Feathery Tendrils of Joy.
While my last five posts don’t lead directly to my present life, I find it impossible to write about the last four years with any clarity. Did I make it back to the arms of the church? Yes, I did. The various church relationships I’ve cultivated have led to happiness and broken hearts, discipleship and loss of faith. I’ve seen young kids ostracied for questioning their sexuality, I’ve seen parents blame the youth leaders for circumstances outside their control, I’ve witnessed as person after person applauded a sermon about “24/7 spirituality” only to leave the trappings of their faith at the door. But that’s not all I’ve seen- I’ve also seen churches rise en masse to help the needy, I’ve seen volunteers show up in such great numbers that they had to be turned away. I’ve seen lives changed because of the faithfulness of friends. I’ve seen pregnant teens struggle with the consequences of their choices, learn new maturity, find the Father’s love in the wake of their own broken hearts. I’ve seen loss of faith and faith regained, brokeness and beauty.
I’ve learned to feel joy in my faith again. Part of the reason it is so hard to write about is simply because joy is insidious. I believe that there are times where people change overnight. I have met people who can give incredible testimony of God coming into their lives and changing them so radically that their friends could no longer recognize them. But is that how it normally happens? No. We go through situation and situation, mountain and valley, drought and monsoon. Somewhere along the way the change happens- but oh so slowly. Just like aging, like the metamorphosis of a butterfly, like carving a statue out of stone.
Somewhere along the journey I felt the tendrils of joy creep back into my heart. Feathery and fine at first, but it grew and grew. Somewhere along the way I saw how I pictured myself changing. I started to feel more sure, more positive. I went from questioning my call to proclaiming it. And parts of what I was meant to do I simply stumbled into by chance- like the time I wrote an “open letter to the church on homosexuality” on my blog, which earned me a never before seen sixty comments.
Somehow I ended up here, writing this to you. I’m not entirely sure how or even why- I’ve guarded my own story closely on this blog. Yet one day I felt a nudging, the kind of nudge I’ve learned not to ignore. So I gave away my secret faith.
I hope it helps you.
My Crisis of Christianity
I spent a long time angry at God because I was angry with other Christians. I couldn’t understand how, if they spoke to God as they seemed to, and heard from God as they claimed to, they couldn’t understand God’s heart for other people. How could God let Christians get away with the kind of cruelty they espoused towards others? Towards me, my friends, strangers whose stories I’d heard? Christianity seemed, to me, to be a big farce. A way of slapping an “I’m okay” sticker on people’s most virulent behaviors. It was okay to gossip in the name of God, judge in the name of God, castigate in the name of God. It was okay to torment people as long as you were doing it to save them!
There had been a time that I had embraced the Evangelical lifestyle. Handing out “Jesus Pamphlets” at the park, demanding that my friends recognize and leave their sins, burning all my non-Christian music and trying to read the right things. The thing was, it made me miserable. I had gone from a suicidal depression into a grudging last-resort relationship from God. And that depression had deeply colored the way I viewed God. I had seen God as wanting my life, but wanting it because he was the possessive Jealous God of the Old Testament. I didn’t truly understand God’s love for me. And the Christian lifestyle I’d adopted seemed to reinforce the idea that God didn’t particularly care for me. Living without all of the things I loved- my fantasy novels, my music, my pride, my inert sense of what was and wasn’t appropriate behavior at the park… These things all were impossible for me to deal with.
I took to forcing myself to live with Christianity with the same kind of zeal I attacked everything in my life. I viewed my distaste for the lifestyle I was living as a challenge, a test of faith. Sarcastically saying “Jesus is my boyfriend” as a way to justify my inability to have a relationship with the opposite sex was supposed to fulfil me. I didn’t confront the fact that I ran away from relationships because I was terrified- I justified it with my faith. Burning all of my old music and devoting myself to only pursuing what was “good and holy” was supposed to reinforce my devotion to God. So burn the fact that it was leaving me bored, that all I had to listen to was what I saw as falsely cheerful tripe. It was supposed to fulfill me, so it would. I would “fake it till I made it” if it killed me.
