In the early 1980's, most mornings when I emerged from my childhood bedroom to get ready for school, I would see my mother on the sofa, the eerie light from the television reflected on her face. I could hear the urgent voices of tele-evangelists: "If you want the healing power of the Lord in your life...that person out there dealing with chronic pain, send us your love gift right now. Don't hesitate. Yes, Lord. We see this person that has rheumatoid arthritis. God is going to heal you right now..."
It mystified and irritated me that my mother, someone so profoundly damaged by the shame and judgment associated with her own evangelical upbringing, was drawn to these charlatans. To this day, sixteen years after her death, I have never understood her perverse attraction to the many things that hurt her. When I asked her about this particular fixation, she would tell me that you had to "know what the enemy was saying."
"But you do know what they're saying. How much do you have to know? Does it change from day to day?" To that I don't remember getting a clear response, but overall her message didn't waver. "They want to take over the country. They want to control every branch of government, inserting their brand of Christianity, destroying the separation of Church and State, and all the checks and balances of our system." I didn't think she was paranoid, but I did think that she was getting herself prematurely worked up. These buffoons on television with their dripping mascara, Bible-themed amusement parks, sex scandals, and financial malfeasance, didn't look like they could manage any of that. My mother was quite certain that they could and would.
My mom was not an atheist or even an agnostic. Her particular faith in Jesus was a complicated one just like every other aspect of her life. Her bookshelves reflected seemingly conflicted intersections of identity: various versions of the Bible, a book on the Dead Sea Scrolls, The Prophet by Gibran, Women: Our Bodies, Ourselves, the poetry of Adrienne Rich, a wide collection of feminist and lesbian writers, some novels by Chaim Potok, the Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein, among many other volumes of assorted interests. She could recite passages of scripture, sing the sacred choral works she had loved so well, and remind me that our mission on this earth was to help the least of these. She had taken what she could out of the religion whose interpretation, mostly my grandmother's, had caused her pain from which she would never fully recover. Her contrary, rebellious, and fiercely independent spirit had battled with her own shame and guilt for the majority of her life. Her mother's condemning voice, on earth and in the hereafter, lived in her head just as hers, entirely affirming, lives in mine. What I hear these days goes right back to her direful predictions about the dangers posed by the so-called Christian Right coming into full fruition.
She could see the particular threat posed by political alliances made between secular Republicans and people like Jerry Falwell. This was the height of Reaganism and that President and those of his ilk, leaned hard into common ground held with the Moral Majority, for political gain. She could not have envisioned how obscene, blasphemous, and heretical those alliances would become under an entirely narcissistic, megalomaniac like Trump. In other words, she could see the end result, but not the vehicle for getting there. And even she would have never anticipated how rapid the slide into fascism would be with only a handful of elected officials offering any resistance. How could she? Barack Obama was a few weeks from his first inauguration when my mother died. Like me, she had watched those scenes in Grant Park on election night, when the Obama family, young, beautiful, full of optimism and energy, took the stage and waved to the sea of dazzled faces in front of the them. Like me, she had sat back in amazed joy as the cameras panned to Jesse Jackson's face wet with tears. Wow! Anything was possible.
She was dead two months later. Overwhelmed by the loss of my brother three years earlier, her declining physical health, the depletion of her savings, and that persistent self-loathing she could never shake, she took her own life via an insulin overdose at the age of 66. Sixteen years later, I am still not completely at peace with that decision. Despite my absolute certainty of her love for me, and the knowledge that she believed she had exhausted all of her resources, I still struggle with feelings of abandonment and anger when they flare up unpredictably. Even with that, I can't begin to count the number of times, I have said aloud when confronting the latest horrifying headline, "Oh, Mom. I am so grateful you're not living through this."
I hear my mother's voice all the time--most often emanating from my own. I feel her pride at all things related to her grandchildren. I hear her laughing at all the absurdities I encounter every day. I feel her love. I see her face more and more every year looking back at me in the mirror. What I don't hear is her counsel about how to respond to these times. Should we flee? Fight? Be silent? Raise a ruckus? Have hope that the system will one day be restored? Or be glad that an awful system that served some and destroyed others without mercy, is dying? On these questions she is eerily silent. She never got this far--never got from her sense of dread to that of a dreadful reality, after all. Her role was just to prepare me and anyone else who would listen for what she thought was the country's certain fate. Well, here we are. Now what? I should have asked more questions.
