Yes

I used to live a life of great sin. In my early adulthood, I didn’t practice my faith. The Lord allowed me to wander, lost in the darkness. I studied Zen Buddhism, from which a Christian can glean the practice on non-attachment to things of this world, disinterested love, and vigilance of the mind and passions… Such can be what God permits, to draw something good out of a state where He is nonetheless absent. But that was just for beginners. I also delved deeply into the realm of the New Age that feeds the mind so many of those dark things. Tarot cards, crystals assigned powers, gurus, healers, mediums, qi gong, yoga, Kundalini chanting – all were my territory. And, when I was 18, I came out as a homosexual. No doubt the playing in all these pagan mysteries had paved the road and opened the gate to living in full sin; but so had my mother’s years of the same before, during, and well after my conception and birth. Ancestral sin is a real thing; we all inherit from our parents and antecedents, given life through them. (I love my mother greatly, we talk all the time. I don’t blame her – only pray for the healing of all our family.).

With enthusiastic abandon i gave myself over fully to homosexual “life” and cultivated a complete identity and lifestyle to legitimize it. The goal was to be a subversive, creative, and vivacious intellectual-spiritualist – to convince myself and everyone else that I was this thing, to be seen as that and see this perception reflected in their eyes and to reflect their reflection back in mine. Wit, art, studies (critical theory is popular), tastes (in pop entertainment, culture), politics (especially progressivism and gender theory), spirituality (ancient but progressive, iconoclastic, possessing and giving power, getting one spiritually high) beauty and image – all this was institutionalized and codified and worshipped and good. Being this, doing this, you were accepted into the flock of “intelligent gay people.” They were masses who wanted to be either what they thought the others were or that against which they believed they were being judged – sheep with a shepherd they couldn’t see, playing a flute they couldn’t hear, leading them into danger – all for a desire they mutually had and which none could ever really understand or explain or justify, no matter what emotional and psychological rigors they put themselves through or social and cultural constructs they built up to bulwark their tenuous houses – this desire fed to them unconsciously at formative points by the same flute-player, because lies are the way to draw sentient beings and children of men with God’s inheritance – who naturally and rightly seek ultimate pleasure (which is truth and beauty and endless survival) – into destruction. The Good Shepherd they had either rejected in ignorance or willfulness – or had never known… It makes me sad. I pray…

I got sick. In 2006, after 8 years of reckless wrecking, i was diagnosed HIV-positive. Leaving the clinic on the train that afternoon, everything in my field of vision went black. My life as I had known it, as I heard a deep interior voice say, was over… and a new one was beginning. Over the years that followed, I became ambiguous about the identity I had worked so hard to believe in. I started to take a hard, naked look at my shivering soul in the night, barely lit by a candle flame at that point, and ask what I was. I took the leap and admitted to myself that I did not know my life or my sexuality, but only that it had been abused. I looked at myself straight-on with cold, flat light. And in the bathroom one evening, I allowed myself to listen to the truth- like a child ignored and now acknowledged – I doubted that I cared about being homosexual. But honesty is hated. I began to hear another voice telling me not to lose “faith” (interesting sophistry), to keep my head in the game (a truer word choice than I knew). Emotional security is invested in identity, so I listened – for years. Back and forth I struggled between shedding it all and re-committing, doubling down, renewing the oath. Dating supported this; few things in our narcissistic culture (that enshrines romance and sexual activity without love) support your identity as bonding with others who confirm your false identity through being desired.

It was in the midst of this struggle that my re-conversion began. Instinctively, I was seeking the power of God and the light of Christ to lift me out of darkness. And it was the Blessed Mother who led me back to Him. One day, at my mother’s house all those years ago, I picked up a book on the Third Secret of Fatima; it put the holy fear of God in me, as well as a suddenly ignited and overwhelming burning love for Our Mother that spread throughout my soul. Although I wasn’t practicing my Catholic faith actively, I had never sworn it off or left the Church, so it was not difficult for me to begin seeking out Catholic teachings to replace the New Age ones in my always voracious hunger for truth in the written form. Mariology, lives of the Saints, Catholic doctrine and dogma – I couldn’t get enough. The first Sunday of Advent of 2011, I took myself to Mass with the intention of it being the beginning of a new regular attendance, which it has been. And begin praying the Rosary in earnest, my devotion to it growing only exponentially over the years. But it was this new path that allowed one of the greatest miracles in my life to happen.

