religion, queerness, disability, background, and consent

I was at my college's queer/faith group today and felt kind of bad because I said something like, "I'm not from a religious background and I came to God through being queer so it's really weird for me when people see gay + Christian and imagine that I have some sort of conflict or that this has caused trauma for me." (Or even imagine that I realized those things in the opposite order from when I actually did.)

This seems really privileged as if I think that the reason people see gay + Christian and associate that with a really terrible set of experiences is just some anti-religion bias. I mean, the people who've said this to me are atheists so I do feel a little bit like they're stereotyping Christianity and religion in general and failing to understand that at its core there's nothing that would inherently be my enemy as a queer person. And I kind of like expressing how much that isn't my experience because my type of experience is so rarely expressed.

At the same time, it's a very rare experience. I grew up with liberal atheist parents and I go to a college that is primarily liberal atheist--that is a tremendous privilege for a gay person. So for me to be like, "Yeah, God and I are buddies, why wouldn't we be?" is kind of a dick move. It's actually kind of like the way I feel about queer people who have overcome certain things, that I can't overcome as easily due to being disabled, and act like all queer people can overcome those things.

I know a lot of people's experience is one of religion being forced on them. But mine is one of being expected not to be religious and even feeling uncomfortable as a religious person in the spaces I tend to be in, and once having someone compare the fact that I believe in God to unusual stuff I do that's related to my disability. Which is really not cool.

This also applies to disability. My disability has been (cognitively and emotionally) a huge barrier to my ability to participate in things like church--largely because church is unfamiliar. So I'm very jealous of my liberal atheist and otherwise non-Christian* friends who had a sort of upbringing where they were brought to church, confirmed, etc., and the fact that they went away from that wasn't such a big deal to their families but it was just kind of how they did things as they were growing up. Because that structure would have been really important and my life would be totally different if I'd had it. I'm really lucky that my dad is as supportive as he is or I would never have (finally) been baptized and would have even less experience going to church than I do.

*(not that atheist=non-Christian but I'm thinking of people who are agnostic or "spiritual but not religious"--not people who have converted to another religion or heavily identify as anything.)

When I was a kid I had a babysitter who was Catholic and would pray with me when she put me to bed, against my parents' wishes. I'm extremely grateful for this because it gave me familiarity with prayer and the knowledge that it was an option. I still pray the way she taught me, every night. But I know what most atheists, and even many Christians, would think of her decision. And I don't know how to reconcile that with my gratitude.

I'm looking for a job next year and I'm interested in a particular facility for kids and teenagers with disabilities, which is Christian. It would be really wonderful for me to work in an environment that's Christian and I do relate being staff to being Christian (I don't mean this the way it probably sounds, but it's a huge other thing to talk about--it has nothing to do with me being better than the people I serve). But I feel creeped out also because, while they write on their website that the people they serve have a choice about being Christian or going to church, religious education, etc., they use the word "encourage."

In my experience, some people with disabilities have been taught to be compliant to the extent that if you "encourage" them to do something, or even ask them if they want to do something, they perceive it as an order.

I mean, I also have known people--and actually, this doesn't just mean more severely disabled people who I've been staff for, this also includes me, and maybe this includes me more than anything in terms of religion--who have a very hard time saying they want to do something, asking to do something, even saying "yes." My camper Stephen from this summer would say no to everything, including things he had previously shown he liked; after bringing up the subject again and again, you might be able to find out whether he really didn't want to. Sometimes this didn't work and you had to put him in a position where he had to make an effort to opt out, instead of to opt in--this was generally how you found out for sure what he really wanted.

I'm not saying this in terms of the facility, because that word encourage really does bother me and I'm not applying there until I can figure out what it means. But when it comes to religion, I am a great deal like Stephen. Which is very confusing for me and which, I'm afraid, often results in me saying things that ignore the very nonconsensual and/or negative history that a lot of people from my communities have with religion.

I got baptized this morning which was, you know, swell (can't really talk about it), but one of the priests told my parents and me the best story and I could only really sputter in response because I guess you would have to know me to understand why I found it such a wonderful piece of information.

