August 1, 2025

Before Death: An Incoherence (Part 2)

II

With awareness of death comes, inevitably, religious psychosis. There is the faith of youthful naivety, the one inherited from parents and our surrounding culture, where we parrot the beliefs of those around us as much out of the childlike affect of cleaving to the identities of those higher in the social order than us as any kind of sincere belief. There is a reason, after all, that functionally all religions have a recommitment ceremony sometime in adolescence or adulthood, where the naivety of youth and its remarkable and charming credulity must inevitably give way to a more rigid, impermeable and permanentizing faith. The triggering event of a true faith is a strange one. To create a social faith, the kind carried, say, by most of the Hellenistic era, who could plainly see Mount Olympus and thus knew in a certain real sense that no gods lay up there in manses of splendor controlling the looms of the world but instead had a construction of a faith that straddled the line between a real metaphysical explanation of the engines of the world and a metaphorical symbol-image substrate with which to broadly order and communicate thought in a religio-linguistic event, is not ultimately a difficult process. In a certain manner of looking at things, our pillars of popular culture serve these same functions, where complex and inevitably layered and polyformal references to these abstract engines of cultural wisdom provide at least the semblance of an immediating symbol-language that bypasses the linguistic nihilisms mapped by Derrida and Wittgenstein. But this does not represent really a true faith, one of the heart and spirit, one that is as alchemically fused to the center of being as, say, our burgeoning understanding of physics, the biological processes of hunger and sleep, of defecation and matters of basic hygiene. The social in a real sense is a layer we allow to cover the fundamental world, a necessary one when confronted by the solipsistic anxiety of the perfect alienation of the self, but not ultimately the bottom of the real itself. This requires something with greater force.

For me, it was this burgeoning awareness of death. My brother had started going to a church service at the behest of his friend Shane, a fellow trombonist in middle school band he had bonded with only to discover that he too shared the same taste in music and by great luck played drums compared to my brothers guitar, facilitating a band to be formed. The rub, in a certain sense, was Shane's devout Christian faith, one that left slight room for bending and acceptance of friends to a certain degree of intimacy but forbidding much beyond that unless they too shared the faith. This was further complicated by his specific sect of the Christian faith, being a member of the local Assembly of God, a Pentecostal church. Pentecostalism in general is a rather pernicious and vile sort of evangelical Christianity, taking the already odious capacity for it to pass like a stinking choking cloud of miasma and intensifying it, preaching that those who are without Christ and often even those who are Christian but outside the bounds of the Finished Work Pentecostal theological strain are not only doomed to serve Satan knowingly or unknowingly but are themselves inherently spiritually corruptive even to Christians of great faith. It preaches by nature an isolationist view of the faith, that all Christians are lambs in a world of wolves, and that while ministry beyond the walls of the faith is mandatory, socializing and fraternizing is frowned upon given its grave spiritual risk. My brother, sharing the same amorphous proto-Christianity as me due to our shared upbringing around it where it was a consistently present but ultimately quite passive force, found himself drawn to the church at the behest of Shane. Given the increasingly complex relationship my brother and I had, one mixed between my idolizing of him along with his mentorship of me but complicated by his increasing tendency to take out his wrath, trauma, and aggression on me physically and emotionally, I in short order too would join them.

Apeirophobia had already tilted my mind toward infinity and the aching dull numb abyss of being before and after life, so the transition to eschatological Christianity was an easy one. In those death fugues in the church, the fire and brimstone, the constant reeling over the Book of Revelation and its grim portents of oceans of blood and locusts with the faces of women and the mass deprivation and slaughter of humanity, I found at last a pitch to match the inner aimless scream inside of my head. I sought answers to eternity and this particular form of Christianity was fervent if not almost manic to provide them. My death fixation proved quite fertile ground; a faith like that did not thrive, as some Christianities do, with the deeds of the living acting out of love for the world and its people and life but instead out of the absolute scalding theological terror of the soul petrified of Hell. All that matters in the Pentecostal mind is eternity; you are not only encouraged to think toward that infinitely regressing horizon mapped now onto the compactified space of a human life but to actively shun looking away for any reason. To gaze upon the temporal is to blink in the face of infinity, to turn your face away from God in faithlessness. This faithlessness could prove fatal; the only unforgivable sin, the impugning of the Holy Spirit, could be incurred simply by conveying an inadequate amount of faith in the perfection of this perpetual deathward gaze. Given my then-undiagnosed OCD, a combination of the effects of autism, mounting C-PTSD and the gainlessness of certain moral, ethical and social questions I had seemingly no matter how much data I had, this neurotic fixation on the knifeplay of eternal damnation proved a fruitful place for my mind to take root.

