Love Appeared and Saved me from Despair.

 

Some of my hardest spiritual times were when I was in seminary at Earlham School of Religion in Richmond, IN.  I chose to go there at the age of 25.  I felt called to ministry, and it had been affirmed repeatedly.  I was also still living that double life, but I thought seminary would save me from it and I would be moulded into the minister I was supposed to be.

Wrong.

I should have known the moment I started taking Spiritual Preparation for Ministry. Bill Taber was my professor. The point of the course was to get us to go deeply spiritually.  The problem was when I looked deeply, I saw into the abyss, and was unprepared for the demons that were waiting there.

At the time I believed in real demons, but that's not the point. There were certainly psychological ones.  You see, I really had never dealt with how I was treated by kids at my school growing up. I was called it all: sissy, queer, faggot. We all laughed at antigay humorists.  I took note, though.  I was the biggest homophobe; I truly was afraid of it. I never really could make peace that I was gay. Oh, I would rub that I was gay into anyone's face that opposed it.  I would bring up anything gay and weave it into any conversation. I had fun partying, being campy, going to parades and clubs, being young and silly.  But was I proud? No. Not really. Churches were openly hostile to gay people. We knew the stories of cops entrapping men, men getting gay bashed, families disowning and kicking out their gay kid. It was normal.  My parents gave me no reason to believe they would do the same and yet I also got messages that life would be hard and people wouldn't like me if people knew I was gay.  Like it would ultimately be a choice. All my friends told and laughed at gay jokes.  So did I. (Hey some gay jokes are plain funny).  But I took note.  So there I was in seminary, with none of that resolved, all staring back at me from the abyss.

At Guilford  I celebrated Pride, helped found the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Association at Guilford which still exists today. For my senior project I founded the Gay and Lesbian Resource Center at Guilford, now known as the Bayard Rustin Center.  I revived the Baccalaureate ceremony at Guilford which still goes on today.  This year, an anonymous donor paid for faculty lunch after the baccalaureate ceremony in my honor and in the honor of a person who was important in the spiritual lives of many Guilfordians.  It feels good to have left a legacy. But the young man who left that legacy was struggling so hard with self-hate and the draw of gay pop culture (sex, drugs, dance music).

At Earlham I served on Ministry & Worship.  For my preaching class I preached at all-campus meeting for worship.  I preached on the resurrection.  I remember the night before trying so hard to prep a sermon, but feeling that a prepared sermon was not what God wanted.  I prayed all night.  I did organize the programmed worship:  I chose the hymns.  I chose my elders to sit behind me and hold me in prayer.  The room was packed that day.  John Punshon, my Quakerism professor, and Tom Mullen, my preaching teacher, were there. Everyone was there.  The choir sang whatever song I had chosen.  There were readings from scripture.  Then I rose to preach. I wish I could tell you what I said.  We ended with the song Amazing Grace with the praise god chorus at the end. Afterwards Tom said my sermon was incredible and he had never heard anyone preach on the resurrection like that.   Two Friends, one from Latin America who was lesbian and another who was Australian, told me that before they didn't believe, but now they did.  It was no less than a revival.

So it was clear I had the gift.

But I was also on the side living a life that would ultimately catch up with me.  I shared with my evangelical Quaker friends what was going on, perhaps in too much detail.   One Friend gave me a book on being a prayer warrior from the Moody Bible Institute.  I began to pray every night. Every day.

Weird things began to happen.  One was that the woman who gave me the book started feeling spiritually attacked. She shared with me that her old demons were creeping up; issues long resolved were coming back.  She knew we were under attack.  Then my roommate asked me if I was battling demons.  I immediately accused him of going through stuff in my room.  He absolutely denied it.  It was because he had been praying for me and all of the sudden HE was being attacked spiritually by his own demons.

Then there was the night I was praying, warding off my room and my dreams with the Holy Spirit, and all of the sudden the room became super vivid.  I tried psychedelics in undergrad. It was as if I had droppped a tab.  Everything was super vivid. And then I realized I was not alone. Something was in the room with me.

There was another time I was doing the same thing (warding my dreams), and I was laying in bed. All of the sudden I couldn't move. I could, however, roll. And so I rolled myself off the bed and then I could move again, but stiffly.  Actually that may have been the same night as the spiritual trip. I can't remember. It was back in 1996.

It finally came to a head one day when I was in my living room contemplating all this.  I began to feel despair.  I began to cry.  Then I started sobbing.  It was while I was crying, shoulders heaving, tears dripping down my face onto the carpet, that I saw a pair of feet beneath me.  I was shocked. I knew I was in the presence of something.   "Look at my face" the entity said.  I could not and I cried harder.  "Look at my face" the being repeated to me softly.  "I can't," I replied.  "Look at my face" it coaxed softly.  As I looked up, I saw a robed figure, I assumed male, and then looked into his face.  There was a man, with a face as bright as the sun. Pure light, no human features. The light radiated and filled my vision.  I felt nothing but love, pure love. I knew I was loved.  I assumed at the time it was Jesus.

I wish that would be the happy ending but it was not.   The seminary staff began to suspect that I was mentally ill and needed help. They found a psychiatrist for me who prescribed a medicine combination that made me crazier than a bat out of hell.  I had all sorts of physical side effects that made me sicker.  Later, when I would have the dean of psychiatry at Hopkins as a counselor and doctor, he balked at the regimen I was on.  Every doc and therapist has since.  Things got worse.  Eventually I withdrew from ESR and came home mentally and emotionally unrecognizable.  The process of me having to leave was nothing short of abusive, though through therapy I saw that I had to leave, even if the process was harmful. I needed to go home and get well. Hurt, angry and feeling ashamed and a failure, I moved back in with my family in Tennessee.   A few months later I would meet my future husband.  But it would take decades before I finally decided to make some serious changes.

Did the demons get quiet? No, but I ceased to recognize them as any more than psychological ones.  But they would show up any time I began to get spiritually and emotionally well and I would sabotage all progress.  Was that Jesus that appeared to me that day? I have no idea, though I believed it to be so.   But Love appeared to me that day and saved me from despair.