The Agony and the Apostasy

Yesterday, I more or less publicly—if you count the ten people who pay attention to my Facebook posts—renounced my participation in organised religion. And then I cried for a good half hour.

The breaking point had been coming for some time. For my entire adult life, I have been patiently explaining that “Christianity” is not monolithic. We have denominations, and we do not all believe the same things, but are bound together by a basic shared philosophy. The former two points are things I still find to be true. The latter is not.

The vast group of people who call themselves Christians do not share the same basic philosophy any more than the Daesh and Boko Haram, and pretty much every other Islamic group ever do. At best, we have a shared scriptural canon and a mostly shared history.

And I am tired of engaging in apologetics. I've tried, and I've failed.

I am probably still willing to call myself Lutheran, of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, but that is so specific that I am not even sure how to go about explaining that. I just want to distance myself from any notion that I might be a Chtistian because I am ashamed of the idea that I might be perceived as such.

The irony is that when I was in elementary school, I attended a nondenominational youth group on Wednesday nights called AWANA (which stands for Approved Workmen are not Ashamed. The phrase is taken from Paul's second epistle to Timothy. Pretty sure it is in the second chapter). Well, perhaps I am not an approved workman, because I am damn well ashamed.

I am also disappointed.

I see nothing of Jesus in the cowards who will not allow Syrian refugees into our country. We did not let Jewish refugees into our country in the thirties, either.

I see nothing of Jesus in the people who hate gay people so much. I do not care what they think of me; I can take care of myself. But I do have a problem with a philosophy that instills fear in people. This has affected me personally, and both breaks my heart and makes me angry.

I see nothing of Jesus in the platitude that “everything happens for a reason” when someone is grieving. Eat that. That is not compassion; that is laziness and cowardice and selfishness.

I could go on.

What I find distressing is that when I, in a fit of pique, did post my anger, I was immediately greeted with the “don't paint us all with a broad brush,” “we aren't all like that,” “I am not like that.”

I KNOW.

I've been fighting this fight for years. I know, better than a lot of people, to be honest, the differences between religious groups. It is not God in whom I have lost my faith, though my relationship with God continues to be complicated. It is the people who claim to follow the philosophy laid out in the Christian scriptures, and I shan't defend them any longer. I have taken enough arrows, especially this year. I am tired.

Take your own damn arrows.

Gutted

I dreaded going to her class. Dreaded it.

In my four years of high school, I only got detentions from her: seven of them in my first semester of freshman year. It got to be a joke. I would be in detention with a whole bunch of other people who never got detentions.

“Miss Clark?” we would ask each other. Solemn nods all around, and then snickers. My best friend received a detention from her for “excessive happiness.”

Miss Clark was mean, and harsh. We found a certain unity in that no one was safe from her ascerbic wit, not even the smartest guy in our grade (probably, actually, in the entire school, for several years before and after our graduating class. Yes, you, Tom). At the time, the only redemption in going to her class was that she made it clear that she thought my archnemesis was the stupidest person she had ever come across.

God bless her.

Miss Clark wore starched men's button-down shirts, stonewashed jeans, and Birkenstocks every day, weather irrelevant. Her grey hair was shaved short on the sides and only a bit longer on top, just enough to curl a bit. And she did not give a good damn what anyone thought about her attire. She, alone of nearly all teachers at Sterling High School, had the spine to tell us when we were being idiots, when we were not thinking things through, or when we were being straight up careless. No one else talked to us like that. She was absolutely terrifying.

I dreaded her class, in which the powers that were enrolled me because I had the temerity to be on the drill team (Do Not Say A Word) and orchestra at the same time. My punishment, therefore, was to have class at half past seven in the morning with the most intimidating teacher I had ever had, who, I was certain, existed solely to torture me.

However, the great thing about it was---and it did not actually take sixteen years of retrospect to come up with this (in other news, Holy God I was a freshman sixteen years ago aaaaahhhhhh)---she never talked down to me. Other teachers would put on their Very Disappointed face and tell me that I simply was not applying myself, and I could do so much better, and I should prioritise their class, et cetera. Not so with Miss Clark.

