I'll be back next week

It’s that time of year again, when we’re supposed to be indulging ourselves in snowman cookies and eggnog, trimming trees and wrapping gifts, and generally enjoying our time off work. But with a background like mine, no amount of crass commercialism is going to change the fact that Christmas is always going to be less about this dude:



Than this dude:



I grew up a Footloose Baptist, the kind of religious that people in this part of the country have trouble comprehending, the kind not allowed to dance or watch secular cartoons or wear a two-piece bathing suit. The kind of religious you see in documentaries like Hell House, railing against homosexuality and abortion. One of the hard-faced tiny warriors lined up on pews being filled with a boiling rage larger than our own small frames.

I believed wholeheartedly that my lord and savior had died for me to cleanse me of my sins. That the end of the world was coming and that I must spread the gospel of Jesus Christ to save those I cared about from an eternity spent in hell. God could see inside my very mind and heart, I was taught. And he knew when I was tempted by the devil, who would speak to me through secular music, movies, and television. I asked Jesus into my heart at age 4, was baptized in front of the congregation, and swallowed down the bitter intolerance they taught as easily as the grape juice that was supposed to symbolize Christ’s blood.

So deeply did the hellfire and the hate lodge themselves inside me that on a trip back home, just pulling the car up to the red-brick church where I spent my formative years was enough to make my heart flap in my chest like a trapped bird. The conviction that I am a worthless sinner is the very deepest layer of my low self-esteem, and the unrealistically rigid morality I learned imbues the very sexuality that became my livelihood with guilt and fear. The church was not good to me.

But for all the fucked up things about the religion of my childhood, faith itself is a beautiful thing. The people I went to church with weren’t bad people, they just believed in a concept so fervently that it grew bent and warped in the fire of their zeal. In the beginning, God was good. And when I look back at the Christmases of my childhood, I remember the best parts of Christianity. I remember joy to the world. I remember peace and goodwill.

When I lost my virginity to pre-marital rape, I stopped believing in God entirely. I was taught that True Love Waits, but that 19-year-old boy with a boner, well, he didn’t wait. The next time I talked to God it was in a room filled with folding chairs and addicts. When I tried to reach out this loving higher power, all I saw was the stern father of my youth, as oppressive as a suburb. The God I knew damned you to hell; he didn’t pull you out of it.

As many of you have noted, I am not a perfect person. I have made mistakes, over and over again. And sometimes the only way to get back up after you’ve fallen so far is to rely on something bigger than yourself, to pull your head out of your ass and notice that there even IS anything bigger than yourself. And it’s awfully sincere, but when I went looking for God, I found a whole big world out there that saved me from myself. Whether it’s the love of friends and family, the talent that comes and faithfully offers me the right word, the potential for kindness between people, or the ability to tell a story that comforts others. These things can be holy too.

I will never again call myself a Christian; never spend another Christmas with my head bowed in worship, never walk back into the red-brick building where love so often ferments into hate. But this year I approach happiness. And in those creeping moments when I walk down the street and look to the tops of the buildings that skim an endless skyline, when joy unexpectedly fills up my lungs like crisp winter air, until even my blood is sweetly singing. Then I am feeling God.

Merry Christmas.