I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Tag: southern baptist church

  • easter, comes the resurrection

    easter, comes the resurrection


    Fifteen years ago this Easter my mother was in a secured memory care unit of the Atria Westchase assisted living complex in Houston, Texas. Pretty and I had recently bought a second home in Montgomery, Texas, so I could be closer to Mom as her dementia progressed; she lost that battle two years later, but on that Easter Sunday in 2010 I arrived in time for a chapel service before lunch with my mom.  After lunch, well, here’s what happened…

    The traditional Easter egg hunt came to us mid-afternoon through the children of the staff members. The day was beautiful, and the fenced courtyard area was the perfect setting for a party. Those in our lunch group pushed their walkers or were wheeled outside into the bright sunlight, those who could sat in the Adirondack chairs under the portico. I met three other daughters who were visiting their mothers that day which made me thankful I was there with my mother, too.

    The Hispanic women who were the caregivers for the memory care unit brought their children to enjoy the search for the pastel colored plastic eggs filled with candy in the tranquil setting of the facility’s outdoors. Eggs were hidden everywhere, including on and around the residents.  Jim, a tall sad unshaven man who never spoke and struggled to move, opened the chocolate egg Rosa placed in his shirt pocket; he ate the candy before the kids arrived. No one tried to stop him including my mother who in days of yore would have surely reprimanded him in her best elementary school teacher voice.

    The small group of children burst into the courtyard with an exuberance all youngsters bring to filling an Easter basket. Ages ranged from four to twelve, with one six-month-old baby girl held by her mother. They were dressed in their Sunday best. Little boys wore ties with their jackets, little girls wore pretty spring dresses. It could’ve been a movie set, I thought, because they were strikingly beautiful children. They flew around grabbing eggs with gusto as their baskets filled quickly. They were noisy, laughing, talking – incredibly alive.

    It was the resurrection. For a few brief minutes, the stones were rolled away from the minds buried deep in the tombs of the bodies that kept them hidden. The children raced around the residents searching for treasures, exclaiming with delight when one was discovered. One little boy overlooked a blue egg under a wheel chair, and my mother tapped his shoulder to point it out to him. He was elated and flashed a brilliant smile at her. She responded with a look of pure delight. The smiles and the murmurings of the elderly were clear signs of their obvious joy that proclaimed the reality of Easter in their minds in those moments.  Hallelujah. We were all risen.

    Memories were made and lost that afternoon. The children who ran to find eggs among the old people in the place where their mothers worked were unlikely to forget this day.  Years from now some will tell the stories of the Easter Egg Hunt with the Ancient Ones.  The stories will be as different as their own journeys will take them.  For my mother and her friends, no stories will be told because they won’t remember. My mother doesn’t know I was there for her on Easter this year which is not unexpected.  But I remember I was, and it is enough for both of us.

    I was born on another Easter Sunday morning in April, 1946, and that makes the year 2010 my sixty-fourth Easter. I recollect a few of the earliest Easters from my childhood: sacred religious days for my Southern Baptist family that rarely missed a worship service on any Sunday of the year but never at Christmas or Easter. I also remember having a hard time finding eggs in the church hunts. My baskets never runneth over. But to be honest, in recent years Easter Sundays had been difficult to distinguish from any other day of the week.

    When I moved away from my family in Texas in my early twenties to explore my sexual identity, I didn’t know I’d be gone for forty years. I also had no way of knowing one of the costs of my freedom from family togetherness was my absence from family rituals.  Distance, travel time, money, job obligations, girlfriends—these were the obstacles I had to overcome for visits home. Or maybe they were just excuses. I usually made the trip home at Christmas and less frequently one more time in the summer. But never for Easter.

    This Easter was special for me because it was a day with no excuses necessary. I shared a Sunday sundae with my mother for lunch today at a table neither of us could have envisioned a few years before. Today was for the two of us, and if there were barriers between us that once seemed too impenetrable, they were now lost in the cobwebs of time.

    We were all risen, indeed.

    **************

     My divorce from the politics and religion of the Southern Baptist denomination took decades, but I am grateful for the biblical stories I learned in Sunday School about resurrection because I continued to believe in the power of hope I experienced even in the midst of personal despair on an Easter Sunday afternoon in Texas when the children came to play.

