Category Archives: Loving Across different ways of being in the world.
Sexual Morals and Love in our Day
I’m turning 89. My generation grew up not even knowing what queer meant. We knew boys who seemed feminine. My brother, who is very religious, dated a woman for ten years who was happy to be treated like a sister. At 40 he gave up and accepted that he was gay because he wanted to love someone his whole life. He and I discovered that we had lesbians in two generations of both sides of our family. We discovered the first, a great-great aunt who in the turn of the century in the late 1890’s became a pediatrician and founded a clinic for poor children in California. I saw a beautiful woman in a long dress in a photo of my cousin’s family album and asked who she was. When told of her achievements at a time when she would have had to been amazing to do this, I asked why I had never heard of her. My cousin pointed out another woman in the background of the photo and said, “Well, she lived with this woman all her life.” My brother and I also agreed that on our other side, a great-aunt who was very masculine and lived a very sad solitary life was also gay though she chose to live her life alone. My brother and his spouse have been together over 35 years. So, I was prepared then when one of my sons came out after college and moved to California where it was more acceptable. He and his husband have been together thirty years. Another son also decided he was gay at about thirty. My husband has one gay cousin that we know of. So, I’ve become pretty sure it’s a recessive gene that has to be on both sides of a family. We now have a grandchild that is trans. My brother and one of my gay sons have always been very religious and kind. And my other son and my grandchild are two of the kindest people I’ve ever known. In my spiritual journey and my sixty year heterosexual marriage, my experience has led me to see marriage as the best opportunity to make the journey from the neediness of a baby to the spiritual maturity of being able to love another person more than yourself. Our current sexual permissiveness for heterosexuals is much more likely to create children born into situations that are tragic. I personally did not choose abortion as a Catholic though I almost died having a fifth child by Cesarean Section when my church taught me it was wrong to use birth control. I have come to see NOT using birth control as one of the greatest evils we are currently doing since more children are suffering from that. Interestingly enough, if being gay had been accepted all along, so gays didn’t marry women and lesbians didn’t marry men trying to conform, maybe the genes would have died out by now! My first experience personally of becoming aware of gays was when taking art classes from gay teachers, which opened my eyes to how much better gay men treat women, even ugly women and old women. They treat us as interesting individuals and friends. Gays often have more women friends than men, because they treat them as people, not sex objects. I am a born again Christian, who has experienced the unconditional love of God expressed in Jesus and many miracles, including in my last years becoming free of judging people, even the judgmental people who find safety in the rules as they have learned them. I don’t agree with them and I see the terrible harm it does, but I understand them. Once you understand people, you may not agree and may work hard to make society more loving of minorities, but understanding frees us of hating and judging.
Can We Love All?
Congressman John Lewis (1940–2020) describes his Christian faith as the foundation of his commitment to nonviolence:
I believe in the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. I accepted it not simply as a technique or as a tactic, but as a way of life, a way of living. We have to arrive at the point, as believers in the Christian faith, that in every human being there is a spark of divinity. Every human personality is something sacred, something special. We don’t have a right, as another person or as a nation, to destroy that spark of divinity, that spark of humanity, that is made and created in the image of God.
I saw Sheriff Clark in Selma, or Bull Connor in Birmingham, or George Wallace, the governor of Alabama, as victims of the system. We were not out to destroy these men. We were out to destroy a vicious and evil system. [1]
Theologian Walter Wink (1935–2012) recalls a tense moment in Selma in which a reminder to love their enemies shocked the conscience of the crowd and forged a nonviolent path forward:
King so imbued this understanding of nonviolence into his followers that it became the ethos of the entire civil rights movement. One evening … the large crowd of black and white activists standing outside the Ebenezer Baptist Church was electrified by the sudden arrival of a black funeral home operator from Montgomery. He reported that a group of black students demonstrating near the capitol just that afternoon had been surrounded by police on horseback, all escape barred, and cynically commanded to disperse or take the consequences. Then the mounted police waded into the students and beat them at will. Police prevented ambulances from reaching the injured for two hours….
