It took a while to recover from that shattered faith as a kid. Even before I met the true love of my life, the moment I first fell in love as a young adult I found the matter put entirely back at priority one. There was no doubt about the love. I’d never felt such longing. The all consuming affection for another human was palatable. I’d never loved anyone like this. I think the difference between this and my love for my mother (besides the physical) was that my mother’s love in return was unconditional. I’d like to think the heart my heart chose did love me - even loved me unconditionally in her own way - but her mind just wasn’t ready to kiss in the streets. And the real kicker, is that looking back now if she had - I would have wound up an entirely different, much less desirable, in my opinion, person. This intense affection I had for her could make me swoon - but the conflicts that increased in complexity after a while morphed us into something so wrong that in time I don’t think she even liked me anymore! I certainly didn’t. My hurt and insecurities got the better of me so that my shadow self had the propulsion of an explosion bursting forward and no longer from any "good" place. I tried to love her in that way of Jesus without expectation but in the end, I just couldn’t. I absolutely had to just let go. Love cannot root unless it is grounded from both sides. It just doesn’t seem to work.
Author Caroline Myss, who wrote Energy Anatomy, Advanced Energy Anatomy, and dozens of other books I highly recommend, conveys that we are essentially born into tribes we are meant to leave. It’s beautiful to think that we could all be born into a safe hub without significant issues chipping at our philosophical foundations, but honestly what would we even learn in such a world? How would we evolve? As pretty as that looks fundamentally, it just doesn’t work within the bigger picture. If it does, I guess I just haven’t reached that level picture yet.
So what went wrong? All you need is love, right? (Was that the Beatles? or the Bible?) I loved this love but it went against everything normal in the tribe that I knew and at a time when “normal” was all I aspired to. I tried to change but simply couldn’t. Nothing worked. I’d tried to connect that way with guys. I just couldn’t do it. I like guys, but as friends. All attempts at romantic involvement just feels silly or theatrical. Ultimately, there is just no magic. (To be fair, there were women I can’t trust either but they still made my knees weak when we kissed so I think in the end it’s all a bit beyond thought - at least mine anyway). Eventually I tried to connect that way with other girls besides the one I’d fallen head over heels for. The magic with girls knocked me for loop after loop - even when I knew I was not in love. Sex is its own magic!
But, God hated homosexuals.
Up until then I wasn’t sure there even was a God. He was starting to bear a remarkable resemblance to Santa Claus. Still, I’d had moments. A quick desperate prayer was answered. A profound thought at the right time that appeared to come from nowhere. After a while, God didn’t seem totally implausible. I even think I may have had an out of body experience once that I later read followed much the same protocol others had experienced such as feeling stuck at a solid object and extreme fatigue upon reentry. This alone was resembling an empirical argument for the infinite.
But it did appear God was more and more unlikely as I grew older and older. By this point I’d met my share of priests, discussed these issues of consequence at great lengths but never left feeling satisfied that I had received real truth in return. Perhaps I wasn’t truly imparting my own? I was becoming more and more enthralled with the study of philosophy and ethics, if only because it was comforting to know that the same questions I was asking were asked and recorded by so many others and for so many centuries. College opened my eyes to the similarities of my thoughts and some of the most preserved questions that plagued the minds of names I’d heard only vaguely referenced throughout the ages. I explored the stories behind names like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kant, and Voltaire. In college I was able to shed my facades as I found notions that I favored in people such as Plato, Hume, De Beauvoir, Weil, Gilligan, even Cioran. As I grew to discover myself, I started to accept who I was. This was the beginning of finally coming from a good place.
One night, I picked up this book. All I knew about it was that it was popular, had gotten that way through word of mouth, and a friend had bought it for me. “A true adventure story” it boasted on the cover. I don’t know what exactly lured me into it but that one evening literally changed my life.
The hoopla around the Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield coincidentally casted just the right amount of credibility and intrigue to fascinate and inspire me just enough. I somehow wound up giving it the chance to prove itself to me empirically. The book picks up with a rather mundane character lollygagging around his life who passionately and wholeheartedly stumbles into a South American suppression of an ancient manuscript.
And this is the part of the plot I force myself to tell because it’s a worthy story even as I come off bad in it. I was still as gullible in college as I’d been at six 6 years old. To me, a “true adventure story” translated to “true” as in real, or factual, not as in faithful or pure. I considered it the opposite of “false” or “fiction.” For me, the plot circled around like The Neverending Story leaving the reader with the possibility that it all had - yes indeed - all had actually happened, if you bought the premise of the narrator’s say so at least.
The difference between these theatrics and the ones encountered in church for me was I think simply my age. In church, I could just about comprehend that we were there to learn to tell the truth and to be good to others. I knew there was this guy Jesus who walked around a lot and inspired a few people to write about him. I knew there were meanings underneath the stories that were expanded upon by the priests and that a bunch of stipulations had somehow been dolled out for congregations to follow in order to be “saved.”
