I don't feel dirty anymore.

What I mean is that I feel like I can shine sometimes now and I don't have to fight through layers of muck.

I was reading Gay Mormon Guy's blog tonight and thinking* that if I believed in it, it wouldn't be all that different for me to be active in the church. I'm not dating and I don't have a boyfriend, so no change there. I like to read, so if I thought it was worthwhile I could pick up the scripture habit. Prayer would be a little more iffy, but if we're supposing I believed in the church I guess we'd also suppose I believed that the formality of prayer was useful. I usually have some free time on Sundays, so going to church would be possible, and if I believed, it might even be enjoyable. It would be good Japanese practice, for sure. It would be nice to believe.

Because, you see, that's what I was breaking myself against all those years ago, my unbelief. For a short while I thought the problem was my desire to be with men, but it never was. The problem was that I expected to believe, but all I ever felt was empty. I thought that acting as if I believed would make me full; it didn't. It turns out stretching to be all the church expects of its believers just made the emptiness bigger. I tried to be an Example to the World, part of a Marked and Chosen Generation, and I felt such an enormous space inside, because I didn't believe I was the things I was trying to be. It was a terrible space.

The point is that pretending to believe again would be a problem.

I'm thinking of this because before the blog I watched Brideshead Revisited, which is a gorgeous, gorgeous movie about love and loss and faith and belief and, perhaps most relevant, other people's belief. A gay character loves a straight character; an atheist character loves a Catholic character. There are unrequited feelings all over the place, and I guess that I feel that for the life I could have in the church, if I only believed.

So we have Gay Mormon Guy, who believes, and also the friend with whom I first watched BR at BYU, who is attracted to men and yet who believes, and then lots of other people and then me, who doesn't believe.

The point is that BR makes me feel how I feel about the church, and also sometimes about men, and I suppose that this is also how Gay Mormon Guy feels about men, and also sometimes about the church (although he may not, I wouldn't know), and when the movie's over and the blogs are written there's nothing left but to feel.


*Yeah, it's one of those nights.