Me and Jesus, part two
If you haven't read yesterday's entry yet, then you'll want to read that first, because this is a continuation of that story, about my background with the Catholic Church and Christianity. I broke it up into two parts, because it ended up being a lot longer than I anticipated. (And it might end up being three parts, actually. Sorry. I'm a windbag sometimes.)
Looking back on that point, where I accepted the Holy Spirit into my life... well, let's start with what I was thinking. I wouldn't have admitted it at the time, but I had some sort of Sally Struthers vision of what that meant. "Going where the Spirit leads me" has this nice, dreamy sound to it. One pictures traveling with the Red Cross to Central America to give immunizations to poor children, or something equally exciting, and to be totally honest, something equally ooh-and-ahhworthy. I think I pictured that particular thing because I knew someone who had planned on doing exactly that, and I could see myself doing it. (He died during his Senior year, before he had the chance, which is a story for another entry.)
But I don't think that public recognition was the goal, in and of itself. I really did want to do something for humanity, something big and lofty. But looking back, with that painfully honest set of internal binoculars, I was hoping for something to redeem me, and something to distract me, from the same ugly spots I continued to see in myself. I was running away from two things, really: my sexuality, and the emotional baggage that came with my circumstances.
I'll discuss the sexuality part first, because it's the most obvious and easiest topic of the two. I think I knew, in that strange wordless way, that I fancied men from a very early age. And I also knew that I wasn't supposed to. Still, I managed furtive glances at them, and even had a crush on one when I was about ten. I didn't recognize it for such at the time, since I was painfully shy and never acted on it, and I was getting much more reinforcement for my pathetically Charlie Brownish crush on a red-haired girl (and thus, help in identifying what my feelings about her were), but my feelings for the kind of nerdy, blond guy with glasses fell into the same category. When I hit middle school, and found myself surrounded by naked boys for the first time, my eyes immediately went to the crotch of the one who was a bit ahead developmentally, that delightfully spongey looking log of flesh that bounced around so enticingly, and by my standards at the time he was quite hung. (He was probably average, but given that my other peers had not started to develop yet, his cock looked absolutely enormous, a man's cock on a boy's body.) And I imagined myself doing things with him, and that cock, things that somehow I knew I wasn't supposed to want to do, things that kept me up late at night, aching for release.
I know now that I was going thru what every teenage boy goes thru, that painful surge of hormones that not only gives one a deeper voice and body hair but also draws the overwhelming majority of one's thoughts inexorably toward sex. I was completely unprepared for it, and frightened by it, not only because I had a difficult time dealing with the feelings I already had, and these sexual feelings were exponentially bigger, but also because those feelings led me even further away from my peers, marked me as even more different. My sexual impulse became yet another feature in the internal labyrinth that I could never share with other people, lest they have even more reason to pick on me and hate me.
And the internal labyrinth was already quite full to begin with, without adding hormones to it. I can see this now, but at the time it was an aspect I was completely unconscious of. I had, and to some degree still have, this well of rage, this huge, encompassing, out of control anger that I kept bottled up inside me. I was angry that my needs and my feelings were always secondary to something else, usually my mom's needs and feelings. I was angry that my origins were apparently this ugly secret that I wasn't allowed to even ask about. Sure, my mom had told me and Mikki both that if we ever wanted to know anything about our mothers (she always added "biological" to mother when referring to That Woman, to make her sound less like a person and more like some lab specimen) that we could ask her, but I knew that was just part of the script, and she didn't really mean it, and to actually ask her would be an exercise in futility. I knew that she had no intention of discussing Those Women with us, that she considered us to be "hers" now (her property, really, the way she talked to and about us) and any further examination of the extremely limited information she had given us might just make us more curious. And I knew that I was expected to not be curious, because wanting to know any more about my mother would be taken as a slight against Mom, implying that there was something lacking in her maternal skills, and protecting her ego was more important than any silly little need I might have. I was angry about all of that.
