"I wish I had no history to report. I've pretended for so long, that my childhood did not happen. I had to keep it tight, up near the chest. I could not let it out. I followed the redoubtable example or my mother. It's an act or will to have a memory or not, I chose not to have one. Because I needed to love my mother and father in all their flawed, outrageous humanity, I could not afford to address them directly about the felonies committed against all of us. I could not hold them accountable or indict them for crimes they could not help. They, too, had a history--one that I remembered with both tenderness and pain, one that made me forgive their transgressions against their own children. In families, there are no crimes beyond forgiveness."[1]

My first ministerial job was at a family cam…