"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 33:
Advent, Week 2: The Wait of Glorie

The holidays always leave me feeling a little crazy. One hopes that this year there will be no massive flooding in my bathroom, although if that were the worst of my problems, I’d probably be thankful. As it is, there’s not enough money, and, I worry, not enough love to go around. I’ve been waiting to hear if I got into grad school, and the anticipation of it has been keeping me from being able to make many other decisions about what sort of jobs to look for, or where to go in life from here.

But we are in the Advent season, which is about waiting for Christ to appear, and I remind myself that when He finally did, it was in the most unexpected and common of places. Still, I am not really built for waiting, and sometimes, I feel anxious.

So, the span between Thanksgiving and Christmas always leaves me feeling a little panicked. I worry that our society has become entirely too commercial, since the B.C. Clark's jingle is now considered a Christmas carol if you live in my city. I worry that I will get presents from people for whom I’m not buying them, and that this will mean I’m a bad, bad person. I worry that my family will melt down right around the holidays, and that I’ll start smoking again.

Also, this year, I’m the only one of my friends who is currently single, and this is a problem. I’ve learned, over the last two years, to be fine by myself, as long as I had people around me to whom I could turn when I was feeling that old loneliness poke its head out again and again. The problem is, the last time I tried to call around to find someone to comfort me, everyone seemed to be spending time with their boyfriends, their husbands, their partners. It was such a rotten feeling, I spent two entire days in my room playing video games. But finally finishing Final Fantasy X didn’t seem to help much.

I bundled against the cold, and I moved, and set up a new work space in my house, complete with a one-inch picture frame, to remind me of how much I must get down on paper every day, and my replica of St. Francis’ cross, to remind me that I have faith, and am not doomed, even if it won’t bother speaking to me like it did to this spiritual hero of mine.

Moving was such a surreal experience. It always is, really, but this time, for some reason, it pushed me so near the brink of insanity that I thought I might, at last, go over. Also, because everyone has a life and a day job except me, I ended up doing a lot of it myself. Spending the past six months not working has given me an excess of energy, if not a deficit of creativity, and somehow, I managed to get almost every piece of furniture, every boxful of books, and every belonging into the back of my car and down to my mom’s house, then up the stairs and situated the way I like it, all by myself.

Part of it was that I didn’t want to wait to do it. I’m like both my parents in that, when faced with a challenge, I’d just as soon go it alone. It’s not that I don’t want help, it’s just that when I make up my mind to do something, I can’t see putting it off. I don’t want to wait around for someone else to be ready to help me when I can just get it done now. So, rather than wait for anyone to get off work or clear a block of their schedule, I lifted, pulled, dragged, and drove all my furniture, my hundreds of books and thousands of knick-knacks, and arranged them all how I like, by myself. At the end of it, my body ached, but I felt as if I’d accomplished something. It reminded me of when I got into college, how I’d studied for the SAT, prepared all my own financial aid documents, applied for all the scholarships, without anyone knowing the tremendous strain I was putting on myself.

Heaven forbid I don’t make it all look easy.

Then, of course, came the couch, which I had fit in my car with a great amount of difficulty and assistance when I’d been given it by a lesbian couple I know. It was the last thing before I could leave my apartment for good, and since I’d come this far alone, I was convinced that I could clear this one, final hurdle. But my muscles ached, because they have been woefully underused these past few months, and my spirit sank as I spent two hours trying to cram a large couch into a fairly-small SUV. I pulled at the legs but couldn’t get them off. I tried every configuration of the car’s back seats, all to no avail.

I gave up, and called my friends Laurie and Jay, who are married, and who love me very, very much. “I need help with this couch,” I said, feeling hopeless but trying to sound nonchalant.

“We’ll be right over,” Jay said. They arrived, and Jay managed to pull the legs off like they were glued on by wet noodles, and within minutes we’d stuffed the sofa in the car and managed to even get the back door closed.

“I owe you a dinner,” I told them. They chose, instead, just to take the night and hang out with me, because they know I’m poor and that I spend too much time alone. We had soup, and then we went to the pet store, because they needed to stock up on cat food.

In the store, they had a large area where you could look at and adopt a cat, and we couldn’t resist holding the tiny kittens, cooing and doting over every one. There was the little ginger kitty, who ran around his cage, playing with every bar, pawing at the legs of every person that walked by. There was the one I named Patrick, because he was a tiny little calico, who clung to me like I was life, and purred, and looked around fearfully, and so I wanted him to have a dignified name. He was quiet and not too rambunctious, and he seemed to fall in love with me instantly. I like that in a kitty.

