Faith, Anger, and Heart: Part Four (MAYBE DON’T CALL PEOPLE FREAKS?!)

As I rage-hovered off my pew at the back of the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Restoration, Substitute Minister called the children up to the front to join him for the Story for All Ages. On the big screen up front appeared…P.T. Barnum?!

“I never get tired of telling people he was Unitarian,” said the Substitute Minister. I’m skeptical whenever any old-timey (or new-timey, for that matter) white dude’s face is up on the big screen at church, but sheesh-o-rama this was the WORST.

Substitute Minister had seen The Greatest Showman the night before and was inspired to talk with the congregation’s children about it. (For a good accounting of what makes The Greatest Showman so problematic, check out this surprisingly woke episode of The Flop House: https://www.flophousepodcast.com/2018/05/episode-257-the-greatest-showman/) Substitute Minister was impressed with how Barnum had uplifted the “freaks” in the movie and convinced them they were good enough, as if that were up to him.

The. Idea. That this man. Who OWNED AND EXPLOITED HUMAN BEINGS, who called people who looked different “freaks” and CHARGED PEOPLE TO COME LOOK AT THEM was somehow a doer of good, was some white angel there to redeem them?! Was too much. This was the story he was telling the children, and everybody there was just LETTING IT HAPPEN.

This was the day that Trump’s trans erasure memo began circulating, the day we all learned of the impeding registry of genitals, the day my friends across the gender spectrum became even more afraid than they already were. On that day, Substitute Minster thought a song from the “freak” Bearded Lady was what was called for. She was just beginning her song on the big screen as I steamed out the door.

It’s hard to talk about that morning in church without becoming incoherent with rage. The weight and sum of my fear and anger and disgust at the white male entitlement that allowed Substitute Minister to think he had the right to 1. Stifle political announcements and 2. Bestow worth upon those he viewed as beneath him thought his proxy the fictionalized Barnum is heavy to carry and hard to parse. It’s garbage. It’s everything wrong. This kind of institutional white cis male supremacy needs to be stifled at every level, in EVERY edifice, in EVERY way if the rest of us are truly ever going to thrive.

I wrote to the non-substitute minister and heard back pretty quickly. Valid, he said, and offered to talk when he got back from travelling. I headed off, not wearing warm enough clothes, to our local Democrats’ campaign headquarters with my BFF. We picked up our door-knocking lists and settled into our Blue Wave work. But I felt hopeless that afternoon, the things that were wrong and broken seemed so vast and embedded that I worried they could never be healed.

That hopeless feeling would pass, but this brush with Institution, like all others for me, would steal a big swath of time and leave lasting scars.

Faith, Anger, and Heart: Part Three (Singing and Seething)

Not long after I started trying Restoration monthly, they welcomed a new minister. I’d been a fan of McKinley Sims (Okay, full disclosure: He’s super-dreamy. I had a crush. Sometimes the body leads the soul places, what can I say?) since about six years ago when he did some of his seminary work through the Unitarian Society of Germantown. He was always someone I felt like I could learn from, maybe because (as I later learned) he’s from Lubbock, Texas just like my ex-wife/BFF is. Something about that accent just makes explaining go down easy, I guess.

Still, I wondered why a congregation that had a stated goal of inclusivity and a Black Lives Matter banner out front would choose, in 2018, a white, cisgender straight man, albeit a presumably progressive one.

Encouragingly, McKinley’s first sermon as Restoration’s new minister gave me lots of hope. He said “siblings” instead of “brothers and sisters,” which suggested that he might be trained in the ways of the gender spectrum. He made it clear that he is committed to immigrants’ rights and his first month’s theme was “sanctuary.” He talked about how building sanctuary takes work, takes facing problems rather than sweeping them under the rug. He even acknowledged those harmed by church-enabled sexual abuse, which I have NEVER EVER heard a preaching minister of any denomination so. NEVER. I’ve been alive for 44 years. That’s a big deal.

