Leaving my Father's House

No Kings.

father washing my hair, circa 1994.

I borrowed the title of this piece from Marion Woodman, a wise old crone whose writings continue to hold me steady through turbulent times.

In 1992, Woodman compiled a series of non-fiction stories that follow Kate Hanson, Mary Hamilton, and Rita Greer Allen in analysis as they painstakingly worked to cultivate their own divine feminine power while living through an eon of patriarchy.

The subtitle of Woodman’s book is “A journey to conscious femininity” and I read most of it last year. For me, it’s right up there in a rich canon of texts written by mistresses and maidens who built lighthouses for women walking a path of initiation, women who are attempting to break the unconscious covenants they made in childhood when they committed themselves to laws that were not their own.

I thought of Woodman’s book when I called my father a few days ago to wish him a Happy Father’s Day but instead received a message from my sister that he was no longer speaking to me since I came out as bisexual.

That’s right.

I’ve found my voice and the price I must pay is that I may never hear my father’s ever again.

I’ve always sensed that fairytales are true and there’s something Ursula in The Little Mermaid about all of this that I find slightly amusing.

Am I in shock?

Not really, no.

But I asked my sister to clarify, just to be sure I understood the gravity of what she was saying.

Can I talk to Dad?

My sister: I’m afraid not.

Why not, I asked, totally anticipating what she would say next.

He is no longer talking to you.

An odd feeling of calm overcame me, and I steadied my breath. I think the sensation was something like acceptance.

A week earlier, I asked Mom how Dad was doing and she told me he was “okay but disappointed.” To hear that he was working through that disappointment by shutting me out was heart wrenching, but not surprising.

Dad is a preacher after all, and he has the same melancholy spirit I have. I’ve always looked up to him. He retreats to his own inner world and becomes avoidant when he experiences grief. So many mystics do.

Still, his silence is a threshold I knew I would have to one day cross in order to become who I am, a transit he himself taught me to make when he decided to follow his own calling.

I was four or five years old when he received his vocation and he completely changed his life — and mine — because of it.

He wanted to be close to God, so he tried (and still does) to live out the Bible to the letter, which requires attending church on Saturday — not Sunday — and abstaining, as the good book of Leviticus commands us, from eating pork or shellfish, and celebrating all of God’s festivals that mark the year’s equinoxes, like the Feast of Trumpets (Rosh Hashanah) and Pentecost (Shavuot).

The covenant that my father is bound to emerged out of the dawn of literacy; it was a contract birthed into being long before he was born, through the invention of the printing press in 1440 and the royal might of King James VI and I, some 150 years later;

its decree states that if we want to do what God requires of us, we need to get clear on what his word actually says, which means sussing out the false interpretations that the establishment (catholicism) has spread for thousands of years and letting everybody know that our path is the true path to salvation.

Sometimes I wonder how it is that so many splintered churches and fragmented pulpits fail to realize that in insisting their way is the one true way, they are simply repeating what their fathers believed, fathers who rebelled against their fathers before them who rebelled against theirs and who strove in season and out to achieve some kind of existential literary nirvana by insisting their word was final.

The Earth has seen this story play itself out a thousand times across a thousand lifetimes.

There is nothing new under the sun.

The King James Bible continues in this tradition. It is, objectively, a masterpiece.

But it is also a collection of interpretations composed in the cool, wet, maritime climate of England and Scotland, commissioned by a fallible man (who was probably bisexual, btw) seeking to gain absolute authority over two warring nations and quell Anglican dissent by selectively translating the mystical and political ongoings of shepherds and farmers who lived thousands of years before England was even a concept, in the hot, dry Levantine desert thousands of miles away.

The psychedelic multiverses that are contained in this fact alone makes the project of perfect translation — or, ahem, purity — a rather strange farce and a walking contradiction that has very little to do with righteousness and everything to do with power. It is, yet again, man’s petulant attempt to guarantee himself certainty and safe passage in the face of an overwhelming Mystery that will ultimately devour him.

But when I was a child, I did not know this and I believed our way was the true way and became devout. I spent hours pouring over chapter and verse trying to draw the conclusions my father and the church had already come to, and work out my own salvation with fear and trembling. I believed the lie that the gays would burn since it was the only thing that saved me from the terror of looking in the mirror and owning the full complexity of my being.

Denial is a strange way to draw close to God. Yet in spite of my bigotries, I remain grateful for the discipline and devotion that growing up religious has afforded me. It has enhanced my ability to pray, a skill I don’t believe I could live without, certainly not now, in the maddening apocalypse we now find ourselves in.

But in my late twenties, I started to notice that the God I worshipped in my youth didn’t really have daughters; there was the occasional heroine here and there but that exception proved the rule. The shape of my body was never really depicted in loving terms.

It is said that God made all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small. Does that include me, and the way the Muse moves through me, and the thrust of my hips when I dance, and the way I swoon when I see a beautiful woman? Is this not also the hand of God or am I simply dirty and inferior and in need of redemption?

These are the questions I began to furtively ask in my journal in my late twenties.

I wanted to be just like my father. He was my hero, and I admired him as he preached from the pulpit; I wanted my voice to bellow like his did and show the people how God moved through me but I never could due to the apparently inferior jewel God had placed between my thighs. Only the men were allowed to preach. It was only kings who were sacred, destined, and fit to rule.

Until now.

This treacherous covenant was never mine and it has arrested my tongue for far too long.

I know why my father mourns. Perhaps all parents must when they discover their children are, in fact, not their property.

But I cannot carry his sorrow, and I can no longer stomach the mandate that women keep silent in the church or that the queer be banished, an unfortunate set of commandments since I happen to be both.

I have never known King James, and I have never been his subject. He certainly was never my king.

He cannot circumscribe the boundaries of my affection and though I will always love him, my father does not have the authority to deny me my own calling.

The divine has always been my birthright; she has been ringing in my ears since before I was formed. Her melody is sonorous and full, and it is my duty to answer her call.

I’ve done all I can to block out the sound of her voice ringing in my ears. For thirty-one years, I did all I could to entrain myself in the asphyxiating light of my father’s vision.

Alas, I accept my defeat.

Through the ecstasy of devotion, I have discovered my way which no other person can live out and I will die from anguish if I deny my true self the right to know and be known by God.

There is sorrow in my chest now, and a roaring anger too.

My father’s silence is part of the divine calling; I know this to be true.

But this time I will respond.

This time I will not keep silent.

This time I will pray and answer his silence with the same words a shepherd in the desert once famously uttered:

Hineni.

Here I am.

How fitting and how conveniently we forget that Abraham left his father’s house too.

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To listen to an a cappella song I channeled last year that describes my relationship with the divine, check out this song entitled ‘The Lord.’

Thank you for reading. :)