I was talking to someone recently who said, and this is almost verbatim, “I go to church every weekend because I have embraced my father and Lord. I feel that He guides every step I make and I leave it all in His hands.”
If we leave the he/him assigned to God at birth for a second, yay, you, for having so much faith in a higher power! I have a bit of faith in something larger – an intelligent Something that I couldn’t possibly comprehend that everything exists within and because of. But even then I don’t have the kind of capital “F” faith that lets me stop trying to control things in my life.
Even though I know my source is the universe and the universe is abundant, I can’t help worrying every now and then about money (the lack of it, really). I know all these man-made systems are elaborate structures designed to keep the majority of us destabilized, afraid, and easily controllable. And still, I can’t help the rising panic when faced with a rapidly dwindling bank balance with an ever-slower rate of replenishment.
I know much of this comes from being strictly and heavily controlled as a girl-child, but much of it also comes from the scarcity myth and a capitalist set-up with tremendous roadblocks for women, single mothers, and BIPOC folks (not to mention a disastrous dearth of mental health supports…but that’s a post for another day).
I envy the kind of trust fall some people are able to take into “the Lord’s” arms. I know all the problems with that: lack of personal responsibility, spiritual bypassing, and the risk of slipping into anesthetic cult-think just to name a few. But there’s a pull to it, too. Not having to worry about anything at all because someone else is taking care of it feels so…freeing.
I understand the longing for some sort of parent-figure to handle all the unpleasant and hard stuff. It can be a scary world out there, and regardless of whether you grew up with a/n involved and protective parent/s or the lack of—who doesn’t want safety, the feeling of being carefree and stress-free? Especially when whipped into a spiraling vortex of impending doom from news and social media?
I’ve found that people who make statements like the one at the start of this post often also have faith in the systems and structures that surround us. That’s not to say that there aren’t social justice oriented religions out there. I’m Sikh - we are an entire religion based in social justice and equity.
But there is something incredibly tempting about belonging. No—more than tempting. Necessary. People are so often willing to give up pieces of themselves to belong to a group. So much so that it can be hard to know at what point they crossed the line into losing themselves totally and merging with an ideology they may not entirely, or at all, agree with.
So, let’s get back to the part about God being assigned male at birth. Even with the social justice oriented roots of Sikhism, with equality written into the scriptures of our holy book, God is generally accepted as He/Him. This maintains the structures of patriarchy or, to use the term Judith Herman and other feminists have employed, “male supremacy”. The use of these pronouns has gone mostly unchallenged, unexamined, and unquestioned by pretty much all of the world’s major (and most minor) religions. But using these pronouns allows religions, even those that use the language of equality and equity, to uphold systems of domination and remain hierarchical.
If there is an undisputed supreme Father at the head of all creation, and His church sets the rules, then all the structures and systems that follow must be consecrated, no? If these assumptions are then reinforced by presenting only images of male prophets, gurus, “sons” of God (aside: does any religion have a “daughter of God”?), then the overall message to followers about where value and power reside is a potent one. One that pretty much every single one of us has been indoctrinated into, on a global level.
When we begin to challenge dominant messages, we begin to see just how fierce the resistance is to any changes in the status quo. Change is the one thing most of us resist with all our might. It’s scary. It means letting go, it means a death of something. Loss. Grief. Suffering.
We’re rarely taught to embrace change as a positive (it should, quite frankly, be taught in schools as a life skill). To acknowledge the loss, while at the same time holding growth, expansion, being what you once were and what you are becoming is something we have to learn to do, and it’s an essential element of the Life curriculum. Shedding what’s been outgrown, so that something new can be incorporated, understanding that the past isn’t gone, it’s a digested part of your DNA, and that all of that is the miracle of living is part of a universal lesson that we learn over and over again. But all of us do it by ourselves, stumbling through the dark, usually with no guidance or textbook or learning materials. We have to somehow piece it all together on our own.