One Sunday a few weeks ago, McKinley went out of town. The Substitute Minister, the layperson leading the service, was a slight, middle-aged white guy. He seemed nice enough, so I felt safe to settle in.

Ever in organizing/canvassing/yelling-at-Nazis mode, the Joy I wanted to share that week was a mini book review. Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger by Rebecca Traister had saved my life and fired up my soul in the trigger-laden weeks following the Kavanaugh hearings, and I admit I was feeling quite evangelistic about it. I’d brought the book for McKinley because I thought he’d like it, and even though he wasn’t there, I carried it up through the Joys and Sorrows line anyway.

“Joys and Sorrows,” announced the Substitute Minister, “Are for matters of the heart, not for political announcements.”

I was SHOCKED! I had never heard them mention politics during that admonition before—one of the reasons I felt safe at Restoration was because it felt like a break from the politics-shaming of my family and of the world at large. Everyone there seemed political, I hadn’t yet had to feel like I was badly-behaved or a freak.

I SEETHED when it was my turn to share. The Substitute Minister shrugged and rolled his eyes as I said:

“I deeply resent being told that politics are not a matter of the heart so…NO…to that.”

(If I had it to do over, I would 100% say “FUCK that.” Live it, learn it.)

I gave my teensy book review, and the women of the congregation smiled and nodded.

As I sat back down in my pew, nearly shaking with anger, a tall and warmly hippie-ish white man, one of the congregation’s regular musicians, that “Thank you for saying that.”

The next person in the Joys and Sorrows line, an African American man who looked to be in his early twenties, made (YAY!) an announcement about the vigil for immigrants’ rights that his committee was hosting the following Tuesday.

Stoplight Guy wasn’t there that week. I missed him.

I tried to listen to the rest of the Joys and Sorrows of the congregation, but I was seething so badly I felt like I was hovering off my pew. I did the bad-habit thing of planning what I was going to write on the minister’s facebook page after the service. I wanted to start typing then and there, but that seemed beyond the pale. I tried joining in the singing, but everything felt dissonant and out of whack.

SURELY once McKinley knew about this, he would fix it, right? SURELY he would understand what the problem was?

Spoilers:

1.      He SORT OF understood.

2.      The service was about to get even more egregiously fucked up.

Faith, Anger, and Heart: Part Two (Stoplight Guy Forever)

The week that the Unitarian Society of Germantown put “Welcome Pope Francis” on their sign, the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Restoration’s sign said something that made way more sense to me: “Beloved Community.” I also noticed that their minister was a woman, so it seemed like it would be a safe place to be while the rest of the city (and my now-former church friends) fell in love with the pope. They put stones in water for their Joys and Sorrows just like USG did, but the congregation shared aloud if they chose to. One member shared his post-Catholic pain during that time, and that was the ONLY mention of the pope. The sermon, given by a layperson who was a woman of color, was explicitly in favor of LGBT rights (The Q hadn’t been widely added yet.) and ended with something like “Someday maybe I’ll be ready to sit down with Kim Davis and try to understand her. But not. Today.”

Still, for all of Restoration’s wokeness-before-that-was-a-mainstream-thing, it was hard to get past the architecture. Just like all of those cathedrals I’d studied in Art History, it was shaped like a cross. All of the characters on the stain glass were white people. Unitarianism, for an anti-racist post-Catholic, is like trying to break the cycle of abuse and then realizing you’re still abusing and being abused, but gently. It’s like one of those dreams where you know a place is your home, but you also know it isn’t.

But still, this spring when the voice in my Kirtan-blissed mind told me to sing in church, Restoration seemed like a good bet.

There’s a flaw in my personality wherein I’m still sort of looking for a perfectly welcoming, perfectly approving community/family. It probably comes from not having been particularly welcomed as a child, from inherited ancestor-grief in my XX chromosomes, or both. It’s a flaw that has caused me unending sorrow as an adult, to the point where if some group seems perfectly kind and safe, I should probably run for my life before I get too attached/expectant/hurt.

