A few thoughts about sin.

I don’t believe in sin, but Paul Tillich did, and I found his concept of sin to be useful. Tillich believed that people lived in a state of estrangement and that they longed to be reconciled to their fellow human beings, the world around them and to the Ground of Being.

He said that this was the driving force of love. He defined love as the urge toward the reunion of the separated. Considering the way Tillich defined “sin”, you could say that the desire to reunite is also the driving force behind it, too.

Tillich claimed that there were three basic “sins”. First, there is unbelief. You lose faith in God, the Ground of Being, or life, or humanity or whatever. You no longer believe in something higher than yourself. It’s all about you. The second “sin” follows from the first: hubris. You become the focus of your life. Your needs become paramount, and no one else really matters. You become your own god. The third “sin” is concupiscence. Rather than trying to reconcile yourself to the world, you attempt to reconcile the world to you. You do this by attempting to bring as much of the world under your sphere of influence and control as possible.

Concupiscence can be expressed in a variety of ways: the hoarding of money, seeking power and fame, having numerous sexual encounters or collecting baseball cards. But none of these things are “sins”, according to Tillich, in and of themselves. They only become “sins” when there is a spirit of concupiscence present. The person doing these things must be striving for some kind of control and dominance.

In Tillich’s view, sexual desire and sexual activity, even with multiple partners, is an expression of love. It only becomes “sin” when there is a form of conquest involved.

Anything you do can be a form of concupiscence in Tillich’s theology, including celibacy if you’re doing it in order to conquer and make your acceptability inevitable.

Obviously, our ability to control the greater world is exceedingly limited. We are mere specks that exist for seconds in an ageless and unimaginably huge universe. We can relish being a part of this grand mystery, or we can rebel against it and try to win it over.

I don’t know if there is a god or not, and I certainly don’t claim to know why we’re here or what we’re supposed to do while we’re here. But reading Tillich in my youth has helped me in determining my own course of action. I can either accept and appreciate the world and my little role, my hour on the stage for what they are, or I can attempt to own the world and become the master of my own fate. The latter seems like a lot of work, and I’ll still end up dead no matter what.

Taking Care of Myself

I need to lose a significant amount of weight for health reasons and quality of life reasons. I would feel better and I could do more things if I were smaller. A few years ago, I was doing much better. Most days I ate fewer than 1,700 calories, and I walked up to 20 miles a week, and I did yard work. I wasn’t exactly strong, and I wasn’t up to doing anything strenuous, but for me–someone who has had to battle chronic severe depression, someone who survived a brain tumor, someone who has hernias–I was doing good. I was at the top of my form. But still, I was a bit chubby. When you’re 5’4” and over 40, it’s hard to keep the weight off, but I’ve been at least a little chunky since the age of 9 or 10. Probably because of genetics in part, I imagine. But I was allowed my fill of junk food when I was a kid, too. My parents were raised during a time when scarcity of food was common, so they thought fat was healthy. And I had been in poor health when I was a little kid, and I had been underweight. So they didn’t try to restrict my diet in any way when I started gaining weight. My mother was my primary caregiver, and she was simply too out of it to pay much attention to what I was eating. If I wanted chocolate bars and potato chips, she let me have them.

Slowly, I started to pick up on the fact that some thought I was fat, and eventually I heard the comments and the put downs regularly. It made me feel ashamed of myself, and it all got mixed in with the homophobia, too. I could not acknowledge my feelings, and not one of the boys I found attractive showed the slightest bit of interest in me. Of course, nearly all of them were straight, and even if they weren’t, they couldn’t say anything for the same reasons I couldn’t say anything. It was too dangerous. But I began to feel like no one wanted me because I was undesirable. I felt ugly and worthless.

I did slim down a little in high school, and when I moved to Morgantown to attend WVU and discovered the small, secret LGBT community there, I was noticed and I got picked up. It was thrilling. But several of the guys I slept with told me after that I’d be “really hot” if I lost twenty pounds. Well, I can’t say that I disagreed with them because I wanted to loose that twenty pounds, too. I was attracted to thin guys, so I wanted to be one myself. But the thing is, I was at about the right weight for me. In order to be smaller, I would have had to starve myself or run five miles a day or both. It just wasn’t worth it. So for a long time, I gave up completely, and gained an enormous amount of weight. I later realized that you don’t have to look like what you’re attracted to. And those guys who were rude enough to tell me that I was too fat after I had blown them, they probably would have found some other reason to complain if I had been the prototypical twink boy. They were jerks. What do you say when someone goes down on their knees in front of you and gives you pleasure? Answer: Thank you!

These days, I’m trying to learn to take care of myself–which takes a serious dose of self-love–and I’m trying to accept the way I look. I know that 99.9% of the guys I find attractive aren’t going to be interested in me, and that’s fine. They can like whoever they like, and they don’t owe me a damn thing. I’m simply going to own my feelings and celebrate my sense of beauty without expecting anything in return.

It's good being gay.

