Will You Come and Follow Me?
Posted on by Malinda Collier
Will You Come and Follow Me (The Summons) is one of my favorite hymns. It can be a bit tricky to sing and as I learned at one point in my life even trickier to play on the piano. But is it a beautiful hymn and truly a summons.
“Will you love the you you hide” is a line that Amos picked out in his Sunday reflection. As he wrote, “We all find faults with ourselves and struggle to love ourselves as we are – this is, of course, the precise opposite of God’s love.” And indeed, it is. Amos speaks to our current environment when sadly it seems some of us are too readily othered by many. Some of us it seems by simply living and being the person God made us are now being told to once again hide, to deny, to be healed of what is not sickness but rather self-knowledge and self-understanding, our identity.
As a woman I know some of what it is like to have my identity, my safety, and my autonomy challenged. But I do not know what it is to try to live a life in which I am forced to deny who I am.
Growing up in 1960’s Louisville KY our across the street neighbors had a daughter a few years older than me. She was like me in some ways in that we were both “tom boys” as girls who preferred to climb trees and play 500 in the street were called back in the day. But even as a child I knew there was something in her that was hidden – she always seemed tense and unsettled. Her parents belonged to some fraternal organization that had a teen auxiliary which sponsored fancy dress socials, and I so felt for her when she had to dress up in the powder puff pastel prom gowns for yet another dance. She’d have to stand in the driveway and pose for photos with her dad. Her face was drawn tight.
My childhood included close family friends who were gay and lesbian. In mid to late 1960’s Louisville they couldn’t be out (and keep their jobs, their housing, etc.) but I knew and knew it was sad and wrong that they had to hide who they were and who they loved and lie behind the excuses of “just sharing the house to save money,” or “well I’ve just never found the right women…” Years later it was good meet these folks again – one man was a pall bearer for my father – and be able to fully and openly acknowledge them and their partners/spouses.
So even as a young person, I had the language for what it was to be gay or lesbian. I always kind of assumed that my across the street friend was lesbian. She left home the first minute possible and though her parents lived there for decades after, she never came home for a visit. I learned many years later that she died young and only near the end of her life did she see her parents again.
Somewhere along the line as my knowledge of gender and orientation and identity expanded it dawned on me that she wasn’t lesbian, she was transgender. I wondered what her life must have been like struggling between the person she was expected to be and the person she knew herself to be. I could only imagine her battles in an unaccepting world. It made those dresses and dances even sadder to me.
Returning to Amos’s reflection it is a sad truth that today transgender children, teens and adults are being targeted and dangerously othered. Their safety is not assured and, in some cases their very lives are at risk. Why? This discrimination and hate is so at odds with our baptismal promises. It is so at odds with the example of Jesus who taught us to love one another as he loved us.
So, altering the hymn a bit - Will we love the you you don’t have to hide? I think yes.
And my childhood friend, I wish I could go back and tell them how beautiful and loved they were just as they were.
Malinda