Dear Sage & Blunt,
I’m completely in love with my ex-girlfriend, but I was raised Catholic and my family isn’t supportive at all. My sweet ex is so understanding and still is trying to be friends even though we both are still in love with each other. How do I overcome the insane amount of guilt and just let myself be happy with her?
Sincerely,
Catholic Lesbian
* * *
Dear Catholic Lesbian,
I’m not religious. Well, technically speaking, I’m Jewish – I’m a bat mitzvah, I went to Hebrew school, and my dad used to take me and my siblings to synagogue every Saturday morning growing up. At the time, we groaned about having to get up early on the weekend, but as is often true of the things we are made to do and complain about as children, I think in reality I found the ritual comforting.
I liked standing quietly by my father’s side while he greeted the rabbi and chatted with the regulars. It was a secure feeling, knowing he had a place in the community that I could share with him as his kid. I liked praying in an ancient language that I didn’t fully understand, letting the words and melodies wash over me. I was always more invested in the feeling of being at temple, and the social world of it, than the laws of the Torah. Now that I’m grown up and live far away from home, religion occupies even less of my mental space than ever.
I am, however, quite lesbian. And that I think about a lot. Like God, it’s everywhere and all around. In fact, I treat lesbianism with much more religiosity than I do Judaism. I glean many of my moral and ethical lessons from its philosophers and own volumes upon volumes of theoretical and artistic texts on the subject. I study Carmen Maria Machado’s “In the Dream House” like it’s the damn Talmud.
But more than that, being a lesbian is the most rapturous and divine experience of my life. I don’t know how to say it without sounding corny as hell, but it’s true. Being gay is a soul-level thing that makes me feel tapped into the hum of the universe. It gives me that feeling I had in temple as a kid, of being surrounded and held up by something bigger than me, and it lights up every nerve ending in my body with the glow of connection and truth.
I suspect that you feel it too, that being with your girlfriend feels right in this deep, ancient way, despite what you have been taught. There is something about lesbianism, maybe homosexuality in general, that is all-consuming. But to embrace however gay you may be, whether you were born that way or not, is up to you and only you. I like to joke that the haters are onto something when they call it a lifestyle choice.
I know it’s easier said than done. I also don’t know how you feel about the faith and the family you describe. I don’t know if you are trying to reconcile who you are with a tradition you love, or if your goal is to deconstruct and leave as much of Catholicism behind as you can. I don’t know how close you are with your parents, or how close you possibly can be to a family who denies or disparages you in such a basic way.
Either way, you must focus on what is in front of you now. Borrow a little something from my religious tradition and turn your attention towards this life on this earth, rather than anything that may lay beyond. Remember that homosexuality has been observed in nearly all of God’s creatures since the beginning of time, and that your practice of it puts you right at home with the rest of the world around you. Break small rules until you are comfortable breaking the big ones. Find people who have walked this path before you – they are out there.
There is still meaning to be found wherever you want to find it. I do not light candles every Friday when the sun goes down, and I do not keep kosher, but I do believe that part of my responsibility as a human being is to heal the world around me, and I believe in the essentiality of healthy community that Judaism teaches.
Do you believe in loving your neighbor as you love yourself? Do you believe in feeling and responding to the pain of others? As far as I’m concerned, anyone who embodies these basic principles, variations of which almost all religions teach, is almost certainly not going to hell to burn for all eternity.
More importantly, and as I’m sure you well know, it will be basically impossible to be friends with your ex-girlfriend. You are completely in love. Be in love. Do not let absolutely anything get in your way. I’m glad she is sweet – what a salve in the face of this struggle. Do not go through it alone. Talk to her, and others who you love and trust, about exactly what you are feeling, and every day it will get smaller and easier to manage.
Keep the faith.
Gayly,
Sage & Blunt
