That Damned Closet

The Closet. It’s a crowded place, full of gays, atheists, Pagans, and anyone else the American Mainstream has a personal problem with.  We’re all in there together, but sometimes we have to come out, either on our own, or being dragged kicking and screaming into the open.  It’s a veritable Sword of Damocles over the heads of many of us, as getting outed can ruin family relationships, careers, or even life and limb.

I’d mentioned that I’d gotten outed as a “dirty heathen” to my fundie family in my last post, so I thought I’d share a little about my own experience with unexpectedly coming out.

A few weeks ago, my mother was in town to visit, something that used to be enjoyable, but hadn’t been since Phase 1 in the slow-motion train wreck of my coming out that started last Thanksgiving.  I’d had That Feeling (TM) that Phase 2 was about to begin, and I was right.  That night, she’d insisted on watching a disgusting piece of missionary propaganda babbling on about how wonderful it was that Jesus was coming to China at last, those poor unwashed lost souls.  (I’ve loved Chinese culture for a looong, time, so apparently my mother thought that a DVD glorifying the potential destruction of it would be something I’d enjoy.  Fundamentalist thinking, it’s unexplainable.)

Anyway, when I didn’t express exuberance for this trash, but rather sat stoically through it (and was probably not managing to fully hide my disgust), she decides to finally ask me point-blank if I was still a Christian.  (Her phrasing: “Have you thrown it all away?”)  After I try, vainly, to get her to understand how loaded and inflammatory her wording is, I tell her no, I’m not, opening the floodgates of three hours of Drama.  We go round and round about the Bible, how I don’t buy it any more after I actually started to research and scrutinize what I’d had hammered into my head since I was a kid, how Paul was a misogynistic asshole, and so on.  Pascal’s Wager, thinly-veiled hellfire threats, and half-suppressed tears all made an appearance at one point or another, pretty standard fare for this kind of a thing.

Eventually, we got to what it would take for me to believe, as I’d mentioned that I had never had an experience of the Christian god, despite having been a devout believer for over 20 years.  My mother has had numerous experiences she believes have had divine origin.  She asked why I couldn’t just accept her experiences in lieu of having my own, essentially.  I tried to explain to her that one person can never really know the transcendent experiences of another, as it didn’t happen to them — for the person who has the experience, it’s revelation, for the person who hears of it, it’s hearsay.

I eventually said that I did believe there was something numinous out there however, and that I’d finally had one of those experiences that you *know* is direct contact with something Divinely Other.  I asked her if she agreed that you can have these kinds of experiences that you KNOW are divine, and she eagerly agreed.  That’s when I began to describe what happened to me a couple of months ago.

It was the first time I decided to attempt autosacrifice.  This was a big step for me, since as I’d mentioned before, I was phobic of needles or anything related to intentional bloodletting. I had pierced my ear with my lancet and daubed up the drop of blood with some special paper I reserve for sacred use, then sat to meditate while the paper burned and my incense smoked.  As the fire died out, I began to feel like I was rising, and I had the only open-eyed, waking vision I’ve ever had in my life.  I could see a beautiful forested valley below me, matching the forested landscape of Mexico’s mountainous woodlands.  I felt like the mythically-portrayed Sun, hanging in midair over the world.  Then I became aware of Huitzilopochtli’s Presence and… Laozi and Zhuangzi were right, language is utterly inadequate for expressing the numinous.

The only way I can try to sum it up is that I touched the face of god.  It was like a whitewater torrent of pure vital LIFE, life that was almost fiercely joyful to be alive, welcoming all parts of living, even the pain and suffering and dying.  It was the truest personification of Nietzsche’s spirit that says “Yes!” to life, even in its deepest agony.  Brilliant life, radiating its vitality with wild joy upon all things below, and I was veritably immersed in it.  I found the most overwhelming sense of gratitude and love pouring out of me involuntarily as I observed my own thoughts in utter shock at the experience, so different from what I had expected (if anything — I half-doubted anything at all would happen).  A sense of welcome and proud approval from the god that I’d conquered my fear to offer blood, and a non-visual feeling of being surrounded by eagles and ocelots — the traditional symbols of the warriors of Mexico, many of who were destined to die in battle and were thought to go to the House of the Sun as a reward.  Then the vision faded, leaving me back in the normal world.

