Tamas - Spiritual Inertia

When I first met my former therapist (Therapy Elsa), I eyeballed her with a great deal of distrust. I had finally been in therapy enough years to understand that the client, too, gets a say in whether or not the fit is right.

"Are you one of those therapists who talk about sin a lot and how it's wrong to be gay?" I asked.

Therapy Elsa smiled. "That's an interesting question. Why do you ask?" I assumed she was mentally writing down some kind of note like, "Prospective client probably gay."

"Because you have diplomas hanging on your wall and one of them is from a seminary," I said. "Also, I know a lot of Christians, and they care a LOT about whether people are gay."

"Ah, I see," she said. "Well, to answer your concerns, the seminary I went to was quite open-minded." She went on to tell me how they used gender-neutral references for God, which basically made my head explode. Then I worried maybe she was too liberal to therapize me.

Therapy Elsa went on to become one of my favorite people, as much as a therapist can be one of your favorite people when it's a one-sided relationship. True to her word, she never talked to me about any of the things I'd learned in "Christian counseling." She was scientific. She said that sexuality is a spectrum and that people fit all over it. In this, I came to build trust in her. I didn’t really care about gayness, except insofar as it was a canary in the coal mine. I did try to convince her once that I was asexual, but she said she saw zero proof of that. By then, I trusted her.

I don't know what Therapy Elsa believed because your therapist can't talk to you about their religious beliefs. What I do know is that she gave me the space to start questioning my own religious beliefs... sexuality had just been a placeholder for that. No one had really given me the space to question what I believed before.

Pastor Dad and Borderline Mom started teaching me about the perils of hell about age 5. I lived in mortal terror that I would accidentally take communion with sin in my heart and be immediately struck dead. 

That's when the OCD began. People misconstrue OCD a lot, but it’s when your mind fixates on something and then insists you do another thing repetetively to ensure the first thing doesn’t happen. I started fixating on hell from a very young age. The compulsive piece for me came in obsessively apologizing for anything that might be considered sin.

This made me a really weird kid. If someone asked how my day was, and I said fine, but then remembered I got a B on a test & was really NOT fine, I made myself stop the conversation in the middle so I could apologize for lying and ask the other person's forgiveness. This ensured I would not be struck dead during communion. It was exhausting.

As an adult, I decided to join a church, also to avoid hell. To become a member, I went through a 12-week process. I missed a week because of my second job (working on a Sunday was its own sin), so the handouts from the previous session were waiting for me the following week.

Reading through them, I became uneasy about some of the expectations to "report" the sins of others. I turned to Martie, a woman in my small group who was also going through the membership process.

"Do you agree with this?" I asked her. "I don't know, dude. I don't think I like this."

"Excuse me," said the table leader, a woman the same age as me. "This is neither the time nor the place for you to talk about this. We did that last week, when you were absent." 

Class had not yet started. 

I looked woefully at the door, but at that time, I had not yet developed the spine necessary to get up and walk out.

After church, the woman marched up to me, on the instructions of her husband, the co- table leader.

"I'm sorry if I was harsh earlier," she began. "It's just that I could see you were clearly trying to cause division in the body of Christ. And that has no place here."

Best Apology of All Time!!!!

Believe it or not, I still became a member. I'd been conditioned pretty well up until that point to believe that:
1) No church is perfect, so it's useless to look for one
2) It's important to go somewhere & commit; otherwise, churches will die (case in point: dad's)
3) It's a sin to NOT go to church because Hebrews 10:25 explicitly says, "not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much more as you see the Day approaching." -- the "Day" is the day when Jesus will return and make it clear who the REAL Christians are.

So, yeah. I still became a member after all that. This lasted for years until I started actually falling asleep at church. I thought, "Why am I here? Why am I doing this? I am miserable. I hate church."

So I decided to go, hand out bulletins, and then write in my journal to stay awake until it was time to leave.

The problem with this plan is that I never stopped actually wanting to be a Christian. And I was torn up over the fact that I simultaneously hated being a Christian & didn't know if I really believed God died on a cross. So I continued asking questions. 

You'd think I would have learned my lesson with the whole membership fiasco, but I had not.

It was then that I was called in to meet with "M," a woman on staff. She informed me that handing out bulletins was now a leadership position and that, given my doubts about God, it might be a good time for me to step down.

Yes. 

I was lovingly invited to step down from giving people pieces of paper with the names of songs printed on them. But hey, if the staff was telling me they didn't need me at church anymore, why stay?!?

"M" did give me one good piece of advice: God is not limited to church and can find you anywhere -- she told me to go where I saw God working. 

And now here we are.

On some level, I see God working in schools. Because God can work wherever you are, and I am in a school.

I myself only went to public school for 2 days. When it appeared that I liked it too much, my folks pulled me out. Don't get me wrong, I'm really grateful for all they sacrificed to send me to a prep school -- but I also wonder how my life would have been different if I hadn't lived in such an echo chamber.

