#but i don’t go to church or really consider myself part of the faith

[stayatsam]

the concept of the derogatory phrase “cradle catholic” for those baptized as a baby and raised in the church is kind of hilarious to me because of adult converts envy over the cradle catholic is contradictory to their desire to raise their own children catholic (thereby raising cradle catholics)

like what do you want me to do about it i’m sorry you didn’t go to catholic school and latin mass dressed up in bed sheets as saints when you were 13 not really much i can say

[givemearmstopraywith]

I often find myself having mixed feelings about my relationship with christianity. I love who god and jesus are and what the bible stands for and its teachings, but I feel guilty for not fitting in at church (I’ve been to multiple churches growing up, and even now at my family’s current one I still feel like an outcast- which is funny considering that’s who churches are for). I want it to be enough for me to just love god but I feel I can’t do that, especially since my current church teaches that you can’t have a relationship with christ if you don’t go to church. I see god’s people in church and I feel so disconnected with them, and I wonder if I’m doing something wrong and if I really *can’t* have a relationship with him if I’m not like them

churches have evolved to be about power. post-reformational, enlightenment developments in the church as an ecumenical body, on one side, opened more readily to the laity the mysteries of church, scripture, and sacrament. but this opening was simultaneously inoculated against any revolutionary impulse that might be ignited by the idea of a personal relationship with God by the institution– one which is about power, which is patriarchal and authoritative. it instituted an anesthetizing repression in which the personal and private element of faith that had once been part of devotion for clergy was not opened up to the laity but dissolved entirely. this element of personal faith constituted an unusualness, an autonomy, of erotic impulse too dangerous to allowed to proliferate in civilization at large unless it could be commodified, unless it was exploitable, made people submissive and easily persuaded. an example of this is the slave bible, which removed passages about equality and freedom from bondage in bibles intended for use by enslaved africans in the british west indies, in order to prevent them from having any idea that God, not man, was the ultimate authority: that anyone could have a relationship with God that was personal, private, empowering, and ultimately revolutionary.

conservative christianity, both protestant and catholic, responds to independent and personal faith as a kind of fetish rather than as a legitimate religious expression. i'm not saying the church you attend is conservative, but this is a fairly universal tack in all churches, because all churches are built on hierarchical authorities and require human forms of submission to that authority to remain vital and exert control. i do not hate the church, i love it, but i also recognize that it often stands more as an impediment for people gaining a closeness with God more than it acts as a means of bringing them closer to him.

in matthew 18:6, jesus says:

if any of you put a stumbling-block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea.

in this passage, christ is specifically talking about children. but spiritually, we are all and are always children. i approach primarily theology through psychoanalysis, and one thing about children is that in their development they are disposed to see themselves and their mother- their nurturer- as part of them. separation is learned. maturation is learning how to be a part of and connect to the world while neither consuming it wholly for oneself nor being absolutely consumed by it. as simone weil says, to eat without being eaten. our spirituality, our connection to God, is similar: we recognize that we are made in God's image a priori, we may recognize our communion with him as private and beautiful, and separation is learned. we are made in God's image and our separation from him comes after: it is a human institution. all separations, not only in terms of personal relationships but in terms of christian conservatism, militancy, and nationalism. all separations are learned and human.

but simone weil also says: every separation is a link. our separation from God is our link to him, because we are separated from God but God is also separated from us. and our separation from other people is their separation from us. our innate state of being, our longing as human beings, is a longing for connection. but it is precisely this separation that is our communion. maybe the church you currently attend is not a good spiritual home for you, but that does not mean that you don't have a spiritual home. christ spent much time alone: he spent forty days in the desert, but a day is a thousand years to God: he has spent an eternity away from his creation, made in his image, whom he looked at and saw was good as he is good. the hebrew bible says tov, not only good as in physically good and beautiful to look at, or good as in virtuous, but good as in a fertile land, as in good gold. intrinsically good. creatively good. the first thing God asks of man is a question of companionship: humanity is capable of creating communion because that is what God does. but first, humanity- and God- were lonely.

your loneliness, your sense that you do not belong, is as profoundly a part of God as you are, as goodness is. don't be afraid of it and don't let how others behave convince you that you deserve loneliness. (God did not accept loneliness nor think we deserved it: that is the story of christ.) you will find a place meant for you. for now, lean on God: he is leaning on you. you will find your place, your heart, your love. christ also felt disconnected from his own community: a prophet is never recognized in his own town. you'll find your way. i love you.

[blogger360ncislarules]

Everyone knows that a great book can take you on an amazing journey. For actress, author and producer Roma Downey, a gift from a friend led to the new TV series The Baxters, which launches the first 10 episodes March 28 on Prime Video.

“I came to the series really as a fan of the books,” Roma tells Woman’s World of the Karen Kingsbury series. “A friend had given me the first book, Redemption, and I was reading it on a flight from LA to New York. I just fell in love with the family. I fell in love with the characters. I thought the plots were exciting and dynamic and I just loved how relatable they all were.  It was telling the story of a family of faith. People who went to church, but not perfect people, not pious people. They are just regular people like you and me with the same problems and challenges that we all have, but they come together. Even when they don’t like each other, they always love each other. It is such a great portrayal of family.”

Roma admits as she was reading the book, the wheels started turning and she began thinking about bringing the books to the screen. “I had visuals in my mind. I thought this has to be a TV series,” Roma recalls. “So I reached out to Karen. I didn’t know her at the time, but I reached out to her and asked her if she would consider letting me have the rights to the books to bring it to the screen.”

As the two women discussed the project, Karen confided something that really touched Roma’s heart.

“Redemption was the first one I wrote about the Baxter family, and I have a picture of my dad reading it on a park bench,” Karen tells Woman’s World. “He was absorbed in it and when he got finished reading it and he said, ‘Karen, this is so good. This needs to be a TV show and you should call that Touched By an Angel woman, Roma Downey. I am confident that she would love to make a TV show on this.’ This was in 2001. I said, ‘Great idea Dad! Do you know her number because I don’t have her number?’ 

“Then fast forward. My dad had already gone to heaven, and it was maybe 2015 when I got a call from Roma Downey in that beautiful Irish voice and she said, ‘Hello Karen, I would like to have your blessing to make the Baxters into a TV show.’ I was hoping my dad had a definite window from heaven in that moment.”

Bringing The Baxters to life

“So Karen agreed to entrust me with the TV rights,” Roma continues, “and I set about gathering a fabulous team. Obviously, it takes a village to make a series and I brought in some great writers, directors and producers. Then we started casting. Karen was available for consulting whenever we needed her. She was very generous with her time and incredibly helpful during the process.

When it came to casting Elizabeth Baxter, Roma knew exactly who should play the matriarch. “I thought, I know this woman. I know her well. Maybe I should just step into this part myself,” she says. “Elizabeth has a mother’s heart, which I can relate to as a mom myself, and we see how compassionate and how much empathy she has for her children when they are going through heartache. We see how feisty she is and defensive if anybody from the outside is trying to harm any of her children.”

“Most of all what I love about her is she’s a prayer warrior,” Roma says. “She’s not afraid to stop what she’s doing and call on the Lord, call in prayer to bless her children and to watch over her family. I haven’t been on a series since I did Touched By an Angel and to be back in front of the camera, as well as behind it, was a lot of fun for me.”

Finding the perfect cast

Karen is pleased with how the show has come together. “It’s been a long journey, a long process, but I have been privileged to see everything that’s been created so far and it’s just so good,” she smiles.  “It’s griping and it’s real. There are five young adults. They are making some bad decisions. They are being human like we all are and so I feel like it’s a different kind of show where you have praying parents who are leaning in and loving and showing grace and young adults who are making their way and sometimes making the worst decision of their life, but finding the hope and grace that you only find through God and family.”

“Then when I read the book, it was just the sweet spirit of Reagan. And it was just so fun meeting Roma because I had known about Roma forever. She’s been friends with my mom [Kathie Lee Gifford], but I really appreciate the freedom that they gave me to make Reagan a little bit my own. That was wonderful.  You’re not always afforded that opportunity especially when something was adapted from a book. I just feel very, very blessed to be a part of it.”

Roma refers to the show as a “hope opera,” as opposed to a soap opera. “We see a family come together and that’s one of the lovely things about this series is that we see a family modeled well. The series plays out like a great hope opera,” she says. “We anticipate that Easter weekend there will be a lot of families across the United States curled up on their couch, in the comfort of their own homes, binging on The Baxters.

“When Karen wrote her books, she designed them in a way that you can’t wait to get to the next chapter,” Roma continues. “You want to know what happens next. You want to find out what happens next, so we obviously wanted to create that in the TV series as well that you would no sooner finish an episode then you’d want to see the next episode. With the streaming capabilities now, The Baxters will be there, already dropped and you’ll be able to binge and watch multiple episodes when it first goes up.”

The Baxters is a full family affair

Roma says over the years when fans have come up to her to talk to her about Touched By An Angel, they don’t just remember the show, but who they watched it with. It was a family affair for most people, and she’s hoping The Baxters will be as well.

“Our viewing habits have changed because people are watching things on their phone or their laptop so that family moment of coming together and watching something has altered slightly,” Roma says. “We’ve become more isolated in our viewing patterns, but my hope for The Baxters is that families will get together on the couch and make it a shared experience, and maybe say, ‘Mom, I’m coming over. Let’s watch The Baxters together,’ particularly because there are so many mother and daughter themes written into the story.”

Roma hopes the show will have broad-based appeal. “I think people of all faiths will enjoy the show because it’s relatable as a family drama,” she says. “I think that particularly people of faith will love to see our values reflected on the screen. Don’t they say the family that prays together, stays together? We’re going to see that sort of play out in The Baxters.”

[diet-jesus]

Hi! So I recently joined my Church, new to God and all 🤍 can I ask what makes you a catholic and why you chose this route? every time I ask someone what the difference is, people say it’s works-based but they just leave it at that and they never expand on it and I truly want to know if that’s okay with you! because the priest also talks about “getting grace” by the work we do at a Christian church so that also makes me confused even more. thank you and god bless you <3

Hiii ♡ long answer ahead tee hee.

Faith vs Works.

Catholics know that we need both faith and works. It’s not “I have faith in Jesus so now I can go about my merry way”. So many people profess that Jesus is Lord but they do nothing to conduct themselves as a true follower. They don’t renounce the works of the devil but instead they willingly and joyfully continue to partake in his works. They do not follow Gods will or keep his commandments nor are they working on it in private. Scripture says that if you believe in your heart and profess with your lips Jesus as Lord then you’ll be saved. We can’t isolate Bible passages and exclude others. Matthew 7:21 Not everyone who says to me “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven. Only those who do the will of my father in heaven. They have done no works, therefore when they call out “Lord, Lord”, they will not enter His kingdom. Believing in God is not enough, it is just step one. Faith without works is like having no faith. In James 2:24 it says that we are not saved by faith alone. Faith is needed of course, but it is not the only thing.

On the flip side, there are people who do not fully believe Jesus is Lord or believe in His kingdom. They may even acknowledge a higher power but have no faith in God in particular. They may be a truly wonderful person, honest, giving, kind, charitable, just an all around upstanding individual. A truly good person that everyone can see is an incredible testament of good character and proper morals. But they have no faith and do not profess Jesus as Lord, so their works alone will not save them.

So don’t think that there is a certain amount of charity donations you can make or x amount of days attending church that will make you holy or not. It’s not a costume that can be put on, it’s not about appearing noble in public but being a deviant in private. It’s not running wild while constantly saying “only god can judge me” when people acknowledge your bad behavior. Faith and works together is the key.

Why I am a Catholic:

Family influence

I was raised to believe in God but not necessarily under any specific denomination. My mother’s side of the family is Catholic but we have many Protestants in the family as well. Church attendance was moderate as a child but slowly weaned as I got older and my religious upbringing was more of a passive thought than an active part of my life. I think my mom was more in tuned with it years before but by the time I came around (I’m the youngest with a 15 year age gap between my oldest siblings), it just wasn’t her top priority anymore. She would gift me rosaries and religious iconography but the education wasn't there. Although I didn’t learn what it meant to be Catholic growing up, I was very familiar with aspects of it and it felt comfortable to me.

Personal exploration

As I got older, like teen years, I considered myself agnostic since I really lacked any education or understanding of God and Christianity. Like I said, we’d go to church but I didn’t get why anyone had to. I’d see my mom do a rosary but I didn’t know what any of that meant. I couldn’t claim to believe in a religion if I couldn’t tell you the first thing about it. My best friend and her family were all atheists and I spent a lot of time at their house. It almost influenced me to call myself atheist but I knew it didn’t feel right. Atheism is a direct answer to the question of do you believe in God. Agnosticism is more so when you haven’t been convinced yet but you are absolutely open to having your mind changed and accepting new information. I did some research on various religions, trying to figure out the differences and what they believe to see if I align with any of it or if I am simply a nonbeliever and of them all, the teachings of the Catholic Church are what made me feel like I finally found the truth. This did not happen overnight. It was over the course of several years.

