When my 17-year-old daughter texted me at work to say she’d be making dinner for our family, I had a hunch she had an announcement. I felt a surge of nervous energy and a sinking feeling in my stomach. I was bracing myself.

I don’t remember what Kayti cooked for dinner that night, but I‘ll never forget the invitation she served us to know her more deeply. After we ate, half-laughing and half-crying, Kayti said, “I have some great news!” and handed us a book called, This Is a Book for Parents of Gay Kids.

When I list the best gifts I’ve received over my lifetime, Kayti’s courageous truth-telling is at the top.

The night is a little bit blurry in my memory. I know we embraced Kayti in long hugs and spoke words of love — but I was afraid.

Suddenly I found myself in an unfamiliar landscape — internally and externally disoriented — feeling like I had no landmarks, no muscle memory, and no guide.

The way of seeing the world I was raised with and embraced as my own was not just in my head, it was in my body. My body was bracing against the truth. My nervous system was saying “NO!”

Finding Our Way

I didn’t have examples of Christian people celebrating gay-ness to draw on in that consequential moment, no images of an arms-wide-open welcome, no imagination for how this could lead to flourishing or belonging.

I’m sad to say it was actually the opposite.

At the same time, what I knew for sure at that moment was that I loved Kayti. Loving Kayti was the first and truest thing I knew when everything I thought I knew was falling away.

That night my body was in gridlock. The forces of scarcity and love were duking it out inside of me. Love and scarcity could not co-exist for long. This is a truth I knew first in my body.

Although this terrain was unfamiliar, we were all held. Love was the landmark. Love was the muscle memory. Love was the guide.

Kayti’s courage was an act of love. Her love invited something similarly courageous from me.

Scott and I got into bed later that night and started reading. I have tears in my eyes and want to sob as I remember how the book was sprinkled with bright pink Post-its.

Kayti had written notes to us throughout the book to help us understand the particulars of her experience. She was guiding us in this process of discovery, even amid her vulnerability.

The next morning, I barely made it to my spiritual director’s office before bursting. In her presence, I released a river of tears. I apologized over and over for my lack of composure, but my emotions had to come out for me to listen from the depths.

I asked myself frustratedly, “Why am I crying?” “What am I grieving?” Then, I started the process of naming.

At first, the only answer I had access to was my worry for Kayti’s safety and the pain this would surely bring her over a lifetime.

I was also afraid. What did this mean for Kayti’s soul? What did this mean for our relationships?

I was so practiced at looking outside of myself for wisdom and belonging. A thorough (but gentle!) excavation would be required, but rearranging my theological furniture would have to go on the back burner. It was crystal clear what my role was in that season.

Vulnerability, Bracing, Softening

What felt like minutes after Kayti told us she was gay, our church announced plans for a sermon series on a “biblical view” of sex and gender. Lines were being drawn about who could flourish here and who would need to constrict their humanity to belong in this church and the kingdom of God.

Though the sermon series had been planned well before Kayti came out to us, In this small church where leaders knew what we were freshly holding, where there was freedom to pause, we felt alone in this new landscape. We were vulnerable at the moment we most needed care.

I need to give this larger context as a backdrop to my own story, because, in that same season, I began to realize there was a conditional nature of love in my actions.

Fear of something unknown — something that had been forbidden — was eroding the love I professed. I now knew what it felt like when someone was afraid for me, and I was feeling afraid for someone else - my child. I could see it more clearly now because I had felt it from both sides.

I had inflated my role in the story; I saw myself as responsible for keeping my loved ones on the same path that I was on. I thought this was the most loving thing I had to offer.

Scarcity obscured my capacity to see that Love is wooing all of us into a greater capacity to be loved and to love with invitations that fit the shape of our particular hearts.

Healing From Moral Injury

I now recognize I was both experiencing and perpetrating a type of trauma called moral injury:

Moral injury is the damage to our “soul” that is caused by actions we commit or witness that violate our central tenets of ethics and morality. Beyond a violation of our sense of safety, moral injuries can call into question our or others’ fundamental goodness. They upend our sense of moral agency; they break our moral compass. Moral injuries bruise and fragment something very fundamental and essential to our identity and sense of self.

Dr. Shannon Michael Pater in “Moral Injury and the Pilgrimage of Moral Restoration”

I was ashamed of the harm I caused all of our kids, but not in a way I could bear at the beginning. Kayti’s love helped me bear the weight of the uncertainty and emboldened me to glance at the shame, fear, and scarcity that was coming out sideways.

