LYX Does Religion
So this is the essay thing I mentioned a million years ago about my experiences with religion growing up. I think it's reasonably finished, though of course it doesn't contain everything possible, like my Grandma being a crazy gypsy-woman, which I only learned well after she died. This all has to do with my perceptions as I had them, so they go from pre-Kindergarten to college. Since it is a personal thing, it has little academic value and really isn't saying anything but 'This Is How I Roll And Why I Roll That Way.'
Here you go:
I didn’t grow up with religion. It’s weird to say that, because I always thought I did, but looking at it now, religious meetings always felt like someone else’s to me, and since my parents weren’t the originators, it felt like something I did on the side.
My parents were college kids. They both went to school while I chilled at home and did whatever in my 'under 5' years. I had babysitters and amused myself quite well. After a while, I went to school too, so my parents had fewer babysitters to hire, I imagine. A friend of mine, Andrea, invited me to come to her Youth Group, called AWANA, when we were five-ish. I went, and got to wear the honorary red vest of the little kids’ group. All I remember of the church element was that praying scared the hell out of me and my mom’s writing of my name in my tiny orange Bible was very pretty. There were also a few fundraisers and kids who flung quarters at my knuckles during snack time. I eventually stopped wanting to go.
Later, I can’t say exactly when, we moved to Ellwood City, near my Grandparents. I was the new kid in school, and one of the youngest in the grade because I was allowed into kindergarten early, so while I didn't spend much time with my classmates, I saw my Grandparents all the time. Other kids had sleepovers with each other and I had them with my Grandparents.
My Grandmother was my personal library. She's been a big woman as long as I've been alive, and was probably that way a long time before, and as a kid, I saw this almost as a manifestation of how much crap she knew. My Grandmother told stories for a living after she retired from the family profession of being a teacher. She often took me to her speaking engagements in which she did everything from tell perfectly interwoven personal anecdotes to get across a total theme, or assumed the role of a main character in a book she'd internalized. Most often, the theme of the family stories, the theme of the books, and the stories and songs she gave to me at bedtime had one thing in common: God.
My sleepovers with my grandparents always included a church service on Sunday mornings. This included me sitting around in my nice clothes through the boring part of listening to a man say things I didn't understand and getting to the part where we got to do crafts. I had no idea what the adults did while I made little pots or Easter baskets or whatever, but I didn't particularly care. While our 'teachers' gave us the daily verses to learn, I did my craft until it was done to death and then sat in a room full of strangers talking about things that I seemed to have missed. Being in that room was a bit like attending a seminar that was all about an article you hadn't read, and I suppose, in a way, that's exactly what I was sitting in on. We didn't go to a church before I moved to Ellwood, aside from my adventure with AWANA, so while the kids in the room with me had probably been born into the congregation, and thus into the idea of Jesus and his book, I was stepping in six years later.
Vacation Bible School, the week-long summer version of Sunday School, was great fun for me. I liked the snack time, the plays, the themes they decorated the church in and the craft time. I didn’t like singing and praying time so much, because I didn’t know the words. In singing and praying time’s defense, I didn’t like game time either, and once I learned the words to singing time, I loved it.
I was a smart kid. I don't say that to be vain or to say that kids who were into religion weren't smart, just that that was what was behind everything that happened to me in relation to the church. I preferred being a fly on the wall and absorbing the way people talked and moved to engaging in debate, and I didn’t like to volunteer answers until I was sure they were right. I internalized information about the people I was around, tried to learn their pledges to their Christian flag, and their prayers, but also how their social dynamic worked - what kind of jokes did they like? Why were the boys still so mean even though Jesus was telling us not to mess with each other? Could they all smell the strangeness on me? Maybe, in the beginning, it wasn’t smarts, but quiet perception.
My favorite thing in the world is ancient history and culture. I think it always has been. The moment that I realized that Bible Stories didn't happen in Ellwood City or just in the years before I moved into town, I was interested in how the Bible people looked, how they dressed and what surrounded them. I was interested in pretending to sing ancient songs and saying ancient words. I was interested in their names and their geography. What I wasn't terribly interested in was worshiping their god. This god was the god of all the people who were mean to me, of all the boys that were cruel and rude.
I was terrified as a kid of having to get married when I grew up. I assumed that at some point, you just had to - girls in my class asked me who I thought I would marry and squealed that I must have a secret crush when I said ‘no one’. I told them all I would be a nun, unintentionally giving them the idea that I was religious or even knew what I was talking about. It was quite the contrary - nuns were simply the only people on Earth I was SURE did not have to get married.
I had a hard time memorizing Bible verses. All my classmates knew every book (“Wait, I thought the Bible was one whole book? How many of these do I have to buy?”) of the Bible , in order, and I didn’t even know what a ‘testament’ was, let alone why we kept making a big deal about one being new. (I thought after a few hundred years it would have been old news again.) I didn’t understand how Noah got kangaroos on the ark and then to Australia from Turkey, and I was angry when people told me that unicorns and dragons were too anything to have been allowed on. Still, when I was small I told people in the grocery store about Jesus, because we were supposed to. They all thought it was cute, from what I remember.
In fourth grade, after a few years of doing my vaguely Christian 'praying when I wanted something real, real bad,' I took a book out of the library at school. I don't know what kind of book it was, or even why I got it, but as I was flipping through it I came upon a black and white photo on most of page. The image was a statue of a black dog with a ribbon around his neck. I LOVED him. I looked at him and wanted to tear the page out and take him home with me. He was beautiful - every inch of him, down to his amazing toenails. He was imperfect in places, where people had sculpted and shaped him or his paint had flaked off, and I adored even that about him. I drew him, since I couldn't steal the book or the page and because drawing something was my way of never losing it. The book told me he was Egyptian, had been found in the tomb of someone named Tutankhamen, and his name was Anubis.
I took Anubis home and showed my friends and parents. My babysitter and her daughters were amused to the level of 'Oh, she drew another pretty picture,' but looked wary of him. The girl emerging as my new best friend, Jen, loved him and she wanted to know more about him too. My Dad already knew who he was and taught me to say his name properly. From the day of my meeting with Anubis in the pages of mildewed library books, Jen and I devoured all our library's Egypt books and bought all the ones I could from the Book Order Club that ran through our classes. Jen and I got best friend necklaces in the shape of ankhs and made little dolls of the gods we liked best. Kids in my class wrote "egyptian" on our end-of-the-year "things about you" cards in sixth grade. My all-knowing Grandmother bought me a silver cartouche with my name in it that year. I still wear it.
My excitement over Egypt's mythology, not to mention the fact that I was thrilled that mythology other than the Greek I heard at bedtime existed, fueled me to find Egypt's people. My Grandmother's church had led me to believe that "Pharaoh" was this crazy old guy who ruled Egypt for the entire duration of the Bible. I had discovered quickly after finding Anubis that ‘Pharaoh’ was a title.
