Vampires, faith, and a better master

Ok, I'm about to make an embarrassing confession.

I have been watching Angel.

Yeah, that Angel.  The brooding-vampire-with-a-soul-and-a-black-leather-coat, "We-help-the-hopeless," Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off Angel.

Yep.  Like I said, embarrassing.

There were the predictable fight scenes and beautiful damsels in distress and all that but what grabbed me was when they started to talk.  In the first episode, the main character is challenged not just to do penance to atone for his crimes but to care for people, not just to save lives but to save souls.   He opens a conversation with a stranger he's assigned to help by asking, "Are you happy?" 

Holy smokes!  An altogether fresh conversation about forgiveness and atonement, hope, love, and happiness.  I couldn't look away for all of Seasons 1 and 2.

Angel has faith.  He believes in The Powers That Be.  He believes in soul and God and Hell (several Hells actually).  He believes in right and wrong.  He believes some beings are pure evil and deserve death.  He believes in forgiveness and believes, too, that he is unforgivable.  He believes he must atone for the crimes of his past.  He believes that if he ever has sex and experiences a moment of pure happiness, he will lose his soul and conscience and will revert to evil.  He hopes against all vampire history that The Powers That Be will make him human again someday when his work atoning as a champion is completed.  He longs for love, a family, and a place of his own in the world but knows it can never be and so he expends the juice of his life helping people who can have the joys he cannot.  When he's not helping the hopeless, he sits in the dark, brooding, self-sacrificial, profoundly envious and grieved.

In a scene in season 2, episode 5, Dear Boy, his old sadistic lover says, "See.  No matter how good a boy you are, God doesn't want you.  But I still do."

"Wait," I wanted to gasp, "that's not true.  God wants everyone."  As I said it, I could feel how deeply her statement and his silent concession had struck my own heart.  I went to bed with a heavy heart, wanting to believe that God loves me, but protesting too much not to notice my discomfort.

Here's another embarrassing confession.

I believe a lot more like the vampire than I'd like to admit.



Here's what I wrote in my journal in September 2004, addressed to God.

I'm so afraid I'm going to blow it.  I'm afraid that if I don't try to make it happen that (it) won't go.  That You won't bless me.  That I'll be left stranded alone without enough resources, powerless.
Yep, that about sums up.
I'm terrified that You'll torture me.  That like Tantalus, what I desire will be held just beyond my grasp.  Forever.
I'm afraid that you'll get me excited, that I'll have a vision, that I'll be pumped and that You'll hold it close enough and just far enough away to try for.  But not reach.
I don't really believe that You're going to fulfill my heart's desires.
I'm afraid to try but I'm more afraid that if I don't keep reaching for it, that the one split second in all of eternity it is within my grasp, I'll miss my chance.
It's not like I can say, 'Oh, it doesn't matter.  I'll just get another passionate gift.  I'll just go for another heaven, another twin, another childhood, another God.
This is it.  If it isn't Your presence, if it isn't You, then it isn't.
And I'm terrified that You won't let me in and I can't make You.
Instead of feeling like You've practically dragged me to Your party and seated me at the head table, I feel like I'm standing with my nose pressed against the window hoping to...to what?  Sneak in?  Stand in line to get tickets before they sell out?  Wait on pins and needles for my name to be drawn in the lottery?  Be attractive enough to catch Your eye and get picked?
Ooo, ooo, Mister God, sir, pick me, pick me!


Then, here's February 2008.

If I just keep the words coming
     more books
     more videos
     more classes....
If I just keep the words coming
I can live in my head
     ride the wave of words
Then
Then I won't have to listen to the screams
and I won't have to feel the remorse and anger and revulsion


What kind of people could do that-
      Sacrifice with own willingly?
Why would God ever entrust a child to me?
There's a taint in the blood
I'm contaminated
And I'm afraid I'm contagious
I feel sick in my guts
I feel like throwing up
Nobody wants to hear 
    that my people and
      not too long ago
   sacrificed babies for personal gain....
I will never be able 
   to lead
      or touch spiritual power
Without lust in my womb
      blood in my mouth
   and someone else's suffering in my ears


We are child killers
   sex-mongers
   deal-makers
and willing cause of suffering to others


And God,
   what precisely
   are You going 
   to do about
             that


How can I ever be
   a true healer-
      ever
   after what the
   gifted healers in my
   line did when they
   took their glory as 
   a weapon and became
   predators....


God
If You don't have
   a balm to heal
   the sin-sick soul
then no one has


I would repent
   renounce
   and make reparations
but there is no way 
   to give back life
     to the dead
   or virginity to the raped
   or wholeness to the tortured
There is no way for me 
   to do that


Come, God, and pick up
   our self-made 
   catastrophe


Party's over
   God'll pick up

I can't stop the past
   I can't bring back the dead
I can't even remorse or 
   revulse this into goodness ....


