Every Friday, we have pizzas and movies at our house. Aaron just called from Austin and before we hung up, he said, “I just had to make my proverbial appearance at pizza night.” He said I could pick the toppings.

So far, the order is sausage, bacon, light mushrooms…. a celebration of friendship all the way around.

Because lots of people proverbially come to our house on pizza night, and most of them don’t even know it. Even if it is just Dana, Aaron and me physically attending, it doesn’t mean that when we look around the house, we see empty chairs.

Here are the questions I am asked THE MOST.

1. Why are you so vocal about saying Diane’s name?

A) She was a monster to me. 2) She was an angel to me. Those things are both true, and I choose to believe that she is my angel that I call upon in distress, rather than someone I would like to incinerate and leave them alive while I do it. I am trying to create peace around chaos instead of chaos owning my peace…. and those things come out on this web site in equal measure, because I cannot give her mercy all the time, and I cannot give her perpetual hate, either. I have tried both, and loving her despite her flaws works better than trying to stay angry at everything I lost, both when she opened the door to her heart and the day she slammed it shut. I am vocal because I cannot and do not deny the legacy she left on both sides of the spectrum.

2. Are you having an affair? Are you and Dana having problems?

Absolutely not! We both have huge flaws and quirks we try to merge every single day. However, because of my history, lately I have just been vomiting teenage emotions that look great on a teenager and not so much on me. So, newsflash. Girls are cute. I hear lesbians think that sometimes. However, there’s no one alive that makes my wedding ring burn. Dana and I were meant for each other, and have each other trained just the way we like it.

3. Why hasn’t Dana left you already?

Because she’s not as much of a bitch as you are.

4. Could you not write X?

No. No, I can’t. However, if you’re upset that I’ve posted something, you have the option to not be my friend. I cannot help that you are angry. What I can do is apologize if you’re hurt, and try to make amends. Take it or don’t. Most people choose “don’t.” It’s very painful when people get angry and fight with me over what I’ve written. But you know what’s even worse than being embarrassed or ashamed of something I’ve written? Shutting down completely just because you were mad about something. Taking down Clever Title Goes Here was a split-second decision. It was, and then it wasn’t. I didn’t write for four years after that, not even to myself. When you come after me because of something I’ve written, approach me how you want, but know that every time you do it, you’re taking a piece of my self-worth, because I didn’t put anything out there to hurt anybody, only to tell the story that is mine. If you’re caught up in it, you’re part of my life… and you get to choose whether you want that or not. You are allowed to have your feelings about what I’ve written, and I will care about them. But at the same time, I will not go to that place of hopelessness again… the piece of me that says my story doesn’t matter.

Addicts talk all the time about their recovery and how easy it is to relapse. I have extrapolated that to believe I recover and relapse all the time, too. Except my drug isn’t alcohol, cocaine, etc. It’s dopamine created by my own brain when I interact with other people. It’s an addiction closer to Overeaters Anonymous, because there is nothing I can do to get out of my own head, just like salt/sugar/fat addicts cannot stop eating completely. It is just a dissonance that I’m learning to live with…. a Charles Ives chord that drowns my humility, grace, gratitude…. you name it. I slide down into my basest self and withdraw because I do not have the ability to function in relationships all that well. I am solid with Dana. I am solid with Aaron. These are the two people that live with me and see me all day, every day. These are the two people that have seen my enormous boatload of crazy and decided that I’m worth loving, anyway.

Well, technically, Aaron does not live here. He has his own room and uses it when he needs to get away for a while…. like a vacation home in the middle of Houston. We sit on the couch and watch Regular Show, or just chat until Dana wakes up. Aaron and I are morning people. Dana is, to put it mildly, not. So on the days that Aaron is here, we meet in the living room about 6:30 or 7:00 and just bullshit until one of us has to do something else.

