A Bigger World Yet: Faith, Brotherhood, & Same-Sex Needs

A BIGGER WORLD YET

Faith, Brotherhood, & Same-Sex Needs

by Tim Timmerman

Published 2012 at Smashwords

by Bird Dog Press

800 E Franklin ST


Newberg, OR 97132

A Bigger World Yet: Faith, Brotherhood, & Same-Sex Needs

Tim Timmerman

Smashwords Edition Copyright 2012, Tim Timmerman, all rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission from the author.

Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION(registered trademark). Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 Biblica. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

The NIV and New International Version trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica. Use of either trademark requires the permission of Biblica.

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ISBN 978-1-452-46222-6

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: Hope and a Dilemma Indeed

Chapter Two: They Go to Your Church and a Hierarchy of Sin

Chapter Three: The Fruit Of Our Fears and Neglect

Chapter Four: Christians Limp and Forgiving Your Nazi

Chapter Five: A Five-Year-Old in a Thirty-Year-Old Body

Chapter Six: Beloved Friend

Chapter Seven: Sex and Blood

Chapter Eight: Jesus With Skin On

Chapter Nine: The Gift of Being Needy

Acknowledgements

Notes

Introduction

Now mind you, I have been looking. I have been waiting for some time to find this paperback on the sociology, spiritual, self-help, devotional, inspirational or autobiographical sections of the bookstores I frequent but it was to no avail. I haven’t found it. I had to write the book I needed to read. Here is a story, here is a voice that is rarely-if ever-heard in churches that I guarantee you have not seen on a television show, cable, movie, or found in any sort of publication of popular culture, unless unfortunately as a figure of ridicule.

To be honest, there is a part of me that had absolutely no desire to write this book. And so, here I am, an artist and teacher, a man comfortable spending hours assembling pieces of broken things or taking brush to paper, instead pounding on laptop keys watching little black letters appear, push each other around, and move across the screen. I’m very familiar with facilitating men in and out of the shadowy depths of their hearts and pasts on experiential men’s weekends or teaching students how to create an effective composition in paint or clay. But now I am letting my thumbs pound out spaces between words and letting my left pinky type out every single a. I am more comfortable dialoguing with my voice or visually, but here I will spell things out with letters and story. There is very little paint or allegory to hide behind with these typed words. This is a bit terrifying, since my objective is to be an open book to you about this journey. In part, I want to be honest because I’m tired of all the hiding I see, all the words not said, all the struggles of the men within the streets of our cities and within the doors of our churches that go untold, and hidden for years out of fear, and pride. There is a bigger world yet that I believe many don’t even think does, much less could, exist.

This book is not a I Was Sick and Now I’m Better book. This is not a, I Was Gay, Now I’m Straight, Ten Steps to Healing book. This is not a Let Me Tell You How You’re Wrong book. This is an account of what it is to be a man. This is a tale of a spiritual journey, a messy love affair. This is a story of bleeding and breaking, and of finding bandages in the most unusual of places and communities. This is a story with tear-soaked pages, so thoroughly wet that the letters blur and become difficult to read in the mess of it all. This is a story of lying prostrate on the floor in ashes and of God’s face and revelation. This is the story of dreams and long walks and arguments, and times of praise in the desert and in fields of grasses. This is the story of years of absence and the satiating power of finding a hand to hold. This is the story I know so far: in the silence, in the wailing, in the howls of pain, in the begging, in the laughing, in the hopes met that have left me speechless, in feeling the Spirit move though my body like electricity, in the amazing honor of walking with others as they wrestle through their hell to find their way out. This is a chronicle and accounting of men.

