Jesus Christ is the Same Yesterday, Today, and Forever

Since I started this blog, I've wanted to write a post about my parents. I've wanted to be able to examine the situation I find myself in with them. It is peculiar, and has taken these two months to fully riddle out (though I suspect I have not gotten quite to the bottom of it yet). I have had to observe and listen to them, take in some of what they're taking in, and try to remember what is was like to be how they are to achieve my meager understanding of our situation. Even if I do manage to fully understand what has happened and continues to happen, I expect it will somehow remain, in the words of Yul Brenner "a puzzlement". To lay out what exactly I've learned, I'm going to need to give a little bit of back story to ensure that the whole issue (as I understand it) is brought to light.

To start, some seven or eight years ago, I became interested in politics. I was in middle school, and the primaries and caucuses were raging to see who President Bush's opponent would be in the 2004 election. A couple of friends and I were raised in Democrat households, and so we came down squarely in favor of whoever wasn't George W. Bush. Since we had decided we were "politically active" now, we started finding out what it was that the Democratic Party preached as the solutions to society's ills. I quickly became the most liberal person I knew, and proclaimed my new-found identity to the world. My mother liked to describe me as being "to the left of Richard Belzer" (a liberal Libertarian actor on one of my favorite t.v. shows).

To prove my legitimate political cajones, I could often be found annoying everyone within earshot with my very enlightened pronouncements on why the president sucked (he was dumber than my cats), why the vice president was evil (dude, have you seen what he looks like???) and how the Democrats were totally kewl and John Kerry was going to whoop George Bush's butt in the general election. I was of the opinion that everybody should be just as liberal as I was, and then society would have no problems. I mean, shouldn't everybody have supported gay marriage, abortion on demand, and embryonic stem cell research unequivocally? It was just common sense to me, and unfortunately for everyone else, they were woefully lacking in it.

Now, some of the things I supported were rather insidious, and some of them were echoes of what other liberals I idolized thought. My views matured as I got older, and as I began to see that not everybody disagreed with me because they were a bunch of fascist jack*sses whose mothers had dropped them on their heads. This, however, made me no less liberal, especially as I began my foray into atheism and neo-paganism in high school. I believed the entire time that my heart was in the right place (though my mouthy opinions almost never came from that place) and so did my parents, who tolerated my liberality and were proud of the very "aware" young woman I was becoming.

A few weeks before leaving to go to college, I had what I thought at the time was a powerful reversion back to Catholicism (until the real reversion happened), and left for school hoping to find a nice church where I could hit up the Mass each Sunday. When the actual reversion happened on September 11, my whole world was rocked. I knew there was more to God and Catholicism than I had ever thought there was, and I was determined to absorb it all. This led to my becoming pro-life, and reversed a good number of the social views I had held at home. When my parents came down for Parents' Weekend, they discovered this all at once and reacted viscerally. They saw what I had done as a rejection of my upbringing, their efforts at raising me. I saw their reaction as a rejection of who I was because it wasn't like them.

I had always heard (and usually participated in) my parents' lambasting of any person less liberal than themselves as I was growing up and developing my views. We assumed we knew what the other guys had in their hearts and minds, and it was idiotic. To us, all truly civilized people were Democrats or liberal Independents (Libertarians opposed gun control, so they couldn't really be as smart as they wanted to seem), and all Republicans or conservative Libertarians were nothing but thawed out neandertals. When I went off to school, I opened myself up to the Church and what she taught, and more importantly, why she taught it. I wanted to know every single thing I could about this body which had brought me face-to-face with the Head. On faith, I brought myself to learn and believe everything I had been raised to oppose (if not outright hate) until I could delve into the intellectual aspects of it. All the while, I had never realized that being as liberal as I was for so many years reinforced my parents' leanings, and made them even more liberal than they had been before.

Over all that has transpired since then, I have continued to grow in my relationship with God. I have come to love Christ more than I have loved any person or thing, without exception. In turn, Christ has called me to love Him and all people with agape, the Divine Love which cares only for the good of the other. I have often failed at this, but I try to do so whenever possible. It has led me to some unfortunate incidents with my parents, often ending in some passive-aggressive statement about how there are some things which some people just don't understand because they're too young, and don't know how the world works yet. As a result of this change in our relationship, most of the storge, the tender feeling of love felt for people with a familial or similar bond, has faded from it. Home is usually tense, and interactions are volatile, especially if politics are involved.

This reversal of sorts is painful to see and deal with, mostly because it is also a role reversal. Because the tenderness is almost all gone from my relationship with my parents, anything can become a bone of contention, even if we agree on it. I often hear nasty comments about Republicans as if I am one and just waiting to come out of the closet about it. If Planned Parenthood, adoption, or stem cell research comes up, I hear about how antiquated it is to oppose such good on such baseless grounds as religion. When I first noticed the pattern, it struck me painfully because I was instructed by Christ (and my school's chaplain) not to respond in kind, and to keep loving my parents even if it hurt. It also often seemed as if I was the adult in the house being needled by two teenagers about what fascist bigot I was for disagreeing with them. It's as if we've switched places entirely.

I have been tempted many times to call it quits on God and faith to have my parents back. At the FOCUS Conference I attended in January, while my friends were ecstatic with their new or renewed fervor for Christ, I wept bitterly in Adoration because it had hit me that my family would never be the same, and I couldn't wait for my parents to come around any longer. I was sorely tempted to tell God to take everything back, that it had been a nice run, but I preferred to have my parents rather than Him. My heart was nowhere in it, but I chose instead to pray for the strength to accept His will, no matter how much I hated it. I knew that I had come out of profound sin and darkness over the preceding months, and I was unwilling to go back or compromise.

Life since then has not been easy where my parents are concerned. Many times, I would get off the phone after talking to my parents and simply burst into tears. I hate having to see the broken remnants of my relationship with my parents, but it is my particular cross, and I will not put it down. This is the cost of following Christ, and I will pay it because life without Him is less than nothing compared to life since finding Him.

God called me back to Himself last summer, and in so doing, He asked for all of me. He asked for my mind, heart, and soul, with no return policy. I don't know what this means for my life, for my education or my family or anything else, but I intend to give God just exactly what he asked for: me. I've confided my fears in people about not knowing where my life will go, but I have come to believe the almost ubiquitous response I received: whatever He calls you to will be your happiness. Though other things may change, I believe the author of the letter to the Hebrews, "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever." (Heb 13:8)