Scott and I chose to worship in a church community that was actively (though unintentionally) harming folks, something we obviously didn’t understand. The church said, “All are welcome,” warmly invited folks to weave their lives into the fabric of the community, and then imposed untenable conditions for belonging that ripped some beloveds forcefully out, wounding all of us.

What Does Love Look Like Here?

We were swimming in the waters of constriction. My unquestioned way of seeing God and others was no longer load-bearing, but a powerful image emerged for me in that season that helped me recognize I didn’t need to let go of my faith completely. In those very same waters I began to perceive a loving force, a substantial foundation that undergirded the whole thing.

Turning toward the discrepancy that was surfacing in my own lived expression of faith was an act of courage and deep trust that the foundation my life was built on could hold me.

Spiritual direction was a safe harbor I would briefly anchor into as I lived into change step by step — a space for me to stabilize in the presence of someone who was not afraid for me. My director was a loving, non-judgmental presence who celebrated tiny signs of something new emerging even amid the unfreedom that still existed in me.

Every two weeks I would gently excavate present moment invitations to open a little bit more — an overreaction I regretted, a conversation that knocked me off center, a resonance I sensed, an experience of God in the place I least expected.

Every other Tuesday I asked, “What does love look like here?”

Here, I said words out loud — I picked them up, dusted them off, looked at them from different angles, and felt around for what was underneath them.

I got a feel for what it’s like to glance at what needed attending with love and compassion — and new muscle memory emerged.

Gradually I moved through a threshold into a new territory of spirit, I found the boldness to call Love my home.

All of this unfolded slowly over time. Each step offered me a taste of love, freedom, and connectedness. I was welcomed into an expansive way of being, ever-beckoned by a capacious love to take one more step into the unknown — in Dr. James Finely’s words — “to be ruthlessly honest and endlessly compassionate to myself” in this process of becoming.

Savoring

As I recount this story now, I’m moved by how its retelling has changed over time. I’m not a victim. I’m not a hero. I still experience grief when I look back, but the shame has fallen away completely.

I have compassion for this earlier version of me, and I’m proud of her for listening and learning. There have been losses on this journey, but recounting those losses is not interesting to me anymore.

I would rather tell you how good it feels to be free.

What I Would Tell Myself On That Threshold

If I could travel through time and put my arms around me on that threshold, l would look myself in the eyes and whisper these words:

Breathe. Take a moment to really be here. There will be time to turn toward all of the things swirling in you. The only thing that matters tonight is presence.

I know this seems scary, but Kayti felt safe enough to tell you who she is. She risked heartbreak and rejection by inviting you to know her more deeply. This is something to celebrate!

Kayti’s love will bring healing to our family. What seems hard right now is a portal to freedom for you and others.

Go first with expressions of love, even if you don’t get the words right. Silence is scary for everyone in transitions. Together we can get through anything when we lean into connection.

You are going to make some mistakes, and doing so will invite you to experience new facets of love that can only emerge in that friction. You don’t have to do this perfectly to do it well.

You’ve got this!

We’ve Got This, Friends!

As a spiritual director, nothing enrages me more than seeing the ways that being systematically conditioned to believe we are inherently bad and untrustworthy:

• makes it hard to find inner ground to stand on when the “shit hits the fan”

• inhibits the development of the musculature needed for discernment

• convinces us we do not have choices in our spiritual lives

This diminishes our capacity to live fully and freely, to love ourselves and others with our whole hearts.

If the Church doesn't speak to the full spectrum of our human experiences, then as we begin to awaken to the pain and complexity of living and loving, our options are to leave, stay and fall asleep to complexity, or double down looking for the love we sense must be a part of this beautiful mess.

Alok Vaid-Menon teaches me about possibilities for living and loving I couldn’t see before. Instead of responding to the violence from individuals in kind. They say, “I reserve my rage for systems.”

I want to join ALOK in directing my energy toward:

• Naming how systems and structures have a vested interest in us being afraid of each other

• Arousing our imagination with possibilities for collective flourishing

Unaddressed personal and collective pain mixed with power infuses evil into our systems, and evil thrives when we are unconscious of it — when we accept it as “just the way things are.”

I write these words with an open heart and no resistance in my body to the good people who are doing all they can to change things from the inside, and the good people who, like me, have become numb to the harm caused when a system puts conditions on belonging that deny the full expression of anyone’s humanity.

Love still finds us somehow and, miraculously, there is so much grace running subversively through the whole thing, but none of us can truly belong until we are all celebrated. When any of us is marginalized it takes all of us down.