And by the time I hit my late teens, it was certainly killing me. I was back to listening to the music I liked. So DMX and Staind and Nirvana weren’t on the approved list? Oh well. I was back to wearing the clothes I liked. So tight tops and black lace skirts and leather knee high boots and pink hair weren’t a good Christian look? (Not to mention the huge tattoo on my lower back…) Oh well. So being depressed and angry at God and thinking “Jesus will never fill this emotional hole in my gut” wasn’t the right attitude towards God? Screw it. So refusing to Evangelize and telling the people I was hanging out with that I didn’t care how they felt about Jesus, that was their business, is shirking my Christian duty? By the time I started wrestling with that one, my attitude was to reply, “F*** IT. I want to be able to be friends with my friends, get out of my faith. I don’t want to talk about it!”
And for several years, I confused the above with having a crisis of Faith. But, in the end, it wasn’t really a crisis of faith I was having. It was a crisis of Christianity. There is a famous Buddha quote that reads: “Believe nothing merely because you have been told it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be kind, conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings — that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.” That quote affected me profoundly. So many of the tenats of faith I’d been raised with simply went contrary to my internal compass. And who gave me that compass? Who gave me my conscience? Would God have created me to react so adversely to Christianity if he wanted me to be a Christian? What in the world was going on here?
Then I realized something else. The Bible has this to say: (Romans 2:14-15)- Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them. This verse has been used, for some time, to demonstrate that God guides man’s law by guiding his heart. That written inside of each one of us is a code that can guide us to God’s heart for our lives. And I, by trying to be what other people percieved as a Good Christian, was denying that code. I was denying who God made me to be by trying to be who other people wanted me to be.
What I needed to do was seek after God’s heart for me, to leave behind the trappings of the Lindsey of Old and just try to be the best disciple I could. But not a disciple of the church- a disciple of God himself, of Jesus.
(to be continued…)
Jesus and Me plus nothingness makes three.
By the time I turned nineteen, I didn’t discuss my spiritual life with anyone. I was fairly certain my family wouldn’t understand, and I didn’t have many friends that I felt comfortable being honest with. Just a few years ago I was the one leading the prayer groups, I was the one leading the Bible lessons, I was the one answering other people’s questions. A spiritual crisis seemed like the kind of luxury I couldn’t afford. The friends who did know that I’d given up on church mostly commiserated. We were a rag-tag group of kids who had often had our faith questioned because of our appearance, or our choice in music, or the friends outside the church walls we chose to keep. But I didn’t really even talk to those friends about what I was doing to keep myself going. Studying Buddhism? Taoism? Wicca? I was the one who may as well have had “Jesus is my boyfriend” tattooed on my forehead for most of my life.
I wasn’t sure that anyone could understand what I was going through. I didn’t even understand.
I would practice yoga. Not just the exercises, as was quickly becoming fashionable, but the spiritual lifestyle as well. Focused thought, strength of center, guiding your bodies internal energies. It made sense to me. It seemed to be working. Day by day I wasn becoming less scattered and panicky, more in control not just of my body but of my emotions as well. I would meditate on nothingness. This was an interesting practice, as my brain is hyperactive, and clearing myself of all conscious thought has always been nigh on impossible. But I would light a candle and focus on the light inside the light. I would sit, for hours, trying to empty myself. It was my time alone, my secret. I really didn’t even talk about it with my husband.
And slowly, over the course of years, I learned to be quiet. To listen.
In the meantime, I worked on my relationship with God. I wanted to trust him, I wanted to trust Jesus, I wanted to walk into a church on a Sunday morning and not feel horribly out of place. Yet the times we did go to church I still felt like a charlatain. I didn’t like other Christians, and it bothered me.
In the quiet of the morning when there was no one in my world but myself, I would become empty. I would become the flame within the flame, pure potential. In this place of silence I would feel something that I had never before felt so keenly: Love. Love in its purest and simplest form. Love that exists for no other reason than itself. Love, which like God, proudly proclaims “I am that I am.” End of question.
