I am a christian, I am scarred for life.

I have an obsession with the spiritual. I am scarred for life.

I grew up in western canada, one of the few pockets where religion—christianity—was the norm. I went to a mission church, my grandmother was the church organist and had been for god knows how long. I remember that my father also worked as a musician at another church and nearby, where I'd float the styrofoam cups over the airconditioning vents over the floor. a simple activity, a fun activity. i was fascinated by how they hovered over the grates in the floor, eventually flying upwards and falling to the ground or moving out of the grate's mystical boundaries of levitation and fall away. i and my three-year old friends, of whom were random and i never cared many times to know their names or how they were distantly related to me, would engage in this activity but I always the longest, forever enthralled by what would become a cobbwebbed childhood memory that can be used as a playful metaphor for my obsession with the otherworld.

i am not a pagan, i am christian. i am scarred for life.

I may never fully understand the doctrine in which I was raised, for childhood memories and childhood foundations are things that are buried so deep, so hidden from plain view, that the deepest mirror can never show them to us. Only when a day comes when we're older and maybe even gray, the childhood rising up like a pimple through the underlayers of the skin and becoming hard and stiff at the stop when we're elderly—we become staunch in our ways, we force our present beliefs on others, and they're actually the things that were drilled into us when we were three and four.

I grew up in church, I'll never be the same.

In middle school I was a patron for christianity in a seemingly heathen Christian private school, where the girls swooned over Hayden Christensen instead of buddy christ and the boys bragged of the Martial Mathers EP while I touted the latest and edgiest of christian music, enough of a rebel in that I poopooed the hymns my grandmother played on the organ in her church.
Eventually, in my youthful days, I saw the base nature of the church at work even though I could never comprehend its true nature until weeks, months, years after the events took place and I could hear and re-hear them recited from my parents' mouth, sometimes with tearful sadness (of which I did not see) or with intellectual fervor.

I've seen the mass-congregation of America. I've seen the new christianity, I've seen the crucified christ.

The nature was that it was a business model. Nothing was special about it because we saw it everywhere—McDonald's, GAP, WalMart, anything American based on mass consumption, the lowering of standards, mass marketing and cultural addiction, and ultimately the stagnation that brings about pride and ignorance, giving birth to hate and violence.
The nature of American christianity of my youth was that of a mass-savior—in a three-step process you could do this very minute, in your seat, you could repent of every respiteful wrongdoing you committed in your life; everything from stealing the hotwheels car from your best friends playbox in preschool to murdering your ex-husband's brand-new wife. It was not a matter of justice, because that was taken care of through an elaborate doctrine that the common Christian-consumer didn't need to work out for themselves. It was kept by the clergy, who oiled the machine with literal interpretation and their denomination's specific and rational solutions. There were only minor rules. Go to church. Sing. Pray, and preach to your friends. Make sure they accepted the painted, smiling, toga-wearing buddy christ just as you had, because you knew they must never rot and burn and fizzle and pop in a land of sulphur fire populated by lecherous goat-beings with whips, even though all the human race deserved it (that was the amazing miracle of christ).
Of course I believed all of it, and I had my outbursts of righteous indignation at my friends, who simply laughed at my actual dedication to what was actually just a rule forces upon them by the school administration. Who was really to say what was right or wrong? Who was to really say whether or not we evolved from monkey-like apes standing postrate upon african fields, and that they were not once a soup of gooey green ooze that held the original semen for the human race that so needed forgiveness.
Oh, how I hated Evolution. How I posted on message boards, how I made these long nonsensical rants based on half-truths that somehow involved the second law of thermodynamics and the problem of something coming from nothing. I took an apologetics class not to apologize for my faith, as what I later learned I might've done in the first place, but to defend it from an onslought of demonic scientific evidence that needed cleaning with more literal bible verses and mentions of pre-flood environmentalism theory, explaining why dew rose from the ground in eden and why melchizedek got so old.

I am the aftereffect, I'm the reborn one. Through a journey of misgivings, I'm saved.

