Living the Gospel – According to My Texas Uncle
This past weekend (3/15-16/02) I was at a seminar at Sophia Center. The seminar leader was Miriam Therese Winter, a Medical Mission Sister, renowned liturgist, and songwriter. Perhaps her most well known song is Joy is Like the Rain. MT (as she is known by Sophia’s director, Jim Conlon) talked about the Bible and how it has been the source of much pain and much joy. She is a passionate woman who embraces all faith traditions if they bring the believer into a more loving relationship with God and the world. Her audience was composed of Roman Catholics (including nuns), Baptists, pagans, and who knows what else. While listening to her speak, I was struck by the difference in the audience and the difference in her approach, compared to my recent attendance at a Christian Writers Conference in late February.
At the writer’s conference the audience was largely evangelical Christians. The keynote speaker made a reference to the Bible as “absolute truth” and there were comments throughout the weekend about believers and non-believers. I leave it to the reader to decide which group I belong to. The conference was marked by an atmosphere that presumed certain knowledge of God’s plan and intentions for humanity as revealed in the Bible. Living life according to the Bible, especially in reference to the Gospels, was limited to the definitions they provided. In recalling the conference and listening to Miriam, I was reminded of my famously conservative, Catholic uncle in Texas, who gave a living example of how to live the Gospels and walk in the footsteps of Jesus.
In 1976 the older of my two brothers went into the hospital for what should have been routine surgery. While recovering he acquired a neuropathy, which impeded his healing. Unfortunately his doctors failed to diagnose it. Instead, they focused on evidence of his participation in sodomy and, in a remarkable breach of the patient/doctor relationship, announced to my parents that he was a homosexual. My parents were devastated. My father was certain he had somehow failed as a parent; otherwise his son would surely be different. My mother got drunk and called my brother’s companion in New York and berated the man for my brother’s plight. Everyone, including his doctors, was certain that my brother’s physical condition was a manifestation of his inner turmoil as a homosexual and that he needed psychological help. While the rest of my siblings were told, I was left out, probably because I was not living at home.
Just after New Year’s 1977 my father brought my brother back to Cleveland from the Chicago hospital. When I saw him, he looked like a living, breathing escapee from the death camps of Nazi Germany. He could have blended seamlessly into any picture of that horrible time. My heart broke to see him this way and I had no idea what I could do to help him. The evening I first saw him, he asked me to come back to the bedroom that had become his new home. He lay in bed looking at me and I suddenly knew what he was about to say; he was gay. He told me, he said, because he knew that I would understand. That night I pledged to help him as best I could, beginning with a call to his companion to reassure him that my brother was OK and that I would be the main contact point. I thought I would be alone in helping my brother, but I found out I was wrong.
My Texas uncle has a knack for reading people, and he quickly read that my family was in the throes of some trauma that they weren’t going to share with him. So he did the only thing he could think of and phoned me, at the time the family Black Sheep, demanding to know what was going on. So I told him my brother was gay. There was a momentary silence followed by “Is that all?” I said yes, and from that moment forward my uncle took over.
My uncle is a practicing Catholic who teaches religion to Catholic children attending public school, and has led marriage retreats. He and I have engaged in interesting conversations on spirituality, and he is unshakeable in his beliefs. To learn that he had a homosexual nephew must have been quite a shock to him, yet he did not turn his back on my brother. For the next year, as my brother recovered, he arranged opportunities for my brother to come to his house, allowed my brother to baby-sit our cousin, and generally embraced him in a loving manner worthy of Christ, who admonished us to love our neighbor as ourselves. Given the tenor of the times, it was a courageous act, but I don’t believe my uncle ever considered doing anything differently. It would not have been Christ-like.
Over time my parents came to an understanding that my brother was not psychologically disturbed, was a loving man fully engaged in the world, and was deeply committed to doing the right thing. A strike by United Airlines (UAL) pilots (my brother was a UAL Flight Attendant) helped my brother’s relationship with my father, a retired UAL employee. My mother named him executor of her estate after Dad died in 1990, a mark of how much her views had changed over time.
In December 1992 my brother was diagnosed with AIDS. Not HIV, but AIDS. He was living outside Houston, in a house my uncle had helped him to find along with the financing. My uncle’s love for my brother had been constant over the years. I remember going to see my brother at the hospital at Easter time in 1993, and talking with my uncle in a waiting area while the medical team removed my brother’s breathing tube. He had been in the hospital for nearly a week, part of that time in intensive care, and we thought we were going to lose him. As we waited and pondered how much longer my brother would be with us, my uncle commented on how much he would miss my brother and tears came to his eyes. In June of that year my brother left this world and yes, my uncle misses him as do the rest of us.
In 1977 my uncle could have done what the convention of the day called for; condemned my brother and insisted that he give up his sinful ways and come back to the faith that he was born to. He could have kept his son away from my brother, in the misguided fear that homosexuals are likely to be pedophiles. He could have put all sorts of conditions on his relationship with my brother. He didn’t do any of that. My uncle lived the Gospel of Christ in the only way he knew how. He embraced my brother as the Good Samaritan embraced the beaten traveler. He did unto my brother, as he would have it done unto him. Christ commented that He was the poor, the weary, and the sick and how we treat them is how we treat Him. My uncle treated my brother as if that were literally true. During those dark times in early 1977 my uncle was a reminder of how to live according to the Gospels and the teachings of Christ. He still is.