Cast Into the Depths, But Then Dredged Back Up

Today’s post is from Fr. Gregory Greiten is a priest of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and pastor of Queen of Apostles Parish in Pewaukee, Wisconsin. He came out publicly as a gay Catholic priest in December 2017.

The liturgical readings for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time can be found by clicking here.

A servant owed his king an amount so vast that the gospel writer doesn’t even try to make it plausible: ten thousand talents. Biblical scholars have tried to put this in perspective for us. In today’s terms, we are talking about a debt in the tens of trillions of dollars. It was not a debt to be repaid. It was a debt that could only be forgiven, or it would exist forever.

And the king forgives it. Not partially. Not on a payment plan. Entirely, and on the spot. That servant then walks out, finds a fellow servant who owes him a comparatively miniscule amount  and has him thrown in prison for it. The king finds out, and asks the question at the center of this whole Gospel: “Should you not have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?”

I want to place another image next to this one because I think this parable only tells us half of the story about mercy. The prophet Micah gives us the other half of the debt story: “You will cast into the depths of the sea all our sins” (Micah 7:19).

All our sins. Not filed away. Not placed in a drawer to be reopened later if needed. Cast into the depths, a place where nothing is retrieved.

Because I live in Milwaukee,  I ask people to imagine putting a single drop of water into the lake. Let that one drop represent everything you are ashamed of, everything you have done and left undone. Now try to find it again. You cannot. Lake Michigan holds something like ninety-eight quadrillion individual drops of water. Your drop has not been hidden somewhere within it. It has been absorbed into something so much larger than itself that it no longer exists as a separate thing at all.

This is what Micah promises about the mercy of God. Not suppression. Not quiet toleration. Dissolution into an ocean so vast that the thing forgiven simply ceases to be retrievable.

For years, I have sat with the gospel  parable and asked myself: which character am I? I mostly assumed I was the servant who is forgiven much and must, in turn, forgive others. But in the spirit of the pastoral honesty this gospel passage calls for,there is another way to read this story, and it is not a comfortable one for the institution I serve.

Many LGBTQ+ Catholics know exactly what it is to have something cast into the depths, only to watch it dredged back up. A person comes out, finds the courage to live honestly before God and their community, and is met not with the completeness of mercy but with old language resurrected yet again: “intrinsically disordered.”. A policy invoked as though grace had never touched the matter at all. The debt was supposed to have been cast into the depths. Instead, it keeps surfacing, hauled back up by hands that have been forgiven an unpayable amount.

 In October 2022 at St. Bernadette Parish, we celebrated a Mass of Inclusion  for the LGBTQ+ community, their families, and allies. Afterward I was summoned to a meeting at the archdiocesan office where the plain message was that no such Mass should happen again (this occurred under an archbishop now retired, not the present archbishop). I do not say this bitterly, but if God is willing to forgive an unpayable debt of an institution, including the church, that institution cannot refuse its own members over perceived debts as small as who they love or how they were made.

Forgiveness and forgetting are not the same thing, though. In today’s first reading,Sirach does not ask us to pretend harm never happened:“Remember your last days, set enmity aside; remember death and decay, and cease from sin.” We are permitted, perhaps even required, to remember. What we are not permitted to do is let that memory calcify into a grip on someone else’s throat.

For those who carry real wounds from the church and I know many LGBTQ+ people do because I have carried them, too–I believe the Gospel does not ask you to release those wounds before the institution itself has done the harder work of examining its own unpayable debts. But I also believe, from my own experience, that not  forgiving is its own kind of prison. As many have noted, resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. I have found this to be true even when the resentment is earned. It does not touch the one who wronged you. It only poisons the one who carries it.

Last month, I celebrated the funeral of my mother, Jean. IShe gave me what the institutional Church has rarely been able to give in the same measure: she loved and accepted me for who I really am.

I always had a place at the table. I never had to earn it. It was simply there, waiting for me, every time.

This is what church is at its best. Not a ledger to be balanced. Not a debt held over someone’s head until they prove themselves worthy of belonging. A table where you already have a place, because love got there before you did. This is what forgiveness and grace look like when they are fully alive in a person. This is what an ocean of mercy actually is, not an idea in a homily, but a mother setting a place at the table without ever once asking her son to earn it.

Forgiveness from the heart does not require you to forget, to minimize, or to reconcile prematurely. It requires only that you refuse to let what was done to you become the thing that defines the shape of your own heart going forward.

And to my brothers and sisters within Church leadership, myself included: may we have the humility to remember how much we have been forgiven, and never again mistake the pocket change owed by our LGBTQ+ family for anything worth choking someone over. May we learn, at last, to set the table the way our mothers did.

—Father Gregory Greiten, September 13, 2026