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Hey guys. It's Chris and welcome to another episode of Academia Obscura. Today I do not have a guest. I wanted to take some time and tell you a little bit about my story and my faith and the lens that I'm bringing to this podcast. That's a Mercury retrograde, so my Mac is in the shop. Thank you, Mercury. So I am winging it with my iPad today. And we're just going to make this work. So starting off, I was born in Hampton, Ohio. It's about 45 minutes north of Cincinnati. And we always called it Hamiltucky. It's a very southern-influenced part of the state. Fun fact, used to be the paper capital of the world. During industrialization, there were so many paper factories in the town that it's just where all the paper came from. And there was a giant railroad infrastructure to support it. It was such an economic hub that Al Capone and all the Chicago gangsters running around during Prohibition used to come down on vacation in Hamilton, and it was known as Little Chicago. That's how influential that small town was. But like most Rust Belt towns, all the economy and the shift away from industrialization hit it hard. Growing up, the entire downtown Main Street was just like an area was just rundown factories. They put up a federal building that kind of helped with jobs. It never fully recovered. Just standard Rust Belt Midwest story. Was raised in around Hamilton most of my life, but also raised by my grandmother. She lived out in the country over near Shandon, which is over by Ross. It's just way out in the country. Her neighbor, her neighbor used to raise horses. And uh there was a soybean farmer right across the road. And she would always get annoyed that when the neighbor's horses got loose, they would come eat her flowers instead of the farmer's soybeans. Just funny country stuff. She she her name was Maxine, but I called her Nanny and was out there every weekend. And that's where most of my childhood actually took place. Had me at church every Sunday, was raised evangelical, very like speaking in tongues, like doing the expressive worship, all of that stuff. She had me in the pews from, like I said, the moment I could be in there, starting off at like Hampton Christian Center, but then just moving around from like country church to country church. She just kept trying to find like a home for where she was going. And she was on a fixed income ever since my grandfather, her husband, died shortly after I was born. Complete freak accident. He was just driving home from work, drinking a Pepsi in the car. And then somehow he just drank Pepsi down the wrong two, and his lungs spontaneously went into a pneumonia state and just started filling with fluid. And he basically drowned before uh the ambulance could get there. So when fun note when death comes, death doesn't follow the rules. But ever since he died when I was so young, that was why the two of us sort of bonded. I was in a way, for my company as that young wait child, was in a way her healing from that loss. And with everything going on with my biological mother at the time, she liked I needed that sort of feminine grounding. Biological parents, that's a long, fun story. We're not going to get into the whole thing today. Long story short, they just had constant economic issues from prescription drugs, opioids, that whole thing, past trauma, ended up kicking me out when I was 15, moving from temporary homes until I went to college, and really rocky stuff that I'll get into later. Today, though, I'd like to talk more about faith and what my faith is and where that faith background grew up out of. So, like I said, growing up, Nanny had me in church every Sunday, and then a lot of Wednesdays, because there's a lot of Wednesday night Bible study in youth group. So it was growing up, it was it was pretty easy, you know. Christianity, like mainstream event, like evangelical Christianity, sorry, it wasn't mainstream. Evangelical Christianity to a child. It's like, oh, this is nice. We're going to school, we're dressing up in nice clothes, we're singing songs, we're playing games. It's basically daycare uh while the adults go do their thing. So it's a fun time. And the children's pastor, I remember growing up like, how do I put this? Like they were sort of my examples for what like a positive man should be, because my biological father is just an absolute deadbeat piece of shit. Complete other episode. So that was really important to me. And then, but once I started becoming a teenager, things got rocky because I started noticing a lot of the cracks. Because when you're a kid, they just tell you all these nice Bible stories. You go to Sunday school, we do like Easter egg hunts where you have to go and find the golden egg. And if you find the golden egg, you get a special prize. I found the golden egg one year, and the prize was $50. And like to a small elementary school tid that can like $50, like, oh my God, I was a millionaire. It was great. But once you start getting older, you start seeing the edges. You start seeing number one, it's the purity culture. Don't drink, don't smoke, don't do