When I first came across the Gnostic gospels in college, I didn’t have much of a concept of what it would look like to really connect to god without religion.Â
There was a decent amount of religious diversity in my family. Most of my mom’s siblings converted to Islam from Christianity, plus one became a Jehovah’s Witness. I went to a Catholic elementary school so I went to Tuesday mass every month but my grandma went to a Presbyterian church on Sundays. When I was in high school my mom would make me go to an Apostolic church with her on occasion. The one person in my family who didn’t follow a specific religion was my dad, who considered himself spiritual, was into astrology, and filled our living room with old dusty books on the occult and world religions. Though I know he believed in a capital G God, his approach felt more intellectual and he didn’t share much about what was important to him about his spirituality.
So while I grew up with the awareness that there were many paths one could follow, I still mostly associated god only with religion, and the push and pull of fear of eternal damnation kept me relatively anchored in the Christian vs agnostic/atheist binary. How would you really even create a personal relationship with god without already established institutional rules? What if you do it wrong? What if you end up talking to a demon by accident or something and lose everything? How do you know you’re not just going to end up in hell anyway because you committed to the wrong beliefs?
If any of that feels familiar to you, maybe you too have experience with religious trauma! Religious trauma is a big deterrent to folks connecting to god on any level, with good reason. And even if you weren’t raised with religion, you can at the very least recognize the oppression that sanctimonious judgement brought on by people supposedly working in the name of god has on so-called secular society as well.Â
So I get that me talking about Jesus even outside of a religious context feels probably either triggering or just absolutely ridiculous to some people. I’ll admit it feels kind of scary doing it (when I tell you sharing about this stuff has been years in the making I mean it)! There’s been so much cruelty done using his name as a shield. What does it even mean to try to develop a holistic relationship with a figure that has been used as an excuse for so much harm and violence in our society?
As a kid in my elementary school religion class, I always had a certain affinity towards the New Testament gospels, which are the tellings and teachings of Jesus’ life and death. There's a lot I love about Christ energy through the gospels: the ecology present in his sayings, the metaphors and riddles, the invitations to contemplation and listening.Â
So in college when I started reading the Gnostic texts, I thought that the most logical next step would be to become a Christian again after being agnostic for the last several years. If I felt a resonance with Jesus, that’s the path I was supposed to take right?
But that part still didn’t click for me. Without telling my friends too much about it, I started trying out different Christian and religious services in my small college town. Episcopalian. Unitarian. Even Quaker meetings. Some of it I enjoyed, but none of it felt right. I didn’t have the language at the time for the deeper why, but I just knew that it felt impossible to call myself a Christian in any form when it felt like I was beholden to laws that didn’t feel relevant or ethical according to how I was living my life in the day to day. I didn’t like feeling put into a box. And I didn’t understand how I could give myself a label within a belief system that didn’t fit, even when I tried the sects that more closely aligned to my socio-political viewpoints. So after giving it a go for a few months, I once again pulled back my interest in anything god related. Besides, why was I bothering trying to go to church anyway? There were parties to go to and drugs to do, who even has the time to fit in religion!
At a certain point (ten years give or take after my last encounter with religion), I got bored with drinking and drugs. Not in a "oh I’m so great I’m above this" kinda way but in a "wow I am miserable and want my life to look different but I have no idea what that means" kinda way. This is a whole story that can’t be told simply or succinctly here. But in short - I found tarot. I asked for help from people I trusted who also quit substances. I started to see the world in a more expansive lens. What I thought was a straight line between feeling damaged and healed, being punished or punisher, became a holographic journey that opened my eyes in ways that I could not have imagined.
And when it came time to connect back to the energy of Christ again, I realized that what matters to me the most is the personal relationship I have developed with Yeshua through my channel. Not through religion or through the lens of any particular dogma, but being able to recognize myself in him as a fellow seeker and admirer of mystery. Feeling into Christ energy is so gentle and present, without a hint of judgement. Curious and steady and vast. Straight from the heart of god.Â
Religion works for a lot of people, but for me it doesn’t. I’m stubborn, rebellious, and honestly a skeptic when you really get down to it. If I can’t feel it, smell it, or taste it within my own heart, it ain’t gonna work. And when I followed what did make my soul alight, there was no denying it, and no turning back. Even when I didn’t know how I would find the way, it was shown to me, through closed doors and redirections galore.Â
Eventually I found a place for my heart to settle - and I saw that it was in everything. I saw that I could be a part of the whole and still be me. That there was radical acceptance and unending love available through the darkest storms and highest highs. This is why Christ consciousness feels so special and important to me - it is an invitation, not a summation. A trusted hand held out saying, let’s go and see who and what we find on this path, together. We learn from each other. And in that anything is possible.
xo, Alia
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