Tattered Roots Part II: An Open Mind Unbuckled

by Lanascopic

Back when I used to go to church, and for years afterward, I lived in a horror-movie-level fear of God and ye old devil. Realizing I had a singular soul to live out of no matter where it might end up in the scheme of eternity, I grew hysterical about pleasing God to save myself. With hell hounding all who walked the earth, though, I was distracted from sincerity by my sense of coerced righteousness. Feeling insincere in my mechanical honor of God bothered me a lot for two reasons: Fake doesn’t feel good, and I just knew that God knew when I was being fake toward him on top of that. So, I regularly catastrophized, getting stuck too long in dark imaginings, about being plunged screaming into hell's fire by an all-knowing, unforgiving God. How regularly? Sometimes, well, many times a day. Soon, I realized that all this horror was unproductive, that I was way, way too convinced of beliefs that tormented me. Surely God did not want his children to feel tormented. I had to free my mind to save my soul. This became my highest active priority for years. My goal was not without its challenges, though. The greatest of those challenges is the undeniable, disappointing truth that my homeland happens to be crammed far down into the Bible Belt, which happens to be predominantly Protestant. There are a couple of belt-holes in it, though, where Catholics, as opposed to Protestants, populate the Sunday scene. One of these bible belt holes is way down near the Mexico border in Texas. The other is in Acadiana, my home. That local belt hole provided my little mind’s eye with its first serious peephole into the grand scheme of things. It was a powerful, looking-glass that I handled and operated while perched one day in a state of awe, high up in the treehouse of life, inside a Catholic church. Now, to my branch of southern people, I’m an oddball. You see, I wasn’t raised Catholic like they were. Not that it matters much since I've long been unchurched by now. Still, I wonder if I might have liked Catholicism better than the alternatives if given the chance to spend decades learning the ins and outs of what I see as a complex branch of religion. But with its deep, detailed construct it looks like you'd have to start practicing young or else feel like an outsider, kind of like ballet. So, neither of those two disciplines have shaped me. (Pity, ballet is good for muscle tone.) When I point my toes and go spinning like a childhood jewelry box icon, my dusty memories of a particular old cathedral surface. I can't recall all my visits there or even all the details of that fortress of a church house. Though I do vividly remember being a child during my last visit there, when I felt at ease in the shapely cathedral’s magnificent, swanlike stance. The cheery warmth of the light was subdued in that cathedral. While strangers sat in silence, the nave's architecture was alive that Sunday, calmly breathing just behind the curtains of consciousness, and I must have been the only one there who saw this. Its upwardly ambience made me feel like this mothering cathedral expanded in serenity, arching its spine overhead with me seated under its bosom.

I was experiencing a moderate degree of inward comfort, neither hot nor cold, neither hungry nor thirsty. Just right, no extremes.
It was as if the flow of the room landed all around that small compact me before being drawn into the weightlessness of my tiny spirit.
As if suspended in the perfect equilibrium of the water inside the warm womb of this cathedral, there was nothing that I wanted, so I was fully present in this opulent security.
