Untamed

by Glennon Doyle

There are wild, mysterious forces inside and between human beings that we have never been able to understand. Forces like faith. Like love. Like sexuality. We are uncomfortable with our inability to comprehend or control these mysteries. So we took wild faith—the mysterious undefinable ever-shifting flow between humans and the divine—and we packaged it into religions. We took wild sexuality—the mysterious undefinable ever-shifting flow between human beings—and we packaged it into sexual identities. It’s like water in a glass. Faith is water. Religion is a glass. Sexuality is water. Sexual identity is a glass. We created these glasses to try to contain uncontainable forces. Then we said to people: Pick a glass—straight or gay. (By the way, choosing the gay glass will likely leave you unprotected by the law, ostracized by your community, and banished by God. Choose wisely.) So folks poured their wide, juicy selves into those narrow, arbitrary glasses because that was what was expected. Many lived lives of quiet desperation, slowly suffocating as they held their breath to fit inside.