congregant

When things get weird, I go back to the trees. They have been waiting while I flailed. 

Why do the wisteria-wrapped branches 

look just like a cross?

Oh god, did it actually pull me out here? 

Now I'm nervous, because I'm not ready to talk about saviors and crucifixions, 

"You don't have to," the trees tell me,

"Settle down, settle down."

I sit before the lone oak 

on a strange, straight kitchen chair

I dragged out into the backyard. 

And I stare. 

At her trunk, 

At her height.

Up into the spread of her branches, 

Two nearby scraggly cypress stare with me. 

"We get it; we love her too." 

Every plant nearby is a different age. 

Some dying, some dead, some just born, 

but most are like me. 

Somewhere in the middle 

just waking to another day, 

wondering whether it'll be monotonous, perilous, or miraculous. 

Because we've all lived at least a thousand 

of each by this age. 

The dog barks behind us wondering 

why I am in a new spot instead of the porch. 

She cautiously creeps out to inspect me, 

in case I've lost my mind. 

Then, no lie, the other dog and the cat follow, and we become a congregation. 

I whisper, "You guys, you guys, this is Church. This is Church.!"

But they don't react.

They were born knowing.

The Four Times I Met God

The first time I found god, I wasn't even looking.  No one told me to look, I just sensed Someone.  When I was a child, if I woke scared in my bed in the middle of the night, I instinctively said, "Help.  Please."  I was addressing someone.  After a minute, I'd call out to my dad to come check on me, but even while I waited, intuitively I was urging someone to help Dad hear me and get there faster.  No one told me to do that.  It wasn't that my parents didn't believe in god, but we weren't the kind of home where someone explained that god was there listening.  That feeling was just in me, and I could never remember at time it hadn't been.  Later in church, god was introduced, but I already knew him.  I'll use the pronoun him for now because that is how I knew god at that time.  That church was low key, low pressure, service-oriented, and loving.  I don't remember ever hearing about Hell or evangelism there.  Whatever I heard fit the god that listened to me in the dark at night when I was scared.

That was my first relationship with god.

The second time I found God, He was different.  He was a Him who needed capital letters.  I found out I had to know Jesus for access to God.  I'd always felt like I could talk to God before this, but evidently, that had been temporary, because I hadn't known better.  I hadn't heard about asking Jesus into my heart, so I did that.  And it was important to know Jesus, so I'd be safe from Satan and Hell.  Prior to that, there was some vague notion of the devil, but never as a real entity to worry about.  I learned that when I was scared in bed or anywhere else, the fear was him or his evil helpers, and the only safety was to call on God to "Bind Satan in the name of Jesus."  So even though God was still loving, a new unseen spiritual world was happening all around me.  It was terrifying, but I thought I was mostly safe because I knew God and Jesus.  Most of my prayers at that age (I'd started journaling them) were repetitious prayers for God's help, for my friends, salvation, and for safety.

The next time I met God, shit got even more real.  I was a young woman.  I found out Satan wasn't so much the problem as was my Original Sin.  Actually, humans had caused all of the existing evil in the world by listening to Satan a long time ago.  Eve listened first, and as a woman, I felt extra shame for this.  The Bible became a really big deal too.  God wanted me to study and accept every word without question.  And I did.  I was good at it.  I was naturally wired to thrive on a team with a mission.  I loved studying, and I loved doing the right thing.  I was such a good girl.  I was as good a girl as I had been as a little child in my bed at night, but I didn't feel like it.  Now I knew I was born filthy.  It was like God had just tolerated me until I finally came around.  I'd had a "grace period" like a temporary hire, but now I was in, and I needed to live accordingly.  So I did.  I did what I thought the Bible required of women.  The men did what they thought it required of them.  The pastors and the deacons and the elders did their assignments.  The women couldn't hold those positions, but we could teach each other and the children, so we did.  And all the time I did it, I enjoyed my work, but it also felt like a losing battle.  Every mistake I made in life was no longer a mistake; it was a sin.  It was a reminder that I'd been born filthy and incapable of any good without Jesus.  This was supposedly the Good News.  But I just felt ashamed.  It felt like God and everyone else had known I was gross before I did.  But I'd gone along happily, unhindered, ignorant. This type of relationship with God lasted over 20 years.  My awareness and shame and anxiety only increased during this period.

The fourth time I'm meeting God is now.  It's been seven years since I left the third way.  The third way was ruining me.  Until recently, I was scared to even say God's name because, although I knew I couldn't continue that relationship the way it was, I couldn't prove the theology wasn't true. I just knew I didn't want my kids or me in it anymore.  And I couldn't risk calling on Him or even physically touching the Bible because I was so susceptible to jumping back in.  It had been my life for so long that I didn't trust myself.

