grief, love, and religion

they say the veil is torn so why is there always something in between us?

i miss god. i miss church. i miss jesus. i miss holding hands and singing. i miss the feeling of the wooden pews sticking to my sweaty thighs on summer sundays. i miss the way the carpet felt in the hidden rooms only accessed when running around with the preacher’s daughter on god’s days off. i miss my grandfather. 

When I heard this song for the first time I felt grief in a whole new, unimaginable way when realizing I’ll never be able to share it with my grandad. I’ve created a memory that doesn’t exist of me playing it in the car for him on a drive when it’s just us two and then dissecting the lyrics together and I’ve replayed that fabricated memory so many times. And I realized that most of my most actual vivid memories of him are filled with god and religion and many of our closest, most vulnerable moments together were facilitated by conversations about god. And the things that make me miss him the most are centered around god and church. This realization filled me with anger. Those moments were supposed to belong to only us, and to now belong to only me. 

I want to experience closeness with my grandfather without god standing in between us. I want to hug him and become one the way humans are meant to without this massive, weighing presence always looming there. I don’t need a bridge to reach someone who’s my own flesh and blood, who has the same eyes as me, whose dimples form in the precise location as mine when we laugh together, whose two front teeth take over his face in the same way and shine just as brightly as mine and my mother’s. I don’t need an interpreter with someone who can finish my sentences and someone who I have decades old inside jokes with and someone who I can identify by their breathing or by the way their footsteps sound in the other room or by the force with which they close a door. Someone whose different types of sighs I have memorized and categorized in my brain. Someone who I can tell has fallen asleep during the movie yet again just from the change of energy in the room. I don’t need a god to tell me to love him or to teach me how to love him. 

I hate the way people use religion simultaneously as a way to avoid any real closeness or too much closeness, a buffer, a stupid little cushion, while it also serves as their only context for closeness. It’s so strange as a child to feel and even be blatantly told that the sole reason your parents and caregivers love you is because a god told them to. This far away, silent figure has the power to extinguish this love at any time. This unreachable force holds the love with your name on it in the palm of his hand and can crush it in an instance. This isn’t always true in practice (though horrifying when it is), many religious humans show repeatedly that their love surpasses an outside authority, so why attribute this love to a god? This love that we shape and form, molding it uniquely each time for the different recipients. In these moments where all we can hear is each other, why pretend that god’s breath is audible there? 

How could we ever give credit to someone else for the love we created, for the love we taught each other? 

I miss my grandfather praying with me but I hate what it entailed. I hate the way religion causes people to say their most vulnerable words in the dark, to the void, when the person those words are meant for is sitting right there. I wanted you to say those words to me, just me, with our eyes open and heads held high, not bowed like we had something to be ashamed of. 

---

I don’t need god or Abraham’s bullshit about stars to know ours were always right next to each others. We don’t need a translator. In every lifetime I could understand how you only feel loved when you have someone’s full attention and how you need so much time set aside with those you love to feel seen, to feel understood, because me too, me too.

They say the veil is torn so why is there always something in between us?

I want more time with you, yes. I want so much more time. But more than that I just want one single moment with you without this suffocating presence hovering over us. I want to be embraced by you, your safe arms, with no trace of god, only you, fully you. I want to know the you you kept hidden, the you that you saved only for god. I want you to know me, the me I was taught to hide too. Maybe then we could’ve felt some relief from the loneliness I know we shared.

Maybe we’ll exist again in another lifetime, maybe we’ll be reborn at the same time and we’ll be two birds who know nothing of god or we’ll know that we are god. The point is we’ll be together and we’ll fly and we’ll know each other fully without even having to think about it and we’ll laugh in the face of the humans’ god who ever thought he could come between us. 

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

inspirations:

fragrance:

perfumes that smell like church: 

• basilica by solstice scents 

• la liturgie des heures by jovoy 

perfume that reminds me of my grandad’s aftershave:

• adamus perfume oil by possets 

books:

• oranges are not the only fruit by jeanette winterson 

songs:

one thing i miss the most about religion is the experience of singing worship songs in a group setting, specifically some memories i have of this from a summer camp. the way carissa’s wierd sounds and makes me feel is the closest i’ve ever gotten to that feeling again. these are two of my favorites that evoke that feeling most strongly for me: