God Calls . . . At Last I Answer

January 1, 2006

“God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.”
–Rainer Marie Rilke, “Book of Hours”

Introduction

I consider my candidacy for the Boston University School of Theology to be a natural evolution within a lifelong spiritual context. Just as all rivers flow to the sea, so too has my life flowed inexorably towards God, despite a myriad of bends and log jams and whitewater. Indeed, in light of my present successful career in the Boston business world, there are those who view this proposed career change at age 37 as more of a waterfall, a precarious drop over an unknown edge. Yet the pull of the current is such that I feel no ambiguity. My application to Boston University fulfills a destiny created long ago. God’s call resounds in my mind, drowning out all else. I am surprised only that I have swum against the tide for this long.

The disruption of motion towards God’s plan for my life can be traced back, as I will illustrate, to a very clear dissonance: I was raised a Southern Baptist, yet I am gay. Conflict between the two has created a life lived along a volatile fault line.

Autobiography

Chronologically, my relationship with God started very straightforwardly. My childhood unfolded in an unabashed Christian home, full of Jesus picture books, songs in Sunday school, eloquent prayers before meals. God was drawn up slowly from the depths from really the very beginning, such that the Trinity was fully clear to me even before I learned to ride a bike. My mother came to love the Lord as a small child, all at once, in a moment of coming upon her beloved grandmother, Mamaw, on bony knees in a drafty winter bedroom. The sight of that rapt prayer session has remained indelibly etched upon my mother for over 50 years. Raised in the hot blooded bayou country outside New Orleans, Mama introduced us to a religion of passion and warmth with a fully engaged God. Balancing that was my father’s expression of religion, which mirrored his own personality: placid, calm, unflappable. Dad always said simply that Jesus’ death settled everything, and as believers we had crossed to safety. We went to church every week, and lively discussions of the sermons often ensued in the car on the way home. My sister and I were always encouraged to offer opinions, and, even as little girls, our views were given respectful consideration. We were a family that liked to think and relate deeply. We loved nothing better than to tell each other stories.

On my 13th Easter, I received an engraved white bible and a sprinkle of holy water on my pink be-ribboned head. I remember staring down at my gloved hands as I was prayed over, feeling awe that such a big God knew where to find me, like Santa Claus. Unlike St. Nick, however, the Lord seemed real year round, flickering in our home like a candle. Nighttimes were the best, falling asleep with God in my head and my dog Sandy in my arms, all three of us breathing steadily through the darkness.

Then, a few years past my baptism, something shifted. I started getting an uneasy feeling inside, a skittering restlessness. I poured a lot of this unnamable longing into something new, a game I inherited from my dad. Basketball. For a long time that was my whole world: family, Sandy & God, and the pure joy of hours on the blacktop, aiming hard for a circle in the sky.

Then junior high descended, cracking open my cozy little world irrevocably. It was a time when everything changed beyond recognition: my body, my friends, everyone’s expectations. I felt emotionally dyslexic, just a few steps off center. Then my senior year, the fog finally burned off –I was different. I was gay. Love had gathered inside me seemingly overnight, birthing itself into something startlingly unrecognizable, at once a rescue boat and a destroying undertow.

Shame gripped me upon this discovery, especially on Sundays. Now when the pastor pounded the pulpit, railing against the sickness of homosexuals, my heart seemed to fracture under each blow, its bloody redness seeping out hotly unto my cheeks. I was frantic that discovery might cause my whole family to be ushered out of the lush, hushed sanctuary like illegal aliens. My mother, portrait of a lady, walked down the aisle in humiliation? Dear God, I used to pray, as I studied the neatly combed backs of all the boys’ heads in the pews. . . please fix me, something’s gone wrong. Church, heretofore my peace, became my anguish.

Grimly, I channeled all my fears into basketball, and began racking up awards. Division I State Championship, All-State and All-American honors, All-Star games, State Championship in tennis, summer camp MVP awards, and finally, many college scholarships offers. I let the adoration and praise wash over me cynically–inside I knew I wasn’t a star, I was an abomination. In September 1978, I packed for college. Sandy died during that stretch. So did God. Romans 1:26 was blood on the sidewalk, Paul’s letter to Corinthians the chalkmark around the body. I walked into my adulthood alone.

