Guest Post: The Ever Changing Faces of God

Dani is an obsessive geek, skeptical feminist, graphic designer and struggling writer over at crooked neighbor, crooked heart.
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Trigger warning: self harm, sexual assault

"I did it to myself. Mea culpa, mea culpa."

I would rock back and forth, muttering those words to myself, scratching my arms and legs until they almost bled, eyes squeezed shut to keep out the images I'd just emblazoned into my mind.

You're a girl, I scolded myself. Girls aren't supposed to want sex. You're nothing but a filthy whore. You're robbing your husband; you'll have nothing to give him. You're disgusting and vile and worthless. Only evil women have desires like this.

You see, believing that my highest calling was to be a wife and mother, it occurred to me that I was ill-prepared for the physical intimacy that marriage entails. Since I was told that frequent good sex was something I owed my husband, and since sex is generally a taboo subject in conservative Christianity, I did what I thought was the most reasonable thing for me to do. I decided to learn about sex from the privacy of the internet so I would be prepared when I got married.

What started as an educational exercise, however, turned into something I thought was a fight for my eternal soul.

I begged God to take away my desires. I begged, pleaded, screamed, wracked my body with temporary scars and shaking sobs. And yet they remained. I hated myself. I thought this must be my thorn in the flesh, and in some moments I even hated God for making me this way if there was no release.

And God was someone who would first make me a sexual being, then condemn me for it. He gave me desires and needs without the means to fulfill them or the decency to end my suffering.

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"Your...hair...smells...good," he breathed into my ear. I'd stopped struggling — he was surprisingly strong for someone wheelchair-bound. My breast throbbed with pain as his grip tightened, my back twisted oddly as I was being pulled halfway painfully into his lap. His guardian and our professor sat across the room, talking, oblivious.

It took a long time for them to notice. Even then, my teacher did nothing — my attacker’s guardian was my salvation. As he was being pried off of my body finger by finger, he stretched to kiss me. "I don't want this to be my first kiss!" my brain screamed as I tried to twist away. He managed to plant a kiss on my jaw anyway. It occurred to me that perhaps this was God's punishment for my sexual desire — that my sexual desire made me a sexual object to be consumed against my will.

The next class, my teacher caught up with me. "So, he has wandering hands, huh? He apparently has a way with the ladies."

I was horrified. Shaken. Enraged. Confused. Terrified.

He saw...and did nothing.

And I couldn’t shake the image of God as that teacher, watching silently from across the room, doing nothing.

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I had just begun dating my husband, and I was quickly becoming terrified at his level of commitment to me. I tried to push him away as hard as I possibly could with the only thing I knew would surely be repugnant enough to open his eyes. I launched attack after attack, explaining how unlovable I was, how dirty I was, how worthless I was.

He batted it all aside with kindness. He spoke life and truth into my wilderness of self-hatred. He didn't see me as a project. He didn't see me as a collection of moral failures. He didn't even see me as an object for his pleasure. He saw me as a person, full of inherent worth. He saw me. And he loved me.

It took a long time to accept his love. But when I did, all I could think was, "This...this must be what Jesus is like. This is what people mean when they talk about a God of love. I haven't seen it before. This is grace, this is peace, this is hope, this is love. I understand now."

He was the first person for whom love did not include shaming or controlling me.

And God started to become someone I could love, trust, and believe in.

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That is...until we had sex.

"Your relationship is ungodly," my friends told me. "If he was the one God wanted for you, he wouldn't have tempted you to sin like this. The fact that you gave in to it shows you're not ready for a relationship, let alone marriage."

And I was confused, so confused. Would God really want to take away the one person who most convinced me of His goodness, simply because we made love? People kept telling me how sex before marriage could never be about love — it could only be about sinful lust and defying the work and word of God. But my experience was completely the opposite. Having sex with him had been the most loving, healing thing I had experienced in my life. And yet it was evil?

And God was someone for whom good and evil could be arbitrarily defined, no matter the consequences to His followers.

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"You do have some polycystic ovaries."

My breath caught in my chest and I stared at her, not quite ready to understand what she was saying. "You mean...you mean I have PCOS?" I somehow managed to keep my voice steady.

She didn't quite meet my gaze. "Yes. We'll continue with your birth control, and when you're ready to talk about having kids, come in and we'll see if you can."

I felt dizzy. My mind flitted back to a sermon that a trusted mentor once gave about Hannah and Elkanah. He posited that Hannah should have been content with Elkanah's love and not continued to ask God for children. That when women were barren in the Bible, it was God that had closed their wombs and they should unquestioningly accept God's judgment in their lives.

And God’s judgment seemed clear. He was holding all of my sins against me, and I was found lacking.

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After years of squelching doubts and emotions and fears, I finally began talking.

I began to tentatively share my questions, my problems, my fears with a small but growing group of people. They told me about a God who really doesn't hold past sins over our heads to beat us with. They told me about a God who understands fear, anger, pain, and doesn't shame or punish for those feelings but instead listens, loves, cherishes, and comforts. They told me about a God who isn't abusive, who isn't capricious, who isn't cruel. I hardly dared to believe them.