When I went back to try Restoration again, my child-brain started to spin its fantasy of perfect welcome. Here’s why my mistake was both understandable and irresistible:

When it was my turn in the Joys and Sorrows, I told the congregation I was feeling scared because the following weekend I would be headed to D.C. to counterprotest the (DELICIOUSLY FAILED! https://theserotoninfactory.blogspot.com/2018/08/my-wonderful-magical-day-of-yelling-at.html) Unite the Right rally. I said I wanted to honor Heather Heyer’s name. And then, the most intoxicating thing happened: the congregation applauded.

As activists, we are trained not to expect rewards or thanks (derisively called “cookies”) for simply doing the right thing. This is in spite of the fact that doing the right thing takes hundreds of hours of unpaid labor and is often physically and emotionally dangerous. Women are especially policed for this (we especially police EACH OTHER for this) and I think the phrase “performative ally” was one of the phrases most successfully weaponized by Russian trolls in 2016. Though I wouldn’t criticize another activist for being praised, I live in (misogynist) fear of being deemed too proud of myself, of being too happy to be in the struggle.

So when the Restoration congregation applauded my efforts, I felt a deep sense of relief and belonging, of sanctuary. As I sat down, I felt briefly free from the family alienation, the Bernie Bro concern-trolling, the microaggressions, the weaponized phrases. I just felt appreciated for a second—a very wholesome drug.

EVEN BETTER: A few Joys and Sorrows behind me in line, there was Stoplight Guy. Stoplight Guy is everything that is right with democracy, with spirituality, with the world. He was a tall African American man with caring-dad energy. He explained that he lived across the street and was there to update the congregation about the very dangerous intersection the church shares with him. He told us about his efforts to get the city to understand the need for a light. There were SO many accidents, he said. It really needed to stop.

If this church had a place for Stoplight Guy, it had a place for me. We sand “When Your Heart Is in a Holy Place,” one of my favorite hymns. I felt refreshed and energized, ready to let my guard down.

Screaming at the Supreme Court: A Love Story (Part Five)

            After the conversation with the pro-Franken family, I needed to get away. On the way to finding a spot on the Capitol lawn, we ran into an art project. We were asked to write our thoughts on a popsicle stick (There was some kind of pun involved there, I forget.) to be glued onto a “believe” poster. I wrote “Fuck Al Franken too.” on mine and the young woman whose poster it was frowned at my contribution before placing it on a pile of also-not-fucking-cheerful-enough rape thoughts.

            Even protest art seemed to have betrayed me. It truly felt like there was nowhere to turn, like I would never be a part of anything ever again. This is a normal thing to feel during a panic attack but this was a NATIONAL panic attack, a GLOBAL one, fueled and pushed (I can only see this in retrospect) by all of my enslaved and exploited ancestors and precursors, by ALL of the women (especially the women of color) and girls and femmes and trans people and non-binary folks, all of the non-white non-men who had fought for freedom against colonialism before me. When I’m screaming, I’m screaming for all of us.

            I can see now there were generations, millennia, of pain and fear coming out of me in racked, animal sobs. I honestly didn’t are who saw. I hoped they saw. I hoped that the people around me could hear me but I ‘knew” in the way that a panicky rape survivor knows that no one could hear me, no one could ever hear me again. No matter how disruptive, how livid, how determined, no one in the world would ever be able to hear me.

            Amy’s policy, whenever scared at a protest, is to find a friendly tree, so we did. We sat on the grass and I tried to breathe. I was still starving so she gave me her sandwich. I wondered what she would have to eat and I nagged her about it for the rest of the day.

            I sat in the grass and scream-cried. I asked her if that women from China had really said “me too” to me and Amy said yes, she had. I shriek/bellowed “WHY?” Like a poorly written movie character. WHY does she have to go through this too? WHY do they hate us so much?

            I felt so dissociated and lost that it seemed like we were done with the protest. (Spoiler alert: We were not.) I wondered if we should start making our way to the Hope Diamond, my favorite post-protest reward. Instead, I kept crying, brokenhearted, feral, bereft.