Aaron and I are best friends because the content of our relationship is based on nothing. We are both each Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer with the same ridiculous plots. It is hilarious when we run “Aarons,” as I call them. Going to the electronics store. Going to the makerspace. Going on a wild goose chase for some car/truck part. It doesn’t matter. One of my favorite things in the world is going nowhere with him.

My high school girlfriend and I had the same relationship once we broke up and decided that even though we weren’t right for each other in a partner type way, we were perfect as beer and Xbox buddies. She even gave me a soundtrack for our relationship at that time in our lives, and because it is so precious to me, I want to give it to Aaron, too. The resurrection I need to happen in myself more than anything else is letting go of the people who don’t want my love and affection and continuing to celebrate those who do.

I was once told that my capacity to love was enormous, and so was my ability to give in to my anger. It’s just true. But that doesn’t mean my focus has to stay glued to the dark. I cannot right every wrong, but I can relish every right I’m able to achieve.

My relationship with Aaron is one of them. He is in Austin this weekend, so here it is…. about 6:30. What am I doing? Talking about Aaron like he’s right there in his chair, trying not to peek before I hit “post.” I love that guy.

At Bridgeport UCC, Susan Leo wrote a beautiful affirmation that I didn’t even realize I BREATHED until today. Both in and out. In long, gulping breaths of fresh air exhaling fear, regret, shame. Without even knowing it, she tattooed my palm.

When Susan asked me to start preaching at Bridgeport, I walked around for five weeks with R,M written on my palm in Sharpie. Every time I looked down, I said the words again, because I had to get them right in front of the congregation.

We are God’s children, wonderfully made…
And as fallible as we are, we are no mistake.

Be RESPONSIBLE, but let go of guilt.
Be MINDFUL, but carry no shame.

Believe the Good News of the Gospel.
You are loved unconditionally by God.

Yesterday I had a moment of realization. I was so wrapped up in my own head and my own pain that it was stopping me from seeing other people. I do not have any resolution for this, because while I recognize the obstacle, I am not healthy enough to move it all at once.

So I trip. Hard. Fall on my face because I’m not putting my hands out for shield. There were areas of my life begging for my responsibility with their hearts and I could not see it for the log was in my own eye. Everything is breaking apart. Simply everything. I have to hope, though, that the divine will win. That feelings of goodness and light will eventually overtake the darkness I’ve put into the world just by existing. It is the meaning of God. It is the meaning of faith. Atheists get all tied up about the Grandfather in the Sky That Watches Every Move, but they fail to see that religion ALSO provides a place to go when you’re inflicting damage on other people and you’re trying your best to STOP PERPETUATING THE CYCLE.

Diane’s actions rewired my ability to function. It is my responsibility to undo it. Faith is a way for me to let God have it so my friends and family don’t have to. I lost that place in me, like we all do, and showed my basest self to someone I love in the sacred circle of inner companions that you collect over a lifetime. As it turns out, we were soulmates in the Elizabeth Gilbert definition… someone that shakes you into reality but was never designed to be permanent.

My responsibility is to stop the “clicking off safe” from happening again, whether it is in this relationship or not. My mindfulness is that in the moment, hatred won. It is a terrible mistake that will take time to let go. I have been destroyed at my own hand, because sometimes feelings of regret just aren’t enough.

And sometimes, resurrection happens in the middle of the mess. I don’t hope for much, but I for damn sure hope for that.

Pretty sure the Presbyterians own that title, but I don’t mean to steal. I mean to say that we’re all in this together. All fighting the same struggle. All trying to keep our defenses up so that no one can penetrate, and we all try to get through as best we can. We hit, we miss, we fumble along… because that is the way of life. Beauty and pain all mixed together in inextricable strands. You cannot take one from the other. Darkness feeds light, and light feeds darkness, because it is the same DEPENDING ON WHERE YOU’RE STANDING.

If you choose to find darkness, you will. If you choose to find hatred, you will. If you choose to find any number of sins, you will find them all in the glory of life…. as well as the celebrations. The sadness encourages the sweet and vice versa.