But there it was, that seed of hope.

And God became someone I really felt I could wrestle with, because He might really want to engage my heart and mind, no matter what that meant. Even if it meant waiting until I was ready.

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"My friend called me, wanted me to come over to see him at his house. I hung up the phone, and walked to the front door, and stopped. God wouldn't let me leave."

My head was pounding with a migraine that made lights blindingly bright, sounds unbearably loud, and made my stomach lurch. The preacher’s voice droned on, each rise and fall of his tone piercing my head. I held onto my husband for dear life, my only physical stronghold in an environment that made me taste fear.

"The Holy Spirit finally released me, and I walked over to my friend’s house to find people sitting on the front porch, crying. He just shot himself." My stomach lurched again, and I felt my husband stiffen beside me. "He'd been sitting in his room by the window with his gun, waiting for me. God worked salvation in my life that day. If I'd arrived any earlier, he could have shot me."

By the time the closing prayer had been uttered, I was being steered to our car — I was shaking uncontrollably from pain and rage, afraid I would be sick or pass out.

But as we drove away from the church building, my head eased, then stopped hurting altogether. My stomach calmed. Lights became normal, sounds became bearable.

And it hit me like a ton of bricks, how emotionally and physically toxic that environment was.

I looked at my husband and said, "I think this is our last Sunday."

His jaw was set grimly. "I wholeheartedly agree."

And for one day, I was convinced that God was not the monster that this man was preaching. I didn't know what He was exactly, but I knew more than I knew anything that He was not someone who would sacrifice life like that.

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Now? I struggle daily with my view of God. I suppose it's only natural, considering the many faces He has had in my life. I'm still sorting through them all. Some days, I don't even think He has a face. Some days, I don't think He exists — or exists in a form that isn't pure evil. 

But the struggling is worth it. Because it's finally allowed. I've seen goodness and kindness in people that makes God seem so near. I've seen interpretations of Scripture that seem like they can override the way I was taught to read and understand the Bible. I catch glimpses of a God who isn't a narcissistic sociopathic monster, and those glimpses are enough to keep me searching.

And so now, God is a mystery. But I am resting in that mystery, in the in-between of the faith of my childhood and the faith of my adulthood, waiting.

And I think He's okay with that.

Worth Reading This Week: March 1st

This week had a lot, so it took me a little while to distill my favorite posts down to these three. First, Flavia Dzodan returned to blogging at Tiger Beatdown after a short absence with a heart-wrenching openness about struggles in her life - living as an undocumented immigrant, losing a pregnancy while in State custody, State surgeons screwing up surgery and making her sterile, and all the pain that comes with not being able to talk about it in relationship to her feminist work because she would be called "too emotionally close" and "irrationally involved":

I am often accused of being “resentful” or “racist against white people” or “irrationally angry”. I pity those who have never experienced the pain of having the thing they wanted most taken away while they are capable of calling someone “resentful”. My husband often tells me “but they don’t know what drives you”. I contend that even if they knew, they would still demand more proof, more suffering, more pain in order to believe. And that’s the reason I never spoke publicly about my past an an undocumented immigrant before. I always thought some people would try and use it against me to invalidate everything I stand for. “oh, but you are emotionally involved!” “you cannot possibly be objective about it” “you are too subjective about this to have an impartial opinion”. So, I remained silent in spite of the fact that I wholeheartedly believe that the personal is indeed political. I didn’t speak because I was afraid to victimize myself and, in the process, render everything I write about European Union policies suspect. I was also ashamed. Undocumented immigrants are “the scourge of society”, “they broke the law”, “they are illegal”. But since I haven’t been able to write anything for the past four months anyway, I have nothing to lose. Now it’s time for this story, my story to come to light. I might not be impartial or objective or “uncompromised” but neither is a State that renders people sterile because of immigration status or a State that sees fit to allow seventeen thousand people to die for having the nerve to immigrate without the correct paperwork.

Over on Black Girl Dangerous, Mia McKenzie wrote a response to the Onion's vile tweet, talking about The Thing About Being a Little Black Girl:

The thing about being a little black girl in the world is that even when you are the youngest person ever to be nominated for an Academy Award, many people will use the occasion not to hold you up for all of the amazing things you obviously are, but to tear you down for the ways you don't look like them, the ways your name isn't their kind of right, the ways you don't remind them of themselves, the ways you are not blonde or blue-eyed, as if those things could possibly matter when set against the otherwordly talent and beauty and brilliance you possess.

The thing about being a little black girl in the world is that you come into it already expected to be less than you almost certainly are, the genius and radiant darkness you possess already set up to be overlooked, dismissed or erased by almost everyone you will ever meet.

The thing about being a little black girl in the world is that even when you are everything, some people will want you to be nothing. They will look at you through the nothing-colored glasses they will put on every time you enter a room. And the bigness of you, the outstandingness, the giftedness, will be invisible to them.

