"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 37:
Miracle Drug

Spring is coming. You can feel it in the air. It’s not a snap, like in fall, where all of a sudden things are cold and colorful. It’s a gradual warming, like when our hearts or muscles slowly recover from a wound. Soon the bulbs we planted in the winter will break through the once-frozen soil, and things will begin to bloom again.

For me, spring is about letting the windows stay open and a fresh breeze blow through everything, kicking up a winter’s worth of dust that has settled. In doing so you often find things that you have neglected, old chores that you put off, and some things you simply forgot were there.

As the days got warmer I found I couldn’t stop thinking about a boy from long ago. He was someone about whom I cared very deeply and whom I hurt very badly. Luckily, at the time, I was depressed and drinking a lot, so I was able to bury all the crummy feelings I was having about him moving off to New York and leaving me here to rot in my longing for him. I tunneled down into my self-pity and made a nest. As seasons passed and winter set in, dust settled over the place where I’d buried all my feelings for this guy, and I thought maybe I would get by like this.

But the deeper you bury things, the more violently they break through. The bulbs planted in winter, in the frozen ground, force their way to the top to bloom brightly in the spring’s thaw. And as the weather got warmer, and we all got over the election, and the holidays, I found that this boy whom I’d hurt was never very far from my thoughts. I had been madly in love with him, and he’d left, and now it seemed his specter was walking alongside me as I walked to class, and work, and around my neighborhood. I began to feel deeply despondent over how I’d hurt him, but it had been months since we’d spoken and I knew that getting in touch with him would be inappropriate at best.

So I prayed for him, because if I’d hurt him, I wanted him to at least know that God loved him a great deal, even though I had been unable to. I prayed for his success – he is going to be a famous writer of Broadway musicals, which is why he went to New York. I prayed mostly for his peace, and happiness, and a sense of being okay in the world. And it seemed the more I prayed, the more his ghost stayed with me. It was like living in an Indigo Girls song.

Then one day I found an old email that he’d written me. A short note saying he missed me and would like to talk. I wrote back, just a short note saying I missed him too and that I was thinking about him a lot. I gave him my new cell phone number, doubting he’d call. One minute I prayed desperately that he wouldn’t call, that he would be too angry or, better, indifferent. The next minute I was checking my phone to make sure I hadn’t set it on silent.

He did, of course, because absolution never comes that way. The grace that saves us comes easily, freely, a gift from God. Still, we often end up paying through the nose for the things we ask for. And I had asked for forgiveness.

He called, and we talked a whole lot about our lives, and where we were. I told him that I was no longer the person he knew, because I was no longer making a habit out of things like hating my life, or vodka tonics with dinner. I told him I was sorry, but that I could not begin to apologize for hurting him, so therefore I would only apologize the once. I let him know how much it was consuming me that I’d hurt him, and I asked if he could forgive me.

“I just think that for me to say that would be a step back at this point,” he said. I wanted to die.

But we kept talking, and I kept feeling like a jerk, like Satan with ill-fitting jeans and a sore back, and I prayed every day for some kind of an answer. I thought maybe if I wormed my way into this boy’s good graces that he would tell me that all was forgiven, that I was absolved. I could go to school the next day with ashes on my forehead. I wouldn’t have to feel so terrible every time we spoke.

Then, amazingly enough, it was Ash Wednesday, and that day it was warm, sunny, and windy, just like a spring day in Oklahoma. I had picked a few of my more attractive bad habits to give up for Lent – iTunes, going out to bars – and on Ash Wednesday I went to school feeling rotten, like I’d eaten a healthy breakfast but was dying of cancer.

Music always helps. That morning I listened to U2’s Bono, who is a Christian, sing these words: “Freedom has a scent like the top of a newborn baby’s head.” The sun was shining.

That night I decided to bake some muffins, because I enjoy bringing something sweet and warm into the world, if not a bit fattening. As I baked I called my oldest friend, Eric, who I met on the first day of seventh grade, thirteen years ago.

Thirteen years. My mind reels at this. Was I even alive thirteen years ago? Am I really going to be a quarter-century old this year? We’ll just say that Eric is someone that I’ve known for quite some time, and with whom I’ve had more than my share of adventures and mishaps. Senior year we used to make up books to see if the girl in our English class that we couldn’t stand would claim to have read them. She always did. More than once we drove from Cincinnati, where he went to bible college, to Oklahoma and back for the holidays.

With all my pent-up self-loathing playing in one ear, and all my delusions of grandeur in the other, I rang my old friend and began to rant about my life, which is something I do when I need to blow off steam and am tired of having conversations with people who are not actually in the room. I finished up somewhat quickly and asked him how he was doing.

