Sometimes the people we love change in ways we don’t understand. They tell us things we wish weren’t true. They challenge beliefs that feel fundamental to who we are.
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In those moments — feeling pulled between our convictions and our relationships — what in the world do we do?
I meet people wrestling with this question frequently. The pain such tension generates often pushes them down one of two “quick” paths: drop their convictions or drop their relationships.
Sharon Morris, 80, and her 42-year-old daughter, Anne Marie Denman, followed a slower and harder road somewhere better.
And as I learned in my conversation with them for the “A Braver Way” podcast, that road began with a rupture neither of them had any idea how to heal.
‘I had to obey God’
When Sharon first heard her daughter was coming out as gay, she described writing to her, quoting scripture and “basically saying how wrong this was,” recounted Sharon, a lifelong Catholic in Ohio. “And I remember Anne Marie calling me back and just bawling, crying. She was devastated by my reaction, and I really didn’t know what to do.”
Sharon asserted her convictions to her youngest daughter, the “angel” of the family, who once had plans to become a nun. But her daughter responded not with repentance, shame or apology but with pain.
The confusion this mother felt as a result led her to call her son, Jonathan, a Catholic priest. Everyone in the family was so close to Anne Marie. “We don’t want to lose her, Mom,” he told her. “She needs your love.”
Fueled by this conviction, Sharon joined Anne Marie, then a 26-year-old lawyer, in something deeply uncomfortable: a series of weekly breakfasts where mother and daughter tried to abide a difference neither was sure would resolve.
One time, Anne Marie was so upset she walked out of the restaurant. Sharon thought she’d lost her for good, then watched, relieved, as her baby girl reentered the cafe and sat down.
Years passed with neither woman changing her mind about faith or sexuality. But the hours they spent wrestling this rift together showed them something important.
They each learned, without a doubt, how desperately the other wanted to hang on.
“Anne Marie had a girlfriend who became serious,” Sharon recalled, and Anne Marie invited her mom to meet her. “ My husband told me that I should not go, that that wouldn’t be good. It would just be encouraging her.”
Sharon saw good sense in her husband’s counsel. Before the breakfasts, she might have followed it.
But now she was feeling a different, more challenging message from another trusted voice.
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“I had to obey God,” Sharon said. “And what God was telling me was that I needed to go and love who she loved to understand her.”
So she did.
“I got out of the car and I felt an image of Christ walking beside me and taking his hands.” When she saw this woman, Sharon said, “I loved her with the love God had for her. I had eyes to love her that way.”
‘That was his way to try to love me’
When Anne Marie’s parents and six siblings learned she had come out, they each disapproved. She didn’t just see them as family then — “They were my best friends,” she said.
Would she need to grow apart from them to build the life she wanted?
Anne Marie worried she would … and hoped to God she wouldn’t.
Her mom, she knew, was trying to understand her. Meanwhile, her dad, whose charity and hospitality was legend in his community, kept giving her books urging her to reconsider.
Anne Marie would take the books … and thank him. She threw them away later, but never let him know.
I asked Anne Marie why. She said she felt her dad had “developed a view of the world that, in my view, drew premature conclusions on certain things, but that also had a lot of wisdom.”
“So I try to … let him be himself and not toss out all of it, even though some of his conclusions caused a lot of pain to me.”
Did she need to argue, Anne Marie wondered? He already knew where she stood. Over the years, father and daughter had built the capacity to disagree fiercely and honestly about anything, including politics and sexuality. (Anne Marie, to her conservative parents’ chagrin, is politically independent, leaning left.)
So in those moments, Anne Marie could look past the books to the person handing them to her — a father trying to stay faithful to the deepest truths he knew — sharing, as he often did, what had given his life so much meaning.
“That was his way to try to love me,” she said.
Anne Marie’s ability to see her father’s gesture this way meant the world to Sharon.
The choice to look again and again at each other, honoring both their convictions and their relationships, changed everything.
“I hope in my life I can see people more and more as who they are,” Sharon said, “and not just some figment of who I think they should be.”
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