For one thing, I don’t particularly enjoy having to give anyone in my family a violent verbal shove or contemplate total “divorce” from the lot of them, even when my mom insists upon continuing to pound my buttons as if they were nails and all she has is a hammer.

It also kills me to force distance between Ted and me when all I long for is the opposite.

I keep thinking of Aron Ralston, the guy who sawed off his own arm to save his life, or the animals who chew off a paw to get out of a steel trap. I feel like I’ve been trying to chew off a paw. It’s an act of desperation to cut off a part of yourself in order to (supposedly) save yourself and get free. It feels like sawing off living flesh.

**

I do feel much stronger about my exchange with my mother, because it was truthful, and confrontational, and not least of all (to be brutally frank) because it was more painful for her than it was for me. My worst agonies of maternal alienation and abandonment already happened a long time ago. Really all I did was quit being invisible in the name of protecting her. And the truth is, I feel much freer now.

In a nutshell: she pushed the religion on me one more time (after I expressed something resembling self-doubt in my Facebook feed) with the tired message that I “already know where the answers are.” (Wasn’t I just describing for you in my last post how fundies pounce on the faintest indication of vulnerability as an opportunity to proselytize?)

I lost my shit, kids. This time around it was the last proverbial straw hitting the camel’s back.

The first thing I did was to adjust my privacy settings so that she could no longer comment on my posts. Then I decided to take away her ability to so much as see them. Finally I sent her a private reply.

In my defense, I could have been a lot meaner.

Will you never let it rest? Oh, no, that’s right…you’re working on Commission. What you seem to forget is that you’re trying to sell me the same old lemon that never drove for me (subjectively speaking) in the first place – and a bizarre, bloodthirsty theology cobbled together from literalized myths from a plethora of ancient sources (objectively speaking)…

Do I ever try to force my beliefs (or lack thereof) on you? NO. Do I live and let live? YES. Why can’t you have just a tiny bit of respect for me, too, for a change? (That’s what finally gets to me. The constant picking. It’s like with parents who can never be happy with their child the way he or she is.)

Oh, no, that’s right…I’m going to “Hell.” I’ll tell you what…if “Heaven” is anything like that nutter Jesse Duplantis made it out to be (in that badly written book [my brother's wife] forced upon me), there’s no way I’m hanging out at that infinitely soporific church picnic. Send me wherever Mark Twain and Bill Maher are. I can’t imagine any decent god would want to live without them, myself.

I’m going to regret this outburst tomorrow, but…I just can’t take the picking, always picking. And the smugness of “being right.” You’re as bad as some of the more strident atheists I know. Fundamentalists (on both sides) and their certainties!!! I’m long overdue for a good explosion.

It took her a week to respond. Her reaction was predictable: shock, hurt, and the confusion that comes with years of stubborn, intentional denial. “I couldn’t believe it came from the daughter I have known and loved these many years,” she lamented (with a nice heaping helping of parental guilt), “and wondered what was going on in your life that produced such an outburst.” Ever the willful innocent, she continued “I never expected to receive such a hurtful attack, not ever.” My reply was an “attack,” as if it came out of nowhere, apropos of nothing. As if she had not been attacking my choices and beliefs for decades.

Clearly (and perhaps deliberately) misunderstanding what I meant by “respect,” she defended herself by talking about the admiration she had for certain thoroughly unobjectionable qualities of mine, like the “tender heart” that led me to take my first job at a local homeless shelter. (I swear on Lucifer’s balls, every time my mother talks about my “tender heart,” so help me Jesus, I want to go out on the street and kick a puppy or snatch a little old lady’s purse.) She expressed bafflement at what I called “picking,” and insisted she only wanted to “share” things like “videos and stories” that had “touched (her) deeply,” completely ignoring the fact that it had been yet one more presumptuous evangelistic prod that had pushed me over the edge.

With a feeling of weary, almost callous resignation (perhaps the feeling one has when it’s time to get an actual divorce) I realized that just because she was never going to “get it” didn’t mean I had to sit down and STFU. I wrote back.

Follow my metaphor for a moment. You’re sitting behind someone who used to agree with you. Now she just does her own thing, and tries not to bother you or anyone else, but you feel the need to keep intermittently poking, prodding and nudging her. It’s not good enough for you to peacefully coexist. She must agree with you!

For twenty-five years this goes on, you poke and you prod, and from time to time she turns around and politely asks you to stop.

Finally, after twenty-five years, she suddenly turns around and gives you a violent shove that sends you sprawling, shocked and hurt, onto the floor.

Honestly, can you blame her?

Of course, much of the problem here also lies in the phrase “Who wrote that?”

I’m afraid that no matter what I say, I will fail to communicate with you in any significant way. The fact is, I’ve tried several times in the past few years to “come out” to you — which would be easier if I were actually gay, then there’d be a thorny but concrete identity issue that might possibly work some change here — but at this point it seems like whatever you don’t want to see or hear is going to get filtered out. Or maybe it’ll be just chalked up to “evil” or “sin,” which are handy catch-alls for otherwise normal human traits and behaviors that often frighten and/or confuse fundamentalists of all stripes.

When I say “respect,” by the way, I don’t just mean “admiration for certain desirable traits.” I mean respecting other people’s boundaries — which runs completely against the whole born-again modus operandi of “witnessing,” I know, Henry Cloud notwithstanding. I also mean respecting the differences and choices of others, which in evangel-speak would probably be translated to “tolerating sin and destructive choices” — so there’s really no way I can win here.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say it was an angry outburst. I hoped to shock more than hurt, although I could write entire volumes about what, within the belief system I was raised in, has hurt me. Perhaps now I can start doing that publicly. What I couldn’t tell you before is that the work I did with that career coach revealed that one big thing I want to do is somehow help others who have been screwed up by Manichean evangelical Christian doctrine/culture. Franky Schaeffer (prodigal Greek Orthodox liberal son of Francis) is a role model of mine.

