Sandy Foundation Shaken & Building a New One

You may have heard of the Friends Journal project called QuakerSpeak. If you haven't, here's the link.

Jon Watts came down and we talked for some time regarding Quaker faith.  He was able to put together a couple videos using clips from our talk.   It's easy to talk to Jon.

Time for a little testimony: Mom, if you're reading this, this is when you groan - again.

Most of my adult life I've struggled with various hurts, habits and hang-ups.   I've lived most of my life operating out of fear, from a defensive place.  Have you ever seen or known a cute, playful, spastic dog that wants attention but for no reason will snarl and snap, but then cower? That been me most of my life.

I wasn't always so fearful.  Evidently, when I was a toddler (as young as 2 or 3), I would run away.  Like a homing pigeon, I'd find my way back.  In Korea, dad had to build a fence so that I'd not run off.  No problem for me! I'd throw my coat over it and climb over, to walk off base and off into -- well wherever I went.  I did the same when we lived in Ft Meade.   When we moved to Tn, mom told me to go walk the neighborhood to find friends. I did. When we moved to another neighborhood when I was in 3rd grade, I did the same thing again. I remember being anxious, but I was willing to do it.

While I didn't care for school and was teased, I managed alright up through sixth grade. Then life threw me a curve ball.  I'll never forget Chris H. Oh, he was so cute.  I probably stared at him way too hard.  One day, in seventh grade in Mrs. Steed's  TN History class, Chris turned around and looked at me and stated "You're a faggot."  Everyone laughed. Even S.S, my friend. Everyone.  I had no clue what that meant.

Now, I'd been teased most of my childhood from first grade onward.  I knew I wasn't the same as other kids since the time I became aware of where I ended and others began.  I was a sissy. I had a lisp, and when I got excited, I would jump up and down with elbows at my waist and wrists dangling limply.  Mom used to tell me to "stop doing that."  I did.  The lisp was corrected through speech therapy.  Boys still played with me somewhat.  I wasn't educationally motivated enough to be  a nerd, and couldn't give a rat's turd about sports, so I usually played with the girls.  I had survived, but now...

"What's that?" I asked Chris.  The entire class laughed.  I looked up. Even S.S., my friend, she was laughing too. I remember feeling so tiny. Everyone seemed to surround me. Everyone got bigger.  "A faggot is..." 

There are a few times in my life that I call "defining moments."  That one was huge.   I had already sensed there was something different about me, and also that there was something wrong with that difference.  From an early age of my effeminate displays of joy, to the occasional mocking of my lisp, to being called a "sissy" I already felt like I didn't belong. Still, I had some friends.  But at that moment, as everyone including my so-called friends roared laughing, I realized there was a name for what I felt, for people like me; and everyone felt the same way about it. What I felt about other boys was bad and it was something worth humiliating me.

To make things worse, I got an itch to start attending church.  I went to school with this kid Martin and his sister was my babysitter.  They lived up the street from me, so they took me to church with them.  The church was huge; Central Baptist of Bearden.  Kids there didn't seem to be any friendlier. The Sunday school teachers weren't friendly at all.  I always wondered why Martin seemed less friendly at church than he was at school.  I had a mad crush on his older sister, though, and she was friendly no matter where we were. I adored her.   The family was nice and took me to evening services and church dinners.  Oh, the spaghetti dinners were so good!   My thirst to know God grew, and I began studying the Bible and listening to Focus on the Family,  In Touch and Chuck Swindol's Insight for Living.  It was Chuck's ministry that spoke most to me.   I lasted only a little while at Central Baptist.  For whatever reason, the final straw was when the pastor built up his sermon to the climax relating salvation to a "Touch Down!"   Football.  He lost me with football.

About the same time, also in seventh grade, my librarian, Sabra Brown, had already taken me under her wing and had introduced me to, among other great books, the Witch of Blackbird Pond.   It didn't take long for me to inquire about the Quakers, and when my parents figured out I was considering going to a Quaker meeting, they forbade it.  That only had me reading more.   The problem was that the only Christianity I was exposed to was Evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity.  I did go to Catholic youth group occasionally with a friend, but they didn't teach me anything about Jesus (though they did reinforce the Quaker position that the Bible is not to be used the way fundamentalists use it).   Once I started going to Quaker meeting, I met Quakers who were either opposed to Christian expression or ones who didn't seem much different than other Protestants.  The particularly Quaker expression of Christianity wasn't preached much.  I felt betrayed; that I had found a faith that wasn't even practiced, and yet I also felt like God wanted me to stay put.  I was confused spiritually. All this while my hormones are raging, my love of God is budding, and fear that these feelings that I have about other boys will lead me to spiritual and social ruin.  I was emotionally and spiritually insecure -- and a teenage boy.

