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I found myself homeless when I was nineteen years old, and I figured that being homeless was a better alternative than driving back to the city my parents lived in like a prodigal daughter that wasn’t actually a prodigal but whom some of the cult perceived as prodigal. While it is no excuse for my bad behavior, desperate people act in desperate ways, and I was no exception.

On Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night, and any other time the church doors were open, I was dressed modestly with a long skirt and a shirt that was less than three fingers below my collarbone, singing hymns. But on Monday mornings you could catch me outside the pub with a miniskirt, fishnet tights, with my hair and makeup done totally different than it was the day before. Not that I ever had the guts to walk into the pubs, because I knew God would fry me for eternity, and I knew I was living dangerously as far as the cult was concerned.

I wished that I had the “guts” that my other homeless friends had in that they had no problem selling their bodies for money, and it was damn good money. I happened to be unemployed, again because of my own stupidity, which is often how I have found myself unemployed. I certainly was not the prettiest out of the group, but I often wished that I could do what they did, that if God would not throw me in hell or punish me by bringing me even lower than I was already, I would give it a try. I suppose that in this case I am grateful that fear kept me from prostitution.

I’m also grateful that fear of going to that pit of fire forever kept me from doing drugs when everyone around me was doing them. They called me a prude because I would not have casual sex and I would not do drugs, but I was happy to be around both. I’ve never been a casual sex person it wasn’t entirely my fear of hell but also the fact that sex was very emotional for me and I had trust issues surrounding it. I suppose that happens when one is raped, sexually harassed, and sexually abused as a child. I was dirty and ashamed, and I did not want to make myself even more dirty. I would be unable to present myself as a pure virgin on my wedding day and that was one of the biggest sins a fundamentalist could commit. There are bigger ones, and I committed those too.

There was this disconnect where I thought that the only two options available to me were to remain fundamentalist even though some of it seemed like bullshit, or I could totally ruin my life with drugs, pre-marital sex, and bad friends. It is quite possible that I thought this because those truly may have been the only two options I had at the time. Fundamentalists who “got saved” once they became adults had these elaborate stories about how they had supposedly lived a life of sin before accepting Jesus as their personal savior. It seemed that the minute they did that, they suddenly reformed themselves and thanks to Jesus they were now new people and no longer struggled with their previous sins.

This of course fed my shame, because those stories were only good if you had not been saved before doing that stuff, and I had been saved hundreds of times by this time. Here was I, someone who grew up in a “good Christian family,” struggling with grievous sin. Since I am talking frankly and honestly, the things I was doing were wrong, they were sin, and they were lots of times illegal. While I was doing these things, I also wanted the people I was doing them with to get saved so that they could be saved from hell. It was a very confusing time.

So yes, I was baptized again. This time it was in a private swimming pool owned by one of the more popular families in the church. The pastor went on with the same drivel about how baptism does not make you a Christian, that it is a symbol of the new life in you, of the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus. This whole idea of baptism and communion being pictures and symbols rather than sacramental never made sense to me, but this is what the church taught, and it was what I believed even though it didn’t make sense.

Not surprisingly, in looking back on it, that baptism didn’t take either and I was still doubtful of whether I was saved or not. This would be an ongoing issue until I learned that baptism was a sacrament that immediately initiated a person into the family of God. But I mostly stopped my nervous habit of praying the sinner’s prayer over and over because I figured that if I was not saved by now then perhaps there was no hope for me. I was going to hell no matter what I did or said or how earnest I was.

As a teenage girl I would earnestly pray for God to “break me” as God breaking me and putting me back together was apparently the only way that I could be of any use for God. I would never be good enough if I had not been broken first. God was supposed to shatter me and then put me on the potter’s wheel and mold me into something beautiful and new.

There is a story told in all four Gospels (which I will return to later and which is one of my favorite parts of the Bible) in which a woman comes and she breaks a jar of ointment to anoint the feet of Jesus after having already washed them and dried them with her hair. The fundamentalists said that the point of that story was that she had to break the jar before it could be of any use to Jesus. Until it was shattered it was worthless.