drugs, uh, don't sin. Sin is terrible. And how everyone is righteous because of all the stuff they don't do and all the rules they follow that are so made up anyway. This one time I was at the Hamilton Vineyard during their schism. And the schism was because Mrs. Tilney and some of the other elders did not like the direction of the church. And so they wrote an open letter and basically tore the church in half. But her theology was so maximalist black and white. I remember like I talked to her several times, and she's just like, oh, God doesn't see black and white. I mean, God doesn't, and she was like, God doesn't see shades of gray. There's only black and white, there's only evil and sin. And if you're not completely pure, then you're evil and going to be cast out. And she just had this whole list of rules, completely unable to like engage with any other topic. And when I try to bring up with her, well, then how do you square away in Exodus when the Bible says that obviously you should not lie, but during in Egypt, when the Pharaoh ordered that the Israelite children should be killed, right? The midwives would go around and tell the Egyptian officials that they killed the baby while letting them live. And then the Bible explicitly says that God did not hold that against them. So on the one hand, lying is a sin, right? Ten commandments, thou shalt not lie. On the other hand, concrete example of, but your reasons were very good. So it wasn't a sin and you're off the hook. So on some level, biblically, there is a your intentions matter like for how you're judged that she was completely unable to accept into her worldview. And like I said, tore the church apart over it. Had a similar experience when I was first coming to terms with being gay. Growing up in Hamilton, like I said, very southern. Being gay was one of the worst things you could possibly be. I remember being in the car one time, listening to a res game or something. It was like talk radio. And part of me wants to say it was Rush Limbaugh, but the other part's like, no, there was some other guy running around like big on talk radio when I was a kid. And I just remember being in the car and he was just going on about how this queer pervert in prison got HIV and died, and how that was a just punishment and thank God for dead faggots. And I was just like, oh my God, like what is going on? My biological father used to constantly say he'd rather have a dead kid than a gay kid. Being gay was the worst possible thing that could ever happen to anyone. And it that was just like how it was. Like it was a constant fear. And I didn't even know what being gay was. I mean, it was so frowned upon and so taboo that there were just no examples of it that I understood until high school when there was like, oh my God, there's like three other gay kids in high school. I was like, what? That means you like other boys. And then I started going because even when I was going through puberty, like I didn't really like girls, but I didn't really know what I liked because there was so much other chaos going on. Um, and it took a while for that to come out. But I remember being and being in the vineyard and going to talk to one of the assistant youth ministers for the first time about this. And at the time, it's like my parents had kicked me out, was living in a temporary home, but I was teaching Wednesday night, it was called Iwana, or like the children's program. I taught like the young boys like in the awana program because I've always loved kids, even so much like I volunteered in the nursery. I went on a missionary trip with them in between high school and college, like the church was essentially the closest thing I had to a stable family growing up. Like I totally like truly believe in the coal in the core mission of the church. I remember uh going to talk to one of the assistant youth pastors, and I and I told him, I think I'm gay. And the first words out of his mouth were, Do you have a thing for the kids you work with in Iwana? And I'm like, no. Like, how could you even say that to me? And it kind of went downhill from there. Like so you didn't tell anybody, but what proceeded was I had to have a couple of exorcisms because the first one didn't take that well. Um and like, and but then it just sort of all like died down, and it was all like positive motivation to like resist the demonic urges because quite literally uh being gay was caused by demonic possession or at least strong demonic influence, and resisting the urges was about being righteous to God, and that was the framing. Um, because being gay meant not only you're going to hell, but pretty much everyone has a license to just do whatever they want to you because it's fucking Hamilton. There was one other gay person in my family that I didn't fully understand that for most of my life. Uh his name was Mark. He was my grandmother Brenda's sister's son. So I think that'd make him my second cousin. Not entirely sure. I don't know how all the names work. But both of my parents were only kids, so but they came from bigger families. So like my great aunts and uncles were more like my aunts and uncles, just