It is the dance of intimacy that we all crave, the one we’ll do anything for, because being let in says “I belong.” When that doesn’t happen, we retreat into our own iniquities for the post mortem and at some point, decide for ourselves whether light or dark perpetuates itself.

I choose light. I choose freedom. I am just about the biggest bastard on earth, and sometimes I am so full of rage that I can’t even see straight. But that doesn’t mean I fall short of the glory of God. In so many ways, it blesses me more.

Who wants a priest who’s never screwed up? If you’re Catholic, do you wonder how your pastor can actually speak to marriage? I called my church “St. James and All Sinners” to highlight the fact that I am imperfect and so is everyone who follows me…. but that we are together in the struggle, because we will all fall short and need each other to resurrect what was lost.

The glory of the resurrection is even more intense when I think about all the pain Jesus endured to make it happen. It doesn’t make me feel like a martyr, though. Just that if Jesus can make it through a weekend like that, there’s nothing on earth I can’t accomplish.

Who cares if it factually happened when I can feel it happening inside me? Isn’t that what’s important?

God doesn’t need to learn jack shit from a gutter sniper like me. It’s just lucky that God doesn’t click off safe.

Part of recovery from abuse in all its forms is that you’ve been told all your life through thought, word, and deed that your mind doesn’t matter…. so that when you finally do start having opinions, it’s awfully hard to tell which ones are for company and which ones aren’t. I say shocking things because I don’t have the ability to not. There’s no filter in my head that says, “this might upset someone” because I’ve stopped ruminating on every possible way that I could hurt someone so that I could tailor the entire conversation around it. For instance, say you’re sensitive about your haircut. Before I go up to you, I will have things rehearsed in my head that do NOT include what a freak show of a haircut you have.

I don’t pre-record canned responses anymore, and I think that’s what people are noticing about me right now, but they can’t put their fingers on what’s different and/or why.

It took 24 years to realize that it wasn’t normal to plan out conversations beforehand (to a certain degree? OK. FOR HOURS? No.) in order to avoid any possible hurt on either end of the interaction. When I stopped spending processing time to ensure that everything that came out of my mouth was pre-approved, I changed the tape in my head that says, “your words don’t matter.” I have strength and hope for the future because I was finally willing to say “i can’t live like this any more” and mean it.

I was so emotionally abused for so long that now I never think my words are going to mean anything to anyone but me. So when I say things like, “I walked into a wall I thought she was so cute,” it would never occur to me that anyone would take those words seriously, ever. because what do I know? I’m just a writer. No one listens to me, anyway. My words don’t matter.

It’s not reality, but it’s my thought process. When my words turn around and mean something to someone, anyone, I am surprised- as if I have discovered some new species of bee. Every time, it’s like it’s never happened before.

I wasn’t watching my mouth, and I got smacked for it (deservedly). In some ways, it’s nice to know someone was watching and cared enough not to let me make a bigger idiot out of myself than I already had. In others, I started to ruminate and couldn’t let go. By the end of the night, not watching my mouth was the most horrible thing I’ve ever done and I punished myself for it by spending far too long on recap.

That’s the other thing about abuse. When you have a conflict with anyone, you automatically assume that there is no meeting of the minds for resolution, because clearly anyone willing to engage with you is right. Why? Because someone told you you were wrong about something so gargantuanly huge that now you can’t trust your opinions on anything.

For me, it was that Diane Syrcle was in love with me. She groomed me, she planted the right kind of evidence at the right time, my mind caught up quickly… and then she left down and our dance was interrupted. There was no clear anything, so it was easy enough to make me believe that she only had my best interests at heart.

This was…. inaccurate.

All of her flirts were seductive to the melting point, and if you’ve ever met her, you know what I mean. She knows that look. She feeds on it. Dopamine hits her brain like crack cocaine.