I have to say, part of my outburst, at least in my opinion, was damn funny too…what I said about Jesse Duplantis and church picnics and Mark Twain…that’s my real sense of humor: sharp, pointed, ironic/sarcastic, highlighting absurdity. It’s nothing foreign or affected — although I tone it down to the point of disappearance around every (member of our family) but (my brother). I don’t think he would have been as shocked as you, or found me quite so unrecognizable. He’s a lot tamer and more conservative than he used to be, but he still has a little bit of a subversive streak.

I’m more than a marshmallow peep, Mom. I’m not just sugar on the outside and a soft, chewy center. I’m also tart and I have bite. Don’t you like Macintosh apples?

Sorry to have hurt your feelings.

That was over a week ago and I haven’t heard from her. But at long last I feel freer than ever to say whatever the hell I want, even without the anonymity of this blog. Perhaps I’m that much closer to setting up my own fundamentalist-recovery Web site.

I thought the marshmallow peep comment was particularly inspired.

**

On Super Bowl Sunday I went over to my 74-year-old gay friend Richard’s house for wine and cheese, and we watched Howl instead of the game. It was an imaginative project, built around the 1957 obscenity trial of the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s titular opus. James Franco completely inhabited the otherwise inimitable character of Ginsberg. He was astonishing.

The reason I mention the film is because of something Ginsberg said to a writer from Playboy during their lengthy recorded interview (shown between clips of the trial, Ginsberg’s first public poetry reading of “Howl,” and hallucinatory animated interpretations of the poem). He talked about how he would have been unable to write such an uninhibited, nakedly honest poem if he had ever thought about his “daddy” reading it. Instead, he strove for the kind of intimate self-expression one experiences with one’s closest friends. “Don’t hide the madness,” he said. “You say what you want to say when you don’t care who’s listening.”

I wish it hadn’t taken me so long.

**

But it’s been another film, or more properly a film series, that has given me a non-fictional character with whom I could wholly identify, who makes me feel less alone in my particular life ineptitudes, and who gives me some hope that I can eventually prevail.

Out of a longtime curiosity, I requested Michael Apted’s 7-Up series from Netflix. This is the ambitious ongoing documentary series that began in 1963 with a group of fourteen seven-year-olds from various areas and social classes in England. Apted intended to follow up with them every seven years, although as the years went by some of the grown-up children wound up opting out.

It’s fascinating. Even at seven, the children have distinct accents, opinions, and personalities. (One upper-class Londoner named John is practically a miniature William F. Buckley.) Some become more subdued by fourteen. But by twenty-one, a few have changed pronouncedly. Neil Hughes, a middle-class Liverpudlian, is one of those few, and the filmmaker’s interview with him made me burst into tears. I saw myself in the series’ only societal dropout — rejecting his upbringing, questioning everything, devoid of self-confidence, unable to find his place in the world.

A bright-eyed and precocious child at seven, Neil is, at twenty-one, perched on the edge of homelessness — living in a squatter’s flat and doing day labor after having dropped out of a third-class University. His expression is one of perennial woundedness and bewilderment. Battling depression, directionless, he has a strained relationship with his devoutly religious parents, who (as he relates, with a nervous calm masking suppressed rage) taught him that “if one was to survive in the world, one had to believe in God” and that he should “always think of other people first before yourself, to a ridiculous neurotic degree.”

I don’t think I was really taught any policy of living at all by my parents…I was just left to fend for myself in a world which they seemed completely oblivious of. I found when I even tried to discuss problems that were facing me in school, my parents didn’t seem to be aware of the nature of the problem.

At that point I felt such a powerful recognition and sorrow I started to weep. The cluelessness and helplessness of which he speaks is, I believe, part of the fallout from growing up within a narrow religious worldview in which all problems are “spiritual” in nature (rather than social or psychological), we are essentially powerless to direct or change our own lives, and everything is a matter of God’s will. That is, some invisible, inscrutable external Being is in control of our lives, not us. Decisions are made and problems solved through prayer and submission to His divine will.

Given the overwhelming silence and absence of said Being, and the reinforced belief in one’s own helplessness (and worthlessness), this does not prepare a child to go confidently into the world and shape his or her own destiny. What it does do is encourage passivity and paralysis.

When Apted asks Neil if he is “kicking against stability,” Neil replies that there never was any stability to begin with. “I think I’ve been kicking in midair the whole of my life.”

Ouch. I hear you, brother.

“How many parents really think of their children as individual human beings?” Neil blurts out passionately, tangentially, at another point, interrupting his interviewer. And I found myself thinking of my own losing battle to show my parents who I am. “I couldn’t believe it came from the daughter I have known and loved these many years.” That unwillingness to let one’s children, or even other people, be visible — it seems to also come with this religious territory.

At the end of the conversation, Neil rues his inability to “take any positive course of action” and hopes that one day he’ll be able to “wake up in the morning and feel this day is going to be worthwhile.” Which I couldn’t have said better myself.

By 28-Up, Neil is a drifter in Scotland, living in a rented trailer, picking up odd jobs. He waxes philosophical about what Thoreau referred to as the majority of men living lives of quiet despair. He never wanted the 9-to-5 life and evenings spent watching television. (Another thing we have in common.) I already know that by 49-Up he will be living in a small England town and be involved in politics, so somehow it’s reassuring to see him flounder, rootless and directionless, the way I have all these years.

If Neil can find his way, I can too.

**

But then there’s the ongoing story of Ted.

After a while, Ted seemed to grow used to the status quo, i.e. my assiduous avoidance, and by then I had become too passive and cowardly to change course. Following three weeks of no contact (other than being in the same big room), I was at last getting to a point where I didn’t think about him that much outside of work. I was going on some Internet dates, which, though unsuccessful, were at least dates, and resulted in some interesting conversations. (What would be even nicer would be if I could inspire interest in someone I actually found at least marginally attractive.)

