A Solitary Cabin

cul-de-sac (n): a street or passage closed at one end, a blind alley

It is 1977, and I am six years old. My mother plays guitar for the weekly prayer meeting at our church. I listen to new hymns that came out of the Jesus revolution earlier in the decade, not long after I was born. I feel warm and safe and surrounded by love.

It's hard to explain the feeling of belonging I experienced when attending church with my family. Imagine being a child, a shy one at that, living in books and make-believe. Each week, there is one place you can go where the people accept you for who you are, watch out for you, smile and sing, and are convinced that God loves all of us. That God IS love and that love is for everyone.

It is 1981. I am ten years old, and my parents take me and my sister to South Bend, Indiana. We are going to the Charismatic Catholics convention at Notre Dame. I'm in awe of the number of people in one stadium, singing and praying. We listen to lectures and participate in the life of the convention. I see miracles. I witness my mother speaking in tongues.

My parents were deeply involved with Catholic Charismatic Renewal. This movement started in 1967 when Catholics from Duquesne University attended a Protestant worship service and were "baptized in the Holy Spirit." Fresh off the heels of Vatican II, the ecumenical council called by Pope John XXIII that updated and reformed nearly every aspect of church life, the movement was deeply influenced by the evangelical movement in the United States and featured many of the same trappings; faith healing, prophecy, and glossolalia. Groups in the movement would form prayer groups and "covenants," written documents that set up the rules for life that focused on a more profound commitment to spiritual ideals.

Twice a week, we would go to the church, once on Sunday for mass and once on Tuesday for a prayer group. There would be singing, and there would be prayer. There would be crying and laughter, reading from the Bible, and discussing the Word. Most of all, you knew...you KNEW that Jesus loved you and wanted the best for you. You KNEW that God was love and that those words, The Word, would change the world if people would take it into their hearts.

It is 1987. I am sixteen. The two young couples who helped form the youth ministry have moved away. Sr. Gayle, the parish nun, takes over leadership. Suddenly there are strict lines and rules. Places we should not go, things we should not read. It is explained to us that anything not Catholic is not only occult but a cult. I asked what about the Jews since Jesus was Jewish. I am reprimanded because Jesus was a Christian, and the Jews were non- believers. The fissures between my 1970s hippie Jesus and this stricter dogma of the church are too much. I stop going to church. I start meeting people outside of this little suburban white cul-de-sac. My mother starts listening to cassettes about backward masking in rock music.

If God was love and for everyone, why draw all these lines? Surely different people call God by different names, and sure, we're the chosen ones, but not everyone else is going to Hell...are they? I mean...isn't that sort of cruel? And how, for Pete's sake, can the Jews be "a cult" or even "occult" if they were around BEFORE the Church, and that's what Jesus was raised in? What gives us the right to judge all these other people...even people who have never heard the Word?

Sure, the Old Testament was full of God punishing people, but the New Testament did away with all of that...didn't it? How on earth do you square "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy" with the disdain and even hatred of other people who don't think like you? Didn't Jesus's words challenge us to do better than that? Didn't He die so that EVERYONE would be saved?

Didn't he?

No?

Only if we say so? Only if people do as they are told? Only if people deny who they are, what they are, where they came from, who they love, how they speak, where they dance, what they wear? Only if they choose to get off the main road, drive down our little tree- lined street with the little houses that all look alike until you come to the place where nothing ever changes. Where everything is trimmed neatly and fits into a little expected beige box, tidy and safe and unchallenging. Only if they come to the neighborhood picnic on the cul-de-sac and wear the polo and khaki uniforms all the dads wear or the floral prints the moms wear. No bright colors. No rich flavors. Everything is safe and white and Christian. Driving in circles forever, away from wonder or difference or diversity.

It is 2016. I am 45. I watch my Catholic family line up to vote for someone who aligns with precisely none of the values from my youth. They are untroubled by this chasm between 1977 and 2016. I cannot find a bridge. I stare, confused, as my mother intones that it's ok because Obama was a Muslim and this guy will end abortion. Besides, the homosexual agenda and affirmative action are just wrong in the first place. We need to keep an eye on Those People, they say. They want power, they say. I gather with my closest friends, many of them Those People. We hunker down for the next four years.

My parents are not cruel people. They love their family, generally kind to others. But the people they cast themselves with baffle me to my core. The politics these espouse fly directly in the face of everything I thought I was taught as a child, and that confusion has driven me in circles ever since I learned to see it — how is it that those who espouse a God of boundless love can in the same breath unleash such venomous cruelty?

If this were a script, this is where I would tell you about The Confrontation, where I Stood Up for my beliefs and Challenged my family. In the Hollywood ending, we would see eye to eye, have a meal, freeze frame of laughter, and conviviality. This has never happened. Yes, we've had our little moments, spats and petty words over our politics, but never the Big Scene.

I made a compromise with myself some time ago: I would rather continue to have a decent relationship with them than have a fight that could end it. My parents are older now; they know what they think. I am older and know what I think. We each vote, my wife and I canceling out my parents. A quiet detente as we pass the years. We love each other, even if we do not agree.

The confusion racks me still. Even though I walked away from the church decades ago, I still try to reconcile the lessons I learned with the madness I see and hear about today. I cannot. But it circles in my mind, a dog chasing its tail, round and round. In the center of the chaos, I try to stick with the love I was taught and embraced as a child, even if I do not see it around me in those that are supposed to embody it.

Because "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. " - 1 Corinthians 13:4-8