THE FLESH IS WEAK 9: Performing An Act of Love
“Though we cannot think alike,
may we not love alike?
May we not be of one heart,
though we are not of one opinion?”
– John Wesley,
founder of Methodism
(This piece was written in regards to the documentary AN ACT OF LOVE, about a United Methodist minister who was put on trial for officiating the same-sex marriage of his eldest son. It was directed by Scott Sheppard, who also produced it, along with Kate S. Logan, Pauley Perrette, and Mike Manning, and was released in October 2016.)
It’s a bright sunny day in Pennsylvania, where a crowd of people has gathered outside of a church. Nothing seems odd about this until one particular detail becomes clear. Everyone in the crowd, from young single men to purse-carrying grandmothers and middle-aged husbands and wives, are all wearing rainbow-colored stoles around their necks. Then it becomes apparent that they are sharing communion before entering the church. Many of them come forward to embrace the pastor, who is smiling at everyone despite the obvious concern on his face.
The pastor sighs, it’s time to begin. Together, he and his makeshift congregation begin the long walk toward the church.
My wife was inside, making all the phone calls. I was on the porch, having a cigarette, listening to her tell the church people about her mother’s operation. They got the tumor on her lung. It was benign but would have been inoperable cancer in six months. Again and again, I heard Betsy talk about miracles. She looked tired, yet here she was, almost beaming as she said, “We have our faith and that gets us through.” The we she referred to belonged to her and her mother, not to me, of course. I took another drag and stared out across the parking lot, still shaking. We’d been together for a long time, shared a million conversations, but this still felt like a foreign part of the woman I had married.
I asked myself again, why am I so faithless?
That afternoon, while my wife sat in the hospital, waiting for her mother to get out of surgery, I was with another woman.
Her name was Michelle. She had come to get her paycheck just as I was leaving work, raven hair hanging conspicuously over the bruise on her face. An ex-boyfriend had shoved her into a wall, she said. It was only natural that she would seek me out. We often joked that I had become her therapist over the past several months. However, even as I had been urging her to ask other people out, that wasn’t what either of us was thinking anymore.
Michelle had been to our apartment a week earlier, while my wife was staying with her mother. She was eager for me to hear her recording of “The Rose”. It was then, with her lovely, plaintive voice caressing the word love, that I knew I was in trouble. I watched her mouth move as she sang along in my living room, feeling like some kind of monster. Before any of the things that were in my head could come true, I asked her to leave.
I told her now that we had to talk.
We sat on a park bench, close, looking out over the Detroit River. Over a couple hours, we spilled our hearts to each other about all kinds of things. We shared our thoughts about religion. We talked about life and we talked about love. We talked like my wife and I used to talk, seemed like so long ago now. It was like time had stopped there on that bench, or maybe it had reversed. The park was warm and dusky, and the light had begun to fade. Michelle told me again that she wished I wasn’t married. She rested her head against my arm, dark eyes looking up at me, and I reached out to gently touch the bruise on her face.
I didn’t let myself kiss her.
But I wondered why my wife and I weren’t like this anymore.
By the time we left the park, we had established something: I was married. We wanted each other, and maybe even more than that, but it wasn’t going to happen. In separate cars, I followed her to Sibley Road. There we waited, side by side until the traffic light changed. She was crying, and I would be soon. She turned and we each went our own way. I stole a glance at the red eyes of her tail-lights, growing smaller and smaller, wondering why I felt so sad if I had done the right thing.
The headline screamed Defrocked and Defiant.
The Reverend Frank Schaefer was not born a rebel. He had grown up in a conservative Baptist church in West Germany, believing most of the things he was taught, such as homosexuality was a sin. He never really had any reason to argue with that or anything else. Frank loved God, and he loved going to church, so much that when he was young he often thought about becoming a minister. It took him some time to follow that dream, believing that such a calling should be accompanied by a booming voice from the heavens.
Such callings, like so many other paths we take in our lives, are often more like a whisper than a shout. Frank was working without passion as an engineer when he had another dream about the ministry. In the dream, it was like God was saying, who do you think put that desire in your heart anyway? It didn’t take long for him to embark on his Bible School journey. Within a few years, he had become a reverend in the Methodist Church. Considering his German heritage, it wasn’t long before Frank and his family were shipped off to a church in the middle of Pennsylvania Dutch country. The New England town of Lebanon seemed fairly conservative, but that didn’t bother the Schaefers.
