I have been avoiding this one.
Not casually — actually avoiding. I knew I was going to write this and I kept putting it off because writing it means looking at it. I keep doing that. I keep using this blog as a place to look at things I have not yet been able to look at anywhere else. Including with myself.
It is becoming clear to me that I should probably book some therapy appointments. I am spilling on the internet in ways I am not spilling to myself or to anyone in my life. The blog is doing work it should not be doing alone.
Naming it. Moving on.
Here is what happened a few weeks ago.
I do not remember what started the conversation. I rarely do.
My boyfriend and I were talking, and somewhere in the middle of it he told me that according to the Bible, women should not be pastors. It says it right there in the book. He cited Eve. The snake. Something about how women have it in our nature to listen to things we shouldn't.
I am still digesting that conversation.
I asked him: How would you feel if, for your entire life, you were told that you would never measure up to someone else no matter how hard you tried?
He said: It wouldn't matter. I believe in myself. I do not compare myself to other people. And the Bible saying women cannot be pastors does not mean God thinks women are lesser than men.
I told him: That is all I hear. That is all I see in that book.
At some point in the conversation, I told him:
The more I talk to you, the farther from Christianity I feel.
A little later, crying, I told him:
I am worried that our future daughter won't be safe with you. Because you are going to tell her she can't be a pastor. Because the Bible says so.
I do not cry to make a point. I cried because I had reached the bottom of something I had been keeping a lid on.
The good part — and there is one — is that the conversation kept being a conversation.
He wasn't dismissive. He didn't shut me down. He took what I said seriously. I took what he said seriously. We sat in it. We are still sitting in it, in different ways, in different rooms.
I went and looked up the verse he cited. I have learned more about the Bible in the last few weeks than I have in years.
That is the good part. I want to name it before I get to the harder part, because the harder part has been getting all the airtime in my head and the good part has not gotten enough.
Here is the harder part.
I meant what I said.
The more I talk to you, the farther from Christianity I feel.
That sentence was not rhetorical. It was not the kind of thing you say to make a point. It was a status report.
The longer I learn about what is in the book, or what people say is in the book, or what the book has been used to do to people who look like me — the harder it is for me to keep using the word Christian about myself.
I have been making an excuse for a long time. The excuse is: Christianity is not the issue. Organized religion is. The institutions failed. The original thing is still good.
I am not sure I believe that anymore.
If the original thing is good, and the original thing is the book, and the book lays out — explicitly, in the parts my boyfriend cited and in the parts I have since gone and read for myself — things that I morally do not agree with, then what is the original thing?
What am I making an excuse for?
That is the question I have not let myself ask out loud until now.
I am scared.
I started this journey wanting to be closer to God. Not farther. The podcast was supposed to be the thing that pulled me in. Going back to church was supposed to do something. Reading the book more carefully was supposed to do something.
What is actually happening is the opposite.
I do not want to end up somewhere I did not want to go.
I am scared the journey is taking me there anyway.
That is where I am.
I do not have an action item. I do not have a verse for it. I am not closing on a note that ties it up.
I am sitting with the fear.
I am also, finally, going to book the therapy appointment.