Destiny Star's Blog

So, apparently because I’ve done something immoral in my past, I’m not allowed to have opinions about other people doing immoral things… Here I thought I understood that Jesus forgives sins…

Yesterday I did a little bitter of Twitter activism in the Maine referendum on allowing gay marriage. I’m Catholic, as I’m sure you’ve all figured out by now, and so my opinion on that is pretty set. I agree with the church’s teaching that homosexuality is a sin and shouldn’t be endorsed by the state through the marriage subsidy.

Because I endorsed the radical position on twitter that marriage means a man and a woman starting a family together, I was roundly criticized by a large number of people, some of them claiming to be Christians, which makes me curious as to their rationale for rejecting the teachings of Christianity in that matter over the last 2000 years?

Christ created His Church to provide guidance in the lives of His followers on earth until His return, and for the last 2000 years, that Church, through all it’s mainstream incarnations, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant, has recognized that homosexual actions are sinful in the eyes of God.

Now, however, at the dawn of Christianity’s third millennium, some churches have decided that God doesn’t think sodomy is such a bad thing after all.

Some compare this to teachings on slavery. I fail to see the comparison. The bible and church tradition, while recognizing the existence of slavery among mankind, sought to control it by creating restrictions on the keeping and treatment of slaves.

The controls placed on the sin of Sodom have always been among the strictest. Leviticus places it among the things bearing the penalty of death (admittedly, most Levitican laws bore death sentences for their violation), and St. Paul, whose divinely inspired writings tempered many of the restrictions placed on Leviticus saw no reason to indicate that homosexual activity should be one of those laws that were no longer binding on Christians under the New Covenant.

For two thousand years homosexual actions have been held to be mortal sins of the highest order. The Catholic Church counts them among the sins “crying out to heaven for vengeance.” The others are Willful Murder, Sins of Sodom, Oppression of the Poor, and Defrauding Workers of Their Wages. (In case you didn’t notice, keeping slaves would violate at least two of those.)

Now, whatever you may think about homosexuals and their place in society, it’s hard to find any justification for a change in the way any church claiming to follow Jesus Christ to reject the clear teachings of all of Christian history. The only justification I’ve found is people’s unwillingness to accept that their friends and family may be entirely lost to their sins.

The Church’s teaching on the matter is fairly simple. If one’s sexual predisposition is towards homosexuality, then God has called one to be single and chaste, just as surely as those called to the religious life are called to remain unmarried and chaste.

Apparently loving Christ and refusing to accept that society should sanction and subsidize something inherently sinful that provides no clear benefit to society makes one mean, hateful, intolerant, evil, and a host of other unsavory adjectives. Jesus never said that it would be easy to follow Him. In fact, He was pretty clear that it would be hard, and that we would be hated for it.

We are all called to be like Jesus in His ability to love the sinner and hate the sin. I know it’s hard knowing that your homosexual friend is sinning and will likely never stop, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore 2000 years of God’s teaching to feel better about our friends’ lives.

Being stalked is probably the most terrifying experience anyone can have. You meet someone and are nice to him, and he’s nice t you, but for some reason, things just aren’t going to happen in a relationship. You tell him you just want to be friends, and suddenly your life is turned upside down.

I met my stalker at the club where I work. He asked questions while I was dancing, and even invited me to just sit and talk. We talked, I tod him about my art, and even gave him a way to see some of it online.

He started coming in to see me dance more often, and started reading commetns on my art pages. He even commented a time or two and made me feel special. One day h came into the club wih a box of art supplies for me. I thanked him and continued my night.

He coninued to come in, and while I didn’t realize I at the time, he would get extremely jealous whenever I danced for someone other than him. I didn’t know that when he wasn’t there watching me, things were getting extremely creepy.

He was frequently following me around town. He knew my car and my license plate number. He knew my home phone number and my cell phone number. He knew my real name. He had my myspace and facebook addresses with my real name on them.

He knew who my parents had been. He knew where I lived, he knew when I worked and when I didn’t. He knew hings about me that I thought were deep, dark secrets from all but my very closest friends.

He would watch me from the shadows outside my home as I dressed for bed. He watched me go to sleep. He watched as I occasionally had sex with someone from the club or a bar. He got jeaous. He got angry. In his mind, I belonged to him, and no one else should have me.

