"With My Body, I Thee Worship"

Nuptial Prayer, Queer Love, and the Mystical Life

The Tension We Live In

Opening the Wound

As I’m coming more fully into my identity as a gay man, I’ve been surprised to realize how much fear still lives in me. Not so much the fear of being rejected by others, though that’s real. Not even the fear of hell or God’s judgment, at least not in the way I used to feel it. No, the fear that’s been hardest to name is quieter, more sorrowful. I’m afraid that by embracing this part of myself, I’m putting myself at risk of losing what’s true, good, and beautiful in the faith that formed me.

My whole sense of God, the sacred, the divine, the language and grammar of my prayer, has come to me through the Catholic faith. I don’t want to lose the sweet silence of contemplative prayer, the way the borders of heaven and earth seem to merge at the altar when I celebrate Mass, the sense of being held in the mystery of God’s love. I don’t want to let go of that vast, upward striving I’ve felt in my soul ever since the earliest days of my conversion.

I’ve known transcendence. I’ve tasted it. I’ve tried to shape my whole life around my burning desire to “seek the things that are above” (Col 3:1). So the question that haunts me now, in moments of doubt and confusion, is this: Can I still live a life of depth and meaning, striving for holiness, a life of real communion with God, without denying the deepest desires of my body—my sexuality, my love?

There’s a verse from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians that came back to me recently in prayer. “Having begun in the Spirit, are you now ending in the flesh?” (Gal 3:3). I would guess that for many queer Catholics, as for myself, that question is unsettling. The unspoken assumption so many of us bear is that our sexuality will lead us away from the Spirit—that if we dare to follow the impulse of love into the body, to give real, bodily expression to our desires, we’ll lose the thread of grace.

I’ve internalized that fear. I’ve lived in its shadow for many years. But the more I experience life as a gay man, the more I’ve begun to believe that it’s just not true. That maybe the Catholic mystical tradition I’ve been formed in all these years is not something I’m in danger of losing as I step more fully into myself. Maybe the Spirit is still waiting for me—here, in this queer body, in this heart that loves another man, in the vulnerability of being seen and known and touched. Maybe this, too, is a place where God speaks, a place where grace can work.

The following reflection is not a theological argument. It’s a testimony, a prayer, a way of wondering aloud. If it resonates with you—if it helps you see your own body or desire with a little more reverence—then maybe the Spirit is moving here, too.

What I’m Afraid to Lose

Remembering the Spirit

My spiritual life has been formed by three streams. One flows from Mount Carmel, another from Mount Angel, and a third from the snow-capped Caucasus.

I began my priestly formation with the Benedictine monks at Mount Angel Abbey in Oregon. There, I learned the rhythm of ora et labora, work and prayer, with the sacred pattern of the liturgy shaping every hour of the day. I discovered the beauty of monastic chant, the solemn simplicity of the liturgy, and the sacred drama of little, ordinary moments, each one open to grace: a hand raised in blessing, a body prostrate in adoration, a beeswax candle flickering beneath a hand-carved cross.

But even before the liturgy, my first love was silence. Earlier in my conversion, I would linger in the church long after Mass had ended. When the final words of blessing had faded and the last person had gone, I stayed, alone in the stillness, yet surrounded by a presence I couldn’t explain. I would sit for an hour or more in that silence, pouring out my heart with every breath. I learned to seek God in lonely places. I’d hike into the forest or climb high into the hills, as if to see the world from His perspective.

Later in seminary, I began praying each night with a few friends at 9:00. They would stay for their hour; I often remained until midnight. I couldn’t say why. It wasn’t that I was virtuous or disciplined. I just felt at home in the stillness. In that sacred space where God dwelt, I found peace. And I ached for that peace, because so much of the rest of my life was in turmoil. I was wracked by shame and fear, a deep inner fracture I didn’t know how to heal.

