Spiritual Confusion

I was nine years old the first time I found myself “spiritually confused,” I remember the incident very clearly. I was in my fourth grade Sunday school class, and my extremely charismatic Sunday school teacher, who had recently anointed me with oil and “the power of Queen Esther,” sat my class down and told them to ask her anything. It was an open forum about the Bible and God. Young minds were being encouraged to explore. But I don’t think she was quite ready for my question.

“So…” I started, “God knows everything, right?”

“Of course,” my teacher said.

“And God made everyone?”

“Yes,” she said.

“So when God makes people, He knows everything they’re going to do in their life?”

“Yes.”

“Then why does God create people if He knows they’re going to hell?”

She paused. “That’s a very good question,” she said, “but we do have free will…”

            And thus began the paradoxes and logical fallacies. This did NOT make sense! How can you say that going to hell is the individual’s choice (based on their decision to reject Christ) if God basically made the choice for them when He created them? My addled nine-year-old brain couldn’t handle this bullshit. After a time of arguing, I remember my teacher, flustered and impatient, moving onto the next question.

            I was not a very light-hearted kid. I was very serious, very quiet, very thoughtful, and, at nine years old, perhaps already growing a little skeptical and rebellious. I questioned a lot of things, from the necessity of homework assignments, the rules of my classroom at school, and the unspoken norms of society. I was not a “Why is the sky blue?” kind of kid. I was a “Why is the world so evil and cruel?” kind of kid.

            Fast forward four years, and at thirteen, I think I was driving my mother crazy. I was drinking alcohol at parties, getting in trouble at school, and flaunting my barely-developing body every chance I got. I was depressed, anxious, almost constantly on the edge of emotional ruin. And, for the first time in my life, I openly scorned organized religion. The rules were confining, the traditions were pointless, and the theology made absolutely no sense. My parents and Christian-school teachers brushed this off as immaturity and angst. They weren’t necessarily wrong, but the questioning and doubts continued long after I stopped wearing thick eyeliner and wishing I could change my name to “Daisy.”

            All throughout high school, I spiritually “flip flopped” between two extremes. I have a feeling there are at least a few Christian school kids who can relate to this. Spiritual Emphasis Week would happen, and I would be compelled by the messages or touched by the worship. I would read a convicting Christian book directed at wayward teens, and do an immediate 180 in behavior and thought. I would go on a mission’s trip, or go to a Christian conference, and come back “changed.” But the “change” never seemed to last. After a few weeks or months, the doubts would creep in, my normal behavior would resume, and I would look back on my “spiritual high” with scorn and skepticism. “Brainwashing” was a word I used a lot back then. I also liked the words “agnostic,” “searching,” and “myth.”

            But of course, things change. This proved to be just a phase after, when I was seventeen, one of my dad’s girlfriends gave me the book Eat Pray Love. To say that it changed the landscape of my religious experience forever wouldn’t be a strong enough statement. That book changed my spiritual DNA. It opened my mind to an entirely new reality – I could believe in an all-knowing, all-loving God, and yet not buy into Christian dogma or theology. I had found what I saw as a middle ground, and I jumped on the chance to live in that fray. I reveled in it, rolled around in the dirt of it, and fell in love with it. Suddenly lacking that angst and hatred I had once directed toward my Christian upbringing, I suddenly liked words like “open-minded” and “universalism.” I liked signing my letters with the phrase “Love & light.” I meditated. I smiled at strangers. I felt like I was radiating wisdom. I felt enlightened, god damn it.

            But the pendulum still swung.

            There were still chapels to attend every Monday. There were still Bible classes to go to every day. My peers were still mostly devout evangelical Protestants, and I had no one to share this new spiritual elation with. So it died like that parabled plant that didn’t take deep enough root. I swung back and forth wildly, changing my religious and political convictions as often as I changed the color of my hair (which, if you don’t know me, was often enough to scare people). I was spiritually volatile. I was in a crisis. I was always so sure that I possessed complete certainty, but in reality, I was extremely confused.

            Eventually, blessedly, the pendulum seemed to stop swinging. I sat in one spot for a couple of years, with only occasional, short hiccups of change. I pressed into my own path. I grew in my knowledge of auras, portals, past life regression, indigo children, pendulums, crystals, shamans, reiki, chakras, ascension, enlightenment, Higher Self, spirit guides, Christ consciousness, and soul agreements. Some of my best friends were like minded, growing in their knowledge of the same New Age-y stuff as me. It was, quite possibly, the happiest time in my life. It’s hard not to be happy when you truly believe, with total assurance, that Love is god (this phrase was tattooed on my arm, to my mother’s displeasure) and that humans are inherently good. It especially made me happy to believe that all religions were equally right and equally wrong about God. God was too big and too incredible for humans to truly understand, I thought. Religions were just grasping for knowledge of the same beautiful, universal deity.

