The Cult - Part 2

"Where has your beloved gone, most beautiful of women?  Which way did your beloved turn, that we may look for him with you?  - Song of Solomon 1:6 (NIV)

April 22, 2007, St. Sava Orthodox Church, Plano, TX

I'm trying to make this post about religion and not my marriage, but I'm not sure if that is possible.  I'm trying to be respectful.  Walls may go up and some may come tumbling down, but I would like as little collateral damage as possible.  It's all so interwoven, I really don't know where one started and the other began.  But here it goes...

September 10, 2004, one day before the third anniversary of 9/11.   September 10, 2004, two days before the third anniversary of my epiphany that enabled me to walk away from my first marriage.  September 10, 2004, the day I put on my red high heels and brown velvet dress, slammed the hotel door and took my power back.  September 12, 2004, the day I started giving that power away...again.

We called it the "hand of God", "a fairytale".  We called it mysterious and miraculous.  We called it falling in love.  Of course, there is more to the story.  But is this THE STORY?  As I said earlier, I can't tell the difference, because it is all so...can I tell the truth here?  Let me go back to the beginning.  Let me tell you the whole story, from my perspective, as I saw it.  Let me tell you what I believed happened to me.  Let me tell you what I believed happened FOR me.

September 10, 2004, one day before the third anniversary of 9/11.  I'm on a plane headed to Austin, TX with my dear friend and maybe a little bit of a chip on my shoulder.  Sad.  Confused.  Loving someone who didn't love me back.  "I don't love her."  Those were his words, what he told my friend about me, yet for some strange and maybe sadistic reason, I was heading to Austin to paint his living room.  Why?  I don't remember that part.

He is supposed to pick up my friend and I from the airport, it's a later flight, didn't even land until 10 pm or so, as I recall.  He must have called or messaged my friend or something like that, because she told me that he couldn't pick us up from the airport.  "He needed to go to a party that a couple of girls were having".  Also, we couldn't stay at his place like we had planned.  We needed to get a hotel room for the night.  We could come over the next day to start painting.  OK.  Maybe he owed it to them, maybe he was doing them a favor, I'm not sure, but the whole situation just kind of made me wake up and say, "WHAT THE FUCK AM I DOING HERE?"  

Mind you, I had a 4 1/2 year-old son waiting for me back in Illinois.  Yes, I was a 36 year-old divorced woman exploring a relationship with a guy that I had loved from many years before, so much so that I ended up marrying the first guy that I did because he reminded me of this guy with the beautiful black hair and brilliant mind that I loved and couldn't get out of my head or my heart even though he never loved me back.  And I just knew I had to move on.  So, I did back in 1993, so I thought, but now (2004) somehow, oddly enough I was back in his life.  

We were flying around doing trips and other fun stuff as a "team" with my dear girlfriend.  Everything was polite and really on a friendship level between the three of us.  We had a good time traveling, although he was pretty quiet and oddly absent a lot.  Doing his own thing I guess, which was hard for me because I did still love him, as much as someone can love someone that doesn't love them back that way.  But he wasn't cruel about it...until after we had sex one time.  

Maybe he thought I was expecting something more.  Maybe I was, but really, I wasn't.  I wasn't expecting, just hoping.  There is a difference.  I didn't think he loved me, just hoping, I guess.  But he didn't talk to me.  He just said to my friend, "I don't love her."   That hurt.  But maybe it wasn't even meant to hurt.  It was just the truth.  What else could he say?  What else could I say?

That I ever got to that point, to that place, that I got to his house, even if it was only to paint his living room, really must have been some kind of act of God, except that he was an atheist, which did not bother me, because I was a free and liberated woman by now.  I was spiritual, but I was definitely not religious anymore.  I believe the Email conversation that brought us back together back then started off something like this...HIM: "Fuck God."  ME: "Oh hi (name redacted)!  How are you doing!"

He was philosophical, which was fine for me, except I never thought it was an even playing field, or more like he didn't really want an even playing field.  He wanted a student, maybe?  Or he wanted to test my wits, perhaps?  To see if I could keep up with his mental jousting.  I don't know.  Anyway, I guess from my perspective, I was there to see if there was any potential for a relationship.  I found out the hard way, there was not.  And when he didn't pick us up from the airport, I MOVED ON, once again.  This time, I didn't look back.

September 10, 2004.  My friend and I got a room at the Holiday Inn downtown Austin, TX.  I said, "We're going out."  I put my hair up.  I even put my contacts in.  I was on my way, to where, I had NO IDEA.  We called a cab.  He took a LONG TIME to take us to a place on 4th street.  He dropped us off in the middle of the street.  The whole thing seemed odd to me, even then.

"Where do you want to go?" I asked my friend.  She didn't care.  I said, "Let's just go here."  The "here" was Cedar Street Courtyard.  There were brick stairs and a band playing and we paid $10 to get in the door.  We were invested.  We walked in.

And that's when I met HIM#2.  He was literally, as far as I could tell, floating towards me when I walked in.  He came right up to me before I even had a chance to get to the bar.  I remember thinking, Oh my gosh.  This guy is coming right towards me.  He, uh, I'm not even, chance, bar. Nope.   "Hi!"

I could say that the rest is history, and it kind of was.  It is the story that we tell everyone who ever asks, "How did you two meet?"  But I need to add it here instead of glossing over things.  No more glossing over...but I don't want to be here 'til midnight either.

OK.  So, from HIM#2's perspective, his side of the story was that he had been having a "conversation" with God, before I walked through the door.  YOU ARE GOING TO MEET SOMEONE TONIGHT, said God.  "NO, I don't want to," said HIM#2.  YOU ARE.  "No."  YOU ARE.  "No."  To be honest, I don't know how long this conversation went on/had been going on when I walked through the door and he saw me and recognized me and said, "That's her."

I wasn't sold at first sight.  I was looking more at his friend that was with him, although I wasn't attracted to him, but he had dark hair like my guy who didn't love me so it was only natural that I would be looking for something to replace him, right?  But these two, they were nice guys.  They were gentlemen and my friend, and I didn't mind hanging out with them for the evening...late into the evening, and I should have seen a red flag when we were walking down the street on our way to another dance bar, when HIM#2 touched my back and said, "There's nothing better than a big beef brisket on the grill."  I cringed.  Good alliteration, but no thank you.  I was a vegetarian.  That was soon to change as did everything else.

We ended up, the 4 of us, hanging out together the next night and the next, next day, until our plane had to take off for St. Louis.  It was a very nice time.  A lot of magical things had happened between HIM#2 and I.  We had talked.  We had danced, Tejano, waltzes, magical stuff.  My heart chakra started opening, I felt it, on the dance floor of the Mexican restaurant that was playing beautiful Celtic music after dinner.  I felt myself falling for this guy and I somehow KNEW that he LOVED me...but I didn't understand how, or why.  

The strangest thing of all happened on the Sunday afternoon while we were visiting the history museum in downtown Austin, near the state capitol.  The two of us were walking around the museum, holding hands by this point, we really liked each other.  We felt SO comfortable together, and I remember having this distinct feeling, one that I had never had before.  I remember thinking that "we've done this before".  It felt like deja vu.  It felt very dreamy, and even though I really didn't know anything about past lives or believe in them, I didn't disbelieve in them, and I just couldn't shake the feeling that we had known each other somewhere, sometime other than this time.  It was powerful.  It was surreal.  It was enough to make me believe that this was important and eventually, it made me believe that "He, HIM#2 was the one."

Except it never really felt that way.  I remember him trying to convince me of this, sitting (arguing?) in the car in the driveway.  I remember seeing his face and often thinking, "something is not right here".  I never thought that I was attracted to him the way one "should" be attracted to "THE ONE" although I HAD been attracted like that before.

Alright.  So, I had said that I don't want this to end up being about my marriage and here I am.  Does this just sound like one big love story?  I swear it relates to my spiritual journey.  I'm sure that you can see that it does.  There are just SO MANY more "little details" that I feel are so important.  They are clues, they are part of my story.  I just don't know how to share them without blowing everything up.  Maybe the answer is, I just need to blow everything up.  I feel bad, because this is not JUST my story, but it IS my story.

So here it is... I gave myself up.  It's the co-dependency trap.  I'm not saying that there was no love in the relationship, there was, it would be very hurtful to me and to him, to believe that there wasn't.  But there was also dysfunction.  It's what happens when two broken people come together.  Hopefully healing occurs.  The truth is, it's better to be healed, to be whole, before you come together with that special ONE.

