Tell me- elders, ushers, fathers and mothers of the house- where are your children? Where are the babies you baptized in the name of your god?

Who do YOU say we are- the children of the house, the daughters of Zion?

Have you ever paused to ponder why we’ve become the prodigals? The ones you claim to so love? For us there is no ring, there is no robe, no banquet and no fattened calf that comes without some sort of condition and some string attached.

You see, the cost of our returning home is our silence-

shrinking into submission, not allowed to ask any questions of our “fathers”, of those charged with protecting the sheep. We can share nothing of our journey, or what we learned in our darkness.

Where are the elders? The shepherds are now the wolves.

Where are the children YOU called “anointed”, whose voices filled your sanctuaries for weddings and celebrations, for funerals and hours of mourning. Where are the children YOU prophesied over? Whom YOU called “special, chosen, set apart, royal priesthood, prophets”.

You’ve exiled us into the valley of dry bones.

Where are the sons and daughters of the house?

We stand at your doors and knock, not to be allowed in-

but didn’t Jesus say, “Let the little children come”,?

WE lie just outside the walls of the home that WE grew up in-

Told that our pleas to look into the face of injustice are the moans of a seductress, and the very bait of Satan. Where are your children?

Those of US who waved our banners and flags at your conferences, who danced barefoot and played our tambourines to the sounds of the shofar and Eagles Wings,

who made videos of our humanity and enacted the very darkness you expelled us into.

Where ARE the children of the house? The ones YOU brought in front of the congregation and stripped naked- shamed for our sexuality, our bodies and our hair, but only AFTER we gave you our voices, our anointing and our gifts. We left them at the altar.

The voices YOU called anointed, unimportant unless we’re performing-

Smiling and greeting strangers into our house- one big, dysfunctional family, a Christ-less “Christianity”. My wayward path is a reflection of YOUR profanity, and severed connection from YOUR humanity, your own flesh and blood. Will you not feed me? Give me something to drink?

What do you mean, God needs weapons of war to fulfill end times prophecy?!

Where are your children? YOUR flesh and blood?

Palestinians, black and brown and indigenous reflections of the face of father God, reflections you’ve reduced to faces on a flyer to attract more buyers to your commodified commitment to truth and righteousness-

WHERE are the children of your HOUSE?

And since when is a flag our religion, and a president our god?

Where are the children you anointed? Buried.

Will you hear our voices from beyond the grave?

Tell me- elder, preacher, teacher and brother-

Where are the children of Zion?

Citations:

• “A Conversation With James Baldwin.” 1963-06-24. WGBH, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. July 20, 2026. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-0v89g5gf5r>.

• 1997, “Interview with Osama bin Laden”, CNN's Peter Arnett, producer Peter Bergen and photographer Peter Jouvenal.

• President George W. Bush, 2001/09, “Address to the Nation”, https://www.georgewbushlibrary.gov/media/6510

• Human video performed by the Unlimited Youth Church of Calvary Tabernacle, Cranford, NJ., 2010, 13 February, Valentine's Day Dinner,
  Song- "Paradigm",

• Beck West, “APOCRYPHA”, track, “BREATHE/PROPHESY”, (2025, 22 November)

• Rob Stearns, Eagles Wings Ministries at Calvary Tabernacle, Cranford, NJ., circa 2013

PLAY ME WHILE YOU READ.

It’s Sunday again. I’m not allowed in the church, so I study myself when I’m out in public with my windows down playing, “Let Her Go”. At every red light, every turned corner, there is a man watching, and even if he isn’t “watching”, he’s observing out of the corner of his eye. I’m always in his periphery, his poor wife in the passenger seat. He loves humiliation and degradation. He degrades himself. His swiveled neck signals that he’s searching for someone to commune with him in the experience of his longing. He’s trapped in his own body, bound and gagged by his aroused and tortured psyche. I get out of the car at a gas station and there’s a man pumping premium, kids in the back seat, eyes & souls plugged into their screens. He pretends not to look, but I sense his eyes through his shades. His kids aren’t watching him- there’s no witness, so this is his window. He pretends not to look, but I loved playing make-believe as a kid. We can both pretend- you pretend not to look, and I’ll pretend like I don’t like it. My innocence was robbed a long time ago and so was yours.

I narrate my experience through the eyes of men, reading their every move, translating intention with my pussy. The wetter I am, the more dangerous the beast.

“How will he devour me? How does he imagine I taste?”

Church is the most dangerous place of all, full of devouring eyes.

Even my pleasure is not mine. I experience pleasure through him, can only access it through him, naturally, because his pleasure defines my holiness down to the very molecular oneness with myself. I must refrain from pleasure, experience pleasure through observations of pain, be pleasure, apologize when I pleasure myself. My body should be reserved for my proverbial husband. I can only cum once he cums, access my water if he releases his. The more I, woman, can please him, man, the closer I am to fulfilling my traditional role as a woman made in the image of “god”, and therefore “pleasing” to “god”, right? And if the men who lead the church have set themselves up as god, do they not also become a sort of perversion of a spiritual husband of the women in their follow? They claim many spiritual wives. Spiritual rape. I see it in their eyes.

