Why I'm Not Christian Even Though I Love Christianity, Or: Spirituality And BDSM

Mixed feelings.

Omnis mundi creatura
Quasi liber et pictura
Nobis est in speculum:
Nostrae vitae, nostrae mortis,
Nostri status, nostrae sortis
Fidele signaculum.

All the world’s creatures
As a book and a picture
Are to us as a mirror:
Our lives, our deaths,
Our present condition, our destiny
Faithfully symbolized.

(The Latin verse was written by a Cistercian mystic named Alain de Lille in the twelfth century. My favorite rendition is the 2003 song “Name Der Rose,” by an industrial/darkwave band called Qntal. De Lille's original has nine stanzas and reflects on the life cycle of a rose as a metaphor for human lives.)

—

Over the last year, many people felt called to give me unsolicited advice. 

Some sent me dozens of short messages, or wrote multi-paragraph letters. People I’ve never met have tracked me down across social media platforms and left detailed anonymous comments for me, even after I closed comments on the posts they were responding to. This is aside from the hate comments, which are a whole different beast. I don’t think of those as advice, though perhaps in some sense they are intended to be.

It must have felt very important to these folks to give me advice. Some of them invested a lot of effort in doing so.

Admittedly, my current story is interesting. I am pregnant by a man who is theoretically one of my political enemies. We fell in love, he suggested that I have his baby and promised to marry me, then he left me — or perhaps I am expected to use the more neutral and face-saving phrase, that “we broke up” — after I became pregnant. It’s a compelling story! I guess I see why people get excited and want to give me advice, even if they’ve only heard a few details.

In recent years, many people have also asked for my advice. I have mixed feelings about this. Generally I try to respond by asking questions, sharing mythology, or telling personal stories from my life. Giving advice has always felt fraught, to me.

These circumstances lead me to reflect on a quote by the poet André Maurois: “Advice is always a confession.”

The unsolicited advice-giving happens with many people, but nowhere is it more common than when I interact with Christians and Catholics.

To be clear, I’ve had awe-inspiring conversations with people from that wide array of traditions. I am so grateful to the ones who showed up in my life at critical times, offering insight and support. And also, wow, Christians seem to really like giving advice.

I have a lot of intentions in writing this piece, and one of the strongest intentions is to show my loving confusion about Christianity. Often, when I meet Christians who live their faith, I feel stunned by their kindness. I am also amazed by their willingness to go to bat for people who are inconvenient to defend. Both of these are qualities I aspire to.

Plus, I believe in God. I have wrestled with my faith, and it feels good to talk to other people who share that experience. The question of whether we worship the same God is sometimes interesting; these days I usually put it in the category of paradoxes, similar to the Paradox of Omnipotence, which asks whether God can make a rock that God cannot lift.

I suspect that paradox is a key principle of the universe, but that doesn’t mean we can reason our way through it. The most important principles in this world are things we cannot merely think about, but have to feel.

I seek to write this essay with humility, as an offering to God, to Christianity and Catholicism, to family and friends and lovers and adversaries, to many people in my life who made me who I am today. I don’t know if I intend it as advice. Perhaps I intend it as mythology.

—

I’ve explored the experience of “consciousness” a lot. Some ways include meditation, plus other mostly uncontroversial spiritual practices. I say “mostly uncontroversial” because occasionally, one still finds a modern preacher warning the American public against meditation or yoga, but this seems increasingly rare.

Other ways have included sex and drugs. Really, quite a lot of sex and drugs. I was a well-known BDSM author for some years, for instance. In non-BDSM contexts, I’ve tried every drug you’ve probably heard of (never heroin or ayahuasca, though), plus some drugs you probably haven’t.

I think recreational chemicals are clearly bad for some people, but as far as I can tell, they’ve never been a problem for me. In my case, other psychological factors seem to be a more dangerous hazard than chemical drugs. For example, it is interesting to ask whether I’ve ever been addicted to BDSM or spiritual practice. Or to challenging men.

It was obvious from the beginning of my BDSM practice that I got pulled in by a transcendent experience. There are clear parallels between how my spiritual awakening happened in 2016, and my BDSM coming-out story from 2005 (a tale published in my book The S&M Feminist, under the pseudonym Clarisse Thorn). But something I hear frequently from spiritual people is that it’s hard to keep track of when we started. What counts as starting?

In my story of spiritual awakening, I describe awakening to God, then losing faith. If you can lose faith after spiritual transcendence — and indeed, loss of faith is one of the most commonly described spiritual experiences — then what does starting even mean?

When I was a little girl, I read lots of Greek mythology, and then secretly made a sacrifice to Aphrodite in the side yard. Specifically, I sacrificed a hot dog, which may or may not be a preferred food of the goddess, but I get the sense she appreciated my sincerity. I thought all the time about True Love, wished for it constantly, hoped someday to earn it from the gods. Was that when I started?

Did it start with sacrifices I’ve made to have a child? Was it the sacrifices my parents and further ancestors made before I was born?

This is one thing that inspires me about the story of Jesus Christ: The deep focus on personal sacrifice; the way he made a sacrifice directly and completely out of himself. Simultaneously, he seems to have gone to great effort to avoid deciding others’ sacrifice on their behalf. That inspires me too.

