At Peace

While I was visiting, my grandmother sat in her television room and lectured me about opening my heart to the lord so I could achieve peace and direction in life, wiping her plentiful tears on her pink nightgown trimmed in colorful rickrack.

I sat there on the couch, my computer in my lap because I'd been showing her some picture she'd wanted to see, staring back at her, blank faced and stony-eyed. What else could I do?

The thing that annoys more about my grandmother than all the holier-than-thouness, the selfish manipulating, the lies is how she demeans my opinions. To her, I am just a little girl. Whenever I express an opinion on something deeper and more important than a flower arrangement, she laughs at how cute it is. Somehow, I can't help but think deep down she knows I'm right (she is racist, my dad isn't a horrible man, she is judgmental). Her demeaning glance is her way of justifying her flaws to herself: I can't be right, I'm just a kid.

But I'm not a kid. I know what I know. The sixty years or so of life "experience" she has on me means nothing the way she's lived it. She preached to me for so long about how God has been protecting her her whole life. But all that means to her is giving up any personal responsibility. In her world, she was a neglectful mother because God called her to serve the church. Not because she was just a bad mother who didn't know what she was doing and ran and hid. In her world, she was fired from one church because the preacher had it out for her. Not because she's incapable of compromise and highly arrogant. In her world, I am "defiant" because my parent have corrupted me. Not because I'm capable of independent thought, and capable of seeing that I never want to be anything like her.

She simply uses religion to absolve herself of her mistakes. I thought Jesus was supposed to forgive you for your sins, not justify them.

She swears I can't have peace without this same kind of God. I have no god and I want no god.

What she fails to understand is that I'm only at peace without religion in my life. It only makes me feel uncomfortable in my skin, make me doubt myself, a weekly infusion of needless and undeserved guilt. I don't need the sort of justification she does.

I am peace when I know that I'm in control of my life, and that measure of control gives me the strength to deal with what is beyond it. She has no idea how her lecturing solidifies the beliefs she so desperately tries to drive me away from. She has on idea how strongly I feel about them, and how sure I am of who I am.

I played her "The House That Built Me" once because she wanted an example of the music I saw in concert, a song about finding yourself again in your childhood home. All it prompted from her was a smug look on her face and the question, "are you lost? Do you feel lost?" I knew she wanted me to collapse into tears, fall into her arms, and beg her to drag me into the light of God, or some crazy crap. But I simply looked her in the eye and said "no."

It's crazy how many different meanings one word can I have. To her, my no meant I was harboring religious feelings inside, that I secretly possessed a blooming and magnificent relationship with her God. My no really meant that I was happy with my decision to reject her god, that I never felt more secure in my beliefs then when I decided I didn't need or want Christianity. I am not lost, but to her I always will be. She can't comprehend a "found" that is happier than hers or different than hers.

I was lost when I was trying to humor her, I was blind when I tried to sit honestly in a sanctuary, I was a wrench when I lied to myself about my beliefs. But now I see, now I see.