Guard Your Heart from Chaotic "Spirituality"

     Have you ever been so excited about a new spiritual path, thereafter wondering, “What the heck was I thinking”, when your excitement ceased?  This happened to me because of the obvious flaws I witnessed in “Born Again” Christianity.  Generally these kind of churches try recruiting certain types of people into relative retreats made to “change your life” in a way that attempts to convince people that through “Jesus” is the only way you can be the best person you could possibly be.

     Even though I am a firm believer that Christianity isn’t for everyone, I still recognize, political agendas aside, that the Christian path is very beneficial to certain individuals in my life.  However there are sometimes retreats like I mentioned, or other church programs which more or less just manipulate …  Which is never a good way to start a new spiritual path.

     Below you will see and excerpt from my book, Becoming the Devil They Fear: A Gay Book of Shadows, where I share my experience at one of these retreats:

“…We were greeted with cheers and confetti being thrown in our faces as if we were very important people who had arrived to an event in our honor.  Soon after we all joined hands and those who brought us sang a song about having “a new life”.

I wasn’t too worried about it at the time because I trusted my friend and it all seemed quite positive.  I had become more of a firm believer in “Christ” and more open to other denominations of Christianity.  Although this event took place inside an Alliance church, the event was meant to be for anyone seeking a path to the divine in their lives.  I suppose this was their version of that and I went into the retreat expecting to become closer to “Jesus”.

There were a number of people who brought friends to this event which they claimed to be a gift from the people who brought us.  I definitely appreciated the sentiment of my friend and loved seeing how happy he was that I was there. However there were, on occasion, people who left the retreat and if you attempted to leave, you were surrounded by some of the organizers being questioned of why you wanted to leave.  Then they would desperately try to convince you to stay and say things like “just wait it out for a while because the real retreat hasn’t even started yet and when it does, you’ll be glad you stayed”. Throughout the weekend we constantly heard the same songs about being in “Jesus’ arms of love” and having “a new life”.  It was an attempt to turn us all into firm believers of “Christ” and possibly even joining their group for future retreats.

The majority of the food provided was paid in half by the person who brought you and the other half by the church.  The food was rather good and during supper there would be these plays.  I recall one of the plays to be a bit of a guilt trip played on the youth.  It suggested that the average youth wears a mask of what peer pressure turns them into.  Shaming on the small “sins” like swearing or fighting with a sibling to the bigger “sins” like doing drugs or having sex.

It was a pitiful attempt to make us all feel bad for trying to be accepted into whichever click we belonged.  Ironically they were attempting to mask us with Christian culture and I assure you there are far better ways to reclaim one’s innocence.

We were assigned to groups with one boy and one girl as our leaders and they asked us to call them their Mom and Dad.  In these groups we were expected to share our most personal stories as they would tell us that we didn’t need to share if we didn’t want to.  However if we didn’t share anything, it became a huge issue for them.  The leaders would run to each other to pray and discuss the fact that certain people are having problems sharing.

They literally told us nothing about what goes on during the weekend before we arrived and the pressure they put on us to share stories was a bit overwhelming so eventually most people, ironically, just started sharing out of peer pressure because they don’t want to be looked down upon.

The format of the retreat had a lot to do with family.  There were other plays that had to do with the way we treated our parents and siblings, even going so far as to show someone being mistreated and crying which was performed to shame the guests.  Many people cried as they flashed through memories of mistreating family members.

Finally there were plays closer to the end of the retreat that shamed us for not being Christian and how if we became believers then we would treat our families better, becoming more disciplined Christians.

On the final day of the retreat, we found out that our sponsors had collected letters from our parents…”

     I think this is a good place to stop because you probably get the idea by now…  Let me make a point however.  I am not writing this blog as an attempt to discredit one’s relationship with “Jesus”, but to open some eyes to what is really going on in some congregations.  I am simply saying that these retreats, or other similar events aren’t very good reasons to start a relationship with “Jesus” because when the excitement burns out, and when you are faced with events in your life which reflect on who you are, you suddenly begin remembering how things were before an event like this.  And certain parts of who you are aren’t really being addressed but rather suppressed.  You start a journey in a desire to be  “a good Christian” but in doing so, you try not to think about the hurts you did towards friends and family by just apologizing and leaving it at that.  Apologies are good, but not if you aren’t being genuine in who you are, thus you never really did grow spiritually but rather put everything on pause in a manipulated attempt to be “a good Christian”.

     Once you break free of the manipulation, you may very well not want to go to church anymore due to haunting memories you miss in your past and how much more meaningful they were than this new journey.  This new identity you have isn’t you at all, but rather an alternate journey that doesn’t quite fit into your life, and the troubling part is that it takes time to process all of these feelings that haunt you.  By the time you may have processed these feelings, so many people have expectations of you in the church and they would never fully understand the real you underneath it all.  The moment you begin being yourself again, people begin saying that you aren’t in a good place and you aren’t the person they once knew.  Because you were a manipulated version of yourself and it becomes unfortunate when some walk into full blown identity crisis’s because their circle doesn’t really understand them genuinely but enjoy the clone who they have become.

     Learn all the right teachings and say all the right things, and charm them just enough to be highly respected.  Label your natural non-harmful desires as sin, and repress yourself even more.  Then suddenly you realize that no one in your circle of friends are genuine friends because they are pretty much just like you and look what you have become.  It's never too late to be who you already are and guard your heart from such a chaotic way of life, and you don’t need to leave the church to do it even though I eventually did.  Just be you and if they don’t like it, fuck ‘em.  You don’t need anyone’s approval but your own and those who love the real you.