Put on your own mask first

Bracing for impact now that CRCNA has lost cabin pressure.

Have you heard the news? Whether you’re LGBTIA or just a queer sympathizer, you are cordially invited to depart the CRCNA.  For you and yours there are other options: PCUSA, ECLA, RCA. Or even, young man, the YMCA.

After all, Jesus has sheep in many pens. Surely, you could graze elsewhere?

Today I won’t mention the ridiculousness or injustice or sanctimoniousness of this, nor the pain it will cause. Nor the fact that morality is not an obstacle course established by the Supreme to separate the wheat from the chaff. I’ve said all of those things so many times already.  Instead I’ll share advice—advice I’ve never actually needed, but that I nonetheless I receive several times a year.

Humanity’s view of morality and sexual purity differs by religion, by sect, across time, and as a matter of opinion. Nonetheless, there is, behind it all, a universal truth. I have heard this truth around the world, in many languages, from all races and religions.  The truth is that in the event of the loss of cabin pressure, an oxygen mask will descend, like manna itself, from the panel above your head.  If this happens, it is a matter of undisputed wisdom that you are not to help the children or the elderly seated beside you until after you’ve placed your own mask over your own nose and mouth and begun to breathe normally. This truth transcends geography and religion and language. It’s true no matter what. Even if the bag does not inflate.

An unscientific review of comments on Facebook and X (that dung heap formerly known as Twitter) informs me that many of you—whether individually or as congregations—will leave or be removed from the denomination. Good for you!  Others might conjure acceptance, fall in line, and stay. Good for you, too!

A third group will remain, attempting to be agents of resistance or as embedded hope-mongers who will make it their jihad to prevent damage to the fresh crop of soon-to-be traumatized queer CRC youth.  It is for you, members of this third group, that I have a message.

I grew up in the CRC and I suppose I’ve always been gay.  I was a good Christian school student and a kerchief-clad, Crusader-reading Calvinist Cadet. I even survived a full year at Calvin College, including that then-indispensable-yet-now-forgotten course called Christian Perspectives on Learning. It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I began to realize the inevitability of my homosexuality. I was over 30 years old when I finally had the courage to fully come out. I’m 45 now, and still experiencing the effects those formative years. Yes, there were moments of pain.  But suffering is a part of life, and suffering is a prerequisite to wisdom.  I look back now not with bitterness, but with gratitude for the small degree of wisdom I’ve gained from so much experience. I might not be very wise, but I know I’m wiser than I would have been had life’s path been any less rocky.  

A great deal of our sophistication as a human species can be ascribed to the helplessness we experience as babies and young people.  We spend ten or 15 or 20 years as children: nourished and protected and guided and perhaps even indoctrinated by our parents. During our long childhoods, we absorb language and skills and education and culture and values and etiquette and religion and social mores.

(Aphids, to provide some contrast, can give birth to babies so developed that they can essentially crawl from the womb. Aphids do not enjoy the warmth of parent-child relationships. But neither do they pass on intergenerational baggage. Aphids do not go to Catechism. Aphids do not worry about their offspring’s life choices. Aphids don’t need therapists.)

Human children, via the strong parent-child bonds that develop during our years-long childhoods, learn to associate love and nourishment with acceptance and approval. We learn that a person who is loved is a person who will survive. In most cases, this helps us develop into responsible, well-adjusted, well-behaved adults.  But sometimes this feature of evolution backfires. Sometimes, children are not fully accepted by their parents, whether because of their sexual orientation, gender identity, neurodivergence, or whatever.  Such children may internalize their parents’ disapproval. These kids will perceive a lack of acceptance, which they will subconsciously interpret as a threat to their very survival. The unluckiest of these children will spend a lifetime dealing with guilt and shame and fears of intimacy. The lucky ones will untangle it all.

It is a child’s parents who do the feeding and nourishing, who do the loving, and whose well-intentioned desire it is that their children grow up to become fine Christian adults.  The parents, doing what they believe is right and godly and in the interest of their children’s very souls, will stress the unacceptability of homosexuality—or any type of queerness or other perceived immorality. The children, in turn, will absorb and believe their parents’ teaching, just as they will learn to say ‘please’ and ‘thank-you’. Just as they learn to hold doors open for the elderly. Just as they learn to stand during the Hallelujah Chorus and to never ever show up to a dinner invitation empty-handed. Trained in the way they should go, they will not depart from it.

Is it your intention to remain in the CRC as an affirming Christian? Just in case a kid needs you? Just so you can be beacon of rainbow-colored acceptance in an otherwise black-and-white congregation?

I can tell you that no well-meaning and affirming congregant sitting three rows behind a family with a small gay kid should hope to interfere with the information and indoctrination this child will learn from her parents. The child will learn from her parents as her parents learned from theirs. You may be a dear and open-minded and charitable soul, but you will be derided, openly or behind your back, as a liberal and a heathen.  That small gay kid will learn from her parents that you’re in the wrong. This will happen long before the child discovers her own sexuality, long before she begins to question whether mom and dad might not have been correct one hundred percent of the time, which is what she thought. What our parents also thought. What we all thought. What kids always think.

Let the Buddhists detach, let the Hindus renounce. Let the Christians sell all they have, giving all to the poor, before following Jesus. The faiths agree that we must separate ourselves from this material, transactional world in order to follow the Path, whatever path that is. Ego, nostalgia, drugs, vices, relationships, and most of all: stuff. We may need to jettison things very dear to us before we attempt to trudge the life-long length of our spiritual path.

But one should never, in the name of anything, sacrifice the Path itself.

If you’re thinking about staying the CRC for the sake of others, then I, as a gay kid who was raised in that denomination and who lived to tell about it, am grateful for your concern. But I encourage you to reconsider. You risk ruining yourself, and there’s little chance you’ll help anyone else.

Find a space where you feel welcome before you try to welcome others. Find a place where you are nourished before trying to nourish others. Cater for your own spiritual development before concerning yourself with the fate of others. For your own sake and that of the other passengers, put on your own mask before assisting those around you. And then breathe normally, even if the bag does not inflate.

Photo by Sacha Verheij on Unsplash