Why Do You Stay?: Reflections of a Queer Catholic

Why do you stay?

It’s the question that typically follows when people find out I’m queer and a practicing Catholic. It’s a fair question. It would seem I’m actively participating in an institution that has historically pathologized queer people, oppressed women, justified slavery, and covered up decades of child sexual abuse. Sometimes I ask myself the same question: why the hell do I stay?

Call me naïve, but I’m pretty sure if folks like me leave the Church, we’re fucked. Christian and particularly Catholic ideologies have been woven into the very fabric of American life. We inherit the rituals and myths and values of Christian traditions in explicit and implicit ways in our legislature, popular culture, education, and civic lives. Whether we like it or not, the Church has power, and I feel an ethical responsibility to try to chip away at the power or at least to redistribute it.

To be clear: I’m not suggesting that all marginalized peoples within the Church make the same choice I have. I know so many who left because the pain and trauma they or their loved ones experienced was too great to reconcile; and while that deeply saddens me, I applaud everyone who has had the courage to find new communities that will affirm them. For me, as an able-bodied cis white man who comes from immense economic opportunity, I have the privilege and ability to stay here, get my hands dirty, and labor to make the Church what it should’ve always been: a home.

And, yet, I am still at odds with my home. What does it mean to feel alienated in one’s home?

When I walk into Mass, I’ve noticed that I hold my breath as if bracing myself for some encounter that will reveal me as other. I walk into a space that I know almost as intimately as my childhood home while also knowing it wasn’t built with people like me in mind. I’m alien to my home, and that is precisely why I stay. Sound strange? Scholars like Sara Ahmed have called this a revolutionary consciousness:

It is no accident that revolutionary consciousness means feeling at odds with the world, or feeling that the world is odd. You become estranged from the world as it has been given…As a structure of feeling, alienation is an intense burning presence…The revolutionary is an affect alien in this specific sense. You do not flow; you are stressed; you experience the world as a form of resistance in coming to resist a world. (“Happiness” 168 & 169).

In some ways, choosing to stay isn’t much of a choice for me. By inhabiting a home that was not made for me, I resist. In being conscious that I am a queer person who loves Jesus, I resist. Just by being at home in the Church, I resist. And because I resist in my very being, I feel more at home than ever before. In some ways, I’m not sure if I stay or if I simply just am. I feel what Ahmed means when she talks about an intense burning presence. When I pray at Mass, I often feel heat, fire, energy emanating from me. And I believe that’s resistance, that’s what it means to be at home.

And I love being at home. I love my faith and my queerness and the ways they resist, push back, cause stress and make space in my home. Isn’t that what Catholicism is all about, anyway? If we break down the story of Jesus, here’s how it goes: a stranger travels around the land telling everyone, and I mean everyone: tax collectors, harlots, lepers, fisherman, corrupt politicians, (hell, even Gentiles!)  that they are loved, that their very presence is enough demand for equity, and that they matter in this world. This stranger gathers a powerful following of people because of a sense of belonging, and they then advocate for their political structures to start affirming the dignity of every person. The cry for revolution becomes so strong that this stranger is imprisoned, mocked, tortured, and publically assassinated by the governing structure in order to quell uprising.

For me, the story of Catholicism, much like the story of queerness, is the story of a revolution that is ongoing. And it’s a story of being at home. Christ was the stranger in a world He created, and He lived at home by changing it. And he changed it precisely because He loved His home and His people so much. For me, while I’ve fought and wept and toiled in my spiritual home, I’ve also been so blessed to love deeply in it. I’ve met Jesuits, nuns, ministers, and fellow lay people who, similarly to my beloved drag queens and trans activists and kinksters, have all said to me: welcome home, stay a while.

So, why do I “stay”? I want Catholics to see me and my humanity and all the badassery that I bring every time I come home. Usually, when they actually get to know me, something kind of miraculous, something like justice, starts to happen: we share in our home and make it a little bigger for others to join.

 

 

 

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