{"id":3510,"date":"2014-07-18T12:13:38","date_gmt":"2014-07-18T16:13:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/barefootandpregnant\/?p=3510"},"modified":"2014-12-30T09:35:39","modified_gmt":"2014-12-30T14:35:39","slug":"an-apology-to-my-parents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/barefootandpregnant\/2014\/07\/an-apology-to-my-parents.html","title":{"rendered":"An Apology to My Parents"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I did something awful yesterday.<\/p>\n

Well, I didn\u2019t do it yesterday, but it all came to a head yesterday. I did it a few weeks ago, when Sam interviewed me for his series on the Art of Blogging<\/a>. I started to go off about the online Evangelical culture that makes me crazy and I conflated that culture with the way I was raised. I lumped my parents in alongside Matt Walsh, who is not my favorite blogger. If someone illustrated that section of the interview, they probably would have drawn me mashing them all together into a ball with some eye-catching insults, then kicking that ball as hard as I could and doing a little victory dance.<\/p>\n

When I gave the interview, I had a nagging sense of unease about that section. I had planned on going back later and fixing it, because I didn\u2019t want to upset my parents. But I got busy, and distracted, and I forgot. When I glanced over the interview yesterday morning, that section didn\u2019t even register with me.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until my mom got up from the couch yesterday afternoon with tears in her eyes and the interview pulled up on her Ipad that I realized I had left it as it was. I tried to defend myself and explain why I didn\u2019t mean it that way, but my own syntax in the interview proved me wrong. I stopped trying to explain it and listened to my mom tell me that she didn\u2019t want to make me feel bad, but that the caricature I had drawn of my upbringing simply wasn\u2019t true.<\/p>\n

I sent Sam a frantic facebook message asking him to change that section, and poor Sam, stuck at a tire shop on the way to a gig, couldn\u2019t get wifi. It wasn\u2019t till he was on his way home that he pulled over at a grocery store to get wifi and change it. I felt like an ass for that, too. More so because it didn\u2019t rectify the offense, it just covered up the evidence.<\/p>\n

My mom is right. It wasn\u2019t true. I may have experienced a big-haired, God, Guns, and the GOP culture by proxy, seeing as how I grew up between Ft. Worth and Dallas, but that was not the culture in my home. My parents did not raise me like that. As my mom said yesterday, they raised me \u201cto learn to love God more every day.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is a kind of convert zeal that is unhealthy \u2014 the \u201cscorched earth\u201d kind, where you\u2019re so on fire for your new faith that you want to burn everything you left behind to the ground. For me, this has been compounded by the antagonistic, estranged-sibling relationship between Catholicism and Protestantism. Just like it\u2019s easy for a former Catholic to find, in Protestantism, a cure for all that ails them, it\u2019s been really easy for me to find in Catholicism a cure for all that ails me. I don\u2019t want to equivocate here \u2014 I believe that the Catholic faith has the fullness of the truth, or I wouldn\u2019t have converted. However, I do want to point out that what my parents taught me is the most important thing they could have taught me, whatever their religion.<\/p>\n

Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or a moralism. Christianity is an encounter, a love story; it is an event.<\/p>\n

-Pope Benedict XVI<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My parents gave me a priceless gift when they raised me with Christ at the center of our family life. What I said about them in the interview, and the general way I have characterized my upbringing, is not a small mistake. It\u2019s a genuine injustice, and I apologize for it. To them primarily, but to everyone else as well.<\/p>\n

I talk a good game about mercy and love, and while I have it in spades for people I\u2019ve never met, I haven\u2019t bothered to spare much for the people I\u2019ve known all my life, and the people who love me the most. \u00a0It\u2019s cowardice mostly, since it\u2019s easy to love strangers twice removed by the impersonal vortex of the internet. It\u2019s hard to love family. It requires something besides nice words \u2014 it requires putting myself away, being content to let the opportunity for a zingy one-liner or a hyperbolic description of Protestant culture pass. It requires recognizing that earning the fleeting chuckles of a few facebook friends is a poor substitute for the honoring and loving my parents. It doesn\u2019t speak well of me that I didn\u2019t recognize that until the ish hit the proverbial fan, but it would speak even less well of me if I let it pass without correction.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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