I pretended to have an Oracle in the coat room. Jen and I were briefly persecuted for worshiping ancient gods on the playground (even though we weren't), and I wrote almost all my passed note correspondence with anyone in hieroglyphs. Jen and I hid secret messages, rocks, charms and whatever else we liked under a special part of the rock wall on the playground. We dressed our dolls up as pharaohs, and made up characters who lived in the ancient culture. Our classmates were suspicious of us and one classmate of mine told me I was going to hell.
When I went to church during all of this and Sunday School teachers talked about anyone saying anything to "Pharaoh", I asked 'Which one?'. They didn't know. My Grandmother told me "Rameses," which settled me until I found out just how many Pharaohs had that name. In my church adventures, I started hearing Egypt being portrayed as the bad guy. I had never met an 'Isrealite', but I was supposed to empathize with them. I had no idea what made someone a Jew, and I’d never met one. Meanwhile, I spent my afternoons with my best friend acting out adventures with a chunk of the Egyptian pantheon. Jen’s characterization of the goddess Anukis became best friends with my character, June, and the sisters Kipa and Rhodopis got their names from Egyptian myths we’d collected over the years.
In a kind of confused protest only I could understand at the time, I began signing my arts and crafts projects in Bible School in hieroglyphs. At one particular church camp, one of our teachers picked up my paper collage of whatever, checked the back of it and asked of the group, "Okay, who's the Hebrew guy?" I was horrified. This Bible business was written by the Hebrews wasn't it? And the people teaching it to us didn't know that Hebrew looked nothing like Egyptian? Even my crude Egyptian couldn’t be that bad. From then on, I stopped seeing those women as my teachers and saw instead the volunteering mothers of three that they really were, which made my anger and separation from the rest of everything easier.
I was angry to hear that I would never get to meet Cleopatra or Tutankhamen because they didn’t jive with Jesus. I was horrified at the number of people I read about who were born in anything ‘BC’, because it was a giant tag saying they were not up there in the giant depot of awesome people to meet. I had issues with this idea that God waited for all those people to be condemned or unsaved before he sent someone to clue everyone in. I prayed for a lot of dead people. Impassioned prayers were delivered to God to save Cleopatra, my dead friend Britney, and probably most of the Roman Empire.
Back when I went to the AWANA group, I don’t know what denomination it was, but I was under the impression from those people that prayer for the dead was a good thing to do. I guess it was them, as I can't imagine where else I could have decided that. When I asked my Ellwood-based Youth Group leader one night, years after my AWANA days, to add my dead best friend to the prayer request list she instead added me(!) and prayed for me to heal from my friend's passing. I said nothing, but inwardly, as she squeezed my shoulder, I changed the group leader's words. I wasn’t the dead one! Why was she wasting the prayer on me? I’d been over the death for quite a while, but it still scared me that my friend wasn’t seeing her favorite Pink Panther episode in heaven and I definitely did not need someone praying for me to accomplish this.
We were told stories over and over in these classes of how Jesus died for our sins, died for our sins, died for our sins. And Judas! Judas betrayed him! I did not understand what the betrayal really was and why Jesus died for real. Why, in the real world, people had to kill him. At first, I didn’t know that he was uprooting the Jewish religion, because we were given only the word ‘Jews’, which was really synonymous with ‘Hebrews’, and nothing more. Worse yet, though, was that I was given no outside look. No one said, “This was radical, okay? Jesus sounded INSANE, in addition to blasphemous. He and his followers were considered a cult.” Instead, we were just told over and over that he was the glory and the power forever and the Romans (who I also thought were pretty cool, but not as cool as the Egyptians) were bad and dumb for not recognizing him for what he was. Since WE all knew that Jesus was great, we condemned the Romans in our perfect hindsight. When asked how we KNEW that Jesus was the right dude, the Bible was the only thing anyone had to give me. If it said it in the Bible, it was true and there were no other arguments. I honestly didn’t understand why we needed a whole Bible if you could just say, “Yeah, Jesus is pretty cool,” and be saved anyway.
Sometime in elementary school, and twice, actually, I went to church camp. The place was beautiful, with gorgeous buildings and lots of forest and awesome little cabins. While there, we were woken up at seven every morning and often kept up later than ten or eleven at night for ‘chapel’ and ‘devotions’ and ‘Bible Study Time.’ I wasn’t allowed to bring my art stuff with me, only a Bible. I didn’t even have a whole one; I had to dig one out of my Dad’s library. I still had the little orange Bible from my AWANA days, but it was apparently only the damn New Testament. I had no idea that that wasn’t enough until someone told me it was the second half of the Bible. I don’t think anyone explained to me why someone would only publish one half a book. At night we were all told to study the Bible until we fell asleep or it was ‘lights out’ time. They usually asked us to share our favorite verses for ‘devotions’ but I couldn’t internalize them. I was also totally clueless as to what ‘devotions’ were really supposed to be, so I doodled on the blank pages.
We had a preacher there who screamed against the evils of secular music and whatever else every morning before breakfast. He tried really hard to demonize Smashing Pumpkins, who I wasn’t interested in at all because they’d never sung in a Disney movie, but I remember hearing him screw up their name, and do the same to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He was the same guy we were forced to hear every night at ‘chapel,’ which I had the guts to skip only once in favor of taking pictures of the sunset. When people asked me about it later, I pretended I had lost track of time.
I called my Dad one night, desperate to go home. He told me to stick it out, and when I confided in some other kids over a Klondike bar, they told me to pray about it. I didn’t understand that at all.
On an afternoon when we were all supposed to be in the pool, I climbed a giant rock wall, sat on a protrusion just like the one in the Lion King, and tried to become the wind, or at least Pocahontas. I still love the feeling of singing into the wind. Someone found me and a friend I had brought along and told us that the time we had in the pool had been wasted on the rock and steered us to the pool. I don’t remember the pool except for getting certified to swim in the deep end without praying about it first, even though I told someone I had. That rock though? I’d love to sit on that rock again.
One night, we gathered in a circle on the floor of the room beside the one I stayed in. It was like girls’ night in, and we all told stories and attempted to bond. I had this eerie feeling that they all knew each other before I arrived, so I wasn’t particularly part of their group. Regardless of knowing them or not, we all sat there, exchanging stories of God in our lives or something. I say ‘or something’ because it was really the end of circle time that I remember. Our leader passed out small cards with a bit that we were supposed to read to ‘accept Jesus into our hearts as our savior.’ After we read them and were instructed that we were under no obligation to actually do it, we began going around the circle to declare whether we had accepted him. Some girls had already done this before, and anyone who hadn’t decided to accept him right then with their little card. I wasn’t aware I had to proclaim accepting him to anyone, and I wasn’t sure that peer pressure was supposed to be how this accepting happened, but I dutifully repeated everything the other girls and the little white card had said. I didn’t sleep very well that night.
