The Lord's Prayer

I barely remembered the Lord's Prayer in my dream but I was reciting it out loud in my dream as I walked through the cityscape of various atrocities holding hands with my 18 year old patient. The same patient who told me God created Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve on Friday during his monologue about the results of last week's election. No hard feelings for Archie though. Archie has been through a lot, so much in fact that he tried to kill himself this past summer, so much in fact that Archie's church family is the only family he has. Archie is the kind of kid (he's half my age I can call him a kid) that turns up in clinic nearly every week and alternately pulls at your heart strings and tries to press your buttons. Friday I managed to avoid his efforts to get a response, and turned his inquisitiveness into various questions that asked him where he stood on the issues that he was so concerned about. Archie is frail and small if he weighs 119 lbs, and is taller than 5'2" I'd be shocked. He is also so pale he looks somewhat jaundiced to me. I mean if I was doing a portrait of this kid I'd be using way more lemon yellow than pink I'll put it that way. It's not really olive either. It has a completely different greenish quality. So in my dream I was walking Archie through the valley of the Shadow of death (the Tenderloin), and he was laughing because I was so freaked out I couldn't remember the Lord's prayer. So Archie had to take over with the prayer and I'll hand it to him. He recited it perfectly.

I am really grateful to Archie. Because more so than anyone else he reminded me of the importance for having compassion for those who oppress us. Here is this 18 yo kid, sick as can be, never had a family, believes the church is protecting him from everything vile and despicable in the world, who voted yes on 8. All I could do was hear him out. And the more Archie went on the more I realized it wasn't about me, it was about him. Voting yes on 8 was about him asserting himself as a fundamentalist Christian. It was not about gay people. It was about his religious beliefs. I don't know how you challenge religious beliefs in a meaningful way. There I was in my dream confronting the obstacles Archie faces every day and the only response I could muster was the lord's prayer. Would it make a difference to Archie to know that there are gay Christians? Maybe? My sense of Archie's steadfast beliefs was that he is a very lonely kid, who needs more love in his life, and a couple good breaks so that he'll be able to succeed.