I became absolutely sure of three things: God is love, Jesus is the embodiment of that love, and those who live in that love serve God.
Yet I couldn’t seem to conquer the pain that was eating me alive. I couldn’t find the words to express it, but I felt betrayed. Broken. Misused. I had given God my life out of bitterness and despair, and up until that point my relationship with him had been defined by that. I felt no joy- I felt hope, but no joy.
(to be continued)
How Buddhism led me back to God.
When I was in my late teens, heading into adulthood, I was unsure of myself. I wasn’t sure about my spirituality, or how I felt about my family, or what I wanted to do with my life. I wasn’t even entirely sure that I was sane. I went through a period of intense questioning. My biggest questions were about God. Who was God? Was God really even there? If God was there, was he a good and loving God or some cranky guy in the clouds with a big stick and a score to settle?
What was the real point of Christianity? If someone asked me my opinion of church, I wouldn’t equivocate. I would smirk and say that it was a load of crap, that I had other things to do. Church made me feel guilty and dirty and even more unsure than I already was. I saw people getting joy from it and I hated them, I hated myself for not feeling what they were feeling. The only thing I did know with any certainty was that the status quo wasn’t working.
So I gave up. I stopped going to church. I stopped reading my Bible. I stopped doing everything. I started buying books about the Dalai Lama and Taoism. I read about Wicca and elemental spirituality. I buried myself in hope- hope that even if everything I grew up believing was wrong, that there was still some essence of goodness in the world, that there was still something I could connect myself to, to give myself purpose. Here’s the thing: I never questioned if there was some higher force or higher power. I was sure of it. And even at my worst, I still believed in a kind of god. That god just wasn’t the God of Christianity. Or, at least, that’s what I thought.
Because my God was a loving God. He was compassionate and tender. He didn’t want for people to suffer, or be judged, or be tossed aside. Yet the way I saw God’s name being used seemed to say something different. People used God to set themselves apart, to judge others, to justify their bigotry. And I couldn’t let myself believe in the same God they did.
I found a lot of the elements of the God I sought after in Eastern Spirituality. Here were systems of belief based off of truth and observation. They talked about a natural order, an observable rightness, aligning one’s self with the right patterns in order to be whole. They talked about how man kills himself with anger, judgment and bitterness. How pain is not your enemy, but a way to find truth. They talked about how the greatest good comes from sacrifice. And as I read these words, I found myself thinking, “isn’t this Jesus?”
Jesus spoke in the same sort of parables as the Dali Lama. He spoke observational truth. His words rang true because one could watch the world around themselves and see the evidence. He cautioned against anger, bitterness, judgment, and idleness. His death itself proves that there is no power greater than sacrifice. And certainly he didn’t view pain as the enemy if he was called the “man of many sorrows.”
I had an epiphany. No matter my contentions with the church, everything brought me back to Jesus. And I felt sure that I could embrace all that I loved the most about Buddhism and Taoism while still following God: mastery of one’s will, one’s body, one’s emotions, self-sacrifice… these are concepts that are very at home in Christianity.
(To be continued…)
I’m… moved!
Short personal life update for those that care:
We’re in the new house, and mostly done with all of the settling and painting and rearranging and busywork of the move. There’s still a few big projects looming, but I’m past the point where I’m giving up sleep every night to get things done. I have a wonderful garden, and will be harvesting the first of my snow peas today. Hooray! We also have a puppy, a very bright and energetic boxer-mutt who delights in being my daughter’s pillow and getting wrapped up in baby blankets.
And that’s life right now. I’m back to the point where I’m desperately missing blogging and have a million things to say, so brace yourselves. I’m going to start saying things again.
See your circumstances as malleable
Oh, it’s April Fool’s day. I’m supposed to do something shocking and humorous. Uh… I’m totally writing this post in my underwear. No, really, I am!
