on faith

I never wanted to stop being a Christian.
Growing up, love was always demonstrated to me as loyalty: unconditional, persistent, eternal. I had a family and community that demanded integrity, so what we were taught at church was translated and grafted into our friendships, jobs and schools. I was excited for whatever Jesus had planned for me, even if it was scrubbing toilets, and especially if it involved living in a foreign country. I felt pretty lucky to be born into a Christian family and privileged to have been shown the right way to live at such an early age. One of the most valuable things to a human psyche is hope. I consider myself blessed to have had a childhood void of violence, poverty, death or any significant trauma. Moreover, I had parents and friends who loved me and supported my path. Community. Loyalty. My little mind and heart had no reason not to believe that everything was going to be okay. Somebody else was in control, I just had to follow and believe. So I did. Because it was right.
It started when I was seventeen and honest to a fault. I honestly loved Jesus Christ; I honestly loved being alive and all consequent experiences; I honestly loved my punk rock friends and I honestly loved my boyfriend. So many things merited my loyalty; it was all so huge and beautiful. Surely Jesus understood the vast beauty of the world he himself created. Surely I wasn't the first Christian who needed more room on her plate. I knew my heart was open and loyal, which was always the bottom line, so why did I feel so torn? It must've been something I wasn't doing. Honesty. Just be honest and integrate all your sides and everything will be okay. I opened up with full abandon, trusting my family and my faith to support me in my exploration of truth. I needed the love that raised me to take me on and guide me. It turned out that my parents loved their religion before their daughter, whose experience of reality was more than any of them could handle. For all the loyalty I had pouring from eyes and heart, It was strange to be so parched on the receiving end.
So I went to bible school. And I asked questions, lots of questions. I still believed and I was daring, begging to be taken on, all of me. I spent countless nights outside my dorm with my blanket, writing, writing, writing. I couldn't back down with the fire inside of me, I couldn't stop being pissed at the church for each of it's shortcomings. The Jesus I followed was a radical, a revolutionary, a lover of all, excluder of none. He was huge and I was determined to find a way for us to get along.
I remember when I stopped believing in hell. To me, god was pure Love, the absence of which was dark enough in and of itself, in my understanding negating the purpose of a place. Furthermore, 'perfect love drives out all fear' and in a world where I was wholly loyal to the former, I had no faith to spend on the latter. It stopped making sense. The bible and it's stories started seeming smaller to me, mere poetic metaphors for the mysteries of life and the pursuit of light. I kept writing and telling the truth. To myself, to my Jesus, to my peers. Most of the Christians around me didn't want to be immersed in real life, they wanted reasons to be above it. We were studying stories of a god who ultimately represented reconciliation, but building strategies to either change people or practice segregation. Still, I believed god was bigger than our student body, than the christian church, possibly even the christian faith, but how big? I wanted to know, I wanted to push the edges, I wanted to see.
I moved back to the states with such an sensitive awareness of our world and its reality. Everything: the poverty, the loneliness, the suffering, the hate, the greed. Of course there was beauty, but it was tainted by sin, by the absence of light. I couldn't handle it. All I saw in the people around me was their hurt, however acute. The worst part was that, according to my faith, there was a chasm between our human condition and the only thing truly needed: pure Love. There didn't seem room for chasms, politics, conditions of salvation. I could feel that Love was the bottom line and I think it was Love that bottomed out Christianity for me.
I proceeded to turn down my awareness as to be able to be with people more wholly and love them as they came. I moved Love from my heart out into my skin and kept that search going one person at a time. I didn't know what I believed. I didn't know if Jesus was more than just a man in history, I didn't know if, I didn't care. Then I met people that were doing things, affecting their environment, teaching each other, indulging in life, exploring meditation and their own ideals, still asking questions but with light in their eyes and less attachment to what form the answer takes. They were promoting their own kind of loyalty: self loyalty. It was a crazy beautiful concept. Could I believe in myself? Could I build my own life, make my own decisions, carry my own weight? What is Love without religion? What is spirit without law? I started building. I moved out of my parents' house, I taught myself how to cook, I began practicing yoga. I woke up to my own body, Its miracles, and nutrition. I explored poetry and philosophy. I started making things, anything. I paid attention to music, I paid attention to ritual, I enrolled in college, I asked questions, I practiced non-judgement. My new community took me in, all of me. They trusted me, they validated me, they demonstrated what felt like unconditional love. I was floored, I was home. Gratitude and beauty radiated from everything around me. I felt like man and god were being reconciled presently, perfectly; I was reborn.