The priest's daughter (who is hearing) is a first-year in college and just changed her major and life plan. She wanted to teach D/deaf students, but then she took a class on Deaf culture with a Deaf professor and learned that a lot of Deaf people don't think that hearing teachers should teach at schools for the D/deaf. After she learned about this, she changed her mind about wanting to teach D/deaf students, and decided to major in sociology instead of special education.

It was so nice to hear about someone who is so young but is already so ready to take into account what other people feel and have to say. As a disabled person I wish everyone who wanted to contribute to the lives of disabled people was willing to listen to the disabled people they want to help. And as someone who wants to contribute to the lives of people who have disabilities different from mine, I really hope I can live up to the priest's daughter's example and listen to what other people want and need, and accept it when the contribution they want and need from me is for me to not be involved.

The Bible is always saying that you should hate the world and sometimes I feel like hating the world is a way of better loving it. And hating people is a way of loving them better. Being focused on your own pleasure from other people, being afraid of having conflict with the people you love if you don’t do what will make them like you in the short run, is really a way of guaranteeing that the love you experience with them is not real.

My dad and I got to go to my dad’s friend’s church which I really love. The priest was a gay person and he mentioned his coming out process in his sermon. I’m always disoriented when people assume that being queer and religious is some sort of conflict for me. And I am also disoriented I think when queer religious people hold opposing views, having relationships and being open in secular environments, but still kind of acting as though they think homosexuality is wrong when they’re in religious environments. I would not be with God if I was straight I think. And I really fear the loss of God now that I’m in an environment where my sexuality is not such a big issue, because being an oppressed minority breeds hatred—and by hatred I mean the disconnect from immediate gratification and easy connection that causes you to detach enough to treasure everything and try to be consistent and decent in your actions.

It is really frustrating that Christianity is so based in community because it makes it hard for me to do things like go to church because I have so much anxiety about groups. So I wouldn’t say that having autism is helpful to me in the way that being queer is, or if it is it equally helps and hurts me—because autism is a little like the kind of hatred I’m talking about, the tendency to focus seriously on details instead of being caught up in your impression of what’s really going on. And that is I think a gift. But the anxiety stuff is a huge problem and I just feel shitty when I think of all that people have gone through to be Christian when I can’t even talk to people and initiate actions enough to be baptized, which consequently makes it hard for me to make myself go to the church in Oberlin because I can’t take communion, blah blah blah. I pray a lot on it and all but I guess your own mind is the hardest thing to fight.

Church at home

When I was a kid I was afraid of the sound of flushing the toilet. I'd run out of the bathroom as fast as possible, without washing my hands. When I got older I was expected to wash my face and use an electric toothbrush but the electric toothbrush especially upset me too much.

Normally I'm okay. But the worse things get, the less I can handle the sound and feel of the electric toothbrush. Also, I find church to be very scary, as I've mentioned several times, so the worse things get, the more I become this little unhygienic person skulking around my dorm on Sunday morning, with very dirty hair and very dirty teeth (or, possibly, trying to get into the bathroom when no one else is there so I can jump around while brushing my teeth to distract myself from the toothbrush overload).

Oh right! So, because of not going to church, I was thinking maybe I'd try to write religious stuff here on Sunday. I tend to think that I was better on God stuff when I was thinking about it in on my own instead of feeling that it had to be about other people, or specifically about social structures. I almost feel like developing the idea that I had to go to church is one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made. I can probably count on all my digits the amount of times I've gone to church since I made that decision two years ago, so it's just a way of making myself feel like a failure because church is hard for me.

So:

I’m glad I’m Christian because other religions don't have room for what a major shit I am.

I believe certain things about God. Specifically: I am NOT good enough. Something needs to take me over. Terribly. Always.

It’s not about sitting around and whining about how I’m not good enough. I think of it as being a lot like disability. My sin is not a tragedy. It’s also not nothing. Something has to be done about it. God is my assistive technology.

To people who have trouble going to religious services

Something to remember: God doesn't think you're normal, ever.

