#honestly growing up catholic makes it hard sometimes to figure out what the other christians do because catholics are judgemental bitches.

[seeminglyseph]

I know everyone hates M Knight Shyamalan's The Village, and "oooh it's modern day all along" seems like a lame twist, but consider:

A) wool cloaks fuck and that's always a cool look and I won't apologize for the fact that I definitely just wanted to wear cloaks instead of coats even though I live somewhere that experiences winters in Hardcore Mode and that was not viable

And B) the concept that your parents decided for you that you had to live in a dangerous and reductive environment and raised you on fear and punishment and secrecy because they hated the way society was developing and didn't want you to have access or choice was like. Extremely real fore as someone raised Catholic with multiple friends raised either Jehovah's Witness or Mormon. Like, obviously, it was extremely exaggerated as a 2000s horror-thriller type movie, but like.

It's no Lady in the Water. I honestly haven't seen The Village in a bit, but in concept, I think it does make sense as a cult movie. It's just that too much is like... "oooo it's a twist!" Rather than, like... "damn, the adults of this movie have a cult compound that they have used to isolate, indoctrinate, and control their children, literally creating and becoming monsters that haunt and torment them to keep them in line to maintain a way of life in line with their own moral values"

And like. If you look at it through the lens of like. The emotional impact of how much betrayal goes on within the film in the families and the cult and for the children who had no choice to be there and no information, like. That's much more impactful than simply "it was modern day all along"

It's "your parents have been lying to you all along, and all of your pain and fear has served no greater purpose. Half of these rules were not to keep you safe. They were to make you obey, and you have no way of knowing which are which. The people you trust have deeply and intentionally fractured your relationship with reality as a way to keep you contained and docile and under control. You have been betrayed on the most fundamental level by the people who were supposed to raise you and guard you and keep you safe."

And that's like. That's good horror that sticks in the back of your brain forever? Idk. Maybe my imaginary Village is better than the real Village but like. I think it's a better movie than it gets credit for.

And I want more excuses to wear wool cloaks, like damn.

[brujoenlafrontera]

hi!!! I’m a puertorriqueño/nicaragüense enby looking into resources for learning bruja stuff, any good place you know to start?

I’ve gotten a couple of asks about this lately, and i’m so happy to know there are more latinos finding their way to the practice, tumblr’s brujeria tag often gives the impression that theres so little of us out there reclaiming our practices but getting asks like these brings me a lot of faith that thats not true :) first and foremost:

GETTING INTO BRUJERIA IS HARD.

it really is. baby brujos like us know that better than anyone- getting started, is often the hardest part of doing anything, and its no different with brujeria. it can feel so overwhelming and feeling lost is natural. from my experience, although i am still a newbie ive been able to find a lot of information out there, here are the best places to find info, sorted by priority:

FAMILY! a little self explanatory, but brujeria at its best is truly is an inherited, familial practice. If you can, before delving into internet resources, definitely connect w your family if you’re able to and ask them for guidance and about their experiences!

Your family is always the best resource over anything you can find online; theres so much misinformation out there or information not relevant to your region and if someone in your family already has established practices, always trust them first

 Do some thinking back to all your cultural traditions, quirks, stories, and superstitions that you’ve  learned from your family across time and never thought too much about- and rediscover them under a new light

KEEP IN MIND: brujeria is NOT a singular , concrete practice w concrete rules in itself, the term blankets a lot of traditions across latam, the caribbean, mexico, but imo its always best to stick with brujeria related to your heritage and where your connection is.

this can be hard for people (like me!) with huge family taboos toward brujeria that make it unsafe to ask around about, and/or limitations in family connections (also like me unfortunately). I personally can really only get the tidbits and stories that my family accidentally slips out when I occasionally see them. i try to write them down as much as possible, but the info i can get is limited... and thats where the following comes in.

ONLINE COMMUNITIES. i.e, youtube, tumblr, instagram brujx communities. notice I haven’t said “internet” in general- the reason why i trust community based social media more than random individual websites you find on google is because, in the case of brujeria and honestly any non-european craft, you’re often gonna find a LOT of white people writing blogs, books, etc about their “spiritual experiences” in latam countries and wrongly/incorrectly taking ATR or indigenous traditions (like with smudging). I know, with social media, although those same white people are also on insta and tumblr, it’s a LOT easier to see the face behind the accounts and differentiate who to trust, who’s legit and has real experience to share, rather than a nameless, faceless, website that is actually some colonizer sharing colonized ideas who thinks theyre on a spiritual journey taking traditions all willy nilly. And the fact that in social media, its much easier to find a lot of good brujas at once bc they tend to follow each other lmao.what ive personally done to find information tho is essentially SCOUR tumblrs, insta accs, and watching tons of youtube videos for posts, accounts, videos, etc, and narrowing down good info from there through , namely:

CHECKING WHO YOUR SOURCE IS!!!

ASKING YOURSELF FROM WHAT EXPERIENCE THEYRE SPEAKING FROM

ALWAYS TAKING EVERYTHING WITH A GRAIN OF SALT

AND STICKING TO INFO FROM CULTURES OPEN AND RELEVANT TO ME.

again, brujería is different depending on where your family is from in latam, and if you have an established connection to indigenous and/or black roots, so it’s useful to use keywords relating to that when searching (like if ur black, you can look into ATRs(african traditional religions) which tend to mix deeply with brujeria, if ur indigenous, finding other people from your tribe is great, and if youre not pursuing your already learned traditions you can think about connecting to them more deeply(altho indigenous traditions are their own thing, sometimes they do mix with brujeria too), and apart from familial roots, if ur catholic/christian and/or want to explore it, saint work/catholic brujeria might be a good fit for you!)  

tumblr: there are a couple of fantastic brujxs on this site with great blogs and resources who have sadly left the site, but i still go through their posts heavily for spells, rituals, scraps of info! etting started w brujería is hard bc there’s really not that much info out there right now, but i compile as many good brujeria posts i find on my acc.

@brujeria-n-bongs great for catholic brujeria, now at @Upliftherbs on instagram

@brujeria-lost @barberwitch @reina-morada @highbrujita

@naomi121406 is by far the most active and informative tumblr resource ive found, shes an afro-indigenous diaguita curandera from argentina so shes also really helpful if ATRs are in your path!

