Stories and "Prayers"

The Lifetime network is re-airing Prayers for Bobby today. The film, made for the network, stars Sigourney Weaver as real-life gay activist Mary Griffith. A devout Presbyterian in the 1970s, when son Bobby Griffith told her he was gay, she believed that God would change him if he prayed hard enough. Instead, Bobby killed himself. Now a devout member of P-FLAG, Mary is dedicated to preventing similar suicides.

The film, which originally aired in January, generated a strong response on the Lifetime website and websites dedicated to gay topics. People write that they feel understood at last, that they gained courage from the family's story, that they too came close to suicide because of the way their families or communities reacted to them.

They are powerful, emotional comments that communicate authentic human experience. As a church, we take human experience seriously. It's one of the four pillars of moral theology -- the theology that helps us understand what to do in complicated situations.

As Catholics, we have to pay attention to human experience. What other people have to tell us about their lives is just as important as an abstract theory of how to behave.

But there's a danger in listening to human experience, and an even greater danger in listening to experience distilled through a film or a book. Catholic theology listens to all human experience, to life as it has been lived by people all over the world for hundreds, even thousands of years. One person can be sincerely wrong. One person's interpretation of his or her experience can be distorted or exaggerated. One person's heartfelt response to a situation can be the complete opposite of another's.

Extracting human experience from a book or a film can be even more perilous. A talented writer can make any story seem true to life. If he or she has any talent at all, a film writer can take anyone and make him a hero (remember Hustler publisher Larry Flynt as a crusader for free speech in The People vs. Larry Flynt?) or a villain. Deftly wielded, empathy for others can fan support for a good cause or generate sympathy for a bad one.

The fictional slaves in Uncle Tom's Cabin helped convince an indifferent public that slavery was just as bad as the abolitionists said it was. Reading it makes you want to take up arms for the Union. But as a teenager I wept over the English translation of The Family, a Chinese novel about the life of an arrogant, aristocratic Chinese family and their oppressed servants in the early 1900s. Reading it makes you want to join the socialist revolution.

Certainly the experience of this real American family is powerful. The tragic suicide of a teenager and the transformation it caused in his family are profound. But is their response, true though it is, the right one? Reading the Lifetime website, it's obvious that the network thinks it is, and wants you to think so too. Yet even in this most sympathetic of forums, people have written to share some very different human experience.

Some, for example, wrote to share that they had been helped by two Christian organizations, Exodus International and People Can Change. These groups say homosexual inclinations can often be changed, and that people who can't change them will lead happier, more fulfilled lives by remaining celibate. A Catholic apostolate, Courage, has a similar message. These organizations are controversial, because they have many members whose experiences are similar to the Griffith family's, but who have come to very different conclusions.

If we are going to listen to people -- and we certainly should -- we have to listen to many people. While a particular view of people with same-sex attraction is being advocated by popular media, it's not the only view. Other opinions and other real lives are not featured in Lifetime movies and on popular television programs and feature films. These men and women have also struggled and suffered. Their joys and sorrows are equally valid. And when it comes to making legislation, devising school curriculums, and changing the US Constitution, our empathy for the feelings and lives of our brothers and sisters is one -- but only one -- of many things we need to take into account.