The story I write is not my own. It is a collection of sorts, a written assemblage of writings, pictures, wisdom, and people I have collected on the way that have given me air to breathe and hope. Even my own story I have come to terms with is not mine to hold onto. It belongs to the loving God who continues to save me. Within these pages, there are also images, writers, lines of a lecture or song, all that have given strength to my bones and wisdom to my heart in the driest of times. Then there are the teachers who I want to tell you about. These are the meek and broken who are willing to admit that they are helpless without a God of love who pursues them like a father in search of his lost child. I have found myself walking with a handful of communities that are willing to strip away all pretenses and stand naked with one other in the truth of the reality we are living: the beautiful, the ugly, and the shame. For over twelve years I have walked with these men and they have walked with me. I want to introduce you to them and give you a glimpse into the wisdom of their lives. I have laughed, cried, embraced, vented my anger at, and committed my life to this family. We are so versed in one another’s lives that we pat each other’s demons and angels on the head when we enter the door. With fear and trembling, we have risked being seen and risked letting one another be Jesus within our most vulnerable of places. We have risked being Christians, not the phony excuse with a mask and pretense of sinless austerity, but the followers of Jesus who are down in the mud and dirt of life, loving others and learning to love themselves in the humbling mess of it all. And yes, some of the names have been changed to protect these people who I hold dear.

These pages are for those looking for hope’s whisper. This is for those who want to see what God is doing in the lives of others and want to enter in. This is for ones who want to be more like the Savior in these days when life seems like such a beautiful and broken place all at the same time. This is one man’s story of faith, brotherhood, and friendship.

***

Chapter One: Hope and a Dilemma Indeed

Who knows the joys of friendship?


The trust, the security, and mutual tenderness,


The double joys where each is glad for both?


Friendship, our only wealth, our last retreat and strength,


Secure against ill fortune and the world.

Nicholas Rowe

Hope comes in many forms and seems to work on its own time schedule. For me, a chunk of it would land like a meteor in the Squaw Peak Preserve in Phoenix, Arizona, on a late summer night around the year 2000.

On these back mountains of Squaw Peak about three years prior, I had a conversation with a friend who was like a brother to me that would split my life open as if with a hatchet. Atop a crest overlooking the north side of the city, we sat next to a lone Palo Verde tree amid some creosote and bur-sage bushes, and the dearest friend in my life would begin putting an end to a brotherhood that I had believed would last a lifetime. A brotherhood that literally had saved my life and that I had staked my life upon. When the conversation was over, we walked back down the trail along the craggy edge of the mountain with an uncomfortable silence. At the time all I could think of was how the stones down below would feel if I jumped and threw my body upon them.

Now it was years later. I had thrown myself not onto the stones but onto a wise therapist, the lives of those around me, and a secular men’s weekend that scared me to death, but in my heart I believed that mountaintop still needed redeeming. I had to claim it back. I would often gaze at it as I tramped along with the quails and rattlesnakes in the back bowl area of the preserve and gaze up at the lone Palo Verde tree on the top of that northern crest with a pang in my heart. It seemed haunted. So, after his baby was asleep and in the good care of his wife, I asked my buddy Scott to go for a walk with me late on a hot summer evening in North Phoenix.

Every man in his life needs a Scott. He is a rare gem with a heart as big as Christmas and a stalwart identity as a man. A six-foot construction worker who is the first to defend the helpless and be the heart of Jesus, he is definitely someone you want on your team. Scott also is a testimony of evil that has been used for good. His background is harrowing and heartbreaking and because of it, he now lives his life with the charismatic willingness to risk loving others. He knows how dark darkness really is and because of it, he is willing to be light to any degree to those he calls friends. I wish the world were full of more men like him because they are the kind of men that, in a very practical sense, would change it.

Scott knew something was up as we traipsed up the Palo Verde-topped back mountain that late evening. I was glum and tired and in a funk. There are times in my life that I feel like it is all so much work, all the sorting and working through all the emotional history and garbage. Life can often appear to be one exhausting, gut-wrenching exercise after another. On top of that, I despise feeling needy, especially needy in regards to men, and that night I was very much in that state. With my water bottle swinging at my side, we talked about work and friends, climbing through the 100 degree heat that still radiated from the stones and dirt below us.

At the top of the mountain overlooking the valley of the sun, glowing in its urban-sprawl evening glory, I began to cry. I shared with Scott all the brokenness rattling inside me, including the painful memory of what had occurred years before at that very spot. Now Scott was among a troop of men and women who, by then, knew everything about me. When falling apart with the members of my community, I was often struck at their nonplussed lack of surprise at my tears, fears, and needs. Scott was notorious for it. With him, I would begin talking about some dilemma and not stop, to which Scott became adept at breaking down my hedging and verbal defense mechanisms by simply saying, Shut up, Tim. Come here and let me hold you. Falling into him, I would simply break down. Tonight would be no different.

