Labyrinths V

We all spend time in the wilderness.

I don’t know why I keep coming back to extend this series of essays. I have notes that I’ve accumulated over the past couple weeks for other essays. Some are album reviews, some are explorations of genre in music, some are artist overviews. A lot of it amounts to portfolio work for sending to prospective publishers and magazines when applying for staff writer positions, or ideas that were rejected when pitched to other magazines. I have notes for the next few chapters of pretty much every SUNWORSHIPPER serial novel that I haven’t gotten around to putting to paper. And I’ve been ticking away at the novel I’ve been writing, which I should tease a bit more with excerpts.

And yet, I keep coming back to this. Must be something in the air. Oh well.

We all spend time in the wilderness.

I grew up in a very broadly Christian environment, both in reference to family and my hometown. I mean this in a literal way; the breadth of Christianity I was exposed to growing up was profound. My mother and her family was Catholic, my father and his family were half Baptist and half Methodist, I had Lutheran and Baptist babysitters, my brother and I were baptized Anglican, we had friends who were Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Presbyterians and non-denominational, and my brother and I wound up being very involved in a Pentecostal church. The ins and outs of these various strains became intimate knowledge to us, and the general idea that any given branch was blasphemous by nature became patently silly. We had direct access to pastors and believers of so many kinds of branches of faith within Christianity that ignorance regarding their mechanics was entirely owned by us for lack of asking the people around us who clearly knew. My brother and I were both (and still are) very curious kids, though, so there was no shortage of questions, even to the point of supreme frustration of pastors, Sunday school teachers, and peers.

We were only an ambiently Christian home, really. We celebrated Christmas and Easter, we would occasionally say grace before meals, and we read from the Bible, but it was not a particularly overbearing sort of Christianity in the home. This was not necessarily so of my babysitters, extended family, or peers; growing up in semi-rural Virginia and having family in rural New England and rural South Carolina, Christianity was not only the law but a severe and unbending one.

My enunciation of faith came when I was 7 following the death of my step-grandfather. I had known that he was my step-grandfather, and that my maternal grandfather had died when my mother was a teenager, but the notions of mortality and decay hadn’t really sunk in until I experienced the death of my step-grandfather. At once, I experienced not one but two deaths; first his, and then the shadow image of my biological grandfather, finally emerging latent grief blossoming from the mirror of experienced grief.

I’d lost pets before, and that was hard as hell as a kid, but there was something different to losing a human, someone in my family. Grandparents exist as a kind of externalized embodied object of the concept of permanence and lineage; we know that we emerged from them indirectly, passing through another node, and that they by nature must preexist our existences, and as such they gain a metaphysical weight that isn’t contained in peers or strangers. Further complicating this is the notion that, by being our blood, they resemble us at least partially in how we must look when we reach their age. We layer ourselves psychologically and bodily into them, even if not as strongly as our parents or siblings, and so witnessing their decay and deaths becomes a window to our own, a grim prophecy of sorts. (This, I am certain, is why people feel so uncomfortable and vaguely terrified-masquerading-as-bored when the elderly talk about their loneliness and body pain.)

Thinking of these twin deaths made me reckon my own. I wondered whether my grandfather and step-grandfather were in heaven, or would be once the gates of heaven were opened. (Theologically, it is a debated question whether the gates of heaven were opened upon the bodily ascent of Christ into heaven or whether they will only be opened on Judgment Day following the Apocalypse.) Worse, I wondered about my own soul. I wondered about my body. I wondered about decay and death, and how they were dead forever now and would remain dead forever, and that one day my other grandparents would die, and my parents, and my peers, and myself, and my children, on and on and on. It’s heavy shit when you’re young.

The effects were two-fold: first, the genetically loaded gun of depression and anxiety felt a finger ease itself onto the trigger, and I was sent to twice-a-week meetings with the school guidance counselor to discuss grief, decay, bodies, integrity of psyche and physique, and death for two years; second, I poured myself completely into faith. The counselor was hard at work with me on the experiential aspects of grief, exploring and containing the existential and physical anxieties. My ambient faith suddenly became terribly pitched when I reckoned the necessity of answering the question of death, eternity, and salvation vs. damnation, and that required God.