It is a mirror of the personal sacrifices people made in the spiritual traditions I most relate to: People burned at the stake for their faith.

Lots of mystical practices focus on bodily discomfort and pain. This was something I always related to, in my BDSM experience. Hardcore BDSMers sometimes talk about it among ourselves. Some of us compare ourselves directly to ascetics who name pain as a refining fire. My BDSM partners have often commented on how much I seem to want the pain for itself, apparently an unusual amount. 

Once I got into BDSM, I experienced it less as a want than a need. I went to great lengths to find men who had empathy and yet seemed capable of physically hurting me a lot, who would then stick around afterwards to help me process the experience without freaking out. I always stayed within the bounds of consent, for those practices — though I sometimes accepted conditions that blurred my consent, for many reasons, the main reason being that the experience of blurred consent vastly amplified my cognitive dissonance, and thus intensified the concurrent psychological pain that mirrors the physical.

Several of my greatest emotional bonds were forged with men I trusted enough to fall in love with through BDSM practice. I still love them. They are good men.

Later, when I had a seemingly sudden spiritual awakening, I wondered what led me there. I had never meditated or prayed much, or at least I thought I hadn’t. I had not considered myself a “seeker,” or at least I thought I wasn’t. Eventually, a friend who is not into BDSM asked me what inspired me to do so much BDSM. When I described it, she said my experience sounded like meditation.

BDSM, I have heard, is a sin. These practices are sinful. 

Some of the people who seem most ignorant and judgmental when they hear about my history identify themselves as Christians.

—

My mother was raised in a Unitarian Universalist religious tradition, as she later raised me. She once told me a story from her childhood about how her father described local Christian religions. When she was eleven, she asked the difference between her family’s beliefs and a neighbor’s religious beliefs.

“Well,” her father said, “they believe that everyone who doesn’t follow their religion goes to Hell forever after they die.”

My mother, with all the innocence of childhood, was horrified. Her naïve response was to go down a mental list of the nice middle-class middle Americans she knew, and then ask her father if each family really believed it.

“The Millers? They believe that?” she asked.

“Yes,” her father replied.

“And the Smiths? They believe it too?”

To which her father also said, “Yes.”

It took my mother some time to acclimate to the fact that most people around her — nice, upstanding people — believed this horror.

I disagree with this method of orienting children to other religions’ beliefs, as I strongly believe in respecting all religions (the ones that mostly manage to be peaceful, anyway). It’s hard to respect things while horrifying children with lurid details, so maybe we shouldn’t do that. Also, I know I have some details wrong about how this story happened in material reality, partly because I wasn’t there.

Still, the tale makes a point, doesn’t it?

—

After my spiritual awakening in 2016, I really believed in God. Really believed in God. I became totally certain that God, or something analogous to that word, exists. That magic, or something analogous to it, is real. That miracles happen and total transformation is possible. It became obvious to me that the most important thing in my life was to be close to God — and/or achieve enlightenment — and/or experience the world as a miracle — or whatever you want to call the state of consciousness that these words try to point to.

I tried different things to be as close to God as possible. Prayer and meditation have stayed with me. My foundational practices turned out to be about love, and peace, and aiming my intention at what’s best for everyone. Today I generally envision myself as part of a spiritual substrate that both seeks and offers help when asked.

For example, one practice I always use is Dedicating the Merit on meditation and rituals. This is a Buddhist practice whereby one gives — or perhaps sacrifices — the benefit of one’s spiritual work back to the world, instead of keeping it for oneself. I also Take Refuge a lot, a practice that began in Buddhism and has been adapted by some Pagans. A Christian friend recently invited me to speak Psalm 23 with her five times per day, and I’ve reflected on how similar the prayer’s energy feels to Taking Refuge.

I memorized a few Bible passages. I still use one occasionally as a prayer, 1 Corinthians 13:4-8:

Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not selfish, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in others’ sins, but rejoices with the truth. It is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes.

Love does not come to an end. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.

As I continued to develop my frameworks, as I invested hours and days and months and years of spiritual work, my regular practices emerged from West Coast communities around psychics and Paganism. I adopted practices such as neo-Pagan ritual magic and witchcraft, with philosophies derived from chaos magic and the historic occult.

I did not learn these things during my Unitarian Universalist religious education as a child. Yet in retrospect, I feel like UU upbringing — at least in the years I did it — is practically designed to teach us how to walk a challenging personal spiritual path, alone.

There is a Christian story, a widespread story, that sin will send you to Hell. Yet there is another spiritual story to be found in this world, a less well-known story, the story of the Magician: That part of the Magician’s practice, our duty to the world, is that we learn to go alone deep into the Abyss and then to return. The Abyss can be analogized to, can parallel, the unconscious or the Underworld. Or Hell.

In other words, if you study the occult in any serious way, then you may in some sense ultimately be called to Hell and back.

I want to be clear: I do not recommend this path. I advise against it! If you have the capacity to choose any other religious or spiritual or psychological framework, then here is my advice. I advise you to pick a big, relatively peaceful, world-spanning framework with a long history and a stable community of practice. If you can do that, then please, for your own sake, do that.