I was angry that I felt like someone's property, picked out at the baby store adoption agency to complete a set for someone's Kid Collection. I was angry that I had to live in fear of this crazy, irrational woman I called Mom, who had an explosive and completely unpredictable temper. I was angry that I had to grow up feeling like an alien had dropped me off, feeling completely different from my adoptive family; I didn't look like them, or think like them, or share their interests, and yet I felt like I was obligated to pretend otherwise. I guess this means I was angry about being adopted. I was furious that I had to mask my feelings constantly, that as a survival skill I had to stay tuned into Mom and how she was reacting to me, and I constantly felt like I was trying to head off yet another tantrum when I saw that I had done something that, for whatever inexplicable reason, had set her off. And I was absolutely livid that my dad was always absent, that he knew what a psychotic bitch my mom could be and yet he never protected me or Mikki from her. He was too busy avoiding her wrath himself, burying himself in his job, and when he finally got home from work he was glued to the television with the ever present Lone Star beer in his hand, completely tuning out the chaos around him. So even when his body was there, he was still absent.
I was angry that I was trapped in this Catch-22 situation with my mom, where it felt like my survival depended on the impossible task of making her happy. I knew deep down that she would never be satisfied with who I was, that whatever I did would never quite measure up to her impossibly high standards, that she would always find a way to twist my efforts into not quite good enough. (I lost track fairly early of the number of times my efforts got shot down with the equivalent of "if you really loved me, you would have done just a little bit more," always with the insistence that she was easy to please.)
So when I hit puberty, and discovered all these desires within me that I knew made me even less like the ideal son she was hoping for, I felt doomed.
I see now that the prospect of handing the whole situation over to some nebulous Higher Power relieved me of responsibility to confront these issues head on. It was seductively easier to blame my perceived imperfections on Satan and credit all my triumphs to God than it was to take responsibility for my actions and my emotions. And given just how miraculous my experience with spirituality had been so far, I think that deep down I saw hope that maybe this Holy Spirit thing might be able to accomplish what I felt I had no hope of accomplishing on my own. I think that my intention, deep down, was to use this Holy Spirit to tame that anger, and to purge me of those horribly perverted desires. The group I was involved with more or less promised as much; anger and hate, what I now see as two completely different things (I see anger as an emotional reaction, and hate as more of a choice), were both considered the opposite of this beautiful fluffy love that was the essence of God. And sexuality-- well, I don't think much more needs to be said there. So if I turned myself over to Love, maybe all that anger and confusion and secret desire could be tamed, or better yet, could be made to simply vanish, taken off my hands.
I think that I turned to the Holy Spirit in an effort to remove my shadow self, and mold me into this nice, likeable, perfect guy who would do Big Wonderful Things (and make my parents proud of me), a guy I desperately wanted to be. Interestingly enough, I think that the actual path that the Holy Spirit had in store for me was more of an internal path of self-discovery and truth seeking. But that part came later.
For a while, as far as my conscious and unconscious motives went, it seemed to work quite well. My relationship with my girlfriend eventually ended, but I found another girl to date, and when I was sixteen I felt on top of the world. I felt more at ease with myself than I had ever felt, like there were no secrets to keep anymore. (I think it was more accurate to say that I didn't feel like I would have to ever share those secret longings, because they seemed to magically disappear for a while.) I had a circle of friends, thru my church, and I was fairly popular with them, and got all kinds of reinforcement for the person I was becoming. Perhaps because my grades improved, and I seemed happy (or perhaps because it looked good for me to be a good church-going teenager instead of one of those horrible, rebellious types), my mom encouraged my participation in the youth group. And everything was wonderful. (I never really questioned why she would encourage me to go to church, and saw my involvement there as a good thing, when she didn't go herself. At least, I didn't question it when I was in high school.)
But there was one thing that happened, early in the relationship with the second girl, that made a small crack in those internal walls of that box, deep inside me, behind which I hid my hunger for mansex.
