"We Don't Need Your Prayers," Part 2
The rest of the short story, and why I yearn to have a romantic relationship
Just a note: the mom in this story is not accepting, but my mom in real life is!! In my Jan. 1st post I’ll be sharing the story of how my mom became LGBTQ+ affirming *before* I did.
Please read Part 1 if you haven’t yet:
I held my phone tightly with one hand and Elsie’s with the other. We were sitting together on my bed in our dorm room.
“I don’t know if I’m ready to come out,” I told her, holding the screen to my face, my home phone number staring back at me. My fingers hovered over the call button.
It was one month after Elsie and I had sex. Surprisingly, no one on my hall heard us; at least, no one reported us to the Student Conduct Board if they did. But we hadn’t risked having sex since, because a queer student couple we knew got caught making out in mid-September.
We had met Sam and Julia through one of the online support groups for gay Christians that we joined. [redacted] had such a huge campus and it was hard enough to find friends even if your theology “fit in,” but through the internet we had slowly accumulated a circle of friends there who were either gay or accepting. Sam and Julia were juniors, and they had been secretly dating for a year. They usually hid it well, but someone in student leadership saw them kissing in their car in the parking lot of a grocery store. The student recognized them and reported them to administration, and Sam and Julia received emails that said they were now required to attend “counseling.”
“It’s so invasive,” Julia told me a few days ago when we met in her and Sam’s room. “They ask probing questions; they try to convince us we’re wrong and broken and just need faith in Jesus to be ‘fixed.’ It’s awful.”
They had been going to counseling sessions for the past two weeks, and they were miserable. If they didn’t show signs of “progress,” the counselor was threatening to out them to their parents. This was why Elsie and I needed to leave. We didn’t want to go through what was effectively conversion therapy. We wanted to be free to love each other, to show affection, without being punished for it. We wanted to be in a space where we could exist without fear. And it wasn’t just the homophobia on campus that bothered us. I was getting sick of the sexist comments my classmates would make. Elsie found her worship music courses to be emotionally exhausting; she felt like an imposter when she was up on a stage singing songs written by people who did not affirm her humanity, and did not represent the God she believed in. But if I was going to transfer from [redacted] to a different school, I wanted to tell my parents first.
“It’s okay, Cass,” Elsie said. “If you’re not ready, we can wait until you are—”
“I don’t want to wait, though,” I said. “We have to transfer soon. And I have to tell them why I want to leave.”
“You can apply to other schools without telling them,” Elsie said.
I sighed. “I used to always be honest with my parents. I would talk with them about anything. Keeping it secret just doesn’t feel right, even if I’m really afraid of how they’ll react.”
Giving Elsie’s hand a squeeze, I pressed call, the ringing tone lasting an eternity.
My parents were on the elder board at the church I grew up in. On the walls of our home you could see photos of us there at Easter and Christmas, wearing our Sunday best and displaying perfect white smiles. Mom started to teach me to memorize Bible verses when I was seven. She hosted a party at the house when I got baptized in our backyard pool. That was when she gave me my pink Bible, which now sat in my lap. Mom used to be the person I went to whenever I had questions about faith and Scripture, or when I was having problems with friends or classes. We would have open conversations. Now, in the face of being vulnerable with her, I needed to breathe deeply to keep myself from hyperventilating.
I knew what her reaction would be to my coming out, all the stereotypical lines, like “you just need to pray more about this.” I knew that my world would shatter and my only hope of starting anew would be getting a good scholarship somewhere else. But I had read stories about how conversion therapy drove people to suicide. Anything, even disownment, would be better than living on a campus that actively worked to suppress LGBTQ+ sexuality. And if Mom tried to force me into conversion therapy, she would be the one who would be disowned. Either way, I would lose her, and my father along with her.
But I made peace with that. Through the books I had read and by talking with other queer Christians online, I knew that there was a life on the other side of rejection, even if it would hurt like hell to get there. When Mom answered the phone with a warm hello, I took a deep breath before speaking, and said, after a moment of hesitation, “Hey, Mom. How are you?”
“I’m doing well! My students this year are great, though there are some slackers like usual; I try to get them interested in writing and reading by seeing what interests them. Your father and I have been checking out the new restaurants that have opened up in town; we’re basically part-time empty nesters! How’s your semester going so far, honey?”
“Good. My classes are interesting, especially my Intro to Directing course. I’m making new friends through the film department, and…” I took another deep breath. “I have something to tell you.”
“Is something wrong?”
