Church

Church. While I admire anyone's ability to broaden their spiritual understanding enough to visit a church, I am not nearly as connected to that part of myself. I have a lot of discontent, restlessness, and generally confusing emotions and I have no place to put those feelings. Generally speaking, I put them into writing or fantasies, but when I go into a church they get all riled up and confused. Is this making any sense at all? I feel like I'm rambling... I don't know. Churches fuck with my head. There. I guess that's a clear, less convoluted way to say it. I mean, I do have a spiritual relationship to something I consider a god... I do see that creator when I look at my son's gorgeous blue eyes and every time he surprises me and makes me smile. As the faithful in my life have so insightfully pointed out, having a child removes most of the capability to doubt the existence of a force far greater than our capacity for understanding.

Where I get off track is when I walk into a church and feel disconnected instead of connected.... as if the very thought that we could put up walls and somehow commune and understand the vastness that is creation, dumbfounds me. When I talk to God, I'm usually praising the awesomeness of him, or begging for mercy, or at times begging for someone else to be blessed or gain mercy, but never do I pretend to understand him to the degree that I think he'd care if I know him, care what I want, or even recognize me at all. And, I'm okay with that. Never do I feel closer to God than when I stand on the edge of the ocean, or when I'm a mile out on Lake Michigan and can't see a spot of land anywhere. It doesn't make me feel alone at all. That place that makes most people feel small, makes me feel extraordinarily connected and completely immersed in existence. Church... not so much. Maybe you can help me understand.

I will say immediately though that I am not an atheist... I am a fallen Christian with a deep seated confliction about faith and an almost constant love/hate relationship with God, to which he always responds with a kind and sentimental hand that makes me want to puke. I'd prefer fire and brimstone and maybe to be struck by lightning... something to get my attention. My own hangups and Daddy issues (he was a preacher the first 10 years of my life, and gave it up) have no effect on my fundamental belief that certainly we weren't sparked into existence by nothing- so logically something is there... and God is as good a name as any I guess. Although if they can rename the Hoosier Dome the RCA Dome, maybe I can call God... "Frank".

Kicking my legs while seated in a pew in pretty white tights, Mary Janes, and a pretty dress are nice memories from childhood. As a black sheep child of the most fundamentalist republican hypocrisy- machine of a family, I told my Dad that it's difficult to make friends in TN because "I am a socialist, hippy, literature loving, D&D playing, conceptual theorist who hasn't made a friend while sober since she was 15. I'm on an Army base, Dad, and I think the war is an international war crime... I read John Irving, they listen to Rush and the extent of their reading is cheap B-rated porn mags... Even sexually they're repressed". So, he says to me, uncomfortable with the fact that I've gotten all "liberal" and inappropriate and made him uncomfortable, again... "You have a worldly family, but now you need a church family. You're unhappiness comes from your distance from God." [I am not unhappy btw, he misconstrued what i said].