Addison Road

I had the most interesting Christmas this year, far more interesting than any I have experienced in recent memory. I went to Indianapolis, Indiana to stay with my folks, who just relocated there last month. It snowed on Christmas Day. I nearly threw up with excitement…seriously, I was that excited.

I was with my parents for a few days before my brother and his wife and Ash flew in. It was great just to hang with them and hear about how amped they are for all the new stuff going on in their lives. (Dad going back to school, Mom starting her dream job.) They are renting this little duplex in an old Indy neighborhood called Woodruff Place, which is one of the oldest suburbs in the U.S. (It was a suburb when it was started in 1872, but it was only two miles from downtown. Now it’s just downtown.) It’s three square blocks of these incredible, rambling Victorian homes that are slowly being restored to their former glory. I love old homes, and you just don’t get ‘em in Southern California. I took a lot of walks.

I also hung out a lot with my dad’s youngest sister and her roommate, Lee. (Aunt Ruth is three years younger than me. It’s complicated.) Ruth and Lee are both gay. And Christians. While they are far from the first Jesus-following homasexshuls that I know and love, they are the first to share their journeys — personal, relational, and theological — so warmly and openly. (They are also the first to take me karaoke-ing at a gay bar. There were a lot of show tunes, but the highlight was Lee singing “The Great Adventure” by Steven Curtis Chapman. He brought the house down.) We went to Christmas dinner at their house; it was my family (my brother and sister-in-law flew in that afternoon), Ruth and Lee, plus a whole crowd of their gay friends who couldn’t afford or were not welcome to go home for the holidays. It was beautiful. In a Jesus-showed-up-and-sat-down-to-eat-turkey kind of way. (And what a turkey it was! Ruth is from Oklahoma and Lee is from Kentucky and they know how to cook with the two things Californians most fear: butter and cream. Lee’s homemade corn pudding was just this side of Glory.)

We went to midnight Mass at All Saints’ Episcopal Church on Christmas Eve. The rector there is gay, and also a helluva preacher. He spoke about setting aside our agendas (gay, straight, Right, Left, American, whatever) and gathering at the Manger to get on God’s agenda. Dad and I joked later that it was really hard to be low-church evangelicals during his sermon, since we both wanted to give him some “Amen!” shout-outs, which would have been highly inappropriate amid the clouds of incense and Latin chant. I asked my dad how he felt about suddenly finding himself on the periphery of the gay community in Indianapolis. (Dad’s been an evangelical pastor for over 30 years.) He thought about it for a minute, then he said, “Loving gay people isn’t the ministry I moved halfway across the nation to have…but it seems to be the one God’s given. That’s good enough for me.”

The last night we were there, Ash and I went with Ruth and Lee to The Peppy Grill (an all-night diner where the food is cheap and Alice the cook/waitress/busboy/dishwasher is really, really grouchy) and talked about God and life and Bill Gaither’s body of work, and chain-smoked over fried foods and bad coffee until four in the morning. My hair still smells like an ashtray, but it was the best church service I’ve been to in a long, long time.