Im not black myself and dont follow ATRs so i don’t really know many good blogs for afrolatine brujxs out there but if anyone would like to tag some in the replies thatd be awesome!

instagram: Ive found that instagram #brujeria tags has a pretty healthy active stream of posts. You’re gonna have to sift through a lot of them to get to the good stuff though- imo a lot of hispanics use the brujería tag not to mean “latine brujería” but just the spanish word for witchcraft, so a lot of white hispanics will put wicca/neo witchcraft in the tag. imo that’s really not something i’m personally interested in bc it’s not true to brujeria’s traditional nature, is very white/eruropean , and that wicca shit basically just got here. its a relatively a recent thing😭 so i try to stick to bruja accounts that aren’t influenced by that.

youtube: The youtube brujería tag is hit or miss? and again, contains a lot of wicca. But there are some good practitioners on there like The Mexican Witch! You just gonna look around, and dont be afraid to click on videos by really really small youtubers; they often are the ones with the most informative and legit things to say!

Everyone’s path as a bruja/o/x (sjdf trying to be inclusive w gendered language is difficult) is different but here are some topics i think are great to look into as a beginner!

ancestors: start at the bottom and figure out who they are, where theyre from, and set up an altar. it’ll help you a lot with figuring out your identity and path as a bruja later on.

setting up a grimoire

divination: tarot is actually what got me into brujeria at first! tarot isnt strictly traditional and is european in itself but its a wonderful tool for connecting to dieties, saints, etc as well as super fun and helps a lot with introspection

ritual abrecaminos, aka road opening spells!

amarres (love spells... proceed with caution)

limpias, mal de ojo

saint work: even if you’re not catholic (im ex catholic), a growing number of us (especially lgbt latines like @/upliftherbs on instagram) are starting to take back and decolonize our view of saints like La Virgen Maria and removing her from the rigid european/colonized interpretation thats been forced into us

candle spells in general (i fucking love candles tbh, cheap, easy, fun, and WORKS)

spiritual colognes, how to cleanse

finally, here are some helpful posts yall should definitely read and think about moving forward!

about using tumblr as a resource

about looking into brujeria as a part-white part latine

bruja psa + about reclaiming lost indiginety

honestly naomi’s entire brujeria tag is great and super informative for beginners and basically holds answers for almost anything at this point

hope this post helps yall out!

EDIT: oh lord now that this is posted the outline format i tried to use is all kinds of fucked up please dont mind the odd numbering lmfao tumbr hates organized formats

[ohhgingersnaps]

can you explain what you mean by "questioning the validity of the bible"? cuz i thought the bible was flawless 🤔

(in reference to my tags on this post)

Hey anon! I really appreciate you asking this question. This got pretty long, and I apologize for that, but I feel like it’s important for me to really dig into this, because this is an area where I feel like I’ve had some really interesting (and if I’m honest, deeply uncomfortable and difficult) spiritual growth.

TL;DR I place a lot of value on being encouraged to ask fundamental questions, fully allowing for the possibility of discovering you’ve been wrong. Truth-seeking, although sometimes painful, is a natural part of one’s spiritual growth and development, and it ultimately leads to deeper faith and understanding. I personally have gone through this process with questions about the validity of Scripture, hence the tag.

Background (and a bunch of explaining) under the cut!

First, I think most Christians will agree with your sentiments. I vividly remember sitting in the college dining hall with a friend and being asked whether you need to believe the whole Bible to be a Christian, and it stopped me dead in my tracks, because most Christians I know do, but do you, technically? (Biblically, I think the answer is actually no; faith in Jesus is sufficient, per Romans 10:9. One does wonder where a person is getting their ideas about who Jesus is and what he taught, so there’s definitely some inherent dependence on the historical accuracy of the Gospels there... But all of this is kind of beside the point.)

Overall, I think the exact starting point of The Bible Question was my trip a couple of years ago to the Museum Of The Bible in DC. It was a really interesting experience overall, but the one thing that really stuck with me was The Shepherd Of Hermas. This is an apocryphal book that was generally accepted as canonical Scripture by many early Christians, but was eventually left out of the Bible itself.

Now, I’m sure the Catholic church had perfectly good reasons for rejecting it, but it occurred to me that I, personally, did not know what those reasons were! I was suddenly hit with the irony that despite being Protestant, I had never questioned the validity of the Catholic-constructed canon of Scripture. To be clear, I absolutely don’t mean this as a knock against Catholic folks: I mean that in the Protestant circles I grew up in, we put absolutely no stock in church tradition, in every single case besides this one. The texts themselves are authentic, historically speaking, but which books “belong” in the New Testament portion of Scripture was decided in 1500 AD, and how much faith do I have that those council members were right? The Protestants removed a bunch of apocryphal books when they left, so why did they decide to keep the remaining text?

Hence, the question: Could the church have been imperfect in the construction of Scripture?

I was also absolutely terrified to ask this question.

Because, here’s the thing. If you are a Good Christian Girl Who Got Saved At Five™ you go to church and you maybe Ask Hard Questions every once in a while, but usually those questions aren’t fundamental faith-shaking questions! They are questions that are important and cerebral and sometimes difficult to answer, but not necessarily faith-essential. They are questions like, Do people still speak in tongues? or How much free will do human beings have? They are absolutely not questions like, Hey, um, we don’t know who wrote Hebrews? Why is it part of the canon of Scripture??

But here is the other thing: This question did not leave. I was scared of it, so naturally, I tried to ignore it. I had so much shame about it, too! I kept thinking like, Normal Christians don’t have questions like this, this is such a fundamental thing, why am I struggling with this! What’s wrong with me! So I repressed the question as much as I could, but it festered, and my relationship with God ended up suffering, because God wanted me to take this out in the open and deal with it properly, and I refused.

(Disclaimer that I was also dealing with some pretty bad burnout, which didn’t help, and of course even under normal circumstances my brain is generally kind of... Easily thrown into havoc by stuff like this? I like having things in a framework and do not like when that framework is disrupted, but also I have to properly vet and interrogate everything, so you can understand where the conflict here is.)

