"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 34:
Advent, Week 3: Bad Things to Such Horrible People

I enjoy writing at coffeeshops. My favorite one in Oklahoma City is happily located within the best bookstore in town, so I go there often to try to get some decent work done. They have warm soup, and fireplaces, and, when I run out of money, free pots of cinnamon-spiced coffee.

The only thing about this bookstore is that it is in the same building as the store at which I held my last real job, at what is arguably one of the most upscale clothing stores in the state. Going into this building is always a little scary, because my relationship with this company did not end well.

I think it’s that I’m not built for retail. I have this awful habit of letting my more casual thoughts fall out of my open mouth without thinking about how they might affect people’s perceptions of themselves, or me. I find it difficult to be popular or talk someone into something. I’d never, ever be elected anything. Also, as a rule, I don’t generally get on well with retail professionals, especially people at the managerial level, because I’m not one of those motivational poster type of people. I don’t get up at six thirty. I don’t dress for success. I don’t motivate my determined potential or inspire any steadfast ambition.

Granted, a big part of the reason I lost this job is because of what a bad person I am. And at the time, I was fifty times worse than I am now. When I was working this job, I was staying out all hours, perhaps drinking a smidge too much, smoking, and not getting anywhere near enough sleep. I was poor, and sometimes my car ran out of gas. I was depressed and angry, because boys kept rejecting me, and I felt very alone, and very, very afraid. I would come in five minutes late on a daily basis, and not speak to anyone until after about eight cups of coffee. I was surly and standoffish, and, despite the fact that I was one of the company’s top salesmen a few times, I felt more and more trapped the longer I stayed.

Retail does have its perks, however. I’ve worked in a more relaxed environment, in a teen-oriented clothing store, in a mall, but that doesn’t compare. There, the company piped indie rock and hip-hop over the speakers so loudly that you could barely hear yourself think, much less interact with the customers, which was fine with me. I never really knew what to say to a middle-aged woman who was letting her ten-year-old daughter dress in midriffs and short shorts. Especially when she bought an outfit to match.

This latest job, however, was very chic, the clothes very expensive. The clients were CEOs, the mayor, a state Senator or two. There was a lot of money to be made in commissions. The best part of living in a red state, I learned, was that I became the queer little style consultant to the same people who were passing laws banning any hope of my equal rights. It was my own cruel little sort of vengeance. I figured, if I couldn’t make them accept me, I would have to settle for making them look like me.

“That green tie with the orange shirt – that’s perfect.”

“Real men wear pink and aren’t ashamed.”

I turned a bunch of straight white men metrosexual without the least bit of resistance or understanding from them. Their wives would occasionally pull me aside and thank me profusely. The men would shoot me odd looks when I measured their pants for alterations. I understand why the Queer Eye guys get those evil little grins on their faces sometimes. Still, the pleasure I gleaned from this experience was not enough to keep me fulfilled in my work, and I was let go. Which, let’s face it, was best. I hated being there, and, given the toll it was taking on me, it hated me, too.

To be fair, I don’t think it hated me so much as I think my boss hated me. He wasn’t such a bad guy, really, if you like soulless suck-ups whose entire appraisal of your worth rests on how much money you can make for him. We would take cigarette breaks together, during which he would go on long tirades about his boss, our district manager, to whom he was so sickeningly sweet in person that people fled the room if they were there at the same time.

This was the kind of man at whom you laughed when he shared stories of traumatic things that had happened to him as a child. I had to take an emergency bathroom break when he began talking about how his first wife had turned out to be a lesbian. This was a man who tucked his tie into his belt. To tell you the truth, it was a relief when they finally let me go, because just looking at his face had become a challenge for me. Every morning I told myself, “Don’t take the Bailey’s to work for your coffee this morning. Maybe tomorrow – probably tomorrow – but not today.”

I’ve spent the past several months writing, and doing menial work to keep the bills paid, but one day recently I strode into that building and sat down in the coffeeshop, intent on getting some real writing done.

I looked up from my computer and saw a girl who had been a coworker of mine. I tried to look away as if I hadn’t seen her, but our eyes met, and she came bounding over to my table, where I was spread out with books, Bible, note cards, pens, and discarded paper cups.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

I thought of telling her where she could shove her issue of Cosmo, but it’s the holidays, and anyway, I had a Bible open on the table, staring up at me – j’accuse – so I invited her to sit.

