This post contains trigger topics such as Christianity, God, and Sexual Abuse. Please approach with caution and practice self care before, during and after reading. This post is intended for audiences 18 and older.
There have been so many days in my life when I thought – on purpose – that God hated me. That I had done something wrong and that I was being punished, turns out that God didn’t have shit to do with what was happening to me. The misfortune that I faced came from human beings, who wanted to do terrible things to little kids because they are gross and yucky horrible human beings.
I found out that one of my abusers – one of the worst ones – has a heroin addiction now. Personally, I hope his death is as painful as possible.
He abused raped many women, not just me. And he hurt a lot of kids, not just me. So I have no problem with saying that. But when I think about what God would say, I admit I flinch a little bit.
It’s hard not to believe in God when you’re me when you’ve lived my life and seen the things that I have seen, it’s equally difficult to express your love for God in a world that either adores the idea of God or uses him as a weapon.
In my childhood, God was such a terrifying weapon that I was afraid to fart – any inclination to be anything other than the white cis Christian version of perfect, gave me nightmares of Hell and damnation.
I was raised to believe that to love God is to be afraid of God and to be afraid of God is to be pious and perfect. The problem with such a weapon however is that eventually, the ability to instill fear runs out.
God is either the thing that breeds LOVE on purpose or is the creature that EVERY living HUMAN should FEAR and loathe. He is either a gift or a WEAPON, there seems to be NO in between. – Devon J Hall
I don’t know when it happened exactly, I don’t know when I made the decision to stop caring about what God or anyone thought for that matter. I think it was after the Priest molested me and said it was because I “chose” to be born Brown instead of white.
Lucifer was bred as the EPITOME of danger. If You Want to go to HEAVEN, you better do the OPPOSITE of everything HE did, because He’s in HELL and you’re not…YET.
At some point, I started to realize that I didn’t like the way the adults in my life were treating me. I started to question their motives, and in sixth grade, I called the superintendent of schools in Calgary, to complain about my school principal. The woman wouldn’t let me eat lunch because I was in detention, even though the white kids were allowed to eat theirs.
There were rumors that she’d once thrown a kid against the wall for talking back to her, and I’d had enough. This mind you was just after my father slapped me, the police officers I had to speak to about that incident told me that adults weren’t allowed to be mean to kids. That was a game-changer.
I had to spend a lot of time thinking about this and it’s the first time that I’ve been able to say it out loud. Just because someone says they speak for God, doesn’t mean that it’s true. Lots of people lie, and they like to lie because they know that God is somewhere far away, and “he” can’t “really” do anything to call these liars out.
But what if God was responding to every prayer and cry for help, but we just didn’t know that God was responding? What if we’re stuck in the paradox of not being able to fathom that God would care about us, while God is actually doing everything they can to protect us?
When I was around eleven years old I used to wonder why everyone was so fascinated with the idea that God was a man, especially because as the father of Jesus it made sense that God needed women. Without Mary Jesus wouldn’t exist. And so years later when I saw a documentary that said that Jesus had actually married Mary Magdalene, it made sense to me.
One of the commenters said something like “Jesus understood the fine balance between women and men, but the Christian church out of a grab for power downplayed this understanding to make it seem like women were unimportant.”
It was then that I decided I would give a name for my respect to the Marys and their contribution to the life of the man that we know as Jesus. I started calling it Krisya Ohana – Kris for my brother Chris, ya for the Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (which hadn’t yet existed so I added that later), and Ohana for “Family.” Chris’s family, because my brother’s name actually comes from Christ.
Krisya Ohana was supposed to be about honoring the women throughout history, the women who were writers, scholars, and philanthropists, women who believed in majick and in science, but as I got older, I stopped finding women to believe in. Back in the 90s, the only women that I saw on television were not quite as successful as the men and oftentimes were made the butt of jokes instead of the teller of jokes.
The 90s and early 2000s brought me a lot of trauma, a lot of pain, and a lot of bad memories, and the more that I was abused by giant men who didn’t care about me, or God for that matter, the less I felt connected to my spirituality, the less I felt connected to humanity.
I remember once a man came to me at the church and said he was ready to get sober. So I called around town and found him a placement at a recovery house. Another volunteer said he would drive the man to the house, and the man asked if I would go with him.
The man was Indigenous and this matters because, throughout the entire drive, the volunteer talked about how recovery was all about coming back to God.
The man left the recovery house that night and spent the next ten years living on the streets.
For MANY people around the WORLD, God has been used as the WEAPON of their DECONSTRUCTION. There Will be NO going back to the house of God, there will be no forgiveness, there will ONLY be the BATTLES and the WAR.
For many people around the world, the word of God has been a weapon used to destroy everything that matters to the individual, and God himself the sword. A weapon of fear and anxiety. “You better behave this way or you’re going to go to Hell,” he is the perfect metaphor for the white supremacist society that we have been living in for the last two thousand years.
There is not a single organized religion on the planet that represents the words of Jesus and Mary better than the individual who has had a religious experience that no one else can understand.
I often refuse to talk about my spirituality because I believe that there are many more Gods and Goddesses than we can fathom. I believe there are entities out there who are genuine God-type creatures that we’ve never even heard of yet because I’ve come to realize that if it could exist, it might exist because anything is possible in this world.
MIRACLES are only miracles because YOU saw them when NO ONE else did. They are a gift for YOU and you ALONE. You can talk about them, you can even try to photograph them, but NO ONE will see them the way YOU Do. That’s the MIRACLE.
I know that I didn’t survive all those years of rape and trauma on my own. I know that there were angels and guardians in my corner, I am more aware of that now than ever before. But I am equally aware of people who are absolutely terrified to see what I see, and because of their own fear, they would rather tell me that I am stupid or crazy.
In my last post about transgender and non-binary human beings, deserving to be here I got a comment calling me stupid because clearly, I’m wrong.
Why am I stupid? Because you say so? As far as I’m concerned I’m doing the best that I can to put more good into the world than what I’ve received, and if God has a problem with that, then God himself can come and tell me so.
But the chances are high that I won’t listen. All this to say that I believe in God, and I don’t believe we necessarily agree with all things, but I think each of us is on the right path to connecting with each other in a positive way.
I spent years being terrified of the higher powers that surround me, thinking I was crazy for seeing miracles that others refused to see, believing that I didn’t deserve to be loved because no matter how I behaved or what I wore or said or did, it was never good enough.
I can’t control what other people think about God or religion, but I can honestly say that God doesn’t hate you, the Gods I am connected to don’t know how to hate, they know only how to explore and examine and learn from what they see.
Each of us needs to develop our own relationship with the spiritual world, we can follow others as long as we want, but until we open the doors to our own majickal connections and worlds, we won’t really be whole.
I really hope you know, wherever you are, that you are loved, cherished, and wanted here. Even and especially if the people closest to you say otherwise. They’re lying, I love you. I want you here, and so does God.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 