"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 30:
St. Francis Ants

Last week I hope I entertained you with the story of an odd little experience I had in Slovenia. I wrote that piece to help me get through a block, and when it was finished, I decided I had to share it, because when I read I hope I find more stories like it out there, stories of tribal uplift and hope for the hopeless, which always includes me.

I’ve been struggling to write a piece about what’s been going on with me lately, because my heart has been hurting a lot, hurting about singleness, and friends and family who consistently fail to be as perfect as I need them to be, and hurting about the current political malaise we’re feeling in this country. We all seem to be caught up and holding our breath, even more so than your normal election year, and we’re all just dancing as fast as we can to keep it all together, no matter who gets our vote. Personally, I fear that my prayers for regime change will go unanswered and that, for whatever reason, I won’t be able to trust that God has our best interests at heart.

Also, I’ve been having migraines, and I wonder if maybe John Ashcroft didn’t have something to do with them.

All this has made me feel a bit more blocked than usual, and all my best advice to other writers I know – “just keep writing through the block, even if your stuff is crap” – suddenly didn’t seem to apply to me anymore, because obviously I’m too smart to fall for that Chicken Soup bullcrap.

In the midst of melancholy such as this, I’ve been doing some pretty revolutionary stuff. I’ve dared to believe that I might get published sooner rather than later, and applied for a Master’s program to help me with that. I’ve dared to speak out in defense of the Dixie Chicks, and I’ve been doing a lot of reading to make me feel better: David Sedaris, Molly Ivins, Jonathan Kozol, C.S. Lewis. I’ve taken my friends out for beer and sushi. I’ve gone to the Oklahoma State Fair and sent my careful eating habits packing with Indian Tacos, fried Snickers, and milk jugs full of root beer. I watched Jeffrey for the millionth time recently and was greatly comforted by the words Darius says to Jeffrey near the end of the movie: “Hate AIDS, Jeffrey, not life. Think of AIDS as the guest that won’t leave, the one we all hate. But hey – it’s still our party.”

These words seem to encapsulate my feelings about the current regime, and about my own horrible thoughts, and I try to remember that it’s still my party.

Still, I do get down sometimes, and it got me to thinking about a day, four years ago today actually, when I felt as defeated as I ever had up to that point in my life.

When I became a believer, I became fascinated by the writings of St. Francis of Assisi, partially through the influence of my pseudo-Catholic friend Jack, with whom I lived in a large house in Venice. As a part of our study-abroad program, we were given two week-long vacations during the semester to travel wherever we wanted. I was poor at the time and hadn’t yet purchased a rail pass, so I opted to spend most of my week in Venice, exploring the town I was calling home. I managed to find some of the more interesting landmarks, the trendier bars (and the more interesting ones), and even make an Italian friend or two, including an old nun named Suora Luisa, with whom my roommate Chey volunteered twice a week.

Suora Luisa learned of my fascination with St. Francis, and urged me to visit Assisi. “You must go while you are here!” she exclaimed. “It is so quiet, you can pray so well.” So, with no better alternative, and craving a time alone with God in the spot where one of my spiritual heroes was inspired, I went, my heart bursting with hope that I might find Some Peace and return with at least a slightly-healed heart.

I swear, that trip was the biggest pain in the ass you’ve ever seen.

I got my ticket, which included two stops in Florence and Terontola-Cortona. Okay, simple enough, I’ve taken flights with multiple stops before. Can’t be that different, right? Of course, the train managed to stop for three hours just outside Bologna, causing me to miss my train out of Florence for Cortona, and, subsequently, my train for Assisi from there. Here I’d been hoping to arrive in the late afternoon and get to the hostel at which I’d reserved a room, and now, it was after nine and I was just pulling into the station, which was a mile away from the town, and down the mountain.

I managed to convince an older American couple that I was not in fact an axe murderer and they let me share their cab up to the village. I won’t discuss in detail the fact that they made me pay half the cab fare when I was clearly a poor college student, except to say, I’m glad I am not as angry and unfeeling a person as they.

