God loves me as a gay man 

  Recently, I received a long text message that hijacked my whole day and left me shaken and unable to do anything. It was from an old college classmate, one of my best friends. He had just finished reading my book, "Of God and Men." We lost touch over the years, and he expressed surprise when he learned that I had come out of the closet. It turned out that he was hiding under a rock, in a manner of speaking, and he was not on Facebook either, so what was big news for our Ateneo College Batch 1988 had never reached him, until this past weekend. In his text message, he admired my writing and praised my sincerity, but added, “You are sincerely wrong.” He said that my views on God were inconsistent with the Bible. He chastised me, pointing out that I should not say who God was based on my personal views, but that I should know God through His revealed Word in the Bible. He cited the usual passages—Romans 1:24-32, 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, Galatians 5:19-26—to prove that God abhors homosexuality. The God that I talk about in my book, he said, does not resemble in any way the God that St. Paul speaks of in his Epistles. I have read those passages before, but the loving concern of an old friend had me picking up the Bible and reading them again. And once more, I felt hurt, because here again, it seemed, that the Bible was clearly condemning all “practicing” homosexuals to eternal damnation. I could hear my friend pleading, in tears, please, Bong, please save yourself, repent and change your ways. The chastisement was coming not from some arrogant self-righteous fundamentalist, but from someone who genuinely loves me as a friend, and I could sense the Holy Spirit reaching out to me. So in humility I allowed my friend’s words to rest in my heart, as I quietly placed my trust in God’s grace. Since the release of my book, originally called "God Loves Bakla," I thought that the argument was over—for me, at least. I even declared so in my title, which rebuffs the placard slogan in many fundamentalist rallies in the United States (“God hates fags”). Thus it came as a shock to me how much my conviction was shaken by a tearful appeal from an old friend. It reminded me that God was on both sides of the debate on homosexuality. Many scholars have attempted to explain away the Bible passages condemning homosexuality. I am not a Bible scholar, and I can speak only from the perspective of this wounded sinner. Saint Paul seems very clear when he said that homosexuals would not inherit the Kingdom of God (1 Cor 6:9). For many people, that’s it, end of story. This is what my college friend apparently believes. However, we have since learned that these Biblical passages must be read within their original socio-historical contexts, in order to properly interpret them. One particularly relevant theory is that of Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, who speculated (though he was not the first) that Saint Paul was a repressed gay man, and that his private struggles with this “thorn in the flesh” informed his apparent homophobia. Excerpts from his book, "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism," can be read in this website: http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Christianity/2004/04/Was-The-Apostle-Paul-Gay.aspx?p=1 As someone who struggled with repressed homosexual desires for decades, I understand where Paul is coming from. During his time, living openly as a homosexual man was out of the question, and Paul’s struggles against his own “sinful” desires colored his statements on homosexuality, the very same statements now being invoked by fundamentalists. Yet times have changed, and we know more about human nature now than Paul ever did. We know now that homosexuality is not a disease or mental illness, that it is not a sinful state to be abhorred, but that it is actually a special grace to be accepted and embraced. To that last phrase, my friend would probably say: No way! Surely many Catholics will rush to agree with him. One Muslim friend in Egypt, when I told him the title of my book, echoed what my college friend said. “It is simply wrong,” he said, “to say that God loves gays.” According to his understanding of his religion, God never created the sinful state of homosexuality, which, he says, is purely the product of man’s sinfulness. Given all that, where do I get off saying that God loves bakla? My answer is this: “God loves bakla” is my thesis statement, and the book is my thesis. I have come to believe, through the events of my own life, as illumined by the Holy Spirit, that God loves me as a gay man and desires only my happiness in this life that He has given me. This deep conviction came after decades of inner struggle and prayerful reflection. The rightness of my cause has been confirmed for me many times over, through countless encounters with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) persons who in their own struggles for dignity and equality reflect the face of our crucified Savior. But for many Christians, this is not enough. The only authority that they will accept is sacred scripture as interpreted by the leadership of the church. There are many persuasive articles arguing the Bible actually does NOT condemn committed loving