THE GAZE.
I am thirteen or fourteen, somewhere in that awkward set of ages, and it’s late on a Sunday morning.
I’ve already done my weekly reflection assignment for school, showered too late, heard my parents’ cry “Paul, we’re leaving in two minutes!”, and made the highway trip to the church’s 11am service. I’ve already seen that warehouse turned into a church in the dash of my dad’s van. We’ve already attended the service together. And now, I’m here again, waiting for my dad to finish browsing the bookstore, and my mom finish talking to her friends from home church. I’m waiting in the lobby, seeing bright direct sunlight filtered through large windows slowly pass over the coffee shop onto the large linoleum floors. I brought my plastic binder with me and a #2 pencil in the hopes of getting ahead on homework, but I’m not, because he’s here.
In front of me, there’s the man. The long, gently curling, unkempt hair that made him iconic. The face, the smile, the brightness behind his eyes that was projected onto the huge screens at service. The fabric fedora hat. In the mostly empty lobby, he’s talking to a girl, maybe half my age. And it shocks me, that he’s actually real. That you could talk to him, touch him. See what brand of disheveled t-shirt he had on that day.
We make eye contact for a moment. He’s not sure what to do with me, this acne-prone teen sitting with his french textbook on a remote table near the corner, ambling his eyes over him like one would a famous statue. He feigns a smile, then returns to talking to that girl.
Now I sit here wondered whatever came of that girl, who she was, and who she is now. I wonder if this memory now makes her feel as profoundly unsafe as it makes me.
Now I’m twenty-one or twenty-two, somewhere in those years of both want to finally be yourself, but also knowing profoundly little of what that actually means.
I’m shopping for a church. Of course I am. It’s my first time working an internship while living away from my parents, a proposition both exciting and terrifying. As soon as I got the job, I felt this vacuous pit in my stomach open up, and felt the urge alongside it to fill it with all the things that occupied my life with my family: working in my room, chores, assembling my housemates for dinners, and of course finding a church. Life without church would have been a plant’s branching cutting itself from the root. I had to look.
I try the place my mom attended in her youth, a low-built building near Kipling, led by a comedic, charismatic pastor. When I enter the building, however, this immediate sense of not belonging overcomes me. Something about it all felt custom-built for someone who wasn’t me, perhaps for the generation prior. I give the Welcome Team a courteous smile, and leave.
After a couple more rounds of this, I remember a contact I had made in the Meeting House, a gay man who created a group specifically for LGBT people like myself. It felt too significant a connection to miss, a symbolic reunion with the church of my childhood, now equipped with the unashamed knowledge of my queerness. I contact him and arrange to meet at the Downtown Toronto site the following Sunday.
There’s something about the seats. It’s in a movie theatre, everything from the coffee to the worship to the message played on the big screen, the same resolution and film texture as a Marvel film. There he is, this long-haired charismatic, talking about spiritual seekers, atheists, and people with questions, but in a new way I never heard about before — as if they’re just as human as Christians, and just as worthy of being listened to. I sink into the cushioning all around me, feeling profoundly safe in a way I hadn’t in church before. Here, I am allowed to be on the knife’s edge of belief and doubt, as I had been for many years.
The message concludes, the lights come on, and I notice again the man leap from the screen into reality - he’s here! Again! It’s a sign, surely, that this is the place for me. I stand and make a beeline to him, filled with questions and enthusiasm. A mite shorter than me, he greets me with a smile,