Coming Out As Spiritual Journey – Reflection*[1]

Risking being vulnerable is like crossing the desert.

Risking sharing something deeply personal and private about ourselves means being vulnerable to the reactions of the people you share yourself with.

Whether you are gay or straight, the journey of self-awareness and claiming a truth about yourself is a “coming out” experience and I see it as a spiritual journey.

Becoming aware that some aspect of who you are may not be welcomed by your loved ones or your faith community or the general public where you live

–  it’s an isolating experience –  maybe even a soul-shrinking experience.

The good news I want to bring is that coming out from whatever you are hiding or denying can be a liberating and a soul-expanding experience.

Jesus told those who were about to go out and spread his messages of compassion and justice, “fear the person who can destroy your soul” but at the same time tell far and wide what I have told you in private. Coming out is a step in the direction of facing those who would destroy our souls or smother our spirits.

I have suggested that personal ‘coming out’ or truth-telling is a spiritual journey and I see that it has three stages: Awakening, Venturing and Returning

Let’s think of the first step on this Spiritual Journey as AWAKENING.

Substantial spiritual growth is not a simple progression – there is a radical point of departure – some moment of turning in our life. This is the stage of awakening – the point at which the spiritual journey properly begins

As I’m going through these, I hope you are reflecting on your own life experience and can identify what you discovered and how you reacted as you made your first self-discovery of something that you felt made you less than perfect or different.

1.     This Spiritual awakening cannot be inherited, it must be self-discovered

Most of us inherit our faith from our family and church. We are taught to believe what people are like and how they are expected to act. But our journey into real awakening always seems to start when we arrive at the limits of our inherited forms of religious truth and sense that there must be another truth beyond that –  another level of life to be lived. That leads to self-discovery and an awakening that is not inherited.

          This awakening or conversion is often the way in which God opens us up or breaks down barriers that have inhibited the work of the spirit in our lives.

          For some of us, the first great spiritual shock comes with the recognition that we somehow cannot live within the framework of our inherited roles and gender expectations – that we must reject what our entire culture takes as normal, if we are to become who we truly are. Parents do not guide us on how to grow up gay or lesbian; schools do not talk about famous gay men or lesbian women. We must always discover our difference for ourselves. We can no longer live lives of unquestioned, unthinking conformity.

2.     We are aware of something about us that sets us apart from others

Sometime in our childhood or youth, we become aware that we are different than our peers. We think and feel differently; we notice different things; and to some extent we have an awareness that we do not easily belong to either the group of boys or the group of girls but are stranded somewhere between.

          Some mystics felt that way and were regarded with similar curiosity – if not distrust. Along with those mystics we wrestle with questions like: “Why did God create me so uniquely?” “Did God make a mistake in forming me?” The church says I am an abomination for who I am, even before I DO anything! These alone are enough to make us theologians – students of thoughts about the Creator.

This early experience of being different becomes one of the ways we are made open to God. It is a sense of differentness that goes as deep as we do and that bonds us invisibly into the company of all those, in every age, whom God has chosen, set apart, and claimed as a separate people.

3.     Some incident reveals to us the deception we have lived

While we wore the mask of being like everyone else we were living shallowly and guardedly. We used energy to maintain the façade and kept our true spirit from flourishing. How poor our lives were as a result of investing years in trying to be someone we were not in an attempt to be accepted as “normal”. We almost get the sense that we were what Jesus warned against – we were one of the people who were killing our soul. Our emerging stories come in all varieties but their common feature is that when we fully begin to accept our difference as gift, there is often a terrible recognition that our lives to that point have been dishonest.

          Whatever your scenario, coming out throws a merciless spotlight on the unendurable reality of having lived a lie.

4.     Then an impulse moves us to some kind of action

A real revelation is not something that we grasp, but one that grasps us and will not let us go. It keeps up a relentless inner pressure until we let it move us –  let it impel us into action. A revelation has always been the prelude to a life lived out in very different terms. Our awakening prods us into doing something about it. It urges us to a new way of being in the world.

          This is the first stage of the journey, the identical path that saints and spiritual pioneers have walked. Part of reclaiming our spiritual identity as a people lies in consciously and deliberately articulating the spiritual dimension of this journey and recognizing it as the process of spiritual development.

The Second Stage is VENTURING

This venturing forth stage of coming out is scary but it is also sacred. We are in a long tradition of Hebrew and Christian desert spirituality because we are in a place or space where we are separated from the safety of our inherited but confining systems. We are in a place where our inner drama is played out. It is the paradoxical place of exile and refuge. This is the stage of darkness or struggle – the crossing of the sands alone.

1.     We experience losses.

In venturing outside the limits of inherited roles or traditions, we find ourselves unable to rely on things we previously learned or valued. It is not uncommon for those of us who achieve a sudden insight into the nature and call of God to be honest, to find ourselves at odds with our community, even to the point of being rejected by it. Families may disown us, friends avoid us, and our churches condemn us. Our losses can be extreme. We are abandoned in a desert to make our own way through it or not.

          Our desert experience is all the more intense because it is a solitary one. At least until we can connect with a support group of kindred travelers.

          But the desert way is also the beginning of our journey to freedom. Later we will appreciate that this period of desolation is in fact the very means by which God strips away the old and prepares us for the new.