Belief system

Getting a proper Catholic education was finding the truth. Being properly introduced to the catechism was eye opening. The words in the nicene/apostles creed perfectly align with my beliefs. You can say that there are plenty of similarities and overlaps with other Christian denominations but I’d say the main thing that makes Catholicism different is a wholehearted belief that God is present in the Eucharist and the way we celebrate that. It’s not symbolic, it’s just a cute little thing we do as an homage, He is really there. When we attend adoration, it is not worshipping a false idol, it is worshipping Him. That is one thing I can’t get from other denominations. You can mention a belief in saints, going to confession, our reverence for Mary mother of Christ, nuns, or other things also set us apart but as far as beliefs down to our core, I think it’s the way we celebrate Eucharist. That is what made me choose to be confirmed by the Catholic Church. Only by attending mass and being in a state of grace can I receive it. I can’t go to random churches and receive it. I’ve seen a church take their excess communion wafers and toss them to the birds in the back parking lot after service bc it’s just a symbolic thing to them rather than an actual belief that the Lord is present.

I hope this helped.

[saras-devotionals]

Quiet Time 2/4

James 2 NIV

(v. 10-11) “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. For he who said, “You shall not commit adultery,” also said, “You shall not murder.” If you do not commit adultery but do commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker.”

I need to keep this in mind. All sin is seen as equal in the eyes of God. I can’t say, oh I’m good because I haven’t committed xyz sin, and yet I’m bitter, angry, judgmental, etc. Those are still sins. I am still a lawbreaker. I just haven’t put as much weight to it because I’ve convinced myself it’s fine, it’s normal. It’s not. I keep saying that I need to get to the root of it, and I believe with some of it I have. But then why do I still give in to it? Why am I so resistant? Why can’t I just let it go? I will take some time alone to go over it, trying to let it all out and ask God to help me resolve it.

(v. 14, 17-19) “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them?… In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.” Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.”

‭I should do more. I know I have my faith, but I feel as if my actions don’t always reflect that. I could be kinder, I could be more welcoming, I should share my faith more, I should excuse myself when friends or classmates are gossiping, etc. I could do more for my church too, but I’m not really sure where to start. I’ll simply place my trust in wherever God leads my life.

(v. 24, 26)

“You see that a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone… As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.”

You need the balance of both. Faith alone is not enough to save someone. You cannot proclaim that Jesus is Lord and continue on in your life as if nothing has changed. On the other hand, you cannot be saved by works alone. There are many people in the world who wish to do good and are lovely, but they have no faith. This does not discredit what they do or the type of person they are, but it puts into question their salvation.

PRAYER

Dear Heavenly Father,

Thank you for another day of life Lord. I’m so grateful that I get to wake up every day and have another chance. God, I thank you for the sleep I got and those few moments of peace.

God, I need your help with my sin. My anger is so easily provoked. And for the most part, I can dampen it. I can put out that fire and go about my day unbothered. However, there’s one that I can’t seem to shake and it’s really bothering me. Lord, I need your help. I thought I was good. I really thought I was fine. I remember going to you and thanking you that I was finally over it! But then this past week happened and it’s back when I thought it was resolved. God, I pray that you open my eyes to the root of this problem. That you show me what’s actually bothering me and how to resolve it because I don’t wish to feel this way.

Lord God, I pray for our drive on our way to church this morning, that we’re able to arrive safely. I also pray for the crash that caused the slowdown this morning. It looked really bad and I pray that everyone involved is safe and cared for.

God, I pray for the sermon this morning. That he is able to preach powerfully and I’ll get some new knowledge and wisdom about you and your Word. I also pray that any visitors that come out will be encouraged to study the Bible and that we may be fruitful this month!

Father, I want to thank you for my dad’s appointment today. That it’s at 4 pm and therefore I will be able to go with him. Thank you for answering that prayer!! I pray that whatever news the doctor gives us, we will be able to handle it well and resolve and withstand it together as a family. I really don’t want to lose my dad yet God. He means so much to me and I pray that you continue to give Him as many years with us as is your will.

Lord, I want to pray for the rest of my day. That I am able to relax, but also be productive. That I can prepare properly for the busy week I have ahead of me. I pray for my week as well. I know I was very stressed out this past week, thinking it looked impossible. But you pulled me through it as you always do! And I’m asking you do the same this week because it’s so much busier with more early morning wake ups. Please God, help me get through it without breaking down.

I love you dearly and I pray this all in Jesus name,

Amén.

[eight-twenty]

Most days in my head i am a coming of age main character in a county in Ireland; smoking cigarettes i hate, with fringe bangs too short, a mentality too mature for people my age, still swallowed by catholic guilt. And this is an entry to her diary.

This is a work of fiction—a creative exercise if you will—and I mean no disrespect to the Irish language, I admire it so much in fact. Sure I only sound more defensive saying that.

———————————

3rd Sunday of August.

Ah, today’s a Sunday, but I dodged church, blaming it on period cramps, much to me mother’s dismay. I haven’t missed it yet. Not technically as I’m writing this. Ma’s always keen on being an hour early to church. She already left. Normally she would have called out my bluff and would’ve said a homily’s worth about how the Lord only asks an hour of my day. But today she surprisingly was calm about the idea of her only daughter potentially heading to hell.

I’m feeling to knackered to practice my faith today—I haven’t been devout for long. It shouldn’t be so exhausting to sin, considering I’m less Catholic by the day. Should feel less buggered to Skip holy the Sabbath day. Bah. It’s more sin to be a hypocrite in church. If anything, I should feel less guilty about it.

I only go church to please me Ma. Sorry, God, but I reckon I worship me mother more, even if we rarely see eye to eye. We don’t necessarily fight. But we don’t also talk about boys I fancy over a cup of tea. My mother is a fucking saint. So regardless of me being a good daughter by the book (really good grades, no drugs, home by reasonable hours, hormones in control, etc.), I am always a hair out of place closer to hell in her standards. This week most especially.

Me mother found me pack of cigarettes. She did not know I’ve been smoking—at least not in her presence just yet. She found it while she was sorting my pile of clothes for laundry last Friday. I forgot I stashed one in the front pocket of my jacket. Could’ve blamed it on Madison (Ma always thought I was too good to be her friend), but I was too exhausted to lie. I feel the disappointment in her, the way she placed it on me bedside table (placed, not thrown. On the table, not garbage bin) and walked out of the room (she did not close the doors, she did not also slam it shut).

The pack is there on the table exactly the way she left it. Pretty sure there was a lighter in the pockets. Wonder what she has done with that. If she used it to burn my clothes, fair enough. But they’re drying under the sunlight outside. I’m not sure if her disappointment stems from the idea of her daughter trying to kill her self with every pack smoked or if she’s disappointed because I turned out to be just like me dad.

I don’t even like smoking because it reminds me of dad. I don’t even think it’s cool. I am not trying to be poetic about it. But I hate being stuck in social situations more, and the excuse to smoke has been my only reprieve. I guess I’d literally rather off myself than admit I hate going out with me mates. There’s a difference between hating the social situations you’re forced to be in to fit in versus hating the people. I love ‘em, but rather unfortunate or me that their idea of having fun involves a dance floor and bursting one’s eardrums out. Like me faith I guess, I do believe in a being bigger than me (than all of us), but do I really have to display it so dutifully in pews and choir songs.

I’ve been using smoke breaks as an excuse to break away from it all while still participating to be part of the gang. Disappearing without the need to declare my exit and to reappear only when I felt the need to. “Oh she’s out for a smoke.” “Oh she may not be coming back”

It started when I went out from the club because I couldn’t stand Marianne’s cousin breathing down my neck. Instead of decking him, I went out in the guise of a ‘smoke break’. Thank the lord he does not smoke—had a case of asthma I heard. Maybe I should’ve pressured him for a smoke.

I merely wanted to just give my selves a few minutes of outside air. I pretended I was looking for a pack in my empty pockets. But like some angel in disguise, a hand offered me a pack “have some” like it were a pack of gum. “Thanks” I said and it was lit up while I tried to put the stick in my mouth. Surprisingly, I did not cough up. I was actually good at it. Being good at something (even if it is smoking) is addictive.

Had a grand time in the smoker’s area. No one felt the need to talk to me, I didn’t feel obligated either. There was a communal exchange of light and the consentual exchange of poisonous air. A safe haven of people who just want to bugger off. It felt nice. Felt worth burning me lungs for this respite.

Maybe that was my church. Because church pretty much had the same aesthetic, smoke from the incense and the communal religious experience of escaping from the real world.

I pray mother knows that I’m not doing this to anger her, not specifically. But god did I feel so guilty. The 4th commandment didn’t exactly say Honor Your Mother and Father by not smoking. But it feels like it does.

Bless me mother for I have sinned, I meant for you to find me pack of smokes so you’d expect less of me and see more of me as a person who only looks like me dad but is hell-bent not to become the person he is (or was).

Ever wonder if I’d l believe in the concept of sin if I wasn’t raised catholic?

Feck this catholic guilt. No this isn’t catholic guilt. I’m not feeding more into the institution’s ego. It’s me being me ma’s good daughter. Feck it, I’m off to church.

[through-being-a-christian]

i’ve never really Told my testimony before, because i’m not sure how much of one it is to even be called one?

but this my story / testimony(?), but vague enough for privacy:

I grew up in church, always dressed up and whatnot by my mom for Sunday school and our church’s biblical version of Boy/Girl Scouts. And being honest, I don’t remember much of these years ( Not for any bad reason I assure you!!! ), because I was young and had/have bad memory about the mundane parts of my childhood. I think that I believed in God? But maybe I only did because that’s what my family and friends all believed in, but I’ll never be sure.

When I moved states in 2016, I was probably cursing God because “How could He do this to me? To rip me from my friends and family so suddenly? (it was a period of a few months btw). I’ll never recover from this and will never forgive my parents >:(“ I lost all my friends and family in a matter of months, and was forced to make new friends at this prison-like middle school all alone, knowing absolutely no one and being so alone. This was probably when my depression started to make its way into my mind. I would like to mention in advance that I have been diagnosed with ADHD and General Anxiety Disorder since just before the Move.

I would say seventh grade is when I realized I was apart of the LGBTQ+ community, and this was a big realization. I wasn’t unaware of the community, my uncles were gay and they were married, so why would I have a problem with it? Then the Internet told me the whole “The Bible says its a Sin and its best not to associate with Christians as a queer” debacle (Not even going to talk about Westboro like dang). And that is probably when I started to question my faith.

I was listening to the anti-religious queer users online, and never looked at the Christian side of the argument, and yet I was trying to decide what I’d devote my time to. It ended up that I decided I was going to live for myself, not for others, and certainly not for God. The only reason I was still going to youth group, and church in general, at this point was because I had made a really close friend. That should be great, right? Except looking back, she only enabled and encouraged my turn to witchcraft in high school.

In high school, I was so deep into social media under the name Haelea because my name wasn’t “given to me with consent,” and I had started an altar and began my journey down witchcraft while simultaneously still going to church and hiding this massive secret of magick and queerness from my parents and family (big mistake obviously). I kept it going, and didn’t look back at what I Thought would (not actively Was) going to cause me pain when I would come out.

Then Covid hit. First round of quarantine was fine, because I had time to improve myself and improve my knowledge and craft, and I did some spells that ended up working (self-love spells due to insecurities). Summer was great too. Then fall came, and my mom’s Snapchat recommended my account to her. (I was NEVER allowed social media, and I never knew how to delete that snap account after one month of having it). She was pissed as all of everything. Came into my room (while watching TikTok mind you), asked for my phone, and left. I cried in my bathroom for however long it was, and thinking back I think it was my first anxiety attack.

As practically a digital citizen at that point, I was dying and crying without my phone and access to the internet. I was already years into s*icidal ideation, and for a moment I really truly considered it. Never had the guts nor balls to do it, even before this point. But in the state I lived in, it was entirely legal for parents to kick their kids out for being gay, and I was so terrified of being homeless that I started thinking of ways to get It done fast.

Skip some time, and part of the deal to get my phone back was by going to church, and being able to explain What was being preached during service. Essentially I was being quizzed on church. Eventually I had good behavior enough that I earned back my phone, only now it had a parental-controlled VPN and no internet access. I could call, text, or play mobile games that didn’t need wifi or internet. I was no longer netizen Haelea, I was just American Me.

Do I regret going behind my parents backs and lying for five years? Of course I do, but I felt most guilty because I didn’t follow one of the Ten Commandments of “Honor thy father and mother,” because now (still selfishly thinking), I would never “live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you” (Ex 20:12).

It took a while, but by junior year I started believing again, and I was repenting so much, but not for selfish reasons anymore. Briefly junior year, I joined my school’s color guard, and made a new family that I could discuss religion with, and I think that helped one person go deeper (maybe not, maybe it was the Spirit working) and it helped me go deeper. I was going to church because I wanted to now, not because my parents made me. I wanted to go so I could learn for myself. I would go so that I could experience the community we as Christians are called to live. I learned so much that year, and I am eternally grateful for the Spirit to move me so much towards returning to the church of our Lord. This one university, the Christian one i attend, kept advertising at my high school, and I decided to visit as many of their meetings as I could. Not necessarily to dedicate my college-life to this school, but to open my mind to more than public or state-run schools.

Then senior year is when it became hard again, but not in a non-believing or witchcraft way. It became hard from asking “Why? Why is this happening? Why are you making this difficult?” At this point, I had to start enrolling in universities so I could graduate. The school mentioned previously, I almost didn’t apply to. I almost solely applied to state universities because of their acceptance rates being more doable for my low-academic-mind. I almost went to my state school too, because that’s where my friends were going. Why would I want to start anew all alone again?

