If Gordon White’s podcast “Talking Magical Realism, Curanderismo & Empire with Jesse Hathaway Diaz” had dropped this time last year, I would have flung the phone out the window and sulked off to as savage an anti-Christian position as I could physically and emotionally get.
But some of the wounds touched (some gently and some not so gently) by that podcast have been healing. So the listen wasn’t so much an acid bath as it was a soft debridement.
No, I’m not going back to Christianity. My name is [Rebellion], and I am apostate for many a layered reason. But what I had initially understood as Christianity, I now understand is a massive cult that wears Christian trappings and buzzwords. Of the threads that tie my hands, I have to admit that Christianity is one of them.
Just not the version I was brought up with (or beat up with).
I hunger.
This and related podcasts keep poking at some smothered shard of self, long buried under misconceptions and behavioral modifications. I hear someone describe a thing and that deep shard stirs as it resonates with harmony.
Between Rune Soup and Deeper Down The Rabbit Hole I start to find a different shape being outlined within me in an unexplored void that I had long been forced to stay away from. It lays at the boundary of light in the metaphorical pool I still struggle to enter. I want to jump in, but I have no teacher to show me, so I flounder in the shallows remaining nothing more than a slightly damp dilettante.
So no fucking surprise the entirety of my dream last night was me sitting on a dry boulder in the middle of a wide and impassable River. I’m holding the small black clay statue of La Virgen de Guadalupe that a beloved friend had bought for me knowing my lust desire for all things Black Madonna. As I hold it in the strange multisourced light, turning it this way and that, the appearance of the little thing doesn’t change, but my perception of it does.
I hold it this way, and it is La Virgen. I hold it that way, and it is Tonantzin. Neither perception rejects me. And I realize the Black Madonna aspect is something I hold separately from “Mother Mary”. This is someone else, something else. Patiently waiting for me to enter the darkness.
I want in.
But I don’t know how to get in.
I hunger.
And I am close to chewing off my own hands in despair.