Confessional
"Lord, grant that I might not so much seek to be loved as to love." - St. Francis of Assisi
I sink my weight onto the narrow wooden platform as I softly close my eyes, the warmth of the sun coming through the stained-glass windows and kissing my cheekbones, my nose. The priest leads us through the Lord's Prayer and I follow along, the words coming effortlessly. I have done this before. I have been here many times before.
The church is Episcopalian, the building made of red-fired bricks with ivy crawling idyllically up the east wall. Ever since I had spent a year in Germany I knew I couldn't go back to the Baptist church. I was too drawn to the beauty and the aesthetics of the Catholic mass I had experienced there, and in my small town an Episcopalian church was the closest I was going to get to it. The sound of the pipe organs moves through us as we stand to sing from the hymnal, our untrained voices settling into an easy and uncomplicated harmony.
My relationship with the church is also relatively uncomplicated. Though I was raised in the Southern Baptist church my mother was a single mom raising several children, working full time, finishing school. Church was something we did on Christmas, on Easter, and on the Sundays when my mother could afford the lack of sleep. I never felt inspired in those large, minimalist auditoriums, soft Christian rockers playing the same three chords over simplistic lyrics that felt like they belonged in a children's choir. The pastor yelling at us from a stage that seemed too far away. He was like a celebrity. Untouchable.
After the service our small congregation filters into the dining hall, this was my week to provide the snacks. Other than the few children of local families, I was the youngest person there at twenty years old. I unwrap the cookies I had made, arranging a tray of chopped vegetables with various dips and dressings as I talk amicably with the organist, who was also one of my college professors. This type of religion is not so popular among people my age. It's a little too subdued, not quite sensational enough. I think it was a phenomenon that I was there. An oddity, but a welcome one.
There is no confessional in the Episcopalian church, but we had a deacon named Christie who was almost 80 years old and a wonderful sounding board for anyone with a trouble or two. I would drive my old station wagon to her home which was shaded by oak trees on all sides. She would serve me sweet tea and shortbread while we chatted on her patio. On Sundays after the service I would follow her around, holding the box of fresh candles as she replaced the old ones in the chapel, warmed by the peacefulness of her presence.
It is amazing the things we want to share, the truths that bubble up unwittingly to the surface. I found myself telling her anything and everything - I couldn't stop. It is human, I think, to ask another to be a witness to our pain. See me, we are asking, hoping that the act of being seen will set us free. And it does, a lot of the time.
Our church was a community center more than anything, and the place where the idea of religion became less theoretical and more tangible for me, something solid I could hold onto. We ran a free meal program, and partnered with the Methodist church across the way to send food-insecure school children home with meals for dinner and the weekends. We ran a thrift store that, if asked, you could come in after hours and take anything you needed. The week of my finals I checked my college mailbox to find it stuffed full of goodies to lift my spirits (and satisfy my sweet tooth).
Now the focus of my prayer has moved outside: to the moon, the trees, the water—the earth herself. Our great cosmic mother. There are truths to be found everywhere, and the sacred is anywhere we wish to see it. My tarot cards sit right next to my bible, both integral in the making of me. The creation of a religious practice is a strange journey, one that seems to defy all explanation. It is a continued attempt to come home to ourselves, and one that can only be completed as we eventually leave these physical bodies once and for all at the end of their cycle.
Christianity is an old wound, a trauma that has left it's mark on us as individuals, on our histories, and the very land we walk. I am lucky to have walked through it relatively unscathed as a queer woman, a prostitute. As a white person Christianity has not been used to erase my culture or my identity—it is a part of my culture, my identity. I think the rest was just luck or circumstantial, but somehow the church is not so much a looming danger for me, but rather more like a friend you've known since childhood and still talk to, even though you disagree on some things.
The bible has a lot to say about prostitution. And yet I come back to it, like an album from my youth that should now be embarrassing but still is able to move me to the deepest tremors of feeling. There is a line somewhere that exists, separating god from the men who write about them, though I'm not always sure where it rests. The bible has a lot of rules that are harsh and vicious, and I have long since stopped trying to reconcile the text itself with my actual faith. If we were to take the bible at face value then we'd all be going to hell, and what kind of world would that be?
"To preserve you from the evil woman, from the smooth tongue of the adulteress. Do not desire her beauty in your heart, and do not let her capture you with her eyelashes; for the price of a prostitute is only a loaf of bread, but a married woman hunts down a precious life." (Proverbs, 6:24)
The price of a prostitute is only a loaf of bread, but a married woman hunts down a precious life. So it says in the King James Version. But the English Standard Version is a little different, see, it ends - "and the adulteress will hunt for the precious life."
Who is the hunter here - the prostitute or the married woman? Either way we are coming for you, claws out and fangs bared, waiting for the right moment to attack. Either way we are pitted against each other, one woman thirsting for the blood of the other. They have to make us into enemies, otherwise who would choose the subservience over liberation? I have to remember that these words were still written by men, taken by kings and made to uphold a world in which they hoard all the power.