We were told that if messed up, God would spank us. Metaphorically of course, but that was still a threat because the idea was that if we did not obey God’s commands exactly, that God would take us to rock bottom to punish us to lovingly bring us back to God. Besides, spanking in fundamentalist churches is more like beating. I was told that there was nothing whatsoever that was good in me and that if I wanted anything good, I needed to follow Jesus, because threats are totally the way to make sure people are all in. The Bible in Hebrews uses that violent imagery.

One day I wrote in my journal: “Oh Lord, you are so merciful! Again, you slapped me. You slapped me harder this time and gave me more. The merciful part is that it doesn’t sting for long. These ones stung more and longer than the last but thank-you for doing what you had to do to get my attention. I know that people need a shock before they will listen. I have been going my own way, so you had to give me a shock to make me listen.” (17 November 2002). I seriously thought that I deserved to have God slap me in the face or come down with a huge cattle prodder and beat me. This is completely and utterly fucked up, but I did not know that at the time. It seemed very reasonable. If I didn’t do what I was told I was in for a beating. After all that’s how it was like with my parents growing up, and God was my spiritual father, so God operated the same way. But God only did this to me because God loved me.

In their book Proverbs for Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us, Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker say: “Do we really believe that God is appeased by cruelty, and wants nothing more than our obedience? It becomes imperative that we ask this question when we examine how theology sanctions human cruelty.

If God is imagined as fatherly torturer, earthly parents are also justified, perhaps even required, to teach through violence. Children are instructed to understand their submission to pain as a form of love. Behind closed doors, in our own community, spouses and children are battered by their abusers who justify their actions as necessary, loving discipline. ‘I only hit her because I love her.’ ‘I’m doing this for your own good.’ The child or the spouse who believe that obedience is what God wants may put up with physical or sexual abuse in an effort to be a good Christian.”

This quote resonated deep inside my soul, I recognized myself and that what I had been taught made me equate violence with love.

When I was seventeen I spent most of my time wondering how God was going to chasten me, how God was going to break me and mold me into something that pleased God more that the awful person that I was, and freaking out that I was too worldly. I lived in absolute terror that God would do awful things to me if I strayed from God’s path, which is how I ended up becoming even more fundamentalist than my parents for many years. I was so afraid of doing it wrong that I went to extremes to be right with God and show God my love, which probably has a whole lot to do with my not being able to separate love and abuse. For a long time, I thought that abuse was love, all because of shit like this.

The shame was so prevalent. I first got baptized when I was ten years old in a freezing cold creek that was basically in the middle of nowhere. It was surrounded by bush and sugar cane fields, it was a creek that flowed rapidly most of the time, but I remember the water being relatively still that day, because the church chose baptism times around what the creek and weather would be like. We were not one of the fancy churches with white baptismal robes and a baptismal pool. We just showed up at the creek after church in our church clothes. I was terrified of “being dunked” as my parents jokingly called it.

I think my entire Sunday School class may have gotten baptized that day because the biggest pressure had been put on the pre-teen class. We were old enough that we should already be saved, because hey, who wouldn’t want to be saved from hell?

Herein lies a huge problem with fundamentalism, that obsession with being saved from hell. Hell is one of those necessary, foundational beliefs, without which, there would be no fundamentalism. There are several things that fundamentalist cults like the one I grew up in need in order to be successful in maintaining their control. They need shame, they need hell, and they need the doctrine of original sin. In fact, Matthew Paul Turner, in his book Churched states that: “Being a fundamentalist was pointless without hell. With no hot and fiery pit existing somewhere below the soil, our views and beliefs lost a good deal of their meaning.” (p. 108).