After a few years of this, I entered the Carmelites, because I wanted to be consumed by silence, to give myself so utterly to God that I would become silence, become stillness, forever “alone with the Alone.” It sounds pious, but in fact, I was chasing self-erasure, and God didn’t want my disappearance. He wanted my wholeness. So I didn’t last long as a friar, but still, I learned much from Carmel: how to listen, how to distinguish God’s voice from the rest, how to speak to Him as one friend speaks to another.

Last of all, I was drawn deep into the spiritual traditions of Russian Catholicism. In my last years of seminary, Providence led me to a tiny Russian Byzantine parish, where I met a priest who would become my spiritual director. I remember my first Divine Liturgy there. When he chanted the opening words—“Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”—it felt as if the roof opened and heaven came down to meet the earth. I was caught up into a different world, where silence and singing kissed, where incense made the invisible visible, and time gave way to eternity.

Each of these traditions has formed me, not only intellectually, but existentially. They taught me how to pray, how to wait, how to be open and receptive to the ever-greater mystery of God. They taught me that God is always nearer than I thought, and more beautiful than I dared to believe. And they taught me that love—real love—is always self-gift. That the human soul is made for union. That God doesn’t just want our obedience, but our desire, and presence, and trust.

And this is what I’m afraid to lose.

I’m afraid, on some level, that embracing my sexuality more openly—stepping into my identity as a gay man, loving someone, and being loved—might somehow flatten all that. That the more I enter into the flesh, the more I might lose the Spirit. That what once burned white-hot in me with longing for the Holy might cool into something merely human. That I could trade transcendence for comfort. That I might lose the Spirit who first taught me what love means. That I’ll forget how to long for God.

But maybe, just maybe, that’s a false dichotomy.

Maybe the eros of the body and the eros that longs for God aren’t mutually exclusive.

Maybe the God who called me in silence is calling me still, through the language of the body, through love that is tender, mutual, and real.

Maybe the deepest longing I knew before—that yearning for stillness, for presence, for intimacy with God—is not something I have to leave behind.

Maybe it’s not the Spirit or the body I have to lose.

Maybe it’s the fear.

The Body Prays Too

Surprised by Desire

This may sound strange, even scandalous to some, but I’ve come to believe that prayer and sex are not as far apart as we might have been led to believe. I’m not saying they’re the same, of course, but they do share a grammar. Both speak the language of longing, of openness, of surrender and receptivity, of giving and being given to. They both ask for presence. They both draw us out of isolation into communion. And when they’re real—when they’re true—they are not about control. They’re about trust and mutual self-surrender.

I’ve been reflecting on these topics for some time, but still, I was surprised when I found myself praying the other day and was suddenly reminded of an intimate moment with my boyfriend. The words of my prayer, I realized with a jolt, echoed the very words he’d whispered to me.

At first, I recoiled from the association. It felt scandalous. I had the absurd impulse to glance over my shoulder, as if to make sure nobody had heard that thought!

But then I paused.

What if this wasn’t something profane crashing into the sacred?

What if it was the sacred revealing itself, in a place I had been taught to fear?

There is something deeply holy in the mutual vulnerability of embodied love, something that expresses, however imperfectly, the kind of love God desires from us. A love that says: I want to know you, and be known by you. I want to give myself to you. I want you to live in me.

These are not just romantic sentiments. They are the language of Scripture, of liturgy, of mysticism. “Abide in me, and I in you.” “Let it be done unto me according to your word.” “Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.” “This is my body, given for you.”

The mystics have always known this. Think of St. Teresa’s ecstasy, St. John of the Cross’s dark nights and living flames, St. Bernard’s kiss of the Bridegroom. Even the Psalms ache with desire: “My soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you … as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.”

We’ve spiritualized these texts so thoroughly that we hardly hear the body in them anymore, but it’s there, and it’s not there by accident. Human sexuality is a site of revelation, a locus theologicus. It does not point us away from God; it draws us toward communion.

