I, like many who attended Sunday School, memorized Psalm 23 as a child. To this day there are only two pieces of literature that I can still quote verbatim–Psalm 23 and the first sixteen lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (which many of us were forced to learn in high school).  I hadn’t thought about the psalm for a while until I was asked to help with the blessing of a child. In the Book of Common Prayer, Psalm 23 is read during that service.

Memorizing the psalm, I remember being somewhat obsessed with the Valley of the Shadow of Death that is referenced. Why would anybody choose such a horrible name?  And why would anyone choose to walk through such a place?  It reminded me of screaming at the TV “don’t go in there” when you knew a character was going to run into a bad guy. Only someone who was an idiot would enter a place with such a foreboding name.

In the thousands of years since those words were authored, there has been much dialogue about both the physical and metaphorical nature of the Valley of Death as it relates to sheep, grass and our own journey.  But I wonder if perhaps we are the Shadow of Valley of Death and while extolling us about the perils of going it alone, the author is also asking us to question whether we are bearers of darkness or bearers of light.

I grew up, as most people will guess, in a very Christian household with both the good and the bad that that entails. I think children with backgrounds like mine face a certain specific challenge when it comes to matters of spirituality. The natural rebellion that often occurs during adolescence can become expressed on a deeply personally religious level. After all, songs and stories abound about sons and daughters of preachers, and often casts somewhat of a pall over the morality of such creatures.

For me, my challenge of finding my own way was complicated by a sense that I was gay. I remember, as a young boy, collecting pictures of Jim Palmer in his Jockey underwear ads. Somehow the fact that he was a sports star made it a little more justifiable in my mind. Other boys my age loved baseball so I should try to understand it as well. I might as well start with a handsome, half-naked pitcher. But at this point I didn’t have the words to express what I was feeling. In my Christian world, there was no such thing as homosexuality.

When I was a freshman in high school I tried out for, and was cast, in the school musical. This wasn’t a result of any great talent but more a result of a dearth of guys willing to participate. If you were male and could walk across the stage without tripping, you were pretty much assured a place in the chorus at least. All the leads in our production of The Mikado went to juniors and seniors, many of whom had real talent. I specifically remember the guy who played Nanki-Poo, the lead tenor character who was in love with a woman set to be married to another. The senior who played him was also captain of the swim team, about 6 feet tall, blond and had the build of swimmer. During one rehearsal early in the process, he showed up from a quick workout in the pool. His hair was still wet and as he pulled off his sweatshirt, the t-shirt underneath rode up to show off one of those desired six-packs. I couldn’t help but stare.

While I may have, at that point, started to become aware of what was going on, I was also more aware of what the Bible according to my church taught regarding being gay. At the same time, AIDS had become an epidemic. I remember being in downtown Philadelphia with my family and some family friends on a Saturday that happened to coincide with a march for gay rights. The march was in our line of travel so we had to wait until it cleared. While we were standing there, someone in the crowd yelled “Up with AIDS!”  I am not one hundred percent sure who yelled it but the voice came from someone standing close to me. I knew that being gay was a fate worse than death and could even be the reason some people would advocate for my death.  That was the first time I caught a glimpse of the Shadow Valley.

A couple of years later, while still in high school, a group of us was sitting around contemplating our lives as teens like to do. There was discussion about applying to college, speculation about what the “real world” help for us and conjecture about what would make us happy. In teen-angst I muttered that I didn’t think I would ever truly be happy. I think my friends interpreted that as statement about being a tortured artist or the like. I knew that I meant that the things they talked about as the sources of potential happiness such as a spouse, 2.1 kids and a white picket fence to be out of my reach. I hadn’t fully embrace the fact that I was gay, but I had accepted that I would live outside the “norm”.  I had entered the Valley.

Fast forward a few years, and I had finally come out to myself, then my friends and finally my family.  Out of a feeling of respect for my parents, after telling them I was gay I agreed to go and talk with one of their friends who was a pastor in NYC.  This pastor was, and is still, known for some very conservative viewpoints so I wasn’t expecting a sympathetic conversation.  I was a little nervous that I was going to go head to head against a man whose depth of theological knowledge far outdid my own.

The conversation started off civilly enough, but we both knew why we had come together.  As the conversation turned to the topic at hand, I braced myself for a barrage of Old Testament quotes and deep deconstruction of ancient texts for which I would have no response.  Instead, the pastor took an interesting nurture versus nature tact.  He firmly espoused that I must have “learned” to be gay by things in my environment.  I must have picked being gay up.  He used the analogy of a young child who is moved to a foreign land who readily learns a new language simply from being around it day in and day out.  I looked him in the eye and asked, “how could I have picked something up when I never knew what being gay was, much less had ever knowingly interacted with a single gay person?”

I was prepared for a host of different arguments, but the simple darkness of this argument threw me for a loop.  I excused myself politely and left his office.  I walked down the street wondering how such a learned man could have used such an ungrounded argument.  That was when I saw how wide the Valley was. I decided that if the Church served to widen the Valley, I wanted no part of it.

It wasn’t until I was forced to deal with major depression that I really came to understand how dark the shadow could be. But thanks to medication, therapy and reconciling with my own spiritual background I made some forays into the light.  In doing so, I became more empathetic to those around me, but particularly to those people who had also walked that Valley as I had.  As I came to understand that I could become a bearer of light, I also had to realize that there were times in my life when I had been a bearer of darkness.

Granted, I probably had not actively “thrown shade” on anyone, but, like Rhianna, I could make “shade” known.  I did little to conceal moments of schadenfreude.  I had had my fair shares of “I told you so” moments and I knew that there were many times where I strangled someone’s enthusiasm for an idea by simply saying, “gee, I don’t know”.  I had blotted out light at the very moment when someone could have used it–which is just as bad as being the source of darkness.  And I had often done it out of a means to advance myself, or at least make me feel better about myself.

But the problem about not generating light, is that it also would leave me fumbling in darkness.  Did I want to have the kind of impact on others that I had experienced growing up gay?  Did I want to make someone question their self-worth by exercising my ancestral gift of the Southern back-handed compliment?  Did I want to make someone’s spirit wither because I was blocking the good light they needed to thrive?  Or I could choose to be a source of comfort.

I realize that the adage, “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” is a passive way of permitting the casting of darkness. I imagine that, if we tried hard enough, we could always find something nice to say.  We should always work to shine light, not just move ourselves out of the way of casting a shadow.

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