I don’t say this because I think this path is wrong, but because it’s difficult to the point of legitimate insanity. I thought I was taking it seriously and being appropriately careful when I chose it, and I was, but also I wasn’t, because I could not possibly have known how hard it would be in advance. If your karma leads you towards the occult, I strongly suggest that you treat it like traumatic wounding and that you resist the temptation to be proud of yourself. In some ways, all spiritual paths are like that, but I get the sense that this is more so, at least in 2020s America. 

Therefore, I might recommend Christianity or Catholicism for most people over what I did myself. But the thing is, when those institutions are allowed to run the world, it doesn’t seem super great for people like me. None of the big totalizing worldviews do.

I experience this dissonance every time I engage with these things. It’s clear that major religious traditions, and even science, contain many people who hope to make sense of similar experiences to mine. Each tradition includes beautiful mythology, architecture, and governance. And also, their history shows a marked tendency to either convert people like me with violence as soon as we give them enough power, or to execute us.

This is true even for religions based on the story of a heretic, whose self-sacrifice showed the limits of earthly power and authority. One who was executed.

—

My dedication to love, sexuality, romance, and relationships has resulted in exceptionally interesting experiences. I mean, I’ve done other things with my life too, but this is the arena that recurs, that continually sideswipes me and reshapes my life. One way I perceive it is that love is where I have the most karma to unwind. There may be another way to look at it, involving the doctrine of original sin, but that’s not the frame of reference I generally choose.

I have been fairly promiscuous. I always say I’m not that promiscuous compared to people in my community, and it’s true because my community is full of people with romantic karma similar to mine, but it’s also a dodge. I know the median number of partners for Americans in the 2020s, and I’m way past that. I lost count years ago. I’m sure I’m still in the double digits and not triple (yet), but that’s all I’m sure of. People who talk to me or read my writing about sex appear to have a range of reactions, from considering me a genius to considering me a damaged whore. One of my philosopher friends used to compare me to Diotima of Mantinea, from Plato’s Symposium, whose name according to Wikipedia “suggests an association with prophecy,” and who taught Socrates about love.

When I met Curtis, my ex-fiancé, I was 37. We both knew I’d had many more partners than he. He used to call me and my community the “Delta Force” of sex and relationships.

It is hard and confusing to write the words that say the relationship is over. My ex-fiancé. Reality, however, is like pain: It’s there, whether you like it or not.

Delta is an appropriate symbol, come to think of it. These sexual and relational practices are transformative. They change people. One might call them insight practices, at heart.

I have always done everything I can to allow love to change me, even when it hurts. At the same time, when any change goes deep enough, people tend to resist it automatically, even if it is necessary. I am no exception to this.

Developing the willpower to not avoid pain is hard. One thing I used to request of my BDSM partners was that they hold me down with their hands, instead of tying me down. I also used to ask them to order me to stay still, using spoken words, instead of holding me down. Some obliged me, but a lot of them tied me down anyway, and I understood why: It’s difficult and frustrating to restrain someone using only your voice and body, when her body is fighting back. 

By the time I met Curtis I was convinced that I had a romantic epistemic problem. (Epistemology is a key concern for Delta Force romantics, and also for magicians.) The problem was that most men I’d developed a serious relationship with in the last decade would tell me, within the first few dates, that he was sure we were meant to be together, that we’d be together forever. I mostly did not believe these men, but sometimes I did. And I had a story in my head that, whenever I believed men who insisted they’d stay with me, eventually they ended up leaving. Not that I blamed them. I did not consider myself an easy person to date. Generally, when I’ve broken up or been broken up with, it was because we were putting each other through Hell, or because I felt certain we’d eventually send each other there.

This unresolved, unconscious belief led to epic testing behavior on my part. Pickup artists talk about “shit tests,” but that doesn’t cover the sort of thing I was doing. On some level, I felt sure that I couldn’t trust a man who lacked the will to stick with me through Hell. In retrospect, I can see I’ve made things much harder for men who loved me than was probably necessary. Or maybe it was necessary. But I wonder, now.

Curtis had zero BDSM experience and little respect for the sexuality communities that were important to me. He mocked polyamory and demanded monogamy, which I gave him. He expressed enormous contempt for spirituality, which hurt my feelings a lot. My community of “liberal coastal elites” considered him, an extremely famous far-right writer, to be the Devil himself, and he was kind of an asshole about them. There was no rational reason to think our relationship would work. I could barely understand it myself and couldn’t explain it to anyone else. 

So I rarely tried to explain, mainly tried to act like I knew what I was doing. I figured that if I appeared certain enough, then people who loved me would be less alarmed and would let me get on with things. I think, in retrospect, that one of the key things I felt attracted to was Curtis’s will, but describing that to other people was hard. I also think, in retrospect, I should have told my friends and family how hard it was and worked harder in real time to describe the commitments that were orienting me, but I guess I didn’t know how to do that, at the time.

I tried to express to Curtis, up front, the risks I perceived to him, in dating me. As if either of us could somehow have consented in advance! In the first email I wrote him, I asked him to promise not to write about me without my consent. I used the phrase “mutually assured destruction” to describe what I thought would happen if he broke his promise. Maybe it was only my own destruction that was assured.