We Can Only Flourish Together

The only way we can make sustainable collective change is to turn inward — to glance at our pain over time with compassion and support, to stabilize in our preciousness and integrate the pain that arises organically, to allow the love that is already ours to seep deeply into our being and liberate us with an expanded capacity to see and love others.

I’ll speak the words here to all of us that I offered myself above:

Breathe. Take a moment to really be here. There will be time to turn toward all of the things swirling in you. The only thing that matters now is presence.

I know this seems scary. What seems hard right now is a portal to freedom for you and others.

We are going to make some mistakes, and doing so will invite us to experience new facets of love that can only emerge in that friction. We don’t have to do this perfectly to do it well.

We’ve got this, friends!

My Hope For You

One day, I hope you receive a gift like I did the night Kayti came out — someone you love heartfully telling you who they are. If and when they do, may the possibility of celebration arise — may YES be an accessible option.

Love, Kirsten

A Note: Kayti is using she/her and they/them these days. I just read this article to them on FaceTime. We reminisced and marveled about the ways their love and courage have rippled out beyond what any of us could have ever dreamed.

Wisdom To Hold Us in the Space Between

Information and advice won’t hold us in the disorientation that we experience when the seemingly solid ground beneath us cracks. No one can give us a map of the inner landscape that we alone must traverse, but wisdom found me along the way, offering possibilities I couldn’t previously imagine.

These words became a plumb line. I didn’t understand them until I had hindsight, but I felt them. They resonated so deeply — voices in the wilderness calling me into freedom.

Because these words were so radically stabilizing and invitational for me, I want to share them with you here.

I listened to this obscure podcast episode over and over for weeks, transcribing the parts that called to me. These are the [paraphrased] words that now live inside of me from Father Richard Rohr’s description of the contemplative mind:

The contemplative mind looks at things in their whole instead of their parts. It looks upon others with a compassionate, loving eye rather than a critical, analytical eye. Its posture is grounded in a fundamental YES to others.

Parker Palmer has a striking ability to describe the inner terrain in a way that weaves together soulful, actionable wisdom with real-world examples. In A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward An Undivided Life he writes:

The heart’s fear of being open is not fanciful: holding powerful tensions over time can be, and often is, a heartbreaking experience, but there are at least two ways to understand what it means to have our hearts broken.

One is to imagine the heart broken into shards and scattered about — a feeling most of us know, and a fate we would like to avoid.

The other is to imagine the heart broken open into new capacity — a process that is not without pain — but one that many of us would welcome.

As I stand in the tragic gap between reality and possibility, this small, tight fist of a thing called my heart can break open into greater capacity to hold more of my own and the world's suffering and joy, despair and hope.

Parents often find themselves standing in the tragic gap between their hopes for a child and what is happening in that child's life. If the parents fail to hold that tension, they will go one way or the other, clinging to an idealized fantasy of who "their baby" is or rejecting this "thorn in their side" with bitter cynicism. Both ways of responding are death-dealing for all concerned.

But many parents will testify that by standing in the tragic gap and holding the tension, they not only serve their children well; they themselves become more open, more knowing, more compassionate.

E.F. Schumacher painted the picture well: ‘Through all our lives we are faced with the task of reconciling opposites which, in logical thought, cannot be reconciled…Countless mothers and teachers, in fact, do it, but no one can write down a solution. They do it by bringing into the situation a force that belongs to a higher level where opposites are transcended — the power of love.

Divergent problems, as it were, force us to strain ourselves to a level above ourselves; they demand, and thus provoke the supply of forces from a higher level, thus bringing love, beauty, goodness and truth into our lives.’

Music to Hold Us in the Space Between

• I created a Spotify playlist (a spiritual practice for me) that accompanied me in a season when what I knew had fallen away. Playlists like this one call me home to what matters in moments of disorientation.

• The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus performed a song that I’ve experienced as both humorous and profound. I will always be grateful the “gay agenda” came home to our family. As our kids opened to love and inclusion, they “converted us.”

Reflection Questions

Are there parts of this letter that you resonate with? Parts that you resist?
Resonance and resistance can be portals to wisdom when they become conscious. You may want to be with what you notice in prayer, in writing, or a conversation.

What is it like in your body when know you are celebrated?

If your child or other loved one has come out to you and you need someone to hold space for you, I’d be honored to journey with you.

I meet with folks in spacious accompaniment and trauma-informed spiritual direction. and deep listening sessions. I am also willing to meet with couples or small groups who are discerning how to hold their loved ones who have come out as gay or trans with care and love. Please contact me if there’s any way I can support you.