Sue Ann: Becoming Real
"I wasn’t deliberately trying to deceive people. I think mostly I was trying to convince myself. I was wanting so much to believe Christianity, because I saw that it made people happy."
Edited by Cliff Williams from an interview with Sue Ann in 2003. "Sue Ann" is a pseudonym.
I was pretty much born a Christian, from the womb, but I didn’t start digging into my faith until six months ago. I grew up in a Christian family, and somehow I have the ability to figure out what people want me to be and then become that. It wasn’t that I knew I was being fake, and I don’t think I was intentionally being fake. But at this point my theory is that what I was doing was being spiritual because that was in my environment. And I was good at it.
For example, here at school I led a prayer ministry. It wasn’t so much because I didn’t believe in prayer. It wasn’t because I thought, “Hey, people want me to lead a prayer ministry.” It was more an outflowing of understanding that the way I could succeed and be liked and accepted in my social environment was to be strongly spiritual. That sounds a little stronger than it was. It was genuine. I didn’t know I was being fake, though I kind of felt it. I felt I was always striving to feel something that I couldn’t and that I saw other people experiencing. It was, “I want that. I want what they have.” I saw the things they did. They prayed, they read their Bibles, they felt things during worship, and I decided I should do those things, too. So I did. The deeper I got, the more it looked as if I was doing okay spiritually. Maybe in my own eyes I was.
It’s too strong to say that it’s all fake, but it feels fake. I think it feels fake because I’m experiencing things so much more deeply now so far as my faith is concerned. I’m asking questions and doubting things and searching for answers. “What do I think and why and who cares what other people think? Who cares if they say, ‘You’re dumb, and you’re fake, and you’re going to go to hell because you don’t believe this’? Who cares?” Before, that was everything to me. If someone said, “Hey, you’re doing really well spiritually,” I thought, “Yeah, I’m doing well spiritually.”
I wasn’t deliberately trying to deceive people. I think mostly I was trying to convince myself. I was wanting so much to believe Christianity and grasp it and become a Christian. I was wanting to become someone who is deeply affected by God, by Christ, by whatever it is in Christianity that changes people, because I saw that it made people happy.
What happened six months ago was a combination of things. It was me having doubts my whole life. I always doubted that I was a Christian. I was trying to prove that to myself. All the doubts and all the questions I had my whole life came to a fountainhead.
I was having a conversation with a friend, and she asked me the old classic, “If you died tonight, would you go to heaven? What would happen to you? If someone held a gun to your head and said, ‘Do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God?’ what would you say?” I don’t know why, but it was a really honest moment. I hesitated for so long. I didn’t know. I still don’t know the answer. So I realized, “I have enough courage now, it’s time for me to face my doubts.”
That moment of honesty came from something that happened in a worship service. I was at F.A.T. Thursday, and I fell to my knees. I remembered a time when my family told me we were moving again. We moved a lot and I remembered sitting in my room and crying. I was crying and I was hurt and I didn’t want to leave people I knew. What brought me to my knees—I literally couldn’t stand anymore—was that I remembered feeling abandoned. My dad was nowhere to be found. I knew my mom was outside my room, but I felt that she didn’t care. I was angry when I remembered that, because it felt as if God had brought that memory to me. It brought up so much pain and so many other memories that I got freaked out. Then I got angry at God and felt abandoned.
I don’t remember how, but somehow it all spiraled back to the core of Christianity and what I believed about it. I didn’t know. Before that time six months ago, I thought I knew, but after it I didn’t.
In a short series of weeks, I stopped being in the prayer ministry, I stopped giving people the impression that I could lead them spiritually, I stopped acting the same way during worship. I stopped engaging. I sat back and listened and watched and thought, “Okay, what’s going on, and do I really buy into this?”
For the first couple of weeks, maybe even for the first couple of months, the entire foundation of my world was ripped apart, because so much of who I am and was is based on the Christian subculture. You pray, you read your Bible, you’re a Christian, and that’s how things are. I was a leader, and the foundation of everything I believed was being ripped away. And if my beliefs were ripped away, I couldn’t act on them anymore with integrity. Integrity is really important to me. So I stopped engaging in all those things and went through upheaval in my life.
I cried everyday for three or four months. I stopped praying. I was still reading my Bible, but skeptically. “What is this? God made Adam and Eve leave the Garden of Eden, but he put them there in the first place.” I had tons of intellectual upheaval. All the questions I had repressed for my whole life were now high in the forefront of my brain. Did the resurrection happen? Did Jesus live? How do I know? I went back to questioning the very nature of reality. What’s real? How do I know? Do I feel loved? Questions like that.
