[MUSIC]
My dad always told me 99% of being a parent is showing up for your kids.
This from a man who deferred countless promotions to be sure
that he came home for dinner every night, and echoed by my mom,
who gave up her career to raise me and my sisters.
In our family, we hug until the other person lets go, and
then just a little bit longer, as a reminder that the best part of
any relationship comes from that choice to show up, to stay.
Today, we're experiencing the opposite, an epidemic of leaving.
Social media is filled with white flags of people giving up, surrendering.
Unfriend me if you don't support x.
I don't want to be friends with anyone who believes y.
Decades long relationships with colleagues and friends, even siblings,
gone with a simple declaration.
But what's possible when we stay in those difficult conversations,
relationships with tension between ourselves and others?
Every week, we hear stories of friends muting, blocking,
unfriending each other on social media.
And cancel culture,
it makes it almost impossible to have relationships across difference.
When your gut says to disavow a childhood friend,
to leave behind the hometown, to cut and run,
I want to challenge you today to ask, what's possible when we stay?
Catholicism to me is an ethnicity, I was born into it.
In my community, we used to trade gossip about pre-Sunday sermons the way that some
trade highlights about fantasy football leagues.
And in my family, we prayed to saints for
everything from world peace to help finding a parking space.
The single monolithic experience of the Catholic Church touched everything and
everyone in my life.
So when at eight years old, I realized that I was gay,
I hid that shame like a tattoo,
a permanent reminder that I was different, that I didn't belong.
In 28 years and two decades of Catholic education, I've experienced continuous,
intense opposition to my place in the Catholic Church.
I've been called a faggot by my priests.
I've been spat on leaving church multiple times.
And in one stinging memory, had a teacher tell me to go to
hell in front of her class of second graders.
But I've also experienced the exact opposite reaction too.
The very first time that I came out, I was in an Indiana Wendy's sitting
across from a priest who called my gayness a gift from God, my superpower.
I still have friends and
family who believe that I don't have a place in the church.
But I do belong.
LGBTQ people have always been a part of the church and always will be.
I choose to stay in the church for the handful of people for whom my presence on
Sundays will be the religious experience that they have that week.
And when I walk into a church with my head held high,
holding my boyfriend's hand, I get to be the change that I always wanted to see.
And for a queer kid like me, wondering, hoping, even praying for
some sign of belonging, that would have changed my world.
Sometimes our decision to stay is less about our identity and
more about how we choose to show up for friends.
At the height of the 2014 war in Gaza, I worked as a summer counselor at
a camp dedicated to conflict resolution between Palestinians and Israelis.
Camp was founded on this extraordinarily simple idea,
that maintaining friendships across difference could make all the difference.
Teens ate, slept, played sports together.
Chairs were thrown, yelling was frequent, but
never did tears run more freely than when camp ended.
Hugs between sides literally lasted minutes.
Over the years, camp alumni communication channels, once so
effusive and friendly, grew volatile with time, and then silent.
But under the surface, we're incredible stories of lives changed,
even saved because friends made the decision to show up for each other.
In May of 2019, when violence spiked again in Gaza,
a Palestinian man placed a call to a commander in the Israeli Defense Forces
with a single request, please protect my family.
His former camp mate replied, of course my friend, they will be safe.
What makes these moments so
impactful is not just the decision to pick up the phone to reach out.
It's also, on the other side, about how we choose to answer the call.
While working at NBC News, I often received a very different type of call.
In our age of political polarization, death threats from angry viewers were
frequent, and some were spine chillingly specific.
I grew used to hanging up on hundreds of different calls with an instinctual click.
Until one day, one unusual day, I heard something and decided to stay on the line.
I remember the rage and the yelling even before the receiver hit my ear.
But then I heard yelled a familiar town name.
Travis was from Iowa, but not just Iowa, a tiny little town, not 30 minutes from
where my dad grew up and where I used to spend holidays with my grandma.
And so, while he was yelling, I built up some courage, and I threw out casually,
I thought, you don't happen to know Happy Joe's Pizza, do you?
Silence, and then he started laughing.
In true Midwestern fashion, with zero explanation at all, we went from ranting
about politics to raving about a local pizza joint that we both love.
Another day, another caller, Melanie is from Kansas.
We quickly learned on the phone that she loves profanity and she hates socialism,
but this time I started asking her questions, trying to understand her anger.
We discovered that she and my mom were both preschool teachers.
And that was a huge relief for her.
Thank God you get it.
And truly, I did.
Last month I had the surreal pleasure of wishing Melanie happy birthday on Facebook
where we're now friends.
A very frequent caller used to call and ask for the gay one.
Hi John, I would say, answering the phone.
John had recently moved to an assisted living home by his family.
And once we got past his homophobia, he mostly wanted to just talk about college
football with someone who would listen.
This past fall, John's grandson came out, and surprisingly,
he reached out to me looking to understand how he could support.
After our back and forth, I believe John will stay if only for his family.
I wish standing here that I could tell you with these examples that staying is easy.
It's not, it's messy, it's unpredictable, and often,
it's not without great personal cost.
And as such, it's easier to believe that our lives are better when we cut and run.
But are they better?
Or are they truly just easier?
Too often I feel we make the easy choice.
We see something and we're triggered.
We get angry, we grab our phones and type.
If you don't believe what I have to say, unfriend me, shut the hell up.
Anger is easy.
The alternative is what's harder.
And maybe that's all it takes, one person who makes a different choice.
I want you to imagine with me,
a different world where the choice to stay is our first instinct,
where we grow together instead of apart, where we reach out instead of lash out.
Where we make the decision to show up for other people with the understanding that
by doing so, we increase the likelihood that they show up for us.
Because isn't that what we all want at the end of the day?
What is possible when we stay?
The answer is everything.
But you won't know unless you try.
Thank you.
[MUSIC]