Again, I’m not trying to collapse the distinction between sex and prayer, but I am saying there’s a resonance. That something in my experience of being held, being loved, being known in the body, echoes the same movements I’ve known in the most intimate moments of prayer.

And I’m learning not to be ashamed of that echo.

I want to learn to listen to it.

Nuptial Spirituality is for Us

Reclaiming the Sacred

The longer I sit with it, the more convinced I am that what the mystics and saints have called “nuptial spirituality” isn’t just a pious metaphor. It’s a real participation in the mystery of love that God shares with the world—and it is, unavoidably, embodied.

We don’t just pray with our minds, after all. We pray with our voices, our breath, our posture, our longing. We open ourselves to God with the same bodily and spiritual faculties by which we open ourselves to another person: attention, vulnerability, trust, desire.

The Church has never been shy about this, at least not in the voices of the mystics. Again, in Bernini’s famous sculpture, St. Teresa faints in ecstasy as her heart is penetrated by the flaming dart of an angel. St. Bernard longs for Jesus the Bridegroom to kiss him with the kisses of his mouth. The Song of Songs, once reserved exclusively for monastics, is an unabashedly erotic poem, yet it’s been read for centuries as a window into the union of the soul with God. Most wondrously of all, the Eucharist is not just a symbol of communion—it is a body given, blood poured out, a communion so total that we dare to say He is in us, and we are in Him.

This is the language of love. And not just any love—nuptial love.

So why has the Church taught us to believe this language only applies to heterosexual bodies? Why are these images held up as sacred and sublime when they describe the love of a man and a woman in marriage, but sinful, or even obscene, when they resonate with the experiences of queer people?

I’m not asking rhetorically. I’m asking from the inside—from a body that has known the beauty of prayer and the beauty of embodied love, and that is learning, slowly, not to see those as enemies.

Like many of you reading this, I’ve been told all my life, explicitly and implicitly, that my sexuality is a problem to be solved, something to suppress, something to repent of. And so, even when I began to experience the goodness of being in love—of giving myself and receiving another with tenderness and joy—I wasn’t sure how to hold it before God.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: the mystical life I’ve known—this life of silence, presence, surrender, communion—is not separate from the body. It happens through the body. It is shaped by the body. It is expressed in the body.

And if all this is true, then maybe nuptial spirituality—this deeply embodied, mystical way of participation in divine love—is not just for heterosexual couples. Maybe it’s for all of us queer people with bodies who long to love truly, deeply, reverently. Maybe it’s for anyone, and everyone, whose love is tender and mutual and real.

Maybe it’s for me.

Maybe it’s for you.

Where Love is True, God is There

The Turning Point

We sing these words every Holy Thursday as we process to the altar of repose, following Christ into the Garden to keep watch through the night. Ubi caritas est vera, Deus ibi est. “Wherever love is true, God is there.”

The words are simple, almost too simple. But if they are true—and I believe they are—then something in the way I’ve been taught to see myself, my body, and my capacity for love has to change.

The Church teaches that God is love. Not just loving, not just a source of love, but amor ipse, Love itself. And love, as the Church also recognizes, is not primarily a feeling (though feeling is an essential, inseparable part of the whole affair). Love is the act of self-gift. It is fidelity, sacrifice, desire for the good of the other. It is communion.

I’ve known that kind of love in prayer, and I know it now in my relationship with my boyfriend. It’s not perfect, of course, but it’s holy. It’s patient. It’s attentive. It’s drawing me out of myself and teaching me how to be more human, more honest, more courageous, more kind. And I’ve come to recognize the presence of God in this love, not in the abstract, but in the flesh.

If it’s true that ubi caritas est vera, Deus ibi est—if Christ can be present in the Eucharist as much as in the poor, in silence as much as in the stranger—then how can I deny that He is present in my relationship? How could I fail to find Him in the gaze of my beloved? In our quiet, shared moments of intimacy and care? In the vulnerability of desire that is tender, mutual, and free?