“I’m doing well. I’m engaged.”

The floor could’ve fallen out of my kitchen. Muffin batter dripped lazily into a pan. I forgot to breathe for a moment. “What?”

“We set a date.”

My oldest friend was engaged. I wasn’t ready for this, to say the least. I felt, once again, like I was in seventh-grade gym, and anyone watching at that moment could’ve seen my lack of everything. Only in this case, instead of tallness and body hair, everyone could see that I am still a professional failure, single, and living at home.

Still, I congratulated him and offered my wedding-planning services in any way he could use them. We talked for an hour or so and when I got off the phone I poured a tall glass of wine. I put Derek Webb on the stereo. I called everybody and told them, bravely trying to play down the minor trauma to my circulatory system. I might’ve hinted once or twice that I may be getting leukemia.

God knows that Eric’s earned a good marriage. He’s had the most difficult time of dating of almost anyone I know. But I am not remotely well enough for my friends to keep doing this to me. I felt like I was playing that old elementary school game, “The Farmer in the Dell.” And in my case, the cheese stood alone, in a kitchen, with muffin batter all over his hands.

Mostly I’ve learned to be okay by myself, but this gets more and more difficult as people pair off. My greatest fear – or rather, one of my great fears – is that everyone will pair off and begin having babies. Then the babies will fear me, as babies tend to do, and I will have to start over with an entirely new set of barren, gay, alcoholic friends who will be my co-workers at Dairy Queen. I will grow old with these barren, gay alcoholics and will earn the official title: I will be the Dairy Queen.

My two best friends are a married couple, and they are always inexplicably overjoyed to see me, and they love me with reckless abandon. One way they have of doing this is to remind me that they do not plan on having children for a long time, and this calms my fears. Still, friends of mine who have been notorious for the short-lived nature of their relationships all seem to be pairing off, while the best I can do are intermittent phone conversations with a boy who can’t tell me that yes, I hurt him, but that I am forgiven and released.

Still, I gave up bars and beer for Lent, and here it was only Ash Wednesday and I found myself craving both in a big way. So I made a dinner that was fattening and filling, and ate half a plate of muffins.

The next day I was listening to U2 again – “Freedom has a scent like the top of a newborn baby’s head.”

Babies, I thought. Everyone’s going to start having babies, and then what will I do? Sure, the human race has to propagate itself, and this world sure could use some more people like my friends in it. But I fear babies, and more than that, I fear that everyone else will move on and leave me behind.

After days of this kind of agony – you can only listen to that Caedmon’s Call song “Can’t Lose You” so many times before you lose your mind – I began to flash on something that was said to me once: “You have to make a home out of where you are.”

So I began to look around at where I am. It’s spring, and warm, and I could spend hours every afternoon watching the light stream in through my window over my great-grandmother’s desk. I have writing, and people in my life who will not run out of love just because they have a baby to give it to. I live in warmth, and motion, and the times I’ve spent running now that it doesn’t rain so much. I don’t live in the image I see in the mirror, all droopy butt and skinny arms. I don’t live in my fear, or at least, I’m not meant to. Jesus said, “Abide in me, and I will abide in you.”

So I prayed. I prayed that I would be released from the prison of guilt I’d built for myself about this boy. I prayed that I would be able to rejoice with those who rejoice, and mourn with those who mourn; that I would be able to be happy for Eric, and that I could, after a crushing November, get back out and start marching against the war and registering voters. I prayed for financial tensions to be released and for awhile, they were, just enough so that I could breathe. I found a new church and a new place to read my writings aloud, just like I learned from Dr. Angelou.

Eric appointed me an unofficial “wedding planner,” along with our friend Liz, despite the fact that we pointed out to him repeatedly that this is his bride’s day and it could prove physically dangerous for us to interfere. I asked him to hold off on babies for a few years at least, just to give me time. He promised to do so, though I thought I hinted a note of relief in him having to do it as a debt of honor to me. I’m always here to help.

I didn’t call the boy I’d hurt for awhile, because I was tired of feeling so awful, so on-the-hook, every time we talked. I decided that I needed some room to breathe and exist before taking up the mantel of friendship with him once more. So I prayed, and light got in through the cracks – just enough to see by, just like always, just enough.

The next sunny day we had I took a walk. I was thinking about that U2 lyric, and about how when my cousin Alec was born, I held him and he smelled new and ancient, and also like fabric softener; like something that has come, if not to give life, than to make it a little more yielding, more palatable. He smelled like the open sky, like the light that streams in through my window in late afternoon. The light makes the desk I inherited from my great grandmother glow a little, as if it is something timeless, and untouchable.

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