The Healing Heart

I’m in Birmingham, at a hospital, where my mother’s long-time companion is undergoing cancer surgery.

Yesterday, Mom called to read off a roster of the other people who will join us in the waiting room, including my brother, a friend of my father’s I haven’t seen in twenty years, and his girlfriend. I also learn that my mother, to my great surprise, has left the church I grew up in; she now attends a larger, more vibrant congregation, and her new minister, I’m told, will be in the waiting room with us, as well.

I get the impression, then, that I’m to be on my Very Best Behavior. And while I’m happy to know my mother has a group of friends who are willing to come to Birmingham to support her, I’m also a little wary.

In the past, Mom’s been very unhappy when friends and family have learned of my fourteen-year relationship with Clyde. As a result, when her friends ask me innocent, friendly questions — such as, “Are you married?” — a simple, honest answer (“Yes, for fourteen years.”) has potential to cause painful friction and emotional upheaval on a day that will be strained and stressful enough.

Worse, I fear Mom’s new minister might choose this day — a day that I do not want, in any way, to be about me — to question everything from my relationship to my choice of faith. With an eye toward not rocking the boat, I channel Miss Manners, consider my options, and decide I’ll answer any pointed questions about my sexual orientation or my faith with a gentle rejoinder: “I’m sure that today is a time for us to focus on my mother and her friend.”

My brother arrives first. After many years of growing apart, we are finally growing back together — instead of simply being relatives, we are back to being brothers. I enjoy his company; I’m glad he’s there. We join Mom, see her boyfriend off to surgery, and find seats in the waiting room.

Mom’s new minister arrives next — a man I last saw more than two decades ago. His warmth surprises me, and his genuine concern for Mom and her boyfriend pleases me. The subject of religion does, eventually, come up, and I involuntarily stiffen; instead of a tirade, though, he tells a self-depricating story about how faith grows and matures over time. He recalls fierce, hard-line stances he adopted in his youth … and notes how, in retrospect, these stances strike him as misguided.

In the end, he stuns me by quoting some of my own dearest-held tenets of faith right back at me: that part of our freedom in Christ involves each of us being personally responsible for our own relationship with God, that we don’t need others to manage or evaluate that relationship for us, and that our relationship with Christ (as opposed to, say, a perfect understanding of every jot and tittle of Scripture) is the most important factor in an effective faith.

These are not words I expect to hear from someone schooled in the strict faith of my childhood.

Later, Mother’s friends — my father’s old acquaintance and his girlfriend — arrive. They are warm, funny people, determined to do whatever needs to be done in order to make Mother feel as grounded and cared-for as possible. They are the sort of friends I’ve always wished for Mother — people who very genuinely love her, people with real potential to support her and help her grow. I fall in love with them immediately.

The day, then, is rightfully focused on Mom and her companion — who comes out of surgery doing better than i hoped, though serious concerns about his future health, recovery, and treatment options abound.

For me, though, the day has also become, unexpectedly, a day of healing and growth. I begin to see how I’ve molded everyone associated with the church of my childhood into rigidly-defined and inflexible caricatures. I understand how my own fears and pain and prejudice have sometimes caused me to dismiss the potential for growth and change that everyone possesses.

I see my mother, my family, her faith, and her friends in a different light, and this moves me more than I can easily express.