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thrillingdetectivetales) wrote2020-07-24 07:24 pm
thrillingdetectivetales) wrote2020-07-24 07:24 pm
Entry tags:
"The Father Tongue and Other Stories"
So, I turned in my first "essay" to my spiritual nonfiction class this past weekend. It's not really an essay, inasmuch as a series of vaguely connected scenes, though I plan to revise and expand it going forward. I haven't decided if I want to take the true essay route or if I want to go in a more memoir direction, but I thought I might share it here in case anyone cares to read/offer feedback. (No obligation, or anything, but what use is a journal if you don't throw your own weird personal shit out there every once in awhile, y'dig?)
As it's spiritual nonfiction, you can probably guess that it mostly deals with God stuff. Largely with the slow departure of my faith and my background growing up as a member of a Pentecostal Charismatic congregation.
My step-mother spoke in tongues. Not always, and never with the howling fervor that overtook some members of our congregation, but quietly, under her breath, with her eyes closed and her hands lifted in open-palmed reverence unto the heavens. It was a regular enough occurrence that I grew used to seeing her at it, to the whispered cadence of foreign syllables rolling from her mouth in a vaguely familiar linguistic rhythm.
“It’s the language of the angels,” she told me once. Mystified, I asked her how she learned it.
She explained that it was divine knowledge, sacred speech delivered by God straight into the mouths of His most devout believers, so that they might communicate their prayers to Him without need of translation. “It’s a gift,” she explained, “like prophecy, or healing. The Holy Spirit fills you and blesses you with it.”
I had never been blessed, as far as I knew. Certainly not with the ability to speak a language from beyond this earthly realm. I asked my father if it was expected of us, worried that I might never earn the Lord’s favor, and he told me that I should only do it if it felt right, and that nobody would judge me if it never happened.
I tried at the next service anyway, just a word or two, so much garbled nonsense muttered to myself as the band segued between songs. I felt foolish, and was struck with the sudden surety that if I kept on in that manner someone would hear me, know that I was faking, and announce my sin to the congregation. It was a shame I thought might kill me, so I turned my attention back to worship and sang along with the hymns in a language I already spoke.
Harmonizing to the music in church is the closest I’ve ever really gotten to speaking in tongues, or any of the Lord’s divine gifts, though I felt unaccountably blessed the time that Pastor Tina, the leader of the church choir, saw fit to give me one half of a duet in the Christmas musical. The other little girl who’d been cast was the pastor’s grand-daughter, which, my father explained to me through a buoyant cresting of pride, was nepotism. Nepotism, he continued, meant that my triumph in the matter was greater than hers.
It was not a blessing by God’s grace, but rather by that of Pastor Tina. Still, I hoped it was a step in the right direction, and that I would soon begin to reap the fruits of devotion that had imbued so many of our congregation.
It wasn’t until high school, when I joined a chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes for a brief, doomed stint during my freshman year, that I realized not every house of worship saw such an abundance of blessings.
There were a variety of Christian backgrounds represented, but I was the lone Pentecostal Charismatic amongst mostly Baptists and Evangelicals. I didn’t really understand what that meant until someone characterized my church as “the one where people yell and fall down and stuff.” In retrospect, it seems a fair, if oversimplified, description of how Valley Haven Church operated, but at the time I was desperate to make friends at a new school and being singled out as the weirdest of the religious weirdoes was not the foot I had hoped to start out on.
One girl asked if it was true that members of our congregation regularly fainted.
“Yes,” I told her, surprised that she was asking. I had assumed it happened everywhere.
“What about snakes?” a boy piped up. “I heard you keep a box of them in the pulpit.” Somebody else wanted to know if we exclusively employed rattlers in our faith healing, seeing as they were abundant here in Arizona, or if we ordered our snakes in from other states.
“No!” I felt hot out to my earlobes and my stomach started working itself into a Gordian knot. “Snakes are the devil's work. My dad says any church that uses them is as good as inviting Satan in the front door.”
