Gay Gospel Doctrine Class: Our Divine Inheritance

This is another in the Gay Gospel Doctrine Class series of posts that takes a lesson from the LDS Church’s (Adult) Gospel Doctrine class and presents it from a gay perspective.  Today’s lesson is based on Lesson #36 in the Gospel Doctrine Manual (“Be Ye Reconciled to God”) and was prepared by Trey Adams.

Purpose: To remind class members that they are children of God and to encourage them to live worthy of their divine inheritance.

Consider the opening words of this Primary children’s song:

I am a child of God,
And he has sent me here,
Has given me an earthly home
With parents kind and dear.

As I read and really think about these words, I find myself wondering how some boys and girls feel who sing this song while sitting among their young peers in Primary conscious of the fact that their parents are not “kind and dear”; kids who return home from church to face the emotional weight of unhappy homes or abusive situations; kids unsure of God’s love for them given the conditions of their earthly home.

Or, or what about the 14 year-old boy who sits silent and alone in Priesthood meeting painfully aware of the sick feeling forming in his stomach as the instructor outlines what is required for boys to be noble, worthy sons of God’s – a status he fears is hopeless for him because of his unintentional attraction to other boys?

It is not my intent to discredit the song nor do I suggest that secular and religious ideals should not be taught and encouraged.  I am concerned, however, through personal experience that doctrine taught during singing time and in church classes may unintentionally relegate a segment of the impressionable young and the sensitive mature alike to a lower status of love and acceptance, not only among peers with whom they sit and interact, but among the favored family of God.

In his letter to the Romans (Romans 3), Paul teaches the doctrine of justification which is essentially understood to mean that one must be “reconciled unto God”.   How does this doctrine apply in the tragic case of the 14-year old boy sitting in a Priesthood class?  How does it apply to the thousands of others like him, or to me or you?

Milton wrote Paradise Lost to "justify the ways of God to men” and “elucidate the conflict between God's eternal foresight and free will.” ("Paradise Lost: Introduction". Dartmouth College.)

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Later, the poet A.E. Housman penned these famous cynical lines in his poem Terence This is Stupid Stuff:

“And malt does more than Milton can

To justify God’s ways to man.”

Is life the hopeless tragedy Housman implies and are we victims trapped by our circumstances in irreconcilable conflict with God: the 14-year old boy, the unfortunate Primary age children, you, and me?

For me personally, I was not able to reconcile myself to God until I understood that His true character is not what I was unwittingly taught in Primary class or as a confused, anxious 14-year old boy in Teachers Quorum.  Not until I cast off that tragic concept and opened my heart to the real God of love, and not until I was able to begin accepting and loving myself the way God created me, did I feel His confirming love, acceptance and support for me and for my desire to develop my true God-given character. 

There are many who have felt this reconciling relationship with God after wrestling their way out of the God-limiting and the self-limiting cultural and social fetters with which they were bound.  With implied permission, I will take the liberty to include Invictus’ and others’ own such personal accounts published in a Gay Gospel Doctrine Class lesson earlier this year. 

The children’s song continues with these words:

Lead me, guide me

Walk beside me

Help me find the way

From Dante's La Commedia Divina comes this strategic, life-changing epiphany that many, if not most of us, have felt at a critical point along our path to self reconciliation:

In the middle of the road of my life
I awoke in the dark wood
where the true way was wholly lost

I pray that all who have lost self in the dark and fearful woods of cultural anonymity may awaken, find the true path, and reconcile the true self to God.