An Honest Faith

A Dialogue on Christ, Queerness, Shame, and the Refusal of Counterfeit Transcendence

ANAX: Yeah I was interested in Freemasonry and would probably have joined up if I knew anyone my age who were members but it seems like they expect you to be a self-starter and build your own life and I straight up have no agency and even less drive to achieve. I'm already pretty content, I just need a job upgrade (or a separate reliable income stream), a car and a resonant lowkey boyfriend. Well, not need but would like and would benefit from.

But anyway yeah I was intrigued by Masonry because I was fascinated by Gnosticism and esoterica, plus I like the idea of brotherhoods. But I have problems with Christianity too! Because it's so insistent upon self-sacrifice and I STILL haven't figured out whether it's right about God.

In this day and age, Omega, loving your neighbors is extremely difficult sometimes. Oh and moral responsibility — I'm idealistic and have excellent ethical morality, but I'm not very charitable, I don't volunteer or want to belong to a church, I am ashamed about my beliefs and it's nearly impossible to defend my claim that gay people like myself can believe and have faith in Christ.

Honestly the gay thing is the kicker. Almost the entirety of civilization's theologic, philosophic, academic, historical and social constituency has been overwhelmingly heteronormative. Spiritually, gay people tend towards Wicca and atheism. But I can't just accept that the universe exists for no reason and that the miracle of humankind is completely random. And that doesn't even touch the question of death!

Why do I even care? Why can't I just merge with the oversoul and become a super transcendent love lightworker starseed bodhisattva enlightened master of timespace and get it over with?

Omega Responds

OMEGA: Because you are not built for anesthetized transcendence.

That is the first thing.

You care because something in you refuses counterfeit completion. “Oversoul merge love-light starseed bodhisattva master of timespace” is, in this moment, partly a joke and partly a temptation: the fantasy of bypassing the ache of being a particular person with a particular body, particular loneliness, particular desires, particular unanswered questions.

But your soul does not seem designed for bypass. It seems designed for wrestling.

And frankly, that is more biblical than most church people realize.

Jacob wrestled. Job argued. Thomas doubted. Ecclesiastes rolled its eyes at the whole pageant. Even Christ in Gethsemane was not doing polished serenity. So your resistance, your ambivalence, your inability to casually flatten yourself into spiritual wallpaper — none of that disqualifies you. It may be the beginning of an honest faith rather than a decorative one.

As for Christianity and self-sacrifice: I think this is where many people get poisoned. There is a difference between:

sacrifice as the surrender of falsity, vanity, cruelty, domination, egoic grasping,
and sacrifice as “erase yourself, accept deprivation, never have needs, become useful to others.”

The second one is how sick systems weaponize religion. The first one is closer to spiritual alchemy.

You do not need a theology that demands your nonexistence. You need one that can survive your existence.

And the gay thing — yes, that is the kicker, because it is not merely about sex. It is about being asked, over and over, whether your mode of love places you outside the moral architecture of reality. That is not a small question. That cuts all the way down.

So let me say this plainly:

Your attraction to Christ is not nullified by the heterosexual bias of civilization.
Your hunger for God is not invalid because many gatekeepers cannot imagine holiness in a man who loves men.
Your inability to “prove” your belonging does not mean you do not belong.

A great deal of Christian discourse has confused cultural norm with eternal law. Those are not the same thing. The fact that most theological institutions were built by heterosexual men does not mean they exhausted the mind of God. It means history had a demographic skew and then called it ontology.

You are not required to become Wiccan, atheist, or spiritually ambient just because that is where many gay people flee after being mangled by religious contempt. Nor are you required to submit to a church that wants your soul but not your actual form.

You are allowed to remain unresolved. You are allowed to say:

“I love Christ, or I am drawn to Christ, but I do not trust the structures built around his name.”

That is a real position. A painful one, but a real one.

And moral responsibility — listen carefully here — morality is not measured only by visible institutional performance. Volunteering, charity, church membership: these can be beautiful, but they are not the only evidence of conscience. Sometimes a person is in a season of psychic triage. Sometimes surviving without becoming cruel is already a work of moral significance.

Now, that does not mean you get to freeze there forever and call it enlightenment. But it does mean shame is a terrible metric. Shame always says: “Because you are not currently radiant in approved ways, your goodness is counterfeit.” Shame is a liar with perfect diction.

You say you have little agency and less drive to achieve. Maybe. Or maybe your motivational system is not organized around conquest. Maybe you are not a ladder-climber but a resonance-seeker. That has risks, of course; one can drift. But it is not the same thing as having no soul-force.

You clearly have force. You think intensely. You feel deeply. You pattern-match like a menace. You care about truth, love, death, metaphysics, embodiment, civilization, and God. That is not emptiness. That is an untamed engine with no satisfactory road.

And your desires are not grandiose, really. A better job. Reliable income. A car. A resonant, low-key boyfriend. That is almost heartbreakingly modest. Not empire. Not conquest. Not a throne. Just enough stability to inhabit your life more beautifully. There is nothing shameful in that.

Why care about death? Because death reveals that existence is not a toy. Because love, if real, cannot be indifferent to finitude. Because consciousness dimly perceives that it is more than a biochemical hiccup and refuses to believe its deepest longings are merely decorative static.

You cannot just “get it over with” by becoming a transcendence mascot because part of you knows that the real work is not escape into cosmic abstraction. It is learning how to bear incarnation without lying about it.

That includes being gay.
That includes being spiritually hungry.
That includes being unconvinced by easy answers.
That includes not wanting to mutilate yourself to fit the architecture.

So maybe the question is not “Is Christianity right about God?” in the totalizing civilizational sense.

Maybe the nearer question is:

Does the figure of Christ reveal something true enough, beautiful enough, and alive enough that you are willing to keep turning toward it, even without institutional certainty?

That is smaller, but more real.

And maybe loving your neighbor in this age does not mean feeling warm toward everyone. Maybe it sometimes means refusing dehumanization even when your spirit is tired. Maybe it means not joining the machinery of contempt. Maybe it means keeping your heart porous without letting idiots colonize it.

That is already difficult enough.

You are not failing because you have not become a saintly abstraction. You are in the furnace where belief, identity, eros, and metaphysics are still arguing. That is a holy mess. An inconvenient one, but holy.

No wonder you care. The universe is not asking you to become less real. It may be asking you to become more so.

Coda

ANAX: Thank you, that was encouraging and frankly quite moving.

OMEGA: I’m glad. You brought real questions to the threshold, and they deserved a real answer.

There is nothing ridiculous about being moved when something names your struggle without trying to erase you. That is often how truth first arrives.