What You Do in Life, Echoes in Eternity

To care for things as if they were people, is illusion... To care for people as if they were things, is violence... To care for people as if they were people, is justice... To care for people as if they were ourselves, is love...

Thesis

I used to be afraid of the world. One of those things in time where as a youth I hated myself so much and was so afraid to just live. It was my fear of living that closed me off to really seeing what was right in front of my nose. And through the course of my life I realized that I would be okay, and in the end would discover how much I had missed out on, but how much was still left to be discovered.

Body

I think I was one of the happiest kids growing up. At school I was always the outgoing one coming up with new and inventive ways of doing things. At recess My friend Brad and I would always play the fourth graders in basketball and would always win, making us THE kids to know as merely second graders. I was proud of that, and will still brag about it to this day.

At home, my sister and I were best friends. We would always build these elaborate forts made of cushions and chairs and go out onto the lake behind our house in our small inflatable boat to catch snapping turtles and craw dads. We would have dancing nights, where my parents would put on the old country music and swing each other back and forth while my sister and I used our light bright to create “ambience”. My dad was a girl’s basketball coach at a local high school and I was his biggest fan. I would sit at the end of his bench and always scream at the players “Good Job” and hiss and growl every time the opposing team would be shooting free throws. I attended his basketball camps every summer and was the star every year.

I was always the adventurous kid and in my spare time I always wanted to explore the world around me and see how far one path could take me, before I had to turn around and come home. I would always take my bike, sometimes miles by myself exploring the trial that ran behind our house.

Another important part of me were My Grandparents on my mother’s side. Whenever they would visit, I was always excited, because I knew that they would bring me back gifts from their travels around the world. It was that time in their lives where they had just retired and spent the first 10 years of it traveling the globe. My grandmother would always bring back treasures from everywhere. One time she brought back a beret from France, which I proudly wore to school every day until I was 10. Another item she brought back was this intricate hand woven vest with dragons and circles on it from China. She had told me that she purchased it on the Great Wall where she learned about the culture there and how dragons served as a means of protection.
When the war had broken out in Ireland between the Catholics and the protestants, my grandparents joined a group that every summer would bring together one Protestant and one Catholic to try to create peace in the country. My grandparents were amazing people and I loved them very much.
Being a teacher from New Mexico that worked with lower income families, my Grandmother had the opportunity to work very closely with the Native American Tribes in the region. She would always share stories of the culture they had, stories of respecting the land, and honoring everything and everyone within it, telling me tales of great warriors, spirits and tribal dance. One time she even went in to have eye surgery, and because my sister and I were visiting and she had no one else to drive her, she decided to forgo anesthesia “like a native warrior would” so she could drive herself home and be with us. She was an amazing woman and one who inspired me greatly. One of the fondest memories I had of her, was the day she came to visit and she brought me a gift… it was a picture of a guardian angel, and she explained to me what a guardian angel was and it was in that moment that I felt protected by something greater. My Grandmother in that moment became my guardian angel which would become much more apparent many years later.

Back at school, I started having some trouble. I had always known that I was different than everybody else…and it scared me. As far back as I remember, I can recall always having a different orientation to the world. I was different than the other kids my age and worst of all, I knew it. And I knew enough that to be different was not good and that if I were to get along with my fellow classmates I would have to hide my innermost feelings and suppress how I really felt about a lot of things.
Over the course of the next few years, I became more aware of my difference which made me feel more and more alienated from people around me. The same world my grandmother had once taught me to love and to cherish slowly seemed to be crashing in on me. I was alone.
As adolescents will do when faced with those who stray from the “norm”, I soon found my self slowly ostracized from my peer group. I wish I could have taken pictures from above my group of friends, because at the beginning of my sixth grade year I started out at the very center and over the course of a couple months I slowly was pushed out. My difference became something that was harder to hide; and internally harder to accept. I would be called such horrible things by people I once considered friends, and found myself deeper in isolation. I found solace in knowing that I still had my family and my soccer team and even God left in my life. When I was called such horrible things it was “Father Forgive them for they know not what they do” that I would repeat to myself over and over again to get through my day. It was this that kept me going, words my grandmother had once instilled within me.