Granted, on the days I did see Ted, I still felt that undercurrent of low-grade misery that comes from prolonged, unresolved inner dissonance, of behaving in a manner diametrically opposed to one’s true feelings, and my numbers suffered. (I’ve had four quota warnings in six weeks. Good thing they like me too much to fire me.)

Then those nonexistent rom-com scriptwriters decided to fuck around with me again.

Ted had, one particular evening, decided to be more in-my-face than usual anyway by taking an empty station just on the other side of the row partition from me. Perhaps because my (nervous) energy level spiked as a result, I started scoring some solid pledges right away. There had been a system crash earlier in the day, but we hummed along without incident for an hour into the evening shift. Then suddenly my computer screen froze. I kept “pitching” the donor without the use of my script, and had just persuaded her to donate ten dollars a month to the ACLU, when the line went dead.

Another system crash. The supervisor rebooted everything. In the meantime, I jotted down the donor’s information and phone number to complete the transaction manually, and went to the reception area to call her back. Twice I got voice mail. The second time, I left a message explaining what had happened with the system. I told her she would probably be getting a call from someone else in the near future. (Ruefully, I assumed I’d lost the pledge.)

When I walked back into the call room, Ted and the supervisor came rapidly toward me. My donor was back — on Ted’s line. Apparently when the system came back up, the autodialer must have redialed her number and sent her to his computer. I had to finish my call from his station. (Out of all the call stations in all the rows of all the sections of the call floor, as Bogart once said…)

With a laugh, Ted told me that both he and the donor could hear me leaving the message. It was the most we’d interacted in a month. Again, as in my last post, I experienced that fleeting warm and homey feeling of everything being all right with the world.

Ted either left of his own accord or got sent home at the shift break, but my performance continued to shoot through the roof for the rest of the night, and saved my whole week. That’s the good news. I can’t say if the indulgence of renewed fantasies involving furniture-smashing resolutions of sexual tension later that night, leading to certain unmentionable conclusions, is good news (Russ would probably say so) — but it might just as easily be comparable to the indulgence of a self-destructive drug addiction. After all, you come back to work the next day, and he’s way over there again, and it hits you that this is never really going to happen, and then you feel about as shitty as a junkie with a crack hangover.

Ted may be leaving soon. I know he’s had a number of interviews, and last week he was in the director’s office with the door closed, which may mean he was giving his notice — but not having talked to him, I don’t know. Yeah, I know. You don’t have to tell me how lame that is.

**

My rational mind tells me to get free and get on with my life. My emotions and my body still crave Ted. Avoiding him is an act of both despair and helplessness, because I feel on the one hand too weak to follow my mind’s ruthless resolve, and on the other utterly helpless to get what I want from him.

Is it worse to divorce yourself from what you know you want today, or to sabotage possibilities you might want in the future, but don’t yet know you want? Especially if you have no confidence whatsoever in your ability to win either way?

If Ted simply leaves, it will be taken care of for me, by virtue of my own passivity.

Which is how good little Christian boys and girls like me and Neil have been trained to deal with our life challenges.

I tried not to visibly wince and smiled wanly, saying nothing. My mother was doing it again. Laying the sugary icing on the conversion cake with a trowel, as born-agains are wont to do. I hadn’t been looking forward to this particular aspect of my parents’ Christmas visit.

To “born-again,” evangelical or fundamentalist Christians, the three modifiers I just used for clarification are superfluous. They are the only real, true Christians. When my mother says her friend “became a Christian,” it doesn’t mean he got confirmed by the Catholic Church. He didn’t join the Quakers or get baptized into Eastern Orthodoxy or start attending a Methodist church. No, he said a prayer, no doubt on his knees, to “accept Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior” — and then embarked upon a “relationship” with his New Best Friend by adopting a whole bunch of conflicting and sometimes outrageous dogmas as well as the unshakable certainty that the (Protestant) Bible, as the Word of God, is the inerrant source of all truth (including historic and scientific truth).

**

Conversion stories like these are offered up by “Christians” like my mother as evidence that their God is the only game in town, and that only accepting their version of Jesus can solve your major life problems. It’s a message I heard (and internalized) throughout my childhood, and even now, having had firsthand experience of the failures of such a belief system, I’m still at a loss for words.

“Testimonials in support of the faith,” notes missionary child Marlene Winell in her religious-recovery book Leaving the Fold, a book which saved my sanity, if not my soul, “are heard and recorded, whereas stories of failure go unnoticed.” (Only recently did I find out that the hallowed former pastor of my parents’ celebrated church had “nonbelievers” for children.) “Similarly,” Winell goes on, “reports of success with other belief systems may not be heard.”

Certainly within the yoga world I heard some miraculous redemption stories attributed to the power of yoga, or meditation, or a Hindu Swami by the name of Kaleshwar. My friend Natalie straightened out her chaotic life, apparently, with the help of all three.

This kind of selective perception proves useful in other areas as well:

An area of selection that is always interesting is the convenient use of “scientific evidence.” If it does not serve the fundamentalist belief system, as in the case of evolution, it is disregarded as “of man,” or worse yet, Satanic. But if it supports anything biblical, it is hailed as “proof.”

I remember excitedly watching, with my family, a Christian documentary about “evidence” of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat, as well as reading articles in my parents’ Christian magazines about the Shroud of Turin. We found these “scientific discoveries” very gratifying.

It was that Satanic evolution taught in my “secular” biology classes, however, that became a major chink in the wall of my mighty fortress — a fortress that during my pluralistic public-schooled adolescence developed rapidly multiplying cracks.

