Unholy Rhythms
On the pain of leaving the church I grew up in (with mixed dance metaphors; don’t think about it too hard)
church of my youth, do you remember when we used to dance? when I could enter your halls and stand in your pews, arms outstretched, my feet bouncing? I’d slip right into your beat: you’d put your arms around me, placing your hands on my shoulders, pray for me, and we’d sway side by side to the music of hallelujahs. I stepped side to side and sang songs with such power, pouring joy into my soul like the fistfuls of multicolored flour that we’d throw at each other at the summer camp color war. do you remember me then, prancing and laughing with robin’s egg blue on my cheeks, green and yellow splotches on my shoulders? I was like a bird, arms fluttering like wings, legs leaping into the air, but I didn’t know that I was in a cage. you let me paint myself, but only with the colors you chose. after my summer camp days were over, when I decided to paint on colors of my own, red on my forehead, purple and green on my palms, yellow and indigo on my forearms, and orange and blue splatters on my feet, you reminded me that you led this waltz and you stepped on my toes. you pinched the colors of my body in disgust, leaving bruises, telling me that black and white would look better. that was when the steady beat we always had together became intermingled with sharp notes of pain that never stopped no matter how much I tried to listen to the sweet melody instead. the last time we ever danced, I entered your halls and could hear the music growing softer, dissipating. I bit my lips, because though I had started to jump off-beat to your incessant drumming, there’s something about that melody that always kept me going. in these last few steps we took together, your music wrapped itself around me. I savored the lyrics on my tongue, singing out, “what a beautiful name it is, the name of Jesus Christ my King.” in the silent pause at the end of the songs I prayed, head bowed, eyes closed. after the worship music, there was the sermon. my hand swirled across the page as I wrote notes in a journal, question marks ringing in my ears like alarm bells. but it wasn’t all out of tune. for a few moments, I took your hand in mine and could hear that sweet melody again, soft and persistent. but then the questions and doubts came back, loud and buzzing. that was how our waltz came to an end. I left, with no words of goodbye, because I could not bear the dissonance, your notes turning sour towards me. I just walked, far away, until I could no longer hear you.
Up until this very moment, this poem (which was an assignment in a creative writing class during my junior year of college, prompt was writer’s choice) used to be titled “Holy Rhythms,” but I have decided to change it to “Unholy Rhythms” because although my pain is holy (that is, not that suffering is holy, but that my pain deserves to be taken seriously, that this grief and anger that I experienced in my holy body was valid), what I describe here, what that church did to me, was not. Originally, this poem had a final stanza that tried to end on a hopeful note, some thought that maybe one day, I could go back, if the church became better, was replaced by a better pastor after the old one stepped down. But a key piece of constructive criticism that I got in a workshop was that the end of the poem didn’t need to be the end of my experience, that it would be more powerful to focus on the grief and let the reader sit there in it with me. And now I definitely don’t have hope that whatever senior pastor comes after him will be even slightly more progressive—it’ll probably be one of the pastor’s sons. I think this poem was making peace with the fact that I was leaving fully, that I wasn’t going to stay there and try to “bring positive change” because I knew my voice would not be heard there.
I wanted to share a few snippets of the description from when I posted this on DeviantArt back in 2019. Although I didn’t get too many eyes on my work on the website (with the exception of two pieces, which actually won awards on the site), I’m really glad that I posted on there and made a literary space for myself that ended up showing my faith deconstruction in real time. It’s why I haven’t deleted anything even though I don’t use the website anymore—I get to share pieces of the in-progress baby gay me with you:
“I came out on Facebook as bisexual1 this past week. I felt ready. And surprisingly, I have gotten some positive responses from people in the church I grew up in. But I'm still not going back. I've already gone through the pain of leaving, and I do not have the energy to try and make change. It is a megachurch and there are too many people who will not listen to me. And yet, the way I feel about this church is so complicated—I hold joy paradoxically alongside the pain, precisely because of moments and feelings that I reminisce about in this piece. I loved summer camp; my gosh, I still need to write more and be able to articulate what that meant to me. I need to be able to articulate how much I love worship, and why it feels so good. The whole experience of leaving a church is weird. It's so hard.”
Although I now see the choice to leave the church I grew up in as the best thing I ever did, and have found new community and love in abundance, this poem reminds me how hard it was to leave, reminds me of the trauma that many LGBTQ+ youth are still experiencing. Leaving a church or staying in it should never be a choice between embracing your queerness or not. And you should never regret leaving because you feel guilty that you didn’t stay and try to bring about change.
This experience is what compels me to my studies at The Seattle School. I have that deep-in-my-bones need to create spiritual spaces where LGBTQ+ youth are safe—especially if they don’t have a safe space at school, in their home, or in any churches they have ever been in. A couple weeks into classes, I’m still not sure how I’m making that happen. But I am seeing what queer flourishing looks like in a church. At the time of this post’s release, I’ll be at a “lunch and learn” event after church hearing from Shannon Kearns, co-creator of queertheology.com (I’m probably going to be a total dork, lol). For the past few weeks, I’ve been involved in a discussion class on Shannon’s new book, and damn, his vision for what the church could be gives me so much hope. The church I’m currently part of doesn’t dance too much—though I do, I sway and raise my hands during worship because that is still a central part of who I am and how I connect to God—but it is filled with vitality, and opportunities for me to serve. It’s a new rhythm, but the melody of Jesus that first drew me to faith is as strong as ever. And the question marks no longer ring in my ears like alarm bells, but as invitations to conversation and adventure.
Have you ever had to leave a faith community? What was that experience like, in all its challenges and gifts?
Oops, turns out I’m a lesbian. And I kinda started to have doubts about the bisexual label shortly after coming out, but I was like…uh I just came out and that already took a lot of energy, let’s table this question for now.
I moved around a lot as a young adult so by default I left churches frequently, but I definitely left evangelicalism and orthodox Christianity in general (meaning, don’t make me agree to doctrinal statements to be part of a church, please!). But I went and married a fellow seminarian who’s a pastor, so I haven’t left church life altogether, for sure. Sometimes I come to his church, sometimes I go to the most liberal church I could find in our small town we moved to for his pastor job. I’m an unconventional pastor’s spouse, lol. So it’s a funny “dance” I suppose I’m doing with the church and Christianity!
I love your poem. Thank you for sharing it. You describe some experiences I can relate to quite a lot.
My partner and I left the church I grew up in, that we married in, almost 9 years ago now, and at the time it was a “we have to get out of here NOW” decision that I don’t regret one bit. I thought for years we’d find another church-did for a while-but my deep distrust of institutionalized religion coupled with our family’s sensory needs mean we have no interest in finding one for the foreseeable future.
It’s nice to hear once in a while about others finding a church where they can thrive. It reminds me not to over generalize about individual churches.