“The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for…” (CCC #27)
Everywhere in the gay world, I saw a constantly swerving polarity between the beautiful and the ugly; between the quest for heaven and the collapse into hell; between all-giving sacrifice and all-consuming selfishness; between the earnest desire for love and the unrelenting despair of loneliness. Like myself, everyone sought the ultimate high, but always came down with the ultimate hang-over. From earliest childhood – we saw salvation in sex: affirmation, protection, and healing in another man’s arms – something that we forever felt we had been denied. In our fallen world – this automatically turns into sexual activity. In “The Catechism of the Catholic Church” it states that through original sin: “Adam and Eve immediately lose the grace of original holiness. They become afraid of the God…” (CCC #399) And, as our first parents did, we are shameful and turn away; we become base and cover over our pain with the things of the earth; we clutch onto fig leaves; and to people – whatever is nearest. In this sense, the gay lifestyle becomes secluded, self-absorbed, and co-dependent; we instinctively shrink into the fetal position, we huddle together with those who are like-minded, we are overly sensitive and suspicious, we become scared and repulse anyone or anything we perceive as a threat.
Within homosexuality, we find solace; albeit temporarily. Because we fear God, as He is the ultimate source of true lasting happiness, we turn to the familiar and the immediate; we find consolations in the physical; to merely what we can comprehend with our senses. In this world of the fully physical, we become grounded. Yet, what we desperately seek to grasp and hold on to – always keeps slipping away; the body ages, withers, and dies. The transcendence we chase falls apart before us; in the gay world this catastrophically occurred in near-Biblical proportions during the height of the AIDS crisis. Only in pornography was the image of the perfected male kept alive; for porn, symbolized the eternal pursuit of all gay men: to reach angelic proportions while still fastened to the flesh. Only, this dream is a fantasy turned tragic farce – a lie as old as Man himself: the same one whispered by the serpent to Eve: “…you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil.” Just, in this knowing, we have also come to be deceived: to only see the route of salvation in front of us – the quick and easy way, not the true path that God has prepared for us: and, when we go down that wide road – we glide along with such ease that we forget the troubles and pains of the past, we become complacent, and, for a while, we truly believe that all is okay. Suddenly, someone betrays us, someone goes away, someone dies, or we catch a disease, and then we are alone again; that which we thought binded us to happiness is lost. Sometimes, then, we realize that nothing is eternal except God.