Love is the Only Gospel

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This sounds familiar, not because I was gay and now I’m notstruggled with same-sex attraction and now I’ve found a balance (I’ve always been straight), but because this is why I became Orthodox (I was Roman Catholic at the time). Of course, most Orthodox parishes would never have treated me the way I was treated at St. Athanasius, so I would still be Roman today if it weren’t for Fr. D. and Matushka R.

So, if this pricks you about how you treat those with same-sex attraction, excellent. But it may also prick you about how you treat anyone at all.

I care about this so much because I wouldn’t be Christ’s today if it were not for the friendship and love of the Christians in my first Anglican parish, people who knew I was a gay activist, didn’t agree with me about gay sex, and loved me anyway. They knew I had homosexual sex and that I believed it was fine – and they disagreed with me. But they nevertheless invited me to their cookouts, car washes, sporting events, school plays, pot lucks…the whole joyful, chaotic mess of parish and family life and as our friendships deepened they showed me they loved me.

And they told me their stories too. They told me about their own past drug use, their own previous abortions, their own prior womanizing, and their own previous struggles with the Faith and its demands. In short, they made it clear to me that the church universal is a hospital for sinners far more than it is a penthouse for saints.

This was crucial because prior to coming to Trinity, I used to believe that Christians would treat me…well, much as the New Oxford Review appears to believe they should have.

I had a little box of prejudices in which I put “Christians.” Christians, I believed, hated and feared me. Christians would not want to have anything to do with me. Christians believed I could not be trusted with their children.

Read the whole article: Sed Contra: What? Befriend Those People?!

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