Lent 5, Greenfire, Winter 1996, Part 3

For Lent, I'm writing here about significant memories from my life in faith.

When I'd left home to go to Greenfire that winter, I was in the midst of something I couldn't at the time articulate. On the surface, everything probably looked fine to the outside world. We were pretty much a "typical" family, though, I have come to believe, there really is no such thing. Every family, even the mom-dad-brother-sister-dog-in-a-big-old-house, has layers of mystery to it that even its members haven't fully unwrapped and examined.

I'd begun the process of unwrapping my own mystery a couple of years earlier, when the issue of my identity-- who I am, and who I love-- finally stopped being some vague rumbling in my subconscious and forced me to pay attention.

Actually, it had already done that a good ten years earlier, when I was in my early twenties.

Scratch that. There was that girl on the softball team when I was 12.

How does this sort of thing come to the surface? Pretty much as you'd expect. I was minding my own business when my experience of a good friend started changing. Now she was not merely a friend, but the most compelling person in my life. And without ever saying a word to anyone about it, I was thrown into the first real crisis of my adulthood. I couldn't stop thinking about her.

By the time I got to Greenfire, she was long gone. She'd moved 3000 miles away, and one frank conversation before she left had confirmed what we both knew to be the essentials of the situation: I was married, and that was a non-negotiable and unalterable fact. Neither of us wanted to cause pain to anyone I loved (all three, people she happened to love, too).  At any rate, I'm pretty sure the feelings were all on my side, though I've never asked her point-blank. Crisis averted.

Now it was two years later, and here I was at Greenfire to talk about my hopes and dreams for answering my call to ministry.

But.

And.

There was something about Greenfire-- several things. It was a community of only women, an idea that had appealed to me as early as age 6 when I became acquainted with the Dominican nuns who taught at my elementary school. The community was all about women, too-- our lives, our dreams, our faith, our spirits, our souls. I'd quickly noticed that two of the women were a couple. I'm pretty sure the woman who'd greeted me the first day was a lesbian, the one with the braids. (She'd told me I had beautiful blue eyes. Though, maybe you don't have to be a lesbian to mention that you like another woman's eyes? I hadn't a clue.)

At Greenfire, I talked to the women about ministry. I talked to God about sexuality.

I was terrified of my own feelings. I was angry that they threatened to undo a life I'd chosen, and vows I'd made, and a family I cherished. I believed that all that was entirely within my control, if only I could quiet this small but growing voice inside that kept threatening to overwhelm me.

I begged God to remove those feelings from me... feelings that, perhaps, I had missed out on the life I was meant to lead (but which the fact of my children completely contradicted. How could I have been "meant" to not have them? I still say, impossible). Feelings that drew me to connections with women that threatened my own internal sense of what it meant to remain faithful in my marriage. I begged God, not only that week, but for years afterward: make this go away.

God did not choose to make it go away. I want to emphasize this, just in case there's any question as to whether I simply did not pray hard enough, crying in my room, or driving around in my car, or first thing in the morning, or after I climbed into bed at night, or every Sunday in  my pew at church. I prayed with everything that was in me that I would no longer feel those connections and stirrings. Those prayers were answered with a firm-- and loving-- "No."

Lying on the mattress in my little room at Greenfire, watching the stars wind their way across the winter sky, I began to understand that I might never get the answer I wanted from God. I began the years-long process of reckoning with the truth of who I was.

I wish I could say something inspiring, like, "... and I did it fully trusting that God would guide me." But that wasn't my experience. My experience was more like this: being alone, in a dark room, with a single light bulb flickering, as if its filament was trying to decide: light? or dark?