I have since revised my opinion on snakes, thanks in large part to a ball python called Bella I met several years later. She belonged to my cousin’s high school boyfriend, Jordan, and was about as long as my arm, with forest-dark banding along her emerald body and sweet black eyes and surprisingly kittenish features. I would wear her at house parties when Jordan was hosting them, her body coiled around my throat and extending down the collar of my shirt, tucked into the heat of my chest. She would curl her tail around my sleeve, like a child afraid to be lost at the supermarket, and occasionally poke her head up to flick her thin pink tongue into the air.
I was seventeen, then, and fairly confident that God couldn’t hear me regardless of what language I was speaking, so there didn’t seem to be much harm in fraternizing with one of Satan’s creatures. Bella never gave me reason to regret that decision, though I look back on what I got up to at those house parties sometimes and cringe.
I attended another prayer group in college, and while nobody asked me about my background or accused me of consorting with serpents, it turned out that four years and change wasn't quite enough to wash the bad taste from my mouth. I availed myself of a muffin and sang some familiar hymns and very carefully didn't give out my phone number so I couldn't be invited back a second time.
I don’t remember exactly when my family started attending Valley Haven Church, but the congregation moved into a larger location when I was seven, or maybe eight, and that’s the building that comes to mind whenever I think back on my spiritual upbringing. There had been another before it, with dingy brown carpeting and sloping popcorn ceilings and high, narrow windows, where we were relegated to the balcony more often than not because my sister and I could never be coaxed out of bed early enough to secure more estimable seating.
The new church was bigger, brighter, done up in soothing blues and crisp whites and soft dove greys. There were digital projection screens at either side of the sanctuary and another directly behind the pulpit, camouflaging a baptismal pool on a raised dais. The stage was wide enough to accommodate the choir on one side and the band on the other, with room left over for Pastor Davies to prowl and perform as he liked to do while he delivered his sermons. The stage descended down onto the congregation floor via an array of shallow, carpeted steps. After the sermon, Pastor Davies would invite any member of his flock in need of personalized prayer to kneel on those steps, and he and his two sons—college-educated pastors in their own rights—would walk amongst them, bending low and close and seeing to their spiritual needs.
More often than not, there would be a woman laid out in the aisle between the pews and the steps, supine in her Sunday best with her spit-polished heels twitching against the carpet as she thrashed in the throes of religious euphoria. Not a single, specific woman, but a rotating cast of them in ankle-length skirts and color-coordinated blouses, being carefully guided to the floor by the surrounding church-goers so they didn’t injure themselves in their ecstasy.
My step-mother never fainted, but she knelt on the steps sometimes. So did my father, on rarer occasion, and so did I, once, because we’d just received news that an uncle on our mother’s side had a brain tumor, and supplicating oneself in times of illness was how good Christians helped to heal. My sister must have been with me—we were young enough at the time that there was very little we didn’t do together—but I can’t remember for certain. It felt like a solitary experience, like standing under a spotlight on opening night when you haven’t rehearsed enough and can’t remember your lines.
Pastor Davies came by and put his hands on our shoulders, benevolent and fatherly. He ducked his head in close and led us in prayer, and I tried to believe that I could feel the gift of the Lord’s healing like a light in my body. I wanted to carry it into the hospital and shine it over my uncle where he was nursing a six-inch suture in his skull, drive the Devil’s shadow out and the cancer along with it.
There was a woman just last week, Pastor Davies had said, whose family had all gathered on the steps and basked in the glow of God’s grace long enough to reflect it onto their grandmother like the sun off the moon’s face. She had been healed.
I prayed with all the power in my skinny limbs that my uncle might be due the same miracle.
My uncle recovered, but it was a grueling process that took years of chemotherapy and more additional surgeries than I can accurately recall. I couldn’t say whether God had a hand in it or not, but I do know that I walked out of the hospital and back into church the next weekend certain that, unlike the rest of the favored flock in our congregation, I was a dim bulb.
A few years after the cathedral upgrade, my parents and the rest of their Bible study group decided that Pastor Davies had made some misstep in the theological politics of congregational leadership and agreed to begin attending services at the home of some of the Bible study members. The particular reasoning was never explained to me, as I was only twelve at the time and had no need to concern myself with those sorts of matters. It was simply announced one morning that we would no longer be attending Valley Haven Church, but would instead be participating in a smaller congregation with Pastor Tom and Pastor Linda, who I had known up until that point as simply Tom and Linda Fordham.
