losing my religion: part I
That was just a dream
That’s me in the corner
That’s me in the spotlight
Losing my religion
-R.E.M. “Losing My Religion.” Out of Time
My brother’s name is Nathan David. He goes by Nate. His middle name, David, is my dad’s first name. In the Bible, the prophet Nathan lives in Israel during the reign of King David and is a member of the royal court. Nathan serves as a divine dream interpreter for the king, a conduit for God to speak to King David.
Ann Faraday, a British psychologist and torchbearer in the empirical evaluation of dreamy content once said the “science of understanding our dreams is like learning a language of our hearts.” I fancy Faraday a modern-day Nathan, except for the masses not just the kingly.
When I was a senior in college, my brother Nate had a dream about me and penned a letter, interpreting the dream. It is transcribed in black ink on college-rule paper with a hurried scrawl, and was delivered by hand from Nate to me, folded into thirds.
The letter begins:
Niki, I had a dream last night and when I awoke and thought about it, I was saddened. It was vivid. I didn’t understand it. But I couldn’t understand it with my natural mind because it was a dream from God. I prayed this morning that God would give me understanding, and He did.
I like my brother’s name and only recently discovered the likeness of Bible Nathan with brother Nathan, what with the vivid dreams and all.
Nate’s letter continues:
I dreamt that somehow you had lost your right leg. It had been completely severed. I came across your right leg severed off in the bathroom, just lying on the sink. You could see the bone in the middle of it. I wondered how it happened.
Very like me to leave my dismembered body parts laying around for all to find. It says, “I didn’t mean for you to discover this, but I’m glad you did.” It feels more authentic this way.
I’ve researched symbolic meanings for limb amputation in dreams. Specifically, legs. Meaning ranges from prophetic — the person will encounter loss and it is important to take action to prevent it; to assumptions about a person’s general disposition — feeling that their existence in this world is full of discontentment.
Later still in the letter, Nate writes:
I find you laying on the couch on your stomach. You are completely wrapped in brown blankets. You weren’t making too much noise, but I could tell you were in deep, tremendous pain. I was standing back watching and I think Mom and Dad were there too. I looked and saw that your right leg was now a prosthetic limb. Your thigh was there, but the bottom half, your calf, was a perfectly clear prosthetic limb. I could see the bone of your upper leg growing into the piece. I remember grabbing Dad to point this out. He didn’t realize what I was pointing to until the third or fourth time I told him. Then, once he saw it, he started crying for you. That is all I really remember.
I like Nate’s dream. I’m coming to terms with his letter. The second page of the letter is his interpretation. It goes something like this: the brown blankets symbolize the cocoon of a butterfly, something only I, Niki, could create and something only God had the power to reach through to heal me. And, the healing would be painful.
These days, I feel like the 1985 version of Faraday when she writes, “I fell asleep one night in October 1985 and woke next morning without a self.” I feel like I woke one morning, suddenly free of my cocoon, a new butterfly, flapping around on its first day, but not quite sure what to make of itself. My wings are not what I thought they would be. One is real and delicate, made of layered membranes. The other wing I fashioned myself. It is made of an exotic metal that is clear like glass but sturdy like iron. These days, I do not think God had anything to do with either of my wings — that perhaps they are the natural next step in my evolution, the next formation of my atoms, these atoms, the ones that have existed since the beginning of time, forever moving forward, not back, and the color blue to match the blush of the expanding universe. Nonetheless, I find myself in a scrappy butterfly body, and I think it is good.
Oh, life is bigger
It’s bigger
Than you and you are not me
The lengths that I will go to
-R.E.M. “Losing My Religion.” Out of Time
These days I rub lavender oil under my nose at night in a piddling attempt to find Zen. I genuinely like the floral smell, and the tacit sensory experience lassos my attention like a rope halter around a wild horse’s neck.
The other night, I breathed in the mollifying scent of the essential oil and crossed my eyes. I tried to stare at my invisible third eye, a newfound spiritual body part that lives somewhere between my eyebrows and beneath my epidermis. I discovered this, of course, in yoga class, the same place where I learned that our hips carry what our hearts cannot. Sitting cross-legged and cross-eyed on my bed, I imagine that mindfulness looks like the blurry tip of my nose — a kaleidoscope of skin pigments swirling in an uneven, overlapping nebula of white duvet covers, ceiling fans and the glare of a street lamp. I remained present in this moment for a brief second until the discomfort of my strained eyeballs yank me back to my normal state, a state of square eyes.
“I’m not sure that’s how it works, babe,” my boyfriend tells me one night when he catches me in the bathroom with the tip of the lavender oil bottle almost up my nose. He’s right. It burns.