Back to our regularly scheduled programming. So far, in my “path to overcoming” we’ve covered believing in our own sufficiency, being willing to be vulnerable, recognizing God’s timing, and that I often have conversations in my head. Oh, wait, that last one was just a bonus. Today we’re going to talk about seeing our circumstances as malleable.
I remember one conversation with a friend who was threatening suicide. She kept saying, “I just can’t live like this anymore, I can’t, I can’t.” And I kept reminding her that being dead wasn’t the only way out. “But what else can change?” she responded.
The answer? Nearly everything. Some things never seem to change. You may look at your family dynamic and think that everyone is still the same as they were twenty years ago- and that may be true. But just because some things stay the same doesn’t mean that everything always MUST.
Allow me to try to explain this a different way. Look at nature. The snowmelt runs down the mountain because it must, it’s a natural directive, there is no other way. But plumbing shows that we can sometimes tweak things to our advantage, we don’t change natural law but we change natural circumstances. Water flows up in our pipes because we’ve found another way, to take that momentum of the snow melt and force it to our advantage.
Whatever your situation is: you have the power to change it. If you can’t pay your bills, you can either find a way to make more money or find a way to live off less. If you are frustrated in your relationships with your family, you can find a way to change your own patterns or a way to break them out of theirs. If work is exhausting you and making you feel trapped: simply DO NOT ACCEPT THIS AS THE WAY THINGS HAVE TO BE.
The second you accept the fact that your situation does not have to be permanent is the second you can start plotting change.
The first step to victory is accepting it as possible.
Overheard in my head
Person A: What, so all I have to do is focus really hard, and I can stop being gay?
Person B: If you pray hard enough and trust in God, yes.
Person A: So if you focused really hard, could you become gay?
Person B: Why would I want to do that?
Person A: For the sake of argument let’s imagine you do.
Person B: But why would anyone want to just be gay, just like that?
Person A: imagining you do…
Person B: But I wouldn’t ever want to.
Person A: Okay, so we’ve got a lack of imagination here.
Person B: You just need to believe that your life could be completely different than it is now.
Person A: But I wouldn’t ever want to.
(Lindsey scurries to make notes to write this into a novel someday.)
What do gay people do when no one is looking?
*
Someone actually googled that question, and ended up on my blog as a result. The post in question had an offhand comment about how Christians shouldn’t be so concerned with what gay people do when no one is looking. At least, I believe, we should be no more concerned than we are with what ANYONE does when no one is looking.
That leads to a question- What, exactly, do people do when the world has it’s back turned?
To examine this further, I’ll look at what I (notably a heterosexual Christian female of 26 years of age) do when the world shuts it’s eyes.
- Yoga
- Pilates
- Showering
- Using the toilet
- Reading various books (currently Watchmen, the Bible, and Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods)
- Drawing
- Cleaning the house
- Washing dishes
- Cooking
- Stealing brownies or cookies and neglecting to add the calories to my food diary.
- Just laying on the couch, staring at the ceiling, adamantly doing nothing (which I generally later feel guilty over)
- Wondering what it would be like to actually be a superhero. Yes, some section of my mentality just refuses to grow up.
- Secretly loathing certain segments of my religion. (Oops, guess it’s not so secret now.)
- Blog
- Peruse IMDB (The internet movie database, that bastion of useless movie trivia)
- Playing “six degrees of separation” with my Thesaurus. (Look up one word, then a synonym of that word- do this six times, and compare the definition. Yes, I find this fascinating.)
- Pick at the bottom of my feet
- Drink too much Pepsi
- Stare at the contents of my fridge, wonder when I stopped buying sugary items, wonder if I would be a freak if I dipped grapes in raw sugar.
- And, finally, if all of these other items have been totally exhausted and I still have the energy, I will engage in adult activities with the human being of my choice, who also happens to be my husband. These adult activities are often as boring as debating politics. They don’t necessarily involve disrobing or anything that could lead to procreation.