So, guess what? My flirts get fucked up, too, because I don’t know how to flirt without sounding too serious, when in reality, all I meant is that it was funny because Dana was laughing at me. The modifier was not the cute girl. The modifier was the amused wife who watched me walk into a door jamb and fell on her butt laughing because she was right. Her friend was cute and I hurt my nose trying not to notice and just be cool. It’s the just being cool part where I trip. Where I’ve always tripped.

But that’s as far as it goes. There’s no substance. There’s no there there.

There’s only Dana and me, letting our words matter to each other.

To All Friends of St. James and All Sinners,

Every congregation in America has to have this talk. It’s uncomfortable, you won’t really want to read it, and some of you will skip it outright. However, it is fundamentally important to the light and life of this church. For instance, if you want the ability to create and paint in our church, you have to be willing to be okay with giving us enough money to keep the lights on while you do it.

A church is only as good as its budget allows. Right now we are running on a shoestring with two volunteers, but we believe that the mission is bigger than us. We are not advocating wealth for ourselves or for our church… just enough for it to breathe, so that if we want to expand the homeless ministry from being able to serve 50 people to 500, we have enough to do it without wiping our capital account down to zero.

At this point, we need everything from a building to meet to a choir director to hymnals to Bibles to other religious texts that we need in order to study said Bibles in the first place. It is a fledgling dream aching for resources to fight spiritual emptiness in all its forms… that in order to heal, one must be available to take in light…. impossible when you are wandering around in darkness hoping there’s gotta be a switch somewhere…….

I invite you to be a part of the solution. You know as well as I that people may not be aching for God, but they’re definitely aching for something. Give us the ability to realize our dreams, not for ourselves, but for the legacy we want to create.

Not only do James and I want to have money to respond on the fly to need, we would also like to create an endowment to keep the church running in times of economic distress.

But first things first.

I need a living wage to be able to devote myself to making this dream possible. If you are able to help with that, please do. It is my hope that by reading and responding to this worship experience here on Facebook, we will gather enough money to bring it to you live. Music and art entwined with praising God in all God’s forms with glorious music all around and gardens for meditation so that if God to you is being alone, you can have your communion, too. At present, my bills are ridiculously cheap and I would like to keep it that way. If this worked out to be a $14/hr job, I would be ridiculously happy. I want to work under Francis’ model of living humbly and giving money to the less fortunate, because I have already been blessed so many times over that it’s time others had a chance.

Needing money is not out of desperation. It is about creating a church that will live for much longer than I will, because there will never be a chance in hell that people stop being anxious and introspective because their pain tortures them. I cannot help the people who aren’t willing to help themselves, only because emotional healing requires a certain openness to take hold. As a non-credentialed minister, I will not be involved in counseling, but I will be involved in creating the materials that help you examine your own grief… not because I am so super-awesome. I am one of the most broken people I know. Since I let the brokenness be known, though, light has been flooding into my body faster than I can really take it in.

I want to be a message of hope to people who think intelligent Christianity is dead. I want to prove that the risen Christ has relevance in our world as part of the lens we use to see current problems (to paraphrase Marcus Borg).

Aren’t you curious to see what happens when you step out on your own ledge and say, “I’m a part of something greater than myself?”

I promise. It feels excellent.

Pax,
Leslie

In doing so much research on verbal abuse, I know that my reaction to getting well is right on target. I have managed to piss off nearly everyone I know because I don’t act in ways predictable to who I used to be, so they think I’ve gone bonkers while at the same time, I feel like this is the first time I’ve ever made sense. What has been ridiculous is thinking for the last 24 years that I was destined to be a normal person with a normal life who could make it through in the rank and file when my personality indicators in both the Meyers-Briggs and the Keirsey Temperament Sorter have been Idealist/Visionary. I am not telling you that I am a visionary. I will let every personality test I’ve ever taken speak for me. The people in my category type are, for example, Jesus. Martin Luther King, Jr., Oprah.

Oprah.