Getting down to brass tacks, Scott finally asked, Tim, what do you need? Fearfully and in all my neediness, I said, Would you hug me and sing to me, Scott? To form, he readily obliged. We stood up and Scott hugged me like only he could. It was with no fear that Scott would hold or hug me. He always seemed to want to be sure that all of me connected to all of him. With one of his big, calloused hands, he held my head against his, and tilting his mouth to my ear, he sang. Now Scott’s voice is not one that will ever be heard in a concert hall, but it can settle in and ease the broken heart of a friend on top of a desert mountain. Encircled within Scott’s arms and with the notes of all the praise songs he could muster streaming out into the night sky, I gazed over the western part of the preserve and the lights of the valley, and, through the tears, felt that maybe life can be okay. Maybe I wasn’t crazy. Maybe life could be this good. Maybe I could find healing from all the years of not having a loving father in my life or not feeling like I ever was wanted. Maybe I would find brothers who would not only walk with me, but stay for the course of my journey. Maybe this world could be that big, and it was okay for me to just be me. Maybe there was a chance that God loved me that much.

Hope settled in like water in a parched land that evening, watering the driest parts of me, and I think maybe that the lone Palo Verde tree and those creosote bushes sensed it too. Maybe the picate beetles and horned lizards noticed something shifting in the dry air and did a little dance for only God to see. Could be. All I know is a chunk of hope was laid within my foundation that evening which had not been there before, and it has been there ever since.

Ben was my roommate during my junior year at the Christian university I attended in southern California. He was a math major who would cry himself to sleep if his girlfriend didn’t kiss him goodnight. About once a month, he’d strut around our dorm without a stitch of clothing and announce with his hands on his hips, I am naked man! to all of the residents. It was the late eighties, and although he was quirky to say the least, I admired Ben for his humor and lack of bodily shame. Across from us resided the halls Resident Advisor Mike, and his roommate, Jesse. Mike was a prematurely balding Bible major with glasses and Jesse was a quiet strawberry-blonde guy who had the absolutely the largest stuffed animal collection of any college student I knew. I remember soon after settling in that fall, Jesse got a job at Knott’s Berry Farm, which wasn’t far from school. Shortly after taking his new job, he would often talk to me about this great new friend he made at work, and yet he never brought this friend around to school. His friend did come by once, and it was then I had a hunch as to what was happening. Soon enough, Jesse often was gone on the weekends and at the end of that fall semester, he dropped out of school. Mike said he had decided to quit school and work full-time and that he moved in with his new buddy. Later in the spring semester, I had a conversation with Mike, where I said, Jesse went into the gay lifestyle, didn’t he? Mike, quite broken up, told me the sad tale. He was conflicted about how to help Jesse, and he had no idea what to do. He felt like he had lost his friend.

At that time, Henry was a fellow graphic design major at the university. He had a good heart, and was quick witted. With his dirty blonde hair and Izod shirts, I remember him fondly cutting up with some of the more feisty residents of our class. At one point, Henry was engaged to a girl he had known for a month. It seemed a bit sudden to me, but they broke up as quickly as they had become engaged about a month later. At one point, Henry got really sick and had to take a leave of absence from school in order to recover. He would never come back to join us again in our typography or illustration classes. I talked with some of the girls in the department he knew well as to how he was doing at one point, and I remember they were creatively ambiguous; apparently, more was going on in his life than medical issues. My senior year of school, I ran into Henry near one of the dorms, as he was at school visiting some friends. I asked him how life was, how he was feeling, and what he was up to. He informed me he was feeling much better. When I probed a little deeper, he told me that he had also fallen in love and had finally found the acceptance he was always longing for. He said he was finally being true to himself. I knew what he was really saying under his words, but, didn’t know how to respond, so I said something like, Well, …that’s great, and wished him the best, and went on my way. Henry, too, had decided to go into the gay lifestyle. Later, I pondered if the quick engagement to the woman several years prior was an attempt to fix himself or to see if a woman was what he wanted. I have never known.