I gave up my hometown.  I gave up my vegetarianism.  I gave up my free spiritedness.  I gave up my philosophies.  I gave up my clothes.  I gave up my art.  I gave up my career (not like I really had one though). I gave up my ideas.  I gave up my dreams.  I gave up my search for someone to spend the rest of my life with.

In return, I got a new home.  I got 4 step-children.  I got new ideas.  I got pushback.  I got more family.  I got financial support.  I got some of the stuff that I wanted, some of the time.  I got new dreams.  I got a new religion.  I got new rules.  I got new habits.  I got to eat meat again.  I got good at arguing.  I got to learn how to be able to stand up for myself.  I got free time to pursue my art when I decided that I was worth it.  I got counseling.  I got stronger.  I got braver.  I got back in touch with who I really am.  Now I am getting free.

THE RELIGION

Somewhere around 2006, HIM#2, who was not yet my husband due to some technical issues, cautiously asked me if I would consider exploring Eastern Orthodoxy.  Being the most ancient form of Christianity, he felt that it would offer the closest version of Christian truth available in our age.  I was open to it.  Truth is truth.  If it's true, it will stand, if not it won't.  We decided to pick a church and check it out one Sunday morning.

What we didn't realize, was that there was NO going in under the radar.  In the case of St. Sava's, the little church we went to, there was no sitting in the back row.  There was no back row.  There were no pews at all.  At this church, everyone stands for the entire service which is about an hour and a half to two hours long.  But the smells of the incense were BEAUTIFUL, magical almost and the feeling of the energies as we were immersed in the sounds and sights and smells of the Orthodox Liturgy, it was as though we had been transported to another world.  It felt like Heaven.  It felt like Home.

Much like embarking in the study of Alchemy, there was much to learn about Orthodoxy.  Orthodoxy, they say, is not a religion, it's a way of life.  This is what we found to be true.  Prayers 6 times a day, or more if you want them.  Saying the Jesus prayer "without ceasing".  Fasting twice weekly and before every Liturgy.  Seasonal fasting prior to major feast days, such as Pascha (Easter) and Nativity (Christmas) and minor feast days like the Dormition of the Theotokos (the falling asleep of Mother Mary), Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul, and others.  I don't remember it all off the top of my head.

Vesper services were offered Wednesday and Saturday evenings and Liturgies were on Sunday mornings.  During holiday seasons, extra services were added, morning, noon and night.  After liturgies on Sundays a common meal was shared by all parishioners.  We were a family.  No doubt about that.

In order "to become" Orthodox, we had to take a series of confirmation classes for several weeks.  We either had to or were able to be "baptized" by full immersion.  We were also required to make a "lifetime" confession prior to baptism as well as pick a patron saint.  The saint I chose was Mary Magdalene.  

We were baptized on a Sunday prior to Liturgy.  After the baptism, we were dressed in white and able to receive the Eucharist for the very first time.  This was a very emotional time for me.  I sincerely felt the energies of God present and working in my life, healing the emotional wounds that I had suffered and inflicted upon myself throughout my lifetime, wittingly or unwittingly, as the Orthodox confessor would say.  

Prior to getting married in the Church, I went back to Illinois and lived with my parent's since living with my fiancé (who never did actually "propose" to me, I will add) would be considered living "in sin".  And although we could have probably gotten away with it as long as we were sleeping in separate rooms (I actually put a mattress in the closet to sleep on) it was "better" for us to be living apart.  We definitely wanted to do everything "the best" that we could...and we did.  But it wasn't necessarily for the best.

Following the Divine Liturgy, on Sunday April 22, 2007, at 2 pm, we were married in a beautiful, traditional wedding ceremony at St. Sava Orthodox Church in Plano, TX.  Family and church friends were there, and even my dear friend that was with me on the night I closed the door on one guy and dove headfirst into another, was there with me to celebrate this magical, fairytale of a day, and I didn't even need a diamond, a simple gold band was all that was required (by tradition of course).  This was how I knew my love was real.

We had been obedient children of God prior to our wedding.  Following the ceremony, diving HEADFIRST into this religion as a direct pathway to knowing God was the way it was going to be.  We were even instructed not to have sex on fast days (Wednesdays and Fridays) on our honeymoon.  That sounded CRAZY to me but guess what...and I hadn't shaved my legs or my armpits for months, so it was probably all for the better.