Sure, the church gave lip-service to this wonderful new life I could have in Christ but usually only after literally trying to scare the hell out of me first. Anyway, for some reason the shame got to me right before and many times after I was baptized. Almost every time hell was preached about, which was a lot, I just knew I was going there. I was constantly told that people could only be saved if they really and truly meant it when they prayed to be saved. I guessed that I just never meant it enough and I spent my childhood and teenage years being terrified of hell and the fact that I was obviously going there. I prayed “the sinner’s prayer” more times than I can count, and I eventually went on to be baptized twice more as I thought I had gotten “truly saved.”

The next time I got baptized was a time of even greater confusion for me and I was still straddling the fence of this elaborate double life I had lived since I was a child. On one hand I was the picture of a decent fundamentalist young woman, on the other, my heart wasn’t in it at all and I knew the whole thing was fucked up but those people were my life, they were my community, I literally knew nobody else and had nobody else. So, it was a matter of conforming if I wanted to keep my community and life as I knew it.

This baptism was done when I was twenty, right after my six-month stint of homelessness, where I had done things which I still regret to this day. I guess that I may have been in search of another community to attach myself to. I wanted to fit-in somewhere, and I was never quite good enough for the fundamentalists. I always missed the mark. But the things I did during that time were big bad sins that definitely meant I was not saved. I knew I had done wrong, and this was not just a thing that I could pretend was inconsequential. I had messed up big time, in ways that could have totally ruined my life, and not just in the fundamentalist community.

References:

Brock, Rita Nagashima and Rebecca Ann Parker. Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us. 2002: Beacon Press.

Turner, Matthew Paul. Churched: One Kid’s Journey Toward God Despite a Holy Mess. 2010: WaterBrook.

One of the very first entries in my journal said: “I’m a dirty, rotten, filthy sinner, and I don’t deserve God’s love.” The phrase “dirty, rotten, filthy, sinner” was something my father often said, especially in discipline or spiritual conversations. I also recorded many suicidal thoughts in my journal that year, and that continued all throughout my teenage years. By December of 1999, I was writing things like “just knowing how horrible I am, and how useless is a start.”

I was ashamed of my very life. I can’t remember the expanse of my sins as a fourteen year old, and they weren’t anything serious, but I was still ashamed because I wasn’t modest enough, I wasn’t pure enough, I didn’t talk about the right things, I was proud of my accomplishments and pride was a sin so I needed to be “humbled” and God was out to get me. I wanted to fix my hair a certain way which was vanity, also a sin. These were apparently very serious violations against a holy God.

The pastor would preach about how each individual in the congregation was responsible for nailing Jesus to that cross, that if I was the only person to ever live, Jesus would still have had to die as a sacrifice for my pride and my vanity and wanting to wear something even remotely fashionable.

“Many of us were taught that if you do not fit inside the circle of the church’s behavioral codes, God is not pleased with you, so we whittled ourselves down to a shape that could fit those teachings, or we denied those parts of ourselves entirely,” says Nadia Bolz-Weber in her book Shameless (p. 4). I strived so hard to do what I was told. It was reinforced over and over that if I truly loved God, I would obey. Questions were not allowed. It was a case of comply or be punished. Doubts had to be pushed deep inside my soul, and never entertained because I was supposed to trust God completely, and if God said it in God’s word then it was literal truth.

I was often told that I was a rebel at heart, that I was a dirty, rotten, filthy sinner, that I deserved God’s wrath. I was never good enough and I never would be because I never quite fit in, either with my family or with the church. I remember desperately trying to gain an interest in cricket because the rest of my family was interested in cricket. I knew absolutely nothing about cricket, I couldn’t understand why my family was so enthralled with the games, and why they shouted at the TV when things were either going well or not going well. I’ve never been a professional sports fan. I read my mom’s cricket magazines that came in the mail once a month, I hung posters of cricket players who I didn’t know and didn’t care to know, on my bedroom walls, so I could pretend to be interested in cricket long enough to actually become interested in cricket. It was often pointed out to me by my family that I just did not fit in because I did not like the same things that they liked. It wasn’t for lack of trying or lack of pretending or lack of trying to deny who I was.

