In the clutches of puberty as I was, I spent many nights writing in sweat and anguish over my INABILITY to keep ‘dirty thoughts’ out of my mind, and my body chemistry, and so my failure to live up to the expectations I was told Jesus had for me…and praying like hell for forgiveness for something I absolutely couldn’t *control* no matter how I tried.
I weas eventuallly forced to the conclusion that Christianity as it had been given to me was anti-human, it could not help but put me at war with the body I didn’t ask for and couldn’t trade in. At 15, my parents dropped me off at the church & watch me walk in before they drove away…and went down the stairs, too a double left down the hall…and out the back door & into the woods.
I spent the next hour or two sitting in the sunlight, next to a trickling stream, listening to the birds, the water, and the wind in the trees…and I KNEW suddenly and without a shred of doubt that if God were in the vicinity, he was out there, in the Sun by the creek, with me - and not in that building with its Sunday Christians & their missionary drives and their building fund and their constant grooming and scolding