A big old sack of dead cats

Here is how I deal with who I am and what I’ve been.

I think a great deal more about God and the nature of God, about the state of my soul, at least in the way I define soul, than one might suppose, given my behavior and potty mouth. I’ve searched for peace longer and harder than most people I know, partly because for a long time I only thought I was looking for peace.  I’d never find that until I dealt with something I couldn’t even articulate back then. I called it lunacy, sickness, sadness, fear, brokenness, damage, anger, sin, no more than I deserved (I was going to say just deserts/desserts but whichever I used, if it was wrong it would just make ya’ll laugh and lose the thread).

The people-fixers told me there was an app for that—that app was pills. They eased the panic, anxiety, and depression that kept me from thinking clearly about what I needed. They helped me set the cornerstone that someday would someday be the basis of a whole person. They leveled the playing field for me, helped me start to—oh, crap, this is so Dr. Phil—start taking care of me from time to time.  I still didn’t know what the root of my instability was. Strangely enough, I figured it out at a conference.

 

Someone had been trying to get something going with me for way longer than a man with any pride would have. I think I exercised a great deal of verbal acuity in saying “no” in a way that did not say “I would rather eat frog innards than even kiss you, much less—” well, you know. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I just wanted him to go the hell away. He started in again during happy hour, which is probably the wrong time to talk to me about things that irritate me.

I was on my third Margarita and about my tenth “I’m married. I don’t screw around. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror,” when he popped up with “I don’t do guilt.”

Ordinarily I would say the man wasn’t smart enough to make me think about much, but “I don’t do guilt” struck a chord. I long thought that guilt was the way God kept us in line, and if you weren’t weighted down with it, you weren’t living right. I also thought God was a man who looked like Santa Claus and had the temperament of an abused Rottweiler. He was hunkered down around the corner, waiting for me to screw up so he could bring the hammer down, only I didn’t have to actually screw up, and the hammer wasn’t really a hammer, but guilt, along with all the things that accompany it—depression, sadness, self-loathing.

It would be bad enough if guilt was only something visited upon me. It wasn’t. It didn’t function only as a noun. It was also a direct object. I did guilt. I REALLY did guilt. I looked for guilt. I took it when it wasn’t mine to take. Fifteen years in a fundamentalist church had given me lots of practice.  I had subconsciously chosen the strictest, most unbending denomination I could find that required neither burka, bun, nor snake-handling. A girl can only go so far. I draw the line at unflattering headgear and hair-dos, and slimy things, too—my ex-husband not withstanding.

Even though my choice of places to worship, or whatever it was I did, lay under my cognitive radar, I know me, and if I was going to do something, I would by God be perfect at it, and if I wasn’t, I would accept as much guilt, would do as much guilt, as it took to find perfection.

And so it went. The road really does go on forever when you’re working on your own self-destruction. I worked at it full time, too—trying to be as bad as I thought I was. Not so anyone would notice—I would never cause a scene. But to stop, I had to let go of religion. So I did. But then I felt guilty because everybody knows God lives in a church. If I didn’t go to church, where would I find God? And that’s where it stood for many years.

That’s the short version, according to me. Other people’s version is like all of history—half bullshit and written totally by those who think they have all the marbles.

I finally realized I was going to carry around this sack of dead cats for freaking ever if I didn’t make peace with God. That had to happen. Screw fundamentalism and the self-righteous horse it rode in on. If I wanted to live, I had to know a god that wasn’t confined to a building, wasn’t some personified figure with a bag full of whup-ass just for me. I needed a god more like the spirit that hovered over the waters, if not in the beginning, then just at times when the waters needed some hovering. I needed a god who was shapeless and formless, who was everywhere at once, but probably not in the Wal-Mart parking lot waiting to find me a good parking space.

I needed a god who was compassionate, slow to anger, and constantly shaping me with unfailing love. I needed a god who knew my weaknesses and knew also that my only solace would be the tender mercies that emanate from whatever and wherever “God” is.

I can’t say that I “discovered” God (although I do have a magnet that says, “I found Jesus! He was behind the sofa the whole time!) because God was always there. What I can say is that the dead cats in that bag fell away one by one until only the tattered bag was left.

I’m keeping that. You know. Just in case.