Kids in public schools are a different breed. They don't get brownie points for praying extra powerfully, protesting at Planned Parenthood, or raising funds for a "home for unwed mothers" like I did. They're just -- normal. And weird. And awkward. And everything that a kid should be!! Some of them come from really shitty homes, and some of them come from really great homes, and some of them are entirely homeless. But even those things are things that I never saw at church or at Christian school!

Public schools show you the full spectrum of humanity. They are for everyone.

In the 1830s, public schools in America were created to raise a literate, productive workforce capable of critical thinking and participation in democracy. In this country, the purpose of public education is not to teach religion-- not even the religion of the majority, not even if your religion is the one true religion, not even if you want to save everyone from eternal damnation for totally altruistic reasons! It is to teach literacy, critical thinking, and participation in democracy. Period.

That's why I love it. 

A lot of people accuse schools of being bastions of liberalism; however, I can safely say that college certainly did not turn me liberal. But it does teach you to think.

I wasn't allowed to think as a kid. In fact, I was taught how dangerous thinking for yourself was, no lie!

This is why we must have a separation of religion and politics. I have seen TRUE beauty in religion at some points -- like when the Church of the Shepherd "adopts a teacher" because they know want to do something kind! (Thank you for the calendar and cinnamon gum!)

Honestly, that is the type of religion that makes me want to return to church.

But I've also seen how evil it can be. This year, someone posted my name and teaching credentials, along with a link to report me all over the internet. Hiding behind the name "Amber June," her entire FB wall was Bible verses, w/ no identifying photos. It reminded me of Chaucer's "Pardoner," maliciously telling the other Canterbury pilgrims, "Under hue of holiness, thus I spit my venom!"

I was brought in for questioning several times, accused of engaging in "shady" practices when I revised my slides. It escalated all the way up to the superintendent and school board, & now several different committees are being formed to challenge all the books. 

What a farce. I mean, seriously. I created a master list of 250 books for my students to choose from -- all award nominees. I booktalked about 65 of them. Of those, 4 featured gay characters.

Here's the slide the entire school district is in an uproar over, and the reason the school board president called me at 7 a.m. on a Sunday:

And now, here is a hard truth: just because you pay taxes and some of those taxes go to fund public schools does not mean that you are entitled to project your own convictions onto others. I don't get a refund on my taxes just because I'm a single woman with no children attending the schools! There are some things that you do just because society will cease to function if you do not do them. 

The problem is that here in America, we established schools to teach civic duty, yet we've conflated civic engagement with religion. I began to write that this is a uniquely American problem, but then I realized -- well, crap. They have that problem in Iran, as well. And a lot of other countries. And look how that's going for them. It does not bode well to mix politics & religion.

But if you do want to make it about the Bible, know that nowhere in the Bible does Jesus Christ take the side of Empire. And yet! Taxpayers are trying to usher in the "kingdom of God." Against His will. Into public schools.

I am a public school teacher. And I will not allow my classroom to become a podium for political Christianity, for American Christianity.

When I think of Christianity in this country, I think of the president.

I think of late-stage capitalism where "good people" send part of their "tithe money" to Africa but essentially say "screw you" to the actual neighbors the Bible talks about because, "I'm not investing my money in those welfare queens!"

I think of James Dobson, preaching "purity culture" and raising up generations of trauma victims.

I think of Matt Walsh and the barrage of hatred he hides under "theocracy."

I think of Mark Driscoll and his toxic masculinity. 

I think of Charlie Kirk and his "It's worth it to have a cost of...gun deaths... so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights..." (Awaken Church, 4/5/23)

My friend K teaches at the school district that just weathered a shooting the same day Kirk was assassinated. Another girlfriend went to high school there. But we don't talk about those things. We don't have moments of silence for those things. 

In the yogic tradition, "tamas" is a word we ascribe to lethargy. It means heaviness, lack of momentum, and unwillingness to act. Tamas is a spiritual inertia.

This is what I see in society when it comes to things that really matter. My friend Charlotte used to tell me, "All churches care about is a body count. A soul is a number to them. How many numbers can I win for Christ? You're not a person anymore." She dropped out of seminary. And church.

I didn't know what she meant at first, but I do now. Churches are overlooking the individual in favor of the soul. Public schools in the Midwest are doing the same thing when it comes to queer people.

I started this post talking about Therapy Elsa. I'll end it with a conversation I had with her several years ago, when we were still meeting. My then-boss told me to remove all the books with gay characters from the bookshelves in my classroom.

In a rare show of defiance, I quietly forgot to. I remember telling Therapy Elsa at the time, "This is a hill that I will die on."

A person's gender and sexuality are some of the most basic things about them. I don't have to understand someone’s struggle to allow them to exist in my world. 

Even if my world is only my classroom.