Free Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality by Wesley Hill

acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm…is part of our inconsolable secret.
    C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”
    All the people I love, I trust, I want to be around, all of them answer, with varying volume, “yes” to the following basic question: “Will you be there for me?” I’ve come to believe it’s the question that houses all my other questions, fears, and longings.
    Jeremy Clive Huggins
     
    “All our lives we’re searching for someone who will take us seriously. That’s what it means to be human,” a friend of mine once mused. Whether heterosexual or homosexual, people are wired, it seems, to pursue relationships of love and commitment. Maybe it’s possible to be more specific: it seems that we long for the experience of mutual desire . We’re on a quest to find a relationship in which we can want someone wholeheartedly and be wanted with the same intensity, in which there is a contrapuntal enhancement of desire. For many people, entering into this kind of relationship means stepping into a new world of radiant wonder and breathtaking beauty. The tingly, life-changing sense that I am wanted! and I want another person in return! makes everything look fresh and bright.
    Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, expresses it this way: “To desire my joy is to desire the joy of the one I desire: my search for enjoyment through the…presence of another is a longing to be enjoyed…[Romantic] partners ‘admire’ in each other ‘the lineaments of gratified desire’. We are pleased because we are pleasing.” 1 Relationships of love show both partners that they are lovable.
    Music, poems, stories, and films say the same thing all the time. I remember sitting with a roommate in our apartment living room once, just after a girl he had been hoping to date turned him down. Her rejection had hit him pretty hard, and as he and I talked about it, he gestured toward his impressively large CD collection. “Just think—most of the songs on all these albums are either about wanting love, finding it, finding the end of loneliness, and it being the greatest thing in the world, or else they’re about losing love, love being unrequited, and it being the worst thing in the world.”
    In Wendell Berry’s novel Hannah Coulter , the title character describes how she first fell in love with Nathan, the man she eventually married. “To know you love somebody, and to feel his desire falling over you like a warm rain, touching you everywhere, is to have a kind of light,” she reminisces from the vantage point of her old age. 2 “The knowledge of his desire and of myself as desirable and of my desire would come over me” without warning, she said. 3
    Hannah reflects:
     
A woman doesn’t learn she is beautiful by looking in a mirror…She learns it so that she actually knows it from men. The way they look at her makes a sort of glimmer she walks in. That tells her. It changes the way she walks too…It had been a longish while since I had thought of being beautiful, but Nathan’s looks were reminding me that I was. 4
     
    Movies, too, express this deeply human longing for relationships of mutual desire. I still remember the first time I watched Zach Braff’s Garden State , a powerful film that probes the depths of the ache for genuine love. Andrew Largeman is a young actorliving in Hollywood making B-grade television shows. After his mother’s death, Andrew, or “Large,” returns home to New Jersey and meets Sam, a quirky, painfully blunt, astonishingly alive girl whom he gradually falls in love with. During the course of a long weekend, they share their secret fears and hungers with each other. “You know that point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore?” Large asks Sam as they take an evening swim together. “All of a sudden,…that idea of home is gone…Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people who miss the same