But this time I'm getting to know god cautiously.  I'm making sure god isn't mad if I don't use capital letters.  god isn't.  I'm testing the waters by using non-male pronouns for god.  god doesn't mind.  I'm asking god to confirm that yes, if humans were created by god and in god's image, we must have good in us even as infants.  And I see that good everywhere and in everyone.  And I'm finding out what so many people have said, but that I was scared to believe:  There are many paths to god.  I suspect god is huge, maybe a person, maybe a big pervasive love, maybe just something or someone I can't explain, but definitely the Someone that was listening to me as a scared child calling in the dark.  I'm not sure why god needs to be more.  I think we just thought we needed god to be.

Because of this fourth meeting, I am finally able to look forward to many more.

June 24, 2022 Roe v Wade Overturned

Today is a different morning.  It has to be, because I can't live everyday like I did yesterday.  The shock, fear, outrage and anxiety -- it is important and necessary, but if I live in it everyday, I will be exhausted.  I assumed I'd wake feeling hungover from all of it.  Strangely, I feel the tiniest wee smallest bit of hope.  Maybe it's my mind tricking me for self-preservation, but I will take it.  Because this tiny bit of relief may be what I need to go forward and consider next steps.

For the first time in five years, I observed a group prayer.  I can't quite say I participated, but I did the part I could handle which was just be there.  Since leaving the conservative church, I have feared and avoided any church-like setting for many reasons.  Even the most liberal ones scared me.  But yesterday, I listened to a female pastor pray with nearly 1000 people who were outraged and heartbroken over the ruling.  I'm not sure I knew that was possible in a church because...    

in many other prayer groups, people were praying with gratitude and relief because they truly believe their god's will was done in overturning Roe v. Wade.  And here's the thing:  Both groups have good people in it who earnestly are trying to do what is right.  That scares me.  Because how do two such dichotomous perspectives ever come to terms with each other?

I see the younger generation outraged and fighting against this ruling and I am SO THANKFUL FOR YOU.  Fight and work and speak!  I'm so glad for your energy and even your anger.  Do it, kids.  Change it.

For me though, at least for today, I feel like my past is leading me to look at and consider what I read this week:

  

When God Gets Distorted: Warnings on Conservative Doctrine from a Girl Who Excelled at it. (Part 1)

I wasn't raised on conservative theology.  I didn't start sniffing around it until my 20s, and my first exposure to it was (I'm sorry Baptists) a bit too Baptisty for me.  I nibbled the hook, but it wasn't until I hit Calvinism and an ARP Presbyterian church that I was hooked.  Something about an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent god with his hands on every detail in the world and my life made sense to me.  Add to that, he not only controls, but PRE-destined every event, including my faith in him?  It sounded so logical to me.  Finally, something that closed every loophole.  At last a theology that answered every doubt with an unquestionable response.  Sign me up.

Many of you think that sounds ridiculous, cultish, and terrifying, but to me, it was the most rational argument.  The building blocks made sense to me.  I'd hear:

1)  "If you're going to believe there's a god, wouldn't you want it to be an all powerful god?  Otherwise, why bother believing?"
And
2)  "Wouldn't that god give you his words to live by to help you in life?  Of course, here's the Bible."
And finally,
3)  "If you're going to follow a god and a text, wouldn't you only do that if you believed they were both infallible?  Of course you would, you're too intellectual to follow something fallible."

And when I'd read or hear things that sounded crazy or inapplicable or wrong, the answer was, "Obviously God knows everything and we are only human.  How can we understand all of God's thoughts and teachings and will?  Trust they're true, and follow them now on earth.  You will grow to understand them, or you will understand in heaven."

Again, many people read the above and think, "Watch out, Leah Remini.  I see where this is going."
See how every question ends with an indisputable response, if you buy into the first tenets?  But if you are a person who likes logical answers, it is logical.  Take one young woman in law school in 1996, add a rational argument that comes with a textbook and you get a match made in heaven.
Or you get a recipe for confusion and pain.

There is good and bad to embracing a sovereign, hands-on god.  Or rather, I should say "being embraced by such a god."  Remember I mentioned predestination.  An omniscient and omnipotent god already knows who will follow him, so if you made it this far, he chose you and not vice versa.  And I'm not being snarky; that was a comfort to me most of the time.  If I hadn't created my own faith, I couldn't ditch it accidentally.  And anyone who has "been saved," has worried at times that they somehow "un-did" their salvation, or it "didn't take the first time."  Work with a middle school youth group sometime, and hear them voice this fear over and over:  out of the mouth of babes comes every adult's fear.

