I decided to wait.

The Advent season really is all about waiting, after all. It’s about waiting for redemption to come in human form, about waiting for the birth of something wonderful, something new, something completely different. The trick is the waiting: see, I’ve never been a patient person. I’m just like Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory: I want it, and I want it now!

I started to think about Mary and Joseph, which is hard to do when there are so many friggin’ manger scenes everywhere. I thought about when Mary went to Joseph to tell him she was pregnant – and by the Holy Spirit of God nonetheless. Talk about mixed feelings; what kind was Joseph having? Here he gets to be a part of something – hell, just gets to be present for something that is going to change the whole fabric of the human experience. And yet how’s he supposed to live up to God as far as fathering goes? How will his community react when they find out his betrothed is pregnant? For that matter, did he even believe her at first, or was he looking around for rocks shaped perfectly for stoning?

I decided to quit looking for rocks and just believe for once. And that lasted about ten minutes, most of which I spent standing in my bedroom thinking about believing and not doing much else. Then, of course, I went and watched TV and thought about buying gifts for people and got stressed out again. So I decided to sleep. Then I decided to write about how horrible things have been, and I got bogged down in it all. I began to despair; what I was waiting for didn’t seem anywhere near, or even possible.

So I put on Sarah McLaughlin and lay my head on the computer and was this close to crying when there was a knock on my door. Bryon and Julian, bearing wine and cheese and hugs for me. They let me talk for a minute, poured me a glass of wine, and we began to talk about dumb things, about life, about boys, about the party we had this weekend. Erica called me and invited us to a New Year’s party.

And there, there it was. I was waiting for this big Christmas miracle where an agent calls me and says, “Queer as Faith is brilliant, let’s turn it into a book. It’ll be a bestseller!” I was waiting to win the lottery. I was waiting for my family to come together and talk out our issues and learn the true meaning of love. I was waiting on an apology for everything that’s been going wrong. I was waiting for God to take me on a trip through the heavens. Instead, he gave me friendships, grace, and an overflowing toilet.

See, as we’re sitting here talking, Bryon goes into my bathroom and begins to scream. “Nathan! Flooding! Major flooding!” I go into my bedroom and find that half my carpet is soaked, my clothes are floating on my bathroom floor, and my toilet is running. Has been running for three hours. Hadn’t been used at all that day, mind you. It had just decided to start running.

And I just start to laugh. Sometimes, when God isn’t being all mysterious and divine, she can be such a prankster. Not to mention a showoff. I sat on my wet carpet and laughed and laughed. It was all just too much.

Sometimes we can’t always see redemption. But we can sit and wait for the repair man to come with his wet vac and big towels and come clean up our messes, or at least make them better for a time. In the meantime, we can just laugh at the absurdity, because that’s often the only way we have of dancing along with all this silliness, and that may be the best gift we have. Laughing, crying, having a family of people around us – they remind us that we are alive, and that we are not insane, that life is not meaningless and that the despair isn’t going to last forever.

After the repair man has left, at about 12:30 in the morning, Bryon looks at me. “Nathan,” he says, “I envy you. I haven’t seen you this happy in a long time.” I begin to laugh again, and a few tears well up. He hugs me, and we go out to dance the night away, and that night, I sleep like a baby. On the couch, of course, but maybe this isn’t the time to be picky.

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