On Religion

I was raised in a household defined by religion, yet completely devoid of spirit. In amongst all the rules and doctrines, the feast days and the church services, there was not one iota of true communion: not with God, and not within the congregation.

My early education was entirely oriented around Right and Wrong. Good people did this. Bad people did that. I was taught that my only purpose in life was to be a good person, a rule follower, a humble supplicant to a righteous and angry God. Nothing mattered more than obedience.

But what were we obedient to? What was missing in all the constructs and edifices of our religion was the spark of divinity. Our God was a fickle, angry parent; our religion a dysfunctional family. There was no Love, only Fear. There was no Belonging, there was only self-righteousness and pomposity. Men labored over translations of Ancient Greek texts, seeking the Truth in scripture. Meanwhile, their devotional lives were utterly bankrupt.

I tried so hard to fit in to that group, I am sorry to say. I hold so much love for the little girl that was me, who desperately sought validation and acceptance. I wanted so badly to be good. I still do. I will spend the rest of my life rooting out the invasive weeds of be a good girl and selflessness is a virtue, and, perhaps the very worst, if something bad happened to you, it was probably your fault.

One of the great challenges of my early life was that I never did fit it with them. I was always too bold, too curious, too weird, too, too, too. It was only later that I realized that this challenge was also a profound gift. Once I was exiled from that religion, I was free to seek Truth for myself. Oh, I still carried the baggage they had given me. But I could travel a world that was so much larger than they had told me.

I’ve had my troubles out in this wild world (and I always will). There were times when I wished it could be easy, I wished fervently that the rules were simple, and goodness could once again be quantified. There is some comfort in being willfully blind and finding some other shepherd to lead you.

Those confines could never serve me for long, though. As the famous quote from the Buddha goes, “Just as we can know the ocean because it always tastes of salt, we can recognize enlightenment because it always tastes of freedom.” Once you taste that freedom, the confines of purely institutional devotion cannot hold you. I developed an acute allergy to religion and avoided it for my health and sanity. I chose my own wild brand of spirituality, that of Nature, of synchronicity, and of Love.

A couple of years ago, a friend who is a Unitarian came to visit me. We had talked about God, what the term meant for each of us, and his thoughts seemed aligned with mine in most ways. I sat in meditation, he sat in prayer. I read Starhawk and Tara Brach, he read Richard Rohr and Marcus Borg. I was surprised to realize that I didn’t break out in spiritual hives when he shared his experiences with church. I wondered if I had healed enough to explore further. If I truly believed that “what we resist, persists,” then keeping the door to religion triple-barricaded in my heart was not going to turn out well for me, ultimately. Perhaps this was a chance to find ease, to heal.

We went to services together in a small, whitewashed church near the local university. I remember being nervous, but doing my best not to show it. We went in just as the service was starting, so we were able to slip past the clusters of congregants chatting with each other and find our seats in a pew in the back. Down the center aisle was a long strip of art paper, with crayons in jars at the end of each row of pews. It was for the children, I learned, so that they could draw and color and be creative while the adults listened to the sermon.

My breath caught in that moment, looking at the little crayons and the colorful doodles already imprinted on the paper. I vividly remembered getting yanked out of an auditorium and being spanked in the bathroom because I’d been coloring too loudly during a sermon. I remembered being forced to sit week after week, silent and still, while a man yelled from a podium about all the ways God was angry with us.

I think that’s the moment I started crying. It was a different sort of crying: it wasn’t the percussive kind one does in sadness or disappointment or frustration. Tears simply began to stream down my cheeks, a constant flow of salt water dripping down to my chin. Love lived in that building. It was infused in every crack, every crevice. I could feel it swirling around me and it was as if a dam had broken inside me and I was flowing, flowing, flowing, with the energy of Love. At one point I remember a speaker reading to us from a children’s book, something about learning to celebrate different cultures through food. Some part of me feared this was all a little bit silly. But the part of me who was in love with the Love in this place was singing a hymn. I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know this hymn. It wasn’t until that very moment that I understood it.

There is a balm in Gilead
To make the wounded whole.
There is a balm in Gilead
To heal the sin-sick soul.

How lifeless that song had been. How vibrant it was now.

My friend was visibly confused by my tears. He asked several times if I wanted to leave. It must have looked pretty strange on the outside, this woman sitting in the back with tears streaming down her face while being read to from a childrens’ book. I wasn’t uncomfortable, not in the way you would think. As I sat there, I knew something deep, something ancient within me was finally being mended.

I haven’t visited that church or any other church since, but I finally understand what was missing at the center of the one I was raised in. Sure, I had found spirit in myself, but I had also learned that I could safely share it with others. Love was possible, even in the guise of religion.