Pastor Tom and Pastor Linda had a house in a nicer part of town, architecture not quite up to the standard of a McMansion but yearning toward it. Floor-to-ceiling windows cut swathes of morning sun across the marbled floor and interior water fixtures burbled between lush arrangements of tropical plants in huge, glazed pots. The faint scent of wet earth lingered on the air, overpowered by the cloying chemical vanilla of commercial candles and the sugar-stink of the spread laid out across a nearby counter—an array of baked goods in flimsy plastic containers, procured last-minute from the local supermarket because Pastor Linda didn’t cook, and neither did my parents, or most of the other attendees milling about the kitchen.
She didn’t tend the plants either, I learned when I asked later. Hired help came through to pluck, and prune, and nurture. It made sense when I considered Pastor Linda’s style. She was a thickset woman, which suited her, and she flattered her figure with a variety of flowing clothes—gauzy floral dresses and elegant monochrome pantsuits and sweeping shawls in vibrant animal prints. Her shoes were always sharp and her nails always at least an inch and a half long, painted with stark cherry reds or rich royal blues and dotted with rhinestones. She wore her hair straightened and nearly shellacked to her head, and a month or two before I started high school my parents sent me off with her for spiritual guidance.
I sat in the passenger’s seat of Pastor Linda’s lemon-yellow Humvee, enjoying a smoothie as she explained to me that if I wanted the other kids at school to take me seriously, I needed to invest in a designer handbag and better shoes. Going on thirteen, and with a sense of humor still in desperate need of refinement, I joked that I was planning to wear a different cat shirt every day of the first week. That would cement my personality as well as a designer handbag, and seeing as half my wardrobe at the time consisted of cat shirts, it seemed a markedly more affordable method by which to make a memorable statement.
Pastor Linda’s lip curled when she told me I didn’t want to do that. She had been blessed with the gift of prophecy, everybody said, so I figured she must be at least a little right. I didn’t buy the handbag—if God wanted me to have one, I reasoned, He would send me a check—but I compromised on the cat shirts.
A little while after that, my parents quietly started taking us back to Valley Haven Church. Before we left their congregation, Pastor Tom delivered a sermon where he talked about doing things by halves. It was meant, I think, to energize the audience, to instill in us the fortitude to enact great workings of faith. He stuck for some time on the phrase "hell in a handbasket."
It was misleading, Pastor Tom said. Certainly the feckless heathens of the world weren't content to traipse down to hell in a measly little handbasket. They were committed to the decline of this country, and the world, and a handbasket wouldn't be enough to get them there, no matter how many festive ribbons were tied around its handle. We Christians, he reasoned, need to match their fervor.
"If you're going to Hell," he said, presumably speaking from the perspective of one of our mortal enemies, "don't do it in a handbasket. Do it in a Learjet!"
Alright, I thought. If you insist.
As it's spiritual nonfiction, you can probably guess that it mostly deals with God stuff. Largely with the slow departure of my faith and my background growing up as a member of a Pentecostal Charismatic congregation.
My step-mother spoke in tongues. Not always, and never with the howling fervor that overtook some members of our congregation, but quietly, under her breath, with her eyes closed and her hands lifted in open-palmed reverence unto the heavens. It was a regular enough occurrence that I grew used to seeing her at it, to the whispered cadence of foreign syllables rolling from her mouth in a vaguely familiar linguistic rhythm.
“It’s the language of the angels,” she told me once. Mystified, I asked her how she learned it.
She explained that it was divine knowledge, sacred speech delivered by God straight into the mouths of His most devout believers, so that they might communicate their prayers to Him without need of translation. “It’s a gift,” she explained, “like prophecy, or healing. The Holy Spirit fills you and blesses you with it.”
I had never been blessed, as far as I knew. Certainly not with the ability to speak a language from beyond this earthly realm. I asked my father if it was expected of us, worried that I might never earn the Lord’s favor, and he told me that I should only do it if it felt right, and that nobody would judge me if it never happened.