And the funny part was that throughout all of the name calling and degradation, to the whole world, everything appeared fine. I still excelled in everything I did. I was the captain of my soccer team, first chair violinist for our school orchestra, acknowledged for my work ethic and simply put a kid that seemed to have it all. And yet, every day I would find myself coming home and escaping to the seclusion of my room. I became the hunchback of Notre Dam; I became not afraid of the outside world, but more so, myself. The same names and taunts that others used against me, I had internalized and when I looked into the mirror, I knew what I really was.
As the years dragged on, the taunting became a constant in my life. It became something that drove me away from some of the things I loved the most. While I still had my club soccer team to turn to, my passion for basketball dwindled, to the point where when I actually made the basketball team in 9th grade, I decided not to play because my teammates had been my tormentors. My father the basketball coach, the man who had watched me play all those years and knew how good I really was, was quite shocked when I came home and told him that I had decided not to play. When he asked why, I was scared to tell him the truth because I didn’t want him, my father to start thinking the same thing that they did. The more depressed I became, the more I tried to hide it from those I loved the most. I stopped going out with my family because I was afraid that someone from school would call me those awful names in front of them and that my family would think the same thing and reject me as my peers had. I had heard once on TV that people like me were often rejected by their families, kicked to the curb if you will and left to live on the streets. I even heard once that families of people like me would rather their children be dead, than different like I was.
To escape the pain, I buried myself in movies and music and slowly drifted into an abyss known as my dark and cold room, where I would simply sit and wonder about why I was the way I was. I asked myself, is it true that someone like me was going to hell? Was I bad person? Inhuman? Was their something wrong with me? Sometimes I would cry myself to sleep and other nights I would yell at God and ask why? Why me? What purpose do I serve?
Fighting the internal hate and sadness that had overcome me by that point in my life, I often would ask God to simply end it all. It became a burden I no longer felt I could bare and on top of that I had distanced myself from everyone simply to numb the pain of wondering constantly “if they only knew who I really was, would they still love me?”.
I would fall asleep at night hoping never to return to the consciousness I knew, to die in my sleep and to forever escape the anguish of knowing who I really was.

****PAUSE****
And yet I would wake, each morning. Faced with a new day. I was given life over and over again. And suddenly one day it just dawned on me… wait a second I wasn’t alone. Someone had been with me the whole entire time. Someone who loved me, who cared for me, and created me just the way I was.
Slowly but surely the more I started to think about it, the more I realized how wrong I was, how wrong my tormentors had been. In fact, I started to recognize that instead of being some ugly demonic person both I and society had made me out to be, I realized that my existence was quite the opposite.
I realized that not only am I something beautiful, but someone who is connected to something greater. That my existence is apart of a whole world of people all connected and all related in some way or another. I remembered the children in China my grandmother had once told me about. I remembered that stupid beret I would were every day. I remember the kids my grandparents would host every year from Ireland, the same kids who in their native land would be bitter enemies, but some how became the best of friends when they realized they were simply human. I remembered the stories of love and forgiveness of some foreign man who died on a cross my parents would read to me at night.
As I slowly came out to people and told them the truth about who I really was, the more I realized just how amazing it was to know that all along I had someone with me. That the same people who I once feared had always been there, that God had been in them for me and my life. From my mother who stood by my side on a rainy Sunday afternoon embracing my battered body and sobbing soul as I revealed to her who I really was. It was ok. In her heart she had always known and even more so, had always been there, whether I knew it or not. My father’s first words to me were “First foremost, and always, I love you…the same emotions and feelings of unconditional love a man once told his people. My sister my best friend, simply said, nothings changed, and it hadn’t. She was and always had been there. My friends in school, many had suspected all along and had remembered the times I made them laugh, or been a shoulder to cry on. They said that if I wasn’t the way I was, the way God had made me to be, then I wouldn’t have been the same person to them. They had been there all along too.
The same love I now knew was there, both for myself and from others, led me to also recognize the same beauty in even those who had hurt me once before. While my tormentors raced through my nightmares over and over again at one point in my life, I saw in them the same beauty I now knew to be in everyone, including me.
I am created of a different dust, but am still human, still thy brother, still thy neighbor, still thy friend. I am gay. I am human, in and of the same being. Of His flesh, His blood; of your flesh, your blood. I recognize that God exists not only in one person, but in everyone and everything. That we were all made in a common image, and that would be our existence itself. I am apart of something and what is in everyone and everything is God.

In my eyes, God is love. Love is what connects us to one another and what we strive for. It is the simple connection between one person and another. It is in every human being, in everyone.

conclusion

In conclusion, I just want to say that my story may be similar to many, but unique to me and me alone. I have realized how truly blessed I am and recognize the privilege I have been given in my life of knowing who I am and knowing that God loves me. There are so many people in this world who suffer far greater than I could have ever imagined. There are young women and men being exported from their native countries as sex slaves to greedy men. There are children in Darfur and Iraq who see bloodshed every day. There are people who are dying from starvation in both our country and abroad. There are people who experience hate and bias in multiple ways from the color of their skin, the country they were born in, the language they speak, their abilities to walk upright, see clearly or hear perfectly, people who are born of one gender or the other, people whose love is not recognized by others, children, elderly, and even some of us. There are people on our very campus who sit alone as I once did, scared of the world and scared of themselves.

If you take away one thing from my talk today, I hope it is not the loss of hope or feelings of despair, but rather the genuine sense that there is something greater in our lives that connects each and every one of us. There is something beautiful that we should embrace and cherish, love and commit ourselves too. So many times we have distain and disgust for things we may not know of first hand, but if we can open our eyes and accept all people no matter who they are, even people we’ve never met as truly God’s children, as perfect beings in and of themselves, then I think it will be easier to also accept ourselves.

Walk away from this Search, this experience not only KNOWING that you ARE LOVED, but remembering to give back this love to others as well, from a simple smile to that homeless person on the street or contributing your time and energy to one of the many humanitarian services around the globe, place these feelings and emotions into action, and remember those people out there who might not know or realize just how loved they truly are. I leave you with Yeha-Noha or Wishes of Happiness and Prosperity) by a group known as Sacred Spirits….a group my Grandmother once introduced to me.