An open letter to God
In which I rant and rave and get things off my chest that have been there for years. Warnings for extreme religious and personal content; cut for length and content.
Dear Christianity,
I hate you. Take me back.
Look what you do to me. Look what you reduce me to. I call myself a writer, an English major---words are my strength, and my weapon, and my chosen means of expression, and yet I cannot put into a single cohesive sentence how I feel about you. I sit with my face in my hands, a horrible ache in my chest and stomach, tears burning my eyes and streaming down my face, unable to ARTICULATE ANYTHING ABOUT YOU. But I have to try. I have to.
There is absolutely nothing in my life that makes me feel as frustrated, bewildered, small, large, alone, ecstatic, holy, hateful, and vulnerable as you do. Nothing that gives me such a conflict of emotions, such a war of violent reactions. I struggle with you daily and try my hardest to ignore you, yet everywhere I go, you're right fucking there. You're insidious, you're ever-present, you infect my speech and my patterns of thinking and my view of the world no matter what I seem to do. I can't get away from you.
And I want to. Or I think I do, and everytime I think I'm starting to, I come crawling back to you, in tears and ashamed. I call myself a pagan now, because I don't really feel Christian anymore, but that title doesn't feel right either. I can't get you out of my brain, out of my heart, out of my skin, out of my soul.
What the Hell is the problem? SEE? THERE YOU ARE AGAIN. I've never been particularly religious. Both my parents are doctors, and everything that entails: Logical. Scientific. Questioning. Intelligent. Not given to anything approaching "superstition" or "folksy." My dad listens to Celtic music---that's about as good as it gets. My mother is nominally Christian, and when she was younger, she wanted to be a minister, but only until she found out women can't be ministers in the Lutheran tradition, so it was "screw you guys, I'm being a doctor instead." They taught me to question, and to take nothing for granted, and to have a healthy dose of skepticism for all things "other-worldly." But they also introduced me to beauty, and a deep appreciation of life and love and spirituality. They show me poetry that breaks my heart, and play music that stirs my soul, and read me stories that changed my world.
And it seems like you're always there. I haven't been to church in years, but there is still no word that's more holy to me than "Hallelujah" or "amen." They're words of power, in my head.
I love your stories and your images and your fables. Your Jesus, your human, breathing, living Christ, fascinates me and holds my attention like no other. He breaks my heart. I think of him alone in the desert, crying out to a Father that's seemingly abandoned him, afraid, alone, in pain, tears streaming down his face, and I want to curl in a ball under the covers of my bed. I think of Mary, holding his lifeless body, feeling the pain of every mother that's ever lost a child, and I want to die. I think of a man whose heart was so big that he wanted to love everyone, to heal them, to help them, to make the world better, and it aches. It hurts.
I think of the fall of man, of the primordial mother, Eve, and her flawed, confused consort, Adam. I am drawn to the myth of Lilith, who refused to lie down and be subordinate to Adam. And I am fascinated by your wayward, cursed son, your Lucifer, your morning star, your fallen angel. I'm obsessed with him. I love him for his fire and his passion, and I mourn for his despair and his resignation to his fate. I see the good and the evil in every person I meet, and I wonder, and I'm confused, and I can't stand it and I can't get enough.
I'm obsessed with angels; images of them are everywhere in my life. My desktop is the Serra Angel, by Rebecca Guay, a beautiful, beautiful image that I see in my fucking dreams more often than I want to admit. A woman with long, fiery streaming hair, a gleaming sword in one hand, and a pair of wings----white, huge feathered wings. It's the wings I want. I need them. I have to have them. I've wanted a tattoo of a pair of feathered wings between my shoulder blades for...god, years now, but I've never had the nerve because I'm afraid I'll hate it later in life. I'm obsessed with flying, and images of flight, and beautiful otherwordly people with outspread wings and open arms and burning eyes.
