FRUIT BASKET

For someone of my history and demographic, I have had an unusually large amount of Christian and Biblical education. In fact, I can quote long stretches of Bible verse by memory including the book and chapter. The act is a guaranteed show stopper, friends responding as if I’d suddenly burst into an aria from La Bohemé. Others often ask what church I attend now. Listen, I reply, I can also quote long stretches of All About Eve but that doesn’t make me Bette Davis.

When I was a child, I would spend summers with my mother’s family in Virginia while she was in Florida working and trying to have some kind of a single woman’s life. I stayed with my aunt and uncle and their four kids, three boys and a girl all around my age. My uncle was an extremely religious man and the entire family attended church all the time. Wednesdays, Saturday nights (“Youth Night”), Sunday mornings and Sunday night. In addition, we had to learn a Bible verse every day and went to Bible Camp for a week in August. It was a whole lotta Bible.

I’m not really sure what denomination they were, Quaker or something along those lines. Church services were held in an old meeting hall where folding wooden chairs were arranged in a big square around a central opening. The men who were the Big Church Cheeses sat in the center while the women sat with the children in the back and wore doilies covering their heads. Communion was a whole loaf of fresh bread that was passed around and you’d break off a piece and pass it to the next person. One of my cousins was notorious for falling asleep and my aunt would tell us to just leave him alone.

For many years they didn’t traditionally celebrate Christmas with decorations. Eventually, due no doubt to my Aunt, they’d get a tree. They also didn’t have TV, probably not until some time in the 70s. We would have “camp outs” in the living room because of the heat and I remember that July night of the first Apollo landing, we all lay awake staring at the moonlight on the ceiling until we heard faint cheers from the houses around us.

There was nothing the least bit campy about “Bible Camp”. No tents, no woods, no fires. Actually it wasn’t an overnight camp, we were just shuttled there every day, but where were the popsicle stick pencil holders? What is Camp without beads? When is the Talent Show!? Instead we spent an action-packed five days studying the Ark of the Covenant (which held the Ten Commandments) and the accompanying structure they’d built around it for display purposes. I was obsessed with Disneyland and imagined the whole thing as plans for an Ark Pavilion in BibleWorld, the concession stand selling Burning Bush t-shirts. We examined artist’s renderings of the layout, discussed the kind of material used for the walls and the torches which provided appropriate lighting. Frankly I have no idea why we were learning all this but it was a young queer’s decorating dream come true. Needless to say, I passed with flying colors. You cannot overestimate the importance of Divine Taste.

Later, in my pre-teens, I became involved with a church next to the apartments where my family lived in Florida. My parents weren’t interested but I was because I had fallen in love... with the Youth Minister. Ok, he was married but he was so, so virile and funny and athletic and handsome. Plus he was nice to me, the chubby queer kid who craved attention. He and his wife even moved into our apartment complex. Oy. My obsession grew until I was one step away from boiling rabbits which has to be creepy in a ten year old boy. Despite my age (or perhaps because of it) I still committed the Three Big Sins of having a broken heart - 1) I said things in anger and frustration I regretted later, 2) I gave a gift and took it back and 3) I stalked him. Well I rode my ten-speed around and around our complex in hopes that I might “accidentally” run into him.

At the time, however, puppets were the Next Big Thing in Youth Ministry and one Ace Up My Sleeve was my natural talent at the craft. Years of Sesame Street, my own puppet stage at home and the innate ability to lip-synch with my hand in a sock made me a star. This was the Big Time - professionally made, felt covered hemispheres with thin wires to manipulate the arms. We would perform for the congregation (in a real church this time) usually on Sunday night which was considered the more “laid back” service and we even toured some of the local churches in our denomination. Puppetry was a guaranteed cover for my Aching Heart and (backed by my already extensive Bible Verse trivia) I embraced the performances wholeheartedly.

Obviously (if not to me at the time), I wasn’t really looking for Jesus in my life. Not unless Jesus was going to hold my hand and Talk About Me all the time which I realized was less and less likely. My continued participation implied more and more commitment, both to the church itself and to my misplaced idea of God, and if there’s one thing we learn later, it’s nothing spoils the blushes of First Love like the word Commitment. I finally stopped going.

Eventually I went to a private Episcopalian High School. The title was slightly misleading as there wasn’t much Episcopalian about the whole thing. My paternal grandmother was a self-professed Episcopalian and I don’t ever ever recall her in a church until I went to her funeral. My guess is her religious preference had more to do with the Episcopalian’s acceptance of alcohol. As we used to say in school, “Wherever you find four Episcopalians, you’ll always find a fifth.” My preferred drink of choice through High School was gin and tonic. I’d have cocktails at friend’s houses with their parents and we’d show old movies at a teacher’s house where we’d made homemade sangria. I was fifteen at the time.

At school, our religious involvement was pretty minimal - Mass every Wednesday morning and one trimester of Theology taught by a campus priest. In English class, however, we were also discussing Zen Buddhism while reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. My mother kept my school records and for Theology the Father noted how he enjoyed my “witty comments”, a Godly way of saying I had a big mouth. The same can be said of most characters in the Bible and I appropriately got an A.

Which leads me to the recent brouhaha in the Episcopalian church over the appointment of the first openly gay Bishop. Tenuous as my connection is, there’s enough for me to recognize I know those people. I may not agree with them or understand the obsession with the whole Gay thing, but I have had an experience of their beliefs. Indeed, I have been in their church. In fact, I could say the same of Jerry Falwell. I have a real experience of people like him that’s outside of the talk show circuit and angry ranting. Sometimes my experiences have been, if not always pleasant, at least instructive.

So I take my indifference to their religion and try to marry it to my personal knowledge and the two are hard to get to the alter. It’s like watching the family down the block, the one that had backyard bar-b-ques just like you, suddenly go crazy and cover their dog in tinfoil to deflect Alien Rays. The dog you once petted now sits in the front yard like a baked potato, a pie plate tied to it’s head with string. You know what it’s like to be a family but you have no idea how to handle their loony distractions. Can you afford to wait until your cat comes home wrapped in french fry paper? How much compassion can you elicit for those who live around you - your “neighbors”, the people you once thought of as polite acquaintances and once, long ago, greeted you at the door with a welcoming fruit basket?

I’d love to say an endless amount but that’s not my job. In the end I’m only human and trying to figure it all out myself. Just like the Episcopalians, just like the people who hate me because I’m gay, just like the Bishop who has committed himself to God above the confines of his Church, just like my neighbors, just like you.

4:49:57 PM    sro home /