Category: recovery | Page 28 | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

Why I’ve been a spiritual hobo

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on December 8, 2014.

Maybe I’ll try church again.

Two years ago, I’d been exiled from my church home four months before.

One Sunday, I went to a service at a local megachurch, hiding myself in the crowd. And I asked God why I hadn’t found a spiritual home yet, if I ever would.

And in the dimmed light and slow guitar chords trickling over me like creek water, I thought maybe he answered.

You won’t find a home. Not yet. You’re a hobo for right now. But I am going to show you all the different kinds of people who are part of me, part of my body.

So out I went. New Life Church became my soup kitchen, but I visited the LGBT affirming church, my friend’s mother’s Catholic church in Boulder, the Apostolic Pentecostal church.

I saw chanting and wailing, people speaking in tongues, people reciting the Apostle’s Creed and the sprinkling of holy water. I saw transgender women bustling around a church kitchen, brewing coffee.

And everywhere, I found someone whose heart seemed alive, people who sought Jesus.

For years, I’d been told that our church was part of a remnant holding to sound doctrine, that other churches were to be analyzed and mistrusted.

According to the Barna group, I’m not alone in being spiritually homeless. Their surveys say my generation tends to fall into three groups: nomad (Christian, but not involved in the church), prodigal (once Christian but no longer identifying as Christian), or exile (Christian, lost between the culture and the church).

I’ve written before that something that keeps me from leaving completely, something hopes I can still find light in Christian belief. Stuck somewhere between nomad and exile.

My friend Cynthia B. and I went to see Handel’s Messiah at Village Seven Presbyterian Church last weekend. Poor college students are always up for a free concert.

Churches feel awkward to me now. I don’t feel like I belong, because I’m not hiding my problems anymore. Cynthia and I sat in one of the back rows.

I was skeptical.

But the choir joined with the lead singer the first time, and I was four or five years old again. I know it sounds cliche.

But I forgot the beauty and the light I once found in music and church performances.

I’ve been escaping emotional hypothermia, realizing Jesus didn’t ask for my pain and didn’t need my defense, finding purity beyond the rings. And I let go my original concept of church to grow. To find church outside four walls.

I needed to know that Jesus didn’t label me, that there would be room for my doubts.

And now I cried, let the music and community back in again. I cracked open in the light, soaked my soul in the ethereal sound.

Maybe a hobo can find a home again.

Emotional Hypothermia, Part 5: This is your life

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on October 6, 2014.

Continued from Part 4

I remember when
We used to drive
Anywhere but here
As long as we’d forget our lives
We were so young and confused
that we didn’t know
To laugh or cry
Those nights were ours
They will live and never die
Together we’d stand forever…
– Skillet, Those Nights

The first week of February 2014 at around 4:30 am, I was driving my little white Toyota sedan that I named Journey somewhere between east Houston and Beaumont, Texas, floating through bayou fog and the darkness before dawn.

I adore roadtrips. Few other activities allow my brain that raw time stretching as far as the humming asphalt between my tires for pondering my life’s direction and my purpose.

No school, no work, just hours and hours of listening to music and calling friends or chatting with anyone in the car I’ve managed to kidnap. I can just be and enjoy existence. Roadtrips make me feel alive.

Two of my housemates traveling with me had fallen asleep in the backseat a few hours before. Our little escapade is still nicknamed “that one time we drove an extra 15 hours to have a 20 minute conversation with Mullet Jesus.”

We’d left Colorado Springs around 11pm Friday night, arrived in Dallas around 1pm, napped and visited friends, and now I was in the 4th hour of the 6 hour drive that Saturday night stretching into Sunday. The remaining itinerary involved church, a 9 hour drive to Lubbock to see Skillet at the Rock and Worship Roadshow, then 7 hours back home.

Despite the Monster drinks and beef jerky, I knew I was nearing my limits. I turned up the speakers and scrolled for Switchfoot’s Beautiful Letdown on my iPod.

Don’t close your eyes, don’t close your eyes / This is your life and today is all you’ve got now / Yeah, and today is all you’ll ever have…

The rhythmic, deep buzz of the opening notes blended with my thoughts. Don’t stop feeling this semester. Don’t forget how you learned to be alive, I reminded myself.

This is your life, is it everything you dreamed that it would be? / When the world was younger and you had everything to lose…

I imagined my 5-year-old self. What would she think of adult me? She’d be slightly ecstatic, I decided. I was finally going on adventures my heart longed for, and at last I had friends.

– – – – – – – –

Since recovering from repression, emotional honesty has been crucial.

My counselor told me summer 2013 that other people, including my parents, wouldn’t understand me unless I told them how I felt.

And I’ve found abundant, vibrant life in community and artistic expression.

Late nights driving around town with my friend MangyCat and the Midnight Muse writers and making miniatures in my friend Kim’s cozy basement were staples of my first year living outside the box.

But last spring, I took an entire semester of courses for pure enjoyment: Acting, 2D Art, Koine Greek, Poetry Workshop, and Choir.