I was this little four-year-old-girl in a slick-tight brunette bun, wearing an emerald-green velvet fluted dress and white stockings tipped with those classic brown buckle shoes. I remember sitting on the end of a polished pew with my sensibly dressed mother when something powerful happened to me. No, it wasn’t supernatural— or was it? I blinked my hazel eyes at that gorgeous ceiling art as if birthed just then. Needing to know, to examine, I gradually lost myself in the massive, vibrant windows that gushed mysterious lives from the stained-glass society all around us. I could only surrender to this glow of intrigue, to let it bathe my soul. The quiet window-people, those ladies, those men, looked so gentle, sincere, softened like the marrow of concern, outspread sadness. They were simultaneously weighted by humane devotion and weightlessly paused; their yearning arms outreached. Their faces gasped in a sheen-glossed gaze so solemn it would make your stride stiffen to a compassionate stop— available to help without hesitance— if any live person looked at you that way. I was in an unlikely relationship of unspoken mutual empathy with these people-of-the-glass and their divining emotions. Being immersed in their portrayals of fragility, their searching sorrow, heaving hope, noble tear-stained ideals, and other budding bits of me, all of which I could neither name nor entirely comprehend, I didn't know my mother was observing me. She didn’t say anything about it to me then, but my Sunday morning indulgence in what she apparently saw as holy eye candy offended my prudent mommy, who’d years later reveal that she saw me just looking around, not at the priest, but distracted by the décor. Looking lost. She'd say the Latin echoes were clearly meaningless to me, and that I wasn’t getting anything out of the sermon, that she’d concluded on the spot that going to a Catholic church was pointless. I was too young to read and too innocent to feel any longing to dive into a sea of visually expressed pain or impose justice by mercy, to rescue the drowning, liberate love and run away with all of them into the clean, dry wind. Too young or not, I did read what I saw accurately, I knew its humanity was of some remorseful texture that wrapped the world like a tapestry that never ends, and even being without a complex lexicon or any evidence I knew the secret suggestions in the glass— one of them being that people may feel such depth of baffling emotions that many of our troubles are trivial compared to theirs, yes. I expected no one to explain what I knew I saw. Even I could not. It was like a sighting, and I couldn’t know if anyone else saw the pictures of our secretly common woes, of elephants in the room whose open expression I knew were taboo. I had two wide eyes made for staring. And I did long to know and feel how much others suffered, to what extent these tragedies could go. What could I ever do to relieve myself and these agonized beings of their menacing shards of pain, to protect and help and embrace them back to ease. I distinctly remember my gripping impulse to spread mercy somehow, because I saw this senseless suffering in those windows, and I knew that among evils it was the saddest evil ever. In fact, I discerned the gnaw of agony, its gravity, its urgency, more readily at that time than I would even as a troubled, young adult. The Latin echoes didn’t interfere with the glimmering green glass that sprouted like a magnifier in fertile soil behind my bony chest plate and burrowed beneath my cranium. Instead, that bud of crackling contemplation expanded into being, as a long glassy bridge between the islands of Neverland Mystery and Prohibited Shores, complete with me already ambling over the river of confusion in my own micro crisis. But like a tiny inspector convinced of the existence of illusion and pain, I had a little map burned into my memory, and my loyal informants had been those people-of-the-glass. My little brain's conspiracy theory about humanity hiding from its hurts was a real phenomenon after all, and on that day, I knew, almost certainly. I understood the main theme of this life as revealed by art, not words. But my mother didn’t know that. So, the next time around, we went to a Babtist church. While I didn’t consider the people-of-the-glass to be church stuff but more like big stuff, way more important than church, I didn’t question the switch in worship houses. I wouldn’t miss catechism because I, to this day, have never gone to it. As far as any church, I didn’t see the point in sitting down to look at a man, to begin with, so if that was what we had to do then it didn’t to me matter which man or what language we stared at him in. Besides, I just went with the flow. She was always the one driving, so what could I say from three feet under her chin? My Silent Bob ways tended to make life an adventure for me. My mother parked and we walked inside, where it was crowded and loud, and talked to some tall clean strangers who were too happy to be of any interest to me. You’d think I was the very second Goth in the whole world, the first being Edgar Allen Poe. Or maybe I was just not convinced by their happy masks and crisp clothes; it seemed they were in disguises so convincing that their humanity could not be picked up by my senses, so my brain saw them as cardboard cutouts. In real life, no