Despair and Ecstasy

A 15-Year Post-Religious Journal Entry

“Dealing with Emotions”

“I’m not sure which will kill me first – the beauty of this life or the sadness of it.” Jim Palmer

Along my religious deconstruction route, even in recent years, I’ve felt many difficult and many beautiful things. I remember years ago when I first found out that hell was a total scam. I cannot tell you the jubilation and ecstasy I experienced. Suddenly, the heavens parted, the angels sang, the sun shone brighter, the sky looked bluer, and for the first time, the world felt like a safe place. Everyone and everything felt so valued and full of promise. I could not have felt more light, joyful, secure, and full of hope.

Over the next couple years, the light faded. Reality began to set in. Questions and novel struggles came in waves. The more I deconstructed my “solid beliefs,” the more inner storms I encountered. Since then over the last decade, I’ve encountered many intense, turbulent feelings, such as:

Rejected: Many of you know this struggle intimately. I could not believe that the people I had invested so much time and heart into could turn on a dime and cut me out of their lives seemingly without a tear. I don’t believe I ever would have done such a thing if the roles had been reversed. It showed me how shallow the connections, and that religion is more like a club than a family. If you obey the club rules, you are a member with full privileges. But disobey the rules, and the next time you show up to the club, the locks have been changed. You are, overnight, on the outside. It was truly eye -opening.

Then there was my sister. Long ago, before she and her husband left the family for ten years (with their five children) to follow a “modern day apostle,” we had been best friends. The loss of her friendship in my life, occurring on the heels a horrible, high conflict divorce, was more than I could bear. I fasted, and prayed, and cried over her for five years. Simultaneously, I walked with my mom through cancer for six years, with no sibling to help shoulder the burden and loss.

Eventually, eleven years later, the religious gathering broke up and my sister started making efforts to get connected with me. But she was different; things were not easy and comfortable between us like before. As soon as she figured out that I had written a book deconstructing a cornerstone Christian doctrine (hell), she decided I was a dangerous false teacher (oh, the irony), and she could not associate with me. She indicated that she could not pollute herself (her exact words “light can’t fellowship with darkness”) by being around me anymore after that. That was ten years ago, the summer I graduated from nursing school, and we have not had open or meaningful contact since.

How does it feel? It doesn’t feel like much of anything now. After I cried for five years, I came across a verse where God asked Samuel how long he was going to mourn over Saul. Then he said to Samuel, “Fill your horn with oil and be on your way” (1 Sam 16: 1). I saw myself in that passage. I got up, dusted myself off, filled my horn with oil, and moved on with my life. Eventually I found two new, loyal sisters (shout out to Barb and Carrie) who loved me for me, and not my beliefs. But damage done between families remained. Our adult children aren’t as close as they should be. I barely know my nieces who were young at the time. We are slowly building, but it feels like the tribe that should be there for you in your lifetime has never been there. That part still feels sad, disappointing, and empty. It’s a loss of dreams.

Alone: I have touched on this above. But going deeper than religious deconstruction, I was sort of born into a story where I was fated to do things alone and quite often to feel lonely. As a latchkey kid of the 70s, I practically raised myself from the time I was six—which was way better than the old, mean, chain-smoking babysitter I’d had before that time. I remember asking my grandmother when I was young if she ever felt lonely. I was trying to find out if that was just the human condition or if the constant ache in my soul was unique to me. My grandmother, ever the joyful soul with multitudes of friends, denied any such feelings. Her contrast made the aloneness within myself more suffocating and achy.

I grew up in a small town in Wyoming and never fit into peer groups. I’m not sure why. I was always left out and even bullied through grade school and middle school by a few teachers and students alike. In high school, the in-group, made up of jocks and mean girls (I participated in volleyball, basketball, and track), still kept me on the outside, though they had stopped bullying me. One of my high school classmates wrote me a letter of apology a few years ago. She said something like, “I just want you to know that how we all treated you wasn’t anything you did, and I’m very sorry for participating.” It was extremely validating to receive that letter.

