Burning Bush

Like many Christian orgasms, mine was hesitant and dredged in uncertainty.

Well, dredged wasn’t the best term for this. I didn’t batter up my shame and fry it piping hot. The air did feel heavy, though, as I stared at his clock and tried to count milliseconds.

How many times had ‘A’ came? I think we were both pretty into it, but it was honestly too dark and we were both too tipsy and god, nobody could have prepared me for just how much it would hurt. I went to the bathroom twice that night to make sure all the pieces were still there.

It wasn’t his fault, either. ‘A’ was a cute, warm guy who had no way of knowing that some schmuck named God owned my body first. I mean, I’d talked everything over with God first.

He was my go-to guy, after all. I would ask how I was supposed to live out my college experience — you know, how I was supposed to be ‘missional’ to the people in my dorm, how to put Him first.

His silence wasn’t a big deal anyway, because I usually went with whatever incited the most self-flagellation. I even chose “substance-free” housing because I knew He’d be proud of me.

That’s usually how you have to operate — all unfulfillable expectations and assumptions of guilt, I mean. That’s just par for the course when your best friend is silent and invisible.

Obedience was paramount to a good relationship with Him, as all good, abusive relationships are wont to require. I’d been an overachiever since youth so naturally, I tried to impress God by skipping WILDs and joining three Bible studies. I broke up with my Freshman-year boyfriend because I enjoyed his kisses too much. I cried as I did it and cited the Holy Spirit at least 8 times.

And the more desire brewed, the more I felt it necessary to shut in and strap down my dangerous body. My holiness was at stake and my thoughts were my first enemy.

Now, I didn’t think it was all that bad at the time, these squashed thirsts and dry longings. I mean, refusing my body felt like masochism in the sacral and honestly, martyrdom had never hurt so good. I’d been forever instructed that my purity was the vanguard of my faith and my commitment to righteousness in the 21st century. It mattered so much more than completing my degree from a top institution or using my liberties as a thinking and learned woman.

So when God held my orgasms captive, I refused to put up a fight. When Holy Words were forced down my throat, I’d always swallow.

Until I got tired of edging for God.

“Say,” I started suggesting in Junior year. “Say we rethought this whole ‘you-making-me-feel-bad-for-wanting-to-use-my-body-in-ways-that-make-me-happy’ thing.” I’d try to phrase it in cavalier ways so that God couldn’t strike me down for challenging His authority. He’d been pretty faithful in holding up His end of our silent relationship so it wasn’t really His fault that I liked to play with unholy fires.

I’d been worried for a while that I hadn’t been approached romantically since Freshman year and suspected that some of it was due to my visible religiosity (or, in a more troubling suspicion, my visible blackness in a mostly white campus. Go Bears!). In any case, I downloaded Tinder and Bumble and hoped for a fresh start.

It worked, too. I could usually get through entire dates without mentioning the deity who’d held me ransom. Now, I’m sure most people could do that without breaking a sweat — avoiding religion and politics on the first date is a cardinal rule, after all — but silencing anxieties about disappointing my already-silent God was an accomplishment in itself.

Imagine being told that trying to be perfect for God is legalism. Imagine being ‘told’ by Jesus anyway, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” Rinse and repeat.

Of course, the real troubles would come after the second or third date, when I’d have to force myself to decline invitations to watch Netflix or “study” in people’s apartments. Most guys were okay when I found excuses to end our courtships, but a few were bewildered. Their wounds withstanding, I felt embarrassed to tell them that their eyes and my breasts and their hands and my lips were off limits, only to be fully mine in post-marital coitus.

(And even then, I knew that as a woman, the Biblical understanding of my body ever being ‘my own’ was tricky and unsubstantiated.

I never got earrings because 1 Corinthians 3:16 scolded me, positing that my body would always and forever be a temple and a dwelling place of God. The following verse would seal those anxieties, promising that God would destroy me if I destroyed His temple… an entity formally known as ‘my body’. 1 Corinthians 7:4 informed me that my body and its authority also belonged to my future husband. It’s why I refused to masturbate when my friends told me it felt good in the 8th grade. I couldn’t do that to the husband I’d never met — the Bible told me so.

This, by the way, was the same Bible that told slaves to obey their masters with fear and trembling in Ephesians 6. If I still believed, I’d probably protest this interpretation, arguing that Paul didn’t mean chattle slavery, and that masters weren’t as cruel as modern readers would imagine. My own spine aches, now, having spent far too much time bent over backwards in attempts to make sense of these verses.)

So the cycle of swiping and chatting and dating and refusing went on and on, and while I had never thought harder about my Christianity in my life — the extended parenthetical above in note — , I’d also never felt crazier.

It took 8 months of this crazy-making for me to demand air again. Within this, it took 5 months of asking a forever silent God why I’d had to keep throwing away desire after the 3rd date, and 2 months of questioning when my own body would actually become my own.

In April of that year, after spending months of pondering my sexual masochism and regretting the things I’d looked at but couldn’t experience, weeks of reading books by religious skeptics like Marx and attending Christian counseling with nice women who couldn’t answer my not-nice questions, days of asking how the biblical King Solomon could employ 1000 concubines and still be considered one of the holiest men on Earth while I’d had to feel perpetually shitty about kissing a boy I liked in Freshman year, and hours of fighting with my spirit and my psyche and the well-intentioned support of ‘spiritual sisters’ trying to drag me back into the godly fold, I found autonomy again in the secret of that boy’s bed.

(I’d also found run-on sentences, but they weren’t nearly as intense.)

And, to my utmost surprise, I’d had rambunctiously unholy non-marital sex after a drunken night at the Co-Op and the sun didn’t fall out of the sky. I hadn’t been struck by lightning, and I didn’t feel the prophesied breaking of my future husband’s heart. My folds were all sore and my makeup smeared his sheets but reclaiming myself as my own felt worth it.

I told ‘A’ a week later in BD that it had been my first time having sex. I felt nervous that I’d deprived him of some sort of informed consent by not telling him beforehand, and the janky neon lighting filtering into our booth seemed fitting for this uncomfortable confession. He was understanding and sympathetic to this grasp for personal reclamation, in a way that my silent and invisible best friend could never be.

(I found out later that he’d tried to invite me out again, but I didn’t see his message in my Bumble inbox until months after he’d graduated. Que sera and what-not.)

I don’t really think about God much anyway, now that I’ve graduated and am removed from campus groups focused on faith. I say His name aloud every so often, but mostly when I stub my toe on the dresser or forget to thaw the chicken out on the counter. I play Candy Crush when I’m forced to sit in church with my parents.

I’m not sure if I can unequivocally claim that I’m less anxious now as an agnostic, but god, I’m pretty glad to have desires that I can shamelessly explore with the person (woman!) that I love. And god, I’m so relieved that I can spit out harmful ideologies and extinguish much of the guilt I’d had surrounding sex.

God, I’m just so happy to be fucking free.