“Holly Ivy,” she would say, keeping me after class. She always called me Holly Ivy. I do not know why. Probably specifically because it irritated me. “Holly Ivy, what was your point here? Don't say 'uh' to me. This paragraph is completely unecessary. Tell me what your point is here. I would somehow managed to stammer an answer. “Okay, so why did not not write that?” I would say something about how I was not sure if I was right.

In reply, she glanced up, on this occasion, at the door, then lowered her voice. “Holly Ivy. I don't give a damn if you agree with me or if I agree with you. I only care that you can make a decent argument. If your argument is dumb, I will tell you.”

Then she sat down on her desk and winked at me. “You know I'll tell you the truth.”

Damn right she would, like no other adult. If one were to looke up “Brutal Honesty” in a dictionary which included adjectives, Miss Clark's picture would be there, accompanied by no words. Somehow I survived that year.

Imagine my horror when I received my class schedule for my junior year and found out that I had Miss Clark again. I walked into her room, probably looking like I was being led to the gallows. She laughed at me. “Good to see you, too, Holly Ivy.” It turns out that she actually just hated teaching freshman.

Day two of her class, she took me to the book closet and I picked up copies of All Quiet on the Western Front, Catcher in the Rye, The Chosen, and five or six other books I cannot remember right off hand. This year, she said, everyone would read what they wanted, and we would write analytical essays, present our findings, and discuss each other's work in class.

It was amazing, for a couple of weeks.

Then, in a stroke of bullshit of enormous magnitude even for the powers that were at Ross Sterling High School, we were unceremoniously removed from Miss Clark's class and sent to the class of one of the most milquetoast individuals I have ever had the misfortune to come across.*

I did not really get the impact Miss Clark had on me for a few years, but I am pretty sure I survived the Honours program at Lee College because she started getting in my face about thinking at the tender age of fourteen. I survived my bachelor's degree because after having my wee fourteen year old ego ripped to shreds and then nuked from orbit, I was used to criticism and there was not a lot that could faze me. One of my professors actually, sarcastically, told me that she “assume[d] that [I] have more than two brain cells rattling around in there” while lecturing me on some transgression that more than likely had to do with my attendance.

In retrospect, that is one of the greatest complements I have ever received from a professor. Backhanded and brutal, but great.

Normally, when I write one of these essays about someone who had a significant impact on me who has died, I trot out the fact that I, fortunately, am not one of those people who “never listened and now it's too late woe and regret.” This remains true, but still I have some woe and regret because my thirty-year-old self wishes that my eighteen-year-old self would have had the damn sense to go get a mailing address from her so I could keep in touch. I am quite convinced that she had yet more wisdom to impart.

I did run into Miss Clark at the grocery store in Baytown a few years ago, and I hugged her and told her the standard rubbish about what I was doing with my life. I hope that encounter was enough for her to know the affection which I, in retrospect, held for her. I knew that I respected the hell out of her, and I am pretty sure she did know that, so I have that going for me.

However, last night, when I found out that she had died, I felt absolutely gutted. This is what it is like to not realise how much someone means to me until they are gone.

____________
*This was actually the beginning of the end for my high school career. In retaliation for being put into this class, I tested out of junior and senior English. Then I tested out of junior and senior history. Then I tested out of health and government. I tested out of everything except for physics and mathematics. Eat it, GCCISD.

Metaphor About Lack of Ball Possession in a Given Sport

Last night, I wrote to an old friend. I do not know that I will receive a reply; that is fine, I think, because I have said what needed saying and the rest is presently out of my control.

Our estrangement came about before my wedding. That was a fairly stressful time in mine and Amber's lives; I, of course, can only truly speak to my experience. We were living out in the sticks and Amber was working on her thesis. I was dealing mentally with all of the potential ramifications of telling my sundry family members that I was getting married.

More accurately, I was dealing mentally with all of the potential ramifications of telling my sundry family members who I was marrying.