in how it worked. I interacted with them, and because like they all like lived in the same town, there was a lot more interaction with them. But Mark was Howard and Elsie's kid. Uh he was gay and he was a complete black sheep. I only ever heard about him in passing from uh my grandma Brenda and my aunt Elsie. Was never met him, never came to family reunions, never came to a family dinner, but I knew that he lived with uh Howard and Elsie, and he was basically their caregiver because they their old age was really hard on them, and uh he just stayed at home and and took care of him. I knew he like had a friend, and I didn't really know what that meant. But like I said, I never met him. I'll finish that story later. But like I said, like it was completely impossible to talk about being gay, and being gay meant ostracized. So that was growing up, and but I kept really wanting to like be what God wanted me to be. I struggled with it my entire teenage years, most of my 20s. One day I was in Mrs. Jewitt's chemistry class in my 10th grade year of high school, and she was telling me about the Abbey of Gethsemane in Trappist, Kentucky. And I was like, okay, I will that sounds like a really cool place. I'll just go down there as a 10th grade kid and just see what happens. So I got my grandma Brenda to go drive me down. She like was from Kentucky, she likes the area, and she's like, oh sure, we'll do a road trip. She went there, dropped me off. I did a week-long silent retreat there. And the focus of the retreat, at least that one for me, was just really trying to wrestle with my sexuality and how do I square that with everything I believed. Uh, the great thing about the uh the Trappists, they follow the rule of Saint Benedict, and they are explicitly open to anyone. It had a strict code of hospitality, so anyone at all can come and stay in their visitor center and have full room and board for free for the retreats. The only qualification is you have to email or call and book it so they can track inventory, and then it's just an offering for what you put toward it. Uh so you go there, you stay in the retreat center. The first couple of times the retreat center was like booked because I was coming on short notice, so they had some rooms in like one of the monastery rings for solo male retreats, and so that was really nice. And I just lived in a monastery for a week and just like going to their Catholic rituals, going to their meals, they had a beautiful garden, and I was always struck by just how beautiful and peaceful it was. Just like walking straight in and just like feeling like the energy of the space, it put me completely at ease. So I'm there, I'm going through it's Catholic, which all the which all they didn't bother me at all. There's a lot of anti-Catholic sentiment in the evangelical community. For me, I never had that. I always looked at the Catholic churches and especially like the Catholic rules as like like the Catholics at least follow their rules, whereas the evangelicals just break them. Well, what for example, one of the core differences between how Catholics view forgiveness and how evangelicals and Protestants view forgiveness is Protestants view it as view forgiveness through a lens of justification by faith alone, which mean, which is where you get the just go and just go pray and ask God for forgiveness and move on, right? It's very private. You don't really even have to mean it. You just have to say the words and keep going, right? Whereas from a Catholic perspective, the there is this concept, yeah, yes, you have to go and confess. Yes, a priest has to facilitate the office. They'll talk about that whole thing later. But the core difference is you have to do some sort of penance to atone for what you did, depending on what you did, right? So, say, for example, you went and your sin that you did was you cursed out your mother. Maybe you've got to go and like do some work to show you're sorry, right? And like the the whole, or maybe you've got to say ten Hail Marys. But the goal is that you have to have some sort of right action in the world to atone or show or show that you're truly sorry for what you did to varying degrees, depending on what it was. Sometimes it's just say 10 Hail Marys, right? Some other times it's just go and like actually go do something, right? And it's completely up to the priest's subjective judgment what he wants to have you go do. The act of atonement is part of what grants forgiveness, learning through and showing that you're committed to growing and being better. That entire methodology is missing from the evangelical Protestant wing, which honestly is why it completely theologically sucks. People just do whatever they want and think that God's just a sugar daddy, just gonna forgive whatever you do, and there's no consequences for it anywhere. Remember, start biggest example of this growing up was I was at Bolton Vineyard at this point, but I remember Nanny was going to a little country church called Book of Acts Tabernacle, and the pastor Wayne Pace, complete womanizing asshole, kept cycling through women in the church, sleeping with them, promising