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Peace.
Your story is sacred. We would be honored if you would share it with us here and join our community conversation.
Peace.
posted by divalicious at 12:58 PM
4 Comments:
Okay, I'll start. My story is that I have heard voices since I was very young. They're not exactly out loud... but they definitely aren't coming from me. I get information -- like I know things before they're going to happen. I don't know what to call it. But, it is where I put my faith, I guess. I listen to the voices. They almost always give me important "inside information."
I grew up with a very demanding God. He was always whispering that I need to be better. I suspect a combination of things led to this- fearful parents, the Catholic church, later on Sexual abuse, even the positive feedback I got for being a good boy. It was a lot to live up to, and later I found it hard to relax or trust or just be myself.
I found an answer to those voices in my head in high school: Alcohol. Beer, vodka, rum. For the first time I felt unfettered and alive, like God really wanted me to feel, and I was my true self- witty, confident, happy. But, the bad feelings started creeping in, and alcohol stopped working, and things went bad.
In graduate school, I crashed, and I was sent to rehab. I was nearly dismissed from school, had alienated many of my friends, and to top it off, now I had to submit to the inane advice from patients and counselors who didn’t know Me. Who could never understand Me!
I didn’t sleep for days. One night I lay in bed, fuming about all the ways I supposed people had wronged me, furious with God, my friends and everyone connected with the treatment center, asking again and again for God to take away the agony, wanting to rip my chest open to release the pain, when suddenly I heard, no,… felt the words “Let Go. Just let go.” The heaviness in my chest lifted, a joy trembled throughout my body, and I felt like I had found the secret.
I’m not sure I changed that much. I did look at things with a new detachment, forgiveness and love, but that feeling faded in a few days. I like to think I’m not quite so self- absorbed as I once was, but I’m separated from the Great Spirit by ongoing fear, anger and self-centeredness. And I don’t understand a God who lets kids develop cancer or be abused, one who rewards long life with loneliness and decay, or one who allows incomprehensible injustice, poverty and hunger. But thru Grace, I now have a reminder in the center of my chest that there is someone or something much bigger than me that is in control
I’m Jewish – well, that’s how I was raised. My father was Jewish and the rabbi would only marry my father and my non-Jewish mother if they promised to raise their children in the Jewish faith. So, from pre-school to middle school I attended “Jew School” and Sabbath Services. Our family observed Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kipper, Chanukah, Moses, Queen Esther, and all things Jewish, but we were Reform Jews – which means we could eat ham and marry outside the faith. My mother is Christian – she grew up on the Cumberland Plateau and was raised in the Church of Christ. Her mother, my Granny, went to church three times a week: Wednesday night, Sunday morning and Sunday evening, and so did mom and I when we went to see her. Granny’s husband, Pap, went to a different Church of Christ in the same city. I understood why my parents didn’t go to the same house of worship but I was never clear on why Granny and Pap attended different Churches of Christ in the same city. In the small Arkansas town where I grew up, I attended elementary school at the Holy Cross Episcopal Day School where I went to chapel each morning wearing a bobby-pinned lace doily on my head and I had to study the 4 books of the Gospel (in the 5th and 6th grades). Later, when I went to a Catholic middle school, the priest who taught religion visited my father one day at work to tell him that I was the only 7th grader who knew the names of the 4 books of the Gospel and I was JEWISH! Daddy was really proud of that. At the Catholic high school that I attended, I went to mass every week, and when “Jews killed Jesus!” was thrown at me by my classmates, I was ready with “Jesus WAS A JEW, Stupid!” My family always celebrated Christmas. One of Daddy’s favorite Christmas Carols was Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas”, which, he reminded me several times, was written by Irving Berlin, who was Jewish.. My husband is Methodist. I knew about Methodists because in middle school I belonged to MYF – the Methodist Youth Foundation. It was either that or become a “Rainbow Girl”, and that “eyeball” icon on the side of the Masonic Lodge where the Rainbow Girls met really creeped me out. At MYF we sold Tupperware one summer and financed a trip to St, Louis. I liked MYF. Early on I learned that if I prayed to Jesus, my father was hurt – and if I said that Jesus was not God, my mother was hurt. I worried that if I didn’t occasionally go to church with my Christian friends, they may not like me anymore. So, I assimilated very well. I could pull off being a Jew, an Episcopalian, Catholic, Methodist, or a member of the Church or Christ.What I figured out is that labels, religious and otherwise, can hurt. And I know I’m right. Look at the names of places of worship that are desperately trying to avoid labels. Bellevue Community Church; West End Fellowship (which isn’t even on West End); Oasis Worship Center; and The Temple. Is that Jewish, Buddhist, or Hindu, or Voodoo? Those places of worship clearly avoid labeling themselves.I don’t need to belong to a denomination. I don’t want dogma. I have my faith.