I think that I made this decision for myself, diving so deeply into Orthodoxy, but I'm not sure anymore.  "Women, submit to your husbands," isn't that what the good book says?  I think I probably agreed to this somewhere in that marriage service too, it was kind of a whirlwind of a day.  

From the get-go, I was definitely trying to be the good wife, the good Orthodox wife, which is a conundrum, because when you are a Christian, for me anyway, specifically an Orthodox Christian, I could by definition, never be "good".  As a human, as a sinner, I was inherently evil.  According to church doctrine I was born a sinner, and I will always be a sinner, so the task of becoming a "good wife", being the "good Orthodox" was thereby literally impossible.  This was the beginning of my end.

The same can be said for directly knowing God, as we had been promised, because circular arguments were in place to keep us from ever trusting any spiritual experience that we were ever to have.  This was the really slippery slope.  This was the rathole that got me on my way to going crazy.

As a couple, we bought every book we could find on this new religion, and I read and read and read.  I devoured all the books I could find. Some books would make me feel better, others would just confuse my mind.  I developed an even greater propensity for literal thinking, very black and white thinking, so if they said it, if it was a rule, then I better be doing it, sure as shit you were going to find me doing it because I wanted to be "good".  

It was like a childhood trauma coming back with a vengeance, although I never felt traumatized throughout my childhood.  Yes, my parents made me go to church and maybe they didn't always appreciate my unique style of creativity, and maybe they hurt my feelings and did make me feel bad about stuff from time to time like "good Christian" parents should, but it wasn't the type of mind fuckery, the type of guilt I saw grown adults subjecting themselves to in the Orthodox Church.  

For the most part, I think those of us that did the most extreme stuff were all just crazy converts (this is an actual title in the church, you know).  We had converted and we were going to be the BEST damn converts ever.  So pure, so righteous, so strict and it was like it was some type of competition, if only with ourselves.  We certainly were not judging others, or God forbid talking about them.   That said, there was actually A LOT of love for our brothers and sisters in Christ in the church.  Some of us just hated ourselves, A LOT.

And not every woman in the church became what I became.  I gave away my high heels and my sexy dresses.  I put on long skirts and baggy shirts and actually wore a head covering ALL THE TIME, not just as was prescribed during the Liturgy.  Because somewhere in the bible it said that women should have their heads covered when they prayed, and I logically concluded that if I wanted to "pray without ceasing" I should at least wear a little bandana, all of the time.  ("Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me a sinner" was to be upon my heart and my lips always.)   Wow.  Right?

I would wear "normal" frumpy clothes around the house and when traveling, pants, jeans, shorts, etc., but I always wore a dress to Liturgy and "peasant garb" as I call it, was definitely required when we would visit the monasteries.

There were two monasteries where we loved to visit, down in Southern Texas.  Holy Archangels is located in Kendalia and St. Paraskevi in Washington.  These are actually very beautiful, and I do believe holy places, and the craziness that existed in our lives was not because of the monks or the nuns at these places.  We were crazy, because we were trying to live a monastic life within the bounds of our marriage and in the daily life we were living in Plano.  The nuns were kind and loving souls, the monks, more like marines for Christ, but kind and loving, nonetheless.  It is said that Archangels have appeared at the monastery of Holy Archangels.  Apparently, they are very large, over 15 feet tall.

Any many demons have been fought within the walls of these monasteries, and the books that we read were full of stories of saints and monks fighting demons and struggling for the love of Christ and I think that we just thought that we needed to do the same.  I suppose we invited more than a couple of demons into our own spaces at that time, metaphorically speaking but literally as well.  I do indeed remember black swirling energies surrounding my neck as if trying to strangle me one night before going to bed.  I prayed to a Saint for help and the things went away and I slept fine.  Just saying...it was a wild time.

But it was an emotional time, full of turmoil and fights and struggling, with our relationship and with our children.  Why should I care if my husband wants to get up at 2 am to pray?  Why should that bother me?  I don't know, but something about it did and I would wake up to find an empty bed and feel a sense of abandonment and anger and resentment all rolled into one.  This is not conducive to sleep.  It was not conducive to a happy marriage.  I would become sleepless and get more and more stressed the longer he was out of bed praying.  Both of us would become more and more unhappy.