During one session with our daily classes, our teacher presented us with cards she had bought from the gift shop with each of our names on them. They’re the kind you stick in your wallet for some reason. You know, the ones with pastel colors, flowers and a verse or two from Matthew or Luke on them. When she read my name, and gave me my card, I read that it meant ‘Shining Fame’. This was probably the most uplifting and exciting thing I’d experienced all week. She asked me what I thought ‘Shining Fame’ would mean. I told her that I liked to draw, so maybe I’d be famous at that, feeling kind of proud of my awesome name. She looked a little awkward and said, “Maybe you’ll draw pictures someday that glorify the Lord and you’ll be famous in his eyes.” I cannot express the kind of dissatisfaction I had with this. I had no intentions of glorifying anyone, especially not someone as boring as God. My bloody horse demons and magical cats and elf people enchanted me, but they didn’t belong anywhere near a cross or a manger. I told our teacher “Maybe” and let the conversation go to the next kid. I dwelled on ‘Shining Fame’ for the rest of my time there.
The night of the Bonfire (which was apparently a deeply significant event that I couldn’t understand, much like the ritual Baptism, which looked like sheer madness to me), other campers were giving their ‘testimonies’. I knew what the word testimony meant, and while I wasn’t sure they were using it the same way I was, I thought surely I had something to say about God. I was in God camp, and I was going to have to get down with this Jesus business eventually, because there was nothing else. So I stood up and told them about ‘Shining Fame.’ I told them never to hate their names, because their parents gave it to them, and since their parents loved God, then God loved their name and it meant something and blah blah blah, I’m eight years old and haven’t the foggiest idea what I’m talking about. I’m sure it was excruciating for others and probably caused them to feel embarrassed for me. I’m embarrassed to think on it now, and I think I knew in some sense that it was a silly thing to do even then. I didn’t hear a single testimony that night, before or after my ‘deep’ proclamation of ‘names are good, guys.’
Our last day at camp, we ventured to ‘The Cross’. The Cross was the giant illuminated cross that sat atop the camp’s largest hill and could be seen from nearly everywhere at night. While I thought being up that high would be exciting, I was not excited about climbing there. It was long, and it was hard and I probably complained too loudly over my fellow campers and leaders saying that Exodus was probably just like what we were enduring. I tried to imagine how awesome the Cross would be, how it would be this glowing beacon of amazing, and how we were going to do something radical up there.
The Cross was big.
And it was illuminated.
And that was it.
We stood on the cliff and looked over the landscape that we could barely see because it was midnight or eleven or something insane like that, and then we had to head back down. Cars came and picked up the older people. I was so angry. No one else seemed to think the trip had been wasted, no one else seemed flipped out that they had hiked a mile uphill to stare into the black and look a cross that wasn’t as cool up close at all. I went to sleep very bitterly that night. The next day, some girls in my room asked me if wanted to go with them back up to the cross. I made up some excuse not to, went out, took more pictures of the sky and bought a T-shirt with a lion on it in the giftshop. I honestly bought it because it was the least Jesus-y of anything in the shop, though whether I thought the other stuff was cheesy or I was just delaying the inevitable I don’t know.
When I returned, I didn’t feel like a changed girl at all. I felt like a girl who had been the fat chick during relay races and the confused one during study time. I told everyone about how pretty it was though, and how good the food was and how nice a time I thought I might have had overall. I didn’t even tell my diary that this stuff didn’t sit with me. Hell, years later, I made an entry in my diary that dedicated the whole volume to God, though it was only done under the most classic of ways - out of fear. Fear that my house would be swept up by the tornadoes I kept hearing warnings for that summer. I never wrote another dedication like that.
One particular day, Grandmother told me that the next big animated movie coming out was going to be just PERFECT for me. The title? "Prince of Egypt". I was slightly dismayed to discover that it was just the story of Moses, but I enjoyed the Egyptian imagery of the film, even when Moses was no longer enjoying it. That is, until the 'evil guys' sang their little song number.
In their chants were the names of gods that I knew. There, being depicted as the great evil, ignorant, comedic relief sinners were cartoonish looking men singing the names of people I loved. Bastet. Isis. Re. ANUBIS. ANUKIS, who was the namesake/representation of my beloved character June's best friend! And, worst of all at that time, despite my initial intro into Egypt by way of Anubis, was Sekhmet. SEKHMET. Sekhmet was my bloodthirsty lion woman, my badass woman in a big collection of kingly men. I loved Sekhmet and developed a whole personality for her. Even though I was a pre-teen at the time, the tiny wooden spoon toy of Sekhmet that I’d made years before stuck out in my head and I couldn’t take the idea of the God that had made me figure out two testaments and devotions and mime knowing the Pledge to the Christian flag was something that could take her down. Sekhmet was a firey, bloody guardian of women and she was my FAVORITE.
It was a movie. An animated one. Not to be taken seriously at all, but my Grandmother seemed to take deep religious satisfaction from it. I, on the other hand, tuned out half the movie after the painful assumption that characters, beings, PEOPLE that I did not venerate, but did love, were ‘evil’. And rather than turn from them, as I suppose was the message that that song would have liked someone like me to get from it, I clung tighter. That song tried to dismantle what I had fallen in love with and cultivated along with everything else that I loved. Chaos Knot happened around Egyptian myth, and in some ways BECAUSE of it. What I knew about me was that I had never taken comfort from a church but that I had taken a great amount in drawing and filling with life the characters mythology showed to me. One giant male god in the sky was not going to take Sekhmet from me and wasn’t going to make me think of anything but my best friend when I heard ‘Anukis.’
After that, I grumbled angrily when dragged to church. I protested my mother trying to take us to one for even Christmas and Easter, and when I was there I made sure that I had a blessedly awful time. I encouraged my mother to go by herself if she really wanted to hang with Jesus, but I wasn’t into it. When I was 14, my brother and step-brother and I were taken to church for months when my dad married my step-mother. It was a condition of their marriage to be active members of the church for a certain period of time and while everyone else droned ‘Hallelujah’, we sang anything else we could think of. I sung some Japanese pop that made me feel good, or Disney songs, and my brother and step-brother sang selected rap songs and commercial jingles. We were pretty smug about the whole thing.
During these services, communion bread and wine were passed around for the first time in a service I’d witnessed. They passed right over me, and my step-mother explained, ominously, that if I hadn’t been baptized, I couldn’t have this stuff, but that even if I had, I could never take it with a unclear soul. If she and I were having a fight, for example, and we were just furious at each other, then we shouldn’t take it. While I watched the cute little cups and bread cubes float away from me along the pew, part of me was very proud that I’d been spared baptism as a child and had no obligation to like the place I was confined to.
That year, my very Catholic town had a new crop of kids to confirm, and when they all disappeared for a few days, I discovered I was in a very small minority of non-Catholics in town. However, like Jews, I really had no idea what the deal was. One day, my friend Jimmy, who had a very Catholic family, was walking with me and one of his brothers to a place for lunch. Jimmy’s brother asked me why I wore so many necklaces, and I looked at all five or six of them and said I just liked to. He saw my ankh and my cartouche and asked what religion I was, after saying that he was Catholic.