After six-ish months of bottling everything up, I finally broke down while I was home for the holidays. Obviously my parents were deeply concerned, both for my spiritual and mental well-being, but it was through talking with them that I realized that my question wasn’t inherently bad: At its core, it’s seeking truth, which is inherently good.

What I’d characterized as this horrible, faith-breaking thing was just spiritual growing pains. God was calling me to engage with Scripture more deeply, in a new, different, exciting way, and I was too scared and ashamed of asking the question to even think about following him there. It was taking me outside of what I felt was safe and well-established, but when has God ever stuck to what we know as safe and well-established, right?

Honestly, I’m still in the process of working through this. I’m taking the canon of Scripture at face value for the moment, because “go through each individual book of the Bible and figure out why it was included, and also go through the Apocrypha too just for good measure” is a pretty big goal and I don’t want to put my actual Bible studies on hold! And I feel like as I go through the books, I’ll end up saying, Oh, yeah, I guess that makes sense more often than not, and I’ll be glad to be fully convinced in my own mind about everything once this process is done... But I’ll have my answers, and I’ll be more certain of those answers than I was before, because I’ll have fully interrogated that question.

So I place a lot of value on not only being allowed to ask fundamental questions, but being actively encouraged to do so, fully allowing for the possibility of discovering you’ve been wrong. Seeking after the truth will never lead us away from God, only towards a deeper understanding.

I know this got super long (and maybe a little heretical?) but I hope it helps clarify where I was coming from with that particular tag. Thanks again for asking, and I hope this is useful!

[aprillikesthings]

Thoughts on praying. (Well, actually; on a lot of subjects, that’s just one of them, lol)

(behind a readmore for ppl who’d prefer to skip this kind of thing)

Praying is a weird thing, for me. 

The fact is--I’m coming back to some kind of faith after...hm. Fourteen years of atheism? I missed religion and especially ritual, and would openly admit that in conversation if it came up. I was, in fact, a practicing Wiccan for a good year or two after realizing I didn’t believe in any kind of divinity anymore. I only left my coven after it became less important to me and I kept skipping rituals in favor of things like group bicycle rides (the drunken party kind, at night with loud music). 

I started going to church again because I missed singing Christmas music. But I went to a “liturgical” church because I knew I wanted something ritual-heavy; old-fashioned in form but liberal in spirit. (An ELCA church would probably have been just as good; but I didn’t know about them--just that I couldn’t do a Catholic church and Episcopal was the closest thing I knew of that was affirming of LGBT people.) 

And here I go bumping up against this again--this church fits me so well, the people in it are so good, the priest is fantastic; I keep finding out she’s friends with liberal Christian authors like Nadia Bolz-Weber and Rachel Held Evans--and it feels like fate. I mean, the first time I walked up to the building, I was greeted by a rainbow flag with parts of my fave Bible verse on it. (It’s on our nametags, too.) That might as well have been a flag saying “Hey April, this is the place for you.”

But do I believe in fate? Or destiny, or my life being guided by god? I don’t know. I still think the idea is hard to believe when so many people’s lives are shit through no fault of their own. 

Anyway: prayer. 

When I pray, who the fuck am I even talking to? I sometimes do feel like someone is listening. But so many people have prayed over the years and not felt like anyone heard them; so many people have poured out their hearts to god and gotten jack squat in response. It feels incredibly presumptuous to think Jesus is listening to me and not them. 

But I do it anyway. 

As I’ve mentioned, the Episcopal church is a liturgical one; they’re big on things like set prayer formats. The Book of Common Prayer (BCP, which I still sometimes misread as “birth control pills”), in some version or another, unites the entire Anglican Communion and is only changed very slowly over many years of arguing; some of the prayers in it have barely changed since the 1500′s. There’s a little wiggle room for each congregation, but step into any Episcopal church in the United States and the basic structure will be the same between them every Sunday: the readings from the lectionary, chanting a psalm, passing the peace, the Eucharist--there’s only a few versions of the Eucharist given in the BCP. 

And I do like the set prayers. As I’ve mentioned, sometimes the collect for a given day feels really apropos. Sometimes the ones we do in church feel aimed directly at my own heart, and there I am feeling strangely exposed by words hundreds of thousands of people will be saying that same morning. 

But I’ve also started, in my own uneven way, to do personal prayer. I’ve leaned heavily on Nicole Cliff’s essay called How I Pray that she wrote for The Toast (RIP), not long after her conversion. Her daily prayer comes down to (my own summation):

1. A rote prayer such as Our Father to separate this time from the rest of the day  2. Fearless moral inventory! What could I have done better? Where did I fuck up? (For Nicole this includes sometimes stopping prayer to go and apologize.) 3. Gratitude! 4. Ask for things I want 5. Pray for other people 

And as Nicole points out, you don’t have to believe in anything at all for this kind of private reflection to be useful. Many books have been written about daily gratitude practice, for instance. She noted that taking the time to be grateful for her husband every day has improved her relationship with him, and that makes sense. 

Nicole says her fave part, by far, is praying for other people; and honestly? That’s my fave thing as well. I did not expect that. And while I do keep a running list (in a private just-me discord server), frequently edited, of people I’m praying for on the regular so I don’t forget; I find myself doing it all the time at random during the day. I will see someone’s post on twitter talking about something hard in their life, and I’ll pray for them. A coworker will mention that they’re having trouble finding stable housing, and I’ll pray for them. 

(To my eternal amusement--when I pray for people I know through fandom, I usually end up using their fandom name, not their real one; even if I know it! I figure God knows who I mean.)

They’re usually not eloquent prayers. Sometimes it’s more of a feeling than words--a weird fuzzy ball of compassion that grows and moves through me. Sometimes it feels like I’m a toddler tugging on God’s sleeve to get their attention and then wordlessly pointing at someone. Look, look! This person needs you.

And sometimes I find it difficult to pray to big-G God outside of the set prayers. Sometimes I can only do it if I’m praying to Mary. (Episcopal opinions on Mary devotion vary a great deal; from folks who pray the Rosary, to folks who think it’s Papist Bullshit.) Mary is easier. And she can pass things along. Praying to Jesus still feels intimidating to me sometimes, so I talk to his mom instead. I feel like I can be less formal with her. 