And this didn't just happen when we were at home.  Apparently, something like this happened one time when we were staying at my parent's house.  I don't remember this, but he does.  He had gotten up in the night to pray.  I guess I woke up, we were in the same room after all.  He said I got angry and was jumping up and down on the bed saying, "I want you to worship ME!"  He says now that he thinks I was possessed by a demon then.  I say now, I am not so sure that I was.  But I think he still believes it anyway.  He's like that.

I say, probably, I did want him to adore me.  I wanted him to love me as much as he loved the church.  I wanted him to listen to me and do something for me.  I wanted him to be able to shave his beard off if I didn't like it...but he couldn't, because men were supposed to have beards.  It didn't matter what I wanted.  It just didn't matter, and I knew it.  I think that there were probably 1000 of those moments that had happened by the time I, well he found me jumping on the bed, just begging him to adore me.  Sorry I chose the wrong word in the heat of the moment.  Bad on me...of course.

Life was a normal roller coaster of this stuff from pretty much most of 2007 - 2011.  I know there were good time, happy times, great times in there too.  I'm not trying to say that it was all horrible, but it was a consistent mind fuck for me.  The whole stinking thing.  I just didn't realize it.  I certainly didn't know that I should get out.  This was my marriage.  My FOREVER marriage.  I never had any desire or intention of leaving or divorcing.  It just wasn't an option.  It wasn't even something that crossed my mind.  All that I ever tried to do was figure out how I could fix things.  Boy did I feel busy and important and occupied.

On top of all of that, I was traveling back and forth to Illinois every other week so I could be a mother to my son, since my husband's job took us to Texas, 700 miles away from my child.  I am so grateful for cheap Southwest flights at the time and that my husband "let me" do this.  But this really took it's emotional and mental toll on me.  There was a point that I was asking if he could consider getting another job somewhere closer to my son in Illinois.  There were some failed attempts, but it never happened.

We did end up moving back to North Carolina in 2011, where his kids lived and where there are apparently a lot more jobs for engineers of his kind.  To be fair, he did have contacts at the company where he was hired, and I was grateful that he had a good job and was happy to be the supporter of our family.  I played the role of wife the best that I could too.  I can keep a fairly clean house, and I am really a pretty good cook.  That worked out pretty well for everyone, even me for a while since as you might recall, I really wanted to be Martha Stewart back in the day.  

Once in North Carolina, we started going to another Orthodox church in High Point, because it's what you do when you are Orthodox.  You go to church.  Holy Cross was small and friendly, and the priest there was so kind and was a breath of fresh air for my inner artist.  His kind and loving wife was a great help to me as an Orthodox woman and wife.  She did not cover her hair during Liturgy, or ever as far as I could tell.  She even wore pants to church sometimes.  

Church was just church, sending love and gratitude to our Creator, but it was not a self-flagellating penance festival.  There were monasteries not too far away in Virginia, but not many of the people in this congregation went to them.  Those that did were definitely on the more extreme traditional side of the spectrum, ie. the women covered their heads.  

It was a real spiritual struggle for me to make a choice to cover my head in church or not.  This is how far I had come since 09-10-2004.  Sounds crazy, right?  But it's true.  It was so difficult for me to give myself permission to do anything, to be anything.  In the tradition we came from in Texas, we took it upon ourselves to be conditioned to ask the priests permission for every big decision that we were making.  It became more and more difficult for us to make our own choices.

I actually went to this new priest of ours in North Carolina to ask for a blessing to do my artwork.  I honestly didn't know if it was "godly" or not to be making this kind of art or any art really.  It was like I needed permission to be an artist.  I still have not really given myself that permission.  Damn.

Part of my artistic struggle though, was that I was making images based off of Icons.  In the church, the Icons are sacred images.  Technically, all sacred things were to be burned when they were worn out or retired.  It was actually considered unholy by some to wear a t-shirt with the image of a Saint on it.  There were extremes everywhere.

As an example, the Eucharist was to be consumed by a priest if there was any left over after receiving (as it was now the body and blood of Christ, can we say Alchemy anyone?).  If there was left over prosphora (holy bread), which there hardly ever was, it was either given away to be eaten or it was thrown outside under a bush where no one could step on it.  I once heard a story of a person throwing up after receiving communion and the priest ate the vomit because the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist could not be spilled.  It is what it is.

