I am the gay son of an exangelical former pastor: "God has freed my emotions"

Testimony of Stefano Demasi collected by Paolo, volunteer of Evangelical Project

It is a late summer morning, the eve of my thirty -seven birthday. It is already too hot to be 7:30 in the morning. After turning and turning over more and several times in bed on an almost sleepless night, with the hope of winning thirst, I raise myself and drag myself to the refrigerator with the desire to drain me an entire bottle of water.

This will be the last morning I open the fridge of the old Io. A new awareness is close, an awareness that made me come out of the emotional refrigerator in which I had been locked up for years and years and that one day of late summer I open as, without wondering how and why.

My name is Stefano, today I am 44 years old. I was born and raised in a family evangelical Christian of the brothers of Milan. My father had been responsible (so -called elderly) in the churches we attended for many years since I was a child. I therefore grew up with the 'fear' of the Lord but also with the weight of the responsibility that even the son or daughter of a church manager must bear in his conduct as in the spotlight, judgmental, of the whole community.

At the age of 17 I asked for baptism. At the age of 21 I moved to England for work in which I matured on a personal and spiritual level. I began to build an individual and autonomous relationship with God, without family interference and attending local Protestants.

It was on this occasion that I observed, among people, that true freedom and Christian personality that I had never noticed in Italian frequentations. For me that was an important element, because if that free and unconditional love that was so preached in Italy was true, I had never fully found it, as, instead, the English experience presented it to me daily.

Returning to Italy, I took up my Christian journey made of frustrations and guilt that crushed me with the awareness that at least, the mercy of God had to give me a little breath.

My recognized and silent homosexuality, from the first year of high school, had fortified over the years my sense of guilt, which was, in turn, nourished by the judging and overwhelming context in which I was growing.

For this chaining and overwhelming sense of guilt, I had repressed and frozen my emotional sphere for many years. I did not want to make myself discovered by my family and my church of origin, for the fear of their judgment and not to expose them in bad light in the eyes of society. Fear was now the armed sentinel of my emotional refrigerator in which I was imprisoned.

I remember those years of emotional repression with a lot of pain, suffering and difficulty, those of many of us, in order not to be able to freely express what nourished my heart towards the boys I met in my life path. Compression and freezing had now become unsustainable.

Until, on that day described at the end of the summer, I had met the man I had fallen madly in love with.

Absolutely that was my first time when I fell in love with someone, inescapably recognizing the feeling of love with a capital A.

I finally came out of that emotional refrigerator in which I had locked myself for years. It was I who definitively opened that handle, who defrosted emotions thanks to love and, once out, that armed sentinel was gone.

However, the relationship had not lasted for a long time. Thus it reached me, inevitably, a psychological crisis, not so much for my now made use of coming out, but for the end of the story. The pain of abandonment and not being loved were the narratives of that collapse of mine.

To this had also been added a spiritual crisis because the precepts of faith with which I grew up turned to me. Even if I had fallen in love with a man and I had recognized my homosexuality in a paroxysmal way, I still felt the son of God, the same as always, only with an extra awareness.

However, these crises had also contributed to a new growth - crisis and growth in Jewish have the same root - my new relationship with the Lord. It was precisely at that time that I had put in touch with the Valdese Church because I knew of its transversal welcome towards all human beings without distinction of age, gender, origin, status, extractions.

As if it were yesterday, I remember when the dear Shepherd Giuseppe Plato, known as Zizzi, had allowed me to meet and get to know us, welcoming me as a consoling father as well as in the parable of the prodigal son.

The new relationship started with God had become, in my eyes, more real and aware. I first saw it as a forcing, victim of that 'fear' of the Lord who was so well preached in theory, but who in reality had perceived as a real fear towards God, my family, my brothers and sisters. It was the same armed sentinel that had monitored the refrigeration cell of my emotions for years.

From that crisis onwards I walk with daily, transparent and vibrant emotion alongside my God with feelings explicit to him, and no longer hidden to me. Feelings made of joy, cry, anger, amazement, perplexity, etc.; feelings that I only knew only from afar.

Now I receive a real dialogue with God the Father and I believe this is one of the essences of the Protestant believer: to put himself daily and consciously under discussion in front of the Lord, do not give the relationship for granted and ask himself what to do to like him despite our limits.

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