One afternoon after school, I went over to the house of one of my church friends, and he wasn't home yet. And I needed to use the bathroom. At first, I was content to wait, but the need became desparate, and I wasn't sure I could hold it until he made his way home. So I went to a little strip mall near his house, and used a public restroom there. I didn't know it yet, but this particular restroom was a popular cruising spot for men to have anonymous sex with each other, and I stumbled into my first sexual contact with a man. It was brief, and relatively tame, but it woke up all those desires that I thought the Holy Spirit had put to sleep.
In a sense, I had bitten into the apple.
Suddenly, I had a secret life again. Even though it was one time thing, for the moment, it was still a horrible, shameful thing that I could not share with anyone. I think I immersed myself even more into my relationship with my girlfriend (whom I was sure the Holy Spirit brought into my life, to tame my sexual impulses) and my participation with the youth group. I went to Mass every Wednesday morning before school, a special, smaller, less pretentious Mass for the high school youth group, in addition to my Sunday morning Mass, where I sang in the choir. I prayed the Rosary almost daily. I read the entire Bible from cover to cover, and some bits I read enough times to where I could quote them. I was an avid Pro-Lifer, wearing a tiny golden set of footprints on my collar that were the size of a ten week old fetus' feet, and lectured proudly about how my own life was an example of better options being available than abortion to anyone who asked about it. And I did my best to squash those desires deeper and deeper into that secret place within my psyche, hoping that God would empty them out if I said enough rosaries. I worked hard to be that perfect little Christbot, so that maybe I would manage to be good enough to make that desire go away.
But I lost a critical part of the equation, early in my Senior year. Eventually, as many high school romances do, mine started to wane. And I think I dragged it out much longer than it needed to go because I was so convinced that I was letting God down if I dumped this girl. After all, He had brought us together, I reasoned. It was an incredibly painful breakup, partly because she was so clingy (at one point, more or less threatening suicide if I left her) and partly because I felt like I was backing out of the deal I had made to let the Holy Spirit run into my life. When that relationship was finally over, when the dust of the drama finally settled, I had nothing holding me back from exploring that secret world I had stumbled across in the public restroom.
Well, I still had guilt, which I inflicted on myself mercilessly, but I didn't have this other person to be faithful to. I think that knowing that God is everywhere, and knowing that this girl was The One I Was Supposed To Spend The Rest Of My Life With, was the only thing keeping me from picking up more anonymous hand jobs and such in the bathroom I discovered. When I finally ended that relationship, I felt like I had let God down, so I was doomed anyway. And without that powerful externally imposed motivation to remain faithful to her, I became pretty compulsive about seeking out more men. Especially when I managed to score my first blowjob, from a guy that worked at Radio Shack who looked to be in his forties, I was totally hooked. I couldn't go to a mall by myself without checking out the bathrooms, and soon I knew all the best ones to score in.
So I spent my senior year of high school thinking that I had fallen off the path, that I had lost the Holy Spirit, and I was even more doomed than I had been before I found the Church. In retrospect, though, I don't think I had fallen off the path at all. This was, as strange as it might sound, precisely the path that the Holy Spirit had in mind for me.
In order for that statement to make sense, I imagine there is a lot of explaining that needs to be done.
In the early days of my participation with the youth group, my capacity for taking in unconditional love was pretty limited. I was full of self loathing, utterly convinced that nobody would accept me if they really knew how ugly and perverted and dirty I was inside. So the level of acceptance I felt from the members of the youth group overwhelmed me, and was actually more than I could process. It took me a long time to open myself to the point where I could take in all that love. Yes, in spite of some of the less than wonderful aspects of the Catholic Church, with all its dogma and rules and problems, there was a lot of love there.