And although all of these liturgical protocols were followed precisely in this church as they were in any Orthodox church, the feel of this congregation and the priest and his wife were a breath of fresh air to my enslaved mind.  I am supremely grateful for them.  But all of their kindness couldn't prevent my final breakdown which happened sometime around 2013.  

It was sometime in 2012 when I really began to feel like I was having a mental breakdown.  My brain felt so twisted and my self-worth was veritably nonexistent.  I was trying to get out into the community by volunteering with local charitable organizations.  It was so hard for me.  I kept volunteering and even became part of the leadership teams of these organizations.  My esteem was beginning to reestablish itself.

It was around that same time that I started this blog.  It was under a different name and none of those posts exist online anymore.  I do think that I have copies of them somewhere so that I will never forget how far gone I really was.  I was depressed.  I was self-critical even to the point of self-hatred at times.  I was confused about my role as a wife and a mother and what it meant for me to be honoring those roles.

I was confused about having my own goals and my own opinions.  How obedient was I supposed to be, really?  I became a doormat, pretty much although our first priest always warned against that.  I didn't understand what that meant, as a Christian.  I just knew that it felt selfish and wrong to defend myself or stand up for myself, but I ended up doing it anyway sometimes. Something inside me was trying to get me out.  My higher self?  Maybe.

The cycles of guilt and shame and anger that would come from standing up for myself was awful.  My anger, which I could not express except through confession, was eating me up inside.  Which turned to more self-hatred and anger at my husband, and we would fight and that's when the real mind fuckery would ensue and I just got so fucking tired of fighting and fighting for myself and trying to have my own opinions or interests.  

My psyche was fracturing, and I started thinking about death, like killing myself, which I know I would never really do, but when you start thinking about it, you know that something is really fucked up somewhere.  And the church was no consolation, not because there weren't caring people there, but because I chose to suffer in silence.  I didn't feel like I had any real friends, because I didn't.  I still don't, not in this town where I live. 

But people did like me, and I had been invited to and attended a paint and sip party in honor of our priest's wife's birthday.  I loved painting and felt so happy after going out for the night.  I even dressed in some not so frumpy clothes that I had picked up at Goodwill.  It's my favorite place to shop.  I am a good size and lots of the clothes there fit me.  I've gotten some really good finds over the years...but I digress.  Turns out that there is a little bit of fashionista archetype deep within me after all.  She's trying to come out again too.

So, after this event, the priest's wife and I were sitting out in my car talking.  I'm not sure about all of the conversation, but it was centered around the incessant guilt and shame that was consuming me.  She didn't understand where all of it was coming from.  She asked me if any of my family were alcoholics.  She said something about guilt correlating to grandchildren of alcoholics even.  Sins of the father?  And this was a scientific study she was referring to, not some sort of spiritu-religioso mumbo jumbo.

She recommended the book Gifts of Imperfection by Brene' Brown.  I have to say that book probably helped save my life, or at least it gave me a shovel to help start digging myself out of the psycho-spiritual pit I was finding myself in.  I am forever grateful to her for that.

And it was somewhere around that same time, when I was really having trouble understanding why homosexuality just isn't ever ok.  Why we hate the sin but not the sinners.  Well, why the fuck was it a sin to love someone of the same sex anyway?  My husband apparently could wrap his big brain around this, but my little one just couldn't do it.  Why were we judging people?  Why were we haters?  I couldn't do it.  And the day that they were singing so joyfully about Arius the heretic and the celebration of his death (he was dragged through the streets with his bowels hanging out), I thought who the fuck died and made you all kings!  I just snapped and I couldn't go back.

Saint Athanasius the Great, Patriarch of Alexandria - Troparion & Kontakion

Commemorated on May 2

Troparion — Tone 3

(Podoben: “The Divine Faith...”)
You were a pillar of Orthodoxy, O Hierarch Athanasios, / supporting the Church with divine doctrines; / you proclaimed the Son to be of one Essence with the Father, / putting Arius to shame. / O Righteous Father, entreat Christ God to grant us great mercy.

