“When religion does not move people to the mystical or non dual level of consciousness, it is more a part of the problem than any solution whatsoever.” -Richard Rohr
I had a relationship ending conversation with a man in Paris a few weeks ago.
Extracting my upbringing and placing it on the table I’ve built in front of me has been equal parts debilitating and confusing since I moved to France.
Asking myself: “Am I just a fool waving conductor wand to sentimentalise the unimaginable human condition? Or is my faith a courageous act of hope?” has created a stark reality in my daily life. I dropped out of seminary 5 years ago and the echoes of
“Where the heck do I go from here?”
still ring in my head.
I live two streets over from the American Church in Paris and my desire to know the unknown has felt like a senseless act of romanticism.
In the deep south of the United States, a brick of belief about God and how to know God is formed in people until they either drive out or die. In an environment of fixed mindsets and morals, worshipping a creator who was explained to you from birth is never questioned. You just do it. Every Sunday morning. Every Wednesday night.
And I hate to be so critical of my own religion, but the system that rejected me structurally taught me to reject others too. As a woman, it was always an inconvenience to want to be involved with doctrine. The little me who was cast as a wise man in the Christmas Nativity Scene still feels too loud and too curious for my gender in the Christian status quo.
Sitting at a corner terrasse table, we somehow got on the subject of mental health and God. And like the combination of his Irish whiskey and my white wine, our opinions were not compatible. In fact, they were down right contradicting.
“Your beliefs aren’t truth.” he declared.
“Yes, but they’re my truth.”
A dialogue ensued not so much about religious beliefs but about what the definition of belief actually is. His eyes grew large in confusion as I began to explain all of the un-doing of Bible Belt religion I’ve done.
Being diagnosed with an eating disorder that almost killed me from a very early ago, I always wondered why mental health was never integrated into the spiritual health of western Christianity. And though I’m now in recovery, years of therapy and hospitals and prescription drugs didn’t heal my disordered eating habits or chronic depression. And surely nothing about my mental health was salved by Hillsong worship music or cool instagram worthy small groups. The most life-changing recovery I partook in was with actually communing with God. Learning to be loved and patient through meditation and prayer. Integrating tools of self-sought neurological education and studying who Jesus was as a person through many lenses gave me a hope that I cling to to this day. He responded, loudly, of his view of evolution and the many forms he believed God exists. That Jesus couldn’t be proven as the messiah because historically, how could anyone?
He shared his ideas about not labeling God and not separating good from bad. And I disagreed.
I had seen bad. Felt bad. And I had also felt Good. I caught myself regurgitating doctrine I subconsciously believed:
-That Jesus was the son of God (I couldn’t prove)
-That we all came from Adam and Eve (I couldn’t defend)
-That we were all either going to heaven or hell (I coudn’t define)
Words like “exclusive” and “just like the others” began to spew from his mouth. He began to compare me to the priests and people who did unthinkable things to children and women and land in the past. I scrambled to explain how leaving organised religion exposed my love for the God. And working under a political, powerful, mostly misogynist leadership tainted my view of the word “Christian”, but the horrible connotation wasn’t true of all of us.
Yet, I still defended the label so aggressively that it made it sound worse. I was taught apologetics from such an early age, but I guess I really wasn’t taught empathy. My demeanor became small and I pleaded that there’s plenty of proof that Jesus existing and that Christians, like all groups of people, had done harmful things. But good things too. In this passionate defense his anger grew like his eyes as he brought up his personal experience of sexual assault found within the Church system.
I didn’t know what to say. And I didn’t know how to say it. It seemed now that the relationship that was built on mutual interest and companionship in this new country was slipping away.
And I didn’t have the language to bring it back.
The more I defended my view, the more arrogant I became.
I felt myself shrink into either imposter-syndrome or hypocrisy.
Maybe both.
As Ted Lasso puts it, “every person is a different person” so why, in ways of Christian faith are we raised to treat others with no tenderness beyond conversion? To speak before we listen? To sympathize and love beyond an agenda? With a background I thought I shook, I began to cry in this French brasserie. I shuttered at my responses. It was impossible for me to overlook his insults my soul found so vicious. And he felt the same.
After the yelling and tears subsided, I realized that the argument wasn’t about whether God existed in the form of a human man 2000 years ago in the Middle East or not. It was about how beliefs are fabricated into our lives. Into our relationships. And how we live is more important than how we defend we die.
“Come and Take it”, as the original Texas flag states, has seeped into my bloodstream more than I’ve consented it to.
We got the check as people around us stared. In the rain we walked and apologized for our quick tongues, but I knew the love that existed between us was going to ask for permission to stay. And we were both going to have to say no. Not anymore.
Values, beliefs and thoughts are important to build trust. And when trust is broken or worse, misunderstood, relationships are nearly impossible to flourish. This reality breaks my heart but also confuses me and gives me context to a lot of the confusion I felt in the time I spent with this person.
Love is understanding.
But what about understanding yourself? Is choosing to disagree with someone the bravest thing you can do? Or can being quick to listen, slow to anger and accepting of reality the braver way around? What does living a life of integrity in your own experiences look like? Sound like? Feel like? Right now, for me it feels like committing to my own understandings of things and listening. Listening to the experiences of others who were raised in different villages than mine, in different circumstances under different conditions. And perhaps breathing before I inhale their views and exhale my own. Being a martyr for your religion isn’t sacrificial. It’s egotistical. Especially when you claim someone’s already done that on two pieces of wood.
The more I travel from home the more my heart breaks. Perhaps this is what it means to live like Jesus.