Moral Loneliness: January 11, 2004

(Originally written and posted to my personal blog January 11, 2004)

Everybody should have a wise friend, the kind of friend who will listen as you spill out your troubles, and then ask the one single question that illuminates everything and makes your choices clearer.  For me, that friend is Brian, whom I met six years ago at the Men's Discussion Group at Winnipeg's gay and lesbian resource centre, as I was going through my long-delayed coming-out process.  Last year he moved away from Winnipeg, and although we keep in touch by phone and email (and he is often in Winnipeg on business), I do miss him.

Late last year, he mailed me a photocopy of an article from the Western Catholic Reporter, that addressed an issue we had been discussing at length: the expectations among many single gay men to have as many sexual conquests as possible... and then brag about it.  In reality, it's no different from the skirt-chasing that many single (and married) straight men do.

I am definitely not judging anybody else for how much they do (or don't) have casual sex; I am certainly in no position to judge others, and I am no saint myself.  But what I have only recently discovered is my sense of loneliness, a particular kind of loneliness.  It's a loneliness that comes from realizing that your moral line—or your moral compass, if you prefer—is set differently (higher?  straighter?? narrower???) from almost everybody else in your social circle.  The loneliness that comes from having a personal moral viewpoint that doesn't match those around you.

Having a older, more experienced friend tell you that a fuck is equivalent to a handshake in the gay community.  Starting to judge whether or not your night out at the bar was a success the same way that many around you do: by whether or not you picked someone up and took them home.  Feeling the tension, caught between private scruples and public zeitgeist.  Wondering if there's just something wrong with you; wondering if you should change.  Peer pressure, in short.  It sounds ridiculous, of course; but to someone who comes out late, and is eager to "fit in" and make friends within the community, the pressure to buy into a particularly widespread stereotype can be quite strong.  (Packs of gay men have more in common with packs of teenaged girls than you might imagine.)

One of the reasons I miss Brian so much is that he was a friend whose moral line was drawn pretty close to mine (perhaps that's why he's one of my best friends).  So when I opened the envelope and read the photocopied article he mailed me, I was amazed at how accurately the author described the tension I was living with.  And then dismayed at how ineffectually he prescribed a solution.


I'm only going to cite the part of the article that had the most impact:

"The term 'moral loneliness', I think, should be credited to Robert Coles, who first used it to describe Simone Weil.  What it suggests is that inside each of us there's a place, a deep centre, where all that's tender, sacred, cherished, and precious is kept and guarded.


It's there, in that deep centre, where we're most sincere, are still innocent, and where we unconsciously remember that once, before birth, hands gentler than our own caressed us.


Here we remember the primordial kiss of God.


It's also in this place, more than any other, that we fear lies, harshness, disrespect, being shamed, ridiculed or violated.  We're most vulnerable there, so we're scrupulously careful as to whom we admit in this space, our moral centre, even as our deepest longing is precisely for someone to share that space with us.


More than we need someone to sleep with sexually, we need someone to sleep with morally: we need a soulmate.  We achieve moral consummation more easily in fantasy than in real life.  Because of this, especially as more of the tensions of life descend on us, we perennially face a double temptation: resolve the tension by giving into compensations which, while not the answer, get us through the night; or, perhaps worse still, give in to bitterness, anger and cynicism, and in this way drop our ideals because it's too painful to live with them. 

(SOURCE: Rolheiser, Ron.  "Tend your garden of moral loneliness", Western Catholic Reporter, unknown page and date)



Bingo.  My loneliness perfectly described, and given a name to boot: moral loneliness.

Rolheiser then goes on to say that Jesus refused to do either of the two options outlined (i.e. giving in to the quick but temporary fix vs. giving in to anger and cynicism) and that "He stayed and carried the tension to term.  Not easy, but that's the Gospel route."

Uh, well, sorry, but I have absolutely no intention of becoming a monk, Father Rolheiser.  You may have hit the nail on the head in describing my problem, but I'm not buying into your solution.  There has to be a better way to set a moral compass than simply (and simplistically) telling someone to "carry the tension to term", somewhere to draw a moral line between chaste and profane, monk and slut, hermitage and bacchanal.

I don't have an answer.  But I now have a much better understanding of the question that I am living (thanks to a wise friend)...

UPDATE April 15, 2012: Well, unfortunately, my friendship with Brian ended, as sometimes happens to two people who are separated by circumstance and distance.  But re-reading this entry has made me realize, over the past eight years, how the things we worry about and obsess over when we are younger seem to fade over time.  I'm not certain if it's age or wisdom or a bit of both, but I feel much more comfortable in my own (gay) skin, and less of a need to prove myself by doing (or not doing) anything.  I guess that's a good thing :-)