My God

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I’m back from my “Mattie Jo Goes to the Belly of the Beast/Bible Belt” book tour (fun pics abound!) last week and oh boy, do I have a soul filled metaphorical cup that can’t wait to be spilled over via my big mouth and overtyping fingers. Let’s dive right in.

Upon returning to the Northeast from the Midwest, Ken (my beloved, not raised at all religious Jersey frat/tech boy partner) asked me about the details. I caught him up on each stop and why each was different. I showed him pictures and told him how grateful I feel for every moment filled with meeting readers who told me their stories. How time slaps me in the face when I go back to my childhood home or see my niece play varsity basketball when she was struggling to say “Silver Dollar City (SHIDDER DODDER SHITTY!) just yesterday.

And then, I told him through hesitant yet happy tears, that I think I had … a relationship with God again?

Even typing that feels SO WEIRD and trigger-y.

One of the things I’ve missed the most since I deconstructed my “personal relationship with Jesus Christ” is the sense that I am never on my own. Okay, that’s not entirely true. I do like parts of feeling like God has gone away. For example, I am very grateful to longer feel the sense that Jesus is watching me masturbate or watch reruns of Laguna Beach when “you should really be reading my Bible, Mattie Jo!” It was nice to not feel like I was failing as a “woman of God” every time I preferred trashy TV pleasure over “deepening my connection with Christ.”

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Looking back, this loss of personal connection (with God) was the most heartbreaking part of my deconstruction.

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What I do miss, however, is the feeling that I’m not ever going at life reliant solely on my own efforts. The kind of comforting, ever present presence. The creepy, Peeping Tom meets Santa kind.

This feeling of going at life alone started before I actually admitted to myself I wasn’t a Christian. Once I moved to NYC unmarried and began living “out of alignment with Christ’s teachings” I believed I wasn’t earning God’s* goodness, therefore he was no longer there to help me out.

*(I’m using God and Jesus interchangeably)

This loneliness intensified when I stopped believing that Jesus was the messiah, and therefore, my identity as a Christian died. Jesus was no longer “walking with me daily.” Basically, I wasn’t holding up my end of this “unconditional love” bargain I was told God established. You know, the Christian love that says “Nothing you can ever do will separate God’s love from us! Unless you don’t ask Jesus into your heart/identify, save your virginity until you’re married, and try to constantly convert all your gay friends. Then he’ll burn you in hell.” Definitely unconditional.

The point is, I wasn’t doing my Christian belief and behavior part so I didn’t think I had access to Jesus anymore. Without this omnipresent partner in crime, I felt both more in control of the outcomes of my life, and also, more pressure. Jesus wasn’t on my good side (or on any side, really) so I had to make things happen on my own, with less peace.

After all the hurt and anger I felt towards Christianity during what I call my Rubble Years – I’d knocked everything down but had no idea how to rebuild. So I was sitting alone in an atomic wasteland of my previous set of beliefs, identity, and “blueprint for life” – I just needed a clean break from it all. So I stopped trying to connect with God all together.

Looking back, this loss of personal connection was the most heartbreaking part of my deconstruction.

I felt like I’d lost my forever best friend. Or worse, that I’d never really had that best friend to begin with. They were a figment of my imagination and I could never go back to basing my entire life on connection with a fictional character. Talking to Jesus felt like talking to an imaginary friend.

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I liked my island of relativism. It was such a nice reprieve from the Great Commision anxiety of my yester-faith.

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I could no longer fall for the delusion of it all.

In the last ten years since the private denunciation of my Christian identity, crying while overlooking Broadway and the Hudson from that miraculously gifted penthouse on the Upper West Side (read my book for this story), I’ve tried many different modalities of faith. Crystals, candles, and jumbled up ideas about a higher power based on the writings of Pema Chodron, many-a-life coaches, and Winnie the Pooh. My “faith” practice became neuroscience meets woo woo shit.

I leaned into the belief that there is something beyond me at work in my life, but I can’t and won’t ever fully understand it, so don’t bother trying. That “thing” is not to be proselytized about for the sake of conversion, and it doesn’t even have to “work” for someone else. As long as it was working for me, that was all that mattered. Things like manifestation work, vision boards, positive affirmations, acting in alignment with my words, feeling the future in the now, etc etc. This, to me, was a faith that was truly personal.

I liked my island of relativism. It was such a nice reprieve from the Great Commision anxiety of my yester-faith.