that they can be like the pre the preacher's wife, which in that community like is a really good job. Like a lot of women like would want that. Cycling through women. At the time, he was dating a woman named Ramona. She was the church secretary. She was okay. I had some disagreements with her, but I understood her. And she and of all people, she was fine. But he just immediately, like, as soon as he met another woman, just completely dumped her. And then, like, Nanny, I don't remember if it was nanny or Jean, but I I think it was Nanny, like, walked in on him just like fucking this other woman, like in the sanctuary, just like on a random day where she was cleaning and no one was there. And she and she left the church because it's like, oh my gosh, how can you just dump this other woman immediately and just start doing this? Like, this is against everything you say. There are a lot of other problems with Wayne Pace. But that's what happens when you get into this name a claimant thing of I'm so righteous, I follow all these rules. And anytime I break a rule, there's the consequence that I don't have to do anything to atone for it. I'm just saved because I'm so divinely righteous. That's the whole that that's the rabbit hole you get into in the country evangelical community, especially for someone charismatic. But back to the Abbey of Gassemis. So, like I said, I always at least partly admired the Catholic Church because, like I said, they follow their rules at least much more strongly than any of the people that I grew up around did. And they had a lot, and there was at least some sense of yes, there is some shades of gray, yes, your intentions matter. Not everything is categorically like a sim except for a handful of things. They also didn't like gays. Growing up, there was it was the cat, like there was TBN, which was the Christian TV channel. I think it was EWTN or something. It was the Catholic channel. I remember just talking about watching a nun talk about it. It was like other superior type thing, and she was she basically talked about it was like, there's nothing wrong with having the inclination to be gay so long as you don't act on it. Because sex is only for a man and a woman. I was like, okay, well, at least I'm not demonically possessed. Let's go try and explore that because that's at least a step up from where I'm at. So I go to the Abbey of Gethsemane. The liturgy is beautiful. I'm really enthralled with monasticism and the energy of the space, the peace, the ritual. And I'm just sitting there like praying, constantly, trying to meditate, trying to wrestle with my sexuality there. And it's a it's a silent monastery. You can only speak in designated talking zones. Uh, one of those zones is outside in the parking lot on a bench. So I go out there and I'm just sitting there and I'm just like praying. I had done some journaling beforehand. And then all of a sudden, this visiting priest just randomly, unprompted, just walks out and sits next to me. And like, I didn't know him, didn't know anything, and didn't ask for him to be there at all, have made no prior contact with him. And he just walks over and sits next to me and just starts talking to me and asks me what I'm praying about. And I tell him it's like, I'm gay and I'm really struggling with it, and I'm trying to figure out what that means for my life. And then the priest starts talking about how actually he's gay too, and so are quite a few uh monks at the abbey, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that at all. And how he used to be a monk before he felt fit felt realized that yes, he's religious, but he was more called to the priesthood and that God loves me anyway, and it really doesn't matter. And at the time, I didn't really have a way to process that. Like it meant something, and but it's like you go in and you're like, something is so totally your framework is something is so totally wrong with me that like everyone in society rejects me. For example, even with Broke Back Mountain, right? Broke back mountain was like first big gay movie, right? I when I saw it, my takeaway wasn't this is some great love story. My takeaway was from it, well gosh, like the people actually kill me for this because the one guy in the movie ends up getting lynched at the end, which gay lynchings happened in Ohio. They just did. They just didn't get reporters swept on under the rug. And it was just like, I remember even in high school, like I walked in the gym one time and the kids just like pissed in my shoes, just complete like cluster. So so I didn't really have a psychological way to understand that answer at the time. But it's like, well, I'm gonna see what it is. So I just stayed in the closet, didn't really tell anyone. Told told like a couple of friends in high school that ended up being a disaster. Choir teacher, Mr. Birkemaier, who was the worst asshole I think I have I experienced in my entire high school career, ended up like tak like taking the rumor meal and then like outing me in front of the entire choir uh in front of class one day while I'm just sitting there humiliated and like ended up trying to like