I hesitated. I decided to ignore her question and go on with one of my own: “Do you remember that one time when I was in 9th grade, and I told you I doubted my salvation? That this one kid in my class told me that every sin I committed I had to repent of immediately, or Jesus didn’t love me?”
“Of course I remember… But why are you—”
“Do you remember what you told me when I talked to you about it?”
“Yes. I said that once you were saved, you’re always saved. Nothing can take Christ’s love away from you. Are you questioning that again?”
“No. I know God loves me,” I said, holding Elsie’s hand tighter, trying to give her a brave smile, but failing. “And I hope that after I tell you this, you’ll still love me, too…” I bit my lip for a moment, hesitating before finally saying, “I’m gay.”
She was silent. For about a minute. Or maybe it was shorter and just felt like that. It felt like all the blood in my body was rushing to my head, making my forehead pulse. Then, she finally said: “What do you mean? Are you…in a relationship?”
“I’m dating Elsie,” I said. “We’ve been dating since December of last year. I love her.”
There was another long moment of silence. My chest tightened, and if not for Elsie whispering “Breathe,” I might have forgotten to do so.
“What do you mean?” Mom finally asked me, again, her voice trembling. “You…have you been praying about this? Have you been reading Scripture? How is your walk with God?”
Now it was my turn to be silent, my teeth gritting, my face getting hot, trying to figure out what to say besides cussing her out. Of course I had read Scripture. And she knew it, too. She’s the one who read me Bible stories every night when I was a kid. She’s the one who taught me the Lord’s Prayer. When I was a teenager, we did Bible studies together, just the two of us. After coming home from youth group, she would ask me what I learned and what God was doing in my life. When she cleaned the house, she would sing or hum worship music, and I’d chime in with her. Mom cultivated in me a love for the Bible and particularly a love for Jesus. “The Word of the Lord is my delight!” she would always say, and I would say back, “It is my delight indeed!”
The way she taught me to deal with my problems or any decision was exactly how I had approached my sexuality—prayer, Bible verses, seeking wise counsel (research). I had read (and read again, and dear God, prayed about, over and over) passages like Romans 1:26-27, “Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.” But how I felt about Elsie was not unnatural. And that question Mom asked me now was not natural, either. She knew I prayed every day; she didn’t need to ask me that. It was as if the faith she had seen in me my whole life did not exist anymore. How was I supposed to prove I was a faithful Christian when I already had?
“Yes, Mom. I’ve read all the passages,” I said, sighing. “I’ve read the story about Sodom and Gomorrah—none of them are about gay people, they’re about overly lustful relationships and gang rape—”
“But it says in Leviticus 20:13, ‘If a man practices homosexuality, having sex with another man as with a woman, both men have committed a detestable act.’ It’s clear—”
“If you’re going to quote that, quote the whole damn thing!” I snapped, almost throwing the phone, dropping my hand from Elsie’s and letting it clutch the cover of my pink Bible. She had read the whole verse to me before; she shouldn’t be trying to hide it now. “And quote a more accurate translation, not the one you gave me: ‘If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them.’ You can’t tell me that you think one part of the sentence is true and the other is cultural, that’s just cherry picking, isn’t it? Do you think I deserve to be put to death? Or is that verse not as clear as you think?”
Elsie wrapped her arm around my shoulders. I choked back the sobs I felt rising in my throat, digging my fingers into the comforter on my bed. More silence.
“I don’t understand,” Mom said. “Your faith used to be so strong, now you’re questioning God’s truths? I love you; I just hope that you’ll reconsider this. Is it really love that you’re feeling?”
I grit my teeth again, wanting to scream at her that what she thought of as “God’s truths” was an incorrect translation, the one that sat in my lap. I wondered how I could ever prove to her that I still had strong faith in God, even though at the same time I was having trouble holding on to some Christian beliefs. Elsie was too. When we went on our first official date in mid-December at a coffee shop, we talked for hours over mocha lattes, opening up about the doubts and fears about our faith that we couldn’t trust anyone else with.
Together, we did more research and decided we didn’t believe that God was male, and we didn’t believe that during the crucifixion God placed wrath on Jesus to atone for our sins. We supported each other as we found new ways to believe. Even when we felt that no one was listening to our prayers, we listened to each other. We also did research on whether there were any LGBTQ+ accepting churches in the area. There were a few, and we chose to attend an Episcopalian church.
