12 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE MARCH 26, 1999
BOOKS
God can be found in our own lives and emotions
Both Feet Firmly
Planted in Midair
My Spiritual Journey by John McNeil
Westminster/John Knox Press, $18
Reviewed by Joseph Gentilini
I must admit that I am biased about John McNeill's new book. In 1976, McNeill came to Cincinnati as part of his book tour with his first book, The Church and the Homosexual. He autographed my book, and commented that I had supported him from the beginning. That is true; he has been a positive force in my life, helping me to see that being gay is a gift from God, a God of love and not a god of fear. His latest book is a testament to that truth.
John McNeill is a familiar name to many of us in the gay community, especially those who have been involved in the battle for justice within the Christian churches. He been involved in this struggle since the 1970s and has personally suffered as a result.
All of these books give gay and lesbian people the ability to refute those Christians and others who condemn us. Reading and incorporating the scriptural, philosophical and theological foundation given in these books allowed me and other gays to free ourselves from the guilt thrown at us by the self-righteous Christian Right.
In my opinion, however, his best book has come last with Both Feet Firmly Planted in Midair.
This book is more personal because it more clearly is an autobiography, and it is the story of a prophet. Like most prophets, McNeill's life has not been easy. He grew up having little interest in sports and liking music, gardening, and the aesthetics. He had a spiritual orientation expressed in a very pre-Vatican II Catholic religious tradition.
We meet McNeill's family, experience with him the tragic loss of his mother, the difficulty he had with his stepmother, and the harshness of the religious sisters who taught him in school. The morality of the Catholic church seemed to center only on sexuality, and McNeill was first
McNeill wrote his trilogy of books beginning with The Church and the Homosexual in the 1970s. This book pre-introduced to a god of fear as he struggled
sents excellent arguments against the traditional Christian thought condemning homosexuality through the use of scripture, tradition, and philosophy. His second book, Taking a Chance on God, is more personal and deals with McNeill's own struggle to accept himself as gay and Christian. The final book of the trilogy, Freedom, Glorious Freedom is the synthesis of his philosophical reflections on freedom (of conscience) and his theological work on freedom as a gift of the spirit of God.
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with his masturbation and the resulting guilt. Once he went down the path to "resist and fight" his sexual urges, he couldn't easily stop and became compulIsive about it for the next twenty years.
McNeill tells of his involvement in World War II as a very frightened but loyal soldier, and time he spent as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany. He recounts the time when a guard had a rifle to his head and McNeill waited to be shot to death. He asked the guard to let him say a final prayer, and suddenly the guard
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changed his mind about killing him. This experience and others helped to foster his vocation to the priesthood.
McNeill was ordained a priest in June of 1959, and suddenly realized that he would never be happy trying to satisfy all the demands of a god of fear; he finally able to accept that God was truly a God of love. That realization was a major turning point in his life and set him on a course that totally changed his life. As McNeill struggled with his compulsive sexual activity, he began to realize that the drive in his compulsive acting out was the drive toward intimacy. McNeill had studied the philosophy of Maurice Blondel, the philosopher who wrote that “Our God dwells within us and the only way we can become one with our God is to become one with our authentic self.”
John McNeill
McNeill realized that he was never going to meet or love God unless he came to God as he was, a man with a body and sexual desires. He would never "reach" God through his intellect alone but through "doing the truth" and living of his life as a gay man. This finally was brought home to him after his first real experience of gay love where his sexuality was a true experience of love and affection, an experience that helped restore his faith and trust in a God of love. Although that relationship was shortlived, the struggle to believe in God's love forced McNeill to search out gay love and integrate it into his personality and spirituality. He met his beloved Charlie and they have been in a committed relationship since 1965. This love, condemned by the church, helped him to develop an appreciation of God's love and to see God loving him with and through Charlie. He. realized that God was not calling him to celibacy; God was instead calling him to love God and to love himself by allowing himself to be in a loving sexually intimate relationship with another man.
At the same time, McNeill began teaching at LeMoyne College in New York. Here he earnestly listened to his life experiences and realized that God was calling him into a ministry to the gay and lesbian community. He felt a call to write on the ethics and morality of homosexual love from the inside as a gay man. He knew, as we all do, that gay relationships help us to grow in maturity and health, and are not "immature" and "disordered" as the homophobic mental health professionals and traditional church teaching would have us believe.
The remainder of the book details how McNeill began to write articles and books
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on homosexuality, and the difficult trials and sufferings he endured at the hands of some of his Jesuit brothers and, especially, the Vatican, who ultimately dismissed him from his Jesuit priesthood and community of several decades. It details how he became involved with the gay and lesbian Catholic group Dignity, and founded the New York City chapter in the early 1970s.
The latter part of the book clearly shows how McNeill discerned what God wanted him to do. With each phobic reaction of the Vatican, McNeill was forced to retreat, regroup, and listen to his heart and the pain of the gay community. God granted McNeill an intimate awareness of the sufferings and also the goodness of the gay community. As a priest and as a psychotherapist with hundreds of gay and lesbian clients, McNeill became convinced that "gay people needed a spokesperson and defender in the Catholic church who, from personal experience, could fearlessly speak the truth about gayness."
He learned that real obedience to God often results in conflict with authority and that this would therefore have to be part of his life, whatever the consequences. After keeping silent and not speaking or writing about homosexuality for ten years on the order of the Vatican, he disobeyed the Vatican and broke his silence. He became convinced that that to obey the Vatican's order would be to disobey his God of love, much higher demand.
What McNeill reveals in these pages is that God speaks directly to each of us and informs our consciences. If God is to be found, he or she will be found in our own life experiences and we must listen to those experiences, to what our emotions are actually telling us. We must listen to our authentic self and there we will find our answers.
I highly recommend this book as a story of our history of struggle for justice and compassion over the past 50 years, and as a help to those of us who have not heard the liberating story of God's love.
Joseph Gentilini is the secretary of Dignity-Greater Columbus.
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