2.     We are forced to confront our demons.

In the emptiness and silence of the desert, we become aware of all the things we previously denied or avoided. We may be confronted with many things we held at arm’s length or denied before. We all have demons that we have to confront. There is often a struggle with the self, with the deepest and most repressed parts of our selves. We all possess a shadow side, the disowned and often hated parts of own natures that we do not want to claim as ours.

          Coming out may push long-repressed emotions to the surface and we may have to wrestle with the depths of our own anger or sense of betrayal, or an overwhelming rage at the injustice of our lives. On person came to realize that, “It’s not my dad’s anger and rejection that I’m struggling with, but my own unwillingness to forgive him.”

          We achieve the wholeness God intends for us, not by rejecting what we feel are unacceptable parts of ourselves, but by ultimately recognizing them and then transforming them.

3.     We discover God deep within us.

Stripped of our supports and pushed beyond the limits of our own resources, we are also pushed beyond our old images of God. Many of us abandon our faith community and find our sense of God evaporating. In our outcast state, we may throw ourselves into the deeper emptiness that lies below the surface – into the abyss of God. At the bottom of this great fall, we become aware of God in a new way – the God of the depths who shares the empty spaces within us and around us. Here we come to know the God who comes not only to seek out the outcast, but also to share the exile.

          For many people, this revelation can be as startling as their initial self-awareness. Because as our image of God as a jealous judge begins to shatter, it takes with it some of the guilt and fear that many of us carry – the conviction that God condemns us for our very natures.

          This is a significant turning point, but not the end of the desert journey. We realize that we are never alone. We even gain an awareness that we are bound to every other outcast and are called by God to walk with them as God walks with us. How many of us have become committed to the causes of reconciliation and social justice. So the desert is a sensitizing place and coming out is simultaneously coming IN to solidarity with others.

4.     We gain the courage to be truth-tellers.

We come out of the desert journey telling the truth. The biblical prophets told the truth that was uncomfortable to hear. We emerge as committed truth-tellers, no longer willing to hide behind half-truths about ourselves. This change in us is related to the two-fold revelation that has taken place in us:

(1)  God is not the source of our pain, but is our companion through it, and

(2)  Our exile is not merely a unique and individual experience, but the very place where we are bound most closely to the fractured lives of others.

We may now start living a more open and vocal lifestyle, ready to confront or challenge homophobic relatives or civil codes. Or it will be quietly articulated by living the truth of who we are. Like the prophets of old, we may feel an overwhelming sense of being called to speak the truth both to, and on behalf of, others.

          The desert journey may be the singular experience that signals spiritual rebirth. It is a dangerous journey and some never venture to take it. But whoever has come through the journey must finally share their knowledge with others.

The Final Stage is RETURNING

The return to life occurs with the re-awakening of the energies that are no longer needed for a struggle.

1.     We emerge re-integrated or deeply changed.

“Nothing can be brought into the presence of God and remain unchanged.” The extent of the change will often be in direct proportion to the depth of the struggle and the length of the journey. Paradoxically, the more shattering the experience, the more whole we are on coming out of it. Part of what has fueled our struggle are the deep divisions, conflicts, and fracture lines within our personality and worldview.

          In the breaking up of what has often been a deeply conflicted view of life, the pieces are re-ordered into something closer to coherence; out-grown beliefs and values have been left behind and more powerful and focused ones achieved.

          We may in fact become aware of qualities and gifts in ourselves that were not previously evident: a confidence or courage, a compassion or a willingness to make decisions long deferred. These qualities are noticed by others who are close to us sometimes long before we see it for ourselves.

          This is the point at which we are actually OUT. There is life after the abyss and the losses, and this life rests upon a different centre. Our transformation has been spiritual – our true spirits have been released.

2.     Our sense of apartness takes on a positive value.

We have a conscious recognition that there is a profound rightness in being different; it has a value and a meaning.

          At the end of our desert journey, we may sense that this experience was God’s way of meeting with us. We have been drawn apart precisely to be set apart; marked in some way as God’s own. We have been set apart FOR some reason, FOR God, FOR some calling.

          This may be the first real peace we have in accepting our nature. We are different, but our differentness is a sense of specialness – a gift, a quality that adds to who we are, that gives us something more than we would have had if we had not been created differently.

          We who have been to the depths of our own natures come away with an overwhelming sense of gratitude; how incredible to think that God should have loved us so much that we were given this enormous gift, this otherness!

3.     We become agents of change.

Whatever emerges from an awareness of God’s presence will inevitably change everything it touches.

          The drastic freedom of the emergent self, by its very nature, may open doors of change for others. This may be as simple as our unwillingness to act out older scripts and this forces those around us into unusual and new reactions.

          We are members of the body, parts of one another’s lives. Whatever we experience becomes a part of our collective and communal being.

          Our private anger, bitterness, and grief are not contained within the silence of our own minds and hearts, but they leaven the whole. Likewise, whatever freedom, healing, forgiveness we experience within our own lives also becomes part of the shared life. Seen in this light, even what we cannot verbally articulate inevitably brings changes in the life of every person who shares a communal life with us.

          Our solitary journeys into spiritual wholeness are not private affairs; they are social and communal acts to spiritually transform our community. As we change, we become aware of the challenge of helping the larger community to which we belong, to continue on its own long journey of transformation. We can become like yeast.

When you get to the point of placing the rainbow flag stickers on your entrances, you people of  McDougall will be indicating that you can be an oasis for those who are struggling through a desert space. You can be a life-line to those who are seeking a safe place to share deeply who they are and not fear being rejected because of their difference, regardless of what that difference may be.