strongest choices when they have access to clear and accurate information. But no one around me questioned this problem and I struggled to make sense of the vacuum. I just couldn’ t understand validating abstinence as an accurate measure of birth control and pushing a pro-life agenda. This thinking felt logical and confirmed by research and, in my mind, had little to do with faith and a lot to do with clear reasoning and knowledge. I used contraception, and, though for the first time I questioned the moral use of such a medication, in the end, I decided that I was not about to give it up to God.
As I sat in my apartment, with George Bush’ s face beaming in front of the flag, the pop pop of the bullets died down. In the ensuing silence, I realized that I missed home, even though I knew my parents’ relationship was quickly unraveling. We learned that winter that they would be divorcing. My father moved out that spring. But still, I missed talking with my mother, the honking road rage of Massachusetts drivers, walking my siblings through middle school problems, and the distance that I could comfortably put between me and the love of a church whose price was more than I could afford in my early twenties.
On my flight home after graduation that May, my parents didn’ t speak to one another; yet I felt a new confidence that I was on my way to where I needed to be. I would miss the sun in February and the way talking about Aristotle could stretch a glass of wine into an evening lingering on friendship and its relationship to the integrated soul. Most of all, I would miss the simple version of God that dwelt in the Texas dust outside the Church of the Incarnation and being in the presence of those who felt a true belonging both to the place in which they were born and to the One they believed created them. As the homeland of the new president disappeared for the last time, I felt a deep gratitude for the people for whom the love of God and country was entwined deep in their DNA and for the look they gave me into my own.
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