because I told like one friend who was in sh who was in drama with me at the time and he just went and blabed everybody. But he was gay, he's the only other gay kid I knew at the time that I was close to. So I just wanted to talk to somebody about it, and then just all glue up, tried to retract it, ended up ha dating like another girl who was a lesbian to have a beard for the rest of high school. And then at college, I just basically just stayed in the closet the entire time because the attempt in high school was such such a disaster. Yeah, college mostly in the closet, largely because I was an ROTC at the time. I grew up on TNG and Stargate SG1 and Deep Space Nine and Voyager, and I really wanted to go in the Air Force, busted my butt in high school, got a full ride Air Force scholarship for full tuition, because that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to go manage satellites and help do like aerospace design. So I was a physics major, had full honors classes. I had a 4.1 GPA, something out of high school because of how like the GPA system worked. But when you take a and the way Hamilton did it was when you take AP classes or honors classes, they're they just sort of add extra weight so you can go beyond a four, and I had a 4.1 GPA. Um, because like book stuff doesn't just always easy for me. So it's like, but part of that was I remember like sitting there and like when I was signing the forums, it was like, Don't ask, don't tell, just keep it to yourself, it'll be fine. So I was like, okay, I'll just say under the rug. First year it was fine, didn't cause any problems. That's what colleges where I just completely just got fed up with the evangelical community for a lot of other reasons, but largely just the hypocrisy, how they treat women, the fundamentalism, just going in there and And I remember visiting with a couple, and the wife was just talking about how it was her God-given duty to submit to her husband to whatever he wanted to do to her and let him just set the direction for her life and their entire family. And so just part of me is like, no, that's not how this is supposed to go. Like, even as a young kid, it was like, no. But just from how anti-gay, and even it started turning into politics, like there was this weird sense that like to be a Christian meant you had to be a Republican. And the Democrats were this evil, demonic thing that was like akin to Satan. And it never made any sense to me. Like the whole Hillary Clinton thing. I mean, yes, what was the woman's biggest crime? She did chip. She wanted children to have to have health insurance. She wanted people to have access to health care. That was her biggest crime. Wanting people to be able to go see a doctor and not go bankrupt for it. And for that, she is the spawn of state. Never understood that. Similar thing with Michelle Obama. What was Michelle Obama's big thing? Kids eating their vegetables, right? Somehow that makes her like the Jezebel, like Lilith, like eat like evil enemy of all humanity. Because oh my god, this Democratic woman like wants to wants to raise awareness around gardening and children eating their vegetables. Never made sense to me. And it's just like you had to completely buy into the taxes, the like the entire Republican Party line to be an evangelical Christian. I'm like, I don't believe in that shit. I don't believe that, like in my core, that the sole purpose of my life is to go get a job, work for minimum wage, so uh some rich shareholder somewhere can rake in a dividend or borrow off their stock portfolio to fund their lavish lifestyle. It's not what I believe I was born in this life for. I mean, there's some areas where I agree, like even a broken clock is right twice a day. Growing up in in Hamiltucky, I have a very strong libertarian streak, which gets me into trouble with some of my true progressive friends sometimes. But on the whole, it's sort of like I'm a mix of Rand Paul and Elizabeth Warren, and that really made it awkward for me because I couldn't be part of the religious faith because I truly, in my soul, did not agree with their political agenda or their religious hypocrisy. I remember one time I remember I'll go into more than that. But anyway, back to the Abbey of Gethsemane. So I'm I'm there. I made several more retreats to Gethsemane, each like for different reasons. It's like part of me like felt that I'm supposed to be a monk, but not one like this. Because the way it felt was Catholicism always felt close, but not quite right. Like some of their rules, especially with gays, like I said, like this gays are still second-class citizens, they were slightly better on the treatment of women, especially because they have Mary as sort of their divine feminine uh stand-in. So, like there is a sort of example of like a a high-ranking like female spirit where in the evangelical community you have nothing that clings to respect. But still, women can't be priests. Women's roles in the church are vastly limited. And like I said, even nuns have to take vows of obedience and like to the local priests, but even to the point of absurd things. Like there's a story I read a