Trending Upward vs. Following the Trends

It is not we who choose to awaken ourselves, but God Who chooses to awaken us.

Thomas Merton

I am curious about memory.

Maybe it is partly nostalgia, but I wonder about how we remember and what we remember.

Do we hold in our memory banks moments as they happened, or, especially from childhood, do we create memories based on pictures we’ve seen or stories told to us?

Likely a combination of both. So, this memory I maintain to be true and authentic, because no one else in my family was there to see it and tell me about it later, and I certainly did not discuss it afterward.

I was not yet elementary age; the Sunday school class huddled on the floor around the seated teacher who held up picture illustrations. In one hand she held the image of a man wearing a tuxedo and woman in a gown — a heterosexual couple in typical wedding attire. In the opposite hand, she held up illustrations of two men and two women embracing at the wedding altar.

Who is allowed to marry? Which picture is right and which was wrong? The class had to point and call out yes or no.

The queer girl inside me burned. It was my first feeling of shame. A core memory. I was not any older than 5.

It takes grit, courage, and faith to be yourself in a world that wants to conform you to a standard of normality that sustains the hierarchy of power and wealth. I am not original in stating this claim, but I do seek to validate it through my experience and assert that when the hierarchy collapses around us, and the world breaks us down, it is actually God taking hold and saying: You are created for more. Listen, and incline your ear to Me!

The Sunday school class taught us nothing about the sanctity of marriage, the purpose of holy unions, or selfless love, only hate, judgment, and fear – which are not part of God’s kingdom.

How could I grow and dare to imagine or explore the possibility of being an instrument for God if I felt I was despicable and being punished by God?

I repressed and kept going. Luckily I enjoyed writing, and teachers noticed that trait and encouraged me to grow the skill. It was a helpful balm but otherwise ineffective because my voice was disconnected from my truth and identity. I was not yet able to ask, “How can God use my voice?”

So, I figured out how the world was making use of writers, majored in journalism at university, and started working in the field as a newspaper reporter when I was still a teenager.

The irony of print media’s collapse circa 2008, due to the surprise attack of the internet, is that newspaper management started microaggressing the very workforce on which publishers’ crumbling fortunes were built. Lazy leaders projected onto the audience. “Nobody wants to read anymore,” they claimed. Instead of taking four paragraphs to establish a narrative we had four seconds to sideswipe someone’s attention.

I internalized the turmoil and felt ashamed for the first time as a writer with a skill no one needed (or a skill the industry no longer wished to exploit).

“Writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources,” Toni Morrison said. “The alarm, the disquiet, writers raise is instructive because it is open and vulnerable, because if unpoliced it is threatening.”

Thus, institutions rely on censoring mechanisms, social degradation, and other restrictive containers to keep us lukewarm, passive, and disconnected. The world operates on an industrialized, medicalized marketplace model of fix and cure rather than holistic modes of understanding and evolving. Repressing the very thing that makes us unique seems safer and less painful than exposing our difference, and then being told by those who maintain the margins that our distinction requires remedy or warrants exclusion.

“The efforts to censor, starve, regulate, and annihilate us are clear signs that something important has taken place,” Morrison said.

Thomas Merton says it takes “heroic humility to be yourself and nobody but the artist God intended you to be.”

And needs us to be.

What I understand, and must atone for, is that I wasted years in vain efforts to be accepted by the world, and those sentences are edited out of God’s masterpiece. There is no use following everybody else or attempting what trends today and is canceled tomorrow.

God’s Word is everlasting, and it is implanted within each and every one of us. When we take the time to discover it, we also unearth our individuality, which we are called to use according to divine purpose.

I wonder how God wants to use my voice.

Perhaps to make meaning in the margins, to gather different voices, and together, we write it into memory.