I have a B.A. in Religion.  That was one result of looking for “the answer.”  I eventually found my answer.  And sometimes, as now, I have to talk with people very dear to me, whose answer is different.

It’s awkward to discuss matters of faith, religion, spirituality — whatever word one chooses — when there are differences in belief, even (maybe even especially) between people who care about one another.  Beliefs are deeply held, and it can be too easy too get into arguments about which belief system is right or wrong in ways that hurt each other.  But if we don’t risk the awkwardness, then instead there’s silence…which also hurts.

I’ve been having a conversation with someone dear to me about this religion stuff.  It’s been a sporadic conversation, because it’s been an awkward one.  But if argument is one way, and silence is another, there’s also a third way: to accept the awkwardness, while resisting the urge to argue.  If I love someone, then I want to listen and to know what’s in her heart, his heart —and I want that person I love to be able to know what’s in mine.  Not to argue, but simply to speak from one’s heart, in hopes that one’s interlocutor will listen, even if s/he disagrees.

This post is based upon things I’ve written on my side of the conversation.

I have been cautioned that it’s an unforgivable sin to deny Jesus Christ as the Son of God and our Savior.  I don’t believe there is such a thing as an unforgivable sin, at least not in any ultimate sense.  On a human level — just people being people, no god in the mix — some people will forgive each other for things that other people won’t.  The thing that sticks out in my mind with Jesus was when he said, of the very men who were killing him, “Forgive them father, for they know not what they do.” That’s what I believe of Jesus, whom many call Christ — that he had compassion even for his own murderers (which is what they were, even if they had the “law” of their time and place to “justify” their execution of him), because he knew how confused and limited human understanding can be.

That’s where I place myself, too, as a limited human being often confused about this or that, and knowing I have no final answers for everything I meet or see in the world.  But no other human being is any more empowered to give out final answers than I am: every one of us is limited.  And so I don’t believe in any such thing as inerrancy of, say, the Bible, because the people who wrote down its words were human beings.  So were the people who copied down the Bible’s words for later generations, so were those who translated those words into Latin or English or any other language.  So were all those who spoke or wrote down and propagated the words and ideas of Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, and every other religion.  And being human beings, however much they strove to know and understand the mystery that we call God, they made mistakes. Unfortunately, they also often institutionalized those mistakes in ways that brought uncountable harms to other people — often even to themselves.

I’m not a Christian, nor have I been one in at least  since junior high, because I reject the notion that there is only one way to approach or to believe about god — a notion of exclusivity that is  commonly held amongst Christians, as it is also by adherents of other religions.  If I have a confession of belief, it’s the one I’ve used for years: God is the universe and everything in it.  Illimitable god, I called it in a poem I wrote a couple of years ago: incapable of being limited or bounded, measureless — that is far beyond what I or any human being can completely comprehend or contain.  As my calculus tutor in high school taught me: No system can contain a metasystem.

And so god shows it/him/herself in ways that are infinite in their variety.  Jesus was and is a son of god, but so are all of us are children of god.  And following from that, I believe that Jesus was not the savior, but was a savior: not for having died crucified for our sins but because he taught his followers (and all of us who still heed his teachings rather than only the circumstances and meaning of his death) an understanding and a compassion, even at the point of his own death, that few of us reach even on our best days.  The thing he said that I love the best is: “The Kingdom of God is within you” — and within the limits of my own understanding, I do my best to live according to the goodness, the godness, that is within all of us to live by, if only we choose to.  Righteousness is another word that some use: to live in right relationship with ourselves, with each other, and with illimitable god and the illimitable creation that is one with it.

Being limited, I may be wrong about any of the conclusions I’ve formed so far about the world and god. No “conclusion” that I can make can be final anyway.  If it turns out I’ll be judged and damned for believing as I do by some specific God of some specific ideological belief system — well, mainly that’ll mean that, much to my disappointment, the universe is run by a Big Bully of the Sky who has all the morality of a Hitler, a Stalin, a Muammar Gadaffi, or even that putative enemy of the Christianist God, Satan.