I became obsessive within the Church. On one hand, I could quote verse fairly readily and fairly quickly; the soul-numbing fixation on solving the problem of eternity with a  text that presumes to assist you in doing just that tends to help. The problem I encountered was not strictly and exclusively one of that fundamental text however but of my faith itself. Not that I lacked faith at that time in God or Jesus. They were to me as fundamentally real as, again, the forces of physics, the phenomenological aspect of experience I endured. If anything, my exponentially increasing faith in Christianity allowed me to begin to disregard things that in my home were treated as self-evident; the Big Bang was thrown out for creationism, slaying evolution in me as well, while homosexuality clearly became the sign of malevolent demonic influence. My problem was not that I did not believe in what the Bible was telling me. My issue was that I did not believe it was good.

I did not struggle to believe in hell. Some capacity in me felt a natural kinship with the concept, an abyss of fire and torture, darkness and isolation. A schooling in Christian theology quickly dispels you of the common notion of red devils with pitchforks jabbing away at the sinners. In truth, they too are tortured, and that torture is the outer darkness of Corinthians, an undescribed wasteland, weeping and the gnashing of teeth, isolated madness. You burn in your immortal days next to Lucifer and every fallen angel. It is unclear in Revelation, or rather I should say an unsettled question, whether hell is eternal or, instead, the ultimate death, that all souls taken to heaven live forever while all consigned to hell cease to exist altogether in precisely the kind of cold annihilating infinity that terrified me when I stared into the jaw of death and contemplated those that had died. For some reason, hell did not terrify me. The idea of being damned did, being beyond love and beyond forgiveness; this notion of the ultimate conditional placed upon human love and human worth is what would in time cause me to get into conflicts with certain strains of feminist theory for how, to me, it became irreconcilable with a rehabilitative justice. One of the few good pearls I carried with me through the desert of the spirit after I escaped Christianity was this unwavering belief that every soul can be saved and we should strive to do so. I had been in abysses; I too had fed on roots and locusts. No, what I struggled to believe in, to trust in its goodness and the perfection of its construction and vision and purpose, was heaven.

I was told that heaven was a place that all good souls go. The image that had been presented to me in youth was the same as everyone else's; harps and clouds, wings and halos, long white gowns and a golden gate and somewhere off in the distance a great and shining throne upon which sat the white bearded king of the real. Theologically, this, I learned, as not quite accurate. God was described as having brass feet and straw-like hair, a sword for a tongue, all ablaze. God in this vision was no welcoming figure but a fearsome hybrid of a Mesopotamian war god and a lysergic nightmare, but like the rest of the likely-ergot inspired Book of Revelation. The domain of heaven likewise was described as functionally a featureless abyss, a paradox of infinite size and infinite compactness. In one sense of things, every noble soul saved by faith would be there, but they would not be segregated into isolated egos, nor would they be differentiable in a meaningful sense from the angels. The ego would be stripped bare; the soul within your chest, I was taught, was not your name or your memory but something else, something beyond, hence why it could live on after death but your body and mind could not, that even your mind and everything you know or believe of yourself is in a way a kind of delusion of Mara, an attachment to the world of flesh and not spirit. There would be no choir of all you loved waiting for you. There would be no reunions with those you had missed. Your featureless identityless egoless glowing ember of proto-self would be hurled into that paradoxical fire above, like sparks into the sun, and everything and everyone would be joined to the wholeness of God in a singular worshipful choir. The only real sense of self that might persist would be that you are not God, that you are nothing without Him, and that for the rest of infinite time you would worship.

This terrified me to my core. I had sought in my flight toward faith an escape from the suffocating cold of infinity and the blank expanse of death. Again, I did not have great fear of dying, of say succumbing to some wound and entering into the blackness of non-being. It was that non-being itself that was my terror, this notion of being dead and the eternal condition of that non-being, the way it erased the value of being in a fundamental and overwhelming way. Learning that, to my Christian faith, heaven was what I feared most filled my veins with ice. I did not have great terror of visions of demons; they were weak, I was told, appearing to trick you into believing in their awesome might when simple magic spells, invocations of God and His angels and His Son, would disarm them completely. I began to be filled with the sorcerer's dread, that that which I had signed my compact was in fact that wicked force I feared and that in attempting to escape one psychic hell that tormented and dulled me I had accidentally hurled myself backward into it. This was compounded by the resolute might, I was taught, of the angels. Their force, granted by God, exceeded not only my own but also any demon's. The stone holding Christ's body entombed, after all, was guarded and held fast by a great number of devils but was hurled aside effortlessly by a single angel seeking his Lord. This meant in a deep sense that their presence meant that deeply terrifying abyssal anti-peace of heaven, which invoked the deepest phobia of the eternal I possessed then and still possess now, was about to be pressed upon me. Films about angels and stories of their presence would rattle me and leave me unable to sleep; I would see half-hallucinated visions of them in the corners of rooms, standing tall and leering between bookshelves and dressers, perched by windows or sitting in chairs, especially in my paternal grandparents' house, an old house from the 1800s. I feared I could find no peace. When you believe God is real and the devil too and you believe too in the righteousness of the Lord but you fear deepest in your heart the abyss of heaven, it makes you feel like you are a living rebuke of the Holy Spirit.

