06.04.2020

I was reading A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, and the character of Jude got me thinking. I’m only about one fifth into the book, and so far all we know is that Jude has childhood he doesn’t want to talk about, a childhood where bad things happened, a childhood that he thinks is unintelligible to others, sets him apart and has the potential to socially ostracize him. I think we all have, in some form another, our shameful, our not-normal, hidden in some knot in our psyche, saved there from those moments in childhood where you knew that something about you wasn’t right – you didn’t know why, but you knew you had to hide it. I think if you grew up in any sort of religious set-up, there exists a very special anxiety inside you, because you are hiding yourself from two different sets of expectations. 

I want to begin by saying that my parents did not force us to go to church. My mother accepted that I wanted to cut my hair short and dye it purple, she did not protest when I wanted to wear boy’s clothes, and my father had relatively lofty perimeters for his love – don’t pierce or tattoo your face, don’t dye your hair black and don’t bring home a girl. For the record, I now have a face piercing and a mullet and I brought one of my friends home a few Christmas’ ago and even though she was not my girlfriend I later learned from my sister that the situation had confused my parents (I did gift her lingerie). My mother even once sent a heart-felt email about how she’d always want to be included in my life, even if I was making choices she wouldn’t make herself and that she’d always love me no matter what and then proceeded to ask who the girl on my Instagram photo was (another friend, I hate to disappoint). What I’m trying to say is that I love my parents, and I think they’ve worked very hard to love my siblings and I the best way they know how. 

Still, this is retrospective wisdom, produced by pushing the boundaries I once viewed as ironclad. I spent a lot of my childhood afraid of two things; first, in the early years, my non-Christian friends finding out about what my family, and myself to some extent, believed in and judging me for it because I had been told repeatedly that they would (if you weren’t persecuted you weren’t doing it right), and later on my family finding out about all the ways in which I was experiencing the world in a way that was inconsistent with their views, because I had seen it happen with others, the ostracization. 

The dogmas I grew up with were less about what you might think about when you think religion, the sacraments and the performance of it, and more about a deep sense of personal responsibility over the state of my soul. I had an acute awareness that even though the preacher in the pulpit stated that by the grace of God you were loved and accepted, you lived in a fallen world. There were shadows inside you that you had to be wary of at all times. Discerning which part of you was the world and which was God was the never-ending schizophrenia of it all. I became pretty good at figuring out what behavior got a positive response, which seemed as good of a compass as anything. What I wanted, I was told, was not always consistent with what God wanted. I learnt to hate myself for wanting things I suspected God did not.

There is a part in A Little Life, where Jude talks about wanting to pretend like certain things happened to somebody else, and the longer he spends not talking about it, the easier this becomes. There is something about oral histories, something about telling your friends your deepest, darkest secrets, those parts of you that you thought make you unlovable. It sheds light on the darkness and things are never as scary in the light of day as they are at night. I believe this was the original function of a confession, not the Hail Marys or the money. 

There are parts of myself I have willfully left out, or if not left out then I rarely mention them, or if I do its anecdotal. It exists outside of that area in the Venn diagram that is me that intersects with their world, somewhere just on the periphery of their cultural lexicon and I have always feared what people who have no first-hand experience of charismatic Christianity might think. 

After all, it was I who lied down on gymnasium floors all my youth, waiting for Holy Spirit to come and take away the empty pit inside that seemed to only grow bigger, not smaller. It was I who cried on the floors wondering why I was never good enough, why I couldn’t be what they wanted me to be. The choice to fly to California to attend a discipleship training (that word is still normal to me, but I call it “bible school” when I talk to my friends because they can understand studying a text, whereas discipleship training has that cult-y ring to it that sounds so much worse) – it was not forced upon me.

It was I who, after having dated a non-Christian boy and getting eaten out for four months because I didn’t want to lose my “virginity” (only later could I appreciate the humor) and fearing what I had discovered inside myself, booked the flight and willingly handed over the thousands of euros I had saved up working a shitty retail job and living at home. I distinctly remember thinking that this was the last chance I’d give God, my final offering, all chips in.

Here is a list of some of the things I rarely talk about:

Sitting in a circle with others on our first night, using the vocabulary I knew was legible to them to discuss the forbidden relationship I had had while leaving out the parts I was supposed to (how I did not regret it), knowing guilt was the appropriate emotion but failing to summon it while everyone around me branded me as “the girl who had a non-Christian boyfriend (and probably premarital sex even though she won’t admit it)”. It is virtually impossible to communicate to someone who hasn’t grown up in this culture the hatred I felt toward myself, explicit in my high-school diaries, for not being able to be the kind of girl who patiently waited for God’s chosen husband. It is hard to explain the subtle (and not so subtle) ways it gets drummed into you just how worthless you become if you spread your legs, how irrevocable the damage. When I first mentioned having broken up with a non-Christian boy to a few guys I knew from the church circles, one of them called me a “basic Pentecostal slut” (perus hellarilutka in Finnish, which has a better punch to it, trust me), which was only a joke in so far as they did not care too much that I was one.