They say that you often go through things that prepare you for other things. Throughout many seasons of my life, knowing how to navigate loneliness became an asset. I’ve needed to learn to be my own best friend and wise guide in this lifetime.

During religious deconstruction, I lost all of my closest friends, my entire church family, and my “Christian integrity.” Where one minute I was a beloved friend and mentor, then next I was suddenly a danger, a false teacher, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a Jezebel (I was called all of these) just because of a few empowering theological shifts that made the awareness of God’s love greater. By that time, however, I was a pro at losing friends and doing life with me, myself, and I. In the span of thirteen years, I experienced the loss of husband, loss of marriage friends, loss of church friends, loss of custody of my children, loss of my sister and her family, and loss of my mother. I have never written about most of this..maybe someday I will.

It's important to learn how to be okay in your own skin—alone—but it can become its own prison of sorts when you lose touch with how to have deeper relationships or you quit trusting life. Over time and much rejection and loss, I have learned how to protect my heart with a hard, impenetrable shell. In recent years, it feels crystalized. I want to try to open up again somehow, but I don’t know what it will take. I don’t think more pain and loss is the answer, if anyone upstairs is listening.

Liminal: The idea of liminality is transition with no known resolve. It’s like when the African slaves were torn from their motherland by the slave lords and then were tossed on the seas for what seemed like endless days on the way to their new lands and lives. They were no longer the identities that they had been stripped of—kings and queens, tribe members, husbands, wives, parents, businessmen, holy men and women, friends, healers—but they did not yet know who they were becoming. They were in the middle space between knowing and not knowing, between being known and being completely unknown.

I would say that my life, since leaving behind the certainties of religion, as well as going through all of my ongoing identity changes spiritually, relationally, vocationally, and geographically, have left me stranded in a liminal space. Even fifteen years later, I don’t yet know who I’m becoming. It feels very open-ended and uncertain.

Lost: To be liminal is to be lost at sea. Sometimes the sea is stormy, sometimes it’s placid. But either way, there is no lighthouse waiting on the other side to give you a stable reference point or to guide you with a sense of certainty to your next destination.

Insignificant: Five years ago, a dark cloud of insignificance emerged on my horizon. I can’t adequately understand the origin of this very specific feeling, but I think it’s tied to my childhood, and particularly my mother wound. I think with the liminal and lost feelings, it naturally leads to the questions, “Do I matter? Why do I matter?”

I remember the very day this feeling came splashing up into my consciousness with overwhelming despair in November 2019. I often go to nature to find answers in the patterns. So, I sat on the rooftop of our guest casita, overlooking the steep jungle ravine. What did I see? Thousands of nameless, unnoticed, seemingly unimportant, purposeless trees. If one died, who cared? The jungle vines covered it up never to be seen again and perhaps another tree emerged in its place. The jungle felt so cold and impersonal that day. It did not offer me any hope, and I could not shake the haunting despair for a couple of years.

Confused: According to Gandhi, there are as many religions as there are people. Everyone has an opinion on truth (and Truth). Isn’t it ludicrous that we ever allowed any of those billions of opinions to become authoritative for us?

Now we see through a glass darkly. We apparently brought ourselves into this realm behind a veil of forgetfulness where it’s normal to feel confused and disoriented. The thing most of us who grew up in religion aren’t good at doing, is sitting in the fog of our questions and uncertainties. Over time, though, this can get easier. Dogma and certainty aren’t our friends. We don’t know, and we can’t know the full Truth while in this realm.

Powerless: Remember back in the days in church when we were completely indoctrinated with all of the answers about life, faith, the hereafter? I mean, we didn’t know all the minor details, but we were certain of the full game plan and outcome of this Story, as interpreted for us out of the Bible by our pastor in our particular denomination. But eventually, the whole narrative falls apart.

Losing one’s certainty is like being an NFL football player at halftime of the Superbowl when the coach says, “Guys, we’re going to change it up a little for the second half and finish out our game with a ballet contest over in the fine arts building.”

