Or, you know you've found your God when It knocks you on your ass
I have insomnia right now... something that happens virtually every time I'm between jobs, hence the two articles in one day. I'm writing this one at the request of island_gurl12, who asked me to talk about my conversion experience(s).
A 'crisis conversion' is exactly what's implied by the term - some radical change (perhaps religious, usually 'spiritual') that occurs as a consequence of some stressful situation in life. My crisis conversion occurred when I was 24 and its immediate consequence, my becoming a 'Christian', lasted approximately fourteen years. I am no longer a 'Christian' and haven't identified myself as such for at least the last ten years - but I continue to live with the legacy of that event, and with the development of that legacy that occurred in response to another, eerily similar event, that took place a little over three years ago - just prior to my coming to America.
1984, the UK. At that time I'm once again living in Scunthorpe, my home town, lodging with my mother and sister in the house they then shared. At that time I was drowning in despair, without having a concrete reason for the misery I then felt. It seemed to me that I was 'out-of-joint' with everything in the world. Wherever I looked I saw no way forward for myself; only mere continuance, without purpose, in an endlessly grey world. I had been told, by those in the Social Services, that I was unemployable in their opinion and that I should resign myself to a life of dependency on the state. Within myself I felt entirely alone, isolated behind some impenetrable wall of my own devising, and permanently locked away from any kind of meaningful human contact. The voices in my head (not literal voices that I regarded as outside myself but the voices of my evil nature) that sang sweetly to me of suicide began to seem ever more seductive and rational and only my profound repugnance for such an act (a repugnance I take no credit for - to me the horror of suicide seems as natural as breathing) kept me from actually making the attempt.
I liked the idea of being dead - but not by my own hand. Never by my own hand.
Once every two weeks I got a check from the government. With it I paid my mother some small amount for my lodging with her; I paid installments on what other minor debts I then had; I made sure I had enough hand-rolling tobacco to last another two weeks - and the rest of the money I drank away, usually that same day. Had I had enough money I would have been an alcoholic - just like my father, and my father's brother.
I had a routine that I followed on my bi-weekly trips, involving drinking in certain pubs in the town in a set order. First stop, the Parkinson Arms. Then on to the Oswald Hotel - possibly the roughest pub in Scunthorpe and by far and away my favourite. From there to the Brumby, and finally back home by way of the Priory Hotel and the Beacon. Sometimes I'd vary the routine slightly, going to the Lincoln Imp for several pints of Old Tom, for example; or to a pub locally known as 'The Pig' but the actual name of which I've long since forgotten. In essence, though I sometimes changed the names on the list, these bi-weekly trips were exactly the same: disappear into a pint glass for as long as the money lasted, then stagger home to sleep in drunken stupefaction. Two weeks later I'd do it again.
That was what passed for my life, then: a pointless round of inebriation without hope or meaning, that did nothing but reinforce my sense of disconnection from the world and other people. During the rest of those two weeks I locked myself away in my bedroom, smoked countless hand-made cigarettes, and lived in a fantasy world fuelled and reinforced by endless reading of science fiction and 'sword and sorcery' novels. I lived a life as arid and empty as it's possible to imagine, hating it all the while, and myself, while seemingly utterly powerless to change.
Change eventually came to me, however, and from an unlikely source. One night, sat in the Oswald, watching the whores pair off with men fresh from the fishing-boats newly docked in Winterton, I fell into conversation with a young man who was almost supernaturally emaciated and possessed of the largest, most flamboyant ears I'd ever seen. In the middle of the Oswald, surrounded by whores, pimps, drug-dealers and drug users, this skinny bat-eared creature was reading a Bible while contemplatively drinking a pint. I found him utterly incongruous and therefore interesting and so did what I almost never did by choice - began a conversation with a stranger.
This young man was called Steve, and that conversation was the first of very many that took place over the next year. Steve, it soon transpired, was a recent and very militant convert to Christianity - the kind of Christianity then referred to as 'happy clappy': Pentecostal in origin, zealously evangelical in outlook, and 'charismatic' in nature - emphasising the gifts of the Spirit - in particular the gift of tongues.
For six months he talked to me about his newly-found God, and I asked him questions that I hoped he wouldn't be able to answer. I was drawn to him, and to what he had to say, and to the people he eventually introduced me to - a charismatic 'cell' of believers within a local Methodist chapel. And at the same time I was repulsed. I found the notion of being 'washed in the blood of the Lamb' deeply repugnant - not because blood was involved but because the blood in question belonged to a lamb, possibly the most pathetic and unimpressive of all creatures.
I found the passivity of Steve's Jesus repugnant: a passivity that led to the eager embrace of a death both revolting in itself, ignoble and completely fatuous. I found the notions of the Trinity and the perpetual virginity of Mary an insult to my intelligence; and the Christian's horror of sex (and the rampant paranoia it induced) an affront to my nature. And yet still: I talked, I listened, and I debated. Because behind these conversations there was something real - and in all the rest of what passed for my life there was no reality at all.
October 24th, 1984, 2.00am. That night I had attended, for the first time, a meeting of a 'house-church' - a gathering of believers in a private home, devoid of any of the trappings and rituals usually associated with Churches - except for the breaking of bread together and the drinking of wine. It was there that I heard people speaking in tongues for the first time (something I then found to be utterly freakish), witnessed ecstatic prayer for the first time, saw people collapse on the floor as they were 'slain in the Spirit' for the first time. And once again, but far more vividly, I experienced the sense of reality that haunted my conversations with Steve.
