WARNING: THIS POST MAY CONTAIN MATERIAL AND CONTENT RELATED TO SPIRITUAL ABUSE, PURITY CULTURE, SEXUAL ABUSE, CHILDHOOD ABUSE, NARCISSISTIC ABUSE, COLONIZATION, RACISM, MISOGYNY, LGBTQIA, SUICIDE, AND OTHER TOPICS THAT MAY BE SENSITIVE TOPICS TO THE READER. READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.
This fast has genuinely been a different experience than the ones preceding it. It was a time of dismantling, not rebuilding, but building something new entirely, of realizing how to experience a whole life.
My reading this time consisted of the following, and I highly recommend all of the following:
Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived by Rob Bell
Bad Theology Kills: Undoing Toxic Belief & Reclaiming Your Spiritual Authority by Kevin Garcia
The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism by Jemar Tisby
Walking the Bridgeless Canyon: Repairing the Breach Between the Church and the LGBT Community by Kathy Baldok
I have begun reading Richard Rohr’s The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe, but have not yet finished it, but will likely lightly cite information based on this book as well.
So what is it that I believe?
My spiritual path has taken a drastic turn. As a person raised in America, my philosophy of choice was Christianity. I don’t know that I can say that I was coerced into Christian beliefs in adolescence. Maybe more so during my childhood, but when I reached my middle school years into high school, the lifestyles of those living in my household convinced me that I had to be different, and I quickly bought into purity culture at this stage of my life. I redefined good and evil. My goodness became based on how many things I could prohibit from my life rather than how I treated other people. My abstinence defined excellence. My GPA determined worth. Goodness was prescribed by my choice not to participate in alcohol or drug consumption. Integrity was represented by a high income, being married after I have a degree, wanting a house with a fence, having two children, having a career in higher education, my contribution and output to capitalism defined goodness.
I was trained into Islamophobia in middle school, shortly following the attacks on 9/11, being handed articles in class that argued to keep a keen eye on anyone who may look suspicious. I was 9 when the attacks on 9/11 happened and 12 when society first told me to fear a racial other. In high school, history classes taught that the USA won every single battle it ever fought, that no one lost the Vietnam War, that America was the savior to the world. Mission trips included groups of white kids having the money to travel worldwide to build homes and give out bibles, to be the superior savior to those they viewed as inferior.
I didn’t want to watch the news because I even said out loud that “ignorance was bliss.” I was abused and trained that my body was not my own as early as five years old. I said I didn’t want to and was threatened. I complied, and when my childhood coerces me into compliance, it wasn’t difficult to continue having a target on my back to those with poor intentions. I was robbed of the belief that whatever I felt or thought mattered. When I began attending church on my own, the church repeated that same message: “I am worthless. I am nothing. I am wicked. I am bad.”
It didn’t help that starting around age 8, I was awakened to my attraction to girls. I went to a sleepover where the other girls talked about having girlfriends and how envious I was. I remember kissing my female friends, feeling an attraction, but I never wanted to say it aloud. Homosexuality was wrong, after all, so instead, I leaned towards homophobia to cover the tracks that I hid deep within myself. I was exposed to porn at a young age and remembered feeling a strange attraction and awakening during scenes with two girls. I was jealous when my female friends would date each other because it looked so safe and free. I would often joke that if my boyfriends and I ever broke up, I would switch to girls. I fell deeply for several of my friends of the same sex, some of whom will probably never know just how deeply I loved them and could never express it because of my innate shame for same-sex attraction.
I came out as bisexual in 2014 and was shamed back into the closet. I now identify as pansexual because of simply having more knowledge of how sex and gender work.
It took my self-awareness to realize a truth being snuffed by shame, that homosexuality is not a choice. Empathy now guided my path first and foremost.