I told her the story, leaving out certain details — I didn’t mention the autosacrifice, and I didn’t reveal the god’s identity at the beginning.  If I had, she never would’ve listened to my story, and I was drawing her into something of a trap — I wanted her to agree with my experience as much as possible before I sprang the identity on her and made backpedaling difficult. (I *am* an attorney, this wasn’t really different from cross-examination…) Up until the very end, she listened with rapt attention, nodding to what I was saying, clearly ready to attribute it to her god and claim that I really had experienced Jesus/Yahweh after all.  And then I told her that this god had a different name, and I told her it was Huitzilopochtli.  She looked like she’d been sucker-punched as her hopes of a quick reconversion were shattered.  I felt kind of bad for her, but I knew the pain was something unavoidable and that this couldn’t be put off any longer.

Then came the very crap I expected of “Satan can masquerade as an angel of light,” “test the spirits,” “don’t be deceived,” etc, the shit that I had been predicting would be said in this very situation for months.  Amazingly,  she never quite said directly “your god is a demon,” which I was waiting for with a ready request that she not blaspheme.  The discussion ended shortly after that with her in tears and praying for her god to reveal himself to me, and a bizarre tangent about how there were supplies in her house in case the Rapture happened and what to do with her pets, then her handing me a copy of her house key.

Since then?  We haven’t discussed religion directly, but she’s continued to send me annoying bits of Christo-spam email.  I’m tired of it, as it comes off as a passive-aggressive attempt to proselytize by pointedly ignoring my different beliefs, so there will likely be a more blunt, comprehensive statement of my spirituality soon, combined with a request for her to show some respect.  Silence by those of us who are Pagans can amount to allowing ourselves to be victims of religious imperialism, and I’m fucking sick of it.  All the reasons I had before for keeping my silence with my family no longer apply, so I have no reason not to speak out.  I was unintentionally outed, so I might as well roll with it.

The moral of the story?  Keep your cool when this situation inevitably arises, no matter what.  If you get angry, you lose — it’s “the Devil tormenting you,” or else “the Holy Spirit convicting you of your sin.”  But they will certainly get emotional at you.  You *will* be misunderstood, and your religion will be attacked as Satanic if you’re dealing with a fundamentalist, so there will be extreme provocation that you can’t respond to.  It’s not fair, but it can’t helped.  They can’t usually be reasoned with, so don’t try.  I kept the conversation controlled and only touched on my problems with Christianity in the briefest fashion, and when it started to get ugly, I cut off that part of the discussion.  Under these circumstances, the best you can do is try to plant the tiniest seed of potential tolerance and common ground, and the rest is damage control, assuming you don’t plan on cutting your family out of your life.

Even then, no matter how hard you try, I can’t promise you good results.  This religious stupidity is slowly eating away at my relationship with the fundie half of my family like acid, and I know this Christmas will be a hell worse than the last one.  If I come across a solution, I’ll definitely share it with everyone.

So, to cap off this incredibly long post, if you’re a Pagan, be prepared.  You *will* come out of The Closet, one way or another, sooner or later.  If you’re ready for it, you stand a chance at minimizing the damage to your relationships, and maybe, if a miracle occurs, achieving understanding and tolerance.

To any Christians who have stumbled across this blog posting, what I’ve said may seem harsh, but try to put yourselves in my shoes for a moment and understand the kind of pain this intolerance is inflicting and the damage it’s doing to my family relationships.  I don’t ask you to change your beliefs, but I do ask you to respect ours and to be sensitive to the very real human cost that exclusivist theology has.  If you can’t do that, do not comment on this post, it won’t survive moderation.  I have zero tolerance for preaching or prejudice on my blog — it’s a haven, not a debate site.  If you want debates, go to the Internet Infidels forums, they’ll gladly oblige you.

~ by cehualli on June 3, 2008.