There was, as one example, a nun there, whom many of us lovingly referred to as Sister T (her first name starts with a T, and this was the eighties, after all). She is more or less the opposite end of the spectrum from the stereotypical nun, the stern, mannish, judgmental, nightmarish caricature that one sees in movies. The easiest way to say it is that the woman simply glows. Her energy totally lights up a room the moment she and her boundless joy enter it. She always has a smile, and a genuine one at that, not the masky paint job. Her door was always open to anyone who needed to talk. And there were many times over the years, when I couldn't help but feel trapped in that house with that bitter woman I called Mom, when she listened to me pour my heart out, without judgment. She was completely empathetic, sharing her own stories about her mother, validating my feelings and letting me know that I wasn't alone in feeling them.
And she is just one example. There were plenty of others.
The thing is, as my capacity to take in love expanded, eventually I became aware of the flaw in this scheme. Actually, that's kind of harsh; the scheme worked well enough for me at first, but couldn't work over the long term because of an inherent conflict between who I am and what the Church is.
I slowly came to understand that the love and validation I received there was not actually unconditional, because I knew that with all the "hate the sin, love the sinner" talk that my nonstandard orientation would not be taken well. It took a few years for me to understand this clue, as far as what it meant for me. It didn't mean that I didn't measure up, as I originally felt; it meant that the experience of love I had there no longer fit as well as it had before. And acknowledging that involved eventually leaving the safe haven, where I was told what to think and believe, where what I was supposed to believe no longer fit my experience. It was quite a scary step to trust the inner voice that told me that my connection to the Divine didn't rely on this comfortable church, or any external voice really. I had my own, private connection. And now, I believe that this is what I was really accepting when I invited the Holy Spirit into my life. It doesn't even have to be called the Holy Spirit, although that's what worked within the framework of understanding I had at the time.
Still, it took a while to let go of the church. I had to get dissatisfied enough with my experience there, and find something to take its place, before I could really move on to the next phase of my spiritual life. In this, there were really three important milestones.
The first was reading a book by Michael Crichton, called Travels, a nonfictional account of how he got into writing, and what happened in his life thereafter. This book hit me hard, on two levels. On one level, it showed me that deep down, I wanted to be a writer when he talked about that aspect of his life. (I'm still taking that part in, to be honest, but this was the first glimpse of "Wow! People really do do that, for a living even!") And on the other level, he talked about inner travels, experiments with the metaphysical that he performed, to check them out. He talked about seeing psychics in London, and channeling, and past life regression, and doing out-of-body meditation with a friend he made in California. At the time, part of me was horrified, because this was so against the laws of the church (past lives? goodness gracious no!). But part of me was secretly thrilled. I felt a tug, a kind of light going off, the inner voice whispering to me this is real, and you know it.
I think the reason I was able to take it in was that he approached the whole issue from a scientist's perspective, because he did, after all, go to Harvard and make it thru med school. He had a manner of exploring it that emphasized eliminating anything that could interfere with what he was observing. For example, when he went to the London psychics, he did his best to stifle all his nonverbal communication, and kept verbal communication to a minimum, so that he couldn't say later, if a psychic had hit the mark, "well, I was leading her." With the out-of-body experiments, he paid close attention to what he felt, and then asked his friend what had happened, and compared it to his experience to see if the explanation could fit. He was open to it being real, while also open to it being fake. Some of it was very fake, some of it was shockingly real, and lots of it was somewhere in the middle.
I could accept that, and finally admitted to myself that I would love to try some of that stuff out, but figured that there was no real opportunity for me to do that in Texas; all those New Agey types were in California, from the sounds of it.
Then my parents finally got divorced, something that I had been expecting to happen as long as I could remember, and eventually the tug of war between them, and the way they used me and Mikki as the rope, got bad enough for me to finally move into my own apartment, which was the second milestone. And something I discovered, once I had my own space, away from my crazy family, was that I could hear my inner voice much more clearly. I started to develop some value of free will that didn't depend on what someone else wanted or expected of me.