After a dazzling collegiate basketball career balanced by Dean’s List academics, I graduated from national champion Old Dominion University, hoop dreams realized. I was the starting point guard and local media darling; I was also the resident party girl, with tons of friends and a bit of notoriety because of a popular newspaper column I wrote through my junior and senior years. I had glossed over the emptiness inside as best I could–earthly spackle to cover an unearthly yearning.

Upon graduation, I accepted a position to coach at the University of Hawaii, becoming the youngest NCAA Division I assistant coach in the country. The first year in ‘paradise’ was easily the most unhappy time of my life: I went from hero to non-person overnight. I wasn’t just on an island, I was an island. I walked the beaches endlessly and pondered the state of my heart. Ten months later, my answer came like a volcano erupting: God exploded and rained down. I had a 100% bona-fide, Pauline-style rebirth, a spectacular spiritual awakening. It could not have been more unexpected or intense–signs and wonders were embedded in the very streets of Oahu. I joined an international collegiate fellowship called Maranatha, a bastion of zealous fundamentalism. It was only much later that I realized that Maranatha was extreme to the point of cultism, with a ban on drinking, dating (internal “arranged marriages” were encouraged) et al. Attendance was mandatory for abortion protests, street preaching/testimonies, speaking in tongues, and daily prayer meetings. After my estrangement from God in college, the strength of the fervor actually felt thrilling. Christianity always seemed to me like a call for extreme living anyway, so I went forward, despite the steep pricetag–I was required to renounce my homosexuality, and become a celibate “recovering lesbian”. I believed the pastor and his wife when they told me that if I stayed with my deviancy, I would “likely commit suicide by age 30″, because I was too “marked by the Spirit to remain ‘an enemy’ of God”. I heeded this warning fearfully, and let go of the concept of romance in my life. Instead, I would sacrifice my physical self, my feelings, and concentrate solely on the matters of heaven.

Accordingly, my life became cloistered, monklike. Incredibly austere, but undeniably powerful. I became immersed in Scripture, and I felt God coursing through my veins profoundly. It was at this stage that I was selected to play for the national Christian All-Star basketball team, “Athletes in Action”. The tour that summer was especially exciting, a first-ever foray into Red China. We were to play the Chinese National Team, on the eve of the ‘84 Olympics in L.A. Ostensibly, we were to be their American warm-up for the games; our mission, of course, was vastly different.

We wanted to bring Christianity to a country notoriously closed to the West. It was a heady time; my background enabled me to take the lead in street ‘preaching’, talking about God without fear or nervousness. This despite the fact that our rooms were bugged and our phones tapped. Many of my teammates seemed to shred under the strain of our incessant shadow, the armed military police. Yet paradoxically, the danger and risk only made me bolder. I remember walking the streets of Beijing one night and stopping before a line of crippled beggars near Tiananmen Square. I froze for a long moment, realizing with a stab that I felt a compulsion to put my hands on one old fellow’s legs. Could healings still happen in the 20th century? He and I stared at each other silently. Then I rebuked the sensation and walked on, feeling ridiculous. That incident is one of my strongest memories of the tour.

After the games, I never wanted to go back to the hotel, and I was always joined by one teammate in particular. Wandering at night unchaperoned was not allowed, but invariably we would make up an excuse to our coaches and slip out, disappearing down warrens of crowded streets, determined to get close to the real China. The pungent, pervasive poverty was powerfully moving, as were the people themselves. They flocked around us every time, eager to hear such tall Caucasian girl athletes speaking American English, even if it was only about some “ancient Jewish monk”, as one student described Jesus. I remember once, in Taiwan, I foolishly reached for a metaphor about how Christ was like a car–opps, no cars in that village–like a bicycle, to be used as a way to get to God. One teenager, I’ll never forget, looked ready to cry. Encouraged, I congratulated her on her obvious emotional reaction to being ‘saved’. She shook her head, alarmed: “No, it’s. . .I cannot reach this heaven you talk about. I have no bicycle!”. As if I meant a Schwinn. As if. Lessons learned.