Modern christianity today is like a well-furnished airliner heading into the eye of a hurricane. The thing is huge, has hidden compartments filled with strange, nasty-looking and greasy items everywhere, has a choosing of crowd-pleasing music and nightly movies on selection that never crosses the line of accepted morality, has plush leather seats to subdue the sitter, has a clear difference between first class and coach, which constitutes the difference between clergy and laymen, with an aisle seperating genders so nothing becomes questionable. Women are never pilots or even co-pilots—if they are, they belong to a different company. The only instance they're not a simple paying passenger is if they're a stewardess, in which case they all wear the same makeup, all dye their hair blonde (perhaps even have blue contacts), have the same uniforms, and must smile at all times while politely serving the passengers any non-alcholic drink of their choosing. The food is always bad, but we seem to like it, if only for the familiarity and not the cherry-medecine cake.
And then we get into the eye of the hurricane which is filled with darkness. It is terrible, it is massive, it can engulf the whole airplane even though it has none of the typical tools one would think could so easily destroy a 747. The only thing it has is air—a bombardment of individual particles that are brought together by a number of inexplicable effects that not even the literal interpretations of the bible can shed holy light on. These monsters are made off of the coast of Africa—a pagan country, mind you— where they're spun together by a contrast of seawater and land, of undulating winds of hot and cold, picking up speed and getting slingshotted off to St. Paul's Retirement Home in southern florida. They feed off of hot water on the way, seeing people that are so rageful and angry about the inattention and all the bickering and all the denominational squabbles and all the bogus explanations and all the "you're going to hell if you're a bhuddist a hindu a wiccan an atheist an agnostic a catholic, and especially if you're a muslim."

So our 747 barrels onward, guided by a pilot with a holy compass that gets magnetic readings from god's heavenly throne somewhere in heaven, and we hit the brunt. Our food goes off pop-up table, the baggage flies out of the storage comparments and knocks us out, the cabin pressure drops and our ears begin to pop. The gas masks drop from the ceiling—perhaps this is a ticket into the rapture and we're just in the seventh tribulation—and we panic, smacking themselves onto our mouths and gasping for air even though the bag won't fully inflate, snapping ourselves with the rubber bands at the sides.

God help me, I was on that plane. God, wherever you are, save me before its too late.

And if the hurricane was just one particle—one single person—it could never rip the fuselage in half like it did or cause the liner to plummet into the sea. It was like that once, where it was just one person—the medieveal peasant—who knew nothing, who said nothing, who only hoped for righteouss salvation, although they had no clue as to what it was or where it came from, since that was regarded to the men in white and gold robes.
Our old buddies ghutenberg and luther changed all that though, and everything was happy until they inspired peasant rebellions all across germany—Ghutenberg was the african coast, Luther was the hot Atlantic. From them the peasants went mad like a crowd of toddler McDonald's customers that realized Ronald is just a clown and that he really isn't visiting anytime soon. "Kill the men in red, white, and yellow!" They shout, "burn them at the stake!" Relics get smashed, cathedral windows shatter by a wall of airborne cobbler's rocks while they begin to fight among each other even about predestination, the trinity, the timeline of revelation, whether or not women can speak in church, and if they should light candles. In the meantime Europe rots and the church splits, all thanks to the precursor liner—the Medeival church—that gave birth to this now-hurricane-fondled 747. It was all their fault anyway. What did they expect when they fed indulgences to people for their money to build cathedrals that we can still vomit on today for all the greed they were built with? Did they really find it preposterous that one, even just one of their own that was so overlly dedicated, so obsessive about belief and getting the truth to people's mouths straight without any marketing, without any positioning, without any dreams of fame or glory or reverence for sacred cows that he would ultimately chop up into mince meat and feed to his children for sandwich filling didn't really exist? Well, whether they did or didn't, they never saw what happened afterwards coming. Not by a long shot.

Lord, if everyone's wrong, I don't want to be wrong too. I know that I probably am, but I'm too obsessive. I'm already scarred for life. If I'm going to see You, I'm really, really going to see you.