            At a certain point, though, I realized that my crying might be disrupting the MAGA hat couple, who were engaging in performatively “reasonable” conversations with protester after protester. (I try not to hate those who take the Sarah Silverman, let’s-empathize-with-racists tact, but I kind of do hate them. Talk to somebody better!) When the spite started to re-emerge in my heart, I began to feel something like okay.

            Amy and I decided to go back to the protest for fifteen minutes and then call it mischief managed, but then we saw that the whole demonstration was on the move. It was magnificent to see: Mostly women (cis and trans), mostly people of color, mostly clad in black, fists held high. They were marching together for the Capitol steps.

            As Amy and I joined the march, I had an inkling that this was going to be one of the most powerful things I would ever see. I was not wrong.

Screaming at the Supreme Court: A Love Story (Part Four)

            A really cool thing happened and then a really dreadful thing happened. Lots of protesters were sitting and having a rest along the planters that lined the sidewalk across the street from the Supreme Court. Amy and I went over there to relax for a minute and make sure our phones were charged. I opened the foil-wrapped PB& J from my purse and ate it with panic-hunger. We still joined the chants going on across the street. I wondered aloud why we weren’t BLOCKING the street. If this were Philly, we would definitely be blocking the street.

            Sometimes, tourists would come by and talk to us about what was going on. A group of Chinese women stopped to ask me what my “E.R.A. Now” sign meant. One woman in the group, tall and thin and brightly dressed, didn’t have much English at all, but she had two words:

“Me too.”

            Her face was shiny and happy, maybe just excited to have found the right words. A lightning bolt of connection, sadness, and heart from all across the world went through me. We smiled at each other. We had something beautiful and horrible and profound: Me too.

            Not too long after that life-altering exchange, a white, middle-aged, American man with a goatee, walking his bike and wearing yellow bicycle clothes, stopped to greet some friends who were sitting near me. In my freaked-out, hypervigilant state, I overheard what he was saying, and it FUCKING CONCERNED ME.

In an offhanded, chitchatty way, he said this:

“It’s just a shame because you know the ones voting yes today are the same ones who went nuts when Franken…”

“NO. NOT HERE.” I went from peaceful PB&J mode to spitting-nails mad in half a second. “YOU ARE NOT going to talk about that FRANKEN BULLSHIT HERE. NOT. TODAY.”

Like so many “liberal” men, he was super-ready with:

“You shut the fuck up, bitch. I’m just talking to my friends.” He shook his finger at me and said something physically threatening, I wish I could remember what.

“GO. AHEAD.” I said, holding my sign aloft and bracing for impact.

It seems so foolhardy now, but I WAS physically ready to fight him. I wanted him to come at me so I could rip him to FUCKING SHREDS and with him, all of the troll-farm- indoctrinated Bernie Bro rape-apologists I’d been tormented by for the past three years.

It felt like the crowd around him was treating me as a threat, but it’s likely that some of them were trying to protect me. NOT the white woman that the Bicycle Man had stopped to greet though--she stood between us, shielding the man from my attack. A black man with a very gentle manner tried to get between us on the other side. He was trying to help, I think, but I felt boxed-in and snarling. People were filming with their phones—I’m sure I’m on some feeds looking and sounding like a caged beast.

“You need to get some help.” The white lady acting as the patriarchy’s human shield kept telling me.

“You’re crazy,” the bicycle man kept saying.

1.      I am getting help! This protest IS me getting help.

2.      Nothing calms a girl down like some good old-fashioned gaslighting.

The worst part was that I ‘knew” in this moment that I was the threat here, not sleep-rape-joke making Franken (Who, in my fury, I kept calling Frankl. Sorry Viktor Frankl! Love youuuuu!”) not this man gaslighting me and telling me to shut up, not even Kavanaugh. To this little crowd, I was the scariest thing at the Capitol that day. Maybe I’m a little bit okay with that, except:

            “You’re making my daughter cry!” said the woman angrily.