couple months ago of some nuns in Europe, I think it was Italy, that the archdiocese just said, like, hey, you've been living in this nunnery, and uh part of your vows was that you get to live in this nunnery until you die because you're a nun and you joined the order. But we want to turn this into some sort of school or something. So the bishops just moved them to a retirement home, like against their will when they didn't want to. They the the three little nuns like ended up fleeing the retirement home against the bishop, moved back, like pretty much broke back into their nunnery, into their old rooms. Because they're like, no, we're staying in our hole, caused a giant uproar. But then all the community is like, no, we love the nuns, they're part of the community, like they like the kids love them, they can love interacting with them. But the bishop's like, no, you cannot defy my authority like this, and had to like work out like some sort of settlement with them because it just got too much publicity for them to fully crack down. But it's just like like that level of like, how do I put this, of just like viewing women as just subordinate to the point of property is kind of just baked into a lot of the really old frameworks, and you can't really talk about it. And there are some liberals in the church, especially like the Jesuits um or the Franciscans, that are like, yeah, we want to fix that, um, but the conservatives won't let us. Hopefully, eventually it'll happen. But yeah, but anyway, in college, but so it was like Catholicism felt really close, but not quite it. And with the monastery, they were like their monasteries is just out in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the country, which is peaceful, but because they're a cloistered sect, they they tend to their cloister. Um, their whole motto is aura at aura at labor, work and pray. And they just sort of live about their lives in the middle of of the country in Kentucky, and they earn a living making cheese and fudge. And they sell cheese and fudge in their store on online, and that's how they're they earn earned a living. Some of the brothers like made like trinkets, like necklaces or stuff. One time I bought a uh oil lamp from them, which is really good. Like they'll make rosaries, but the main thing is they make cheese and fudge, and their fudge is really good. Uh, their cheese, it's okay. Maybe I'm just used to manufactured stuff. And theirs is actually homemade, but their fudge is delicious, especially when they use Kentucky bourbon. Uh Kentucky bourbon with chocolate and walnuts from them, it's heaven. Best thing in the world. Because the nun because the monks actually make it with love the old-fashioned way, and it's great. But I'm sitting there and like, I feel like I'm called to being a monk, but not for Catholicism. This isn't quite right, and not cloistered. And that feeling just always stayed with me. Fast forward, like I said, in college, I tried Catholicism. I did the RCAA process, fully converted, uh, got my confirmation card, but didn't stay with it just because part of me is like, no, I really want a partner someday, and I want to be married, and I can't do that here. And even trying to talk about that with you, it's like in most of the churches, like the like the priest would either just not engage with it or be like, yeah, but there's nothing I can do. Sorry. So after college, so so after college, I ended up having to resign from ROTC from the Air Force over Donas Data. Second year of it when I had a boyfriend. I just kind of let it slip. I was seeing someone to a friend as I was just jogging in PT. Um, didn't say who, just like, yeah, like I started seeing someone. And that sent off like this whole like witch. It it it didn't mean to be a witch hunt, but like ROTC was like a frass. It was so like, oh, who's Chris dating? Like, why aren't you talking about it? Tell us more. Like, but it's like I can't. And I just sort of kept my mouth shut. And that just sort of fueled it more, and it just blew up into this whole like thing, and it was just like, okay, and eventually it's like, okay, this is now a thing. I didn't mean for it. Like, I never even did anything on this campus. The dude was like going to another school and seeing him. I just went to that other school two fucking hours away, like to do anything. But because this is now a thing that I couldn't keep quiet, I now have to resign. Just complete bullshit. But anyway, after college, I end up graduating and then uh get hired by a company in Texas. So I go to Texas. Pretty much I I have a crisis where it's like, okay, I graduated school, time to go find a boy and settle down and get a house. Um, because growing up, like it was a very simple script you were supposed to go to. You graduate high school, you go to college, you get a good job, you buy a nice house, you settle down, you pump up a few kids, then you raise the kids, then you have a few years where you're like settled, then you retire and do whatever you want. That was sort of the standard script. So like, okay, I graduated, time to go try to find a Christian boy, um, and just start staying