I missed church because I spilled a bottle of soda on my desk so I decided to go to student mass. I don't have much experience pretending to be Catholic and throughout the day it was an unpleasant prospect. I decided not to go a million times. As I was walking there, I decided to call Clayton and talk to him instead, but he wasn't there, so I decided to call Noah and hang out with him. Noah is always there but this time he wasn't. By the time Noah was done not being there, I had arrived at the chapel, and I just went in.

It is really hard for me to go to church since I wasn't raised going to church and I never know what to do and also have to worry about stuff like people maybe talking to me. But I just tried really hard to remember that Passing is Not Ethics. Basically, fucking up in church because I wasn't raised going to church, or because I'm a freak in general--I mean, God knows.

I forgot to genuflect when I went into my pew and it was like, okay, no one's watching me, and even if someone was, God knows why I forgot. I really liked going to mass. I just faked knowing what to say and stuff. I just sort of moved my lips. And I just have to remember that God knows why I do things wrong or right.

This isn't totally related, but I found it a few months ago and it makes me really happy: Suggestions (with many examples) about how to help ASD kids go to religious services.

Living in the pregnant pause

(Hi, before you start you should know that this is not very much about what I usually post about--it's mainly about religion. As with many Christian traditions I halfheartedly absorbed just because I'm American, I feel that I didn't fully understand Lent when I decided to give up I'm Somewhere Else. Having thought about it more, I feel that Lent is a way of living and thinking and isn't as simple as just giving up something concrete, and I think this post is an appropriate post for me to make during Lent.)

When I was younger I used to think that all gay people felt empty and cried all the time because we're naturally unhappy people because it's an inferior state. I thought that whenever people did gay pride or anything, they were just trying to convince themselves, like the Emperor's New Clothes, and that when gay people said they were in love and wanted to get married, they were just trying to convince themselves they were in love, but really they were settling for someone they didn't really love.

This is probably hard to believe given how much I complain about being gay on this blog, but I don't feel that way anymore. There are still a lot of aspects of it that I find to be shitty, but I know they affect other people differently. Also, I just don't feel miserable. I think a lot of this has to do with my environment. When I was in high school I looked at all the shitty aspects of being gay and would just cry all the time, but I think that's because aside from the legit shitty aspects I was in an environment where there were lots of non-innate shitty aspects, like having to feel really nervous about everything I wrote and said, and having to feel cut off from being friends with both genders in different ways. These aspects were sort of under-the-radar and pervasive so I didn't necessarily see them. At Oberlin they are mostly gone, so even though I don't think that being gay is a fun time, I think that being alive while being a gay person can be a very fun time.

So, anyway, the way I used to feel about gay people is now how I feel about religious people. I drew a pretty good comic about it in class.



AFV: batter my heart 3-person God
God: (reaches down with a giant shining hand and wrests AFV's heart open) Hi! I'm here!
AFV: (looks happy)
AFV a few minutes later: (looking sad) Did that really happen. I probably just imagined it. AARGH I'm so alone in the world.

The fucking shit that God has done for me and I don't even care. Or, um, the fucking shit my brain is doing because the idea of there not being a God makes me want to die? Except, either way I just want to die so I can find out, at this point I feel like I'd rather be in hell and know there is a God. (I recognize this is kind of a messed-up thing to put on the Internet. I have no motivation to commit suicide, lots of fun stuff is happening right now and I'm a happy person, gay germs aside. I'm sure I will be agonizing about the afterlife for seventy more years, unless I get hit by a bus.)

I have actually figured out how I ruined my relationship with God. Amusingly, given that I now feel pretty normal about being gay, and horrible about God, in the time period when I felt horrible about being gay, God was just around. Sometimes people are like "it must have sucked to find out you're gay, you're so religious" but I wasn't raised in a religion at all. In fact I became religious when I was ten, after I had already started finding out that I was gay. It was my own thing. For a while I would tell God that I was sorry for being gay, but I soon figured out I wasn't. Even later, when I felt like it was an empty, horrible thing to be, I didn't think that God was mad at me for it or anything like that.

