Free To Burn

Last Easter I posted our family Easter picture with a comment about how it had felt like a weird Easter, disorienting and confusing with lots of questions and uncertainty.  I was learning to be led into the dark, to see.  This Easter, I'd like to elaborate.

Good Friday, 2019, I show up to the Good Friday service with my then 4 year old because the baby needed to go to bed and Kellen isn't as into liturgical things as I am.  They pass out coloring books for the kids and Clement and I took our seats.  I was worried he'd be restless and noisy, but he sat there, contently coloring.  As the pastor started talking about how the cross had nothing to do with some 'sentimental idea of love', but rather our sin, that our badness held him on the cross, my insides contracted.  I couldn't take it.  I couldn't take one more message about how shitty I am.  How I killed the person who loved me the most with my badness.  The badness I was constantly, incessantly trying to right.  How I could never be good enough for my god, living in full peace?  That he thought I was so bad he needed to kill his own son.  If he was an all powerful god why did this awful thing even have to happen?  The violence and wrath in this god I grew up knowing shook me to my core.  I looked down at my little boy and wanted to cover his ears.  I became engrossing in coloring with him as I started to fume.  Anger mixed with yet another landslide of shame.  Again and again I seem to find unrelenting shame in myself at church.  I never seem to be good enough there, there's always something I need to get better at, 'good' just always out of reach or, if you make it there, you're sure to lose it at any second and go back to being bad.  I was exhausted from the endless striving to not be bad, from thinking constantly about how to be good and how to make it up if I was bad.

I went home and began struggling within myself.  I'd spent all of Lent reading healing stories in the New Testament, observing Jesus's behavior and words, running to commentaries every few minutes and looking up the origin of words (full on nerd mode, let me tell you).  While tandemly reading The Body Keeps the Score and learning about trauma, I realized the people he was healing were largely trauma victims.  Learning how trauma affects people, realizing the astounding effect of Jesus fully, completely seeing them, understanding them, touching them, loving them and healing them when the religious world had completely tossed them, more often than not calling them sinners.  I'd also been reading a few other books talking about how Jesus didn't have to die on the cross for me, that the cross was ultimately about living a different way, a way that goes against empire, power and the world.  Jesus was showing us how to live, against the systems and standing for the marginalized, the over looked, the discarded, the different than us people.  That the cross was a symbol of what happens when you choose to live as radically as Jesus did, renouncing power and it's systems and choosing humanity.  That he is with those who suffer, with the least, the unseen, the brokenhearted, in their suffering he is there seeing and knowing, empathizing, showing us the way through the pain not around.  This new message that connected with my soul, waring with the indoctrinated message of my head that I'm am bad, I deserve death in flames for eternity if not for Jesus.  That indoctrination knows all the arguments for why my new way of thinking is 'out of line', 'incorrect' and it uses it against my own self.  The indoctrination, the 'logic' uses shame and fear to fight against my soul, telling me again and again how bad I am and that it couldn't be true that I am good and lovable.  It was a long, dark Saturday.

Easter Sunday we drive to church.  This year I hadn't gone all out with outfits as I usually do.  Just some basic henleys and denim shorts for the boys, a romper with a hole in it for me, somehow I just didn't have the energy to go all out with the fashion (which if you know me, that's saying something).  As we turn the corner onto the street of our church, I see a homeless African American woman sitting with all she has in the baking 90 degree Texas sun.  My heart dropped, it broke.  How could we be heading to a celebration of love, of salvation with her sitting there like that.  We checked in the kids, found our seats in the packed sanctuary and I could not get her out of my head.  I sat there looking around, observing the new beautiful pastel outfits, all the put-together looking people (majority white), the big arrangements of flowers.  I saw money.  I saw lots and lots of money.  I think about the woman on the street.  I start sweating as we sing some upbeat song about the risen savior and the last thing I feel is upbeat.  I feel like I'm supposed to go outside and sit with her, do something about all this.  I start shaking.

Then a whole new war started within me.  Who am I?  What am I thinking?  To be questioning all this, this seeing is too hard, it's too uncomfortable.  I just want to sit here in beautiful clothes and keep singing the happy songs, unaffected, eyes closed to privilege.  I want to be comfortable, damnit.  I don't want to get up and go outside and sit in the hot sun with someone who may not smell like a lovely perfume, but more like humanity, poor, vulnerable humanity.  I couldn't focus on anything the voices in me so loud, my insides squirming in uncomfortableness.  Seeing those two stark contrasts for the first time, on Easter, a homeless person of color against white privilege.  With all the new ideas about what Jesus was about and what he came to do, I was so overwhelmed, confused, disoriented, suffocating on that hard wooden pew.  The war inside me too great, paralyzing.  And I was scared of the new thing I was seeing so clearly.

When the service was over, we grabbed the kids and stood around outside where everyone was laughing, smiling, taking pictures.  I remember just going through the motions, gave the fakest of smiles for the camera.  I just needed to get all these thoughts and feelings into my car and home.  I couldn't contain it all, my heart was breaking and oozing all over the place.  I felt out of place in those smiling, happy faces.  The place where I'd grown up, spent my entire life loving Easter, the new outfit, sharing food and joy with friends.  All that had cracked apart.  Even writing this I cry.  There's extreme grief in losing something you held so dear, something you believed to be deeply true.  Losing that sense of truth is earth shattering and for the most part, very lonely.  I think that the one thing quite often missed, overlooked by those who haven't gone through deconstruction of religion.  It's heart wrenching.  It's like losing a limb.  This way of how you did life, how you made your way through the world, suddenly gone.  I've felt so lost, so confused, so sad.  And also very angry.  I've felt tricked and betrayed.