It wouldn’t be inaccurate to describe my new-found faith as fervent and obsessive. I thought about death constantly, and I feared death, and I feared what would happen to me when I died. I began reading the Bible obsessively, not just at night when my mother would sit by the beds of me and my brother and read from it but on my own. I wanted to know. I needed to know. So, I did what seemed smartest: I started at Genesis 1:1 and I read verse by verse, chapter by chapter, over a period of about two years, until I finished the entire god damn Bible.

A year after my step-grandfather died, my grandmother on that side died. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my mom fall into a deeper depression, even when my father died. This complicated things internally for me, of course. A year later, my brother met a friend who was devoutly Pentecostal, and they started going to youth group together, and due to my strange relationship with my brother, half loving and half abusive as hell, I wound up going, too.

Pentecostals, by the way, are the ones who dance with snakes and drink strychnine. My particular church also taught me, very thoroughly, that the Earth was 6000 years old, more or less, and that homosexuality was a sin, and that I was not to fraternize with non-believers because that’s how Satan finds a door to corrupt your soul, and that secular music is a gateway to evil, and on and on. When you are grappling with the impossibilities of grief, decay, and death, and are petrified for your mortal soul’s salvation in the face of potential damnation, these are messages of great power.

Reading the Bible raises certain questions. For instance, in God’s infinite perfection, in His inability to act without purpose and wisdom, why did He create Lucifer who would become Satan, tempter and adversary of man? Why can Satan not be forgiven? Why did Jehovah wait so long to stay Abraham’s hand? Why did He order the genocide of the native Canaanites upon the Israelites’ arrival? Why did He punish Lot’s wife so severely, a woman who doesn’t get a name, for merely looking back at the town where her family came from, where she was born, where she met her husband, where she gave birth to and raised her children? Why are non-believers to be slaughtered so wantonly and cruelly in the end of days? Why is damnation eternal?

These questions were not flippant for me. I loved God, in a way, and I feared hell, and I feared death, and I wanted more than anything to enter the kingdom of heaven. These seemed necessary questions to resolve. I was honest with myself that they caused me pause, but the Bible is very clear that lukewarm faith and hesitance can lead to blasphemy, which is one of the few unforgivable sins which Christ’s blood does not pay. I was petrified of committing a mortal sin and being thus damned forever no matter what I did. I had to answer these questions.

We all spend time in the wilderness.

I can’t express to someone who wasn’t devoutly religious the unique fear of hell and of disobeying God. Especially in these more strict interpretations of Christianity, the severity of punishment is profound, the margin of error is exceptionally narrow to nonexistent, and the consistency with which these terrors are reinforced by your peers, pastors, and eventually yourself (obsessively, compulsively) is pervasive.

Not only did I spend damn near every waking moment terrified for my soul, striving for stricter and stricter interpretations of faith to ensure ever more solidly the salvation of my eternal soul, but I also learned of a sickening second fear: that questions regarding the nature of God and mercy and salvation and damnation were tantamount to blasphemy, that doubt and confusion were conduits of sin and thus death and damnation. It seems hyperbolic and silly, and I strongly believe that those who are adamant that general resistance to religion never experienced these kinds of profound mortal terrors. I’m not sure I can communicate how cancerous this terror was. The knowledge that I would one day die, that my family would die, that my peers would die, and that the road to heaven was exceedingly narrow and that the punishments and tortures of hell were infinite. This wasn’t heavy metal hyperbole or bad teenage poetry; this was in the Bible, in the culture, in the pulpit, in the mouths of my peers and fellows of the church.

As a seed for a future essay: The sheer mortal and metaphysical terror I felt, the profundity and constancy of it, is part of what made heavy metal simultaneously intoxicating and legitimately frightening to me.

I became devout not only in my faith but in resolving my questions of God’s judgment. After all, if questioning God was tantamount to blasphemy, and blasphemy was an unforgivable sin, and I was honest with myself regarding the severity of these questions in my heart, then I must devote myself to resolving them for the sake of my soul and in honor of my devout and true love of God.