I had had a set-to with my best and oldest friend (C) years before, when Amber or anyone like her was not even on my radar. I had just admitted to myself that I was in love with one of my close friends and dealing with telling people who needed to know. C tole me that she did not think she could come to my wedding if I married a girl, much less be in it. I told her that I would be her bridesmaid if she married my mortal enemy at the South Pole, and made me wear one of those thrice-damned wench dresses from the Renaissance Festival while I was doing so.

When Amber and I got married at the beginning of May, 2009, C was there. As a bonus, she married a very nice man in Wichita Falls in 2007 and I got to wear blue satin. Success!

Since C had given me her positive RSVP, I supposed that when it came to it, my other friends who had been twitchy about the gay would put it aside long enough to come have cake and wish Amber and I well in our life together. It is difficult, if not impossible, to describe how it felt to be told that, really, no, that was not going to happen.

It was definitely orders of magnitude less horrifying than being told that Grandpa had died. Of course.

However, my loyalty is a binary proposition, and so being told that yes, I am her friend, but no, she really would not come to my wedding because Amber is a girl pretty significantly shook my entire worldview. I still do not understand what is so hard about grokking that I love her, and no, please, actually, do not pray that I will change (and what the hell kind of prayer is that, anyway? Dear G-d, please make [insert homo here] abandon her/his wife/husband/spouse and cats/dogs/kids for a person of the opposite gender because that would somehow be better, apparently) because I love this person with everything I am.

And if we are being truly honest here, if G-d is the sort of deity who will condemn me for all time because I married a girl, then I cannot say as how I really need to be associated with that anyway. Fortunately, I am pretty sure that if G-d is in fact sentient, that G-d probably has other things to think about. Really.

I had a point.

Ah, yes. It was that it has sucked all over the place to not have my friend, and that I finally came to a place where I could be less hurt and angry, mostly because I have now been married for two years, and the marriage equality train has left the station and is picking up speed. Also, if things begin to go very poorly over here, I will simply apply to study in a country which recognises all marriages. So, we have options, and what individuals think about who I married is nigh irrelevant at this point. It probably helps that now having been married for TWO WHOLE YEARS that it is really just normal at this point, and I suspect that eventually people will look around and have an epiphany.

At any rate, I feel better having extended the olive branch, difficult as it was on my ego. Egos are the root of most evil anyway, so I expect that the blow will ultimately prove positive.

We SHALL Overcome.

I have seen the photos of the celebrations, and they remind me of the video I saw of the people having cake and punch in celebration when they passed Texas Proposition 2.

Shame on all of you. Shame. Shame on you if you are a supporter of Proposition 8, whether you are in the pictures or not, whether you live in California or not. Nothing but Shame.

You go right on ahead and claim your moral superiority. You go right on ahead and say that your religion is right. But just you remember that not so long ago, your religion and your morals were used to say that black people could not marry white people, that black people could be enslaved by white people, that women could not vote, and that women were property of their fathers or husbands.

You remember that. You remember that because if you support the idea that gays are second-class citizens -- and you do support that idea if you support Proposition 8 and the others around the country -- then you are a bigot, just as sure as you would be if you would deny Michelle Obama the right to vote or Kay Bailey Hutchison the right to serve in the Senate.

This is not the end of this fight; it is merely the beginning. We are not going to go away, and we are not going to sit quietly and defer to your ever so DEEPLY HELD BELIEFS.

I am getting MARRIED to my GIRLFRIEND on 2 May. I am going to vow to her that I will love, honour, cherish, and protect her, that I will be faithful to her forever. And no law of yours is going to change the fact that we will be MARRIED.

So you go on and have your cake and punch; dance and shout with glee that civil rights have been taken away from a group of people who you think are less than you, who you view as disgusting. You go on.

Because I am going to spend the rest of my life with a most extraordinary woman with whom I am in love more deeply than I ever could have imagined and who loves me with the same ferocity, and your hate and anger will not change that.

And in a few years' time, we will be equal, not in your eyes, but in the eyes of the United States which was built on the principle that ALL are created equal.

We Shall Overcome.