"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 32:
Advent, Week 1: Stew

The Advent season is a time for waiting. We wait for Jesus to come and pull us up out of the muck. We wait for the days to start getting longer, and for the cold to get beaten back just a bit. We light fires, and we cook warm things. I watch a lot of movies, and read a lot of books, and I get a lot of sleep.

I think the sleep is the best. Nature hibernates when the cold comes, and we nest. Life seems to retreat back into the trees and the ground – bears hibernate, leaves fall, the grass turns brown again. I added a few blankets to my bed, and set up my room as a kind of little monastic area, where I could be alone with my books, and movies, and blankets, but also as a warm space, where people could come and sit in these things with me.

And I bought one of those tacky “Immaculate Heart of Mary” candles. I’m not sure why. I was doing the shopping, and I came across them in the grocery store, they were a dollar, so I bought one. I decided I would keep it lit on my desk during Advent, to make me think about Mary.

What a burden she had to deal with. Here comes Gabriel to tell her that this absolutely amazing, unprecedented thing is going to happen to her, and she just gives herself over to it completely, with no reservations or questions. I can’t even give myself over to a decision as to where to have lunch. I’d make the worst Messiah.

This year Advent is especially important for me, as I feel that something wonderful may be about to happen in the world, all evidence to the contrary. Around here, there’s not enough money or patience to go around, and we’re preparing to send someone we love a lot off to fight in Iraq. We can’t get the temperature right in the house – it always seems to hot or too cold, and the kitty can’t understand why we’re no longer leaving the door open for her to come and go at will. There’s just the merest bit of tension.

But love seems to abound, as does warmth, on occasion. We’ve all buckled down now that the wind’s started to blow and election season is over. There was all that energy for so long, because of summertime, and because of the electricity in the air about the vote. I did my part, trying to get people registered and not call our opponents “poopy-pants,” although on occasion I failed at that. Still, things turned out the way they did, and the next morning, instead of breakfast, I ate all the Halloween candy.

My father and his friends are all yellow-dog Democrats, so the day after the election, they were walking around like the world had come to and end, like they’d unfrozen Hitler’s head and it had come to rain fire and brimstone on our national parks and cut funding for crack-addicted, HIV-positive kittens.

I, for my part, turned on some doleful music and threw myself into work: copying, filing, typing, and not taking a moment to think about what had happened. But the general crappy feeling of all the people around me seemed to rub off. About mid-morning, everyone just stopped talking altogether, and I, consumed in my work, was all too content with the silence. It was raining and cold and dark outside.

Then, I went to lunch at the Catholic Church, because they feed anyone who shows up on Wednesdays. I gave them a few bucks as an offering, and they ladled me a big bowl of stew. Stew is the greatest comfort food, because, when there are a lot of people around, it always feels like a bit of everyone went into it. There was ground beef, and every kind of vegetable, and garlic, and cornbread. I discovered this miracle though my Irish friends, who fed me very well and kept me warm when I was cold in their country.

The Catholics are wonderful, too, because it seems that, where food is concerned, they always seem to know how to feed the soul and the body. Maybe it has something to do with the doctrine of transubstantiation, which is maybe something I should look into (I mean heck, I’m already so into infant baptism…) I found this when living in Catholic countries, and they didn’t let me down that Wednesday either. I ate, and felt warm inside, and remembered all the college lunches we had after services at Redeemer in Winston-Salem, and Jesus felt very, very near, and I felt unafraid.

I guess Advent is about Jesus drawing near, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when at the Catholic church that afternoon, I felt very enveloped in His presence. I don’t often feel that way – I like to say I’m not really one of those “touchy-feely” Christians. The truth is, I’m just a bad Christian, who couldn’t even remember which Sunday Advent started on and ended up calling all his Catholic and Anglican friends to find out. Once I did, I was excited, and I lit my Immaculate Heart candle and dressed up in my favorite shirt and tie for church. I coaxed my mom out of bed, where she was happily camped with the Sunday paper and the kitty, and she came with me to the large Anglican cathedral downtown.

I got to thinking about the Law and the Gospel during the service, and about the Christmas season. In Advent we are acting out what in reality took 4,000 years – the time from the promise to its fulfillment. We are waiting. And what do we do in winter? We bunker down, and we keep warm. We eat stew. But also, we bundle up and take blankets to homeless shelters, and invite people in, and go out looking for wood for our fires. We brave the cold and the darkness because we want to take our hope and our warmth to places that don’t have them. We take the stew to others, or, at the very least, we make enough so that anyone who shows up can have enough.

The Law is summed up in a command that we love one another, and that we love God with our whole being. That’s what we do while we wait for the glory to be revealed. In truth, we’re always waiting. It’s always Advent. And, despite the most dire predictions of our hearts and our sick minds, there’s always enough to go around.

Going to church with any member of my family has always been an uncomfortable experience, because, despite the fact that we are closer in many ways than almost any family I know, we’ve never been one of those families that talks openly about our spiritual journey or that prays together, despite the fact that we know we should. After two and a half decades of this kind of behavior, we are reticent to change. Still, I knew it would lift mom’s spirits if I invited her to come along, and, on that level, I was happy when she accepted. I figured, for this day, there was enough graciousness in me to hand out freely.

We sat through the service – all that wonderful kneeling, and singing, and recitation – and I was overjoyed because I love the holidays, and I love it when people in authority, people who know, remind me that our waiting does not come to naught, because Jesus showed up, when everyone else was looking around for a mighty king, as a tiny baby.

And here, all summer, and all through the autumn, I’ve been looking around for a victory, for some tangible evidence that the world and my country aren’t racing full-stop into the open mouth of hell, and whoops, despite the fact that it seems to be, God gave me the courage to invite my own mother to church and sit with her through the whole service. He gave me the energy to make dinners, and move home, and apply for grad school.

So. As the cold sets in, and the skies get clearer and colder, and we can’t stop shivering, we keep on waiting for the bus, like all those people in The Great Divorce, to take us somewhere warm and sunny. Just before Christmas is the shortest day of the year, when the darkness seems to reign and it doesn’t ever snow in Oklahoma, just rains, and freezes, and you’re trapped at home, with these people you love so much and sometimes can’t bear to be around. Then it’s the holiday, and the light returns, just a little, because somewhere, out of reach, where we can’t control it or get our sticky fingers all over it, where we can’t take credit for it, there is a miracle being born, and we’re all looking around for a mighty sword that will smite the dark, and the problems, and the poverty, and the injustice, and what we need is coming, looking for all the world like the most common, and mundane, and everyday things we spend our whole lives ignoring. Until it is revealed, until the Spirit descends, we keep warm. We eat stew, we take in the warmth, and we keep walking in faith.

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