**

My greatest objections with my parents’ faith are not about the ridiculously outmoded (scientific or historical) worldviews perpetuated by Biblical literalism. I don’t even identify myself as an atheist at this point. I did call myself an atheist before I studied philosophy, epistemology, and the history of science in more depth; after all that, I started identifying myself as an agnostic. (Now I’m just a yoga woo-woo wannabe.)

A tangent here: a friend of mine from the bookstore once gave me grief about not self-identifying as an atheist. She thought I was being cowardly and evading the question. I told her that I found the assertion that there is no God as hubristic as the assertion that there is one. The presumed omniscience of some scientific materialists is as baffling to me as the rock-hard certainty of some theists; they act as if there’s a kind of epistemological consensus among rational people that doesn’t really exist. The pure Skeptics question whether knowledge is even possible.

Here we are, after all, little nano-bits of nature ostensibly evolved from the primeval soup, yet we convince ourselves that the a priori categories we impose on nature with our evolved-out-of-nature brains can make definitive pronouncements about the nature which encompasses them…not to mention reality itself!

What’s more, given that the means we typically use to achieve scientific certainty is the controlled experiment (to prove or disprove a hypothesis), and that we can only experiment upon what we can control, i.e. that which is “inferior” to us (subject to our manipulations), anything “superior” to us (not subject to our manipulations) cannot be experimented upon this way.  A Twilight-Zone-y example: imagine that we are, at this very moment, being watched by a highly evolved alien race that has the technology to cloak themselves against detection by our primitive instruments and senses. How would we ever know they’re there?

For that matter, how do we know we’re not “in the Matrix?!!!”

**

But enough with the sci-fi head-tripping. I’m not about to pick apart my parents’ version of Christianity with science or so-called objective reasoning. There are better people available for that (some of them are even non-literalist Christians, like John Shelby Spong). I stumbled across one such rationalist, actually, while seeking some fortification after my parents’ Christmas bombardment…

Okay, one more tangent: I am currently utterly infatuated with yet another younger man*, this one a delightful 27-year-old Kansan named Chris who goes by the handle of Evid3nc3 on YouTube. Chris, a graduate student in advanced computer science, has made a series of highly intelligent yet compassionately delivered videos about the gradual loss of his Christian faith. You can find the playlist for his wonderful series here.

After fifteen minutes of listening to Chris’s soothing, mellifluous voice and looking at his kind, easy-on-the-eyeballs face (not to mention being impressed by the generosity and openness it took to offer such an anti-testimony), I was ready to give it up, and not for Jesus. At any rate, his series is a terrific thing to watch if you’re a “fallen” born-again Christian seeking comfort and solidarity. It’s extremely well done, from the graphics to the music. I felt as if I were watching PBS at moments.

(*Before anyone goes labeling me a cougar, I would like to point out that I don’t go out of my way to pursue younger men. If Sam was young enough to be my son, Seamus was old enough to be my dad. “It’s not the years in a man’s life that count, but the life in his years.” Besides, can I help it if I’m such a MILF-lookin’ mama that nobody but twentysomethings have been hitting on me all year?)

**

Where was I? Oh yes, I was about to go into some of my greatest objections with what I was raised to believe. For starters, check out a batshit-crazy Bible passage like this one:

(Romans 9:18-23) Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden. One of you will say to me: “Then why does God still blame us? For who resists his will?” But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’ “Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use? What if God, choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath — prepared for destruction? What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory?

The picture the apostle Paul paints of God is one of a totalitarian asshole for whom some people are, entirely arbitrarily, more equal than others. This passage, among others, supports the whole Calvinist notion of a saved “elect,” predestined for glory, while the great sinful mass of humanity trundles off to hell. So much for “red and yellow, black and white…(being) precious in His sight.” Some people are wholly expendable. (It brings to my mind a yearbook byline written by one of the most incorrigible wags in my high school: “If ten innocent people died to save one human life, it would be worth it.”) Such theology informs the attitude I see on display when our religious and political leaders talk about Our Great Land as a Christian Nation founded by our Christian Fathers (never mind Jefferson), entitled to military and moral dominion over all the world. Naturally, we should be the exception to things like weapons bans, climate treaties, and inconvenient Geneva accords. (Just as members of evangelical power group “The Family” in D.C. have to be allowed different standards of marital fidelity and morality in general.)

Of course, I find the apostle Paul to have generally been a major asshole himself — but where I come from, you’d better not say that. Paul is just taking holy dictation from God.

Bruce Bawer, a “liberal” gay Episcopalian, who has written cogently and at length about what he calls “legalistic Christianity,” puts the noxiousness this way in Stealing Jesus:

…(T)he problem with legalistic Christianity is not simply that it affirms that God can be evil; it’s that it imagines a manifestly evil God and calls that evil good. In effect…it worships evil. In America right now, millions of children are taught by their legalistic Christian parents and ministers to revere a God of wrath and to take a sanguine view of human suffering. They are taught to view their fellow Americans not as having been “created equal,” as the Declaration of Independence would have it, but as being saved or unsaved, children of God or creatures of Satan; they are taught not to respect those most different from themselves but to regard them as the enemy, to resist their influence, and to seek to restrict their rights.

**

I am just now starting to unpack what it meant to grow up with a truly warped fundamentalist conception of “love”  — but this, happily, also begins to explain why my mother’s loaded use of the word can arouse rage, as well as why I have had so much trouble “staying out of the circle” (respecting boundaries) in my romantic (or would-be romantic) relationships.

To be blunt, the “Christians” from whence I came are soupily sentimental — yet their beliefs demand an almost sociopathic withholding of empathy. With sensibilities seemingly derived from Hallmark or Thomas Kinkade, they love to imagine their soft-focus, handsome white Jesus cuddling fuzzy little lost lambs (oh how Jesus loves the little lost lambs!), but when it gets down to brass tacks, these folk neither spare the rod on their own little lambs nor bat an eye at the outright sadism and inhumanity of their capricious and abusive Old Testament “Father.” (I’m sure all those Midianite children deserved what they got.)