Now there’s a reason for my obsession with her career. I was trying to figure out how growing up in BFE prepared her for the life she has now, and I realized that it hadn’t. Unless I miss my guess, the vision came to her in a dream, snapping into action as opposed to a great buildup. Dana compares me to the 50th Anniversary Special of Doctor Who, that my software has been running the algorithms for St. James since I was born.

She’s indisputably right.

I have a palsy in my brain from being oxygen deprived as a child. It did not delay me mentally, but my coordination is off to a tremendous degree and I have monocular vision so that I always look like I’m staring at two places at once. I also started talking when I was six months old, but I did not walk until I was almost two.

That’s the foundation of my personality, those months being able to think without being able to move. I couldn’t do anything but soak up information and start the tape running. Because I am ADD, I start tapes all the time and they just let me know when they’re done. I can’t feel that they’re going all the time, necessarily, but what I know is that I ruminate on things until they’re done and then once that happens, I am unstoppable.

Amen.

• We are a symbolically apostolic church. As Peter is the Rock for the Catholics, so James will be our bishop.
• There is one God of the catholic church indivisible, and that is the Creator, Redeemer, and Advocate. God has many names, brings many names… and all are welcome at St. James and All Sinners.
• We believe that Christ is resurrected in ourselves- that the gifts we bring all flow from the idea that from desperation comes prosperity.
• We believe that all sinners are worthy of redemption, and no sin is too great to receive the blessings that the Spirit will endow if asked.
• We believe that all people are sinners, that there is no way to avoid making mistakes, and that the way to healing and wholeness is redemption with the self, letting go of shame and guilt.
• We believe that God has an intrinsic value to our lives, whether the traditional versions of faith apply or not. We believe that God can be found in all aspects of the human condition.
• We believe that God is every side of every story since the beginning of time, and that society’s reflection on the divine is more important than the divine itself.
• We believe in inclusive language and furthering an interfaith dialogue for the community at large.
• We believe that Christianity is and should be a group endeavor, and that to practice the faith requires dedication to both the church and the relationship its congregation has with it.
• Justice and witness is an integral part of the doctrine, because there are so many places to bring witness to this. People are aching for relief from the struggle that life has to offer, We believe that the way to heal it is by putting aside the self and healing others who, in turn, feed individual growth and development.
• We believe that a prayer life is essential to the work of every believer, whether that prayer is to the Christian God or not. We believe that the exclusion of anyone is counterproductive to our mission, and do not require any formal set of beliefs to join or participate in the life of the church or its activities.
• We believe in the use of all the senses to understand faith. From touching the bread and the chalice to flipping pages in the hymnal, faith is a sensory experience.
• We believe that expression is the heart of learning one’s own connection to the divine, and to that end will support and encourage all types of ways to worship- traditional and not.
• We believe in communion as an expression of divinity. Communion takes many forms… on Sundays at the communion rail, and throughout the week as we minister to the people around us.
• We believe that the ordained ministers are the visionaries, but that ministers exist in all forms and should conduct their own ministries as they see fit… whether that is as a volunteer, a donor to a cause, or a hobby that allows for interpersonal interaction.
• We believe that we are Christ to the world, and will spend all of our time deciding what that means. For some, there is no belief in Christ, but the teachings of goodness, mercy, charity, and love are translatable to other cultures and systems of belief. We are a Christian church, open to all ideas and the manifestation of different types of the divine is a celebration.

My idea for all three church structures (Houston, Austin, and DC) is based on a Russian doll. That way, the idea starts at about 2700 sq. feet, but has room to grow and a vision for the future. All three structures are, at full capacity, three acres including the parking lot, which is essential to ensure that parking is always free and readily available.

Again, God is not the big picture. God is in the details. What would be more frustrating than trying to go to church, getting there, and missing it because you can’t find a parking space? I am slowly taking an inventory of 27 years of church issues and trying to fix them before I even start implementing a grounds plan.

What I am finding is that you can’t be the founding pastor of a church without having a clear vision- when the vision fails, the people perish. I don’t remember who said it (Fosdick, maybe?), but it was a mantra growing up, and having seen its results, I know it works. We came to St. Mark’s and Christ Church at a time in their lives when they needed our family the most… They both grew by leaps and bounds and I WAS WATCHING.