I spent a long while in a fugue state between family meetings for alcohol abuse and youth group being slowly, increasingly isolated by my Pentecostal church, all while numbed and terrified by these dueling phobias in me of damnation and eternity. I couldn't bring myself to articulate a fierce desire to not exist, in part because this too would fulfill the requirements of my apeirophobia, the eternal nature of non-being feeling like being permanently submerged in a pitch black ice bath without the ability to scream for help or ever escape. I wanted not an active affirmative thing, salvation, damnation, eternity, but a negating thing, to be not-eternal even in the potentials of death, to be able to slide between being and non-being like a zoetrope in motion and so never succumb to that terrifying ocean of non-being I felt splashing at my ankles and carving my horizons. I spent those days in between tears, using video games and novels and books about science and math and history to numb the ache within my brain. I could disappear into art and the intellect forever; the iceberg peaks of my terrors would slice up through those black waters scraping at my hull, seeking to claim me for that infinite inky black, but I would sail on, not unencumbered but propelled by the baseless faith of youth. Still, the question was left unanswered, haunting and hovering at the edge of answer without delivering one. This, it turns out, is a good way to go crazy, sustained long enough.

This throbbing death terror which I thought might find a peaceable resolution in the arms of Christ was, of course, destined to explode. I had started playing the drums. My family was a musical family; everyone, and I mean every last soul, on my father's side sang, be it in church or in the car or around the house or in pick-up bands, and piano was passed up and down generations like a perpetually repackaged present. A number of relatives played guitar, honestly the coolest and most holy instrument, especially when an electrical guitar is properly distorted to hell and back crackling like God's own lightning ripping through the fragile sky, but my brother and I didn't learn our dad played too until I was about six or seven. Our aunt told us about his old guitar and how often he'd play, something we'd never known really, which prompted us to dig through the walk-in closet he had where the gun safe was and a hidden smaller safe with precious belongings where, buried behind old suits and jackets from the various stages of his shifting life, we found a guitar case with a Yamaha acoustic in it. Our father in his evasiveness got angry at us for going in the closet where the guns were kept (which, fair) instead of responding to our questions about the guitar. After some haranguing from our mom, who was on our side, he relented and explained he'd been a musician for a long while before settling down but that this part of him was put away now. We would later learn about his lost dream, first suspended by Vietnam and then pursued on his return, seeing him move to New York City from his parents' relocated home in New Jersey pursuing the shipping and fabrics trade my grandfather had been getting ahead in. This second stab at his dream resulted as well in his second marriage and divorce, the first being a pressured marriage to an old high school sweetheart by my grandmother on his return from war which didn't last long at all. When his second wife left, she took the records and much else. So he quit and joined the ad trade, where he met my mother.

My brother became enamored with the guitar. It was an acoustic, a dreadnought, which was of course far too large for our small bodies, especially since my brother was about 8 or 9 at the time. Still, he persisted at practicing it as best he could until one Christmas our grandmother Mary bought him his first guitar all his own, a 3/4 scale electric guitar with action you couldn't adjust and a built in speaker that sounded like shit. Still, it was his, and it was on that instrument that he would cut his teeth before graduating to a series of better and better instruments and amps. Given the intense rancor between me and him by that point, my idolization having turned to a cold and bitter rebuke, I did the best kind of vengeance I could think of; in a house of guitarists, I took up the drums. The problem for me was that I had roughly no sense of rhythm. So at church, I would sit behind Shane on a backup drum throne, tapping on my legs along with him as he played and getting small lessons between services as well as joining on auxiliary percussion on occasion. Eventually, Shane's interests began to be torn between school, church, and, of course, a girl, causing him to become wayward and then delinquent in his duties in the church band, leaving only me to pick up the slack. This in turn led to me being the natural fit for the band my brother had formed with the bassist of the church band, with my working to learn the material they'd written with Shane before chipping in myself with new songs and parts. We were an instrumental group, with all of us singing but none of us brave enough to do so into a microphone, and as a result we mostly built pieces where we could lock into a groove while someone soloed.

