I'm in Tennessee at my parents' place on the lake in West Knoxville. It's just gorgeous. The only draw back is the constant swooshing of cars going by the house at 50mph on what was once a rural country road. Now it's in the heart of suburbia. There are days when the traffic backs up from the signals in either direction; so far backed up that the cars sit in front of the house just waiting for traffic to move. Herons and cranes are flying and wading about, swallows are diving around, blue birds are watching their nest. The geese are honking and the ducklings are quacking looking for momma. While we are part of nature it’s weird how creatures and habitats coexist; humans belonging to nature and yet somehow not fitting in unless we are deliberate about.
No, for real, I just had an EMDR appointment this afternoon. Sometimes I minimize or compartmentalize the pain and trauma of my past. Everyone talks about trauma these days. The word is over used. The DSM-5 defines trauma as exposure to actual or threatened death (check), serious injury (check) sexual violence (check) or experiencing repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of traumatic events (check). I experienced bullying, harassment and teasing from 1-12 grades. By the time I got to my senior year of high school I knew I was gay, my friends and family figured out I was gay, the student body who knew me believed I was gay. The only problem is no one was ok with it, not even me.
I never had a sense that I was well-liked in middle school. I had a few friends. I enjoyed creative writing, music, roaming in the woods, riding my bike. I wanted to form a band and almost did. But for some reason the boys never wanted to hang with me for long. At school I was called a sissy or queer. I sucked at sports and was a wimp in gym. I did have quite a bit of sugar in my tank. I vividly remember getting out of my mom's car in the morning one day, taking a deep breath and going into school. Every day felt that way. Someone was always teasing me. Evidently I was an easy target.
Then there was that fateful day when my entire world was exposed. I was sitting in Mrs Steed's Tennessee history class. Mrs Steed had stepped out to go to the faculty lounge (teachers did that back then). She left someone in charge to write names on the board of anyone who misbehaved (snitching indoctrination 101). There was a boy in my class who I found absolutely gorgeous. I must have been staring at him hard that day. All of the desks faced forward. I was about five desks back two or three rows in from the right. Chris, or that's the name I remember, was in the row to my left two or three seats up. One day, that day, he turned around and looked at me and said matter of factly, " you're a faggot." The whole class laughed. I looked around. Even my friends were laughing. The only problem is I had no idea what that word meant. We didn't cuss in my household. "What's that!” I asked. The whole class laughed harder. I guess the irony wasn't lost on these middle schoolers. "Chris" answered me by defining what a faggot was. At that moment, I knew there was a word for the person I was, and I also knew exactly what people thought about people like me, and my friends were included.
It was about that time that I found Quakers through reading "The Witch of Blackbird Pond." I identified with the Quakeress in the story; misunderstood, harassed by Puritans. I was misunderstood, so I thought, but not really. They understood me better than I understood myself. I was a faggot, apparently, after all.
I loved Jesus though, and the Jesus that was presented in Quakerism was so different from the one that the. Baptists presented. Jesus was love. Jesus was always present as the Light within. Jesus could save us from our sins in this life. Quakers didn't preach up sin but focused on the solution: obedience to God. So when I started attending the liberal Quaker meeting, I was anti-gay and Christian. The Friends at West Knoxville saw through anti-gay stuff, but had almost no tolerance for all the Jesus talk. One day I was told in a business meeting to stop using all the Jesus talk. "Too much has been done in the name of Jesus for us to be comfortable with all that Jesus talk." This came from several Friends.
Mom pulled me from the Quaker meeting at that point. She saw that as just another example of religion excluding people.
At Guilford and at Earlham, I experienced this even more. The Christian meetings, mostly with pastors, were supportive of my preaching in their meetings and engaged thoroughly in conversations about Jesus, but once they learned I was gay, it was all side-eyes and distance. Similarly among unprogrammed so-called "universalist" meetings. (ABC universalism - Anything But Christ). I was eldered constantly by Ministry & Counsel committees about my persistent use of Christian language. It really rankled a number of Friends. Then add the paganism and ...
So from the age of 12 to the age of 53 I've never felt at home anywhere. The closest I felt at home is with Homewood Friends when I considered myself a neo-pagan nontheist. That was totally fine at Homewood and among Baltimore Yearly Meeting Quakers.
Then there was the other day when I spoke in meeting and felt that I wasn't faithful in preaching even though I got positive feedback. I realized after sitting with things that I was given an explicitly Christ-centered message full of Bible. Instead of using the words given, I tried to soften it theologically and while it was well-accepted, I knew I wasn't faithful. "Not this again" I moaned upon realizing the truth of things. Please, Light, not this again.
So from my EMDR session, watching a ball go back and forth, I realized something: since that fateful year when I realized I could not be myself with my peers, from my teen years when I realized I couldn’t be myself with other Christians or even liberal Quakers, to those tumultuous times in my early 20s when I was at seminary, completely wracked with a conflicting sense of self, a desire to serve God and no idea how to do that with integrity, up to today, I have not felt able to come full up because I haven't made peace with who I am. I've been seeking community and connection wherever I can, mostly among Quakers, and yet even then, there have been limits as to what Quakers would tolerate.
So my therapist encouraged me to continue working on my trauma, working on the pain, working on healing, coming to wholeness. Integrity. Clarity.
I don't expect any Paul on the road to Damascus moments. But I wouldn't mind one.
In the mean time, I will continue to dig deeper, with help, coming to accept Light and Shadow.
"You're a faggot." Words that if I hear now, I'm like "duh." I don't fit in everywhere, and I won't for this one reason. But there are others. The thing is I can spend the rest of my years trying not to be who I am, and trying to be who I am not. Or, I can take this lesson, and the counsel of my therapist, and connect with the person I am, Light and Shadow, accept that person, and find the places and spaces where I can connect with integrity. The key is to be open, honest and tender to what I learn and is revealed to me.
There's a storm blowing outside. The sky is dark and the rain is pouring. Ominous sounds of thunder echo not so far away. Even in the storm the swallows are perched on the railing, diving into the water for a drink, showering in the rain, doing their thing. In the time it took me to compose this, the rain poured, then the thunder boomed, the sky grew dark, the water was troubled and then got still again. There's a lesson in this somewhere.