Good evening. My name is Silvio Menzano, and my partner, Jeff Weisner, and I have been members of St. Thomas Parish for almost a year, although we've been attending services here for almost two years.

As I read tonight's passage from Mark's gospel about Jesus healing the sick and casting out demons, I immediately thought about the work that I do as a psychologist.

I reflected upon the clients I've seen over the years who have sought counseling for relief from sometimes debilitating bouts of depression and anxiety, or who have wrestled with their own inner demons:

coping with the aftermath of physical and sexual abuse;

struggling to break free from addiction to alcohol or drugs or food or shopping or sex;

and, at times, attempting to manage more serious mental illness, like the frightening emotional highs and lows of bipolar disorder or the hallucinations and delusions that accompany schizophrenia.

However, as my thoughts moved from the professional to the personal, I tried to think about how I myself have struggled with inner demons, especially those related to my upbringing, and how I have turned to my faith for healing.

My parents are immigrants from Italy, and I was raised in the solidly working-class, blue-collar hills of central Massachusetts. Therefore, by virtue of both family heritage and geography, I was raised solidly Roman Catholic.

I grew up in a community of people who were like me in race, ethnic background, socioeconomic status, and religion. I was received into the church via the usual parade of sacraments: baptism, first holy communion, confirmation. I attended religious education classes and went to an all-male Catholic high school. I was an altar server at my parish church. It was not until I went away to college in Rhode Island that I first was exposed to people, beliefs, and ideas that were different from my own.

Even so, early in my first year of college I fell in with the Catholic community there, and I became very involved: I sang in the choir, I volunteered for service activities, I became a student leader who helped plan liturgies. I made lots of friends.

At the same time as all of this was happening, I was also coming to terms with my sexuality. As much as I was struggling to reconcile being gay with my upbringing, I found that I was not wrestling with my faith as (I learned later) so many gay and lesbian people raised in conservative religious traditions so often do.

Looking back, I attribute the absence of a crisis of faith to the people with whom I shared my faith in college. I was lucky to have wonderfully supportive friends and chaplains who allowed me to fret over my sexuality without ever once implying that I was any less a child of God than everyone else in the church, and in the world. I will always be grateful to them for that.

As college came to an end, I found myself in Washington, DC, having moved away from home (the first, and to this date, the only member of my family to have done so). As I began my graduate studies, I searched for a faith community that was as welcoming and accepting as my college Catholic community.

Soon enough, I was singing in the choir at Dignity, the organization of LGBT Catholics, whose oldest and largest chapter is based here in Washington. The men and women at Dignity were both gay AND Catholic, and finding a faith community where sexuality and spirituality were linked and acceptance of both was the norm, rather than the exception.