out, staying on that script. So I did. Uh his name was Dan. He was a perfectly nice guy, Catholic. He checked every box that I thought I wanted. Uh, went to college, didn't quite know what he wanted to do yet, but he was very easy to be around and we could talk about things. I really liked his nerdier side with like Marvel Comics and like DD and all that stuff. He was Latino, he was Catholic, he had been burned by evangelicalism too, but like he still like really believed in the church, which is really important to me. I remember after my second date with him, my gut said don't do a third. But I completely overrode that and did a third and then ended up dating him for nine years. When we were in Texas, though, in San Antonio, we went to the Episcopal Church. There's a really good Episcopal church there that we loved the priest. What I loved about the priest though was he was married and it was very pro-family, but I remember seeing like his very small children like sometimes like run up and just like randomly hug him or grab him in the middle of the service or whatever he's doing. And there was no judgment. He just like would hug and kiss them and send them back. Like it wasn't there was no sort of like it was just a can he was just like a completely perfectly like loving father figure right in front of everybody. And I was like, Yes, you're amazing. Um so I was like, okay. Uh and I was like, the Episcopal Church will marry like us. I'm like, okay, fine. Finally, some variant of Christianity that I can finally make work. Like the Episcopal Church was liberal, like they were at least closer, like you didn't there wasn't like the political fusion there was in the evangelical church. Like, okay, finally, some version of Christianity I can make work. But so then it's like, okay, I converted, Dan didn't want to, he wanted to stay Catholic. Um, but then after we started talking to the priests about like what like getting married would look like, because we were we had been together like five years at that point. The relationship never quite felt right to me, but I kept pushing through it, thinking if I did something else, like eventually this will feel right, eventually this will feel right. That I this is all the boxes I'm supposed to have in. This is what happiness looks like, this is what happiness looks like. Just keep going forward. A lot of self-brainwashing. But anyway, talk to the priest. He's like, Yeah, like we have one other couple that it was a lesbian couple that we married. Um, but actually the rule is before the church can marry you, the entire the you have to get permission from the bishop, and the entire church has to have a vote to agree to become a church that will bl that that will actually marry gay people. And then one other like lesbian couple that got married in the church, he said, No, I actually, in order to get around all of that, I married them in the in their backyard because they didn't want to go through the whole like ordeal. And I was like, wait a minute, so this really isn't equal, you really don't believe this. I've got to basically do a political, like a religious political movement to actually belong to this church. That's not what I thought this was at all. And after that, I was like, okay, I'm pretty much just done. I had spent basically 30 years of my life trying to find some way to make the standard Christian church like some version of it that I actually believed in. And just no matter what it was, it just didn't work. There was always some level of deep hypocrisy or politics or discrimination that was like, no, you're you're you're not really one of us, and we'll tolerate you, but just know that you'll never really be part of the community. And some of us really do secretly think that you're a pedophile no matter what you ever actually do or say. That I was just like, I can't. I'm just done, especially after what happened with my foster parents. But that's a completely different episode. But I always believed in Jesus. I believed in God. I believe that most of the Old Testament is, except for like the the words that act God actually spoke, like the Ten Commandments, was just the best efforts of the Hebrews and the Jewish people to keep the record of their founding stories and their family missions. And that's how and how like their God revealed themselves to them at that time. Not every I never believe that everything in the Old Testament is directly applicable. Like, for example, I don't believe that it is a sin to wear clothing made of mixed fabrics, right? I know I I would be a terrible Orthodox Jew, but on the same token, I don't believe it's a it's a sin to be gay, which is, if you look at the Jewish law, it is just as much of a sin to wear clothing made out of mixed fabrics than it is to be gay. There's really no distinction. Both are a sin you have to go to the temple and slaughter an animal for. And yet one of those is cardinally evil and caused by demonic possession. One of them we like like the evangelical church just turns a blind eye to. Go figure. But it's but I I was just always just like I I believe in like loving other people, like