Anyways I’m at the Christian university after a split second “No. Let’s dedicate myself to a Christian education. They have multitudes of degrees anyways, so I’m not limited to Bible study or ministry work if that is not what I am being called to do. If I am, great. If not, I’m still here and dedicated.” Somehow this surprised my parents. I think they expected me to choose the school with my friends and cheaper tuition because I have familial financial insecurity even though they tried to make sure I never noticed. They still want me to have the “full college experience” and so I am in a dorm on campus. I have a Biblical study class taught by a Dr, and it has helped my faith grow steadier than before.

This was my story, and we are caught up to the present. This blog is to document my journey and the difficulties I have and will deal with in my faith in Christianity.

I do not judge, because I will be judged (Rev. 20:12).

I care because I am called to love and show compassion (1 Cor. 13:4-10) (John 11:41).

I believe because God is good, and there is no doubt to be had in His plan.

I will struggle, and I will fall, and I will stray from the path. But I have to try my darnedest to stay on path and to get back up and regain balance. If I do not try, then I will have don’t nothing with this life intended of worship that He has gifted to me. I will be unworthy of his love if I do not try to follow.

As of now, I stand in my faith, even if it is more of sand than stone that reaches my chest. Beneath the sand is the foundation, and I will wait for the sand to blow away to reveal the stone that which my life was built upon. I will stand as sturdy as I can.

Thank you for reading. May your day/afternoon/night be blessed, and I will pray as well as I can for you.

Sincerely, Me.

[wistfulwisp]

So I wanted to start my list of good omens rants with my religious upbringing, as well as my thoughts on the book:

I was raised and confirmed Catholic for really no other reason then in order for my mom to marry my dad, my dad had to give up his first born to the Catholic Church, which I think is kind of hilarious to hear about and is also very interesting. I was lucky enough to experience religion in every level of extremity as a kid, because my dad is not a very religious person at all, but still believes in the teachings that go along with “don’t kill other people“ and being kind to your neighbour and all of that stuff. my mom’s side of the family was practising Catholics for the most part… they definitely didn’t like the idea of me watching a show that sympathized with a demon 😂 and would go to church once a week and still do and have a bit of a stronger belief in the religious systems. At one point I had a stepmom that was part of extremist Russian orthodox Group, which basically meant that their entire lives were surrounded by religion, and any step out of that was considered heinous and a lack of faith, and for a while, I had of the part of being a part of that extremist group. which, normally some might consider incredibly bizarre, but I am very grateful for my experiences with religion because it’s allowed me to see many different sides of things. I just wanted to give a little bit of a background since this show is so deeply steeped in religion and religious trauma and that something that will probably come up once in a while in my rambling, so that’s kinda setting the stage for that. I promise my official thoughts will be slightly less personal and more about the actual material.

In terms of the good omens book, I read it probably when I was too young to fully understand what was going on or exactly what was happening, which seems to be the case for a lot of the books I read. I’ll be real with ya homeboys, I didn’t really love the book when I first read it because I am not a huge fan of British humor, and that’s honestly the biggest thing that drew me away from the book was that at the time I found like the humour didn’t reach me. I made a joke with one of my friends that she should buy a copy of good omens and annotate it for me every time that there’s a joke so that I can get the humour🤠 I didn’t find it very funny. I did, however really like the premise, and I remember saying to myself that that “this would make a really good TV show movie I just didn’t really care for the book as much”. I’ll get into more of these thoughts when talking about s1. And let it be known that I do want to get my hands on a copy of good omens now that I’ve watched the show and I’m old enough to understand what the original intention of it was and give it another chance, I just haven’t been able to find a cheap version in thrift stores.

[automatismoateo]

Gf(20F) broke up with me(24M) over religion via /r/atheism

Gf(20F) broke up with me(24M) over religion This happened yesterday and I’m devastated. We were together for just over 2 years and every aspect of the relationship was amazing. She just recently (last couple months) began mentioning how faith is becoming a larger part of her life and wants me to share that with her. She comes from a Christian household and her parents are quite religious (especially her mom). I knew this from the start, and she also knew that I am not religious at all. I would consider myself agnostic. She had zero issues with it. I respected her beliefs and she respected mine. We literally never got into a single fight or argument about it. She stopped going to church for a large part of our relationship and it started to seem as if it wasn’t a big part of her life anymore. I noticed this but never mentioned anything because quite frankly it didn’t matter to me what she did. I loved her so much that I would have respected anything she decided to do in her own time. Like I said, in the last couple of months things seemed different. We got into a couple debates/arguments about it. We met last night to basically hear each other out and see if it could work. My main points to her were that I love her for everything she is and believes. Even if I might not agree with something, I will still always respect it. She went on to say her faith/religion is more than just a belief, but rather a lifestyle that she knows I can’t understand. I told her to think about how unfair that is. To end a 2+ year relationship due to something she can’t even explain to me. She said that in order to continue, she would need to see effort from me to try to begin to understand (going to church, praying with her, etc). Another big point from her was that she apparently knows already that she wants to raise her kids in the church. I told her that isn’t something I would do. It kills me because i know this way of thinking and beliefs are coming straight from her parents and friends. And once she moves out on her own and experiences more of life and meets people with different perspectives her beliefs are likely to change. I tried making the point that we’re so young and this isn’t something to be thinking about 8-10 years away from having kids. Why not just enjoy each other’s company and grow as people until then? This seemed to really do it for her. She seemed very distraught as well because she loves me dearly, but said it simply can’t work. I just don’t know what to think. I’m just so hurt because of the feelings I have for her. Everything in me is saying it would work out if she gives it a chance. Could I have said or done anything to prevent this? (Besides doing the things she asked of course because I wouldn’t be true to myself or her if I agreed to that.) Would it have been a good idea recommending some sort of couples therapy? Or is that just desperate thinking? Submitted September 17, 2023 at 02:30PM by MasterpieceNew6549 (From Reddit https://ift.tt/GnBjUYV)

[errrrgreatperhaps]

God’s Faithfulness Displayed

These past few weeks have been quite a whirlwind. It conjured up lots of emotions I thought I had guarded myself against but somehow it slowly maneuvered its way into my life. More importantly, this whole episode made me marvel at God’s faithfulness over and over again.

It all started out when G confessed to me a month ago. That was the second time he put himself out there and I thought why not give him a chance and give myself a chance to consider the potential of us. Later did I know there were so many things we had to work through. The main reasons why I was very hesitant about dating him was because of the fact that he can’t lead me in Christ and I cannot be super sure of his relationship with God due to his absence from the church community/ bible reading/ praying for over 3 years.

On my birthday, 16th August. It was a Sunday and the plan was to go to the newly opened cat cafe at rail mall with my church mates (yonk, astrid, heather & aden) before popping in for Sunday service afterwards. The day started out with a lovely Macky D breakfast that Alicia ordered and then I had bible study with Phoebe. I haven’t read with her for about a month now and there are many things I had to update her about my life. In addition, she is my CGL and I see the value of being accountable to one another and I really want to share/ consult her regarding my feelings for G. Honestly, I already knew what she was going to say but at the same time, I had an inclination to hear it from her in person. After my conversation with her, I felt very confused and a sense of helplessness overcame me. I immediately texted G because I knew I had to speak to him about all of it. He assured me that he is opened for chatting and that really comforted me for the time being so I could sort out my day before spilling the beans. I realised I was fighting the tension of wanting to obey the Lord and wanting to fulfil the worldly desires of the heart. However, at the end of the day, I feel that it was what I needed to hear....I really respect both R&P and knowing how wise they are in approaching a God glorifying life, so thank Go I can sort out their wisdom/ assurance in this matter. P is absolutely right that if I love G as a brother-in-christ, then his salvation should be more important than tis short term desire of wanting to be in a relationship. 

I had the most marvellous day. Despite the initial hiccup at the cat cafe which has already been fully booked, we ended up at Chow Cute cafe (credits to Astrid because her cousin works there). We spent the whole afternoon there in the outdoor cafe with all the different mix of chow chows and I must say, it was rather therapeutic. I got to see my favourite Brownie (he is a mixed of chow chow and german shepherd)! He reminds me of Woofie very much and he has such an endearing temperament, it’s hard not to adore him. We even had our regular zoom service together and making that a part of my birthday was something I truly value. My highlight of this whole trip was when we drove back to the West and everyone was just singing worship songs in the car while we marvelled at the beauty of the setting sun. I couldn’t help but feel God showing off His wonderful creation and my heart was filled with His praises. I could really sense His presence and see His faithfulness that is as constant as the rising and setting sun. In those moments, I teared up quite a bit because I was immensely filled with so much unexplainable joy. To internalised the truth that God is love. My brothers and sisters in christ are so loved and love each other with Christ’s love. Why then soul do you seek the love from a partner? God has given me these friends that love me with Christ’s love, that should be enough?

After dinner, Yonk sent me home and before I got out of his car, I was prompted to share with him my troubles. The talk I had with P really burdened my heart and I don’t think I can resolve it alone. Praise God for sending the right person at the right time. After sharing with him, I broke down from the guilt of feeling like an awful person who said yes to G the night before and having second thoughts the very next day...I want to call it off but I did not want to hurt him. I’ve gotten his hopes up and now I have to let him down. What a mistake! A costly mistake because it will hurt someone I care for so much. I felt pretty shitty. That night was also the first time I saw how emotional or gentle Yonk could be. He was so patient in dealing with me and he prayed for us before and after this whole fuss. It was absolutely humbling to be seeking God’s help first and foremost in this desperate situation. 

After Yonk left, I knew I had to get through this or not I will not be able to sleep, so I called him up and asked to meet. It was such a relief to know that he felt the same about the situation. He knew immediately that he rushing into things the night before when he asked for an answer. He was very apologetic about it and we had the longest talk that lasted till 4 in the morning. In conclusion, we have decided that we shall not be dating till he has place God at the center of his life (i.e, fruitful prayer life, settled down in The Crossing, serving in ministry) and he is willing to wait on God’s timing for us. This really showed his maturity in handling our hearts and how serious he is about building his relationship first with Jesus. Both of us agreed that we got a sense of peace in this decision. It’s not because we are certain of what’s to come in the months or years ahead, if we ever end up together or not but to know that what we did pleases God, that in and of itself is good enough. 

It feels like everything that happened in the day led up to this point...I had the courage to fight sin, to put on the armour of God and make Him shine in my weakness. My faithful Lord brought me through this and I can rest in knowing that I am walking in His will for me in my life! 

[bogleech]

Since some people were so surprised by the stuff I shared about American fundamentalist christianity let me just compile in one list some of the things that don’t seem to be common knowledge (and are especially “wrong” in pop culture)....again I was not raised with these beliefs myself but my extended family all were and you can still find people preaching this stuff on the internet, on their own weird fundamentalist/evangelical websites and blogs:

So there’s the big one I explained already where the antichrist is supposed to end all war and do good saintly things to take over the world, basically making everyone love him so they’ll willingly give their souls to the devil.

By extension as I also went over recently, Fundies believe Satan/demons generally do good things for people, like miraculous healing, because their goal is not to spread ‘evil’ but just to win souls to their side and out-compete the forces of heaven, like a business competitor. You must be “saved” to know the difference.

Likewise they believe God and Angels often cause suffering, pain, destruction and death to punish sin, test faith or teach lessons. These are all still acts of “love” us mortals are just too stupid to understand, like taking a cat to the vet I guess.

There’s the one from those same posts about how “sin” is not determined by the deed itself but by who it was done for; a godless person feeding the homeless is basically committing evil. It must be in the name of the church to be good.

There’s the one I explained in another post about how Satan doesn’t live in or rule Hell but just wanders the Earth and lives in eternal fear of being thrown into Hell by God when the world ends, because it’s torture for him and the other fallen angels as well.

So now we’re hitting new ones to list: Fundamentalists are taught that Catholicism is a guise of Satanism. Praying to anyone other than God/Jesus is considered idol worship, so the fact that Catholics revere Mary, the Saints, and the Pope is all considered demonic. The pope himself is often claimed to be Satanically possessed by Fundamentalist propaganda.

They believe all “supernatural” forces not explicitly from God are automatically from Satan which is why they believe all forms of “magic” are blasphemous. Many extend this to fiction which is why they ban their kids from Pokemon or Superheroes or Tolkien.

They do not consider ghosts or contact with the dead to be possible, full stop; in Fundamentalism your soul is instantaneously in Heaven or Hell the second you die, there’s no limbo, there’s no waiting period, and there are no exits from either realm. Even if you wanted to leave Heaven and explore Earth, you couldn’t, it’s just infinite with no exits.

This doesn’t matter though because they also believe that you will do nothing in Heaven but float around praising God and you will love it no matter what. You won’t think about or care about anything else. You are essentially a completely different entity that hatched out of your old form, but they believe this is your real true self.

The previous point is why you will not care if you go to Heaven and your loved ones go to Hell. In fact, your soul will automatically understand and agree that they deserve it.

Hell is similarly simplistic: they don’t believe it’s like a scary demon world with torture implements and different punishments, they believe it’s an infinite void of pure fire in all direction and you just float there in so much pain you can’t move or think ever again.

Some of them believe that they are the only people who experience true human love or other emotions. They think all other people are experiencing a fake, diluted form of emotion until they accept Jesus, and it is impossible for anyone to understand that until they’ve experienced it, “like describing color to the blind.” This is a huge part of their anti-LGBT propaganda; a gay couple, in their eyes, is not really in love but will only ever know what love feels like when they reject the sin and join the church.