But I don’t think so.

I will meantime try to base my judgments of other people on their actions — whether they do good or cause harm — not on the name by which their faith is called.  When I have problems with some Christians, it’s when they attempt to justify behaving harmfully and hatefully towards others in the name of their religion — not because they are Christians per se. And so with Muslims, Buddhists, whoever — anyone who attempts to justify harmful behavior in the name of religion, and treat their religion as not religion, but ideology: not Muslims but Islamists, not Christians but Christianists. Religion become ideology has ceased to be religion: it’s just ideology, in all its nasty worldliness, used as a club to namecall, batter, murder, and war upon people who believe differently.

So many of the disagreements between people that lead to anger and hatred and war anyway are not really based in who and what they are fundamentally as people, but on the the names they’re called by — Republican, Democrat, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, whatever.  Does god care more that call upon him (or her!) by one name rather than another? — or that we behave toward one another and toward the creation we have all been gifted to live within with respect, love, and the best effort of our hearts and minds?  God has as many ways to enter into people, as there are people: we all have our own language, and god knows them all.

From another poem of mine,

God cannot be enclosed in a book
or in the miser’s soul
which portions out justice in dribbles
and rations out love in crumbs,
then wonders why we starve.

God is too wide and vast and long
and knows us for what we are
as is known the sky, the river, the rocks,
as is knows each creature that breathes.

God is too wide, too vast, too long
and knows us as we are.

Since I’m still engaged in the awkward & sporadic conversation that gave rise to this post, I’ve been thinking a lot more about religion again, and will probably be writing more about it too.  Meanwhile, here are some of the other posts I’ve written about religion, religious/political ideologies, & my own personal god stuff.

• A brief spiritual history (27 Apr 2006)
• The god thing (30 Apr 2006)
• Hiisi (15 May 2006)
• Sermon (a poem) (17 May 2009; poem written in 1992)
• Religion v. belief (19 May 2009)
• Christianist, defined (23 Jun 2009)
• No Questions, Questions (poem) (24 Jun 2009)
• James Dobson’s God is a child abuser, & so is Jerry Prevo’s (22 Sep 2009)
• Job 42.13 (poem) (9 Jan 2010; poem written in 1995)
• Helping Haiti (& telling Pat Robertson to STFU) (13 Jan 2010)
• Integrity, violation, healing (21 Apr 2010)
• Metsän henki (poem) (30 Apr 2010; poem written in 2000)

Related posts:

1. Religion v. belief
2. An indictment of the Christian heresy followed by Palin & friends
3. God of Mosquitoes (poem)

Jerry Prevo on my TV. June 21 Father's Day sermon at the Anchorage Baptist Temple: lots of damning things to say about homosexuals. As usual.

I’m not sure this is it in final, but as I just told a friend, poetry is nothing if not full of variants.  (As I’m sure all the poets of the Bible full well knew.) So, call this version 1 if you like; I’ll see if there are any others.

No Questions, Questions

The man, smug in his pulpit,
has no questions.
He never has questions
except the rhetorical
question always followed
by his ready knowing answer read
from the book at his right hand:
the book at the right hand of God,
the book — the right hand of the judge
who judges the quick and the dead
to damn whoever fits
the words of his ready
answers read from that book.

I have questions…
What makes one so certain?
How does one live inside a closed book
behind closed doors in a windowless room
surrounded by a great great wall
blocking off all the horizons,
everything known, counted, familiar?
How does one live on a flat, flat Earth,
a horizonless planet where nothing new
ever walks, is seen, is encountered?
How does one breathe there?
How does one breathe where there are only
two kinds of people, the damned and the damning? —
and the smug man in his pulpit smiles,
knowing himself as the latter,
casting the former to flames,
smiling to serve such a God
who made things this way.

Somewhere beyond a horizon
on a round Earth set among stars
crafted by illimitable god,
I catch my breath.

