Perhaps you, like me, were raised in the kind of church where certain totally innocuous things were associated with closeness to god. Things like being married versus being single. The hemline of a skirt, or the presence of one at all, let alone its absence.
Maybe you removed yourself from oppressive places of worship. I hope if you’ve ever found yourself in one, you did exactly that.
The thing about the toxic places where god is said to dwell is that they’re easy to bring with you if you aren’t mindful — shit, even if you’re very mindful. This is compounded by the fact that so many spiritualists are more than happy to point out your every flaw.
Not just spiritualists either. We seem to be in the middle of a moral panic where the standard of goodness is raised ever higher. We are asked to have a deep working knowledge of every political issue, position, and conflict or risk censure. Even our most personal relationships are scrutinized, lumped into new categories, and pathologized.
Meanwhile, the regular abuse persists, as does the victim-blaming that comes with it. These seem untouched by this new high minded discourse.
Spiritualists are often busy with the work of classification: spiritual vampirism, narcissism, fake gods and false priests. And sometimes they’re not wrong, but the fact remains that it’s hard to feel like one can connect to spirit but for everyone’s opinions on it.
The effect is intended to make you hate yourself enough to always want to “fix” yourself, to always wonder what’s wrong now.
There are exceptions, sure, but rarely do I encounter them. What is common in my practice, however, is people being very hard on themselves. People who want to eat themselves alive before the preachers, spiritualists, and TikTok therapists have a chance to do it for them.
Yet maintaining a spiritual relationship with yourself and your ancestors, and moreover with your community means that one must question and, ultimately, abandon self-hate — lest it turn outward. I’ve seen this firsthand.
All I knew on the subject growing up is that I sometimes had to attend church twice in one Sunday. Not just on the days when there was a trial sermon, or a traveling minister was in town. Not on Children’s Day or Women’s Day, or even those long and lonesome years when New Year’s Eve fell on a Sunday.
But many Sundays in between when I would wake up early enough for us to take baths in order of age, forgo breakfast entirely for reasons never detailed to me, and head to my grandmother’s church for Sunday School, then praise and worship, testimony, the sermon, several choral and collective rounds of singing, the tedious purgatory of altar call, (not knowing if the pastor would add another sermon to THAT,) a final hymn, and my grandmother’s circulation through the now packed social sphere of the sanctuary — just to walk out the front door and into my mother’s car so we could head up to Newark, to Liberation In Truth, her gay church.
The Unity Fellowship Church where my mother worshiped was like if all the coolest people in a regular church, the ones your parents whispered about, the ones who got stared at, the ones who got kicked out or simply stopped coming had their own church.
In fact, it was exactly that. No part of the church was sacrificed, merely lovingly expanded upon. We poured libations. We sang hymns. My pastor was a sanguine soft stud who moved down the aisle in a nimbus of roll-on cologne.
Where my grandmother’s church emphasized duty to god, my mother’s church emphasized the honest reporting of a direct relationship to the divine. Prayer reflected this, starting “mother, father, everything god.” An amendment, a retention, a reflection. God was there every time I attended.
While the church formed me, shaped me, made me who I am beyond a shadow of a doubt, I always felt conflicted when I identified myself with Christianity. Yet I’m grateful to my mother’s old church for showing me what it really meant to live spiritually, to pursue an honest connection with the divine through honesty with one’s self.
To me, that’s the seam that divides, and sometimes binds, the spiritual and the religious. I don’t believe it can be sewn in self-hate.
And I know that no spirit guide, angel, nor most ancestors would want their earthly kin to feel any less worthy at my table, or anyone else’s.
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