He started to plan.

He started learning everything there was to learn about everplace I went reguarly. He learned the layut of the cub. He earned the layout of my home and the homes around me. He learned about the stores where I shopped and the parks where I ran.

He learned everything about me and made his plan foolproof. He hid severa times near each place he thought he could catch me alone at times he thought I would be there to learn if he really could catch me alone.

While all this went on, he continued to be a regular at the club whenever I was there. He and I continued to have little conversations whenever I danced for him. I thought we were, well not friends, but people who had a very pleasant working relationship. He was one of my favorite customers because he tipped well for dances and didn’t expect me to do things for him.

Then, one day, it happened. I was walking to my car at the edge of the parking lot of the mall I liked to shop at on my nights off. It was late and the mall had just closed. A van was parked next to my car. As I unlocked my car door, the van door rolled open and I was pulled inside.

I was tied down, gagged, and covered with a blanket. I was driven around for a long time, probably in circles. Eventually we stopped and I was carried like a sack of potatoes to a room where I was tied down on a bed.

He sat and talked to me. He told me all about his obsession with me. He called it his love for me. He told me that now we would be together forever. I cried. He cut my clothes off me.

He didn’t rape me right away. He tried to act like he was my lover. He kissed me all over. He touched me. He made my body betray me by becoming aroused. When he entered me, I screamed. I screamed that I hated him. I screamed that he was the worst thing that ever happened to me.

I made him angry. He beat me. He raped me again. He sodomized me. He told me that I would die as his property. He told me that I was his, and that I’d never see anyone I loved again. He told me that if I wanted to be see someone I loved I’d better start loving him.

I was kept chained to that bed for I don’t know how long. He would occasionally let me go to the bathroom, but would stay and watch me. He’d make me go with him standing right there looking at me, and then he’d chain me back to my bed. He’d rape me whenever he felt like it. He’d use me however he wanted.

I’m only alive and free because my roommates missed me and couldn’t get me on the phone, and I’d parked in view of a security camera at the mall. The police looked for me, found out I’d gone to the mall, found my car, and saw me being kidnapped. They saw his license plate. They found his address.

They found me chained to a bed, beaten, bloody, and feeling like my soul had been raped out of me. He was tried, I had to testify, and he went to prison. He wasn’t a big, tough, or mean guy, so he spent some time being raped repeatedly himself before he tried to fight back and was killed.

He’s the rapist it’s easiest to forgive for some reason, because he was the third. He was the one who led Miranda to bring her priest to talk with me. He was the one who ultimately led me to Jesus, and, in a way, I suppose I owe him for that.

I hope that he found God before he was killed, and I hope that his soul was saved, because otherwise he’ll spend the rest of eternity longing for the time he spent in prison and wishing he could have traded places with me chained to that bed. I won’t pray for him to be released from purgatory, and I won’t pray that he suffers in hell. I do forgive him, though, and I hope he found his salvation.

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This is my prayer to my patroness, St. Mary Magdalene

St. Mary Magdalene, penitent who had the courage to wash Jesus’ feet with your tears and dry them with your hair, pray for me to your friend, my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, that He will grant me the great gifts you were given.

Ask Him to teach me your penitence, that I may weep at His feet for forgiveness of my sins, as you did.
Ask Him to show me a penance as perfect as yours, that I may serve Him as perfectly as you did.
Ask Him to show me the miracle of His resurrection with the clarity He showed it to you.
Ask Him to teach me humility, for while my sin of pride was not as great as yours in your sin, I am still too proud of my beauty and do not use it for His purposes.
Ask Him to grant me the peace and the joy of serving Him that he taught to you.
Ask Him, as He cast seven devils from you, to drive the devil’s influence from my life.
Ask Him to show me the forgiveness He showed to you, as I weep at His feet.

Pray for me, St. Mary Magdalene, that I may find my way out of sin and perfectly into His service as you did.
Amen

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I am chaste. Yes, I realize that sounds a little strange coming from a woman who takes her clothes off for money, but it’s true. To the people in the whole “purity” movement, it probably sounds even more strange given my admission that I’ve been raped several times and skirted the edges of prostitution…

I’m chaste because I’ve taken a vow to myself that I will not have sex again until I’m married. I won’t use my body for my own pleasure, and I won’t use my body to pleasure others. As I’m sure you can imagine, that pretty seriously limits my earning power in the club. It’s not exactly a looky-no-touchy kind of place.