And if I am seeing me through his eyes, then I am existing only through him and his consciousness, so I am hyper-vigilant and hyper-sexual, or better yet, hyper-sexualized. I must be. Prostituted through his vision. I hate existing this way. I hate that I love it, I love that I hate it. This is how I’ve adapted to survive consciousness. Sink into subconscious, pseudo-existence, second player, NPFUCKINGC. I MUST find pleasure in the pain, otherwise, it is just pain itself- dolorem ipsum, placeholder.

His head is on a swivel and so is mine. Twist me, turn me, contort and distort me, matter fact let ME do it FOR you. Strip me naked, shame me, degrade me, spit on me. Crown me and crucify me.

“Use me, o god! I am filthy and wretched. Only YOU can make me clean. Baptize me in your seminal river.”

Forgive my raw and crude depictions, but this is how men reveal themselves- in crude form. They are clay, molding themselves and one another into little gods, idols unto themselves. Brother betrays brother.

Fuck your Evangelical, demiurge god. You love your own pleasure. Just tell the truth. Men stand on their platforms Sunday after Sunday, pretending humility and kneeling before their congregations professing how “imperfect” they are. False humility is a manipulative way for men to get other people to stroke their throbbing ego. They get on their knees while they stare into the eyes of the women they’ve already fucked in their minds three times. “Three times you will deny Me.” They’re begging to be seen but hate it when they are. It’s ok- you can pretend you’re not looking at me, and I’ll pretend we both don’t like it. You’re afraid of your own nakedness, afraid your wife will find you out. “Don’t do this, I have a family.” Cowards. Devise your plan, set your trap you thought was for me. The wetter I am, the more dangerous the beast. I saw you. I walked into your trap knowing you set it. Happy anniversary eve. I covered your nakedness, brother.

His eyes widen and pupils dilate, he senses fear and trembling- I’m working out my salvation. Like the beast he is, he senses his prey. I pretend like I don’t like it, or maybe I’m pretending I like it. I don’t know. I’m unsure, but I’m honest. Church hurt.

If I revoke your access to my spiritual senses, to my perception, my discernment, tell you I don’t trust you, refuse to play the game, you’ll force me to comply anyway, make me the one accountable for how my eyes search and survey to survive. I should sit down, shut my mouth, stop asking the questions you say you love- you love that you hate them. You hate my mouth, you love that you hate it. And if I don’t comply with how you want to humiliate and degrade yourself? If I refuse to commune with you in the experience of degradation? To come kneel before you and plead for your forgiveness for existing? For questioning you? Kneel and use my mouth and eyes to praise you? Humiliate myself- mutual humiliation and spiritual masturbation? Well-

Make me the demon, the bait. Reveal yourself in your disagreement on our perceptions of this communal experience. “Perception is everything”, right? But MY Jesus saw, perceived our nakedness from obscurity and through the eyes of innocence. You betrayed me, brother. You are not my god, and my pleasure and pain do not belong to you. I am not your trophy. Meet me at the well of reconciliation.

Men hate discerning women- women who find pleasure in ourselves, who use hyper-vigilance and our own experience of our bodies to protect ourselves- to serve a God who does not serve them. Jesus is a lover of women. My pleasure and pain does not belong to you.

Have you ever considered how the framework of the Evangelical, Christian faith is phallic worship at its core? How men praise other men and only other men? The hate women. Our water is reduced to lubricant.

Enjoying the sensual experience of my own body has always been a performance. I’ve been afraid to dance. I lock my hips and refuse to switch because the sway reminds me of how the eyes of Evangelical, daddy “god” are always upon me- The Voyeur of the Heavenly Realm, the Cuck of Creation- Christian created and crafted, poured into coffee cups every Sunday morning. But I’ll reserve my judgment, fuck it- watch. That is not my God.

The men at the gas station, the grocery or the coffee shop don’t surprise me. It is the ones who veil their faces with facades of holiness that frighten me most. They hide behind the ignorance of their wives and the innocence of their children, and slut out their congregations. Thank God I’m not allowed in the church. I see it for what it is. Call it judgment, call it insanity, call it unhinged. For generations women have been named hysterics, but never the mystics that we are.

Hyper-vigilant and hyper-sexual, looking for peace and safety, only to find pleasure in pain. At least it’s mine. God finds me here, hidden in the cleft of the rock. Refuge. He pulled me from the den of lions, away from the brood of vipers, far from the devouring worm. This is my pen, my weapon. Finally, I see myself through my own eyes- holy and set apart for such a time as this, an arrow in His quiver.

Psalm 64

For the director of music. A psalm of David.

¹ Hear me, my God, as I voice my complaint;
protect my life from the threat of the enemy.

² Hide me from the conspiracy of the wicked,
from the plots of evildoers.
³ They sharpen their tongues like swords
and aim cruel words like deadly arrows.
⁴ They shoot from ambush at the innocent;
they shoot suddenly, without fear.

⁵ They encourage each other in evil plans,
they talk about hiding their snares;
they say, “Who will see it?”
⁶ They plot injustice and say,
“We have devised a perfect plan!”
Surely the human mind and heart are cunning.