Melissa S. Green
Tuesday, 23 June 2009
Anchorage, AK

My first brand-spanking new poem in awhile. Inspired by — hard to guess, innit? Same place, same circumstances, same ideologues — just a different year — as what drew “Sermon” out of me in 1992. Most of this was written yesterday on People Mover bus #36 during the long construction-interfered-with journey from UAA to the Loussac Library. Tip o’ the nib to James P. Carse whose The Religious Case Against Belief has been a necessary friend these past months.

Related posts:

1. Sermon (a poem)
2. Does Anyone Beat Your Heart for You (poem)
3. The Daily Tweets, 2009-10-31: "Cold" published at Crossed Genres, & other writing projects

I intended to post this a couple days ago, after a conversation with my friend Barbara who told me she was attracted to Buddhism but “I kill mosquitoes.”  I was reminded again this morning as I walked to work from the bus stop & had my own non-ahimsa moment.

God of Mosquitoes

I sit here like a resource.
The mosquitoes come to harvest me.
Over there, beneath the tree,
others fly aimlessly, waiting
for blood-quickened flesh to pass by — a cat,
a dog, a human, a bird.

Those here are lucky: they
have found me.  But
my hand finds them,
first mindlessly, then
malevolently intent.
It smashes down in
summary judgment.

If they know a reason
to buzz about for the summer —
annoying my ears,
adding itch to my skin —
it must be a small reason
for them to die
with such ease.

[July 7, 1995]

P.S. Alaska’s state bird is really the willow ptarmigan.

Related posts:

1. Literal (poem)
2. Spiritus Mundi
3. Ode to Alcohol (poem)

The Religious Case Against Belief by James P. Carse (New York: Penguin, 2008)

Friday before last, on my way down for coffee, I spotted a book on the new books shelf of the UAA/APU Consortium Library whose title caught my interest: The Religious Case Against Belief.  Its author, James P. Carse, is a professor emeritus of religion at New York University, where he spent 30 years directing its religious studies program.

I checked it out & spent a good part of the next morning waiting for my tire changeover at Johnson Tires & fighting my muzziness (I’d been up into the early morning hours finishing my post on same-sex marriage) to read it, & actually getting a lot out of it despite my sleepiness.

Later in the day, a friend of mine came to visited my blog & made a comment on a post I’d written way back in 2006 called “The god thing.” It was interesting coincidence — or perhaps, as I said in my reply to her comment, “perhaps the intervention of Dice the spirit of luck, or so I call her in my eternally forthcoming novel Mistress of Woodland” — that my friend should find that post to comment on just when I’d found this book, which in part discusses what I was saying in that post, and in part what my friend was critical of in organized religion. As she stated:

I don’t believe in any religion on the planet. (Jim Jones and his mass murder/suicide of men, women and children Guyana in 1975 was my wake-up call.) As far as I’m concerned, if the leader has a human body/mind that person can be wrong, wrong wrong…about anything. No flipping way I’m going to follow them.

So far, I’ve found in Carse a pretty good explication of what turns both my friend & I away from organized religion.  My main difficulty (at least on the muzzy, sleep-deprived mind I had last Saturday) is that Carse uses terminology in a way that is unfamiliar to me (despite my B.A. in Religion): e.g., he uses the terms religion where I would more likely use the terms spirituality, & belief or belief system where I would more likely say organized religion or religious ideology.

But same diff.  By Carse’s light, belief system is the kind of horror we’re used to having to put up with from the hardcore “true believer” types who’d like to kill people for differing with them, & who are so hardwire-tied to their belief systems that they’d die for them.  And they do both.

It’s this kind of ideological attachment to belief systems — to religious & other putatively all-explaining ideologies, which claim to have all the answers, & to hold the blueprints of the heavens, as it were— that are responsible for most of the wars in the world. And those belief systems are not, by Carse’s light, truly religion, because true religion does not presume to hold all the answers; true religions recognizes the unknowable.  Carse is, in essence, calling for religion to toss out the belief systems — the ideologies that are the true destructive forces which lead people into violence, murder, war.

