Robert Goss: Robert Goss, former Jesuit, teaches at Webster College, St Louis. This review was originally published in White Crane Journal (#41). It is reprinted with permission from www.whitecranejournal.com online.
In the Introduction, James Empereur offers to move gay/lesbian studies into the field of spirituality and spiritual direction. He claims that his primary audience is gay/lesbian spiritual directees and their directors. The introduction promised much, and I anticipated a long awaited manual for assisting and instructing future queer mentors assisting translesbigay Christians in spiritual growth.
Chapter 1 discusses the gift of gay spirituality in spiritual direction. In this chapter, Empereur is at his best by asserting that “homosexuality is one of God's most significant gifts to humanity.” This is the best chapter of the book arguing for the giftedness of our sexuality and the need to integrate it with our spiritualities. Empereur maintains that sexuality is intrinsic to our experience of God. He grounds the integration of sexuality and spirituality in James Nelson's work and a basic incarnational theology. On a personal note, I have been developing workshops for training UFMCC clergy and laity in the ministry of spiritual mentoring and placed great hope in this book as potential training manual. I was excited about the potentials of this book for queer Christians.
The following chapters, I am sorry to say, were a let down. Nowhere within the book does Empereur cite specific examples or personal cases of his own spiritual direction. All his examples are drawn from John McNeill, Craig O'Neill and Katherine Ritter, and John Fortunato. I would have welcomed some personal case histories or even anecdotal experiences from a seasoned spiritual director to buttress his main arguments. After the first chapter, lesbians got lost, and their voices are elided within a gay perpective. It would have better to have be more explicit in chapter one that the book was addressed to gay males.
James Empereur spends much time on the oppression of gays and their marginalization but never addresses the religious abuse issues that confront the spiritual director of gay Christians. Many queer Christians have felt excluded, abused, and driven from their churches for their sexual love. They have consistently received negative messages about their sexuality and themselves,and also found their churches refusing to bless their unions or recognize their call to ministry. These are central issues to the spiritual direction of queer Christians.
The years of negative ecclesial and cultural messages take their spiritual toll upon many queer Christians, and many have to embark on a quest of spiritual growth that involves healing and the integration of sexuality with their spirituality. Neither does Empereur acknowledge the structures of spiritual mentoring already in existence within the queer community in the variety of recovery programs. Group spiritual mentoring already takes place in 12-step programs, and this is a mentoring structure that can be adapted for further group spiritual direction and growth.
In the chapter titled “Scripture in Gay Spirituality,” I found myself incredulous at the scholarly works Empereur cited. He recommends the works of Daniel Helminiak, Robin Scroggs, and Victor Furnish; finally, he endorses the book of articles edited by Choon-Leong Seow, which is certainly laced with residual homophobia. While Heliminiak's “What Does the Bible Really Say about Homosexuality?” is a wonderfully pastoral book for Christian gays struggling with homosexuality, Empereur neglects the recent work of Bernardette Brooten, Saul
Olayan, Dale Martin, William Countryman, Peter Gomes, and Ken Stone on the biblical texts of terror. This may be due to his Catholic theological tendency to give less authority to the Bible and more weight to theological tradition. However, many queer Christians coming out of churches where biblical authority is primary find the scriptures central to their struggles to integrate their sexuality and Christian practice.
In the last three chapters, Empereur uses the typologies of “conformist, conscientious, and interindividuals” developed by Elizabeth Liebert
for mapping out the stages of gay spirituality. The problem with this typology is that it is intellectually imposed on gay spiritual experience. It is neither derived from examining a broad range of gay spirituality nor from mentoring gay Christians. Empereur does not cite personal experiences of mentoring, and this would have been useful either for the spiritual director or directee. Liebert's typologies appear to be based on a heterosexual model of monogamy, and I question their usefulness for a variety of Christian gay lifestyles and spiritualities.
Finally, in these last chapters, addressed specifically to the spiritual director, Empereur raises the question of coming out to the directee. He seems ambivalent on the merits of “coming out” initially, but later quotes the Whiteheads' study on the generativity of coming out.
Empereur also fails to address explicitly whether or not it is necessary for a spiritual director to be gay/lesbian or even out. There are times when it is appropriate for a person to seek a female or a male mentor who can better understand his/her experience. There are times when it is necessary for a spiritual mentor to be “out,” modeling the possibility of a life seeking wholeness, healing and growth, and integrating sexuality with spirituality.
These omissions raised serious doubts for me as spiritual director who is training queer Christians to minister and become spiritual mentors to translesbigay and heterosexual members in a church. There are good things in this book. It may be useful to some people, maybe especially non-gay people. But I was disappointed.
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