At least not in the beginning.
Frank was thriving as the minister he always wanted to be. He had long been drawn to churches with an openness to different styles of musical worship, even picking up the guitar himself during many services. Some of his opponents snarkily referred to him as a rock star, though the church was usually packed and full of good spirit. In hopes of quelling the criticism, Frank added a second service and reserved the more adventurous music for the later time. People, being nothing if not creatures of complaint, then whined that he put more effort into the second service. No surprise, but he never received a single thank-you from them.
The subject of homosexuality only came up a few times. When young people came to him privately, conflicted by their own desires and coldly rejected by their parents, Frank thought, how can people treat one another like this? But he would never have given a sermon about it, nor would he have guessed that it was eventually going to affect his own family.
Frank’s son Tim was born six weeks premature. He was suffering from blood poisoning, had a weak heart and lungs, and wasn’t expected to make it through the night. He spent the first hours of his life in an incubator. “We couldn’t even touch him,” Frank said, “I begged God to please save his life.” The church community rallied around Frank, his wife, Brigitte, and their struggling newborn child. Whether it was God, or, as Frank has said, a combination of medicine and prayer, Tim survived. The Schaefers, along with most of the church, thought of him as a miracle child and Frank believed that his son had been saved for something special.
Like his father, Tim Schaefer dreamt of a life serving God. He would sometimes build an altar of Legos and place his stuffed animals around it, delivering his first sermons to teddy bear ears. As he got older, Tim’s dream did not fade, and he had already begun reading about religion, law, and politics. He wondered if he too could one day be a minister.
However, raised in the same tradition as his father, Tim had come to believe that his own sexuality had doomed him. “I would pray at night, God, get me through this phase, make me normal,” he said, “But as time went on, it was not changing. I didn’t want to be gay, and I didn’t want to go to hell.” He cried himself to sleep every night. At the age of seventeen, in a fit of despair, he climbed to the top of the four-story parsonage and almost jumped.
In 2000, Frank and Brigitte received an anonymous call. The woman on the phone informed them that their son was gay. Furthermore, the voice said, he was considering suicide.
The Schaefers didn’t hesitate to sit down with Tim and ask him if the rumors were true. He broke down and cried in front of them, confirming everything. He was terrified that they would turn their backs on him, as the parents of so many other gay kids he’d known had done. But his mom and dad tearfully embraced him. They told him that they loved him, no matter what, and were most upset because he thought he couldn’t be honest with them.
“We lost it in tears,” Frank said, “We told him you are a child of God, you are beloved the way you are, God made you the way you are, and this was not a choice.”
Glenn was what might have happened if Alan Rickman and Liberace had a baby. He dressed in black like he was on a manhunt for vampires, but would climb to the top of a ladder in the department store where we worked and give a dramatic rendition of “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina”. To say that he was out of the closet was an understatement. Glenn had set his closet on fire while disco music blasted on queen-size speakers through the whole neighborhood. I had never seen anyone as openly themselves as Glenn, nor as visibly – and comically – contemptuous of anyone who wasn’t him. It made him absolutely hysterical to be around.
He was, without reservation, my favorite person in the store. Ours was an easy relationship, a friendship built on mutual respect and snarky comments about our co-workers. No one could make me laugh like Glenn, nor could anyone crack him up like I could. There were some who questioned our friendship, undoubtedly assuming that I was gay too. I’d always been a strange, expressive person, more content to make up my own world than live in everyone else’s, so my entire youth had been challenged by such assumptions. They didn’t bother me anymore.
Sometimes, however, when we lowered our sarcastic defenses, Glenn and I would actually share something deep and personal. We would talk about God, or maybe the messed-up things that had happened in our childhoods. Beneath the flamboyant bluster and a wave of expensive cologne, there was a great deal of intelligence hiding in this man. Maybe even a sensitive heart. It wasn’t odd at all that I would seek him out after the incident in the park. If I had been Michelle’s counselor, Glenn found himself in the unlikely role of being mine.