They do not believe God necessarily wants them to help the needy or otherwise help anyone at all. God wants them to win souls for him, and that’s the only reason to do charity or otherwise extend kindness to anyone. They don’t think any suffering on Earth matters, because it’s just a blip next to everyone’s eternal afterlife.

This will sound like a cartoon strawman but they really do believe creativity and imagination are evil. Thinking too much about anything other than God is a sin.

None of the above is really normal or necessarily taken from the bible, this isn’t a bitter atheist anti-religion post or anything, but the denomination that believes this stuff IS the wealthiest and most politically powerful in the USA. This is the stuff those big mall-sized ultrachurches are trying to put in people’s heads every Sunday.

Also as a note already pointed out, different fundamentalist churches mix and match different combinations of these beliefs. Whether they believe that makes the other churches their enemies will also vary.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

I really resonate with the idea that religion can be a source of a lot of hatred, trauma, violence, and all round bad stuff and don't find myself to be pro religion in any sphere of my life even though I can appreciate objectively the few benefits being a part of a religious community can have. however, why do you look down upon those who are religious? when religion has been such a big part of their nurture, why do you speak of them are intellectually inferior to yourself? does that truly help anyone? and if you don't care about religion, why have you curated your internet presence so strongly around it, devoting hours online to something you hate or find ridiculous? are you okay?

Religion - or more specifically, faith - stands in the way of truth. Faith is intellectually dishonest.

That it's a "big part of their lives" is a part of that very problem; the lack of perspective, the emotional investment in a belief rather than commitment to truth, and the inconsistent skepticism that props up beliefs that they wouldn't accept if the hadn't been indoctrinated into them when vulnerable. Applying different standards because those beliefs are a "big part of their lives" rather than considering them as objectively as they consider other ideas.

Who says I don't care about religion? I enjoy examining it, finding out what it says, what people believe and why they believe it. And, of course, I enjoy a good laugh.

Why does an oncologist invest their entire career into cancer when they're opposed to cancer? You yourself named a ton of the damage that religious faith causes. Why wouldn't I want to resist that or throw some intellectual chemotherapy at it? If there was no cancer, there would be no oncologists.

I’ve said multiple times that I understand that there are some good things about religion, and even written about how I understand how we came to develop a tendency towards religiosity, the needs it solved. That’s not the point. The point is that it provides no uniquely good benefits that we can’t achieve some other way, and without the bad things.

In response to complaints he focused on the Catholic Church's child abuse scandals and attitudes towards condoms, rather than what good it's done, Stephen Fry responded : it's a bit like a burglar in court saying “oh, you would bring up that burglary and that manslaughter, but you never mention the fact that I give my father a birthday present.”

“Well it’s true that this car keeps breaking down and is slowly killing us through carbon monoxide poisoning, but you know, it sometimes gets us where we want to go, and it is a lovely color, so I don’t really see why we need to get a new one.”

We have better cars now.

As to whether my approach is “helpful,” you’ll have to ask my readers.

You fundamentally misunderstand what this blog is about. The point is to give people ideas, tools and courage - particularly through normalizing dissent and showing no deference - to resist the imposition of faith-based beliefs, of any sort, into their lives. This blog is a response to that imposition. If believers kept their "deeply held personal beliefs" actually personal, it wouldn't be necessary to tell them why we don't believe them, won't be participating and don't have to.

When they shut up, I'll shut up.

[the-insomniac-emporium]

Slumbering Hearts (Alcina Dimitrescu/Reader, Soulmate AU) Pt. 2

Fandom: Resident Evil: Village Rating: T for language Warnings: None Summary: In a wicked twist of fate, you find out your soulmate is none other than your employer, Lady Dimitrescu. To your misery, she (at first) seems equally displeased, her heart already belonging to another. But in time, the two of you find yourselves wondering… could the universe be right, after all? Soulmate AU in which every person has a unique “soul mark”, which they share with their soulmate. Notes: Reader gets a bit of a backstory here, with just enough concrete details to serve the plot in future chapters. Hopefully enough is kept vague for people to enjoy it. Now... Time to meet your new kids-in-law/the gremlins :) Previous Chapters: 1: In The Shadow Of Giants

2: Uncertain Destinations

“You already know my name, as well as my fate, and I have neither threats nor demands to make of you. I am at your mercy, regrettably, with nothing more to say. Shall we consider ourselves ‘introduced’? Or is there more you wish to ask of me?” You wonder, eying ‘Alcina’ with a bored expression. It felt odd to refer to her that way, even within the confines of your mind. She had been ‘Lady Dimitrescu’ for as long as you could remember; starting with your years in the village, and continuing through your months here at the castle. One day, perhaps, you would grow used to calling her by her first name. For now, you simply hoped to focus on other matters.

“Tell me of yourself, your past. Who were you before you came here?” Alcina asks, surprising you. What did it matter, now that you were stuck here? At first you shrug, avoiding eye contact, not wanting to open yourself up to her. But before long she’s placed a hand on your shoulder, applying just enough pressure to encourage you to speak. You win this round, you think.

“Somehow I doubt you’ll find it terribly interesting. I was born in the outskirts of the village, on a small farm, just like any other. I had a pet dog, went to ‘school’ with my neighbors, and spent my weekends volunteering with the church. The only thing you might not expect is that I lived outside the village for about a decade. Traveled for a while, never really staying anywhere for terribly long. Eventually, I got tired, and so I came back to help my parents with what little property they had left,” you explain, quietly. Being vague had been intentional, considering the nature of a few details. Did she need to know why you had left? Or that you had once revered Mother Miranda?... No, because if she learned that, it would not be long before she learned that you had changed your mind years ago. Something told you that she wouldn’t appreciate your lack of faith in her mistress. “That was six months ago, roughly. Barely got to spend time with my parents before I was ‘donated’ to the staff here.”

“Not many ever leave the village. Those that do rarely, if ever, return. How particular,” Alcina replies, giving a soft hum. There’s something in her expression that tells you she’ll eventually ask you to elaborate. For now, however, she seems content to move on. Internally you sigh in relief. “I suppose this is sufficient to sate my curiosity, for the time being. Now come with me, I’d like to introduce you to my daughters, to ensure that they understand you are… off limits.” With that said she stands, once more reminding you just how small and fragile you are in comparison, before heading towards the exit. You’re nearly forced to jog in order to keep up with her long strides. As she leads you through hallways, down a flight of stairs, and past several nervous looking maidens, she slows down the slightest bit, having eventually noticed your struggle. Admittedly, that’s more kindness than you would have anticipated. Perhaps she was used to adjusting her pace for her daughters?

Whatever the reason, you do appreciate it. Still, by the time you arrive at your destination, the castle’s library, your legs are feeling the smallest bit sore. Brushing off the ache, you follow Alcina inside. Then you’re taking in the sights, having not been here before, admiring the impressive collection. Glad I’m not responsible for cleaning this place, you think as you pass by dozens of filled shelves. Before long you encounter the three daughters. They’re sitting in a semi-circle, each with their own book, though they’re quick to sit up once they spy their mother. One by one they’re smiling up at her, not even sparing you a moment’s glance. Admittedly you’re glad for that. What good could come from their attention, especially when they don’t yet know who you ‘truly’ are?

“I’m glad to see you’re all in one place, my darlings. There has been a… development, of sorts,” Alcina says, speaking in the same tone one might use to address a faculty meeting. In a less intimidating household, it would have been much harder to hold in a laugh. Was this always how she spoke to her children? For their sake, you hoped not (though the concept was amusing). Regardless, it is at this point that the daughters notice you, with one of them looking intrigued enough to send a shiver down your spine. You’re pretty sure her name is Daniela, being the only one you haven’t met before today. A toothy grin spreads on her lips, and once you make eye contact you swear that she winks at you. This literally could not be any worse, you think, unable to stop yourself from frowning.

“Does it have to do with this little thing?” Daniela purrs, taking a step towards you. Instantly both Alcina and yourself are tensing up. While your soulmate shifts in front of you, an incredibly faint rosy tint to her cheeks, all you can do is pinch the bridge of your nose between two fingers.

“This ‘little thing’ is not your newest playtoy, Daniela. Rather, they are my-” she hesitates, disliking the way the word feels in her mouth- “soulmate. I expect the three of you to behave, understood? At the very most, you are allowed to prevent them from leaving the premises, but even then I expect you to remain gentle. Have I made myself clear?” Alcina asks. Now she’s not the only one blushing, as Daniela looks so embarrassed that you wonder if she’ll pass out. Maybe now you’ll think twice about flirting with everyone you meet, you think, remembering the various rumors you’ve heard about her. For a moment, part of you imagines what your relationship with her would look like, were you to continue ‘courting’ her mother. Could this be a moment you could torment her with for life? Get some cheeky revenge for all the maidens who couldn’t risk it? A lovely thought, though one soon interrupted.

“Of course, mother. We will not lay a single finger on them, unless we have no other choice. Right, sisters?” Bela replies, turning to her siblings with an expectant look. Neither of them seem terribly pleased, but they nod, each giving their own verbal affirmations. All three spend a few moments glancing you over, reevaluating you now that they know who you are, appraising your worth. It’s not hard to imagine that they all find you lacking- at least in comparison to their mother. “Are introductions in order? We’ve met before, but I hardly know anything about them. It would be… nice to properly meet the newest edition to our family.” The way Bela says the words makes you nervous, and the way Cassandra grins only worsens the feeling.

“If you desire such, I see no reason to forgo such a thing. Perhaps the three of you could give them a tour? I must return to my duties, and I doubt they have seen much of the castle, given their… former occupation,” Alcina admits, softly. Was this a confirmation that you’d no longer have to spend every day working yourself to the bone? On one hand you were somewhat relieved, but you also regretted the possible loss of your preferred coping method. Worse, were you really going to spend who knows how long with the dreaded Dimitrescu daughters? They were going to rip you to shreds, at least verbally, you were sure of it. How could you ever meet their expectations? If they were anything like their mother, you would never be enough to satisfy them. Or at least that is what you assumed.

“I’ve seen a fair bit,” you interject, awkwardly, hating the way it brings everyone’s gaze back to you. Alcina’s lips twitch, as she fights back a frown. Evidently she didn’t appreciate you countering her suggestion.

“Please, we insist,” Bela fires back, a pleasant tone covering her thinly-veiled animosity. “I’m sure we’ll have a wonderful time getting to know each other. You do want to learn more about your soulmate’s children, don’t you?” Something about the way she speaks makes you want to laugh. When you smile back at her, it’s without a hint of any placating intentions, rather a dewdrop of mischief. Bold of her to assume that you wanted to make her mother happy. After all, it was clear from her phrasing that this was a ‘test’, a ruse to ‘reveal your true colors’ to Alcina. But you were as uneasy about your part in this as Bela was, neither of you finding yourself a suitable match for Alcina. Despite the way she narrows her eyes at you, her mother is smiling again, glad that she had a way to keep you occupied for the time being.

“It’s settled then,” she says, moving to give each of her daughters a kiss on top of their heads. They giggle at the affection, looking rather proud of themselves. Then she turns to you, hesitating, clearly having the instinct to give you a kiss as well. Half of you wants to stand on your tippy-toes, expectantly, wondering if she’d do it (and how flustered it would make her). Instead, you pretend not to notice, accepting the awkward shoulder pat she ends up giving you. “I will see you this evening, for dinner. Do try to enjoy yourself. But don’t forget-” she leans in until her mouth is right next to your ear, breath tickling your neck- “behave yourself. I will not tolerate any tomfoolery, understood?” Alcina does not pull away until you’ve nodded, and you do not relax until the library door has shut behind her.

Except now you’re alone with her daughters. Wonderful.

---------------------------

Dealing with finances was not, to put it simply, Alcina’s ‘favorite’ activity. Although she employed someone to handle the majority of the paperwork, she made sure to go over it herself to ensure accuracy. There were many aspects to her business, being both legitimate and illegitimate, technically. One could never be too careful about their records. After all, failing to file tax returns had taken down Al Capone, of all people. Who was to say that such a mistake, or one in a similar vein, could not damage House Dimitrescu? Certainly it wouldn’t be enough to ruin them entirely, but it could lead to certain ‘nuisances�� bothering the village. At the end of the day, Alcina cared more about the impact it would have on Mother Miranda than anything else, even the possible decline of her household.

A nasty habit, really. Few knew the extent of her self-entitled devotion to the cult leader. The only bond that ran deeper was that she had with her daughters, who meant more to her than she could ever vocalize. Even then, she viewed them as a gift from Miranda, which in turn strengthened her love for the woman. Now that love leaked into everything she did. With a flourish of her pen, she signed away some of this month’s earnings. So what if she already ‘donated’ a large portion of her income to the village and its leader? Certainly this was a way to show the level of her devotion? Certainly Miranda would take notice, eventually? Praise her for it? Take Alcina’s hand in her own, thumb caressing her skin, eyes filled with a long-sought affection?...

The sound of passing footsteps brings her back into the moment, and Alcina stares down at the mountain of paperwork she’d yet to approve. With a deep sigh she readjusts her reading glasses, sets the finished document aside, then gets back to work. A part of her mind soon starts to drift to other subjects. To you, primarily. Would your affection be easier to gain? Steadier?... But could it, in any way, compare to Miranda’s? No matter how she tries to brush the thoughts away, they nip at her heels, circling her head like vultures. Only time would give her the relief she so desperately sought.