            To say I was a hippie at the time would be fairly accurate.

­            I won’t bore anyone with too many of the details of my Christian conversion in 2012. I was pregnant with my daughter, in a toxic relationship, and terrified of the uncertainty in my future. I was extremely vulnerable. So I shouldn’t have been so surprised when I had a religious experience at church. I begged God for forgiveness, cried bitterly over lost time, took communion, and left the church “changed” again.

            This time, it stuck.

            For two and a half years, I went to church nearly every Sunday. I dedicated my daughter to Jesus. I vowed to raise her in a home based on Biblical truth. My “Love is god” tattoo was covered up by an ornate cross. My free-spirited self was shoved in a corner, replaced swiftly by a new soul I did not recognize.

            Somewhere in the midst of all of this, I found a completely different kind of happiness. It felt purposeful and mature. Somehow, for me, being a follower of Jesus Christ also meant being and adherent to the American Dream. Where I used to envision raising Paige at Burning Man, there were new visions of traditional marriage and white picket fences. I had done a 180 all over again. But my 180s started to have consequences. My relationship changed. Friendships were strained or lost completely. Priorities shifted. My mother got excited over the return of her prodigal child. I realized pretty quickly that the changes I had made could not be undone. This wasn’t high school anymore, and I was expected to have my religious views figured out. “Searching” was no longer considered kosher – I was a mother, damn it, and I squashed every religious doubt that ever came up in my heart. I went from having a wide-open mind to having a very, very closed one in a very short period of time. Deep down, it didn’t sit right with me, but everything was going so well. I didn’t want to ruin it with any kind of cynicism or admission of “not knowing.”

            But then, 2015 happened. My then-fiancé became my now-ex-fiancé. Everything fell into a kind of chaos that I had not been familiar with for years. My future that had been seemingly set in stone, seemingly certain, was now a series of blurry unknowns. I was mad at God for “taking away” the love of my life. So I stopped praying. Then I stopped caring. Then I stopped believing.

            Some days, it feels like I’m spiritually stuck in my high school years. The last year has been a series of insane changes in every aspect of my life, and I have migrated between belief systems at least a couple of times. I’ve been ecstatic over the course of the last year about new mantras and sage cleansing ceremonies, but I’ve also been ecstatic about Pentecostal prophecy and my mega-church. It’s been a very confusing twelve months, to say the least. But I can no longer swing back and forth so comfortably. I can see the ridiculousness of my position. You cannot believe in the healing power of a moonstone rod one day and the healing power of speaking in tongues the next.

            Or can you? In all honesty, I haven’t got this figured out at all. I’m trying to settle into a middle ground, with opinions and ideas that are more nuanced, but I have always been an all-or-nothing kind of person. I have always been very extreme.

            It’s hard, however, to just “pick” one belief system or the other, when both belief systems (conservative Christianity and New Age-y universalism) have so powerfully affected the direction of my life and shaped my personality. Christianity gave me my foundation. It somehow got me through high school intact and alive. It gave me hope in some of my darkest times. But my hippie-ass, cherry-picking system of belief grew me into an adult. It got me through my eating disorder. It taught me how to love my body and myself. Both belief systems have “saved” me from all kinds of shit, up to and even death.

            So I guess I’m having a moment of doubt. A long, drawn-out, irritating moment of doubt. My poor friends who have dragged me through this past era of my life must have been rolling their eyes the whole time. Certainty may be the mature thing to possess at this point in my life, but I have no certainty to speak of in this area whatsoever.

            I don’t know what would need to occur for me to be faithful to one spiritual path, once and for all. “Proof” does not normally impress my fickle heart. I have read The Case For Christ. I took an apologetics class as a junior in high school. I am well-versed in all of the reasons everyone should believe in the Bible as God’s inerrant word.

            I’m just not personally convinced.

            I have so many questions that I wish there were easy answers to, on either side of the aisle. And I have so many reasons to continue going to my church. I have plenty of reasons to raise my daughter in the Christian faith. But I also have so many personal reasons to reject Christianity as a whole. I know that what I need is more exploration, more time. And I need to give myself permission to be fickle again, to be wrong, to get messy in the mud of “What do you believe?”

            But not knowing can be very uncomfortable. Watching a sunrise and not knowing the character of the creator can be unsettling for someone raised firmly in a certain religion. But at least I can see that the sunrise is beautiful. And I’m waking up to watch one more.

            Whoever made me still wants me here. I still have a reason to be on this plane of existence. And if nothing else is comforting today, that fact alone will do.