I tried at the next service anyway, just a word or two, so much garbled nonsense muttered to myself as the band segued between songs. I felt foolish, and was struck with the sudden surety that if I kept on in that manner someone would hear me, know that I was faking, and announce my sin to the congregation. It was a shame I thought might kill me, so I turned my attention back to worship and sang along with the hymns in a language I already spoke.
Harmonizing to the music in church is the closest I’ve ever really gotten to speaking in tongues, or any of the Lord’s divine gifts, though I felt unaccountably blessed the time that Pastor Tina, the leader of the church choir, saw fit to give me one half of a duet in the Christmas musical. The other little girl who’d been cast was the pastor’s grand-daughter, which, my father explained to me through a buoyant cresting of pride, was nepotism. Nepotism, he continued, meant that my triumph in the matter was greater than hers.
It was not a blessing by God’s grace, but rather by that of Pastor Tina. Still, I hoped it was a step in the right direction, and that I would soon begin to reap the fruits of devotion that had imbued so many of our congregation.
It wasn’t until high school, when I joined a chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes for a brief, doomed stint during my freshman year, that I realized not every house of worship saw such an abundance of blessings.
There were a variety of Christian backgrounds represented, but I was the lone Pentecostal Charismatic amongst mostly Baptists and Evangelicals. I didn’t really understand what that meant until someone characterized my church as “the one where people yell and fall down and stuff.” In retrospect, it seems a fair, if oversimplified, description of how Valley Haven Church operated, but at the time I was desperate to make friends at a new school and being singled out as the weirdest of the religious weirdoes was not the foot I had hoped to start out on.
One girl asked if it was true that members of our congregation regularly fainted.
“Yes,” I told her, surprised that she was asking. I had assumed it happened everywhere.
“What about snakes?” a boy piped up. “I heard you keep a box of them in the pulpit.” Somebody else wanted to know if we exclusively employed rattlers in our faith healing, seeing as they were abundant here in Arizona, or if we ordered our snakes in from other states.
“No!” I felt hot out to my earlobes and my stomach started working itself into a Gordian knot. “Snakes are the devil's work. My dad says any church that uses them is as good as inviting Satan in the front door.”
I have since revised my opinion on snakes, thanks in large part to a ball python called Bella I met several years later. She belonged to my cousin’s high school boyfriend, Jordan, and was about as long as my arm, with forest-dark banding along her emerald body and sweet black eyes and surprisingly kittenish features. I would wear her at house parties when Jordan was hosting them, her body coiled around my throat and extending down the collar of my shirt, tucked into the heat of my chest. She would curl her tail around my sleeve, like a child afraid to be lost at the supermarket, and occasionally poke her head up to flick her thin pink tongue into the air.
I was seventeen, then, and fairly confident that God couldn’t hear me regardless of what language I was speaking, so there didn’t seem to be much harm in fraternizing with one of Satan’s creatures. Bella never gave me reason to regret that decision, though I look back on what I got up to at those house parties sometimes and cringe.
I attended another prayer group in college, and while nobody asked me about my background or accused me of consorting with serpents, it turned out that four years and change wasn't quite enough to wash the bad taste from my mouth. I availed myself of a muffin and sang some familiar hymns and very carefully didn't give out my phone number so I couldn't be invited back a second time.
I don’t remember exactly when my family started attending Valley Haven Church, but the congregation moved into a larger location when I was seven, or maybe eight, and that’s the building that comes to mind whenever I think back on my spiritual upbringing. There had been another before it, with dingy brown carpeting and sloping popcorn ceilings and high, narrow windows, where we were relegated to the balcony more often than not because my sister and I could never be coaxed out of bed early enough to secure more estimable seating.
The new church was bigger, brighter, done up in soothing blues and crisp whites and soft dove greys. There were digital projection screens at either side of the sanctuary and another directly behind the pulpit, camouflaging a baptismal pool on a raised dais. The stage was wide enough to accommodate the choir on one side and the band on the other, with room left over for Pastor Davies to prowl and perform as he liked to do while he delivered his sermons. The stage descended down onto the congregation floor via an array of shallow, carpeted steps. After the sermon, Pastor Davies would invite any member of his flock in need of personalized prayer to kneel on those steps, and he and his two sons—college-educated pastors in their own rights—would walk amongst them, bending low and close and seeing to their spiritual needs.