I’m not going to claim this is making me an amazing person. But I do think that, whether or not anyone or anything is listening, taking a few seconds to pay attention and actively feel compassion towards other people is helping me be kinder. Sometimes. I just started, y’know, give me time. 

[prettylittlelyres]

This Still Happens: Gordon Benn and Religion

Ffion shrugs Scott's hand off her shoulder and snaps at him. "Don't fucking touch me! And don't tell me how to feel about Gordon disrespecting my God!"

Oh, for fuck's sake. I scoff. "Ffion," I say, as if she's three and I'm thirty-three, "It's only disrespectful if the thing I'm talking about is worthy of respect. Else, it's just called talking."

I've passed 11,000 words on this draft of This Still Happens, and I'm getting near to the end of Chapter Two, which is where things really take an awful turn.

We're seeing a really nasty side to Gordon in this chapter. He's hurting inside, and he's lashing out at other people--mainly Sophie and Ffion so far--because of it. That's in no way OK, and I'm in no way condoning it, but I do think it needs talking about.

As a Queer Catholic, I have a really complicated relationship with God--as do most people--but I've often felt like I can't do the religion thing and be Sapphic. Luckily I've always been aware that being Queer isn't smething I can change--it's just the way I am--so I've never been in such a place where I've tried to "fix" myself in order to feel like a proper Catholic... but its gone the other way. For a long time I felt like I couldn't believe in God, because I was always told to pray for the the homophobic bullying I've experienced to stop... and then it didn't. Instead of blaming the adults I should have been able to trust, I blamed God, and decided I didn't want to know Him.

If He would allow such horrible things to happen, why would I? In later years I've come to realise that it wasn't God who allowed it to happen, but authority figures--teachers, parents--and that God never would allow it to happen.

This is a major reason why I don't believe God to be omnipotent. Omnibenevolent, yes, and omniscient, yes. He knows who I am and He loves me--He made me that way--and He knows what happened... but He couldn't have stopped it. Humans do bad things to each other, and it's gone beyond a level God can control. I hate that, I really do. But it's not God's fault, and through Him I've been able to find better acceptance of myself as a biromantic lesbian, far more than I would ever have found growing up in the house, the town, the environment I grew up in.

My approach to Catholicism is by no means traditional. I don't go to Church, I'm not baptised or confirmed, and I don't believe in the omnipotent God most Catholics--for example, my Grandma--do (did, in Grandma's case, may she rest in peace). But I do feel it gives me a sense of protection, stops me from feeling isolated, and stops me from feeling powerless in times of trouble. I pray at home, I pray at university, and I pray when I'm out and about, for safety and happiness for my friends and me. I feel God in nature, God by the sea, God in the forests where I walk, and I feel better about the world and the people in it. God wants what's best for us, His children, and He would give it to us if we could. But most effort must come from us--people--because there's only so much God can do.

We must be the ones to seek happiness and to create it for other people. We must be kind. We must not lash out, even when we are in pain; that just creates so much more, pushing the world even further from the one God wants us to inhabit.

Gordon takes a different view. and we see that in the way he interacts with Ffion McDade, a Baptist girl in his class, and Sophie Wainwright, his friend of many years, herself a devout Roman Catholic.

"Soph, come on. Be reasonable about this," I say, leaning on my upturned hockey stick as Chris hands out bibs and Sophie pretends to be intrigued by the patchy grass.. "Chris loves you so, so much. Please don't throw that away on my account. I'm OK, I promise. He made a bit of a silly mistake, but, honestly, I think he was just a bit… knocked for six by my coming out. Given time, he'll be every bit as accepting as everyone else. You'll see."

Sophie huffs, and thumps the ground with the curved end of her stick. "That's only part of it," she mutters, "There's a lot more to it than you know, more to it than you can understand. By treating you like crap for being gay—the way God made you, by the way—Chris is saying God made a mistake. And I can't be OK with that, Gordon. You know I can't."

I shrug. "I don't care. I don't believe in God."

"Yeah? Well, I do," Sophie says, hooking her thumb around the chain of her necklace and showing me her crucifix, as if I needed reminding that she's Catholic, like most people in Chase Valley. I'm constantly being reminded of how fucking Catholic everyone is. Pisses me off no end.

Sophie sets her jaw, and speaks through gritted teeth. "So I'm sure you'll forgive me for being uncomfortable with Chris turning his back on you for the way God made you."

I snort with laughter. "I don't think he'll be turning his back on me any time soon, Soph. That's kind of the point."

"For fuck's sake, Gordon, that's my boyfriend you're talking about!" she snaps, putting her hands on her hips and scowling at me with hard black eyes. "Can you try and take this seriously? This isn't easy for me!"

"Fine," I say, "I'm very sorry your boyfriend's a little bit homophobic. But I'm fine. And he's apologised. And he's trying to be better. So I don't know why you're getting so pissed off about all this. It's not like it affects you."

Sophie rolls her eyes and mutters heavenwards. "You have no fucking clue what you're talking about, do you?" she says, turning her eyes back on me.

I shake my head. "Apparently not."

We're seeing everything from Gordon's point of view in Chapter Two. That's the benefit--and the drawback--of the first-person style. Although we get a very clear picture of what Gordon's thinking and feeling, and therefore a better understanding of why he acts the way and does the things he does... we don't get that for other characters, because nor does Gordon. Something we'll learn about Gordon in coming chapters is that he's very set in his ways, very determined to hold onto his views, and little ready to listen to those that differ. He rejects the idea of religion because he thinks it makes people closed-minded, but never stops to think that he himself is closed-minded. And that's his main problem.

Gordon won't see Soph's point of view because it involves a belief in God. What Gordon doesn't know--because nobody has told him, and he's only seeing the world through his own eyes--is that Sophie is bisexual, and has been struggling to reconcile this with her faith. A few days ago, she went to Confession, and confided all this in Father Matthew... expecting ostracism... but finding acceptance. Father Matthew tells her it's OK to be Sapphic, because God made her that way... but Gordon doesn't know. He expects the same rejection of his gayness that Sophie expected for her bisexuality, and because he deliberately steers clear of the Church... which means he never gets to know what is actually being said there.

