Spiritual death, redemption and grace

September 22, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

Recently I’ve been to see Confessions of a Mormon Boy by Steven Fales. We’re trying to get a group together to go see it while it’s at the Elephant Lab Theatre in Hollywood (through September 30).

Mr. Fales’ true story is funny, sad, moving and in some ways overwhelming. It is fair to say that Fales is also a strong and capable actor, since in a solo performance he must keep his audience’s attention for 90 minutes. “Mormon Boy” never bores—or even slows down, for that matter. It will leave you laughing, gasping, crying, stunned.

Why the story is most compelling is that Fales was caught in the same web in which many other fundamentalists of other religious stripes have been caught. It might as easily be entitled “The Best Little Boy in the World.” It is a life that many of us might have lived, or actually lived.

But the darker side is what happens to Fales after he is expelled from his church, and his marriage crashes and burns. This too raises the usual existential questions for someone of faith who, discerning one’s sexuality, becomes unhinged from all the connections and supports of life-before-coming-out. “If anything and everything I do as a gay man is horrible and offensive to God, and I’m going to burn in hell for it anyway, then I might as well have the biggest fling I can.”

That absurdity has wrenched spirituality out of the hearts of so many LGBT people. Lives become pointless and aimless in an unchecked progression of promiscuity, alcohol and substance abuse, disease, cynicism and spiritual death. It might sound as if I am joining sides with Pat Robertson or James Dobson here, but the truth is, what causes the downward spiral for so many people is not being who they are: being lesbian or gay or whatever, it is society’s knee-jerk rejection, fear and phobia. Because of prejudice and bigotry, whole classes of people are thrust out, kept on society’s margins, until they find other ways to survive without respect or restraint.

I don’t believe, of course, that virtually any intimate sexual expression earns God’s wrath, just because of the gender of one’s partner, any more than I would say “anything goes” is just fine. It falls to each of us to work out our own ethics in regards to sexuality, so that our sexuality is integrated in our whole lives in healthy ways. Fales’ story can be described as a tale of “fall and redemption.” What makes it most compelling is that it is a true story, and his own redemption is not a dramatic device. He teaches us a lesson for life from his own life education.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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