⁷ But God will shoot them with an unexpected arrow;
they will suddenly be struck down.
⁸ He will turn their own tongues against them
and bring them to ruin;
all who see them will shake their heads in scorn.
⁹ All people will fear;
they will proclaim the works of God
and ponder what he has done.

¹⁰ The righteous will rejoice in the Lord
and take refuge in him;
all the upright in heart will glory in him!

*torpid: : having lost motion or the power of exertion or feeling - numb

I think religion taught me, through the vessel of generational ignorance, that sex was something used to “numb out” my emotions, the “forbidden comforting staff” that “filled a hole deep inside me”, the “secular” rhythm of “filling a void”. Yes, of course, because as a woman I am inherently empty and I need a man to fill the void where my value is supposed to be. I AM “void”, “empty”, and inside of me there’s a “God-shaped hole”, but you’re birthed from me? You see how the theology contradicts itself, contradicts nature even? How anyone in their right mind would be divided within themselves?

*Atoms are unable to be broken down into any smaller parts because VOID is necessary for matter to move. Anything that consists of both VOID and MATTER can be broken down, while if something contains no void, then it has no way to break apart because no part of the substance could be broken down into a smaller subsection of the substance. So the “void” is necessary for the duplication and replication of all objects. How beautifully Epicurean. We all yearn for this void.

Long held theorization is that men hate themselves because they hate their mothers, they hate their mothers because they want to be God, and women are closer to God than men will admit. Why would they? It would be too disruptive. Why does a certain man love to fuck me? Why does a certain person love to use me? I’ve been conditioned for general use by the system of capital “C”, Corporate, consumer church. Maybe this is why Jesus loves prostitutes. He taught men who acted as would-be gods that women are reflectors through a handful of stones. Remember, something about glass houses?

On that note, didn’t God become human?? How do we know JESUS didn’t fuck?? He was sinless, but is sex a sin? Or just outside of marriage apparently, even though I’ve never met a single married man who didn’t actively watch porn to fantasize about sex outside of their marital confinement. Do animals hold formal ceremonies? Did God abandon me, or did Evangelical daddy god? Did God, in the cyclical, ancient narrative, become human to absorb the chasmic feelings of abandonment which overcome our fragile bodies? Didn’t he become the world? Earth? A vessel of clay, the second Adam? Dirt? For God so loved the world, summed up in the earthen vessel of the Son. How can the world “out there” be “secular” and the church in the building be “spiritual”? Isn’t God spirit? And spirit not bound by buildings? Corporeal bodies? Isn’t spirit like, energy? Breath? Life giving force? And like, energy can’t be destroyed, only transferred or whatever, right? Anyway.

*Secular: Middle English, from Anglo-French seculer, from Late Latin saecularis, from saeculum the present world, from Latin, generation, age, century, world.

“For God so loved the secular”.

“The Penitent Magdalene”, MATEO CEREZO

I could talk about how the early 2000’s groomed me, porn fried my brain, how I would walk down the street as a twelve year old girl and men in their late 20’s were asking me for head, how reggaeton was the pulse and soundtrack of my surroundings and how “watching women gyrate on a screen poisoned my young mind”. How colonial- to demonize the world because the church taught us to fear any semblance of culture. Where the law exists, sin abounds. Religion is the choice drug of hypocrites.

One time in a small group Bible study, a woman actually said that when we become Christian we are “no longer human”. No longer human. “We’re just spirit now”, she said. I replied out loud, “So we’re just orbs?”. I was kicked out of that church shortly after, like many before it, and for a multitude of similar reasons. I scare church folk, I ask too many questions. Too human to be an orb, too orb-like in nature to be human. Snoop’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot” music video was my sexual and spiritual awakening by the way. My spirituality was woven by “Rhythm & Gangsta, The Masterpiece”, and obsessive repentance. How many times must I bow my head in submission to the “rod and staff which comfort me”, and where’s the middle ground between orb and human? Or is it all one? Is it where we go when we orgasm? “La petite mort”? Can all of life be summed up in a series of little deaths? An ex told me once that his friends would preach to him, “You know, life is what happens between orgasms”. He hated that. He didn’t know how to be alone. Neither did I. Blessed be the broken road, and how beautifully Epicurean.

Is everything corrupt? It was never the music, the lyrics, the beats, or the artists that were “bad”. It was all so…human. We all love Michael Jackson. Music, dance, art- corruption is part of our nature, and everything we touch can be corrupted under the guise of gold. Remember Midas? Cursed by his own wishes, spiritually abandoned by his own gift. Organized religion, through its hypocritical abandoning of the world only to feed on that same greed and gold, thrusted me into the shadow of shame, forsaken by the Evangelical “Father”. I’m thankful even now that I was forced into that shadow though. It’s where I found true self, stripped down, as I am. What a gift it is to be rejected and abandoned. Remember Chapter 1? The “Mother Wound”?:

“You see, the pain of the memory of abandonment is all encompassing. It throbs and screams, it itches and infects any and all semblance of safety and security. The pain of abandonment numbs you to its own deeply rooted and diseased nature. It reaches out and touches anything or anyone you will ever hope to love. It strips you of your passions, robs you of your connection to people and yourself, and convinces you that you can never be loved or held because you will always be left without, empty, alone. It dictates that the void may as well consume you, and you should just give up and die. The pain which abandonment inflicts is both a pathological liar and a great mirror. The pain of abandonment reveals through absence- through the absence of my mother, I came to know her love for me because the empty space where she once was is the proof that she once was there, and that her love for me was real because it was present. The void is the witness.”