And now that I’m getting accustomed to his terminology, I’m in full agreement with him.

As I wrote in my post “The god thing” –

Any time science learns how to “explain,” answers a question, it gives rise to umpteen further question: there is no end to them because we, just tiny motes of what-god-is, can’t fit any more into our understanding than what we can fit into our thoughts, our speech, our books. As my calculus tutor used to explain, no system can contain a metasystem. No matter how much we understand, there will always be Mystery beyond that. Which is why, I think, people who are wise are also people with humility: however much they know, they are aware how very little that really is.

Somehow, for me, using that word god keeps me mindful about all that. But I don’t think one must use that word to be conscious of it.

As I wrote in my poem “Sermon” –

God cannot be enclosed in a book
or in the miser’s soul
which portions out justice in dribbles
and rations out love in crumbs,
then wonders why we starve.

I’m still reading this book. I’m finding Carse’s analysis very useful for looking at some of the bad stuff going on in the world, both in the larger world of international politics — Israel & Palestine, Iraq, the “War on Terror” — & in the world closer to home, as our local “true believers” continue to wield the weapon of their willful ignorance, willful misuse of language, & false witness to maintain an unjust status quo.

Related posts:

1. No Questions, Questions (poem)
2. The god thing
3. Illimitable god, & related thoughts about why I’m not a Christian

My own sermon is below — a poem written in December 1992 in response to the hatred & bigotry propounded by Rev. Prevo & like-minded preachers during the 1992-1993 battle inside and outside the Anchorage Assembly chambers over the same issue facing us today: whether lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transfolk in Anchorage will be afforded equal protection under the law from discrimination on the basis of a fundamental part of our fabric as human beings: our sexual orientations and gender identities.

(With thanks to Stephen Mitchell, whose translation of The Book of Job helped me to find the words.)

Sermon

I

I take as my text the Book of Job —
for are we not like him, innocent,
suffering, crying out for justice?
are we not like him, each of us
surrounded by these righteous,
these pious friends who so love us,
who console us with false accusations,
who comfort us with lies?

Hear them — Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar —
High in their pulpits they proclaim the good news:

Admit your guilt and repent your sin
the merciful Lord God will welcome you in.

What’s your complaint? you got fired from your job?
The good Lord will cast you to fires of damnation.
Your landlord has served you notice of eviction?
The Lord will evict you from heavens’s salvation.
Beat to death in the street? God signed the death warrant.
Infected with AIDS? The Almighty’s decree.
Discrimination — if it happens, which we won’t admit —
is admonishment of your culpability.
God in his compassion has served you fair warning
and if God’s indisposed, well, we’re God’s grand jury.

But admit your guilt and repent your sin
the merciful Lord God will welcome you in.

We’re a large church, but we’re a friendly church.

II

Is there anything so innocent
as the child you were at birth?
tiny and wrinkled
from between your mother’s legs
you cried — I am here! I am alive! —
such was your first yell — joy of birth!

Were you a sinner then?
Was it sin to cry for your mother’s breasts?
were you damned by your desire
for the warmth of your father’s arms?

Years grew you.
Your ears heard the lessons
of your elders who taught you
the rules to live by:
how you took them to heart.
How you chastised yourself
when you stepped out of bounds
in body, in mind.
How you took them to heart

as alone in your bed
you lay in the quiet.
You stared at your fear,
your eyes searched the night.
Your mind search your soul —

evidence — why
examination — am I
condemnation — vilify
queer — cry

— such were your tears, pressed into your pillow.
Such were your muffled sobs — grief of damnation

III

Be honest — which of you chose it?
Which of you when first you learned
you were queer — faggot! lezzie! homo! —
accepted that label with joy — celebration?

Which of you did not deny it?
Which of us did not seek to hide it?
Some hide it still — some are yet there.
Who knows silence better than we?
How we take it to heart.