Which brings us to last summer.  I went for EMDR to help me digest my terror and discovered through the process how tainted I felt, like a bowl of hearty, nourishing soup with a spoonful of arsenic mixed in.  I said so to the counselor, a lovely lady who assured me as so many other counselors and wise women before had assured me, that it wasn't my fault.  I was a child.  I was powerless.  This wickedness was not mine to carry.  And yet, I bear the consequences and the people were my people and the wrongs are our wrongs.  Their encouragement never satisfied so I decided to try something different.

I was inspired my something my massage lady, Tara, does with joints that are tight.  She gently rotates a joint, a finger for example, clockwise and counterclockwise, observing which direction moves more easily and which direction has more limited motion.  Then, she pushes into the joint slightly and rotates the finger in the easier direction, farther and farther as it relaxes.  After the easy direction, she releases and then begins again in the opposite, more limited, direction.  This to me is totally counter-intuitive.  I would assume that one would start with the sticky direction, but no.  One listens to the body, goes the direction it wants to go first, and then asks it to flex the other way.

So, I decided that instead of walking away from the responsibility like my grampa had, I would turn around and walk into it.  As the weight of evil settled upon me, I realized that I had always believed in my guts that I was tainted, broken beyond repair, beyond redemption, not worth coming back for.  Other people would be happy.  Others would be saved.  Others would be chosen.   But not me.

I served a cruel master, always demanding more.  Maybe if I was cleverer or sweeter or stronger- maybe then I wouldn't have been raped and tortured.  Maybe if I tried harder or longer or more creatively- maybe then I could feel safe.  Maybe if I gave my life making other people happy then they would make me happy.  Maybe if...

But like the vampire, no matter how good a girl I was, my god didn't want me.

"Atonement's a bitch," Angel says.  I'd tried atoning for decades and the bell of evil was still ringing in my life.  I was perhaps serving a good master instead of an evil one, but goodness without kindness is still cruel.

Now, I've heard all about God and forgiveness and atonement all my life but it wasn't until I walked into the weight of wickedness and finally saw my own soul crushed under decades of striving to right painful, life-crushing wrongs that my soul perked up and said, "Atonement- ah, yes."

And there was God's crazy offer on the table- God's death for my freedom.  The ridiculousness of this struck me.  Part of me wanted to keep trying, but all my other parts stared it down, insisting four decades is enough.  Stupid deal- everything for nothing.  And yet, it stands.  I can't negotiate; I did accept to the best of my ability.

Watching Angel not accept atonement, not receive forgiveness, continue to champion because his god doesn't want him- I think this has driven the cure more deeply into my soul.  This could be me.  I could go back to the master who inflicts pain and calls it love.  I really could.  I could pour the juice of my life into other people's happiness and never cultivate my own for fear of losing the truth of evil.  I really could.  I could keep hoping that if I suffer enough everything wrong will be righted.  Yep, I could.

But I'm not going to. 

I've decided that in my experience, the belief that pleasure and happiness lead to evil is exactly opposite of reality.  The only way to happiness is if my atonement is done, if evil is vanquished, if someone bigger is righting all wrongs.  It's time to serve a master of kindness.  I'm choosing happiness.  I'm saying yes to God's offer of atonement.  I'm accepting forgiveness.  I'm cultivating pleasures.  I know exactly where the other path goes and I'm getting off that bus.  By the start of Season 3, his atoning began to feel sad and unnecessary.  I stopped watching.

Which leads me to where I am now currently stuck and it's a doozy.
As a survivor of child sacrifice by rape and torture, how can I accept that God's Son died atoning for me?
As a Christian, not to mention a desperate woman who's spent four decades crushed under the consequences of wickedness, how can I not accept?

If my bleeding just made more suffering, how does Jesus' bleeding make life?

I totally don't get this and I've told God so.  The whole "Jesus dying for my sins" thing is not working for me.  Crux of Christianity, so to speak, and I find myself shaking my head.

I'm ok with this because I'm ok with us- me and God.  I'll go so far as to say that I think God's ok with us.  I'm finally asking the right person the real question and in the fullness of time it will be made clear to me.  Or not.  And whether or not I get the concept, I'm determined to follow a new master of pleasure and forgiveness and freedom and life and happiness.

When I lose focus, I can go back to Angel Season 2 and watch what happens when atonement never ends, pleasure doesn't matter, and pain becomes master.  

If anybody wants to watch it with me or wants to chat about it, let me know.  I could use the company.