Broken vessels

My good friend once said to me, How many Sundays does it take to lose a friend? 

I would say the number of Sundays that existed from my being in elementary school to graduating from high school. The number of Sundays I occupied myself with adolescent aspirations instead of joining the congregation. How many Sundays does it take to bridge the gap between my parents’ beliefs and my own? Maybe only a couple of Sundays. The first one to initiate a truce, the second to reinstate my namesake in the community, and the third to bullshit my way back into the hierarchy. How many Sundays would it take to heal all the damage my past Sundays have done to my psyche, the suffering it has imprinted into my perception of the world? There will never be enough Sundays to make up for the religious pollution that inundated my childhood.

I grew up in a Chinese Christian church. For most of my girlhood, my Sunday mornings were spent waking up at 7 AM to rehearse with the worship team, sitting through sermons taught by youth pastors who claimed to have our best interests at heart, a communal lunch, and then Chinese lessons taught by the parents at my church. Throughout elementary school, this was just a part of the everyday routine. I prayed, I read the Bible, I said all the things that I was supposed to. In middle school, I began to feel like I was just going through the motions. Answer the question correctly, that God was your savior and repent your sins, and you were in the clear. In high school, the seed of resentment began to bloom. Being told that you should treat your significant other like a brother or sister in Christ, that homosexual people were bad, the traditional roles women were supposed to take on. It all began to snowball into one giant thought of skepticism. 

Inherently, religion is not bad. Honestly, there is something comforting in finding a community that believes in a common ground, sharing beliefs, and creating a network through those shared interests. How else is it different than people who believe in astrology or manifestation through the universe or even a fandom? But, religion becomes dangerous when its system and relationships steal your safety and call it spiritual. Growing up in a Christian community, especially a Chinese Christian church, I had ideals and expectations influenced by Chinese culture shoved down my throat at such a young age that there was no room for interpretation. There was no room to offer a nuanced perspective. What was written was the truth. 

Since breaking out of the religious circle, there has not been a day when I do not think about the effects all the sermons and preaching and praying have had on my behavior. I’ve always questioned, why are Christians only kind for the prospect of going to heaven? Why do they not exhibit gentle and tender manners just for the sake of being a good person? How did I find myself in a relationship with this sadistic distortion of God, one who would supposedly hate me for my ungodly actions but did not love me enough to fix me? I was taught to never question anything, that what was written in the Bible was law, that God was our one and only creator, our one and only solution. But I couldn’t help wondering, why would this God allow so much suffering in the world he supposedly loved so much? How could he sit and watch the rape and pillaging of countries and cultures, the genocides, the misogny, the racism, the homophobia that prevails in the people he created? I bit the hand of God and now he won’t feed me either. 

I see some of my friends who still go to church, who, after all these years, have remained firm in their beliefs. Most of the time, I wonder how they have not broken out of the cycle yet, how they possibly still haven’t taken off the rose colored glasses of it all. But I know that is how they must think of me as well. How I have lost my way, how I have chosen the path of the world and not the path of salvation. Part of me wonders where I would be if the religious environment I grew up in were healthy, where inclusion and sound morals were at the core of their belief system. Would I still be a lamb of God? Or would I still be led to the slaughter? Is it better to have sought out a different truth or to live in a state of ignorant bliss? Is it ignorance, or is it a faithfulness I will never achieve? So many unanswered questions, so little time in a world that’s burning to pieces.

If God told my parents to burn my body at the stake, would they do it? And would they have called it love, in God’s name? Through the church, I learned that even as a child, I was inherently evil and deserved death. The only way out was Jesus. It is a bizarre thing to have been told all your life to love thy neighbor, to care about others, but only the “others” that are clean, only those who are followers. I have spent years taking a crowbar to my body and prying out the broken pieces of God in me. I will spend the rest of my life deconstructing the faith that was instilled in me when my mind was still immature, when the most fundamental parts of me had not yet blossomed. 

“Be quiet,” they say to me. “God can hear you.” 

I think about all the grief I have encountered, all the destruction this world is enduring, the people suffering, the planet dying, and reply, “Oh, how I wish that were true.”