Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child

There were a few key moments that totally changed my perspective on the world. Maybe not immediately, but they led to a paradigm shift.

Here is one of those moments.

I was about 17, and my parents had me do a year at the local community college to supplement my senior year of homeschooled high school. That way, I could take math classes that my mother wasn’t equipped to teach me. I took a few other classes to fill in the schedule gaps.

And that’s how I ended up going to a college Black History Month event for extra credit.

Let me back up.

There was a guy in one of my classes — lets call him Jonathan — who was openly gay. I had never knowingly interacted with, or even seen, anyone gay before. (I was extraordinarily sheltered in a conservative religious community.)

I learned, from people-watching (because I had no idea how to socialize) that Jonathan was being harassed on social media by a Christian. “Just watch this skit! It’ll change your life and make you come to Jesus!” I could tell that this was wrong, and the situation made me feel some kind of way, but I wasn’t sure how to process it.

Until the Black History Month event.

As part of the event, Jonathan got up and sang an old Negro Spiritual: “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”.

He just stood and sang, a capella. It was honestly beautiful in its own right — Jonathan has a great voice. But, as he sang, all my feelings coalesced into an understanding. He was singing about what Black folks experienced and still experience in America — something I had never been taught. He was also, I think, singing about his own experience as a gay man — something I had also never been taught.

In that song, I heard isolation. Fear, questioning, self-doubt. Pain. And a bit of hope.

As I processed this experience, my view of LGBTQ+ folks totally changed. I had been taught, indoctrinated really, to just see queer folks as depraved, hedonistic perverts choosing to sin against God. But… once I actually interacted with the outside world, I saw the pain that hate caused, and I chose to start deliberately setting it aside. I replaced it with love.

The way that the Christian church, especially the particular side I grew up in, has treated LGBTQ+ folks is horrendous. Ostracizing, conversion ‘therapy’, hate, disgust, kicking children out of their own homes… Queer folks are the chosen enemy. The ‘other’, the ones you’re supposed to hate. I didn’t understand all this right away, although it would later come to be deeply personal.

What I did start to see right away was that when the childhood church that had taught me about the importance of Jesus’s love had the slightest opportunity which they felt they could justify, they would hate instead. It was a hypocrisy that I didn’t yet understand the reason for, but I knew I wasn’t on board with it.

I saw Jonathan singing, and I saw the pain that people like me, people like my family, people like my church community had caused him.

And I chose not to be a part of it anymore.