When I Broke Up with God
If you want me to see your God, don’t worry, I see.
How you write or say the name is not as relevant as how you live it.
And if you get distracted and spend all your time trying to hijack my view of God instead
you might ask yourself, What kind of God have you got?
from “Don’t Mess with God” by dena parker duke
I am not proud of the fact that I used to visit parks with a wordless book in hand to try and convert children to evangelical Christianity. It had all the necessary colors: black for sin, red for the blood, white for salvation, and a few others for good measure. I had been trained to think it was a service we were providing and felt what I thought was compassion for those “lost children” wandering around in parks back in the day. I thought we had what they needed even if they didn’t know it and were just there to play.
They were just there to play.
Believe it or not, I was deprogrammed from the beliefs that led me to do that when I went off to an evangelical Christian college to study Christian Ministries. There happened to be some East Coast Quakers there who challenged many of the beliefs I had been raised to swallow whole. It was there I had my own conversion to doubt in a God who would condone trying to convert innocent children in parks. I spent several decades after that wandering around agnostic, not willing to let go of a greater mystery even if I couldn’t define it, but no longer willing to call it by name or have it defined for me. I used to say that I had broken up with Jesus, but I had broken up with the God I was raised to fear and who (allegedly) condoned things like throwing my big brother out of the house when he was 16 and I was barely eleven. I spent years unable to hear the name of God or Jesus without experiencing real pain because I felt betrayed on the one hand and abandoned on the other. I became a spiritual refugee and the mere mention of God would make me turn things off, change channels, stop reading or listening at the first hint of a Christian word, phrase. or song. It took years to realize the frustration I felt, while related to grave disappointment in that God, was also sadness over feeling like having my own experience of God was not possible.
I had my own conversion to doubt…making me a spiritual refugee for a long time.
I became the lost child wandering around in the park, but I was in search of a greater power to connect to. It wasn’t easy to admit I had been sold a false god. It took a long, long time to realize I had the agency and access to a higher power for myself. When I looked more closely at Jesus, I knew he was not to blame being the caring, benevolent, assertive soul that he so clearly was. It was also great to discover that the unnamed mystery I had turned to carried the divine spark I always knew was in me, came through in my poetry, and eventually became the children’s book I needed as a child. To recognize it as the same entity I had directed mountains of sorrow and grief to through the years was comforting and familiar. However, to differentiate it from the God originally forced upon me took real time and great precision. My thanks to the Unitarians for helping me find many other names for God when I needed them most. Also, thanks to the many books, nature, people, and practices that led me to a bigger experience of what is sacred in the world.
It took years for me to know I had agency and access to a higher power for myself.
I don’t usually write about my own spirituality in specifics because I so strongly believe now that whatever you think of a higher power (or don’t think) is your own business. However, to be watching more people trying to speak for others about who God is, I have a greater sense of the damage I was doing to innocent children. Seeing the error of my ways play out on such a massive scale with firsthand knowledge of what it means to be denied that, I stand firm behind the First Amendment which offers us all the freedom and the ability to exercise our religious beliefs.
…watching people speaking for others about who God is, I have a greater sense of the damage done…
And for all those kids I met in the park:
Please forgive me.
I hope you will never be met in the park by someone there to persuade you that their God is the one, and the only one, for you. I hope you will never be forced to follow someone else’s God or feel like a choice is being forced upon you in a park, or anywhere, for that matter. And, I hope you know that no one can take away your power or right to a higher power, no matter how unwelcoming or unloving their God may be.
I can only hope you are able to stand in your own truth, both now and in all the days to come.
May it stay forever so.
“You have everything inside that you need right now.”
- All the Time by dena parker duke
