Hearts and Thoughts, They Fade... Fade Away.
L and I watched a documentary tonight called
">For The Bible Tells Me So. Basically, the filmmakers interviewed parents with LGBT kids, both young and grown, and also interviewed different theologians, pastors, ministers etc. regarding how the Bible is interpreted in regards to homosexuality.
This topic will always be one that hits a chord with me, and for many reasons. My religious history is, uh, sordid to say the least. My mother was raised baptist, my father was catholic. We were not raised in a "christian" household by any standard. We did go to a Wednesday youth group, but all I really remember from that was that we were supposed to memorize verses and we got pins and patches for doing it. More than anything, I remember feeling terrified and never knowing why. I thought that if I was bad in church that I would go straight to hell. (Maybe we never got past the vengeful God of the old testament...) As adults, my siblings and I have faiths that are as different as we all are. We have all found a way to make our beliefs work in a way that not only tolerates the rampant amount of queer/homosexual issues in our family, but that really embrace and allow for them.
My mother, though, is another story.
I don't want to come off here as harsh. This is the woman who bore me from her womb, who worked nights on her feet in a hospital so she could sleep during the day and be home with us. She once took back new outfits she had bought (and she never, ever spent money on herself for anything) because I needed glasses. She began a family with my dad when she was nineteen, and I know that both of them did the best they could with us for being so young and inexperienced. And they did love us, which is so much more than I can say for a lot of the nineteen-year-old parents that I have encountered. I see obligation there, but not love.
All that being said, my mother and I have a very surface level "relationship." Being the last child, and also being the only child to be in the house when the divorce was happening, I saw a different side of my mom. I was there before she found religion to be the answer to her questions. I was there when she would sleep for twenty hours a day on the couch in the living room. She went so far as to shut off the heat to her old bedroom, and I don't think she ever went there again. I slept on the floor of her old bedroom on the part of the carpet that looked new instead of worn from where their bed had sat for so many years. During this period of my mother, I don't know that I stepped up the way I should have. I don't know what I could have done at 17 that would have made anything better. I tried to understand, I tried to sympathize, but I was a self-involved teenager with the most angst this side of the Mississip'.
I knew it would be a pointless endeavor to "come out" to her and to think there would be any amount of acceptance with it. I knew better, but part of me dared to hope. I thought that she might be able to look past what had happened with her husband and attempt to understand. Instead, as I really expected, I got the whole hate the sin, love the sinner talk. Really, I'd rather you say you just hate me. Because that's what you're truly saying anyway if you hate something that is so important and intrinsic to who I am. I remember the day I told her that I thought our relationship had changed, and that I didn't think she liked me anymore. I cried, which is not something I often did in front of her. She didn't cry. She calmly stated that she can only understand the Bible the way it is "revealed" to her. It was her Truth.
I say I don't care, and I think I've said it so much it's true now. But I am not too proud to say that I miss my mother. I miss her. I miss who she was before Jesus came into the picture. Sometimes I want nothing more in this world than to be able to crawl onto her lap and lay my head on her chest and breathe in her perfume while she rocks me in her chair. I want to sit on the hang-glider with her and sing I Went to the Animal Fair. I want it to be 7:52 in the morning so she can be reading Little House on the Prairie books to me before the bus comes at 8:05. I want that complete and total acceptance, and the assurance that comes with it that not only are you loved, but you are enjoyed.
But that will not happen again with my mother. I've broken her heart too many times in making the decision to be true to who I think I am. I will not apologize for that decision because I know it is the only decision I could have made/continue to make. I know, too, that there is a sadness that goes through me, in places I don't even know exist, because of it.
I'm going full circle with this, I promise. If I'm going to talk about religion, I'm going to talk about it theologically because faith-based religion isn't enough for me. I do not believe in absolutes, and consequently I do not believe in absolute truth with a capital T. I do not believe there is one path to salvation, or that one must walk a path to get there. I do not believe that a soul is something given, rather I think it is earned. I cannot tell you if there is a god, if some guy walked the earth 2000 years ago with radical, crazy ideas. What I can tell you is that I believe in love, kindness and possibility. If this makes me an agnostic, I suppose that's what I am. I'm not sure what label fits me...
I do know, however, that unconditional love is just that, and if any religion, no matter what it is, causes a parent's love to become conditional...
it's heresy.