But there's so much about you that I detest. I don't even know if I believe in Hell, and yet I talk about it and think about its supposed ruler damn near constantly. I haven't been to church in ages and I think I would hate it if I tried to go now. Just your presence, your taint, the taste of you in my head at my friend Traci's wedding made me squirm inside and want the ceremony to end that much faster. People who preach about your gospels make me want to throttle them, and I scream angry curses in the silence of my car at the stupid fucking billboards I pass everytime I drive to and from Dayton---"Hell is Real. Where are YOU spending eternity?" I can't stand it. I hate you. I hate your hypocrisy, and I hate the hypocrites who preach love and forgiveness but yet could never accept me if I fall in love with a woman. I hate your need to be everywhere, to spread, like a virus, to convert everyone you come across until the whole world sings the praises of your God. My God, no matter how much I want to run away, because I always. Come. Back.
I'm like a wayward lover, crawling back into your open arms, miserable and ashamed, hating myself for being weak, for needing you. I'm a drug addict. That's exactly what I am. And you are my drug of choice. I try to get clean, and I love myself, love my new life....but I need the hit. I haven't been able to find anything that affects me like you do. I can't stand modern Christian music, the really blatant stuff, but others---it moves me to tears. I wasn't even listening to the fucking Ode to Joy this morning, I was just hearing it in my head, during my shower, and it made me cry. I can't even explain...how you move through the musicians, and the poets, and the creators of the things that I love, and their passion and their glory for your---YOUR passion, YOUR glory, your impossible, heart-breaking beauty---moves through me and in me and ruins me and breaks me down to a child on my hands and knees, speechless and in tears, unable to even comprehend why. AND IT IS EVERYWHERE. My favorite song---Hallelujah, in all its myriad forms. I'm fucking obsessed with that song. "And maybe there's a God above, but all I ever learned from love, was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you..." "There's a blaze of light in every word, it doesn't matter which you heard, the holy or the broken Hallelujah..." I HATE IT. I CANNOT GET AWAY FROM IT.
I hear and see you everywhere. Milton. Star Wars. The Chronicles of Narnia. The Sandman. Beethoven. Aaron Copland. Alison Kraus. Third Day. Green Day. JESUS OF SUBURBIA. I hate you and love you, detest you and need you. I just want answers. I want to be at peace. Am I the one that's flawed? What is it that I love about you so much? I still have a cross. A little golden one. I can't bear to throw it out. WHY CAN'T I FIND THIS IN OTHER PLACES? WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?
And what about Christmas? I hate the fucking flawed bullshit that's perpetuated...but I love Christmas songs. I sing them in August, I sing them year-round. Even the stupid, catchy ones, fucking MARIAH CAREY. "Veni Veni Emmanuel" clutches at things inside me I can't even explain. I feel like a little girl every Christmas. You make me believe in miracles, just at this one time of year. It's the one time of year I feel like even the rejected can find love, and the lost find their way home, and people can find peace, and----and---I can't put it into words. It's special, and it's precious, and I need it so desperately that I really honestly think I would die if I couldn't have it. It's snow, and it's bells, and it's Christmas carols echoing in the back of my head, and it's leaning against my mom while there's a fire in the fire place, and my whole family's home, and it's the angel at the top of the Christmas tree, and it's the lights that are dancing just out of the edge of vision as you drive around at night, on every street corner, in all the houses, and it's the stupid christmas movies I watched----I still watch "The Santa Claus" every. Single. Year. I want that little snow-globe. Gimme my damn candy cane.
But you drive me crazy. I want a religion that won't tell me I'm a sinner for doing any number of bizarre things, that won't use guilt to control me, that has a MOTHER as well as a FATHER, that recognizes that women are holy, too, that won't tell me I'm dirty from the day I'm born, that won't make me feel like my own blood is tainted once a month. I want a religion that recognizes women, and that love IS universal. Jesus knows that. Why don't you? I want the old names, I want Beltane, I want the earth and the unity and nature and not your abstinence and your Puritanism and your bleached white walls and your judgement. But I want to see the host of angels. I want it and I want it to leave me alone. I want to feel at home.