Some of us do this through psychotherapy and counseling, which makes sense because the word psychology comes from the Latin “psyche”, meaning mind, soul, or spirit. So, psychology, then, is the study of the mind, soul, or spirit.
That’s what spiritual learning was meant to encompass. The learning of us. What is this thing we are all maneuvering through life in? How are we in this body that heals cuts and bruises all by itself without us telling it to? How does it know, on its own, how to create a whole other human? How does our brain, emotions, memory, dreams, imagination work?
Spiritual study, meditation, and contemplation was meant to help us figure some of these things out. The “mysteries” were about Life, the universe and our place in it, our bodies and what they could teach us about the workings of the Infinite.
But self-knowledge is powerful. Knowing who you are, and being staunchly on your own side is a threat to systems of domination. A structure based on harnessing the life energy of subjects to serve a few in power would topple quickly if everyone began to understand what they were fully capable of.
State and religious leaders knew this well. In order to control the masses, you had to control what they knew about themselves, so education became about learning a trade or occupation rather than learning about one’s self. And, since visual imagery and symbols, unlike the written word, are processed by the subconscious mind, all art and cultural production came under strict state and religious control, or were commissioned by religious authority.
Knowing yourself - and liking what you discover - is a superpower.
There are definitely those of us who see the cheaper metal beneath the gold plating of dominant narratives, and are quick to point it out. Americans (mostly in the South) have coopted the term “woke” from Black vernacular and turned it into a slur for people who call out discrepancies between what is presented and what is actually there, barely beneath the surface.
To my faith-filled acquaintance who leaves everything to God, these people are a nuisance. They’re whiners and complainers—faithless. Perhaps if they would just let go and allow the Lord to guide them, stop resisting and challenging, be grateful and positive, everything would be fine?
But the thing with crumbling systems is that they’re crumbling. Not because people don’t have faith in them, but because they’re not working for the majority of the people in the world. They might be working fine for small minorities in each country, but the majority of the global population is living off of a tiny percentage of the overall resources held by the world’s elite minority.
Things are gradually changing, of course, because they have to. The current structures have proven themselves to be unsustainable. But before any new structure can even be imagined, the old one has to dissolve—this is the way of transformation in all of Nature.
We are currently witnessing this in real time. For those of us who have known, for quite some time now, that things aren’t working for most of us, we can see the positives to the loss, to the shedding. But that doesn’t mean that there is no pain.
It’s just that the pain is manageable, maybe like childbirth. Even those of us who had epidurals or C-sections know that not a single part of the process of pulling a whole human out of your body is pain-free. And yet there is undisputed beauty at the end.
That’s the thing I have full and complete faith in. The thing that created these universal Laws of growth. The cycles of create-sustain-destroy-recreate, the thing that is perpetually evolving, from the past to the new but bringing the past too. Carrying everything that we’ve been into what we’re breaking open and becoming.
As humans, we have a tendency to paint everything in our own image. But this…force, whatever it is, is something that (in the words of His Purple Majesty) is something that we’ll never comprehend.
Thank you so much for reading. Please leave a comment, share your thoughts, and/or pass this post along to someone you think might appreciate it.
As we head into June, happy Pride, happy summer, happy Gemini season, happy heading-toward-summer-Solstice, all.
<3, N.
I love this! It’s funny how we recognize the need to update our phone operating systems all the time but the thought of changing our social systems paralyzes us completely.
Wow, Neesha, this is a powerful piece. In my religious studies and social sciences readings, the sacred and the societal often intersect (see Whitehead, Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin). We should put on a pot of coffee and get on Zoom, Bb, or Teams and talk about the the metamodern cosmology, the sacred feminine, and how the patriarchy has co-opted most of faith-based literature to cover itself.
At the end of the day, it's all about the relationship, which we know women have always done better than men. You are on to something important in this piece. Stay with it and write more. Amen and Alleluia!