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His Cross is Greater than Any Sin
The Rev. Don Alcock's Story
From an early age I felt weighed down by confusion about my sexuality. Even as God continued steadfastly over the years to bring healing to my heart and to lead me to willing obedience, I lurched between spiritual breakthroughs and backsliding. I even came out as homosexual. I wondered if I would ever find peace.
Longing for Companionship
When I was a child, my father supported our family by working out of town. When he did come home, every second weekend and on holidays, he was often tired or more interested in spending time with his wife than with my brother and me. I was never interested in the things most boys are, such as sports (other than hockey, and that was only a lukewarm interest to win my father’s love). My brother, older by two years, wasn’t interested in having his kid brother play with him and his friends. This virtually shut me out of the neighbourhood, as almost all of the boys were not my age, so instead I played with the girls.
As I grew older, I longed for male companionship but didn’t know how to find it. I was willing to do anything for another boy to pay attention to me, and so I was willing to engage in sexual activity to get that attention. What I didn’t recognize consciously (how could I at that age?) was that I was equating homosexual activity with male bonding and companionship. As I went through my teen years then, my desires for contact with other males grew and the pattern was established, but I held back because I made myself available to one young man in particular, who outwardly was living heterosexually. As a result my own sexual needs were met, but they were secondary to my satisfying him so that I could enjoy the male companionship I so deeply desired, and there was little risk of getting caught and exposed.
As an undergraduate student in the late 1960s I remained closeted and settled for masturbation and the occasional contact with that other young man. Even when I went to graduate school in Los Angeles, I was too scared to come out, so I discovered pornography to feed my fantasy life in masturbation. As the threat of AIDS emerged, fear of humiliation and death kept me from acting on my desires for male contact; but the sexual cravings themselves did not disappear, so I became almost obsessed with pornography and masturbation. As well, continually taking comfort in ice cream, cookies, and chips, I became quite obese and would remain so for many years.
A Born Again Experience
In May 1989, I had a career starting, a new car, other material possessions, but something was missing. Then after years as a lapsed Anglican, I was born again, which brought me back to the church and back into relationship with God. I was surprised how fulfilling this proved to be; perhaps that spiritual connection revealed to me an ongoing hunger for human companionship in my life.
In the early 1990s, my church in Victoria hosted a Faith Alive weekend run by visitors from Seattle. The Holy Spirit confirmed that I could confide in these people, with the result that I first confessed my homosexual desires and actions. A follow-up visit to Seattle led to some intensive prayer ministry, and I left with a sense that God had healed these problems once and for all.
Unfortunately, all the old urges continued to cause me turmoil, and to my mind this was an affront to the Seattle ministry and a further sign of my inadequacy. The same cycle played out almost every weekend: rent a gay pornographic video on Saturday, indulge in masturbation, and then return the video on Sunday morning before going to church, where I repented of my failings. Having no one in my parish to confide in about my problems only accentuated them.
The Living Waters Programme
Once I moved to Vancouver, my parish church and priest there introduced me to the Living Waters programme, which uses praise and worship, lectures, and small group discussions to help participants deal with any brokenness associated with our sexual being.
In a church basement surrounded by strangers, I heard the leader prepare us to receive God’s healing. He invited us to close our eyes and envision leaving our emotional baggage at the foot of the cross.
Before closing my eyes I saw a tiny gold cross hanging around the neck of a woman across the room. In my mind’s eye, I saw that very cross, while my sin of homosexuality was represented by a marble – which wouldn’t fit under the cross. I thought my homosexuality was too big a sin for God’s forgiveness! I heard God say about the cross, “I’ll make it bigger for you.” That cross grew to the size of a pectoral cross (like one worn by my former priest in Victoria), and I now imagined myself holding a baseball – which wouldn’t fit under that cross either. Again, I heard God say, “I’ll make it bigger for you.” Next, I figured, would be an altar-sized cross, so there I was waiting and holding a beach ball and knowing it wouldn’t fit under that cross either.
In this vision of mine, suddenly the ground beside me shook and out of it exploded a cross with gigantic beams each 12 feet by 12 feet in cross-section. As it soared upward, I stood there, mouth gaping in awe. Then a tiny drop of blood fell from the cross upon the beach ball, covering it, and in an instant the beach ball disappeared. As I continued to look upward, in my mind’s eye I sensed God looking down with a Cheshire cat grin on His face. He said, “Now is it big enough for you?” I knew then that not only was my homosexual activity indeed a sin, but it is just a sin. With Christ’s help it need not overwhelm me. My healing had begun.
What Real Love Is
One experience from the course has remained with me as powerfully as the cross story. We were invited to replay one of our memories of a homosexual experience, only this time with Jesus in the scene. I returned to the first time I fellated a man. I remember gagging and needing some water to clear my throat. As I stood before the kitchen sink drinking water, there was Jesus across the room. Instantaneously, I was standing before our Lord. He looked at me intently and said, “That’s not real love; this is.” And He hugged me. Jesus hugged me so I could experience for the first time what real love is between men. There was nothing even remotely erotic about it – it was just pure love pouring through me.
I also learned in this course how to break my cycle of pornography – a truly liberating experience in itself! Equipped with the knowledge of what had caused my same-sex attractions, I was now prepared to change my life and become the man God created me to be.
