Читать книгу Undivided: Coming Out, Becoming Whole, and Living Free From Shame - Vicky Beeching, Vicky Beeching - Страница 10

As most British kids do, I started high school at the age of eleven, and it was a shock to my system. My village elementary school with only forty pupils seemed tiny now as I entered a huge building containing a thousand students in the nearby city of Canterbury. It was a girls’ school with an associated boys’ school a mile down the road. Single-sex education seemed great at first, but it would bring me some unique challenges as the years went by.

Once I acclimated to the size and scale of the new environment, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The high school had an entire wing dedicated to music: several private rooms with their own pianos, plus a drum kit and a cupboard full of acoustic guitars. Every lunch break I’d try and get one of these rehearsal rooms, where I would make up piano compositions or learn new guitar chords.

Sometimes my classmates and I would go there and sing. We’d take our lunch boxes with us and spend an hour making up songs and harmonies as we ate and talked. More often, though, I’d head over to one of the music rooms alone. With the security of a locked door, I found a privacy for my singing and playing that I’d never experienced before. I began writing very personal songs—mostly about faith and spirituality. Before long, I’d filled several notebooks with compositions.

My mum overhead me playing them at home in my bedroom and encouraged me to share them at church sometime. The idea terrified me—standing up there in front of so many people—but after months of her encouragement, I agreed to give it a go. I vividly remember that teenage debut. My mum was leading worship, and I was playing guitar. I’d agreed to play one of my songs during the service, and I became increasingly racked with nerves as the evening progressed.

With my eyes clamped shut so no one could see how nervous I was, I stood in front of the fifty or so people in the congregation and sang into the microphone. To my amazement, when I finished and opened my eyes, people looked visibly moved and tearful. Several of them were quietly praying. Somehow, my simple song had helped them connect with God.

What could be more rewarding than that? I pondered, on an emotional high as I packed my guitar into its case at the end of the church service. That first experience made me want to write more songs that would help people to worship. That day, and that song, set the course of my career.

My first experience singing in church, and the positive welcome it had received, had been formative. As the months went by, I wrote and sang more songs, and my shyness slowly went away. I was growing up, discovering my place in the world, finding my voice. But, simultaneously, all that growing up and self-discovery was revealing other aspects of who I was becoming—and not all of them were easy.

As my classmates began nervously giggling about which boy they “fancied,” I was experiencing something totally different. I kept noticing girls. And I was increasingly embarrassed each time it happened. By this time, I’d found out what the word “homosexuality” meant (the older kids at school liked to try and educate us about anything and everything), and I’d made the connection between the Bible stories of my childhood, the punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah, and my attraction to girls.

All these feelings had come totally out of left field for me. It baffled me; I knew I wasn’t choosing them. The conversations I’d overheard among Christians about gay people being sinful all centered around it being a willful choice, but I knew what I was experiencing was involuntary. Even if I didn’t want those thoughts and feelings, they kept happening regardless. It was as normal and natural for me as my friends giggling and getting butterflies over their latest opposite-sex crush.

Female school friends started noticing boys’ bodies were changing. They remarked about how our male friends’ voices were deepening and their skinny arms were turning to muscle. Sometimes the local boys’ school used our gym or outdoor track in addition to its own, and our school erupted with whispers of “Check him out!” as an especially tall or muscled male student walked through our hallways on his way to meet his teammates.

In contrast, I was far more aware of the changes happening in the girls around me. Puberty was hitting all of us, and I blushed anytime I found myself looking too long at someone across the school dining hall or tennis courts. I would catch a glimpse of someone I liked across the classroom and feel butterflies in my stomach. I would daydream about how amazing it would be to hold her hand or kiss her cheek, wishing I could ask her to the school dance, and wanting to help with her English essay just because I would get to spend time with her.

I remember one awful moment when a girl a year ahead of me was changing for sports and walked in front of me in her bra. My eyes fell on her for a couple of seconds longer than would have seemed normal, and she snapped, “What are you staring at?” Blushing terribly, I stammered, “Nothing, sorry. I was just thinking about something else … It was nothing to do with you …” This wasn’t about lust or ogling anyone—I was just struck by how beautiful she was.

A similarly awkward moment happened when, at a school assembly, a group of girls from an older class decided to perform a Madonna song. I had been sheltered from dance parties and clubs as they were considered to be unwholesome by the Christians I knew, so it was a shock to my system when the girls emerged onto the school stage dressed in revealing clothes and danced to the pop track.

My classmates clapped along to the music, loving it, but I felt extremely uncomfortable. I stared at the floor, with no idea where to look. The girls who were performing seemed like the most stunning humans I’d ever cast eyes on, but surely those feelings were not right—God would not be pleased. What on earth is wrong with me? I thought, as I blushed with ever-increasing embarrassment, hoping no one around me had noticed my discomfort.

Outside of school, it was the same. Every now and then, often when I least expected it, these thoughts would break into my consciousness. I went with my family to watch a local performance of the musical South Pacific and was embarrassed when I realized how gorgeous I thought the female lead actress was.

Once at a Christian conference I attended, I was distracted by one of the female singers in the worship band; her voice and personality were so captivating. Whenever these things happened, I felt a wave of shame and did all I could to drown out the thoughts in my mind, especially in a place like church. These were just the normal, run-of-the-mill moments of attraction that would take place in any straight person’s mind each day and be dismissed without a second thought. But for me, as a gay person, each one of them was laced with anxiety and left me feeling dirty and ashamed.

I was certain I couldn’t hide these thoughts forever. Someone would figure me out, I worried. Acting on any of these attractions wasn’t an option for me—I might have daydreamed about it, but I shut down those thoughts as, to me, they were off-limits and wrong. But I feared my accidental gazes at girls might make people suspicious, and it felt awful.