It wasn’t only his will, though. When I first met him in person, I kissed him and the sensation was like an electric shock. Very literally: It felt like the time when I was a child, and against my parents’ advice, I put my finger into a Christmas light electrical socket. That was the feeling. On my lips.

He and I were in a hotel room for that first kiss. I stumbled backwards and fell onto a chest that was positioned at the end of the bed. I sat and stared at Curtis while he knelt beside me to check if I was okay. The moment I saw him kneel, I had a flash of intuition that he’d someday ask me to marry him. He kept kissing me and then said, “We have the rest of our lives to do this.” I looked past him, out the window. I could hardly make sense of what was happening. My feelings were close to panic. I didn’t let a muscle move on my face, and I said nothing.

The relationship quickly became painful and exhausting for me. I succeeded in breaking up with him twice in the first few months. Both times, Curtis made it clear that he thought I was being an idiot, and we got back together. I tried again a few times after that, but I stopped expecting it to stick. I stopped expecting any of my attempts at setting clear boundaries to stick.

I used to beg Curtis to be the one to break up with me because, as I said to him, “If you do it, then it’ll stick.” The relationship made me feel trapped in a nightmare, often, from the beginning. Yet there were moments when it felt perfect. In one of those moments, I agreed to get pregnant. I had long wanted children, after all, and I thought he would be a good father. In another perfect moment, I accepted his proposal of marriage.

The perfection is hard to describe. When Curtis can sacrifice his frame control, and when he’s able to give up on emanating darkness and nihilism, he is one of the most fascinating conversation partners I’ve ever had. Curtis at his best is a genuine grade-A seeker of the truth.

He also saw me in ways most people don’t, and he offered to support me in ways most people can’t. Later he would insist I had misunderstood speculations as commitments. Regardless, I was very moved when he told me he understood that I have work to do in this world, and that he would do everything he could to solve my recurring life problems — money, logistics, time — so that I could pursue my work.

Eventually, of course, he did break up with me. It happened in an amazingly humiliating way, as painful as I could have imagined. Actually it was more painful than I could have imagined, because I had no clue, in advance, how thoroughly pregnancy would amplify the pain. And maybe that’s exactly why it had to happen the way it did. Afterwards, as I tried to make sense of the experience, a nearby Zen friend* asked me: “Is there anyone else who could have broken your will?” And when I replied, “God,” the friend said, “That’s an extraordinary statement.”

Curtis left me with a public announcement, while I was several months pregnant. I did not expect the announcement, and I learned that it had happened after I started receiving dozens of texts asking if I was okay. Because Curtis is famous, it felt like the entire world found out when I did. And I learned after the announcement that, even though he had demanded monogamy and I was faithful to him, at least one other woman had already secretly started sleeping with him behind my back. It was the worst thing that had ever happened in my life up to that point, all the worse because it felt like my own fault.

It was hell. It was Hell. Yet given the path I had chosen, I had to learn to go through Hell. And in that absolute hellish level of pain was where I found grace.

In my total despair, my desperate desire to get to the root of why I put myself in this position, I called on every mode of insight that I had. What I found was how to walk through fire and let it consume me. Not a material fire, like the flames used by the Catholic Church to kill witches and heretics of the past, but a spiritual one. 

Spiritual fire is an experience recorded by mystics through the ages. In William James’s 1902 classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience, he provides Christian accounts of being consumed by spiritual fire.* The 1970 book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki, has a chapter called Leave No Trace that describes how to give oneself completely to this fire, leaving no trace of the self behind.

I thought I had lost my faith. Then I put myself through that spiritual fire. I can hardly describe it, but I know it happened. A paradox. Another paradox.

Rumi, a thirteenth century Muslim poet, frequently invokes metaphors of both fire and love. Here is a poem about the reed flute, an instrument commonly played by Sufis. Please note that this form of the poem was essentially retold by Coleman Barks, who did not speak any of Rumi’s languages. Thus, this is not a faithful translation of Rumi’s original words, though it may faithfully symbolize their spirit.

Listen to the story told by the reed,
of being separated.

"Since I was cut from the reedbed,
I have made this crying sound.

Anyone apart from someone he loves
understands what I say.

Anyone pulled from a source
longs to go back.

At any gathering I am there,
mingling in the laughing and grieving,

a friend to each, but few
will hear the secrets hidden

within the notes. No ears for that.
Body flowing out of spirit,

spirit up from body: No concealing
that mixing. But it's not given us

to see the soul. The reed flute
is fire, not wind. Be that empty."

Hear the love fire tangled
in the reed notes, as bewilderment

melts into wine. The reed is a friend
to all who want the fabric torn

and drawn away. The reed is hurt
and salve combining. Intimacy

and longing for intimacy, one
song. A disastrous surrender

and a fine love, together. The one
who secretly hears this is senseless.

A disastrous surrender and a fine love. Together.

—

Is being burned alive torture? Or a gift? I wonder about this while thinking of another story my mother told me.