One has only to watch Rachel Maddow’s interview with born-again author Richard Cohen — the alleged “ex-gay” therapist (kicked out of the APA) whose book helped spur Uganda’s horrifying proposed death-penalty law — to witness the depth of sentimental “Christian” self-delusion at play. Cohen goes on and on about “loving” gay people, about “having compassion” for gay people, even “healing” them with his innovative (if questionable) hug therapy…but such blinkered and overstated sentimentality belies the bigoted and alarmist language in his book (gays are pedophiles who will recruit your kids!) that incites the kind of fear and hatred behind Uganda’s anything-but-warm-and-fuzzy legislation. (Don’t even get me started on that “love the sinner, hate the sin” bullshit.)

Then there’s the fundamental lack of respect for personal boundaries. In order to evangelize the “unsaved,” you have to continue to push and push them, to get all up “in their circle.” You’re supposed to be like God, after all, and God, as I’ve written before, is the Hound of Heaven who’ll hunt you down like a bloodhound whether you like it or not!

How shudderingly claustrophobic. As life coach Lisa Brown often says, a person pursued will run. We don’t like our boundaries invaded. My experience of both God and Family, as my inveterate readers know, was an invasive one; hence my flashes of seemingly inordinate rage when my mother coos about this sentimental but schizoid and suffocating “Christian” version of “love.” You and your soft-focus sociopath stay the fuck out of my circle, Ma!

Unfortunately, I also learned how to over-pursue. Sorry, guys. (I feel like writing one of those 12-Step-recovery “amends” letters to about half a dozen men from my past. But I doubt most of them want to hear from me.)

**

The perfectionism this belief system instills is also crazy-making. We “Christians” start out with some impossibly high expectations.

“When you feel disappointed,” Marlene Winell explains to those of us who grew up with reassurances of perfect bliss in Christ, “you are more likely to panic about having a bad life instead of a bad day.” This accurately describes the all-or-nothing thoughts that have often sent me spiraling into depression.

Lacking perfection, however, does not equal total failure.

…You were taught to think you needed life to be ideal. You were probably told that you had a void in your life that only God could fill, because only God could fill it perfectly. The implication was that you had to have your needs met perfectly. That is, only Jesus could truly understand you, and you needed to be understood completely. Only God could give you enough purpose in life, and you had to have a grand, compelling purpose.

Winell shares the experience of finally getting her emotional needs met by another human being in her first marriage. “The closeness with a real live person had a profound effect: it broke my addiction to God.” Likewise, for me, finally having a wholly pleasurable and fulfilling sexual relationship with Sam seemed to break my mother’s holy-perfectionist “curse”– No man will ever satisfy you. I could finally say she had been wrong.

This relentless “Christian” perfectionism extends not only to expectations about how life should be, but also to how we should behave and believe in order to make sure God is pleased and we’re doing everything right. (Otherwise we could lose our salvation, and wind up with the goats instead of the sheep.) Paul instructs us to be perfect, as our Father in Heaven is perfect…but I had a devil of a time trying to interpret all the conflicting messages in the Bible and determine whether or not it was even up to me, or to God’s grace. Predestination vs. free will, faith vs. works…what to think? (Check out the wiki History of the Calvinist-Arminian Debate if you’d like a little taste of the madness.)

Frank Schaeffer, son of the evangelical “intellectual giant” Francis Schaeffer, and father of the modern Religious Right, who is now basically a damned apostate like me, writes hilariously in his memoir Crazy for God about the infinite regress involved in simply trying to have faith “the size of a mustard seed” in order to have his prayers answered:

How exactly was this supposed to work? God was in charge, but he wouldn’t do anything for us unless we believed he would do it. But if he didn’t do anything, what reason was there to believe?

We lacked the faith to pray effectively and make God do stuff. So we prayed for the faith to make God give us faith to make him do stuff. But getting enough faith was the biggest problem, so we prayed for the faith we needed to pray for faith. But how much faith did it take to pray to have enough faith to pray for faith? And if God knew you wanted faith, why didn’t he just give it to you? It was like spending all your time calling directory information for phone numbers that you aren’t allowed to call unless you can guess the number right without asking.

Even if we did accidentally do something right, we couldn’t take credit for it. “Good things were always due to God,” Marlene Winell recalls, “and failures were always mine.” This is, interestingly enough, almost exactly the “pessimist” stance our old friend Martin Seligman discovered while doing research for a book on optimism. He found that those with a more pessimistic worldview took little or no credit for their successes, yet blamed themselves for their failures. (The optimists did the opposite, shrugging off failures as due to forces beyond their control, while taking full credit for their successes.)

So this rather insane version of Christianity breeds perfectionistic pessimists.

**

Is it any wonder I’ve been stuck? Lisa, while helping me identify my areas of learned helplessness and set some goals, asked me if I were a perfectionist. I said Hell yeah!

What reason is there to so much as move, if whatever you do is certain not to be good enough, and whatever good things that may happen aren’t up to you?

Meg Ferris, that writing and creativity coach who travels all over Europe and essentially lives the life I wish I could, cautioned me against overthinking. “If you overthink it, you’ll never do it.” When I realized, as a teenager, that God wasn’t going to show or tell me what to do, I still tried to make the perfect decisions every time by weighing all the pros and cons, trying to build watertight arguments for my preferred choice, and attempting to predict every eventuality (something my father still constantly hammers, in classic did-you-pack-your-long-underwear fashion)…which, I can tell you right now, is a recipe for inaction.

One of my favorite passages in Frank Schaeffer’s book is his reflection, infused with characteristic  humor and humility, on what faith really means in most of our lives. Even if you believe the events he describes are completely random in a completely random universe, they nevertheless invite us to be brave and curious and take a leap of faith. We can certainly choose to let them pass us by. I for one have let too many pass me by, while I stood immobile trying to write my own Consumer Report.

