After the Flood

Views from a Ridge

Nearly four weeks have passed since my husband John and I arrived home from the tumultuous 2016 General Conference to discover water pouring out beneath our front door. Those who've been following my personal Facebook posts have gotten a sense of our travails since a burst second-story water pipe drenched our home while we were in Portland, Ore., for two weeks.

I wish I could say that we've reached a new level of spiritual grace from enduring our trials. Truth is, we're still suffering our own version of the Catholic idea of Purgatory: that place of uncertainty where some souls await their eternal fate. Caught between "yes" and "no."

We were numb for the first week or so after discovering the deluge. We were physically safe, living in the home of church friends who graciously turned over their empty house to us while they summer away from Texas' seasonal inferno. Still, being sheltered was no panacea for the emotional and spiritual shock that piled on top of the physical and mental exhaustion of reporting from the 2016 General Conference.

We've lost many possessions including clothes, furniture, household linens, appliances and God knows what else. Our home resembles a toxic waste dump, because mold grew from the flood and resulting indoor humidity of a closed house. I fell ill with intestinal troubles, whether from travel, stress or mold exposure I couldn't tell. (My doctor apparently was worried about mold exposure, because he dosed me with the antibiotic Cipro, also used to treat inhalation anthrax!). My husband John has assumed the burden of keeping tabs on our vacant, sodden home, so now I worry about his exposure to the bacteria-infested house. Meanwhile, we both struggle with the emotional roller-coaster of not knowing what's going to happen with our suspended lives. As John says, when your life turns upside down, there's a lot to process.

Then came the June 12 shooting massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. God help me, but my first thoughts beyond horror at the carnage were whether The United Methodist Church, along with other churches and even other faiths, bears some complicity for fostering a toxic society in which LGBTQI people could be so vulnerable to violence.

Perhaps I might not have such thoughts if the 2016 General Conference, with its vicious anti-gay politics, were not so fresh in my mind. Yet for nearly five decades now, The United Methodist Church has been saying that LGBTQI people were "incompatible with Christian teaching." Yes, I know that the official language says "homosexual behavior" is what's incompatible, but even the Book of Discipline's attempt to hold gays "of sacred worth" hasn't stopped the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual violence against them. With its anti-gay stances, The United Methodist Church violates one of its own essential tenets that we should "do no harm."

Now the events in Orlando have drenched all of us figuratively in the victims' blood. America's flood of gun violence and a deluge of anti-gay prejudice have washed away all pretense. We're forced to own up to the fact that factions of both church and society have used LGBTQI people as scapegoats – sacrificial lambs meant to absolve us of our collective responsibilities for the bewildering pace of social change, for allowing the sexual abuse of children, for the breakdown of families, even for natural disasters. None of those biases against LGBTQI people is true. Not one.

Like the burst pipe that flooded our home, a torrent of terror cascaded upon more than 100 innocent people who sought nothing more than to have a good time together among people who loved them. One man, armed with a weapon whose only purpose was to kill humans, shot them. Those victims had a right to be safe in their community. By allowing prejudice and hatred to make them vulnerable, we let them down.

The Orlando shootings have caused John and me to renew our commitment as straight allies for LGBTQI people's dignity and rights. We didn't know anyone at Pulse, but we know Forrest and Ron, Cisco and Brian, Dan and his late partner Fred, Cathie and Allie, Kevin and Grant, Amy and Jennifer, along with Ginger, Amory, Julie, James, Tom and many more people who only want to live their lives in peace with the ones they love. Whatever it takes, even to standing between them and bullets, we must not forsake these our brothers and sisters until the world treats them with the respect they deserve.

So while we wait for our own lives to be sorted out, while we journey from what was to whatever will be, John and I find ourselves on a simultaneous pilgrimage of trying to love the world as Jesus taught. Today we mourn, but God promises that one day we'll dance. Always, we love, because God first loved us.

A journalist for 44 years and a certified spiritual director, Cynthia B. Astle founded and serves as Editor of United Methodist Insight.