the b-i-b-l-e: no.

There has to be grace for those who were violated by the bible.

For those who panic when it opens, for whom the split-page format quickens breath and makes the skin tingle. The poetry format of Psalms buzzes white noise in my ears, the words of Jesus in glaring red toward the reader, blare in my head as from a scary, spittle-bearded wild man whose hands move too fast, too far. The pebbled dark leather cover; the gold page edges. Words screamed from pulpits in booming, dramatic vibrato, hurled toward the demons in the back of the room, where I hid from everything it fueled, mentally tunneling myself into the upper corner of the baptistry and counting the minutes until I could run outside into the twilight.

I hate the Bible.

I do.

I hate it.

I hate it.

It infuriates me.

A lifetime hemmed in by guilt-scaffolding, gouging and smashing and pillaging in the name of holiness or repairing the sinful human condition; more like a tent-fumigation, every single inch suffocated in the dark, poison in the name of life.

I can't tolerate it.

To paraphrase a fellow struggler: every single lie of my life is footnoted with Bible verses.

It speaks death to me. Striped into my skin on the edge of a belt. Streaked across my person, trails of sweat and sebum. Still and quiet as death, stop swinging your feet as it boomed against my ears. Taped to the bathroom mirror at five-year-old eye-level (honor your father and mother) by people invested in breakage. SOMEBODY is screaming at me through this book, I knew, but it is not God.

This is not God. I had no other words.

Its words bound and gagged me. Imbued my entire spirit with guilt and standard and shortfall. For me, the bible is strictly punitive: a roadmap of all the ways in which I am evil. Whether by all the ways we were all born bad, or by the ways life "made" me "bad" - the bitten apple, or the chewed gum, or you can't take the chocolate out of the milk, or the cake with just a little bit of dog shit baked into it, but go ahead, take a bite, because it's just a little bit of dog shit around smarmy youth-pastor smiles, oh my god, bite me so hard, purity culture, and needless to say, they did not say shit, but I will, because it is shit. 

All of the ways in which God is becoming new to me... redemption is deep, and wide. It is not the instant peace it seems from the perspective of a person who has never known its fragrance; uprooting and shedding light is not the fairy picnic you imagine. The work of redemption, not strictly mine anymore to feebly attempt, requiring that I be, which is (speaking of tension) equally the hardest and most natural thing I've ever been able to be, with God. Present and attuned and aware and listening. Painful, two-steps-back feeling. So much deeper, so much wider than I could imagine.

God is speaking.

Maybe someday, he'll speak to me from the pages of that book.

But not today.

Probably not tomorrow, either.