Sometimes I thought my prayers got answered. However, in twelfth grade I prayed for my music teacher, who was bipolar and would yell and swear at the kids in my class, to get better, because I knew something horrible was going to happen. I really loved my teacher, I was one of the only kids he considered worthy of apologies after he blew up. One time he awkwardly bought me flowers after making me cry in class. Anyway, I prayed a lot, and then something incredibly horrible happened. I think he wasn't even allowed back on campus afterward. After that, I didn't believe in the power of prayer, but I thought that God could change me if I wanted to be changed, and sometimes when I prayed I felt it happen--this grace, just something that altered my way of thinking about things.

Then at the end of first year I read Mere Christianity by CS Lewis. I always liked CSL when I was a kid but sometimes I think this was the worst decision I ever made. I always said Christian prayers because that's most of the little I had been exposed to, but I didn't really think Christianity was true. I remember watching the movie Jesus Camp and thinking "that sucks, those kids have a real feeling for God but they're being told all the wrong things about Him."

But then when I read Mere Christianity I thought a lot of it made sense. I started moving toward identifying as Christian. I also got interested in medieval studies and I was really moved by the way medieval Christians related to God. And I just thought that I wasn't Doing Enough. If I was Christian there would be certain things for me to read and certain things for me to do, in order to be a religious person.

The problem is because of my social shit it is pretty impossible for me to go to church regularly. For the past two Sundays I have gone to church and I think--could be wrong, could totally be wrong--that this will be the time it actually works out, because I have a friend who likes going to church and we go together, and no one really talks to us or anything, which is perfect.

Actually, I don't know why I said "the problem is." I have about eight problems. I would like to know what to do in church all the time, and be able to take communion. But it is scary to think about contacting people so I can get baptized and confirmed. Also, the really really really big problem is just that I have horrible doubts. And not just about the existence of God. I just find Christianity to be--well, I mean, it's very beautiful, and it makes sense, but--

Next year I want to live in Talcott, which is this really castle-y awesome dorm that is right next to the building where most of the creative writing and Latin classes are. Once I started thinking about living in Talcott, I remembered that the kosher co-op is in the same building, and wondered if it would be nice to join it. I remembered that last year I thought it would be nice to be in a co-op where they sometimes pray.

But then I couldn't even believe I had ever thought that would be okay, because I would probably like it a lot, and if I liked praying with Jewish people, then that would mean Christianity wasn't real. I realize now that I believe mostly in experience. I mean, I know I've experienced grace. But lots of people who aren't Christian have experienced things like that. I feel like my attempts at identifying with Christianity are just making me not believe in God because I find it completely impossible to reconcile Christianity with the things about God that I firmly and deeply believe.

Since I started identifying as Christian, I've become aware that lots more people than my parents (especially my father) are extremely contemptuous of religion. I mean, almost everyone I know is like that. It just makes me think I'm stupid and if I wasn't so stupid and deluded I'd be an atheist. I was reading some posts by chaoticidealism, who is an ASD person who's written some really good and important stuff about ASD and functioning level things, and is also Christian. She said that she has doubts, but that believing in God makes more sense to her than not believing in God, so it's actually less of a leap to be a theist. Maybe that's how I feel, now. The thing is I used to be so sure.

I keep meeting people and asking them if they're religious. Why would I do that? Who cares? Why do I need other people to make me not wake up in the middle of the night feeling incredibly terrified and alone all the time? (The other night I woke up and there was this voice singing outside and I didn't feel alone at all and I started shaking, but, fuck, that stuff never stays with me for long, of course, because that's just how stupid and horrible my brain is.)

I'm always screwing with my Facebook religious beliefs, trying to be clever and accurate at the same time. In the past year I've had "Episcopalian Quaker Deist," "Christian Universalist," "Affective Piety," "There was a pregnant pause before He said okay" (Belle & Sebastian), "Pray to God but row for shore" (a quote from Carnivale), and "Cretin." I guess these are all reasonably true (especially the Belle & Sebastian one) but "Cretin" probably gets the closest to how I feel.

