Essay: Woman in the church pew
On faith and exodus
Trigger warning: sexual assault
During a recent session, my therapist reveals that she’s read my book. She holds it up and says,“You know, it strikes me that you’re secretly spiritual. Your poems are spiritual.”
I hem. I haw. She rephrases: “When did you leave God? Or… maybe you feel like he left you?”
I laugh. This feels like a question you should get extra credit for as a therapist. It’s so therapy-y.
“Do you want the real answer?” I ask. “It’s pretty…dark.”
She nods.
Honestly, I know exactly when God left me. It was February and I was 23, lying on the carpet of my friend’s house after a party. A frat bro named Joe was on top of me. That was the moment I saw God exit the front door. I watched him cut across the lawn, turn left on Gibson and then vanish into the night, his breath still hanging in the air.
I drank a lot in my twenties—mostly because I wanted to put my body against men’s bodies and feel their tongues in my mouth. Because I was raised in purity culture, I wasn't supposed to want that—at least not until I was married. Booze gave me permission—the sin of being drunk and violated seemingly less sinful than being sober and sexual by choice.
Raised overseas as a missionary kid, I wasn't taught boundaries or consent because the assumption was I’d never need to know. I was supposed to be a virgin until I was married. Homeschooled half my life and then enrolled in private Christian schools, I finally entered the “real world” armed only with the motto true love waits.
I’ve never really written about my assaults. Mostly because they happened a long time ago and I’m a much different person now. Also, at the time, I didn’t know they were assaults. And because what happens to other women is so much worse and violent and obvious. And because my assaults were complicated situations in which I didn’t advocate for myself. This is to say: purity culture empowers rape culture.
I also never wrote about my assaults because I couldn't bear hearing anyone tell me it wasn’t my fault, or worse, call me brave in the comments.
But that night in February was the beginning of my evangelical exodus. Joe dragging a cigarette across his lips as we talked religion. Joe bragging that he was an atheist. Joe remarking how naive and pure and misguided I was. After he did what he set out to do, he rolled away from me on the carpet and said: Don’t forget, God is dead, like he’d just won a debate. In a way, I suppose he had.
Over the next decade of my life, I would live godless and expansive—traveling to Europe, getting drunk on dance floors, reading Kierkegaard, listening to Snow Patrol, smoking cloves on rooftops, finally buying a vibrator, becoming fluent in curse words, meeting poets and artists and activists, and slowly shedding the complicated heavenly father I’d inherited. But at times, I felt homesick and panicked for him. Like being a little kid lost at the amusement park and unable to find your dad. Running up to strangers with your arms outstretched.
One of my first poetry projects was emailing God poems and sending them to Godinheaven@gmail.com, but they always bounced back.
For a while, I tried churches, but even the liberal ones pinched. Eventually, I left religion altogether. I always felt as if I was trespassing on other people's hope when I went to a service but didn’t truly believe. It felt like walking in on someone making love to my ex-boyfriend.
Now, when people ask me what I believe, I say I’m agnostic. I say what everyone says—that I’m spiritual. That I defer to mystery. On first dates, after explaining that I was raised in central Africa by Baptist missionaries, I joke that I’m still a missionary and I've actually come to dinner to convert them. It’s not a great joke, but if they laugh, they get a second date.
Unsurprisingly, my best friends and closest lovers are all ex-evangelicals. Fellow sojourners in No-Gods-Land—a jungled topography of longing and echo. The only country where you become a citizen as a result of leaving it.
Lately, I’ve been trying to take my therapist’s advice. She says you can call god whatever you like, but you have to find a place to put the trauma of being alive. She’s not religious, but she says we all need something to believe in.
In an interview published before his death, Irish poet and priest, John O'Donohue said the following (this was a podcast so I’m paraphrasing slightly):
There’s a divine region within you where no one has ever reached. Nothing that has ever happened to you has tarnished or damaged it. You have within yourself your own chapel and sanctuary.
He adds:
There is divinity behind every face and, sooner or later, you have to tangle with it.
So now, I’m tangling with it—waking every morning and meditating, walking, praying to something I don’t yet have language for.
Sometimes, when I trip on mushrooms, I feel god as nothing I’ve ever imagined. A force. A swarm of color. A palpitation of love, immense and iridescent. What I imagine the inside of a whale’s beating heart feels like.
I don’t know if there’s a heaven but, once, on the Isle of Inishmore, I saw a door made of ancient stone and imagined finding everyone I’d ever lost just on the other side. Their faces full of eternality.
A couple years after that fateful February night, my friend told me she’d run into Joe. They caught up briefly and, at the end, he said: “Hey, could you tell Joy I’m sorry?”
I’ll never know exactly if Joe understood what he was apologizing for, but it’s clear he felt the weight of something heavy and wounded. That neither of us had emerged that night unscathed. Strangely, the most healing part—the part that helps (if anything really can)—was discovering that that tiny region of the divine, the part O'Donohue claims is intact in all of us, no matter who we are, resides in Joe too.
Instructions for Traveling West
If you’re leaving, leaping or homesick for another life, pick up Instructions for Traveling West, my bestselling collection of poems here.