More often than not, there would be a woman laid out in the aisle between the pews and the steps, supine in her Sunday best with her spit-polished heels twitching against the carpet as she thrashed in the throes of religious euphoria. Not a single, specific woman, but a rotating cast of them in ankle-length skirts and color-coordinated blouses, being carefully guided to the floor by the surrounding church-goers so they didn’t injure themselves in their ecstasy.
My step-mother never fainted, but she knelt on the steps sometimes. So did my father, on rarer occasion, and so did I, once, because we’d just received news that an uncle on our mother’s side had a brain tumor, and supplicating oneself in times of illness was how good Christians helped to heal. My sister must have been with me—we were young enough at the time that there was very little we didn’t do together—but I can’t remember for certain. It felt like a solitary experience, like standing under a spotlight on opening night when you haven’t rehearsed enough and can’t remember your lines.
Pastor Davies came by and put his hands on our shoulders, benevolent and fatherly. He ducked his head in close and led us in prayer, and I tried to believe that I could feel the gift of the Lord’s healing like a light in my body. I wanted to carry it into the hospital and shine it over my uncle where he was nursing a six-inch suture in his skull, drive the Devil’s shadow out and the cancer along with it.
There was a woman just last week, Pastor Davies had said, whose family had all gathered on the steps and basked in the glow of God’s grace long enough to reflect it onto their grandmother like the sun off the moon’s face. She had been healed.
I prayed with all the power in my skinny limbs that my uncle might be due the same miracle.
My uncle recovered, but it was a grueling process that took years of chemotherapy and more additional surgeries than I can accurately recall. I couldn’t say whether God had a hand in it or not, but I do know that I walked out of the hospital and back into church the next weekend certain that, unlike the rest of the favored flock in our congregation, I was a dim bulb.
A few years after the cathedral upgrade, my parents and the rest of their Bible study group decided that Pastor Davies had made some misstep in the theological politics of congregational leadership and agreed to begin attending services at the home of some of the Bible study members. The particular reasoning was never explained to me, as I was only twelve at the time and had no need to concern myself with those sorts of matters. It was simply announced one morning that we would no longer be attending Valley Haven Church, but would instead be participating in a smaller congregation with Pastor Tom and Pastor Linda, who I had known up until that point as simply Tom and Linda Fordham.
Pastor Tom and Pastor Linda had a house in a nicer part of town, architecture not quite up to the standard of a McMansion but yearning toward it. Floor-to-ceiling windows cut swathes of morning sun across the marbled floor and interior water fixtures burbled between lush arrangements of tropical plants in huge, glazed pots. The faint scent of wet earth lingered on the air, overpowered by the cloying chemical vanilla of commercial candles and the sugar-stink of the spread laid out across a nearby counter—an array of baked goods in flimsy plastic containers, procured last-minute from the local supermarket because Pastor Linda didn’t cook, and neither did my parents, or most of the other attendees milling about the kitchen.
She didn’t tend the plants either, I learned when I asked later. Hired help came through to pluck, and prune, and nurture. It made sense when I considered Pastor Linda’s style. She was a thickset woman, which suited her, and she flattered her figure with a variety of flowing clothes—gauzy floral dresses and elegant monochrome pantsuits and sweeping shawls in vibrant animal prints. Her shoes were always sharp and her nails always at least an inch and a half long, painted with stark cherry reds or rich royal blues and dotted with rhinestones. She wore her hair straightened and nearly shellacked to her head, and a month or two before I started high school my parents sent me off with her for spiritual guidance.
I sat in the passenger’s seat of Pastor Linda’s lemon-yellow Humvee, enjoying a smoothie as she explained to me that if I wanted the other kids at school to take me seriously, I needed to invest in a designer handbag and better shoes. Going on thirteen, and with a sense of humor still in desperate need of refinement, I joked that I was planning to wear a different cat shirt every day of the first week. That would cement my personality as well as a designer handbag, and seeing as half my wardrobe at the time consisted of cat shirts, it seemed a markedly more affordable method by which to make a memorable statement.