If you want to donate to that vision, you can drop money into my Paypal account. Because we already have a treasurer, I cannot touch that money if you designate it as such. Eventually, All Sinners will have its own bank account, but for now looking at transaction notes and categorizing will have to do. It’s not a requirement to be my reader or my friend. It’s just two things. The first is that this vision is cool, and you’ll probably want to join it. The second is that you CANNOT say yes if I don’t ask.

When Rev. said the word “Leslieisms,” it occurred to me that I am so out of touch with myself that I have very little concept of what that means. Inside my head, I’ve always been trying to protect someone else, so I have no idea what I look like on the outside. I am only now able to join society in a meaningful way, because until now, I have lived outside it. I had to. Really engaging meant letting go of the shame and pain I’ve carried until now. Really engaging meant I had to tell people I was trying to protect Diane. Tell people I am so overloaded with emotion that I cannot function in my daily life because I don’t care about anyone or anything except not letting anybody find out who I really am… which is one of the most beautifully manipulative people you’ve ever met in your life who is trying to admit that and fix it so that it never happens again. I have the will to be good-natured but not the ability. I have to break it down and reform it so that the chords I have with other people only hit the ones they’re supposed to. The ones that reflect pure, white light.

I have come so far since I decided to talk, and now feel like a warrior rather than a weakling. When I stopped spending processing power on how to keep Diane safe from where the chips fell, my stars aligned like they hadn’t before. I could spend time thinking about how I was going to handle things, instead of how “we” were.

I feel something that I haven’t felt since I was a kid.

Me.

When I was 23 or so, my boss had us take an inventory of our strengths and weaknesses. For instance, there are people that are good at organizing, people that are good at customer service, etc. My result was “the Plant.” The plant is the visionary of the group. You don’t necessarily want them in the trenches because visionaries don’t thrive there. They thrive in think tanks. It’s what I do. It’s what I’m good at. It’s everything I’ve been preparing to do and haven’t been actualized enough to use the skills that I have to prosper myself instead of everyone else. I mean, that’s my job, to promote everyone else, but at the same time, it shouldn’t cause me to ever lose my self-esteem or preservation. That is my work to do with a professional, and not anyone’s process but my own.

However, in the meantime I have realized that I grew up as a preacher’s kid, and followed my abuser to Oregon where she was also part of a church plant, so I have in total 27 years of experience in terms of shadowing a pastor without taking up the mantle myself. I have seen church conflict tear things apart in a Titanic-like fashion, and still, both my dad and my abuser’s wife taught me how to deflect it. How to use it. How to turn pain into prosperity if only you’ll allow it to happen and stop standing in your own way. To me, that is the seat of faith… using all your senses to try and understand the world around you. I have said many times, and will say it many more, that what does it matter if God is real or not? God is not in your big picture crap. God is in the details.

When I figured that out, I decided to start a Bible Study at my house to try and reinforce that church matters- to use my podium to say that faith is as much my comprehensive response to life as my writing. I want to help grow Epiphany until it’s safe while I finish my degree and decide upon one of two things. The first is going to seminary. The second is joining the confirmed minister program and learning on the job instead of putting my vision on hold while I go to school. However, I would not rule it out as I am fascinated by academia and it would make me a better preacher in the long run… not from the standpoint of teaching me HOW to preach. That’s different. They could give me the tools to express what I mean in other people’s words so that I have a chance to reflect and respond and tell you about my experience with the divine.

To that end, I have started a church plant called “All Sinners…” Or at least, that’s its nickname. We haven’t come up with an actual title- this is more like a codename for the project. The actual name is still being decided because there are so many good images to choose from. Jacob wrestling the angel. St. John, who feels God instead of thinks it. Community Church of the Serendipity to play on my current church. Whatever it is, it will contain an image of struggle, because that’s what we’re all here to do. Get the fuck over it and learn to cope with the outrageous amounts of data coming at us.

