My name is Teresa and I want to share my travels as a Christian, as a Catholic, and as a lesbian on a journey to embrace all of my identities.
I used to believe that I could either be a Catholic or a lesbian. I was told that I could not be both concurrently. I grew up in the Catholic Church, baptised at birth and still very much a part of it, making me a ‘cradle Catholic’. It must have been over a thousand times that I heard and read that a real Catholic, a good Catholic and a Catholic who loves the Lord would never commit such an abomination as being gay, which made you “objectively disordered” and was a “condition”, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994, para. 2357).
For the first 25 years of my life, my understanding of Christianity and God brought me much anguish, internal conflict and struggle in loving myself and accepting myself. I constantly asked, “Why do I still choose God and faith to be part of my life?” I am at a loss to explain WHY exactly I stayed. What was that force that kept telling me to hang in there? This invisible force lifted my heart and kept me from surrendering to the desolation.
Throughout my young adulthood, I adamantly maintained an image of God as more flexible than others had described Him to be. My limited understanding and choice could not be explained with reason. I am no theologian, apologist, or a spiritual or community leader of any sort, and cannot provide a logical reason for this belief. It just felt right, and I was at peace with the decision to continue stumbling along this rugged path of searching for SOMETHING that told me it was ok to be Catholic and gay, simultaneously! In hindsight, it was nothing else but Grace that kept me going, and it is clear as day now that God has always been with me.
God opened my eyes to see that He did not make a mistake with me.
For decades I had concluded that I belonged in the ‘Faulty Goods’ box – where God must have failed to apply Quality Control during my creation, which is how I turned out to be gay, and therefore, less perfect and less loved.
It was Him who was ceaseless in his pep talks, invitations and nudges for me to welcome Him into my heart and for me to be coheirs with Christ, to inherit my title as a beloved daughter of God because I, a lesbian, am just as perfect as anybody else made in His image. As Therese of Lisieux described so beautifully in her autobiography The Story of a Soul, regarding our differentness in God’s eyes, “He (Jesus) has created the great saints who are like the lilies and the roses, but He has also created much lesser saints and they must be content to be the daisies or the violets which rejoice His eyes whenever He glances down.”
With the discovery of this new world, in which I now dared to believe that “I am loved” and that “The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb” (Isaiah 49:1-2), I gave myself permission to cut away the barbed wired fences that I had built around myself. Now, I can answer to Him.
One of the biggest changes which I have brought about in my spiritual life since this new chapter began was in my participation during Sunday Mass. For 13 years, I had decided to contribute minimal effort in Mass, because why would I want to waste energy on a Church that teaches that there is something unsound about same-sex relationships, regardless of the person’s faithfulness and commitment to a partner?
Although I had no doubt that God has been speaking to me since the beginning, having acknowledged my past and come to actively choose God, I didn’t know what the next step would be.
During this season as I dialogued more regularly with God, I felt called to help others on a similar path as me, to support those who carry the dual identities of being Christian and gay. The question was, then, how would I do that?
I was brought up in a world where my actions as a Catholic were judged as either right or wrong, so the idea of providing pastoral care to a person was rather new to me – for example, how was it that it could be meaningful to care about the welfare of LGBT Catholics, who in the eyes of the Church are doing so much wrong? That was what I truly believed for years – that emotional and spiritual support no longer mattered for those who commit mortal sins in same-sex relationships. I strongly and blindly believed that I needed to live by Church laws above all else, or God would be furious.
I find peace in listening to the stories of other LGBT Christians and Catholics who have experiences similar to what I used to wallow in when I was inside that barbed wire fence. I was given the opportunity to help others as a leader in ‘Acceptance Melbourne’, a community of LGBT Catholics in Melbourne Australia. I can now freely embark on a new adventure, exploring life together with God’s other LGBT children, my brothers and sisters, walking with them through the stages of sorrow and discouragement where they feel rejected by God and the Church.
I am still in awe at how I have been called to do this work, as I never thought I would be capable of it. I found that answering God’s invitations can bring about life-changing experiences. He does not give us more than what we can handle, and He will always be with me every step of the way as I continue to search for His will.
