Planting Seeds with Pride By Beth Trouy
M
ost of my friends who I grew up with have left
the Church. Each has their
reasons, but my gay friends
have a laundry list to refer to
about why they will never come back. My best friend growing
up used to go every Sunday, but now, she doesn’t even know, or care, when it’s Easter. Between being told that only boys could
be altar servers (after she rode
her bike miles to Church to show up for altar server training one
morning) and the heap of shame piled on her for being gay, (and, well, the abuse scandal getting a bit too close to her friends),
well, it was a bellyful for her. She and so many others tell me they don’t need religion anymore. Unfortunately, it’s not just
religion they leave behind. God gets the boot, too.
Us gay folks always seem to
have to choose what we can keep in our hearts and what
we have to let go of if we want
to be our true selves. It’s often choosing between family, the town we grew up in, the local Church, verses the “real” us, when we realized we were
14 | SPIRITUALITY
different. We’ve learned that we
As Pride Day comes around
for us to be close and share this
places without also being forced
each year and set up a booth
God to fade into the shadows.
can’t go back to those nostalgic to shed some of ourselves in order to be accepted again.
Whatever we choose, a part of
us gets ripped out of our hearts. God usually becomes a casualty in the ripping.
You see, I know that nothing in any Church that brought
shame, self-hate, or rejection
had one iota to do with God. A local preacher once said that if anything makes you feel
bad about yourself, that’s not
coming from God. People have done an awful lot of damage in the name of God. People
calling themselves servants
of God have done the devil’s
work. Good and evil co-exist in
all places and churches are not
immune. The trauma of rejection tends to tie God to the building and the people who caused
the rejection, so God also gets blamed. For those who are
rejected, the thought of God’s house becomes a negative image and a bad memory. Eventually, it’s just God with all the blame.
again, I’m reminded of why I go with my Church. I get asked a
lot why I put myself through this when most people there want
nothing to do with religion. My
hope is to get a chance to listen to their stories and maybe have a conversation. Sure, they tell
me they don’t need religion to have God. True, but also not
realistic. Remember that story
of the seed planted? You know, the one planted all by itself
that gets blown away when
the storms and winds come
because it didn’t have a deep root system? That’s us in this
world of distraction without a faith community surrounding us to keep us grounded.
God’s voice in our hearts gets
drowned out from the constant distractions. We don’t even
know when it happens. We just
wake up one day and don’t even remember when Easter was.
We are influenced heavily by
our environment, whether we
are willing to admit it or not. An
environment that doesn’t reflect
God’s love for us, God’s yearning
love with others—well, it causes What we focus on grows
and what we ignore, withers.
Faith, like knowledge, requires focused attention.
I go to Pride to water that seed that God planted in each of
us. God is nothing but love. If
any Church preaches hate or rejection, then leave. But go
out and find one that sounds
more like God. If I can just plant a seed in their broken hearts to
remind them that God never left them, if I can just help them see that God travels all this way to
Pride to meet them where they are, just to be sure they hear
it again: they are loved, just as they are in that moment, and
always have been. You see, this is the one constant in life: we
are loved and desired by God. It’s a simple message.
For as much as we need the gay community to help us
survive in this world, we need a faith community even more to keep us rooted in love
over fear in this world and whatever comes next.