---------------------------

“So, don’t tell me you really think you’re my mother’s soulmate, right?” Cassandra says, somewhat grumbling, as you trail behind Bela. It’s less than five minutes into the tour, with the siblings having behaved so far, focused on actually showing you around. At her words, both her sisters started walking slower. Their gazes were still locked ahead of themselves. The way they positioned themselves, however, made it clear that they were listening. “Is it some elaborate scheme, hmm? Did you spend a dozen hours with the other servants, noting every last detail about her soul mark, before copying it? Do you really think that you’ll get away with this?” Well, ‘twas good to know who the most paranoid of the three were.

“Ah, yes, it’s all a great, horrible ruse. You’ve caught me red-handed, I’m afraid,” you chime, sarcastically. A hand goes to your forehead as you fake faintness. “I’m just so desperate to be scrutinized by yourself and your mother, to have my every movement watched, to somehow be less free than I already was. I simply… cannot… believe… that you saw through my bluff.” With that you give a dramatic sigh, pausing in the hallway to give Cassandra a judgemental look. If not for Alcina’s instructions to keep you safe, you’re certain she would have beheaded you on the spot. “I’m not claiming to understand the universe’s decision. But I’m also not giving up immediately, no matter how much the three of you scare me.” At that, Bela stops in her tracks, slowly turning to you. Instinctively you go to take a step backwards, only for Cassandra to catch you, holding you in place. Next thing you know, the oldest daughter is grabbing your head, staring you right in the eyes.

“Answer one question, and maybe I’ll make sure you don’t fall victim to some tragic, unfortunate accident. Can you see yourself loving my mother?” Bela asks, more intense than you’ve ever seen her before. Despite that, you don’t tremble, swallowing your fear long enough to reply.

“Honestly? I don’t know. She’s terrifying… and beautiful. Cruel to some of the maidens I’ve met… and loving to you three. I… I don’t know if I can love her,” you admit, gulping. “But isn’t that part of the point of trying? To find out? I am going to try, for both my sake and hers, to love her. To cherish her. What more would you ask of me? I cannot tell you how the days to come will go, whether or not your mother will enjoy them, or even whether she could love me. This is not a situation you can threaten into resolving the way you want it to. So let me go, finish the tour, and give me a chance. You owe your mother that much, do you not?” Soon enough the hands keeping you in place loosen their grip, and Bela turns away with a scoff. Honestly, you can hardly believe that your little speech worked. You aren’t given much time to celebrate, however, as the sisters quickly resume their walking. Before long, Daniela is speaking up between giggles.

“I like this one already.”

[norahastuff]

penny for your thoughts on salmondean codependency ?

Sure. Fair warning it’s long (was longer but I stopped myself.)

I think it’s complicated in a show that’s had so many different showrunners because they’ve all handled Sam and Dean’s relationship very differently. In Kripke’s era (s1-5) there was a romanticization of the bond. Sure there was a lot of in-depth exploration of how they wound up at the place they were at, spoiler alert: it was all because of John and his obsessive crusade to find the demon that killed his wife. That’s all he cared about and as a result, Sam and Dean had to be everything to each other. But Kripke had no intention of dismantling that at any point because he was (and always had been) writing a tragedy. Gamble continued that too. There was no room for anyone else in their lives and it would always just be the two of them against the world. So Cas had to go. Bobby had to go.

(Actually, it's funny because Gamble didn't intend this at the time, her plan was to kill Cas off, but by Edlund creating the masterpiece that is The Man Who Would Be King, he not only saved Cas from being seen as a villain, but he also deepened Dean and Cas' relationship in such a profound way and inextricably linked the two of them emotionally. And since Cas was eventually brought back, that laid the foundation for a lot of what their relationship would become.)

Up until this point, there hadn’t really been any significant dismantling of perhaps the more unhealthy parts of Sam and Dean’s relationship. Enter Carver. He stripped things down and started to explore what drove these characters. What they wanted and why they couldn’t have it. It starts with Dean being mad at Sam for not looking for him in purgatory, which sets up the whole speech in the s8 finale of Sam’s guilt about letting Dean down, but the thing is, Dean was never honest with Sam about his year away either. He never told Sam he could have gotten out much sooner if he hadn’t stayed to find Cas. I mean Dean had assumed Sam was up there alone doing God knows what to try to bring him back, and yet still he stayed in Purgatory because things were clear there. He needed Cas. Anyway, I just find that interesting, but Cas isn’t a victim of Sam and Dean’s relationship in s8.

Who gets the honour of being cast aside? That would be Benny and Amelia, two characters they introduced in s8 specifically to highlight that Sam and Dean’s relationship doesn’t allow for anyone else to be a significant part of their life. I mean that’s nothing new, we’ve watched that happen many times before. Lisa even said as much to Dean. The thing is this time? It’s framed as a truly sad thing. That moment at the end of 8x10 when Dean has just ended things with Benny and Sam leaves Amelia, and they’re sitting alone drinking beer and watching tv is such a hollow empty moment. This is not what they want. But it’s the way things have to be.

I’m actually fascinated by Sam and Dean’s conversation in the church in the s8 finale. Not so much Dean’s assertion that there is no one else he would put before Sam, but more so what provokes it, which is Sam saying “who are you going to turn to instead of me. Another angel? Another vampire?” See the thing is Dean saying he would always put Sam first is not news. We know this and it’s not really an unhealthy statement in itself either. A lot of people would put their sibling above anything else, not less a sibling who you raised and is the most important person to you. But in this context? After what Sam said? It just highlights how unhealthy they are if Sam believes that Dean having other people in his life means he doesn’t love him enough. That he’s a disappointment to him. That’s so profoundly fucked up.

(Note, Dean tells Sam that he killed Benny for him but he doesn’t say anything about Cas. I think like I said before, this is because Cas and Dean’s relationship has largely existed out of the Sam and Dean stuff up to this point - Sam and Cas don’t even really have much of a relationship yet besides both of their connections to Dean.)

And then from here, things start getting steadily worse. But we also keep being shown how bad they are. Dean lying to Sam, taking away his free will by letting Gadreel possess him. Dean sending Cas away, Kevin dying. It’s all awful. The whole “there ain’t no me if there ain’t no you line” from 9x01 isn’t really said by Dean, it’s Gadreel, but that is how Dean feels. He does think that’s all he’s good for. And over the season we’re shown how much of himself and what he truly wants he’s had to give up because of his ingrained “Save Sammy” and “Sammy comes first” mentality. It’s always been this way for him. In 9x07 we see that he had found a happy home, a good father figure, and his first love, a first love might I add that he had to leave behind with no real explanation because Sam needed him, and Sam comes first.

I mean just one episode earlier we had him rushing out the door elated about seeing Cas and spending time with him, only for their time together to come to sad and melancholic end when Dean once again leaves Cas behind without any real explanation, because despite what he wants Sammy comes first. What he wants doesn’t matter.

See I think after the Gadreel stuff comes out is where the narrative starts to get a little wonky for me. You can clearly see that this was intended to be a shorter story that they ended up stretching out to a much longer one because of renewals. There’s also the fact that this is a formula show so they can’t necessarily be separated for longer than an episode or two. S10 is a rough one to get through at times, I think the themes still mostly hold up but it’s a rough one to get through.

S10 highlights all the connections that Dean has, Cas, Charlie, Crowley even, but Sam doesn’t really have those bonds in the same way.  For Sam it’s just Dean, so he goes down a reckless destructive “do anything to save Dean!” path and so many innocents pay the price, and ultimately with the release of The Darkness, the whole world.

They skirted right up to the edge of exploring just how toxic and dangerous their relationship had become in the season 10 finale.

DEAN: I let Rudy die. How was that not evil? I know what I am, Sam. But who were you when you drove that man to sell his soul... Or when you bullied Charlie into getting herself killed? And to what end? A..a good end? A just end? To remove the Mark no matter what the consequences? Sam, how is that not evil? I have this thing on my arm, and you're willing to let the Darkness into the world.

I can’t say evil is the right word, they were never evil, but they were wilfully blind to everything and everyone else when it came to saving each other. S10 tested my love for the show because after watching it, because there was certainly a feeling that the two of them had become the villains of this story. And don’t get me wrong, I didn’t have a problem with that, it’s just after 2 seasons of this I can’t say I had a lot of faith that this was going to be properly addressed or if we were going to keep going in circles around it. Keep being shown, it’s bad and then nothing much being done to fix it. Your mileage may vary on how it was handled, but I think s11 did a relatively ok job considering it wasn’t the end of the story, and the show needed to keep going.

See from Dean’s side a lot of the codependency rests on 1. His father’s orders to always save Sammy 2. His low self-esteem where he sees himself as nothing but a blunt instrument. 3. His guilt at not being able to perfectly fulfil every familial role in Sam’s life 4. His belief that no one could choose to love him but family has to love you. 5. The unhealthy example of what it should look like to love someone that he got from John. You give up everything but them.

For Sam (and honestly it’s not as clear for me as Dean’s side is so feel free to correct me/disagree on this) 1. Everytime he’s tried to leave and create his own life it’s never ended well. 2. His guilt over wanting freedom and a normal life when he was younger (I’m referring specifically to Stanford era here) 3. His guilt over everything Dean has given up for him. 4. John. 5. Jess.

Ultimately it all comes down to isolation. They both had to be everything to each other, and the deeper they got into this fight, the more people that they lost, the tighter they clung to this notion of family and brothers. I think s11 (and 11x23 in particular) was an important turning point, both for Sam and Dean’s relationship, as well as for them as individuals. Because they weren’t alone there anymore. Cas was there. Sam let Dean walk to his death. Of course, it would devastate him, but he knew it was what had to be done. And he didn’t walk out of that bar and go back to the bunker alone. He had Cas, he had someone who cared about him and wanted to help him and talk to him. Sure Dean asked Cas to take care of Sam for him (you know after Cas offered to walk to his death with him) but Sam let him. He let him be there for him. We didn’t get to see much before the BMOL showed up and blasted Cas away, but still, we saw enough.

I think that’s a significant difference to note why their relationship was different in the Dabb era. It wasn’t just them anymore. Cas was an important member of their family and given a level of importance he’d never been given before and couldn’t have been when the story they were telling was of the dangers of their codependency. Mary was back. Eventually, Jack would become a part of their unit too. Just the two of them wasn’t enough for them anymore. This is made abundantly clear with all of Dean’s desperate attempts to get Cas to stay in s12, followed by his inability to keep going when they lose Cas and Mary in s13. Similarly, Sam really struggles when they lose Jack and fail to get Mary back later in the season.

Another big moment is Dean letting Sam go alone to lead the hunters against the BMOL in 12x22 while he stays back to try and reach Mary. Like he tells Mary, he’s had to be a brother, a father and a mother to Sam and he never stopped seeing him as his kid, but in that moment he makes a choice. He lets Sam take charge and he shows that he trusts him and believes in him. He knows he can handle it.

Sometimes it’s not even a character growth thing. Sometimes having other people there stops you from making destructive choices even though that’s still your first instinct. I’m thinking specifically of 13x21 after Sam was killed. Dean would have run headlong into that nest of vampires and got himself torn apart, but Cas was there to stop him. He was able to make him see reason.

Basically, I think that for a long time, they thought the only relationship they could have was each other, which then became a self-fulfilling prophecy because their desperate attempts to keep each other around led to them losing the people around them. They eventually started to learn that that wasn’t true, they could have more, they were allowed to want more, and that it wasn’t an either-or situation. Dean didn’t have to choose between Sam and Cas. They didn’t have to choose between each other or Jack. The same goes for Mary. Different relationships can coexist without threatening each other, and not say that their relationship in s12-15 was all smooth sailing, but it was certainly so very different from everything that came before.

(There’s maybe a point to be made about how they didn’t have anyone or anything in the finale and how that relates to the story we got, but honestly I have no idea what the intention was with any of the choices made in that episode so I’ll leave it at that for now.)

[apenitentialprayer]

I cried the first time I went to a traditional Latin Mass.

It would have been difficult for me not to; I was an emotionally volatile 20-year-old college kid studying theology who loved the “smells and bells” that Catholicism offered—and man, there were a lot of bells and smells going on while Mozart’s “Requiem” carried the liturgy.

After that, I was hooked. A group of friends and I asked a Jesuit, the late Robert Araujo, if he would learn how to say Mass in the extraordinary form (how the pre-Vatican II traditional liturgy has been known since 2007) so we could have it on campus. He did, and a few of us were trained on how to be altar servers for it. To what I imagine was the shock and dismay of many of his brother Jesuits, we were able to celebrate the traditional Latin Mass at the Jesuit residence. To this day, one of my most-treasured books is a St. Edmund Campion Missal & Hymnal for the Traditional Latin Mass that Father Araujo gifted me.