The irony is that we all — secular or religious people alike — make our biggest life-shaping decisions on faith. Life is too short to learn what you need to know to live well. So we make a leap of faith when it comes to what we should believe in, who we will marry, and our careers. Who we happen to meet, one conversation when you were eighteen, the college course you happened to sign up for, the teacher you liked, the elevator you missed and the girl you met in the next one, decide whole lives. You would have to live a lifetime to be qualified to make any big decisions. And since we can’t do that, we trust to luck, religion, or the kindness of strangers. Only the trivialities — say, buying cars, washing machines, or airline seats — are chosen on the basis of good information. I’ve always known I like aisle seats, but what does one really want in a wife? And spiritual leaders are selected like spouses, not like airline seats. There is never a good reason, just a feeling, just that fear of death that must be overcome somehow by something — by religion, or orgasms, or art, or having children, or politics — by anything that interrupts the contemplation of oblivion.

This is the kind of faith I need, far more than I need the kind I was sold as a kid.

**

As for my parents, I’d like to send them off with a quote from Woody Allen’s classic comedy Love and Death: “If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that He’s evil. I think that the worst you can say about Him is that basically He’s an underachiever.”

What I found was a large dragonfly, maybe four inches long and a glittering silvery-blue color, flinging itself against one of the window panes in a vain attempt to get out. I propped open the room’s door to the outside, and with a sheet of paper gently guided the exotic critter to the opening. It took flight immediately and disappeared.

This occurrence was extraordinary enough that it made me go straight to the computer and Google “dragonfly spirit,” as if the dragonfly’s appearance were some kind of augury. On a personal website that depicts certain Medicine Cards, I found this about The Dragonfly:

Look within and feel the sense-of-self energy within yourself. Notice if it is ebbing, and find the point in time when you were deluded into believing that you would be happier if you changed because someone else wanted you to. Misery is a prime clue that you lost your will and personal validity when you bought into someone else’s idea of who or what you should be. The illusion was that you would be happier if you did it their way. In forfeiting what you know is right and true for you personally, you give away your power. It is time for you to take it back.

A few other sites yielded strikingly similar themes.

The thing that hit me like a truckload of bricks today is: I have always been unacceptable to somebody. And it was usually someone pretty darn important, starting with the big guy in the sky himself. The Ultimate Father Figure.

Sure, evangelical Christians will fall all over themselves telling you how God is love, love, love, baby, so much love you won’t even be able to stand it, but if you actually read the Bible and pay attention to the theology you get quite a different picture. That some chick 4000 years ago ate the wrong kind of fruit now means that, on your own, you are totally unreliable, and a worthless turd to boot, unless you prostrate yourself, beg forgiveness, and get neurotic about doing (or not doing) all the stuff this book tells you to. And in this book you get to read about what befell all the people who displeased God by bringing the wrong offering or showing up at the wrong time or even thinking the wrong thing. Shoot, Job didn’t even do anything wrong, and look what happened to him! So you just better watch it.

Yeah, as soon as I could understand concepts, I learned the concept that I was fundamentally flawed, lacking, unacceptable, and that if I was going to please the almighty Creator of the universe, I was going to have to change. My very survival depended upon it.

It’s not unlike the way a young child’s survival depends upon his or her parents. A young child can’t afford to be critical; a young child can’t step back and say, hey, wait a minute, this is whack. Mommy and Daddy are inconsistent, unkind, and possibly downright abusive to me. No, the child has to adapt — to anticipate, to obsess over cues, and to try to be whatever he or she thinks the parent wants.

This was the extent of my so-called “relationship with God.” And it was also, to a lesser degree, my relationship with my parents, who are to this day neck-deep in that faith, and lived out its assumptions in their James-Dobson-style childrearing. So it was actually communicated to me that to the three most important figures in my early life, I was unacceptable at my core.

When high school rolled around I immersed myself enthusiastically in my church’s thriving youth group. But again, there was something lacking in me. I watched both of the guys I had monster crushes on (as well as my beloved brother) go out with my victorious Christian girlfriend. She was breezy and bouncy and good at sports, but when I asked her what her secret was, she pretty much ontologically flattened me by offering up the made-for-Sunday-school answer “My identity is Christ!” Well, then! Not only was I not cutting it as a female, I wasn’t cutting it as a Christian, either. (Personally, I suspected it had more to do with her pouty bottom lip and her elegant jump shot, but whatever.)

Still, that didn’t stop me from mimicking her style of dress, her expressions and manner of speaking, her opinions on the faith, and her makeup preferences. I even went out for junior varsity volleyball, as she was captain of her varsity team. I was like some larger, lamer mini-me.

And it didn’t work. I was still me. I was still unacceptable to those by whom I most wanted to be accepted.

Here’s the simple truth, that I still haven’t seemed to learn after four decades: you can pretend to be someone you’re not, or you can be authentic, but either way there are absolutely no guarantees you will make anyone, no matter how “important,” accept you. So are you going to toe the line and squeeze your butt-cheeks, or are you going to break out and dance like the unabashed dork you are?

Timely dragonfly. There is still that young child very much alive in me, who truly believes that she will literally die, die, if someone important to her disapproves of her, if she says or does the “wrong” thing, if her unscripted actions manage to prove her unworthy of love. The reaction no longer fits the situation; I can cry for hours, like a baby left in her crib to starve. This vulnerability itself seems like a liability; who wants to be around that when you could be around shiny happy people holding hands? Although I suspect a lot of them are on Paxil.

But there it is again, that wish to be different in order to be acceptable. As if five gay guys could come in and make over my soul. In the end, it just ain’t up to me or the Bravo network. I’ll fumble along on my meandering path, and try to tell the truth, and maybe stick my foot in my mouth, sometimes, and if you love me, you’ll love me, and if you don’t, you won’t.

