Opportunities Missed vs. Opportunities Denied

Five Words

The professor’s instructions were clear enough. “Use all five words in some kind of creative writing piece,” she had explained.

She then proceeded to write the words on the whiteboard:

Crow Cripple Silver Mud Regret

“You can use them in any tense,” she added.

A few kids in the class expressed some concern about finding a starting point, to which the professor explained that some people find it helpful to just stare at the words. Within seconds, Regret had started searing its way out of the locked chambers of my subconscious mind and was soon blazing in red neon on a billboard that blocked my vision of everything else.

With it came a flood of conversations from two years ago that had taken place over a ten month period with a volunteer therapist from a gay community center. That therapy had been followed by six months of group therapy, and it had all helped me redirect the anger that was now resurfacing.

Regret, for having spent 35 years in a prison where the door had never really been locked, but because I had been told that the door was locked I had never once even tried the doorknob.

Regret, for the rotten luck of having been born into a backwards family who lived in a backwards village that held onto a backwards belief system that should have died out more than a century ago.

Regret, for having condemned myself just for recognizing my own identity when I was 11 years old.

Regret, for suppressing thoughts that were as natural for me as eating, sleeping, and breathing.

Regret, for all the harm that I had caused in the lives of innocent people by perpetuating the lie that had been fed to me.

But I’m still in my English class, and the professor has only given us ten minutes for this writing exercise. What were the other words, and what do they mean in my context of Regret?

Crow…Matthew 26:34 “…before the cock crows you shall deny me thrice.”

Cripple…John 5:5 “…and a certain cripple was there who had an infirmity thirty and eight years.”

Silver…Matthew 27:5 “…and he cast down the pieces of silver and went and hanged himself.”

Mud…John 9:6 “…and he spat on the ground and made mud from the spittle, and anointed the eyes of the blind man with the mud.”

My involuntary recall of the Biblical verses was instantaneous, and with it came a new flood of anger. I knew at this point my writing was going to come out as a rant, but since this is only an exercise in creativity I proceed to write in a larger-than-life cursive script that reflects the magnitude of my growing rage. I quickly decide that my audience will be the other kids in my class. Most of them are in their twenties.

Yes, you should have regrets. You were lied to for more than 20 years. Perhaps ‘lied’ is too strong of a word, but you were definitely not given an opportunity to find your own truth.

As a preschooler the stories were easy to believe. It’s nice to think that a man can spit in the dirt and stir it into mud, and then heal a blind man by rubbing it on his eyes. Or that a cripple can be made to walk just by hearing a magical voice.

And then you grow up. Now you have an expectation that things make sense, but when you dare to doubt the miracle, you are told about Peter, who denied knowing the miracle worker three times before the cock crowed. Peter is said to have ‘wept bitterly.’

And if that doesn’t scare you righteous, the coup de grấce is the condemnation of Judas, who snitched on the miracle worker for 30 pieces of silver. He went out and hanged himself.

As the good book also says, ‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’

Well, don’t you think it’s about time to grow up and stop believing in fairy tales? How about thinking for yourself now that you are out from under your mother’s thumb?

At this point the professor announced that the ten minutes were up.

Even as I wrote I realized that this kind of writing would not meet my own new standards, but it was out there now, as ink on paper. It matched the kind of writing that I used to do when the famous Mormon author Carol Lynn Pearson had responded to one of my emails with the gentle words, “Lester, you need to learn how to create light, not heat.”

She was right, of course, so I brought up the problem to the class that my piece had emerged as a rant. The professor confirmed that a rant is really not a recommended format for creative writing, but she did indicate that a rant can be a good starting point.

That brings me to this point, where I now find myself. When speaking of Regret, what advice would I give to Christian young adults today…without going into a rant?

Well, to put it simply, I would tell them that the dualism of religious fundamentalism has already caused the death of 400 million people in the history of the world.

I would tell them that the Christian Bible, the Torah, and the Qur’an have been adapted to be instruments of war by creating a tried and true mechanism for “othering.” This has been done with the sole objective of dehumanizing people of other religious beliefs so that they can be murdered at the whims of dictators.

I would explain to them that this tactic has worked in the past because the populace has been uneducated and were easily fooled into believing that a mortal man could become a “mouthpiece for god” if he would just recite the platitudes from the nation’s so-called scriptures.

I would ask them if they are so gullible as to believe that a so-called “loving god” would still perpetuate this idea that some races and classes of people are less worthy of life than others, or that an accident of birth is enough to doom a soul to eternal damnation.

I would remind them that on November 22, 2010, right now, during their lifetime, a United Nations committee finalized a resolution that would protect certain named people, and classes of people, from “summary execution.” This United Nations committee was successful in removing homosexuals from the list of “protected persons.”

The resolution passed because it found enough support to form a majority within the Christian nations of Africa and the Islamic nations of the Middle East. These are nations who do not want any political fallout for codifying a six thousand year old fable that they call “the word of god.”

Yes, I would ask these young adults to make a clean break from their past and help form a new consciousness in the world that is not rooted in foolish traditions, but instead would be rooted in an all-encompassing humanism.

In that kind of a world, and within a single generation, the Regrets that a gay young man will have might just be something as innocuous as having missed his senior prom because he was too shy to ask out that cute boy who would later become his boyfriend in college, and then his husband for life.

Regrets should be reserved for missed opportunities, not for opportunities that society entirely denied you.