The Flaming Heart

From Fort Worth Weekly:

By JIMMY FOWLER
On the recent April night when I became a Catholic, my feet hurt like hell.
It must be the brand-new shoes, I told myself while standing at the lectern in front of a packed congregation at Dallas’ Holy Trinity Catholic Church. I had been selected from among the conversion students to serve as a lector at the same Holy Saturday service at which I was to receive my baptism, confirmation, and first communion. I was reading everyone’s favorite “family values” tale from the Old Testament — the story of God asking Abraham to kill his son Isaac to prove his faith.
Another part of my brain wondered if the gay genes in my body were rebelling, punishing me with aching feet. Yep, that’s right — they picked the sodomite to read from Holy Scripture. This won’t surprise anyone familiar with Holy Trinity, which is located in the gay and lesbian neighborhood of Oak Lawn. This church is listed on national web sites for gay Christians as one of the more tolerant, even welcoming, parishes in the city. Their homosexual congregants are legion. (Just how gay is Holy Trinity? Well, the church choir is scheduled to perform a Cole Porter revue this month, so you be the judge.)

Let me summarize the rest of the article for you:

• He loves the Church's pageantry, mysticism, and iconography
• As a kid he got a big kick out of horror films when the hero drove back the demon, vampire, whatever with a cross
• He has a crush on Jesus (yes THAT kind of crush)
• He figured out, with the help of some so-called Catholic writers, that it would be edifying to go ahead and enter the Church and "forgive" it of it's sin of persecuting homosexuals.

Oh, and this:

So there I was, the newly minted and very conflicted gay Catholic, reading to the congregation the story of a very stern and bloody god indeed. It forced me to wonder if God would ask me to kill a special part of myself — my capacity for loving another man — in order to prove my faith.

It occurred to me that the main point of the story might not be that Abraham was willing to cut his child’s throat, but that God stopped him from doing it. The story illustrates a God that does not require sacrifice — especially of one’s fullest humanity — in order to prove allegiance. I can let myself live whole, and that includes my sexuality.

Well, there's an interpretation I've never heard before. Very disturbing article that shows a total contempt for AND lack of understanding of the teaching of the Church.

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