I wanted to adopt one of the kittens very badly, because I love kittens, partially because they’re cute beyond words, and partially because they’re much less work, both physically and emotionally, than dogs. Also, cat’s can’t, for instance, eat small children. They’re playful and adorable, and independent, which are qualities I adore in people and animals. But it was fifty-five dollars to adopt one, and I can’t spare a cent these days, so I put him back and continued perusing the cages.

The last kitty I held was a gray calico female, and the minute I saw her, I was in love all over again, like I had been with my kitty the second I met her, and like I sometimes still am. I took one look and had to hold her, exclaiming to the woman working there, “My cat looks like her in the face – they both have one green eye and one blue eye.”

“That’s not a blue eye,” she said. “This cat is blind in one eye. She had a virus as a young kitten.”

“Oh no! What virus?” I asked, appalled.

“Herpes.”

I gasped, and looked again. Sure enough, the kitten’s right eye was deformed and sunken in, a deep, cloudy shade of blue as opposed to my cat’s bright, almost teal hue. She played with my hands as I stroked her, but she seemed to be enjoying my presence, and she was as smitten with me as I was with her. When I took a good look at her eye, I knew at once I must find a way to bring her home with me, until I remembered that I have a cat, and that my cat is, at best, the merest bit territorial and selfish.

My cat got mail last week. My mother had taken her to the vet in her infancy, and apparently the vet is in the business of selling pets’ consumer information. So last week when I checked the mail, there was a solicitation addressed to “Glorie Gunter.”

“You spelled her name wrong,” I said, having named the cat ‘Glory’ for several specific reasons.

“No I didn’t,” mom said, examining the pamphlet. “I wanted it to be distinctive.”

I sniffed in irritation, but, knowing how to pick my battles, decided this wasn’t one I could win. My cat’s name, which, to me, had once been powerful and unique, was now the name of a white-trash girl baby born to meth addicts.

I sometimes have problems getting along with Glorie. She’ll stroll up, looking at me quizzically, then leap into my face and stroke me with the top of her head. This usually happens when I’m reading or really into a certain television show, and I’ll indulge her for only a few minutes before setting her gently on the floor. When I pick her up at my own convenience to show her affection, she squirms and hisses like I’m trying to give her an enema or a bath. She’s found out that she enjoys the backyard immensely, and she’ll stand at the back door mewing until I let her out. She’s discovered how greatly this irritates me, however, so once she gets out and I’ve closed the door behind her, she’ll paw at the glass until I get back up and let her back in. This is when things usually go pear-shaped, because after awhile, I am unable to hide my irritation, which she must interpret as my desire to have her for dinner, and hisses at me while running for a hiding place. This, in turn, makes me angrier, and I chase her.

She fits in so well with my family.

I’ve been thinking that she might not be so jittery if she had someone else around, another kitty to take care of. But also, I’m afraid that if I brought in another kitty, Glorie might eat her, because she is pretty tough, and, like any cat, pretty selfish. Still, no one likes to be alone, and when I saw the poor little cat who was blind in one eye, I immediately knew I must find a way to bring her home with me.

But there was none, as I knew, so, as the cat twisted her head around to get a better view of who was holding her, I fought back tears – what’s sadder than a blind kitten with herpes, especially around the holidays? – and placed her ever so gently back in her cage, which was the largest of them all, and she ran to play with the little scratching post they’d put in there. She was full of vitality and energy, and it didn’t seem to bother her too much that she couldn’t see half the world.

So Glorie waits for someone to come along and teach her not to be so self-centered, or so afraid and nervous all the time, and the blind little kitty waits for some nicer, more well-equipped family to come and take her to a warmer place. And, since it’s Advent, I’m waiting for all of these things, and for the glory – the real glory of coming face-to-face with that for which I hope – to be revealed.

I always pray for some certainty, because sometimes, I feel very unsure that my faith will hold me up as I step forward in the darkness, which seems to abound in winter. But I know that faith is the hope of that which is unseen, a trust in God’s goodness that compels us to step into the scary place. So I bundle up, and drive more slowly over the ice, and when it’s dark – whether because of my own blindness or because of the shorter days and constant rain – I keep that one eye open, ever watchful, and I keep moving, and waiting.

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