When I asked the cabbie for directions to my hostel, he said it was a kilometer out of town and up the side of the mountain, and no, he could not drive me there. I’d have to hoof it.

I sighed a big Eeyore sigh and pulled my duffel bag over one shoulder, then began walking. It can’t be so bad, I thought, until I reached the gate leading out of town in the direction the cabbie had told me. Beyond, it was pitch black. The cabbie had also been kind enough to mention that the rest of the hotels in town would probably be full, and, the fact was, I couldn’t afford any of them even if they hadn’t been. So I sucked it up and started walking, into the darkness.

Okay. I am ever so slightly more nervous than your average person, but I also have a bit of faith, and a fair bit of experience in protecting myself physically, so I just started walking, for a kilometer, along a pitch-black road. Looking back, I go, “What was I thinking?” But God must’ve slipped a bit more Vitamin Faith into my cereal that morning, because I just found myself slightly annoyed, and immensely captivated by the sight of the Italian countryside, dark below me, and the stars, bright and sparkling above me. And with a minimum of paranoid starts at random sounds along the road – one turned out to be an honest-to-god horse – I made it to the hostel.

And of course, they’d assumed I wasn’t coming and given my room to someone who hadn’t had to endure a kilometer’s worth of fear and trembling (things are always worse in an upset person’s memory), because isn’t that just the way of the world? Still, the guy at the desk said that he did have one thing left, a small caravan, which is like a really little camper, and it would be cheaper than the room I’d reserved.

“Of course,” I said apologetically to God as I tramped down the path to my new caravan. “Of course you didn’t bring me all the way here to make me sleep in the town square or get beaten up on some mountain road.” I chucked myself under the chin good-naturedly, thinking how wonderful God was.

Until I reached the caravan, and opened the door, and came face-to-face with a fuzzy spider the size of a Kaiser roll. I’m one of the most arachnophobic people alive; the sight of a small, little spider in my bathroom makes me run, screaming (often naked) out the door sounding like a five-year-old girl. I’m too scared to even get close enough to kill them. This spider was seriously the size of my fist, and just sitting there, sounding in my mind like Vincent Price: “I’ve been expecting you.”

I set my bag down on the ground outside the door and considered the situation. I refrained from shaking an angry fist at God, because, no matter how often I ask him to, he never ever lets a spider burst into flame in front of me. But I knew there was no way I was entering that caravan with this little pet in there.

I prayed. “Lord, come on. A little help here?” And I looked at the spider and said, out loud, “One of us is going to have to die before the other gets to sleep. And I’m afraid that it has to be you.” So I pulled my copy of an Italian newspaper out of my bag and – with courage whose origins must’ve been supernatural – smashed the spider into paste.

Here we were, three big challenges had been posed to my achieving spiritual retreat, and God had helped me to overcome them all. I strode confidently into my caravan and rested soundly, once the post-arachnophobic shaking had stopped.

The next day, I still felt funky and weird, possibly because I was alone, and possibly because I was trying to force a spiritual experience when I wasn’t actually ready for one. I’d come here hoping to make something happen, while God sat at my elbow all day, trying not to laugh at my presumptiveness. I sat in a park and forced myself to read all the way through Acts, just because. I was being kind of belligerently-spiritual, and when I started to worry that I might begin accosting people and asking if they’d accepted Jesus Christ as their Personal Lord and Savior, I decided I’d better just take a nap.

I made it back to my caravan as the sun was beginning a slow crawl through the lower sky, turning the tops of the mountains orange. I washed up in the public restrooms, then went to open the door of the trailer.

In my memory now, I feel I knew something was wrong before I opened the door, that brief, Spider Man-like flash of intuition just before something hits you. I know I hesitated opening the door, possibly because of my experience with the spider, or possibly because something inside me knew something was just…off.

But, I opened the door, and it took a few moments for my eyes to realize what I was seeing. The walls were…different. Black. And moving. And covered, top to bottom, in ants. Big, black ants that covered half the inside of the trailer, but, thankfully, not my bed, or my bags.

