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By Andrew Murray SM
At different times during the past few years, parents have asked me to talk with them and sometimes with their families after one of their children had announced
his or her homosexuality and had begun to work out what it meant. I am not sure why I was asked, but the experiences taught me a great deal, not the least about my own intolerance.
Two parameters guide
discussion on this matter. The first is that for the most part homosexual orientation is not a matter of choice but rather a matter of how someone is. There are mediating causes such as traumatic response to assault
or the effects of sexual experimentation, but by and large awareness of this orientation is a matter of discovery rather than of choice or invention. The process of discovery is commonly painful and chaotic.
The second is that the life of a homosexual person as such is not a great life. The exasperated cry of a young woman was relayed to me. “Mum,” she cried, “do you think that I would choose this kind of life?” It is
here that I part company with many gay activists, who, in my view, have not matched their demands for acceptance with frankness about their condition of life.
Whatever else happens, parents faced with this
situation can expect turmoil and usually a long period of adjustment. The reality of the sit uation will not be clear at first to parents or to the child or to siblings. It will become clearer in different ways and
at different rates to different members of the family, and this will cause tensions. Fathers typically find it very hard to accept that the situation is real. Mothers are often torn by their love of the child they
bore and the tensions evoked in the family.
If a way of accommodating one another is to be worked out, and this will take a lot of time, there is going to have to be love and tolerance on all sides. Love is
natural to parents and children. It is also at the heart of the Gospel. Tolerance allows us to respect others despite important differences of attitude, belief and practice. It is valued in the modern world. Both
are likely to be challenged by feelings and opinions.
Whatever the outcome of efforts to come to terms with a child’s homosexual orientation, life is never going to be what it had been thought to be or what
it had been hoped to be. Child and parents have to learn new boundaries and to find ways of meeting that allow love to be exercised without distraction or tension.
The Church is not without compassionate
voices. The bishops of the US showed this in their “Pastoral Message to Parents of Homosexual Children and Pastoral Ministers” (Origins 27/17 (October 9, 1997): 286–291). It contains much that is helpful.
Fr Murray teaches philosophy at the Catholic Institute of Sydney.
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