Paul Leroux turns to spirituality to reconcile his sexuality.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth …

—Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”

I can pinpoint precisely “where it bent in the undergrowth,” and I stood at a crossroads, faced with a life-altering choice “that has made all the difference.” It was 1970, when I turned 14. Two key events occurred that fateful year.

One Sunday, after Mass, I browsed through a bookrack at the back of my parish church. There, I discovered the writings of two 16th-century Spanish mystics, Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, both of the Discalced Carmelite order. I read them in the classic English translation by Edgar Allison Peers. (My major in Spanish still lay ahead of me in the not too distant future.)

“The Way of Perfection”, “The Interior Castle”, “The Ascent of Mount Carmel”, “The Living Flame of Love” … They appealed to my youthful idealism and inspired me to the loftiest vision of service to God. I saw myself one day becoming a cloistered, contemplative monk.

In a way, this is not surprising. I have always been an all-or-nothing, either-or type of person. I have always given myself totally to every endeavor, every area of my life—my pursuit of academic excellence, my work as a translator, my involvement in the community, my efforts as a creative writer.

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But, in late summer of that year, I had sex for the first time with an older man. From that moment onward, my sexuality and spirituality never ceased to clash and collide. That bitter struggle has now spanned four decades, my entire adult life.

I fought a seesaw battle for the next four years. Increasingly, I was mesmerized by the siren song of male physical beauty all around me. More and more, I felt my soul slipping inexorably away from my possession.

Needless to say, I was wracked by guilt, not only for committing what my church regarded as a mortal sin, but for falling so far short of my high-minded, heavenly ideals. Frequent recourse to the confessional did little to ease my conscience, since I yielded almost immediately thereafter to my more earthly, carnal urges.

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Truth to be told, my spirituality always had a strongly sensual component. I breathed deeply the heavy, sweet fragrance of incense permeating a church. I listened avidly to the sonorous and majestic phraseology of the Mass, said in Latin until 1965.

Religious art appealed to my nascent aesthetic sense, especially the medieval and Renaissance paintings that illustrated our family bible, and an illuminated manuscript of Paul’s teachings on love in Corinthians 13. I also never wearied of the stirring strains of Handel’s “Messiah” or Bach’s uplifting “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desire”.

But these were permissible pleasures, time-honored, officially approved ways to draw closer to God. My longing for another man was of an entirely different kind. I knew instinctively that my gay sexuality was “wrong” in the eyes of the church.

Ironically, even my beloved John of the Cross, a saint and a Doctor of the Church, used homoerotic images in his religious poetry. Teresa of Ávila’s piercing by a fiery arrow, symbolic of her mystic marriage with Christ, also strangely resembled an act of sexual penetration.

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By 1974, I had sadly renounced my dreams of entering a monastery. I came out of the closet and left the church altogether. For 25 years, I went about my life as though I did not believe in God. I embraced my newfound identity as a gay man, and reveled in my sexuality with wild abandon.

But it was never enough. Not the countless, quick, anonymous encounters. Not even the two cases where I related to a man on a deeper, more emotionally intimate level. Saint Augustine spoke truth when he wrote, “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”

I will admit that my experience of a grand, sweeping passion rekindled my wish for a greater, higher love. Indeed, during that period, I wrote dozens of sonnets that were often couched in religious imagery. It was the only way I knew how to express the intensity of my feelings, which culminated in what I could only call a “burning bush” experience.

It was, of course, out of the question for me to revive my boyhood dream of a vow of celibacy. But I did feel the need to reconnect with the faith community I had left behind and, if possible, to reconcile my sexuality and spirituality.

Alas, it was not meant to be. I spent four years closely involved in various forms of ministry at my archdiocesan cathedral. Devoutly, I attended Sunday services, received the sacraments, administered communion, sponsored several catechumens (candidates for baptism), and read from the Bible at Mass.

A heated public debate then arose about same-sex marriage in Canada, and the church and the gay community became polarized over this issue. Caught in the crossfire between the two, I had to choose. In 2004, I left the church again. A year later, I legally married the man who had shared my life for a quarter of a century.

There was no way, it seemed, that I could keep one foot in both the church and the gay community at the same time. If I kept my sexuality in abeyance, I could continue to be a practicing Catholic. If I sought to discuss matters of faith and spirituality, I was “persona non grata” among gay men.

As a result, I have found myself a virtual pariah, shunned and outcast on all sides. I had made, first my sexuality, then my spirituality, the sole focus of my life. In both instances, my identity foundered, like the house built on sand in the gospels.

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Yet both aspects of my nature are vital and essential to my sense of self. I cannot truly be whole and complete unless I can somehow weld them into an integrated personality. Without one or the other, a part of me will forever remain hollow and empty, bleak and cold.

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I share in the heartrending cry of Heathcliff, in the 1939 film Wuthering Heights:

Take any form, drive me mad, only do not leave me in this dark alone where I cannot find you. I cannot live without my life, I cannot die without my soul.

Yet to this day, as I pen these words, I still find myself, body and soul cruelly sundered apart, wandering the desolate moor of my fractured life.

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When I was a young boy, before the Second Vatican Council allowed the use of the vernacular—the language of each diocese—the Mass always began with the Latin version of Psalm 43.

In later life, as a gay man struggling to integrate my sexuality and spirituality, I could identify with verses 2 and 5: “Why dost thou cast me off? Why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy? … Why art thou cast down, O my soul? And why art thou disquieted within me?”

It is my enduring hope that, someday, for me and others like me, verse 4 will come to pass: “Then I will go unto the altar of God, unto God my exceeding joy.”

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—Photo eisenbahner/Flickr