I dragged him away from his work, which he eagerly abandoned, and we were off to our usual bench outside. Lighting cigarette after cigarette, I began to pour out my soul about marriage and about Michelle. It was all tied up in my renewed search for meaning, I said, my quest for God and the purpose of life. Glenn just nodded his head. It was my own chaotic nature, I said. I wasn’t content to merely ask one question but had to tear at the very fabric of everything in search of the answers. Glenn continued to nod.
I’d always felt the need to be the knight in shining armor, I said. Maybe it was the movies I watched or all of those ridiculous love songs I listened to when I was a teenager, but I couldn’t shake these romantic notions of what love should be. As an only child who mostly grew up without her father, my wife seemed to neither want or need me involved that much in her life. It was just her and her mother to the end, united on earth and in heaven, and I had become nothing more than a heathen man-child whom she had chosen to save.
But it hadn’t always been like that. She had the best smile ever, I said. It was probably what had won me over. She had basically stolen me from another girl years ago. But now that we were married, it was like the challenge was gone for her. She had no use for me and she’d taken away her smile (never mind that I might have driven it away). My explanations and excuses just kept coming, while Glenn just kept nodding.
When I finally stopped for a breath, Glenn – in his usual bluntness – said, “Well, you are no hero, my friend, and you never will be . . .” I stood there, wondering why he couldn’t just humor me this one time. He went on, “But sometimes you don’t get to be the hero. Sometimes you’ve gotta be the villain instead.”
Then, instead of continuing to tell me what an idiot I was, or offering some kind of sage advice, he did something completely unexpected. He looked at me, very seriously, and said that this girl was a skank and not worth all of the turmoil. I assumed that he meant Michelle and not the woman I had married, but knew he would have said it nonetheless.
Furthermore, he said we should go somewhere that I could really be myself. I looked at him now. I’d never had any problem wearing all of my eccentricities on my sleeve. I didn’t think I could be more open about the person I was, and I figured someone as openly himself as Glenn would have gotten that.
“Wait a minute, so you think I’m, like, secretly gay?”
“Yes, and you’re afraid,” he said, “But you don’t have to be. My people are very accepting, even of complete losers like you. We just dress much better than you do.”
Tim Schaefer wanted to get married.
Like the child of any pastor, he wanted his father to perform the wedding ceremony. However, considering that he was marrying another man, Tim figured it wouldn’t happen. While many individual congregations had opened their arms and hearts to the LGBTQ community, the United Methodist Church’s official stance was that “the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching”.
Even though numerous ministers had conducted same-sex marriages without penalty, it was against church law and would surely have put Frank’s career at risk. Tim and his fiancé considered going to the Justice of the Peace, but they wanted God involved in their marriage. “My only pastor, ever, had been my dad,” he said, which led them back to Frank.
“I’d be honored,” Frank told his son.
Tim was married in a private ceremony where he now lived in Boston. His father, who had once been opposed to homosexuality, conducted that ceremony as an act of love for his son. Few of the congregation back in Pennsylvania were aware of the wedding, though there were many who would nonetheless have been supportive. The truth about Tim Schaefer had become one of the worst-kept secrets in the church, especially as two of Frank’s three other children had also come out of the closet.
But not everyone was okay with it, and all secrets are eventually revealed.
Though I wanted to do right, my involvement with Michelle did not end in the park that day.
There was a pattern of behavior that had run through my family history, winding its way across my own life, forming the spring of my relationship with even the woman I married. I was with someone when we met, and I was with someone again now. It was the same game, only the stakes had been raised. There was a terrible, stupid inevitability about it all.
I could give all kinds of explanations, but they all sound like excuses. The simple fact was that, in my adolescence, when I still yearned innocently for all the things I thought love could offer, it wasn’t there to be found. But early adulthood revealed that everyone wanted something they couldn’t have. So, basically, to attract someone, all you had to do was to already be with someone else. If you felt like you’d missed something in life, it was suddenly available to you. One relationship would lead right into the next in an unending chain of love, pain, and renewal.
But it had to stop.
I came clean to my wife, though in the most cowardly way possible. It was over the New Year and we had gone to see TITANIC in the theater the day before. Maybe seeing the epic story of a ship doomed to sink, in which the male lead died dramatically and unnecessarily, influenced my decision. It’s hard to say now. I put it all down in writing, about Michelle and what had been going on, about everything that I’d been feeling. I left the letter on the dining room table, and then just vanished for a few days.
