A Love Rooted in Fear

Contemplation about religion

Image source: Pixabay

My fear of death and the life hereafter began on a Sunday, when out of fear, I decided that my life was better off if he gave it out. I was 8 and was seated in a class, in church, filled with other children my age. Boys and girls dressed in too much colour: a pink there, a blue there, a yellow there; all colours of the rainbow competing to adorn the bodies of young children. A woman, our teacher, had stood in front of the class, teaching from the bible. We had just finished singing a children's rhyme- a cacophony of voices, chewing and spilling out the lyrics to a song we all loved. A song about Jesus loving all the little children of the world, whether yellow, black or white, we were precious in his sight.

The woman, our teacher, with her rimmed glasses and acne-eaten face and earlobes without earrings and headscarf that kissed tightly and deeply into her forehead, said, ‘Jesus loves the little children of the world and do you know what would make him stop loving you?’ Her large eyes roamed the length of the classroom. All of us, with our tiny eyes and large eyes, with yellow and brown and black skin, stared disconcertingly at her. She sucked in her breath and vomited the word, sin. The word had tumbled out of her mouth as though it was a plague she didn't want to be associated with.

‘What did I say?’ She asked. Her question, directed to not a particular child in class, but to the whole class. This time, all of us, following her lead, sucked in our breaths and allowed the word to tumble out. ‘Good’ she said, and continued about heaven and hell and Adam and Eve and evil and good, and people who would go to heaven and people who would not. We listened as our puerile minds were stripped of its latitude and forced to descend into an abyss of despair and confusion. When she had finished, she asked if any of us wanted to give our lives to Christ, and I and almost half the class having been rattled by her proselytizing, raised our hands up and the woman wore a smile of victory, at delivering our souls from the perils of death into the safety of God's wings.

Later that night or maybe some nights later the nightmares began. Cloud fluffs gathering together, and a bright light bursting from within them. Horses in the sky, and angels with their wings flapping in the sky, slowly descending the earth. Bodies getting sucked into the sky, and the sound of wailing trickling from the voices of those left behind. The ground, like a graveyard opening up and flames like zombie hands sprouting from within them.

The dreams came and went, but each time the fear remained the same and I would lock myself in a garment of chastisement, renouncing all of my supposed sinful ways. I would will my mind to stay still lest I think up things that were evil and will my my lips to not say things that are evil. And whenever I failed to, I would utter prayers of forgiveness. No night went without the fear that I would sleep and not wake up and one sin I was not aware of would make hell to be my destination.

I have not had those dreams in years. But over the years, I have cycled through different waves of despair, all rooted in fear. And even when I spent about 3 years in utter commitment to the church and God, believing I loved God, the despair never left. It only took on a different form. A form where I felt never enough, without a sense of self outside of God. I sang in church, lifted holy hands to God, cried in worship sessions, believing I did love God but each time I was asked to shed one more thing that made me me, I struggled. I'd be in church and inside of me will be a breaking, a sense of utter helplessness because I had abdicated my life to him. But sometimes, I did shed and I kept shedding and they told me this was it. That I had to shed to be found, but i later realized that I didn't know who I was anymore. I kept looking at the people in the church for guidance on how to be myself and slowly I realized I was becoming more and more like them, losing my individuality but above all, I began running on autopilot, gradually losing touch with my humanity. I could never understand why we would be asked to pick between loving the people in our lives and loving a God we cannot see.

I don't have a label for what I am now. I have never considered myself an atheist or an agnostic. Irreligious comes close. Somewhere inside of me, I cannot completely wrest myself from the idea of God. It will take a lot of unlearning and relearning to get to that point. How do you unlearn 2 decades of dogma? I am unable to push away the idea of God into the waters. I can't drown it. It always comes back up. It's there on days when my life feels as though it is disarray and I reach for comfort, I pray, because it has always been my way of coping. I just pray. Sometimes I don't really care if I get answers to the prayers. Not many of my prayers were answered when I was still a believer. But I pray because there my mind finds a semblance of calmness. The storm fades away even if for a moment and I feel better.

But there are other times where I attribute the present difficulty and constant failures in my life to my decision to not acknowledge God in my life. Oh, how far have I strayed and in this straying, God had let me go. Left me to my own whims. This was something I was taught in the church. Something I taught to others. That if we ever deny God, he would remove his hands from over our lives and who are we without him?

When I was a believer, one of my constant prayer points was that "God, I can't do life without you". Then, things seemed to come to me easy or so I thought. I didn't have to struggle as much as I am right now. I was thriving and winning. But now, on some days when everything gets overwhelming, my mind thinks of this and wishes it could return just so I could experience once again God's grace and the ease that comes with it. Just so the struggle can be reduced a little or at least once again believe that the struggle is for a purpose. But then I'm reminded of the trauma, the hurt, the guilt and the self hate. I remember the distance between me and my body, how far I strayed from who I was because I was in search of who God wanted me to be and how much that cost me and I don't think I want to go back there.

I think I'm generally a good person. There are some lines I won't cross. There are some things I won't do but my reasons for them are no more because I'm scared that I will burn in hell if I don't do them but because doing them is the right thing to do. I don't want heaven and I don't want hell. I want oblivion. Even when I was a believer, heaven never appealed to me. But it was better than the alternative. Heaven was portrayed as too impersonal a place, where all the light comes from just one center. I wanted a heaven where all the light flows collectively from each person. A heaven where we all are the center. I also don't think children have any business learning about heaven and hell.

I don't know what I believe now. I tell myself I am on the path to finding God for myself. I might never be able to rid myself of the idea of God. I think it will always be there. But I do not think I want to get caught up with the Christian God anymore, the one taught about in churches, the one who turns his face away from evil in the world, the one we try to rationalize to ourselves, the one who eludes human understanding because it delights in shrouding itself in mystery. The one who cannot be known. The one who doesn't want to know us as we are. No, I want a God that's human, whom I don't have to love out of fear and one who won't expect me to turn my back on others just because they are different.

I'll end with this bible verse "If you do not love these ones who you see, how do you claim to love God whom we cannot see". So right now I'm on a path to loving myself and all the people around me, whom I can see. The people who tether me to me. Maybe in this I might stumble upon how to love God and love him without fear.