After I had my first article published, where I talked openly about my sister’s addictions and my understanding of death and God, I felt conflicting emotions. I felt tall and strong for being honest with myself to write and own my experiences and have them published under my own name. I felt an unfamiliar feeling of self-clarification from sharing my feelings that would undoubtedly hurt my family’s feelings, but doing it anyway for the sake of my own growth. I also felt the familiar fear from my childhood of being on the wrong side of ‘good’. The day after it was published I walked into the kitchen and whispered a question to my husband: Will God smite me for publishing this?
I grew up in a Pentecostal Christian home. The bedrock of my religious upbringing was fear. Fear of doing the wrong thing, fear of being lured into something that felt right but was actually wrong. Fear of losing the love and connection with my parents. It was a terrifying world to grow up in when you are taught that your emotions and actions could literally lead you to hell.
My parents had their own part to play in this dysfunctional relationship. They put the fear of God into me. I still wake up sometimes to an empty bed and think oh no, my husband has been raptured and I have been left behind.
I know that my parents truly believed that the God of the Bible and the burning fires of hell were real, so in that context I knew that in teaching and subjecting me to the things that they did, they truly believed that they were doing the best for my future. If these were the stakes at hand, then any emotional collateral damage would have been acceptable.
One of the many fear-based teachings I was subjected to was the 90s traveling drama production Heaven’s Gates, Hell’s Flames, which portrayed a “true story” of how you get into heaven. It showed a series of people making decisions on earth, and then showed them dying. The scene would cut to those same people standing at the gates of heaven. Some would be let in, others were dragged off to hell.
One scene in particular stuck with me, as it was intended to. It was a mother and her young daughter. Her daughter was encouraging her mother to go to church like she was and her poor, overworked mother said she was busy, but maybe one day she would. They had a horrific, unforeseen accident and died. The daughter was let through the pearly gates of heaven and her mother was separated from her little girl and dragged off, screaming, into hell. I was about 9 or 10 when I saw this and I remember watching it being frozen. Terrified.
Last week I looked up that terrifying show online to see if it was like I had remembered it. I had only seen it once as a child yet I remembered the tune of the first ballad. More importantly I remembered the depiction of the devil. His screaming echoey voice and evil face as he literally drags actors across a blood red stage and into hell.
As a child I remember the feeling that God was just always out of my reach. I tried, I really did, to feel Him, hear Him, experience Him. When I was 12 years old, I stood in line along with many other kids my age at the front of the church, waiting for my turn to be prayed for. This youth pastor was leaving a wake of kids on the ground behind him who were ‘‘slain in the spirit’. This is a term for when the Holy Spirit overcomes you so much that your earthly energy leaves you and you are filled with God’s wonders and visions. I had grown up seeing this on almost a weekly basis. I could see the pastor coming down the line towards me and I was nervous. I had never experienced a word, or a touch or anything that resembled a personal encounter with God, and I desperately wanted to.
As the pastor prayed for me I squeezed my eyes shut and tried my best to focus and arrange my face in a way that I have seen others do. When I felt nothing from the heavens, and I sensed my prayer time was coming to a close, I made a desperate split second decision and I let my body go limp. It was a trust fall of sorts but there was always someone there whose job it was to catch all the fallers. As I fell to the ground I remember keeping my eyes shut and my body still. I lay there listening to what was going on around me before slowly and carefully picking myself up off the ground, after a time I decided was believable.
About 2 years ago I lost that connection with my parents that I have tried so hard to keep. I had been hypervigilant to keep myself in the black and white lines that were created for me as a child. I was scared of two major things – going to hell and losing the love and connection from them if I was to stray, in any way, from the Christian path they wanted so desperately for me. It only took an one hour phone call asking them why they made some of the decisions they did, and me sharing some of my feelings about my childhood for it all coming crashing down at my feet. Losing that connection was heartbreaking, and for a time, I reverted back to a small child. Months on I was surprised to understand that losing that connection with them also severed my obligatory relationship with God, the church and religion. This allowed me some breathing room to examine all of the questions and things that had never sat right with my heart.
Evangelical Christianity taught me fear. Fear of hell, fear of even accidentally thinking the wrong thing, fear of demons getting to me through music or a drum beat. Even fear of God because He was a violent and vengeful God that could correct your ways, out of love, at any stage without warning.
I’m now in my 42nd year of life, I’m finally unpacking my religion. I’ve thrown everything out to be able to piece back together what resonates with my heart and soul. I don’t know what I believe yet and I don’t know where I will land with God.
The coding still catches me sometimes while I’m in this space of evaluating my beliefs, and I still feel crippling snippets of deep fear and dread for daring to even think these thoughts. I’m not sure that will ever go away, but the fear is becoming less and less frequent and I’m feeling more confident in this space.
Conversely, in questioning my beliefs, I feel snippets of freedom and joy in a way I have never felt before. I’m allowing the adult me to finally slow down and listen to the younger me’s original feelings around God. I finally have the confidence to give oxygen to those original thoughts and feelings. The further I go down this new path I see clearly how debilitating and stifling these fear-based teachings have been in my life. All the pain it’s taken to get to here has been worth it to get to today. To freedom.
I’m finding so much comfort and strength to quietly give myself permission to discover what my values and beliefs are.
That in itself feels godly.
