Faith as recovery

I haven't quite made it a daily habit to pray. But I'm getting there.

Almost every day, I take down my little mini-altar, light a candle and incense, and use my little Kindle Book of Common Prayer on my tablet to say a morning prayer. Lately, I've been adding in other prayers from the book, not just the standard morning prayer, but prayers for the sick. Sometimes I feel like maybe I don't deserve those prayers. But I'm working on getting past that.

I've been mentally ill for almost as long as I can remember. I won't get into the details, partly because they're personally identifying, partly because it's just not what I want to write about. I think enough about my own failings without writing them all out again. What I wanted to talk about is how I'm making another push towards recovery. I made a therapy appointment - it's just over a week out now - and I'm going to try to actually stick with it this time. When I first started therapy I thought it was going to be easy, but five years of failed therapy (probably on my part, mostly) has proven me wrong. It's hard. Hard and frustrating and embarrassing and it feels shameful. But I'm trying again, and this time I want to incorporate faith into it, too.

I won't pretend that things are going to be solved through prayer, that God will suddenly take away all of the pain I've felt for over a decade. But I do think that this is something I've been missing in all aspects of my life - I knew that almost as soon as I sat down in church a month and a half ago. I've been lost for a long time. And I think now I have the tools to find those parts of me again, the parts that are happy and find meaning in life and don't engage in all the unhealthy behaviors that I do now. I know that it's going to be a hard journey and I know that it's not going to get fixed overnight. But I think it's a journey I'm finally ready to take. I'm tired of surviving. I want to live and be happy and make other people happy and stop letting this darkness prevent me from living up to the potential that God has set for me.
And I'm going to get that. I think I really do believe that, this time.

Cultivating a Pagan's appreciation for the Bible

"Mother is the one who notices, and tells naught. She started it all, reading the Psalms and various Family Classics aloud to Leah and me. Mother has a pagan's appreciation for the Bible, being devoted to such phrases as "purge me with hyssop," and "strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round," and "thou hast put off my sackcloth and girded me with gladness." Likely she would run through the fields dressed in sackcloth, hunting hyssop amongst the wild bulls, if not obligated to the higher plane of Motherhood." -Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

This is what I want to aspire to, in returning to church. I don't know if I'm capable of anything else. I do believe in my heart that the truest form of worship and faith is in praise of God's creation, in praise of nature, basically. It's what drew me to eclectic Wicca in the first place, the idea that everything, the rocks and trees and plants and animals and humans and stars and planets and the air that we breathe is all divine, it's all an expression of God. It's a good way of reconciling science and faith, really, like I talked about in my last post. If you can acknowledge that God created the world that we live in, with all its beauty and all its flaws, then you can also acknowledge that our work to understand the world, to protect it, to revel in it, is also worship, if you do it with the right spirit. I don't think that "nature-worship" is even inherently un-Christian, if you think of it less as worship and more as veneration. Like venerating an icon of a saint. It's not worshiping an idol, it's acknowledging that the object of veneration is a living, concrete expression of God's work in the world. I don't know if that's really a kosher form of Christianity (not the right word, but something like that), but it's what feels true to me. I can't shut myself in a church and in my home, away from nature, out of sight and mind, and call myself Christian, that feels like ignoring what God created.
I cleaned out my altar today, and removed the more obviously pagan parts of it - the charms I made, the salt, the configuration of elements - and reorganized it into a less denominational altar. It's still got sigils written on the back, I suppose maybe I'll find icons to cover those up. But I kept the beach rocks, driftwood, pearls, seashells. Right now the only thing distinguishing it as Christian is a clumsily macrame'd cross. Not much, but it's a stop-gap measure, until I can make or buy or find something better. It's enough, for now, for me. It's not a requirement of praying, it's just a conduit.
And it feels good to have it.

Praying for surgery

The last Sunday that I went to church was the Sunday after Christmas. When I stood in the communion line, when I received the Eucharist, and walking back, the whole time I was praying about my upcoming surgery. "Fill me with your Holy Spirit, Lord, to protect me, and guide the surgeon's hands so that he does a good job and doesn't let me bleed out on the table", or something like that. Maybe not such an uncommon thing. I'm sure plenty of people do it. 

The difference is, I'm a trans man. The surgery I was praying about was my mastectomy, something that my Evangelical grandparents would probably call a mutilation of the body God gave me, or something like that. So why pray to God for that to work out well for me? I struggled with that a lot in the days before surgery. 

I haven't always been of the belief that being transsexual is a medical condition - it's very much against the popular opinion, for reasons I can no longer really fathom. The popular idea is that it's an "identity", though what exactly an identity identified only by its own name is, I couldn't tell you. Nevertheless, over the past year and a half, I have started to change my view on the subject. The reason being that I actually have the means to medically transition now, and I understand better what that means, and why it's so important to me. Dysphoria (the state of disconnect from your physical body because of the brain being wired to subconsciously perceive the body it inhabits as the opposite sex. This differs from taking on the gender roles of the opposite gender, or "genderbending", it's a medical thing with a medical cause. I'd reconciled this with my feminist self, my "feminine" self, with a society that says "no, it can't possibly be a medical condition because it's bad or wrong to have one". I hadn't, until going back to church, thought about it in a spiritual context. But now that I think about it more, my transmedicalist beliefs tie in really well with my tentative return to Christianity.

