Hard family conversations spanned decades until change arrived at the 11th hour

"It's not even Christian," I argued with my dad decades ago about his church's exclusion of members who were out of the closet. Sometimes, my moderate-minded mom would step in and offer a slice of pie or another distraction to calm us down.

In the early 90s, my husband and I bonded over our anger that friends and family who were dear to us had to leave the church once they came out. How could our own dads uphold these rules? Yet they did as leaders in their respective Pennsylvania Dutch Mennonite communities.

Jonathan and I argued with our fathers over this issue for several years. Trying to persuade them was like going up against the church itself. Jonathan is a second-generation missionary kid, and his dad was a respected leader in the global church. My dad, Ray, was a lifelong minister and the grandson of an evangelist. As if that wasn't enough, my mom was also a minister's daughter and wore the traditional head covering for most of her life.

By our late twenties, Jonathan and I saw that our passionate pleas weren't working. We both gave up. Breaking generations of tradition and probably our parents' hearts, we left the church.

But family get-togethers continued.

We stopped arguing with our fathers for the sake of our own sanity, though that didn't mean those conversations were over. Jonathan and I would work stories into our discussions, ensuring we fully embraced our friends and family. We tried to normalize for them what was normal to us. Several other family members advocated in this way to our patriarchs, too. We weren't alone. As the decades passed, we didn't think these conversations made much difference.

Then, one day, the earth shifted.

It was no family secret that my father-in-law David didn't accept his brother Dan's gay identity. Even though Uncle Dan had become an ordained minister who cared for marginalized people his whole life, the distance between Dan and his brother grew.

"This fact of my identity had caused a major rift," Dan told me. "A rift in our theological and spiritual outlooks. And it painfully affected our relationship." As Dan's friends, Jonathan and I knew about this wedge between the brothers, but we never thought it would change.

Then, at age 85, my father-in-law faced a decline due to Alzheimer's.

He began to review his life and decisions openly. One day, Jonathan's sister, Doris, planned to visit my in-laws, and she brought Uncle Dan along. No one expected the conversation that followed. David took Dan's hand and acknowledged how hard his kid brother's life had been. "We got it wrong," David told him.

"As we talked about the work I've done with the people who are marginalized," Dan reflected, "including gay men with HIV/AIDS, he compared me to Mary Magdalene, who was seen as a forgiven sinner who anointed Jesus' feet in the biblical story." This apparent biblical reference was essential to David, as his theology was the foundation of his life's work.

David earned a PhD from New York University and later authored numerous books. It seemed impossible that such a mind could fail. And yet, there was this unexpected gift as he moved beyond the traditional Christian notion of 'love the sinner, hate the sin' to accept his brother truly. "It was like his heart softened," my mother-in-law said as we discussed it later.

Despite his stature in the Mennonite church, David had a childlike quality that came out when he giggled at his kids' jokes or body-surfed at the ocean with his grandchildren. As he reviewed his life choices, it felt like he'd deeply entered that childlike part of himself and found a more complete love for his brother. My sister-in-law Doris described it as a watershed moment to see her dad overflowing with love and apology to Dan.

Dan told family and friends about their transformative conversation at my father-in-law's memorial luncheon. As black-and-white photos of their missionary work rolled on a screen, I was grateful that Dan, David, and all of us had come to this place before it was too late.

I felt emboldened to ask my dad about his thoughts a short time later. As a Mennonite minister, my dad had been part of excommunicating an area church in the 1990s after it openly welcomed LGBTQ+ members. Then, in an interesting twist, the church my parents attended in retirement opened up their membership to include people of any orientation or identity. I was at their house when their minister stopped by and brought it up. While my mom said she agreed with it, my dad said he was still against it. Even so, he continued to attend every Sunday, which surprised me.

But during the several years since that change, life had turned sideways.

Now, my mother was gone, taken by a short run with late-stage cancer. And now my dad had advanced cancer. So, as Dad and I sat in his small studio apartment, I gathered my courage and asked him about his views on his church's welcoming stance. His silver hair was thin from treatments, and his once-muscular body was beaten down by pain. I tried my best to keep our conversations as present and connective as possible so I'd have no regrets if it were our last time together.

"I still disagree with it," Dad said, not surprising me. "But maybe it's time for younger voices to have a say now."

I no doubt looked stunned at what he'd just uttered. I found some simple words to say, but it was impossible to digest what he'd said immediately. I met his eyes with the love and acceptance of the moment, feeling like some fog between us had evaporated instantly. I wanted to take the conversation further. But his illness limited our time, and we began to talk about other things. We hugged before I left for home and exchanged our usual "Love you."

As I drove home from our conversation, my mind spun. Did my father regret the harm the church had caused over this issue, including damage to our own family? I never asked him. He'd passed the torch. I am that younger generation having a say.

"Stay curious," my dad was fond of saying.

At 85, like my father-in-law, Dad had found his way toward seeing that the greater choice was love and letting go. Ultimately, at the eleventh hour, he used his curiosity to pass the baton to voices that might contradict him. And to be fair, in that last year of his life, I had worked hard to let go and love him better.

Three months after David's funeral, my dad passed on.

Two giants in our lives were gone. Now, we grieve as we adapt to this tremendous gap. As one family member put it, our dads gave us a strength to push against. My husband and I are still unpacking how these conversations, occurring so late in our dad's lives, impact us now.

Leaving the Mennonites defined who Jonathan and I became and how we raised our son in New Jersey. On days I feel nostalgic, it's tempting to wonder, "What if?" But that would deny the trajectory of our lives and the power of this moment of change and forgiveness. I was angry and impatient in my twenties. But in retrospect, I am so glad we kept those family relationships and worked to have respectful conversations.

Though we could have shut each other out, we stuck with our imperfect love.

Cynthia Yoder is a third-generation minister’s daughter and has three small press books out, including Crazy Quilt: Pieces of a Mennonite Life, a memoir wrestling with her Pennsylvania Dutch upbringing. She works as a writing coach and editor and received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her stories appear in Next Avenue, New Jersey Monthly and the collection Just Moms. Her interviews with luminaries, including Pulitzer winners Paul Starr and Paul Muldoon, appear in a Princeton University outlet. She is finishing a novel about a teen who gets pregnant in a conservative Pennsylvania Dutch community.

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