Welcome to my memoir. [It is very small, but in the way that the shed behind your house is. It may not matter to each day, but among the things you keep inside there are some important ones that come in handy more often than you thought they would when you got them.]
I grew up in a relatively fringe religious group. [Statistical Spoiler, I am from Southeast Idaho.] At the same time that I was learning my first words and constructing my first sentences, I was also being taught a set of stories. That is, a whole set of words and sentences not of my own construction. I was taught that a system of beliefs and morals were hidden inside the words and sentences of these stories. I came to believe that those beliefs and morals were my own. If not of my own construction, then of my own embraced belief.
Growing into young adulthood, it felt like those beliefs and those morals were as intrinsic to my own words and sentences [and therefore to myself] as the wood is to the tree.
At some later point in young adulthood, a creeping suspicion began to creep upon me. A hunch concerning just how little of the real estate of my mind belonged to me. That I was a renter in my own head.
Then came the anger. Waves of it. Sometimes peaks of something like rage, sometimes troughs of something like embarrassment. Sometimes a middle ground that could be called at times simmering apathy, at times nebulous confusion.
All of this was was happening inside me [being acted upon] like stretches of weather filling the sky. What I eventually chose to do in response [acting] was to begin to consciously explore the ways in which my words and sentences had been polluted by their [read: our] beliefs and their [ditto] morals. I listened to podcasts and read testimonies [a word loaded like unto a baked potato among My People] of people who felt similarly misled. Betrayed was a very common word in those various personal stories.
After some years of surfing those particular waves of experience, both my own and others’, the Realization finally came. That many of those loaded stories were victims, too. They did not belong to themselves anymore than those beliefs and morals belonged to me.
Some of the stories I learned as a child had certainly been composed with the intention to manipulate of the beliefs and morals of the masses [I’m looking at you, Us]. However, a great many of them predate the beliefs and morals they have been coopted to convey today. These ancient stories, too, have been tainted with Messages not their own.
Facile beliefs and morals are not the wood of the story-tree, either.
This realization replaced my anger with curiosity. The curiosity of a poorly-self-orienting person who looks closely, for the first time, at a map of the places they’ve been, and smiles, and thinks something like So that’s where that is!
For now, I’ve come to think that maybe what the wood of the story-tree is, if we insist on making it anything at all, is the framing of our shed. Which we are, of course, free [agents] to fill as we see fit.
Lest this micro-memoir begin to drag into the short realm, suffice it to say that the stories that I am rescuing as I myself was rescued [acting and being acted upon] are the stories of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles.
But don’t, for the love of God, tempt me, or I will quickly and enthusiastically devolve into a sermon on the traces in the Song of Deborah from when Jehovah was still just a storm-god in the Canaanite pantheon, or why Mark’s Jesus was actively opposed to the masses repenting and receiving a remission of their sins, and why Matthew obviously fixed this in his later gospel.
See, I’m already sorry. I have learned over the years [with particular emphasis on a particular two years of my young adult life] that no one wants an unsolicited discussion of the Bible.
[But if you do, reach out, and I’ll share my YouTube history.]
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