When she was nearing what would normally be considered retirement age, my mother studied at a Unitarian Universalist theological seminary. She is not currently a UU minister and currently attends a Quaker congregation, which I consider an indictment of the UU church. (Leave it to my family to be too much for the UUs.) Years ago, she told me a tale I’d never heard in Sunday school, a fragment of mythos that made me cry:

Once upon a time, centuries ago, in the days of the Inquisition, there was a priest.* In the years he was preaching, there was an expectation that one should only preach in Latin, but he knew his congregation did not understand Latin. He therefore chose to preach in the vernacular, in order that his congregants could better understand his words. He also shared communion generously, in a way that he knew would be perceived as heresy.

Upon learning of this heresy, the Inquisition burned the priest at the stake in front of his church, for all his congregation to see. Yet if their goal was to suppress his teachings then they failed, because he was remembered. There was a legend that his heart didn’t burn in the fire that killed him. He became a martyr, his heart a symbol, represented by the flaming chalice. 

For centuries after our church formed in the late 1700s, Unitarian Universalists would take no symbol to represent ourselves. In the 1930s, given what was happening around the world, we felt the need to identify ourselves more clearly, and so this changed: We chose the flaming chalice.

I don’t know if this history is “true” or what it would mean for it to be materially true. I told the story to some neo-reactionary friends once, who had read more history than I. I saw the look that passed between them. They possessed a shared understanding that this priest had been politically active in problematic ways, that his execution had to do with politics. Many such cases!

Jesus Christ was arguably another of these. Something I love about the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar is that it envisions the political implications of what Jesus was doing. In the 1973 film version of the musical, when Judas betrays Jesus, the betrayal comes directly after Judas sees tanks rolling into their people’s territory. (Tanks in the time of Jesus are obviously an anachronism. The film is full of those.) Judas concludes that Jesus has strayed from the right path, and will bring violence down onto the heads of his people unless he is stopped.

Therefore, when Judas betrays Jesus he is trying to do what he perceives as the right thing. He even tries to reject the infamous thirty pieces of silver, singing the song “Blood Money/ Damned For All Time.” In this version of the story, Judas has to be persuaded to accept the bribe. He asks to be reassured that he isn’t damned. Even then, he ultimately feels so terrible that he commits suicide.

My father, who converted to Unitarian Universalism after being raised in Catholicism, taught me that one of the most controversial and heretical aspects of Universalist beliefs is this: We assert that, if one assumes the existence of a life after death with Heaven and Hell, then everyone goes to Heaven. Including Judas.

—

Recently I was surprised to speak with a deeply Christian woman about my current status. She was curious about how I’d become pregnant so early in my relationship, and how then the relationship was so suddenly over. She was generous with her time. I told her the whole story, crying. 

I had declared bankruptcy on my reputation by then. I’ve burned mine, and Curtis has broken every promise he ever made about protecting my privacy, including the promise not to write about me without permission. I used to be so careful about trying to protect both him and myself with my discretion, so careful that I never even responded to rumors he spread about me, but now….

Part of this, for me, is that I can’t seem to grasp why he feels justified breaking what I thought were promises, and describing me to others in ways that feel like a caricature. It seems like there’s something huge getting lost in translation, because I cannot understand why he doesn’t believe himself to be lying and betraying me. He’s usually an intellectually honest man, so I assume that Curtis genuinely believes this bizarre-to-me reality he’s been propagating. Maybe that’s a faulty assumption, or maybe there is some important thing about reality here for me to learn, and therefore about God. Maybe there’s something about how I’ve perceived the world around me symbolizing itself, some epistemic error I have been making, that I must try very hard to understand, especially because it’s cost me so much already. Maybe I am asking the world for further reflections on the theme by publishing this.

Can I see him — and maybe even this other woman he’s been involved with — as a child of God, serving the truth?

As my Christian friend listened to my story and reflected back her perception of what happened, I saw that she was a mystic, that mysticism is a core part of her experience. When I described moving into the fire and being burned up completely, she seemed to understand completely. She briefly alluded to having a similar experience in the past. When I told her, “I needed a miracle and I got it, in that this renewed and strengthened my faith,” she agreed.

She later sent me an audio message in which she said: “Whenever I’m in a situation that’s hard or hurtful, I try — and it’s not that I always do this, but I really do try — I try to look for God in it and see what good is in it. So when I look at this situation, here’s what I see. I see you getting so close to God. I see you in the refiner’s fire. I see you hearing from God. I see you moving with God. That’s what I see.”

At the end of our initial conversation she asked if she could pray with me. I consented, and listened. Her prayer was extraordinary and very beautiful. She acknowledged that she could not understand what path would lead me through. So she simply prayed for everyone involved, and asked God for a miracle. Another miracle.

“When you’re going through Hell,” she said to me, “keep going.”

That, at least, is advice I can follow.

An important caveat about feeling inspired by stories of sacrifice is that they can decoy you into making too great a sacrifice. In recent weeks I’ve had to work through this. What am I being called to do? Am I supposed to sacrifice more than I have? Do I get to suffer more? And now I see it. As I type those words, I can finally see in myself a greed or gluttony for further pain, which is probably not the right thing to indulge.

I’ve always felt that mothers are expected to martyr ourselves overmuch in this society, anyway.

I believe that God, or something analogous to that word, exists. That magic, or something analogous to it, is real. That miracles happen and total transformation is possible. This truth, or this truth as I perceive it, is something I work very hard to faithfully signal, in my life and work. I would die for it. I would, or at least I sincerely believe that I would, be nailed to a cross or burned alive if it would bring this truth to more people. But living for something greater than oneself is sort of harder than dying for it would be. I would live for it too. And mothers, in particular, ought to live for things, I suspect.

