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

imaginary place.”
    According to Denis Haack, Garden State is a movie about young adults asking the question: In the end, will anyone be there, truly there, for me? Is there anyplace I can call home? Haack writes, “As love blossoms between Large and Sam, they feel the stirring of hope. ‘Safe,’ Large tells her, ‘when I’m with you I feel safe—like I’m home.’” 5
    Toward the end of the film, the two sit together in the airport, minutes before Large’s flight back to California is scheduled to depart. “You’re not coming back, are you?” Sam asks, afraid it’s over. “This doesn’t happen often in your life, you know,” Sam says, meaning “this kind of love.” They had found it in each other. So why was he leaving? In the film’s final scenes, Large sits frozen on the airplane, waiting for the departure from the gate. Why? he wonders. Abandoning his seat, he rushes off the plane seconds before takeoff to find Sam crying and bewildered at his sudden reappearance. He couldn’t leave, he says. What could be more important than knowing and being with another human person through the good and the bad? “This is it,” Large says. “This is life. And I’m in love with you, Samantha. I think that’sthe the only thing I’ve ever really been sure of in my entire life.” “I know [it hurts],” Sam acknowledges. “But that is life. If nothing else, that’s life, you know? It’s real. Sometimes it hurts. But, yeah, it’s sorta all we have.” Love—two people desiring one another and being desired—is life, according to Garden State. Love is all we have.
    As Rowan Williams points out in his moving essay “The Body’s Grace,” the crucial question for the church to ponder in regard to its homosexual Christian members is: How can gay and lesbian believers come to know this kind of love, this awakening of joy and delight, which is the experience of mutual desire? Is there any legitimate way for homosexual Christians to fulfill their longing—a longing they share with virtually every other human person, both heterosexual and homosexual—the longing to be desired, to find themselves desirable, and to desire in return?
    For reasons I described in chapter 1, I do not think the option of same-sex, erotically expressive partnerships is open to the homosexual person who wants to remain faithful to the gospel. Which leaves the gay or lesbian Christian with few options, it seems.
    There is the possibility that a homosexual Christian—while remaining a homosexual—might choose to marry a person of the opposite sex. I have a friend who is gay, a Christian, and has been married for over three decades to a remarkable woman who knew from the beginning what she was getting into. My friend still experiences only same-sex attraction, but he has remained faithful to his wife. Somehow, they make their marriage work, despite not having sex. Such an arrangement is possible, and many gay and lesbian Christians have chosen this option.
    But for those who go this route, the experience of mutual desire is often frustrated in a way that it would not be for most heterosexual Christians who marry other heterosexuals. The homoerotic impulses of one or both partners complicate matters, and desire may turn cold. A pastor friend once told me about a homosexual man he knew who got married and who, on the first night of his honeymoon, sat in a chair in a hotel room while his new bride sobbed on the bed. The man’s desire for his bride’s body was not what he had hoped, and instead of delighting in her desirability, the bride grieved her husband’s sad realization.
    I recently talked with a friend, Lisa, who, when she became a Christian, opted out of her lesbian lifestyle. Shortly thereafter, she met a fellow Christian, Stephen, who had left a promiscuous gay lifestyle after converting to Christianity and had just been diagnosed with AIDS. She fell in love with him, and he proposed marriage to her. But her pastor refused to