My sophomore year at school, I met Sam. He was an awesome guy, an elementary education major who was kind and caring and as Eli a friend of mine put it, You couldn’t find a better friend than Sam. He was someone who would go out of his way to help those he cared about. That year, we became fast friends, but as time went on, I realized I was having a hard time getting to know who Sam really was. I remember I would poke him in the chest and ask him, What’s in there? and, looking a bit lost and forlorn, he would simply reply, Nothing. I always felt there was something else going on, as if there was one story of the surface he was presenting, but there was a whole different narrative operating below ground. One night, I found myself in a very awkward situation with Sam. He crossed a physical boundary with me, and I simply said, What the heck is going on? Cornered, Sam admitted, Look, I love my girlfriend, but I really have a crush on you. I wasn’t sure what to do, and soon after, our friendship ended. I told him I cared for him, but couldn’t see how the friendship could proceed without being terribly awkward. At the end of his senior year, Sam was engaged to his girlfriend. I never heard of him again, and to be honest of the three individuals, I think I’ve worried about Sam most.

And then there was me. In college, I was simply terrified of what I knew I was capable of doing. I had struggled since age eleven with finding myself sexually attracted to men, but I couldn’t fathom how on earth I would share my struggle with anyone at the Christian university I was attending, or anywhere for that matter. I recall that once Andy Comiskey, the head of Desert Stream Ministries, a para-church organization in Los Angeles that worked with homosexuals, spoke in one of our chapels. Andy was once in the gay lifestyle, had left it, and was now married with children. He spoke of the freedom he found in Christ from his homosexual attractions. After the chapel had ended, I heard a group of guys talking as we piled out of the gym. You know I bet he’s still gay. Yea, I think he is. I was about as safe in my nice Christian university as a cat in a pack of hungry dogs. I was petrified that if anyone really knew what I struggled with, they wouldn’t love me or want to be anywhere near me. God and I would simply work this out alone. Years later I remember sharing with Wendy, a dear friend from school, that I felt like I lied all through college because I wanted others so desperately to love me that there was no way I would let others see the real me. Her response was, We all lied Tim. We all lied.

At a meeting in September of 2007 bishops in the Episcopal Church and the top representatives of the worldwide Anglican Church saw a fault in their community of faith that they feared would, in all likelihood, manifest itself in a split. The dilemma: the 2003 confirmation of an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire. Worldwide 77 million conservatives in the Episcopal Church said that the Episcopal Church in America’s stance violated Biblical teaching and asked the church to repent. The diocese of Pittsburg voted in November 2008 that they no longer want to be part of the Episcopal Church if it endorses homosexual behavior, and what was the Episcopal diocese in Pittsburg is now Anglican, and is under a different Bishop, in Africa – not America.

I’m wondering when such things have happened before. When has there been a time in which Christians have argued so vehemently over what is the more Christ-like behavior? I’m sure theologians could give a laundry list, but obviously a current hot topic is homosexuality. One side argues from a place of acceptance in the name of God’s love and the other looks at scripture and can’t see how one can ignore what seems like a clear line laid down by Paul in the New Testament. Homosexuality has become a lightning-rod subject for our culture in the beginning of the 21st century, and churches have tended to subscribe to one side or the other. Over the years, I have found myself in the middle of that conundrum.

In the course of my journey with my sexuality, I have been open to God and whatever direction He may call me. I have done my best to seek His voice as to where I should put my foot next. What I share with you is the road He has walked with me, and the community to which He has brought me. I have been blatantly clear with God that if I am to embrace some version of a gay lifestyle, He would open those doors. He never has. I believe there are some out there who would say God has opened those doors for them, and, in response, I can reply that that has not been the case for me. I have also observed that the men I know who have embraced the gay life or came out of it, found it wrought full of exhilarating crushes, pain, and loneliness. I’m fairly certain I would not be better off if I would have embraced it as my own. All I can share with you here is my life, assessments and perceptions of what I have been shown to be true. It is my story of having deep needs for men and working to get those needs met.