the whole concept, like Jesus, like God, like all of it, but just without the hate and without the division and class system and the priestly gate that you have to go to that you don't have a direct line to God yourself. Because that that was the one place where I thought the the evangelicals and the Protestants had a point, was because the Catholics had to gatekeep everything, right? You had to go to the priest, had to go to the bishop, it was all ritual. You didn't really have your own relationship with God, you had one through the priests. Whereas the Protestants are like, oh no, you actually have to have your own relationship with God, and the priests are largely just here to help do pastoral care and give a rousing servant and teach moral philosophy and like do community like service stuff to like help like hold the congregation together, which is a more honest model, but still got into the other problems. So it's like I don't really fit in anywhere. I had a lot of periods where I was just angry and hateful toward God for a lot of how my life went. And then I'd have a period where I'd reconcile with it, and then I'd hate him again, and it was off and on. But I didn't firmly get set until started looking into more like witchcraft and the occult tradition. There was when I lived in Washington, when I lived in Fairfax, just outside Washington, DC. There I remember I there was a dispensary in downtown Washington that I'd go to at that point. Um, and then there was which the head of a witch shop, right like two doors down from the dispensary. And I just walked in one day because I was like, okay, I have no clue what this is, but off Christianity anymore. So let's just go see what this is. She ended up being a decent mentor for a couple of years of my life and really helped me like start believing in a spiritual plane in a way that I hadn't before. Because growing up, like watching people speak like speak in tongues, get slayed in the spirit, talking about angels. It was just like, this is all like performative bullshit by people that can't possibly mean it. But somehow with her like doing tarot cards, telling me the future, advise me, it's like things that she said would happen, like would actually fucking like she would say like what month like things would happen and what exactly would happen, and then it would happen. I'm like, oh my god, how did you know that? Like dead on, like there is like she's not just being general, like she's giving specifics, and and then it would just work. I was like, okay, that there's actually something here. So I started dabbling in that, and then just like I got some tarot cards, just started like experimenting with it. Eventually, was in Chicago after I moved here and walked into a wood shop and walked past a statue of Santa Muerte, which traditionally is the folk saint of death in Mexico and the Latin community. She is frowned upon heavily by the church because she is the saint that anyone can pray to. And because of that, like the whole lot, the whole logic is that all people are equal before before death, right? Everyone is going to die. Doesn't matter how righteous you are, how rich you are, how much you donated to charity, how many sins you are, everyone is equal. And so there is truly no judgment when you pray to her or you ask her to intercede on your behalf, which is the Catholic doctrine of intercession of the saints. Because of that, the pretty much anyone who is locked out of the traditional Catholic Church in the Latin American community goes and prays to her. Well, who's locked out? It's the LGBT community, the cartels, like anyone that's like anyone that like can't go to a priest, right, and say, help me pray for me, just goes and prays to Santa Muerte because she's the saint that you that the undesirables or the people that society says no, you're evil, can pray to. That's why she gets a bad rap and a lot of it because she will listen to anyone, like regardless of what's going on in their life. And so, but I'm I'm in this wood shop, I walk past her statue. I kind of get pulled, I don't know how to describe it, I just get pulled into a trance where I'm just staring at her straight in the eyes. My mind goes blank and I lose all sense of time. And then next thing I know, like the shop owner's coming and tapping me on the shoulder, saying, Are you okay? And she has to like shake me for a little bit to pull me out of it. It's like, and I was like, Wait, what just happened? How long has it been? She's like, Two hours. So I took the statue home. And ever since then, it has been right. She has like walking with her and praying to her has completely transformed my life in so many different ways, all for the better, even if it was extremely painful going through it. So over the next two weeks, I'm going to be talking about that journey um and explaining more about what Santa Muerte means to me, what I believe now as part of my faith, with where I'm at on my journey and how I apply that to my life, and what I'm hoping to do um in the broader community because of that conviction. So thank you all for joining me today. I will see you next week. Bye bye.