Untamed

I received an email recently from an old acquaintance at that church I left.

It said, “Can I ask you something? I know that you and Abby love each other so much. It’s really something. At the same time, I still believe that gayness is wrong. I want to be able to love you unconditionally—but I’d have to abandon my beliefs. What am I supposed to do with this…God conflict?”

I felt for her. She was saying “I want to be free to love you, but I’m caged by my beliefs.”

I wrote this back:

First of all, thank you for knowing that you have a choice to make. Thank you for not landing on: I love you, but…We know that Love has no buts. If you want to change me, you do not love me. If you feel warm toward me but also believe I’m going to burn in hell, you do not love me. If you wish me well but vote against my family being protected by the law, you do not love me. Thank you for understanding that to love me as yourself means to want for me and for my family every good thing you want for yourself and your family. Anything less than that is less than love. So, yes. I agree that you have a choice to make. You have to choose between loving me and keeping your beliefs. Thank you for being intellectually honest about that.

Second: I understand this conflict because I’ve experienced it. I still do. For a while I felt scared because I thought the God conflict was me challenging God. Now I know that it was God in me, challenging religion. It was my true self awakening and saying: Wait. This thing I have been taught to believe about God, about myself, about others—it doesn’t fit with what I know from my roots about love. What do I do? Do I reject what I know from my roots or what I was taught to believe?

I can only tell you what I have come to know for myself.

Returning to ourselves is confusing at first. It’s not as simple as listening for the voices inside of us. Because sometimes the voices inside of us, which we’ve assumed speak Truth, are just the voices of human beings who told us what to believe. Often the internal voice telling us who God is and what God approves of is not God; it’s our indoctrination. It’s an echo of the voice of a teacher, a parent, a preacher—someone who has claimed to represent God to us. Many of those people have been well meaning, and others have only sought to control us. Either way, not a single one of them has been God’s appointed spokesperson. Not a single one of them has more God in her than you do. There is no church that owns God. There is no religion that owns God. There are no gatekeepers. None of this is that easy. There is no outsourcing your faith. There is just you and God.

Some of the hardest and most important work of our lives is learning to separate the voices of teachers from wisdom, propaganda from truth, fear from love and in this case: the voices of God’s self-appointed representatives from the voice of God Herself.

When choosing between something you Know and something other people taught you to believe, choose what you Know. As Whitman said, “Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul.”

Having the courage to dismiss what insults your soul is a matter of life or death. If those who claim to speak for God or Truth can convince you to believe instead of Know, to live from their rules instead of your roots, to trust the voices of middlemen instead of the still, small voice inside you—then they control you. If they can get you to mistrust yourself—to stop feeling, deny knowing, quit imagining—and instead rely only on them, then they can get you to act against your own soul. If that happens, they can get you to follow them, vote with them, condemn for them, even kill for them—all in the name of this God who is constantly whispering to you: That is not exactly it.

Perhaps the God conflict is not just about God. Perhaps it is God. Listen deep.