These days, I am just as mindful of my place in the expanding cosmos, as I am of the muscle tension behind my left knee and lower back. There is a point to this mindfulness mumbo-jumbo and it is sharp like a spinning wheel spindle and as allusive as a meandering plot line. The point is, these days I sniff lavender to clear away the stench of purgatory, to clear away a path. I’ve stumbled into a fog in an attempt to trace the lines of my religious past, from the genesis of my faith to its later crucifixion, from belief to doubt, from baptism to rebellion, back to the place where something was first lost and — unlike my severed leg on the bathroom sink in Nate’s dream — never found. These days, I think all humans shed and rebuild limbs from time to time, and religious or not, hope to God or science that someone notices, even if briefly, to note our metamorphosis.
These days, I cross my eyes, hold my breath, stick incense in a bowl of dirt and hope to Mindfulness that I can find something I lost long ago, and pray it’s more than just losing my religion. After all, a song has already been made about that.
I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try
-R.E.M. “Losing My Religion.” Out of Time
Midway through the chronicling of my Judeo-Christian past, I ask my friend, G.:
“G., how do you explain your falling away from faith?”
G. is a living human being I call my “best friend.” Before her, it was my dog, Rancho. Before Rancho, it was Jesus. G. and I met through a Craigslist advertisement as full-growing women, both several months shy of thirty. She needed a roommate and I needed a home. After a brief meet n’ greet and survey of her quirky yet homey duplex apartment in Baltimore’s Little Italy neighborhood, I moved in with her. We bonded over uncannily similar experiences with the Christian religion, divorce and a funny story about her mistaken, though later clairvoyant assumptions about my sexual identity.
“At a certain point, religion just didn’t make sense to me anymore,” G. says.
We are sitting on her couch, in her current home, which is a row house in Baltimore’s Canton neighborhood. The couch is the same as the one she had in Little Italy, and like our friendship is also a Craigslist-find. The night before, I texted her asking if she would meet me at her home and tell me stories of her religious past, ones I’ve heard but want to hear again for the sake of details. The Devil is in the details, and so are the answers. G. obliged, texting, “Haha, yup!”
I don’t tell her this, but more than verifying my recollection of her story details, I want to know about the cocktail of emotions she felt during her religious peaks and valleys. I am unsure if she — or anyone for that matter — can remember emotions, and if we can’t remember what we felt, or what we thought about what we believed, how can we verify what we feel and believe now? It’s a squishy state of being. We remember sensory details — the color of a pastor’s robe, or the taste of the Eucharist, or the smell of church pews, or the sound of electrical fans cranking to blow air in a warm sanctuary on a hot day — but can we remember which emotions coursed through our veins that first time we experienced God, that first time we felt angry with God, and then that time we first acknowledged we no longer believe in the sky man? I think I remember. I feel like I remember. I need to remember. I need something to compare the present against.
After spending years away from her home state of Delaware and out of her parents’ reach on an island in Hawaii, G. says she shed her beliefs like scales, ejecting contiguous layers of religious thinking with each mile and hour that distanced her from her past life. She met people that weren’t Christian and were happy, and those people became more relatable to her.
“I felt like I was just following a new truth, things that seemed more authentic,” she says.
G. describes herself as someone who at one time “loved Jesus.” She was raised super Christian like me and experienced the dramatic, though common sway of a religious pendulum, swinging between extremities, vacillating from God’s unconditional acceptance to baseless rejection by mortals. For instance, there was the time she sat in front of an all-male council of deacons to have demons of oppression called out of her. She was barely a teenager, an age when moodiness is to-be-expected, and the last thing needed is a panel of stiff men yelling at you, commanding Beelzebub to come out.
“I remember sitting there, fuming with anger,” G. says.
“Did you think you were possessed?” I ask her.
“No! I knew I didn’t have any demons in me.”
I am amused at the thought of G. hosting a little sprite inside her. She is a generous host and practices the kind of hospitality that is a lost art these days. I imagine her writing a thank you card to the spiritual nymph inside her, the ones with her big initial “G” on the front of it, thanking it (or them) for coming to the party inside of her, and politely letting them know that they are welcome to stay and possess her, she’ll just be retiring for the evening to her bed, and if they can please keep the noise to a minimum, but do help themselves to the manchego cheese and prosecco in the fridge.