Kontakion — Tone 2

(Podoben: “With the streams of your blood...”)
Having planted the dogmas of Orthodoxy, / you cut out the thorns of false doctrine, / and multiplied the seed of faith with the rain of the Spirit; / therefore, we praise you O righteous Athanasios.

This is an example of the "programming" that I was allowing to be encoded into my brain, multiple times each week for almost 8 years.  At first I just saw it all as so beautiful.  New, exotic , poetic, and the tones and the singing itself, in the Russian Orthodox style that our church used was very, very beautiful.  I still believe there is so much beauty in the Orthodox church.  Actually, I still believe there is value in the Orthodox church.

I learned a lot of good things there, like the stories of the lives of the Saints.  Yes, some of these stories were extreme, but the Saints themselves were loving, and I could feel their presence and energies.  They became very real to me, and like my guides that I have today, I believe the Saints are real.  I learned about Saints bilocating performing miraculous feats, not unlike the transmutation of the wine and bread into the blood and body of Christ.  All just Alchemy, right?  

I witnessed so much beauty and love of people, for people within that church and the beauty of the passing over of a soul and the funerals and the meals and caring and the community that was formed around these rituals.  The Feasts after the fasting were so glorious.  Celebrations were transcendent.  There was so much joy! The traditions of the Orthodox Church and their love of the divine is to be respected and even revered.  

But they claim that they have the Truth on the matter of Christianity, yet when I read the story of Constantine and the Council of Nicea, I called bullshit. So much has been hidden from us and an equal amount has probably also been changed to benefit those in power, for power and for control.

Religion is a master control mechanism, it's roots and tentacles run deep.  It will be shattered, and it will be shattered soon if what I believe is coming is indeed coming, and if it is indeed coming soon.  I don't celebrate the day that this happens, because so many will be shattered in their own minds and hearts and souls at that time, my own loved ones included.  

And this my story comes as a reminder and as a cautionary tale as well.  I am struck by how people can become religious about SO MANY things, diet, fasting, exercise, aliens, mythical beings and even Ascension.  In my path forward I have been trying to be so careful NOT to find myself falling into some other new religion.  I just want truth and while Truth might just turn out to be stranger than fiction, I am open to the possibility that everything I believe is bullshit.  But that's uber hyperbole coming straight at ya.  It's a near impossibility that EVERYTHING I believe is bullshit, I think at least something in there somewhere might end up being true.  I hope.  Time will tell.

And there really is so much more to this story, about what happened, what is still happening.  There's more to what transpired after I said that I was done.  There's just more, so much more, but I've been writing all day and I'm tired now and, well, I think you get the gist of it all anyway.  

It was a wild cascade of things that happened to me on my journey to and through Orthodoxy, but now, safe and sound on the other side of spiritual melt down, I can thoroughly see how this experience through Orthodoxy ABSOLUTELY happened, not just to me, but FOR me.  I am who I am today because of it.  And I am grateful.

It opened my eyes to see so many things within me.  It helped me see my weaknesses and more importantly, it allowed me the opportunity to see my strengths.  It allowed me to be courageous, to stand up and fight for myself and my own soul.  I am still fighting today.  I am still recovering.   I am still setting myself free.  I am understanding the things I need to do to move forward, and I know that I absolutely have the power to do whatever it is that needs to be done.  I am taking my power back.

I have discovered myself and who I truly am through the pages of this blog.  You have witnessed my healing here.  You are an important part of that healing and I will say to you once again that I am so grateful for that.  Perhaps my story today helps you understand a little bit more about why this is true.  Perhaps it can help you understand what is true for you.

I am happy and grateful and excited to be on the path to brighter, more balanced, and even more beautiful things.  I am looking forward to settling into a philosophy, not a religion.  Perhaps I will even be able to settle into the philosophy of all philosophies.  Is Alchemy really a viable path?  Is it really all I think it will be cracked up to be?  Honestly, I think it is that AND SO MUCH MORE.  

And what a beautiful world it would be, to be able to finally get to work on my Magnum Opus.  The true journey.  The true Alchemical Wedding.  The journey that can go as many places as it needs to go.  The journey that can take as much time as it needs in order to manifest itself.  The journey that just might be a once in a lifetime opportunity.  It just might be the once in ALL of my LIFETIMES opportunity.  It just might be THE ONE.

AND SO IT IS...