Though it goes without saying, there is as much drama and politics involved in religion as with anything else.
Rumors had already spread through the church before anyone knew Frank Schaefer had performed his son’s wedding. Lines had been drawn, and judgments made, while some people whispered what’s he doing wrong? why can’t he fix his kids? Frank had conflicts with the choir director, which preceded other anonymous allegations against him. When these proved to be completely unfounded, Jon Boger – who was, perhaps coincidentally, the son of the choir director – filed an official complaint about the unsanctioned ceremony with the Methodist Church.
It had been almost six years since the wedding, with a mere 26 days left on the statute of limitations. If the Church had hoped to turn their eyes, believing that a silent problem was no problem at all, they wouldn’t be able to avoid it anymore.
They would have to take Frank to trial.
With my written confession on the dining room table, I left home like a fleeing criminal.
I drove and roamed and wandered, ending up on the other side of the state, where I had grown up. It was the middle of winter, the trees were skeletal and bare, and all the color of the world had given away to the barest outline of life. As I revisited all the places I had known, it was like I was searching for the reasons why I had become who I was. The answers, of course, weren’t anywhere but inside of me. It was like I’d already become a ghost.
Three days later, I returned, a humbled and repentant man.
It was over with Michelle. We said goodbye, just before her parents shipped her off to some religious college in Arkansas. None of my other friends from work would talk to me anymore, many of them having been to my wedding little more than a year before. Glenn had given up on me. Because I left suddenly, without warning – and undoubtedly because I had caused quite a scandal in the workplace – I was fired from my job.
And I faced the hurt I had caused my wife.
We embarked on an intense regiment of counseling, both through the normal means and through her church. I accepted the blame that was mine, a creature of burning regret, and went to work on being a better man. Though I’d been a questing agnostic since we met, I knew that getting involved with her religion would be the surest way to show her I meant it. And I wanted nothing more than to believe. That yearning was some strange part of how I had gotten into this mess in the first place.
So I began, not just by earnestly attending service, but by becoming involved in everything church-related. I did bible studies. I organized a Religion In Movies series, which we held in our home. I would eventually design, edit, and become the main contributor to a church newsletter, Grace Notes (which was at least good enough to win a couple awards from the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan). One of my suggestions would even lead to an annual festival designed to attract the local community and increase the congregation.
Most importantly, after about a year, I was, somehow, a member of the thirteen-member Search Committee responsible for finding Grace Episcopal Church’s new minister.
Over the course of many months, we surveyed and interviewed everyone who belonged to the church. Compiling the information gathered from the congregation, along with the general guidelines of the international church, how much Grace was budgeted to offer as salary, and databases for available ministers, we determined which candidates might be open to joining our little spiritual family, while also figuring out who the church might actually want. In the end, I remember there being at least three strong contenders, all of whom came to visit.
The one we chose exceeded all of the qualifications we sought, matching up with what Grace Episcopal wanted far beyond all the others. As a kind of bonus, his asking salary was even below what the church was willing to pay. More surveys were conducted, discussion groups created across the entire congregation, and we began to introduce everyone to the Reverend Reid Farrell. He was everything they had asked for, except for one detail. It was his long-term faith-based relationship with a member of the same sex.
The shit hit the fan.
Frank expected to be fired.
A year after performing his son’s wedding ceremony, he gave a Father’s Day sermon about unconditional love. He spoke about Tim, and essentially admitted what many in the church already suspected, that at least one of his children was gay. Along with Brigitte, Frank had joined a support group for the relatives of LGBTQ people. It was not a subject that he brought up often in church. In his mind, he still struggled with how it all fit with his religion, but in his heart, he knew that he should offer compassion instead of judgment.
But now, six years later, it was Frank who was facing judgment.
Jon Boger had dug up a copy of Tim’s wedding certificate, with Frank’s name on it, and filed a complaint with the local bishop. The little church went crazy with the news. Nearly half of the congregation left, many of the more conservative members feeling betrayed. Most of the newer members, from the gay community and people of color, were the ones who remained.
The trial was held with a church jury at a camp outside Philadelphia. There was a makeshift stand set up in the gymnasium, with the bishop presiding as judge, surrounded by rows of folding chairs and tables. Each side was allowed one witness to plead their case. Boger went up as the complainant, growing strangely emotional on the stand, even though he was a standoffish military man who rarely attended church. In tears, he said that Frank performing the wedding was both a lie and a broken covenant with the Church.
