"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 23:
Mundane Grace

As you may have noticed, I’ve taken a bit of a sabbatical from Queer as Faith as of late. Those were some pretty tumultuous days and weeks, and I needed to take some time to get my joy back. So, with the help of government assistance, I’ve been doing a bit of relaxing, a fair bit of writing, and, for the first time in a long, long time, a whole lot of dreaming.

See, I tend to forget things. I forget where I put my keys, and how much God loves me. I forget that there is such a thing as redemption, and that it’s hardest to see it when you’re beating yourself over the head with your own life. And since I’m a “beating up on yourself” gold medalist twenty-four years running, sometimes I tend to forget about grace.

So I took some time off, after losing my day job, to reflect and pray about where my life is going. I looked deep inside me, and I realized that for some reason, I gave up all hope a long, long time ago. Oh sure, I’d catch brief glimpses here and there, but there was never really anything to buoy me up on those nights when I’d lie, face down on my bed, and wonder exactly how I was going to make it through the next ten minutes.

For a time, things like smoking and overeating and television helped. Then I realized that my once-fit body was a whole lot saggier than I like, and immediately I had more ammo I could use against myself. So I had to quit those things. Then they cancelled Angel and Wonderfalls. Our addictions comfort us for awhile, until we realize that they control that weird, compulsive little part of us that should be running to grace for comfort.

So when I had entire days free just to think (and to watch the occasional rerun of Strangers With Candy) I felt God begin to prod at my heart a little bit here and there. He was like a little puppy, who, when you give him a treat, keeps jumping up and begging for more. Every tiny little bit that I would pray, God would come back and – tap tap tap – want me to talk some more. Often I ignored it. Sometimes I obeyed.

What I realized I had to pray about was the fact that I have spent the past three years addicted to feeling bad – so much so that I once wrote a song with that as its title. I’ve spent a great deal of time hating my life, seeking out little reasons to be miserable and stressed and sad. Staring through a jeweler’s eyepiece at my little gem of a life, seeking out every flaw and scratch and despairing over it.

So as I began to pray about these things, and to read Job and the Psalms and Philippians, I realized that at some point I sold out on joy, and on freedom, and that a person cannot live like this.

Also, things began to happen. These are stories of renewal.

The first story happens in Nashville, Tennessee, at a wedding. The fact that I was there at all is a miracle, because I had neither the money nor the trust in my car to get me there. At the last minute, just as I was about to call the bride and groom – who were old friends from college – to say I couldn’t come, my mom handed me a fair bit of money and the keys to her car and said, “Go to this wedding. Maybe it’ll remind you of who you are.”

So I mixed a bunch of CDs and drove seven hundred miles to Nashville.

I think that a big theme in your early twenties – at least, the twentysomethings I know – is finding out about who you are. It probably doesn’t stop when you hit 24 (and here I was hoping I only had 3 weeks to go), but I wonder if it’s not a little more confusing than at other times in your life. No career, no relationships that go well, decisions of a life-and-death scope and no idea how to make them.

I met my friends from college once again in Nashville and we connected on this level of intense confusion, deep sadness, and powerful joy in the fact that we had people in this world who loved us and who were excited to see us once more. It was exciting to see that life does, in fact, move forward and carries us all along, no matter how sunk to the bottom and unmovable we feel. Brooke and Derek got married, and we watched, and prayed, and laughed.

For the first time in months, possibly years, it seemed that there was a future, and not just the crushing, heavy present.

That same week, my dad called me to say he’d like to send me back to school for my Master’s, and let’s plan for that. I was leveled. Apparently my family had met in secret to discuss me, and how I can’t seem to find a bead on where I’m going or why I’m so sad all the time. And my dad decided that the solution was for me to figure out where I’m going, and so I should go back to school.

So I applied, I took the GRE, and I’m waiting to hear back on a start date for next spring. I’m going to school to be a writer. Once again, the clouds part and I can dream again, because it doesn’t seem like life very well might end the next minute, or continue on like this forever.

We find grace in some pretty mundane places, I suppose: our families, wedding receptions, beers with friends. I’m learning to see grace again all around me, rather than terror and fear and sadness all the time.

Granted, most of the time I’m like an addict about three days out of rehab, with the surliness and constant relapsing. But it’s summer time, there are warm days and pools and I’ve got people in this world who love me.

And there are fights ahead, too. It’s a fight to tell my bad mind to stop being so noisily afraid all the time, like that one really neurotic passenger on the plane who screams out at every sign of turbulence. Or like Nathan Lane in The Birdcage. My mind acts like that a great deal of the time, but I’m finding that prayer, and faith, really isn’t a crutch. It’s about looking above and below you and seeing grace everywhere.

Hatred is an addiction I’m learning to kick. And when you remove an addiction, for awhile, it leaves a hole. But if I can stop complaining to myself, and stop reminding myself what a huge failure I can be, maybe I can begin to hear the wind rustling the trees, or the sound of the ice cream man driving by, or life continuing to move forward and carry me along.

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