Community Voices

Live the Questions

By Phillip Brown
Sandy, Utah, USA

"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not look now for the answers.... It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the questions. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day." - Rainer Maria Rilke, "The Fourth Letter," from Letters to a Young Poet

I think this is wise advice for anyone dealing with same-sex attraction (SSA), and lately I have taken it as my motto. Only, here's the catch: Rilke said "have patience" but didn't say anything about stalling or stopping. In fact, he emphasized the need to live. I think we have a natural hunger for answers as human beings, but sometimes we need to carry on, even when we don't have a perfect understanding. We can't rush the process. We know this principle from the gospel—line upon line, precept upon precept. I don't think it can be any different for matters of the heart or the psyche. I've seen so many delay truly living because they are caught up in figuring everything out in advance. I've seen it in my own life, in fact.

I am twenty-two years old and about to embark on a mission to Madrid, Spain, and I am a self-diagnosed staller. My experience went something like this:

At nineteen years old, I felt the common pressure to serve a mission. In so many ways I was already prepared. Some people (my father included) told me that I was much more prepared for my mission than they were for theirs. On the outside I appeared to be a clean-cut, well behaved, spiritual, somewhat scripturally savvy young man. On the inside, I knew differently. I felt like a sinner, a private sufferer, a person with a secret burden who had fallen impossibly short of the standard of discipleship. I repeated over and over, "I'm not ready to serve a mission." What that really meant was, "I'm not ready to choose"—to choose between the "church lifestyle" and the "gay lifestyle."

I use quotation marks because I think these are two vague and, frankly, unhelpful terms that we throw around in our experience with SSA. They certainly weren't helping me. In the SSA vernacular we often refer to "sitting on a fence" or perhaps "standing at a crossroads." I really did think of myself as a fence-sitter, straddling the line between the gospel and the world. The problem was, I thought I could stay on the fence until I figured out what I really wanted, and then hop off and stride confidently down the path I had chosen. What I didn't take into account was time rolling forward, as it always does. I was busy trying to choose which life I wanted while the only life I really had was passing me by. I take that back—life wasn't passing me by, but rather taking me along with it, passively, like a passenger in a car. I wasn't driving; I was preoccupied with the map, looking longingly at detours.

During a therapy session, a couple years later, as I was complaining of the duality I felt, it occurred to me that there weren't really two paths—only one. The path that was and is my life. Then I wondered why I held the two-path paradigm for so long. Ironically, it was the very idea of two paths that was keeping me from moving forward. You see, if you believe in two paths, you believe in a crossroads (or fence). And if you are at a crossroads, concerned about choosing the right path, you might be apprehensive about choosing one or the other, knowing that choosing will involve a certain amount of commitment. And if you aren't sure what you want to commit to—or if you even want to commit at all—you remain, quite literally, stuck. That's where I found myself. So, instead of hopping off that proverbial fence, I decided to stop believing in it.

I stopped believing in the two paths, too. I tried to see them for what they were: two stereotypes that didn't exist in reality. Each came with an idealized positive side and an exaggerated negative side. It would be simply a matter of taste if I had to decide between only the positive aspects—like choosing between ice cream flavors—but it was a fear of the negative consequences that really blocked my path. The "church lifestyle" was an impossible road of perfection, requiring conformity to social norms, a marriage and family, and a let's-never-talk-about-it attitude toward SSA. On the other hand, the "gay lifestyle" was an over-inflated mirage, rife with sin, promiscuity, confusion, sexually-transmitted disease, which ultimately ended in loneliness. When I focused on these, I didn't want either path. When I focused on each path's ideal, I didn't know which one I wanted. Hence the stalling.

That is, until I figured out that none of that really existed in the way I thought it did. No lifestyles, no crossroads, no fence. I understood, finally, that I was an individual on my own path, and that it was impossible to know where that would take me. I did have to make choices along the way, but I wasn't limited by those stereotypes in my head. And the only thing I had to commit to was the gospel of Jesus Christ. The important distinction was between church culture, which isn't necessarily true, and the fullness of the gospel, which is. When I realized that my path may not look like everyone else's, but that it was really just between me and the Lord, I felt a new confidence. I handed that map over to the Savior and let him navigate—I jumped into the driver's seat.

Proverbs 3:5-6 reads, "Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths." If we truly trust the Lord, we don't need to fear the unknown vistas that await us. We can listen to the Spirit and the compass of our hearts and look forward to that day Rilke spoke of—that day when we realize we have happened onto an answer, and that it was the Lord who brought us there. But until then, there's no reason we shouldn't roll down the windows and breathe deeply, even if we're not sure exactly where we are. It's okay, the Lord does.

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