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iheartdaisies · 7 months ago

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God Lives in my Earliest Memories.

It’s a pacifying black in the room. Soft moonglow seeps through the window and billowing curtains, enough to see faint outlines of furniture and walls. Every night before bed, I’d have to kneel down on the floor, elbows on the bed, hands pressed together and say my prayers. A lot of them were prescribed by my parents; pray for family, pray for good health, pray for blessings, obligatory Amen. Sometimes they’d ask me what I wanted to pray for. All I remember thinking was why am I doing this? It seemed sort of pointless. Bad things didn’t happen to me or my family. I’d see and hear awful things on TV and think, I’m so glad that would never happen to me. I developed a fascination with dark subjects as a child, I could interact with them from another plane and never have to confront anything in my real life. I still prayed anyway though, at my parent’s insistence. But it made no difference whether I prayed or not. Despite my confliction, I never said it out loud, it just lingered in the air. Somewhere I’d either created or been born with an illusion of invulnerability. I couldn’t even imagine dying, and I thought about it a lot. At night I’d lay in bed and try to imagine death, I couldn’t comprehend the nothingness. But I’d just keep doing it and thinking if I tried hard enough I could comprend what it means to not be a living thing anymore. The only thing that really came of it was that I made myself cry every time. It scared me that one day I would be nothing, think nothing, feel nothing, just the remnants of a soul and grainy overexposed 2000s film in a scrapbook my mom made.

I feel like a lot of people, especially those raised religiously form some sort of concept of god in their heads, we heard so much about him it only made sense to put a face to a name, like when you read a novel and picture the characters in your head. For some reason, god was in an outrageously oversized tan-coloured T-shirt. He was almost bald, like he’d shaved his head and then let it grow for a few weeks just enough to have the roots poking out again. He was young too, or at least he looked young but had all of the otherworldly sacred knowledge. He had a face in my mind but I never really believed in him until it mattered, and I needed something. I’d try and get out of church, make my prayers short, pretend I actually read the Bibles I was given. Nothing scared me more than when my mom was angry. Always a loose cannon, I’d never know when it was coming. The swearing, the screaming, the belt, it would just get to me. In tears and staggered breath, I would kneel, open my window and pray to god to make it better. I used to think that if I cried hard enough, pressed my hands together and squeezed my eyes closed tight enough, he’d hear me.

I remember watching a baptism, vaguely. I was maybe 4, maybe younger. I couldn’t really understand what was happening, or why there were stairs leading down to a shallow white pool in the floor, or why someone walked in fully clothed, throwing their hands in the air once they emerged, white clothes drenched and clinging to their skin. Everything about church was bizarre. I found pictures of my own baptism in a photo album, I’m in an outrageously puffy white ruffled dress and a matching white headband. My mom is next to the priest, and I’m in her arms, visibly throwing a fit. I laugh a little when I think about it. Now thinking about it, my family was pretty tame compared to other religious families. One day when I was in middle school, my mom took me over to a Mormon family’s house. My mom sat in the living room, talking with the husband and wife while I played in the next room with their kids. We were playing with dolls or something like that and I don’t remember exactly what we were talking about but at one point I think I said “Oh my god”, and suddenly they stopped, staring at me blankly. Just thinking about the tension in that room is sobering. It was silent for way too long. “We don’t say that.” One of them said, burning a hole through my head with her weird Mormon eyes.