Much as Gordon might want to think he's super-open-minded due to his militant atheism, he's actually closing his mind off to the idea that there's a higher power who loves him the way he is. While he has no problem accepting himself as gay or anything else--any other aspect of his identity or personality--he creates for himself an extra sense of persecution on top of that which he already experiences as societal homophobia. It's a shame, really. It turns him into this angry person who won't see other people's viewpoints, and picks arguments where there really aren't any.

As a result, he misses out on friendships, pushing people away because he expects them to hate him. And while sometimes he's right about that, he's often wrong. By avoiding talking to Ffion--who is proud to be Christian, proud to be Baptist, and feels at home in her Church--he never gets to know her properly. Unfortunately, Ffion's particular Church community is very scornful of the LGBT Community, and she ends up seeing him in a similar way, as someone to be avoided, and so she too never says a friendly word to him. There's this massive divide between them, created by their expectations of each other, which neither of them can surpass until they start to question those.

Because they're both so closed-minded, they can't do that on their own; it takes the work of their mutual friends and the creation of some desperately horrible circumstances for them each to realise the other isn't so bad. There's a friendship coming out of this, but not for a while.

Gordon has to change dramatically first, just as much as Ffion does. Can he overcome imagined prejudices in order to save and create friendships in the face of real ones?

[howyoutalktostrangers]

So,

Jesus wanted to know if I was taking my medication. 

The saviour of humanity was rocking back and forth in one of our deck chairs, his bare feet propped on the railing of our front porch, as the evening horizon simmered blood-red in the distance. I had just finished putting the kids to bed when I found him chilling there in an orange T-shirt, gazing serenely out at Lake Quamichan and running his fingers through his luxurious beard. It had been years since we’d last spoken, but somehow he knew all about my brain meds.

The thing was, it frustrated me that my mental health relied on a handful of daily pills. Especially because they didn’t change anything about the circumstances of my reality. Shouldn’t I be able to wrangle my thoughts in a positive direction? I was scared I’d be handcuffed to lithium for life, that my bipolar diagnosis would ultimately kill me. My brain felt like an intricate puzzle I couldn’t solve, my mindscape an exhausting treadmill of depression and dark thoughts. Was this the God-shaped hole they’d talked about when I was growing up in youth group? Was I being bullied back towards faith?

As I stepped on to the porch, Jesus motioned to the empty chair beside him and I sat down, a little reluctant and weirded out by this supernatural appearance. My wife was doing dishes in the kitchen, the banging and sloshing creating a background soundtrack to the eery quiet of our mountain neighbourhood as an elderly woman wearing headphones power-walked by with her shaggy white dog.

“I heard you haven’t been taking your meds regularly,” he said. “Is that true?”

I sighed. “I forgot on Tuesday night and it wrecked me for like three days. All I could do was sleep and complain. I honestly can’t believe how patient my wife is with this shit. I’ve been like this for six months now.”

He nodded knowingly. “It’s important to stay on schedule.”

“I hate being this fragile.”

“You won’t feel like this forever. Trust me.”

“That’s why I started praying, you know? Things were just getting so dark that I didn’t know what else to do.”

He smiled. “Most people don’t pray until they really need to. I’m used to it.”

Being in the Lord’s presence was kind of like standing beside a particularly burly bouncer; I felt safe. He didn’t look the same way he did in the paintings, or in that Mel Gibson movie — he was olive-skinned, with wrinkles around his eyes and jet black hair that hung sun-damaged and coarse around his face. I’d invited him into my heart when I was eight years old at Vacation Bible School, and apparently I’d never successfully evicted him. But he’d never bothered to show up like this before, not even back when I was a missionary and a camp counselor. He seemed preoccupied, and a little sad. 

“You know they’re burning down churches, right?” I asked, motioning to his shirt. In capital letters it read EVERY CHILD MATTERS. 

He shrugged, smiled knowingly. “My real cathedral is in here,” he said, pointing one finger to his temple. He then swept his arm in the direction of the horizon. “And out there.”

“Still, it’s not a great time to be Catholic.”

He frowned. “This is a time for atonement. It’s not fun, but it’s necessary. People have the right to be angry.”

“These mass graves, man. It’s hard to square with the concept of a benevolent creator. I mean, I know we have free will but...”

Human guilt had been on my mind for a while now, collective and otherwise. I was having sleep issues, waking up hours before work, and repetitive intrusive thoughts flooded my headspace while my wife slept beside me. I was dredging up sins and mistakes from years and even decades ago, my memory systemically itemizing my fuck-ups, and I didn’t know how to forgive myself. Was this shit going to follow me all the way to my final resting place? I wanted desperately to repent, to access the grace I’d learned about as a kid, but I just didn’t believe in Christianity anymore — no matter how much I wanted to. 

Now here we were trying to repent as a country, whether that meant wearing orange shirts or vandalizing churches. I couldn’t help but feel that nothing would make any real difference to those children, long forgotten and buried underground. I thought of my own kids, and what it would be like to have them torn away, how that would destroy my soul. I wanted to believe there was some sort of God waiting for them on the other side.

“We had a fisherman staying with us for a couple days, a friend of my wife,” I said. “He went to work on one of those big commercial boats, came back with all these wounds all over his arms. He said they could carry like 40,000 pounds of fish at a time.”

“Certainly different than it was in my days.”

“Yeah, he said sometimes they would catch these epic like 10-foot fish that couldn’t fit in their conveyor belt so they just went to waste. Just got cut up and thrown back in the sea.”

Jesus didn’t say anything. The horizon was starting to go dark.

“It made me think of that Bible verse where you talk about being a fisher of men, and I figure some men are just too big to catch, you know? Makes me wonder if I’m going to end up as spiritual bycatch. Like God’s just going to throw me overboard.”

He mulled this for a moment, then held up his arm so that I could clearly see the gnarly nail wound in his wrist. I could see where it had been hammered through, and also where his body weight had tugged it open further. It was surrounded by crusted blood. “You want to put your finger in here?”

I shook my head. 

“And yet still you doubt, don’t you?”