    (This post is an excerpt from my third book I’ll Call It like I See It)

  • 1969 – Not Every “L” Knew She Was Being Liberated (from Not Quite the Same)

    1969 – Not Every “L” Knew She Was Being Liberated (from Not Quite the Same)


    As the Gay Liberation Movement fired opening volleys in the cultural wars in large cities on the East and West Coasts of the country in the late 1960s following the Stonewall uprising in 1969 in New York City, I continued my private battle against guilt and fear, my search to become the “happy homosexual” mentioned by Dr. Holmes in my abnormal psychology class at the University of Texas in 1964. In an effort to take charge of my romantic destiny, I expanded my search beyond the Texas borders and moved across the country in 1968 to the Pacific Northwest where I located a familiar sanctuary. Truly familiar, and truly a sanctuary. To my own amazement at the time and amusement years later, I joined the Mercer Island Baptist Church, a very small (fewer than a hundred members) Southern Baptist church on an island suburb of Seattle. I can’t explain why I looked for the same religion that was largely the source of my deep feelings of guilt except I was twenty-two years old living alone three thousand miles from home, had still never heard of a lesbian bar, and a very kind definitely straight woman (my boss Becky at the CPA firm I worked for) invited me to go to church with her.

    My faith rewarded me with true love. The volunteer Minister of Youth at the church flirted with me and kindled my passion with lingering glances that made my insides vibrate. Sherry was a beautiful woman eight years older than me with dark skin she cultivated, opaque eyes that swallowed you whole. She had perfected a long lingering look that promised secrets too profound to utter, and at age thirty she was a sexy ticking time bomb. She was also married to a successful stock broker who managed the trust established for her by her mother and father who lived in Abilene, Texas where he was the OG oilman millionaire. Sherry and the pastor’s wife Janice were always together except for the nights she invited me to her home on Mercer Island when her husband worked late, her three young children sent to bed early.

    Sherry was not only my first introduction to the unrequited passion of married “straight” women but also my first introduction to the uber rich. Whenever I rang her doorbell and stepped into her house I realized this was how money lived. Money gave you gorgeous lake views, plush white carpets often muddied by a playful registered Old English Sheepdog, a magnificent grand piano in your living room, a fireplace that crackled and offered more than warmth, children that lived downstairs. Cheeses I couldn’t pronounce could be placed on silver trays and served with fresh grapes and crackers to accompany a bourbon and ginger cocktail that helped me overcome the awkwardness I always felt in her presence. Music came from somewhere, and I felt I was surrounded by invisible speakers set at the perfect volume. Yes, this was how money lived. Sitting by her on the plush carpet in front of the crackling fire listening to music while I sipped my cocktail, I found the long hours of just talking met a need I’d had forever. This woman was the woman I was meant to spend my life with.

    I, however, moved from the two-bedroom nicely furnished modern Bellevue apartment in a large complex I had shared with a roommate who decided to leave two months into our lease into a sparsely furnished one-bedroom garage unit above Lake Union in downtown Seattle. The eccentric landlady was an ancient woman that lived next door in a large old home where she smoked cigarettes, watched a black and white TV in her smoke filled living room all day, and tried to control her even more eccentric renegade son who woke me up when he roared in on his motorcycle at ungodly hours. I had limited contact with both of them.

    Winter in Seattle was not as cold as I feared, but it was still miserable weather for a transplanted Texan. Days were short, and the sky was overcast – sometimes bringing damp chilly drizzles that mixed with fog over the lakes. No one carried umbrellas because it never really rained, but I had to use my windshield wipers on my daily commute across Lake Washington to work in the local CPA firm which turned out to be substantially different from my job at Arthur Andersen in Houston. I had my first tax season experience in the days tax returns were prepared by hand and had to be checked and re-checked for errors, a steady supply of new returns stacked on my desk every night. They were like mushrooms that multiplied in the dark, and there was plenty of dark. It was dark when I drove to work every morning and dark when I drove home; some days I never saw the sun because I ate a sandwich for lunch at my desk. I lived for the nights Sherry called me at work to invite me to come by later.

    The minor obstacles of her husband and three children proved major ones for her, the money spoke up, and Sherry rejected my pleas to leave all behind and run away with me. After a year I realized the Pacific Northwest with all its beauty could not bring me the love I wanted so I did the only reasonable thing for a Southern Baptist lesbian who couldn’t find a girlfriend. I called my parents and told them I was coming home to Texas, and would they fly to Seattle to ride three thousand miles with me in my dependable Buick Skylark to keep me company? I had enrolled for the fall semester at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas to prepare for a celibate life in the music ministry of the church. My mother responded to the news by saying she had given me to God on the day I was born so this newfound devotion had always been my destiny. My dad mentioned Fort Worth was a lot closer to home than Seattle. Regardless of their motivation, they were thrilled to make a road trip with the prodigal daughter who was returning to the fold.

    I gave my notice at Simonson & Moore with a feeling of regret because I genuinely liked the people in the office, but I had a calling to pursue. No one argued with God so they wished me well in my new career path, although I’m sure they privately believed my resume was about to take a strange turn. The year was 1969, I was twenty-three years old, and I answered what I believed to be a sign from God communicated through a woman who loved her life with her husband and children more than long talks with me in front of a crackling fire. I confessed my sins and trusted God to forgive me, but I couldn’t manage to forgive myself for who I was. The drag queens might have been liberated at Stonewall that year, but my liberation was about to begin in a seminary in Texas.