My heart is in theater, both inside the church and beyond it, which I admitted to my friend Cynthia Barram last month when I volunteered to act for Haunted Mines, a local haunted house.

“Honey, everybody uses theater to work out their emotional problems,” she replied.

Slam poetry, which I discovered 6 months before moving out, became my catharsis, a safe place for open and honest expression. Almost like a new form of church.

My two favorite slam poems are Confession: For the Christian part of me (Joel McKerrow) and Letter to my 10 year old self (Susan Peiffer, of Hear Here, the Colorado Springs local slam team).

I heard Joel perform his poem live at an open mic in the campus pub one Friday night in October 2012. He said he felt privileged to perform it in Colorado Springs, among all the religious tension. He begins:

For the Christian part of me,
not for the Christ, but for the Christian,
I am sorry.
For when I look at the book and look at my life,
when I look at the Christ and look at the church,
the two are as black and white.
So for the way I have silenced you,
with words that I thought were the only truth,
for every preacher that has yelled at you
every Bible that has been quoted at you,
every megaphone that has damned you,
every friend that has judged you,
every parent that has guilted you,
I am sorry.

And Susan’s poem sparks new beginnings for me through my old scars. I love how she ends:

And Susan, one day, occupy your body again.
Realize and understand the gentleness of touch.
And let this realization convince you
that you are much, much more than a product of your past.
You are the manifestation of some dream whom destiny means to last
and you will always have words.
Words will never leave you.
I don’t have much else to tell you, Sue,
because it gets better, yeah, but it gets worse, too.
Remember, beloved, you are made of poetry.
Stardust, wanderlust.
[….]
You will fall in love, and you will be partially fixed.
And if you miss your youth one day,
You are secure enough to say
You feel twelve again
All over like it should have been
Even if it takes ’til 36.

One day, I want to shout out my story as they have, unashamed and no longer silenced. But for now, I am learning how to feel every day until it’s like breathing.

Where do I go from here?

I don’t ever want to go back to where I was, but I’m not sure how to go forward either. It seems that I’m stuck between worlds, sometimes… not fitting in with groups that are talking about the latest movies, fads, and music, yet not having any desire to go back to the group that I’ve left. And not fitting anywhere else either.

I’m not angry, and I refuse to be angry, at a group at large. Individuals, yes, and even churches that allow abuse. But not an organization as a whole. It seems like a lot of people go hunting a battle to fight. Enough battles have found me; I don’t need to go looking for any.

There are some good people in United Pentecostal and Oneness churches. There are some good teachings. There are also some bad people that manipulate others and encourage the kinds of preaching and teaching that hurt others. But the ones who hurt me repeatedly labelled me as “one of those kind” and I will not do the same to them, as a whole. It’s hard not to, sometimes. But I never want to become like the ones I left because I don’t want to repay hurt for hurt or wound for wound. I don’t want to retaliate, I want to heal.

Most people who read that won’t really understand what I’m saying. But I’m glad for those who do. I get tired of hearing negative talk about others. That kind of talk wears me down, it wears me out. But there are so much better things to talk about and to experience.

I have good memories of the last 20 years. They weren’t wasted years; they were learning years. I don’t want them back, but I won’t throw them away, either.

So sometimes I feel like I’m in limbo… and I ask, ‘Where do I go from here?’

Someone from my former church called me tonight. She started asking how I was and where I was going to church and what I would do in the future. The answer is simply, “I don’t know.” Not back. Not back to the UPC or any Pentecostal church. But at the same time, I’m not sure where, yet. At work, I’ve jokingly told employees that the company doesn’t state all the job requirements up front… and then asked if they have a crystal ball and a 28 hour day. Sometimes I need those things, myself. God is the only one who knows the future. I don’t know where I go from here… just that I’m going forward.

Foundations, again

I wrote about foundations once before, but I keep thinking about them lately. What is your foundation? Is it doctrine or Jesus… or self?

I thought for a long time that my foundation was Jesus. I went to church several times a week. Taught Sunday School, was in the choir, was active in the youth group… I volunteered for a lot of things around church and was there almost every time the doors were open. I was a Christian, and even better I was an Apostolic. And I loved Jesus, or I wouldn’t have been doing all that, right? I was praised by the pastor for my involvement and my dedication, and was even known by district officials. But where was Jesus in all of that, really? I was involved in those things because I enjoyed them and was praised for them. I wasn’t dedicated to God, I was dedicated to church… and church became my god. But it wasn’t God.

I feel like since leaving my whole foundation has changed, but I think it was just buried under so much wood, hay, and stubble of activities and self that I didn’t recognize it when all the junk I’d put on it was gone. Jesus is our foundation. And my foundation has stayed sure. But it isn’t the foundation I thought it was. It’s way better than that.

Laughing out loud

I didn’t realize how long it had been since I’d laughed out loud in public til last night. To jump over puddles, to run happily through the rain, to laugh spontaneously… I’d forgotten.

And it felt so good.