It was uncomfortable, that first service. The hymns and prayer book and the formally dressed priests all went against what my parents had taught me about church: that tradition didn’t matter, only the Bible and Christ did, and that denominations were divisive. The hymns felt stiff; I couldn’t raise my hands, dance, or clap to organ music and a choir. The recitation of prayers and the Nicene Creed and the call-and-response were all so new and the charismatic part of me that was still left wanted to speak in tongues, and call out “Hallelujah!” when the pastor said something good during the sermon. It felt like I had to repress a part of myself that I hadn’t before; on one hand, the theology was more progressive and I felt like I could come as I was as a gay woman, but on the other hand the liturgy itself was something so foreign to me that it made me feel excluded.
But then, the time came to get communion. The pastor told the congregation that everyone, and he meant everyone, was welcome at the altar, because Jesus welcomed all to dine with Him. Elsie and I walked up the aisle holding hands and then kneeled down at the altar together. We received the wafer that represented Christ’s body, and the wine that represented His blood. I didn’t quite know what it all meant anymore—the body and blood, God dying on a cross and then rising from the dead. It didn’t seem loving for God to place wrath and torture on God’s own child.
But despite all my ethical questions and unbelief, and even my confusion about church in general, when I chewed the wafer, I felt that God was present with me. As Elsie and I sat back in our pew, I looked at the stained-glass window of Jesus on the cross at the front of the church, and realized that maybe Christ’s death was God being present with humanity, standing in solidarity with human suffering. In being honest with myself about how I was feeling, and letting God meet me there, I was able to feel at peace with God for the first time in months. I felt God’s love in a way I had never felt growing up, so deep and compassionate. Without Elsie, that never would have happened.
“Yes, I love her,” I said to Mom. “My faith has grown stronger because of her. We show grace and unconditional love to one another just as Jesus calls us to do. And staying at [redacted] will only cause us to lose our faith out of frustration at the injustice we see around us—we want to transfer out. I’ll pick a state school or get a good scholarship so that it’s not a financial burden to you. But I can’t stay here. The punitive and restrictive nature of this institution is more like the Roman Empire than Jesus.”
After another moment of silence, I heard her sigh. “I just don’t understand. I’m disappointed in you, honey,” she said. “And I am praying that God will put his truths into your heart and mind. I still love you, though, no matter what you choose for your life. If you really want to leave [redacted], I will not stop you. I am going to tell your father when he gets home soon, and he will call sometime later tonight, okay?”
“Okay,” I managed to say. “Bye.”
She hung up without saying “Bye” back. I dropped the phone on the bed and hugged Elsie, burying my face in her shoulder. Then, I looked down at my lap and ran my hands over the Bible Mom gave me, holding back tears. Part of me wanted to go back and read through it, see the passages I had circled when I was sad and needed encouragement. Part of me wanted to destroy it; my hand gripped a page tightly, ready to crumple it. But instead, after a moment of thought, I decided to open it to a page where Mom had put a sticky note and highlighted the whole page, saying that it was her favorite Bible passage. It was 1 Corinthians 13:
“If I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing…Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance…Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.”
Elsie took her hands in mine, and I lifted my head up. We put our foreheads together, and she started to whisper a prayer in tongues. I wrapped my arms around her, feeling her heartbeat along with my own. Even if Mom’s love for me did not match the Bible’s definition, the love that Elsie and I had for each other did. Mom’s “love” was only an empty word. But the love between Elsie and I was embodied in all that we did.
*************
I’ve never been in a romantic relationship (I have gone on dates and had some steamy kisses, but nothing more). I have always been a hopeless romantic, so this constant feeling of waiting and feeling disappointed when budding relationships don’t work out has just really sucked. And it feels like my dating pool is really small, because I do want to date a fellow queer Christian woman—I don’t think Christians have to date Christians (that is not what Paul meant by “unequally yoked,” but that is a whole other post), but it’s something that I want, sharing faith together, going to church together (as an autistic person my whole life is centered around special interests of theology, the church, God, Jesus…). I think in this piece not only was I exploring how two other people might go through faith deconstruction, but I also was projecting my ideal relationship. I know romantic relationships aren’t perfect and they won’t complete me, but damn I hope I get to experience one before I’m 30 (currently I’m 24, turning 25 in April 2023—yes, I’m April-born-in-April). Just being a little angsty here. Who knows, maybe I’ll meet someone at the Q Christian Fellowship Conference….wish me luck :) I’ll need it.
Also the commentary Cass gives on feeling stiff when she was at a liturgical church for the first time was 100% my experience—it was really hard, but I started to find the beauty in the prayers and hymns. Now I go to a liturgical United Methodist Church and I absolutely love it—and I still love the contemporary worship at the UMC my family attends in my hometown, and I’m looking forward to being there for Christmas Eve service this week.
Did anything in this story resonate with your experiences? Are you a hopeless romantic who is unlucky in love? Let’s commiserate together.