And Feminisms Fest was this week as well, highlighting within the evangelical blogging sphere what feminism means and why its needed within the church. I didn't participate because I didn't have the time (way too much writing on my plate at the moment!), but I was excited to read what I could of the posts this series produced. I had trouble picking just one, but one of my favorites appeared last night, written by my dear friend, Dani Kelley. She hits the nail on the head for why feminism within the church is important and for why it's often hard for Christians feminists to be in church (something with which I identify strongly):

It’s been outside the church, among these liberals and feminists, that I’ve learned that it is okay for me to exist.

It’s been outside the church, among these liberals and feminists, that I’ve been allowed to grieve when I hurt, rage when I’m angry, dance when I’m happy, and experience human emotions fully for the first time in my life.

It’s been outside the church, among these liberals and feminists, that I’ve truly heard for the first time that there is nothing I can think, say, do, or wear that can possibly justify sexual, physical, spiritual, or emotional violence against me.

It’s been outside the church, among these liberals and feminists, that I’ve been told that my voice is important.

It’s been outside the church, among these liberals and feminists, that I’ve been told that my entire worth isn’t located in my vagina or connected to any activity that happens therein.

It’s been outside the church, among these wonderful, strong, brave, compassionate liberals and feminists, that I have found safety. Understanding. Friendship. Love.

Go. Read. Learn. And don't forget to celebrate church outside the walls, on a Friday night having wine with friends or a Sunday morning sleeping in. We learn from each other and from telling stories, not from keeping quiet and pretending everything's okay.

Worth Reading This Week

This week, Fred Clark has been killing it at his Patheos blog Slacktivist. First, in “16 tons of brick without straw,” he tells us why companies challenging the federal government on birth control is a reversion to a time before labor laws changed how we view employee wages:

We should step back for a moment here to recognize the absurdity of CT’s attempt to make this a “religious” claim, because their argument is simply indefensible on Christian religious grounds. The religion in question here is evangelical Christianity  — Bible Christianity. And the Christian Bible is resoundingly, unambiguously opposed to the exploitation of workers. This is not a gray area. From Laban’s swindling of the swindler Jacob, to Pharaoh’s oppressive edict to make bricks without straw (the original company scrip system), throughout the law and the prophets and the parables of the Gospels, from the epistle of James to the beastly monopoly of John’s apocalypse, the Bible is — start-to-finish and all the way through — vehemently opposed to the exploitation of workers. CT’s argument is not religiously permissible, let alone religiously supported. Their Bible forbids their argument.

But as biblically and religiously indefensible as CT’s position is, I don’t want to get sidetracked into a sectarian religious argument. First because sectarian religious arguments cannot be legally compelling. And second because, as CT sadly demonstrates, such arguments appear to be so infinitely elastic as to be meaningless. If the Bible can be read to approve of the denial of wages, then the Bible can be read to approve of anything. Why bother citing scripture to those who think the Bible allows and endorses such exploitation? Once “religion” has been redefined to endorse such views, it can no longer offer much in the way of a common language for moral argument.

Then, in “Rules For Christian Sex and Rules about Rules,” he breaks down the difference between the evangelical teaching about sex and the practice of healthy sexual ethics (namely that the hardline rules produced in the former make it nearly impossible to develop the latter).

My response to such accusations is always the same: I’m not saying anything goes, I simply want you to treat your “biblical rules about sex” exactly the same way that you’re already treating the biblical rules about money. I want you to take the exact same hermeneutical approach that you are already taking to every biblical teaching on wealth and possessions and apply that to biblical teaching on sexuality. Then treat both sets of teachings — and other people — with more respect than your current practice seems to do with regard to either subject.

My point here, though, is not to argue about the substance of the CRS/RCS, but to note that this rule-based approach is fundamentally misguided — that rules are just about the worst possible method for getting people to obey the rules.

Asserting  and reasserting a list of rules rather than offering a functional sexual ethics won’t ever produce ethical behavior. All you’ll get from asserting a list of rules is a long list of people who break them.

And my last piece worth reading is actually from last week, but it’s just too good not to share. My friend Dani Kelley wrote in “The Body I Have” about learning to accept herself and her body and breaking from a culture that had declared open season on her because she a woman who happens to be larger than a Victoria’s Secret model.

But I do know that during this hours-long conversation, I kept adding things to my mental of list of Things To Do To Be A Good Christian Girl — a list that was comprised almost entirely of Things To Do To Be Pure, which looked a lot like Things To Do To Be Silent And Invisible.

And my quiet panic kept growing and growing, because I wanted so desperately to not be a stumbling block, but it was starting to sound like having long hair, breasts, and hips was stumbling block enough. I thought of my outrageously curly hair that I kept long out of personal religious duty. I thought of my large and endowed body. And my heart sank.

*I* was a stumbling block. *I* was impure — by simple inescapable virtue of being unable to hide the body I had.

So what have you been reading this week?