Life or Death Decisions
Ray and I watched a depressing made-for-TV film last night about how a mother’s ignorance and biblically-based intolerance cost her, and us, the life of her beautiful 20-year-old gay son. In Prayers for Bobby, shown on Lifetime and based upon the tragically true account of Bobby Griffith’s desperate suicide, we watch with horror as his mother Mary, brilliantly played by Sigourney Weaver, stubbornly ostracizes him from family life. She will not have a gay son, she insists, and, in the end, her wish comes true.
This morning, the reading in the Tao te Ching for me was number 76:
Men are born soft and supple;
dead, they are stiff and hard.
Plants are born tender and pliant;
Dead, they are brittle and dry.
Thus, whoever is stiff and inflexible
is a disciple of death.
Whoever is soft and yielding
is a disciple of life.
The hard and stiff will be broken.
The soft and supple will prevail.
Mary’s son’s senseless passing prompts her to get educated and to release her death grip on the Bible. She eventually becomes a valued ally of the gay community. That is what all of us hope for with frightened, angry people – that they let go of their fears and become their better angels. But what happens to the rest of us in the meantime? What does their epiphany cost innocent bystanders?
A recent piece in the New York Times affirms what many of us have learned from our lives: Who you hang around with impacts the quality of your life. Our friends and associates contribute significantly to our physical and mental health. Ray and I don’t hate people who drink too much, smoke, litter, are selfish, depressed, angry, resentful, or mean. We just avoid them. They vex our spirits.
But what do you do when you find yourself surrounded by people who vex your spirit? How do you escape the influence of short-tempered people whose disappointment in, or fear of, life pours into everything they say and do?
The news is filled with reports of angry people yelling out during an address by the President of the United States and stopping their children from listening to him speak; of protestors biting off the finger of someone with whom they disagree, or worse, of shooting them. Such closed minds and hardened hearts are poison not just to the life of the individual but, like secondhand smoke, to everyone nearby.
Closer to home, many of us have family members, neighbors, friends, and colleagues with whom we walk on egg shells or around whom we hold our breath for fear that we will say something that pushes their buttons or that they will do the same to ours. How do we maintain our inner peace and continue to grow freely as disciples of life in the presence of such disciples of death?
As hard as it can be to do, and as much guilt as it may create, you withdraw with love and move on. Doing so may upset others, especially the person who offends, as well as those who count on you to maintain the status quo for the sake of their comfort. But if you want to be physically and emotionally healthy, you have to surround yourselves with people who encourage self-love.
During the film Prayers for Bobby, Ray and I were yelling guidance to Bobby to let go of his need of his mother’s approval. Mary Griffith reminded Ray of his own folks who initially disowned him for being gay, and he knew that Bobby would only find happiness if he lived life on his own terms. Had Bobby Griffith been able to separate himself from Mary’s discipleship of death, he’d be alive today, like Ray.