“All art is erotic.”

-Gustav Klimt

And what made the men in leadership in my church any different from the men on the street?! Didn’t they both have something to say about my body? Its use? Presuppositions about its function? A *postulation about my intentions with every switch of my hips and blink of my eyes? With my lip curled up so as to smirk at the transparency of their thoughts? Why didn’t my voice matter in the equation? Am I simply matter- a substance that has mass and takes up space (volume), composed primarily of atoms? Do I exist in only in states such as solids, wet liquids, and gases? Aren’t I, like all matter, measured by properties like mass, weight, and volume? If matter is classified in chemistry as pure substances (elements/compounds) or mixtures, why am I not also pure if I AM matter? What is the voice of matter? Why is a twelve year old responsible for whether or not you get an erection? She is the voice of matter. Are you afraid of being seen?

*Postulation: demand, claim: to assume or claim as true, existent, or necessary : depend upon or start from the postulate of.

“Farmer’s Garden”

-Klimt

I always liked to fuck though. Sex taught me how to breathe, how to breathe in tandem, symbiosis, how to move my hips, how to use my voice, how to sing even. Sex was always my tool of liberation- maybe not so much the absolute action of it, but the movement in my mind before the action of it. I felt like I brought men to another dimension and I was the guide. I loved it before it became a transaction, when it was a paradise of exploration and mutual vulnerability. Now? I feel so disembodied, or maybe that’s the point of my choice of celibacy? To feel how I transcend my body.

It seems that, as I learn about my own biology, I reach paradise again- Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained. I fucked my way through my twenties, through my trauma, through rejection at the hands of the institutional church, through the death of my aunt and my mother, the death of my inner child. Multiple partners didn’t help through, you know? Biologically I think my body absorbed too much seminal information from the kind of men who watched their fathers beat their mothers, men who hated their own helplessness and translated the DNA of their self-hatred through ejaculate. Information overload. They hate that they want to be held. My paradise revealed to men that a path could be created, an oasis could be found. But I chose the men who use me, remember? Every road I built back to wholeness was somehow stolen by every man who walked on it. Men are homeless because they live in glass houses with hands full of stones. Qué triste.

Here is where I find myself on my journey back to Paradise:

If I am the Void, the “Empty One” waiting to be filled, am I not also the mirror? “Ad infinitum” of possibility? And here we are again, the mortal and emotional absence of and the “absence” who is my mother. I mirror to men their own humanity- their quivering nakedness, their mortal sadness, their desire to be filled, their “God-shaped hole”, the opposing force inherently present in all things in order to give definition to the other. You are as you define me.

My wish for men is that they would joyfully break apart, that their stones be their liberators, that when they throw rocks they don’t hide their hands, but rather hold them out and reveal the holes. Let me see you.

The Void is the Witness.

“The Mystical Womb”

I can confidently say that I am not the only child who has witnessed an exchange like this at such a young and impressionable age. What I can say is that, for this child in that moment, everything changed in my heart. I no longer saw my father as a safe, reliable man. He was no longer soft, no longer gentle. Perhaps he never was. Doubt met me at the foot of that staircase. I didn’t know how to inhale and exhale the anguish of my mother. I didn’t realize that she was walking a harrowing journey of addiction, and my father’s barricading her was an attempt to keep her from using. It is only now that I can look back with somewhat unclouded vision and truly see the brutal history of my upbringing. I lived in incongruity- a specific dissonance, a constant sound of what felt like two worlds continually colliding. There existed this ever-present yet displaced peace hovering over the chaotic ensemble of highs and lows, of screaming and wailing, of laughter and fishing on the lake, of singing Amazing Grace in church and crying alone in my room. A push and pull, like gravity, held my family in a kind of balance. There was “God”, and then there was reality, which was God to me. I knew “God”- this force lager than I- to be chaotic, distant, passive-aggressive, hateful, deceitful. I saw the space between breaths as a constant reminder of my longing to die, because ceasing to exist wholly seemed to be preferable to existing, but not quite existing at all.

My family was and is, to this day, full of perplexities. They will love deeply and fiercely, and then altogether no more. As I get older it becomes clearer to me that hardly anyone in my lineage has learned to delineate their pain, and so cycles of depression, isolation and addiction continue. This deeply rooted generational rage and disappointment is passed down from mother to daughter, daughter to granddaughter; from father to son, son to their children. My family is matriarchal in every way. My grandmother on my mother’s side had six children, five of them girls.What I know of my family is that, as far back as it has been explained to me, my grandfathers and grandmothers have had affairs with alcohol. It starved their marriages and their children of the love and affection they deserved. It has created memories that have stained the hearts of my mother and father. Our bloodlines are no stranger to inebriated judgment and suppressed trauma.