">For The Bible Tells Me So. Basically, the filmmakers interviewed parents with LGBT kids, both young and grown, and also interviewed different theologians, pastors, ministers etc. regarding how the Bible is interpreted in regards to homosexuality.
This topic will always be one that hits a chord with me, and for many reasons. My religious history is, uh, sordid to say the least. My mother was raised baptist, my father was catholic. We were not raised in a "christian" household by any standard. We did go to a Wednesday youth group, but all I really remember from that was that we were supposed to memorize verses and we got pins and patches for doing it. More than anything, I remember feeling terrified and never knowing why. I thought that if I was bad in church that I would go straight to hell. (Maybe we never got past the vengeful God of the old testament...) As adults, my siblings and I have faiths that are as different as we all are. We have all found a way to make our beliefs work in a way that not only tolerates the rampant amount of queer/homosexual issues in our family, but that really embrace and allow for them.
My mother, though, is another story.
I don't want to come off here as harsh. This is the woman who bore me from her womb, who worked nights on her feet in a hospital so she could sleep during the day and be home with us. She once took back new outfits she had bought (and she never, ever spent money on herself for anything) because I needed glasses. She began a family with my dad when she was nineteen, and I know that both of them did the best they could with us for being so young and inexperienced. And they did love us, which is so much more than I can say for a lot of the nineteen-year-old parents that I have encountered. I see obligation there, but not love.
All that being said, my mother and I have a very surface level "relationship." Being the last child, and also being the only child to be in the house when the divorce was happening, I saw a different side of my mom. I was there before she found religion to be the answer to her questions. I was there when she would sleep for twenty hours a day on the couch in the living room. She went so far as to shut off the heat to her old bedroom, and I don't think she ever went there again. I slept on the floor of her old bedroom on the part of the carpet that looked new instead of worn from where their bed had sat for so many years. During this period of my mother, I don't know that I stepped up the way I should have. I don't know what I could have done at 17 that would have made anything better. I tried to understand, I tried to sympathize, but I was a self-involved teenager with the most angst this side of the Mississip'.
I knew it would be a pointless endeavor to "come out" to her and to think there would be any amount of acceptance with it. I knew better, but part of me dared to hope. I thought that she might be able to look past what had happened with her husband and attempt to understand. Instead, as I really expected, I got the whole hate the sin, love the sinner talk. Really, I'd rather you say you just hate me. Because that's what you're truly saying anyway if you hate something that is so important and intrinsic to who I am. I remember the day I told her that I thought our relationship had changed, and that I didn't think she liked me anymore. I cried, which is not something I often did in front of her. She didn't cry. She calmly stated that she can only understand the Bible the way it is "revealed" to her. It was her Truth.
I say I don't care, and I think I've said it so much it's true now. But I am not too proud to say that I miss my mother. I miss her. I miss who she was before Jesus came into the picture. Sometimes I want nothing more in this world than to be able to crawl onto her lap and lay my head on her chest and breathe in her perfume while she rocks me in her chair. I want to sit on the hang-glider with her and sing I Went to the Animal Fair. I want it to be 7:52 in the morning so she can be reading Little House on the Prairie books to me before the bus comes at 8:05. I want that complete and total acceptance, and the assurance that comes with it that not only are you loved, but you are enjoyed.
But that will not happen again with my mother. I've broken her heart too many times in making the decision to be true to who I think I am. I will not apologize for that decision because I know it is the only decision I could have made/continue to make. I know, too, that there is a sadness that goes through me, in places I don't even know exist, because of it.
I'm going full circle with this, I promise. If I'm going to talk about religion, I'm going to talk about it theologically because faith-based religion isn't enough for me. I do not believe in absolutes, and consequently I do not believe in absolute truth with a capital T. I do not believe there is one path to salvation, or that one must walk a path to get there. I do not believe that a soul is something given, rather I think it is earned. I cannot tell you if there is a god, if some guy walked the earth 2000 years ago with radical, crazy ideas. What I can tell you is that I believe in love, kindness and possibility. If this makes me an agnostic, I suppose that's what I am. I'm not sure what label fits me...
I do know, however, that unconditional love is just that, and if any religion, no matter what it is, causes a parent's love to become conditional...
it's heresy.