The upheaval climaxed right after the incident six months ago. It was terrible. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I stopped working out. I still went to classes and I still went to church, but it was more so I could have a setting where I could ask people questions. I was in pain, but I had no idea why. There was a point when I was hanging out with a friend and I cried for two and half hours, because my pain was so deep and I couldn’t identify where it was coming from. It was overwhelming. I could feel my emotional and spiritual pain physically. That’s why I couldn’t eat. I stayed awake at night scared that I was going to go to hell. I condemned myself because I felt as if I was going to walk away from my faith. My entire life would be different, I would do drugs, I would rebel, I would go off the deep end.
What kept me going was that there were people who cared about me, who cared that I was alive and where I ended up and how I was doing. They wanted to walk with me through that. I think if no one had told me that they cared or offered to walk with me, I would have been gone. I think I might have physically exploded.
There were times when I was low enough to commit suicide. It wasn’t a plan—if I hit this point, I will do this. It was more times when I’d be in the kitchen and there’d be a knife and I would think, “I could cut my wrist.” It was possible. I hope I wouldn’t have done that. I was a big mess on the inside—a big ball of pain and emotions, wanting to express myself.
I don’t know how I got past this stage. I just plowed through it. I kept going. People asked about me and expressed that they cared, and I had the hope that I’d solve it somehow, that eventually there’d be enough of a foundation for me to live.
I’ve found parts of the foundation. I’ve found enough that I’m not in extremely poignant emotional pain in every part of my life. I’ve found enough that I’m not incapacitated.
I’ve found that I believe that the reality that we see and touch and feel is real. It’s not fake, it’s not an illusion, it’s the way things really are. I’ve found that there is a God, and he communicates with people, some people, and he created the world. Going out into nature is a huge part of my foundation. I can’t look at a tree or a plant, especially mountains, and think that they just happened. I can’t believe that. I can’t believe that there’s nothing at the core of the universe. I can’t believe that it’s just chance, because there’s so much beauty and purpose in creation.
But I haven’t discovered enough to be able to make choices. I don’t have anything that gives me enough hope to be able to plan the rest of my life. People need a set of values and a set of beliefs that they rotate their life around, that they base decisions on and that they choose spouses and jobs on and steers the course of their life. Well, I don’t have those. If someone asked me, “On what basis would you choose a career, or on what basis would you make a major life decision or choose a spouse?” I could give you the default Christian answer. I could probably give it to you to the point where you believed me. However, as far as my making the decision, I wouldn’t have it. It would collapse, because I question it so much. I’m like, “Do I really believe that? Do I really understand that?”
I wouldn’t call myself a Christian, but I still go to church, because people there let me ask questions. When my faith, my pseudo faith, whatever I had until six months, collapsed, I still wanted to be a Christian. I feel as if I’m working my way back to that. But in order for it to be an honest journey, it has to be very real for me not to be a Christian. I can’t take communion, because I can’t in good conscience take a piece of bread and drink wine that represents Jesus’ blood and body and mean something significant that changed my life. I can’t say that, because I haven’t experienced that. With all integrity, I can’t do that. I don’t pray very often. I’ve pretty much stopped reading my Bible.
I wouldn’t say it’s just intellectual questions, although that’s a big part of it. It’s mostly emotional pain, I think. I’ve been very wounded. This is hard for me to admit, but I need to. It has affected my spiritual life and my view of God.
I feel very emotionally abandoned by my family, particularly by my dad. He’s such a hard person on the outside. On the inside he loves people, but he’s never let it out. So he can’t, or won’t, reach me on that. Because of that, when I’m spiritually honest and when I’m honest about why I’m hurt, when I’m praying especially, I’ll sense God and be angry. “You have abandoned me. You brought so much pain into my life. You bring pain into people’s lives all the time. I hate that, and I hate you for that.”
The image of God and the image of my dad are melded together in my head, and I can’t separate them. I expect God to act with me and feel toward me as my dad acts and feels toward me. I react to God on that basis most of the time. I think that’s the core of this whole thing. The reason I’m not able to have faith is because of the intellectual questions and this emotional pain.
At this point in my life I’m frustrated because I know what the key issue is and it’s hard to deal with it. My life aim is being frustrated. My passion in life, what I really want to do, is work with high school kids. I love them. I would sit around and mentor high school kids all day if someone would let me. But the thing is, with high school kids you have to look them in the face and say, “I believe this, and I believe this would be the best for you. What do you think?” I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t sit down with kids that I dearly care about and tell them that I think I’ve found something that might give them hope. I can’t work with them because I don’t have enough of a foundation. I can’t honestly commit myself to one. I don’t feel that I have a sense of purpose in my life.
Since that time six months ago, I’ve had a fairly joyless existence. But I have hope, even faith, that this stage of my life is temporary and that there might be a God out there who loves me, even who loves me unconditionally. I have hope that this God might be the same God of a Jewish man named Jesus who lived under the rule of the Roman Empire in 30 AD. Who was this man and what is all the hoopla about him? That is a fun question.
Turning Points: Faith Journeys of Twenty-Five People