I didn’t have the foggiest idea how to live in my new skin with any kind of confidence or direction. First of all, I no longer knew what was true. I had to go about life and faith blindly, waiting long intervals of time for answers and clarity. Relying on the Bible for reassurance or “answers” was useless because I no longer trusted the Bible for guidance or insight. My previous superpower (“God’s Word”) became what it actually is: a book of other people’s experiences (not even the people we attribute as writing it) in a metaphorical-historical record that was frequently tampered with and likely still contains inspirational truths under the plain surface meaning. But I needed a break.

I also stopped praying. I realized how silly it is to ask/beg/plead with a “God” to do something about what he/she already knows about that needs to be done. If God is love and all knowing, why in the world would repetitively asking for help or interventions be necessary when this God could and should already be out in the world doing all of that? But after a lifetime of believing that prayer was necessary in order for God’s power to be unleashed in this world, it was a paradigm shift that left me feeling aimless and a bit powerless.

Over time, my definition of prayer has changed to being in alignment with what the Divine Source is doing in this world. Kind of like, “Thy will be done and how can I participate?” Nowadays I do think there is psychological benefit for me in verbalizing or journaling what I want or need, and feeling heard, but not because God is waiting for (or needing) me to ask.  

Scared of the unknown: I’m one of those people who can’t stop wondering what is on the other side and what this Story is really about. It’s taken me fifteen years to unravel a plausible greater story, one little crumb at a time. In the meantime, I have to admit that losing control of the neat and tidy narrative of our existence has brought a lot of discomfort into my life about the nature of existence. It’s quite a mental and spiritual shift. It actually makes God and existence seem as big and mysterious as I always hoped and expected it all to be. But sometimes, it feels out of control and scary, because the real story is that big and a lot of it can’t be known or grasped with our human minds.

Tired: Don’t you just get tired turning over every stone and listening to every opinion on God and the afterlife out there? But, there’s something inside of me that drives me to keep looking, keep searching. Lucky me.

Aimless: For a long time, I took a mental break from religion and spirituality. I was busy pursuing a nursing degree and nearly all my focus went there for at least 8-10 years. Which is why I stopped writing. Anyhow, until last year, I felt like an arrow without a target. Always moving somewhere, but nowhere to land. Last year, thankfully, I discovered the New Thought teachers, which led to many other interesting writers and progressive thinkers. And viola…the spiritual desert found it’s first oasis in many years. Answers, empowerment, new sources of hope and inspiration.

Which leads me to the next half of my emotional journal.

You’ve had a glimpse of the harder emotions I’ve endured these past fifteen years. Lest you’re ready to pop a bottle of Prozac, are there any high points to speak of? Has it been all doom and gloom? Absolutely not! I’ve enjoyed a bountiful realm of positive emotions and experiences within myself.

Honest: You know that feeling when you’ve held your breath under water for as long as possible, and finally you break the surface, gulping in that light, cool, fresh air? That’s how it feels to be outside of religion looking back. I feel honest, and light, and full of life.

Congruent: My mind, and therefore my path, has become so clear not trying to reconcile mountains of cognitive dissonances and contradictions. Now I can just sit in the questions and dangling ends (unfinished chapters) until the story shows me how it all fits together. It could take eons. But it’s amazing how much improved my mental health feels by being true to my intuition and not trying to ignore all the pink elephants in all the rooms.

Relevant: Now that I am more authentic as a human, I feel like my interface with the world and human experience is more relevant. I am not longer silently judging, categorizing, compartmentalizing, and dismissing situations and people, which means that they feel more of a connection to me as well. What I have to say, and how I am being in this world is greatly more impactful now that I see the Divine Spark in all humans. As I tell people now, Life is my church!

Unattached to Outcomes: The importance of allowing life’s evidences and experiences to lead where they may (not where I want them to go) has served me in all areas of my life: spirituality quest, nursing, worldview, relationships, and nature of reality. A true scientist does not perform confirmation bias; she allows the test of a hypothesis to lead her to its own answer. And one thing I have learned is that the initial “answer” is not always the final answer. Sometimes there is an even greater truth behind the smaller truth that disproves the earlier, smaller truth. Which is why science always seems to be in a state of flux where there are few absolute truths. This is why we have to remain fluid, and open, and not get stuck on one answer or concept. Life is an evolutionary process.

