In Search of a Shared Language for God

I rarely talk about god these days. I seldom pray. I don’t worship. I don’t wonder what god’s will is, or his plan for my life, or what he would have me say. God slipped through my fingers as I was recovering from an eating disorder. The last prayer I prayed was for paths of healing, and it was as if he disappeared so I could see the terrain more clearly. 

When you are terrified of your body and demons are locked up in your psyche, paths of healing require a radical self-accompaniment that defies religiosity. How can I speak plainly about my eating disorder? My body took leave of god, thundered down a path god did not authorize, toward a version of itself god does not find useful. I was really fucking hungry for two years, and for two years food did not work. I tried a thousand ways to make food work—to make it ease the gnawing hunger (any one of which would have restored god to his throne, so to speak)—only to find there are a thousand different ways to be obsessive-compulsive about food. 

The gnawing hunger pulled me from my prayers into the enigma of my body. When I finally learned to stay there, to open the boxes I had been unburdening unopened onto god, my body began to find congruence with the world; and food—whatever oddball creation I pulled from the cupboard—began to satisfy. 

I never returned to the prayers I used to pray. Prayer feels like limerence, an escape from my haunted self into the purity of the divine. After all, god’s anger is a righteous shout; mine a lizard’s hiss. God desires from a place of self-sufficiency; I from naked vulnerability. I can almost speak what I dare not say, if I cloth it in the language of god.

But I’ve turned instead to a sacred experience that begins and ends with radical self-accompaniment. I am with myself in my transgressive anger and my inconsolable grief. I am on the side of my body, which resists the self-erasure performed by our language of god. God occupied the part of my psyche that judged and found me lacking. I have learned to accompany the self who is judged. She has been silent all these years, but she has a voice. She cradles a story. She knows things about the world.  

I have abandoned my quest for the divine word and gone after a human word. Is this really apostasy, this abandonment of god? To hold out a word that is merely human, relativized by every other human word, yet fortified by a nervous system that knows the difference between harm and safety? There is a vulnerability and power here unmatched by religion. 

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 Inspiration for this piece came last week, after bedtime prayers with my daughter. Prayer flows almost naturally when I am asking Jesus to go with my daughter where I cannot go; into her dreams, into her preschool classroom where she must return the plastic bear she pocketed last week. Jesus is part of our shared language for our shared burdens, the part that accompanies her when she must find her own way.

I realized after saying goodnight that this shared language for shared burdens is now missing from my other relationships. We must daily extend our roots into the sacred to survive even the most ordinary circumstances. Yet our words about god are merely human. They are as ordinary and afflicted and blind as our lives. We cannot speak about god without, obliquely, speaking about ourselves; because we, in our neediness, reached out and fortified ourselves with the sacred, and now we want to share this food with others. Because we cannot bear to be human alone. 

A few nights ago, during prayers with my daughter, I contaminated our shared language. I was desperate and angry because bedtime was spiraling. Every step designed to bring her home to her body, triggered a flight, and the routine became a breathless escape from what awaited her. In my anger I asked Jesus that she would be quiet, that she would be obedient, that she would be good.  

It was not my anger that contaminated our language, but the way I correlated my anger with the will of god. We were both stricken with fear: she of being alone with herself, I of being erased by her endless needs. It is a moment every mother will recognize, this clash of needs. It is a crisis of love, but not the undoing of love. By staying with ourselves we can survive the crisis. But that night, I did not stay with myself. I retreated into the divine. I calcified a narrative that justified my nervous system reactivity at the expense of condemning hers. Through the delicate, patient work of repair we continue to have a shared language, but it is not something I can take for granted. I cannot continue to contaminate our language—to escape vulnerability into the language of the divine—and expect it to function as a space of connection and nourishment.  

I recognize in the wound that I inflicted, a wound I have also suffered. How contaminated is our shared language of god; a language into which we retreat to escape vulnerability? A language we steal to fortify ourselves against the stranger—whether the stranger be our daughter, a neighbor, or a foreigner? Language that justifies those of us who are positioned to use it, while inflicting violence on those whom we scapegoat? Do we still have a shared language for our shared burdens, a way to nourish one another with the sacred?  

Before we learn to love our neighbor, we must learn to welcome the stranger. This is the essential hospitality, through which strangers become neighbors. The stranger is present when anger ripples through my body. She is present when my four-year-old recoils in fear I don't understand. She is present when my friend drops god from her vocabulary; when old relationships require new patterns of relating. She is always triggering discomfort, always disrupting my attempts to associate myself with god. Can we welcome our puzzling selves and the disruptive other? Can we slow down our pursuit of god to cultivate a nourishing, welcoming language? Is it possible to find our way back to one another? 

In Case You Missed It¹

In this bi-monthly newsletter I will be finding language for my pursuit of a grounded spirituality. I will be seeking out pathways of belonging that I have not found in established institutions. Millions of Americans have left the church in the past decade, and our stories are incredibly diverse. My hope is that a handful of us who are seeking belonging, nourishment, and healing can find a home here. 

While planning this newsletter I began to draft an Unchurched manifesto, which I hope to complete in the next year. Meanwhile, I think it would be helpful to make a few things explicit. 

1. This is an LGBTQIA+ affirming space. How you experience yourself in your body matters, and you do not have to dissociate to belong. 

2. This space welcomes atheists, agnostics, Christians, nones, and other religious affiliations. Where you land on the question of god is sacred to your healing journey and not the determinant of your belonging. 

3. This seeks to be an antiracist space, building spiritual resilience to resist white supremacy and christofascism. 

At this stage in the newsletter I am still feeling out how writing fits into the rhythms of my life. I hope to publish twice a month (tentatively on an every-other-Monday schedule). All features are currently available to free subscribers, but you may update to paid ($5/month or $35/year) at any time if you would like to support this work. Thank you for being here! 

I’d love to hear from you in the comments. In what ways does our common (public/shared) language of god hinder you from knowing yourself or sharing with others? Can you identify a time you’ve recently nourished yourself or a loved one with the sacred, in a way that deviates from our traditional god-scripts? Any other thoughts you’d like to share in connection with this piece? 

1. My prior newsletter went out without my final round of edits. Depending on when and where (your inbox vs the app) you read it, you may have missed the following section.