It's late (for me) and I'm tired, but as a friend told me recently, I have things to say.
Life has brought me through so many strange and terrifying and amazing experiences. Some of them spiritual, some of them detrimental to my spirit, and some of them led me to now, where I sit on my couch feeling quite at home with what resides in my soul.
Though my previous life thrust me deep into church-work and showed me both the beautiful and ugly sides of ministry, I am not that religiously church-devoted person anymore. Yes, I witnessed and felt hurtful things many times, but I learned emotional resilience from those things, and I learned that God judges me much less harshly that fellow Christians do. In the long run, this lesson serves me well, even when I witness the unfairness all around me, as I hear every day, people judging one another instead of loving one another as Jesus commanded.
I am not spiritually wounded. I do not resist organized religion because of bitterness or deep hurt or any other reason for which anyone should take pity on me. I resist it because I simply do not believe in it. Period.
So although my father had me on a church pew from the time I was an infant, and I served in churches well into my 30's, and although I can quote scripture and argue doctrine with the best of all those Bible College scholars in leadership positions at church, I simply choose not to. I choose something else.
What I choose might not make sense to you. It might seem like I've turned my back on everything my father ever tried to teach me; but trust me, it's all still part of who I am. My dad taught me more through the way he lived his life than I ever learned while sitting on a church pew listening to a preacher shout and spew at me about how low-down no good filthy sinners like me weren't worthy of God's consideration.
See, I don't believe that I or any other human being is born inherently evil. I don't believe that an innocent baby suddenly comes to an age that they lose that innocence and become sinners by default, who must humble themselves and admit to their evilness in order to receive God's love and thus, acceptance into the Kingdom of Heaven once they die.
Hold onto your hat, because I'm not even sure I believe in Heaven.
Listen folks, since I was very young, I knew I would not live to be old and when a person knows all her life that life is SHORT, and time can't be bought or bartered or even made up-for once you're dead, she starts to question the whole idea of an after-life and what purpose it even serves. What purpose would it serve, exactly? We believe even the best we can do here amounts to "filthy rags," but we want to also believe that a life of eternal reward awaits us in the life beyond. Because of Jesus, right?
Jesus means many things to many people. To me, Jesus is the spirit of love and acceptance. To me, Jesus is a symbol of the kind of grace you and I should extend to one another. God uses many symbols if we open our eyes to them. Certainly, the life of Jesus gives us an example of Godly love that we can only hope to live up to.
Last summer I inadvertently offended a minister with a poem I wrote--not about him in particular, but about the drive of religion that makes people think they should possess the power to solve all problems and alleviate all suffering in the name of Jesus. The reality is, no matter how much you might want to rescue me from a moment's anguish or even a lifetime of affliction, you can't. None of us possess the power to heal or even, in some cases to help. Sometimes showing Christ-like love comes by way of accepting our limitations and allowing the people we love to find their own path to spiritual wholeness and healing. I find comfort in the Earth--the feel of damp dirt in the palms of my hands, the smell of it as I pull weeds and bury seeds beneath it. I find wholeness in a summer breeze, the whisper of trees in the wind, the flicker of fireflies in the twilight air. I am grounded by the tickle of grass between my toes and the way an evening's dew can cool the ground that a few hours before scorched my bare feet under the heat of an August sun. A breathless preacher with the weight of the world on his shoulders could never give me the kind of peace I find in the all engulfing joy of nature. It reminds me that I still am, and that all that's around me has been, long before I was even a twinkle in my mother's eye. It will all outlive me, and somehow, long after I'm gone, I'll still be part of it. These things feed my soul in a way church never could. Nature reminds me that I am powerless over many things, yet full of faith all the same, enough to plant a seed and water it in hopes that flowers will eventually bloom.
Yes, I have faith, although it might seem unconventional to others. It gets me through even my toughest days though, and that's saying a lot for someone like me, who often wants to just quit. I'm grateful for all the ways grace presents itself in my life, in the form of friends and family who love me, a community of support that so many folks wish they had. I hope that in some small ways here and there, I afford that kind of grace to the people I encounter every day.
