I got a lot of good feedback from my podcast on “gay rights.” And I wanted to add some further thoughts, because I got a whole new perspective about something. But first I thought I ought to recap what I said in my earlier podcast in case you don’t want to bother to dig that out.

I said basically that we hear from two sides in the gay rights debate; that one side says, “I was born this way, and I can’t help it,” and the other side says, “No you weren’t, and yes you can.” And I think that those two stances are talking past each other. Or rather, they’re talking about two different things.

First of all, I want to say that heterosexual people should be able to identify very well when people who have same-sex attractions say, “I was born this way,” because that’s just how we feel about our own preferences. We are attracted to people of the opposite sex, but within that, we each have our preferences for whether we’re attracted to people that are tall or short or blonde or brunette or whatever.

And for us too, these preferences sure seem like they have always been there. If you were attracted to redheads, and somebody told you, “Oh, that’s an abomination. You should never think that redheads are attractive. You have to be attracted to brunettes.” Even if you believed them; even if you wanted to, you wouldn’t be able to change your inner desire.

And so that is what I believe gay people are talking about when they say, “I was born this way.” We, straight people, should know very well what they’re talking about, because we’re the same way too.

But secondly, when gay people say this, they’re talking about their deepest, hidden, inexplicable roots of desire. And when straight people say, “You can control yourself,” they’re not talking about desires. They’re talking about choices and behavior. Everybody, whether they’re gay or straight, has to practice sexual self-control.

This is why you don’t see people having sex in the grocery store. Everybody has to practice self-control to some degree or another. And we can’t choose what we’re attracted to. We can’t choose our passions. But we can choose our actions. And the Church calls us either to heterosexual marriage or to celibacy.

And for all we know, many, many of our beloved saints might have had same sex attraction. We just don’t know. All we can see is what they achieved through their purity of life. Some people are saying that the Church needs to change on this and needs to approve of gay marriage and same-sex relationships, because scientists are now telling us something that they never knew before – that is that these desires are lifelong. They’re not chosen, but that’s just not true.

The Church has always known that these desires, for all intents and purposes are lifelong or at least feel that they’re lifelong; that they are not consciously chosen. To the person, it feels like it’s something that’s been there all their life, and they didn’t have any choice about.

As long as Christians have been going to confession, people have been telling their confessors about all their thoughts and their deeds. And the people who had same-sex attraction have been saying, “I’ve been like this all my life. I’ve always felt this way. I don’t know where this came from. I don’t know why I’m different. This is how I’ve always been.”

So this is not news. Science is not telling us something that we never knew before. The Church has always understood that these desires are very profound, and they don’t feel like they’re something that you’ve put on like putting on a new suit of clothes. And the Church has always responded with compassion and called people, who are struggling with this passion, to celibacy.

So that’s a quick summary of what I said in my previous podcast. I did get some very interesting emails, and I wanted to revisit the topic because of a new insight I got – several of them actually. One of the first was that I had said something like, “People can’t control what they’re attracted to.” And someone who wrote to me said, “Yes you can.” I thought, “Oh really?” I’ve always said, “It’s inborn or at least it’s lifelong, and you can’t really identify why you have these desires.”

But what he meant was, you can control it to the extent that you either indulge those desires by looking at pornography, indulging in fantasies, having experiences, or else you starve them by turning away from those things, returning your mind to the Jesus Prayer instead of thinking about a fantasy.

You can control your attractions to some extent. You may not be able to control the initial temptation that comes by, but by exercising and practicing resistance, you can actually diminish the power that these attractions have over you. And we certainly know that’s true with all kinds of other temptations and sins, and how resisting it and just thinking about something else really can make a cumulative difference over time.

So one of the things that I had said in my podcast was, “It seemed like there were two different categories in the Church. There are those who have same sex attraction and who are called to celibacy. And then there are those very few who actually have a miraculous healing.” And if we believe that God can do miraculous healings in other areas, then certainly he can do it here.

It’s not something you could expect or demand. But I wouldn’t want to exclude that or say it’s impossible. So we have a very tiny number of people who have that miraculous healing and then the great majority, who all their lives will have to, and I laid a lot of emphasis on the struggles and difficulty of celibacy and pain and loneliness and how we have to be compassionate with them and all of that.

And of course we’re compassionate because we’re all the same way. We all go to confession and say something and confess it and believe that we’re really not going to do it again. And then we go back the next time to confession and have to confess it all over again. I think we all have that experience.