            Her daughter, a curly-haired twelve-something, was indeed sobbing, in the same way my then-littlest nephew sobbed when I ruined the Thanksgiving before last screaming at the adults about Nazis and racism and the homophobic Catholic church and rape culture and Water Protectors and god knows what else. I recognized and empathized with both kids’ fear, but I tried to understand that neither I nor my anger was the problem.

            “YOU’RE making her cry! WHY DON’T YOU STAND UP FOR WOMEN?”

            “You need help,” the woman kept intoning, and I really can’t argue with her there.

            “What if it was HER in that fucking picture? What if it was YOU?” I screamed as I started to walk away.

            Although some people said words of encouragement (“Stay strong, you can do this.”) as I was led (by Amy, thank goodness) away from the scene in shock, I felt like the worst monster ever, like I’d ruined the movement, like I’d set back the Democrats by a million years. I was shattered, and ashamed of myself, but I can also see who did this.

            AL FRANKEN FUCKING DID THIS. He fucked women over in person and then he fucked us over as a party. Liberal men did this, by dismissing the concerns of all non-white non-men as “identity politics” and insisting that “real people” only cared about money.

            While I admit my anger was scary and I’m sad that that little girl cried, I hope she’ll remember my fury on her behalf. I hope, someday, it’ll spark some fury in her. That doesn’t make me not-ashamed, but it does make me a little hopeful.

Screaming at the Supreme Court: A Love Story (Part One)

If you're wondering how to manage/use/deploy your lady-rage (or even, dreamy guy allies, your on-behalf-of-ladies rage!) this book is one thousand therapy sessions. If you're in Philly, call the Big Blue Marble. https://www.bigbluemarblebooks.com/

It was a last-minute decision to go. On Friday night, October 5, Amy and I were watching Murphy Brown, newly rebooted and excoriating the fictional White House Press Corps. We were scrolling through our feeds and seething as the “on the fence” votes changed to Kavanaugh votes. I was double-seething because my “friends” on social media seemed to think that Susan Collins was the ONLY person to blame.

“I think we have to go,” I said, and I looked around on my facebook until I found the Flood the Capitol March, lead by the Women’s March and Planned Parenthood Action. I already had a sign I’d made for an anti-Kavanaugh rally we’d attended a few weeks before in Philly.

It didn’t feel like the other protests. As I cleaned the house, rearranged my Saturday plans, and went to bed early, I didn’t have as much power-to-the-people hopefulness buoying me up. Instead, I was SEETHING, so frustrated to still be doing this work, decades after my own rape experiences and millennia after women were enslaved. IT HAS NEVER NOT BEEN THIS.

Since I became politically active, this blog has often been about convincing people that protesting and other political work could be nice, friendly, loving, inclusive, and all of those things are true. But in the past few weeks, I have become less and less willing to perform polite, feminine, hopeful organizing and more willing to give voice to the feral fury that sometimes makes me feel out of control. Getting ready to Flood the Capitol, I felt almost none of my usual aren’t-humans-amazing feelings. It was more a feeling of “Survivors, let’s burn it down.”

For professional reasons, I’m hesitant to be honest about the fury. Because I work with children, it’s important for me to feel nurturing, loving, and safe. My clients and their families deserve a solid, peaceful presence in their lives, so I feel guilty to also be this raging, scary thing. But at the same time, it’s love, nurturing, and protectiveness—for myself (both adult and inner traumatized child), for my nieces and nephews, for the fear that my students, mostly children of color, will face in a future with Kavanaugh on the bench.

            As Amy and I drove Washingtonward at way-too-early-on-a-Saturday-o’clock, we decided: No getting arrested. The priority was to get safely back to the students, to not miss a single tutoring hour. As much as I admire those who get arrested (Later in the day I would sob watching a young woman have a panic attack as the handcuffs went on.) I knew my priorities were elsewhere. 