“My family is Christian,” I told him, with some hesitation.
“Yeah, Catholics are Christian too,” he said. “I mean, what kind?”
I hadn’t known I was a ‘kind’ of Christian, except for maybe a reluctant or unimpressed one. I also had not really been aware that Catholic was in the same bracket.
“Methodist? Baptist?” he offered when I had nothing to say.
“I have no idea,” I answered. “What’s the difference?”
He was not amused and seemed to think I’d insulted him. I was flustered about the whole thing the rest of that day.
Through Jimmy, I began to understand little details of Catholicism. I learned that you told your sins to a priest in a box and in a little town like Ellwood, I couldn’t imagine the horror of doing that. It would spread like some kind of disease in such a small gossip-y place if anyone but the priest heard you (and maybe even just him). I learned that Jimmy was apparently doing something that would cause his family to hate him forever because they were Catholic, though he never told me what, only that he was choking up over telling the priest. Considering what media entertained me most at the time, I should have known, but he was as good at convincing me as he was himself.
I can’t count how many literary characters Jen and I saw gay subtext between as we got older. We enjoyed the yaoi manga genre, and were giant fans of very pretty men. I don’t know when I learned it, considering the funky order in which I seemed to learn everything else about Christianity, but I knew very well at that point that being gay did not fly with the man upstairs.
I ALSO can’t count how many classmates of mine asked me if Jimmy was gay. That same unfathomable number is how many times he told me he was in love with an upperclass girl and how many times he did something that seemed like a blatant cry for help that I’m surprised my subtext-finding mind didn’t latch onto as fact. Unfortunately for Jimmy, being gay did not fly not only with the guy upstairs, but also with his family. Rather than tell them, Jimmy took pills in waves and at his worst, a phone call from me saved him from going undiscovered after taking all of them.
Aside from when I thought it couldn’t hurt (tornado warnings!), I’d stopped praying. Near the end of my senior year, the internet had infiltrated me deeply and I was in support of gays, evolution, and not forcing people into anything, and less in support of a flawed book that had done nothing but make me and people I loved uncomfortable at the very least. My mother challenged me once, saying that there were plenty of gay Christians. I told her I didn’t care, that I was done with hypocrisy and being alienated from them. I’d rather just be free of them. She asked me to give faith a chance.
I decided to cultivate faith in humanity, and cultivate ‘spirituality’ that had nothing to do with God, or drinking wine, or memorizing anything, or being part of group that didn’t know me. Sometime around then, I met a friend online through mutual love of a manga character who was painfully subtexting gay all over the place. With an ease I can’t imagine I would have had without discovering that I disliked this God business, I developed a kind of a crush on another girl.
I’d had crushes on boys before, both on and offline, but had been either rejected or betrayed by them. Most decided they liked one of my best friends better, usually directly after I confessed. The online guy seemed to be attempting his hand at charming girls across the country and accidentally sent me an e-mail in the name of another girl. This actually didn’t totally shatter my faith in men and turn me into a lesbian at last or anything of the sort. In fact, I had conversations through highschool centered about being unable to imagine being with a girl, though this was probably informed by the kinds of girls I had to choose from in Ellwood City.
Online, I met people who had fluid gender identities, which seriously thrilled me. Feeling boxed into types bothered me, and the friend I found online was biologically female, but rejected much of the feminine stereotype. This girl was totally wrapped up in our discussions of this character and when I got to college, she was one of my first calls to someone I didn’t know in person, using a calling card from my mom. A crush on another girl followed and I discovered that I had a mad love of androgyny when I compared the boyish girls I was following around to the sparklingly beautiful (fictional) boys that I loved in highschool.
I had also become one of those people that the Bible, and my hometown, and my dad didn’t like.
In college I met my first real live Jew, who, while totally bad at being Jewish, made the entire Jew experience much clearer to me. With Mab, I voiced irritations at Christianity, and she generally countered with ‘Yeah, Jews don’t do that shit.’ While I wasn’t interested in becoming a Jew, not that I ever could, I felt that aside from hijacking some pagan rituals for Jesus’ birthday, the Jews had done everything better. (Mab even agreed on the Christmas issue and her Traffic Cone Tree is still the highlight of my Freshman year memories.)
Religious people tried to give me pamphlets almost daily at school. I tried to avoid them, because I never had the guts to tell them how I really felt about them. When one shoved a Chick Tract in my hands, I was horrified to discover when I arrived home that it was the one specifically condemning homosexuality. I was outraged. I had gay friends, I had gay characters, and I was bisexual! The next time I tried to avoid a pamphlet guy, I recognized the figure on the front of the book he was trying to hand me: Krishna. I took one, even gave him a donation. I was just so sick of seeing Jesus everywhere.
That Christmas, my grandmother gave me a Bible. With an ankh around my neck, I accepted the gift, and rode home with my mother in baffled silence. My grandmother had no idea that I had rejected the stories she told me when I was young, and no idea, along with the rest of my family, that I was totally nuts about a Jewish girl who lived in San Diego. To this day, she still has no idea.
My mother has gotten over me not jiving with Jesus. In fact, when I first came to the new house that she and my step-dad had built, she’d bought me a small goddess altar that matched my bed sheets. She also thinks my girlfriend is pretty rad. I still love Sekhmet.
I understood religion. I understood what it gave people. Hell, I knew it had given me thousands of years of mythology to love. I think I even understood religious experiences, but I didn’t experience hand-raising-speaking-in-tongues action over Jesus. I felt it in, and still feel it in singing. In Broadway, folk-dances, in Ruslana. I feel it in creating CK and LOFP. I feel in going too fast in my car. I feel it on a roller coaster and I felt it when I escaped Ellwood. It’s not adrenaline, it’s not a simple “oh shit, that was great” feeling. It’s something bigger than that - you feel it inside you and all around you and in everything all at once. You can experience it more than once with the same result and it never gets old or doesn’t bring you an immense feeling of ‘up and over.’ These feelings were what made me sure that my religion was never going to be something I had to strain to feel coming from the sky. My religion came from me - it was my love of anything, be it person, idea or object, and my treatment of it. It was Bill and Ted’s “Be Excellent To Each Other.”
Continued research has only solidified my dislike of organized religion as an option for me and strengthened my love for mythology. I am fascinated by religion, but I don’t want any of it. Worship is death to the soul for me. What I experience as my soul has only experienced euphoria, happiness and acceptance when it is let free. It is warmest, strongest and most comforting when it can escape. If I pray and bow my head, I’m holding it in and that’s damaging to me as a person. I worship nothing. I love, and I appreciate, and I celebrate, but I do not worship. The things I’ve internalized as part of me would only be held back if I were to lower that part of me in worship of something else. I don’t want you to think that I’m ‘too proud for religion,’ because that’s not what I’m selling. My religion isn’t practiced by thousands, it’s not headed by patriarchs, there are no official hymns and no one can tell me that I’m doing it wrong.