The crimson cord of my heritage has always seemed to be cyclical denial- denial of God, of one’s self, denying to acknowledge the pain in others because my family refuses to acknowledge the pain within themselves. I am convinced that the ache which plagues my family is intuitive- that it has a face, a hand by which it strikes us, a mouth by which it whispers to our deeply rooted fears and insecurities. The ache speaks to me in my dreams. It eats my fear. It molests me. The irony which has haunted me since childhood is that everyone can feel the shadow of his being in the room, but none dare to call him by name and expose him, for in doing so, they would painfully expose themselves. We all live in the same shadow.

The longing of my heart has forever been to break free of this paralyzed existence, to sever my enmeshment with the great, unnamed abuser who met me at the foot of my staircase. The characteristic most unmerciful of this antagonist is that he is unyielding. He will push me to the periphery of agony, will drag me to the edge of the chasmic void i see when I peer into my own soul, and then suddenly drag me “back” to “safety”, as if he wasn’t the one who lured me to the edge.

From the age of twelve I’ve known that abuse and pain can be romantic. They have often times been the company I’ve kept during lonely nights, friends to me when my father would lock me in my room for hours on end. Their sting has become a familiar and welcome pleasure, a sensation I would seek out in an exhaustive quest, even if the height of every masochistic endeavor lasted only for a moment. It wasn’t the moment I was seeking, it was the dance. Trauma tricked me into believing that somehow more abuse would fill the emptiness that was growing inside me. I have romanticized more poisonous relationships than I can count or recall, yet my heart has a memory of each agonizing one in its muscles, embedded in its very tissue.

How do I define pain? Is my pain diminished in comparison to the depth of injustice throughout the world, or does it add to the collective consciousness of pain? What was my world as a child? What was my environment? What surrounded me? Clinically and psychologically, how did my mother’s struggle with chemical dependance and my father’s lustful relationship with religiosity damage the intricate wiring of my young mind? Is it possible for any child to make sense of heaven or hell, or to reconcile their guilt after being molested at five years old- reconcile it with the “reality” that they were going to burn in hell for all of eternity if they had sex before marriage? How does a still developing child comprehend the notions of consent, of shame, of isolation, of secrecy, of sexualization, of rape, of addiction, of abuse? They don’t, at least not in a way that will create a healthy, flourishing thought life or world view. There are atrocities that exist in the world, seen through the eyes of children, and regrettably felt by our souls, that prove the existence of evil.

I remember picking at every single scab I had on my body growing up. It didn’t matter whether they were big or small, if they were on my knees or on my elbows, if it was a deep wound of a surface annoyance. Pick every scab and leave no scab behind was my compulsion. Through the scarification of my own body I’ve learned that humans have an intrinsic desire to tear open our wounds- to pick and prod at what could heal them, and to scar our bodies and souls in hopes of developing thicker skin. I witness my mother wither away and exist in a state of non-coherence from my first memory of her until I was twelve years old. In her emotional absenteeism, my father hurled all of his anger onto me, laid it into me. He ripped open every scab on every wound that formed from his passive-aggressive knives- into each wound inflicted upon me by my mother, and screamed at the top of his lungs standing barely an inch away from my small face. Each blow was compounded by another, compounded year after year, until my skin developed just thick enough for me to watch him record my mother at our dining room table while she was nodding off, mocking her and degrading her while I watched. It was like porn to him-

-degrading a frail woman through a small, digital screen in front of his pre-teen daughter in pigtails.

Pornography was a force in our household.

When I reached a certain age, I don’t fully recall when, I traded by desire for affection for a deep desire for aggression. I sought to identify with the aggressor, the identity in the position of “power”. I was socialized to despise innocent affection. There were fleeting moments in my childhood which I can recall when I close my eyes- memories of my mom lying next to me in my bunk bed, running her fingers up and down my back to help me fall asleep. I used to sit on the edge of the couch and my father would do the same, until his hands reached too far down my back. Perhaps this is why innocent affection fills me with so much rage. I seem to be marked by something sacred, but the unnamed abuser notices, and decides to- through men- desecrate it. As I grew older an interesting paradoxical truth began to take root in my little soul: The people who you love and trust the most will both reinforce the innocence within you, and steal the innocence from you.

An emotion which has become a thought, which has grown into a belief system and mantra in my life, is that I cannot allow too close the people I long to draw near to myself. In order to maintain a safe distance and reasonable acceptance, I must hide the most vulnerable part of me, which is the very core of me. For in hiding the most vulnerable parts of me, perhaps I will save the ones I love from the betrayal of abusing me. So, how do I survive? With all of my focus on developing an identity through aggression, I neglected to identify with the woman who had chronically, emotionally neglected me-

-my mother.

My mother’s love is deep, covered by shallow. For most of my life, I didn’t ever understand the depth of my mother’s love for me. I was never capable of feeling it. Often times I’ve questioned whether or not it was even there. One night while in bed with an ex lover, I found myself walking through a maze in my mind and I arrived at the question I’d asked myself since I was a child: “Does my mother love me?”. I also ask myself, “Why does my soul find it so important to feel my mothers love?” I tried more intently to remember a time when I’d truly felt what I would consider the love of a mother for a daughter to be. When asking myself- or maybe asking space, gravity, God- whether or not my mother loved me, the only times I could conjure were of the times I felt mom’s absence. I can recall all of the instances in which I physically cared for her, cleaned up after her, lied for her, lied to her. The sensation of being betrayed wells up within me when I consider how I’ve learned my mother, and consequently, learned who I am through my mother.

