Finding Our Place as Catholic Lesbians: Chapter 5 – Relationship with God
At the 1982 conference at Kirkridge, one of the workshop speakers, Dr. Lorna Hochstein, talked about our relationship with God. She asked us to reflect on the ways in which our relationships with ourselves, with others and with God are affected by the degree to which we acknowledge to ourselves and others that God created us lesbian. Because of that fact we live, love and experience God and the world in a special, particular and complementary way.
Dr. Hochstein told participants that she was not proposing that they disclose their sexual orientation regardless of consequences. But she repeatedly pointed out that invisibility and silence in themselves have consequences: “There are consequences in our relationships with others and thus with God when we choose to keep silent—consequences which affect our understanding of ourselves and the world’s understanding of us. But more important, consequences which affect our understanding and the world’s understanding of God.”
My own relationship with God had been shriveled and bitter for many years. I blamed God for my alcoholism with its horrible pain and loneliness. I wouldn’t set foot in a church I was so angry at God. I was not alone in my feeling of anger: “For the past several months,” a woman wrote, “my personal life has been rather chaotic. And unfortunately, one of the results of that chaos is a great deal of anger directed at God. Despite having physically left the Church, several years ago, that is a new emotion for me. I think the only way I am going to get over that anger is to deal with it directly, a kind of one on one with God. I think all I’m capable of right now is going back to Mass and working through the anger.” We were both estranged from God. The writer’s goal was a one-on-one encounter, but mine was to walk away.
God and I are getting along better these days, although the relationship is not perfect. Over time, and with much searching and self-forgiveness, I have changed the way I see myself, and this has changed how I perceive God. The less harsh and more understanding we are with ourselves and others; the more God has become a close presence of awareness rather than a remote figure of judgment. I can feel God in the beauty of the sun on rippling water in a bay; or in the melody of a hymn everyone enjoys singing together. 
One problem lesbian and gay Catholics face is that others attempt to stand between us and God. If we let this happen, we allow ourselves to be marginalized. This is the agenda of particularly conservative or traditionalist Catholics, who are happy to position God in judgment of others whose opinions, values and “lifestyles” are those which traditionalists find distasteful. These conservative Catholics often point to laws in the Bible as justification for how they act and what they say. As for members of the church hierarchy condemning homosexuality, the institution has been discredited by its own hypocrisy on sexual standards and activity, particularly the sexual abuse of children and young people. Bishops as a group have been discredited not only by the behavior of those who protected predator priests, but by all the rest who said and did nothing. By remaining silent and doing nothing, they lost their moral authority.
It is ironic to contemplate that the success of Jesus’ ministry and sacrifice was built on St. Peter’s rejection of legalism. In a dream, God commanded Peter not to exclude others from receiving the “Good News.” “You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile;” said St. Peter, “but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.” This change of heart by St. Peter changed the whole course of Christianity. In the 1992 book, The Acts of the Apostles,” theologians Luke Timothy Johnson and Daniel J. Harrington, S.J., write that this episode not only signifies a radical change in Peter’s identity as a member of “God’s people,” but also “the implication is that all things God created are declared clean by him, and are not affected by human discriminations.”