So our compassion for those is in recognition of how difficult it would be to live a celibate life, but it’s not a kind of superiority. We just have different kinds of temptations in different areas. Well anyway, a couple of people disagreed with that formulation of some are called to celibacy and some have miraculous healings. Here, let me quote from one of the emails I received. This person wrote:

You pretty clearly imply several times during the podcast that the choices between instant miraculous healing and a long hard road of struggling to be celibate. Both these extremes do exist, but my own personal experience, and that of others I know, is gradual transformation.

The point is, if you’re following that path of celibacy it doesn’t stay exactly the same as time goes by. You begin to experience transformation. That’s a very encouraging word I think. Another person, who wrote to me, wrote very beautifully:

Being an Orthodox Christian, I am sure you understand that we are in spiritual warfare. It is much easier to say, “This is a sin; you are going to hell,” or to say, “Accept that this is who you are.” But both of those are destructive, and neither teaches the tactics that we need to fight the battle. One of my most eye-opening moments was when my spiritual father told me, “The thoughts and the feelings that come into your head are from outside, not within, even if it may feel so.”

He told me that the best way to deal with such thoughts was to give them nothing at all to latch onto; to neither fight with them, nor accept them. I tried this, and I felt freed from such a heavy weight. That doesn’t mean that my struggles stopped immediately. If it had, it would not be a struggle.

But because I’ve been given this struggle, I’ve been able to cry tears of repentance, I think, that have opened me to seeing other things that I need to work on – things I might have otherwise happily overlooked. This particular struggle has been like a magnifying glass on my heart and soul, opening me to God and helping me to know God so much better in ways that are beyond words.

My heart has been filled with joy and hope, knowing that God, in His mercy, loves me and cares for me in so many ways – seen and unseen. If I had not struggled with this, I do not think I would have ever been given these things. I’ve also been given a more compassionate heart for the struggles of others and the ability to see myself as lower than others – not in self-condemnation but in love, I hope.

Now I am able to say to myself, “But remember what you struggle with; do not judge.” To put it honestly, this struggle has saved me.

That’s a very beautiful statement, I think. It resonates so well with all that we know about Orthodox spirituality, doesn’t it? We have compassion on those struggling and support them with our prayers – not because we feel superior, but because we all have challenges. We all know what it’s like to keep going back to confession and repeating the same thing.

As I read this person’s account, I recognized the great beauty, the spiritual power, and the freedom of knowing yourself to be a sinner. There’s quite a beautiful paradox there. This email that I received connected two things. One was the need to “come out of the closet,” to be known, for this struggle not to be a secret, and for others to know that you are struggling with same-sex attraction.

I think for some people the need to “come out of the closet” is satisfied just by going to confession. You don’t need everybody to know. I think there’s some though that really want a larger circle of friends to be aware of, because they feel like that gives them more support. Here’s another quote from that email:

I think that for all people who deal with these feelings there needs to be a coming out experience. I realize that, for me, coming out was making my confession. Really confession is always a coming out, don’t you think? And it is a needful thing. What I found in confession is what everyone dealing with these things is searching for – compassion and love. That is what I found.

That need to “come out of the closet” and to be known and accepted for someone who is struggling is a very strong theme in a book that several people recommended to me by the name of Washed and Waiting. It’s kind of a hard name to say really fast, Washed and Waiting. It’s a book by a young Evangelical, Wesley Hill.

He writes with great honesty about his own struggle with same-sex attraction and the struggle for celibacy. That title, Washed and Waiting comes from two Scriptures. Romans 8:25 is, “If we hope for what we do not see, we wait eagerly for it with perseverance.” That’s the waiting.

And 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 is a passage where St. Paul was talking about those who will not inherit the Kingdom. And he names several categories – homosexuals, adulterers, idolaters, and so forth. And then he says this, “And such were some of you. But you are washed; you were sanctified; you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus.”

So the title of the book is Washed and Waiting. It’s by Wesley Hill and published by Zondervan Press. A number of people recommended it, and I bought a copy and I read it. It’s not a very big book. I read it pretty quickly and I recommend it to you in turn. I was actually able to be in contact with Wesley, and we exchanged some emails. And I wanted to read something he sent in one of these emails. He wrote:

It struck me that it’s unfortunate that healing has come to mean a shift in one’s sexual desires, as when people think, “I won’t be healed until I feel attraction to the opposite sex.” But it seems to me that healing can take many forms – the celibate person who finds community in the Church where before she knew only loneliness; the celibate person who renounces promiscuity and achieves new found sexual purity; the celibate who gradually becomes able to surrender self-pity and looks for ways to love and bless others; the same-sex attracted married person who loves her husband, despite daunting setbacks. Surely these postures and habits are evidence of profound healing, though these people may not register much change in sexual orientation.

