“I’ve had enough of danger
And people on the streets
I’m looking out for angels
Just trying to find some peace
Now I think it’s time
That you let me know
So if you love me
Say you love me
But if you don’t just let me go”
— George Michael, One More Try
“Because of you
I never stray too far from the sidewalk
Because of you
I learned to play on the safe side so I don’t get hurt
Because of you
I find it hard to trust not only me, but everyone around me
Because of you
I am afraid”
— Kelly Clarkson, Because of You
I sat in the parking lot watching the cars pulls in and out of the spots. The corporate signs of Zoe’s Kitchen and Starbucks began to light up as the sun caressed the horizon. The sky became a tapestry of color. On the other end of the cell phone, a woman was interrogating me. Not just any woman, my mother. The questions cut to the core of my identity. The primary concern revolved around my spirituality, as it has for several decades. I’ve learned to welcome the assault that happens as a family member demands an accounting of my beliefs allowing them to stand as judge, jury, and executioner over my words. Tonight was no different, but also not similar. An urgency punctuated the air. Something felt different.
After relaying her doctor’s words about a spreading form of bone cancer, she turned the spotlight towards me. “I wanna talk about your spirituality,” she said. “What do you believe? I’m thinking a lot about death now and I want to know if I’ll ever see you again.” Enveloped in these few words is a whole theology about Protestant Christianity, Jesus, humanity’s sinfulness, a virgin birth, a resurrection, and a certain ascent to particular propositional truths that when said in earnest grant the speaker a life everlasting with streets of gold and mansions in the sky. The corollary being that a rejection of the particular propositional truths grants you a fiery damnation where your flesh is forever tormented.
The question invoked a history the weight of which is hard to carry. In fact, I regularly work to set it down because dragging your family’s history around isn’t merely exhausting it can be incapacitating. Tonight, however, she was determined to know the truth about me.
The immediate felt-need, or pastoral concern, is an elderly woman with a life-threatening disease professing worry about seeing her loved ones again. In this case, me—her son. Phrased this way, the sympathy is rightly directed towards her. My urge to comfort and encourage swelled up.
However, phrased within the context of our history unfolds the dark recesses of power, coercion, abuse, trauma, and a particular form of knowing. I was trapped between two expressions. Unsure how to respond.
Speechless.
The history with my mother involves some narcissism, a lot of co-dependency, and the perpetual feeling that I’m not living up to my end of the familia bargain. One thing to know in my family is that your identity is inextricably linked to your position within the family. What you can provide to the family, what you do for the family, how you support the family determines your status within the family. This family, in my background, is a tight-knit, group comprised of mother, father, and sister. That’s it. All else are outsiders. Potential threats. In order to preserve the family, you maintain a strict in-group status. Tonight, I was the potential threat. I may, in fact, be the outsider. She demanded an accounting. She wanted to know.
I searched for words to offer her comfort. “Are you a Christian?” she asked.
“I went to and work at a seminary,” I told her.
“I know,” she said, “but we never talk about spiritual things, and I don’t know where you stand on anything.”
My mind searched for a shared language to help us grasp a common reality.
I wanted to interject, “well you coulda asked!!!” But that thought never reached my lips. “If that was your concern, you knew I’d been to seminary and frequently talk about these topics…why didn’t you bring it up?” But that thought never reached my lips either. “You know I’m pursuing a doctoral degree but you never ask about what I’m studying only preferring to bask in your own ignorance and surface-level conversation!” But that thought most certainly never reached my lips! As Ms Clarkson says later in her song, “My heart can’t possibly break when it wasn’t even whole to start with.”
But I may be just as much to blame here. After her third suicide attempt—one she attempted after having gotten in an argument with me in 2009 on the phone while in a Pet Smart parking lot—I decided that the relationship wasn’t safe. So her own ignorance may also be, in part, my own doing choosing to keep her at arm’s length for fear of her making a choice to end her existence should we disagree. I couldn’t, I wouldn’t take that chance again. So I remained aloof. Distant. Passionately disconnected. “Because of you, I am afraid.” The words resonate in my ears, while the phone conveys her demands.
Instead, I told her that I no longer believe as my conservative Evangelical background had taught me. But I believe being human means being bent, yet we are made in the image of God. I believe Jesus was God incarnated like us and he lived a life that worked to subvert the culture where the last become first, the poor become rich, and the oppressed are liberated—an upside down kingdom built on entirely different principles. I follow a Jesus who called the powerful to account, undermined political structures, and was murdered by the state. I told her that I don’t follow a white Jesus who primarily concerns himself with my comfort, but demands that I—a white male—have a particular cross to carry in a society that works to remove me from the cross all the time. A society that has placed me in Caesar’s house.
“To whom much is given, much is required, ” she responded.
She seemed placated by this response. Primarily, because I affirmed the propositional truths that allow her to maintain in-group identity with her son. But I’m drawn to the lyrics of the songs above. I’ve had enough of danger, but I’m afraid. I’m looking out for angles, but I mostly just find demons. If you love me, just trust me. Let me find my own way. Just let me go. I know it’s hard, especially at the end of your life. Starring at your own mortality with the freezing cold grip of death beginning to slowly wrap his icy hands around you…you’re only asking for comfort…some level of certainty. I see that. I love you.
And it hurts that you don’t trust me to follow Jesus in a way that may not look like your faith. In a way that diverges from your interpretation. “So if you love me, say you love me.”
Yet, here I am. On the phone. In a parking lot. Watching the sun cede its ground to the slow inevitable embrace of the possibility of a cold darkness. Still trying. Still caring. Still fighting back the demons of my own childhood. Still trying to bring her comfort. Will it be enough?
“It’s the heart, afraid of breaking
That never learns to dance
It’s the dream, afraid of waking
That never takes the chance
It’s the one who won’t be taken
Who cannot seem to give
And the soul, afraid of dying
That never learns to live”
— Bette Midler, The Rose
*Photo by Atharva Tulsi on Unsplash