I don’t mean to suggest a kind of gay Hallmark sentimentalism, as if all affection is automatically grace. But I also cannot believe God is absent just because love doesn’t fit the Church’s traditional, expected forms. The test cannot be whether love conforms to a rulebook, but whether it bears the marks of Christ and the gifts of the Spirit: humility, joy, mutuality, reverence, trust, kindness, gentleness, goodness, to name a few. Real love purifies. It makes us more whole. It calls us to conversion, to become more who we are and who God meant us to be.

I used to assume that if I let myself follow my same-sex desires, I would lose the Spirit. That if I gave myself to another man in love, I would be stepping away from grace. But I’ve started to realize I had it backwards. Grace was never opposed to my deepest desires. It was working quietly in me to heal them. To fulfill them. To teach me how to love without fear.

And now, as I learn to love and let myself be loved, I begin to see what the mystics were talking about all along: not as a metaphor, not an abstraction, but really, in the flesh.

So for me, the question isn’t: Can God be present in queer love?

The real question is: How could He not be, if the love is true?

We Were Never Meant to Be Alone

The Myth of Isolation

“It is not good for the man to be alone” (Gen 2:18).

Loneliness is the first thing in all of creation that God names as not good. Before sin, before shame, before the serpent, there was solitude … and it was a problem. A problem that could not be solved by animals, or even God’s own presence in the garden. It was only answered by another human being. By someone like Adam, with a body like his. By communion.

I used to think the goal of the spiritual life was to transcend that need, to be so filled with God that I wouldn’t need anyone else. If I could just be holy enough, I thought, prayer would be enough to satisfy my heart. Encountering God in the silence would be enough for me, and the solitude would be, not only tolerable, but radiant. I thought my longing for another man—for love, intimacy, touch, and all the rest—was a kind of spiritual immaturity, a failure to be satisfied in God alone.

But that’s not the witness of Scripture. It’s not the teaching of the Church. And it’s not what I’ve found to be true in my own life.

We are made in the image of a God who is communion: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Not solitude. Not supremacy. Not detachment. Communion. Love poured out and received and returned. That’s the divine pattern, and it’s written into our bodies and our souls. It’s why we ache for connection, why we crave to be seen and known and chosen. It’s not a weakness. It’s the echo of our origin in the eternal mind of God.

Even the saints who embraced radical solitude—the Desert Fathers, the anchorites, the Carmelites—did so within a deeper relationship of love. They withdrew into the desert, not because love was unnecessary, but because they wanted to give themselves to it more totally. Their solitude was nuptial. Their longing was personal. They were not escaping love; they were marrying it.

The further I walk down this path of self-acceptance, the more convinced I am that loneliness is truly not good, and being alone in the world is not a mark of virtue. It’s a wound. Fortunately, God never blesses a wound by ignoring it. He touches it. He enters it. He fills it.

And sometimes—often—He does so through the mediation of another.

Love is Risky, and Worth It

Walking Through the World of Serpents

Of course, love is never safe.

We don’t live in Eden. This fallen world is full of serpents. And anyone who’s tried to love deeply—queer or not—knows what it is to be wounded by love, or by the fear of losing it. We open ourselves to joy, but we also open ourselves to sorrow. To misunderstanding. To the possibility of betrayal, abandonment, rejection, of things not going the way we’d hoped.

Queer love, especially, carries its own unique risks. We know, better than most, what it is to live in hiding. To be misunderstood by those we most want to understand us. To be told our love is not real, not holy, or simply not allowed. We know what it is to lose friendships, families, even communities, simply for daring to be honest.

So once again, when I speak of love as a place where God is present, I don’t mean something sentimental. I mean something costly and sacrificial. I mean love that is chosen, again and again, in the face of fear. Love that demands courage. Love that makes you face yourself.

Because here’s what I’ve found: when love is real, it exposes you. It brings your strengths to the surface, but it also draws out your wounds. It shows you the parts of yourself you’d rather ignore. And when it’s mutual, it does the same for the other person. You end up carrying each other’s burdens in ways you didn’t expect.