During the lunch break, Frank started to feel like he couldn’t go through with the testimony he had prepared with his defense counsel. “I was supposed to evade, I was supposed to make blanket statements, I was supposed to redirect,” he said, “I wasn’t able to do that because it wasn’t what I felt in my heart. What I felt in my heart was that I needed to let them know where I stood. So I went into my room and I prayed.”
He said that it was in that moment when it felt like God was saying consider what I have done for you. Jesus gave up everything – not just his career, his paycheck – he gave up everything. Frank reached out to pick up the rainbow stole he had been looking at. “All of a sudden, I knew what had to be done,” he said.
And he walked dramatically up the steps toward the church camp, moving in slow-motion through the doors to where his fate waited for him.
We were gathered behind the church in Grace Hall, the Search Committee and concerned members of the congregation. The decision had really been made already, Reid Farrell was going to be Grace Episcopal’s new minister. He was truly the best person for the job. But several longtime families had already bailed out of the church when they realized we were going to hire an openly homosexual reverend. This meeting was in hopes of swaying those who were still on the fence, a kind of forum in which they could ask questions and air their grievances.
For some of them, it was only about the grievances.
As conversation bounced back and forth, I sat fairly quietly at the main table. I was still trying to figure out how the hell I was there at all. Though I was trying very hard, seemingly harder than many people who had been churchgoers all their lives, I was still essentially an unbeliever. Even more than that, I was an unbeliever who had cheated on his wife not that long ago. It occurred to me in passing that if there truly was a divine creator, and he was the vengeful one that so many still believed in, there was a good possibility that lightning might strike this room at any moment. So I mostly listened to the words of the faithful as they volleyed back and forth.
But there was this guy.
He was an older man, large and imposing, whose family had been in the church forever. He was never unkind, nor was he ever friendly. However, I knew that he, like most of the others in the room, really knew his Bible. I also knew that someone would eventually start throwing the ancient quotes around to support their opinion. Not surprisingly, he was among them.
Then he turned to me, seated there with my wife beside me. We had only recently learned that she was pregnant with our first child. He asked how I would feel to have my child – my son, he said – running about the church with an openly homosexual preacher there.
Maybe I didn’t know my Bible, but I knew things beyond it. I shakily responded that I wouldn’t have a problem with that at all. Then I explained, if he was referring to the allegations of priests molesting their altar boys in the Catholic Church, that the vast majority of those acts were in fact committed by heterosexual priests. Furthermore, as someone openly gay working in the field that he was, Farrell would be painfully aware that there would always be more eyes on him than there would on some other minister. His service for Grace Episcopal, and even for God, would reflect this greater societal pressure. It would probably make him even better.
I said these things, though it was much less eloquent in person.
Then I was thinking of my own past.
I thought about my lonely adolescence, and of the awkward yearning I always felt around the opposite sex that never wanted me. I thought about all the trouble that led to later, but, more than that, I thought about the peers who had actually accepted me. I thought about those kids who were taunted with the cries of faggot, dyke, and freak.
I had been the target of many of those same words, even when they were never true. Part of me always felt like it knew exactly what that life would have been like, and it was not something anyone would choose if they wanted an easy life. It was nothing but anguish to be called a fag even when it wasn’t true. These were not the only people who accepted me then, or treated me with compassion and dignity, but they were among the very first.
I said these things, though they also came out in an awkward chunk of words, sitting there at a table where I never belonged. I started to choke up as I spoke.
And I thought about the last time I saw Glenn.
While he had been snarky and vain, sometimes even comically cruel, he had been my friend. Somehow I had imagined our friendship going on forever. But something had gone wrong, whether it was the reality that we’d never be more than friends, or that I’d had an affair with someone who wasn’t up to his standards. Our friendship was done. One more wave in the ocean of sadness I had brought, he no longer wanted to speak to me.
But he did say this, “Straight people always screw up marriage because they can have it whenever they want.”
Frank Schaefer stood before the church jury, looking out upon his family and members of his congregation. Tim was there, smiling almost mournfully at his father. None of this would have happened if not for Frank’s love for his son. But something else was starting to happen as well. Since Frank had opened up the second service at his church, many of the LGBTQ faithful had found a place where they could worship God as well. Some of them were here now too, wearing rainbow-colored stoles along with straight fathers, mothers, and grandparents.
