My first diary, on The Litany Against Fear, made reference to a principle of embracing the things that trouble us the most. This entry is more of a personal story about the principle I had in mind; how it allowed me to question my fundamentalist assumptions and overcome them.
I can only speak of my own experience, but for me fundamentalism was a response to fear. Or perhaps, a fearful response. As I grew up, my impressionable young self was most impacted by a strong spiritual bent, and by my gayness, if that is a word.
Convinced by my culture that being gay was "wrong" and already accepting of the Bible as the literal "Word of God," I had an internal battle on (and in) my hands.
Through my teenage years, as my hormones raged, I fought harder and harder to escape my sexuality by becoming more deeply engaged in the Bible.
During my senior year in high school, I went from being a Southern Baptist to a neo-Pentecostal. I can still "speak in tongues" for whatever that's worth. Pretty interesting phenomenon from a psychological point of view. Language, it ain't. More of a mechanism to disengage the cognitive function during prayer. Sounds mighty convenient for those who distrust analytic thought, and it is.
But worship is what it is, and the emotional content of my spiritual life was not the problem. Prayer doesn't need to be intellectual. But an intellectual has to do more than pray, and my sexual struggles did not get resolved in the emotional arena. Big surprise, huh.
So I went deeper and deeper, becoming more and more fervent in my quest for absolution, hoping that my faith would one day be strong enough to free me from the attraction to the male anatomy. Gotta laugh about it now, but it was very real then.
Here's the one thing that made the difference. One verse, in particular, which challenged me more than any other, which went to core of what I believed it would take to be free of being gay (and any other second-rate sins to boot).
The reasoning was that, if I was not able to control my sinful desires, then I had not yet given myself over to Jesus completely enough. I became ruthless in my self-examination, not just reading the Bible for solace or encouragement, but for some key to what I could do to resolve the struggle.
Then I found it: Luke 14:33. "So then, none of you can be My disciple who does not give up all his own possessions."
Hm, doesn't sound very American does it. I was used to consulting the Greek whenever I wanted a better understanding of what 'God was saying' -- even I knew he didn't write in English! So when I found the Aorist tense in the Greek phrase, it led to a bit of cognitive dissonance to say the least. A better reading of the passage, given the repetitive sense of the tense of the verb (which does not correspond to any English conjugations), is "none of you can be my disciple who does not keep walking away from all of his possessions."
[NOTE: I have learned since writing this that I'm a terrible Greek student! While the question of verb conjugations doesn't actually affect the story at all, if you're interested check out the comments to my
crosspost of this diary at Street Prophets]
Well I never heard that one from any stateside pulpit, I can tell you that. (I have heard one preacher basically say that if a voice from the sky tells you to do that, you better be willing. But that's an obvious cop-out, based on the idea of biblical literalism, which fundamentalists term "inerrancy" and "infallibility" of scripture). For myself, anyway, I had no choice but to accept that God was telling me to do it. Only question: was I willing?
After some internal struggles, I finally gave away everything I had, keeping one change of clothes and my Bible. Well, actually I kept my crappy car too, but I lived in Texas and didn't have a horse...crazily enough, I even struggled with that!
But then, suddenly, the landscape changed. My mindscape changed. I had nothing left to lose! I had done the unimaginable, going from a mega-Church that taught tithing would make you wealthy, to a second-century throwback to some ascetic monasticism.
I had a strange feeling in those first few days. Gradually I realized, I wasn't feeling guilty anymore. Then I realized that I had always felt guilty. At that point though, I knew that I had done every last thing I could to be a disciple. Then my Bible fell apart. (Not literally!).
But figuratively, the Living Bible stopped breathing down my neck and I realized I could it read it for interest, or not at all, without affecting my relationship with God. And then suddenly, with a silent bombshell exploding around me in the still of spring day, I realized that I didn't have what I could really honestly call a "relationship" with God. I didn't even know who God is, and he certainly hadn't ever "spoken" to me. Everything I thought I knew about God was in the book that I had just graduated from. That moment of revelatory ignorance was probably the most deeply spiritual time of my entire life.
Then the facts started pouring in; the lost books of the Bible, the various councils of bishops and so on who determined the "canon" -- centuries after the original documents were written. Many first-century documents got included in the canon, and became what we call the "Bible," and many other documents did not make the cut. Check out The Gospel of Thomas and the rest of the Nag Hammadi library, for examples.
Anyway, the rest of the details are superfluous. If I had ignored that one verse and simply continued to pray for forgiveness, I'd be one sad puppy today. Hypocrisy is a part of the human condition, but it is possible to overcome it. Hint: It takes a little more than faith that everything will work out alright in the end.