In Praise of Anger

I’m on the outs with one of my favorite yoga teachers, and I feel like a monster just for typing that sentence. She’s one of the rotating teachers for the Friday night Recovery Yoga class I’ve enjoyed for about a year. I’m not in capital-R Recovery for anything, but the sharing combined with yoga definitely got me through all the trauma therapy of last year. I’d always meant to try her women-only Trauma Sensitive Yoga classes, and last Sunday, I finally gave it a try.

Though I’m often ill-at-ease in the (Trump supporting) white suburbs of Philly, this particular space has almost always felt safe and welcoming to me, and if you’ve read me at all, you know that’s hard to come by. But when Nice Trauma Yoga Teacher started off the class with a message that was something like “Sometimes you’re called to stand up for what’s right, but make sure you’re calm and nice when doing so.” (I’m paraphrasing, I wish I could remember exactly what she said.) I felt a little betrayed by her and wondered if I should leave.

The Nice Trauma Yoga Teacher apparently didn’t know that women, survivors, LGBT folks, and people of color are CONSTANTLY being admonished to be calm, constantly being blamed for pain, harm, damage that was actually caused by our/their oppressors, who are NEVER asked to be calm, the straight white men whose anger is seen as righteous, romantic, troubled, worthy of compassion.

Still, she might not have known about all this, might not have known that tone policing is a thing, and I might just have been taking her advice the wrong way. I followed her directions though the poses and felt the good balance she’d always provided, tried some new poses and felt very proud of myself.

Then, instead of the usual quite reflection during shavasana, she read this. Fucking. Poem. By Max Ehrmann, a white man, in 1927.

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;

Go placidly?! THIS IS AMERICA!

Speak your truth quietly?! When will I know I’m quiet enough for you, dude?!

But worst:

Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.

In that moment, I went from feeling like a cared-for member of the class to knowing that deep down what my teacher would feel towards me is fear, maybe even contempt. I was so angry and unbalanced and hurt that I left as quickly and quietly as I could.

To tell women not to be loud, that loud people are bad.

To tell rape survivors they have to be nice to almost everyone, or else they don’t belong.

To tell a room full of survivors who trusted her to guide their bodies and care for their well-being to be quiet, to be careful what they say.

As if women, as if rape survivors, needed someone to tell us to be quiet, someone to tell us to stay under control lest we become vexations.

I went home and wrote her a compliment-sandwiched facebook message, saying this: my voice is one of the most important parts of my body. It has been my safety, my power, and my saving grace. I wouldn't feel welcome or safe in a place where my voice isn't respected and honored. On a wider scale, the idea of telling a room full of survivors to be quiet and polite borders on cultural gaslighting, and is deeply offensive to me.

She was kind and apologetic, but also equated anger with hate, something she was afraid to “poison herself with.” She invoked Dr. King, of course, and intimated that I couldn’t really be a yogi unless I, too, stigmatized anger.

This is where I tend to run into trouble with my spiritual quest, even one as individualized as yoga and meditation. You never know when it’s going to stop being about caring for bodies and souls and start being about controlling each other, about repression and oppression.

This exchange with the Nice Trauma Yoga Teacher might not have upset me so much if it hadn’t been the week of “walk up, not out” backlash/victim blaming and the week after I felt the real cold touch of evil in a facebook conversation. In an otherwise-very-productive conversation about gun control and the power of protest, a young friend of the family, someone I’d known since he was a baby, said this: “Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization, it just is.”

Of course, I knew this was a thing people said, but I’d never heard it from someone I knew before. As I typed my pushback comment, I felt cold fear run through me, too horrified to yet be angry. I’ve known all along that racist media coverage and just plain hatred blots out ignorant people’s conscience and empathy, blinding them to the grief, the love, the power, and the strength of Black Lives Matter. I feel heartbroken for anyone who won’t get to feel the power of marching with that movement, or with others, because they have been convinced that protesting is mean.