Expansive & New: Back in the days of church, I was beyond bored. It felt like there was nothing new under the sun, despite serving a supposedly infinite and mysterious God. I had stopped learning anything new in church from sermons by the time I was fifteen. The old interpretations of the Bible were stale and lifeless, offering no mystery whatsoever. But then…a crack in the veneer. Pandora’s box was opened.

The world truly is my oyster now. I love that I can explore every nook and cranny—from the most distant country to the most “dangerous” book. In fact, if religion says it’s dangerous or taboo, that is the first place I want to go look for myself. I feel almost giddy describing the ways being open to life without fear has changed me and given me so much to think about, to be curious about, to explore, and to find personal growth through. Life is truly full of wonder and mystery now, and I never have enough time to look into all of the new ideas on my horizon!

Limitless: Not only are the world, the great beyond, and the great mysteries of life now seen for what they are (limitless), but I find that I also am that spectacular and limitless. This avatar living inside my earth suit is just a mere speck of all that is the spirit, currently named Julie. It’s an adventure every day plumbing the depths of my unique soul that reaches beyond time and space. There is nothing I can’t do or become if I allow my mind to find it’s awareness of my spirit or my Higher Self.

Empowered/Powerful: I wish I could have listed this one as fearless. Fear has been my number one struggle throughout my life—thee life lesson to overcome. Luckily, my nature is full of fire (as evidenced in my astrology birth chart). This is what saved my life through the challenges of my childhood and beyond. Fire kept my spirit intact where my siblings fell by the wayside after our very difficult childhood. Before learning more about my soul’s blueprint and purpose in this lifetime through astrology, I used to marvel at my ability to endure; now I know why.

I have always tried to go into my fears in order to dismantle them—or else they didn’t give me a choice and made me face them. Some of my fears have been: dying, especially as a young mother, public speaking, being alone or abandoned, the dark, hell, questioning God, loss, betrayal, my father, losing my mother, spiders (and now I live in a jungle). I feel like I have overcome so many fears, but it seems that as soon as I overcome one, there is another even more paralyzing fear behind it.

In the last few years, I have been facing abandonment fears, which can be traced to the wound left behind by my mother. This has materialized as a fear of vulnerability in my love relationships. It’s been a journey, but I think I’m coming out the other side.

Compassionate/Loving: I remember the year before I deconstructed hell, I was walking in a rainstorm, crying my eyes out because the realization that all of my years sitting in church, praying, reading my Bible, and desiring to be better had not filled my heart with love for people. How I wanted to love people, but I could not muster it up in my heart. I felt cold and disinterested (likely from a loveless childhood). But then miracle of miracles! Practically overnight when I learned that there were no throwaways, my heart toward people changed. It was as if I got a glimpse into the heavenly Heart that all people are truly connected as one. My heart opened to compassionate love in ways I did not expect, nor had ever felt before. I know this could not have been contrived. When I became a nurse a few years ago, I often marveled at the deep love and compassion I felt for my patients, and I knew that it had not been there before. I am changed by Love.

Free: I think this is my most prized state of my Being in recent years. I feel a wonderful sense of being untethered, like a cloud, able to grow and experience anything without fear. In fact, the Universe gave me a measuring stick many years ago when I asked the question, “How far is too far? How will I know if I am safe going down any particular path of inquiry? Are there any guidelines?”

The answer came in as soft as a feather:

As long as you are living from love, you will never go astray. As long as whatever stone you overturn, or philosophy you encounter leads you toward love and liberty, and does not induce or proliferate fear, the path is safe to follow. Those are the highest principles in the Universe.

A directive so simple a child could understand and follow it.

So now you have an overview of my inner landscape and emotional journey the past fifteen years. Can you relate?