When you're the leader of thousands of religious believers, you couldn't wish for a worse revelation than a male prostitute telling the press he'd had sex with you for three years, and that you'd tried to buy drugs from him.

A gay junkie? Which church leader would want to be that?

Not Ted Haggard, a leading American evangelist, who faced those accusations last week and whose subsequent fall from grace has been sudden, swift and complete.

He has been fired from the church he founded, has resigned from the evangelical association of which he was president, and, worst of all, now has to confess to being a "deceiver and a liar".

After days of denying it, he now says he is guilty of "sexual immorality". There is a "repulsive and dark" part of him that he's been "warring against all of (his) adult life".

How do you react to a thunderbolt? With distress, revulsion, disillusionment? Maybe those who knew and loved him would also forgive him.

From the public, there is condemnation for the deceit and the hypocrisy (Ted Haggard was against gay marriages. In fact, it was his hypocrisy which sparked the male prostitute's expose.)

As for me, I found it unutterably sad that he had to live in denial for 50 years, that he got married and had five children even as he struggled with accepting himself for who he was.

Of course, not all of his life was a lie, but to have to sneak off for illicit trysts while outwardly condemning the very thing you are? What does that do to a person?

This whole ghastly affair, however, could turn out to be a blessing. It depends on the man himself.

Now that the worst has happened, maybe he'll see that the only person who should judge him is his maker. Not anyone else, not even himself.

And now that his secret is in the open, he won't have to run and hide any more.

It's really up to him. He could run away, wait for everything to die down and the world to forget about him so that he can carry on as he did before, living a lie.

Or he could choose to face himself honestly, without shame or loathing or fear, for the first time in his life. It could be he owes that much to himself and to his wife and children.

Neither path is an easy choice, but the strange thing about the truth is that it sets you free

This story first appeared in Mind Your Body on Nov 8, 2006.