“How are things upstairs?” I asked sweetly, sounding entirely too fake in my mind but really trying to make an effort.

She pulled up a seat. Her eyes grew thin, and narrow, and I sensed that, in her mind, we had just become co-conspirators. She seemed to look around to make sure no one was listening. When she spoke, her voice was a whisper. She told me that the boss, with whom I’d shared such tension and mutual dislike, had been fired for stealing. For stealing! Stealing! It was a revelation of such sweetness and light that I scarcely heard anything else she had to say. I missed out on the details, and her commentary on the holidays, and the classes she’d started taking. My vision tunneled, a long, narrow, black pathway at the end of which was an image of this man shoving sweaters into his briefcase and twenties from the safe into his pockets.

We spoke for only a few more minutes, and she left. I felt as if my soul might actually leave my body and fly away, leaving a crumpled mass in the chair. I wanted to stand on the table and dance. I wanted to learn French so I could celebrate in another language.

This elation colored my writing and sweetened my coffee, and eventually I became so hopped up on it that I felt I might have to divide, like an amoeba, in order to share the good news with the world. “The Universe is just!” my amoeba-self would declare. “Believe in God, rejoice, the boss got caught stealing!”

I called my mom.

“You’ll never believe it,” I began, telling her my brilliant, wonderful news. It was the happiest I had felt in months. As I related the story, however, I saw in my mind this picture of myself, a little child, playing in the mud. I started to think about how dirty I used to get, how covered in grass and dirt and filth I was as a child.

If I have learned little in my faith it’s mostly because I’m stubborn and selfish and I like to have things my way. Being stretched and grown hurts, and so, when I am able, I resist it with every ounce of strength I have. Still, I have learned that sometimes, rather than a dawning realization like a sunrise, we often work in our faith in the same way that we climb mountains.

When you hike a mountain trail, and you get above the treeline where the path is rocky, it is easy to lose your way. I’ve come into some very precarious situations in the past while hiking because I simply lost sight of the trail. Fortunately for hikers, there are these small piles of rocks that lead you where you need to go. You simply go from pile to pile, stopping and looking around until you see the next one, which tells you where to go. If they weren’t there, my dead body would probably still be clinging to the side of a mountain in Colorado somewhere.

I knew, when speaking to my mom, that this picture in my mind of myself as a child was some sort of clue, some small pile of rocks that I needed to find my way to and examine. A kind of prodding from the Holy Spirit, if you will. So I got off the phone and sat with my empty cup of coffee, searching the bottom for some clue, like reading tea leaves. And I prayed about this child.

That led me to thinking about a recent experience of mine. My friend Missy just gave birth to her second child a couple months ago, and I met the baby for the first time just after she was born. I’m so nervous around babies because I fear I might break them, or screw them up, because I’m so polluted and ruined – not to mention outright clumsy – that somehow my mere presence, my physical touch, will cause them to turn out badly.

Missy thought this notion a ridiculous one, and thrust her baby into my arms. I believe that, like dogs and bees, small people can smell fear, because the second she was in my arms, the baby started screaming like she was being lowered into a pot of boiling water. I handed her back to Missy, saying, “You know, I think she’s being really immature.”

When thinking about this experience that day in the coffeeshop, I realized that it had to mean one of two things. Either I was so incredibly messed up that the baby, in her infancy, could sense that and became afraid, or, at best, we are all this screwed up and lousy right out of the chute. Since the Bible seems to affirm the second notion – rather than the complete uniqueness of me – I had to go with that.

Why was I so elated at this man’s failure? I started to think about his wife, and their two kids, and the fact that he had moved his family a couple states to take this job. I started to think about how this must feel for them. I get annoyed with my family for not being perfect all the time, and not one of us has ever been proven guilty of a felony.

Still, every time I put those thoughts aside and concentrated on experiences working with this man, I found it nearly impossible to keep a smile off my face. My body was reacting to this news in a way that my spirit found completely inappropriate. In this case, the spirit was a little bit willing, but the flesh was just so incredibly weak.

My joy became crushing, almost to the point of being overwhelming, but it was still, in a very twisted sense, my joy. I called a friend who tried to comfort me by saying, “Well, karma’s an ugly mother.” But since I don’t really believe in the idea of karma, as much as I’d like to, those words were little comfort. Another friend suggested that the Universe had given me an early Christmas present. I told him he sounded a little too much like someone in the administration telling me the war was going well. Also, I decided to get some better friends.