Frank addressed them as much as he addressed the bishop or the jury.
“I want you to know that, if I’m going to be a Methodist minister tomorrow, I will not discriminate against anybody based on their sexual orientation. I will not refuse ministry to them. We are treating our LGBTQ brothers and sisters as second-class Christians. The hate speech has to stop, we are harming beloved children of God.”
He pulled the rainbow stole from inside his jacket, then asked the bishop if he could put it on.
“I don’t think things happen by accident. I was given this stole yesterday. I’m wearing it as a visible sign of my commitment to be an advocate for the LGBTQ community – ”
His son was watching, with tears in his eyes.
” – that I can no longer be silent, but that I have to speak, and that is all I have to say.”
In the car from Kalamazoo to Detroit, or to Florida from Michigan, Betsy and I would have long, profound conversations under the cover of night. It was probably on one of those journeys where I first really fell in love with her. She was a newly-minted Masters student with all kinds of possibilities, while I was still an adventurous romantic whose crazy notions hadn’t been fully tested. The entire world was open to us like a promise then.
But I remember her speaking about things like fate and destiny, and I’ve never believed in those things. What I felt was that nothing was predetermined, but all a kind of cause-and-effect relationship. My motto for the longest time was: there is no right or wrong, only consequences. I’ve also believed that most of us are essentially unknowable, that anyone is capable of almost anything, good or bad, in the right situation. I’ve certainly proven myself in both directions.
The problems between Betsy and I were far from over. There would be no more affairs, but the marriage would nonetheless not hold together. In a touch of poetic justice, I woke one morning before Thanksgiving to find that my wife, four months pregnant with our second child, had finally had enough of me. She had left a letter on the dining room table, the same table where I had left a letter for her years before.
The reason she gave the judge when we filed for divorce was religious differences.
Michelle and I found each other again after I was divorced. We moved in together and I eventually asked her to marry me. We were engaged for a few months, but that didn’t work out either. There was too much baggage for both of us by then, and the illicit thrill of having something you couldn’t have was long gone. In another poetic twist, she fell in love with someone else while we were still together.
Then I ended up with the girl who Betsy had originally stolen me from, and we’ve been together longer than I’ve been with anyone. Sometimes things are just funny that way.
I’ve not given up on the spiritual quest, though I’m no longer rabidly seeking answers. Basically, whatever happens, happens. I have changed my mind about one thing, though: sometimes there is right and wrong. But it’s not found in movies, nor is it found in any book. It’s found within ourselves.
There are endless scriptures out there, ancient texts, and obscure passages that can be used to defend or condemn just about anything if you choose to. But that’s exactly it, you’re choosing to judge, attack, and sometimes even hate. If there is anything in your religion that causes you to do anything but embrace your fellow human beings, then you are either hanging your own personal biases on the words that are there, or you need to take another look at that religion. It’s easy to condemn something if it’s not what you are, because you really have no understanding that it’s not a choice. What if, to the degree that you judge others, you will ultimately be judged?
There is so much uncertainty built into our existence. We try to undo it with love and religion, but sometimes even they don’t hold together. It’s not always easy to understand what’s right. But some things you can feel in your heart are right. Trying to redeem yourself is right, whether you believe in God or not. Forgiveness is right.
And compassion, for anyone, is right.
Frank Schaefer waited outside with members of his congregation. With rainbow stoles draped over their shoulders, they came forward to speak with him, embrace him, and join him in prayer. He, too, now wore the same garment around his neck. He was very gracious, but the concern was written on his face. Together, they shared communion outside the church camp.
Then he sighed deeply and began the long walk back to his judgment.
The bishop said, “Frank, you’ve been found guilty by this court. Do you repent?”
“No, I cannot.”
“Will you, from this day forward, promise to uphold the discipline and never perform a gay marriage again?”
“I cannot make that statement,” Frank said.
And that was it.
The Church gave him another thirty days in which to repent, but Frank was not going to repent. Everyone knew that. His supporters flipped their folding chairs over in protest and in support. Even as they clattered to the floor, Frank could only smile.
He had done what he believed was right.
– j. meredith
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