This will be a church of amazing magnitude simply because I don’t care who shows up. My version of Christianity is quick and dirty. Get out there and feed all the people you can, all the time that you can. I want a church where all the names for God have room to breathe. Hindi prayer flags as well as Buddhist shrines as well as a Menorah and a blessed Koran. The perfect picture of my church that I want you to take home is building a church in Anacostia instead of in Georgetown.

In the space of 12 hours, I have found a treasurer, a groundskeeper, a CTO, and a possible associate pastor. The groundskeeper and I have designed a three acre plot, although we don’t know where it will go. In terms of architecture, we have three ideas. The first is for flat land, like Houston. The second is designed to be built on the side of a hill, like Austin. The third is designed for the Potomac river. If we are successful, I will start all three. My gift is not in maintaining a church, but in sparking one to become self-sustaining. I mean, come ON. Look who I was raised by. If I don’t know how to ask for money by now, I clearly have not been paying attention… but I have been. I know more about humble leadership and the idea of Jesus as CEO than I do about myself.

My father was a minister when I was growing up, which is kind of like being the President in the Hilary Clinton sense of the word. I sat at my dad’s feet and soaked up everything he exhibited in preaching, working with people, and creating defense mechanisms to keep himself safe from other people’s stories. Then, I moved to Portland to be with Diane & Susan, and spent another ten years learning how Susan dealt with all the same issues. I have been shying away from my destiny since I was 20. I finally decided that it was time to get out of the Matrix and start designing my own order instead of living in someone else’s.

This would not have happened without Tony. Even without being in my life, she set the precedent that I did indeed have the ability to speak truth to power, and especially in DC, I want a place where Democrats and Republicans can worship together in peace, because I don’t care about their masks. I care about their inner children and how to heal them. As Sunshine pointed out, shame is the emotion that every therapist in the world is trying to get rid of, and even though I ended that phrase with a preposition, I fully believe she is right.

I picture a vibrant arts center. The treasurer suggested that we should all get together and drink wine and paint our own images of God. He was kidding, because he didn’t know that I’m an Episcopalian, apparently, so I think his brain exploded when I said “there’s an idea. Our favorites can be the stained glass in the sanctuary.”

The Bible Study is for everyone. The journey is for me.

Can somebody lend me eight bucks for a six-pack? I need to celebrate and nurse the feeling I’ve jumped into the Potomac without my clothes on. Don’t worry, I’ll share with Dana, Aaron, and toast to Tony in the cloud.

When I lived in Portland, I had a friend named Donna who would do something miraculous. Every year that she was cancer-free, she tattooed the number somewhere on her body. Her bout with breast cancer was so severe that decorating her body with time seemed like the only natural response.

I don’t have one, two, three, and four tattooed on my body, but they are certainly scratched into my psyche. I also couldn’t have done this alone. My friends picked me up when I couldn’t pick up myself. They heard my pain, and more of it than I ever should have shared with an untrained bystander. They cried with me, they bled with me, they helped me release a thunderstorm to wake up in mist and rainbows.

I am listening to classical music on Spotify…. monster pieces like The Four Seasons and the Planets and Mahler V. My emotions are spilled out on the table like salt, because that’s what that bastard Holst does to me. It’s all the beauty, all the pain, all the ugly, all the intense rage-dissipating moments where I feel clearly that we are not alone, that there is a creator, and most likely his (or her) name will have a Bach in it somewhere. Although God, to me, is much closer to P.D.Q. than J.S.

Speaking of which, the first time I heard Ipheginia in Brooklyn, I was rolling on the floor laughing. Peter Schickele (the famous researcher of P.D.Q.’s large body of work that sounds, according to the scholar, like one of his legs is shorter than the other). He also said that P.D.Q. managed to write parts for oboe and bassoon without the use of double reeds. You can hear it when the trumpets come in on their mouthpieces buzzing “Jesus Loves Me.”