I traveled back into a memory of a time when I was staying with my parents friends from church. Mom was in the hospital again, this time it was pancreatitis. In my memory, I was in the room of one of the Yuschak’s girls. The space around me felt like an increasing void which I would inevitably be swallowed by. It was an entity with its own pulse, its own agenda to crush me. The moonlight shining through the window felt as through it was there to expose me, shine through me, and draw me out of myself. The tears that I cried that night fell as waves crashing in a vast ocean. They were echoes of the ache. At the time I couldn’t articulate my depth of pain through words, yet my tears articulated enough on my behalf, hidden within them the salt of my memories. My tears screamed for someone to come, for anyone to see me, to acknowledge that I existed in this space which seemed to be a void witnessing me. Mrs. Yuschack opened my door, and despite every voice which told me to keep silent, pretend I wasn’t hurting, hide, I opened the flood gates and spilled my sorrow. I asked her to trace my back like mom did. It was a sacred space that I needed someone to touch. I needed my mom.

You see, the pain of the memory of abandonment is all encompassing. It throbs and screams, it itches and infects any and all semblance of safety and security. The pain of abandonment numbs you to its own deeply rooted and diseased nature. It reaches out and touches anything or anyone you will ever hope to love. It strips you of your passions, robs you of your connection to people and yourself, and convinces you that you can never be loved or held because you will always be left without, empty, alone. It dictates that the void may as well consume you, and you should just give up and die. The pain which abandonment inflicts is both a pathological liar and a great mirror. The pain of abandonment reveals through absence- through the absence of my mother, I came to know her love for me because the empty space where she once was is the proof that she once was there, and that her love for me was real because it was present. The void is the witness.

Are you still with me?

“Here at Perception Is Everything Church INC.™, we are a family. We want YOU to join us every Sunday at 9am and 10am, every Tuesday at 6am, 12pm, and 6pm, and every Thursday at 6am and 6pm while we pray and fast and pray to the American spirit of “Saint” Charlie Kirk, martyr of the faith and champion of our FREEDOM™. Wear your FREEDOM™ tee and blood red MAGA caps to show solidarity in “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage”! Pick up your “ICE IS NICE™”, “God, Guns and Trump”, “BROWNS OUT OF OUR TOWNS™”, “Stone the Sluts™” and “LYNCHED LAMB™” merch on the way in! Sponsored by American Investors and Lynched Lamb Cakes & Coffee™”.

Cheap imitations of power.

“Blow the trumpet in ION !”

The great American Corporate Church, where the prophets whistleblowers are wiped from view, salvation is sanitized and packaged for the American consumer, where the good news gospel of red letter Jesus the Christ has become the inverse and perverse communion, in communities of a shared, propagandized faith in prophecy and institutional supremacy. Men stand on platforms, elevated above their congregation, above *nature, fashioning themselves into demigods and idols to be ever seen yet never known, not even to himself. White washed tombs. A tragedy of antiquity. Their own wives and children do not respect them. They run from church building to church building, hiding. Dear Adam. Behind them they leave a trail of trials and witch hunts, loose ends of their make pretend boyhood. Twisting the wood and nails around their slithering tongues, these pretenders defile the gospel for greed and self preservation- for the cause of a nation. Onward, Christian soldiers. They partner with purveyors of “christian education”, buying and selling the indoctrination of the next generation. What will their children say when they grow and see they have been betrayed by their fathers, their *voices buried in their childhood bedrooms? A tragedy of antiquity.

RED LETTER:

He broke it (the bread) and said, “This is my body, which is given for you; do this (eat) in remembrance of me.”

When Christ came to the Corporate Church, the children were the first to recognize him. They gravitated to the feminine nature of his Holy Spirit- safe like a stream of water in a desert oasis, true like a small light in a deep, dark shadow of religious performance. Nature. A breath of stillness. The demigods trembled at the still, small light, urgently searching to understand how the light could see them. Mary of Magdala, too “erotic” for the church. Afraid of exposure, the church told the children they were naked and in need clothing, then taught them that gossip, slander and false accusation is the best way to cover the body of their corporate shame, then sold their parents the merch. *Buy in created and sustained. Quarterly quota met. Supply and demand satiated.

“We have a culture here- a shared heritage. Trust me, your pastor! I have a platform and the money to prop up my mask of ministry! And look, we even have a brand identity! Make your All-In Giving Commitment NOW, you don’t wanna miss what GOD is doing here at Perception Is Everything Church INC.”

Christ, however, reaffirmed their holy presence, their uniqueness and individuality amid the brand packages, political power-plays, sermon series and clique conformity. The children said, RED LETTER, “This is my body, and of it I am not ashamed!”. This was not the FREEDOM the demigod CEO recognized. It couldn’t be bought or sold, put on a T-Shirt, or stamped to the side of a coffee cup. There would be want for nothing, no soul held in debt, no penance to be paid.