one is that happy all the time. I mean what was this, a bar? I had four big siblings still living at home fighting and making up perpetually while I often retreated soundlessly to the safety of the shadows to observe and analyze what, exactly, was going on here. Sometimes I just couldn’t figure it out. But I wanted to so badly, like my brain was a moth chasing an elusive window of light. Gosh, in the right hands I could have been a super-genius. Or a ballerina-nun. Well, the new church was boring. There wasn’t anything beautiful to gaze upon, no inspiring art or majestic windows, no devastated figures to pity, no angels to trust, no sight of God or Jesus here in this dump. How could I think about other people’s suffering here? I was bogged down in my own trudging hour. The joint was plain, like an undecorated hotel lobby. No messages in the walls, neither in text nor image form. At least the Egyptians understood that pictures don’t have to be idols, but they do make the best messages. They weren’t having it at this dump for the disguised. Maybe that was the point- they wanted to disguise the people and the walls. But why? Isn’t that just called insincerity? Or shallowness? Maybe denial of your human nature? Pretending like that, as if the world was filled with only temptations, the devil, evil hearts, and sin— but no suffering. Why were they even here, these rosy, scented performers? Whatever warmth they pretended to enjoy here did not register as warmth to me. Instead, this warmth was merely cold masquerading as warmth. Wherever my innocent eye looked I felt offended: To the side, there was the gleam of a sleek wooden pew. Overhead, the dull, merged glimmer of numerous overbright, overbig chandeliers. Forward, the expanse of brand-new beige carpet, being warm in theory. Yet it was a flat, lackluster substitute suitable for the satisfaction of the deficient, at least in the watchful presence of one unmasked outsider who’d been out there and who’d seen the real thing. The menacing gleams, glimmers, and modern textile flooring were like a salesperson robot, a full-on false impression. It attempted to impose itself on me, saying in monotone, “Look. Sweet. Child. I. Am. Warm. Like. Human.” Repulsed, I resisted my proverbial interior-robot's intrusion, aware that it was really a creepy, shallow chill, which, for whatever reason wanted to be real warmth. I didn’t care why, or about its pathogenic blank-stare. Its attempts on my endearment, its sheer, lifeless motions, were clumsy, tinny, ungraceful in my keen judgement. I knew that this repulsive coldness didn’t know the first thing about what real warmth means. It was like I had gotten the unfortunate attention of a disembodied psychopath. In retrospect, it’s like in that song by Nirvana, in which some guy is the one who likes all their pretty songs, likes to sing along, and likes to shoot his gun. But this guy doesn’t know what any of it means. I always think of this guy as a psychopath trying to lure a pretty girl like he’s some sorely damaged I-robot. My mother was charmed. How could she! At the pulpit was some old man who looked like Colonel Sanders and whose suit made me sad because, well, I certainly wouldn’t have worn that ugly thing. This pastor laughed every so often, and the audience in the holy hotel lobby laughed too. I’d need to understand what was going on, so I’d whisper, “What’s so funny.” My mother would whisper, “Shush! Listen! Here, chew some gum.” Juicy Fruit or Winter Green? Didn’t matter, cause every time I nagged her for a fresh piece it lost its flavor after three minutes. So, when the live audience roared in intervals like the audience on The Flintstones, I’d hurry up and add my spent gum to the line-up under the hymn book holders. This torture went on for some time. And it got worse because a man who had the face and voice of the lion in The Wizard of Oz appeared on-stage live, and when he sang, he sounded exactly like that lion— the peaks and valleys of his melody so grossly exaggerated that if I hadn’t been thinking about getting some original fried chicken I might have laughed out loud. In the weeks that followed, my mother realized that at Babtist church, children go to Sunday school. So, I went to Sunday school. It was a blast. And it was my only form of social life as the overprotected youngest child of my widowed ma. Now we have two things that went on for some time: My overprotection and our Baptist church goings. No wonder the little Cajun Catholic children didn’t want to play with me at school. They must have detected that I was their baby-bird-pal, who fell out of her nest and was set back in it, by an overgrown mammalian Babtist with opposable thumbs. Well, three things went on for some time, really, the third being that pops never did rise from the grave, so that kept up with no change in sight.I didn’t get it. I asked my mother what happened to my Daddy. “He died in the hospital,” she said. I’d ask her to explain death but if she tried, I just got bored, and I never received the impression that death was more than a one-man horse. I was not afraid of this freak-oddity. I didn’t have feelings for my father, frankly, because I was a year old when he passed away, so didn’t remember him in the least- except I had an image in my head of him looking like the Sargeant on Gomer Pyle. But he didn’t, except by a stretch.