I was ashamed that I was different, I was ashamed of my doubts and questions and fears because those things were not tolerated. As I will talk about later, when I was about thirteen, I began cutting myself in some sadistic way to atone for my sins. To punish myself so that God would not have to do it and that God would accept my sacrifice and love me, and because I was deeply ashamed that I was such an evil person. The doctrine of “original sin” was of utmost importance to the cult because without it, the entire cult would fall apart. As my father reminded me of often, I was a dirty, rotten, filthy sinner at birth. I was told repeatedly that I had inherited a “sin nature” the moment I was conceived. I am honestly not sure about my theology surrounding sin, I’m still trying to work it out, but the concept of God is love is now my starting point and I work from there.

My philosophy shifted a little after I left home, which I left as soon as it was possible because I have this habit of running away from things. I figured that if people were going to talk shit about me and claim that I had done bad things and that I was going to be in trouble anyway, that I sure as hell was going to have fun doing it, although I lived this strange double life, because I still wanted to be “right with God” which meant being submissive to the cult leaders.

So basically, I was just bad. I was born bad. I was supposed to be ashamed of the figurative nakedness of my sin. Sure, I had done things wrong like everyone else, but I actually behaved better than most other kids, because I was ashamed and beaten into submission. What I never realized until right after my 34^th birthday was that God did not want me to live in shame, that God wanted me to live in the knowledge of God’s love. Nadia Bolz-Weber describes this perfectly:

“Shame has an origin, and it is not God. When Adam and Eve tried to avoid God, God said, ‘where are you?’ And they said, ‘we were naked and tried to hide from you because we were afraid.’ God then said to them, ‘who told you you were naked?’

Who told them they were naked? My money is on the snake. For some reason God allows us to live in a world where alternatives to God’s voice exist, and those alternatives to God’s voice are where shame originates.” (2019, p. 135).

The priest who really reinforced this whole idea of God loving me often told me that the voices I was hearing were not of God because God is love and the voices that I was listening to were unloving and full of shame. She would tell me that every time I talked badly about myself. She told me that I was listening to lies and needed to start listening to truth.

Veronica Hollinger, in an essay titled Fantasies of Absence: The Postmodern Vampire, writes: “This deconstruction of boundaries helps to explain why the vampire is a monster-of-choice these days, since it is itself an inherently deconstructive figure: it is the monster that used to be human; it is the undead that used to be alive; it is the monster that looks like us. For this reason, the figure of the vampire always has the potential to jeopardize conventional distinctions between human and monster, between life and death, between ourselves and the other. We look into the mirror it provides and we see a version of ourselves. Or, more accurately, keeping in mind the orthodoxy that vampires cast no mirror reflections, we look into the mirror and see nothing but ourselves.” (1997, p. 201).

References:

Bolz-Weber, Nadia. Shameless: A Sexual Reformation. 2019: Convergent.

Hollinger, Veronica. “Fantasies of Absence: The Postmodern Vampire” Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture. 1997: The University of Pennsylvania Press.

When I first started making prayer beads, I made them as an act of repentance, as a self-imposed penance for the first time I messed around with witchcraft. I went on to dabble in witchcraft three times, once fairly deeply, until I realized that I missed the body and blood of Christ which spiritually sustained me. On June 23, 2019, I officially was “reaffirmed” into the Episcopal Church by the Right Reverend Brian Seage, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi. This means I made a public renewal of my baptismal vows, which I had broken. Not that I made vows when I was baptized three times in the fundamentalist cult I was born into, but I had made those vows both at my confirmation and at the baptism of my children.

The crescent moon tattoo on my right arm was done when I first began to delve into witchcraft, and sometimes I want to regret that tattoo but now I see that it’s part of the story. Prayer beads were very meaningful to me when I first tried them. At first I was afraid to try them because, as a priest said at a street fair when I asked them if they sold prayer beads “we don’t need any trinkets in order to speak to God, we go straight to God” and this is basically what I’d always been told. It turns out that what I’d always been told wasn’t truth, not this time and not a lot of other times either. But I longed to try them, because this whole spontaneous prayer thing wasn’t working for me, because my prayers mostly consisted of begging God to help me with my bad circumstances or cursing God out for said bad circumstances.

