Back home in the Tar Heel State, April is an itchy thing. Pine pollen hangs like smoke plumes, clinging to everything without a material shape of its own. It’s nuclear-yellow fallout destabilizing the rhythms of Carolina life. The goal becomes evasion: porch furniture mutated into garage-bound patios, cracked windows into an Allegra armageddon, shoes into golden powder with each stride. It’s my dad’s indelicate toss of flour across biscuit dough on the counter — bristly, scratchy. The pollen torrent roars silent as judgement, the trees’ interminable perfume pumps ejecting clouds with callous determination. You don’t breathe it so much as wear it. You come home and cough it up. You wipe your eyes and still can’t see straight. The pollen is a particulate veil. Not just a nuisance, but a theological event — like incense offered for no one in particular, clouding a sky that should be clear.

And still, the dogwoods bloom.

The state flower of North Carolina, they do it stubbornly, quietly — without asking. They bloom even though the air is hostile and the light undecided. They bloom in latency, in the smog. They bloom because they must. The enviable final. Salvifically perfect. They are what I want to be.

And as I drive to Sunday mass, I see them: there at the tree line, milky white in the amber storm, undulating petals curving toward me tauntingly. The pistil gazes at me like a mocking eye. April is a season before a season, an exercise in the interim. Caught between the cracked dryness of Lent and the dewy promise of Easter, it dithers in Blaise Pascal’s in-between — “neither angel nor beast,” he wrote, so I made a monster of myself in the haze. I was gay and Catholic, and I hated that I was both. Yearning to be the dogwood, I drowned in the rotten odor of the pollen cloud. Clinging to the hope of my spiritual spring, my grasp slipped, and I suffocated in the cloud’s unyieldingness. So I taught myself that loving God meant killing some part of myself.

The thick, yellow lie cursed my skin. I smeared it across my forehead every time I crossed myself in mass. I was afraid of my own becoming — afraid to love what I loved, afraid that God would not call something holy if it wore my face. I hated my voice and would recoil as it pierced through home videos, grating the melodies of a devout Catholic family like an out-of-tune trumpet: sibilant, feminine, perilous. According to the 1992 Catechism on my bookshelf, I’m destined for Hell. The bishops taught me that I subverted human dignity, that I did not love but deviated and each surge in inflection was evidence why. To speak was to rip off my bandages, to flaunt dripping lesions of the social disease I desperately tried to hide. I yearned to go back to the days of my First Communion — Kohl’s suit and azure clip-on tie, clutching a felt arts-and-crafts banner that, in my sprawling infantile handwriting, proclaimed with conviction what I would later convince myself was a lie: “Jesus loves Owen.” That’s what it means when they say you’re “disordered.” It’s not a theological abstraction — it’s a lifetime of inhaling shame. Of hiding. Of drowning.

And so the Church infected my heart with a dogmatic sepsis, hid my God under an unendurable weight. It was the pollen that inflamed my lungs and swelled my eyes. I craved respite from the debility of the battle, but lost my joy in the Resurrection in the fatigue. I pined for Christ to be my deliverance like I coveted the dogwood, but I couldn’t find Him in the place that promised to offer His love. The weight I carried became indistinguishable from the faith itself. That’s what broke me.

Because the tragedy isn’t just my suffering. It’s that the Church, which taught me to seek refuge in Christ, became the very thing that alienated me from Him. It lent me the language of love while denying me its grammar. Told me I was perverse so that I would hide in myself, loathe myself, mistrust the image of God in me. And this is the true theft — not just of dignity, but of the greatest love we’re meant to know. 

The illustrious Catholic thinkers were clear: radical love is the predicate of the Christian mission. As Bernard of Clairvaux teaches, the highest form of love is to love ourselves for the sake of God — to love what God lovingly made. As Thomas Aquinas contends, the very nature and purpose of human existence, its teleology, is to love like and for God. Christ’s principal commandment, the premise of the Christian enterprise — to love your neighbor as yourself — presumes that self-love is sacrosanct. And yet the Church has made that love impossible, has robbed gay people of their humanity by rendering self-love a definitional sin.