With all of this fear I needed to be right about something.  I finally came to this conclusion:  Early Quakers were right, everything else was apostasy.  Homosexuality was wrong; even early Friends evidently  believed in the death penalty for it (I found it doing research in high school, I can't quote the source here).   War was wrong and people would die in hell for it.   Oh, I believed in the same God the Baptists did; the angry judgmental one in whose son I needed to believe else we all die. The only twist was that I believed that Jesus was the Light and that everyone had the Light so everyone could be saved by following the Light even if they thought it was the Buddha.

There's an "ism" for that belief, and it's not universalism.  I forget what it's called, but I learned it at ESR.  The point here is that my faith was already up in my head.  My head is a place where I didn't need to be, and my faith was an intellectual and emotional one.  Head knowledge.

West Knoxville Friends put up with me, bless their hearts. Later I would learn that several of them suspected I was gay and struggling.  One thanked me for my faithfulness and became a Christian, only to leave the Society when WKFM approved my union with Russell about 8 years later.

Instead of playing with the neighborhood boys, I immersed myself in studying the Bible and Quakerism along with playing Dungeons and Dragons and read fantasy books in a club house my dad built for me that had electricity, intercom to the house, a yo  shelves and card table (that I still have to this day).   I stayed away from my family as much as possible.  I ran around with Leslie, Carey, Paula, Ann and a few others in high school, but honestly I kept an emotional distance from them.  The closer I came to realizing I was gay, the more I withdrew.  While I rarely heard anything anti-gay at Quaker meeting, I heard it daily on those radio shows I listened to while drawing maps and creating new fantasy D&D worlds.   Gays became the big cultural divide. The gay rights movement was burgeoning, and I was going to come out right when it went bang.   At 15 I felt suicidal and finally asked dad if I could see a psychologist; his response "there's nothing you can tell a psychologist that you can't tell us" was a "no."  Um, I feel like I'm gay, that I'm going to go to hell, you guys have already told me if I act out on it I'll be unhappy my whole life, my spiritual mentor at West Knoxville is an ex-gay therapist, people call me faggot daily at school.  My dad didn't know about school. How do you tell your dad that?  So I just corked it.  When mom caught me a year later walking down the beach with a man, her disgusted reaction would throw me back from coming out a good two years. 

I had some bright spots along the way.  Whereas my childhood friends and school friends seemed to try to figure out if I was gay with "gotcha" questions, the Kuehn family would take me in and give me sanctuary.  Marian and Susan would be like sisters to me.  First close to Su, then to Marian, it would be to them that I would start to come out.  No judgment from any member of that family; not even Jim (God rest his soul- 12/2017).   I would mow the lawn to Cyndi Lauper  and the B-52s,  go to the lake with Paula and sing to the Violent Femmes,  and fall asleep nightly to Laurie Anderson.    I laughed with kids on my swim team as we sat under plastic seats during thunderstorms and did dirty mad-libs.  I wasn't friendless.  I wasn't universally hated.  I just didn't believe that any of them could really like me if they knew I what I was.  I didn't believe in the friendship and love that I actually did have.  My parents were never mean to me and were actually very affectionate. I just couldn't let them in.

When it came time to choose college, I wanted a Quaker education. I was accepted early decision to Earlham, but ended up at Guilford, or Shangri la.

My first year at GuilCo I came out, though that was an accident.  Quakers in NC would not be helpful in this process, and the Quakers in TN would be too far away to help (though they were like "yup, knew it" when I came out to them).

I was already on a mission to bring people back to Early Quakerism (yes, I was).  I had spent years arguing with my family and Quakers about how they were wrong and early Friends were right.  I drove people nuts, I'm sure.  But it felt so safe to be right, and to have found a place that if I could just make myself fit in, I would be ok.  I would be acceptable. I would be loved.

