Ouch!!
Sometimes people don’t like you. I mean they really don’t like you. You do something that they disagree with and the knives are out.
For those who are of a macabre mind, why don’t you pop on over to the comment thread on Mark Harris’ blog discussing my latest video and see all the love and sweet thoughts that are coming my way.
For those of you who have stayed behind, enjoy this morning’s Gospel reading (Mark 7:14-23)
Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a man can make him ‘unclean’ by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him ‘unclean.’ ”
After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. “Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him ‘unclean’? For it doesn’t go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods “clean.”)
He went on: “What comes out of a man is what makes him ‘unclean.’ For from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man ‘unclean.’ “
I’m not sure where you came up with this theory, but it simply doesn’t hold water. I have known many very deeply spiritual gay people for whom the writings and teachings of the church’s great mystics are a part of their lives and their souls.
I’ve been reading John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Thomas Merton, Ignatius Loyola, Thomas a Kempis, and many others since I was a teenager (let’s see…30 years or so?), and not only do I find them deeply compatible with my understanding of how I relate to God, but I find nothing that would convince me that “ex-gays” should be any more or less affiliated with them than gays, straights, or anyone else. Teresa of Avila wrote about the soul’s union with its beloved Creator, not about whether gay people qualify to have such a relationship with God in the first place.