Sometimes the sunlight would catch in a prism and rainbows would dance happily across the church.
"Why are you so happy?" I demanded of the rainbows.
"Where are you taking me? Everything about you is more painful then it should be. Is God's love there? There at the end of the rainbow? Is that where it's hiding?"
They never answered, just kept dancing.
I remember when I was kid, running bare foot through the grass chasing rainbows. I remember running full speed, my arms pumping, my breath fast and excited. I remember stopping every so often to gage if I had gained any distance and then eventually stopping all together in defeat. I didn't give up on rainbows until I was old enough to know better. I should know better now.
How much is a mother's soul worth anyway? Would you give up a heavenly paradise to love your child so completely and beautifully on earth? Would a perfect human love be redeeming like in fairy tales where perfect love changes beasts into princes and saves mermaids from evil witches? Would God open his gates to the soul of mother who was willing to give up everything to love her child perfectly, to value his life on earth so completely and to want everything that is good and human and fulfilling for him. Or in the end is that not enough...
Earlier this week I went with my oldest to his college freshman orientation day. They split up the kids and parents and I'm sure this was relieving because who wants to do college orientation with their very pregnant mother. So, I wondered alone through a fair of information tables set up for the parents. Everyone enjoys commenting on the woman with children born 18 years apart and I politely smiled and faked laughed my way through well-meant jokes and comments. I went in order of the tables and eventually came to a table that didn't seem to be getting a lot of parent visitors. I looked at the pins, pens, and brochures until a woman manning the table approached me.
"Hi, this is the LGBTQ organization table." She said as if to make sure I knew where I was.
"I know.", I said matter-of-factly.
"Ok, well my name is Cathy. I help run our campus LGBTQ community. We have weekly meetings and..." She continued to tell me about all the events and community support the group did. We talked a bit. I saw her eyes switch over from all business with a parent to appreciation of the mother standing in front of her and I left the table with a good amount of brochures and continued on to learn about residence halls.
Nothing ever means much until it's in your life. You can be sympathetic, sure...an ally, why not. But to truly feel the ins and outs of something a person is, let it be your own child. Suddenly everything feels different. You're not just a friend of a community, you are a parent of the community, you gave birth to the community, you can feel the community because the community is your child, your love, your pain and happiness. Imagine everything that's happening in a situation is happening to your child. That the things they are saying are about him, that he will hear and see these things on social media and feel pain. Imagine your child in pain feeling like the world thinks these things of him.
I wonder if that's how Mary felt watching her son walk a long road, with a large cross, people jeering at him, insulting him, not understanding his full and complete goodness and worth. But I can't even relate to religion right now, and that's painful on it's own because I love religion. But it's really not God's fault, it's His humans. I keep hearing about what God wants through them. But it can't be this way. God knows humanity, he created it, and he created my son.
"Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you." God knew my son before he was in my womb because he created him. He gave him a divine spark created in His very own image. And God's image is shown in James. He has a soul to strive for heaven and humanity to love and experience all that is good and earthly. And in that "good and earthly" is love...
***
I started writing that 5 months ago, but those feelings consumed my summer and fall. I talked often about my anger with my neuropsych. He self disclosed that he was Catholic and had a gay child. My husband asked if the neuro was allowed to tell me that. I said, "Yes. As long as he thinks that it will help the therapeutic relationship."
Therapeutic relationship... I wish we had more of those that we didn't have to pay for. Instead I felt like every turn of a corner or scroll down social media was filled with emotional terrorists. That's what they are after all. It's bigger than emotional abuse because it's widespread causing pain and distress. I'm just some mom, enjoying FB in her quiet moments and BAM some random person from hundreds or thousands of miles away just smacks me with pain so deep that I'm left reeling the rest of the day. My heart would race and my head would pound from huge stress headaches amplified by my post concussive syndrome from a car accident.
A lot of it is a need to be right... to prove that they know what God wants. Because if they know that, then there is comfort about life. But righteous comfort is in itself some sort of narcissistic sin. To think that anyone could even come so close to understanding God that they could feel that sort of comfort doesn't sit well with me. Maybe that's why I'm so painfully uncomfortable, because human uncertainty is my constant companion.
I'm not a fundamentalist and either is my religion. Yes, the Bible is from God, but we were taught that it was written through "inspiration". That the writers were inspired by God, especially the Old Testament. Writers from an ancient world so very foreign to us today and influenced by surroundings so vastly different. What would that same inspiration look like today?
I'm not a theologian though, just a mother. I used to buy into the "Being gay isn't a sin, but homosexual acts are." That's like saying "Being gay isn't a sin, but having a fulfilling human life is." See, when it's your child you are rarely thinking about "acts" whether it's same-sex or not. When you envision a future for child, you imagine love... beautiful, romantic, life-long love. You imagine them bringing home someone "special" one day. That person that starts coming on holidays and holding your child's hand. That person that you will see, in a quiet moment at dinner or sitting on your couch, catch your child's eyes in their own. That person that you will see at their wedding and proudly hand them off to. That person that gives you comfort that your child will live a happy, fulfilling, love filled life well after you are gone.
Now imagine people are telling you that your child can't have that. That God doesn't want that.
No. God made my son in his image and God's image is too spectacular to limit the good possibilities of life... too fantastic to restrict what kind of love he can have... too blindingly brilliant for you to ever feel any kind of righteous comfort...
"Mommy!"
I look up from writing this. It's my four year standing next to me, a freshly drawn picture in his hand.
"What did you draw, Davey?" I ask, trying to erase the pain from my face and adding an extra dose of fake happiness to my voice.
"I drew our family at the end of the rainbow. There's James and you holding Imogen, and that's me and Daddy and Warren and Brody."
Oh, what a tricky, smart God we have. There's my righteous comfort after all... my family, my children, my son... God's love at the end of the rainbow, it was there all along.
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