Chameleon Relinquishes Control and Gains Contentment

A story of impenetrable faith

When I was little my parents put me in the Catholic school system because that was a better safer more elevated choice than the public school system. I come from a middle white class family that inherently has a lot of vanity and entitlement going on.

I always had to do the thing where you cross your arms and receive a prayer instead of a rice crisp when my class went to church. I have never been Catholic though my father’s family was.

I was baptized at a United church in a small town south of Canada’s capital city. When I was about six I asked if we could start going to church. It could have been that I wanted to be more like the kids I went to school with, many or most of whom frequented a place of worship on Sunday mornings. It could have been that the singing and prayers poked me in places that felt like home.

It also could have been the cute boys or the plethora of stickers and crafts in the church basement Sunday school. It also could have been the nice lady who always gave me Beenie babies or the church library with so many movies and books to borrow.

Regardless, church didn’t stop my parents from fighting or me from turning into a sad angry substance abuser.

I desperately wanted to fit in. I wanted to be good. I wanted to be right. I wanted the glory and riches of God’s approval…

But the meltdowns and tantrums continued and actually got significantly worse as I got older.

Skipping ahead to the middle of my third decade on Earth, my grandmother died. My gran was one of my best friends in a very silent snuggly way. I had moved across the country away from her and my family and when I got the news that she had fallen and her brain was bleeding and the decision was to let it happen and let her go, I was maximally distraught.

Should I hop on a plane and try to make it back to say goodbye? Should I just wait for the funeral? How in the world could I connect to this withering woman to express my love for her.

I went to the beach and started singing. I wrote her a letter and had a big breakdown on the way to the mailbox because I felt like I was competing with time and could never win. I felt like I was trying to force my massive body through a small hole that wasn’t meant for me.

No matter what I chose, she would die and the sentimentality of believing I needed to be there or do something simply was not serving me or her or our connection.

I surrendered. Or at least I learned more about surrender in that week than I ever had before.

I chose three songs and called to sing them to her over the phone. She was very out of it everyone said, but she moaned and I could feel us so alive together on so many levels. I was not afraid. None of the levels of connections I could feel could ever fade or be taken away. Sure I wouldn’t be calling her on the phone again, but we were alive in a more expansive space than I had ever consciously recognized before.

We are circling Circling together We are singing singing our heart song This is family, this is unity This is celebration, this is sacred.

— Buffy Sainte-Marie

While I sang she started to let go. I kept singing,

We are spiraling Spiraling together Onward, inward Creature to creation Holy mystery

My aunt took the phone and threw it on a chair and I could hear their muffled efforts to stop her from slipping away while they were watching. At some point someone hung up on me. She left her body the next morning while her three living children were at the funeral parlor making arrangements.

Classic. I was not allowed to carry her over the bridge with my voice. The intensity of conscious transition was too much for them to be able to bear witness to. We have no training for that in our family. I felt a lot of feelings having been interrupted and I knew it was best that I hadn’t rushed back there just to be in contrast and contradiction with the rest of my relatives.

I understand now that it takes ongoing practice to stretch your own bandwidth to be able to withstand immaculate infinite spiritual presence. I had been doing that for about five years as I slowly distanced from my place of birth and the people who raised me.

I recognize that I came into this world autistic with a different psychological structure than those in my immediate bloodline and this gives me access to a spiritual intensity that is difficult to explain. While I was packing to fly home for the group mourning I was stung by a wasp for the first time in my life.

It was the middle of winter, a blizzard outside, but somehow there was a wasp in my bed. As I’m writing this now as wasp is hovering around my desk. I don’t know what more perfect could have happened right now, for synchronicity is the purest invitation into faith that I can come up with.

I was just wondering if this story is worth sharing. And the universe responds, almost immediately, oh hell yes.

Wasps are a messenger of the divine feminine. I was deeply touched when I read this after being stung that cold February day. The warmth of inner security spread through me and I felt confident in my ability to maintain myself and my faith even in the face of family I felt so betrayed by. I knew, without a doubt, that everything was happening for a meaning I didn’t need to consciously comprehend. I could feel the trust flowing through all the pathways of my body being.

The minister of the United church gave the talk at Gran’s funeral and I realized that he had been her best friend. He knew her secrets and none of us did. I realized that my Gran and I had a loneliness in common that we never found words for but that attracted our bodies to one another in long physical smooshes that seemed to confuse the family.

I apologized to my Mother for not being there, for not choosing to make it home sooner and she, in this moment, recognized me more deeply than I have ever experienced before or after. She said, “You are able to connect in ways that the rest of us don’t know how or don’t have access to”.

I suddenly could feel my own faith, like I had received permission to be the vegetarian wolf in a heard of sheep.

I later learned that my last sleepover with Gran as a preteen had been canceled because she had gotten into a box of white wine. Why no one mentioned this when I was begging family to see me struggling with alcohol is totally beyond me, but again, I have great confidence that it was for the best because the Universe is benevolent like that.

Faith to me is an experience of all walls torn down, all boxes deconstructed.

Faith in this sense is a violent reality.

All choice is violent in the way possibilities are denied through the choosing of one thing over another.

Faith, for me, is a movement of spirit to unite itself with the vastness of the Universe in which all possibility exists.

Being privy to faithful spiritual practices of others is the way I have become the kind of faithful person that I am.

Still, I am learning to hold myself open in faith.

I find, as a highly sensitive person, the conditioned behavioral pattern of shutting down towards intense emotion or the energetic movement of charge is appealing in the ability to be seemingly safe from the historical and continuing presence of persecution.

Faith for me is coming to maintain a willingness to be present as an open person in the face of anything.

Faith is to claim my ability to communicate beyond words in the rhythms of the feminine poetic realm that always and only exists beyond logic and reason.

Faith is what allows me to unmask as an autistic person with a psychotic structure who even though I am able to stream these sentences still exists as a nonverbal person irrevocably threaded with the awareness of life beyond our 3D reality.

Faith is the thread that unites me with not only every other person but the life force in absolutely everything.

Faith is the system of pathways between all particles of matter.

Faith is the inherent ability in every person to be rooted in their infantile innocence of knowing, not a systemically lawful right from wrong kind of knowing, but a universally lawful differentiation between respect and abuse.

Where I find I can ground my faith is in personal emotional responsibility. That may sound strange, but to me, it has become the only thing that makes sense.

In becoming responsible for my own experience and my reaction to the energy moving through my body, I am more in tune with the Earth and the cosmos simultaneously. I relieve myself from the competition and am therein available for faith.

Faith is the energy of trust and trust the energy of faith.

I trust that I am provided for and that I am always deepening my relationship to my purpose on the planet right now. I went through a long phase of feeling meaningless and faithless while I believed salvation from sadness could be found in a large bottle of intoxicating fluid.

I no longer believe that sadness is something to be rescued from. I have immense faith that sadness is one type of energy that moves through me on a regular basis because my body is a high functioning device for grounding charge that is circulating in the environment.

My faith resides in a willingness to continue to learn to be present and in moments of presence I am one with my faith.