“Tell me about the time you got married,” I tell G. This story is one I’ve heard so many times, sometimes I confuse her narrative with my own, even though they have different arcs and plot points. Her wedding story goes something like this:
G.’s parents refused to attend her wedding because the Christian boy their only daughter chose to marry broke pattern with their traditional expectations of formal Christian, courtship etiquette. One night, many moons before they married, G. was with a few of her friends, and they ended up at her then-boyfriend’s apartment for dinner. Being in his home without a parental unit present was a no-no, so they both agreed it was best for her to call home, and request permission from her Mom and Dad. She was a twenty-something when this happened, and like most Millennials, G. was living at home post-college, figuring things out.
“If you choose to stay there for dinner, then you may no longer live under our roof,” G.’s mother told her over the phone.
G. stayed for dinner. By the time she returned to her childhood home, G. was no longer welcomed inside, her belongings stacked on the driveway. She spoke to her mother through a window, their conversation playing to the logistics of getting her remaining belongings from inside the house, to out of the house.
“You’ll have to make an appointment with your father if you need inside,” her mother said.
G. loaded her belongings that were splayed out in the driveway into her car. Days later, she returned to the house, no longer her home, and moved her remaining belongings.
I think of the father in the New Testament parable about the prodigal son — the way he kept watch from the window of his home, waiting day-in and day-out with agonizing hope that today would be the day of his lost son’s return. And when at last his son appeared in the distance, no longer adrift, stumbling up the driveway, the father ran, kicking up dust beneath his feet to greet the boy. Despite the boy’s frivolous years away, living off of and draining his inheritance, the father sacrifices their fattest calf and a party is thrown to celebrate his child’s return. G.’s parents were present the day she came back for the rest of her stuff, and sat purposely idle on a couch, as she removed box after box, subtracting herself from their lives a little bit more with each return trip.
A child’s separation from their parents starts with birth, with the severing of the umbilical cord. If we could all remember our birth, I suppose we might say that first separation is no easier or any less tragic than the separations we endure when we learn to walk, talk, drive, love and move away. We enter this world and within seconds experience loss. It sounds like this: snip, snip. We fight for something we don’t even know we need — air — when all we want is to be back where it was warm and safe, inside a belly, or a cocoon. Then, we find our voice through a first howl for homeostasis, that which once was.
G. tells me her stories with her knees pulled into her chest, controlled hand motions and with a posture so straight, I wonder if anything can bend her. I feel my brows furrow and my mouth drying out from listening with a gaping mouth. I clinch the corners of the couch cushion. I feel she should mirror my demeanor, that anger should crack her voice and flash in her eyes. But she’s stoic.
“That’s so fucked up,” I tell G. “Do your parents realize that’s fucked up?”
“Maybe,” G. says.
“Fucking religion,” I say. It is my mantra these days. Though my yoga instructors suggest something less caustic.
Five years after their wedding, G. divorced the Christian boy and eventually her religious beliefs, in exchange for what seems to me to be a life of daily self-acceptance and hard-won happiness. I know she’s worked tirelessly to get to this place and so when I ask her if she’ll ever talk to her mother and father about the past, I am not surprised when she tells me she is in no hurry.
“Maybe one day,” G. says.
I mentally file stories like G.’s, and similar ones of my own in a tidy memory folder I call “Religion.” Though, G. says she files these particular stories under “Parents.”
These days, I am beginning to wonder if my filing system is flawed.
Like a hurt lost and blinded fool, fool
Oh no, I’ve said too much
I set it up
-R.E.M. “Losing My Religion.” Out of Time
In my first memory of religion I am kneeling over a whacked-out mattress and box spring, praying, in an old house in Kankakee, Illinois on South Poplar Avenue. I am three years-old, Nate is four, and we are whispering bedtime prayers into our pillows with Mom and Dad. The mattress is low to the floor because it has no frame.
“The mattress was you and your brother’s shared bed,” Mom tells me when I ask her about the memory.
At that age, our prayers would go something like this, “Dear Jesus, thank you for Mommy and Daddy, and for giving us food and toys. Please help Mommy and Daddy. Amen.” The priorities were clear — food, entertainment and our parents’ need for help.
The house on South Poplar Avenue was big, with paneling that was white, or maybe it was brown. The colors in this memory are muted. Or, perhaps it was the god-awful color combination of avocado and spice tones in the early 80s that create a fuzzy sepia color burn over my anamorphic images of the past.
The home had a backyard that spilled over the sides of the house, with a thin metal fence that divided our mangy grass from the neighbor’s cut grass. And it was just a few blocks from Cobb Park, where the Kankakee River dipped southeast forming the shape of a crooked elbow. In the spring, the river smelled like sweet watermelon and brine.
