On Loving the Outcast

In every society, there are outcasts: people seen as misfits, people considered different, people whose behaviors or beliefs don’t conform to our own. Shunned, shamed, hunted out and harassed or even beaten or slain by those more powerful, these are the ones the rest of us are ordinarily taught to abhor, to turn away from, to scorn as though they were the Devil’s spawn.

And so what are we to do when the misfits are members of our own families? How do we react when a long disobedient and uncontrollable daughter of 15 tells us she is pregnant, or a dissolute 17-year-old son ends up addicted to methamphetamine, or a spouse confesses to having another family in another state? What do we do when a daughter of 11 tells us she wants to take puberty-suppressing hormones, because she is really “he” and plans to pursue transgender surgery later in life? What do we do when a 20-year-old marriage ends when one partner confesses to being bisexual or gay or lesbian and wants a divorce?

Surely none of these can be neatly addressed and solved or even exhaustively discussed in an essay like this. And yet, these situations are things some people face every day in our world of complicated human relationships and behaviors. None of these are “new,” although our knowledge about such situations may be more widespread now. These, and others that can but need not always destroy relationships, occurred in some form or other in Victorian England as well as in Ancient Greece. Perhaps then they were not topics of conversation around the afternoon tea table or at the marketplace, unlike now when family stories are often blasted loudly on social media or talk radio or reality TV.

While I never married nor had any children of my own, during my 43 years of college teaching and advising of 17- to 22-year-olds, I listened to heart-breaking stories of family lives torn apart by such events as described above, and learned more than I ever expected or wanted to about the ugly and destructive ways in which we can respond to one another in some of these situations. I mostly could ONLY listen, and then refer my

students to other sources of professional help, whether to trained counselors, to doctors, to pastors, or priests, or ministers, welfare agencies or family violence shelters, or other such centers of care and help.

But none of those things alone will completely (or, in some cases even partially) repair the relationships that are fragmented. Sometimes the best that can happen is for new relationships to be built. And that depends on acceptance and reincorporation into social networks somehow of the damaged person or persons (whether victims or ones whose actions brought pain), perhaps together, perhaps apart.

I believe that this is where our churches and other religious organizations have SUCH an important part to play. Faith groups, after all, have Jesus’admonition to welcome the stranger, to minister to the hungry, the sick, and the imprisoned. How much less should we minister then to the sick at heart? If there is not forgiveness and acceptance in churches and other religious groups, where is it to be found?

Please consider this an extension of my previous column (Fayette County Record, February 11, 2023) about how important it is to think of love as going beyond eros: we must work harder on loving the unloved, embracing the outcast, accepting those who are different, and not just accepting them, but even welcoming them into our faith communities with love.

Be well, dear friends, and be loving to all those in need of your love, whether or not they are near and dear to you already, whether or not they are loved by others in our society.

Annette Citzler is a La Grange native and former professor at Texas Lutheran University