Then one day before service came the disapproving look from across the nave of one of the youth pastors. We found it curious but paid it no mind. Then came conversation between him and someone else, then another, all shooting eyes at us as we played a piece we had written recently. He eventually strode up and signalled to us to stop so he could speak, which we did. He informed us that one of the congregation had gotten his attention and told him that we were playing secular music by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and that this was unbecoming of a church environment (especially one so stringent and proudly world-denying as ours). We protested; this was an original piece of music and it was instrumental to boot, thus there was no way for it to be either secular or sacred music definitively given it was pure song. Still, he insisted we stop and that, if we continued, we would be ejected from the service. We thought this had to be a bluff; we were the majority of the band, with only a piano player and an acoustic guitarist/singer aside from us. So we returned to practice, thrashing out a section that the bassist, as usual, could not remember for the life of him. The youth pastor returned, visibly upset, and told us to go outside the church, to not even attend the service, for our disobedience. Given the lack of cell phones at that point, it being the very early 2000s, we all sat in the dark parking lot choked by barren trees in the rural wings of Virginia while we waited for our dad to come pick us up, where we told him of what happened. He, to his credit, kept mum, refusing to comment openly about his true feelings about Christian churches and their ability to live the faith they preached. Instead, he consoled us and reminded us of the value of playing music. Off of the back of this event, my brother would begin his slow turn away from the church, at least for a while. I, meanwhile, would attend sans instrument.

Now having nothing to distract my mind during services, which I had begun attending all by my lonesome, sitting on edge seats so I could watch the congregation as much as the preacher until the power of the Lord overtook me and I felt compelled to kneel at the steps and speak in tongues, my mind was left to roam and ponder. It turns out this was a blessing and a curse. I had turned to Christianity to absolve me of my terrors of the infinite and eternal and found terror rather than succor, with even the promised heaven being an icy cruelty I couldn't admit to others. But in that silence sans song, I had begun to ponder the depth of this infinity and the profundity of the weight of judgment administered by the Lord. I have rarely been frightened of judgment, at least of the common sort. A knock-on benefit of sometimes deep measures of physical and emotional abuse by my brother as we grew up combined with my natural inward sense of justice that apparently is common in autistic people is my ability to take lumps I feel I am owed. A classic way to beat a bully is not to overpower them but to take a beating well, to make it unfun and undesirable for them to fight you, not by being pitiful but by being a haggard bleeding beast. If they knock out your teeth, spit blood on their knuckles, Make them feel sick with themselves. This correlated as well into my sense of religious faith and judgment; for sins committed, an according act of penance is due. This was as obvious to me as gravity and the rising of the sun. What I could not square was the notion of infinite punishment for any act.

This fixation on rehabilitation, born from inside of me but greatly intensified by watching family friends, work colleagues and neighbors abandon my father in his darkness, with my mother and brother nearly doing the same, has always been a nasty little thing for me. I've danced online and in person more than once with people hurling frankly wildly out of pocket and asinine accusations my way, like that I value the lives of rapists over their victims, that I don't understand what pain is like so I don't understand justice, or that my comment on the coldness of their vengeance as a traumatic sickness of the soul means I don't know what it is to be restored. I don't tend to tell these people, these days, that I did once confront my brother with the full heft of the scars he left me, the broken mind ping-ponging between psychotic episodes and fully dissociative depression, how I daydreamed about setting the townhouse I lived in on fire with my roommates trapped inside to drive away and leave everyone thinking I was dead just to hurt them, and how he had done this. That I had timed telling him this all when he was in the darkest window of his relationship with his first wife, his body wracked with excruciating pain from an accident at work where he'd caught a falling engine block with his back to keep it from crushing a coworkers skull and the subsequent battle with first his place of work and then his insurance company to get any amount of surgeries to fix the chronic pain, which left him incapable of drawing an income, and from which he had developed an addiction to painkillers which he mixed with alcohol because it was the only thing that dulled his pain even though it made him mean, a meanness which he took out on his wife who in turn channeled her angst into secretly opening credit cards in his name that she'd max for parties with friends she didn't tell him about. I don't tell them how, on taking the blow I delivered him in that dark place he sat saddled with his woes, he tried to kill himself to, a gun at the kitchen table, just like I did despite me not telling him how I almost did it. How he told me about this weeping over the phone, apologizing, saying he wasn't even good enough to pull the trigger. That did not feel like victory to me. That made me sick with myself, suddenly aware at how monstrous and cruel I had become in pursuit of what I told myself was justice but emphatically was not. My brother and I built a new relationship, like we'd just met for the first time, and now the love we have for each other is an iron bond that I feel deep in my bones. It's a relationship we both earned by blood paid.