All this lead up to the third milestone, which opened with my fateful visit with the counselor at Texas Cradle, the agency where I was adopted.
Tune in later for part three, which should wrap it up.
Looking back on that point, where I accepted the Holy Spirit into my life... well, let's start with what I was thinking. I wouldn't have admitted it at the time, but I had some sort of Sally Struthers vision of what that meant. "Going where the Spirit leads me" has this nice, dreamy sound to it. One pictures traveling with the Red Cross to Central America to give immunizations to poor children, or something equally exciting, and to be totally honest, something equally ooh-and-ahhworthy. I think I pictured that particular thing because I knew someone who had planned on doing exactly that, and I could see myself doing it. (He died during his Senior year, before he had the chance, which is a story for another entry.)
But I don't think that public recognition was the goal, in and of itself. I really did want to do something for humanity, something big and lofty. But looking back, with that painfully honest set of internal binoculars, I was hoping for something to redeem me, and something to distract me, from the same ugly spots I continued to see in myself. I was running away from two things, really: my sexuality, and the emotional baggage that came with my circumstances.
I'll discuss the sexuality part first, because it's the most obvious and easiest topic of the two. I think I knew, in that strange wordless way, that I fancied men from a very early age. And I also knew that I wasn't supposed to. Still, I managed furtive glances at them, and even had a crush on one when I was about ten. I didn't recognize it for such at the time, since I was painfully shy and never acted on it, and I was getting much more reinforcement for my pathetically Charlie Brownish crush on a red-haired girl (and thus, help in identifying what my feelings about her were), but my feelings for the kind of nerdy, blond guy with glasses fell into the same category. When I hit middle school, and found myself surrounded by naked boys for the first time, my eyes immediately went to the crotch of the one who was a bit ahead developmentally, that delightfully spongey looking log of flesh that bounced around so enticingly, and by my standards at the time he was quite hung. (He was probably average, but given that my other peers had not started to develop yet, his cock looked absolutely enormous, a man's cock on a boy's body.) And I imagined myself doing things with him, and that cock, things that somehow I knew I wasn't supposed to want to do, things that kept me up late at night, aching for release.
I know now that I was going thru what every teenage boy goes thru, that painful surge of hormones that not only gives one a deeper voice and body hair but also draws the overwhelming majority of one's thoughts inexorably toward sex. I was completely unprepared for it, and frightened by it, not only because I had a difficult time dealing with the feelings I already had, and these sexual feelings were exponentially bigger, but also because those feelings led me even further away from my peers, marked me as even more different. My sexual impulse became yet another feature in the internal labyrinth that I could never share with other people, lest they have even more reason to pick on me and hate me.
And the internal labyrinth was already quite full to begin with, without adding hormones to it. I can see this now, but at the time it was an aspect I was completely unconscious of. I had, and to some degree still have, this well of rage, this huge, encompassing, out of control anger that I kept bottled up inside me. I was angry that my needs and my feelings were always secondary to something else, usually my mom's needs and feelings. I was angry that my origins were apparently this ugly secret that I wasn't allowed to even ask about. Sure, my mom had told me and Mikki both that if we ever wanted to know anything about our mothers (she always added "biological" to mother when referring to That Woman, to make her sound less like a person and more like some lab specimen) that we could ask her, but I knew that was just part of the script, and she didn't really mean it, and to actually ask her would be an exercise in futility. I knew that she had no intention of discussing Those Women with us, that she considered us to be "hers" now (her property, really, the way she talked to and about us) and any further examination of the extremely limited information she had given us might just make us more curious. And I knew that I was expected to not be curious, because wanting to know any more about my mother would be taken as a slight against Mom, implying that there was something lacking in her maternal skills, and protecting her ego was more important than any silly little need I might have. I was angry about all of that.
