I Left The Church, Not My Humanity, Behind
There Is No Going Backwards
I don’t miss the church. And I don’t miss the people. They were horrid. The abuse was okay, being upset, hurt, angry, resentful, and sad about the abuse, out loud, was not okay.
More than once I was asked “Why can’t they just get over it,” in fact, I’ll relay one conversation I can’t get out of my head to you now. It went like this:
Her: Why can’t they just get over it?
Me: Get over what?
Her: Get over whatever it is that’s keeping them on the streets?
Me: Too tired to respond, so I didn’t.
The truth is the reason that people can’t just “get over” being houseless, is because the experience is traumatic. It leaves you feeling like you have failed so badly, that you don’t even deserve a place to live. It breaks your spirit and makes you think you are unworthy of all the things other people have.
Being houseless, even and perhaps especially after it was your job to help others find homes, really puts a dent in the idea of Hope.
I remember at one point, I thought to myself “Should I smoke crack now? Is that what’s next?” Because I had hit rock bottom, and then Nada Chehade called me. I’ve been retelling this story over and over again because I am there again, at a place where I am looking around and finding very few reasons to have hope.
Inside The Roman Catholic Church, they sideline themselves with soldiers. Where there is an army base, there is most assuredly a Roman Catholic Church, nearby.
This is precisely because the Church feeds on the world the way fictional vampires feed on fictional humans. Always aligning itself with that which it thinks will benefit the church the most.
If supporting the Nazis protected the church, then that was what the church did. If protecting Israel is what protects the church, then that is what the church will do, precisely because the existence of Israel, proves the Bible right, and the Bible as we all know, is the main selling point of the church.
Read the fucking book, sign away your soul to their one and only God, and you can do whatever the fuck you want, because in it’s entirety, the church has never stood for God, but instead for the blood-sucking, life-draining, legacy from whence it was first built.
Jesus had a very specific idea of what the church should be. And in return the same people who built the institution we now refer to as The Roman Catholic Church — Not I might add, The Church of Jesus Christ — are the same people that murdered him in cold blood, in front of thousands.
The same people who marched him to his death, gave birth to descendants who swear that what is happening in Palestine is fair and just because “God said so.”
Except as I’ve been saying since I was born, God didn’t say so. The man said so. Men wrote that book based on experiences they had in their lives, which they then decided must mean everyone must live the same way as they do.
The church is, was, and will always remain, a society of toxic people, perpetuating the worst of the crimes that humans are guilty of while swearing up and down it’s exactly how God wants it.
I’ve learned that those who have faith in God, who don’t necessarily believe in the church system, are different. It’s not easy to believe in God, and that’s especially true since October 8th, 2023, or May 25th, 2020, George Floyd.
The Oklahoma City bombings happened on April 19, 1995, nine days after my 12th birthday.
On my 16th birthday, a boy named Ahmad was killed in Gaza because he laughed at an Israeli cop. I have never gotten over that news, as I was celebrating, he was dying, because he dared to laugh.
I left the Roman Catholic Church when I was 13, I joined the Lutheran Church when I was in my teen years because my mother said “We have to have God in our lives.” She wasn’t wrong.
I needed God the way that most people needed air, but I never found God inside the church. I found the Goddess in the woods, wild and free, dancing just for people like me.
People who can’t see God the way they convince you God is supposed to be seen. I don’t see God in the faces of the rich and the famous. I see the Goddess in the face of the dead and the dying.
I see God in those just coming to this earth, those who are brand new to this planet, I see the ancient ones in all those that I surround myself with and they are all saying the same damned thing.
War doesn’t make life better.
War doesn’t change the world for the better.
Racism is not going to save you.
Separating yourself based on race, color, creed, nationality, size, and orientation, is not going to protect you from being abused. If anything these labels are only going to invite more abuse. Use them anyway if they help you figure out who you are, were, could be, and want to be.
Labels at the end of the day are just words. They help us understand what we have in common with other people. Labels are a language all in their own right, that says “This is who I am, so you can understand because this language is English, but it’s also diversity.”
Diversity, as a language, who would have thought? Every single person who said that the church cannot survive if it is to remain white, conservative, and abusive.
The same people who were excommunicated for speaking out against atrocities committed or ignored by the church communities they were or are a part of.
Can the church be a wonderful place? Not that I have seen. I have yet to come across a single church community that isn’t exclusionary in some way, that doesn’t say yes to some but no to others, and I am no longer interested at 41 years of age, in looking for one.
What I am interested in is building my own church so that no matter what you celebrate, or what faith you come from, you have a place to be, that welcomes you. Even Satanists because why the fuck not?! They know how to party.
I am who I am today because the church taught me that we are supposed to take care of those in need. But I am also who I am today because I learned, that I am a person in need of being taken care of, and since no one else can do it for me, I must do it for myself.
I don’t think God would punish me for getting better so that I can help others again, but I think the church very much wants me to believe I should work myself to death to pay reparations to God, who somehow never funnels that money back into the communities he takes from.
My Goddess loves all creatures, my God and I have some work to do, but what I know for certain is you can’t in my humble opinion, have a true relationship with any diety until you have a relationship with yourself.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall, The Loud Mouth Brown Girl