This is not fidelity to tradition. It is the pompous distortion of it, a self-anointed clerical class claiming apostolic authority while forsaking apostolic love. They drape their prejudice in liturgy and dare to call it pastoral care. And by doing so, they sever people from the God they vow to serve. When bishops articulate a monopoly on Christ, they make Him inaccessible to people like me. And I remain in the wilderness, choking on the pollen of their proclamations, shouldering the weight of the battle, praying that the Resurrection might be true — not just in theory, but for me.

So I waited. I tried to pray through the pollen. I tried to fix my gaze on the dogwoods. But the pews said nothing back. They pierced me in their sleekness, in the rigidity of their pine grain. Punctured me in their heartless silence as my heart hardened under the wood sealer. I feared the Eucharist as I held it in my juvenile hands, trembling not in reverence but ignominy when face-to-face with God. I capitulated to the fight. I tried not to become anything at all.

But God did not want anything. He wanted me. Jesus came down, not in thunder or vengeance, but in skin. Born to bleed. Born to lose. Born to walk among us — not as Judge but as brother, to suffer the suffocation with us. On a tree twisted like the dogwood, He bore our decay, gave up His own breath just so we could have ours back. And with His final gasp, He forgave — even those who nailed Him there.

This is the madness of our faith: that the same God who gave us the freedom to forsake Him used that freedom to save us. That He entered our Hell to break its bars. That His covenant now welcomes all, even me. Even a gay boy crying in the pew, afraid his own voice might damn him.

God’s love does not abide by human categories. It is not trapped in canonical footnotes or doctrinal loopholes. It does not yield to legalism or bow to cultural panic. It just is. Too vast to name, too reckless to regulate. A love so radiant it scandalizes the righteous. A love big enough to bless the crooked.

This is what Catholic revelation gave me. Not answers, not clarity, but a resurrection: a new life in the courage to love myself as God loves me. The courage to breathe even when the air was thick. The belief that my gayness was not an impediment to salvation but evidence of it, proof that God had not stopped creating. And in learning to love myself for God’s sake, I finally saw what Bernard meant: that the highest form of love is to love yourself as God does, not as the Church conditions you to.

That pollen never fully clears. But the dogwoods still bloom. Every year they bloom.

And come Easter, there they are: on the altar, among the lilies and linen, their petals shaped like little white crosses, each edge blushed in blood. The legend says Christ’s cross was made from dogwood, and so it could never grow straight again. Maybe I was wrong: the dogwood was never perfection, never the emblem of the stainless Catholic, blooming white and unblemished in the pollen storm. And maybe that’s the point.

There is no such thing as the unerring believer, only the one who learns to love their contorted branches. Because to follow Christ is to love like Him. This is what grace is: not purity, but a love agrestal enough to bless what the world calls unworthy. Maybe holiness was never about becoming flawless, but about blooming into the kind of imperfection that love can still recognize — not the faultless, but the beloved. Maybe God does not blossom us despite the cross, but through it — not around the wound, but in it.

Somewhere in those many Aprils, I realized that my waiting was not wasted. The latency was not a punishment. Trying to breathe through the thickness — clinging, desperate, to the hope that I could be loved and perfect — was the most sacred thing I’ve ever done. All that striving was not failure but formation. The pang that made space for grace. The blur that trained my eyes on Christ. I was not abandoned in the haze; I was being remade in it. Not lost, but planted.

What mattered was that I never ceased longing for love, even when it seemed unreachable. That I labored toward Christ’s mercy even when I could not feel it. That I stayed — not because I was certain, but because I was called. Not because it was easy, but because through the cloud I glimpsed something holy. I could never quite give it up, even when it wounded me. Weathering the pollen, I found the storm passed eventually, and in its wake, I saw the dogwood differently: not eternally perfect, but perfectly imperfect. The dogwood does not stretch toward light because it is unscathed, but because it has been bent by love’s weight. And maybe I had to choke on the air to learn how to breathe again. Maybe faith had to blister before it could bind. In clinging to a place in the Church that never made space for me, I found the courage to make that space myself — and in doing so, I practiced the radical love Christ preached, even before I knew that was my project.

And so, if I have bloomed at all — if I have become something worth blessing — it is because of the pollen that once throttled. Even in the haze, that pollen is proof: God is not done with you yet. Resurrection does not always arrive with trumpets. Sometimes Easter comes tenderly. In the breath you thought you’d lost. In a love that breaks through even the impenetrable silence of stone. In petals unfolding through the ache.

So peace be with you, because spring has sprung.