I was angry that I felt like someone's property, picked out at the baby store adoption agency to complete a set for someone's Kid Collection. I was angry that I had to live in fear of this crazy, irrational woman I called Mom, who had an explosive and completely unpredictable temper. I was angry that I had to grow up feeling like an alien had dropped me off, feeling completely different from my adoptive family; I didn't look like them, or think like them, or share their interests, and yet I felt like I was obligated to pretend otherwise. I guess this means I was angry about being adopted. I was furious that I had to mask my feelings constantly, that as a survival skill I had to stay tuned into Mom and how she was reacting to me, and I constantly felt like I was trying to head off yet another tantrum when I saw that I had done something that, for whatever inexplicable reason, had set her off. And I was absolutely livid that my dad was always absent, that he knew what a psychotic bitch my mom could be and yet he never protected me or Mikki from her. He was too busy avoiding her wrath himself, burying himself in his job, and when he finally got home from work he was glued to the television with the ever present Lone Star beer in his hand, completely tuning out the chaos around him. So even when his body was there, he was still absent.
I was angry that I was trapped in this Catch-22 situation with my mom, where it felt like my survival depended on the impossible task of making her happy. I knew deep down that she would never be satisfied with who I was, that whatever I did would never quite measure up to her impossibly high standards, that she would always find a way to twist my efforts into not quite good enough. (I lost track fairly early of the number of times my efforts got shot down with the equivalent of "if you really loved me, you would have done just a little bit more," always with the insistence that she was easy to please.)
So when I hit puberty, and discovered all these desires within me that I knew made me even less like the ideal son she was hoping for, I felt doomed.
I see now that the prospect of handing the whole situation over to some nebulous Higher Power relieved me of responsibility to confront these issues head on. It was seductively easier to blame my perceived imperfections on Satan and credit all my triumphs to God than it was to take responsibility for my actions and my emotions. And given just how miraculous my experience with spirituality had been so far, I think that deep down I saw hope that maybe this Holy Spirit thing might be able to accomplish what I felt I had no hope of accomplishing on my own. I think that my intention, deep down, was to use this Holy Spirit to tame that anger, and to purge me of those horribly perverted desires. The group I was involved with more or less promised as much; anger and hate, what I now see as two completely different things (I see anger as an emotional reaction, and hate as more of a choice), were both considered the opposite of this beautiful fluffy love that was the essence of God. And sexuality-- well, I don't think much more needs to be said there. So if I turned myself over to Love, maybe all that anger and confusion and secret desire could be tamed, or better yet, could be made to simply vanish, taken off my hands.
I think that I turned to the Holy Spirit in an effort to remove my shadow self, and mold me into this nice, likeable, perfect guy who would do Big Wonderful Things (and make my parents proud of me), a guy I desperately wanted to be. Interestingly enough, I think that the actual path that the Holy Spirit had in store for me was more of an internal path of self-discovery and truth seeking. But that part came later.
For a while, as far as my conscious and unconscious motives went, it seemed to work quite well. My relationship with my girlfriend eventually ended, but I found another girl to date, and when I was sixteen I felt on top of the world. I felt more at ease with myself than I had ever felt, like there were no secrets to keep anymore. (I think it was more accurate to say that I didn't feel like I would have to ever share those secret longings, because they seemed to magically disappear for a while.) I had a circle of friends, thru my church, and I was fairly popular with them, and got all kinds of reinforcement for the person I was becoming. Perhaps because my grades improved, and I seemed happy (or perhaps because it looked good for me to be a good church-going teenager instead of one of those horrible, rebellious types), my mom encouraged my participation in the youth group. And everything was wonderful. (I never really questioned why she would encourage me to go to church, and saw my involvement there as a good thing, when she didn't go herself. At least, I didn't question it when I was in high school.)
But there was one thing that happened, early in the relationship with the second girl, that made a small crack in those internal walls of that box, deep inside me, behind which I hid my hunger for mansex.