The kind of prayer that I had been taught was no longer working for me, and to be honest I don’t think it was really working for God either. I got to the point where I could not pray at all, except for the liturgy every Sunday, and I knew that God would understand. But I still longed to pray. I expressed an interest in trying to use the Episcopal/Anglican rosary, and a friend from my church gifted me a set. I began to use them almost every day, and it was amazing. Although the fundamentalists insisted that rote, memorized prayers were wrong, they were wrong about that too. They called them “vain repetitions” and claimed that the Bible was against them and that meant we were too.

It was through the use of prayer beads that I began to understand that prayer wasn’t necessarily about me. It was about focusing on God, about quietening my heart, about listening. I also got involved in centering prayer which was a unique experience and one I do periodically when I have an extended period of time, but prayer beads are great for when I only have ten minutes. I’m also learning about breath prayers right now and those are meaningful as well. The beads help me to calm my anxious brain and focus, using my sense of touch to help me to pay attention to the prayers.

I began just making a set for myself, and in fact I just gifted that set to a special friend, and it was almost as meaningful and significant as using them myself, realizing that I was helping other people to pray. I sell the beads for $35 a set or 2 for $60. I use beautiful beads, usually gemstones, because prayer is beautiful and holy and I wanted the rosaries to be beautiful also.

I was bitching on Facebook about a particularly boring and difficult work for me in my British Literature class, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. I have never been able to get to far into anything by Woolf, but I wondered if there was something wrong with me because almost everybody else seems to like her, they find her work profound, or some shit like that.

Instead of just letting me complain, my undergrad sociology professor hit me up and started asking questions that I had difficulty answering, and came to the point where I didn’t want to answer any more questions because I suddenly realized how much I don’t know and that I had no idea what I was even going on about. Which is actually part of what makes learning so amazing. Once I start to ask questions, I get to a place of confusion, and once that confusion lifts, I am left with some usually deep and meaningful (at least to me) insights.

One of the questions he asked me was about my approach to literature, which I hadn’t thought about much. Sure, I had studied structuralism and psychoanalytic theory and Marxism and feminist theory, but none of that really fit. But as I sat and truly thought about my approach, it was blatantly obvious that I take a mythological/archetypal approach to literature. It’s part of what attracted me to Tarot, it’s part of what brought me back to my beloved Episcopal Church, because this mythological/archetypal shit is actually the kind of stuff I thrive on in real life. It makes sense to me, and I connect deeply with it. I know that doesn’t sound very academic of me, that’s my creative side coming out.

This is probably what feeds my fascination with monsters and the macabre and vampires in particular. I connect so deeply with these things because they speak to my own experience and they help me to understand the world and they help me process my own trauma. I suppose that makes me very selfish reader, but reading and writing have been my only coping skills for a good portion of my life. I can honestly say that I would not even be alive today were it not for these two things.

I wanted to know where God was when I had already been awake for three days straight and had to follow an ambulance three hours north to a bigger hospital.

I wanted to know where God was when my child was attacking me in a hours long violent rage, day after day.

I wanted to know where God was when my son had strings of seizures which landed him in the ICU for three days, while I begged God to let him wake up.

I wanted to know where God was when I was on my hands and knees for the fourth time that day scrubbing shit off of the walls and floor.

I often wondered if my faith just wasn’t good enough, if I had done something to piss God off. I wondered if God was just too busy answering trite prayer requests for things like nice weather for someone’s party. I questioned the very concept of prayer.

I begged, I pleaded, I cried, I cursed God out.

And then, one day, things began to fall into place. I didn’t see it at first, as life was crashing down around me from the sheer magnitude of his needs, of my health deteriorating, and struggles my other children were facing.  

