Religion for the Ugly

Has my ugliness deemed even my worship unfit for you, Lord?

Growing up religious is formative to the making of a person in many different aspects. There are different kinds of religious childhoods of course, as many as there are religions themselves. There are good, and there are bad, as is the case with any regular childhood completely absent of any theologies. My particular childhood, though, was one where religion took precedence above all else. If I desired anything, I was to ask God. If I felt lost, sad, scared, I was to turn to God. If I was happy, relieved, successful, I was to thank God. There are merits to this kind of upbringing of course, a child learns to communicate their feelings often, with each of the 5 prayers. Their relationship with their faith and God develops and strengthens each time they raise their open palms up to the sky. Sometimes though, God becomes the only source of comfort and companionship for a child. His only confidant in times of both sorrow and joy. What happens then, when the child realizes God has rejected him?

“I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.”

―Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

I’m in my 20’s now, and I’m thinking about religion. I’m thinking of religion in a way I wasn’t capable of when I was included in it. I’ve known I was queer since I was 14, and I am 22 now and I feel more lost than ever. There is a certain confidence one carries themselves with as a teenager, an arrogant demeanor I miss wearing sometimes. You are learning about the world and as your knowledge exponentially grows, you think you know everything there is to know. I thought I knew what religion meant. I thought faith could be enough.

I’ve noticed this tendency in religious circles to preach about the unyielding strength in faith. If you are faithful, nothing and no one can bring you harm. Your faith is your armor as it is your sword. This holds true until you are facing a barrage of ridicule and humiliation, because no armor protects from heartache and rejection. No sword cuts through ugliness. That’s all I felt by the end of my teenage years, ugly and humiliated and rejected. I had no place in religion, or maybe religion had no place for me, either way a shift had happened within myself. I realized I had been deemed too ugly for God.

When I first realized I was queer, I felt a potent desperation to prove that it was okay for me to exist. Not just in society, but as a person of faith. I spent days scouring different articles debunking the story of Lut, scholars who had revealed the ‘true’ interpretation and how there had always been a space for queerness in religion. I was happy for a long time, safe in my bubble of arrogance that as long as I knew the truth, I was right and I was safe.

Eventually, that bubble had to burst. I had spent enough years amongst my community, my family, to realize it doesn’t matter what I believe. The truths that I know have no bearing on what the other 99% believes. Why would they? It’s easier to say homosexuals and transgenders are equivalent to pedophiles and condemn them all. It’s easier to suppress and reject that somewhere along the way you might have related to the way I feel, and tell me the action is sin, not the thought. It’s cruel. There is cruelty in telling a person their love is sin, their existence is sin. No amount of quoted articles can counter cruelty that sets fire to who you inherently are, that tells you your acceptance is only possible via concealment. The same family I had prayed beside, the same father I had gone to the mosque with, I could see disgust cloud their eyes if they were ever to find out about me.

Then came the time when I prayed and I begged to be normal. I knew now that I had to conform or I had to be exiled. There was no future in which I was myself and I was still a part of my community. Of course, this realization brought much misery with it. I was, and still am, tired of life. There were many nights where I rested my head on a damp pillow and wondered why this life should be imposed upon me with no option of escape. There were many nights where the only prayer whispered from my mouth was one of a quiet death. I’ve never attempted to take my own life, perhaps due to some fear or cowardice, but mostly out of guilt. How unfair it was that despite knowing hatred and rejection were loaded up like bullets in the mouths of people around me, I would still choose to spare them the suffering instead of me. Somewhere along the way, the guilt of burdening people with my death had overpowered my exhaustion and frustration with my life.

To be queer is to mourn the life you could’ve had. When I read this post for the first time, I realized that mourning is exactly what I’ve been doing for the last 4 years. I’ve grieved every single day for the life I could’ve had if I’d been born in a different family, in a different place, as a different person, worshipping a different God. I wanted everything I was supposed to. I wanted marriage, just not to a man. I wanted a family of my own, I wanted a home to set up a praying nook in. I wanted to bring my children to the mosque with me. I wanted to be in love, and to love in return. Even these words as I type them, feel like a perversion I’ve inflicted upon the world; my existence and my desires inherently blasphemous. As a child, the prayer mat held safety and peace for my little hands and knees, and I’d grown up to avoid letting my forehead touch its surface because I felt unclean and unworthy, all of the time.

There is significant and overwhelming pain in growing up religious just to find out as you grow up that you never had a place there at all. A core part of who you were withers away in an instant, with nothing to take its place. Being religious means maintaining a relationship, and the sudden loss of connection leaves you with nothing but grief. The life I had wanted for myself was completely impossible in reality. If I ever were to get married to a person I loved, I wouldn’t see a single face from my family at the ceremonies. If I ever were to have children, they wouldn’t have grandparents to spoil them, nor family gatherings to moan about going to. It doesn’t matter if God doesn’t reject you, He doesn’t have to. His people do it for Him. What good does it do me, then, to worship the same God worshipped by those who want me dead?

“The right belief is like a good cloak, I think. If it fits you well, it keeps you warm and safe. The wrong fit however, can suffocate.”

―Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn: The Final Empire

Religion is not difficult to follow if it surrounds you. We are made for community, and religion offers exactly that for its followers. Loneliness is terrible and awful, and what better way to eradicate it than to give people faith in an omnipresent Creator who will love and forgive them no matter what. Of course, there are conditions behind “no matter what”, and these conditions are only revealed when you step out of line. When faced with the ultimatum of yourself or your faith, what are you meant to choose? What is your faith worth if you are an empty husk just mirroring those around you? What is your personhood stripped of the faith that carved your soul into what it is? I am so incredibly lonely now, but somehow I prefer this to the overbearing oppression I used to feel. I do not pray, but I also do not feel angry and bitter for trying to speak to a God who I felt had abandoned me. I will still probably always believe in God, and in my worst moments I will probably still lay out the praying mat and open my hands to the sky. Faith becomes a reflex somewhere along the way, and just like hope, it’s near impossible to get rid of. Despite it all, I do not call myself religious anymore.

I am not welcome in mosques as I am. I feel unsafe and alienated in the communities that had given me a sense of belonging all my life. I am treated as if I am an ink spill in a chlorinated pool. I am seen as an abomination, monstrous and pitiful. There is no amount of strength that resists against this. I could not possibly try and persist in spaces that look upon me with nothing but revulsion. Though, I am constantly in awe of those who do persist, and create bubbles of safety for themselves and those like them. I can only hope to one day have a heart so strong, and a will so unbreakable. For now, I am okay with exile, because if Hell should be filled with people like me, then that is exactly where I belong.

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