I experienced so much good at the helms of general mindset shifts and/or adjusting my narratives around certain experiences. Something as little as reframing ghosting rejection after a date I thought went well was no longer about my lovability, but about something going on in that person’s life that had nothing to do with me! And let me tell you, nothing is more empowering than a woman raised in patriarchy and purity culture learning to reframe rejection as a moment of rejoicing. Onward, ho!

I nailed more auditions, made more money, and learned to love myself. My life got genuinely better once I no longer identified as a Christian.

In this new approach to my life I did see how much good was within my control. How much my brain and beliefs dictated my outcomes.

I even experienced brief moments of a “good force” wrapping me in moments of closeness, peace, and inexplicable love; much like the feelings I used to have with my personal Jesus. Perhaps my having access to the goodness of God was not contingent on my religious identity, sexual identity, or anything else identity? Perhaps God’s love really was unconditional.

Despite my brief moments of connection with the good force, I have kept that “good force God” at a distance. Mostly because I still have trauma from this God. I am afraid if we get too close again, it might ask me to be a missionary. Or worse, a pastor.

Okay Mattie Jo, what’s your point here?

I’m telling you all of this because while on this book tour I felt closer and closer and closer to that personal Jesus I’ve been missing/afraid of.

I’ve connected with them/he/her in …

Meeting readers who shared how reading my shambly-ass stories through my deconstruction has helped them heal.

Seeing old friends who feel like home.

Laughing until my ribs hurt with my father at a dinner table with my sorority sisters.

Watching my niece do gymnastics tricks that make my shoulders hurt.

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As an Enneagram 4 creative person, I love being delusional! In fact, I fully embrace that I am vibrantly delulu. It is way more fun than being realistic, and often churns more positive results than the stick up their butts realists!

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Witnessing my mom cheers with bloody marys to memories with her high school besties. (Who are huge fans of my writing because apparently religious trauma didn’t skip the Boomers.)

Hugging my school teachers who look me in the eyes and say “Oh Mattie. This president. What are we going to do about the world?” with a purity of concern I think maybe only elementary school art teachers possess.

Listening to my 13 year old nephew read stories of the Old Testament like the pornographic comic book tales they are.

Holding space for one sister’s rage and the other’s hurt.

Seeing my brother be the best dad he can be, despite the trials of her first year, to his baby girl.

On my science meets woo woo spiritual journey time away from the Christian God, I also learned this lesson: Don’t fault people for being totally delusional.

As an Enneagram 4 creative person, I love being delusional! In fact, I fully embrace that I am vibrantly delulu. It is way more fun than being realistic, and often churns more positive results than the stick up their butts realists! (I’ve said this to Ken, who is a total realist. And he said “I bet the stick feels nice though.”) As long as my delusion isn’t hurting anyone – conflating my “beliefs” with “knowing” then becoming like the Crossfitters and Christians, enforcing my “truth” on everyone else – who cares if I’m delusional?!

I left the Midwest, got on my flight (so terrified to fly I peed my pants. But that’s a different blog post), ready to maybe be a little delulu: Ready to return to a relationship with my personal, ever present God.

I don’t care if the story of Jesus is historically true. I don’t care if the existence of God is factually true. Does it need to be? Don’t the best works of fiction tell us about our soul’s desires, our ability to imagine alternative endings, and learn from others’ stories of love, of loss?

As a creative, I feel deeply connected to the story of a creator. A celestial artist who is in awe of the created and the creating. (which is so poetic and beautiful when you’re thinking about sunsets, not so much when you’re thinking about cockroaches but whatever. I’m going with it.) I also feel the most connected to “God the father,” not because of #patriarchy but because, to be honest, I have an amazing dad. Accessing that understanding of love is easy for me. For some it might be a mother. For some it might be a grandma or a lioness or an elephant with multiple tusks. Who the fuck cares?!

So I’m getting honest with myself. I don’t feel the most connected to God through crystals or mantras or gongs. I feel the most at peace, the most joyful, and the most purpose when I am connected with my personal creator father God (but yes still all the affirmations, vision boards, etc…I do love neuroscience woo woo shit).

I’m not here to tell you how to access the most peaceful, joyful, purposeful higher power, or to even access a higher power at all. I’m just confessing that, after a long decade, I’m ready to be delulu and believe the God I was once deeply in connection with as a young teen – before the church co opted my spiritual experience and made it conditional – is the God I call home.

My God.

It’s good to be back.

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Mattie Jo is an author, actor, and shameless oversharer based In NYC. She is the author of God, Sex, and Rich People: A Recovering Evangelical Testimony. Her pitch for the God, Sex, and Rich People TV Show won the Audience Choice Award at the Yale Innovation Summit. She is currently an artist in residence at the MIT + Yale artistic incubator program, Makerstate.