So when I say that my fixation on this question of justice perplexed and devastated me, I mean it. I sat, wracked with mental agony, contemplating hell not for me but for anyone. To send someone to that outer darkness forever, to leave them cold and alone, an aloneness I had begun to feel not just in the isolation of school with my odd mind and inability to act normal long enough to make many lasting friends but also in the increasing neglect and abuse at home, forever. That a god, let alone a god of love and justice and mercy as I was told Christ was, would deliver to anyone what I was experiencing intensified a thousand fold or more felt repugnant and impossible to me. This contemplating eventually brought me to consider a long-standing theological question I'd suppressed: Why cannot Satan be forgiven? In the infinitude of the power of God, is there no means by which to reconcile? That a God can do anything but make peace felt to me frightening, a question I didn't have a good answer to and to which every path felt cold and alien and hopeless. It didn't help that in Satan I saw so many people. He in the depths of his darkness was all abandoned, all who lashed out in pain and instead of receiving a gentle succor to correct their hearts instead were punished, a vainglorious notion of accountability that privileges the preening vanity of the administrating force rather than one that seeks to do the hard work of forging a peace between unpeaceful beings, a habit I would later see mirrored in the most vampiric and blood-obsessed wings of social justice, where it abstracted itself from the material process of restoration and equity and instead solaced itself with mere perpetual punishment. In Satan I saw my father. There was a figure of beauty, of wit and wisdom, something that had been loved once. It had run afoul, certainly, and by actions of its own doing, but actions we could see the roots of, could understand even if we didn't condone. I was taught to bend my heart to help without judgment by my father, who had the widest heart I've seen in someone even when it caused the family no end of vexation on more than one occasion. That the god of heaven could not do the same felt to me a fathomless failure.

So I brought this concern which had been plaguing me to my pastor in private. It was an intense question, I warned him, but one that had become a major fixation of mine that I could no longer shake. I didn't tell him how this fixation tied to my terrors of eternity, of the limitlessness of death, of my failed attempts to be enmeshed with life that seemed to slip out of my mind the minute death became real to me, or how my faith itself was hinged upon this surrender to love in rejection of death. Only that warm glow of love felt like it could cast aside the darkness of the grave, whose loam and grass I could almost smell fresh on my nostrils every evening when the dimming sky suddenly made me terrified I was being lowered into the plot I would be buried in. I wanted help. I wanted insight, some piece of scripture I'd overlooked, which could free me from this trap and let me return to life again. Instead, with an ashen face he told me he felt I was a spiritual threat to the congregation and that my question indicated demonic presence in my life. He implicated my brother and my father, as well as the fact that my mother was a Catholic. All this after I had pushed away friends with my neurotic and cruel rebuke of anyone who would not hew to my sense of specific religiosity as tainted by worldliness. He would not allow me to attend service anymore. So I asked to use the phone, called my father, and left.

In the intensity of my grief, this sudden terror that I had hurled my spirit into hell, I began ravenously reading the Bible cover to cover. This is what I had been taught to do. When in doubt, in life or in spirit, turn to Christ, the Word. I found no answer there. I found only litanies to cruelty, ones which as I assembled them in my mind made me fear that Lucifer was right and Christ was wrong regarding the natural order of the divine. I found the more I read that the more I could not love God. Not just that I didn't; my moral interior would not allow me to. One thing about autism is a remarkable uncanniness, lacking the cleverness to lie to yourself or others. I wear my emotions on my face, a fact which the allistic world takes as a sign of deceit; we are trained, apparently, to see forthright shows of emotion or thought as inherently untrustworthy, acts put on to carry out some kind of sleight of hand. Externally, this has caused me intense and continuous vexation, the loss of friends and social standing, being impugned to many by people who once thought well of me. But within myself, this amounts to a firm and disciplined voice seizing me as if with hands, making me unable to look away or deny those feverish strong impulses. I still thought God was real, the master of the universe. I just no longer loved or trusted him, thought him good, thought him something to admire. Regarding my previously stated anxieties of the infinite and eternal, this left me a bit in a bind. So, with my brother's newly-purchased three-volume set of the Bhagavad Gita, selections of the Upanishads and the Dhammapada, I began to search.