One afternoon after school, I went over to the house of one of my church friends, and he wasn't home yet. And I needed to use the bathroom. At first, I was content to wait, but the need became desparate, and I wasn't sure I could hold it until he made his way home. So I went to a little strip mall near his house, and used a public restroom there. I didn't know it yet, but this particular restroom was a popular cruising spot for men to have anonymous sex with each other, and I stumbled into my first sexual contact with a man. It was brief, and relatively tame, but it woke up all those desires that I thought the Holy Spirit had put to sleep.
In a sense, I had bitten into the apple.
Suddenly, I had a secret life again. Even though it was one time thing, for the moment, it was still a horrible, shameful thing that I could not share with anyone. I think I immersed myself even more into my relationship with my girlfriend (whom I was sure the Holy Spirit brought into my life, to tame my sexual impulses) and my participation with the youth group. I went to Mass every Wednesday morning before school, a special, smaller, less pretentious Mass for the high school youth group, in addition to my Sunday morning Mass, where I sang in the choir. I prayed the Rosary almost daily. I read the entire Bible from cover to cover, and some bits I read enough times to where I could quote them. I was an avid Pro-Lifer, wearing a tiny golden set of footprints on my collar that were the size of a ten week old fetus' feet, and lectured proudly about how my own life was an example of better options being available than abortion to anyone who asked about it. And I did my best to squash those desires deeper and deeper into that secret place within my psyche, hoping that God would empty them out if I said enough rosaries. I worked hard to be that perfect little Christbot, so that maybe I would manage to be good enough to make that desire go away.
But I lost a critical part of the equation, early in my Senior year. Eventually, as many high school romances do, mine started to wane. And I think I dragged it out much longer than it needed to go because I was so convinced that I was letting God down if I dumped this girl. After all, He had brought us together, I reasoned. It was an incredibly painful breakup, partly because she was so clingy (at one point, more or less threatening suicide if I left her) and partly because I felt like I was backing out of the deal I had made to let the Holy Spirit run into my life. When that relationship was finally over, when the dust of the drama finally settled, I had nothing holding me back from exploring that secret world I had stumbled across in the public restroom.
Well, I still had guilt, which I inflicted on myself mercilessly, but I didn't have this other person to be faithful to. I think that knowing that God is everywhere, and knowing that this girl was The One I Was Supposed To Spend The Rest Of My Life With, was the only thing keeping me from picking up more anonymous hand jobs and such in the bathroom I discovered. When I finally ended that relationship, I felt like I had let God down, so I was doomed anyway. And without that powerful externally imposed motivation to remain faithful to her, I became pretty compulsive about seeking out more men. Especially when I managed to score my first blowjob, from a guy that worked at Radio Shack who looked to be in his forties, I was totally hooked. I couldn't go to a mall by myself without checking out the bathrooms, and soon I knew all the best ones to score in.
So I spent my senior year of high school thinking that I had fallen off the path, that I had lost the Holy Spirit, and I was even more doomed than I had been before I found the Church. In retrospect, though, I don't think I had fallen off the path at all. This was, as strange as it might sound, precisely the path that the Holy Spirit had in mind for me.
In order for that statement to make sense, I imagine there is a lot of explaining that needs to be done.
In the early days of my participation with the youth group, my capacity for taking in unconditional love was pretty limited. I was full of self loathing, utterly convinced that nobody would accept me if they really knew how ugly and perverted and dirty I was inside. So the level of acceptance I felt from the members of the youth group overwhelmed me, and was actually more than I could process. It took me a long time to open myself to the point where I could take in all that love. Yes, in spite of some of the less than wonderful aspects of the Catholic Church, with all its dogma and rules and problems, there was a lot of love there.
