the most honest man I've ever known

When I was a senior in college I went to group therapy. All of us were learning to share with our group, but one member was the most honest, the most forthcoming, the most eager to improve. He wanted so badly to be rid of his pain, to understand it, and difficult as it was, to share it, to put it into words.

A homosexual at BYU, he had his share of challenges. And faced with explanations in the media, and religious views, as well as social pressures at BYU, he must have been totally overwhelmed. He must have felt that he had to have a way to explain it to himself. Sometimes he did, he would give different situations from his past that he believed contributed to being a homosexual. His father never played sports with him and he longed for that. He was kind of a preppy boy, not athletic, but he still longed for that closeness with his father.

A small thing he said one day revealed to me his true character—that he was the most honest person I’d ever known. Honest to the point of his own shame and pain, but so earnest that he was willing to dig in repeatedly. The group was sort of monitored by 2 professional psychologists. They attended the meetings, and sort of helped steer them, although they gave little direction and preferred to let us manage the flow. One day halfway through the meeting when my friend was sharing some of his pain about his situation, he said that it made him nervous when one of the therapists sat by him in the circle. Because the therapist was a well-dressed man, attractive, and classy. I couldn’t believe that he would reveal this, even while the therapist was sitting right next to him. But he was so intent on overcoming his feelings of shame, that he would test what he could talk about all of the time. He then expressed that he hoped it didn’t make the therapist uncomfortable, but that he had to say that it made him nervous, even though he wasn’t attracted to him, he recognized the nervousness in himself because he might be attracted to that type of man.

He was the one member who made me feel completely helpless. I couldn’t relate, I could empathize with his pain from growing up, and with the plight of social attitudes, etc. but that was all I could offer. I wanted to love him, and yet, I feared that that reaction was sort of biased, sort of heterosexually rooted, and that I was indirectly, subconsciously judging him, imposing my way of life and love onto another person’s without wanting to. Like maybe I didn’t understand him at all if my reaction was still to want to love him my way.

I think about him all the time, he reminds me how important it is to constantly seek to move to a higher level of connection and communication with others—and also to live, to do that through living true to yourself—as true as one can be to oneself.