The Heart is Deceitfully Wicked

In Which I Take Apart an Article Called "Queer and Christian??"

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So I’m definitely going to be writing a book called Mrs. Kennedy’s Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Theological Behavior, except that I wish my name was more like “Miss Manners,” and therefore, I’m sure I require some kind of pseudonym that is instantly recognizable as me myself. I’ve been casting about for a book to write for a while, and I’m so grateful to the Gentle Reader who thought of it for me. Please begin to send in questions that I can answer with my usual benificent goodwill.

In the meantime, I have a heartbreaking testimony of apostacy to work through. I feel like I was kind of hard on John Oliver and James KA Smith this week. Life is complicated and fraught, and everyone is trying to cope as best they can. No one means to be bad. In that spirit, I want to go through an older piece called “Queer and Christian??” by someone named Candice Czubernat. It’s from all the way back in 2015, which was, just as an aside, the year I happened to fix upon when I was muttering about Professor Smith earlier in the week. “2015 called,” I said to my dear husband, “and they want their audacious courage back.” The piece was sent to me by the excellent Substacker of the account Resources 4 Redemption. Give her a follow if you have a moment; her work is well worth it, and you will not be disappointed.

Leaving all the bitter sarcasm to one side, then, let us go through this accumulation of suffering with all due sincerity, for this person is having a wretched time:

I hear it over and over again in my work with those questioning their sexual orientation; “I don’t see how my Christian faith can co-exist with being gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, or transgender.” I will hear things like, “it just doesn’t work together, I don’t see a way out, there’s no hope, I don’t know how not to be a Christian,” and “I don’t know how to not be LGBTQ.”

It is really awful—a tragedy, in fact—that so many people have had to go on trying to be Christian for the last twenty years without the undergirding Christian structures and assumptions that make faith a thing that can be comfortably grasped.

Every generation has to sort it out for themselves, of course, but we can make it extra difficult for each other without intending to. I lament, I bewail the manifold corporate sins and wickedness, the intellectual and philosophical stumbling blocks placed in the way of a whole generation of people so that they were not able to avoid the perils of apostacy. I can’t litigate all of these failures in a single blog post, but if I had to name one, I would probably say that people of my generation and those before me were guilty of anxiety on one hand and complacency on the other. I came of age in the late 80s, early 90s, and everyone around me was so anxious for the state of my soul, and yet, many of those people were not able to apprehend the kind of evils that were lurking on the horizon. How could they? It was a world that still had the vestiges of belief.

For those who “felt” themselves to be attracted sexually to people of the same sex, and yet identified as Christians, it seemed there was no way out of the delimma because most Christians were surviving on a thin gruel of Christian teaching that did not sustain, enliven, or even challenge them.

This is usually when either an internal voice speaks up, or someone in his or her life suggests simply choosing not to be queer; the idea of choice arises. While both our internal wonderings and the voices of those in our lives are strong and loud for good reasons, we also need to pay close attention to what our heart is telling us by listening to our feelings. In the deep quiet space, what is your heart telling you? To be clear, this is not a stance of weakness, but it takes great courage to hear and be honest about what it’s saying.

Is this going to be the Post of Lamentation? Here is another one. So so so many people are confused on the subject of feelings. Let me clarify something essential from the start. You should not lie about how you are feeling. How you are feeling is a real and necessary point to consider. Talking yourself out of your feelings is a useless task. Indeed, God doesn’t even want you to do that. What you’re supposed to do is go to God—and other people—and say, “This is how I feel.” In fact, as everyone knows, the book of Psalms is full of people feeling many different and sundry ways and bringing those feelings to God.

Moreover, it is absolutely necessary to work through the reasons you are feeling the way you are. To sort through your feelings is to uncover their source. If your stomach hurts, you probably ate something that disagreed with you, and you should try to find out what it was. If your heart hurts, something happened to make it feel that way. If your mind is in a cloud of anxious tension, there is a rational, though perhaps obscure and unknown to you, reason. You should take the trouble to sort it out.

But having discovered the source of your miserable feelings—and this is so essential, so please don’t become distracted and fail to hear me—your feelings are not divinly ordained truth. You offer them to God and ask him for help. Because sometimes the things that you feel find their source in hideous lies that come from the pit of hell.