My parents rented the home on South Poplar Avenue from 1985–1987. I define these years as B.C. — Before Chicago. We lived in Kankakee just long enough for me to collect images of early childhood, before migrating north to the big city, Chicago, where God was calling Dad to start a church. I remember the way mine and Nate’s mops of shaggy blonde hair hung heavy like solemn silk draping over our eyes when we bowed our toddler heads in prayer at night and before every meal.
I tell my parents about these memories when I reach out to them to talk religion, and my lack thereof.
“How do you remember this stuff?” they ask.
“I’m not sure,” I say, wondering how they forget.
I remember vivid details of the past, down to the patterns on window treatments. Like the purple and yellow butterflies on white lace curtains in my bedroom on South Poplar Avenue. Or the inky smell of a set of blue and red Papermate erasable pens I acquired before I learned to write. I rubbed the tiny pair of hearts imprinted on the pens, imagining I was summoning a spell, then shoved the premium school supplies down a large, yellow heating vent. It seemed like the thing to do with writing utensils when you did not yet know their function. Everything was magical, until it was not.
These days, when I find my way back to my Midwest home turf and drive past Cobb Park, the river’s bend and springtime smell are the same, but everything else in the tired town has aged, and changed with time. The large country homes appear smaller, patches of dirt bear holes in what were once loosely manicured lawns, and the throngs of kids playing unsupervised in the grassy knolls of the boulevards are nowhere to be seen or heard.
I remember a time when we were a family in small-town America, and then a time when we were a family in a large city. In 1987, we moved to Chicago. After that, I attach memories to the apartments and rented homes we lived in, and if needed, can deduce the year based on what school grade I was in when we lived in 932 W. Willow, or 1402 N. North Park, or 1432 N. North Park, or 1434 N. North Park. One time, over a series of six years, we moved three times on the same block of a street with two norths in its name. Rent hikes, out-grown bedrooms, crummy landlords and structural disrepair of old apartments were the usual reasons for the moves. Other times it had something to do with God, and where he was calling our family to next.
I remember we were living at 932 W. Willow when a young boy my family was fostering touched me inappropriately and unwantedly under my clothes on multiple occasions. The little boy threatened to tell Mom and Dad that I had been bad and asked for the dirty deeds if I ever told them what he was doing to me. This is as clear as I can write about this situation: a person that was doing bad things to me, threatened to tell people that I was engaging in the bad things willingly, if I told anyone what he was doing to me. It was a tattletale predicament of Biblical proportions. Sexual manipulation is hard enough to dissect and articulate, but add religion, and you have one hell of a toxic dinner table conversation.
By the age of six, I’d prayed more prayers than a born-again adult, and knew about the fall of mankind, that someone somewhere in the clouds was keeping tabs on my doings and had the power to send me somewhere terrible for an amount of time I could not even imagine if I didn’t mind my holy manners, and my parents. I cared about staying out of trouble. I cared about doing right in my parents’ eyes and in the eyes of God. Most days, the two parties were tantamount and inseparable. So, I followed Little Boy’s instructions.
The little boy went to mine and my brother’s school, where Dad was running an afterschool youth ministry. Little Boy’s mother was a drug addict and spent her time and money on everything but taking care of Little Boy. My parents suggested that she put him under their care.
“Until you can get back on your feet,” they told her.
One time she showed up on the footsteps of 932 W. Willow, smelling like something I couldn’t place — sour and sweet all at once. She was thin, with dark pockmarks on her face and moved erratically, her head and hand motions either ahead or behind what she was trying to say. She wore an acid washed denim jacket with matching jean shorts and balanced an unlit cigarette in her slender fingers.
“Your Dad, home?” she asked.
“No.”
“Mom?”
“No.”
“How’s my little boy?”
I shrugged. I wondered if she was there to take him. I wondered whether Little Boy would tell her about how he sneaks into my bedroom at night to lay on top of me, if he would tell her I made him do it, if she would believe him, and if she would be angry, and would she be angry with Little Boy or with me? Would she tell my parents? Sin was hard to understand, but a child knows an unstable adult on their footsteps when they see them. I stepped behind the door and began to close it slowly.
“Alright, well you tell your parents I just need a little more time, OK?”
I shut the door, and remember suddenly feeling the urge to poop, wondering if it was God trying to tell me something.
The story of Little Boy could go in a memory folder about other twisted experiences with males. It could also go in a memory folder about home. Or even the parent folder. It is a universal story in that regard. But in my mind, it belongs in one place — the religion folder.
For thirty years, I humped around the belief that the story of Little Boy was the story of my inherent original sin made manifest. For thirty years, I kept the matter between God and I.
