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.

Since I’m trying to get back on a normal person’s sleep schedule, I drank some chamomile tea and took a melatonin. That put me right out and I woke up at a reasonable time.

What happened in between, though, wasn’t something I was going to immediately blog about at first, because I’m sure some people will think I’m crazy for it.  I thought and thought and realized that there’s nothing crazy about it when I really think about it.

Last night, after falling asleep, I had a dream that was unlike anything I ever remembered dreaming about before.  Everything seemed incredibly real, but I somehow knew I was dreaming.

Shortly after I realized this, I found myself walking through a flower garden with lots of beautiful bushes, flowers, and trees I’d never seen before.  In the middle of the garden, sitting near a fountain, I saw a man and two women.

I went up to them and realized that the man was Jesus.  The women were Mother Mary and Mary Magdelen.  They said hello to me and asked me to join them.  Jesus told me right away that I was dreaming, and I told him that I knew.

We sat and talked like old friends for what felt like hours.  Jesus huged me and kissed me on the cheek and called me daughter whenever He spoke to me.  The Marys hugged me and called me sister.

They all said they were proud of me for the changes I’m making in my life, and Jesus told me that He has big plans for me.  We continued talking and eating, and in the end, they told me to enjoy my night’s sleep, and that they would try to see me again soon.

I’m not trying to claim that this was an actual appearance by Jesus and two Saints in my dream, because there’s no way I can really know that.  I don’t know whether it was just a lucid dream where I subconsciously decided I wanted to meet Jesus, Mary, and Mary Magdalene, or if they actually decided to come to me.

What I do know is that it was easily one of the most moving experiences of my life.  I woke up this morning crying with the memory of it.  I haven’t felt so perfectly loved in years, and I haven’t felt so worthy of love in years.  If Jesus Himself tells you to your face that He loves you, how can you doubt that?  How can you doubt that He’s right to love you?

I know I can’t.  Today I’m happy.

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

Bookmark this on Delicious

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.

Bookmark this on Delicious