The eyes of their incorporated authority spoke in slanted whispers to His presence as he walked through their church courtyard, as they peered from the shadows in which they hid their faces. O, what power this little light held.

“Foreigner. He doesn’t share our thoughts, our beliefs, our ideals. His gospel doesn’t agree with ours. He’s asking too many questions. He’s making the children ask questions. He’s asking about our god, the money we serve and the money that serves us. We have families to feed! His questions aren’t conducive to the conversation that keeps our corporation running. He’s asking of war and prophecy, of church and of policy. We can’t control him. We can’t manipulate him. He will not bow. He will not buy. He shouts in service and sings in the face of our questioning. He sees us too clearly. He has no fear. He won’t conform. How do we get rid of him?.

Accusation! Accusation is always the answer. White women and white tears always upheld white supremacy! Simple. We’ll say he was ‘a threat to our way of life’, to our white babies and black children that we’ve adopted and indoctrinated into our whiteness, that he had too many disagreements, that if he disagreed so much he should go back to his own country, he find another church that is “more his vibe”. We’ll say that he’s “unhinged”, and that his hair is too reminiscent of John in the wilderness, that the color is too reminiscent of the radical ideology. Highlight him. We’ll say that his interest in expressions of free spirit like literature and the arts are demonic, that his gaze erected lust in the spirits of both the men AND the women. We’ll say he was “disturbing the peace”, “disrupting the service” that he was mocking our god by mocking the pastor. We’ll say that he “instigated the pastor”, that he was the “bait of Satan”, that he was tempting our pastor into disagreement, trying to expose his sins.

He calls us brother, but how can he call us brother if we are sons of our god, if our jesus doesn’t look like him and he doesn’t look like us? We’ll redefine the language! Brother is a term of seduction. WE DECLARE AND DECREE IT! We’ll say his feminine Spirit is too erotic, her smile insidious, her worship distracting. We’ll let the other women hate her, shame her, spread seeds of division as to the nature of her character. And then, finally, we’ll trap this Christ. We’ll build our case against him, gather witnesses of our choosing and tailor the facts to our liking. False accusation. ‘His feminine Spirit tried to seduce us out of our power.’ And when the time comes, we’ll publicly expel him. No one will listen to him. We’ve discredited his gospel by then. Everyone will be afraid of him. This will terrify the children. He will become a common enemy, a threat to our corporate safety. And if anyone should side with him or speak on his behalf? We’ll ostracize them, turn our faces and quiet our conversations when they enter the room. They can no longer be trusted. And when we break his Spirit? His feminine wisdom and nature? We’ll call her sorrow and anger belligerent. We’ll reinforce how she was unhinged, dangerous, insane, unpredictable. We’ll stalk her with our digital eye, surveil her from a safe distance, like an animal in a zoo. And when she sees that we see her? We’ll pretend we weren’t looking. We’ll silence her further, and refuse evidence of our actions. We were justified! The Christ. We had to kill him before he killed U.S.! Think of our way of life! Our babies! Our ministry! Our MONEY! But, for good measure, we’ll platform someone who resembles what he represents, a “Token of a Great Day”. Let the children find familiarity in a reminder, but we retain all of the power.”

Like Pontius Pilate they wash their hands. Perception Is Everything Church INC. emboldens the mobs which they’ve created, implicate their church members as a shield to their seared conscience, and never face the ones they falsely accuse. Long live the work force who do their dirty work for them! They take the gospel, the sacred good news of freedom to the poor, the immigrant, the oppressed the downcast and the children, and they strip it of its dignity. They whip it in their courtyards. They spit on and despise the image of the one whose freedom mirrors their own corruption, exposes their true face under their mask, and threatens their branded illusion of freedom. They want to fuck it, abuse it, dominate it, possess it. They yearn to rape it, muffle its screaming voice and songs of praise and puppeteer its body. Subhuman. The gospel. Skin it and wear it on their faces. Cut its hair and fashion it into chairs to seat their usurped power. They despise their own nakedness. Demons. They colonize the narrative. Devils. Righteousness like filthy rags. Put it on a T-Shirt. Collective identity. They don’t believe in the Christ who flips tables. Their anger is stroked and released in delayed gratification, voyeurism. They know not even themselves. Shells. Shiny happy people holding hands. They rot under their masquerading *pretenses, living in a state of desolation in their sacred, earthen vessels. A tragedy of antiquity.

Their mob carries him to a tree. Upon his head they place a noose, on his neck hang a message of mocking disgrace for all to bear witness. They make him the object of shame, branded scapegoat and bearer of false accusation. They hang him. From a tree he is hung. Everyone cheers. They laugh. Their hearts smile a haughty smirk of vain victory. Their children jump in their Corporate bounce house, they drink their Lynched Lamb™ Kool-Aid as they watch his body sway. They steal his song, his expression, his essence. They brand it as their own. They colonize his joy and capitalize on his culture. They hand the congregation the Slave Bible at his lynching. They say, “Narrow is the road that leads to a life of Prosperity™!” And of his lynching they made postcards, posted their perverse pleasantries for their friends and enemies to see. They broke his body, and ate. Cannibalistic communion of hate. They made his sacred body into souvenirs and memorabilia. They turned his murder into a slogan: “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN”, make the church hate again. They offered up a sacrifice to the Great American Dream, to the American spirit of *haint Charlie Kirk.