The traditional Latin Mass (I will refer to it after this as “the Latin Mass” for simplicity’s sake, though of course the current Mass promulgated after Vatican II can be and is also celebrated in Latin) ) never became the primary form of liturgy that I attended, and eventually I stopped going to it altogether sometime after college. But it nevertheless made a significant impact on my spiritual life at a critical, impressionable point in my formation. With the news that Pope Francis has greatly restricted the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass, I have been reflecting on what the Latin Mass gave me and my spiritual life, good and bad. First, the good: What I saw in the Latin Mass was an unparalleled reverence for the sacred. It hammered home, for the first time, that I was part of a celebration of “these sacred mysteries.” Whereas previously I had attended a lot of parishes that couldn’t bother to get their sound systems working, or that were reliant upon the whimsical improvisations of a well-meaning priest, the Latin Mass was choreographed with the care and attention to detail of a Broadway performance. This care for detail, far from seeming stuffy, instead conveyed a deep and passionate love for what was holy. And even more importantly, it invited me to join in that love by taking similar care in my own prayer and participation in the Mass. It gave me a hunger for “the beautiful,” despite my eurocentric understanding of beauty. There were no felt banners or tacky papier-mâché art in sight. To that point, when the Met Gala chose “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” as its theme, do you think they were looking to 1970s Catholic aesthetics for inspiration? But do you know what else the Latin Mass did for me? It made me bitter and arrogant. It made me think I had the more ancient, therefore holier, therefore better way to practice my faith. I would make jokes about the “Novus Ordo” and speculate about the day the church might even do away with vernacular liturgy, considering it a failed experiment. In one example I find particularly galling and embarrassing, when I attended my regular, non-Latin Mass, instead of praying the liturgy I would actually sit there and count all the deviations from the rubrics that I could notice. I found a lot of security in the (very flawed) idea that “Catholicism is an ancient, unchanging faith. This is the most ancient, unchanging way to live it out.” It took me some time and prodding and prayer to realize that this security wasn’t in or from God, but rather about reassuring myself that I had an answer that I would never need to change (a very attractive prospect to someone whose world feels in constant flux!). We are called to faith that the truth revealed by God in Christ is eternal and unchanging, but as Pope Francis has pointed out repeatedly (like a good Jesuit spiritual director), rigidity and possessiveness about how to express that truth are not authentically free expressions of faith. One of the beautiful parts about the celebration of Mass is that it links us to the communion of the church, extending across both time and space. And the Tridentine Mass, representing more than 400 years of that celebration across history, conveys some aspects of that communion powerfully. But unfortunately, some uses of it in our time have become a point of rupture in that communion as well. A more widespread celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass was an initiative that “intended to recover the unity of an ecclesial body with diverse liturgical sensibilities,” Pope Francis explained in his letter explaining his motivations for the motu proprio “Traditionis Custodes.” However, in effect it “was exploited to widen the gaps, reinforce the divergences, and encourage disagreements that injure the Church, block her path, and expose her to the peril of division.” When I read those words, I knew it was true in my own personal spiritual life. It is a great sadness that it was exploited. And if the pope and the bishops around the world who responded to his questionnaire on this topic saw this division throughout the church, Francis was right to respond. But, you may object: I am not a smug pseudo-schismatic who hates the pope, and I love the Latin Mass! Here is the difficult thing being asked of you by the Holy Father: There are many good reasons to love the Latin Mass, but given that it has become a demonstrable cause of disunity and rancor within the church, we have to look for the gifts it gives elsewhere. Pope Francis readily admits that he agrees with Pope Benedict XVI that “in many places the prescriptions of the new Missal are not observed in celebration, but indeed come to be interpreted as an authorization for or even a requirement of creativity, which leads to almost unbearable distortions.” So, one task at hand, and a possible place of common ground for divided Catholics, is to focus on making regular Masses a bit more reverent. After all, the good things that I received from my encounter with the Traditional Latin Mass should have been available to me in the Novus Ordo, too. All good liturgy, in whatever form or language, should engender desires for the good, the true and the beautiful. But there is another, deeper and more difficult spiritual challenge here. The desires that the liturgy awakes and satisfies in us—and for some of us, the desires that the Latin Mass especially nurtured—are good, holy and necessary. But those desires also point beyond the liturgy itself. At the risk of sounding glib, what would it mean if we could find the spiritual goods that the Latin Mass taught so many in other places? What if we were able to discover a passion for beauty from our service to the poor? If we could develop a mature sense of wonder and awe from caring for creation, our common home? If I am honest, those feel like daunting questions that I don’t really know how to respond to. I only know that I think I’m being called to ask them. Answering them, I imagine, will take patience, practice and a lot of prayers—in whatever language they’re said.

[lokilickedme]

The Way

I’m writing horror again.  I guess it’s that time, you know, that time that has nothing to do with Halloween or the seasons or whatever, that time when it just hits me for some reason.  And just like I always do, I’ll say I don’t know why.

Even though I know why, and you know I know why.

Because the truth is always so much weirder and worse and more disquieting than any excuse I could make up for it, and sometimes I just feel the need.

Today I felt the need, and I couldn’t make it go away.

And so I sat down, and words I didn’t want to write were written.

.

8592 words I would rate this Mature 18+ if it was a fic, strictly because of the subject matter.

Warnings: Death, mostly.  Religious trauma, brief descriptions of abuse, mentions of mental illness, domestic violence, grief, familial dysfunction, religious abuse, emotional abuse, medical conditions, brief mentions of drug use/abuse, mild gore in reference to corpse decomposition, psychological unease and mild terror, child abuse (mental/emotional/psychological), brief allusion to physical child abuse, cult references, loss of faith, attempted murder, possible actual murder.

A Note:  I love you guys, you’re always so quick and willing to be helpful and offer advice and suggestions and such, and I adore that about you.  But on this piece of work I ask that nobody offer any theories about what happened to my brother - medical, criminal, or otherwise - and please no suggestions on things we could do to pursue investigation, that ship has long sailed.  It’s been 23 years and he’s a cold case.  We spent years trying to sort it out but in the end it’s just something that happened, and we moved on because we had to.  There are a lot of open ends, a lot of question marks, a lot of suspicious details that never connected to anything - and we tried, we truly did.  If anyone out there knows the truth, they’ve never shown themselves to us.  We do have our theories, but my brother was a secretive person living a life none of us knew about, and the people he knew weren’t people we knew.  Everyone involved is either dead or moved on or got away with whatever it was they did, and there are only three of us who still care.  It’s over.

Until today, I’ve never put these events into words.

It was something I needed to do, finally.

This is PART ONE.  There may not be a part two, unless doing this ends up making me feel better.

Please feel free to comment if you wish.  As you can see, pretty much nothing triggers me.  I just ask that you please refrain from the type of comments noted above.

And thank you.

----------

This is, regrettably, a true story.  Nothing has been changed but the names, because the dead don’t like being talked about, and James was just enough of a shit to haunt me for it.

----------

----------

They made up their minds And they started packing They left before the sun came up that day An exit to eternal summer slacking But where were they going without ever knowing the way

They drank up the wine And they got to talking They now had more important things to say And when the car broke down They started walking Where were they going without ever knowing the way

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold And it's always summer They'll never get cold They'll never get hungry They'll never get old and gray You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

Their children woke up And they couldn't find them They left before the sun came up that day They just drove off and left it all behind them But where were they going without ever knowing the way?

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold And it's always summer They'll never get cold They'll never get hungry They'll never get old and gray You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

- The Way, Fastball, 1998

.

That was the year James died in his sleep.

Or that’s what they say, anyway.  Asthma, the likely cause based on his medical history, our first and least disturbing assumption.  Undetermined, the official determination based on the hastily scraped-together autopsy, the best that could be done under the circumstances.  We tell people he had breathing problems, and they nod their heads and agree because they knew he did, and now he’s been gone so long that nobody asks.  Most of the people who ever met him have long moved on or disappeared or died themselves, or just remember him as the enigmatic middle son from the Keithley family that nobody really knew very well.  You know, the odd one, the one that showed up at meetings maybe once a year and smiled nervously but didn’t really talk to anyone and always seemed anxious to leave?  The one who died under mysterious circumstances?  That one.

He left the way he always came in.  Quietly, unexpected, without anyone being aware of either his entrance or his exit.

But me and mom know some things, and she’s not talking.  She probably never will.

So maybe it’s time I did.

December 1998.  I’d gotten married two years previous and moved back to the family land with my new husband.  He hated it there, but we had an affordable place to live.  It wasn’t bad.  He’d tell you otherwise.  The land never sat right with him, but I’d lived there too many years to see it.  I’d been fifteen when my father uprooted his large family from the city and hauled us out to the great back door to nowhere, and even though I’d left several times to wander elsewhere, I always came back.

I didn’t realize why at the time, at any of the multiple times.  But now I know.  That place gets you, and it holds you, and unless you’re goddamned devoted to staying gone you will always be pulled back.  It took me till I was 49 to funnel the necessary amount of devotion away from the religious dedication I’d had jackbooted into me and turn it toward getting out, but against a great number of overwhelming odds I finally did it.

But this isn’t about that, not yet anyway.  This is about my brother James, and how he went to sleep one night and found his own way out.

----------

It was snowing, had been for days, a bit unusual but not unheard of.  The part of the state we lived in was notorious for extended ice storms and we knew a bad one was coming, but until it hit we played in the snow like it was a gift and we were deprived children who knew it was all going to be taken away soon.  My brothers and I were adults but you wouldn’t know it, watching us sneak around in the woods staging elaborate commando attacks on each other.  James was the best of us, a stealth king who could stand in the middle of a room for an hour without a single soul seeing him.  Perception bias, he said.  Your brain ignores me because I obviously don’t belong, like those puzzles where you circle what’s wrong but it takes you forever to find them.

He crept around in the forest scaring the shit out of people, dropping his long tall self out of trees, appearing from nowhere to administer a well aimed snowball to the face of whoever happened to cross his path and then disappearing just as quickly.  We called him a wraith and it wasn’t a good natured jibe.  We meant it.  He made people nervous.  He was the stealthy kind of quiet you associate with danger, and he knew how to do things an average person doesn’t ever have any need to know.  It was a quiet cool that we admired him for, because none of the rest of us had it.

The religion we were raised in kept a tight lid on us, but me and James, we never really let it get into our bones.  We were the smart ones, in retrospect.  I went through the motions by force of habit and a sense of self preservation, doing what was expected and demanded of me, following the rules and making myself a perfect example of a young member of the church so I wouldn’t bring shame on the congregation and my family.  But mostly the congregation.  It was always more important than anything else.  And I had behaving down to an art form, but mostly when people were looking.  Usually also when they weren’t.

But sometimes, not quite.

And then I prayed for forgiveness about it later because God was supposed to forgive you if you asked him to, right?  The tenet of willful sin being unforgivable never took root with me even though that was what the church conditioned into us through fear and constant repetition.  They said it from the stage two nights a week and again on Sunday to hammer it home.  Two nights a week and again on Sunday my head silently disagreed.  God’s not like that.  And then I did the praying for forgiveness thing even though I knew I was right, because I was disagreeing with the church, and the church was God’s channel here on Earth, wasn’t it?  I committed a mortal sin at least three times a week on that subject alone, and though the dread of divine punishment was hardwired into me, I never could reconcile the concept of a loving and forgiving God destroying me simply for knowing better.

I’m not sure the comprehension of an overwatching deity ever actually established itself in James’ brain.  A moral code, yes.  But isn’t that what God is, really?  Maybe he understood more about God and forgiveness than the rest of us.  But he was considered an unapproved fringe member of the church because he couldn’t suffer people and noise and being looked at and he refused to preach, and he was soft-shunned as a result.  Because if you weren’t all in to the point of being willing to die at any moment for your faith, you were as good as faithless.

And faithless meant condemned.  And the congregation couldn’t be bothered with condemned people, regardless of their reasons for not having both feet in the water.  The first and only option on their list was to put the person out and let them find their own way back once they realized they had nobody left in the world who cared about them.

James escaped that somehow.  He was supposed to be shunned whole scale, but he wasn’t trying to convince anyone to leave the faith and he presented no threat to anyone’s strength of belief, and so far as anyone knew he’d committed no grave sins other than disinterest.  So the rule that dictated we cast him out was bent enough to allow him to remain living on the family land, though at one point during a fit of overzealous righteousness my mother had tried to have a family meeting to vote on whether or not we were going to let him stay.  I refused to vote and when I walked out of the house the meeting fell apart.

I’ve never forgiven her for that.  Her son’s life being put to a vote with her presiding over the proceedings, vengeful and unfeeling and devoid of compassion on behalf of God himself.  It takes my breath away, the anger, still to this day.  The only thing I ever truly learned from my mother about parenting was a long and intensely detailed list of what not to do to my own children, and I suppose I should be grateful for that.  It’s a bitter thank-you to have to give, but it’s something.

We knew James as much as he would allow us to, and not an inch further.  Which meant the extent of our knowledge of him pretty much stretched to include the singular fact that he was different.  What that meant, I still don’t really know - but it was there from the day he was born, that slight off-ness, the oddly off center calibration that you can’t really see so much as sense in a person.  I know now he was likely on the autism spectrum and he walked through life seeing and reacting to everything differently than most of us, but that wasn’t a thing back then.  You were just weird, or you weren’t.  And I’m not convinced that was a bad thing for him, strictly speaking.  But in the confines of our religion and our family’s devout and sometimes violent dedication to it, it took its toll almost daily.

He stood out, and he was very much a person who didn’t want to.  He wanted to fade into the background, to not be seen, to not be known.  And our religion didn’t tolerate that kind of nonsense, because we were commanded to be bold bearers of The Word Of God, and no exceptions were made.

None.

I’m going to stop calling it a religion now.  I beg your indulgence as I shift to calling it what it is, because calling it a religion is an insult to actual religions that don’t destroy peoples’ lives with callous indifference and murderous glee.