Here you go:
I didn’t grow up with religion. It’s weird to say that, because I always thought I did, but looking at it now, religious meetings always felt like someone else’s to me, and since my parents weren’t the originators, it felt like something I did on the side.
My parents were college kids. They both went to school while I chilled at home and did whatever in my 'under 5' years. I had babysitters and amused myself quite well. After a while, I went to school too, so my parents had fewer babysitters to hire, I imagine. A friend of mine, Andrea, invited me to come to her Youth Group, called AWANA, when we were five-ish. I went, and got to wear the honorary red vest of the little kids’ group. All I remember of the church element was that praying scared the hell out of me and my mom’s writing of my name in my tiny orange Bible was very pretty. There were also a few fundraisers and kids who flung quarters at my knuckles during snack time. I eventually stopped wanting to go.
Later, I can’t say exactly when, we moved to Ellwood City, near my Grandparents. I was the new kid in school, and one of the youngest in the grade because I was allowed into kindergarten early, so while I didn't spend much time with my classmates, I saw my Grandparents all the time. Other kids had sleepovers with each other and I had them with my Grandparents.
My Grandmother was my personal library. She's been a big woman as long as I've been alive, and was probably that way a long time before, and as a kid, I saw this almost as a manifestation of how much crap she knew. My Grandmother told stories for a living after she retired from the family profession of being a teacher. She often took me to her speaking engagements in which she did everything from tell perfectly interwoven personal anecdotes to get across a total theme, or assumed the role of a main character in a book she'd internalized. Most often, the theme of the family stories, the theme of the books, and the stories and songs she gave to me at bedtime had one thing in common: God.
My sleepovers with my grandparents always included a church service on Sunday mornings. This included me sitting around in my nice clothes through the boring part of listening to a man say things I didn't understand and getting to the part where we got to do crafts. I had no idea what the adults did while I made little pots or Easter baskets or whatever, but I didn't particularly care. While our 'teachers' gave us the daily verses to learn, I did my craft until it was done to death and then sat in a room full of strangers talking about things that I seemed to have missed. Being in that room was a bit like attending a seminar that was all about an article you hadn't read, and I suppose, in a way, that's exactly what I was sitting in on. We didn't go to a church before I moved to Ellwood, aside from my adventure with AWANA, so while the kids in the room with me had probably been born into the congregation, and thus into the idea of Jesus and his book, I was stepping in six years later.
Vacation Bible School, the week-long summer version of Sunday School, was great fun for me. I liked the snack time, the plays, the themes they decorated the church in and the craft time. I didn’t like singing and praying time so much, because I didn’t know the words. In singing and praying time’s defense, I didn’t like game time either, and once I learned the words to singing time, I loved it.
I was a smart kid. I don't say that to be vain or to say that kids who were into religion weren't smart, just that that was what was behind everything that happened to me in relation to the church. I preferred being a fly on the wall and absorbing the way people talked and moved to engaging in debate, and I didn’t like to volunteer answers until I was sure they were right. I internalized information about the people I was around, tried to learn their pledges to their Christian flag, and their prayers, but also how their social dynamic worked - what kind of jokes did they like? Why were the boys still so mean even though Jesus was telling us not to mess with each other? Could they all smell the strangeness on me? Maybe, in the beginning, it wasn’t smarts, but quiet perception.
My favorite thing in the world is ancient history and culture. I think it always has been. The moment that I realized that Bible Stories didn't happen in Ellwood City or just in the years before I moved into town, I was interested in how the Bible people looked, how they dressed and what surrounded them. I was interested in pretending to sing ancient songs and saying ancient words. I was interested in their names and their geography. What I wasn't terribly interested in was worshiping their god. This god was the god of all the people who were mean to me, of all the boys that were cruel and rude.
I was terrified as a kid of having to get married when I grew up. I assumed that at some point, you just had to - girls in my class asked me who I thought I would marry and squealed that I must have a secret crush when I said ‘no one’. I told them all I would be a nun, unintentionally giving them the idea that I was religious or even knew what I was talking about. It was quite the contrary - nuns were simply the only people on Earth I was SURE did not have to get married.
I had a hard time memorizing Bible verses. All my classmates knew every book (“Wait, I thought the Bible was one whole book? How many of these do I have to buy?”) of the Bible , in order, and I didn’t even know what a ‘testament’ was, let alone why we kept making a big deal about one being new. (I thought after a few hundred years it would have been old news again.) I didn’t understand how Noah got kangaroos on the ark and then to Australia from Turkey, and I was angry when people told me that unicorns and dragons were too anything to have been allowed on. Still, when I was small I told people in the grocery store about Jesus, because we were supposed to. They all thought it was cute, from what I remember.
In fourth grade, after a few years of doing my vaguely Christian 'praying when I wanted something real, real bad,' I took a book out of the library at school. I don't know what kind of book it was, or even why I got it, but as I was flipping through it I came upon a black and white photo on most of page. The image was a statue of a black dog with a ribbon around his neck. I LOVED him. I looked at him and wanted to tear the page out and take him home with me. He was beautiful - every inch of him, down to his amazing toenails. He was imperfect in places, where people had sculpted and shaped him or his paint had flaked off, and I adored even that about him. I drew him, since I couldn't steal the book or the page and because drawing something was my way of never losing it. The book told me he was Egyptian, had been found in the tomb of someone named Tutankhamen, and his name was Anubis.
I took Anubis home and showed my friends and parents. My babysitter and her daughters were amused to the level of 'Oh, she drew another pretty picture,' but looked wary of him. The girl emerging as my new best friend, Jen, loved him and she wanted to know more about him too. My Dad already knew who he was and taught me to say his name properly. From the day of my meeting with Anubis in the pages of mildewed library books, Jen and I devoured all our library's Egypt books and bought all the ones I could from the Book Order Club that ran through our classes. Jen and I got best friend necklaces in the shape of ankhs and made little dolls of the gods we liked best. Kids in my class wrote "egyptian" on our end-of-the-year "things about you" cards in sixth grade. My all-knowing Grandmother bought me a silver cartouche with my name in it that year. I still wear it.
My excitement over Egypt's mythology, not to mention the fact that I was thrilled that mythology other than the Greek I heard at bedtime existed, fueled me to find Egypt's people. My Grandmother's church had led me to believe that "Pharaoh" was this crazy old guy who ruled Egypt for the entire duration of the Bible. I had discovered quickly after finding Anubis that ‘Pharaoh’ was a title.
