'There I was - a married woman with a husband and four children, all of whom I loved. I was around 50 - and I was a lesbian. This was not a welcome truth!'

MOST weeks I spend a day watching my grand-daughter, who is just two years old. Since the day she was born, I have marvelled at how quickly a child learns how to make her or his way in the world.

I watch her learn about responses and behaviour that are rewarding, that gain attention and approval. I see her mind tick over as she decides how she will relate to me and to others. I hear her chattering away to me from somewhere and then there will be silence.

Like her parents, I have learned always to investigate silences. Usually they mean that she knows that things are not as we think they should be. She has spilled or broken something, or she is otherwise engaged in something that she suspects we would stop if we were there.

Already, she understands a little about hiding things, even though she has lived in a gentle, accepting and rewarding environment all her young life.

I'm not discussing dishonesty here in the usual sense but I'm reflecting on areas of our life and thinking that stay hidden because we suspect that, if we reveal them to those around us, we will be judged or rejected.

One cost of silence is that the silent things possess us, they will not leave us alone and they often begin to take over our lives.

When they do this, others realise that something is going on for us and wonder what is wrong. Our often-smiling face does not convince them and they have a sense that they do not know us and that we won't trust them.

This makes life lonely for us and for them. The reality is that if an important part of us is hidden from others who matter to us, we can never believe that we are really loved.

For 35 years of my life, I was searching for my own truth. I was trying to understand why it was that I did not feel right in my male-female relationships, especially my marriage.

When I look at the situation in hindsight, I wonder at my lack of insight and self-awareness.

When I finally knew my own truth, I certainly did not want to know it.

There I was - a married woman with a husband and four children, all of whom I loved. I was a woman minister in a fairly high-profile parish in the centre of Australia's largest city and a member of many of my church's State and national councils.

I was a minister's daughter. I had a certain standing in secular society - the State Library had just asked for permission to gather and include in its files my papers and letters. I was around 50 years old.

And I was a lesbian.

This was not a welcome truth!

I could see a number of possibilities in front of me. I knew that there would be people around me in the church who would believe that to change from being a lesbian was both possible and desirable.

I had seen, in my own ministry, miracles of inner change in people who had been open to the love of others and the love of God.

TWO things moved me away from this solution. The first was that I had been on a 35-year journey since my adolescent years to that moment, open to the chal- lenges from God and others. I had sincerely offered everything I had into a long marriage.

Quite apart from the authenticity of that journey, I had been through a number of agonising months as I faced the truth.

Any thought of going back into the old "truth" I experienced like a death.

The second thing was that I had both encountered and read about those who claimed to be "healed" from homosexuality. My reading included information from around the world that suggested less than I per cent of people of homosexual orientation respond to forms of therapeutic or healing attempts.

I also read the story from the US founders of the religious group Exodus who, after years of leading their movement - which claimed to heal homosexual people of their orientation - left the group.

They said they'd never seen real healings, only people who for a time were enabled to be celibate.

By this time, I had also met many peaceful, healthy and often Christian homosexual people who looked in much better shape than those who claimed to be healed.

Even before I faced my own sexuality, I had met many troubled souls who struggled to move way from their orientation.

They were often suicidal, breaking down psychologially and generally in a mess.

The other thing was that my decision to pretend that I was not who I was deeply affected my husband and family.

What a patronising thing it would have been to decide that, knowing I was a lesbian, I would care for my husband by trying to pretend that I was not.

Despite the agony of his facing that truth, did I not owe him the chance for a new relationship with a woman who was heterosexual?

And did I not owe my children the possibility of seeing their father in a proper heterosexual relationship and me a full and free human being?

Quite apart from all that, I knew that if I tried to carry out a basically less than honest relationship in any sense, I would fall apart as a person.

To live a lie to that degree would destroy me and probably those around me also. I longed for a ray of light to show me a way forward that would be good for everyone concerned. But it did not happen.

The last factor was that, even though I had somehow grown up thinking I was not really due for much, and even though I had been taught to live with endurance in the face of the stresses of life, to be self-sacrificing, I decided that after half a century of life, the God I believed in was inviting me to fullness of life, to a new courage and adventure.

So, with a trembling heart and an agony of soul and mind, I acted. In claiming my truth, I was going to hurt other people, and they were people I loved who had done nothing to deserve this pain. It was the hardest thing I had ever done.

I felt as though I was walking over a cliff and would die at the bottom and carry my loved ones with me. I have no doubt that everyone concerned will always carry the wounds of that moment. I also have no doubt that if I had my life over again, I would still do the same thing.

I watched my husband marry again in two years and saw him happy with a wonderful woman who my children tell me is much better for him than I was. I watched my children shake in their lives, in their different ways, as they too faced the truth and grieved the ending of a marriage.

I wept as I laid down forever the image of myself as a "respectable" married woman and a person who holds to the vows that she makes and can make things right for people.

IN it all, I do not regret this journey of living my own truth. One of the loveliest things that happened to me after coming out was an invitation to contribute a meditation to be included as part of a performance of Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ in the Sydney Opera House.

I was given the words of Jesus, "I thirst", as the theme of my meditation. I found myself writing: "I thirst ... as a bird whose spirit flies free in resurrection life, while its body groans and bleeds in the costliness of its flight."

I knew as I wrote that it described my own experience as I tried to live with my personal truth. I also knew that to turn back from the flight to freedom would be to begin to die.

This is an edited extract from Everyday Passions: A Conversation on Living, by Dorothy McRae-McMahon, to be published next week by ABC Books, A$24.95.

Unabashedly stolen from:
The Weekend Australian
19 September, 1998.