“The good news is that, for a limited time only, YOU can be ALL-IN! Make your All-In Giving Commitment NOW, you don’t wanna miss what GOD is doing here at Perception Is Everything Church INC. Donate your house, your car, your land to the cause! And welcome to our home, where Perception Is Everything™.”

How the American Church Lynched the Gospel of Jesus the Christ. A tragedy of antiquity.

Definitions, Sources and associated literature:

Achille Mbembe, “On the Postcolony”, University of California Press, 2001. Chapters 1, “Of Commandment” (parallels between the current administration and institutional authority within the corporate church. Understanding the concept of “commandment, circularity” within the context of Christo-Colonial thought”).

Chapter 1- “Of Commandment”

p.34: “Yet the colonial *potentate (a monarch or ruler, especially an autocratic one, one who has absolute power) also portrays itself as a free gift, proposing to relieve its object (church member, citizen) of poverty and free it from debased condition by elevating it to the level of a human being. That is what A. Sarraut called “the right of the stronger to aid the weaker”.

p. 35 …“The state that flows from this sovereignty defines itself as protective. The native is its protégé…It is also a family state, and to that extent a “family and filial bond binds the colonies to the mother country”.

Chapter 3 - “The Aesthetics of Vulgarity”

The Intimacy of Tyranny, p. 129- “It is here that the official ‘sign’ or ‘sense’ is most easily ‘unpacked’, ‘disenchanted’, and gently repacked, and *pretense (le simulacre) becomes the dominant modality of transactions between the state and society, or between rulers and those who are supposed to obey.

The Aesthetics of Vulgarity p. 133- “The real inversion takes place when, in their desire for a certain majesty, the masses join in the madness and clothe themselves in cheap imitations of power to reproduce its epistemology (the theory of knowledge), and when the power, in its own violent quest for grandeur, makes vulgarity (morally crude, undeveloped, or unregenerate) and wrongdoing its mane mode of existence. It is here, within the confines of this intimacy, that the forces of tyranny in Africa must be studied. Such research must go beyond institutions, beyond formal positions of power, and beyond the written rules, and examine how the implicit and explicit are interwoven, and how the practices of those who command and those who are assumed to obey are so entangled as to render both powerless. For it is precisely the situations of powerlessness that are the situations of violence *par excellence, (better or more than all others of the same kind).”

Søren Kierkegaard, “The Concept of Dread”, Princeton University Press, 1957.

Chapter 1, “The Concept of the First Sin”

(Understanding Adam), “The Concept of the Fall” (Understanding innocence and ignorance, Concupiscentia (concupiscence-strong sexual desire; lust) and superbia (pride). “The Concept of Dread” (Understanding dread in children as thirst for adventure and the mysterious, and in man, how he relates to spirit and ambiguous power of dread). *Adam’s possibility of freedom.

Susan Griffin, “Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her”, HarperCollins Publications, 1978

Book One: Matter

p. 22- “And it is written that women, on discovering that they have ovaries are liable to become arrogant through this knowledge. And we seek dumbness. And it is decided that human knowledge and human power are one. That “in the womb of nature” are “many secrets of excellent use”. And it is written that “it is annoying and impossible to suffer proud women, because in general Nature has given men proud and high spirits, while it has made women humble in character and submissive….We practice muteness.”

p.33- “And woman, it is observed, like the negro, is flat-footed, with a prominent inclination of the pelvis making her appear less erect, and her gait less steady. That as regards his intellectual faculties, the Negro partakes of the nature of the child or the female or the senile white. That woman’s brain is smaller and the shape of her head closer to that of the infants and those of the “lower races”…

Slavery is said to be a condition of every higher civilization. A woman should be an enthusiastic slave to the man to whom she has given her heart, it declared…

And both the emancipated woman and the Negro freedman are said to exhibit symptoms of insanity or nervousness.”

p. 37- “It is observed that no nation has ever existed on the face of the earth which did not crumble under the use of its perverted energies when the gospel reached it.” *aforementioned in this chapter are definitions of the energies of man, the energies of women, entropy, genetics, mutation.

“Haint”: A “haint” is a dialectal Southern U.S. term for a ghost or evil spirit, originating from Gullah Geechee folklore, often depicted as a lingering, malevolent entity that can cause harm. Often described as a vengeful or malicious spirit, more intense than a typical ghost, sometimes associated with anger or unfinished business.

“Token of A Great Day”: Lynching Postcards: “Token of a Great Day”, documentary short film directed by Christine Turner, 2021.

The phrase “Token of a Great Day” was used on postcards depicting lynchings, a cruel juxtaposition highlighting the perpetrators’ perverse celebration of racist violence. Black activists later used these very postcards to bring attention to the brutality of lynching to national leaders, turning the “tokens” into tools of resistance.

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