Wesley Hill is still a young man, but I think I was most intrigued by a letter I got from somebody who has another decade or decade and a half experience on him; who wanted to say that there really can be changes in one’s sexual desires if you stick with the program and you continue on the path of purity. So this person wrote:

There can be transformation even in the sense of changing orientation. I know some twenty year olds who are shocked when I say this is possible. And I think it’s actually best that they not think about it too much, because presupposing what God might do would definitely impede transformation. But I know this change to be possible from my own personal experience and that of others. It’s easily provable in some cases

So this person wrote to me; described his own life of from about the age of ten, understanding he was different from other boys. That’s a very poignant period in a person’s life. And it was actually in reading Wesley Hill’s book Washed and Waiting that I really was compelled to think about those years of realizing you’re different and how very painful and frightening that could be.

Well, this person was saying he “came out” at the age of seventeen, spent many years in promiscuity and gay rights activism, and then had a conversion, turned his life around, got married, had children, and his life has changed very much. This is the person who wanted me to know that there can actually be a change in your sexual orientation if you persevere.

I keep saying with celibacy, but obviously he’s married. He’s not celibate. He referred to an anecdote in my earlier podcast where I’d said I was reading a newsletter for a support group for people with same-sex attraction and how some of the men were worried because when other men talked about how sexy women were and when somebody beautiful would walk by, they’d all stare at her, and they were worried because they didn’t feel the same way.

And they were thinking, “Maybe God isn’t healing me, because I don’t have lust.” And the author of the newsletter was saying, “Why would you want to have those desires? That’s sin. Why would you want to add one more sin to the load you’re already carrying?” So the guy who was writing to me wrote:

I had the bizarre experience, after years of marriage and children, of suddenly starting to experience lust for women. In many ways, it was a very disappointing moment, but a terribly heady temptation in others. I’ve had to learn once again how to be a person in a new situation. Why would you want them indeed?

So he went on to make a very important point that there are changes that can take place if you continue on that path of purity; changes that you would never know about if you had bailed out along the way. He wrote:

I’m suspicious of what people mean when they say, I tried hard to change and I couldn’t. If they are trying to change orientation, they are making a mistake already, and it’s something God is unlikely to honor. From an Orthodox point of view, there is no virtue in being heterosexual rather than being homosexual per se. The self-labeling terminology is problematic in itself of course.

What’s required is to be willing to be who God wants me to be, whoever and whatever that is. And that means accepting the possibility of lifelong celibacy with same-sex desires. Those who say they tried hard to change and couldn’t and therefore went back to homosexual relationships have by definition not remained open to this possibility. They are not experts on what can happen if you do persevere.

So there are a couple of points here. One, I don’t want to go over too quickly because it’s subtle. But he’s saying you shouldn’t focus on changing your orientation. In that earlier quote, he said, “God is not likely to honor that.” You shouldn’t try to change yourself. You should focus on obedience. You should focus on loving God.

But having done that and offering celibacy or perhaps going into a heterosexual marriage, God can bless that and this change can come about. Just don’t try to force it. Don’t try to tell God what He has to do in so many words. So his point is that for those who continue in faithfulness, you don’t stay stuck at the same point without change year after year after year after year.

Instead, he says, “It changes as you go along.” It gets better. Things change, or rather you change. You see more and more gradual healing. There’s always more reason for hope. There’s always encouragement. Of course this path is going to be different for each person. You can’t expect to have the same story of another person who also has same-sex attraction.

Everybody’s history is different so are their relationships they’ve been in. They’ve had a different life. There’re so many different factors there. The email says:

We make a mistake when we think scientifically that people are interchangeable components, rather than unique persons with unique relationships and experiences. In reality, much depends on what the cause of homosexuality is for each person. I’ve known people who’ve come to understand how their particular sexuality arose – often people with very different causes. And in some cases, this has been instrumental in helping them to move beyond it altogether.

So he’s saying that the same sex attraction, if it does have roots in early life, sometimes by understanding what it is a hunger for most profoundly. And that might be different for different people, but sometimes understanding what it is you’re really seeking as he says, “It is sometimes instrumental in helping people move beyond those compulsions and desires altogether.”

