The Wayward Minds Collective

The Trauma of Religion

It’s getting harder these days to find someone who doesn’t have a problem with religion or spirituality, and it’s clear to see why. 

In my experience, the people who have the most issues with religion were religious at some point in their lives. Most of the time, they were some variety of Christian until they had an especially traumatic experience that made them question the teachings of the church and the existence of a higher power altogether. 

Another instance is one in which they were pressured into it too hard as children and grew resentful of religion altogether, subconsciously attributing the sensation of obligation they felt to religion and faith. 

“There are no words to describe liberation because there is no process to describe. It is perhaps best understood as analogous to dying. Liberation is represented through the metaphor of the warrior’s death. The warrior’s life is one of preparation, adversity, energy, and finally, death. The perfect death for the warrior is to die in battle. In ancient society, it was a great honor for the warrior to die in battle… All of this is a metaphor for something that exists at a much higher level than we generally realize. Of course, the warrior is you—the independent human being.”

~~ Gene Keys, Rudd, 308

My own experience with religion and God fell into the former category. My parents had a rather dramatic ostracization from the church they grew up in; the pastor forbade my extended family from talking to us for several years. I was still drinking the golden nectar of childhood and youth at the time, and I didn’t question too much because I was more concerned with toys and finding novel ways to amuse myself. I pushed aside the quiet curiosities that formed within me about moving away from everyone I’d ever known.

The experience left my parents wary and distrustful of organized religion. Our family would hop from church to church for years, never finding one that could quite satiate the qualms within them and clear the wound that had formed so deeply within our family. There wasn’t a safe space to cultivate their relationship with the divine anymore.

God, Jesus, speaking in tongues, and the Holy Ghost faded deep into the recesses of my mind. Reflecting on this as an adult years later, I feel that perhaps I pushed these concepts far back within myself because I felt that I should never understand them or give them much thought. That would be a betrayal of what my parents experienced. 

When I first started college, I began to meet a lot of new people, particularly when I started to date more. There was always a question that came up very quickly upon first meeting someone:

“Are you religious?” they would ask. 

What I would interpret this question to mean was: “Do I need to walk on eggshells with you?”

“I’m not sure if there is a God,” I would quickly reply, hoping to relieve any anxiety they may have had about me. “Maybe there is. I don’t know.” I would flash my brightest smile at them, setting their minds at ease. “Either way, I’m not religious. So, you’re good.”

There was this implicit understanding of what it means to be a religious person in the social circles that I found myself in. People need to be careful about what they say around highly religious people because these are the people who are quick to judge. Highly religious people are quick to tell someone that they’re living their lives immorally, and they will burn in hell for it. They won’t understand most things. They can’t have fun. They live under a shell. They’re irrational—they believe in things for which there’s no physical evidence. 

I didn’t necessarily agree with these sentiments, but I understood the assumptions that came along with that label. I’ve had religion tear apart relationships for me before and refused to let it prevent me from forging new ones. 

One of the Seven Hermetic Principles is “Everything happens for a reason.” 

Regardless of my incredibly religious childhood, for many years, I never thought to examine my relationship with the divine. I did not consider myself a spiritual person. I thought my experiences of God and Spirit that occurred during my formative years were but fleeting ghosts of my past—completely irrelevant to the rest of my life. 

They weren’t. 

The Ghost of Light’s Embrace

When I was in high school, I was convinced I wanted to be a veterinarian. I spent all of my free time watching veterinary shows on National Geographic. I was fascinated by their work, and I began to study more about it in my free time. I could identify any passing dog breed, or cat breed. I became familiar with several genetic predispositions for issues in certain dog and cat breeds, and how to identify them. In my mind, I was doing some groundwork training for when I would enroll in veterinary school later. I never did, but the information that I did learn proved to be life-savingly timely.

There was an episode about a cat on Dr. Pol who had a urinary crystal blocking the cat’s urethra. Male cats have a particularly small urethra, so any sort of blockage in it can be life-threatening.

A couple of months later, at the request of a new vet who saw my cat at the clinic, I started Hero on some dry food. “It helps scrape the tartar off of his teeth,” the vet claimed. 

Hero started to act weird very quickly after the switch. He would go to the litterbox, paw around in his litter, and leave without doing anything. He would go frequently, always leaving his box looking anxious and uncomfortable. I noticed that he even started straining outside of the box. I became gravely worried and rushed him to the veterinary clinic. 

“He has some urinary crystals—these are really serious for male cats. We’re going to have to keep him here, put him on a catheter, and see if he can pass it.”

I began to tremble. 

This was the first instance where I was truly afraid. It was a new kind of fear that I couldn’t shake off and that my parents couldn’t coax me out of with kind words of reassurance. I was a cornered animal in survival mode, confronted with the possibility of the death of a loved one. It was in that moment that these ghosts came back to me, not in a haunting, but in an embrace back into the unconditional love that I had once forgotten amid the trauma of my family.

The embrace was as powerful and moving as it was urgent. I prayed. I prayed until my voice failed me and my lips would move silently by themselves. I couldn’t hear myself speak anymore; I couldn’t hear anything in that moment. There was only the embrace of light and warmth. I couldn’t consciously communicate how I knew, but there was an innate knowing that he would survive this downfall. My mind still raced in fear, but my body began to relax.

Hero was fine after a week. I never put him on dry food again.

That experience made me realize that I do believe in God, in Spirit. The New Age spiritual vaguely refers to it as “the universe.” I hadn’t been in a church my whole life filled with people telling me what exactly that meant, so I was put in the position of discovering what exactly that meant.