Well, I'd never seen any photos of him, nor would I for over a decade. If I questioned how life might have been different had he been alive, my young imagination answered me with fantasies of a Daddy protecting me from grumpy people and driving my mother and me around. That was the only idea I had of a dad for a very long time— the rest of the scenario was a blank, especially any companionship he’d have had with my mommy, who’d said she was a saint so, I felt, would never kiss a man. And she never did, by the way. That might have creeped me out, frankly, although this thought hadn't occurred to me then. But death didn’t stop with my father, which would surprise the hell out of me. I literally thought death was just this phantom state unique to my dad and a few other rare and vanished specimens. I thought of death like I thought of the Great Flood— it was something that had happened a long time ago. Maybe in a story about a galaxy that was far, far away. And if that story was in book form, each of the book’s pages would be enveloped in glass sleeves, so I couldn’t even touch the pages, so there was nothing real to feel. Death was like Sleeping Beauty, something of a fairy tale. No such clear verbiage came to my mind, of course, but I had these impressions. I was four or five when my grandmother passed away. In retrospect, I guess my mother had stopped visiting her after my father passed; I didn’t remember her much at all. She was, well, dead in a casket, and I just copied the grownups, doing the sign of the cross, kneeling, then walking off from the line. Though I do remember vividly the way she looked lying there. Was it peaceful? No. it was foreboding, like she was sleeping and might get mad if I woke her up. I wasn’t even really sure if she could wake up, but I was leaning toward not. I stared hard at her those seconds, though. Black hair. Little red lips. Perfume, I’m sure I recall. I was trying to decide if she wanted to be in that box or if it was some other person’s idea. Things were really lining up for her to have reasons to be not happy if she awoke. Asleep, some said. Dead, others said. I almost wanted to stand there long enough to find out which ones were lying. Could she be both? Because it sure looked that way. I dismissed it and tottered off to la-la land.Then I was seven. An aunt who I’d never met died. Don’t recall anything about her funeral, other than my mother fretting over plans to go to it but not having a thing to wear. I listened to her phone conversations, relaying the news to others. She wasn’t in tears. We weren’t close to her. I didn’t recall ever meeting her. But after the phone call I asked my mother why she died. She said she’s strained too hard on the toilet, explained it all in detail. They found her like Elvis on the bathroom floor. My mother didn’t say Elvis, though- she didn’t believe in Elvis. She believed in God, she’d profess. And trust me, it was true. So, I asked my mother, “Why do people die?” I was like a tiny journalist giving an interview. She’d answer. I’d ask another. She’d go into a spill without my interruption. I’d ask another. She told me that people go to heaven when they die. Or hell. I didn’t like that one. I’d heard of hell. I thought it was the devil’s house, and people could go there almost as incidentally as if someone was walking through a field of tall grass and fell in a hole— because the reasons for it, the rock and roll of my siblings, smoking, or wearing tight jeans, skipping church, eating fish on Friday, these didn’t sound like reasonable reasons to deserve hell. So, if someone went there, I thought, it had to be the devil himself who might carry them off- no death involved. The place scared me for sure. Hell was more real to me than the idea of death. I mean, she’d often tell my sisters they were going to go to hell for such and such, but not exactly that they'd die first.But now? To hear that God sends you there? Like, on purpose? What was wrong with him, I wondered. What caused this bad idea of his? Was she sure about it? Yes, she was. I thought it sounded awfully mean. God had a mean streak. Then she gave an answer that I didn’t ask for at all. I mean, when she explained that people die naturally, that they live only for so long, I was thinking of people. People. Them. Though her death by age concept was kind of hard to grasp, because the future was tentative, so this could plausibly change. I didn’t even think the rest of the world was taking the idea seriously, but that she was just giving an opinion, more or less. I accepted the worst-case scenario, that it might actually happen, but to very few of the people. If ever it did, it would be like sleeping. Not terrible. Not pressing. Still, not great news. Maybe she saw my doubt. I don’t know. But the next thing she said was, “Even I will die someday.” “What? Oh, no, you will?” I was scared. She had to know about the fate of her own self, this had to be more accurate than her earlier speculation about people in general. My mommy will, what? She will die? But that only really happens to people in the Bible, in fairy tales, on TV, in books, and those we hardly know. The. Killed people. We weren’t anybody special, we were more like plain village people, not people who were in the scope of whatever kind of weird business death was involved in. We didn't live in that corrupt world. We weren't even rich or famous or celebrities.