Another aspect is that in our culture, we’ve unfortunately eliminated the whole concept of strong same-sex friendship – the kind of friendship that we would see among pairs of the saints. We assume that if two people of the same sex have that deep love and deep commitment for each other that it’s got to be sexual. But it might not be. It might just be a deep loving friendship.

One person wrote to me to say that when he was in another culture, he saw same-sex affection without any sexual element to it; that it really shook up his preconceptions. The email says:

We’re conditioned to assume that affection means sexual attraction, but we only have to go to a different culture to see it’s not necessarily the case. I was totally shocked when I went to Russia and saw obviously straight men being physically affectionate with each other in public, even to the extent of caressing and kissing each other. It completely shook me. And it was actually a big factor in changing my mind about the “identity” I’d always assumed I had.

Not very long ago, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware was interviewed on The Illumined Heart podcast on Ancient Faith Radio, and he was asked a question about same-sex marriage. And he spoke to that idea of profound love between two people of the same sex and it not needing to be; it doesn’t have to be sexual. I liked that so much, I am going to insert that clip here so you can hear what Bishop Kallistos had to say.

None of us is in favor of promiscuity, and of course that applies equally to a heterosexual relations. But we need to recognize that there are homosexual couples who are not promiscuous, who are faithful to one another, and who are deeply committed to one another in mutual love. Now, in all sincerity, out of loyalty to my faith in Scripture and Tradition, I cannot say to such people, “Your relationship is blessed by God; that is no problem.”

To me, there is a problem. There is something disordered in this relationship. What I would try to do personally is to say to them, “Does your relationship have to have this particular sexual expression? Could you not share a home and care and look after each other in mutual love, without necessarily having this particular sexual expression of your relationship?”

And people laugh at me for saying that, saying, “You’re an idealist. People are not like that. You’re asking from people what is impossible.” I do not agree. I have counseled homosexual partners, and they have managed with God’s help and prayer to change their relationship so that it ceased to have this sexual, physical, and genital expression.

And they shared a life together with deep affection without expressing it in that way. And to me, that is not a problem. We have a rich tradition in Christianity of friendship – friendship between two men or between two women. But that is not the same as homosexuality.

So yes, I feel we cannot bless homosexual relations. But we can show respect for stable relationships with deep mutual love. But at the same time, we could encourage people to transfigure that relationship with the help of God.

I think that’s a very wise summary and wise and thoughtful pastoral approach there. So as I get closer to the end, I want to talk about something that’s actually very hopeful and positive. At Holy Cross Seminary in Brookline, Massachusetts, there’s a project underway to develop a course that could be used by an individual or in a parish or in a community; to be used for people who are struggling with many different sorts of sexual temptation or problems in relationships – adultery, pornography, same-sex attraction, divorce, all kinds of problems.

It’s not a program that’s aimed at fixing people or causing some specific change, but it’s rather aimed at helping them learn how to put on Christ in their lives and in their relationships; that in Christ we can experience transformation as we set all of our desires in the context of that one over-arching desire to know God and to love God.

As the Lord said, “Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.” That’s Matthew 6:33. So this course that’s being developed, it’s called

The Freedom to Live Project. The full title is called, “Finding the Freedom to Live in the Image of God.” And if you’d like to know more, you should go to the school’s website. That’s Holy Cross Seminary, www.hchc.edu, and go to the faculty pages.

There are two professors involved with this Dr. Philip Mamalakis or Dr. Tim Patitsas. If you go to their pages within the faculty area of the website, there’s a contact form there so you’d be able to reach them. That’s The Freedom to Live Project being developed at Holy Cross Seminary.

To sum up, I think what struck me the most about these emails that I received was this good news of change for those that continue on the classic path of chastity; that it isn’t only unrelenting, unchanging struggle, but that transformation really is possible if you stick with it and if you remain open to what God is doing; not that you should try to control things but remaining obedient and available to God.

And that was a third idea. It seems like we’ve heard always from the beginning that the Church is been saying, “If you have same-sex desires, restrain those desires. Be celibate or be chaste in a heterosexual marriage and just be obedient.” And just on the other hand, we’ve more recently heard voices saying, “You don’t have to restrain those desires. You were born this way. You can’t help it.”

So here comes this third voice saying what we actually hadn’t heard before. I suppose this has always been the experience of devout Orthodox Christians that if you persevere, if you seek transformation, but they hadn’t really spoken out for themselves before. Here’s this third voice of people who are saying, “We’re doing what the Church calls us to, and these are the results that there is change. There is transformation. These are the blessings that flow from obedience.”