Searching, seeking the root of our anguish —
how many of our sisters, our brothers
swallowed some pills, or took a mighty leap
to lie broken and crushed on the pavement?
How many of us climbed into a bottle
or crucified ourselves on a needle
or lost ourselves in an endless tangle
with the bodies of others such as we?
ecstasy! of orgasm — but after,
as we lay together side by side
in the tangle of sheets we wrestled amongst —
we wrestled alone with our dread
in the silent prisons of each heart, each head.

IV

But listen: you’ve heard of the patience of Job?
He was not so patient. Nor should we be.

How many of us looked to heaven to plead —
to shout — which of us demanded —

Yo, God!
Who’dja make the bet with this time?
Some bet. A sure thing.

Do you get your omnipotent jollies
from fate — create a creature
who by nature is unable
to adhere to your commands
without lying, without denying
what you created us to be?
I must abandon my integrity
or you abandon me?
Do you laugh to see us wriggle
with predestined misery?
Who then is righteous, who the sinner,
oh Lord God Almighty?

If this be heresy, if I blaspheme,
then teach a clear lesson, Lord God Supreme.
Cut short the suspense. Loose your thunderbolt.
Fry me where I stand and end my revolt.

Till then, this gospel I give:
curse God — and live.

V

But no — we curse not God,
but this false image of God they’ve made:
a warped, twisted abridgment

stuffed into a book, a Sunday sermon,
their cramped and distorted souls.

Can God be contracted —
compressed — compacted —
and still be God? Can you
hold in the palm of your hand
the width of the cold winter sky? Can you
forge the evening star into a ring
to adorn your little finger? Can you
play the harp of the northern lights? —
each touch of God’s fingers recolors the strings
in hues none of us has imagined.
Can you hide the summer sun
under a bushel basket? — Listen:
blind can lead blind, but the sun will still shine.

God cannot be enclosed in a book
or in the miser’s soul
which portions out justice in dribbles
and rations out love in crumbs,
then wonders why we starve.

God is too wide and vast and long
and knows us for what we are
as is known the sky, the river, the rocks,
as is knows each creature that breathes.

God is too wide, too vast, too long
and knows us as we are.

[December 29, 1992]

Related posts:

1. No Questions, Questions (poem)
2. Does Anyone Beat Your Heart for You (poem)
3. I won’t abandon my integrity, even if you abandon me

Or at least I use the word “god” — what’s that all about? This is what I wrote there.

Though I believe in god, I think the way I believe in it is pretty much on par with what many self-defined atheists & agnostics say. god (lower case g) isn’t to me some transcendent Boss of Bosses: my definition is, god = the universe & everything in it, whether we understand it or not. god is one with all that is, has been, will be, not separate or “superior” to us. We’re all just part of it. Is there an afterlife? Beats me. Will we be judged? I doubt it — except in the moment-to-moment of life when we’re judged by ourselves & each other. If justice comes from god, it comes not from some Big Guy in the Sky, but from ourselves & how we treat ourselves & one another.

I’ve got the same issues with organized religion that many atheists & agnostics do. Maybe the only difference between their fundamental perspective & mine is that they see the wonder & incredibleness of the universe & world & all that’s in it & don’t feel need to call that anything in particular, whereas I apply the name “god” to it. But with a lower-case g because god is as common as rock, as common as a molecule of oxygen, as common as anything.

Why is it that I want to use that word? What does it do for me? I guess because in part it points toward the mystery. god is common, just really the fabric of the universe, but it’s also mystery… we don’t know whether we call ourselves atheists or agnostics or Christians or Jews or Muslims or Buddhists or any of the other “ist” & “ism” names how all this works. Any time science learns how to “explain,” answers a question, it gives rise to umpteen further question: there is no end to them because we, just tiny motes of what-god-is, can’t fit any more into our understanding than what we can fit into our thoughts, our speech, our books. As my calculus tutor used to explain, no system can contain a metasystem. No matter how much we understand, there will always be Mystery beyond that. Which is why, I think, people who are wise are also people with humility: however much they know, they are aware how very little that really is.