This self-righteous insecurity was a nuclear energy cell in my being.  I started Guilford as a 0-tolerance, tea-totaling freshman, calling for a 3 strike your out policy (though I felt that was too lenient).  That didn't last long.  Once forced out of the closet (another story for another time) I began drinking and clubbing.  Within a year I lost all scholarships minus some Quaker ones and was put on academic probation.  Max Carter, the campus minister, whom I adored, served as my confessor.  He listened to me go on and on in explicit detail about my constant partying and all that went with it, and look at me with those piercing eyes, but sometimes I would catch a glimpse of shock.  Of all people he was the last person I would want to let down.  One day, sitting in his office he asked me if I felt the Light.  I didn't, not much, no.  "Then thee's sinning." BAM.   Quakers dont' use that word much.  When we do, it's a slap.  I recall Max telling a story about how he didn't spank his kids, but once his daughter needed it; she had just pushed too far and they spanked her when they hadn't ever before. I don't recall if he said whether it had the desired effect on her.  This would not stop me, but his words have run in my conscience since.

You can perhaps image that I didn't have the best coping skills in a private Quaker school 6 hours away from home, after holding myself up in a club house most of my teenage years, hiding from the homophobes, hiding from my parents (God forbid they figure it out; like they almost did when I was 16, and that was awful), and hiding from the truth.  No, when I found sex, alcohol and clubbing, I found freedom.  When New Garden Friends' response to my request for membership was "We've never been in the  business of asking one's sexual orientation and we aren't in it now" and they didn't even touch my call to ministry, I turned to where I could find support  -- gay pop culture.  That's been my narrative, anyway.  Lately, though, I'm realizing there's more to it.  I would spend the next three years being on one hand an activist and on the other living the party life.   I would pull my GPA up above a 3.0 (higher in my major) after that 1.8 my freshman year.  My senior project would be to found what is now called the Bayard Rustin  Center.  I would resurrect the Commencement Ceremony making it an interdenominational meeting for worship.  I would sing my first solo, and wow the crowd (except for my music instructor who, when I was beaming, would say "it could have been better").  But I wouldn't allow my best friends in.  No matter how many friends I had, no matter how much fun I would have, I could not seem to be intimate with boyfriends, friends or family.   I constantly was searching for a way out of myself.   No amount of achievement, no amount of activism, no amount of clubbing can change that I fundamentally disliked myself, distrusted people and emotionally braced myself for disappointents.

Clubbing and partying was my favorite outlet.  I mean, come on.  The music alone was enough. I would get lost in rave music.  Everybody's free to feel good and I sure did.  I remember walking into Warehouse 29 one day with my friend Aldrick C behind me saying "I'll never stop clubbing!"  We were MAHVELOUS. We were FAHBULOUS. We felt WONderful!

There would be one person who would crack through that shell of mine years later.  I graduated Guilford in 1994 and went to Earlham School of Religion in 1995.  It didn't last.   You know that fear I never dealt with?  It reared it's ugly head in seminary.  I was locked in a true spiritual battle for my soul.  I had Quakers praying for me, some were actually in fierce warfare with forces that were beyond what any of us were capable of dealing with.  If I'm losing you here, dear reader, just stick with me, please.  You don't have to believe in the particulars of it, to understand, perhaps the general gist of it.  There were powers greater than me that were leading me into darkness. You can say alcohol, you can say spirits. You can define spirits as chemicals, spiritual beings or people.  People, places and things were driving me further into darkness.  In my spiritual preparation for ministry class, they asked us to go deeply. When I stared into the darkness,  I saw the demons of my past, and I was unprepared.  Ultimately, I had to leave seminary, back to Knoxville, broken, almost to despair.

It was in Knoxville, though, in 1998 that I would meet my future husband.  God has a sense of humor.  I had never really been able to get close to my dad for whatever reason.   My dad is a Capricorn, I'm an Aries.  While these two signs make good business partners, they aren't known for their friendships and romance is discouraged.  Dad is an introvert. I'm an extrovert (though I wonder if that's changing).  Dad was into fishing, gardening, fixing things, dressed like Mr Rogers at best and like homeless when doing yard work (sorry, Dad, if you're reading this).  We  shared a love for writing, but I had long quit doing that.   Dad wasn't particularly religious and I was.   Then came Russell.  Their bday was a day apart.  Both tall, dark hair, English majors with a love of writing, fishing, introverts. Both loved to serenade their lovers with poems or songs.  Both dressed the same (Marian often called Russell "Mr. Rogers.").  If dad could have had a son any  more like him it was Russell.  And Russell drove me the f**k crazy.  So, what did I do? I called mom for advice.  Mom would then say "oh, your father does that. This is what I do" and it would work.   Over time, I came to appreciate and love my father in ways I don't know I could have without having come to love and appreciate Russell.