I pretended to have an Oracle in the coat room. Jen and I were briefly persecuted for worshiping ancient gods on the playground (even though we weren't), and I wrote almost all my passed note correspondence with anyone in hieroglyphs. Jen and I hid secret messages, rocks, charms and whatever else we liked under a special part of the rock wall on the playground. We dressed our dolls up as pharaohs, and made up characters who lived in the ancient culture. Our classmates were suspicious of us and one classmate of mine told me I was going to hell.
When I went to church during all of this and Sunday School teachers talked about anyone saying anything to "Pharaoh", I asked 'Which one?'. They didn't know. My Grandmother told me "Rameses," which settled me until I found out just how many Pharaohs had that name. In my church adventures, I started hearing Egypt being portrayed as the bad guy. I had never met an 'Isrealite', but I was supposed to empathize with them. I had no idea what made someone a Jew, and I’d never met one. Meanwhile, I spent my afternoons with my best friend acting out adventures with a chunk of the Egyptian pantheon. Jen’s characterization of the goddess Anukis became best friends with my character, June, and the sisters Kipa and Rhodopis got their names from Egyptian myths we’d collected over the years.
In a kind of confused protest only I could understand at the time, I began signing my arts and crafts projects in Bible School in hieroglyphs. At one particular church camp, one of our teachers picked up my paper collage of whatever, checked the back of it and asked of the group, "Okay, who's the Hebrew guy?" I was horrified. This Bible business was written by the Hebrews wasn't it? And the people teaching it to us didn't know that Hebrew looked nothing like Egyptian? Even my crude Egyptian couldn’t be that bad. From then on, I stopped seeing those women as my teachers and saw instead the volunteering mothers of three that they really were, which made my anger and separation from the rest of everything easier.
I was angry to hear that I would never get to meet Cleopatra or Tutankhamen because they didn’t jive with Jesus. I was horrified at the number of people I read about who were born in anything ‘BC’, because it was a giant tag saying they were not up there in the giant depot of awesome people to meet. I had issues with this idea that God waited for all those people to be condemned or unsaved before he sent someone to clue everyone in. I prayed for a lot of dead people. Impassioned prayers were delivered to God to save Cleopatra, my dead friend Britney, and probably most of the Roman Empire.
Back when I went to the AWANA group, I don’t know what denomination it was, but I was under the impression from those people that prayer for the dead was a good thing to do. I guess it was them, as I can't imagine where else I could have decided that. When I asked my Ellwood-based Youth Group leader one night, years after my AWANA days, to add my dead best friend to the prayer request list she instead added me(!) and prayed for me to heal from my friend's passing. I said nothing, but inwardly, as she squeezed my shoulder, I changed the group leader's words. I wasn’t the dead one! Why was she wasting the prayer on me? I’d been over the death for quite a while, but it still scared me that my friend wasn’t seeing her favorite Pink Panther episode in heaven and I definitely did not need someone praying for me to accomplish this.
We were told stories over and over in these classes of how Jesus died for our sins, died for our sins, died for our sins. And Judas! Judas betrayed him! I did not understand what the betrayal really was and why Jesus died for real. Why, in the real world, people had to kill him. At first, I didn’t know that he was uprooting the Jewish religion, because we were given only the word ‘Jews’, which was really synonymous with ‘Hebrews’, and nothing more. Worse yet, though, was that I was given no outside look. No one said, “This was radical, okay? Jesus sounded INSANE, in addition to blasphemous. He and his followers were considered a cult.” Instead, we were just told over and over that he was the glory and the power forever and the Romans (who I also thought were pretty cool, but not as cool as the Egyptians) were bad and dumb for not recognizing him for what he was. Since WE all knew that Jesus was great, we condemned the Romans in our perfect hindsight. When asked how we KNEW that Jesus was the right dude, the Bible was the only thing anyone had to give me. If it said it in the Bible, it was true and there were no other arguments. I honestly didn’t understand why we needed a whole Bible if you could just say, “Yeah, Jesus is pretty cool,” and be saved anyway.
Sometime in elementary school, and twice, actually, I went to church camp. The place was beautiful, with gorgeous buildings and lots of forest and awesome little cabins. While there, we were woken up at seven every morning and often kept up later than ten or eleven at night for ‘chapel’ and ‘devotions’ and ‘Bible Study Time.’ I wasn’t allowed to bring my art stuff with me, only a Bible. I didn’t even have a whole one; I had to dig one out of my Dad’s library. I still had the little orange Bible from my AWANA days, but it was apparently only the damn New Testament. I had no idea that that wasn’t enough until someone told me it was the second half of the Bible. I don’t think anyone explained to me why someone would only publish one half a book. At night we were all told to study the Bible until we fell asleep or it was ‘lights out’ time. They usually asked us to share our favorite verses for ‘devotions’ but I couldn’t internalize them. I was also totally clueless as to what ‘devotions’ were really supposed to be, so I doodled on the blank pages.
We had a preacher there who screamed against the evils of secular music and whatever else every morning before breakfast. He tried really hard to demonize Smashing Pumpkins, who I wasn’t interested in at all because they’d never sung in a Disney movie, but I remember hearing him screw up their name, and do the same to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He was the same guy we were forced to hear every night at ‘chapel,’ which I had the guts to skip only once in favor of taking pictures of the sunset. When people asked me about it later, I pretended I had lost track of time.
I called my Dad one night, desperate to go home. He told me to stick it out, and when I confided in some other kids over a Klondike bar, they told me to pray about it. I didn’t understand that at all.
On an afternoon when we were all supposed to be in the pool, I climbed a giant rock wall, sat on a protrusion just like the one in the Lion King, and tried to become the wind, or at least Pocahontas. I still love the feeling of singing into the wind. Someone found me and a friend I had brought along and told us that the time we had in the pool had been wasted on the rock and steered us to the pool. I don’t remember the pool except for getting certified to swim in the deep end without praying about it first, even though I told someone I had. That rock though? I’d love to sit on that rock again.
One night, we gathered in a circle on the floor of the room beside the one I stayed in. It was like girls’ night in, and we all told stories and attempted to bond. I had this eerie feeling that they all knew each other before I arrived, so I wasn’t particularly part of their group. Regardless of knowing them or not, we all sat there, exchanging stories of God in our lives or something. I say ‘or something’ because it was really the end of circle time that I remember. Our leader passed out small cards with a bit that we were supposed to read to ‘accept Jesus into our hearts as our savior.’ After we read them and were instructed that we were under no obligation to actually do it, we began going around the circle to declare whether we had accepted him. Some girls had already done this before, and anyone who hadn’t decided to accept him right then with their little card. I wasn’t aware I had to proclaim accepting him to anyone, and I wasn’t sure that peer pressure was supposed to be how this accepting happened, but I dutifully repeated everything the other girls and the little white card had said. I didn’t sleep very well that night.
