There are a few things that I really struggle with still on my spiritual journey.
The first is big: One of the main tenets of the AA program beyond the 12 Steps is this powerful principle of how holding onto resentments is tantamount to poisoning yourself. You're effectively accomplishing little more than, as they put it, beating yourself in the head with the club you'd like to use on the other person. But even though I know this to be true in my heart, and I've done a lot of work and come a long way on letting go many resentments, there is still one in particular that I struggle to reconcile.
The second is even bigger: if I hate people because I perceive that their actions are hateful, then I am no better than they are, ultimately. In fact, I become the same thing as what they are, just in a different form. The world is positively sick with this very problem right now... in trying to fight back against those who certain groups passionately believe are perpetuating injustice, intolerance, and bigotry, so many members become themselves just as unjust, intolerant, and bigoted...complete with a justification for being this way that is the equivalent provided by the oppositional party.
That's the trouble: resentments are poison. They will bring about the destruction of everything within us that is goodness and love. And without goodness and love as our guiding, motivational force from within, then we are just adding to the chaos, the strife, the dissonance of the endless plunge into the abyss of "us vs. them."
No one is ever the better for it.
Or, in the words of a protest sign I saw circa-2003: Fighting for Peace is Like Fucking for Chastity.
But, for the sake of real talk, even with all this in mind, I still struggle mightily with resentment towards those people and/or entities that use religion as a weapon to hurt others, and at the very least, launch out on a campaign of fear to try to compel people into adopting their system of belief.
Jesus preached such a clear message of love, but in my experience, one which has been maligned in such a backwards, inverted manner over and over, ceaselessly, in the four decades I've been on this earth by so many of those claiming to be Christians appear the motivated in their faith by pure, unadulterated fear.
Yes, fear... as if the "fear the Lord" thing in the Bible was meant to be taken literally. They adhere to the tenets of this faith because they seem literally afraid that failure to do so to the most extreme degrees possible means that they will spend an eternity in hell.
Legalists. Fundies. They're everywhere.
For those who are on the outside of this faith, as I myself once solidly was, this fear is repellant.
Literally.
Who on earth would want to come from the outside and into a faith where the followers thereof are on an obsessive quest to put as much certainty between themselves and eternal damnation as they can?
I know that for this outsider, even from a young age, I knew that from this perspective, to do so anywhere near perfectly enough to even breathe a sigh of relief was impossible.
Because that's the thing--we're all imperfect. Deeply, fundamentally, irrevocably imperfect.
It's literally how we were made, even in the context of this faith... there was one season of human perfection at the beginning, but then, oops...the original creation themselves fell short, and so it was that we were all doomed to fall short until the end of time because if you gain nothing else from a perusal of the Old Testament, it's that God can really hold a grudge.
And that's why the part in the Bible about Jesus being sent down here to die for our sins so that we might be forgiven as often as we need to be really matters, because... in and of ourselves, we literally cannot ever do enough to performance art ourselves out of hell.
But why is it that the fear-focused pedants somehow seem to skip over that part of the Bible? At least they always struck me as doing so for the majority of my life. The way that these people lived demonstrated to me nothing of what I learned so much later than I needed to...that Jesus was love itself, His sacrifice was a greater love than there ever could be, and because of this, when we accepted Him into our hearts, we were in the clear because... we are saved by grace through faith in Christ Jesus and not by our own efforts or works (Ephesians 2:8-9).
And so, this is where we should rest. We should be embraced by this love, and allow ourselves to grow this love within ourselves and allow it to transform us.
Because honestly? When this is the foundation, there is a motivation that stirs up your heart and you start to want to seek guidance from scripture and pray to be lifted up and manifest this grace, this promise, in your daily life.
You want to try your best to do the right things because you are motivated by a desire to love God back as hard as He has loved you. And you accept that even though you'll try your best, you'll fall short. But you can rest in the fact that even when this happens (because it will, and often), His love for you is unchanged. He's always got His hand out to help you back up. And the best part of all... maybe (hopefully) you'll never stomp around thumping a Bible in your hand and quoting parts of it at people. But know what will happen, when you strive from this place? People will see something in you that inspires them. People will want to know what you did to get to where you are, and they may ask. And then...then you can tell them. Because maybe they will want to hear, and why?
Because you showed them first.
You showed them that you found a faith that works for you. You showed them that you believe in a God that is all loving and all forgiving, at all times, no matter who you are, who you've been. You showed them that by embracing this love and finding within it your own personal truth, that this loving, supportive, unconditional connection gives you peace, joy, and strength that will endure through trials and difficulties that ought to have crushed you.
It really is that simple.
Don't take my word for it. Look at who Jesus really was, what Jesus actually did, and everything that follows in which we are reminded and guided toward who we ought to pray to be and allow to be done through us.
But yet... the fundies. The legalists.
The modern day hypocrites and pharisees who in days of old were shouting and praying in the streets for everyone to see how holy and righteous they were, who now blast this behavior out over social media, turn it into a brand, promote it on swag, emblazon it in books.
Ah, yes: We're RIGHTEOUS! You're DOING IT WRONG! If you're not doing it the exact ways that we're telling you that you should, well... you can just go and get...well, you know.
