Carol Howard Merritt - Healing Spiritual Wounds: Reconnecting With a Loving God After Experiencing a Hurtful Church

I paced the small room, wringing my hands as if sopped with foul dishwater. What should I do? I breathed the question through choppy gasps as I listened to the human explosion down the hall.

Fear choked me as I heard the voices of my mother and father, rising and cresting, with angry rhythm. I tried to figure out my strategy if it became dangerous. I could barge into the living room with some sort of demand and start redirecting my fathers rage toward me. I regularly used that trick because my dad had never hit me, and so the interruption would confuse his fury. But it worked better when my sister was caught in the snare of argument. When my mom was fighting, my intrusion could just make the violence worse.

What should I do?

I thought about my bank account. I started it as soon as I could and filled it with as much exit money as I could gather. My classmates spent their money at the mall, but Id been saving mine for a while. I had to have a plan. I had older friends who would take me in when it got too bad, but I didnt think I could leave yet. I didnt have enough money and I had too much time before college. No one had enough patience for somebody elses teenager invading her space for three years.

What should I do?

I walked from one corner to the other, from my bookshelves to my bed, a simple path, back and forth, so small that it almost made me dizzy. My mind, in contrast, felt like a complicated labyrinth as I tried to figure my way out.

What should I do?

I could run to the neighbors house again, but my mom warned me that they would call child protective services if I kept going to them for help. Then she filled my head with enough foster care horror stories to make me fear Id be jumping from a scary ledge into the heart of a volcano. If I left, I needed to do it on my terms. But what were my terms?

What should I do?

Our family was an upstanding Christian family. I had gone to the church for help, but their teachingthat my father was the head of the house and we needed to submit to himseemed useless now.

What should I do?

The voices grew louder. Dishes banged and clattered. I stood next to my door and tried to figure out if it was from jerky, angry handling or throwing. I didnt think he was throwing things. Not yet.

I had no place to turn, and so I went back to my wringing, pacing, and asking, What should I do? until it became a chant. I added an address to my pleading, and it was a prayer. O God, what should I do? God, what should I do? I muttered as fear overwhelmed me.

Then, as if I entered the eye of a tropical storm, peace blew its hot, humid breath. My feet stilled, but not out of panic. I looked down at my hands and they were motionless too. I inhaled smooth, deep air. The sense of normalcy was such an odd feeling that I sat on my bed and listened to the breath coming out of my mouth in wonder. I closed my eyes and placed my palms up on my lap. I no longer heard the fighting. I wasnt sure if it actually stopped, but I didnt hear it any longer. Instead, this overwhelming sense that it would be okaythat I would be okayflooded me. God surrounded and embraced me.

I became altered so much in that moment that I was sure I was breathing God. I didnt know exactly how, but I understood it to be as true as the oxygen that filled my lungs. I had a sudden realization that I was living, moving, and being in God. The solitary event altered my outlook in such a way that it marked me internally with a before and an after. BCE and CE Before the Carol Era and the Carol Era.

Something grew in the room beside my bed and bookshelves. It was a treea spiritual tree but still vivid to me. The gnarled twisting roots burrowed deep into the rug and the foundation, and they kept plunging, through the earths crust and into the mantle. I could feel the branches hunched with the wearied exhaustion of carrying the weight of the world for so many years, while the hardy trunk looked as if it had stood up to the most bullying hurricanes.

If I could get a good look at its vivisection, I had no doubt that the rings would prove its ancient history. But I had no desire to cut it down. Instead, I imagined plucking a great piece of fruit from its drooping limb and biting into it. It would be bursting with intense hybrid flavors, a genetic splicing of an apple tree with horseradish. For me this connected to the Seder meal, where on the same plate we combined the bitter herbs of horseradish and the sweetness of the apple.

The meal was a reminder to the people of Israel that life was full of bitterness and sweetness. Sometimes they both came on one plate. In my conjured vision of that Saturday morning, both flavors mixed in one fruit. I savored the sweetness of my life, family, and religion, but I also knew it tasted bitter at times. My years encompassed the intensity of this contrast.

As I breathed in my complicated peace, I prayed that God would protect my mother. I asked that God would give me compassion for my father. I prayed for the courage to forgive. As I chewed on that fruit, it wasnt as if the peace lulled me into complacency and made me want to stay in the house. Instead, it gave me a connection with God and strength to leave when I could.

GETTING PAST MY INNER SKEPTIC

A skeptic lives inside me. Just as my memories come with fictional fruit trees attached to them, this inner skeptic also comes out to play among my recollections. With a little jab at my rib cage, he says, Oh, how nice. God, your imaginary friend, arrived just in time! But if God had time for house calls, dont you think that God would be with the starving kids in Haiti rather than with your little privileged white self?

I smile at my skeptic and keep telling the story, even if it makes me ridiculous. There are some spiritual experiences that I cannot fully explain, and doing so may make me sound naive. But they are my truth, and so I take a determined step right over my cynic and his morbid chuckle. I keep moving, making a leap of faith. While in mid-jump, I grasp hold of these narratives because they contain a veracity that a stripped-down history could not. I remind my skeptic that were not rewarded for suffering. God has preference for the poor, but the Holy One doesnt show up like a gold medal for the Oppression Olympics. I just noticed God more in the midst of heartache, because of my need. But God was always there, just as God is in Haiti.

And as for God being imaginary, Gods presence in my bedroom arrived like a substance. It was like the sweet high of the epidural hitting a spine after hours of muscle-straining, sweaty labor. The peace I experienced felt like prolonged sleep, an ache-less back, or the ability to walk. Its one of those things you dont recognize unless youve lived without it; but if youve been in turmoil for a long time, then peace takes on a particular palpability. It is as real as cerulean blue.

That was how I spent my teen years, with that complicated bittersweet relish surrounding me. Fully knowing that religion had been complicit in the violence, I still searched for spiritual peace. I had many things to offer me solace, things into which I readily submergedfriends, books, art, and nature. They all served as retreats from the chaos at home.