But damn if saying that doesn’t still make me cry.

I was glad everyone else’s eyes were closed. These weren’t tears of joy or even of release. The teacher had been extemporizing, during our meditation, about “ease” and “bliss” — two concepts from which I had felt increasingly alienated as the days and weeks went by.

What’s the matter with me? My practice was no longer a source of renewal, but just one more source of anguish. Why can’t I get there? It seemed I was once again in the unhappy position in which I had found myself as a teenager involved in a born-again Christian church: those around me constantly testified to the miracles of their “faith,” while I simply sweated from effort. What am I doing wrong?

This was a perennial and exhausting question in my life. Driven by that question, I had gotten an undergraduate degree in philosophy, pored over psychology and world religion texts independently, done years of therapy, given any number of self-help and spiritual gurus a fair shake, taken up meditation eight years ago and yoga five years ago — and still nothing had “fixed” me. I was in emotional pain, stymied in my life direction, conspicuously single, uninsured and underemployed, awash in self-doubt, and furious with the limitations of my aging size-fourteen body, which had hit a ceiling in terms of its strength and flexibility and had started to break down with chronic injuries. It was clear I was not going to become a yoga superstar. I couldn’t keep up with all the toned and agile acrobats, dewy with health, who surrounded me in class. (I added to my suffering by fretting that this greatly diminished my sexual capital; if I couldn’t twist myself into a pretzel — and make like Cirque du Soleil in the bedroom — what possible hope was there for me among all these Amazons?)

I felt that I had, in fact, turned out to be a failure in everything I set out to do.

My yoga-community friends had by that time become wildly enamored of The Secret, a movie that, as I may have mentioned before, asserts that all we have to do to get what we want is to believe, consistently, with visualization and focus, that we will have it. This is also known as the Law of Attraction. I too had seen this movie, and it had made me want to have nothing so much as a screaming fit.

I protested (though arguing with true believers proved pointless) that I had persisted, despite obstacles, through more than a few situations in my life, trying to keep the faith when I hit a wall, wasting years envisioning outcomes that never manifested, time and time again. By the logic of the film, of course, the failure is your fault — you didn’t believe enough. You let doubt and negativity creep in. Or perhaps you wanted something that was wrong for you. (This is also, by the way, the logic of the born-agains regarding unanswered prayers.)

My failures, my fault. These elements together began to spin themselves into one great infinite regress of self-criticism and self-blame. It wasn’t that these strategies didn’t work for me; it was me that didn’t work. If I weren’t so flawed, wounded, needy, deluded…if I “loved myself,” I would want for nothing. If I were properly connected to the ever-elusive Divine, God, the Source, I would no longer do or want the “wrong” thing. If I were healed and whole and perfect, my life would simply tidy up, stop hurting, and I could get on with it, for crying out loud!

I didn’t see the comical irony of flogging myself with this whip, all the while shouting “Heal! Heal! Why can’t you just love yourself?!!” As my shame about my perceived flaws became more acute, I sought out more and more external input, mistrusting the directives of my own heart and intuition and ignoring my internal compass. Not coincidentally, I became severely depressed and started to suffer headaches, insomnia, migraines, and painful abdominal cramps. Eventually I even caught pneumonia. This was all-out war. Rejection on a grand scale of everything and everyone I was in my current state, with all her inglorious pain and confusion and yearning and need.

Maybe there is such a thing as grace, but if so, it seems to be much subtler in my life than in that of my former Christian cohorts and fellow yogis. Someone had left a copy of The Marriage of Sex and Spirit at the front desk of the studio where I work part-time, and in it was an essay by San Francisco psychotherapist and writer Janna Wissler. Reading her wonderful essay, I broke down like a bullied child in her mother’s arms. With her beautiful, compassionate prose, she gave me permission to be who I was, where I was, in all my hurt and craving and apparent lack of enlightenment. She mentioned the practice of sitting in the fire, patiently — Calcinatio — when whatever we want, right or wrong, is frustrated. “Suffer the burning of your refining defeats,” she advised.

I had surely, I thought, had my share of refining defeats.

But what if that were really OK?

What if “bliss” had nothing to do with a destination or a pinnacle one reached by doing it right and hitting the jackpot, or leaving this sorry world behind, but were instead the result of being true and present to one’s deeply felt, if imperfect, experience? Follow your bliss, Joseph Campbell said, and he sure didn’t spend his life fasting on a mountaintop.

Many gurus and religious teachings give innumerable prescriptions and instructions. Do this, don’t do this, don’t eat that, practice this chant or exercise for two, four, even six hours a day. Then maybe, just maybe, after ten years of standing on your head, you might just see a glimmer of a shadow of the Truth, and the Secrets of the Universe may show a little petticoat. This reminds me of Christian conservatives who don’t want anybody to get a free lunch (dammit). You’ve got to work hard (“the way we did in my day”) to get yours. That’s why they love the Old Testament so much, with all its blood sacrifices and its plagues and its confusing and conflicting laws about not touching your pregnant wife with your left hand on a Tuesday.

But then there are the Tolles and the Krishnamurtis and the Nhat Hanhs who say that the Kingdom of Heaven is all right here, right now, and available to everyone. If we could just quit being so distracted.

A wonderful healer I have the privilege to know, a woman who frequently demonstrates an uncanny sort of psychic ability, stopped in her tracks the other day to gaze deeply into my eyes.

“You are perfect,” she said emphatically, “just as you are.” I crumbled like a cupcake. What a concept — not to have to struggle, not to have to try so hard, because everything is exactly as it should be. Because there is nothing wrong with me.

