on wanting revelation
“What do you think you are on the edge of?”
“I don’t know. Revelation.”
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The Road to Damascus carries with it a promise of possible universes that plagues me still. I left the church, I left the religion of miracles and arbitrarily chosen favorites of the divine who might receive knowledge or healing, and I walked in a straight line toward what I could touch and see. The universe doesn’t play favorites in my current universe. The inexplicable is the simply not-yet-understood, not a sign. Signifiers are intentional and human, contained to systems of power and words and cycles. The signs and wonders I once fervently watched for like the virgins at the gate watched for the bridegroom with their oil lamps in the parable are evidence of work put in and communities lifting up their own, of privilege at work and the cold bones of capital bracing ideas with tangible fruition.
But the Road to Damascus remains as this possible untasted fruit. It might exist, despite how all the other things failed to realize in the scouring light of sunlight and air: the promise of God’s protection if you keep the rules, the promise of peace if you walk further into the tangled, dark woods of your mind armed with scripture verses and prayer, the promise, the transformative delight of total union with another if they were the only one you ever fucked. These were false but, hey, what if God actually really wanted me back? He could do that thing again and show up and stop me in the road and tell me to return to the fold, tell me I was supposed to do something great for him and that it doesn’t look like telling stories to give others hope for healing and justice outside of the world his followers created.
I’m speaking in riddles, if you aren’t from my old world. Let me rephrase.
The more I dig into the nested layers of trauma, the more questions I have about who I could have been without it, and why it happened. There’s an impulse in everyone to try to rationalize suffering as having some kind of purpose, but this isn’t that, I think. I have fragments that don’t add up to a story, and I’m a writer, so I want a story that holds some kind of recognizable shape that I can tell and examine without fear of it falling to dust in my hands.
The story of the Road to Damascus is this: a young zealous man is out to eliminate Christians, and on his way to participate in a raid he coordinated in Damascus, he is stopped on the road by a blinding light. Jesus speaks to him out of the light, asking him why he’s persecuting his followers, and tells him to go into the city and wait until he will be instructed what to do. The light vanishes and the young man is left blind and dazed, but finds his way to the city and waits and fasts for three days. On the third day, a Christian is sent to his side to lay hands on him and pray for his healing. His blindness is healed and the young man repents and converts to Christianity.
In the Christian lexicon, it’s not just an epiphany--although this story is a very literal epiphany in the actual essence of the term. The Road to Damascus is a redirection of your sense of self and your life’s course, a deus ex machina turning you around in a way you cannot reverse. This is the ultimate beast in the jungle, the unavoidable fate to which you must surrender. Like all malefic interventions of the divine, it comes with initial resistance and then followed by the inevitable compliance with how things were always going to go. You can send your child into the woods to live with the fairies; she will still prick her finger. You can send your child into the wilderness to die; he will still kill you on the road. You can run to the belly of a whale; you will still end up in Nineveh offering up salvation promises.
But the Road to Damascus isn’t a prophetic moment. You can’t know it’s going to happen in advance, not really. You might suspect, but the intervention that occurs is one without foreshadowing or fanfare at your christening. You’re full bore on the life path that you think makes the most sense to you, and then one day you’re on the way to work and you have a new name and a new identity and nothing that used to matter does anymore.
And now here I am, a decade out from breaking up with the church and still looking over my shoulder for the Road to Damascus moment to smack me in the face and tell me what I’m still unable to understand about where I’ve come from and why I am the way I am. It is with begrudging acceptance that I have plodded my way out of heteronormativity and into (in chronological order) non-monogamy, bisexuality, and gender queerness. Each moment of self knowledge has been painfully gradual, no revelation, no flash of light. No direction from the heavens to tell me that this was the correct thing to try on and accept about myself, just a constriction in my chest when the wrong assumptions were made about me, followed by a chilly departure from my natural joy in being alive in a body that can touch and play every time the wrong kind of touch or gaze was applied to me. My self-discovery journey had no divine defender to tell me how to live in my own consciousness correctly--there was no “correctly” to be had. There was only following the quiet yeses that my heart whispered to me in my dreams at night after I finally succumbed to rest despite my fear of night terrors.
I crave the revelation, the terror of encountering the divine and having my fears and dreams laid out before me in sharp relief. It would help me avoid cultivating the trust I’ve had to build with my own desires, allow me to sublimate myself into some clear and limited existence knit around the steel core of God’s plan for my life. Yarn bomb self on streetlight, bringing color to divine illumination, formless and void without a pattern of my own, no wobbly existential questions answered because questions aren’t needed anymore.
Several friends of mine are encountering memories returning that were once lost to their adult selves. I, too, have blank spots in my timeline, intense bodily reactions to certain kinds of touch, nightmares that leave me gasping for some secure anchor in the middle of the night. With a friend’s help, a few years back I worked an elaborate spell to lock away (not forget, but to protect against) the terror I suspected lay in my memory. “Do you want to try to remember?” my friend asked. I did not. I wanted revelation without history, I wanted direction and clarity without context.
We all lay awake at night, these friends and I, as our bodies remember. Blinding light we do not have, but drifting on the electromagnetic currents which carry our softest selves between the shores of waking and sleeping and sometimes bump into dark things beneath the surface of the current is just as unsettling as being stopped in the road and struck blind by the divine. Revelation is inherently a violence, a ripping of realities into pieces. Perhaps it’s because we constructed these realities of ours wrong, worked ourselves up to adulthood without reading the pattern directions closely enough. It should have been clear all along, we tell ourselves, but we didn’t see it there. The violence of revelation is a bone being broken to be reset. It’s corrective destruction, but this experience itself isn’t a signifier of understanding. What does it mean, to realize it was all a lie, after all, without God telling you so directly? What does it mean to know in your sleep that you were betrayed and no god was there to protect you, to know this and know that no matter how cogently you respond to this knowledge, you will still wake from a nightmare gasping for air?
So you take the next step and the next, knowing there’s no real difference to be made of this new revision of your story from an outsider’s view. Only you can know what it means to discard the corrupted images of self and keep asking “yes, and?” of your heart’s hunger for softness and welcome. The angel isn’t going to meet me on the road, but I’m meeting myself in the kitchen every morning and greeting the version of me who stands up a little taller than the one who didn’t like themself yesterday until they said yes to this next thing.
I’m not falling into the path of revelation, as much as I wish I could surrender myself to blinding amounts of self-knowledge and just be who I am told to be. Instead, I’m just walking a little further every day toward the things that keep me warm.
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This week I’ve been staying with a friend who just had major surgery, helping her recover. It’s nice to not be alone, but Blanche hates being an apartment dog and I feel weird being out of my routines. Having company has been so, so good, though.
Today we head back home, and I’m going to try to really get my head in the game with the semester ahead. Teaching on Zoom yet again is discouraging. I miss my students, and I miss dressing up for the day and leaving the house. I miss having a clear delineation between home and work.
If you enjoyed this, my venmo is @haettinger and you should also check out the podcast I co-host with Kieryn Darkwater, Kitchen Table Cult.
xo,
e