One of the anonymous advice comments I got on my blog came from someone who asked, “Have you considered going back to your fiancé for the sake of your child?” I had to laugh when I saw this comment. (I also deleted the comment, banned the commenter’s IP address, and complained about the comment to my friends.) To answer the question: Yes, unsolicited advice-giver, I did try to reconcile with Curtis, despite all my friends who told me I’d dodged a bullet and was better off without him, and it wasn’t just for the sake of my child but because I love him. Currently there appears to be no deal. And much of this breakdown in negotiations is that I won’t accept circumstances in which I foresee that one or both of us will be miserable for the rest of our lives.

I don’t think he ought to accept such a deal, either. Not even for love.

Being apart from Curtis is, in many ways, awesome. Every aspect of my health has improved dramatically. My bedroom gets cleaner instead of messier. I have enough time and space to do things I care about and to show up for my friends. I no longer wake up every day with my heart in my throat, afraid to see what vicious deconstructions of me and my tribe Curtis texted me overnight, or whether he published a new post about us for everyone to see. I’m no longer afraid that Curtis will replace me with one of the dozens of women always waiting in the wings, because he already picked a new one. He broke a number of serious promises to me, or words that I perceived as promises. Before he broke those promises I was so afraid that he would. But now it’s done. I don’t cry every single day anymore.

However, something I didn’t understand in advance, having never been pregnant, was what being pregnant would do. A lot of people tried to tell me it would change me. I didn’t listen and they might be feeling superior right now. To be fair, these people were extremely condescending and told me this experience would change me in sexist ways that it has not, e.g. they claimed it would make me less mission-oriented and career-focused, which appears to be untrue. So while they were arguably correct in some ways, they were wrong overall, as I intuitively knew when I first heard their unsolicited advice.

People told me being pregnant and having children would make me want to work less. I get that many women find their most rewarding work to be taking care of children and organizing the home. Me, I want to work, while simultaneously I am femme, and I want children. I try not to be aggressive about making feminist points, but I feel the need to note that if I were a man then this would not be confusing for anyone. 

It is unclear to me that I can do my work and be with Curtis. Or that we can live together and be happy.

Now that I’m pregnant, I can tell you precisely what pregnancy is doing to me, rather than what it does to someone else’s external idea of me: Pregnancy vastly increases the agony of separation. It makes me more viscerally concerned than I expected to be about the other women Curtis gets involved with, because if he actually goes through with marrying one of them, then she will be my son’s stepmother. And it makes me desperately hope that my son will have a lot of contact with Curtis. I can already feel on a spiritual level how much my son needs his father. But… how much of my own sanity and health and work am I supposed to sacrifice for that?

I used to be so angry at my parents for staying together in one house despite the way they fought constantly: My father’s hurt feelings that led to his absence and affair; my mother’s seeming lack of boundaries and self-respect, her seeming willingness to let herself be driven crazy. I saw only how terrible it was for me to be in the middle of their constant war. In retrospect, I don’t know how they could have done better than they did. Many such cases.

Until the moment he published that breakup post, Curtis kept telling me we could do better than they did. I remember sitting on the kitchen floor in his house in the middle of the night after a fight. I was crying. I said, “I can’t raise children in a house where we fight like this,” and he took my hand and said, “We won’t. We’re going to figure this out.”

Why? Why did I sign up for this? It was his idea to get me pregnant, but I’m an adult woman with excellent knowledge of sexuality and birth control, and I went through with it. We knew what we were doing. Or did I? What on Earth was I thinking? It’s not like friends didn’t tell us both to break up. It’s not like I missed the red flags.

When I ask myself this question, the moment that comes to mind is from another fight. This fight lasted, on and off, for days and weeks, maybe months. Maybe all our fights were this same fight. I kept asking why he kept insisting that it made sense for us to stay together. He was standing in a doorway, and he looked at me from the door and said: “Because if we separate, it will diminish us both.”

—

One of the epistemic problems for romantics is understanding: Is this it? Is — or was — this True Love? How can I know?

It’s so much, so very much like faith. And this was the question Curtis asked me over and over, about God. How can I possibly know?

I recently reread a favorite book, The Forty Rules of Love, a 2009 novel by Elif Shafak that concerns the life of Rumi. The story focuses on Rumi’s encounter with Shams, a wandering Sufi mystic. Little is known for sure about Rumi and Shams except that their relationship was profound.

Rumi lived almost a thousand years ago. He was 37 when he met Shams, and the encounter disrupted his entire life. He was a highly respected Muslim scholar of the Quran with a good reputation in his community. Then he met Shams, and wasn’t. It is unclear whether or not they were lovers. The Forty Rules of Love presents their relationship as platonic. They didn’t have much time together. After a few years, Shams either died or moved on.

Rumi had not previously been a poet, but he began to write poetry. He signed his poems with Shams’ name. Of all the work he did in his lifetime, it is this poetry, at least in America, that is best known today.

Here is one quote from the fictionalized character of Rumi in The Forty Rules of Love: “Though I know that there are no words that can express this inner journey of mine, I believe in words. I am a believer of words.”