The crowd outside the church seethed with rage. Cries went up, “Let’s march!” Behind us, across the street, stood, rank on rank, the Alabama State Troopers and the local police forces of Sheriff Jim Clark. The situation was explosive. A young black minister stepped to the microphone and said, “It’s time we sang a song.” He opened with the line, “Do you love Martin King?” to which those who knew the song responded, “Certainly, Lord!”… Right through the chain of command of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference he went, the crowd each time echoing, warming to the song, “Certainly, certainly, certainly Lord!” Without warning he sang out, “Do you love Jim Clark?”—the Sheriff?! “Cer … certainly, Lord” came the stunned, halting reply. “Do you love Jim Clark?” “Certainly, Lord”—it was stronger this time. “Do you love Jim Clark?” Now the point had sunk in, as surely as Amos’ in chapters 1 and 2: “Certainly, certainly, certainly Lord!”
Rev. James Bevel then took the mike. We are not just fighting for our rights, he said, but for the good of the whole society. “It’s not enough to defeat Jim Clark—do you hear me Jim?—we want you converted. We cannot win by hating our oppressors. We have to love them into changing.”
The Spiritual Journey to Wholeness
I am an idealist: The positive is that I want to make things better and often can. The negative is that since nothing and no one is perfect in this life, I have to fight the tendency to always be unhappy with what is.
I’m a people person: Relationships are important to me. The positive is that I reach out to people and notice and can respond to their obvious needs. The negative is that many people are not about relationship and either don’t notice my needs or find them overwhelming.
I respond to life emotionally first. The positive is that I care about people and want to help them. The downside is that I am not logical about limits to what I or others can do and am susceptible to giving up on using my gifts and sometimes on relationships.
I am intuitive which helps me be open to new ideas and possibilities and see connections that others may not see between cause and effect. The downside is that sometimes I connect things people do, or do not say or do, to motivations that aren’t real.
I focus on ideas, thoughts, and possibilities which can help me be creative and open to learning new things. But the downside is I often literally don’t SEE the concrete world around me that is important to others.
We are born with different tendencies to personal focus and values, so we have strengths and weaknesses in different areas, but our birth families and lives may challenge us to develop coping skills different, but less effective, than our natural gifts. So the degree of focus and competence will vary some, but generally not completely. We literally see and hear differently in the same situation. We did not get to chose this. And it affects everything.
The differences for all of us are loosely: Focus outward vs focus inward. Focus on the concrete and known vs seeking new ideas and possibilities. Responding to people and the world from logic vs emotions. The need to move quickly to closure/decisions vs wanting to stay open to other possibilities.
Our upbringing and early influences and survival needs can affect the strength and thus the balance of these tendencies, but will not wipe them out. So we can end up being a square peg in a round hole in our lifestyles, professions, relationships, and even religions.
I stress type differences because it was what I studied and actively worked with for twenty years and understanding it made a huge difference in my marriage of sixty years, since Julian and I were extreme opposites in every area of differences.
This does make marriage more challenging, but once understood it can not only help stay together, it can help us grow and change and become more balanced and understanding of those different from ourselves and free us to love across differences.
What I am working on understanding is if those of us who are : focused outward, open to possibilities, and inclined to stay open to possibilities may be called to lead in attempts to understand one another, so we can allow and maybe even benefit from a balance in these personality traits. Understanding frees us from hating and judging.
But it really has to begin by understanding and accepting the reality of our own strengths and weaknesses. For me understanding these differences helped me value my strengths and understand why some things are so hard for me and that I had to often learn by failing. This eventually not only helped me forgive myself for my failures, but to forgive those I love for their undeveloped sides. We’ve all got them, because we are unfinished human beings.
Now, something I began to recognize in my sixties was that I was becoming more capable in my weak areas, but at the temporary cost of my strengths even in my ways of being open to grace. Since women tend to share both their ups and downs, friends around my age began to struggle with the same thing. It began to occur to me that the second half of life is a series of dying to strengths (self) so we can develop our weak side. This is a journey to wholeness, perhaps holiness.
It’s nothing short of miraculous. When Julian was dying those two years, he needed caregiving in ways that used to would have been impossible for me. I’m sure since he knew me so well, that it was terrifying when I had to do things to/for him that required focus on small physical details and using physical skills that he knew I didn’t have! God bless him! And yes, it was scary and challenging for me and at the end I was grateful that he could have professional medical care in the nursing home though I stayed with him there for five months. But what a blessing for me. I was able to love him in ways I never could have before. And if we are open to these challenges of change, we will not only be able to love in ways we have never loved before, but to also better understand and love those very different from us. No one dies perfect, but we can die like Jesus did, understanding even our enemies.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 