Now you will not hear me saying the journey of a man who has deep needs for men and chooses not to embrace those desires as sexual is easy or not full of pitfalls and detours. Many a man has chosen not to go down this road, and I believe it is not my role to fault, blame, or judge them. What options do they have? The world offers no hope, and what alternatives have the Church, the body of Christ, offered them? Homosexuality is an abomination! Can you blame them for turning and running? Sin seems to beget sin here. From my experience, I can tell you that choosing to not embrace your same-sex desires as sexual makes you a target on both sides, and it often feels profoundly lonely. The world says, Well, you’re an idiot, and the Church says, Yuck, we have no idea what to do with you. Go away and come back when you’re better. At least going into the gay lifestyle, I think some men feel someone is accepting them. They have hopes of no longer being alone, and if these men came from a community of faith, they perhaps hope to be free of the shame and guilt that has marked their life. Some even say they feel free. But what is the cost involved here, and are they sincerely free?

Over the past twelve years, I have been involved in what I will call in general terms men’s work. This type of group therapy and emotional work largely came out of the men’s movement in the eighties and early nineties when writers like Robert Bly, Michael Meade, James Hillman, Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette landed on the public scene. These packs and communities of men that I have been running with tend to have a foundation in ancient myths, Jungian thought, and Gestalt therapy. I have found elements of this work to be very helpful as I have been growing up to be the man God has called me to be. Initially, I was dumbfounded a bit that God would use secular sources and people to reveal His truth, but I was confronted with the fact that if God can use a donkey to speak to Balaam in the Old Testament, He can speak and work through whomever and whatever He chooses.

The past eight years or so have brought me to work with one specific community of men that works nationally and internationally with men who choose not to embrace a homosexual lifestyle. Over the years, I have been honored to call this community of men home and have learned much from the lives of my brothers.

Perhaps your radar went up when I used the phrase men who choose not to embrace a homosexual lifestyle. You may believe that homosexuality is not a choice; it is something that one is born with and I’ve already stepped on your sandaled toes with the heel of a hard shoe, but I ask you stay with me. I believe that no one has a choice as to whether they are going to have stronger desires to connect on an intimate level (and I’m not talking sexual) with a man or a woman, but I do believe that it is a choice whether one chooses to try to fulfill that need in a sexual manner. I’ll unpack this further over these pages.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, perhaps I have challenged your sensibilities around men connecting with other men in intimate ways. With the story from Squaw Peak at the beginning of this chapter, I may have confronted your notions of what you feel is appropriate touch between two adult men. In speaking of men having deep intimate needs for each other, I realize I may be coming up against some of your concepts of what it is to be a man. I, too, was challenged greatly over what I was taught that masculinity looked like and what was appropriate behavior between men by our culture. God brought some wonderful mentors in this realm to me. And although a bit frightening at times, I found how deeply God wanted to meet me in the eyes and bodies of my fellow travelers on this planet. My prayer is that you will be open to the concept that perhaps healing can happen in methods that may work outside of familiar cultural norms and behavior. Specifically, the cultural norms in the 21st century, which as I will speak of, are very different than the norms that I’m defending that Christian men lived by in the 13th, 15th, and 19th centuries.

Also, you may notice I’m not using the term homosexual in these pages except when referring specifically to same-gender sexual impulses or desires. I have my reasons. One is that I work to avoid letting my identity be wrapped up in my sexuality. My sexual desires don’t define me. They also change, and those impulses are not somehow the central axis from which all my actions stem. Can you imagine if we identified and termed everyone by his or her sexual desires and cravings? I laugh and cringe at all the phrases we could refer to one another by, none of which I will dare to list here.

There are also other things about me beyond my sexual desires that are a part of who I am, like I am selfish or I like Indian food. I don’t define or name myself based on those things either. If you want, you are welcome to call me Selfishindianfoodlover, but, there likely is a veritable laundry list of descriptors that could be used also including but not limited to Drawingdisdainerofe-mail, and Pridefulpeoplepleaser. I am defined by many things that go far beyond the limitations of what my groin may be inclined to do.

As I grow up, I’m slowly coming to terms that Christ’s love for me is what I am defined by, period. I love