Note: Finding more great posts I never finished and published. Just throwing them up here…sorry for the incompleteness – but then again isn’t that life sometimes!
Original Date Written: Aug 2012
It’s a little like waking up on Christmas day the first time you knew, you just knew that Santa Claus wasn’t real. The magic of the story had dissipated over the years, or you overheard one of your friends in class telling another friend what their parents had told them…or you snuck downstairs later – or what felt really late – and you saw your parents putting under the tree the presents that would be from Santa. And you knew…you knew their stories about being Santa’s “helpers” were just no longer true…
And like that you were thrusted into a world where something that had once seemed so real, where everyone around you was so careful to keep up the facade…and then wham – the world was different now…yet some how it was still the same.
I never really had this experience as a child. I never remember believing in Santa Claus so I never had that monumental childhood rite of passage…until now.
No, I didn’t just find out at 30 something that Santa wasn’t real…no I found out that God – at least the Christian God I had found at age 19 – I found out that he too is something of a myth. What I once thought was the one true god – and like if you are the only god why would you even need to qualify yourself as the only one true god – is nothing more than man’s attempt to try to describe the indescribable.
I can’t even begin to explain the torrential amount of emotion and thoughts and …well for a lack of a better word…gravity that has been leaving my body as I go through this massive life change.
Bittersweet? In all, this experience is bitter for the things I now know I must let go of in order to birth the sweetness that is waiting for me on the other side.
Anger? Not in an outward, screaming, hair pulling way – but yes i would say it is there.
Betrayal? Most definitely.
Displacement? Yep – talk about being caught in the middle.
Sadness? Certainly. And a sadness that is finding its way out mostly in my tears.
Wary? cautious of falling into another myth believing it was divine and utter truth
Weary? to my bones
Lost? where do I go from here
What must I let go of? an exclusively male representation of the divine
What is good? What can I keep?
What do I still need?
How do I rephrase my thoughts to allow the beauty of what is Truth in my heritage as a Christian into my soul ~ while keeping the patriarchal, oppressive, angry god out? The one that starts with the assumption that I am bad to the core just to begin with?
Found – finally found and finding my own person, what it means to be a woman, to sink and settle in deep to my soul, found the rights to my own life
Freedom freedom from oppression that was always hanging over me in the Church…freedom to be the
