{content note: mention of CSA and suicidal ideation}
Every year, our big old church in the converted movie house hosted a play. It was entitled, rather too predictably, Heaven Or Hell. I don’t remember the plot or characters. I only remember the flashing lights, sound effects, and booming threats of damnation. I was ten or eleven years old, looking to fill myself with something other than Stroehmann’s bread, Kraft mac and cheese, and shame. I didn’t want to be afraid, nor did I want to pretend to like it when that boy in my 5th grade class rubbed himself against me in the coat closet. I didn’t want my “no” to be caught in between my panicking heart and trembling voice box when I most needed to speak up. I felt hot and sad and scared. I needed something. I cried so much, silently, with my mouth closed. My “aunt” cousin – my mom’s first cousin, an adult – and my mom told me to go ahead, because it was okay to get saved. I did not understand what was supposed to happen when I walked that long, long, long aisle down to the altar. There were women in choir robes welcoming those of us who sought Jesus's healing love and light. I just kept crying. She held me so tight. I wailed. She said he would forgive me, and help me. I said I wanted to be helped, I wanted to be healed.
Us kids who’d answered the call, we had to go up all those stairs to an overflow room, and talk about the next thing: becoming a proper Christian. There were tracts we were given, something with illustrations of Obviously White People talking about the goodness of being saved. The adrenaline in my body drained from me like lukewarm, murky bath water, leaving me chilled and confused. Was I supposed to make friends with these other kids? I didn’t look at anyone’s face or really talk to them. I was “shy,” what my adult self recognizes as Godzilla sized anxiety. All I remember was going downstairs to the lobby and looking for my mom and cousins, telling my mom I might wanna come to Sunday school one day. I never did. Everyone was proud of me. I was just confused. I did not feel any better or different than I had before the tears and fright.
I wanted to be saved from danger and harm that no adult could warn me against or protect me from: the handsy kin down south, the girl in my class who always said she wanted to beat me up, my perpetual feeling of not belonging. What was the Lord going to protect me from now that I’d said yes to Him, let Him into my heart and all those poetic things? Was I gonna stop being fat or weird? Was He going to heal my messed up skin, and help me stop picking at it? Would I stop sucking my thumb? Turned out those were things I had to do for myself with His divine guidance. “So, what is Jesus’s job?,” I wondered. If he couldn’t protect me like a literal shield, or teach me how to fight, then what had I gotten myself into? Was he another adult who told me what to do without teaching me how to do it? I wanted to be strong and big and bad, I wanted to be empowered. I did not have power. I had more despair than I knew what to do with.
I wanted Jesus to change my heart and mind, so I repented whenever I was in a church service or Christian day school assembly. Too often, I sat in a pew or weak folding chair, and cried about how bad of a person I must be: I wrote “nasty,” but true things about the cruelty of the people around me, and my grandmother saw it. I was angry at the father who did not honor me, my sisters, or our mother. I envied and resented my little cousins, because they got to do fun stuff and go on vacation while we were almost always stuck at home, and I knew they were my grandmother’s favorites. I wanted to be thin, but I didn’t know how to starve myself enough … and when I tried, it was because my mother and grandmother wanted me on that fucking cabbage soup diet alongside them. My body needed to be different for people to treat me better, but Jesus wasn’t helping me with that. When I childishly imagined I may be pregnant after an incident of abuse, I asked God where He was, and why me. I tried to kill myself when I was twelve, and I was mad at God for not taking me. I did not like that he didn’t take me. I wanted to go. He was a disappointment to me, the way I was to the adults in my world.
In my teen years, I drifted. I loved the music, but couldn’t understand the dogma. No pants on women in the church building, don’t be gay, don’t support gay people, no cursing, no secular music, no, no, no, no, no… I was supposed to say yes to being sanctified and never watch Buffy. Once, my grandmother was so mad at me about volunteering at the AIDSWalk, she told me I was wasting my time. Because those people were “going to die and go to hell anyway.” Even the kids who’d had hemophilia, even the babies who were born HIV positive, even people who’d been assaulted. She said they deserved it, and it was shameful that “the world” wanted to make us “accept gay people.” Where was her Jesus, where was his love and kindness? He was nowhere in her, as far as I could tell. That meanness wasn’t Christlike. I knew it wasn’t, and suspected she did, too. It did not stop her.
When my grandmother died a few weeks before my 18th birthday, I cried my face off in the chapel. I couldn’t not cry. I had to. The eldest daughter’s eldest daughter doesn’t get to opt out of that performance. Didn’t matter if I cried for my mom, or for me. My tears came from relief above all. Mommy could live her life a little more easily, as less of a caregiver. I could go back to college and maybe, hopefully lose myself in classwork and new friendships. I did not want my grandmother back, because her Jesus was a bludgeon against my softness. Her Jesus was the son of the Old Testament God who drowned the world and made people walk through fire. Her Jesus was going to do something terrible to all who’d failed to choose him. She never chose me, I felt. So it didn’t matter anymore. I needed to choose myself. I didn’t think God didn’t exist; I just knew the one I’d learned about wasn’t for me.
As a twentysomething, I would pour over the pages of for colored girls and The Color Purple, feeling a gong go off inside me: “i found god in myself,” and “Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.” I started thinking about the things bell hooks would say in Communion and Sisters of the Yam, and began to feel a good groove had come over me. I could get into and love a god that wasn’t waiting to punish me for being human. I could learn and express a god that showed up when Jill Scott and Yolanda Adams began to sing. The god that animated my favorite rapper also showed me the best sunrises and fed me the juiciest peaches. If god was omnipresent, I did not need nobody’s complicated church doctrines and arguments. All I really needed was me.
I have finally saved my child self. And she’s saving me, too.