So what if I don’t have much in the bank? So what if I don’t know what I’m going to do next? So what if I’m not bow-chicka-bow-wow-ing with my madly beloved every night (in “reverse cowgirl”)? So what if I’m not seeing visions of the holy mother in my oatmeal? So what if I can’t do handstands or side crow or scorpion? So what?

Chicken butt.

(At least I think that’s what the Buddha said.)

My take on him is, of course, highly subjective, and might evoke strenuous objections from those conversant with his philosophy; but then again, Kierkegaard was in favor of nothing so much as subjectivity when it came to questions of truth, so I imagine he’d give me a pass.

…

In his best-known work, Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard speaks of the necessity of passion as a vehicle to arriving at faith — passion regarding desires of the heart which, in the examples he uses, at least, are directed at something other than God, and are quite “spiritually incorrect” by the standards of most orthodoxies. I suppose having passionately desired something other than some abstract omniscient father figure since I was old enough to chase my cousin Nate around the coffee table, I was naturally more inclined to listen to this crazy Dane.

The book attempts to take on one of the problems many sane, rational, ethical people have with the Bible story of Abraham and Isaac: How could a guy agree to sacrifice the cherished son he had waited so long for God to give him, even if God, for some arbitrary and unknown reason, required it? (It is widely believed by biographers and scholars that Kierkegaard’s laborious philosophical endeavor here was, among other things, an elaborate allegory for his broken engagement with the love of his life, Regine Olsen. This angle only further endears him to me…)

I was riveted when I got through all of his preliminary obfuscations about Abraham (that were largely — or so it seemed to me — deliberately roundabout teasers hinting at where he planned on taking the reader without including too many particulars) to the part where he first brings up the knight. This hypothetical knight, you see, is pining for a certain fair maiden, a princess, in the tradition of the knight-errant of medieval romances. But this is no run-of-the-mill fairy tale. It’s a little too dark and intense and ungratifying for that (unless of course you’re talking about Hans Christian Andersen).

No, the action here is all internal, and would make for a very boring Disney movie.

The knight gives himself over utterly to his longing for his beloved; he feels love palpitate in every fiber of his being, as if he had drunk a mysterious potion that could very easily turn out to be deadly. This single-minded desire, says Kierkegaard, becomes “the substance of his life.” To all those who would advise the gentleman to get out more, maybe take up a hobby or find some nice rich brewer’s widow to marry…well, he’d say “let them go on croaking in the swamp.” This is the man’s passion, for the sake of which he is about to embark upon a profound and difficult interior journey — a journey that may or may not lead to faith.

Because when he sends out his dearly held wishes “like doves,” they return to him as messengers of sorrow — there is no way on earth he can be with the princess. What his heart desires is truly impossible.

According to Kierkegaard, he then undertakes a preliminary “movement” — that is, he enters into a sort of despair the author calls infinite resignation. In the midst of abominable, nearly intolerable pain, he recognizes the eternal and formless nature of a love that will never find expression in the temporal world. “Spiritually speaking, everything is possible,” says Kierkegaard, “but in the finite world there is much that is not possible.” The princess may be utterly lost to him, but at the same time she becomes a permanent and immovable presence within her devoted knight’s soul.

Once he has surrendered all claim to his dearly beloved, and is “reconciled in pain,” the knight is ready, if he dares, to make the most difficult move of all, the movement of faith. Kierkegaard pretty much sums it up with the statement “I believe nevertheless that I shall get her, by virtue, that is, of the absurd, by virtue of the fact that for God all things are possible.”

In twelve-step lingo I guess that’s what you might call “giving it over to your Higher Power.” The knight’s surrender is total, yet he believes in the face of inarguable impossiblity that the Almighty will commit an act tantamount to reversing the laws of gravity, because He can.

Thus we can possibly understand how Abraham (Kierkegaard) could prepare to sacrifice (give up) his beloved Isaac (Regine), having gone through this same agonizing renunciation and come to embrace the absurdity that somehow, through the miraculous workings of Divine omnipotence, his loved one would be returned to him (in Abraham’s case, perhaps even from the dead; in Kierkegaard’s, from marriage to another).

…

This will sound like heresy to traditional intellectuals (to them I say: get over yourselves) but in many ways I see this whole setup as paralleling what innumerable New Age quantum-consciousness authors (Deepak Chopra et. al.) are currently saying about intention and nonattachment. There is that same delicate dance between complete disinvestment in an outcome and the absolute conviction that what one desires will come to pass (through something like Divine Providence). Both conceive reaching toward something and letting it go as one single paradoxical gesture.

It’s fascinating to me that I would find in such unlikely places echoes of Kierkegaard, but then, maybe, just maybe, there’s something to it.

…

As I said in the beginning, what I like most about Kierkegaard is his unorthodox appeal to our human desires. It’s not typical of religious thinkers to engage our tangible, terrestrial passions when talking about faith. At best, it’s considered bad form; at worst, it’s considered idolatry, or Samsara-inducing attachment, or whatever. It’s against the law, as the song goes, as long as I’m borrowing lyrics from Paul Simon. But what are those of us to do, who have only experienced something like religious ecstasy gazing deeply into the eyes of another human being? Who touch upon something vast, numinous, and eternal not in church (or even in silent meditation), but in the inestimable presence of (a) certain individual(s)?

Kierkegaard, at least, gets that. Check out what he wrote to Regine (from his Journals):

Oh, can I really believe the poet’s tales, that when one first sees the object of one’s love, one imagines one has seen her long ago, that all love like all knowledge is remembrance, that love too has its prophecies in the individual. … it seems to me that I should have to possess the beauty of all girls in order to draw out a beauty equal to yours; that I should have to circumnavigate the world in order to find the place I lack and which the deepest mystery of my whole being points towards, and at the next moment you are so near to me, filling my spirit so powerfully that I am transfigured for myself, and feel that it’s good to be here.

I may still have trouble with faith, but to that I can say Amen.