Everyone around me kept telling me how excited I should be about this news. I felt sick, like you do after you eat far too much chocolate or Mexican food. I’d gorged on something that I probably should never have tasted in the first place, and now my insides were all knotted up and roiling.

It’s worse to feel this way during the holidays, because almost everywhere you look, people are looking around at one another with such unbelievable tenderness. Or at least, that’s how it seems when you feel like the most screwed up person on this entire boat. I wanted to feel awful for this man, and I wanted to forgive him, and myself for feeling this way, but I just couldn’t. Every time I thought about what he must be going through, I got this twisted, evil smile on my face. I felt like Cartman. I felt like Satan.

I prayed for an answer. I prayed for a spirit of grace and mercy. I looked at manger scenes and played music about forgiveness. I kept reading this quote: “Forgiveness is giving up all hope of ever having had a different past.” But what about the present, I whined.

The next day, I helped my mom put up her Christmas tree. It’s something that we look forward to, but it always ends up being this harrowing experience, because it gets the kitty all riled up, and it means we must subject the closets to a complete cleaning-out in order to get to the Christmas decorations. I was put in charge of the lights, which had apparently been wadded up and tossed into a box after New Year’s. Some were impossibly tangled, and just as I’d pull at them and let loose another strand, I’d come upon another, and a chain of five or six lights would flicker and die. After several significant shocks from stray wires and a cut from some broken glass, I got the merest bit frustrated and suggested we take a break.

We watched a movie, ate something, and finally finished the tree. Later, my married friends Jaye and Laurie called and invited me over for movies and drinks. After the week I’d had, a small party sounded nice. When I arrived at their house, there was beer and tequila, and movies, and a beautiful tree.

I started to share with them my story about this man I’d so loathed, and my asphyxiating elation that he’d been caught doing wrong. I told them how screwed up I felt, how strange it was to be taking so much pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. I told them how it was more than pleasure. It was a feeling of sick happiness, like my heart was having some kind of blood orgy.

Jaye, who has worked in retail for years, told me that the exact same thing had happened to him. He’d had a boss that he hated, and she’d been fired for embezzlement. He remembered being unnerved at how happy he was about this. Laurie chimed in with stories of getting to fire workers that she couldn’t stand and how hard it had been to keep the smile off her face while doing it. I felt the tangle in my heart began to work loose a little, and the lights started coming back on.

Rich Mullins said once, “I know that ‘Vengeance is mine, thus saith the LORD,’ but I just want to be all about the Lord’s business.” Something inside me really does think I know something about right and wrong, when really, what I know is what I want, and what fulfills that whiny little child part of myself.

When Jesus showed up on Earth, there were at least some people who understood why he’d been sent, even at his birth. Simeon held him and cried because he understood something about what must come to pass. Advent doesn’t just teach us to be patient and await the Lord’s arrival; it tells us to mourn because of our deep need for a Savior. Christianity teaches us that there is hope in vulnerability, that there is wisdom in our foolishness. It also teaches us that our notions of justice, and what is right, are fundamentally tainted.

I had a professor once who was fond of saying, “We are more alike than we are unalike.” I thought of this later, after I had started feeling better. If I knew what this man had been thinking, whether when he was treating me so horribly, or stealing from his workplace, or tucking his kids in at night, I would probably have related to it. And the fact of my understanding would not have made it more or less right, but knowing this made it easier to forgive. It helped me to stop seeing myself as his judge, jury, and executioner, and to see myself more as, well, him.

The last bit of the puzzle was this quote, which was given to me without attribution: “There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve, then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving, and tiny blasts of tinny trumpets, we have met the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.”

We await a Savior, because we really do long to be transformed. But, like my sense of justice and joy over my former boss’s predicament, everything I’ve ever let go of has deep claw marks on it. Maybe we deserve everything we get. Probably, we deserve more, but as Christians, we don’t get to bend to that kind of common sense, because our world has been turned upside down. We get what we don’t deserve, we believe in that for which we have no right to hope, and we forgive that which we are unable to redeem or pardon, because we are irredeemable, and we’ve been let off the hook.

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