As I drove home, a slow malaise crept over me so that even the insanely contorted plot of the Wodehouse audiobook I had playing turned from a delight to an irritant. I felt the old cliché, like I was carrying a weight. This was on my return from a spontaneous invitation to a gathering at the bar after classes had wrapped up for the week. I went, I left, but I left with a horrible sense of loneliness. I couldn’t speak with any of these people. They had nothing of interest to say to me, and I couldn’t find anything to say to them.
The major divide between us seemed a moral one, for I found I could not participate in the subject matter for conscience’s sake, and I had, one might say, no experience with these things. Yet, here were my colleagues. They had reached out to me, invited me to drinks; they were nothing but amiable.
I am struck, in retrospect, with what the right thing to do was; that is, as a Christian, I am not allowed to “look down on” my neighbors. I am not allowed to judge these people for something that is really detestable, but I am also not allowed to participate with them. On the whole, it was a lonely drive home.
Tale Told 