Chastity isn’t purity or virginity or whatever the trendy word for it is. It’s recognizing that your sexuality has a specific purpose in God’s plan and committing yourself to using it only for that purpose. Does my stripping work with that idea? Not perfectly, but we’re imperfect beings.

The idea of chastity recognizes that God forgives, and that whatever mistakes you may have made in your life, you can always put yourself back on God’s path. The purity movement seems to ignore God’s infinite capacity for forgiveness by focusing on a state of being that can be lost in an instant of weakness, or even be taken from you by force.

I’m not saying young girls shouldn’t stay virgins until they marry, God knows I wish I had. I’m saying that girls shouldn’t be made to feel worthless for a mistake that God will forgive the instant they ask him for it. They shouldn’t be made to feel worthless for something that might be done to them without their consent.

Girls need to learn that no matter what, having sex has consequences: physical, emotional, and spiritual. They need to learn that pills and condoms and shots can’t take these consequences away. The emotional and spiritual consequences are always there, even if many of the physical ones are not.

I show my body to men for money. In the past I’ve had sex with men to get them to protect me, to get them to like me, and just for my own carnal pleasure. I’ve experimented with lesbianism, as most girls who strip do at some point, when I got so fed up with the men who came to see me work every night.

Now, I just show my body to them. I let them see me and lust after me. Then I go home alone and wish for love from a good man. I dream about him. I wish I could allow myself to masturbate, but I’ve given that up, too.

Every night, I miss the feeling of a man’s warm skin on mine. I miss the way I can feel when I’m with a man. I miss everything about making love except the stains it leaves on my soul, and not missing that is enough to get me to put down my cell phone full of men I could call and pick up my rosary to start praying to the mother of my Lord and Savior for her to intercede with her Son for me.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

Does my sin make me better than the woman who goes to bed every night with the same man, to whom she’s not married? Does it make me worse? Neither, it makes me a sinner, just as she is a sinner, just as we’re all sinners and we all need God’s forgiveness.

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I hope you all understand that I’m not telling you a lot of details about my life. I feel called to share my story, but my second rape was by someone who stalked me at work and on the internet through a blog where I posted my art and photography. If you want to have a conversation with me, feel free to comment on my posts or to e-mail me at destinystar22@gmail.com.

My priest helped me get accepted into one of the best design schools in the world. This school is the Harvard of 3D design. Their program is amazing. The people who design the physical appearance of most of the products people use every day went to this school or wish they went there.

Their architecture graduates design buildings all over the world that make people’s lives that much more beautiful and livable. Interior design at this school is even considered a strong program.

I’m amazed and humbled by the opportunity offered to me in my admission to this school. I’ll have the chance to take my love of my artistic side and use that to better my own life and the lives of all the people that interact with the things I design. It’s truly awe-inspiring that God has put into my life all the people who helped make this happen.

He’s given me this chance to make something amazing of my life. He’s given me the chance to leave the work that might be keeping me from being fully in communion with him.

(For non-Catholics: I’m in a job that encourages the deadly sin of lust in others. This makes me a participant in their deadly sin, even if I’ll no longer do a lot of the things that skirt the edge of or actually are prostitution. At the very least this is a venial sin, which the Eucharist can wash away, and may be a mortal sin, which must be confessed to be forgiven. In either case, I’d have to intend never to commit that sin again to be properly assured of forgiveness. Since I have to go back to work every day, I can never be sure I’m fully forgiven until I’m out of this job. I just have to trust to Jesus’s love and mercy that he forgives me.)

I know that though there are obstacles in my path, but God never offers up an opportunity without expecting a sacrifice, just as he never offers a challenge that can’t be met. I know God will show me the way to meet the tuition that costs as much every semester as I make in a year of stripping, while requiring so much time that I know I’ll never be able to keep a job and go to school. I know He’ll show me how to cover my living expenses. I know He’ll make clear the path to get the required computer that costs nearly as much as I paid for my car.

I trust in the Lord and am forever thankful to Him and to all the people He’s led into my life who made this chance possible. I can’t wait for Mass tomorrow morning. It’s when I’m closest to Him, and when I feel the light at the end of this dark period in my life.

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