When I got older and into my teens, naturally I sat upon my high horse and passed silent judgement where I saw fit. Rolling my eyes at mentions of god, heaven, hell, the afterlife, etc. To me, it was now a fairy tale for people who didn’t want to bother with science and evolution. There was resentment too, towards the people who blocked basic human rights bills because they thought an old book meant more than universal freedoms. How could you look at everything science has explained and think there’s a man up in space or that drinking caffeine is a sin. It was really cultish and scary to me. Religion was created by the same people who thought the earth was a flat disc, so what real credibility does it have? I got a little older, around 18 or 19 when things started feeling really empty and distant. I’d be laughing with my friends in the car, but I wasn’t really there. When we went our separate ways for university, and school was mostly remote, I had a lot of extra time on my hands. Extra time to feel things I didn’t want to feel and think about things I wanted to shove down deep inside. I won’t specify what, but some other bad things happened too. I was depressed and aimless, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life and still don’t. I was so angry I don’t really even have the words to explain what it felt like other than a mind numbing rage and crushing grief. I thought a lot about what it meant to even be here, frustrated and in need of a sign, anything to tell me that there is a reason to stay and that I have a future I was meant for. It took me an embarrassingly long time up until those years of my life to understand that need a purpose to persevere or to just not feel so alone, and for some people, that is religion. If there is no greater purpose or higher power, then what is the purpose of being alive? What does it mean to exist? A possible answer is that it means nothing. And that’s a tough pill to swallow. I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to face the harrowing possibility that all of this has no explanation other than random chance and that we truly are just a collection of materials, bred to eat, sleep, and die. I still don’t like people who use their religion as an excuse to ostracize minorities. But I don’t see a blind cult following so much anymore. I often see people that find meaning in life, whatever that might look like. I see people that have found a purpose, a reason to live, a reason to keep going, because they’re just people.

And it really doesn’t matter. Life has whatever meaning you give it.

I found Ethel Cain’s music by chance one day. PD was the first album I’d found that explored religious themes in the way that it does, and the obscure relationships that come with growing up in the south and baptist culture. Coming to terms with faith, while still holding reservations, nostalgia, and judgements about it all. Though that’s not what the album is entirely about, those themes are still present. In Sun Bleached Flies, there’s a lyric in the first half:

What I wouldn’t give to be in church this Sunday

Listening to the choir so heartfelt, all singing

God loves you, but not enough to save you

In its sweet irony the song itself is part of the Ethel Cain story, while its a reference Ethel’s unfortunate circumstances and goodbye to her family and past, I think it could be interpreted in a lot of different ways, specifically the underlying themes of religious guilt and bizarre nostalgia that arises for environments that brought so much pain and confusion. There’s a general feeling of being let down by God, a feeling of unworthiness. Why does god bless and save others but not me? Why do my prayers go unanswered? I’m a good person, why is this happening to me? But there’s also a feeling of longing for those simpler times, being in church, talking to neighbours and joining them in prayer and song. Clapping in unison after the preacher gave his sermon, and shaking hands as you leave. A wanting to belong and reminiscing for the things you used to think were so boring and awful. It’s rare that I find and feel connected to music and lyrics, to songs that put subconscious feelings into words, or at least ones that inspire reflection.

At 21 now, I have a complicated relationship with religion. If I did have to classify myself, I’d say I’m probably Agnostic. Christianity still resides in a part of me, not in faith but more like a place I came from, left behind and occasionally wax nostalgic for. I still don’t pray, if I read bible verses it’s to analyze from a non-religious lens, and I don’t go to Sunday service. When my Grandmother preaches to me about how God made no mistakes and loves us the way we are, I just smile and take her weathered hand in mine. When I’m in a church, it's to hear my grandfather sing Willie Nelson and see the smile on his face when he looks up from his old bones and guitar strings, to see his wife, sons, and grandchildren nodding along. I have a cross that I wear around my neck and it's my lucky charm. It was given to me by my grandparents, to me it's not a religious symbol, it's them. I live for my family and friends, not any god. Sometimes though, I find myself on the floor in the dark. In the shower with the lights off. In my bed trying to sleep so I can't be awake to feel anymore. When I’ve been alone with my thoughts too long, when I start to feel like I might not be here much longer, when the compartmentalized truths seep back into my consciousness and I’m left with the reality of things that have happened in the past, after I finally cry deeply enough and so silently my chest aches, I pray, and I hope that someone hears me.

#ethel cain #religious trauma

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