After my suicide attempt in 2018, if you have been following my story, you likely know about my fast of 2019. This fast was what I needed at that point in my life. I regained purpose, explored other healing methods, began spending time in the company of others, utilizing my talents, and ultimately, it saved my life. What accompanied this fast, however, was a fast track to my return to purity culture. I began to mask my sexual orientation; I was ashamed to have erotic thoughts and urges created in me and shamed myself for experiencing pleasure; I felt that my purity weighed my worth, but this time, I became a huge advocate for mental health. I was beginning to believe more controversial things usually shunned by the church: that we have an individual purpose given to us by God, that Jesus was an act of God expressing the most considerable amount of empathy by suffering for us, that our labels and status did not determine our worth, that God could not use suffering to shape us, but instead, could create good from any suffering that happens on our planet. I called that experience, when I worshipped, when a sermon indeed rang true for me, like feeling the color gold within my chest and throughout my body. HOWEVER, what I wouldn’t allow for myself was the realization that I had indeed experienced this exact feeling in moments outside of the church.
I feel it when my music comes to life; I experience it when sipping hot tea with honey and milk, I feel it when I sing karaoke with my friends, I feel it when nuzzling up to my boyfriend’s face when I wake up in the morning, I feel it when I play the piano just to play music. So this is what I believe: I believe God is cosmic. I think that “God” may not be God’s, or Spirit’s, or Love’s name, but that as we experience this sensation and energy within us, we give a name to that based on our perceptions, that They ultimately goes by many names. I believe that we may explore spirituality as everything in our life. I think that before anything else, everything was created good, therefore, incapable of being bad. I believe that if we take away Jesus’ divinity, he was a man who died because he expressed radical love among all people. When we attempt to communicate with Spirit, They speak back to us in a way that makes sense to where we are in that moment, and we may feel those experiences in ways outside of the Christian philosophy. I believe that I have a finite understanding of an infinite Being. Richard Rohr explains that Jesus’ last name was not Christ, that Christ is what Jesus lived in, teaching that when we love Christ, this energy and being we call Christ is a priority before the law of the land demands. When we experience love and truth in their most basic elements, that is when we ultimately find peace. I know these are all heretical beliefs, and I’m proud that they are such.
I believe the bible is a set of documents over time combined likely to promote patriarchal beliefs and that it is a collection of writings, human writings, who were working to make sense of how they experienced Spirit. I KNOW these writings were mistranslated to create an agenda intended to harm anyone but the elite of the elite.
The church horrifically attacks the LGBTQIA community. Historically, many would perceive a man who resembled a woman in his attractions and mannerisms as less than. White supremacist documents express deep hatred for anything that isn’t a white cisgender heterosexual male. In 1946, American leaders translating the bible wrote terms like “homosexual” in the bible initially which originally translated to men who had sex with boys and acts of rape, not a term describing two consenting male adults engaging in attraction to one another. In times before the Civil War, the bible was taken out of context and promoted slavery. People continue to claim that a particular group of people is the enemy when it all ultimately roots in colonization. The AIDS pandemic began in colonization, through men raping and pillaging civilizations. Colonization created the United States, whose set their roots in hating a racial other. Colonization was what resulted in white supremacist groups recruiting from the church. The GOP began campaigning to the evangelicals and giving them a message that they must comply to or else their dedication to their faith was in question. The church raised its followers to consent to their abuse. When I see those who prescribe to evangelism and conservative Christianity, I know a group of people who are currently victims of abuse, who are in heavy denial because they are groomed and conditioned to see only one thing.
Love demands consent and the truth. Life is so individual, and we are extensions of Spirit, of God. We are created good. What Spirit gives us is peace, and it is impossible to live without it. We experience God when we experience each other. God loves us by providing us each other. We are given choice as a gift, to become ourselves, to explore ourselves in a way that is aware of how it may or may not harm ourselves or others. We hurt ourselves and harm others when we deny ourselves of our truths. Our sexual orientation/identity, a preference for monogamy or polyamory, sexual activities with another person, physical or emotional attraction are all truths we deny ourselves. A career preference, mental illness, acknowledging how another person treats you, all of these, and more are truths that we tend to deny ourselves. Healing, recovery, and self-awareness are not linear processes. How I experience this earth may be vastly different from another, and as long as that experience is not ignorant or intentional in harming others, then that is okay.
Choose kindness and love today, friends, in whatever way that speaks to you.
The Trauma Chronicles 
Leave a comment