A God that I want to believe in wouldn't create a person whose brain was washed with testosterone in utero, causing their sensory-motor cortices to scream "no, you shouldn't have breasts, you shouldn't have a vagina, what are those doing there?" and then say "You're not allowed to seek the medical treatment that will give you peace from your mental anguish". A God that I want to believe in would be happy that humans created the technology to help themselves - God helps those who help themselves, right? I like to take that to mean that we as a society should help ourselves, work to create better ways of taking care of and loving each other. And individually, we should do the same, work to better love ourselves and love others, find people who love us and support us, and learn how to live, instead of just surviving. To me, that statement is less a Horatio Alger reading of the bible, but a love-thy-neighbor commandment. Love your neighbor as yourself, and find neighbors who will love you back. I deserve neighbors who love me for my depressive, anxious, traumatized, queer, transsexual self. And I deserve a God who will accept those things in me as well. Because God knows, none of those things make it easy to love myself. 

God gave me the ability to live well and better love myself and others through transitioning, in the same way that God gave me the skills and circumstances I needed to get through college (almost), so that I could do my best to help the world through my work, in the same way that God gave me the skills to listen to my friends and care for them and learn to acknowledge my mistakes and the ways in which I hurt others and learn from them, in the same way that God has given me all of the skills and circumstances and good luck and opportunities to grow that I have been blessed with in my life. 

God gave me this mastectomy, and I am thankful for the blessing of peace of mind.

Returning to faith

But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. -Rev. 2:4 

This was the reading my Book of Common Prayer showed for today. It's the Kindle edition, so who knows if it's correct. I'm not Episcopal, I wasn't raised in that church, and from 14 to 20 I didn't set foot in a church at all, except for the baptisms of family friends. I dabbled in Wicca, eclectic Paganism and chaos magic, but mostly I'd just say that I didn't know, that I was agnostic or atheist. The truth was that I'd lost the feeling I had when I was younger, the feeling of God's presence in my life.
My leaving the church coincided with both my own coming out as a bisexual, transsexual man, and my mom's coming out as a lesbian, acts which officially excommunicated her, in addition to contributing to her divorce from my Greek Orthodox priest father, and effectively excommunicated me. I couldn't reconcile the things that I felt with the things that everyone around me said about God. I couldn't imagine praying to a God who thought I was sinful, merely for having an accident of birth which caused my brain to masculinize but not my body, and for loving people regardless of their gender.
I can't blame my loss of religion for the ensuing depression, dissociation, and general fucked-up headspace that came to be my normal in the years that followed. Trauma, bad luck, puberty, dysphoria, bad relationships, and a sense of not really belonging anywhere stemming from all of the above plus my own social awkwardness all contributed to a general feeling of ill-being, lack of meaning in my life, and loneliness. But I can't downplay the role that losing faith had in my life. I lost a community I'd been in since I was born, and I lost a way of making sense of the world. To be honest, I'm surprised I didn't notice sooner what I had lost.
Over the past couple of months, I've been attempting to make a positive change in my life. I've stopped using my smartphone (though I still use it as a "tablet", it's nice to not be connected to data 24/7, to have it solely dependent on WiFi. Kind of a "smartphone methadone", I joked to my dad). I deactivated my Tumblr account, because I spent way too much time on that damn website. I'm trying to read more books, pay more attention in class, spend more time with other people instead of hiding from any kind of social activity. I'm trying to engage myself in life again. Things aren't great, but I've come a long way still. I've fully quit self-injury and smoking cigarettes, and in general I feel better about myself and about the world.
On the Sunday before Christmas, my mom and her wife asked me to come with them to the church they had joined, the Episcopal cathedral in their city. I joined them with some apprehension, like I said, it was the first time I'd attended church under my own steam in nearly six years. In fact, the last Sunday service I attended was the one where my father announced his divorce from my mother to the parishioners of his own cathedral - an almost unheard-of act, since most divorcing priests in the Greek Orthodox church are defrocked from their position due to infidelity causing the divorce. But I went with them. Why this particular Sunday, I can't explain. Nearly every time I've come to visit, they've invited me along, and I've always said "maybe", and then overslept. I was apprehensive, even though I knew this wasn't the same kind of church I was raised in, apprehensive that it wouldn't be formal enough to replace the highly liturgical services I was used to, apprehensive that it wouldn't be as accepting as my moms said, apprehensive that it just wouldn't feel right or that it wouldn't feel like anything at all.
I wouldn't say it was instantaneous, but it certainly wasn't very far into the liturgy when I realized something was changing in me. I felt good about being in church. It felt like coming home. I hadn't realized fully until now how much leaving church hurt me. But the sermon was what really brought the point home. The dean preached about Advent, about how there are two Christmases in a Christian's life. The first Christmas is that of a child, an excited, naive belief - in the birth of Jesus, in the presents behind closed doors, in "peace on earth and good will among humankind", in any of that. And then there's a second Christmas, one that comes after all of the promises that have been made to us are broken, after we stop believing in Jesus or heaven or Santa, after we become cynical. He talked about how the promise God made to David, which is read during Advent, that God would make David's line of kings last forever, was already long broken before it was written down. David's line ended, and the Israelites still believed in it and kept it as part of their holy book, long before the angel appeared to a teenage girl, promising to fulfill that long-broken promise. And she believed in it. "Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word". He said that our second Christmas comes when, like Mary, we start believing in broken promises. When we pull ourselves out of the darkness, not because we know that there's light, but because we want so badly for the light to be there.
To me, that says that faith isn't about belief. It's about giving God a second chance. I'm still not sure that I do believe in God. But I think that's okay. I'm giving God a second chance. And I believe - or at least, I hope - that God will give me a second chance, too.
Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first.