This grace of life to which every person on earth is heir, for Jesus died for ALL of us...is made out to be an exclusive members only club that oftentimes once some of these megalomaniacs get big and loud enough you literally have to pay a fee to buy into...oh, the retreats, the workshops, the speakings, the conferences. Where the hypocrites and pharisees can parade about on a stage to engage in the same behavior that Jesus Himself angrily clarified in Matthew 23 that He had NO patience for.
And what purpose does this serve? None of any kind that Jesus was all about. Yes, these modern dayers do this thing and the whole purpose is to narcissistically gratify their own perverse egotistical need to be holier than, better than, more righteous than everyone else and what they are concerned about is how many likes, follows, devotees they can accumulate.
Meanwhile? How many people, people just like I used to be, who were imperfect, lost, struggling, full of self-loathing, people who have a deeper, more palpable need for a sustaining relationship with an all-loving God than average, are they alienating?
Answer: all of them.
But do they care? Why, of course not! They're the proverbial mean girls, the queen bees of the world holding court in the high school cafeteria that is the world gathered en masse on these platforms. They are WINNING. They are the popular kids, the girls with the shiniest hair, the nicest clothes, the highest degree of privilege. And anyone who does not bow down and kiss their feet and hail them as the be-all, end-all of Christian wisdom and how to apply it, well...
...just as was the case in high school, we the proverbial denizens of the Isle of Misfit toys can just slink off into the shadows, shamed. That's right. And sometimes, these entities will literally en masse shame others who dare to have a different perspective than them.
I won't name names, but I will just say a popular fundie duo who are everything I'm talking about here had a big, expensive, exclusive conference and literally broadcast a video of a faith vlogger who had an alternate perspective on Christianity and shamed her, called upon their sycophantic flock to shame her and that is just...so ugly. Ugly in the same way it was in high school when the mean girls decided to single you out for being "different" in some way and enlisted a whole flock of flying monkeys to visit torment upon you.
And... pardon me for a moment, but... it just turns my stomach that people who are on the outside as I was once upon a time look at the Christian faith and this is what they see. This is what they think it is. This is what I thought it was, and boy I'm here to tell you, I wanted no part of it. I already carried the weight of a shame more immense than I could scarcely bear. And these types of people did nothing to try to reach me, and everything to use my own obvious failures to shame me further, to use me as something to step on to elevate themselves higher.
I am grateful, however, that there are voices--including the particular voice of the vlogger that was publicly shamed--speaking up that are calling out this nonsense for what it is, that are opening up new perspectives for those on the outside to enable understanding that everything this set seeks to put out there about this faith is not what it is even really about.
And I hope, in time, that these voices grow louder and louder and that the message of love becomes louder than this message of fear.
And meanwhile... my husband's son from a former marriage was born to a woman who is a flaming, abject, over-the-top fundie. And, naturally, she insists that an astronomically high rate of tuition be paid for him to attend a private CHRISTIAN school which is little more than a converted warehouse governed by a group of adults who are employed to teach there based solely, it seems, on their possession of scorchingly terrified religiosity and not at all based on possession of relevant degrees/education that would otherwise qualify them to teach; they operate out of a homeschool curriculum book drafted by a large-scale terrified religiosity motivated organization, so who needs actual credentials, am I right? As an educator myself, I shudder to imagine what exactly is in that material and to what degree any of it is factual.
Oh, and of course... the rules:
1. Contemporary Christian music of any kind is prohibited because it sounds secular.
2. Harry Potter is banned because witches/magic/spells = the devil.
3. Halloween is banned. No, they have some kind of ceremony to celebrate Martin Luther.
4: There are no dances, because dancing is evil. This means no senior prom. These kids get dressed up as if they were going to prom, but instead they go sit around a table in a brightly lit room, listen to awards be given out for athletic excellence, they eat, and go home.
Yeah, I just... I can't. And yet, I know I need to let it go, "to each their own" this mess, but... it just gets me fired up because it is hurting people.
Unitarian Universalism advocates a free and responsible search for truth; the Wiccan rede declares, harm none, do what ye will. I'm down with that. But letting go of this resentment is just very hard. I've got a lot more praying to do. And I will do it. Because I don't want to let this resentment or any, for that matter, diminish whatever light God wants to grow in me to help others. And it will. So I must let go.
For now, expressing myself like this helps. And yes, I'll pray. I'll work on healing leftover hurting places within me that this is clearly bringing up... I'll ask God to work through me as I work toward this healing. And I'll just try to focus my energy less on things that are broken, that I can't change nor control, and try to focus it more on things that I can fix, what I can do, to be a part of the solution.
And meanwhile... I'll just keep writing. And doing my best to love God and know that He will always love me. And also, to do my own best to love me. You know... I'm someone who just used blatantly used the F word in a piece discussing Christianity and also someone who totally thinks that we might technically be able to call Jesus a demigod because... the shoe fits.
But you know what, y'all? For real... in the looking back, when I was that lost, hurting teenage girl, I would have trusted someone like me and I would have gained more from someone like me than I ever gained from those that sought to alienate me because they were drowning in their own egos and eaten up with fear.
That's what matters. That will always be the gauge by which I measure whether I'm doing okay enough or not.
And for now, I'm doing okay.
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