What Religion Should Look Like

“I ran down the road, pants down to my knees, screaming, ‘Please come help me that Canadian Shaman gave a little too much to me.’”

Father John Misty makes it sound hilarious. The image of getting backdoored by a Shaman sounds like a joke, right? You trust a religious person with your heart and soul, but end up running away with your pants down to your knees.

It starts out like “whoopsies…lost my pants in the shaman’s tent (again)”, but at some point you have to say, “What the fuck just happened?” I thought this was a good thing. I thought religion was supposed to make things better, but I’m pretty sure I just about got raped. I was lucky to get out of there with my ass-ginity in tact.

Maybe I laugh a little too hard at that opening line to FJMisty’s “I’m Writing a Novel”, because that’s a familiar experience to me. Not so much the literal (almost) rape by a religious leader, but the more figurative (literal) rape of my mind.

What?

Here’s what I mean. Today, I was talking to a guy at my kid’s open house at school. He was telling me about a guy getting out of prison after 20 years and immediately committing an arson on purpose just so he could go back to jail. I immediately thought of the Shawshank Redemption and the definition of institutionalized.

Red tells Andy, “These walls are funny. First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That's institutionalized.”

That was my Christian experience. Didn’t like it. Got used to it. Depended on it. It should be freedom. And Grace. And good memories. But, it was prison to me. It was a mind fuck that is going to be a lifelong work in progress to unfuck. Just like it was for one of the Shawshank inmates, Brooks, who couldn’t deal with life outside the walls of Shawshank prison.

If you do the same thing long enough, it’s hard to get out of that rut and do life somewhere else. People keep the same job for 30 years because it’s comfortable. People stay in marriages for life even if they’re miserable, because they get used to the walls, the same way Brooks got used to prison. Once Brooks got out of prison, he couldn’t fucking take it and committed suicide. He depended on the walls of prison to give his life meaning. He was somebody in prison. He was nobody in the real world.

My old college roommate recently reunited with one of our unofficial roommates, a homeless guy we affectionately called “Mike Porch”. Mike would stay on our porch if he needed a little shelter from the elements. Mike, and other guys like him, choose to be homeless. When you see the type of shit he saw and do the shit he was forced to do in Vietnam (I think it was Vietnam) there’s no way in hell you’re ever going to be “right” as defined by society. There’s no chance he’s going to become an accountant and get a place in the suburbs.

He chose the armed forces, thinking he’d come back a hero. Instead, he came back to night terrors and flashbacks. Fuck that. I’d drink whatever I could get my hands on too. Society smells his breath and looks at his crooked teeth and unwashed body and passes judgement. Fuck society. That’s what he said. He’ll “camp out” as he calls it. He’s not homeless. He’s just dealing with his shit his way.

There are walls that society thinks he should live inside, but he flat can’t. I tried to put up walls around him when I was a 19 year old Christian. I remember saying something to him like, “Mike…the Bible doesn’t say anything about drinking being wrong. It just says that drinking in excess is wrong.”

Fuck me.

The religious walls that were passed down to me were trying to instill that awful tradition in this poor, mind-fucked man who had done what he thought he was supposed to do (serve his country), but his reward was the same that Father John Misty got from the shaman. To think that Mike took the time to listen to know-it-all Christians like I used to be is pretty fucking amazing. But, although he listened, he knew better than to believe our hand-me-down Christian absolute truths. I remember him immediately setting me straight about the drinking issue, “oh I fucking drink in excess.” He wanted to make it perfectly clear that he was no saint. But, it took me going through my own shit to get his story.

25 years ago I couldn’t relate. But, now I fucking adore the guy for putting up with us. He got the idea of story time long before I did. You can’t judge a book by its cover. You can’t just look at a homeless guy and assume the worst.  Listen. Mike was great at that. Despite the fact that we spewed stuff that his life experience must have immediately told him was bullshit.

The best Mike line ever came when all of us were standing around in our kitchen, sharing Bible verses. Mike probably didn’t know any, but wanted to be part of the discussion. So he chimed in with the classic, “Well, I don’t know if it ever made it in the Bible, but what about ‘better thee than me? ‘”

He should have used that mentality and been a dick to us. He should have said, “fuck those Christian assholes who think they know everything.” Instead, he tried to talk like us. He gave us his extra food. He listened and was patient with us. With acts of kindness like that, I guess you could say he was a helluva lot better Christian than we ever were.

20 years later, he and my old roommate just happened to run into each other. And what was Mike’s response? Obviously, he invited Cullen and his family out to his homeless camp for dinner.

I spent 30+ years surrounded by the walls of Christianity. We talked a certain way. And thought a certain way. And got so stuck inside the rut of our walls that it was hard to see things any other way. But, I can’t even begin to explain how much better life is when you get a chance to see who you are without the walls that define most people. Without the job. Without the family. Without the religion. You find out who you really are. And, the truth is, I’m no Mike Porch.

Spend time with guys like that and you’ll scream like Misty did to start this blog, or so conventional wisdom would argue. The reality is, it’s only when you’re outside looking back at what religion did to you that you can see how much it tried to fuck you over. Mike’s not the bad guy. Organized religion is the bad guy. Feel good when you do good. Feel shitty when you fuck up. That’s what my Christian experience was like.

But, I get to do life differently now. Story time with Mike Porch beats the hell out of Bible study with the saints. Mike could have chosen to say fuck the government. He could have chosen to kill himself rather than live with his demons, but man…look at that fucking smile. That homeless mother fucker is doing life to the full. No pants down to the knees. No running away in shame. He’s what religion should look like.