Lent 22: Be Yourself. Everyone Else Is Taken. 2009, Part 3

Dinner was a real celebration (insofar as a person who is melting from relief and nervous exhaustion can celebrate). It wasn't a late night, and nobody broke out the champagne, because in the morning I would see how people who weren't a part of the church leadership (then, a session of 12 people plus a clerk) would respond.

I had an early staff meeting, 8:30, because I wanted folks to know what was going on before the phone started ringing. (For some reason, I imagined the phone ringing off the hook.) I did the same as I'd done with the session, handing out copies of the letter the rest of the congregation would be receiving in the mail that day. While they read, my emotions caught up with me, and I started to cry. Which made our sweet administrative assistant cry, too. And then I tried to explain that I was only crying because I was tired and stressed, and that things had actually gone well with the session the night before, and then the staff began saying kind and supportive things as well.

One gentleman was quieter than the others, and after the meeting was over, he disappeared for a time to his woodshop downstairs. He was our maintenance person, our handyman, and he was particularly gifted at woodwork and creating beautiful items of all kinds (I have a bread basket complete with napkins and a breadwarmer made by his wife, a doohickey that helps me not burn myself when pulling the rack out of the hot oven, an herb planter, and countless other useful and lovely items made by him in both my home and office). I was a little worried at his quietness, and I thought I'd give him some space. I realized that I was likely entering a season of a lot of potentially delicate or even difficult conversations, which might be painful for me or for the congregants or both. I thought this might be the first one.

About an hour later he popped into my office with a tear-shaped cross made of wood, which, upon closer examination, actually contained flames-- the Holy Spirit's fire. He had just made it, he'd begun carving it as soon as he'd left the meeting. "This is for you," he said, "for strength."

That's when the tears really came. I walked over to him and gave him a hug. That cross still hangs in my office. I have never forgotten that loving, moving gesture, which so reassured me at a moment when I truly did not know what lay ahead.

The rest of the day I fielded a couple of phone calls... not a ton, the office was reasonably quiet. A few folks dropped by, including a woman who told me that she and her family had known even before I arrived that I had a partner and she was a woman. They even knew who she was. And they'd never told a soul. This shocked me a bit, though I'm not sure why. Of course, it's a small enough community that someone would know someone, etc. I said, "So... what did you think? Why didn't you say anything?" She shrugged and smiled and said, "We decided we'd see how we liked you. And it turned out, we loved you."

This is where the motto of Harvey Milk-- "Come out, come out, wherever you are!"-- must be given its due. Milk said, "Every gay person must come out. As difficult as it is, you must tell your immediate family. You must tell your relatives. You must tell your friends if indeed they are your friends. You must tell the people you work with. You must tell the people in the stores you shop in. Once they realize that we are indeed their children, that we are indeed everywhere, every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and for all." His logic was: If all the LGBTQ people would come out, millions of people would discover that they already knew us, and they already loved us.

Near the end of the day, there was one more person I had to visit. A formidable woman, elderly, she was in the fight of her life against cancer. But she was also known for her fighting spirit in the context of life at church. She was a force to be reckoned with. And I just loved her.

I dropped by her house, because I hadn't heard from her, and that worried me. When I got there, she invited me in, and began to talk to me about how she'd been feeling, medication changes, etc. Finally, I said, "Have you gotten your mail yet, by any chance?" "No," she said, "It usually gets here by five though." "Oh," I said. "Well, there's a letter from me in it." And I told her.

Before I was finished but after the big reveal, she interrupted me. "People think this is a brand new thing. This is nothing new. This has been around forever. Michelangelo! The Emperor Hadrian! When I was a child, two of my teachers at Loder Avenue School lived together in the same house. They were both women. Maybe they were in a committed relationship! Who knows! It's no one's business, and it doesn't matter to me."

As I drove home that day the conversations I'd been having swirled around in my head. I couldn't quite believe how well it was going. I know this isn't everybody's experience, and a couple of tough conversations were still to come. But at the end of the first twenty-four hours, the expressions of support, the kind words, the warm emails and phone calls, and the hugs were winning. Overwhelmingly. I had come out... it was still early days.... but already, it was grace upon grace.