Honestly, I hoped it was just a phase—I wanted to fit in with my Christian friends and my church; I just wanted to belong. Sneaking away from my parents once at the local library, I found a book about teenage psychology. Flicking to a section on sexual development, I read that lots of young people experienced attraction to people of the same gender for a while and then they grew out of it.

After reading that, my prayers every night—offered with urgency—begged God to help this “phase” come to an end, so that I could stop these sinful thoughts and start living a holy life. The guilt these feelings generated was leaving me feeling paralyzed. I had nowhere to go with them and no one safe to confide in. Would God still love me if I was attracted to girls? I was pretty sure the answer was a resounding no.

Go on, Vicky. It’s just for a weekend,” a school friend said, handing me a paper invitation. “You’ll love it—loads of us are going.”

Despite my increasingly solitary behavior at school, one Christian classmate invited me to a weekend event for church youth. Lately, I’d felt miles away from everyone, behind an invisible wall, trying to navigate the tensions in my life created by this new awareness that I was attracted to girls and not boys. All my friendships had grown distant as I spent my free periods alone in the library writing in my journal or with my Walkman plugged into my ears.

I didn’t feel like being social, but since this would be a conference to develop young adults in their Christian faith, I thought I’d give it a try. It would be held in a beautiful old property in a nearby town and was a Catholic event—something outside my usual Protestant tradition. I was curious and intrigued. “Okay,” I said. “Count me in.”

The weekend arrived, and my initial nerves about being with a roomful of strangers dissipated when someone grabbed a guitar and led worship songs that I was familiar with. I enjoyed the talks, the meals, and, most of all, the singing. But, as always, nagging shame and fear plagued me as I thought about my orientation, knowing that everyone on the weekend would see me in a totally different light if they knew I was gay. Their friendliness would have turned to disapproval and judgment, and I would certainly not have been viewed as an “up-and-coming young faith leader,” as they were describing me there that weekend.

Every time we prayed, and each time we sang a slow song encouraging inner reflection, my mind played the same broken record that beat me up mentally and emotionally for being broken and sinful because of my orientation.

I wondered if maybe, somehow, I could get help that weekend. Perhaps in this more anonymous setting, one of the Catholic leaders could help me? I thought. Whispering a prayer, I asked God for a breakthrough.

On the final afternoon, the event leaders announced that something different would be happening. A priest was visiting for a few hours and would be performing private confessions in a small room down the hall. Any participants wanting to go to confession, to repent of whatever sins they had committed and receive the priest’s absolution (official forgiveness from God), could make their way to that small room and wait their turn.

The Church of England didn’t offer one-on-one confession, neither had my earlier Pentecostal denomination. This was something new to me and I wondered if it might be the key to getting free from my feelings for girls.

Summoning all the courage I had, I made my way down the hallway to the small room and knocked on the dark mahogany door. The sound of that knock seemed to echo for miles, and I blushed, hoping none of my friends knew I was going to see the priest. It could only mean I was struggling with something. And for an “up-and-coming” young Christian leader like me, that was not the impression I wanted to give anyone.

The whole exchange was unfamiliar to me, but the old Catholic priest was friendly and put me at ease. With a smile, he gestured to an empty seat opposite him. After reading some liturgy, the priest wanted to make it more teen-friendly, so he spoke in everyday language: “Are there specific things you’d like to repent of, to say sorry to God for? If there are, just speak them out now, and we’ll give those things to God.”

I listed some minor things—like getting angry, using bad language, and forgetting to do my daily Bible readings. When I left a long pause after this, he sensed that there was something I hadn’t mentioned, the real reason I was there.

“Is there anything else?” he interjected.

I gulped and felt my chest tighten. Desperate for change, for the first time in my life I tried to voice the words: “Um … Yes … I am having feelings for other girls … like gay feelings … and I want to be forgiven for that, and set free from it as I know it’s sinful.”

I hung my head, red-faced, as heavy tears began streaming down my cheeks. It was a shock to hear those words come out of my mouth for the first time.

The priest gave me a kind look and said, “That was very brave. Well, let’s pray, shall we?” Then he read the prayer of absolution, offering my repentance to God and pronouncing his forgiveness over my life. I heard the words, but mostly I was lost in a moment of shock that I’d told someone.

The prayer ended, and he thanked me for dropping in. Surely, I thought, God would see how brave I’d been in speaking out this deeply held secret. Surely, the Catholic priest, with his spiritual authority and the powerful words of the liturgy, would have the ability to change me.

Stepping out of the room, I closed the heavy wooden door behind me. I heard it shut with a loud thud and believed I’d left my sins—my gay feelings, my gay identity—behind that door. Forgiven and set free, I’d stepped out of an old life and into a new one.

But it didn’t take long for me to realize nothing had changed. The feelings remained and with them came the rush of embarrassment and fear. I was crushed—my prayer hadn’t been answered. My moment of courage and honesty with the priest had been for nothing. Perhaps God had forgiven me, according to the priest’s absolution, but he certainly hadn’t set me free.

My head spun with questions, but I had no one to go to with them. That priest had been from another town, and I had no idea how to contact him; to be honest, I was so embarrassed about telling him that I hoped we’d never cross paths again.

I must be so rebellious and sinful, if just hours after the confession I’ve had my old thought patterns return, I thought tearfully. God must be so angry with me. I felt utterly alone and saw no chance of an end to all of my struggles. If even a priest couldn’t break off these chains of sinful feelings, who could? It seemed to me that I must be too broken for even God to fix.