Celestine was less dusty. Celestine was experimental. In Celestine, there was a “try it and see” aspect that I have now also found in other less local to me and perhaps less conventional religions such as Buddhism or Wiccan. It was empirically based in a way I could just no longer trust the Church to be. (It probably helped that it didn’t supposedly damn me to Hell from the gecko.) After all, the Bible had this rather unsatisfying ending with way too many spoilers. There were lots of Christians who appeared to be less than authentic. They were either angry, controlling extremists, or uninvested absentees. I knew enough to see how much of life’s mysteries lead back to explanations one could find in the Bible, but the church had so many obvious atrocities under its belt. From the Crusades and the Acquisition, to the Western slavery of African Americans, inherent misogyny and mass homophobia; Christianity seemed to be a great story, but either a story gone astray, or a terribly insecure and uncharismatic God parting the seas just to avenge His enemies. Celestine however, for me was a solitary experiment that I could pick up and try for myself.
I mean after all this there were certain points a priori for me: One, life was fake in the sense that people were all too often wrong or too misled by their own agendas to really be trusted at first. After all, children are inundated with platitudes and assurances that things will be alright. And yet one thing seems almost certain: we will all die. How shitty is that? Two, love was real. At this point I knew love. I was elated around this person. I was in a relationship with her where I was in no way satisfied, but I was close enough to be painfully aware that no matter what happened, I knew I never really could be. Other people seemed to like each other - to endure one another. They found ways to fit. But even though it wasn’t a conventional relationship by any means, I loved this person like no person has ever loved another person. I was absolutely sure of that.
But there are Bible verses that seem to suggest homosexuality is sinful. It said there were no homosexuals in Heaven and described women who acted on their desires for each other as “unnatural.” Homosexuality at this point was listed in my dictionary as a literal “sickness” or “perversion.” And gay people were not allowed to marry anywhere on the globe.
I bought these definitions and explanations at surface level. All the hatred and disdain for queers to me appeared to stem from there. If I was queer, and only love (true, mature, reciprocated love) could make me happy, and my only path to it was wrong, then I was already doomed.
It’s a terrible conundrum. The cruelty to this day makes me sad. So many are stuck there knowingly or not, and so many more have died never feeling alive as a result of this cruel and manipulative paradigm.
I think the people who purport this must have never really felt God. They may have felt love in fleeting glimpses and whimsical moments. They may be highly intelligent and knowledgeable about well sourced material stemming from ancient truths. Maybe they are clear, precise, unmuddied thinkers with focused trajectories and peer reviewed applause. They may even pray. But a paradise sought after from fear, dissatisfaction, insecurity, anger or control - to me now is very suspect. A rule purported and explained away as hard or soft whether punished if broken or painted as the ideal may be a rule, but it is no true law. A law cannot be broken. There are very few natural laws, but they most certainly have little to do with how “natural” women consensually behave when they are alone together.
It’s a challenge in my life that is behind my efforts here to convey this notion that as much as we are all right we can also be all wrong, but internalizing this could indeed solve so many secular and spiritual problems. The short of it is that there is wisdom in common sense. The extremes that some go to in order to enact power over another for whatever reason is often coming from the fear and insecurity over the inevitability of death.
There are obvious issues that are problematic. The dichotomy that gender purports for example is one. Boys restricted from sentiment or pause, and excused for aggression and girls ostracized from independence and restricted to being ornament is wrong. These are archaic mistakes we keep perpetuating unconsciously. There is no true division between genders or even sex physical or otherwise. In fact, there are just as many sexually ambiguous babies born with both or even neither sexual organs as there are children born with Down Syndrome. Doctors make decisions about sexual assignment in the moment they are shown and can sometimes affect the entire trajectory of a child’s life in one fearful or rash moment. In truth, we all make tremendous assumptions about almost every child and there’s almost no way of ever knowing the effects of these thoughtless or easy decisions. It is often deemed a medical “emergency” to do so, but the emergency is social, not physical. And who has ever really felt entirely “boy” or entirely “girl”? Fundamentalism though, is no longer possible.
This is why the way that Celestine came to me, from the timing of my own gullibility, to my social location and budding sexuality as well as the particular circumstances of my life; all of this combined to make the Celestine coincidence I experienced perfect! I gave it enough of a chance to experience its validity. And, I’m telling you now from that experience, it is truth!
What follows is a spoiler alert. If you haven’t read the book, put this book down now and go read it! Seriously. It’s worth every moment and it’s honestly a quick read. If you have already read it (and about half the people I meet in life somehow have) then welcome back to your quick refresher! It shocks me how many people I meet have read the book in an age when most of us don’t read. We watch and even that is a commitment (especially post 2020). I’m honestly not sure if it’s a tribute to the popularity of that novel, or the circles with which I bring myself. In any case, if you aren’t going to read it, and never have, the following posts are going to be a crash course at least on how the book affected me.
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