But that’s what love is. Love isn’t what happens when everything fits together easily. Love is what happens when two people choose to stay—when they offer grace where it’s needed, forgiveness when it’s hard, and tenderness when the other feels least deserving of it.

And when that happens—when love becomes a place where both people are becoming more fully themselves, more deeply human, more patient, more generous, more vulnerable, more free—that’s not just a relationship. That’s a sacrament: a visible sign of an invisible grace.

I’ve come to believe that part of what it must mean to live “beneath the Father’s blessing,” as Henri Nouwen puts it, is to give and receive that kind of love. To let ourselves be changed by it. Strengthened by it. Humbled by it. And through it, to offer glory to God.

Because what the Father sees in you and me is not a problem to be solved or a risk to be mitigated. What He sees is a gift.

Every human person is made by God to be a gift worthy of His Son.

And maybe, if we’re lucky, we can become a gift to one another, too.

We Are the Gifts

Ending in Reverence

In the liturgy, when we bring the bread and wine to the altar, we call them gifts. The priest, lifting them above the altar, offers them to God. And what happens next is pure mystery. God takes what we give, this little, earthly stuff, and makes it something more. He makes it all divine.

I think the offertory is a fine image of what the entire Christian life is meant to be. Our lives are not flawless offerings, but God invites us to lift them up to him as they are in a sacrifice of praise. Our desire, our longing, our love—they’re not things to leave behind when we come to follow Christ. They’re things to bring to the altar. Things to offer, not so that God would take them away, but so that they might be divinized.

I used to think that if I wanted to be a good gift to God, I had to cut away the parts of me that loved too deeply, or too differently. I thought holiness meant being untouchable. Now I think, more than anything, it means being touchable, and touched—by grace, by love, by the joys and wounds of others. It means being vulnerable enough to be broken, blessed, and given.

Isn’t that what God does? He gives continually. The Father gives His only Son, and both give us the Spirit of their love. Jesus gives Himself in the Eucharist, again and again, not in glory but in tenderness, weakness, and humility—in a little morsel small enough to be held, consumed, received.

That’s the kind of gift I want to be.

And I’m beginning to believe that I can be—that we all can be—without denying our bodies, or our love, or our longing for communion. We queer Catholics are not a mistake. We are not an exception to the great divine pattern of love and self-gift. We are not outside this sacred story.

We are the gifts.

Conclusion

Communion Without Erasure

I asked, at the beginning, whether it’s possible to live a life of depth and meaning, a life of holiness and communion with God, without denying the desires of my body—my sexuality, my love. Whether I could step more fully into who I am without losing the beauty I found in the silence, the mystery, the living flame of God’s love.

I don’t have all the answers. But I’ve come to believe this much:

Yes. It is possible.

Not because desire is always easy to integrate. Not because the Church has made space for this yet. But because God has never stopped meeting me here—in my longing, in my body, in my love—and I can no longer believe holiness has anything to do with disowning the parts of myself that ache to be seen, held, and known. Holiness is about offering them, honestly and without fear, to the One who gave them to me in the first place.

The mystical life is not lost to me. It’s expanding. It’s growing roots in the soil of my real life—this queer, complicated, vulnerable life that is no less beloved, no less holy, no less drawn toward the flame.

My love has not led me away from God. If anything, it has drawn me deeper into Him. The silence that once held me in the chapel now meets me in the shared breath of love, in the stillness after we touch, in the quiet yes of embodied communion. I’m still striving for holiness, still seeking the things that are above. But I no longer believe I have to leave my body behind to get there.

So if you find yourself asking the same question—if you wonder whether your body, your love, your desire might still be a place where God speaks—then know this:

You are not alone.

You are not outside the story.

You do not have to choose between the Spirit and the body.

The Spirit is still moving, even in your body’s deepest desires. Especially there.

And “perfect love casts out fear” (1 Jn 4:18).