I pressed my knuckles into my eyes and groaned. My wife was finishing up with the dishes inside, and I didn’t know how much longer this hallucination would last. No matter how comfortable I was, I still felt like we were living in the End Times. A few days earlier Lytton had burned to the ground in a forest fire, razing the whitewater rafting resort I’d done my guide school at. Between COVID, climate change and the culture wars, it seemed like the world was on a downwards trajectory. 

I was scared for the future of my children.

“Listen, before you go,” I said. “I know we haven’t really been talking for a while, but...”

He turned, and raised his eyebrows.

“Will you look out for my kids? No matter what happens? Like I’m not asking for special treatment or anything. I don’t know how long I’m going to last here, and I want them to have beautiful lives. I’m just worried I can’t give them what they deserve. I’m worried the world is going to shit, I’m worried they need something that I can’t give them. Can you take care of them?”

He patted me on the shoulder, and smiled.

“You can do that yourself.”

The Literary Goon

[heyeulalie]

More of the Backstory

I’m going to try to tell this story as concisely as possible.

So I am 35 and single. So very, very unhappily single.

About 5 years ago I left a relationship I shouldn’t have been in. He was an atheist and we had been living together and sleeping together. I had always been afraid to be alone and had jumped from relationship to relationship since I was a teenager. I was in my late 20′s and he and I were dating around the time a lot of my friends were starting to get married. I hoped that if we just really acted like we were married we would eventually get married and everything would be okay in God’s eyes.

But as time passed and I got closer and closer to God I felt like God was telling me to leave my boyfriend. Deep down I knew that relationship wasn’t what I really wanted either. I wanted to be with someone who also had a relationship with God, even though the prospect of starting all over again seemed absolutely terrifying.

I jumped and God caught me. My friend from church offered to let me move in with her, and three days after my ex and I broke up I was offered a job on staff at my church. It wasn’t easy, but God surrounded me so closely with His people in a time when I was so hurt and raw and vulnerable.

Leaving that relationship was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It wasn’t so much about the relationship, as it was about completely abandoning my old unhealthy way of relating to people and deciding, once and for all, that God’s way really is the best way.

Watching my entire life crumble, and losing all the closeness and intimacy I had been used to only to be replaced with a lot of work was crushing.

One day I asked God, in tears, that if it was His will for me to be single and alone forever that I didn’t want to be alive. I told Him I couldn’t and wouldn’t kill myself. I knew it was wrong and I also just couldn’t do that to my parents, but I very seriously asked God to please end my life.

It turns out that praying for death isn’t a good prayer to pray. God is a God of life, He wants to give us life abundantly. If we’re in Him we’re always alive anyway - so praying for death is basically praying against His will. I know this now, but I did not know it then. The only example in the Bible I could think of was Elijah, who asked God to let Him die. God never reprimanded him for his prayer - but instead sent an angel to bring him a snack.

Anyway, I prayed very seriously asking God to let me die, and then got up to take a shower because I had to go to work again. I was sobbing in the shower, my thoughts racing, when I heard a voice in my head. It wasn’t an audible voice, but it was calm in a way that none of my own thoughts had been. I had noticed that God sometimes speaks to me by dropping a word in my head, so I try to at least pay attention when it happens. Sometimes it’s just my own random thoughts, but sometimes I do think it really is God. 

The voice said “Tobit”.

I had no idea what a tobit was, but if it might be God trying to tell me something I figured I might as well look it up. It turns out that Tobit is a book that is in the Catholic Bible, but not the version of the Bible I had. I had never heard of it. I started to read it and started sobbing again.

Tobit is a righteous man living in the wicked city of Ninevah. One day he is struck blind, and prays, very sincerely, asking for God to let him die. Sarah lives in Media. She has been engaged seven times, but each one of her fiances dies just before the wedding day. She is extremely ashamed and doesn’t want to live. She tells God she can’t commit suicide because she can’t make her father suffer, but she asks God to take her life.

And this was how God answered their prayers for death in Tobit Chapter 3:

“6 At that very time, the prayer of both of them was heard in the glorious presence of God. 17g So Raphael was sent to heal them both: to remove the white scales from Tobit’s eyes, so that he might again see with his own eyes God’s light; and to give Sarah, the daughter of Raguel, as a wife to Tobiah, the son of Tobit, and to rid her of the wicked demon Asmodeus. For it fell to Tobiah’s lot* to claim her before any others who might wish to marry her. At that very moment Tobit turned from the courtyard to his house, and Raguel’s daughter Sarah came down from the upstairs room.“

I just had no words. Sarah’s prayer had been almost exactly my prayer, and take this to mean what you will, but I felt like God was saying that He wasn’t going to let me die, but that He was going to heal me and bring me a husband.

This really felt to me like a promise from God, and it’s something I’ve been holding on to and honestly trying to figure out how to steward well. I believe God told me this to give me hope through a very dark, hard season, but I’ve been through times when I think maybe I’ve held on to this promise more than to God, and wondered if even a promise from God can be an idol. I have to keep laying it down again and trusting that if this is really His will then it is completely safe in His hands.

I’m still trying to figure this all out.

For about three years I felt like God was stopping me from dating every time I tried. Instead I felt like He just wanted me to focus on trying to make friends with other believers.

Again, it was a whole new thing for me. I hadn’t grown up going to church so the concept of having Christian friends, or the fact that it could be important to have friends who share your beliefs was pretty foreign to me. Church people didn’t feel like safe people to me because they weren’t like my old friends - most of them weren’t nerdy and I always felt a little less than around them. I felt like most of them were better than me and didn’t know how to feel like I was on even footing with them, even though I knew, intellectually, that we’re all equal in Jesus’s eyes.

Through all of this God uncovered so much junk from my past that was inhibiting in my relationships in general. I felt extremely rejected and ostracized as a kid, and took rejection on as my identity. Growing up I felt like a total outcast until guys suddenly started noticing me and being attracted to me. Their attention gave me a value that I hadn’t been able to find in myself, and from then on I always felt like I needed to have a boyfriend in order to have the same value that normal people just have inherently.

I also felt extremely rejected and ostracized by average people, but among other rejects I felt extremely loved and seen and valued, probably because most of the attention from guys was coming from that circle of friends. I was constantly categorizing the people I met as “safe person” or “unsafe person” based on whether or not they seemed like a rejected person. I felt like the only people who wouldn’t reject me were other rejects, so therefore they were the only safe types of people to befriend.

