'Cause Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

It's odd to outgrow a friendship.

I have never been any good at letting things slide with people. I have made my husband and other friends very uncomfortable by confronting a casual statement. And I have never been one of those southern women who is too nice to tell you how she feels. Often to a fault I tell and I should really just shut up. It would be a lot easier to let it go.

I guess I'm afraid that if I did that - let some stupidity or hate or false statement slide, where would I stop? Some examples --

someone recently said to me that all of this trouble with greed is bound to happen when people don't feel accountable to their creator... Couldn't let that go. So, if you're agnostic or atheist you can't be a good citizen? Is that the implication?

someone recently said to me that they wouldn't mind civil unions (not marriage though) but why now? Did they gay community really need to push this now? -- I certainly couldn't let this go. How long should someone wait for a basic human right? What if it were 1922 and I weren't allowed to vote? Should I forgo that fight because there's too much going on? Ridiculous.

And then there's that prayer. That prayer I received... AAAAHHH. That Prayer. It can't even be called a prayer it's so hateful. Calling reproductive choice sinful. Calling welfare recipients lazy. And the sender has no idea why this made me so angry. Of course not. The author of this foul prayer, Joe Wright, can't imagine it either. People who are so imbued with that hateful rhetoric seem to be incapable of understanding its impact. Their self-righteousness prevents it.

I know how flawed I am. I come before the divine again and again seeking forgiveness, admitting my failures. But I can't abide that KNOWING that some people have about who is right and who is evil. The more I learn the more I know that the less I know. The more open to the questions I am. And if my faith were so tenuous that a single circumstance could undo it, I guess I might hold fast to fantasy too. But my faith is not that way - the physical properties of this world, the social and economic realities of biblical times, the flawed human authorship of the Bible, the non-existence of hell -- I didn't grow up being taught all these things, but acknowledging them now doesn't shake my faith. My perceptions might alter, but my understanding of the divine merely grows.