Anger-shaming is a tool of sexual abusers, sure, but it’s also a tool of white supremacy, and that’s why I felt so deeply disturbed at my yoga teacher’s choice of poem. Even as I write this, I’m afraid I’ll get in trouble for it, that my anger makes me unworthy to be in a family, a community, a yoga class. I’m scared that it means that I’ll never really have a place in the world, but still, when faced with the NRA, with rape culture, with white supremacy, I can’t see anger as anything but a sane response to an insane situation. It’s not the only emotion I feel in my activist life (LOVE being the strongest one) but anger is a cherished and beloved guide.

So, as I look for more yoga classes and more wild and free ways to express my divinity, I just want to say thank you. If your anger is pushing you to call congress, to make beautiful or unbeautiful art or especially vexing art, if your anger helps you sign up for marches or just stay home and treat yourself like a treasure, THANK YOU for your anger. And THANK YOU for your work.

Pope Week is All of the Panics, the Parkway Is all of the Violated Places

 

***Please note: I would like to acknowledge a bout of empty-womb sorrow that informs the general frustration of this post.***

Geez, this is a lot of dark topics lately for a happiness blog, you might be thinking, but sometimes, there’s anger, sometimes you have to dig through three thousand porta potties of shit to unearth joy, or in this case, get to God.

Here’s what I see when I see the “Welcome, Pope Francis” signs everywhere, including at my own usually-liberal Unitarian Society:

Welcome, institutionalized rape.

Welcome, marriage and childbirth as coercion.

Welcome, only being worthwhile as a woman if you serve a husband and have lots of children.

Welcome, only being worthwhile as a man if you own a woman and have lots of children.

Welcome, birth control as sin and overpopulation murdering the planet.

Welcome, narrow definition of love that doesn’t apply to me.

Welcome, my ex-wife and I being told we’re sinners at most family weddings.

Welcome, even babies have inherent sin.

Welcome, the thought is as bad as the deed.

But the thing that makes me angriest is how Catholicism taught me that some of the best things about myself are what keeps me separated from God. My questioning, my strength, my sexuality—not even queer sexuality but the very fact of out-of-marriage desire; that these things kept me from feeling entitled to a relationship with God make me feel enraged. God made me this way, and the Church separated me from God.

I happen to be in a phase right now where I’d like a more openhearted relationship with the divine, where I want to come out and come to terms with my not-atheism. I’m not a cool agnostic, and I’d like to find some ways of expressing it. I do believe in a benevolent force that loves me. I do want to be grace-filled and joyful and accept that love. But right now all I can feel is anger for how long I was told I didn’t deserve that connection, that god belonged to more straight and well-behaved girls. I know it’s my fault for not realizing it sooner.

Mostly, like all things are to me, it’s personal. I am angry on behalf of child me, as is way-too-often the case. An example is this: When I was fourteen, I had sex for the first time. I did it right then because I was feeling sad and ugly and I thought I might never have the chance again. I thought it would make some sort of connection with the guy but he treated me like a stranger afterwards. It was so sad as to seem like a cliché.

I told my aunt, my favorite confidante. That evening, we were in church and I mentioned that someone had on my (recently deceased) Great Grandmom’s perfume. “Maybe she’s telling you she forgives you.” said my beloved aunt.

Here is what she should have said, and I’ll say it to myself now—

You are worthy and good and there is so much happiness and love in your future. Sex is yours and you will have it in the happiest, most playful, most exuberant, most loving ways. You can and should expect more from partners, and you have so much in body, soul, and heart to offer them in return.

Being shamed about sex, believing somewhere inside that it’s something for which I need forgiveness, has caused me so much pain and loss that at 41, I’m still working to heal the consequences.

Welcome Pope Francis, chip in on my therapy bills.

So, during Pope Weekend, I will do every kind thing for myself. I’ll pray for everyone who was hurt in large and small ways by the Church. I will take the opportunity to stay home and work on my sex memoir, so that this woman, at least, will continue to have a voice, so I can honor the hot-pants spark inside me that IS God, and it will be, loved, celebrated, and will know it never needs to be forgiven, that it was born forgiven. My family’s faith may have hampered their ability to raise me (and themselves) with love, but I can still raise myself, and still find my own path to God.