We were raised in a doomsday death cult.  There’s no other name that fits.

And we were trapped in it and its ugly cycle of neverending mental and emotional manipulation and abuse until we were adults, and some of us are still bound to it.  My oldest brother worked his way up to the upper levels of oversight in the local congregation and was solidly entrenched in it until his death, which is a story for later.  My youngest brother, the last remaining living blood sibling I have, is still deeply in it to this day and will likely never leave it.

I took the hard way out, three years ago, by walking away.

James, though.  He took the easy way.  He simply closed his eyes, and he was free.

----------

December 22, 1998.  Three days before Christmas, though that meant nothing to us.  The cult told us Christmas was a filthy demonic pagan ritual that was condemned by God, so to us the season was just a nice chilly time of year with lots of time off from work.  We’d had an unusual amount of snow, the most we’d had in years.  The roads were impassable and everyone was home except my husband, who worked close enough that his boss at the glass shop came and picked him up that morning with chains on his tires.  Lots of windshields had shattered from the sudden violent cold that had struck the previous night and Scott had the only glass shop for sixty miles.

I think it must have been around noon, and likely my mother had sent my dad up the hill to see if James wanted to come down for the lunch she was making.  He and his wife had split up against the strict rules of the church after a few years of suffering through an ill advised marriage, an important detail to this story that will come into the tale later, and he was alone up there at the top of the hill a lot.  Sometimes he forgot to eat, or he got so busy that he just didn’t bother, so our mother always made something for him because even though he was in his 20′s he was still a kid who needed looking after and her zealous fervor against him had died down with time.  I think he let her believe he was helpless because it worked in his favor and there was always lunch waiting for him in her kitchen as a result.

He was different, he wasn’t dumb.

We all lived on the hill back then with the exception of our youngest brother.  He’d moved to the city with his new wife not long prior.  The locals jokingly called the place a commune, and I guess they weren’t completely wrong.  Thirty-eight acres of wooded land far beyond the city limits that we’d painstakingly spent years carving a livable space into, with five houses, all built from the ground up and inhabited by an extended family of well known culties from a well known cult.  It’s almost comical, looking back on it, knowing now how they kept an eye on us for years to make sure we weren’t doing anything weird up there.

They should have run us off with pitchforks and burning stakes at the very beginning.

Things might have ended differently for us if they had.

----------

My grandparents lived at one end of the property, an old couple as simple and solid as salted soup, devoutly religious and devoted to the cult and very much cut from the can survive anything and probably will cloth like so many old country folks of their generation.  They were waiting out the end of days up there in their little wooden house, expecting the final hour of this old system to come long before their own demise.  I liked my grandmother, she had a sweet smile and fell asleep every time granddad started talking about the Bible and she paid me five dollars every Wednesday to drive her into town to get groceries, and years later, when she was dying, she told me she’d had a dream where she met my unborn son.  I was four months pregnant and didn’t know yet that I was having a boy.  She died before he was born, but to this day, fifteen years later, he tells me he’s sure he met her, he just can’t remember when.

I was scared of my grandfather.  Not terrified, but there was nothing grandfatherly to him and I always suspected he never actually liked kids much.  He’d once told us a story about the great Fort Worth flood that wiped out most of the city when my mom was a baby, and how he had told my grandmother to let go of my 2-year-old mother while he was struggling to get them across a rushing flooded creek in water up to their shoulders.  My grandmother couldn’t swim.  We could make another Ruthie, he said.  But I couldn’t get another ‘Nita.

He said it proudly, like he was to be admired for his choice.  I was young when he told that story, but it settled into me that this was evil.

Even when he was old as dirt and dying of a brain tumor in hospice care, he made me uneasy.  I was never close to him.  But for some reason, in his final days, he forgot who everyone was except me.  I had been living in another state for years and he hadn’t seen me since before the tumor started taking his life.  But when I walked into the room he turned his head and looked at me, and he mouthed my name.

He couldn’t speak.  I don’t know what he was trying to say, struggling with words that nobody could hear.  And I felt bad.  I didn’t want to be the last person he recognized.  My cousins adored him and had spent the last few years constantly at his side, and they were angry, maybe justifiably, that I was the one he reached for.

I didn’t want that at all.

I don’t believe he was a bad man, but he never spoke of anything except the cult’s interpretation of the Bible, and it was as tiresome as it was terrifying.  Granddads are supposed to be fun.  Ours quoted doctrine at us in a deep loud commanding voice that you couldn’t interrupt and you couldn’t tune out, and once he got going you had to just settle in and wait for him to run out of zealous steam.  And then he would suddenly stop and command grandmother to turn on a John Wayne movie and bring him some ice cream, and it was over until the next time.

I know my mother resented him.  She knew grandmother was the one that had refused to let her go, the one that had held onto her even though she almost drowned by the simple act of holding on.  She knew her father had been willing to let her wash away and drown.  That he thought she was interchangeable with whatever baby they would have next.  How she could spend her entire life with that knowledge and not be deeply affected by it was something that never made sense to me, but now, when she’s in her 70′s and I’m in my 50′s, I finally understand.  It affected her.  She’ll just be damned if she’ll let anyone see it.  And she had stood there in that hospice room watching him mouth my name with resentment burning in her eyes, though she would have rather died than let anyone know what it was for.  He’d forgotten her weeks ago.

The house in the center of the hill was mom and dad.  The homestead.  The house we’d all lived in together, that we’d built with our own hands, the first thing that marked that wild overgrown hill as a place where people actually lived.  A long path through the woods connected it to the grandparents’ house, and it was the epicenter of everything in our lives.  James and I had lived in the upstairs rooms of that house until we both moved out and married our respective mates years later, a reprehensible act on our part that was never okay with my mother and that she never forgave either of us for.  She’d wanted us all to stay.  We can all live here together until the New System comes, she always said.  That’s how the Bible says it’s supposed to be.  We can all keep each other safe and on the right path until the end comes, and then we’ll all be here together forever.

A decade later when I sat up on the hill watching that house burn to the ground, there was as much relief as grief billowing into the sky with the black smoke.  It was the end of an era, and it was far beyond time for it.

Nobody saw it but me.  James was dead, had been for years.  Robbie was dead now too.  Dad was gone, so was granddad.  Me and my youngest brother David were the last two left of the kids, but he had moved to a neighboring city when he got married and he has never seen things the way I see them.  We were of different generations, we weren’t raised the same way, and he’d never experienced the abuse I lived with for the first half of my life.  And he had dedicated his own life to the cult with all the honesty and lack of guile that I didn’t have when I’d made my own dedication vows at the too-young age of sixteen.

It was the end of an era, but apparently only for me.

James’ house was up the hill, past a clearing where my dad used to keep old cars that he cannibalized for parts.  Our oldest brother Robbie, long married with kids of his own, lived at the bottom on the farthest corner of the land.  And my house was on the slope to the west, built on the spot where we’d cleared off an old half-fallen homestead from the late 1800′s, dutifully paying no mind to the fact that a grave was nestled into the slope, right where the yellow daffodils grew.  The cult told us superstition was tied up with the demons and false religion, so we didn’t have the built-in human instinct that tells most people to stay the hell away from certain things.

We just pretended it wasn’t there, and put no importance on it.  It was just an old grave.  The soil was good and the garden I planted next to it did well, though those strange daffodils always wound themselves through everything I put in the ground.  My husband said something wasn’t right about it, but I didn’t pay any attention to him.  He hadn’t been raised as devout as me.

My dad knocked on my door around lunchtime and I opened it.  He backed up, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket, the fancy leather coat the dealership had awarded him when he was designated a five-star Chrysler technician and given the state’s first and only license to work on the new Vipers that had recently rolled off the prototype line.  It was a cool jacket.  Made him look like the old pictures my other grandmother had shown me of him from the early 1960′s, when he was young and very much a product of a fancier era.  He’d never stopped greasing his hair back and was still so thin that he and I wore the same size jeans.

I’ve never understood the look on his face when I opened the door.  To this day I can’t sort it.  It wasn’t a blankness like so many people who’ve seen death wear without awareness.  It wasn’t grief.  It wasn’t even shock.

He was sorry.

Those were the first words out of his mouth.

I’m sorry.

I stood there, not knowing what he was sorry for.  It was cold.  I couldn’t push the screen door open very far because of the snow blocking it.  And my father was standing at the bottom of the steps James had helped my husband build, his hands shoved down far into his pockets like a penitent child about to get in trouble, telling me he was sorry.

James is dead, he finally said.  He’s in his house.  I went up there and he’s dead.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I do now - just now, this very moment in fact, I know that I was the first person he told.  He came straight from James’ house to mine and told me my brother was dead.

I don’t know what I said back to him, I just remember sitting down on the top step and feeling the cold bite of the snow through my pajama pants.  There’s a vague recollection of putting my face in my hands, and the embarrassing knowledge that I did that simply because I didn’t know what else to do.  And dad just stood there, nervously stepping from foot to foot in the snow, because he didn’t know what else to do either.

I think I asked How at some point.  He said he didn’t know.  He had something in his pocket but to this day I don’t know what it was.

I don’t know if it was important.  Something tells me it was.  Or maybe it was just the eternally present handkerchief he always kept on him.

I’m sorry, he said again.  He seemed to feel like it was his fault somehow.  I’m sorry.

What do we do?  I asked him.  I’ve never felt more blank.  What are we supposed to do?

I don’t remember what he said, other than he was going to get my older brother.  I remember thinking that was a good idea.  Robbie would know what to do.  He always did.  Brash and blustery and bigmouthed, he got things done while other people stood around debating how to do them.  He would get on it, whatever needed doing.  He would figure it out.

I went back in the house and dad walked away, headed down the path through the woods that connected my house to Robbie’s, hands still shoved deep in his pockets, the big retro vintage Chrysler emblem on the back of his jacket the last thing I saw before I pulled the screen door shut.  I stared down for a minute at the mound of snow it had scooped into my livingroom, still with no clue what I was supposed to do.

No clue at all.

I kicked the snow back outside and shut the door.

----------

It’s an odd thing, watching the coroner’s van drive away with someone you know inside it.  Someone you saw just yesterday.  Someone who was alive.  Someone who should still be alive but isn’t, somehow.  And since there’s really no way to earn a ride in a coroner’s van without dying, there’s an awful unsettling sensation to it that you can’t get away from.  The last time I saw James he was laughing that devious little laugh of his, his eyes red and bloodshot from the ever present asthma he’d suffered with his entire life.  I don’t count the sight of the coroner’s van leaving the hill via our long steep driveway with his cold corpse tucked into a black zippered bag, because I didn’t see him.  I never saw him.  I didn’t see him dead in his house and I didn’t see them carry him out, I didn’t see them put him in the van.  I didn’t see him later, when it was all over with.  And if I try hard enough I can imagine that van empty, with that long black bag tossed crumpled in the back without a body in it, and James somewhere else living his life however the hell he pleases.

I hold onto that.  Some days it helps.  And some days I think I see him, walking by the side of the road or getting out of a car in the post office parking lot, and it makes me happy thinking he escaped.  I see him in every hitchhiker, in every wandering traveler making his way down the interstate, in every tall thin man I glimpse from the corner of my eye as I go about my business in town.

He’s out there.

I hope he’s happy.

The ice storm hit the next day.

----------

For the next two weeks we were stuck on our hill.  Power out, no electricity, no heat, no lights, roads iced over and impassable.  We all piled up in mom and dad’s house, quietly grieving James, trying to stay warm.  Most of the state lost power for days, including the city 150 miles away where his body had been taken to the state coroner’s office.  There was no apparent cause of death, so the state ordered an autopsy.

His body had just been placed into cold storage to wait its turn when the power grid went down.  And then, by some unholy stroke of nightmarish luck, the facility’s generators failed.

Nobody could make it in to work because of the ice.  By the time someone finally got into the morgue the cold storage had been down for four days.

Six bodies melted, including James.

----------

No viable autopsy could be done, though they tried their best I suppose.  The end report was obtained two months later.  It was mostly inconclusive due to the long delay and resultant decomposition of tissue.  There was apparent scarring on James’ heart, but it was old scarring and had nothing to do with his death.  His lungs were scarred as well, but that was no surprise, he’d had severe asthma his entire life.  There was no determinable cause of death, no inflicted trauma, no presence of illicit drugs as far as they could tell from the limited toxicology report they managed with what they had to work with.

No reason.

He’d simply died.

It seemed fitting, to me at least, that the end of him be enshrouded in an unsolvable mystery.  He was a secretive person, intensely private.  He would have loved knowing nobody had a clue what happened to him.

And so we drew our own conclusion as a family.  He’d had an asthma attack in his sleep.  There had been an inhaler next to his bed, but it was new and still in the box.  He simply hadn’t woken up to use it.  Dad didn’t participate in the drawing of this conclusion, his input kept stoically to himself, like he knew something the rest of us didn’t.

We pretended not to see it.

He and mom braved the last of the ice a few days later to make the 150 mile drive to see James one last time.

They came back different.

You couldn’t tell it was him, my mother said.  He was melted, literally.  It was like one of those science fiction movies where they melt you with a laser beam and you turn to goo.

Dad had nothing to say.  He went to bed and stayed there until the next day.

You can go see him, mom told me.  I’ll go with you if you want to go.  But I don’t recommend it.

I decided not to go.

