On Being Loved And Having Faith

I write a lot about Christianity. To some people, it may seem strange coming from a trans woman and self described witch, a woman who worked in nightlife for a decade and who has, at times, turned to sex work for her well being. So much of my life seems opposed to normative Christianity, and yet I am drawn to it time and again.

I grew up in a Missouri Synod Lutheran congregation, surrounded by a family that was heavily tied to the church. My grandfather was a teacher, principal, and bus driver for a small Lutheran school. He and my grandmother built a small cottage on a private Lutheran lake and then after their retirements, moved there permanently. My father was deeply attached to the church. It was the only place I saw him be moved to tears. I knew something special existed there. 

Before long, I discovered that something special for myself. I saw the vestments change over the course of the liturgical year and knew they held meaning and power. I heard the music of yearning and grief and prayer over and over again. I read the poetry and said it aloud, in unison, with the other thirty or so people and learned the way togetherness felt. I watched the sun change position behind the stained glass window and illuminate the stories of Christ and his teachings. There is magic in the Church. Religion touches people because there is power in belief, community, ritual, and storytelling. There is a great beauty in it.

Alongside this love affair with faith I was having, I began to learn that something about me was wrong. At six years old, I was punished for playing with Barbies and said to my mother, “I wish I was a girl because you all would understand me.” While I vividly remember this conversation with my mother, I don’t remember my dad’s involvement in detail but I remember his anger and my fear. This became a trend in my memory–long stretches of love and tenderness and joy as long as I stayed within the box that was assigned to me, then blank spots that, when I try to remember now, only feel like sadness and fear.

In college, this festering, mysterious sadness that I so often dissociated from boiled over. I decided to end my life. Thankfully, I was saved by a friend. I don’t even know if she realizes today what I was in the midst of attempting when she interrupted me, but she is the reason I’m alive today. She was also a good friend who before this decision had encouraged me to be straight and to lean on God’s understanding. Her impact on me, her love and friendship, was muddied by her urge for me to be someone I was not. This was and is my experience with Christianity in a nutshell. People I have loved and felt loved by, mixed in with their rejection of what is fundamental and true of me.

I repeated this pattern over and over again throughout my life, seeking partnership and friendship with people who were sometimes good to me, but also very destructive. I have lived with negligent and abusive partners, had close friends who sought to heavily control my life, and practiced addictive behaviors with things like sex and alcohol because despite how badly they could make me feel, they also occasionally made me feel loved and whole and seen. I learned a version of love from my very earliest moments that rejected whole pieces of me. I did not know that anything better could exist.

I am in the midst of rewriting my own love affair with myself. I am choosing to stop rejecting myself, and to learn a version of love that embraces me in my entirety. Transition has been life saving. However, the results of the election have sent my nervous system backwards. I have been triggered back into my own self-rejection and the fear that others will reject me. I know that people in my life who profess their love to me have once again chosen to act in a way that doesn’t align with my new understanding of love. They have done so on the basis of their Christian authority. They have invoked God and they have decided that I do not deserve protection. To them, this is love.

I reject it. Frankly, I think God does as well. The fundamentalist Christian understanding of the texts that we now call “The Bible” is so anti-human, so anti-life that it doesn’t align at all with the magic I felt sitting in the pews at ten years old listening to the hymns pour out from my congregation’s lips. Hell is not below our feet, and Heaven not above. Heaven is something we create here on Earth with our friends and family. Heaven is genuine care and affection. Heaven is wholeness. Whether you believe in Christ, Allah, Brahma, or only that which you can observe with your own eyes, you can create Heaven right here and right now. 

Love someone in their wholeness and experience the radical transformation that it takes to do so. I dare you.