I built a whole elaborate system to avoid being rejected, which really just put a huge limit on the types of people I allowed myself to get to know. Even in my dating relationships, I would, for the most part, intentionally choose someone I thought was a little bit “less than” me - less attractive, less healthy -  so I would feel safe knowing that he would have to be crazy to reject me. Ultimately though, these relationships were never satisfying because, deep down I wanted someone who would challenge me and be on my level, even though I was too scared to go after it.

When I prayed about dating, I felt like God was giving me permission to go on dates and meet people, but He just kept telling me that He was going to send someone to me and I didn’t need to go out looking. I ultimately needed to wait for God to move. A church service I went to that week taught on Habakkuk 2:

“Then the Lord answered me and said:

“Write the vision And make it plain on tablets, That he may run who reads it. 3 For the vision is yet for an appointed time; But at the end it will speak, and it will not lie. Though it tarries, wait for it; Because it will surely come, It will not tarry.”

They printed these verses in the church bulletin and I hung it on my mirror, trying to remind myself of what I felt like God was saying to me. Though it tarries, wait for it.

Then, a few weeks later, my very first boyfriend from middle school reached out to me. I hadn’t spoken to him in about 20 years. Of course I wondered if maybe this was who God was sending, but I wasn’t sure. He wasn’t a believer, so I didn’t think so, but it was nice to catch up with him. He had moved to Canada when we were kids, and he and I, at the tender age of 13, had tried to maintain a long distance relationship over the brand new invention of the internet for a few months.

But the whole thing got me starting to think about what I really wanted, and how I really wouldn’t mind moving if I met the right person.

Shortly afterward my roommate let me know that she had just got engaged and that she wouldn’t be renewing our lease. Again, it seemed like door was closing and I was wondering where God was wanting me to go next, and if He really was wanting me to move somewhere else.

I prayed, telling God that if He wanted me to move somewhere that I would go in a heartbeat, He just had to tell me where to go.

Around this time I felt like God wanted me to sit down and think about what I really wanted in life, and in a husband. I felt like this list could be as ridiculous and impossible-sounding as I wanted. This is what I wrote down on November 1:

-To pay off my student debt

-To lose about 30 pounds in a healthy way and stay healthy (I actually did this, praise God!!)

-My own apartment/condo/townhouse with a gym, pool and a porch that is quiet, safe, and free from bugs and mold, with a washer and dryer and is close to work. And to make enough money to decorate and make it feel like my own.

-To make comics for a living and be picked up by a publisher, to write and create with God - for the stories to eventually become movies or a TV series. Possibly start my own animation studio? Or build a team to make comics?

- A new car? Maybe a hatchback? One that works well and doesn’t looks so beat up.

-To find a kind, creative, intelligent, witty man who loves Jesus to marry

- To have a circle of friends that are also kind, creative, intelligent and motivated that love Jesus

-Maybe eventually get a french bulldog puppy?

-Visit Canada!

Then, 13 days later, I met someone at my friend’s wedding. He was the groomsman I was paired with and was my friend’s husband’s best friend. He looked nerdy - kind of short and awkward with glasses, and he made a reference to “Arrested Development”, so I liked him immediately. We didn’t talk much at the wedding, but I did mention to him that I worked at a theme park, and he mentioned that he had already been planning on going to that theme park the next day. I told him he should come visit me at the booth I worked at, and we ended up hanging out in the park together when my shift ended. It very quickly felt like a date - instead of riding rides we just sat and talked until the park closed. It didn’t feel like either of us were pushing for it - it just felt so natural. But I wasn’t completely sure I was attracted to him at first. He had a strange way of walking and a strange way of talking and was kind of short and skinny for me. I wondered if he was gay. But my coworkers who met him kept assuring me that he seemed like he was crazy about me and that I should go after it. As we talked, it sounded like he was everything I had said I wanted on the list I had made - he had gone to seminary school so I knew God must’ve been important to him, was intelligent, had a good job, had creative hobbies, and liked movies and video games like I did. The only downside, it seemed, was that he lived in Austin, Texas. I was in Florida.

We hung out for the next few days, and I ended up driving him to the airport to fly home. Despite God having been talking to me about moving, starting a long distance relationship with him wasn’t even on my radar, but he mentioned he wanted to keep talking to me. I agreed. I figured that it seemed like God was opening a door to something, and I wanted to at least see where all this was going.

We spoke on the phone for hours after he got back to Texas, and by the end of the call he asked me if I would be his girlfriend. I had been single for so long and had literally been begging God for a boyfriend daily, so of course I said yes.

Suddenly, we were dating! I appreciated how consistent he was in reaching out to me and how carefully he listened and remembered the details of the things I shared. Sometimes the regularity of the way he reached out almost felt robotic, but I just figured he was a more structured, routine-oriented sort of person, whereas I was a flighty artsy sort.

In January, I flew out to Austin to visit him. I prayed the whole time if this was the direction God was pointing me, that if this was my next move, that God would make it overwhelmingly, abundantly clear.

A verse I felt like God had been bringing me to around that time in regards to moving was Exodus 3:17:

“ 17 And I have promised to bring you up out of your misery in Egypt into the land of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—a land flowing with milk and honey.’”

We had a phenomenal time together. He kissed me, he said he loved me, we prayed together, he even started talking about marriage. Austin was beautiful and quirky and growing and artsy - I loved it right away. I prayed about it all and I just felt such peace about stepping forward with everything. 

Then one night, my boyfriend and I walked around downtown. As we crossed the street, I prayed silently, asking God again that if this was really where he wanted me to go that He would make it clear. When I looked up I saw the store we were in front of was a salon called “Milk + Honey”. 

I just knew that this was my next step. 

When I got back to Florida, he dropped the bomb on me that he wasn’t sure if he was attracted to me. He said I wasn’t really his type, and eventually it came out that I essentially was too fat for him. Granted, I was overweight at the time, but I just have never had that kind of thing come up in a dating relationship before. Even when I was on the heavier side of things men usually were still very attracted to me. And if they weren’t attracted to me they just wouldn’t approach me in the first place.

