I’ve had a lot of time to think about this, to think about the realities of Church vs God, and I have come to believe that as much as the Church says, they represent God, they actually don’t.
I’ve always struggled with the idea that God could hate anything He created, it wasn’t until I started to question why Humans come in so many varied forms, and God only comes in one, that I started to understand a bunch of bullshit said by a bunch of white guys over millions of years, doesn’t make that shit true.
Yeah, I said that.
I’m not afraid of God. I’m not afraid of the Devil, because neither God nor the Devil tried to take my life, both in equal measure held my hand and laughed with me, cried with me, stood with me, heard me. Both in equal measure helped me to survive the horrible, awful, evil shit, that I’ve been through.
I’ve been hearing this my whole life – especially from white men who claim to be “of the cloth.” Which is code for “yeah sure I wear Church clothes, but I’m still a psychotic perverted asshole who will violate you in horrific ways just to prove that I can.“
My mom’s Priest used to violate me before he went out for Sunday Mass, he thought it was funny, that he was committing a sin against a 4th grader, while simultaneously telling people to be pure and pious.
I can still feel his disgusting hands on my body in parts of my body I can’t stand touching myself.
Don’t blame the man, blame the Devil, if you say that it’s the Devil’s fault, then people won’t blame you when the world ends up in flames.
I was angry at God – and at Jesus for a long, long time. I was convinced that if the men who worked for God and Jesus were this bad, then clearly they had to know right? There were enough people on this planet, that surely SOMEONE had told them how bad things were down here? But the more that it continued the more I started to believe that both God and Jesus were completely complicit in what was happening to me.
Surviving being very nearly murdered – again – taught me that wasn’t true, and I am forever grateful that I survived that encounter, but I know I didn’t do it alone. I am fully aware that angels were with me, and I know this because I saw them.
Now a doctor, a lawyer, and even a judge might tell me that this sounds psychotic, but how the fuck can we understand how the brain works at near-death experiences when we don’t listen to people who have those experiences?
My Church is whatever place brings me peace. It sets me free from the confines of the white man’s religion and gives me the space to be myself, without fear or shame. I smoke cannabis, I drink coffee, I masturbate often, and I set myself free from having to apologize for doing what I need to do, to survive, thrive, and fight for my freedom.
Millions of stories of people seeing Jesus and we’re all crazy? We’re ALL insane? The reality is that people who have NOT had near-death experiences, go out of their way to convince us that we’re crazy so that they can explain away the shit we’ve had to deal with when we’ve survived.
Anyone outside of the world of trauma has no real concept of what it means to be so traumatized you feel yourself being electrocuted in space while your physical form is having a fucking heart attack that your doctors SWEAR didn’t happen.
Yes, that happened to me and I honestly thought I was dying, and then I rolled over and went to sleep like it didn’t happen. So yeah, I believe that God exists, and I do believe that Jesus was a great man who got seriously abused and traumatized for his beliefs. I believe that he was made into a martyr because it allowed super evil people to make a lot of money and control a lot of less powerful people.
All these thousands of years later, with billions of stories of historical abuse at the hands of the Roman Catholic Clergy – and other religious organizations like Scientology – and we’re still conditioned to believe that we need to be in a church-based organization to have a relationship with the universe, and I’m here to tell you that this is completely untrue.
There will come a time when your faith – whatever it might be – will be tested because people love to poke holes in the things that make us who we are, and each of us is going to have to choose where we want to be, and what we need to be, in order to be whoever it is that we’re trying to be.
Each of us has to decide for ourselves, and no matter who we are, no God, Goddess, Human, Angel, Vampire, Faerie, Elf, or Giant, get to make that decision for us.
Believe in God if you want to if it makes you feel good to do so, but not at the risk of hurting other people who believe or see the world differently than you do.
You’re never going to convince me that trying to destroy someone else’s life is going to make mine better, and I can’t imagine why you’d want to.
It doesn’t work, it just creates more chaos and trauma, and I’m not about that.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 