I thought I might cry, just before I realized that I already was crying. It was so defeating – here I’d come to meet God, my heart full of the promise that to seek God is to find Him, and all I’d found were stupid bugs, mean people, and that I never really had enough money to make this stupid bloody trip in the first place. And now, here it all was, ants. The Universe seemed to be sticking its tongue of meaninglessness out at me.

My head swam with options. I could leave, and get back to Venice in time to lie in my own bed. I could go to Cortona, or Rome, or the front desk to see if they had another room, but I was out of money as it was. Or, I could force my way past the ants and sit on my bed, since I’d need to get my bag no matter what I did.

It seemed that the bed was, in fact, the next logical step. I’ve learned that this is how we, in our faith, often work: from one step to another, like climbing a mountain, when the path gets too rocky to follow, you look ahead for the next little pile of rocks to tell you where to go. At this moment, that pile of rocks was the bed, where my duffel bag was.

I dashed past the ants (who, oddly enough, weren’t on the floor), and landed on the bed, clutching my duffel bag, holding on for dear life. I cried awhile longer, watching the ants swim over the walls, and felt completely, utterly lost. I thought, I want to go home, I want my mommy, I was stupid to think I could tackle Europe all by myself.

And every time I’d think of another option, another way out of this horrible situation, this thing in my heart I’ve learned to call the Holy Spirit kept saying, “Don’t move, just stay here and breathe. You’re safe here.” And I actually began to believe that, despite the ants, I really was safe. I read out of Isaiah and the Psalms. I prayed for a long time. I watched the ants.

As it got dark, the ants seemed to retreat into nowhere, until there were none, and I fell asleep, sort of against my will. That kind of vigilance can only be maintained so long, you know, until you’re just completely exhausted and unable to pray, which is part of why I think Jesus was so down on legalism.

I woke before sunrise, before my colony of roommates could go about their work, and grabbed my things, and checked out of my little room. I had breakfast on the hostel balcony, a meal of warm bread, hot milk, delicious sausage. I wrapped up another helping of the bread and sausage for the trip back, and, deciding it was worth the cost, caught a taxi back down the mountain to the train station.

There’s not a whole lot of redemption in that story, except that I made it safely home, and I learned that no matter how hard you try, you can’t even imagine what it is that you need. I’d gone to Assisi thinking I needed a quiet place, a place of prayer and contemplation, and instead, my head had been more filled with worry and disquiet than when I arrived.

On the train, I watched the sunrise over Tuscany and thought about how much St. Francis loved nature. You can really see why, too, when you’re in Assisi, because there are birds, and trees, and hills, and you can see for a hundred miles all around. I wondered if the ants had ever terrorized this hero of mine, and if he’d ever felt this afraid.

My roommate now has a small statue of St. Francis that he pilfered from someone’s front yard while drunk. Francis poses with a serene look on his face, birds perched on his hand and shoulder, like he’s Snow White. I look at him now and think how much turmoil he must’ve endured to know the kind of peace he seemed to have known. When I was in Assisi I bought a small, fifty-cent replica of the cross which spoke to him, and I always keep it nailed above my bed, to remind me that God speaks, not only in nature’s beauty, Scripture’s words, the love of the people around us, but in crisis, and discomfort, and unquiet, to remind us that we are courageous. That sometimes all we can do is wait for that next little pile of rocks to show up. That we walk not only through the Valley of Death, but up the pitch black, scary-ass mountain road that seems to house all our childhood fears, and we’re just fine, we’re just fine.

I think of that now, with my hurting heart and my deep fear of being alone. I think of it when I wonder what will happen if nothing changes in this country this year. I think of it when life piles up and I find myself holding my breath and afraid, watching the ants on my wall and the spiders on my floor, and I remind myself to breathe, that the sun will go down, and they’ll all retreat back where they came from, and I’ll manage to sleep, and to find my way back home just fine, just fine.

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