During one session with our daily classes, our teacher presented us with cards she had bought from the gift shop with each of our names on them. They’re the kind you stick in your wallet for some reason. You know, the ones with pastel colors, flowers and a verse or two from Matthew or Luke on them. When she read my name, and gave me my card, I read that it meant ‘Shining Fame’. This was probably the most uplifting and exciting thing I’d experienced all week. She asked me what I thought ‘Shining Fame’ would mean. I told her that I liked to draw, so maybe I’d be famous at that, feeling kind of proud of my awesome name. She looked a little awkward and said, “Maybe you’ll draw pictures someday that glorify the Lord and you’ll be famous in his eyes.” I cannot express the kind of dissatisfaction I had with this. I had no intentions of glorifying anyone, especially not someone as boring as God. My bloody horse demons and magical cats and elf people enchanted me, but they didn’t belong anywhere near a cross or a manger. I told our teacher “Maybe” and let the conversation go to the next kid. I dwelled on ‘Shining Fame’ for the rest of my time there.
The night of the Bonfire (which was apparently a deeply significant event that I couldn’t understand, much like the ritual Baptism, which looked like sheer madness to me), other campers were giving their ‘testimonies’. I knew what the word testimony meant, and while I wasn’t sure they were using it the same way I was, I thought surely I had something to say about God. I was in God camp, and I was going to have to get down with this Jesus business eventually, because there was nothing else. So I stood up and told them about ‘Shining Fame.’ I told them never to hate their names, because their parents gave it to them, and since their parents loved God, then God loved their name and it meant something and blah blah blah, I’m eight years old and haven’t the foggiest idea what I’m talking about. I’m sure it was excruciating for others and probably caused them to feel embarrassed for me. I’m embarrassed to think on it now, and I think I knew in some sense that it was a silly thing to do even then. I didn’t hear a single testimony that night, before or after my ‘deep’ proclamation of ‘names are good, guys.’
Our last day at camp, we ventured to ‘The Cross’. The Cross was the giant illuminated cross that sat atop the camp’s largest hill and could be seen from nearly everywhere at night. While I thought being up that high would be exciting, I was not excited about climbing there. It was long, and it was hard and I probably complained too loudly over my fellow campers and leaders saying that Exodus was probably just like what we were enduring. I tried to imagine how awesome the Cross would be, how it would be this glowing beacon of amazing, and how we were going to do something radical up there.
The Cross was big.
And it was illuminated.
And that was it.
We stood on the cliff and looked over the landscape that we could barely see because it was midnight or eleven or something insane like that, and then we had to head back down. Cars came and picked up the older people. I was so angry. No one else seemed to think the trip had been wasted, no one else seemed flipped out that they had hiked a mile uphill to stare into the black and look a cross that wasn’t as cool up close at all. I went to sleep very bitterly that night. The next day, some girls in my room asked me if wanted to go with them back up to the cross. I made up some excuse not to, went out, took more pictures of the sky and bought a T-shirt with a lion on it in the giftshop. I honestly bought it because it was the least Jesus-y of anything in the shop, though whether I thought the other stuff was cheesy or I was just delaying the inevitable I don’t know.
When I returned, I didn’t feel like a changed girl at all. I felt like a girl who had been the fat chick during relay races and the confused one during study time. I told everyone about how pretty it was though, and how good the food was and how nice a time I thought I might have had overall. I didn’t even tell my diary that this stuff didn’t sit with me. Hell, years later, I made an entry in my diary that dedicated the whole volume to God, though it was only done under the most classic of ways - out of fear. Fear that my house would be swept up by the tornadoes I kept hearing warnings for that summer. I never wrote another dedication like that.
One particular day, Grandmother told me that the next big animated movie coming out was going to be just PERFECT for me. The title? "Prince of Egypt". I was slightly dismayed to discover that it was just the story of Moses, but I enjoyed the Egyptian imagery of the film, even when Moses was no longer enjoying it. That is, until the 'evil guys' sang their little song number.
In their chants were the names of gods that I knew. There, being depicted as the great evil, ignorant, comedic relief sinners were cartoonish looking men singing the names of people I loved. Bastet. Isis. Re. ANUBIS. ANUKIS, who was the namesake/representation of my beloved character June's best friend! And, worst of all at that time, despite my initial intro into Egypt by way of Anubis, was Sekhmet. SEKHMET. Sekhmet was my bloodthirsty lion woman, my badass woman in a big collection of kingly men. I loved Sekhmet and developed a whole personality for her. Even though I was a pre-teen at the time, the tiny wooden spoon toy of Sekhmet that I’d made years before stuck out in my head and I couldn’t take the idea of the God that had made me figure out two testaments and devotions and mime knowing the Pledge to the Christian flag was something that could take her down. Sekhmet was a firey, bloody guardian of women and she was my FAVORITE.
It was a movie. An animated one. Not to be taken seriously at all, but my Grandmother seemed to take deep religious satisfaction from it. I, on the other hand, tuned out half the movie after the painful assumption that characters, beings, PEOPLE that I did not venerate, but did love, were ‘evil’. And rather than turn from them, as I suppose was the message that that song would have liked someone like me to get from it, I clung tighter. That song tried to dismantle what I had fallen in love with and cultivated along with everything else that I loved. Chaos Knot happened around Egyptian myth, and in some ways BECAUSE of it. What I knew about me was that I had never taken comfort from a church but that I had taken a great amount in drawing and filling with life the characters mythology showed to me. One giant male god in the sky was not going to take Sekhmet from me and wasn’t going to make me think of anything but my best friend when I heard ‘Anukis.’
After that, I grumbled angrily when dragged to church. I protested my mother trying to take us to one for even Christmas and Easter, and when I was there I made sure that I had a blessedly awful time. I encouraged my mother to go by herself if she really wanted to hang with Jesus, but I wasn’t into it. When I was 14, my brother and step-brother and I were taken to church for months when my dad married my step-mother. It was a condition of their marriage to be active members of the church for a certain period of time and while everyone else droned ‘Hallelujah’, we sang anything else we could think of. I sung some Japanese pop that made me feel good, or Disney songs, and my brother and step-brother sang selected rap songs and commercial jingles. We were pretty smug about the whole thing.
During these services, communion bread and wine were passed around for the first time in a service I’d witnessed. They passed right over me, and my step-mother explained, ominously, that if I hadn’t been baptized, I couldn’t have this stuff, but that even if I had, I could never take it with a unclear soul. If she and I were having a fight, for example, and we were just furious at each other, then we shouldn’t take it. While I watched the cute little cups and bread cubes float away from me along the pew, part of me was very proud that I’d been spared baptism as a child and had no obligation to like the place I was confined to.
That year, my very Catholic town had a new crop of kids to confirm, and when they all disappeared for a few days, I discovered I was in a very small minority of non-Catholics in town. However, like Jews, I really had no idea what the deal was. One day, my friend Jimmy, who had a very Catholic family, was walking with me and one of his brothers to a place for lunch. Jimmy’s brother asked me why I wore so many necklaces, and I looked at all five or six of them and said I just liked to. He saw my ankh and my cartouche and asked what religion I was, after saying that he was Catholic.
