Reconciling My Faith: God, Christianity and 4 Years In The City
There are days when I am really angry with God.
I want to tell him/her/it, “WTF?! I had the perfect life, and you took it all away! And now I’m wasting away in this dead-end job and my creativity is shrivelling and dying. Is this it?”
(Of course, God’s like, you know I heard that, right?)
Recently I caught up with a friend who is thriving creatively and professionally. Business is going well. She has plenty of creative contract work and consistently gets new exciting work with cool companies like Google.
While I’m happy for her, a spring of anger starts welling up in me whenever I hear stories like this. “That is the life I could be living, God. That is the life I had! Hello?! Is anyone listing?”
The Truth About My Relationship with God
Some people lay down their lives for God.
I had mine taken away from me.
During the Incident in Montenegro (which I’ve written about previously here), I had everything that was precious to me stripped away. My friends around the world. Years of work building up a positive and inspiring online platform. A love for travel and exploring new countries. Squashed. Electrocuted. Evaporated within days.
When I chose to turn around and come back to Toronto, I didn’t do it because it was some grand act of surrender. I did it because I was forced to.
I had no other option. The spiritual abyss that I was plunged into left me a scared, naked, terrified version of myself. (Picture those hypoallergenic cats with no hair).
I knew I couldn’t go forward and keep doing the thing I had done for years: travelling and creating content that was driven by my personal values, convictions and passions. “Follow my bliss,” they had told me. And it worked! At 26, I was living my dream life and the sky was limitless.
In Montenegro, I was left with two options: kill myself, or go back to the one place I could eek out a living while I see what “God” had in store for me.
Coming back to Toronto, I looked perfectly intact. I was healthy. I still had all my skills, ones that would eventually land me a job at a church. Inside, I was fractured into a million little pieces.
Coming back, I had a lot of emotions to process, and honestly, no little idea of how to unpack it all that.
Making Sense of My Return
Some lettering art I started making this year.
This summer will be the 4th anniversary of my return to Toronto.
I have grieved.
I have re-understood who or what God was.
I have accepted the things I cannot change.
I have made peace with the life I have been given.
And I’m still in the process of sorting through all these emotions.
My biggest spiritual breakthrough has been giving permission to understand the Christian faith in the way that makes sense to me, with the way that I am wired, as a product of my generation and my travels, with my temperament and my explorer-personality.
Finding God On My Terms
If you’ve ever listened to a preacher talk about the centrality of Jesus to the Christian faith, you know that Christians like to talk about how Jesus is THE POINT of Christianity.
For me, my return to church and to God had nothing to do with Jesus. Nothing. No visions of a white figure in robes. No revelations about his sacrificial love for me. Hardcore Christians don’t like to hear that because it seems to break their theology. “What do you mean you became Christian and it had nothing to do with Jesus?” I can see the question bubbling behind their eyeballs whenever I tell them how I ended up in Toronto, working in a church.
In Montenegro, I had an acute understanding that there must be something alive and intelligent in the cosmos and it, whatever it is, is communicating with me.
Since I have a Christian background, and multiple concepts about God in my memory files, I just called it — the thing that warped my world in Montenegro — God.
One of those memory files identified God as something/someone who could cast thunderbolts from “heaven” and strike down his opponents and punish them. (That might be a God + Zeus amalgamation, but anyway, that’s what happened to me.) So sure, it was God in Montenegro.
Kind of like Moses and the burning bush in the wilderness, if I wanted to put a Christian spin on it.
The truth is that I just resorted to unpacking my experience in Montenegro through a Christian lens, because that this the spiritual tradition I am most familiar with. If I was a Buddhist, I’d probably find some teaching that related it to transcending suffering and releasing desire.
The Problem with My Christian-Looking Life
A few months after arriving back in Toronto, I ended up with a job at a church. On one hand, I felt a sense of comfort from God. God is watching over me. God has a plan for me.
On the other hand, I felt like I was being put into prison. Oh no, now everyone is just going to assume that I’m a Christian!
I can play Christian really well. I know all the Bible verses. I speak and write Christianese at the level 5 advanced. (By the power of the Holy Spirit!) Heck, I’m even studying at a seminary and doing a master’s of divinity. Oh! Then, God even gave me a second job, with a Christian digital media company where every week I export some Christian-ish content into the world.
The problem was, that 75% of the time, I felt like an undercover deconstructionist.
On the outside, I ticked off all the Christian boxes with flying colours. Even now, I could write a version of my life that sounds like cookie-cutter Christian testimony. Inside though, I still figuring out what all this God, Jesus and Holy Spirit stuff is about.
Inside, I was only 10% Christian, and 90% figuring out my spirituality. Outside, I looked like I was 1000% Christian.
Perhaps that’s why I felt like I couldn’t write about God and Christianity and spirituality for the last four years. I constantly had to deal with the dissonance of looking like one thing while being another.
Unpacking My Spirituality, four years Later
For the last four years, I have been sorting through all of my thoughts and questions about Christianity and spirituality. And it’s what I’m still doing. I’ve come to understand that it’s just the way I’m wired. I love the spiritual, mystical, ethereal, ephemeral, artistic. I love exploring and unpacking spiritual and religious traditions. I almost wish I had an extra three senses so that I could take in the world more spiritually, and not just materially (…maybe I actually do!)
What’s allowed me to finally arrive somewhere solid enough to write and talk about my spiritual journey is the personal understanding that the stories of God and Jesus do give me hope for the world.
I do not intend on discarding my “Christianity,” but neither will I just let the world tell me what it means to be a “Christian.”
I have something to say. The “thing,” which I will call God, compels me to speak and share this process.
I don’t need to have all answers. I will never have all the answers. My way of understanding the gospel message, the Bible and God WILL continue to morph, grow and evolve throughout my lifetime.
In The Deep End Of Christianity
If you can remember what you learned in Grade 5 science class. Maybe we learned about precipitation and how water changes states. Then Grade 11 chemistry, we learned about reactions between elements on the period table. Then, if you went on to student science in university, you took more advanced classes. Calculus, biochemistry, genetics. (I’m sorry if you’re a science major and I’m totally butchering this!)
Then, an even smaller number of people go on do to Ph.D.’s in science, and someone, who knows and understands lightyears more than the fifth-grader, comes up with a cure for cancer.
We use words like chemo, radiation, cancer and vaccine, but the average person doesn’t know what those words mean: chemically, biologically, physiologically. (Since I’m not an expert in this, I literally don’t have the words!)
I guess you could say, I have an innate love for the science of spirituality, religion, faith and humanity.
It’s not the only thing I care about, much like a scientist can also be a kayaker, but it’s a thread in my life that pulls me deeper.
Through my Mdiv program, I am discovering that I actually like to unpack religions. Not just Christianity, but all spiritual traditions. For me, it’s like understanding the heart of humanity.
Why have all societies constructed their version of “God”, be it Hollywood celebrities or 500-ft golden Buddhas?
What is it in the human spirit that points us upward to wonder?
The Gateway
The Mdiv program is giving me all kinds of fancy 8-syllable words that the average person cannot pronounce. (And I’m still learning to pronounce! Like… homouusios, patripassianism, monophysite.)
For some, this is gibberish. For someone else, this is the gateway to the cure for cancer.
What keeps me going on this pilgrim journey is the realization that my beliefs are going to change and that they are supposed to change. But I’m not just meandering aimlessly. The thing, which I will call God, that communicated to me in Montenegro is still communicating with me.
It is leading me.
I do not walk alone.
And that makes all the difference.
Infinite Love,
Anita