But words aren’t real. It feels like maybe I’ve been needing to grasp that words are not real, and perhaps I will learn that here. The symbol of God is not expressed fully through words nor through any particular slice of Creation, but rather through the totality of Creation. Words, no matter how persuasive, no matter how spiritually resonant, no matter how much they feel true, can always turn out to be false, can always be a trap, can always betray you. Except sometimes words are real. Sometimes they’re real.

In my current practice of reading and rereading Psalm 23, I think over and over about the words. Reading it five times per day means that sometimes I feel lost in a moment of disgust, or rage, or terror — and then the time comes to look at the prayer again. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil….”

A lot of pregnancy takes place in the valley of the shadow of death. I assume this is true in the best of circumstances, let alone my current circumstances. It is so hard to manage my fear that my child will die. Or the fear that my child will kill me with his birth. Is it possible that a man who left me alone with this ever really loved me?

The Forty Rules of Love talks a lot about the metaphor of finding one’s “mirror.” The idea is that Rumi and Shams were deeply critical mirrors for each other, allowing them to see themselves in a new light, a transformative light. It is an incredible work of fiction. I recommend it.

The way I previously told the story of my spiritual awakening, I describe meeting a Roman Catholic exorcist and telling him about how I had lost my faith. The exorcist helped orient me by reminding me of a particular frame on this experience: The Dark Night of the Soul. What I didn’t mention when I wrote that story was that Curtis was the person who seemed to have broken it. He didn’t tear my faith apart using logic — I suspect there’s no logic that can break faith — but through sheer persistence combined with contempt, a distaste for my belief, alongside an apparent desire to take it apart in order to understand how it worked. 

The thing is, taking things apart to figure out how they work sometimes destroys those things. On the other hand, sometimes you can build them back better.

When I wrote about meeting the exorcist, I also did not mention how the exorcist described the light that can clarify a person during a Dark Night of the Soul. He used the phrase “dark light.” Curtis, as many people reading this will already know, is sometimes referred to as the best-known writer of a political movement called the Dark Enlightenment. This, of course, is a coincidence. It may or may not have anything to do with truth.

You may have encountered the mythic, occult metaphor of the magic mirror. Mirrors are used for a lot of things in magic. Sometimes they help us see our inner demons. One easily observable fact about mirrors today is that they are common. I pass a lovely and effective silver-backed mirror at least once per day, generally more than once. If you live in 2020s America, then you probably do too. My bedroom contains several mirrors, though I mostly store them under my bed right now, and I also carry a small mirror in my purse.

Would it make sense to feel attached to one mirror?

In the twelfth century, Alain de Lille wrote Latin words that can be retold thus:

All the world’s creatures
As a book and a picture
Are to us as a mirror:
Our lives, our deaths,
Our present condition, our destiny
Faithfully symbolized.

De Lille was a Cistercian, which is to say, he was part of a Roman Catholic religious order. Yet his words have resonated with religious naturalists throughout history, including Pagans and Unitarian Universalists. Recently, while thinking of this poem, I got curious and looked up two of the Latin words (sortis, signaculum), and then I changed those words from the most common English version I found online (passing → destiny; signified → symbolized). 

Full disclosure: It’s been decades since I studied Latin. I also don’t know who wrote the common English translation in the first place.

These are the kinds of things Christians and Catholics say and do that show me how we are kindred. Yet there also, commonly if not always, seems to be a belief across those worlds that I don’t share: A belief in irredeemable evil. A belief that Hell can be eternal, not merely in metaphor, not as inner experience, but in reality.

Whereas for me, in my world, one of the ways I respect Jesus Christ is as the Magician: A man who understood the path to Hell and back. A magician who made one of the greatest sacrifices he could, himself, while seemingly doing his level best not to force or demand it of anyone else, and inspired a guiding tradition that’s brought others out of Hell for thousands of years.

—

Upon passing through the spiritual fire, I was flooded with reminders and indicators of my inner demons. I had previously encountered these, off and on, through spiritual work, but suddenly I was incredibly aware of them. They were all over me, and some probably still are! — just as they’re all over everyone, everywhere.

For weeks after experiencing that fire, my everyday cognitive actions were focused on comprehending my personal inner demons and giving them the opportunity to rest. My methodology came from spiritual and energetic work I’ve done in recent years, combined with cues I remembered from mythology and historical spiritual traditions.

Then, as I was completing my work on this draft, I was reminded of one of the most useful books on magic I ever read. It’s from 2009 and the writer, T. Thorn Coyle, is alive in the present day. The title is Kissing The Limitless: Deep Magic and the Great Work of Transforming Yourself and the World. Earlier today, on the day I first write these words, I saw a physical copy in front of me. I picked it up and leafed through it.

As I opened the book, with no conscious intention, I turned the page directly to a later section about working with demons. I reread Coyle’s ritual instructions, which I had long since forgotten. Then I read these words:

One helpful way to think of our demons — internal or externally named — is as adversaries. The very word conjures up a struggle or an obstacle to be faced, something we can “gird our loins” in order to confront. An adversary is something we can meet. The universe conspires to remind us of why adversaries are so important to our work. They do not exist so we can wallow in an orgy of superiority and self-congratulation. Spiritually, they crop up so we can better look upon ourselves. [Emphasis in Coyle’s original text]

Adversaries are always mirrors, if we are willing to look.