I’m still navigating it, and I’ve come to several, very different understandings of what it means over the years. Even now, I struggle to bring myself to merely write the word “God” because of the many interpretations that come with it.

The navigational terminology that people utilize to express their own personal categorization of that which is greater than our individual human selves is fascinating. While at a metaphysical store buying herbs, I heard a woman say, “Oh, my Goddess!” after dropping a heavy box on her foot. 

Being Taught vs. Learning

Organized religious settings adopted the systemic approach of schools in that they tell us who and what God is instead of letting us experience the relationship for ourselves. It gives us a guidebook for what the relationship is supposed to be and how it’s supposed to feel.

Just like in school, there are right and wrong answers.

“…But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth… As for you, the anointing you have received from him remains in you, and you do not need anyone to teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about all things and as that anointing is real, not counterfeit, just as it has taught you, remain in him.”

~~1 John 2: 20-27

I believe this is the reason why there is a mass exodus of people turning away from more traditional Western religions to more vague understandings of New Age spirituality. I admit being drawn to the teachings of everything being love and light when I first began my journey, but there was something that always felt incomplete in the philosophy.

Dismantling the Guilt of Being Human

Particularly in Christians, there is the seed that is planted of sin, sinning, wrong, and right. There are lines that are painted again and again within the compass of morals that we’re fed from the moment we open our ears to a sermon. 

I can’t speak of all Western religions, but I can speak of my experience with Christianity.

There is a guilt that is created internally for being human. The taboos of sin—fornication, envy, gluttony, etc.—are all the most base components of being human. It is identified as the Devil lurking within us and whispering in our ears to do these wrongs. 

In my journey of discovering God, and reconnecting with my Higher Self, I also had to ask myself about the nature of the devil. 

And sinning.

I will always attest that there is always more than one explanation for something, if it is true. Many roads lead to Rome.

Regardless of your understanding of what God is or your understanding of evil, the very basis of sin is the carnal drive that is hidden within us as animals of Earth. Humans are very quick to distinguish themselves from the rest of the animal kingdom, and yet we exhibit many of the same behaviors we so eagerly like to analyze in the wild. They are the same trivial behaviors that amuse us when we see them in animals.

“… God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in light, we have fellowship with one another… and [Christ/Christos] purifies us from all sin. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”

~~1 John 5-8

These are the distractions that we can get lost in and can drain us of any drive that we can have to cultivate any relationship with ourselves, with our true internal essences and Spirit, and therefore with God. 

How much energy do we devote in our lives to these aspects of fleeting pleasure that we so readily identify with? That we devote so much of our waking lives to? 

They’re rabbit holes.

We get lost because we believe that these perceptions are our true internal, eternal essence when they are just our human. It is the creature bound to the restrictions of this Earthly realm and the material laws that speaks to us. Our Spirits and souls are much more than that; they are eternal.

Most teachings of spirituality teach us to renounce these material aspects of ourselves because they are not eternal, and therefore do not matter. 

With these teachings in mind, I came to the understanding that the biggest thing that was holding me back from forming an intimate relationship with God and with myself were these qualities of myself that I understood to be sinful. I utilized the same black-and-white morals that I had attained from an early age to decipher the riddle of myself.

“… for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith.”

~~1 John 4-5

I would be ashamed every time I looked in the mirror before heading to work. Every time I had a thought of attraction to someone who walked by, I would be met with waves of red hot hatred from myself for not being more pure. It was a viscous cycle of noticing the flaws within myself and thinking I could hate them away, back into the corners of my mind—into a submission of the person that I was trying to become. The person that I thought I needed to be to become happy and wise.

I was hating the devil within me because I thought that was how I would become closer to the divine light that I knew I held within myself. It was my responsibility to fix myself and be better. 

“The Work asks me to stand in this pain, doing nothing, judging nothing, simply feeling the pain totally without judging it good or bad, right or wrong. Simply stand in the pain and allow it to be sensed throughout the body. Nothing else. The body knows what to do with the energy, but only when I do not interfere. But my habits interfere: i think about the pain, I react to the pain, I judge the pain, I fight the pain, I try to “fix” the pain, it does on and on… Thus, the pain gets worse.”

~~Self- Observation, Red Hawk, page 21

Becoming A Warrior

This is absolutely nothing short of a long, circular path of self-loathing. You can never train a dog to not want food, just as you can never train a person to not be human. 

We are immortal spirits walking on this path of being human in this lifetime, but there is a reason for that. In our pursuit of condemning religion, we ignore the principle teaching that is in the words when it is not in the action of the people. 

And that is unconditional love. And an unconditional knowing in yourself that you will breathe with unknown peace after the end of your trial. Trusting that there are things that you will never understand and that you are not in control of does not make you powerless. 

“Your battlefield is the world, and the war is life. The true warrior is the one who is willing to die for the highest cause, whether that is represented by your country, your cause, your brothers and sisters, or your children. The important part of the metaphor is that the warrior has to give his or her life for a higher cause. This rebirth is liberation, and it occurs only after great effort through the death of a smaller self. This is the true meaning and symbolism of the warrior and why we all aspire to it.” ~~Richard Rudd, 309 

It’s ironic, isn’t it? 

You are a powerful being, but to fully claim that power, there is an element of surrendering to it that is necessary. 

You must love and accept that which you hate. 

That which scares you as a human, to fully embody your identity as an immortal being of light.

For fear comes from a position of darkness, and not knowing; light knows, loves and is. Regardless of the dark.