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I never had a chance to tell her or to see her reaction about bringing a gay guy back to God.  Before I tell you that story, let me tell you another.  

My spouse, John Robertson, and I are foster parents.  We are also United Church ministers. Years ago, in a discussion with two of our sons, one of them asked me, “Why do you keep talking about this church stuff? I’m not going to join the United Church.”

My answer was, and is, “I don’t care if you join the United Church, Baptist Church, Roman Catholic Church or no church. We talk about God and spirituality because I believe that a whole, healthy person has a relationship with the spiritual.  Something that gives us hope, gives us strength and connects us to a community and a world beyond ourselves.  What that is for you, may not be what it is for me.”

I say that to you, the reader, as well.  My experience is Christian – Roman Catholic and United. Your experience is uniquely yours and what you take from this article will depend on how you understand and live spirituality.

For me, spirituality is living in relationship with flow, the energy, the spirit of the universe.  It’s felt most profoundly in those moments that carry you into a space or time or feeling beyond the ordinary.  It’s knowing and feeling the connection with all living things, the past and the future and to know how wonderful and significant you are in that whole cosmos.  You are more than body and more than now.  You are connected to the whole and embraced by the whole and cared for by the whole.

Now back to Dale.  It was a Sunday morning and I was home alone in our townhouse.  It was around 1972 and I was about 24.  I had gone through behaviour modification and had been declared cured – I was no longer gay, I was straight.  

For a second time, gay fantasies had begun and I had scheduled another round of treatments. I was reading an article about DIGNITY, the Roman Catholic group for gays and lesbians.  Dale Evans was the only interesting thing I could find on TV.  She was singing but when she finished she talked to the evangelical host of the show and how she had once felt abandoned by God.  When she met Roy and started back to church, she realized God hadn’t abandoned her, she had abandoned God.

Those words, the article and my own internal struggle brought tears to my eyes.  I had believed God hated me because I was gay.  I realized that day it wasn’t true.  God created me and I was gay. God loved me and I had run away to become what I was not – straight.  I pictured myself turning to my wife and saying, “Not tonight, dear.  I haven’t had my shock treatment.” What does that say about her? About me? About God? 

I determined that day to do whatever I could for other GLBT folk not to go through the pain I had.

Paul’s letter to the Romans, Chapter 9 states “[verse 25] As indeed [it] says in Hosea [Chapter 1 verse 10], ?‘Those who were not my people I will call “my people”, and her who was not beloved I will call “beloved”. ’ ?‘[Verse 26] And in the very place where it was said to them, “You are not my people”, ? there they shall be called children of the living God.’ [NRSV]

It’s true.  It happened for me.  In 1984, the national United Church gathered in Morden.  One of the topics was whether or not, gays and lesbians could be full members of the church.  Ten years later, in Morden, the Conference of Manitoba and Northwestern Ontario, commissioned me as a diaconal minister – the first openly self-declared gay diaconal minister in the national church history.

God is always with us. Are you connected to God, however you understand that word?