My China trip was followed by another missionary tour the next summer, this time to Russia. We were to play their Olympic team, too, the mighty USSR juggernaut. After a frightening run-in at customs (most of our Russian/English bibles were discovered and confiscated, along with–for a few hours–our passports), we were grudgingly allowed in. We were beaten soundly on the court that tour; on the streets, it was likewise tough going. Many seeds were planted that summer, but it seemed a failure compared to all the people that came to God in Asia. To make matters worse, I injured my knee in the first game. I pressed on, hobbling on crutches, but people on the street seemed more interested in bartering for my Levi’s than discussing the meaning of life. Where the Chinese were passionate, alert, the Russians seemed resigned, numb, oblivious to the once beautiful church steeples that stood like silenced sentries under gray soviet skies.

The general disquiet of that trip added to my uneasiness when flying back to the U.S. I suddenly did not want to return to Hawaii, to my spartan room and lonely life. My spirituality was richer than I had ever imagined, but my mortal heart ached. I realized I resented all the rules at Maranatha, and I began to feel deep fury over the insistence of the Church to “cure” me of my sexuality. On the flight back to Hawaii, I secretly plotted my escape. I applied to the Peace Corps and to Regent University, a Christian graduate school in Virginia where an AIA teammate was enrolled. Homesick, I turned down a Peace Corps assignment to Lithuania, accepting a merit scholarship offer to Regent instead. My return to the East Coast was the beginning of the end, in a sense. The school, founded by the Christian Coalition’s Pat Robertson, was conservative, although not so stiflingly fundamentalist as Maranatha. During my two years there, I tried to ignore the growing restlessness in me. But after receiving my Master’s Degree, a pervasive feeling was suddenly unavoidable: the Church was dead wrong in its treatment of homosexuals. After all, I reasoned, God made me, and apparently He had made me gay, since my sexuality had never remotely seemed a choice. Heretical thoughts bubbled up from a long-simmering cauldron: if the Church didn’t want me as I was, then by God, I didn’t want the Church. I felt resolutely betrayed, the unfairness galling me to my very core.

Disillusioned, I exiled myself to the more tolerant North, moving to Boston in 1989. I ‘came out of the closet’ and plunged into a new life and job. Workaholism quelled, for a time, the aftershocks of my past. But the effects of conditional love preached to me by the fundamentalist Church surfaced like shrapnel in the years that followed. I was appalled by the damage. Eventually, I sank into a clinical depression, defined by many psychiatrists as a state wherein ‘anger is turned inward’. It was true. I had nowhere to put my hurt and rage, in that I still revered God deep down, despite His seeming rejection of me. Unraveling alarmingly, I entered therapy, to try to heal the ragged holes. There I confronted a hidden self-homophobia, and gently, came to love the way I was made. After several years I began to realize it was all wrong: God was not condemning me, humans were. The Church was merely a human expression of the Divine, and as such, was not perfect. Even better, God was not content to stay boxed in thus by men’s definitions.

And so, in 1996, my Father came back for me. Wadding through the murky waters, He turned over my waterlogged body and pulled me into His arms, dripping and muddy, and breathed new life into my lungs. And I awoke once again to the deepest truth of my life: that God flows through even the strongest manmade damns, pushing past our piles of misguided rocks, our foolish attempts to contain the ageless river.
In the reeds along the water’s edge, I found a message in a bottle. It said divinity school and that is from where I now recount my story.

My desire is simple. I just want the chance to go “to the limits of my longing”, as the poet Rilke so eloquently states. Religion incessantly tells me about all of the things I cannot do because of the way I was made. Yet God calls. I tried to walk away from the Church a decade ago because of the hatred against those like me, yet God calls. I am ready for this journey. As Dean Thornburg said to me once, “God plus one equals a majority”.

And so, God calls.

At last, I answer.

This personal story of faith and reconciliation comes from the archives of www.christianlesbians.com and was originally posted in 1999.

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