I may turn off comments for this one. I haven’t decided yet. I’m not up for endless arguments about how the Phelps family deserves to have their father’s funeral picketed and why it is okay. I got enough of that on FB, tyvm.

Here’s my thing: I will not fuck around with the souls crossing the threshold. I just will not. That is not my job. My job in fact is quite the opposite. So, I am not going to picket anyone’s funeral no matter how horrid they or their family is/was. I find picketing funerals reprehensible and I don’t see it as okay depending on who is doing it. The same way I don’t view methodically killing a human is okay if the state does it instead of a citizen. So there’s that. I didn’t raise my kids by teaching them how to act right by doing to them the wrongs they had done to others. If one hit their sibling I didn’t teach them a lesson by hauling off and hitting them. You may like the “an eye for an eye” thing as a discipline, punishment, or fix, but I don’t follow the religion(s) that piece of justice comes from.

But the uppermost reason I will not picket anyone’s funeral is because I’m not mucking around there, in the liminal space, with ideas of revenge fueled by the same emotion that feeds the hatred of the Phelps family. Or any other human who is easily classified as despicable. Transitions are holy. I work the edges, I facilitate transitions. It’s not my job to exact punishments there. I don’t think it is anyone’s job to do so, but I don’t know All, so who knows. What I do know is it is not my job and I’m not doing it. Period.

What I also know about me is that I will continue to hold out hope that the Phelps family has a lessening of hate’s grip on their hearts, that the energies shift with the founder’s death, and they become decent people. I have no idea what the chances are for that, but I will still direct my energies there.

If they remain as hateful in the future as they are now I will happily stand between their picket line and the funeral they are desecrating. But I won’t be doing it for them. And while I’ll be doing it for the grieving family I will mostly be doing it to hold sacred space for the transitioning soul. Because that’s what I do. There is no amount of “convincing argument” about the bastards that the Phelps are that will change that. I do not need convincing, I know they are bastards.

Which brings me to the final piece. The Phelps picketed funerals. Some anti-Phelps folks will picket the founder’s funeral. I will not. Same as they get to be exactly who they are and you get to be exactly who you are, I also get to be exactly who I am.

Liminal space, sacred space, I hold the edges. I will do my Job.