My gay daughter helped me learn some powerful insights into the mind and very nature of God.
Growing up evangelical, leaders taught me many times that I needed to avoid certain people so I wouldn’t give Satan a toe-hold to turn me away from God. They also taught me to avoid certain media and certain situations. I saw this even as recently as my Divinity school journey, when one classmate used the old computer acronym, GIGO–Garbage In, Garbage Out. We were taking part in a class discussion on that passage in Mark when Jesus tells the religious leaders and his disciples that it’s not what goes into a person that makes them unclean. I was arguing that my faith was strong enough to enjoy the Poison’s Greatest Hits CD I’d bought over the weekend. (Or it could be that I’d listened to so much of Poison’s music in high school and college that I was immune.) This guy argued that it’s garbage and would cause garbage to come out of me.
Anyway… We had to avoid people on the outside because they could and would turn us away from God. Non-Baptists would corrupt our faith. Beautiful non-Christians were Satan, “God’s most beautiful angel,” in disguise. If we were around people who did drugs, we’d do drugs. If we were around people who dressed less conservatively, we would, too–and then what would our witness be!? I heard a youth leader admonish the kids that they shouldn’t hang around with boys who wear earrings and have long hair–the evening that one of the boys who was born into the church brought a friend from school with–yep, you guessed it–an earring and hair just over his collar.
We never talked about gay or transgender people. They honestly weren’t on the church’s radar as we were fastidiously preparing for the imminent Rapture and WWIII between the US, the Soviet Union, and Israel. (This was a thing in the late 80s.) As years passed, though, I heard more and more how mere exposure to people in the LGBTQ+ community could turn someone queer (used here respectfully as an umbrella term for these folx). My churches didn’t teach, preach, or proclaim that, and, in fact, one pastor questioned, “Why is the state Baptist convention focusing on that when there are so many actual sins in the church?”
When she was six, our older daughter, Mary, decided to dedicate her life to following Jesus. I wanted her to wait a few years to understand exactly this commitment she was going to make, and when she was nine, she was baptized. When she was 13 1/2, she came out to her dad and me as gay. Her being gay (or, as she’s later suggested, bi) didn’t negate the salvific work that Christ had already done in her life. It didn’t delete the plethora of people who her love had touched. It was simply another aspect of her we were blessed to discover together.
In Psalms, the psalmist talks many times about “delighting” in the Lord, or delighting in the ways of the Lord. Occasionally he might exclaim, “I delight in your word, O Lord.” For many years, I wondered what it was to delight in someone. To me, “delight-full” experiences were, well, just that, but they were also fleeting. This incredible meal or that wonderful trip–I could feel delight in the moment, but it didn’t stay with me.
Then along came Mary, and as I looked at her adorable baby self, I understood what it meant to delight in someone. Every finger, every toe, her thick black lashes, and her cupid’s bow lips were all sources of delight for me. Then she started smiling and learned to laugh. More delight! Her world began to expand as she discovered more and more, and I delighted in her fascination and curiosity. She began to talk and share her ideas, and I delighted in hearing her thoughts. Every day brought a new discovery in which to delight, and I understood: It is in being present to her with my own sense of curiosity and discovery that makes me delight in her. The psalmist had it figured out: When we approach God with our own presence and curiosity, being content and satisfied in not knowing all about him, we can delight in God.
At 18, Mary made some choices that sent her life sideways. It happens like that sometimes, and it was through processing this that the last nail went into the coffin holding my belief in hell as a place of eternal torment. The Christmas before she ran away, Mary had given me Roger Wolsey’s book Kissing Fish: Christianity for people who don’t like Christianity. Wolsey asserts that we experience hell on earth in this life when we live inauthentic lives. That meshed better with what I knew of God, what I’d been taught about God from my very young, 1970s and -80s Southern Baptist church kid days.
Dealing with Mary led me to a deeper understanding of what hell is not. It led me to decide that a literal hell doesn’t exist for Christians. (Norse mythology includes a realm of the dead called Hel, overseen by a goddess of the same name, much like Hades/Hades in Greek mythology.) If you’re a Christian parent, I want you to think about parental love for a minute. You’d probably agree that, when it comes to having compassion and patience with children, God has all of us mere humans beat in that department. Right? Now, think about yourself and your own kids. What could your own children do that would make you want to cut them entirely out of your life for all of eternity and condemn them to unthinkable physical and psychological torments forever. I bet you can’t think of a single, solitary thing that they could do to warrant that.
You know what? I couldn’t, either. Even when Mary lied about me, and even when she said I wasn’t her real mom, effectively denying our entire relationship, I could never think of wanting her to endure suffering in any way. I haven’t shut the door to her coming home or barring her from my life. In fact, eternal separation from this child in whom I’ve delighted for so long is the last thing I would want.
Now, if the imperfect mom that I am can love her child so much, despite all that that child has done to her, how much more loving is God? If I wouldn’t want my own flesh and blood, this wonderfully created child, to suffer physical and psychological tortures for her choices, how much more patient would God be with her own creation? So much so. So much more patient, so much more loving, so much more than I could ever be, and thus, a God that loving wouldn’t–nay, couldn’t–condemn their creation to hell because of the narcissistic ego which the evangelical church has created God to have.
The leaders in my home church when I was growing up wouldn’t have wanted kid-me to have anything to do with a kid like Mary–queer, making bad choices (not related to her sexual orientation at all). Yet, this child has shown me and led me to learn so much more about God and my relationship with God. She was the first to show me what it is to delight in someone, and she’s reminding me daily that a God who is love as the Bible says wouldn’t send God’s wonderfully created children to eternal punishment.
