fandomnumbergenerator | In response to a question sent to my TinyLetter

I know you’ve written about being brought up in Christian Science/by Christian Scientists and the attendant clashes. I’m curious about how you figured out life and being in a body, what to do with your Sundays, etc., in the absence of or in opposition to religious practice. If if sounds like I’m waffling with the terms, it’s because I don’t really talk about this part of my life with people and a lot of this I’ve had to make up as I go along – the people I grew up with either went back to the church at 28 after doing whatever they wanted in their 20s, or became Buddhists, or are in the punk art scene. I don’t feel like I have anything particularly insightful to say about religious experience. I don’t consider myself religious or spiritual. For a long time I called myself an atheist, but I feel like that word has been tainted by Richard Dawkins and assorted other douchebags, so I’m not really sure what word I would use now. But I am suspicious of organized religion because I feel like there is always something pre-modern lurking there (misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia). And also really suspicious of buffet-style spirituality which often seems to involve escaping the commitment to service and community which is the actual good thing about organized religion. And I am deeply philosophically opposed to anything New Age with its idea of self-actualization, and the flip side which is blaming people for systemic oppression that they are not able for visualize their way out of. So, basically I’m just a judgmental curmudgeon.

And on Sunday mornings I go grocery shopping. It’s been almost 30 years since I had any kind of religious practice, so it doesn’t really feel like something that I have to decide about on a week by week basis.

But your question about “being in a body” really resonates with me. Starting when I was about 11, when I actually started paying attention to it, my experience of Christian Science was all about denying I had a body. I had a fantasy of myself as a glowing brain floating through the dim nightmare world (kenoma). At the time I thought of this as a spiritual practice, but in retrospect it looks like what a lot of fat, lonely, anxious, outcast girls do. It’s just that Christian Science was abetting my desire to disappear instead of helping me make sense of being an embodied human. (I would also say that there didn’t seem to be any conflict between Christian Science and the pretty deep eating disorder I fell into when I was 13).

When I was 15 my body asserted itself. In quick succession I was overpowered by desire for a woman and had my first experience of physically desiring a man (as opposed to the compulsory heterosexuality-style crushes I would get on any boy or man who in any way noticed me). I was in some ways already primed to leave Christian Science. I had finally read Science and Health cover to cover and had gotten disillusioned with the not very inspired Sunday school teaching at the Berkeley second church (and in New London, NH where a teacher told us to pray so we could get motor boats). And also the sense of betrayal I had when I started reading beyond the weekly lesson in the Bible and felt like the passages we were supposed to study had been pulled out of a very contradictory and messy text. Which I guess I would put in the category of teenagers think they know everything.

Also, when I was 13, my mother got viral meningitis, and more or less dropped out of the church. For me, the dark side of Christian Science (beyond the anti-vaccine and child endangerment issues, which thankfully were never inflicted on me) is the crypto-Calvinism: your virtue is manifest in your health. So if you are sick, it is evidence of Error (sarkic thought, dukkha, or to put it bluntly: Sin). At the time, I didn’t really understand that my mother was avoiding the church community, because it was a pretty tumultuous time – moving to California, and the drumbeat of my parents’ eventual divorce – and because it took me a while to realize how impossible it was for my mother to tell the truth about shameful things. I tried going to Sunday school on my own, but in 1988, the Berkeley Second church seems more or less abandoned, and it was just logistically difficult for me to get there. (Even though my mother loved Maybeck, she had heard that the first church was super cliquey so we avoided it.)

So I basically had a smoking hot hypnagogic dream about a woman, and overnight gave up Christian Science and decided to wallow in the flesh 24/7. I started self-identifying as a sinner and as evil. Which was not a particularly helpful way to interact with sexuality and my body, and certainly got me into a lot of bad sexual situations because I thought I had to be up for anything.

As a weird tidbit, my first experience of sexual excitement (when I was about six) was also tied to Christian Science. I would feel like I had to pee when I pretended my dolls were sick, which seemed like the most forbidden thing I could do.

I spent most of my late teens and early 20s with a pretty unhealthy relationship with drugs and alcohol. Which I used to say was ironic considering I was an ex-Christian Scientist, but even at the time I understood that both religion and drug use had a strong element of escapism for me.

It has taken me a while to appreciate some of the things I learned through Christian Science. The idea of being the watchman of your mind, and telling self-defeating thoughts to move along. And also the idea that you don’t have to listen to pain. I have a complicated relationship with pain. I’ve always had a high pain tolerance, and I’m sure that part of that was all the training on praying pain away. And it hasn’t always been useful – it made it hard to get the torn cartilage in my knee and later a scratched cornea diagnosed correctly. Also, a sort of numbness in my body is what drew me to BDSM, which I don’t in any way regret. I just know that it’s true that it was something I had to search out to feel things in my body the way I wanted to. But now that I feel like my pain tolerance has recalibrated a bit, I sometimes wish I had more practice ignoring my body. Especially when I was pregnant, and spent 8 months feeling like I was trapped in the pain and nausea of my body