Pastor Linda’s lip curled when she told me I didn’t want to do that. She had been blessed with the gift of prophecy, everybody said, so I figured she must be at least a little right. I didn’t buy the handbag—if God wanted me to have one, I reasoned, He would send me a check—but I compromised on the cat shirts.
A little while after that, my parents quietly started taking us back to Valley Haven Church. Before we left their congregation, Pastor Tom delivered a sermon where he talked about doing things by halves. It was meant, I think, to energize the audience, to instill in us the fortitude to enact great workings of faith. He stuck for some time on the phrase "hell in a handbasket."
It was misleading, Pastor Tom said. Certainly the feckless heathens of the world weren't content to traipse down to hell in a measly little handbasket. They were committed to the decline of this country, and the world, and a handbasket wouldn't be enough to get them there, no matter how many festive ribbons were tied around its handle. We Christians, he reasoned, need to match their fervor.
"If you're going to Hell," he said, presumably speaking from the perspective of one of our mortal enemies, "don't do it in a handbasket. Do it in a Learjet!"
Alright, I thought. If you insist.
no subject
Or well okay my church of origin was a bit eccentric even by Pentacostal Charismatic standards, but that's the well from which our communes etc sprung, and churches like Valley Haven (and house churches!) were where my family landed when we started to join mainstream society in my late teens.
So, I suspect we share a lot of those same feelings about tongues and healing and prophecy. It's so hard to explain to anyone who never had that as their default-normal. It doesn't always feel weird while it's happening, and the human responses to things are all still there. It's just...it's a whole-ass Experience, isn't it, living that way and then slowly finding your perspective changing.
And yes, to the experience of other Christians reacting as if you/your church are some kind of batshit crazy weirdos. 💔
I tried to speak in tongues too. It never felt like something I wasn't making up. Same with a lot of the rest of it. I've said to Mucca that it felt like living in a world where everyone insists that magic is real, but you can't see or feel or work it yourself. You quickly gain the impression that you're defective. Some people go on to decide that everyone must have been faking it. I'm still not sure--I've talked to people who sincerely did seem to have real stuff happening. But for me... 🤷🏽♀️🤷🏼♀️🤷🏻♀️
❤❤❤
no subject
It 100% is. And I think that's the hardest part to get across is how not-strange it seems, until suddenly it does? I don't know, I've struggled for a really long time with figuring out how to explain my feelings re: the Pentecostal Charismatic faith and my personal relationship with it and the best way I've been able to do so is just by like, telling people what it was like and letting them draw their own conclusions, but even that isn't very accurate at the end of the day.
And yes, to the experience of other Christians reacting as if you/your church are some kind of batshit crazy weirdos.
YES. This was like, SO DEVASTATING to me as a child/early teen who was starting to see fissures in their family's faith practices but still wanted to believe in something. It was really jarring to be clinging to the belief that there was higher power that loved indiscriminately and walk face-first into discrimination after discrimination while trying to find an avenue to that higher power that felt more true.
I've said to Mucca that it felt like living in a world where everyone insists that magic is real, but you can't see or feel or work it yourself.
THIS. 100% THIS. What an elegant way to put it, wow. Yes. It's exactly like that. And I totally get you on the whole, assumption that everyone is faking despite the fact that people seem to have some real stuff happening.
I was talking about it with a friend the other day and explained it as like, I know it's never been true for me. I've never felt like any of the Charismatic gifts were an actual power that I wielded or had access to, and even if that's the factual truth and it's just the human desire to be special and connected to God in this particular way, I think there's a beauty in that yearning and in wanting so desperately to feel the presence of your God there with you that you manifest it yourself in ways other people can't understand.
I don't know, it's a whole big complicated thing and I'm still angry about a lot of it at the same time that I like, miss parts of it? I wouldn't go back but I've definitely grieved some for what I lost when I had a sort of shattering of that particular faith.