Obviously I was incredibly hurt, and I mostly couldn’t understand why he would even approach me to date me if he wasn’t physically attracted to me. We met in person. He knew what I looked like.

More than that, I’m realizing now that I was SO hurt and floored by this because I felt like I was the one who was settling. I couldn’t believe he didn’t see that I was the one who was out of his league. I was still doing the thing I had done in the past - finding someone who seemed a little bit “less than” me so they would be crazy to reject me, so I would know I wouldn’t be rejected. I couldn’t believe that he didn’t feel lucky to be with me. I also thought that the fact that he had never kissed a girl before me or had a serious girlfriend before was like a safety net for me - of course he would be grateful to be with me, and he would have no one to compare me to so of course I would seem great.

So really, this whole thing help expose my broken way of choosing a “safe” boyfriend that was actually more rooted in fear than love. My failsafe system to avoid rejection was completely maladaptive. A lot of the things I thought made my boyfriend feel safe to me should have actually been red flags.

We probably should have broken up then. But I felt like God was telling me to tell him everything I was feeling, to fight it out with him, but not to pull the plug.

I’m honestly not sure how it all got resolved, but we decided to keep dating.

He visited Florida in February and we had a lot of ups and downs. But we had fun together and again wanted to keep dating.

I went back to Florida and wrapped up a lot of the loose ends I still had dangling. I finished the graphic novel I had been working on, and I started putting together a design portfolio to hopefully find some kind of art job in Austin. 

Then, the world exploded. There was that little global pandemic thing that you might have heard about. I had been planning on staying and working at the theme park through spring break, but the park closed in the middle of March and I was out of a job.

My lease was ending at the end of March, and I just realized I had almost nothing keeping me in Florida. I was hoping to have a job lined up in Austin before moving, but I figured I might as well move out there and look for a job and a place to live instead of staying in Florida and doing the same thing.

I said goodbye to the few friends I could, donated most of my stuff, and headed west. I was pretty scared. The morning of my move I prayed again, asking God is this was really, really what He wanted me to do. He brought me to Isaiah 55:12-13: 

“ 2 “For you shall go out with joy, And be led out with peace; The mountains and the hills Shall break forth into singing before you, And all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. 13 Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress tree, And instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree; And it shall be to the Lord for a name, For an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.””

It seemed crazy but I just felt like God was saying He was in it. I just prayed that God would at least let the gas stations stay open and wouldn’t close any state borders while I was on the road. 

I got to my Airbnb in Austin just as the city announced its stay in place order. My boyfriend came to see me but then told me to stay 6 feet away from him because he wasn’t feeling well.

It was already pretty obvious that this move wasn’t at all what I was thinking or hoping it might be. 

To make a very long story shorter, things have been crazy but God has been so good to provide through all of it. My boyfriend was part of a small house church and a girl in his church was looking for a roommate, so I ended up moving into an apartment with her and another friend of hers. 

I had no idea how hard it would be to find a job during the apocalypse, but my boyfriend’s manager decided to pull her kids out of daycare because of the virus, and needed a nanny. This woman is seriously probably the kindest, most generous person I’ve ever met and paid me incredibly well, which allowed me to actually buy some furniture and even decorate the apartment a little bit.

But, unfortunately I’m realizing I just don’t like working with kids in the way I think I should. I was pretty unhappy, the kids were unhappy, and when I was praying about it I really felt like God was showing me that just because something is a “good” thing to do doesn’t mean it is necessarily the thing God wants us to be doing. God designed us all with different gifts and abilities and I felt like He was kind of showing me that by me being in the wrong role for me I was keeping someone else out of the right role for them. Around this time I got accepted to be an Uber Eats driver, which I know doesn’t sound glamorous, but the thought of being free to make my own schedule and not have to worry about interacting with people just sounded so appealing. Finally I felt like God was saying it was okay to step down from the nannying job, and the mom sounded surprisingly grateful because she had been wanting to quit her job to stay home with her kids, but I guess hadn’t quite worked up the courage to do it.

Anyway, I was just grateful the whole situation benefited everyone so much.

Since then I feel like God has really been impressing on me to use my gifts and talents, although sometimes I realize I don’t even totally know what they all are. I know I need to be writing and creating though, so I need to make that more of a priority. I applied for a graphic design internship on the same day I put my notice in for the nannying job and was offered the internship the next day. I’m just feeling very grateful to be able to be taking a tiny step forward in a creative career again. 

Through all this things with my boyfriend had been weird. It didn’t seem like he really wanted to see me, but it was hard to know whether it was because he was genuinely concerned about COVID or because something else was going on. I finally confronted him about it and told him that I just didn’t feel like he was attracted to me, and he finally admitted that he wasn’t.

Honestly, now that I’ve gotten to know him better, I think he might be on the autism spectrum. I might really not be his type, I don’t know, but I think he might just not enjoy being physically close with anyone. It’s sad. I think the hardest thing has been realizing the relationship I thought I was in and the person I thought I was dating never even really existed. He’s just not who I thought he was, but I kind of feel like I’m grieving a phantom.

But I guess if this relationship was God’s way of moving me somewhere He wanted me, and giving me companionship through a very lonely time, I’m still grateful for it. And I’m grateful for the people I’ve gotten to know because of him, and that because of him I have been able to be a part of this little church community. So that’s all good.

And I know God’s promise to me is still good. I guess I’m just wondering what on earth to do now. Should I start dating again? In a way it feels like SO MUCH has changed in just a few weeks I should maybe just hold back at get my bearings again. I know I need to keep writing. 

I think maybe I need to take some time to really reflect before jumping in to yet another new thing. So... some fun subjects for next time:

-Why do I even want to be married so badly? 

-Maybe my list of what I’m looking for kind of sucks. My ex was my list, or so I thought, and it was a mess. Maybe I need to come back to God and really find out what HE wants for me and what HIS will is. I feel like I keep getting caught up in the external things about people - what they look like, what they do for work, what kinds of movies they like, and I’m not at all careful about looking at their hearts. I need to start seeing people the way God sees people.

Okay, sorry that this entry kind of devolved but I’ve been writing forever and need to start doing some work today. But now you know the rest of the backstory.

More soon!

Love,

Eulalie