Russell filled a space in my life.  Unfairly to Russell, I needed someone, anyone, and I met this kid and he was cute. The story is a bit more romantic than that but I'll leave it for another post.  Nevertheless, I wasn't ready for a relationship. Mom had asked me to not date him, but I have a habit of ignoring my mother's advice.  Still, within no time, dad was calling Russell his other son.  Mom and dad fell in love with him.  My whole family did, or at least those who came to know him.    My Quaker meeting in Knoxville, the one against whom I would rail for not being Christian enough, would eventually come to unity to celebrate our commitment.  They would acknowledge, as many would, that while I was the talker, the type-A personality, Russell was the reason, the wisdom and the grounding one in the relationship.

However,  Russell and I ended up moving before our wedding could happen. I earned my masters in education and he received his bachelors.  We wanted a place with a strong arts community but I needed a teaching position that would give me insurance to cover him so he could be free to pursue his writing without being bogged down by a job he hated because he needed insurance. So we picked Baltimore City.  And we hated it.   Both of us had fallen into the club life again.  Marian even warned me about it.  I didn't listen.    In 2001 we separated over it and he would date a guy in New York.  Then he moved home to TN for a while. Mom and dad gave him a car to drive.  Everyone knew I messed up.  My friends, my family, Russell's family.  I loved Russell, but couldn't be intimate with him.  I wouldn't let him in no matter how hard he tried.  He tried harder than anyone should. I did things that would push any reasonable person away.  Finally, I said some cross words to him, he had just met the guy from NY, and he thought "you know what? Fine."

I was devastated.  It was yet another defining moment. I remember  taking Russell back to TN in our Jeep.  We took his stuff down then I drove back to Baltimore.  He drove along with me as far as the Dollywood / Sevierville exit then said goodbye.  The memory of the pain still chokes me up.  When I got back, I cut out lots of people from my life.  I quit cigarettes and the club/party life. My spiritual practice increased with the sole purpose of changing just in case Russ would come back.

9/11 occurred and Russell came back to me with "no expectations of" me whatsoever.  We bought a house in 2002 (I still own it, but no longer live there). I remember when I finally let Russell in. We used to do this silly motion where we'd hold out our arms to one another as if to  embrace the other, motion with both hands for the other person to come give a hug, whine and scrunch our noses and make baby sounds and repeat "me me."  Yeah, two grown men. Think Eddie Monsoon when she wants something.  Usually he would come to me and hug me.  I couldn't just ask for a hug, I had to be a baby about it; to be silly.  One day I came in the front door of our house on Druid Hill Avenue, and he was in the dining room at the foot of the stairs.  I made that silly gesture for him to come give me a hug. "Me me. Me me?" This time he said "no. you come here and give me a hug."  I did as he said.  I went up to him, put my right cheek on his chest, hugged him and he put his arms around me.  And I let him in, completely.  I was his. I trusted him.  I believed in us.  Another defining moment. This is the first time, and only time, I've ever felt that with another man.

I don't remember if it was before or after our marriage in 2003, but there was another memory that sticks out. We were walking up this side street between Cathedral and Maryland, across the street from Leon's . It was midday, and we were walking around.  An older gay couple was walking up Park Ave to our left.  "That will be us one day" we mused.   You see, in my mind, I was Russ' for life.  I knew I had some things to work out. I knew that the past was there manifesting itself in my head in still unhealthy ways, but I didn't feel pressed to deal with it.   I mean, look at how I'd arrived and what I had accomplished!  I served on executive board for Seton Hill, campaigned for Martin O'Malley  and Baltimore County dist 11 candidates for the teacher's union, I served on national committees for Friends General Conference and organized gatherings and served on Ministry and Counsel for FLGBTQC.  I was married to Russell.  I loved and admired the man I married.  Life was working out. I had baggage eating at me but, it seemed to be working itself out enough that I had time.

For a long time I just plowed through life so as not to feel anything.  I never stopped to smell the roses let alone consider the lilies.  I would do anything to feel good and and not have to think too much; that worked for me whether it was clubbing and partying, dating, traveling, working, volunteering, or fighting the Man and the Machine.  I had a certain level of false pride as well when I was married and had all of these positions and titles; I had arrived.   Pride is no counterweight to pain.   Self-satisfaction is no remedy to suffering.   Busyness is no balm.    My love for Russell was true, but the life I had built up around me was of this world.  The World is a foundation of sand.  Russell leaving my world, shook the foundation, and everything fell.

