To begin the story at the beginning, read "Part 1: Post 1: Beginning Again," published in January, 2013. To consult a description of the campus, read "Part 1: Post 14: The Greening of Campus," published in March, 2013.

Monday, January 8, 2018

Mastery Year 1: Part 8: Post 1: Andy, Rick, and Love

As I explained last time, I'm going to use the next several weeks to catch up on the storylines I didn't get to this past year. It's a giant info dump, I will admit, but it will allow me to go on with storylines this coming year that refer to the missing material.

Starting with Andy.

Looking back over my records, I've actually included Andy in more posts than most of my other "characters," but I feel as though I have been neglecting him. Maybe it's just that I like him him so much.

2007 was Andy's last year as a candidate. He received his ring at Brigid, 2008. I've written about his bike shop ministry, but he'd already begun developing that as a novice. By the time his candidacy even started, he had most of his programs there in place. I think only sponsoring bike races started afterwards. He didn't need to come back for his ring in order to have his ministry, and plenty of people don't come back for their rings and go on to do really neat things. Joanna didn't come back, for example. She didn't need to.

But Andy did. He came back to learn how to be a counselor.

He considered, but decided against, becoming a licensed therapist. "Jesus didn't have a license," he pointed out. He didn't want to be a professional counselor, he wanted to be someone people talk to--he just wanted to be better at it.

So, he spent the first year of his candidacy studying counseling with Allen and talking with Charlie about sponsorship. A "sponsor" is a kind of mentor or personal supervisor within a 12-step program, and Andy both has a sponsor and sponsors others. He also joined Al-Anon, attempting to head off the codependency that happens when most people set out to help others. This past year he's been teaching classes--all of us learn how to be professors, since the green ring essentially recognizes qualification to work for the school. Most of his classes and worshops covered Christian topics and were very sparsely attended, but he taught some history and psychology, too, and of course, bicycle repair, bicycle safety, and business.

I remember one day in late September, I finally got the question to ask him something that had been bothering me for a long time--he's a member of a denomination that generally regards LGBT people as sinners. Does he?

"Sure, we all are," he told me.
"You know what I mean."

He glanced at me, uncomfortable. As I've mentioned, "homophobe" is one of the worst possible insults around here. There are people with whom he attends church who regard it as a compliment.

"Well, I don't know that I support homosexual behavior," he said, slowly. "But nobody asked me. I support the people. It's not like I'm perfect."
"I'm asking you," I said.
"But you're straight."
"Suppose I wasn't."
"Well," he said, "if a young gay approached me and asked, point-blank, whether he ought to engage in the lifestyle, I suppose I'd have to say no. But those attractions are God-given. There can't be anything wrong with being gay. Anyway, I hope no one ever asks."

A gay? The lifestyle? Who talks like that? My innards kind of shrank. It wasn't what I wanted to hear from my friend.

"Why do you hope no one asks?"
"Because no one will hear me. You can love the sinner and hate the sin, but if you say that you're an idiot. If I told a gay not to have sex, he'd hear that as a rejection of his whole self. Anyway, there is so much more that population needs of love. They don't need sex advice from me."

I thought about that. I've thought about it a lot since. I know Andy was and remains the real deal. Those proud homophobes in his church? They don't like him. The second Thursday of every month, Andy's bicycle shop hosts Gears for Queers, a bicycle repair and social mixer for LGBT people. Youth participants can earn a free bike while connecting with adult mentors and allies in the community. There are trans kids who aren't homeless because when their parents kicked them out, someone they met through Gears for Queers took them in.

So, what is Andy's issue? I think he has a problem with sexual promiscuity and has it stuck in his head that "the lifestyle" is inherently promiscuous. How he got that stuck in his head, I don't know.

I ran his words by Rick some days later. Rick made an amused and disparaging noise.

"So, how do you hear 'don't have gay sex,'" I asked.
"I hear it as 'don't have gay sex,'" he said. "An instruction I will not take, by the way. I happen to like gay sex."

Although I actually had never known Rick to have a boyfriend by that point. If he had transient lovers during his candidacy, he never brought them on campus and never mentioned them.

As you may remember, Rick's main assignment from Charlie that year was to learn to love. Specifically, he was supposed to learn to love Charlie, who had offered himself as somebody Rick could practice on without fear of social awkwardness. Over the months of 2007, Rick said very little about that assignment, either in our group sessions or to me, privately. He spent very little time with Charlie, as far as I can recall.

I did ask Rick how it was going, one day in late November, and he told me a little about the work he'd been doing. Apparently, every day since shortly after he's received the assignment, he'd been giving a gift to Charlie every day. Most of the gifts were not physical objects but acts of service, and Charlie himself didn't know about all of them. Greg had made that suggestion, and Greg was more or less acting at Rick's supervisor in the project, since Charlie really couldn't. Allen helped to, at times.

"So, how's it going?" I asked. "Do you love, yet?"
"I don't know," he answered. "How am I supposed to know? I don't feel any different, but Allen and Greg say I might not."
"How will Charlie tell when you get there?"
"I don't know, but that's what I'm afraid of."
"Afraid?"
"You think he might test you, like he did me?"

As you may remember, Charlie taught me to love a patch of forest, and he tested my progress by telling me that forest was slated to be clear-cut. He was lying, it was only a test, and I almost slugged him for frightening me.

Rick nodded.

"If you're afraid of that," I pointed out, "don't you think it's a good sign?"

He didn't quite answer.

It's curious that I decided to talk about Rick and Andy together, since what one had, the other lacked. Rick didn't know how to love, nor did he even feel the urge to try, whereas Andy loved passionately, for all his initial clumsiness at it. On the other hand, Rick didn't have a major mental health problem to work through. Andy did. And Rick has always had the self-assurance that comes of fundamentally knowing one's own worth. Andy had lost that, somewhere along the way, and needed to find it again.

Andy frequently alluded to the principle that certain things should not be said because they would be heard as something else. Once he mentioned that he'd learned the principle the hard way.

"There was a time," he said, "when if you'd told me I needed to find Jesus, I wouldn't have heard you."

The who idea of me telling anyone to find Jesus struck me as amusing, but I knew what he meant.

"What would you have heard?" I asked.

"That I was a bad person. That I needed to go back to church and start behaving in a Godly way. That I needed to just not be a sinner, which I couldn't do. The suggestion would just have reminded me what a failure I was."

"But someone go through to you," I pointed out. "Who? And how?"

"It was a man I met at a shelter. I'd been clean for a few weeks and I'd just used again that day. I was feeling pretty crummy. and he said 'Andy, God loves you whether you are clean or not.' And I heard him."

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