"Cretin" means Christian. People started using it as a word for intellectually disabled people as a way of saying, God is for everybody. Our society hates intellectually disabled people, so now it is a Ramones song, but I like the original idea. I think that spending time with severely intellectually disabled people is a pretty good way to understand God, and this definitely isn't because I think that they are adorable saints, but I do think there is a deeper love in us that we try to constrict and deny the farther we get into the world. If you don't have language and you're not far enough entrenched in your standard culture to do impression management, I think that you experience and display that love in a more obvious way. I know a woman who tears up Bibles and scratches people in the face when she gets mad--I'm not saying severely disabled people don't have original sin--but she also hugs and kisses people as soon as she meets them. She doesn't remember people's names most of the time. I think that if we didn't remember we're not supposed to hug everyone, we would hug everyone. It's caritas.

I hope this doesn't come off as offensive but I seriously sometimes want a DDDD--Doctorate of Developmentally Disabled Divinity. I feel like maybe as I've tried harder to be standard, I've tried to make my feelings about God be standard too, and it's just not taking. It just makes me feel terrified, it has for months.

There has to be something under all the systems. There has to be something under all the words. I put all these words on top of God and now it's hard for me to see God. I'm always praying and it's like I need to pray to keep God alive. But what if there's a kind of prayer that stacks on top of God and hides God away?

I try to look at life like I have the brain disorder where you can see colors but you can't tell what anything is. Like an everlasting shutdown, but more fun. If you dislocate your mind like that, then of course you can see life is glorious, it's something more than the sum of its parts. But sometimes I'm afraid that that's all I can say about God. Maybe it's stupid that I find myself trying to say more than that.

(If you have any more faith than I do--i.e. about as much faith to fill a contact case, probably--please talk to me about this, I'm kind of falling apart.)

Psalms of Lamentation, or MCC plus me equals true love forever

I have to write about the Metropolitan Community Church. Or not all of them, I don't know what they're all like, but I have gone to the Edinburgh one twice and it's by far my best experience going to church. I hate church. Or, to be accurate, I feel about church the way I feel about girls; I think about going to church all the time, but it's something I'm really anxious about because I don't have much experience, so every time I get close to going to church, I usually break down and don't go. Or if I go once, I can't make myself go again.

Well, MCC Edinburgh is the only church I have ever gone to twice. The people are friendly but not in the way they have been at other churches I've gone to, where there are just a lot of people talking to you and making you feel nervous. People just smile and look kind. After the service there was soup, and I almost left because I was nervous about socializing, but I made myself come back when I was almost out the door because I knew that it would be okay. And it was okay, I talked to some people some, and then I just listened to the conversations of the people around me.

According to Wikipedia, MCC is particularly focused at reaching out to gay, bisexual, and trans people, but what I really like is that it doesn't stop there. They have open communion and the communion is gluten- and alcohol-free in case someone has trouble with one of those things. And there's just the thing I can't name, the thing that makes me feel comfortable in a church for the first time. Last time I went there was a toddler playing with blocks and making noise during the service. It feels like there's no bad behavior there.

The sermon was about how it's okay to tell God you are confused, upset, or doubtful. The pastor said that no one ever make hymns out of Psalms of Lamentation, and that is wrong because it makes people feel like God will be mad at them if they don't have positive feelings all the time. I don't remember the whole sermon because it was really long, but it was really good and by the end a few people were crying. It was so wonderful to feel whole and safe, and I am always spacing out all the time, no matter where I am or what I'm doing, but almost the whole service I was right there.

We had to write our own Psalms of Lamentation. Mine goes:

Why does everyone have to think it's stupid to believe in you & make me feel like I'm stupid and crazy for believing?

If this works on me, does it mean You aren't real?

Why does church have to have so many rules that make me nervous?

It's true that everything is beautiful and hits me hard in the eyes.

I wish more people loved me.

I wish I wasn't as scared.

I wish I could make myself do things.

I love You.