If you want to see hypocrisy in action, just catch me behind the wheel of a car. I’m like a maniac. A maniac who drives like a little old lady and gets really, really self-righteous about it. I don’t speed, I don’t cut people off in traffic, and I don’t do that really terrible thing that some of you do where you know - you know - that your lane is about to end, but instead of merging over you speed around the rest of us and expect the person at the front of the line to let you go ahead of them. All I can say is that someone in your car better be having a baby. The head better already be out, too.

See? Just thinking about it gets me riled up.

Now. I’m willing to allow that some of the people who act horribly in our daily lives are like that one car - the one car in all of creation - that is carrying a crisis case to a hospital. But mostly I just assume that everyone thinks that where they have to be is more important than where I have to be, and that sorta gets my goat. Cars are dangerous things; drive carefully and courteously, and if you’re afraid that Home Depot will be out of all the good flowers before you arrive, say, or if you’re late to church, well - you’re listening to the wrong music in the car. Put on something a little more mellow - K.C. Clifford, perhaps - and chill out.

Cars are dangerous objects that can be used to kill or hurt, and like all the rest of you - well, not you - I wield mine with reckless abandon from time to time.

Words are the same way. As a writer I don’t have the luxury of taking words for granted, which is a problem when you have things like deadlines, and readers, and people who need your words the way I need the words of writers I admire. I could be starving or facing eviction, but if there’s a new Anne Lamott book or David Wilcox album out, I’ll find the money. At the heart of it I am a writer because I am a reader, a listener - I crave the shared experiences that words give us because I need to know I’m not alone. I share my story and all the grace I’ve been given, hoping it will come back to me.

That’s why I’m always so surprised when some religious whack job twists off and says something off-the-wall about gay and lesbian people. I’m surprised because those words really do have an impact, and even as a lover of words I am never sure what that impact is.

I live in Oklahoma, okay, so where I live it’s almost everywhere you look. Anita Bryant, she of late-1970’s-anti-gay-crusader-fame, lives and has offices just blocks from where I live and work. Sally Kern, the Oklahoma state legislator who became an internet anti-celebrity in 2008 when she was recorded making all kinds of inflammatory and untrue claims about the “gay agenda,” is my best friends’ state representative. They didn’t vote for her, but there you have it: democracy.

Usually the way I deal with people like this is to laugh at them, because honestly, to take them too seriously would cripple my ability to live in this world. Part of the problem that Sally Kern and Anita Bryant and James Dobson have is that they do take it too seriously, this idea of an army of homosexuals descending on America, forcing everyone to get gay married and surrender their two-year-olds to the “gay agenda.” Their chronic seriousness doesn’t allow them to step back, to get a sense of perspective and peace about the whole situation. This makes them crazy, which in turn makes them funny.

Still, we can’t write them off entirely as nut jobs. No matter what schoolyard chants our parents may have taught us, words do hurt - they cut and leave scars that don’t heal with time and vitamin E.

To wit: not long after I came out I was sitting in silence with a friend of mine. We worked together in a job that occasionally required us to sit and wait for long periods of time. We’d gone to get some food to pass the time, and we were eating in relative quiet. Out of nowhere my friend looked up at me and said, her voice shaking and angry, “I am traumatized by the fact that you’re gay.”

I can still hear it as clearly as if she were standing next to me today, repeating it over and over.

These voices get in our heads. I think that a huge portion of our thought lives consist of them, these things we have heard about ourselves and the world and God, on loop. They’re all saying different things, in different tones, and they’re hard to turn off. They’re the voices of our teachers, of the adolescent friends and schoolmates who said mean crap to us to assuage their own blistered egos. They’re the voices of our parents, the culture, and the harshest, meanest part of ourselves.

We all have known people who did not understand the simple truth that this looped tape is not, in fact, the voice of God. I didn’t understand that for a long time, and even now I must remind myself of it at least three times every day.

We’ve all had plenty of people who said awful, crappy things to us and who claimed to be doing it in the name of God. It’s funny how we can take something completely awful and then proclaim God’s blessing on it, thinking that makes it okay. The awful things some Christians - Sally Kern, for example, or me - say to one another or to the world. A whole lot of Contemporary Christian music.  

Jesus wasn’t having any of this kind of behavior. He stood between a woman and the people who wanted to stone her and said to them, in essence, that just because they thought that God condoned what they were doing didn’t mean that they shouldn’t take a moment in their holy fervor and think about their actions. They were going to kill a woman for sinning - sinning - something every person does every day. They were singling her out because her sin - adultery - stuck out in their minds as something particularly awful and abhorrent. The truth was that no one in that crowd was any better than she. Not one of them had the right to throw a stone at her, no one except for Jesus that is, and He took mercy on her.

I’ve had some truly difficult things said to me in the name of Jesus. Some of them were things I needed to hear, said lovingly by people who knew me and my journey. Some of them were harsh and unfeeling and discompassionate and coming from nowhere near the vicinity of the Holy Spirit. One guess which words made it into The Loop. One more guess which of those two things have more often come from me.

We’re called - listen up, Sally Kern - we’re called to spend our short time on this earth taking care of one another, but more often than not we choose to beat one another into submission, and our words are our stones.

We’re called to love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Our words matter because they turn into other people’s thoughts. They get sucked up into the interior worlds of the people we care about, and when they’re there we don’t have any control over them. Most of us can’t go on CNN and say we were taken out of context, and as Christians we most certainly can’t say whatever we want just because we feel, in the moment, that we’ve been appointed by God to do so. I think that’s what all that “test the spirits” and “pray constantly” stuff is about.

What’s great about being a Christian is that it presumes that we are going to fail. I can more or less promise you that on my next outing to the store, on any five-minute journey through midtown Oklahoma City, I will question a fellow motorist’s parentage. I will make insinuations about his or her past or current drug use and helpful suggestions as to where he or she can place that cell phone when he or she is done using it. This is precisely why I don’t have a Jesus fish on my car.

Our failure is presumed, and forgiven, gone into the wind like it was never there to begin with. The Christian story starts with failure - with Original Sin, with bad words and bad news and bad faith. It ends somewhere else entirely, somewhere safe and redeemed, gentle and secure. In the middle we get to do this dance, this awkward two-step with the Holy Spirit, while the music goes on and on.