Pride Month Series: A Love That Brings Life | By Lindsey Chou

This Pride Month, Interfaith Philadelphia staff and board members who identify as part of the LGBTQIA+ community are sharing their experiences at the intersections of faith and sexuality. This blog post is part of a series of stories that will be shared throughout the month of June.

Sexuality has always been inseparably part of my faith. Long before I was ready to understand why, I found the spirituality of queer Catholics to be one of the most deeply compelling examples of what it could mean to be Church. I was always awed by people — coworkers, teachers, friends, strangers — who were able to stand in the face of narratives and people that challenged their belonging and still say I have a right to be here. 

As a young woman, a progressive, a frequent doubter and questioner, and a Chinese person in my heavily white hometown, I spent years feeling both vaguely and acutely that I did not belong in church. I wanted to, desperately. I have wondered over the years if I simply slipped into religion because I yearned for a place to belong. This would have been narratively simpler. The much more complicated truth is that I believed there might be something to all the talk of a love that brings life. Most days, I still do.

I wasn’t consciously hiding my bisexuality through high school and college. Rather, I filed it away as something I would surely attend to down the road, then proceeded to fill my arms with so many other causes, identities, hobbies, hurts, and habits that I stayed conveniently preoccupied until years later.  For years, I dedicated all my energy to declaring my right to belong, at church and everywhere else. I kept waiting to feel like I had arrived at some final verdict, maybe even one that would render me so belonging I would not even have to deal with the one piece I left unspoken: I was queer, I had been for a long time, and I could not make this part of me smaller. In time, I became increasingly certain that I did not want to become smaller, that the highest call of what I believed to be holy was in fact, to be exactly as I was. 

The more I came to believe that the truth of my queerness was worth cherishing, the more clearly I saw how much it was hurting me to fight to convince others of the same. Relinquishing that effort has been freeing, but has not come without grief. I have left a string of ministry jobs in my wake, and I grieve the work I might have done had I felt safer. Sometimes I grieve the women I might have loved and the person I might have been had I believed earlier that I already deserved to belong. I grieve for my teenage self, who believed fervently that she had found a home she would never need to leave.

 I don’t attend Mass anymore but I do find myself telling coworkers the story of a saint whose faith carried her through grief and rejection, to her vocation. The Catholic Church will have always been my first spiritual home, the place where I encountered and found words for the sense of life that I learned to call God. This is how I came to believe that embracing my whole self is sacred. This is where I first met the God I always come back to, who I am convinced desires nothing less than all of who I am.

It has been a gift to know myself more, to allow myself to be known by my loved ones. It has allowed me to accept the community and belonging which have been offered to me and to have more peace around my choice to no longer work for belonging where it is not offered.

I came of age steeped in arguments against the validity of exactly this position. I heard dissenting Catholics cast as misguided, weak-willed, or disobedient to the truth of God’s creation. All I can say is that my own delight in my queerness has come to me in the same way as everything else I've ever called holy: quietly, then loudly, patiently but persistently, and leading always to greater life.

Lindsey Chou is the Communications & Program Associate for Interfaith Philadelphia. The views shared here belong solely to the author, and reflect one of many experiences which exist within diverse religious traditions.