Yet when one build's one's home on a sandy foundation, and that foundation is shaken, the house will fall.  Russell died in 2004, and the ensuing battle between his parents and me was too much.  People rallied to my side and to theirs.  All I wanted for years was for the Groffs to love us, and accept us.  I wanted them to be my inlaws.  I wanted Russell to be happy with them. They believed me to be the man who took away their son, who manipulated and controlled him.  They didn't know how often I pressured Russell to talk to them, to reach out to them, to make peace with them, to give them time to come around.  When he died I needed them so bad, and after he died I needed his family, but instead  I jumped into a relationship I had no business being in. I isolated from friends and my own family, save for a few, and I spiraled downward.  It wouldn't get real bad until 2009 when someone would do something to me which would change my life.  After that, the demons came with swords in hand.

The court case would bring back to the front of my mind all the baggage about being gay and feeling unsafe. It was real.  My relationship was called into question. My morals were called into question. My worth was called into question.   I sat in depositions and in court the center of attention, my life with Russell and my life as a gay man put on display and judged. I was surrounded by support, but it didn't matter.  Russ' parents hated me.  They saw me in a light that was untrue.  It was Chris H. all over again.   C.W., my boyfriend at that time, was a huge support, and my friends and Quaker meeting rallied around me, but I just couldn't connect with that love.  Fear, anger, bitterness, resentment, they festered.  And the cycle of self-destruction took hold.

If I were to leave the story there, (and there is so much more to say), it would be depressing. But, friend, you should know that at this point in my life, there is reason to believe and to hope.  In looking back, I see where it makes sense how I would cope poorly with the cards that were dealt.  I also am beginning to see where I made choices that made things worse.  I ran from love many times when love was offered.  I did accomplish a lot all things considered.  And I was blessed with a marriage in which love and admiration were present and our faith was central; many people live decades with the same person never knowing such affection. 

In this whole time I've gone from being a Quaker (in all its forms) to dabbling in Catholicism, Episcopalianism (I went for a couple years straight), Russian Orthodoxy and paganism.   I kept looking for answers outside of myself through ritual, a different confession, different forms of worship, but the whole time I was running from that still small voice.   You see, that voice, even when I sinned, that voice was there. It never judged me. I have never felt judgment from God. Only love.   And yet, I know that there is much that God's Light will need to illuminate, how I've been wronged and wronged others, where I've missed opportunities to love and be loved, to forgive and to forgive.  That's uncomfortable, and I don't want to feel that discomfort. I've run from it my whole life.

But it hasn't worked for me to run.  I'm tired.  I don't know how I look the way I do, considering how hard I've lived life, but my scars are on the inside and there are plenty there.  Nonetheless, I'm ready to be redeemed from this mess, to have my obsessions and compulsions alleviated.  I'm ready to have God ease my mind, to being centering my life in God, and be assured of his good will and love for me.   My whole life I've professed a certain belief in God, but I would not yield to him.   Just as I was afraid to trust my friends and family, I could not trust God.    I put so much time into becoming a teacher, to serving my community and Quaker meeting, learning Dungeons and Dragons or how to play World of Warcraft.  I studied politics and religion, and have explored my role in racial injustice and white privilege supremacy.  I've spent my entire life in inquiry and seeking knowledge.   It's been hard to come to God this way.   That religious background I had somehow warped my view of God and made my journey difficult, almost resulting in atheism.

Friends teach that the true foundation comes from an experiential (experimental) knowledge of God through his Light, the Light that was Jesus, and that still lives today teaching us directly. That experience of God comes through seeking and yielding to God, to that still small voice, to coming to a place where our faith is built on a rock.  So I'm at a place where I've made a decision to turn my will and my life over to God.   I don't profess more than that, only that I know I'm not God, and that if I understood God, God would not be a power greater than me who could restore me to the child of Light that God wants me to be.   So, I will pay attention to that molecule, that pearl with in me, that within me which seeks to unite with the creator of the universe.  I will try to nurture the seed of love and light within me, however small it may feel sometimes, more than I give attention to the seed of darkness which houses my pain and fear.   In time, I have faith, that my foundation will be true, and I will rest in the knowledge that I am loved and can love too.