Anyway, yes, it's totally an Experience and it's a really hard one to explain and I'm glad that you're out there and you Get It (even if yours was further along the bonkers scale than mine) because it's so rare that people do. <33333
no subject
the best way I've been able to do so is just by like, telling people what it was like and letting them draw their own conclusions, but even that isn't very accurate at the end of the day
Same. Sometimes the plain simple description gets the most across--or else I just don't even know where to start with describing how it felt and how my feelings have changed over the years, so I just go with plain facts and that works as well as anything. And then sometimes you just had to kind of be there, you know?
I know it's never been true for me
Yes. That was really hard to come to terms with, but it's the honest truth for me as well. It eventually felt freeing to admit that (along with admitting that I don't know if God exists, I'm no longer obsessed with being sure, and I even find some beauty in the ambiguity) but it still sometimes gives me vertigo to compare what the inside of my head used to look like with how it does now--because I used to think a) all this stuff was vitally important and b) there was something wrong with me that I could never get it to click. 🤷🏻♀️
even if that's the factual truth and it's just the human desire to be special and connected to God in this particular way, I think there's a beauty in that yearning and in wanting so desperately to feel the presence of your God there with you that you manifest it yourself
Oof. That's just made something click for me, thank you. YES, that yearning, that longing--sometimes it was so thick you could cut it with a knife. I know people felt that. I'm not entirely sure if I ever longed to know God (I do know that I longed to feel all the right things that "everyone else" felt, but I think that was more about desperately wanting not to feel alienated and bad at this supremely vital thing) but I know other people did. And I don't think I've encountered that same incredible heart-aching longing anywhere else. Except maybe in queer fiction, where it's the longing to be seen and known and allowed to love who you do love.
[ETA: And that is why, even though it was never real for me, I can't really write it all off in a way that mocks the people it was real for. Sure, there are frauds and hucksters and people drunk on their own egos. But there are also people for whom all these strange behaviours and unusual beliefs are part of a genuine longing to connect with the ground of their being. Part of something real, for them. And I can't mock that part.]
But yeah. That shit blows your eyebrows off. I still have no idea if the love and longing is coming from inside people or from outside them, like whether it's their brains processing life in a specific way mine doesn't or if there's really A Someone Out There they're talking to and in love with. But the yearning is absolutely being felt.
(Just not by me. Is this what it's like being asexual at an orgy? It's not an accident that I compare how I feel to the feeling of being gay in a straight society I guess (even though I'm bi irl and sometimes feel the het feels). Unsure if that makes sense or if my metaphor has run away with me!)
it's a whole big complicated thing and I'm still angry about a lot of it at the same time that I like, miss parts of it? I wouldn't go back but I've definitely grieved some for what I lost
Yes. All of that. ❤
💕
no subject
I really love your writing in this. You have some really fantastic descriptive phrases. 😍
no subject
And thank you for the lovely compliment! <33 I'm glad you enjoyed it~
no subject
I'm kinda glad my parents didn't really take us to church. We went to a Chinese Methodist church for a little bit before my siblings were born. It was very singy from what I recall but I never sat through a full service as I was in the Sunday school with the other kids.
no subject
It was definitely a defining experience of my life, lol. We did Sunday School, too, which was a whole other Thing that I didn't feel like going into in this one, but yeah. I'm not sure if I'm better or worse off for having been regularly exposed to this particular church, but I guess we'll never really know, lol. Singy churches are the superior churches and anyone who disagrees can fight me.
no subject
Singy churches are the superior churches and anyone who disagrees can fight me
True facts! 😆
no subject
This is such a different church experience than I had coming from a poor Catholic background. I've never heard of "speaking in tongues" being viewed as good thing! For us that phrase was a bad thing across the board. It's so wild how different all the branches of Christianity can be.
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Yeah, as far as I know the Charismatic faith branches are the only ones where this particular type of speaking in tongues is considered good rather than kind of cringe-worthy. Seeing the deviations in the root faith is really super interesting, for sure. My older step-sister, who was well out of the house by the time we were attending church in somebody's foyer, went to Catholic churches for awhile as an adult because she liked the ceremony of them. I went with her a couple of times and it was nice but I didn't want to learn a bunch of new ritual practices, lol.
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I appreciate your input always, but especially on this. <333