SOUL FOOD:Unsettling thoughts about a fallen leader’s life

By the wee hours of Monday morning, the pages of comments that followed an msnbc.com story on the fall of evangelical powerhouse Ted Haggard numbered several hundred more than 1,000. For the most part, the messages were not kind.

I found myself drawn to reading them in much the same way one can be drawn to sticking one’s tongue in a broken tooth. You know it’s still going to hurt every time you do it, but you do it anyway.

What I’m still trying to figure out is why the news and these comments hit me like such a punch in the gut that even now I’m still catching my breath.

I don’t, after all, know Haggard. At least not personally.

In September, I sat in the fifth row of seats in the Capitol Ballroom of the Marriott City Center hotel in Salt Lake City listening to his keynote address at the Religion Newswriters Assn. Conference. Haggard was then still president of the National Assn. of Evangelicals and senior pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colo.

As Eric Groksi of the Denver Post introduced Haggard., I was aware I would not have recognized the prominent evangelical leader had I earlier passed him in the hotel lobby. What he thought and what he did had, until, then, scarcely won my attention. Before the standing-room-only crowd that morning, Haggard seemed good-natured and genuine. As a high school student, he told us, he had worked on the school’s very successful newspaper. It was a time, he recalled, when Planned Parenthood and sexualitywere the focus of “raging” discussions. He found reporting on these issues exciting.

He planned to spend the balance of his life “doing journalism.”

His father, though, had other ideas and promised the young Haggard a car if he would agree to go to Oral Roberts University. Haggard didn’t know Oral Roberts from Adam’s house cat but was tempted by the offer.

So, in the manner of the journalist he aimed to become, he set about to do some research.

It’s odd now looking back at my notes. I came home to tell my husband what I noted in a margin: If Haggard weren’t an evangelical Christian, I’d swear he was gay.

I was ashamed of the thought for a number of reasons.

Years ago, in Santa Cruz and the San Francisco Bay Area, I worked with dozens of colleagues who were homosexual men. The high-pitched-voice, low-pitched-sarcasm, limp-wrist stereotype was just that — a stereotype. Some gay men fit and wore it proudly. But many more did not.

And what if Haggard were same-sex inclined? If he believed those feelings were not what God intended and chose not to act on them, what business was that of mine or anyone?

Haggard told us how he learned who Oral Roberts was. “I thought, this is my entrance into some of the largest newspapers in the country,” he said.

“I can skip journalism school if I can find out Oral Roberts is sleeping with somebody other than Evelyn or if I can catch him in a lie or if I can catch him faking miracles,” he remembers thinking.

He went to the university, Haggard confessed, “fully intending to expose Oral Roberts in order to advance my career.” But, he said, “[Roberts] got to me rather than me getting to him.”

Haggard shared his dismay over becoming “fully convinced” that Roberts slept with his own wife. “I was so heartbroken,” he said.

He laughed. And we laughed, too.

Such is the story of Ted Haggard’s seduction into a career in ministry.

“The Spirit of the Lord dealt with me,” he said, “and I ended up in ministry, teaching the Scriptures and encouraging people to live a better life and to live a life that is honorable — keep your promises — and keep your word — and that type of thing.”

Looking back at my notes, I can’t help but wonder what he is thinking now.

I can hardly bring myself to wonder what Haggard — who with his wife Gayle wrote a book called “From This Day Forward: Making Your Vows Last a Lifetime” — is feeling. What does “from this day forward” mean to them now?

If everything Mike Jones has said about Ted Haggard it true (Haggard continues to contend that not all of it is), it’s not hard to understand how he’d be angry.

Perhaps in his disgrace as much as, or more than, in his prominence, Ted Haggard will make known the God he believes loves sinners so much that as Scripture says, “He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.”

If so, I suspect he and his wife and his children and his former church will thank God and count it all a blessing.