Born Again (Excerpt 7 of 8)
The Washing of Regeneration
This is the seventh in a series of excerpts I am doing from my book “Born Again.” It’s from the fourth chapter, which is called The Washing of Regeneration. If you’ve not yet read the previous installments, you can find them here: First | Second | Third | Fourth | Fifth | Sixth
“We are made to fear ourselves and our fullness.”
I’ve spent the past few decades unlearning and discarding beliefs that were damaging and harmful to me. This type of purging inevitably raises questions of whether one is throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. I’m not quite sure how to respond to such concerns, except to say that if a system is built on a foundation of teachings that cause us to:
Loathe our humanity, rather than embrace it
Suppress or repress our feelings
Judge, shame, and distrust ourselves
Discard our own reason, intuition, and decision-making abilities
Submit to others and what they believe is best for us
Put others first, regardless of the costs inflicted on ourselves
Fear and withdraw from the outside world
View pleasure and happiness with suspicion
Passively wait on God, rather than taking proactive and responsible actions of our own
Live primarily for a purported afterlife, rather than in the present moment
…then I think that system has to go.
And so I have chosen, the best I can, to walk away.
There is great difficulty associated with that seismic shift; at times, it has felt as if I’m in mourning. I feel like the world I grew up in has been turned upside down. I was always led to believe that I was on the team of “the good guys.” We were the ones who were right! We knew absolute truth! We were on God’s side! (Or perhaps he was on ours?)
That sense of certainty has evaporated for me, bringing great relief, but also confusion and grief as I’ve opened myself up to being called wayward, backslidden, an infidel, a heretic by people I love and care for.
Who I am at 51 is not who I was a year ago, or even a month ago, and it’s not who I will be a year from now. There are many things I don’t have answers for, and I’ll no longer claim that I do. Life is amazing, complicated, mysterious, often unfathomable, and that’s enough for me.
“I was recently told that I ‘wandered away from the faith.’ My response was, ‘No, I didn’t wander, but quite intentionally fled and abandoned the toxic religion I was taught’…
It requires courage and determination to create the life you want, because it is likely antithetical to what you’ve been told your life ‘should’ be. If consciously directing and living your own life was easy, everyone would be doing it.
Some people will claim that you’ve ‘lost it.’ Okay. Yes, you’ve lost the beliefs, mindsets, narratives, and ideology that poisoned your soul, but you have gained your liberation and fresh start.”
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You can read the next excerpt here.
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