Believe it or not, I grew up going to church. My mother came from a very pious Seventh-Day Adventist family who wholeheartedly believed that Jesus was coming soon and we needed to be watchful for deception. Growing up, I experienced many different flavors of Christianity (Adventist, Catholic, Pentecostal, JW, Mormon, Non-Denominational) and many levels of adherence to the creed. I’ve read my bible front to back multiple times and although I may not be able to tell you where exactly a certain verse is I can tell you if an idea is biblical and roughly where you will find it if it is. I am well-versed in the language of Christendom and I speak it fluently (for which I am grateful because one cannot properly unravel an ideology until you can speak its language). I was taught that following rules alone would not save me and that an intentional relationship with Jesus was the only path to salvation. So at the age of 15 I began studying scripture seriously. I loved God. I believed wholly in his goodness, but I never developed a taste for church. Christian myth seemed so beautiful to me, the stories so vibrant and interesting, but the people who went to church seemed shallow, lifeless, and fake. We didn’t go to church often, but when we did I tried hard to enjoy it, which was basically impossible because church requires sitting still for long periods of time, wearing uncomfortable “appropriate” clothing, while listening to someone’s monologue on a stage. Church is a place of community and communion, not a source of belief and so I stopped going more than a couple times a year.

My breakup with Christianity was rough. I first noticed the inconsistencies when I was 18. I was studying the begats (the listing of generations documented in the various books of the bible). Many Christians don’t pay much attention to the begats because, well, they’re fucking boring. But if you study them you will see they don’t add up and when you have been raised to believe that the Bible is the beginning and end of all objective truth, inconsistencies are problematic. I sought insight from family, from pastors, all of who told me the same thing; Only God knows, but we must “Trust in the Lord with all our hearts and lean not on our own understanding” (Proverbs). That answer never did sit well with me. When I finally allowed myself to fully deconstruct the Christian narrative, I was 27 years old and it felt like the end of the world. My faith had been what bonded me to my family, what gave me hope while living in poverty, and what soothed me when I was drowning in anxiety and fear. It was hard to watch those foundations crumble and fall.

The final blow came when I was studying the foundations of Western culture. If you really want to learn how to think critically, study how culture and myth evolve. It’s a mind fuck and it will leave you wondering if there is a such thing as objective truth (in fact, that was the first question asked by our professor that semester; What is Truth?). Yeats wasn’t wrong when he wrote of the 20th century, “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold”. The more we as a species learn how to deconstruct ideas the more we realize the dreaded truth of our existence; that nothing is certain and we make up stories to help us cope with uncertainty, to help us create meaning.

I was angry. So. Fucking. Angry. After spending my young life trying to keep myself from being deceived, I felt that my very faith had deceived me. In my final paper that year I compared Christian doctrine to bad food I had eaten and was now shitting out. But my Christian faith did introduce me to the concept of listening for the voice of the divine. As a girl I would lay in bed after reading my bible and try to empty my mind of all the clutter and just listen for the voice of god. When I did hear that gentle voice, it was always brief and to the point; a couple of words, a sentence at the most. The Divine doesn’t monologue – we do. I have not identified as a Christian for almost 10 years now, but I know that the voice I learned to listen for then was the same voice I hear now and although I no longer believe that Jesus is the only pathway to Divine Energy, I do believe that he is one of them. I think that there are many way to connect with Divinity (or whatever you choose to call it – Goddess, God, Spirit, Universet, etc. I’m honestly still unsure what I feel is right to call it) and that walking in relationship with Spirit will look different to everyone and it is our job as reflective and meaning-making creatures to deconstruct our beliefs and examine the values and subtle messages that they hold, as well as how they affect people who don’t agree with us. Until we do that, we are walking blind and don’t really know what we believe.

It took a long time but I no longer feel anger toward my Christian upbringing. I don’t believe it is what I was told it is, but I appreciate the ethics that it taught me. I’m grateful that I was taught from such a young age that it was possible to have a relationship with God/Spirit/Creator/Goddess/Universe, etc. In some ways, the combination of poverty and religion that I was raised in led me to the spiritual path I’m on today. And for that, I’m very thankful.

My spiritual connection is through the Natural World. I no longer believe that we are above nature, but a purposeful part of it. Humans are not more intelligent than trees; we exist differently and for different purposes. There is not some celestial abstract idea that I need to rise up to, but a guttural knowing I need to sink down into. I do not resonate with Sky Cult worship, but an intimate Earth-Based spirituality. I still sing hymns, but now they have no words and instead of tunes that I learned in man-made structures, they are sounds that come to me in the wild. Now I take communion with the trees and birds and the dirt. Walking barefoot in dark soil and noticing the warm sensation spread from my feet into my body is church. Rocking in my hammock on Willow and listening to the sound of the wind in her leaves is church. Listening to the frogs at dusk is church. Melting into the animal of my body is church. And I look forward to that everyday.