Okay, I've been wanting to talk about religion...But with my family and friends, religion is something I discuss less than being verbally/emotionally/possibly kind of even physically abused as a child (which is something I never discuss - meaning that not only do I not discuss my own faith, I actively dodge questions on the subject).
My parents decided before I was born that I would be allowed to decide about religion for myself (their other pre-birth parental decision was that they would never force me to eat lima beans). My father is Methodist, but never goes to church - he did undermine their agreement, though, and try to make me listen to stories out of Bible Stories for Children on Sunday mornings, something that backfired horribly. Trying to force a young child who wants to play to listen to stories about babies getting cut in half and people being thrown to lions doesn't *encourage*...But I very much liked the Greek myths (at least those gods had human attributes and could understand pain). My father's whole family is also non-Church-going Methodist, but all of my uncles married Catholic women and my cousins have been raised that way (which has led to interesting explanations from their parents about how, despite what they learned in Sunday school, I am the one and only non-Catholic not going to Hell...). My mother is somewhere between agnosticism, atheism, and humanism - her mother's family is Buddhist and her father was raised going to church but stopped going when church leaders tried to tell him that marrying my grandmother was a sin (I don't actually know whether or not he actually became an atheist, or if he just stopped going to church...I don't think anyone dares ask him).
I think being allowed to decide about religion for myself was a good thing. Somehow, though I'll never admit it to either of my parents (one would try to make me join the church, the other would yell at me about how awful God is if He lets all of these horrible things happen), I've always believed in God and always prayed. Okay, when I was little I prayed that God would make my stomaches go away...But I was still praying! I'm sort of a combination of pantheism, Deism, Buddhism, and something else...I think that whatever we call God, whether we consider that force one or many, male or female, it's all the same. I go to a Southern Baptist university and in the Old Testament class I was required to take, the professor explained the presences of *other* gods in the Old Testament as God revealing Himself to the people as they could understand him. So why can't we believe that the same omnipotent, omniscient force that drives the universe wouldn't *still* be representing Him/Her/Itself in different ways - in the ways different people need. And I think the same thing about Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Zoroaster, and every other prophet/messiah. Different people need different things, especially from the creative force in the universe, so why do we nitpick about how everyone finds it?
Growing up, I always felt like my religious beliefs were my own thing, and I really like the quote attributed to Buddha, "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense." And I always felt very connected to the universe and to God, just in simple things, like being outdoors. I'm a writer, and I always feel very connected to that force in the universe when I write because I know it's something that comes from beyond me and comes through me. But in the past couple of years, I just haven't felt that connected. I mean, I've written a ton and I do then, but in life itself, I can't *feel* God anymore. I've never doubted the existence of God (since, after all, I decided for myself that He/She/It does exist), but I just don't feel the connection. So I envy people who go to church and really feel it there - the problem with discovering your religion is that you don't have a community. You don't have other people to turn to when you suddenly feel something is missing or something has gone wrong and you've gotten off track.
When the poet Anne Sexton once went to a priest and demanded to see God - she said she actually needed to *see* him, and not in heaven but right at that moment. The priest told her God was in her typewriter - so maybe I should just keep writing and hope I feel that connectedness again, but I just keep thinking that at least she had a priest to go to.
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