I want to stop feeling like a hypocrite who can't make up her little confused mind. I want to be at peace.
Please, just let me sleep.
Dear Christianity,
Look what you do to me. Look what you reduce me to. I call myself a writer, an English major---words are my strength, and my weapon, and my chosen means of expression, and yet I cannot put into a single cohesive sentence how I feel about you. I sit with my face in my hands, a horrible ache in my chest and stomach, tears burning my eyes and streaming down my face, unable to ARTICULATE ANYTHING ABOUT YOU. But I have to try. I have to.
There is absolutely nothing in my life that makes me feel as frustrated, bewildered, small, large, alone, ecstatic, holy, hateful, and vulnerable as you do. Nothing that gives me such a conflict of emotions, such a war of violent reactions. I struggle with you daily and try my hardest to ignore you, yet everywhere I go, you're right fucking there. You're insidious, you're ever-present, you infect my speech and my patterns of thinking and my view of the world no matter what I seem to do. I can't get away from you.
And I want to. Or I think I do, and everytime I think I'm starting to, I come crawling back to you, in tears and ashamed. I call myself a pagan now, because I don't really feel Christian anymore, but that title doesn't feel right either. I can't get you out of my brain, out of my heart, out of my skin, out of my soul.
What the Hell is the problem? SEE? THERE YOU ARE AGAIN. I've never been particularly religious. Both my parents are doctors, and everything that entails: Logical. Scientific. Questioning. Intelligent. Not given to anything approaching "superstition" or "folksy." My dad listens to Celtic music---that's about as good as it gets. My mother is nominally Christian, and when she was younger, she wanted to be a minister, but only until she found out women can't be ministers in the Lutheran tradition, so it was "screw you guys, I'm being a doctor instead." They taught me to question, and to take nothing for granted, and to have a healthy dose of skepticism for all things "other-worldly." But they also introduced me to beauty, and a deep appreciation of life and love and spirituality. They show me poetry that breaks my heart, and play music that stirs my soul, and read me stories that changed my world.
And it seems like you're always there. I haven't been to church in years, but there is still no word that's more holy to me than "Hallelujah" or "amen." They're words of power, in my head.
I love your stories and your images and your fables. Your Jesus, your human, breathing, living Christ, fascinates me and holds my attention like no other. He breaks my heart. I think of him alone in the desert, crying out to a Father that's seemingly abandoned him, afraid, alone, in pain, tears streaming down his face, and I want to curl in a ball under the covers of my bed. I think of Mary, holding his lifeless body, feeling the pain of every mother that's ever lost a child, and I want to die. I think of a man whose heart was so big that he wanted to love everyone, to heal them, to help them, to make the world better, and it aches. It hurts.
I think of the fall of man, of the primordial mother, Eve, and her flawed, confused consort, Adam. I am drawn to the myth of Lilith, who refused to lie down and be subordinate to Adam. And I am fascinated by your wayward, cursed son, your Lucifer, your morning star, your fallen angel. I'm obsessed with him. I love him for his fire and his passion, and I mourn for his despair and his resignation to his fate. I see the good and the evil in every person I meet, and I wonder, and I'm confused, and I can't stand it and I can't get enough.
I'm obsessed with angels; images of them are everywhere in my life. My desktop is the Serra Angel, by Rebecca Guay, a beautiful, beautiful image that I see in my fucking dreams more often than I want to admit. A woman with long, fiery streaming hair, a gleaming sword in one hand, and a pair of wings----white, huge feathered wings. It's the wings I want. I need them. I have to have them. I've wanted a tattoo of a pair of feathered wings between my shoulder blades for...god, years now, but I've never had the nerve because I'm afraid I'll hate it later in life. I'm obsessed with flying, and images of flight, and beautiful otherwordly people with outspread wings and open arms and burning eyes.
