When I try to feed myself and not act crazy, I crash and burn. When I ask this "Jesus" to help me, I eat like a non-eating disordered person, albeit possibly a preschool-aged one -- your foods can't touch each other if you insist on eating them one at a time, kiddos! But: I eat foods, don't throw them up, and (mostly) avoid tearful confrontations over whether consuming a bagel and an orange at the same time renders subsequent meals unnecessary and excessive.
Alternative explanations of this phenomenon notwithstanding, in my experience, in over twenty years of disordered eating, the only thing that has helped me is asking a Higher Power for assistance. I feel like a schmuck writing it -- the last thing I want is to be accused of some sort of sloppy attempt at apologetics or evangelism -- but after the last thing I want is to relapse in an effort to find a less embarrassing means of staying healthy. So, there it is.
A predicament, because mostly I just want to punch Christianity in the face right now, between kicking little kids out of school for not being girly (a phenomenon that got its own post, but which I'm waiting to edit until after my two twelves in forty eight hours) and this whole crazy World Vision craziness, which, I just, you know, can't.
I'm saying this with the peculiar caveat that I spent most of my teenage and adult years wanting to be with a woman, but dating a self-selecting group of men -- for a bunch of tedious and depressing reasons, I honed a performance of femininity designed to appeal to lonely heterosexual men, men who like smart girls, but not really -- and then, in a charmed turn of events, meeting and falling in love with a straight guy who in any other set of circumstances would have been out of my league, but who happened to be slumming it at the time. So, I have a lot of privilege going on here: I'm not straight, but I get treated as though I were.
And it
I'm really depressed about World Vision reversing this decision, but honestly, I feel like in their position I might have done the same thing, because they were losing money that they needed to save kids' lives. I don't know; it's a shitty choice to make, and maybe they could have gone about this switch differently, moved more slowly, made sure to have a back up plan should sponsors pull out over this.
But then, maybe they thought that people who professed belief in a Savior who commands us to feed the hungry and bring little children to Him would not withhold money from hungry children because someone else wants to help, too, and that person is a man with a husband.
It is really effing depressing to read that two thousand people felt that World Vision's willingness to employ gay married people in the service of starving kids worldwide was a legit reason to stop sponsoring said kids.
It's clear to me that just like the only answer for my eating disorder right now is to go back to soliciting help with something I clearly can't control, the only answer for the plentiful bullshit that seems to come tumbling down every time I shift my weight towards Christianity is to quiet down and then beg for the kind of love that can keep me charting at 2 am and acting civil towards my husband, the kind that engenders fuck-giving when everything seems stupid and pointless.
A few things that help:
I try to remember that people have always said things like, "The Bible is clear on [x]." They said it about slavery, they said it about "the Jews", they said it about divorce and stoning prostitutes and beating kids. It does not change the (polyglot, haphazardly assembled, contradictory) history and nature of the Bible.
I try to remember that I am not actually required to do something that I think is wrong, just because someone else thumps a book in my direction -- fingers casually laid over any number of other "self-explanatory" texts -- and tells me, look. No, not there, here. This is God's Word.
I try to remember what love is and is not: that when I love someone, I want them to be happy. I'm no scholar, but I know from being shamed and ostracized, from being lectured and edited and gaslit, and I know that it did not make me happy. I do not believe, in retrospect, that the people doing those things to me loved me. If I would not accept a certain kind of treatment from a parent or girlfriend or sister, I am not willing to excuse that behavior as "tough love" when it comes from a pundit or pastor or poster of comments online. And I am not willing to attribute that behavior to God.
I do think that God, such as He or She is, has it together enough to care for me even if I'm not willing to shame or discriminate against gay people for Him (Her?) or to believe in the literal truth of the Bible when that seems so totally inappropriate a way to read a pre-modern text, the original of which no longer exists.
Critical to my faith as it stands (wobbles?) right now, is the belief that insofar as a God exists, His presence in our lives should move in ways that make other peoples' lives more tolerable, not less.