Once you believe you followed God because God made you, it is no leap to believe he ordered your circumstances and relationships as well.  Before you were saved you were dead in your sins.  A dead man can't do anything, but be dead.  God must breathe the breath of life into him/her.  This was my favorite quote by the way.  Not to brag, but I am really good at learning "right answers."  And if you know me, I'm super participatory, so I was the first one with my hand up in every bible study and small group.  Okay, we all know I didn't raise my hand, because I'm always too jacked up on caffeine and just blurt things out, so it was more like, "Adeadmancan'tdoanythingbutdieuntilGodbreatheslifeintohim.Goldstarplease."

Before people think I've lost my faith, or turned against everything I believed, I need to tell you something VERY VERY IMPORTANT TO ME TODAY:

Maybe I am wrong.
All of the conservative doctrine may be true.
There may be a hell.
God may control every single thing including my ability to even believe in a supernatural creator.
Maybe sexuality and genders matter a lot.
Maybe not making wedding cakes for sinners is the sword to fall on  (okay that was snarky).
But y'all...
I just don't care.
There's too much at stake.
And frankly, it all just seems...wrong.
And if something feeling wrong isn't a good enough answer, and it'll send me to hell in a hand basket, I
Just
Don't
Care
.

I mean, I care about you.  I pray for my people.  I see the world and I love it. I love it sooo much. I believe only a loving artist could have made it and us.
Someday, I may tell people again, "Consider the lilies.  See how they neither toil nor spin?"  But I will never again tell them to consider hell.  To be fair, I was never big on hell anyway, nor evangelizing.  I hate confrontation and conflict, so I like to believe I didn't do too much damage outside my family.

But y'all, I took my tiny children  to classes and preschool where they heard graphic descriptions about Jesus dying on a cross.  They heard about the whips, the nails.  They heard that his father did it to his son, because of them, so they wouldn't have to get that and much worse in hell.  They heard they were born enemies of god with no good in them until they were saved by Jesus, and Jesus had to go through horror and hell for them.

I have the most clever children.  They are teenagers now; they question things, and I'm glad, but they admit that they've spent plenty of time worrying about hell.  Unfortunately, they will in the future too.  I know, because I will.  I had the benefit of not even being taught the concept until I was 25.  They were exposed before their minds were fully formed.  I can't undo that for them.  And some of you are thinking, "It's scary, yes, but hell is real.  It's good they know."
Y'all.
Y'aaaaal.  No.
We don't even let them see inappropriate movies, hear about sex, or say mild curse words until they are older.  Yet, we pour that fear of hell right into them.  The love of god we think we pour into them along with it, in my opinion, is no compensation at that age.
At any age.

I feel like I've gotten off topic now.  There is coffee involved.

When my ex-husband met me, he said I was one of the most conservative people he'd ever met.  My father-in-law asked me once about free will.  He asked, "Does it really matter if you chose God or he chose you?"  I actually gasped.  "Of course it does!  It makes all the difference about what type of god you believe you're following!  Why would you follow one that didn't have that much power!"

Bless his heart.
Bless mine.  I was an earnest little thing.  I wanted to do things so so very right.  I wanted to please that god so much.  I never believed I was successful, but I don't think the god I was picturing was accurate anyway.

And that's my point.  I don't want to spend time anymore studying to find verses about hell and seeing if it's real.  I don't want to find verses to back up beliefs that homosexuality or transgender issues are wrong.  I don't want to study the bible to follow a god that I believe has all the power, and I have zero. 

For me, the more power I gave that misconstrued view of god, the less I felt capable of anything.  I felt completely de-selfed and powerless.  Maybe it isn't supposed to work that way.  I heard teaching that it truly is NOT intended to have that effect...
but it did.  It can.  And that's enough for me to ditch it.

Because a person who believes they have no power and no self, can get into a lot of trouble.  A lot of shit happens that does NOT have to happen.  Don't go looking for sanctification or creating messes and then say, "God works it all for good."  Because he might, does NOT mean you were right. 

So for now, I will err on the side of loving.  I will believe in a broad, wide non-detailed love.  I can live with the discomfort of not knowing answers for things.  And it is uncomfortable sometimes.  But too much is at stake, for me to grab onto answers for comfort.

My kids can believe what they want.  Their beliefs will grow and develop and change over time like all of ours.  They know they are free to question, and I believe in a creator who is totally comfortable with questions, belief, and even disbelief.  He's no wimp; don't get too worried about him.

If I'm honest, since I have stepped outside of the conservative doctrine, life has made so much more sense.  Had anyone told me that a few years ago, I would have sworn they were wrong.  And if you worry about me, pray for me.  I believe in prayer, and I believe in a Creator. 

I have a pretty hard time using the male pronoun Him for that creator though, so this whole essay has made my spleen ache a tiny bit.
I better go pour some more coffee on it.