Christmas is coming and I am dwelling on spiritual matters.
Not least as I have just had some interaction with a member of my husband’s
family who professes Christianity, yet makes members of my mother’s family look
good – suffice to say this person looks ‘nice’ on the inside, says all the
right things (in church anyway; not to me), projects a caring persona (as long
as you agree with everything this person and spouse espouse from their pulpit; plays
in the church band etc., but is ugly on the inside. This person is married to a
‘leader’ in the Pentecostal Church – a church I once attended in a school
building in London. In Christianity, as in many institutions, what you ‘see’ is
not what you get, but it took me a long time to come to terms with this – 15
odd, yes very odd, years. I should say from the outset that I have also met
some wonderful, sacrificial, genuinely wonderful people inside (as well as
outside) the 4 walls of the church that I am slightly in awe of given how much
they put their money where there mouths are, so suffice to say, my experience
is mixed – heck humanity is mixed.
Though I came ‘out of the church’ as in stopped being a
member of a church that met in a building, in 2015, I believe in God. I try to
follow Jesus. I fail a lot. I swear; I rant; I get things wrong. Often. I don’t
call myself a Christian, because I find it hard to identify with the plethora
of meanings that the word throws up. I don’t attend church because having been
through the Catholic Church as a child, numerous Pentecostal and ‘house’ type
churches, and through the Anglican Church, I have come to the conclusion that I
do not belong in the walls of a church. However, for those of us who believe in
the (to secularists) quaint notion of God and in the bible, our belief is that
the spirit of God resides in us (you have to invite him in – I won’t try to
explain the theology of incarnation here; you can look it up if you’re
interested,) and therefore we, and not a building are the church.
I ‘became a Christian’ in 2001. My parents and sister were
members of a house church (it was a cult frankly). There was a cult leader and
a sidekick – one of my siblings married the cult leader as a teenager. I was a
teenager at the time too. I had recently left home and was travelling the
country and the world modelling. The cult members in my family spent a fair
time trying to terrify me into Christianity. It partly worked. The notion of
hell petrified me. I had a sense that ghastly as it was to contemplate, it
might be a real place. I was in the fashion business. I had lots of gay
friends. I knew they weren’t welcome in the church, so I was pretty wound up
and ranty on their behalf. I began studying world religions and esoteric things
– for which I seemed to have a knack – the Jesus thing kept coming back.
Eventually I succumbed in 2001 and that in itself is a saga that I will relate
but not now.
Back to #MeToo. Not only did I come out of the church in the
summer of 2105, I also came out of my (mother’s) abusive family in the winter
of 2015. My mother’s semi-final (cutting me out of her will was her grand
finale) act of cruelty proved to be my tipping point. My experience of
organised religion is that it is often (and consistently in my experience) and
abusive structure (with some good elements within it) that is disconnected from
the world. I knew when I made the decision to leave church and family, that God
was in it. I sensed very clearly in my spirit that God was against all abuse
and that we were going to enter into a time when these institutional abuses
would no longer be tolerated by society. I told one of my key abusers this when
I met with him so that he could crow over what he and other abusers had
achieved with my mother’s will. Soon afterwards #MeToo broke out. The God I
believe in is in that movement. The God I believe in does not live in the 4
walls of a church. Like Jesus he is down with the people, out there, in the
world.
When I came out of the (in my experience) abusive settings
of church and family, I was able to recapture my true identity that I had been
required to leave at the door of both. I am not just over the third anniversary
of my mother’s act that led me to say that I would never again go back to my
mother’s family for punishment – my being there enabled and sanctioned it. The
previous summer, I had done the same with the church. The three years since, I
would hate to repeat; I have needed extensive treatment to heal. I am now
mentally stronger and despite being treated with chemotherapy for the cancer
that was, thankfully, cut out, I can honestly say, I’ve never been stronger. I
am free.