And I know many gay people who have been asked this question, and answered much the same way. They bake, they clean, they read and blog and maybe watch too much TV. Sometimes they have a partner in life they are devoted to, and they may engage in the kinds of things that two adults do in a bedroom at night. (Read in bed, ask if they’ve gained weight, wear woolly socks. Maybe that other stuff, too.) You know, they are humans. They have human lives. Their lives are simultaneously dull and amazing, banal and magnificent.
Like me.
Like everyone.
*! Rare second post! Huzzah!
airing laundry
So in reality I am grumpy. Me and God have had this ongoing conversation or a while now, in which I ask him to help me find a way to ease the stresses of my everyday life and he says, “obey.” I ask him if he can please give me some sign, some sense of direction, anything. He says, “obey.” I ask him what about this or that or the other situation coming up in my near future that could end in a disaster that may hinder this obedience, and he says, “for the love of all that is holy haven’t you been LISTENING?”
I get the point. I must obey. Even if I end up homeless, destitute, and semi-neurotic. Obey, obey.
And in the process of going through the metaphorical desert with God, I’ve realized that there are a lot of things about Christianity and the way in which Christians speak and portray themselves that just chafe me. And since I’m feeling tired of philosophical and doctrinal debates and I honestly just want to whimper and have my hand held, I thought I’d list them here.
- “God is just really blessing me right now.” Saying that phrase in and of itself isn’t necessarily bad. It’s just that it is always used in terms of getting a raise, or a new home, or having lots of people liking you and what you do. Having your husband laid off and your family cut you off and your entire life go to pieces overnight can also be a blessing. I ought to know.
- “I can just see God wanting to take you somewhere really wonderful.” Oh, really? Do they serve pizza? Listen, I understand that people want to encourage each other, but phrases like this just HURT sometimes. So God really wants to take me somewhere wonderful and I really want to go there, and yet my life continues its downward spiral despite my obedience because… because this awesome place is in the seventh circle of Hell? Ai ai ai.
- Any song that goes something like, “Jesus, I just love to _verb_ your _noun_.” I do love to verb all of God’s nouns, really, but after a slightly drunken game of Contemporary Christian ad-libs, my brain automatically goes somewhere it shouldn’t, and I get fits of the giggles, and I have to bite my tongue or sit down and cover my face.
- Actually, almost all contemporary Christian worship songs. With the exception of one Jonathan Reuel song that breaks almost every rule I have for songs I like to sing, I hated every song sang last Sunday at my church. For one quarter of them I felt like I was lying (I don’t want to do nothing but praise his name forever, unless by praise his name the author of the song meant something other than singing) and for another two quarters I felt the lyrics were stale and overused, and for the final quarter I was just generally angry about everything.
- Which brings me to something truly significant: why do we think that we should be happy? Shining? Effusively praising God? Does it never occur to anyone that there are these moments in which it seems plasticine and worn? Faith is not about happiness. Yes, it is about finding joy, but that joy may be found in the desert when you are at the end of all you thought you are and left with nothing but the hope of at some point regaining your usefulness. Where you scream and cry and fight for the chance to serve God, to be of use even though your skin is cracking and you are nothing but a shell of a person, nothing but a broken vessel that dreams of one day bringing water to someone’s lips.
- We’ve forgotten the beauty found in weakness, the hope found in having nothing left but God himself.
- Many Christians seem unaware of the fact that the pressure put on being happy with your faith becomes a barrier to real intimacy. The best conversation I’ve ever had with my pastor wasn’t about all of the great things I want to do for my church and how hopeful and awesome everything is- it was blood and guts sincerity about all of the things that have gone wrong, that have hurt and changed me. It was about how cynical I’ve become in some regards- how cautious. About how God has used that.
So… anyone else out there with me on this?
Rape, and why I think submission in “all” things is a dangerous concept to handle.
I do believe in the existence of good doctrine. And from time to time I write about those beliefs on this blog. Not in the sort of vague “it has to start with us loving each other” terms, but in terms of real verses that make real commands of us, and what I think of them.
