Over the last few weeks, I’ve been reading the bible daily, not for any particular faith-based reason but to help my oldest with his religion homework. I’ve always been a person of faith, a spiritual person, a believer in a higher power but not a bible totting hardcore Christian. As we combed through Genesis and now Exodus I realize there are some beautiful life lessons in the Bible, and sharing them with my son while helping him decipher facts (that’s the homework assignment) from fiction has changed my thoughts on how to process these words, which at one time felt like a burden of grand expectation, not healing.
In viewing my faith through this new lens, I have revisited the myth of being “blessed and highly favored” and what that means. There was a point in my life when I believe it meant that God saw something in me and therefore sprinkled blessings in abundance, but when things went left I felt abandoned. That revelation started the struggle and it’s kept me away from this idea of a Christian God for some time. Why? Because no one wants to feel abandoned when they fall on hard times or exhibit normal human behaviors, and at the heart of it all, that is what that statement conveys. One weekend on the way to Harlem, I sat and thought about all the people in the world that are struggling to live, those who can’t feed their kids, the homeless man two rows from me, How did God’s grace escape them? What bad thing had they done to remove God’s favor? And that ate me to my core! The more I thought about it the angrier I got, did my ancestors betray this Christian God they didn’t even know of, and so centuries of oppression should befall them? And that is when I got honest with myself, it has never been an absence of grace or favor but instead a system of oppression, a constant need of capitalism to marginalize people so it can continue to breathe. But it isn’t God. And if this is the God people want to preach, it is a God I don’t want in my life.
One of my favorite gospel songs is Kirk Franklin’s “Hide Me”, where the choir sings about hard it is to lay it all in God’s hand and in that struggle they plead with God to hide them as they do the work. This is something I relate to, I pray to my ancestors and God to protect me during good and bad times, enabling me a safe space as I grow and blossom. And that continues to give me comfort and keeps me grounded when the world is too much for me. This is a message I wish we shared more, so no one ever feels alone or deserted.