And so I never saw my brother dead.  I never saw any proof that he was gone.  He just wasn’t there anymore.  There was no funeral, he was cremated and his ashes were sent home weeks later, and I went on with my life with the image in my head of James, alive, somewhere else.

----------

Dad was different from that day on.  He’d always been stoic, terse, strict.  My childhood had been spent in fear of him, an eternal dread of making him mad and feeling his temper erupt keeping me from showing any hint of a personality during my formative years.  The cult had forced him to abide by the violent tenet of Spare the rod, spoil the child and there was never any risk of me being spoiled.

James being gone flipped a switch in him.  He was nicer suddenly.  Mellow.  Kind.  After the trauma wore off his humor discovered itself and he was funny.  The dour angry demeanor fell off and revealed a man that I was sad never to have known before.  He and I became friends.  I could sense in his new attitude toward me that he regretted how he’d raised me and respected the way I’d always stood up and been my own person despite it.  But my mother was falling off the deep end and for all the newfound easygoingness of my father, she counterbalanced it with an extremism born of the religious fervor of a mother determined to gain enough favor with God to see her dead child again.  And she was going to make sure the rest of us did too.

We all had to get good and straight on the path, get completely right and stay that way, or we’d never see James again.  He’d be in the New World and we wouldn’t, and how would she explain that to him?  She and I worked together in a law office at the time and as she became more unhinged and unpleasant, I reacted by becoming more outgoing and accomplished.  Our boss changed my work designation from receptionist to Executive Assistant and started teaching me how to do everything from filing papers at the courthouse to photographing accident scenes.  I no longer answered to my mother, the office manager.  I answered directly to the boss.

That didn’t go over well.  She was a control freak with heavy untreated trauma, and the one person in the world she felt the most obsessive need to control was suddenly no longer under her thumb in a workspace where she considered herself the supreme authority.  She countermanded every order the boss gave me and tried to load me up with general office chores that left me no time to do the important assignments he’d given me.  I had no choice but to tell her she wasn’t my superior anymore.

She chose that day to have her nervous breakdown over James, jumping out of my car at a red light on the way home and storming angrily through a shopping mall with me trailing frantically along behind her, yelling for security to arrest me while I tried to get her to calm down.  I ended up telling her she wasn’t the only person who lost James but that none of the rest of us were allowed to experience our own grief because we were too busy catering to hers.

She sat down on a bench outside the sporting goods store and glared at me with a cold hatred I’ve seen on very few other faces, ever.

I knew it would be you, she hissed at me.

That moment changed our relationship forever.  It changed me forever.  That was the day I decided my life was my own, that she not only didn’t have authority over me at work, she didn’t have authority over me anywhere else either.  She could no longer dictate my actions, my behavior, my thoughts and feelings.

For this she disowned me.  It was the first of several disownings over the next few years.  I got used to it.  We went to work the next day like nothing had happened, and I didn’t do a single thing on the task list she slapped down on my desk.  It was a metaphor for the rest of my life, but I didn’t know it yet.

My husband and I moved out of state a couple of months later, away from that hill, away from her increasingly controlling paranoia and bitterness, the first of many small steps toward freedom.

As we were driving away with our trailer full of personal belongings behind us, he said one thing that I tried to argue against, but that somewhere deep inside I knew was probably right.

That land is cursed, he said.

----------

A few weeks before we moved my youngest brother came to town and we went into James’ house together.  It was exactly like it had been the day my dad found him.  The only thing that stood out as different was the bare mattress on the bed - the men from the coroner had wrapped him up in the sheet he’d been laying on and took it with them, leaving just the naked springform mattress James had bought for Jessica right before her final breakdown and their subsequent separation.

It took me a while to go in the bedroom, but I knew from the moment I walked into the house that I was going to end up there.  I needed to see it, the place where James had closed his eyes and left us.

There was a small puddle of dried blood near the foot of the bed, brown and stained into the fabric.  James always slept backwards, with his head at the wrong end.  The blood had come from his nose.

I touched it.  I don’t know why.  It was dry.

He was gone.

----------

David and I laughed a lot that day.  James had been funny in a way that was distinctly him, quiet and of few words, but those words had always counted.  And as we sorted through his things and talked about him and moved some of his stuff into boxes to be stored away, I felt as much awed respect as befuddlement at what was around me.  He’d never been a conformist, which I knew was why the cult had never gotten a firm grasp on him.  He was unknowable and therefore unbindable.  But his house was proof that he didn’t conform to any human expectations either, and nothing in it made sense unless you’d spent time around him.

There was an engine in the bathtub.  I’m not sure what it went to.  Another engine, in the beginning stages of disassemblage, rested on a blue tarp in the center of the livingroom floor, obviously the last project he’d been working on.  There wasn’t much furniture - his wife had taken most of it when she left and it would have never entered his mind to replace any of it.  Jessica’s cookware was in the kitchen cabinets, unused, some of it still in the original boxes, some not even fully unwrapped from their wedding shower years before.  Jessica didn’t cook, she microwaved.  David asked me if I thought it would be okay for him to take a glass Pyrex measuring cup because he’d broken his.  I told him to take it.  It had never been used.

I didn’t want anything, but knew I needed to take something.  One of my husband’s solo CDs was sitting on the entertainment center and the cover, the cover I’d designed, caught my eye and brought me to the CD player to pop the tray open.

Inside was a CD single of The Way.

It was the only thing I took.

----------

My husband told me some time later that my dad and older brother had altered the scene before the police arrived.  After the phonecall from me his boss had rushed him home and he’d gone up to James’ house without my knowledge.  He’d thought it strange that he’d had to step around at least a dozen empty compressed air cans scattered haphazardly around the place as he entered, like they’d been used and tossed aside one after another.  There had been several more on the floor around the bed.  My father had told him to go back down and see how mom and I were doing, and when he returned to James’ house after the coroner’s departure, the cans were gone.  Other than that he said things seemed different, but he couldn’t say quite how.  Just not the same.

He told me my dad didn’t call the police until after he and Robbie had been in there at least an hour, alone with the body.

It’s not something we’ve talked about often, because there’s no satisfactory explanation for it that either of us can come up with.  My mother says they probably didn’t want the police to assume the cans meant he was huffing compression fluid and accidentally killed himself, because Look at the shame and reproach that would bring on the congregation if anyone thought such a thing!  We all knew he used the compressed air to clear the valves on the engines he was working on, all mechanics do, it’s common.  Wouldn’t the police have accepted that explanation?  Dad was the only one that spoke to them.  They wrote down whatever he said, and then they left, and then the coroner came and took James away and that was that.  My father, the most upright straight-and-narrow devoutly dedicated man I’ve ever known in my life, misled the police for a reason that he took with him to his own grave.

The only other person in the world who knew the truth about it took it to his grave too.

At the same time.

In the same car.

Four years later, on October 18, 2002.

----------

The big garbage bag of empty air cans and whatever else that was removed from James’ house that morning had been stashed in my dad’s garage and stayed there until a few weeks after he and Robbie’s joint funeral, when my mother asked my husband’s old boss to come and dispose of it.  Scott was a man who knew people who could do things.

The evidence, whatever it was evidence of, vanished.

----------

The mystery around James never dissolved and eventually no one talked about it anymore, I guess because there was no way we could ever truly find out what happened without him here to tell us.  There were a lot of details that we could never find a way to weave together into anything that made sense and a lot of it was probably inconsequential anyway.  There was a girlfriend that he’d tried to keep hidden from us, a woman that was quite a bit older than him who wasn’t a member of the cult and therefore needed to be kept a secret.  In the end she had convinced him to stop hiding their relationship and he’d bought her a ring.  We met her all of twice before he died, and within days of his passing she left town with her brother and never came back, taking whatever she might have known with her.

James’ ex Jessica had sneaked onto the hill and broken into his house to put a dead raccoon in his kitchen sink a few days prior to his death.  We were shocked when he told us she trespassed on the land often without anyone knowing, and my mother made my father fix the electric gate down at the road so that it wouldn’t open without one of three clickers in the possession of herself, my father, and me.  James would have to come to her house and get hers any time he needed to leave the hill, an arrangement he agreed to because Jessica stole things from his house all the time, she would absolutely take a gate opener if she saw it.

He told us the gate wouldn’t keep her out though, and that she didn’t come in that way anyway.  The only way to protect ourselves from her was to lock her up and he doubted even that would do it.

He died less than a week later, and twenty three years later we still don’t know how or why.

----------

We never felt safe on the hill again.  Jessica was deranged in the worst possible way, we’d known it for a while, and James was her obsession.  She’d threatened to kill him multiple times and had tried twice.  We hadn’t known this, because James, big strong stoic Clint Eastwood type that he was, wasn’t about to tell anyone he was violently abused for years by a skinny little woman that everyone believed was not much more than a meek dormouse with shyness issues and a case of painful awkwardness.  But we knew she was evil.  We just didn’t have any proof.

The first thing my mother said after the initial emotional breakdown of finding her son dead was Jessica did this, I don’t know how but I know she did it.

I believe she was probably right.  But if Jessica was anything she was wily and devious with a strong survival instinct and an uncanny ability to lie convincingly and draw sympathy onto herself.  She’d convinced us for years that she was the perfect combination of sweetly harmless and endearingly clueless, but that only lasted until the day she called 911 screaming that James was beating her and then threw herself face first into a tree in their front yard and sat, calmly singing and coloring in a coloring book on the porch with blood running down her forehead, waiting for the police to arrive.  The act she put on when they got there was one for the Academy, but the officers didn’t buy it.

James calmly rolled up his sleeves and showed them his scars where she’d burned him and slashed him with a kitchen knife.  He pulled up his shirt and pointed out the marks she’d left on him with her teeth and nails.  He hooked a finger into his mouth and showed them the empty hole where she’d knocked one of his teeth out with a baseball bat.  One of the officers asked him why he hadn’t killed her and buried her somewhere on the land already.

She left in the back of the squad car, and my mother took James to the courthouse to get divorce papers started two days later.

Jessica came to his memorial service when we finally had it, several weeks after his death.  She wasn’t invited but we couldn’t keep her from coming.  She wore black like a widow and created a dramatic disruption complete with loud wailing and declarations of undying love, and afterward she stood to one side of the room, smirking at us with the kind of icy malice that you only see on the dangerously deranged, and then usually only in the movies.  Several people commented in hushed voices, asking why she’d been allowed to come.  At one point she started wailing They killed him!!, but everyone with the exception of her mother ignored her.

Her mother, who was still in our congregation, flitted around the room chatting with everyone, sobbing her heart out like it was her own son we’d just memorialized.  She was an ER nurse and had been famously fired from her job at the hospital for taking locked-cabinet medications home by the purse load.  She claimed she put them in her pocket to use on her shift and forgot to return them to the cabinet before leaving.

Jessica had been staying with her for a while.

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We fed the crowd at mom’s later that afternoon with my husband and his boss guarding the gate, making sure she didn’t try to come into my mother’s house.  The police were called preemptively, and because this was a town of 300 with not much of anything else to do, a squad car was dispatched and stationed near the inlet to the main drive.

Jessica showed up not much later, like we knew she would.  She drove past the police and parked a few yards down from them in plain sight, just sitting there by the side of the road, far enough away from our property that we couldn’t legally do anything about it.  The officers got out and talked to her, warned her not to cause us any problems, and she fed them a woeful tale about being banned from her beloved husband’s memorial service and denied the right to say goodbye to him.

The officers knew there was no body at that service to say goodbye to.  They also knew her.

My husband came up the hill and told us she was down at the road and that Scott was blocking the driveway with his truck to keep her out.  I told my mother it was time to file a restraining order against her.  She was living in fear and Jessica was known to be trespassing on our property frequently.  No, she told me with tears in her eyes but not a sign of distress on her face.  It was a look I knew, because my mother rarely showed emotion unless she was angry and the rest of the time it was this cold detachment.  That would bring reproach on the congregation because everyone knows what we are.  I can’t do that.  I won’t let her win that way.  I won’t let her cause us to bring shame on God’s name.

God’s name.  I took it in vain that day.

More than once.

I was leaving in a few weeks, moving a thousand miles away.  My husband and I weren’t going to be there to help her keep an eye out, and thirty eight acres of heavily wooded land is impossible to protect and easy to sneak onto from a hundred different directions, James had shown us proof of that.

God will protect us as long as we do the right thing and leave it to him, she said.  He knows what she is.

I think it was just a coincidence that nothing terrible happened in the following weeks, because my faith was getting tenuous and a lot of prayers were going unanswered.  But Jessica quietly disappeared back to her own world after a couple of infuriating weeks of putting herself in our paths every chance she got, and not long after that my husband and I moved away, and as we left the driveway for what we thought would be the last time he sighed and shook his head with the exasperation of a man about to say I told you so.

“That land is cursed,” he said.

I tried to disagree, though I don’t know why.

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Less than a mile up the road we passed a man walking.  He was tall and thin and covered in the dust of a long journey with a ratty backpack strapped to his back, and as we passed him I caught his reflection in the side mirror.

It was James, I knew it in my heart every bit as strongly as I knew it couldn’t be.

He was walking away from the hill, toward the west.  The way we were going.  And I swear on whatever holy relic you wish to place under my hand that he raised his head and met eyes with me in the mirror, and he smiled.

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Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold And it's always summer They'll never get cold They'll never get hungry They'll never get old and gray You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today

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