In retrospect, this news was like reading about a shocking scandal that nobody ever imagined existing until it exploded in the newspapers.
“Why will you die!” She said, “Because, I’ll get old…” “Then when will you die?” She was already old to a little girl, forty-seven. She said, “Not for a while. Years and years and years.” Yeah, she had freaked the baby-poo out of me so was walking it back now. “When you’re a hundred?” She said, “Yes, something like that.” “I don’t want you to die.” “It’s okay. I’ll go to heaven. Then you’ll die and come meet me someday.”
Woah. What? “I’ll die? I don’t want to die!” I became flat scared ever since. Life wasn't sustainable. Doom was imminent. Now, three people were dead, all people will die, she’s still a widow, we go to church a lot, and I’m still shy, timid, the baby of the family, and overprotected by my mother so friends are out of the question. This was how my life started. I’ve pondered death, heaven, hell, the meaning of life, and the experiences of the dead in the seclusion of my mind from an early age. Sometimes my tentative answers to my questions tormented me to tears. Sometimes they opened my mind to imagine the beauty and safety of heaven. Sometimes the answers were both dead and sleeping, and I felt like I couldn’t figure out the impostor-answer from the real one.
And this church thing was making me grumpy, because it wasn’t all fun and markers anymore. My mother moved to a Pentecostal church when I was around 14. I tried to listen to the preacher with an open mind. I listened to all the silly gossip about whose daughter just had a baby out of wedlock and whose son was on drugs and how they’d better clean up their act or they were going to hell. Some people look too satisfied when they say that. It makes friendly, grace-giving people like me feel offended by their blind hypocrisy. I was too timid to dare say anything. I’d just have to listen to this junk when my mother had her friends over from church. And still, I had no friends. So, I borrowed hers. They loved talking to me. So, I never disagreed with them. At the time it was more important for me to just have social interaction with someone as opposed to always observing people, or being correct, or being honest. Social interaction can be like gold, water, and air combined. Usually, they’d say that God was going to bless me for doing this or understanding that. None of them ever threatened me with hell. That’s a mother’s job in the South. As is cooking great meals, answering for your child, and making frequent trips to the library before getting ice cream.