I had a friend suggest I talk to a pastor about how I was feeling, and although I get what she was saying, just the idea of going to an 'authority' with my ideas felt like going into battle.  I anticipated they would battle with my brain's logic, the indoctrination, use it against my soul, my very being, that little voice inside me calling for more.  I thought that if I did, it would only cause more war inside myself, or worse, snuff out that little voice inside of me that felt so right.  So I pulled away even more and started to get quiet and listen closer, closer still.

Last fall I quit going church all together.  After Easter it just seemed like every single Sunday coming home from church I would rant and rage.  The tiniest of word choices, of takes on ideas, new contrasting ways of seeing things would set me off.  Songs drenched in language about how bad I was, would have me in tears ready to bolt.  Realizing how much was missing in terms of diversity, in facing the hard reality of life, lamenting deeply (not just in the church I was currently attending but in all the churches I've been to my entire life, save one or two).  Finally, in September I did the bravest thing I've done in a very long time.  I stopped going to church. You might laugh that that's the bravest thing I've done, but it took every ounce of my being fighting for the fact that I was good.  Extreme fear and anxiety that not going to church would condemn me to hell, that indoctrination screaming at me how bad I was for not going.  That first Sunday I went to restaurant down the street, drank a froze and read a book while Kellen took the boys to church.  Surprisingly, it was an act of liberation, of freedom.  The first Sunday in months I wasn't angry.  The first Sunday in months I was actually in peace.  (That information alone was a bit confusing as well.)  For the next few months every Sunday I kept fighting for my goodness by not going to church.  Eventually falling in love with extra time with my family, actual rest and more time in nature, which felt very, very good.

I recently read about the author of the book You Are Your Own by Jamie Lee Finch having similar experiences.  Anxiety and anger just entering a church building.  So many other books on trauma and anxiety that I have been reading talk about listening to your body, listening to your anger and anxiety.  The anger and anxiety have something to say to you if you pay attention to it, get curious about it, listen.  That first act of not going to church was me finally honoring what my body had been trying to tell me for months, years if I really dug into it.  Beginning to pay attention to my anger, my anxiety and it was saying, "burn this belief down, this system down, you don't agree with it anymore, it makes you and others feel awful, excluded and ashamed. Find something more meaningful, more beautiful, more true."  Slowly, I have been doing that.  I've been researching psychology, anthropology, activism, church history, American history.  I've been reading books from people who aren't white men, but going to people of color, women, the LGBTQ community, spiritual leaders of other religions for wisdom.  I've been listening to people's life experiences, their struggles, hurts and joys.  I've broadened my community.  It is no longer people who believe and look like I do.  And it's shot holes, blown apart, what I held so dear.  A recent read, The Color of Compromise by Jemar Tisby along with learning about colonization of America has peeled my eyes open to the African American experience and how Evangelical Christianity has actually upheld, enforced racism and segregation.  It makes me want to vomit, quite honestly.  And to be apart of something new.  Something very, very different.

To be honest, I'm still struggling a bit to figure out where to land on god and religion.  As I keep reading and researching, I'm trying to put the pieces together and it's been messy and emotional but I'm realizing what incredibly necessary work it is.  I love the idea of Jesus, but the label 'Christianity' is one I struggle with greatly at the moment.  One thing I've deeply learned and believe to be true is that all people are very important, loved and good.  There are lots of people walking around hurt, hurting others.  Trauma is a very real thing and we need to meet people with love and compassion.  Not by telling them they're bad, they need to be like us and to get 'saved'.  We need to sit with people who are nothing like us, quit being afraid of those who don't think, believe, look or love like we do and LISTEN.  We need to learn to check our privilege - which can be very uncomfortable, but absolutely necessary, required.  I've learned to use critical thinking for the first time about these things, to think for myself, to listen to my intuition, that wind within me pulling me in a specific direction.  I've also learned that I can't trust someone is absolutely certain about god and what she/he is like.  That is a thing humans are incapable of, certainty, comprehension of the Divine.  I would rather follow that voice in me into the unknown than go with with the certainty of someone else's idea about where god says to go, what to do, who to be.  I am trustworthy, my heart is trustworthy, my intuition is trustworthy because the Divine is in me and I will follow her.

I painted this picture after I’d written my story about sexual assault finally feeling free, free to let go of old narratives and fears, burn them down. Since painting this I’ve seen that phrase everywhere. Instagram, authors, friends talking about it.  It’s that little nudge, you’re okay, this is good.  Because some days I still heavily doubt myself.  That’s part of the trauma. But there’s still that little fire inside saying, “You are good. You are enough. Keep going.”

I share this because I felt very alone in all of it. I had a friend or two in other cities that were going through the same thing but no one in my daily Austin, Texas life and it felt very lonely. So just in case that’s you, you’re not alone, you’re not crazy. You are good.  Keep listening and following.