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I posted this on Facebook earlier. As much as it hurt it has also been liberating. I hope others can draw strength from it.
The Tormented Little Christian Girl.
A good friend of mine has recently been telling me of her feelings and experiences. She is a Christian but has feelings that are incongruent to a Christian lifestyle. Her beliefs are deeply entrenched, but rather than give her peace, love and hope, they served only to condemn her. I feel sad for her because when she kept it all under wraps people were kind to her and wanted to be around her, because she is eloquent, articulate and quite charismatic. Over time though she struggled to keep herself together and maintain a thin veneer of strength and faith, but underneath it all her conflicts raged on relentlessly. She suffers from anxiety and depression which is sometimes manageable and at other times is overwhelming. She said that she began to be more open with people about her fragility and unhappiness and allowed people to see the more human side of her persona rather than the put on face that she presented. She is the first to admit that she has not always been perfect. She did things that were very stupid and hurtful to people and now she feels sadness for her actions. Underneath everything she knew that one day she would have to face a part of herself that she denied existed at one time, and then when at last she acknowledge it was there tried to drown it in alcohol. What is saddest about this is that she knew that one day she would be faced with a stark choice, to continue as she was and hide away the real person within and thus have the conditional approval of those of her faith or allow the other side to surface and face the total end of her Christian walk. One of the things she used to say was that when a person is enveloped by tendrils of blackness that wring out their heart, a church full of joyous people can be the loneliest place on Earth. She often wondered how many others were like her in there, twisted in torment but pretending to be happy for fear of being branded un-spiritual, each locked into their own personal prison. How much happier and free would the place have been if they were safe to let down their guard and expose their soul, warts and all, wouldn’t it?
Eventually after a life threatening catalyst she realised that she had to do something so she stopped her drinking over night and dared to face her demons. At first she was terrified but her desire to be free was so overpowering that she continued come what may. One day she looked in the mirror and saw a different person staring back instead of the jaded angry wretch who had been there not so long ago. She smiled albeit briefly.
Of course her Christian life was more or less ended. Thinly disguised words of disapproval were issued by those from whom she expected better. Confidence was betrayed to serve a purpose and her faith in the people who she shared her life with for so long was shattered in a day. She attended church less and less, going back from time to time to try and make friends with those she had loved, her arms reaching out imploringly and there were smiles from the pews but they were smiles with mouths, not eyes and certainly not hearts. It was then that she realised that a slave cannot serve two masters, his feet are in two camps and eventually he will hate one of them. She did many things she is not proud of for which she says she is truly sorry. She continued to look on longingly from afar at what she had lost but knew she could never go back. For many years she could not even enter a church, nor hear songs of worship without bursting into tears, such was her grief at her loss.
That was some years ago now though and her life has change so much as to be virtually unrecognisable. Gone are the hand wringing apologies and fear of rejection. She began to believe that God’s love wasn’t just for those who said their “Amens” and waved their arms in the air, after all their own holy book tells them that their reward for their outward show had already been given and they had the adoration of the people around them. The God she craved was everywhere she looked. She has a new way of acknowledging him now and gives thanks to both God and Goddess. The forests are now her church and her heart is her altar. Love is her God and the animals her children and brethren.
So I say to her love is not just for other people nor is forgiveness. If you have loved or forgiven then how much is the love of your God greater for you? So weep not tormented little Christian girl.
