I still can't get over this painting, or the alternate universe I've imagined where "Bathing the Red Horse" is a popular euphemism.

You know you've made it when an artist attempted to make a painting of your penis and it looks more like a giant red horse.

the horse IS his junk. #symbolism

"There’s an underlying assumption that absolute freedom is the normative and desirable state of humanity: that anything which impedes a person’s interior freedom is, necessarily, a psychological disorder. Such thinking is basically the result of a modernist conception of the person as a kind of autonomous tabula rasa. Again, this conception is foreign to Christianity, which sees the constitution of the person as a unique creation endowed by God with particular graces and crosses, rather than as a uniform product which ought to conform to certain normative expectations.

A much more reasonable, and traditional, Christian approach is to believe that “all things work good for those who love God.” That the thorn in one’s side is a means of illustrating the sufficiency of God’s grace. That weakness is strength. That the obstacles that we face, whether interior or exterior, are ultimately meaningful manifestations of Divine Providence. In short, that our lives are not meant to be self-directed and that very often the key to our vocation is found just as much in our limitations as it is found in our strengths."

source: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/catholicauthenticity...

As for myself, when I was a teenager I saw my queerness as a “disability” that prevented me functioning "normally" as a man, which led to depression, despair, frustration, guilt, self-doubt and ultimately a loss of trust in God. After that, I never developed any sort of queer-positive faith in God. I found my peace as an agnostic. In any case, those words I quoted above seem somewhat relevant to the various sorts of cognitive dissonance between the models of self presented by psychology and faith.