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 “Couldn’t Care Less” and “The Love of Jesus.”
Summary:
A discouraging enounter. I thought Jesus was supposed to make us care more, not to care less.
An Excerpt from Straight Into Gay America.
Sitting at a Formica table next to a father and his daughter, the father asks about my unicycle. The twelve-year-old daughter keeps eating her lunch as I answer questions. After all the technical details of speed and miles and who carries my gear, Dad asks, “Are you riding for a cause?” The luster leaves his face as I give my first sentence about riding Straight Into Gay America.
“What do you think?” I ask.
“It’s wrong. It’s a sin,” he answers, “I’m a Christian.”
I ask about equal rights. I tell him about Greg and Willie and others I’ve met—hospital visitation, next of kin rights, inheritance.
“Honestly,” he says, with conversation-stopping finality, “I couldn’t care less.”
“Couldn’t care less?” The words ricochet through me, even as I finish my meal, even as I get back on One Wheel and start spinning my legs toward York and Gettysburg.
“Couldn’t care less?” How can a Christian say this?
The point of Jesus
is for us to care more,
not to care less.
“Couldn’t care less?”
These words irk more
than anything else on this entire trip.
Back on the road I can’t decide
whether to wish a lesbian daughter
on this care-less man
or to wish she grows up
heterosexual so she won’t be the one
to try and knife through Dad’s apathy.
“Couldn’t care less” finally uncaps me. I feel like I’m bubbling over, all the experiences since Manhattan needing release. On this hot afternoon, riding toward the most famous battle of our country’s history, again not knowing where I’ll stay tonight, I turn my unicycle into a solitary pulpit, pretending I’m the preacher, as I once was on every Sunday.
My stomach used to turn each time I stood up in the pulpit. The shyness of my youth has never fully left me, but a part of the anxiety came from knowing the job of preaching is to pull off the covers we wrap so tightly around ourselves, to penetrate our masks, to drill beneath the veneer that makes us judgmental and lets us get by with saying, “I’m a Christian,” and “I couldn’t care less.” |