“My family is Christian,” I told him, with some hesitation.
“Yeah, Catholics are Christian too,” he said. “I mean, what kind?”
I hadn’t known I was a ‘kind’ of Christian, except for maybe a reluctant or unimpressed one. I also had not really been aware that Catholic was in the same bracket.
“Methodist? Baptist?” he offered when I had nothing to say.
“I have no idea,” I answered. “What’s the difference?”
He was not amused and seemed to think I’d insulted him. I was flustered about the whole thing the rest of that day.
Through Jimmy, I began to understand little details of Catholicism. I learned that you told your sins to a priest in a box and in a little town like Ellwood, I couldn’t imagine the horror of doing that. It would spread like some kind of disease in such a small gossip-y place if anyone but the priest heard you (and maybe even just him). I learned that Jimmy was apparently doing something that would cause his family to hate him forever because they were Catholic, though he never told me what, only that he was choking up over telling the priest. Considering what media entertained me most at the time, I should have known, but he was as good at convincing me as he was himself.
I can’t count how many literary characters Jen and I saw gay subtext between as we got older. We enjoyed the yaoi manga genre, and were giant fans of very pretty men. I don’t know when I learned it, considering the funky order in which I seemed to learn everything else about Christianity, but I knew very well at that point that being gay did not fly with the man upstairs.
I ALSO can’t count how many classmates of mine asked me if Jimmy was gay. That same unfathomable number is how many times he told me he was in love with an upperclass girl and how many times he did something that seemed like a blatant cry for help that I’m surprised my subtext-finding mind didn’t latch onto as fact. Unfortunately for Jimmy, being gay did not fly not only with the guy upstairs, but also with his family. Rather than tell them, Jimmy took pills in waves and at his worst, a phone call from me saved him from going undiscovered after taking all of them.
Aside from when I thought it couldn’t hurt (tornado warnings!), I’d stopped praying. Near the end of my senior year, the internet had infiltrated me deeply and I was in support of gays, evolution, and not forcing people into anything, and less in support of a flawed book that had done nothing but make me and people I loved uncomfortable at the very least. My mother challenged me once, saying that there were plenty of gay Christians. I told her I didn’t care, that I was done with hypocrisy and being alienated from them. I’d rather just be free of them. She asked me to give faith a chance.
I decided to cultivate faith in humanity, and cultivate ‘spirituality’ that had nothing to do with God, or drinking wine, or memorizing anything, or being part of group that didn’t know me. Sometime around then, I met a friend online through mutual love of a manga character who was painfully subtexting gay all over the place. With an ease I can’t imagine I would have had without discovering that I disliked this God business, I developed a kind of a crush on another girl.
I’d had crushes on boys before, both on and offline, but had been either rejected or betrayed by them. Most decided they liked one of my best friends better, usually directly after I confessed. The online guy seemed to be attempting his hand at charming girls across the country and accidentally sent me an e-mail in the name of another girl. This actually didn’t totally shatter my faith in men and turn me into a lesbian at last or anything of the sort. In fact, I had conversations through highschool centered about being unable to imagine being with a girl, though this was probably informed by the kinds of girls I had to choose from in Ellwood City.
Online, I met people who had fluid gender identities, which seriously thrilled me. Feeling boxed into types bothered me, and the friend I found online was biologically female, but rejected much of the feminine stereotype. This girl was totally wrapped up in our discussions of this character and when I got to college, she was one of my first calls to someone I didn’t know in person, using a calling card from my mom. A crush on another girl followed and I discovered that I had a mad love of androgyny when I compared the boyish girls I was following around to the sparklingly beautiful (fictional) boys that I loved in highschool.
I had also become one of those people that the Bible, and my hometown, and my dad didn’t like.
In college I met my first real live Jew, who, while totally bad at being Jewish, made the entire Jew experience much clearer to me. With Mab, I voiced irritations at Christianity, and she generally countered with ‘Yeah, Jews don’t do that shit.’ While I wasn’t interested in becoming a Jew, not that I ever could, I felt that aside from hijacking some pagan rituals for Jesus’ birthday, the Jews had done everything better. (Mab even agreed on the Christmas issue and her Traffic Cone Tree is still the highlight of my Freshman year memories.)
Religious people tried to give me pamphlets almost daily at school. I tried to avoid them, because I never had the guts to tell them how I really felt about them. When one shoved a Chick Tract in my hands, I was horrified to discover when I arrived home that it was the one specifically condemning homosexuality. I was outraged. I had gay friends, I had gay characters, and I was bisexual! The next time I tried to avoid a pamphlet guy, I recognized the figure on the front of the book he was trying to hand me: Krishna. I took one, even gave him a donation. I was just so sick of seeing Jesus everywhere.
That Christmas, my grandmother gave me a Bible. With an ankh around my neck, I accepted the gift, and rode home with my mother in baffled silence. My grandmother had no idea that I had rejected the stories she told me when I was young, and no idea, along with the rest of my family, that I was totally nuts about a Jewish girl who lived in San Diego. To this day, she still has no idea.
My mother has gotten over me not jiving with Jesus. In fact, when I first came to the new house that she and my step-dad had built, she’d bought me a small goddess altar that matched my bed sheets. She also thinks my girlfriend is pretty rad. I still love Sekhmet.
I understood religion. I understood what it gave people. Hell, I knew it had given me thousands of years of mythology to love. I think I even understood religious experiences, but I didn’t experience hand-raising-speaking-in-tongues action over Jesus. I felt it in, and still feel it in singing. In Broadway, folk-dances, in Ruslana. I feel it in creating CK and LOFP. I feel in going too fast in my car. I feel it on a roller coaster and I felt it when I escaped Ellwood. It’s not adrenaline, it’s not a simple “oh shit, that was great” feeling. It’s something bigger than that - you feel it inside you and all around you and in everything all at once. You can experience it more than once with the same result and it never gets old or doesn’t bring you an immense feeling of ‘up and over.’ These feelings were what made me sure that my religion was never going to be something I had to strain to feel coming from the sky. My religion came from me - it was my love of anything, be it person, idea or object, and my treatment of it. It was Bill and Ted’s “Be Excellent To Each Other.”
Continued research has only solidified my dislike of organized religion as an option for me and strengthened my love for mythology. I am fascinated by religion, but I don’t want any of it. Worship is death to the soul for me. What I experience as my soul has only experienced euphoria, happiness and acceptance when it is let free. It is warmest, strongest and most comforting when it can escape. If I pray and bow my head, I’m holding it in and that’s damaging to me as a person. I worship nothing. I love, and I appreciate, and I celebrate, but I do not worship. The things I’ve internalized as part of me would only be held back if I were to lower that part of me in worship of something else. I don’t want you to think that I’m ‘too proud for religion,’ because that’s not what I’m selling. My religion isn’t practiced by thousands, it’s not headed by patriarchs, there are no official hymns and no one can tell me that I’m doing it wrong.