And every time I write about these things, it gets uncomfortable. You see, for the last couple of days I’ve been involved in (and then following) a conversation on another blog about wives submitting to their husbands. The topic was breached in the absence of talking about the husbands role, and inevitably turned to the question of the wife submitting when she disagreed with her husband about something that would have long term repercussions, like family being sent to boarding school. And I tried to respond and did a poor job of vocalizing myself. So I tried to write about it here, and again did a poor job of vocalizing myself.
The idea of submission still holds a great deal of fear for all women. The idea that my husband could make any demand of me, and I would be expected to offer myself up to him as to Christ. That’s terrifying. And anyone who doesn’t find that terrifying and respect the power that such fear holds for women obviously knows very little history. There was a time when women were seen as less than men- as property, as pawns in a game of chess, as a method through which to gain an heir and keep the house clean and often little more. We all should know this fact because that time was roughly when Ephesians would have been written in the first place. And the thought of women as lesser continued for some time. Daughters were the property of their fathers while sons gained autonomy, wives were possessions, women were thought of to gain a soul later in life then men, to be more prone to witchcraft and evil, to need this evil purged from them by a heavy hand as much as possible.
Women were on a level above cattle, but sometimes it doesn’t feel like much of one. Honestly. The right to vote and hold property is still a historically recent one.
And the idea that a husband “can’t” rape his wife is still one being debated in some circles.
So let’s talk about submission, in frank terms, and let’s not mince words. Does anyone reading this believe that I should submit to my husband if he allocates money that needs to go to feeding my children to buy himself a gaming system? Does anyone believe that Ephesians five requires me to submit myself to his will when he demands sex and I’m ill, or tired, or otherwise not compliantly disposed to the idea? Does anyone believe that if my husband heard a word that he should take a second wife, that I should say, “yes dear?” I’m hoping most would say no, because these are extreme examples.
But what about less extreme examples? What if I am sick, and exhausted, and don’t have the energy to cook a meal, and my husband complains that he’s been working all day and shouldn’t have to work at home? Or what if I haven’t seen my family in over half a year and he demands that we spend Christmas with his, meaning that I won’t get to see mine? Or what if I feel God is calling me to a position in my local church body and my husband says that he will not have his wife teaching other men, and forbids me to do it?
Do I really submit to him in all things, to the cost of my body, my family, my calling?
Or by submitting to my husband, would I in some things draw myself further away from God? In order for both my husband and I to follow God and serve him with all our hearts, my submission to him MUST follow, CANNOT be without his submission to God and his loving me as his own body. These things are NOT seperable. Likewise his loving me as his own body and cleansing me as Christ cleansed the church MUST be, CANNOT be without my submission to him.
Both parties must obey God in their commands, or one will get hurt. That is the beauty of the arrangement- the two become one, or they don’t function, period.
Now, in case I haven’t made myself clear:
- The wife does not, by submitting, become her husband’s possession or subordinate. She is his servant, but by choice alone.
- The husband, should he demonstrate a pattern of making unfair demands or abusing his wife’s submissive position, is not acting in a holy manner and should be called on it- first by his wife, then by his church.
- Both partners serve God first and each other second- if either one interferes with the other’s servitude to God, something is wrong.
- Children come first. If either one places demands on the other that interferes with the raising of their children, something is wrong.
- If something is wrong, both need to go before God and their local spiritual leaders and sort it all out.
I’ve seen numerous books on the subject which talk about how women can win over their husbands through loving submission. And at it’s root it’s not a bad thing. It’s in the Bible! The problem comes when it’s taken to far. Anything, no matter how good, no matter how holy, becomes bad when not delt with in reason and moderation. When a woman stays with a drunk who is abusing her kids to win him over in loving submission, it’s not good. When a wife does nothing about her husband overpowering and raping her to win him over in loving submission, I am sure that is not what God intended.
These concepts must be handled with the respect they deserve, because mishandling them takes advantage of weakness and can lead to real damage.
And I guess that’s what I needed to say.