Somehow, for me, using that word god keeps me mindful about all that. But I don’t think one must use that word to be conscious of it.

I believe that there are as many paths as there are people to follow them — whether “religious” or not. But I often find people who say being so “accepting” of other people’s different paths that they let them get away with all manner of evil. “They were only following their path.” “All perspectives are equally valid.” Bullshit.

The fundamental judgment I make of people, including myself, is not whether they follow a particular religion, or any religion at all, but whether the things they do & say cause harm. The most simple, most profound, & most succint statement of ethics & spirit that I’ve ever heard came from the neopagan movement: Harming none, do as you will. But if doing your will causes harm, then damn right I’m gonna judge you for it. And feel that your path sucks the big one. And maybe hate you for it too.

Related posts:

1. Religion v. belief
2. Illimitable god, & related thoughts about why I’m not a Christian
3. A brief spiritual history

Here’s the short version, as written there (with some emendations).

1.

Junior high Jesus freak

I was raised in the Episcopal Church (the American version of the Anglican Church), but sometime during the summer after sixth grade I found a sort of emptiness inside of myself that I knew had to do with the god thing. My sister came back from a music camp where some Jesus people stuff had been going on, & next thing you know she & I were the only two Jesus freaks in Columbia Falls, Montana. I used to read anything I could get my hands on about the Rapture, & speaking in tongues, & all kinds of evangelical stuff. I even have a picture to illustrate this — which I usually entitle “Junior high Jesus freak.”

I don’t know how I reconciled this with being a Trekkie — I was a bigtime fan of the original, & at that time only, series.)

But,

first I was a Jesus freak
& then I turned the other cheek

Which is to say, I started questioning some of the things that the evangelical Christians were saying. For example, if homosexuality was a sin, why did I see in Time magazine that some denominations were ordaining gay ministers? This was long before I came out, too. I also remember reading an article in a Jesus People newspaper from Spokane called The Truth that attempted to explain why Abraham’s wife Sarah let her husband take the kid (Isaac) up the mountain to sacrifice hiim like a goat: being a good wife, the story went, she accepted his decision because he was The Man & women always obeyed Their Man. And I thought (but in far less profane language), Fuck that shit! I’d kill Abraham before I let him kill my kid!

But the biggest question was raised by the popular Christian slogan One Way, as in, there is but one way to God, & Christianity is It. The stuff I was reading told me that if a person was a really good caring loving person who treated other people with care & respect & compassion, that person would still go to hell & suffer eternal damnation simply if she or he hadn’t accepted Jesus as her/his personal savior.

I decided that a god who would set up things this way was an immoral god, & so by the time I completed junior high, I had ceased being a Christian.

But I never ceased believing in God. Over time this became lower case g: god. Over time, after flirtations with Zen Buddhism, feminist witchcraft, Unitarian Universalism — not to mention getting a B.A. in Religion (1981) — my “confession of faith” gradually became “god is the universe & everything in it.”

I have been afflicted all my life with depression & despair, & it is what has probably shaped my spiritual journey more than anything. That’s what the hole I felt in my gut at the beginning of my “Jesus freak” period was about. My coming out & acceptance of myself as a lesbian at age 19 when I was in college was the first strong spiritual foundation that I had to deal with that: because I was accepting Who I Am, & beginning to live according to my own integrity, instead of according to arbitrary rules & regulations foisted on me by other people.

2.

After the Aha!

The picture here takes its name from what my sister-in-law termed the aha! experience — a profound spiritual experience I underwent in August 1984, when I stopped hating myself, stopped living continually at the edge of or inside the pit of despair. It happened like this:

I had a long long battle in from about 6th grade to about age 25 with depression & despair. Thought about suicide a lot. Never did attempt it, but that’s mostly because I knew it wouldn’t be just an attempt. And because I couldn’t do that to my family. About age 25, had a spiritual experience (nothing to do with any organized religions though) that put the end to most of the self-hate, though I’ve never been completely free of the despair or occasional, & sometimes very debilitating, bouts of depression. And still, being a dyke is one of those things which gives me the greatest strength to get through it….