There was, as one example, a nun there, whom many of us lovingly referred to as Sister T (her first name starts with a T, and this was the eighties, after all). She is more or less the opposite end of the spectrum from the stereotypical nun, the stern, mannish, judgmental, nightmarish caricature that one sees in movies. The easiest way to say it is that the woman simply glows. Her energy totally lights up a room the moment she and her boundless joy enter it. She always has a smile, and a genuine one at that, not the masky paint job. Her door was always open to anyone who needed to talk. And there were many times over the years, when I couldn't help but feel trapped in that house with that bitter woman I called Mom, when she listened to me pour my heart out, without judgment. She was completely empathetic, sharing her own stories about her mother, validating my feelings and letting me know that I wasn't alone in feeling them.
And she is just one example. There were plenty of others.
The thing is, as my capacity to take in love expanded, eventually I became aware of the flaw in this scheme. Actually, that's kind of harsh; the scheme worked well enough for me at first, but couldn't work over the long term because of an inherent conflict between who I am and what the Church is.
I slowly came to understand that the love and validation I received there was not actually unconditional, because I knew that with all the "hate the sin, love the sinner" talk that my nonstandard orientation would not be taken well. It took a few years for me to understand this clue, as far as what it meant for me. It didn't mean that I didn't measure up, as I originally felt; it meant that the experience of love I had there no longer fit as well as it had before. And acknowledging that involved eventually leaving the safe haven, where I was told what to think and believe, where what I was supposed to believe no longer fit my experience. It was quite a scary step to trust the inner voice that told me that my connection to the Divine didn't rely on this comfortable church, or any external voice really. I had my own, private connection. And now, I believe that this is what I was really accepting when I invited the Holy Spirit into my life. It doesn't even have to be called the Holy Spirit, although that's what worked within the framework of understanding I had at the time.
Still, it took a while to let go of the church. I had to get dissatisfied enough with my experience there, and find something to take its place, before I could really move on to the next phase of my spiritual life. In this, there were really three important milestones.
The first was reading a book by Michael Crichton, called Travels, a nonfictional account of how he got into writing, and what happened in his life thereafter. This book hit me hard, on two levels. On one level, it showed me that deep down, I wanted to be a writer when he talked about that aspect of his life. (I'm still taking that part in, to be honest, but this was the first glimpse of "Wow! People really do do that, for a living even!") And on the other level, he talked about inner travels, experiments with the metaphysical that he performed, to check them out. He talked about seeing psychics in London, and channeling, and past life regression, and doing out-of-body meditation with a friend he made in California. At the time, part of me was horrified, because this was so against the laws of the church (past lives? goodness gracious no!). But part of me was secretly thrilled. I felt a tug, a kind of light going off, the inner voice whispering to me this is real, and you know it.
I think the reason I was able to take it in was that he approached the whole issue from a scientist's perspective, because he did, after all, go to Harvard and make it thru med school. He had a manner of exploring it that emphasized eliminating anything that could interfere with what he was observing. For example, when he went to the London psychics, he did his best to stifle all his nonverbal communication, and kept verbal communication to a minimum, so that he couldn't say later, if a psychic had hit the mark, "well, I was leading her." With the out-of-body experiments, he paid close attention to what he felt, and then asked his friend what had happened, and compared it to his experience to see if the explanation could fit. He was open to it being real, while also open to it being fake. Some of it was very fake, some of it was shockingly real, and lots of it was somewhere in the middle.
I could accept that, and finally admitted to myself that I would love to try some of that stuff out, but figured that there was no real opportunity for me to do that in Texas; all those New Agey types were in California, from the sounds of it.
Then my parents finally got divorced, something that I had been expecting to happen as long as I could remember, and eventually the tug of war between them, and the way they used me and Mikki as the rope, got bad enough for me to finally move into my own apartment, which was the second milestone. And something I discovered, once I had my own space, away from my crazy family, was that I could hear my inner voice much more clearly. I started to develop some value of free will that didn't depend on what someone else wanted or expected of me.
All this lead up to the third milestone, which opened with my fateful visit with the counselor at Texas Cradle, the agency where I was adopted.
Tune in later for part three, which should wrap it up.