There was a lot of hell-talk in the household, God was pretty mean now, he not only sent people to hell on purpose, but he was the one in charge of death. For a little while I saw God as having furious blue eyes, just like my mother’s which could glare down hard when she was fussing at me. Soon, I unconsciously displaced my mother’s anger, projecting it onto men with blue eyes. So, I’d secretly reflect on cruel blue-eyed superior men, eventually becoming sure that God did not possess their harsh assertions or their twisted hate and rage, whatever mishaps were the cause of their frigid, authoritative malfunctions. No, God was not among them— despite all the loud punishment propaganda, what did God ever do to me, after all? I reunited with my original impression of God as the wide blue sky, and sometimes walking home from the bus stop I’d stare up, knowing I wasn’t supposed to be looking at God, but not sensing that he was objecting. It felt more like he was just watching me closely, as curious about me as I was about him. And whenever I looked, not at the Bible, the Cross, or any church, but at that blue sky, I felt like God had concern for me and reservedly wanted me not to suffer, exactly like my mother did. So, my impression of the blue sky alternated spontaneously, so that one moment it was the nurturing side of Mama. Another moment, it was God. They time-shared that sky, I guess because I could not separate these loving guides-in-charge from one another in my mind. And I was pretty sure my mother would never ever send me to hell, no matter what my crime or how great her fury. Nor would I send her, no matter who told me to, no way. Never.Why would God do that to me? I couldn't dismiss it, though.I didn’t entirely trust him to love me like my own mommy did. One day I realized that, since I’d never want to send God to hell if we had switched places, that he couldn't want to send me there. Why would I take any interest in sending God to hell, even if I was in charge and I thought he was bad? Causing suffering is not my bag at all, never was. Not into torture. Not even into death row. Not into human horror. Well, after this deeply genuine realization, which happened during a long and trusting talk with God, no scary preacher could convince me for longer than half a minute that God would care to do anything like that to me, or to anyone else. Something had changed.It was as though I’d captured the oppressive question of hellfire and brimstone, which had feloniously stalked my mind too long, and I tied it up and shoved it down to its knees before the throne of a just and fair God. He declared that my soul had been wrongly bound all those years in shackles meant for this villain-at-large. Now God would send this villain, this despicable oppressive question of hell, burning inside of its own terrifying screams into oblivion. With it silenced the love of the Wise Healer nurses the scars in my mind. Neither that rumor nor that haunting question was his child. Instead? I am.And so, with that blinding, deeply disabling, fear gone, I wondered freely: If that rumor was false, how many more rumors about God’s civil and balanced parental character were false? This is my definition of a personal relationship with God. I feel like—he and I— we understand each other. He doesn’t torment people with death. Nothing God does is unproductive. He isn’t mean. He feels about each person just like I felt about the stained-glass people: like he wants to relieve their suffering. God knows what a relief his goodwill is to our unstable souls. God is patient, no matter what man is talking, or in what language, at any pulpit.
I was odd among my people from the beginning. But this particular perspective? Well, it has really set me far apart from Deep South thinking, so now, I’m more on the fringe than ever. And God isn’t upset with me for that, even if people are. The fringe can be a highly contemplative place, void of people pressures, a sanctuary outside of world of fast and shallow assumptions. Besides, God's not the angry type. Some don't understand why, but he has no use for the drama that humans value so much. He’s been working with humanity to try to put those fires out. How much sense would that make if he wanted to engage in villainous ways himself, casting out people's children, who also are his own? The sky would be red then. Love would be an impossible, legendry dream God had once dreamed but could never achieve. Southern mothers would be too terrified of imminent hellfire to threaten their children with it over trivial, petty matters. God would have made all humans like beasts with no potential for good. Why would he burn your good traits with your bad traits? Sounds wasteful. God does not waste. He repairs what breaks.
And there would be no God-inspired art, which I suspect should be taken in with the same devotion that people give the bible, or with more devotion, because those images are alive. Clear. Honest. They are written in a universal language. Their interpretation is directly accessible to everyone, almost instantly.
I saw so myself; love one another.
Anyone who understands their message is a step-away from understanding the lengths of compassion that lie behind the two skies, the blue one and the starry one, each of which are like a left and right eye of God, protection and wonder. They'll realize that a just, fair God wants no suffering. And ultimately, and fortunately, what God wants, God shall have.
The sky is clear now. The stars are twinkling around the asteroid belt, Orion's Belt, and the Kuiper Belt, despite the darkness in the Bible Belt. Benevolence has unbuckled a potential of being that I can almost touch from here.
It's our human potential for uncoerced goodwill.