Unfortunately, the books I went to to answer these questions were evasive, gesturing vaguely to the idea that one must simply accept the mysteries of God. While I knew in some manner that this must be true, I was too honest with myself that this did not satisfy my question and would thus still threaten my soul. So, I asked peers, who became uncomfortable. I was directed to the youth minister, who admonished me for tempting my peers (which triggered a severe wave of mortal terror; leading the faithful away from the flock is also a mortal sin), and gave me a vague and unsatisfactory answer.

I was in a panic, so I turned to the head pastor. He was more thorough in his answer, telling me I must defer to God and that the reality of the Lord is that sometimes He is a god of justice and not always one of love, or at least that love does not always look as we think it should.

In my heart, this was the answer I dreaded. Because I remained honest with myself, and I knew I could not love a god that was this way, that was so unwavering, domineering, and vain. I loved… The best way to say it is that, in my faith, I loved and respected God, and it was through this love and respect that I had to admit to Him that I could not worship Him as He was. I tried. I fucking tried. For the sake of my soul in the knowledge of death, I tried. But I couldn’t find love for God anymore. It’s an experience only the very devout who lose their faith can understand, that in the remaining flickering light of your true love of the Lord you acknowledge to him with the breaking of your heart that you cannot worship Him anymore.

I did not want to be an atheist. Death still haunted me. I wasn’t sure whether I disbelieved in Jehovah, but I knew I still felt something in me that gestured to a God, and I still loved God, if perhaps not the one I grew up with. I did not want to die. I did not want to be requisitioned to hell or, worse, to non-being. So, I began reading as wide in other faiths as I had in Christianity.

We all spend time in the wilderness.

It did not help Jehovah that in the midst of my very severe abuse, I cried out to Him for help, and my prayers were not answered, and my abuse continued unabated. There is an anger when your Father abandons you that only the faithful can know. It sounds melodramatic to non-believers, casual believers.

We all spend time in the wilderness.

I read the Quran. I read the Talmud. I read a selection of the Upanishads. I read the Bhagavad Gita. I read the Dhammapada. I read the Zohar. I read works of mysticism and the occult. Some things made me feel the glimmer. Mysticism, the occult, and Buddhism came closest. I could almost feel faith in me. But the more I read, the more distant it felt, the more my faith disintegrated. This was a traumatic nightmare to me; I wanted to love God, to find God, to worship God. It was a desperate and sincere quest. I did not want to be an atheist. I did not want to die. I wanted to know and love and worship God. But the more I tried, the more distant God became.

I read Nietzsche. I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey. As cliche as that is, it made me accept what had become true. I was an atheist. My faith was dead. I did not want my faith to be dead, but it was.

The corpse of faith turned to anger. It’s the kind of anger only a former believer can know. Especially surrounded by people who were still so faithful, who made you feel not only alien but a threat to their souls for this traumatic loss of your Father. You become unable to communicate your pain and your rage and your despair and your sorrow because your peers and family are afraid you will drag them to hell. I cannot convey what this feels like. Other former believers in these circumstances know. Someday I’ll figure out how to say it. New Atheism made sense to me then and was in a way necessary, even if it is silly at best and far too often dog-whistle racist at worst. But it was one of the few things I found at the time that matched the pain and rage toward this traumatic loss and reckoning of the warping effects of the death-worship, the death-fixation, the soul-fixation that this kind of faith puts in you that you can’t ever undo really. It was an improper coping mechanism perhaps, but I was young, and I didn’t know what else to do, and I felt very alone.

Later, I read The Brothers Karamazov. The greatest enunciation of this pain and despair and strange post-nihilist hope I’ve ever read, perhaps that’s ever been written. A torch in the darkness. Far, far better than the works of the New Atheists. A sigil etched on my heart, forever.

We all spend time in the wilderness.

There is a necessity to move through these things, through an idiot’s hope of heaven and fear of hell, through the nihilist’s reckoning of the emptiness of things, into something else. To not ignore the doorway, to not linger at its threshold, but to move through, and through, and through, in this wilderness of corridors.

We all spend time in the wilderness.