When I moved to Philadelphia the next year I met even more people who were living like this. I fell in love with that city because of it's potential, because it had room for investment, belief, because it's real. I wanted to be part of the Love that was willing to take it on. I wanted to see reconciliation on a social level like I had experienced on a spiritual level. I wanted to see Philly fall in love with itself. I still don't understand what happened, but somewhere in there I got spooked. I think American society in general started to really freak me out. The more I learned about permaculture, the more I felt drawn to nature. I think I blew my love for travel and need for spiritual stimulation out of proportion and my self took the backseat to my own ideals. I was so willing to stretch and shrink everything in order to be more available to the answers that I neglected to see that such distortion wasn't even necessary.
As the story goes on, it gets cloudier for me. I don't think I've really begun to process what the hell happened when I lived in central america. I guess life happened. And I guess it was mine. There is no question that Love has been my first love, yet it's been imperfect because the self love was missing. I chose a man to fall in love with and I lived & travelled with him for five months. He spoke no english, I gave all I had just to see what came of it. I believed so deeply that intention and time beget destiny, transcending culture, transcending reason or practicality. I'm not saying nothing came of it, but sometimes you get to the other side only to find you've got bits of all sorts of things but yourself. You can't even remember what it was you wanted in the first place; the wanting has taken on a momentum of its own.
These days ideals are being challenged and life still proves itself quite huge. That wanting seems both absurd and urgently necessary. One thing that has been clear in my transience and endless search for home & path is How: Not what, but How. Not who, but How. Not where, but How. Can I be far gone in my own head but present with what is in front of me? Can I be honest, can I be productive, can I be loving? Can imperfection function like that of which it is a fraction? (Because it sort of has to...) Can faith be broken and still serve us? (Maybe broken is all it will ever be.) Is faith's purpose even to serve us? What does one believe in when nothing is known? More specifically, can I know something's impermanence and still believe in its eternal significance? How do you act toward water? You can't hold it, you can't breathe it in deep. You may float on it, you may swim in it. You can't live in it but you sure can die in it.
Tonight I went to a surprise birthday gathering for a loving woman named Nancy who lives on the farm next to us. We toasted to her life and what a wonderful life it is. Somehow she got part of the sky and put it in her childrens eyes. Somehow she maintains a marriage, a farm, a business, laughter. Something about small talk and not enough solitude lately got me out of the red celebration and onto the cold street. I let my fists drop to the bottom of my flimsy jacket pockets and tilted my face toward the sky. I walked a few blocks before I decided this would be a search for some rolling tobacco, a vice I let in on nights like this when I have greater battles to win. When I got back, someone had done their job and cleared my wine from its hiding spot. None of the waitresses had any sympathy, I had left the building, I wasn't getting a replacement. This is well and good for restaurant rules, but not fine for a girl who lives in metaphors or a farm camp. I couldn't let it go, I was pissed. I had three sips at most. What's another glass of wine to you? By the time I got in the car I was done for. Sobs muffled any outside sounds and I shook shook shook with Airielle's arm draped across my shoulders. I told her I was lonely. She knew: "it's not even about the wine..."
Sometimes I get really tired when I think about all that has happened since I stepped out from under my mother dogma. I try not to make it about loneliness or homelessness or anything victimizing. I guess what I'm getting at is the pure fucking awe I feel when I stand up next to myself and the life journey of believing in her. Her strength, her gut, her heart, her stories, her voice. It's a lot to love a god in the sky, but what about the one under your skin? Things definitely seem easier when they are far away, separate. But they're not, they never are, they always are. At the same time it feels like such an endless plane with no voices or music. I want to know how to love what I choose and choose what I love. I want to love like a child but I want to be loved as a woman. I want the world I live in to respond to the beliefs I author inside. I need to feel that I'm doing the right thing, even though there is no such thing. I want another glass of wine.