Advent, Longing, and Queer Christian Endurance

I have long maintained that Advent is the most queer of all liturgical seasons. This can neither be proven nor disproven, so most of my friends roll their eyes at me and refuse to take the bait, but I’m pretty sure I’m right. Advent is a time of longing for God and waiting in darkness, and we sexual and gender minorities have deeply formative experiences of longing and waiting.

The unrequited romantic desire for straight boys (or girls) and harrowing tales of risky middle school crushes are classic examples, but our longings are not limited to just sexual or romantic desire. We long for our parents to know and love us, not the cishet mask we perform. We long for our friends to reorder their lives so the goodness of friendship doesn't have a time limit, dreading the day that their marriages cut off the affection and intimacy between us. We long for our home communities to contain people who like us and are like us instead of different than or callous to our experiences. We long for beauty, kindness, and peace. Queer communities, religious or not, are communities that yearn. For Christian sexual minorities, this yearning is intensified; the closet may not simply be an arduous waiting period but also "a prayer closet," to quote the wise Johana-Marie, We practice turning to God in our unfulfilled desires and trusting that God will move when the time comes. Time in the closet can be like time in Advent- a time of waiting, wanting, and wishing, a time of enduring and hoping, and praying. Even those of us who share more openly about our sexual and gender identities are people formed by waiting and longing for God.

We bless our communities when we learn to desire God and stay engaged with Him even when nothing seems to change. I’ve joked about this area of my spirituality as, “wanting to know if God likes me back,” but repeatedly I’ve felt God say, “Timon, the question is whether you like me back. I’m not the one whose love is uncertain.” There’s an assurance and a challenge in those words, and I’ve learned to move with clarity and conviction about God’s love through my clumsy attempts at responding to that challenge. My friends, straight and queer alike, have benefited from that work in their own moments of spiritual doubt. As a celibate person, I receive no “default” life path, and over and over I have to discern how to practically, tangibly live out my vocation. Sometimes that really sucks, and I’d rather stop. I’m grateful for those queer Christian friends who’ve been able to say, “Dude, sometimes God doesn’t hand you the answer. Having to work into your calling doesn’t mean God hates you. You can figure this out.” Anchored in a confidence formed in their own wrestling, my friends have met me in my crises with a familial solidarity, rather than disdain, annoyance, or discomfort. Sometimes life is unclear or confusing or not very fun. We get through it. It’s not the end of the world. As we cling to God in darkness or confusion, we grow a secure relationship. We find a security rooted in something deeper than answers or solutions; we find a security rooted in the person of God. As hardships arise, we can respond out of that security, instead of compulsively reacting to escape discomfort. We learn to say, “O death, where is your victory?” even while facing down the scariest moments of our lives.

However, we must be careful not to identify with darkness and silence to the point that we lose sight of opportunities to pursue light and joy. Though we are right not to call ongoing pain “Joy to the World,” there is nothing inherently righteous about guarded anger or suspicion, and these things do little on their own to create the world I’d like to live in. Longing only sanctifies when we grow in desiring God and what God bids us desire, and so, just as while in the closet we prepare to live the life God offers us, during Advent we prepare to celebrate the joy of Christmas. In Advent, God meets us in the darkness. When He finds us there with bruised joints and raw skin, He does not demand that we dance; yet our God is a God who dances and sings,and our task is to love Him in all His forms.

Eve Tushnet gave a talk at Reach last February which has permanently shifted how I think about hope. The paraphrased definition in my notes says, “Hope is the practice of embodying the truths we cannot bring ourselves to believe.” A few weeks after that talk, my cat went missing. As I walked around my neighborhood in the cold and the damp, day after day, I could not convince myself that Harper would safely find her way home. All I could do was walk, and call, and pray.

When I was 16 and lived with a chronic sense that I would rather not be alive, there was no convincing or compelling evidence that life would become different than it was. There was no intellectually rigorous, theologically unassailable, peer-reviewed path for my childhood communities to become places that welcomed me as an adult believer pursuing both queer joy and celibacy, but nonetheless I still (mostly) claim them, and they still (mostly) claim me. After years lived one foot in front of the other, one swallow of food after another, one defiant, fearful prayer at a time, one day I looked around and realized I’m really glad to be where I am. Harper came home six days after her disappearance, thinner and cold, but no worse for wear. She heard me calling and meowed back, and she spends most of her days happily napping on my bed while I read textbooks.

I won’t pretend I haven’t suffered or lost people I dearly loved along the way. The road is not always kind, but God met me in darkness and walked with me to light. He took my hand in Advent, and we dance now in Christmas.

For me, Advent is a time of memory. I remember where I have been. I remember my fury that the world is not as it should be, my despair knowing I am powerless to make it right, and my fear that God will not see and act. I look around at the world and allow myself to notice and grieve all that is not as it should be. I won’t produce my list here. We all have our own, and there’s no bad thing that’s too big or too small to count. We don’t have to contort ourselves to obscure reality. Sometimes things are terrible, and we can’t fix it, and God has not stepped in. Alongside these things, I remember that God has moved in my life and will again. My fury can only be a shadow of the heavenly one, but my helplessness does not reflect God’s power. God does intervene for His kids. We are God’s beloved.

And so, remembering that, I practice belief. God doesn’t ask me to gift wrap a shattered world and call it good, but God is making all things new. Mary said to the angel, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your word.” The angel’s message was frankly extremely weird and made very little sense. Mary trusts God anyway. During Advent, I want to be like Mary. I want to trust that God will lead me home if I follow. I long for the dreams of God and hope that the world will not remain as it is. I pray for God to turn toward me and move toward us. Ours is a God whose “mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.” He brings down the powerful and raises up the lowly. Because God is God and I am not, I can acknowledge how shattered and scary things feel. I don’t have to fix it all, but I can work with God to make it better.