It's okay to believe in God and say: I don't know what else that belief implies, other than hope that, my innumerable frailties notwithstanding, I actually am, and will be, okay. And that, whatever God is, She is not the bitchy lab partner holding Her favor over your head until you've established your bone fides at the expense of whoever's on Her cosmic shit list.
The reasonable part of me cannot believe I still need to repeat this -- to anyone, let alone to myself -- but here it is: God's not asking you to hurt other people and call it love, to stop sponsoring children and blame it on someone else's refusal to discriminate, to call the withholding of employment opportunity from a category of human beings anything other than what it is: discrimination.
Right now, all I can do is beg this mysterious God for love, when what I feel runs closer to panic and frustration and an exhaustion that no amount of sleep seems to cure. All I can do is breathe in and out, exist in this exact moment, and apologize for that being so little when there's so much need around me. And hope that maybe the people who have all this energy to patrol the various "sins" of others, and to tantrum when others refuse to do the same, might hit a similar wall of exhaustion, and soon.
That, or that their internet providers might themselves endorse equal rights for gay couples, inciting a boycott that might cut just a little closer to home -- their homes, not those of others -- than does withdrawing charitable dollars from children in the developing world.
This is really good and honest and a privilege to read, as always. I think perhaps you're being a little too hard on yourself in a few places and thus I thought I'd just leave a salient paragraph from "Infinite Jest" about a character (who is pretty obviously David Foster Wallace writing about himself) terrified by the efficacy of prayer, which persists despite his unbelief:
ReplyDelete"He notes how he's observed already that some Catholics and Fundamentalists now in AA had a childhood understanding of a Stern and Punishing-type God, and Gately's heard them express incredible Gratitude that AA let them at long last let go and change over to an understanding of a Loving, Forgiving, Nurturing-type God. But at least these folks started out with some idea of Him/Her/It, whether fucked up or no. You might think it'd be easier if you Came In with 0 in the way of denominational background or preconceptions, you might think it'd be easier to sort of invent a Higher-Powerish God from scratch and then like erect an understanding, but Don Gately complains that this has not been his experience thus far. His sole experience so far is that he takes one of AA's very rare specific suggestions and hits the knees in the a. m. and asks for Help and then hits the knees again at bedtime and says Thank You, whether he believes he's talking to Anything/body or not, and he somehow gets through that day clean. This, after ten months of ear-smoking concentration and reflection, is still all he feels like he 'understands' about the 'God angle. ' Publicly, in front of a very tough and hard-ass-looking AA crowd, he sort of simultaneously confesses and complains that he feels like a rat that's learned one route in the maze to the cheese and travels that route in a ratty-type fashion and whatnot. W/ the God thing being the cheese in the metaphor. Gately still feels like he has no access to the Big spiritual Picture. He feels about the ritualistic daily Please and Thank You prayers rather like like a hitter that's on a hitting streak and doesn't change his jock or socks or pre-game routine for as long as he's on the streak. W/ sobriety being the hitting streak and whatnot, he explains. The whole church basement is literally blue with smoke. Gately says he feels like this is a pretty limp and lame understanding of a Higher Power: a cheese-easement or unwashed athletic supporter. He says but when he tries to go beyond the very basic rote automatic get-me-through-this-day-please stuff, when he kneels at other times and prays or meditates or tries to achieve a Big-Picture spiritual understanding of a God as he can understand Him, he feels Nothing — not nothing but Nothing, an edgeless blankness that somehow feels worse than the sort of unconsidered atheism he Came In with. He says he doesn't know if any of this is coming through or making any sense or if it's all just still symptomatic of a thoroughgoingly Diseased will and quote 'spirit. ' He finds himself telling the Tough Shit But You Still Can't Drink audience dark doubtful thoughts he wouldn't have fucking ever dared tell Ferocious Francis man to man. He can't even look at F. F. in the Crocodile's row as he says that at this point the God-understanding stuff kind of makes him want to puke, from fear. Something you can't see or hear or touch or smell: OK. All right."