It didn't occur to me to question whether or not, or in what way, a connection existed between what these people said and did and this sense of reality. I simply assumed that there was, and that this connection was direct, straightforward and simple. And despite myself, I was impressed by what I saw, what I heard - and by the acceptance of each other that was evident between these people.
Disturbed, my thoughts and emotions in turmoil, I left early in order to walk home without being interrogated by Steve as to my impressions of the meeting. I wanted to think, not talk. As I left, a little old lady (very little and very old) presented me with a card on which was printed the parable of the Good Shepherd and the Lost Sheep. In the bitterness of my loneliness the thought of someone actively seeking me out because of concern for me touched me very deeply. "Do you know Jesus?" the little old lady said as I walked out the door. "I'm afraid not" I replied. She looked deeply and honestly saddened and replied in her turn "He's waiting for you, you know. All you have to do is ask." I had nothing to say to that, and left in silence.
So home I went, to an empty house, both my mother and sister being away, arriving there a little after midnight.
What I'd witnessed and felt had moved me deeply. I found myself actually wanting to believe.... but unable to do so. And then, at 2.00am precisely, that sense of profound reality swept over me - but now magnified into an actual presence. And with this sense of presence came communication. In the moments of consciousness that remained to me I was aware of being offered a choice - to remain as I was, or to follow whatever it was that confronted me. I remember my decision, I remember, quite clearly, making this decision - which was to follow, from that moment on, this presence which had come to me. And I remember nothing after that, for the next five hours. When I came back to myself I was in the shower, yelling 'hallelujah' as loudly as I could and grinning like a lunatic.
To this day I have no certain knowledge of what passed during those five hours. But I'm left with the very strong impression that negotiations were entered into and a bargain concluded. And it's in the shadow of this unknown bargain that I live even now.
And that should have been my first clue that what had happened to me was not what I thought (and was told many times over by the members of the house-church which I shortly thereafter entered) had happened to me since, so far as I know, Jesus doesn't make deals with those who believe in him. I hold to that bargain still, whatever it was, because it's fundamentally and inextricably associated in my mind with that overwhelming sense of reality that swept over and through me before I blacked out: which caused me to black out.
*********************
Jump forward almost twenty years, to another late winter's night, several years after my divorce (years I've spent in intense exploration of my sexuality and my beliefs) and not long after the ruin and loss of another deeply valued relationship. In the months before this night I've met Sabrina online and come to feel for her an affinity that dwarfs any I've felt before, which consoles me for the loss of that long term and real time relationship. She and I have talked at length about her beliefs, her experience as a Chaote, and about Magick generally. She's sent me the Book, and an obsidian dagger she had created especially for use in the Rituals I'm beginning to develop in conjunction with the lessons of the Book. And in consequence of those early ritual sessions I can already feel everything I thought I knew about 'religion' and 'spirituality' slipping away from me and turning to dust.
Over these preceding months my mind has returned, again and again, to my original conversion experience. And a fundamental question has emerged: where and what, in that experience, was the definitively 'Christian' element? And in all honesty, I could not then and cannot now, find such a definitively 'Christian' element. Thinking as honestly and clearly as I can I realise, that night, that such an element was never present in my 'conversion'. Whatever of 'Christianity' was present that night was something I brought to the experience, something I attributed to it: not something which it brought to me.
Years before this night I had effectively ceased to practice my supposed 'Christianity'. The particular reasons for doing so are not relevant here; but in effect what had happened was that I had, slowly, returned to that sense of hopelessness and futility that had characterized my life prior to my conversion - only now my despair had a specifically religious quality. It was in that moment of final realisation that I was literally forced to my knees by the return of that overwhelming sense of the real that I had known once before and not felt again for years.
I found myself, once again, drowning in the attention of the real, and in the knowledge that it was my faltering first steps in Ritual practice that had drawn this attention to myself. This time there was no confusion as to whether or not this was a Christian experience. Though the presence that confronted me for the second time was in no way different to that I had met in my 'conversion', there was not the remotest suggestion that what looked at me, what recognised me, was in any sense a Lamb. It was, in some plainly obvious but incomprehensible way, far more dreadful, far more awesome, and far more dangerous than any Lamb could be. And in the last instants of consciousness left to me I was reminded, forcefully, of the Angels described by the prophet Ezekiel, and of his account of their effect upon him - which left him stunned for seven days.
Do I have a name for the presence I encountered that second time? Yes. A Name to which I've alluded in articles such as 'My Mother made me my own Jesus' and 'How to induce auto-erotic schizophrenia'.
Is there a connection between my supposed 'Christianity' and what I now worship? Yes, in the same way that there's a connection between the Old Testament and the New Testament.
Do I recognise my God in the words of the prophets? Yes. As in the Psalms and Proverbs, and in the Song of Solomon, and in Ecclesiastes. As also, but to a lesser degree, in the words of Hebrews, Romans, and Revelation.
Is there any trace of Jesus the Good Shepherd left in my spiritual life? No, not remotely. Sweet Jesus, meek Jesus, mild Jesus the Lamb, the Christ of God.... has withered away entirely in the flame of another revelation altogether.
Do I regret his passing? Occasionally, in the way an adult, in a moment of nostalgic weakness, might regret the passing of childhood into adulthood and with it the loss of innocence. But only rarely, and such moments become still rarer, as I contemplate the endless vistas of what I would once have called 'darkness' that have opened to me, beckoning me onward to things I would once have thought unimaginable.
Am I fearful now, as I was then during the years of my Christianity? No. I no longer fear the things that I did. Why?
1Jo 4:18 There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.