Break on through to the other side....

A very strange and wonderful thing happened to me today on this most glorious of Easter Sundays. I made the journey home to be with my family for the weekend and ended up going to my old church this morning for Easter service. Now this church was pretty much my life from the age of 15 to 25. It's standard christian dogma was the course by which I set my sail. I followed the teachings of the bible and the church like a proper sheep. I did good things, I spread the word of god and tried to save my friends from eternal suffering in hell, not because I felt this burning desire within me to spread the truth, but because the bible and the church told me that was what I was supposed to do. I always wanted to believe it, but it somehow never felt right to me. The church always had an answer though, they said that salvation is an act of faith and not one of emotion, they said that my base emotions were the devil's tool to lead me away from god and that they must be suppressed, they told me that unless you asked Jesus to forgive your sins and accept him as your personal savior and devote your life to him; you would burn in hell for all eternity. Now, I do not want to paint an entirely bad picture of this church because it was filled with very good people and dear friends who honestly believed in what they were saying and I do not hold anything but love for them. However, the church and its dogma is a completely different story and I hold them dearly and painfully responsible for fucking up my mind by filling it with a lot of fantastical nonsense, because I took everything they had to say quite literally because that's exactly the way they took it. To them, hell is a very real place and satan a very evil devil who is seeking to destroy the world over some age-old spat he had with the way god ran things. Although I do believe that Abraham, Moses, Jesus and all his disciples existed and were real people, I now add to that belief that men are greedy and will distort history for their own purposes and those purposes are rarely altruistic. Does anyone else find it odd that a man who spoke of changing the world never wrote anything himself? Where, pray tell, is the Gospel according to Jesus? Anyway, I digress into bitterness, now back to the story at hand...

I believe I left off with my return to this church that I once held dear. Now, back in the day I was the only one in my family who attended church, and boy was that an issue of guilt, I mean my family was going to burn in hell because they had not "accepted Jesus into their hearts." What a load of crap! The strange thing that occured today was that it was my sister who was now going to church and I was the one tagging along to check it out and witness it from a different perspective. So, I met my sister and her family at the church for the 8am service. I sat in the thrid row on the right hand side and listened as they played all new songs that lacked the joy I remember, listened to prayers that felt empty in their meaning to me, and listened to a sermon delivered by my old pastor as masterfully as I remember, but somehow seemed simple minded. He spoke briefly of the evils of the DaVinci Code and how Satan picked two of his finest to bring the story to the big screen, these two emissaries of evil being, of course, none other than Ron Howard and Tom Hanks. I mean, who else would come to mind when speaking of the emissaries of Satan? He told a story about a man who went down to South America to minister to some of the native tribes living there. This man came across a village that had many sick and the man offered to lead them to a place where they could receive medicine. They would not follow him because he would lead them across the river, which the natives believed contained evil spirits that would do them harm. This belief had existed in this tribe for so long that its origin was no longer known. So, the man did the sensible thing and dove into the river and swam under water until he reached the other side. When the tribe saw that no harm had come to the man, they too dove in and swam across to get the medicine they so desperately needed. Now, when I heard this story, I could not help but think that the river and its evil spirits represented the christian belief in hell and how any not following Jesus would burn in its fires for all eternity and how the man represented some person who would come and, through some action, show these poor misguided people how their fears and beliefs were unfounded and based upon myth and legend.

So, I sat there, listening to my former pastor and wondered how I could have ever allowed this thing to control my life and this is when the wonderful thing happened. I discovered, in the course of his sermon, that the church and its dogma and its beliefs no longer held any power over me. I heard the words and they did not affect me. I felt no guilt. I felt no remorse. I felt nothing but a sense of breathing the air of a free man. Christianity no longer held any power over me. I realized that I was free and it felt good. So, on this day that celebrates Christ rising from the dead, I stepped out of the prison of my own making and felt the rain fall upon my face, breathed the clean air and said goodbye to that prison cell forever. Amen.