But there's so much about you that I detest. I don't even know if I believe in Hell, and yet I talk about it and think about its supposed ruler damn near constantly. I haven't been to church in ages and I think I would hate it if I tried to go now. Just your presence, your taint, the taste of you in my head at my friend Traci's wedding made me squirm inside and want the ceremony to end that much faster. People who preach about your gospels make me want to throttle them, and I scream angry curses in the silence of my car at the stupid fucking billboards I pass everytime I drive to and from Dayton---"Hell is Real. Where are YOU spending eternity?" I can't stand it. I hate you. I hate your hypocrisy, and I hate the hypocrites who preach love and forgiveness but yet could never accept me if I fall in love with a woman. I hate your need to be everywhere, to spread, like a virus, to convert everyone you come across until the whole world sings the praises of your God. My God, no matter how much I want to run away, because I always. Come. Back.
I'm like a wayward lover, crawling back into your open arms, miserable and ashamed, hating myself for being weak, for needing you. I'm a drug addict. That's exactly what I am. And you are my drug of choice. I try to get clean, and I love myself, love my new life....but I need the hit. I haven't been able to find anything that affects me like you do. I can't stand modern Christian music, the really blatant stuff, but others---it moves me to tears. I wasn't even listening to the fucking Ode to Joy this morning, I was just hearing it in my head, during my shower, and it made me cry. I can't even explain...how you move through the musicians, and the poets, and the creators of the things that I love, and their passion and their glory for your---YOUR passion, YOUR glory, your impossible, heart-breaking beauty---moves through me and in me and ruins me and breaks me down to a child on my hands and knees, speechless and in tears, unable to even comprehend why. AND IT IS EVERYWHERE. My favorite song---Hallelujah, in all its myriad forms. I'm fucking obsessed with that song. "And maybe there's a God above, but all I ever learned from love, was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you..." "There's a blaze of light in every word, it doesn't matter which you heard, the holy or the broken Hallelujah..." I HATE IT. I CANNOT GET AWAY FROM IT.
I hear and see you everywhere. Milton. Star Wars. The Chronicles of Narnia. The Sandman. Beethoven. Aaron Copland. Alison Kraus. Third Day. Green Day. JESUS OF SUBURBIA. I hate you and love you, detest you and need you. I just want answers. I want to be at peace. Am I the one that's flawed? What is it that I love about you so much? I still have a cross. A little golden one. I can't bear to throw it out. WHY CAN'T I FIND THIS IN OTHER PLACES? WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?
And what about Christmas? I hate the fucking flawed bullshit that's perpetuated...but I love Christmas songs. I sing them in August, I sing them year-round. Even the stupid, catchy ones, fucking MARIAH CAREY. "Veni Veni Emmanuel" clutches at things inside me I can't even explain. I feel like a little girl every Christmas. You make me believe in miracles, just at this one time of year. It's the one time of year I feel like even the rejected can find love, and the lost find their way home, and people can find peace, and----and---I can't put it into words. It's special, and it's precious, and I need it so desperately that I really honestly think I would die if I couldn't have it. It's snow, and it's bells, and it's Christmas carols echoing in the back of my head, and it's leaning against my mom while there's a fire in the fire place, and my whole family's home, and it's the angel at the top of the Christmas tree, and it's the lights that are dancing just out of the edge of vision as you drive around at night, on every street corner, in all the houses, and it's the stupid christmas movies I watched----I still watch "The Santa Claus" every. Single. Year. I want that little snow-globe. Gimme my damn candy cane.
But you drive me crazy. I want a religion that won't tell me I'm a sinner for doing any number of bizarre things, that won't use guilt to control me, that has a MOTHER as well as a FATHER, that recognizes that women are holy, too, that won't tell me I'm dirty from the day I'm born, that won't make me feel like my own blood is tainted once a month. I want a religion that recognizes women, and that love IS universal. Jesus knows that. Why don't you? I want the old names, I want Beltane, I want the earth and the unity and nature and not your abstinence and your Puritanism and your bleached white walls and your judgement. But I want to see the host of angels. I want it and I want it to leave me alone. I want to feel at home.
I want to stop feeling like a hypocrite who can't make up her little confused mind. I want to be at peace.
Please, just let me sleep.