A Question of Faith : A gay man tries to unravel the mystery of his Christianity : WRESTLING WITH THE ANGEL: Faith and Religion in the Lives of Gay Men, <i> Edited by Brian Bouldrey (Riverhead Books: $23.95; 314 pp.)</i>

On Feb. 28, the uncorrected proof of this intimate and jarring book was delivered to my isolation cell at the Virginia Beach City Jail. The mail deputy assured me that each page had been inspected for “acid stains.” In our brief conversation, whispered through the food slot in the steel door, I learned that inmates regularly get high eating book or magazine pages treated by friends on the outside with LSD and other “regulated substances.” Although I resisted my own temptation to nibble or sniff the pages, I did spend the entire night on a natural high reading voraciously the passionate, thoughtful, moving, often eloquent stories of these 23 gay authors and their painful, even heroic attempts to reconcile their spiritual and sexual journeys.

Two weeks earlier, televangelist Pat Robertson had called the police to arrest me when I walked into his broadcast center with a group of interfaith leaders to protest his false and inflammatory rhetoric against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Americans. Placed in solitary confinement for “my own protection,” I decided to fast until the televangelist would hear my request to acknowledge and condemn the hate crimes against us. At the beginning of the third week in isolation, I was even more interested in feeding my hungry spirit than my growling stomach. At that moment, the writers of “Wrestling With the Angel” sneaked into my cell, formed a circle on the slab floor around my steel cot, and began to share their stories.

Turning the pages, I laughed, cried and argued with the gay men sprawled about me. They were products of the great faith traditions. From earliest pubescence each had struggled to integrate sex and spirit. I was stunned by the familiarity of the trials, the terrors and the little triumphs we had shared.

Each of the three Jews in that midnight circle (Lev Raphael, Gabriel Lampert and Michael Lowenthal), after telling his own deeply moving story, admitted most happily that he had returned to the faith of his family. I was fascinated by this, since most of the Christians gathered in my cell had seen the collapse of their childhood faith, undermined by intolerant and homophobic pastors, priests or parents. In their remarkable stories we join these spiritual archeologists on site as they sift through the ruins of their spirit-lives for something worth saving.

Phil Gambone made it beautifully clear. “My search,” he said, “was not for the right denomination as it was for a mode of spirituality that would clear away all the bull----and let God truly speak.”

Around my cell, heads, including my own, nodded in agreement. These were the rare and hopeful ones who had recognized “the wildest possible difference,” as Frederick Douglass wrote more than a century ago, between “the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ.” A few have embraced their new understanding of the life and teachings of Jesus.

Others aren’t ready to take that step, but admit candidly that we must rediscover our “homo-spirituality” even as we embrace and celebrate our homosexuality. In a brilliant and moving essay, Fenton Johnson warns that “ . . . we cannot make peace with ourselves, unless we make peace with our pasts, and we cannot make peace with our pasts unless we forgive (without forgetting) what religion has done to us.”

Others aren’t sure about (or reject out of hand) the various forms of Christian faith; but even the most pessimistic see our sisters and brothers as having special gifts to offer in the reshaping of all the great traditions. “ . . . Gays have particular promise as a group for cultivating a new orchid of spiritual life,” says Brad Gooch, “as long as it’s planted in the black erotic soil they’ve tilled so generously over the past few decades.”

Although the shadow of AIDS falls on almost every story, even the angriest echoes with a kind of stubborn hopefulness. “This virus,” says Mark Matousek, “made me a human being, opened my eyes, opened my heart, made me look beneath the skin, beyond this world, for what could not be taken away. . . . Friends who were satisfied with muscles and big jobs and summers in Cannes are jumping like lemmings into the quest, throwing themselves on the fast track to God, reaching for a higher love.” Matousek, from his own Jewish tradition, has embraced a guru in Germany, one of the less traditional approaches in this collection.

Felice Picano may say, “I don’t really care for my life any more. It’s lost its value to me. I’d throw it away on a whim.” But he also adds these magnificent and hopeful words. “I sometimes wonder,” he admits, referring to the courageous death of one he loved, “ . . . if that broken fragment of belief in the face of everything else, is somehow, ultimately, what counts.”

When the stories were told, when the storytellers had left my cell and I was alone again, I knew that the risk they had taken in sharing their lives with me had inspired and informed my own spiritual journey. I was deeply moved by their gift.

During those days in the Virginia Beach jail I, too, spent time contemplating the mystery behind my own Christian faith.

Then, on the 23rd day of my fast, Pat Robertson appeared. Two hours later, I was free. And on March 27, Robertson spoke these words to his vast “700 Club” audience: “We abhor violence against homosexuals. We would counsel strongly--in relation to homsexuality--that you can hold your religious beliefs without beating people up and being violent.”

Frankly, I was stunned that he had come. Maybe one day, Pat Robertson and the others will understand the terrible mistake they are making in waging this war against God’s gay and lesbian children. Mine was only a small victory in that direction, to be sure; but behind it lies the mystery of faith that I may never fully unravel. Until that day, my gay brothers and sisters and I will go on wrestling with the angel, refusing to let go until we, too, have been blessed.