I was shamed. I was made to feel like an outcast, a weirdo, a freak, worthless and unwanted. I was made to feel afraid. But from the moment puberty hit and I realized I was attracted to members of my own sex at age 11, I knew in the depths of my being that my attraction was a good thing. My attraction made me feel alive. Being sexually excited was a thrill. Experiencing crushes was a thrill. Wanting to spend time with certain boys was a thrill. Adoring the Hardy Boys was a thrill. I was awake and connected to this world at last. It made everything burn brighter. I liked this world, and one of the reasons I liked it was because it had people in it I thought were beautiful, sexy, funny, alluring and sweet, and those people just happened to be members of my own sex. I have no patience with those who say it’s wrong or that I should resist this natural urge that has been such a positive force in my life because of dogma they learned at church. While growing up, I heard the things the preachers said about boys like me. They didn’t know what the hell they were talking about.

Homo Evangelist

I admit it, I am a homo evangelist. Not an evangelist in the Christian sense, or even in a broader religious sense. But I believe that homo desires, homo sex and homo relationships should be celebrated. I believe homo attraction should be honored in the world at large and in ourselves to the extent that it exists. I realize that not every attraction should be pursued. Maybe the person you want is straight or in a monogamous relationship. Maybe you’re simply too emotionally vulnerable to get into the game right now. There are many reasons to exercise restraint. But I don’t think it’s right to defame and ignore homosexual attraction simply because it’s homosexual in nature. And I don’t see how you can celebrate and embrace homosexuality without saying the condemnation of homosexuality is wrong.

Fever

I was very sick in my 20s. I saw my therapist at least once a week, sometimes twice. I kept her phone number with me at all times. I even had her home phone number and her permission to call her in the middle of the night if necessary. (I never did.) I saw my psychiatrist at least once a month, sometimes twice. I had blood tests done at least once a month because I was taking so many medications at such high levels, my doctor had to constantly make sure he wasn't poisoning me.

Every time I saw my doctor, he would ask me about my libido. And that's because, to be quite frank, a young man who isn't horny is probably in trouble. That is a warning sign.

I believe that the fever is life. It is the thrust and force of life. It is life sustaining energy. It's not simply sex, or the desire for sex, but hope, a need to connect with people, a need to connect with the world, a need to stay alive and be a part of the mystery of life. I think to deny it is to deny life and our own existence.

Love Songs

This is from the film Les chansons d'amour (Love Songs). Ismaël, the one with the dark hair, is a young widow. He fully expected to live the rest of his life with his wife, but one night when they were out on the town, she unexpectedly dropped dead from an undiagnosed heart condition. Ismaël is not only heartbroken but profoundly depressed because life no longer makes any sense, and he doesn’t know how to continue. He doesn’t know how to stop needing this young woman he expected to be by his side for decades to come. When he meets Erwann, a university student, he thinks he’s just a young, silly flirt who wants to play. Ismaël doesn’t take him seriously, and besides, he never considered having a relationship with a man before. But Erwann is persistent, and eventually Ismaël realizes that he might be interested after all. Ismaël gives in to Erwann, but he makes it clear that his grief has gutted him, and in this song, he is imploring the boy to make love to him in such a way that it rekindles his passion and desire for life. He demands that Erwann burn when he sinks into his bed of ice.

Desire for a man is what brings Ismaël back from the brink of oblivion. This is fiction, of course, but I think it reflects life. It’s beautiful and real. And it’s important. I think if we ignore these needs, if we attempt to deny them and to smother them we run the risk of destroying ourselves. And I strongly suspect that if there is any kind of spiritual dimension to life it is intertwined and closely connected to passion.

Some of my thoughts concerning Before Midnight

I can’t believe that it’s been almost twenty years ago since I first saw Before Sunrise. I loved the idea of traveling through Europe, connecting with a stranger in a foreign city and spending the evening walking the streets and engaging in one long, circuitous conversation. I could imagine bursting with creative energy and sharing all of my half baked ideas about life, existence and love and listening to this other person do the same. It all seemed so romantic and wonderful, and it gave me hope that something like that might happen to me.

I liked the second film in the series, too–Before Sunset. It was great seeing the characters again after nine years, and it was nice to know that their one night together still meant something to them. It wasn’t merely one of those youthful experiences where both parties are so in love with being in love, they do a lot of projecting and avoiding and find out later that they were fooling themselves. Jesse and Celine really did bond that summer evening when they were in their mid-twenties.

Now, after another nine years, there’s another installment–Before Midnight. Jesse and Celine are in their 40s, they’ve been together for a number of years, and they’re the parents of two little girls. It was good to see that they’re both still healthy, vibrant and full of energy. But I thought there was too much dialogue. I can’t believe that a couple in their 40s who have been together for so long would chatter so much. At times, it came across as a little forced to me, and the characters seemed a bit pretentious. Throughout the film, tensions grew, and finally they began to argue. The things they said to one another… So hurtful and cruel. It was painful to watch. And as someone who suffers from PTSD and extreme social phobia, it reinforced my worst fears about getting involved with people. Relationships are so much work. The more you open up, the greater the chance you’ll say something that will be misunderstood, the greater the chance that you’ll reveal something that will be unacceptable to your friend or partner. The closer you are, the greater the chance you’ll find out things about your friend or partner that you won’t understand. I fear hurting people, I fear getting hurt, and it’s hard for me to keep my emotions in check, so this movie, in a way, was more scary than a horror story. Goodness, if I had to regularly go through all of that, I’d throw myself off a bridge. I couldn’t take it.

I hope Jesse and Celine are still together nine years from now, but you can tell if their relationship survives, it’s going to be complicated.