Sleeping in bunk beds in a room with five others, getting up at 6am to go for a morning run in the icy fog that floated around the neighbourhood, nesting between the sea and the mountains. It was the only time in the day I had the chance, before the morning prayer time or bible study or prayer walk or house chores or worship. 

Piling up in some beat up van to drive to an auditorium somewhere in Pismo Beach and being asked to pray for all the women getting abortions across the world, to ask God to change their minds (I remember crying, not for the dead babies but the women alone in their hospital gowns, carrying around their uteruses like the punishment it was, wanting to hold their hands and tell them it was all going to be okay, that they were loved  – if there is a holy spirit, that overwhelming sorrowful tenderness that I felt, that was both mine and theirs, is it). 

Singing Taylor Swift in the car on our way to some service, telling the devil how we’re never, ever, getting back together. I can’t remember if I sang along, but the fact that I can’t remember probably means that I did. I think we got fro-yo afterwards. I think most of us were wearing yoga pants. 

Giving testimonies, that were a performance art of sorts. There were certain words and phrases you used, as you spoke about the way God had revealed you your waywardness. You’d know you hit the nail on the head when you’d see people’s eyelids flutter shut and their heads nod in approval, maybe someone would reach their hand in the air as if to catch the little bits of Holy Spirit flying out of your mouth as you spoke. I remember the adrenaline, the high. It could never be the truth, because the narrative had to be victory, it had to be resurrection, it had to be hallelujah God is good, oh how good He is to me.

The way I was asked to stop wearing a see-through shirt because it was distracting to some of the male members of staff, i.e. the husbands and fathers of the staff. The implicit message was that if I did not change my shirt, I would be responsible for the adultery these men were committing in their minds, or any consequent action they’d take. I remember thinking it wasn’t right but I didn’t want to get kicked out of the program, so I complied. 

Going on outreach, the six of us, all under twenty-five, our “team leaders” barely older than the rest. Us giving out Bibles, which even then felt like violence of sorts to me, an intrusion. I was, for those weeks, a missionary. In the Venn Diagram that is me, the side that disagreed has grown much larger in the years that followed. Back then it was only a vague nausea I felt, something I was meant to punish in myself as disobedience to God. Then the week we spent in a hotel in Nicaragua, sun-bathing, being attended to by the locals working in the hotel. The missionaries, lathering body oil on their skins by the pool. We’d earned it, having had to go without a hot shower for a few weeks – God wanted us to have this. What a shit show.

Then there is the one that is harder to explain. How sometimes I did feel I knew God, even as I never fully believed in him. It was never a professed knowledge of anything, just a sense. It was like somewhere beyond the bullshit and the language and the pain there existed something beautiful, and pure and true – a truth. The issue was that it was rarely ever found on the floors of all the gymnasiums that I lied on, waiting for some pastor to lay his or her holy hands on me, to allow me to finally experience what everyone else appeared to be experiencing. 

Being split down the middle like that is a curious thing. I’ve sometimes felt like I exist in some two-way closet, passing through this tunnel as I swap between the world I grew up in and the world I inhabit. Never shall the two meet, except inside me, as close as they may get to one another. Even as I confess these things to you, there exists a library of snapshots inside my brain that I still consider belonging to some other person. The more I think about her though, the more I remember. The more I remember, the more I find that I still love that girl, even if she was obsessed with Fall Out Boy. 

I’m not here to say my childhood was bad – it was not, by any measure. I just think as children we absorb the silences that grow around certain subjects, in religion more than anywhere else I’ve encountered, and then fear grows in those silences. And when you leave the silence and the fear long enough, it hardens to a knot and you start forgetting where you got it in the first place. But I think the reason we protect the knot so hard is because in it exists something that we were and wanted, innocently like children are and want. There were moments when something in us extended out and the world said put that away, you can’t be or want that, it’s disgusting and it’s wrong and it’s dangerous to even look at. So instead of throwing it away we squeeze it inside a sweaty palm and keep it there, waiting for the day we’re somewhere safe so we can uncurl the fingers and look inside. We fear it will undo us, all that we’ve built to cope.