I’m a bit too anxious to sleep for some reason right now.
Well, I guess i know that reason, but it has to do with *feelings* and experiencing them in a way that will be productive eventually but right now is uncomfortable and stressful.
Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, though. Uncomfortable and stressful is necessary to turn problems you have into problems you don’t have anymore. At least, it’s the way to do it that doesn’t involve becoming an ascetic monk and not having to deal with said problems. And I don’t really want to be a monk.
Anyways.
I recently read this series:
It’s really good. Essentially God has left heaven, there’s a half demon-half angel entity with a power equal to or greater than God’s inhabiting a preacher named Jesse Custer, and Custer is trying to track down the Lord. His best friend is a vampire, his girlfriend is a sharpshooter, and the Saint of Killers is chasing him for several different reasons depending on where in the timeline you are. Also a super secret organization called The Grail is trying to catch him. I think that’s all I can say to encourage people to read it without spoilers.
It’s fucked up and beautiful and just about everyone is both an angel and a demon. Well, the bad guys are, for the most part, just demons, but you know what I mean. if you like comix, you should read it.
That, and also getting a facebook message from a former teacher of mine inviting me to a bible study (i think she mis-sent it, but I’m not sure. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve gotten a facebook message that was supposed to go to someone else) has had me thinking about christianity and how I experienced that whole thing lately.
I’m gonna throw in a cut here to be courteous to people who don’t care to continue reading. I don’t want to clog your dashboards too much! (Marie, if you’re reading this, the good stuff’s after the cut.)
One thing that’s struck me is opposing views of time by different sects. Catholicism views time as ascending, and the nondenominational brand of christianity that I grew up with (and all of the rapture fanatics) see time as descending, until the good guys get to go home and the bad guys get punished for their evil ways.
I used to buy into it 100%. I can honestly say that I loved Jesus etc. with my heart and soul and was waiting for the day when he’d call me up to heaven so that I could spend eternity worshipping him in any and every way possible (the church I went to believed that heaven was doing a bunch of fun shit in God’s name, because you can worship god by singing songs to him, going skiing, eating a sandwich, and so on and so forth. The idea was it was going to be a super awesome extra long version of life without the bad shit. and your dead pets would be there, even though they don’t have souls! because playing with rover is another way to worship God!) I was a young earth creationist. I thought abortion was evil and killing babies. I was saving myself for marriage. I refused to listen to ‘secular’ music (until I was about 16, when a dear friend of mine introduced me to bright eyes and then I started listening to secular music). I didn’t even consider dating until I was 17.
17 was when it all caught up to me. I’m queer. And whereas the Catholic church says that being gay is totally cool, because that’s who you are, you just have to be celibate because the act of homosexuality is the sin, the church I grew up in said it was a choice. Even being a celibate queer was a sin. It was a.) lusting after something that was not natural and a perversion and b.) a relationship that could never be consummated without sinning because two men or two women or two queers with the same parts can’t get married in the eyes of that church and c.) HOMOSEXUALITY IS A SIN WHETHER YOU ACT ON IT OR JUST THINK ABOUT IT. IT’S EVIL AND BAD AND OF SATAN. NEVER MIND THAT GOD CREATED SATAN AND ESSENTIALLY SCAPEGOATED HIM FOR ALL THE BAD STUFF BECAUSE ANGELS DON’T HAVE FREE WILL.
Yeah. And it took until I was 17 because I didn’t understand that being “bisexual” (I hate that word. But it was the first one I learned. I’m queer. Not bisexual. I love every gender, and every space outside of gender. There’s so much more than strictly male and female, and I embrace and respect all of it. Each and every one of you, and each and every person who is not reading this is awesome. except for the douchebags. but being a douchebag depends on things that have absolutely nothing to do with gender) wasn’t normal. I sincerely believed that everybody had crushes on both girls and guys etc., and that being gay was all about denying your attraction to the opposite sex as opposed to denying your attraction to the same sex like everybody else did. I just didn’t get it. At all. To me, like everything else, it was black and white. Then I heard about this group of people called “bisexuals”. I realized that I was technically one of them, and not just like everybody else. That these feelings for ladies were not, in fact, normal.
I spent what was, at that point, my entire life, not knowing that I was a part of the group that my church despised. I know for a fact that it’s not a choice, because I was queer without knowing that that’s what it was my entire life (until I found out what it was and continued to be queer). And I realized that it’s not a choice. The seed of dissent was planted.