There have been many situations where I have been overwhelmed and I have begged, pleaded, cried, and cursed God out, and in all those times, God has shown up in dramatic ways, possibly because I would be too hard-headed to see it otherwise.

I threw fits at God and I questioned the concept of suffering and why things happened and came up with no satisfactory answer or theories (and I still haven’t). I even questioned atonement theories, although again I’ve not come up with any epiphanies on that one either.

But today, as I was driving up to the facility where my son lives now to visit him, God spoke to me. Not audibly, for I would wonder if I had schizophrenia too if that happened, but with God’s presence and my own thoughts.

When I placed my son in that facility, I grieved hard, although I felt that I did not have the right to because my son was still alive, he just had to live in an institution. I still grieve, it still hurts. I see things in the store that are some of his favorite things, and they make me cry. Sometimes I even pick the things up and hug them as if my son is present in them. He isn’t, but I wonder now if maybe God is. Is God present in the dinosaur pillow I picked up off the shelf at Walmart and hugged while I cried.

I have been visiting my son at least once a month since he left. He is flourishing and living his best life in the facility he lives in. He’s thriving on being in a heavily structured environment. My son is a different person. He’s happy, he’s secure, and he loves his mommy. Just like that, on my drive up there this morning, I realized: through all the grief, and all the pain, in the past, the present and the future, this is my son’s healing.

The healing didn’t happen the way I wanted it to, where God just waved some kind of magic wand and everything was different. Instead, God allowed for circumstances and the right people at the right time to get him a safe and secure place to live where he could thrive.

Healing is a process, not a one-time event.

My son is experiencing his healing.

Thanks be to God.

As I was strolling through the library noncommittally, I saw a book that was, being new, on display. The cover spoke to me, and as much as they say not to judge books by their covers, I do so when the covers speak to me. The book is a delight to the senses. The cover art is gorgeous, it’s a hardback, and it’s the perfect size, and best of all, it smells amazing. Although I am not sure why, it took me a while to actually read The Raven’s Tale after I checked it out and brought it home. I think maybe I wanted to admire the cover a little more before I cracked the book open.

The Raven’s Tale is a fictional account of the life of Edgar Allan Poe as a youth. Cat Winters has obviously done her research on Poe’s life, and she has knit together a delightful treat. When I read books, I do not read them merely for entertainment, I read them for learning also. I can’t help it, that just happens to be the way that my brain works. I picked this up at just the right time, as I am trying to follow my passion and find my purpose.

I have started accepting that I am a creative person, even when I don’t necessarily feel creative. My brain never shuts down, thinking deep thoughts and making connections. Although I, like Poe in The Raven’s Tale, have often despised that part of me, it’s something I am learning to embrace. Just like Poe realized the importance of his muse, which he named Lenore, I have realized the importance of mine. Poe quickly found out that without his muse, he was not a whole person. As I walk my journey towards wholeness, I need to embrace who I am.

Part of who I am is a deeply emotional thinker. I make connections that other’s don’t make. My mind is always on going a million miles an hour. Writing is how I process my life and make sense of things. Writing and creativity are a huge part of who I am. I have often despised being called a “deep thinker” as many people have used it in a mocking way. The more I allow myself to be who I was created to be, the more my passion comes out and the more alive I feel.

In The Raven’s Tale, there came a point at which Poe thought he would die without his muse, and I understand that feeling. While I am not in danger of physical death if I don’t pursue my creativity, a part of who I am dies inside of me. Seeing as this story is based on Poe’s life story, I feel deeply connected to Poe. Poe’s heartbreak lead to some beautiful literature, and although The Raven’s Tale is a fictional account, it’s all based on facts. The book is exquisite, and important reading for creatives.

As beauty emerged from darkness in the life of Edgar Allan Poe, I notice the beauty also emerging from darkness in my own life as I continue to write and continue to learn. One day I will make a meaningful contribution both in my writing and in academia. I know I will, the muse is here to stay. Just as Poe eventually embraced his muse, so I embrace mine. It’s part of who I was meant to be all along.