relationships between two persons of the same sex. But if someone is convinced that the Bible condemns homosexuals, then no amount of Biblical exegesis will change his mind. In our country, it is the consensus of the Catholic majority that homosexuality is a sin. This has resulted in many LGBT Filipinos leaving the Catholic Church. Nothing in the developments of the last two decades in Western countries, where gay rights have been recognized as human rights and same-sex relationships have been granted legal recognition, has significantly impacted the view among Filipinos that when it comes to moral issues, the Catholic Church remains the sole arbiter of what is moral and what is immoral. As a result, I no longer call myself a Catholic. I no longer recognize the authority of the Church Magisterium dictating to me that as a homosexual the only path to sanctity is chastity. I am a “practicing” homosexual, and I believe that Saint Paul is wrong to say that homosexuals would never enter the Kingdom of Heaven. If I do not believe that the Bible is infallible, then what do I believe in? I believe in my own conscience and the mysterious workings of the Holy Spirit. I believe that my twenty years of Jesuit education and the many years of living that followed have sufficiently taught me the difference between right and wrong, moral and immoral, legal and illegal, and through God’s grace and spirit I am mature enough to make moral decisions for myself and take personal responsibility for my actions and my life, including the salvation of my soul. I believe that I do not need a bunch of old men telling me who God is and isn’t. Nor do I need experts telling me that God’s Word is this and that, or that I should conform my life to what they claim is God’s will. I am an adult. My life here and beyond is strictly my own business and no one else’s. And I believe that God agrees. I have lived and worked in four countries—the Philippines, Singapore, Cambodia and Egypt—each country having its own unique religious culture and traditions. I have met men and women of different faiths—Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh. I have met atheists and agnostics. I have friends who do not know what they believe in. I have worked for the United Nations alongside colleagues from dozens of countries representing various cultures and traditions. If I were to ask each person who God is, there would be so many different responses, even from those belonging to the same religious tradition. There will always be the vanguards in every religion who will try to control and monopolize understanding of and access to the divine, and it is these people that we should be wary of. I recall being told in school that “the Catholic Church is not a democracy,” and I have always found it disturbing. But questioning authority was disrespectful, even heretical. And I found that the situation was not much different in other religions, which also need to preserve their orthodoxies for their continued growth and survival. In most religious traditions, homosexuality falls outside of the norm. Thus, LGBT persons seeking to nurture their spiritual life have little choice but to chart their own course toward God, guided only by their conscience and the Holy Spirit. Happily, new churches sympathetic to LGBT persons have sprung up; in the Philippines we have the Metropolitan Community Church. But charting one’s own path toward God is not moral relativism. There are still, and will always be, guiding principles. The Bible remains the principal guide for me, but without the textual rigidity that has calcified over the centuries. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is another guide. More recently, there is the trailblazing document on LGBT rights known as the Yogyakarta Principles. As a Filipino lawyer, I am guided by my own country’s laws and legal traditions. Most important, I am guided by what I learned from my parents, who raised me in a God-fearing family, where my moral education began and where I learned the most important lessons of living and loving. At the end of the day, only God will be the judge of whether as a practicing homosexual I will or will not be saved. I believe that when the time comes God will not focus on just my sexuality but will look at my entire life. I believe, like Saint John of the Cross, that love is the measure by which we shall be judged. Where does that leave my college friend, who believes that homosexuals will not be saved? I believe that this will be irrelevant to God, who will see only the love that my friend has for me. I fear, however, that it might not be the same for those persons who have acted with hatred and disgust toward homosexuals, but I will leave their judgment to God. The last chapter of my book is entitled “The Primacy of Love” and contains my feeble attempts to explain my understanding of what love is. I turn to Saint Paul once again, my kindred spirit, in 1 Cor 13, the “Love Chapter,” the one that tells us that love is patient, kind, and without envy. I have tried in my daily life to embody this ideal kind of love, and this is the love that I share with my partner, and he shares with me. Love is the greatest force in the universe, and I know that in the end, by the grace of God, all shall be well. - GMA News