About halfway into the start of the eyes, when a million air particles are ripping off the plexi-steel hull of our magnificent, martyrous airpline, getting stripped to pieces by something as simple as chaos theory, I rip off my air mask and head for the exist. On the way I'm looking for something, anything, that could help me break the fall. Preferably a parachute—some secret magic trick, some secret proof in hard evidence to keep the unquantifiable wind and rain at bay. The Shroud of Turin would be a great device for such ventures, if it weren't for all the holes. Even so, I look for a copy beneath the seats and inbetween the seat cushion/foatation device, and find nothing but emergency booklets that no one ever really read because their airplane was made of pure faith and they had no need for it. I look for the second law of thermodynamics, but find that instead of a parachute it's actually a thermometer; I see the theory of intelligent design, but it's from a poor-quality manufacturer and has to many strings to mess with in the short amount of time I have to get off this airpline. I even find the left-behind books laying around in the aisles, but they're just a bunch of books and won't do a damn thing to save my mortal life. Now the plane is in the heart of it and it looks likes a heathen drug rave with the lights going on and off and all the people screaming desperately, singing desperately, vomiting and hiccuping and waiving their hands in the air—either in reverence or in fear, I don't know.
Finally, I reach the back of the airplane with an exit door, but I've got no parachute. Not a single bible verse to hang-glide with, which quite possibly may fail miserably in this atrocious weather; not a new cure-all translation to use as a rocket booster and shoot straight to the surface, not any holy relics to even supernaturally save my life like something out of a sci-fi flick or one of those Armaggedon-code movies (we're all protestants here, the catholic trinkets are fakes, and the movies all have different codes).
Maybe just because of all the wind outside and my arms jerking around while holding the handle as the plane gets thrown around like an angry child's toy, the door unlocks and I get sucked out with it into the insane and raging tempest. I know I'm surely going to die, and though I know buddy christ is in my heart and I prayed the three-step prayer, it still doesn't keep me from crapping my pants and wondering if the evolutionists were right all along.

Okay, Lord. You told me to take the leap of faith. Well, I'm out now, with not a single handle on what's going on, and I'm searching for the truth. Seek, and ye shall find.

In the hurling onslaught I'm ripped away from the aircraft and it becomes a tiny blinking red-and-green-flight-lights blip among an angry gray and black hurricane's eye, taking away any sense of theology, much less up and down, and my head nearly explodes from the pressure change. My eardrums are popping like they're the bass drum at a Newsboys concert and all the blood is running to the extremes of my body. My heart pumps faster to keep up with, my body gets pounded by clumps of hail, and in general the angry tempest treats me like a squirrel with a brand-new and especially shiny golden nut, trying to break my skull open and pick the contents of my brain, wondering why I even thought of getting on the plane in the first place. "I'm sorry! It was my parents! I just subscribed to my parents' religion!"
"Yeah? So did they, and so did your grandparents, and everyone else going down the line to buddy christ. What's it to us?"
So I think that surely my skull's going to get cracked open now, and it feels like this is the end, and by this time i've stopped singing even the old hymns that my grandmother played on the organ and praying my third-grade version of the Lord's prayer. Now I'm just part of the storm—I become another particle with a tumultuous past, whipped about by innumerable winds that've traversed the whole globe since time began, the same thing that's taking down the aircraft two miles even deeper into the eye, and with no aim other than that I am an air particle and part of the Hurricane. And so we chant.
We are the hurricane, we are the force of change. We're the force of expanding culture, we're the force of truth. We're the source of humanity's soul, we're the face of the world. We're the place where the scholars keep their books, we're the place where Erasmus comes out to play. We're the place that never sleeps, never satisfied, never fulfilled, until we find a truth that lasts.


I once was a christian, and now I'm scarred for life.
Now I'm part of a hurricane of people refusing to believe lives fed to us for hundreds of years.
It's hopeless. I'm spiritually obsessed. I will travel with the hurricane, testing each and every plane that comes our way. Only will I be satisfied when I find a plane that does not shatter and break like glass and ego. None have not done so thus far. All have tried and failed in the face of the seeker, in the face of the hurricane, in the face of the one searching for truth. Even the plane that says there's no truth at all was ripped apart with impunity. Nothing's survived.

Nothing, at least yet. I'm forever part of the hurricane, but I find that this is the invincibility, this is the philosophy that carrying me to new lands. This is the thing that's opening me eyes, where I'm cast about from shore to shore and travelling through a million lungs and seeing the world, the cosmos, as a tiny particle within a sea of more tiny particles. There is nothing beyond me, because I am part of the invinvibility. I am the invincibility. The pain of jumping out of the airliner was just the pain of the adjustment, like the moment you cry after you pray the sinner's prayer.

Lord, I don't know a single thing about the world. I don't know you, I don't understand you, I may never understand you. I may never understand what you said, I may never understand where all this is going. But in the unknowingness I have the knowingness of experiencing everything through the eyes of a million air particles, through the eye of a hurricane. Without my kindred seekers I'm lost. Without you, the thing I search after forevermore, I am lost to the depths of hell.

I once was a christian.

I still am a christian.

I was just so spiritually obsessed, I couldn't resist looking for the truth. I had to find it all over again, and I will continue to do so for the rest of my days.