I had been doing a lot of stuff that year (1984) trying to deal w/ my depression/despair stuff. One thing was to get involved for a time w/ a 12-Step group (similar to AA) called Emotions Anonymous. I did a lot of writing about the first three steps, & most crucial was the stuff about “Came to believe in a power greater than ourselves that could restore our sanity” (or however that goes) & “Made a decision to turn our lives & our will over to the care of god as we understood god.”

My problem was, how can I turn my life & my will over to the care of someone I don’t flat fucking trust? Mind you, I had by that time a B.A. in Religion, knew craploads about a whole big variety of religions, was an adherent of none of them because much as I believed in god (lower-case g), which I define as “the universe & everything in it,” I didn’t trust any of the Gods that various religions put up as who I should be kowtowing to.

When they told me who to put on the throne
I said no, I will not be ruled
the gods they showed me were tyrants
who displeased me with their judgments,
their injustice, yes, their cruelty.

— from “Mielikki”

So, in short, I made up my own self-defined “religion.” I reckoned that the universe & everything in it (god) is awfully damn hard to develop a personal relationship w/, so I had to whittle it down somehow, so I “invented” a sort of big sister/helping spirit/personal guide type of “imaginary” being to act as my personal connection to the “all of the above” that is god.

I named her Mielikki, after the Finnish spirit of woodland. The name comes from the Finnish word mieli which means mind or heart or desire, plus the suffix of endearment -kki. It’s sometimes translated as darling but to me her name means my dearest desire. She is an “imaginary” being who is bigger than myself, while at once she is a part of me… like my gut feelings (which have always been more accurate than my conscious brain-thoughts about how to live life). So her “will” is the same a mine: what is best for me, to be most fully me. If that makes sense.

That was February/March of that year that I did that work. Fast forward to August: I was spending about 20 minutes each night before falling asleep doing a sort of meditation breathing in & out to the phrase “Thou art / with me” (a borrowing w/ slight rewrite of part of the 23rd Psalm). Although some things were changing, I was still pretty messed up, still self-hating, & still going a lot into deep ugly pits of suicidal ideation. And then I was fired from my job.

My job was at a bookstore, one of several in a large Alaska-owned chain called the Book Cache, & the reason I was fired made no sense. I got confirmation later that I was fired for being a lesbian. But the important point is that as I was leaving the mall, in a matter of just a few steps down that hallway by the phone booth, a whole bunch of thoughts went like at-tat-tat-tat through my brain:

“This doesn’t make sense. Why me? I should just give up. First last night” [a particularly nasty evening in the pit] “& now this. I’ll never be free of this depression. I should just kill myself…. ” blah blah blah.

And then: “Thou art / with me.”

And with that thought, it all just… changed. I knew my brother & sister-in-law & friends wouldn’t let me die in the gutter. I knew I’d get through this, & would find another job. I knew I would be okay. (And I also knew that even if she was just a made up figment of my imagination, Mielikki was right there.)

And I went & got on the bus & went over to my brother’s & sister-in-law’s house to tell them about it.

Although I’ve had my bouts in the pit since then, I’ve never hated myself since, & have generally known that I could get through whatever hard times I have. Well, usually. Mielikki is still here — one of, & the most central of, what I now refer to as my “household gods.”

I call this belief in something I can’t prove, & even made up, but which is beneficial to me & nonharming to anyone, intentional belief. It works pretty well.

– Mel

(Mielikki is also the title character in one of my eternally-forthcoming novels, Mistress of Woodland.)

Related posts:

1. Mielikki
2. Illimitable god, & related thoughts about why I’m not a Christian
3. The god thing