• [ ] A voice inside me for years had been encouraging me to keep my head in the game. At one point, the game shifted. While previously I had always attracted other men who were vain, dishonest, psychologically and materially unstable, unreliable, narcissistic, generally arrested in development, and mentally and emotionally abusive, I began to attract those who were kind, caring, gainfully employed, and “spiritual” (although in the popular empty, atheistic or pagan senses). And I could not have cared less. I was totally left cold – completely uninterested. I desired less and less to be with them sexually as well. If I tried to engage in sexual fantasies about other men, I became at first dispassionate, and then eventually utterly repulsed. I wanted nothing more than to run far away from what was increasingly a blackness framed, a shadow puppet play in my mind’s eye, lurid firelight flickering behind a flat simulacrum of normal human existence, which showed itself to be actually a toxic mockery the longer I watched. Gaining full clarity on what I was coming to understand was prevented by a veil of cognitive dissonance that I was keeping in place. I needed to rip that veil down. But I was afraid. All of this falsehood was the foundation of “he” whom I thought I was. What would I be if I ripped it down? Well, God sent me the drive. Courage, thy name is woman.
• I met a young woman in the graduate program I was in at the time. We had become friends, but, the more I got to know her (and she, me) the more I came to care about her. It felt like she understood me, and we enjoyed being together. I started having feelings for her that I’d never had for anyone in my life before, and they felt so good. I cared for her in a way I hadn’t cared for anyone, and It felt so special and right.
• [ ] That’s when I identified what was happening to me. I faced what I was feeling. I said to myself, “WOW: THIS is what I’m supposed to be feeling! THIS is what other guys are talking about! THIS is RIGHT!” And I knew with perfect clarity that it was. This was Truth. I faced that this is what God had created me – and all of us – to be, and I chose – finally – to be it. I said, “That’s that. My old life is over. It’s done. I choose this.” No sooner had I claimed it than I felt the weight of the world fall from my shoulders, and I felt so free… Things didn’t work out between that beautiful young woman and me, but God used her to deliver the key to unlock the lock on the demonic chains on my soul. I had reclaimed my soul and my faith.
• [ ]
  • [ ] And I am convinced that the entire reason that God made it so easy for me, reached into my heart to change me, sent me His Spirit to lead me, gave me the faith to follow, sent me a messenger to take me the rest of the way, is because I first took that leap of faith that Advent and said, “Yes,” to His invitation to return. His Voice has been calling me all along, but I resisted out of pride, out of fear. A lost sheep, I’d gotten myself far from safety in a thicket of thorns, and I didn’t know how to get back. But He called… He called… ceaselessly He called for me, searching me out, the one who had gone astray – such love, faithful and persistent – for me. He had a pattern put me to live in apartments very close to churches, inviting me to go; He put holy books in front of me, asking me to read. Because I wanted the sureness of His Love and the brightness of His Light, I gave in and said, “Yes,” that Advent. And then, out of love, He changed my heart for me, brought me all the way back. All I had to do was gulp and face the shadows and lies and face the unknown and take that leap of faith – throwing myself with full commitment into space… and say, “Yes. Lord, yes. This is Truth. I love You. I want to be back in You. Catch me…” He did.

Wanting to love Christ is the most central and sustaining part of my life. My love for and devotion to the Catholic faith and the one true Church is like that of a Crusading knight for the Holy Land or soldier for his country. I am dispassionately intolerant of the madness and lies to which the current age has sold itself and in which it has built houses for the insane and the Godless and the critically emotionally damaged – and intolerant with pain in my heart to the rancorous backlash, the screams of bitter resentment and Hellish indignation, and vicious attacks from those clinging to cognitive dissonance against accepting the painful reality of what they are choosing – lies that are destroying humanity and civilization. It isn’t true that homosexual attraction (to say nothing of the ill and these days endless spectrum of sexual and gender disorientation) is “what you are.” That is a lie from Hell. There is confusion, there is mental instability, the is Godlessness – but what you are is a child of God who has gotten lost and tangled in wires and briars. Pride and fear of being cut keep you there; humility of what you may not yet understand and willingness to be free will allow you to be. I must live the Truth – the truth about Jesus’ saving power, of the Blessed Mother’s supreme role in our salvation, and of the Father Almighty’s immense love and omnipotence, on which we are to be utterly dependent. Witnessing may be one of the reason He’s kept me alive. But more importantly, He wants me to pray for them – and one day minister to them on the battlefield, casualties of the Devil’s open fire.