It grew in me, and changed me from someone with problems (but not anything that God couldn’t help me with) into something bloody but beautiful. I lost my faith in a benevolent creator, and dove headfirst into the kind of thing most people don’t make it back from.
I fell into a coma.
I jumped down a rabbit hole.
I went batshit crazy.
The structure of my life was gone. Until I was just about 18, I was at church 6 out of 7 days of the week. I had intense and beautiful philosophical thoughts, all centered around christian doctrine. I typed God “G-d” out of respect. I rebelled, but i never actually looked away until a couple months after that first mental breakdown. The one where I was convinced that my loving creator had condemned me to hell because of who he had made me.
- I was in Springfield, IL at the time, at a 2 day conference called ICTC (friday night, saturday all day). My dad was a sponsor on this trip (I feel that this is a good point to mention how much I love my dad). We skipped the workshop classes on saturday and instead explored historical downtown Springfield. We went to a cafe that had Chocolaits (a cafe au lait with chocolate). He took a picture of me sitting on a stack of chairs. We hung out and talked and it was amazing. The entire weekend up to saturday night was great: just me and my dad and God, hanging out. Then the saturday night main session happened. I don’t remember the speaker’s name. I don’t remember his face. I just remember that he was skinny and was either bald or had a shaved head. And at one point during his speech, he said something that burrowed into my heart. He said that while salvation is free and for everyone, there are some people who God turns his back on. People who reject Him to the point of no return. And knowing what I did know about myself at the time (that I was queer and I smoked and drank and that I was dating a nonbeliever and we had been intimate (I hadn’t actually lost my virginity at the time, we had just fooled around), I came to believe that my loving, forgiving, understanding creator had forgotten me. That I was sitting in that main session so that I would know that I had been condemned to hell. It was too late for me. Naturally, I lost my shit. I left my rainboots at the hotel. I left my SLR camera at a Steak n’ Shake on the way home (it got returned to me somehow). I screamed and cried in my parents kitchen at the same table that I’m sitting at right now. I went over to my friend Andrea’s house and recorded a cover of Between The Bars by Elliott Smith. You can hear the desperation in my voice.
it took two more failed church trips (the last one involving drama with my little brother, whom I love to death and just want to protect) before I walked away.
Before I walked away, though, in somewhat of a psychotic episode, I stood before God. I didn’t look him in the face out of respect, but I stood there before him. And we made a deal.
Not so much of a deal as an agreement. You can’t make deals with God, but you can come to an agreement with Him. It went like this:
I would not be condemned to hell outright. Instead, I would walk away from the free gift of salvation. I would go out into the world, alone, without him at my side, and save myself. Once I had earned my salvation, He would return to me/I would return to Him (however you want to phrase it) and I would once again become His servant. If I failed, well, then I’d be condemned to hell. But I had a chance. It made me special. It made me the only human who could earn salvation.
Several months later, after 2 more church trips that didn’t go very well, I realized that walking away from being saved meant that going to church was a waste of my time. I had to figure it out for myself.
Over the course of my crazy, I prayed. I dedicated myself to the semi-sentient duality of the universe. I heard that duality speak to me, and I spoke for it.
Now that I’m getting better, nothing speaks to me like that. It was all a fever dream. I was a holy fool.
But now? Now I can live. Now I can grow into the person who I was the whole time, but couldn’t be because of all the delusions. I don’t know if the thing that I was talking to, be it God or the duality of the universe, is real on any level. I’ve settled down at agnosticism. Not because of anything I’ve seen or heard in an extreme state, but because there’s no proof for a god of any sort existing or not existing.
The funny thing is that I am saving myself. Not from hell, but from that place I went after I made that deal. I somehow came back from a diagnosis that typically means you have to take pills to regulate yourself that will make you stop functioning, or that you’ll still stop functioning, but in a different way. Whether it was depression and anxiety, bipolar disorder, or borderline disorder, I am beating it. Drug free. And although I am in therapy right now, I did so much of the work myself. I’m a person. therapy for me is about becoming the most awesome person that I can be (which a lot of people who never go crazy don’t do). Most of the time, I feel more positive than I’ve ever felt in my life.
But the point of this post was not to chronicle my interactions with God. It was to talk about how christianity has fucked me up. At this point, however, I think I’m gonna start a new post. just because this one is so long.
So I’ll meet you back here for part two!