I may live in the cage of criminalization but at least I can see the bars; I know my captors. Prostitution in the bible is often really about adultery—if I am profiting from sex with a man then I must be stealing him away from his wife, who is noble and godly (and yet easily susceptible to my charms). Biblical prostitution is not so much about the money but rather the destruction of the family unit in a time where the strength of your family was intimately connected to your economic livelihood—somehow we are out to get you. Watch out, they say.
Marriage is often its own captivity, one that is designed to make us think that we are cherished and pious, that if we work hard enough to maintain our households, raise our children, serve our husbands, that we will be holy. I have nothing against partnership or family, but I have to recognize the ways in which our value as women and non-men is tied to our willingness to be wives and mothers, and that alone.
Damned and liberated, as Virginie Despentes says, is the woman who walks alone in the night. The only freedom I have is to choose the way in which I will be hated, the way in which I will be punished for the mere fact of my womanhood. And I am not alone. How many are made into the Other, the Less Than, and how often am I as a white woman given the opportunity to step on the hands of others to get closer to what is supposed to be the Ideal and the power that comes along with it?
Lord forgive us, for we know not what we do. Here we all are grasping, only some of us are much better at us than others. Who were the real sinners but the tax collectors and the rich fools—they who make a mockery of life, of faith, yet hold all the power and push us down with its weight.
I still believe in god, of course. I still believe in the nameless, faceless force of the universe that rests within and without us all. I like to think it's all the same, that we choose the face of the god that feels right for us, whatever that might be. I want to be as close as I can for as long as it lasts. And I am not afraid to be a sinner.
Church is a hard place to be. I got lucky, with my Episcopalian congregation in the rural south, what we had was something special. So many preachers throw it out at you like an accusation are you faithful are you faithful are you faithful that even the admittance of your own humanity feels like the freshest of scars.
Are you faithful?
Faithful to who - God? A husband? My feet are always dirty and I never don't have bruises on my knees - I walk barefoot in my garden and kneel at an altar of pigeon feathers and old teeth. I pray and sing and I wonder who washed the feet of Jesus, because I know that even a prostitute can be dirty without being wretched.
Who did Jesus speak his sins to?
People like to fight about whether or not Mary Magdalene was a hooker but I find that I don't much care. If it wasn't her then it was another—she, like so many before her, has become an archetype. A symbol. Even if it wasn't her, there was a whore at God's table, and there will always be a seat for her there.
There is a freedom in being the whore, even as I look over my shoulder at every turn, wondering who is behind me. I am allowed to reject the prescriptions that society has written for me because I choose to be a criminal—I walk around as I please, I accept the danger in deciding not to be a kept woman. The empowerment is not in the fucking but in the independence from anyone else who might seek to bind me. This should not be mistaken as a romantic take on living the life that I do, merely the observation that I have been able to find meaning in it, and I have used it to make my life better than it otherwise was. The line between choosing this life and being chosen is also blurry—the more steps you take the less it feels like you can do anything else. I have already been branded. Might as well keep going.
Across from my bed there is a wall of mirrors, and in the midst of our embrace I lock eyes with myself over their shoulders, greeting myself in that moment of union. There I am, wanton and brazen, openly daring to use my femininity and my sexuality for my own personal gain, and not for the church or the state or some theoretical husband. Lounging in my apartment after with my breasts hanging lazily out as I watch you gather your things, already thinking about the cigarette I'm going to go smoke. I am using my body to walk through a capitalist world and survive here, when they would rather see me die. And I am one of the lucky ones.
I refuse to be grateful for my poverty, though perhaps I am grateful for the strength that it gave me. But I am demanding more always. I have greedy hands that will take anything they can get in this world. Because the world in fact owes me. God owes me. Have I not suffered, despite my faith? Have I not been left wanting? I do not find it shameful to desire a decent life. I refuse to lick my wounds in private to ease the conscience of my torturers, instead I am drawing them in even as I push them away. You cannot use god against me because they are on my side, you see, for they are nothing if not love and I have enough of that to fill every crack and crevice in the universe.
A poor woman using her body endangers the place of the upper class woman who has chosen to place herself closer to power,y et always beneath it. That was what people like King James and his bible were worried about, I think, because once a woman gets a taste for living outside of her bounds she doesn't want to go back to the old way of doing things. And when people who have been cast out and left to die by the nation have found a way to survive, well, that just won't do.
This is my confessional. It is messy and incomplete. Not all of my questions have answers but I am willing to look for them, and I am willing to believe in something greater even when the odds are stacked against me. There is no paradox in being religious and being a whore - people are confusing god with the men in power who say they speak on their behalf. Still, it has been a while since I've seen the inside of a church, because inside there are people, and they are the ones who take issue with my presence.
It says in Luke we must love our enemies, and do good, we must not judge nor condemn others. We must forgive so that we may be forgiven. There is no solid ground here - it is all waves. You can't distinguish one from another, they blend together, they are always shifting. All the laughter and beauty, and ugliness as well. At the center of all I find stillness, for there is peace in the mystery of faith. We are all holy.