Sadly, I did not follow up with any kind of group counselling or therapy as is recommended. My pride got in the way. I thought I was able to do it on my own and didn’t need further help from others. That was a key mistake. Over the next decade, I continued to struggle. What I couldn’t understand was why, if our Lord had truly healed me of my sexual brokenness, I was still experiencing homosexual attractions. The Enemy is patient and was taking his time to seduce me back from God’s truth.
Coming Out in Seminary
In 1994 I moved back to my parents’ home in London, Ontario, with the intention of taking care of my ailing father; however, he died just hours before I arrived, so instead I spent the next two years caring for my mother. My parish guided me through a process of discernment, and I then entered Huron’s diocesan seminary, which was steeped in liberal theological ideas.
Still heavily burdened by unresolved anger over my father’s death, and continuing to let myself be ruled by my desire to be accepted by others (especially male authority figures), I succumbed to the enormous pressure there to accept the liberal notion that homosexuality is not sinful. It was easier to give in to the feelings than to fight them: I declared myself to be a homosexual.
What surprised me most was that the liberals did not embrace me and love me and support me as I’d expected. The conservatives did! Other members of a prayer group to which I belonged told me that they did not approve of my decision and would continue to pray for me in that regard, but that I was loved and accepted nevertheless. I continued in fellowship with them.
Even when terrible accusations by certain liberals drove me out of seminary, I still wanted to prove myself to them. During that hellish year, it was only when I gave up trying to fix my problems without God’s help that I was able to resolve the accusations against me and get back into seminary to complete my studies. Furthermore, I finally decided, even if (as the liberals proclaimed) I was created with same-gender feelings, I would not give into them. I planned to remain celibate.
Prayer Ministry in the UK
Once I had been ordained as an Anglican priest and placed in my parish, I met a couple involved in the Wholeness Through Christ Prayer Ministry in the United Kingdom. It sounded like a fantastic Christian method of pastoral care, so I didn’t hesitate when they offered to send me to the UK for a course in May 2001.
The premise was simple enough: we are all wounded in some way or other. Until we address the wound itself and its root causes, it cannot properly heal. Likewise, until we do that, we remain in bondage to that wound and will continue in reactive sin. Through the prayer and counselling at this course, I was finally able to forgive. No longer did I see my same-sex attractions as something created by God; rather, I understood them as something I had created to soothe my wounds.
I finished the first course on cloud nine. As it happens, I went on to spend a day touring the Trossacks region of Scotland with the woman who had led the course. I was eager to return for a second course but faced a compulsory six-month waiting period, during which I was once again tempted with plausible ideas as to how the course had been brainwashing me away from my “God-given” sexuality. This time, though, I had the prayer and personal support I needed to keep me steady until I returned to the UK in the autumn for a second Wholeness Through Christ course, also led by the same woman.
Falling in Love
The programme administrators invited me to attend a third course the following February. In the meantime, late one night during a clergy retreat after I had returned home from the second course, I was talking about the programme and that team leader for my courses, who was named Yvonne, when one of my fellow clergy looked at me and said, “You’re in love with her.” I had to be told before I could see the obvious: I did indeed love this woman.
But how could this work? I was in Canada and Yvonne was in the UK. Nevertheless, my friends encouraged me to express my feelings to her and test the waters. I did so in an email and waited. No reply. Needless to say, all of my old insecurities bubbled to the surface. I was ready to proclaim myself celibate for life, never intending to risk like this again. Fortunately, my friends telephoned her and found she’d not replied because her office, where I’d written to her, was closed for the Christmas holidays. She went in, read my message, and replied with the same trepidation that I felt: How could this work?
We decided to spend a few days together before the third course, in February 2002. By then we had both put our trust in the Lord that He had ordained this relationship, so I proposed marriage to her, and she accepted. We married in Scotland on September 6, 2002, and returned together to Canada. If we needed any other assurance that our union was of the Lord, we found it in that date: my parents were married on September 6, 1947, and her parents were married on that same day! We have been happily married ever since.
Several months after our wedding, as the depth of Yvonne’s love for me began to sink in, I realized that I no longer needed my comfort foods. Over the succeeding months I shed 75 excess pounds, which I have kept off. To me that was another of God’s miracles.
I don’t deny that I can still be attracted to other men. What’s different, however, is that I know what’s behind these feelings (which are becoming less and less frequent) and no longer have any need to indulge them. I have something far more precious: the love of my wife Yvonne within a marriage truly blessed by God.
It has been a long and often difficult struggle, but the Lord never gave up on me. He persisted even when I was turning my back on Him. His unconditional love won me over. The truth of His Word brought healing of my brokenness and resurrected the heterosexual man He had created me to be. Thanks be to God!
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The Rev. Donald Alcock is rector of St. Thomas the Apostle and St. David’s Anglican Churches, Cambridge, Ontario.
This testimony appears in printed form in the booklet Transformed by an Encounter with Christ: A contribution to the ongoing discussion on same-sex blessings in the Anglican Church of Canada, published in 2006 by the Zacchaeus Fellowship.
Story © 2004 Don Alcock. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Photo : Sue Careless