It is one of the things that has made me laugh since I was a teenager. Good to have things that don’t change, especially as I look back over the sea change from destruction into construction. I had to deconstruct the idea of what basic elements of life looked like since I’d skipped them the first time around.

I am aware that the entire world must think I’m actually a fifteen year old boy by now, and that’s not *entirely* wrong. I just try to be one of those people that looks approachable so that if something is wrong, I look trustworthy. I don’t have a collar, but I try to be a minister regardless. It’s the side of myself that I choose to foster given the dark side that nags at the corner of my eyes like a Grimm. Like a Grimm, I see things that other people don’t. I see the pain in your shoulders when you walk, but I can’t cure you. I can only heal you, and I will give you everything I can in the three minutes I will interact with you and feel comfortable about it. I have short attention span theater, but I promise those three minutes will be very, very important to you. I will ensure it. I will lift you up with my words and my smile and the fact that I think you are perfect in your flaws and I can take them….. for three minutes. That’s about as long as it takes for me to realize that I have opened up a huge chord of energy with someone and as they feel it, they relax into the same space they go to when they pray, and they ask for attention in the most loving of ways because that’s what we all do. We all ask for each other’s attention, nicely or not. I cannot stop being true to who I am, so that’s why I am a hermit. I want to care about you. I want to love you until I can’t anymore, I am so full of your life and energy that when you’re hurt, you have the ability to hurt me. This is not a problem with anyone immediately close to me. This is cumbersome at the grocery store, when I want to fix every crying child and every screaming adult and all the disgruntled employees and I don’t want anyone to hurt in front of me, ever, because I can’t fucking take it. I will emotionally bleed out, and have done it. I just want to fix the whole world, and thanks to my blog, the whole world is fixing me.

The Aforementioned Cantata

It has been a few days and now the shock is wearing off that my eighth grade history teacher saw me and recognized the face of child abuse/neglect. Here’s why I couldn’t tell her the truth. She was friends with members of my church that adored Diane to the ends of the earth… and as an enabler, you ALWAYS PROTECT THE PATH. I did not want worlds to collide, and I probably could have been assured of her confidence, but I chose not to trust her because I was afraid Diane’s image would be ruined, and I couldn’t have that. I would have died first. I was so dedicated to the idea that I “asked for it” that I couldn’t breathe. I needed my church life and my school life to be completely different compartments, and for them to leak was to cause a massive wake of destruction. I can only hope that there is not a massive wake of destruction now…. that time has tempered people’s reactions because it happened so very long ago and there has been no proof that there are others like me.

It is why I am so married to the Internet now. I’ve been living in two worlds since I was 12 years old~ the Internet was just an extension of the metaphor. In one world, I was a preacher’s kid, bubbly, bright, charming….. in the other, I was a monster. I thought things that justifiably scared me, and I still think things that make others keep the lights on. I just try not to say those things out loud and I have to try really hard because I am always on the “think it, say it” plan.

I remember after Diane moved to Dallas, she came back to Houston to sing at St. Mark’s when I was one week away from turning 16, and I had a full-on panic attack, so short of breath that I was going from red to purple because my hair wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do and my clothes were itchy and it was just enough to be the tipping point that screwed me to the wall emotionally. I went into a rage and screamed at the top of my lungs. I didn’t even know where I was. I didn’t know I was reacting to trauma at the time. I just thought that all people went through this much anxiety. That my crush was so intense that it was leading me to feel this pain. If I wasn’t so crushed out, I wouldn’t always react like this and we could be normal friends if I ever got over myself. To me, she never crossed a line. My friends have become the gatekeepers when it comes to my emotions regarding Diane. I give them permission to protect me, because I know from past experience that I cannot.

I cannot.

It was too loving, too tender, too seductive, too intense, too “I want to get under your skin in the next five minutes.” By that, I mean that after our first conversation. First. I was hooked. I could no more let go of her than I could let go of my own hand.