Her methodology for interacting with her inner demons is different from mine. Yet the similarities are profound, and her philosophy is very similar to the one where I have converged. In rereading that section, I found yet another demon in myself, which could also be described as a profound moral hazard related to pride. Demons generally can be perceived as internal moral hazards, I think. Or psychological problems. Or trauma patterns.

I’m grateful that the demon brought itself to my attention before causing further trouble. Everyone in the world has these things, but there are better and worse ways to handle them, and I suspect that it helps when you can see them directly.

Some of the earliest passages in Kissing the Limitless are about the Peacock Angel, an angel of paradox. I think a lot about angels these days. In some myths, of course, demons are angels who have descended into Hell.

An occultist friend of mine — in fact, the same friend who introduced me to Coyle’s work — messaged me this morning after reading this draft. He wrote: “I am very sorry that this has turned as it has. I think enough of an interval has passed that I can confess to an un-feminist You Break-A Her Heart I Break-A You Face impulse toward your ex.”

I wrote back, “I know,” and then: “For what it’s worth, this really was the level of spiritual correction I needed at the speed I was asking for.”

I wrote earlier in this essay that I don’t recommend this path. Yet in the end, it seems that I do.

•

—

For your reference, here is a Dedication of Merit. That’s a Buddhist practice I mentioned earlier, which helps us sacrifice the benefit of our practice back to the world:

May the benefit of these acts and all acts go to all beings everywhere. May the frightened cease to be afraid and those bound be freed. May the powerless find power and all beings seek to benefit each other. Peace.

—

* Asterisk, 12/11/22:

• The first public version of this post described someone I know as a “Zen master.” The person in question has now explained to me that he is not a Zen master, although he studied Zen, and some people in our shared communities refer to him as a Zen master. At his request, I have updated the text to call him a “Zen friend.”

• I originally dated William James’s book The Varieties of Religious Experience to 1901. Recently, while glancing at the back cover of a copy around my home, I realized that the volume’s actual publication date is 1902. The book is based on a series of lectures James delivered at the University of Edinburgh between 1901 and 1902, so I assume I made this error by looking at the date his lectures started rather than the date they ended.

• In the interests of intellectual honesty and historical accuracy, one of the people who was present on the night to which I refer asked me to name the priest and link to further historic information about him. His name was Jan Hus, he was Czech, and he was burned at the stake in 1415. His main thing seems to have been that direct experience of God and scripture ought to be considered a source of truth over and above the Church, which in his day was particularly corrupt. He was given multiple chances to recant his views, including one final chance right before being burned alive, at which point he is claimed to have said, “In the same truth of the Gospel which I have written, taught, and preached, drawing upon the sayings and positions of the holy doctors, I am ready to die today.”
  Here is Hus’s Wikipedia page and here is an abridged version on a progressive/socialist website. According to these sources, in the immediate wake of Hus’s death, the then-Pope Martin V announced a crusade against his people. Thousands died. Then there were further crusades. I don't have the best understanding of the material political realities that corresponded to these spiritual conflicts, but there clearly were many; kings were involved and stuff. Later in the same century, after a lot of fighting, some of the ritual changes requested by Hus’s more moderate followers involving administration of the Eucharist were deemed acceptable by the church, though this was only after the Hussite moderates allied with the Catholics and threw the Hussite radicals under the bus.
  About a century after Hus’s death, the religious reformer Martin Luther credited him as a major influence while kicking off the Reformation. Luther expressed his ideas in a manner similar to Hus, saying that Christians are saved by scripture alone, by faith alone, and by grace alone, rather than necessarily being saved by stuff the Church does.
  Eventually, in 1999, Pope John Paul II expressed regret for what happened to Hus and praised Hus’s “moral courage.”

• Curtis is quite incensed by this post, according to texts he has sent me, also according to the escalating rumors he is attempting to spread about me, and also according to the various threats and blandishments he is attempting to levy against my friends and family. I had hoped for a different reaction, but here we are. A number of people, including him, have read this post and then tried to inform me of the on-the-ground Curtis-related tactical realities that they seem to believe I'm in denial about. It’s somewhat condescending and I suspect that they are, in turn, ignorant of core priorities that have emerged for me over the course of this scenario. Those priorities are (a) that the father of my child have as much integrity as possible, and (b) that he take my reality seriously.
  I have been hoping that this post might increase Curtis’s integrity. Maybe it won't work. Arguably, the matter of his integrity is beyond my control. But that is genuinely one of my hopes and intentions here.
  Overall, my main intention with this post was, and still is, to express love for the Divine through its reflections in other parts of my life. The main reason I wrote about Curtis here was that, for better or worse, he somehow managed to be one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever interacted with in terms of my faith in God, despite the fact that Curtis himself does not believe in God, and despite the fact that he overall appears to have had an acutely destructive impact on my life. This feels truly paradoxical and weird, and I'm still coming to terms with it. None of this means he and I should necessarily be together; we definitely should not. But it feels important to me to make it extremely clear that the core emotion I intended to express was love.