Alan Yoshioka’s path is less clear than it used to be.
Yoshioka, 62, once knew exactly what his mission was. He and his wife Theresa were on fire to serve an unmet need – supporting same-sex attracted Catholics and helping the people who love them learn how to be good friends.
Alan is gay, but Theresa was not. The two of them loved each other and loved the Lord immensely throughout their ten-and-a-half years of marriage.
Theresa blazed with purpose and clarity and with a desire to bring the hope of God’s love to people in need of healing – not only one day in heaven, but right now. Her love of God and the people around her was radiant and overflowing and she lived with a constant sense of the communication between earth and heaven.
Theresa succumbed to cancer in 2020 at age 48. Alan has since suffered a series of deep losses.
“It’s less clear what I’m supposed to be doing right now,” he said.
The way forward has been cloudy before. Yoshioka was the son of a minister in the United Church of Canada, and while he wrestled with his sexual identity growing up, he thought about suicide, and he fantasised about dying young of AIDS and leaving behind dramatic words of farewell. In college, he became an activist, writing the first column on gay or lesbian issues for a Canadian student newspaper.
He rejected Christianity. Or he tried to. He sampled atheism; he held his tongue while silently disagreeing with what he heard from the pulpit. He accepted a dubious second baptism and he tried attending churches that preached chastity but carved out an exception for gay people.
He was always looking for coherence, stability, and something on which to ground his hope.
There were many steps and missteps along the way, but eventually he decided that, in good conscience, he could no longer have sex with men. He broke the news to his long-term partner, expecting shock and dismay. Instead, the response was more, “What took you so long?”
“In his view, I was either going to return to the church, or start burning churches down,” Yoshioka said. Christianity had gotten under his skin, and everyone but Yoshioka could see it.
When John Paul II died, Yoshioka began “reading furiously,” and, partly through sheer process of elimination, ended up in the Catholic Church. He is an analytical man, and it was the only church that made sense to him.
But long before his sense of hope was founded on Jesus, he had always felt this inchoate idea that he should not give up.
“I don’t know how to describe it. I just had some sense that things will get better eventually,” he said. He now recognises this inarticulate optimism as a primitive form of hope.
Then he met Theresa and they became friends.
Theresa was big on love, big on the theology of the Trinity as an expression of love as a relationship. And she, like Alan, despised the way professed Christians justified cruelty toward gay people. One day, Alan offered up a spare ticket to a baroque music concert, and Theresa accepted. As the music poured over them, he found himself wanting to put his arm around Theresa, and she found herself wanting the same.
They spent a year and a half as friends, coming to know and admire each other.
“Theresa was the queen of non-linear thinking; putting things together nobody else would have thought of putting together,” he said.
The idea of joining themselves together in marriage was mutual. Despite their mismatched sexual identities, their marriage wasn’t a statement or a project; they just loved each other and they wanted their marriage to bring them closer to God.
Most of their struggles weren’t even sexual, Yoshioka said, but just had to do with basic human fallenness. Together, they embarked on a mission, offering training and support to help priests become more competent pastors when someone came to them for help related to LGBT issues. They organised events, retreats, and talks, and planned to apply for charitable status and form a board of directors.
They also discovered the appeal of the Byzantine church, which Theresa joined shortly before she died. She tended toward scrupulosity, and something about the Byzantine tradition “allowed her to exhale,” Alan said.
Then Theresa got cancer. At first her prognosis looked hopeful, but she suffered some setbacks, and then the cancer returned. They hoped and prayed she could be cured by ordinary means; then they prayed for a miracle.
“But we knew and accepted that healing might come in different ways,” Alan said.
It soon became clear Theresa was not going to live. The hope for physical healing was replaced by the hope that God would be present.
He undoubtedly was. More than one unexpected healing took place in the room as Theresa died.
Theresa’s parents had divorced when she was 18 and her father, Don, remained so hostile and bitter that he didn’t even want to accidentally meet his ex-wife in the hallways of the palliative care unit. Alan had to arrange for them to visit at different times.
But one day, Alan he didn’t make those arrangements. They rode up in the elevator together, but Don didn’t recognise her. They entered the room together, and Alan told them Theresa was dead. Theresa’s mother turned to her ex-husband and asked if she could hug him. He agreed – and then he realised who she was.
“And it was okay,” Alan said.
They reconciled and it lasted. They went from bitter enemies to friends and even corresponded by mail afterwards.
Alan said he and Theresa were aware of the saints interceding for them as her body failed.
“Her emotions became freer, as she shed attachments to things that had been holding her back from more fully accepting the deep, deep love God has had for her from the very beginning, from the moment she was formed in her mother’s womb,” he said.
After Theresa died, Alan cared for Don as his health declined. When he died, Alan took it hard; and then his mother also died. The political landscape has changed and the couple’s mission doesn’t quite fit anymore. Alan doesn’t feel the drive to carry it forward on his own.
Lately, he finds himself turning to music more and more, especially to requiems, which articulate things he cannot put into words.
He recites from memory a polyphonic anthem set to music by Christopher Tye:
“My trust, O Lord, in thee is grounded/ Let me not therefore be confounded. From all sin and inquiry / In thy goodness deliver me”
The piece continues with each voice singing its own lines and tune, and then toward the end, they all come together at the same time:
“Glory to God in every coast,
the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
As it was in the beginning
is and shall be, world without ending.”
Yoshioka has performed the piece with a choir, singing it deliberately, feeling it profoundly. In his atheist days, sacred music appealed to him. Now it anchors him. He reminds himself how solid a foundation he has and his hope in the Lord, while not blazing as it did when Theresa was alive, has not been extinguished.
The route of his pilgrimage may not be clear, but he knows who is guiding him, and what he has promised.
“I know that my redeemer liveth,” he said.