And I’m very glad to hear from them. I hope that we will listen to them. I hope that they will be given a seat at the table, so to speak. It’s a voice that we haven’t really heard before. It’s like a third wave. We have the first, “Don’t do it.” We have the second, “Yes, do it.” And we have this third wave saying, “We’re persevering in the path. This is what our story is.”

And they’re speaking to an authentic experience that they’re having.  And it’s a very precious, enlightening and encouraging word that they bring. So I look forward very much to hearing them be part of this conversation. I’m going to end with two anecdotes or stories from the Fathers that one of my email correspondents sent me.

But first, there was something else that I wanted to say. And I think I can’t say it in a way that isn’t going to be offensive. But it’s that I worry about and baffled by an attitude that says what the Church has consistently said through the centuries about same-sex attraction is no longer true; that it doesn’t matter that there’s been complete consistency on this for all these centuries; that we’re smarter than that and we know more know or that doesn’t apply to us.

I don’t really understand. It seems to me there ought to be fear and trembling about saying something like that. I think you take quite a risk. I hope that God will be merciful to those who hear that advice and follow it, because they’re like sheep. They’re following a shepherd. Somebody told them “You don’t have to suffer. You don’t have to struggle. You can just give in to those desires.” I hope that God will have pity on them because they are sheep following their shepherd.

But for those who are doing the leading in this circumstance; who are departing from this unanimous witness of the Church through time, how positive can you really be that the Church was wrong for 2000 years and that this is okay? How can you believe that you have more wisdom now or that you understand something about the soul and about psychology that God withheld from the great spiritual Fathers from the beginning of time; that you know things about people’s psychology and sexuality that St. John Climacus didn’t know?

I think that anybody who is, at this point, in a position to be encouraging Orthodox gay people to live out their desires rather than follow the path of chastity, I think they ought to think about Matthew 18:6 where Jesus says, “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fashioned around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

You know I feel almost embarrassed quoting that. I mean if I was on the other side and I heard somebody quote this Scripture, I think that I would just laugh it off, not that I would have any reason for laughing at it. I would just think, “Oh, what a ridiculous thing to say. Obviously, that’s just ridiculous.” But I really would hope when I was all alone and saying my prayers, I might think about it again and maybe give that a chance to speak.

Because really, how do you know that that Scripture isn’t talking about you? It’s talking about somebody. How can you be sure it’s not addressed to you at this moment? There’re other Scriptures that I was looking through, pulling together before I started this recording. James 3:1, “We who teach shall be judged with greater strictness.” Matthew 5:19, “Whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the Kingdom of Heaven.”

And this one, 1 Corinthians 8:11 is just the most touching one to me. And it’s a verse that has been important to me even in other contexts.  1 Corinthians 8:11, “By your knowledge,” and St. Paul means your self-approved knowledge; your idea of all this wisdom you have that makes you smarter than other people. “By your knowledge, this weak man is destroyed, the brother for whom Christ died.”

Why would I want to have on my head the responsibility for leading one of these little ones astray, for this weaker brother, for the brother for whom Christ died. Well alright, I’ll end with two stories that were sent to me by one of my email correspondents. The email says:

The first story starts: In a monastery there was a monk that was struggling with sexual sin and another monk who was judging him for this struggle. Their spiritual father noticed this and prayed that God would remove the struggle from the lustful brother and give it to the judgmental one. When the judgmental brother felt this struggle, he could not bear it and ran away from the monastery. But the formerly lustful brother came to his spiritual father and said, “Please Father. I know what you have done. Pray that God will send this struggle to me again. For it was saving my soul.”

The second story is about a man who commits the same sexual sin every day. Yet every day, he runs to Christ and weeps over it. One day the devil taunts Christ over the falls of this sinner and says, “Why do you keep taking him back? Obviously, he is mine.” The Lord responds, “No, He is mine, and I am taking my own in whatever state I find him.

The email concludes: It is because I know this love and mercy of God that I struggle and when I fall I repent and again feel God’s mercy and love for me. In this way I am saving my soul with God’s help. If I did not have this struggle, perhaps I would not have such a chance to save my soul. I will always be grateful.

I’ll end there, but just a P.S. in case you missed it earlier. The title of the book I was referring to earlier is Washed and Waiting by Wesley Hill, published by Zondervan Books. The name of the program under development at Holy Cross Seminary is The Freedom to Live course, and you can make contact with the professors leading this project, Dr. Philip Mamalakis or Dr. Tim Patitsas, by going to the website of Holy Cross Seminary and looking in the faculty pages. That’s www.hchc.edu.