Other worlds

old worlds for new wineskins

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I wanted to say to remember the fifth anniversary since I walked out of those church doors on that cold Thursday night. I remember the next day as I went to work and my co-workers let me cry all day at my desk. They didn’t understand but they were kind.

I remember three years prior to that Thursday night I had asked Holy Spirit to delete the Bible from my head because I was a know it all, but like David, I wanted to keep the word in my heart, that I might not sin against God. Holy Spirit honored my weird request I think. I suddenly became a question-asker, though most of the time I didn’t have any answers.

When I walked out of those doors I thought my world was crumbling down, and to my surprise it did. When I left the white evangelical church it wasn’t trendy or cool to leave. I walked the long road ahead with people listening to what I was saying but I was the only one that left. I was the one who lost all my sense of community from one day to the next. I was left with infinite loneliness and aloneness. Yet even today I would never take it back, because I think that was a result of my prayer from three years prior.

I want to say that I started building a new world for myself, but I don’t believe that’s true. I believe I found myself back on the worlds my ancestors had already prepared for me. Did they have theological degrees? No, but they experienced liberation through their own resistance and that is the study of God I carry in my bones today because their study of God was embodied. Leaving the white evangelical church was a return to who I am through my ancestors, my culture, my Spanish speaking Black and brown Pentecostal church, and through the ritmo divino that runs through my veins.

In a bit of a kind of random situation I found myself in Miami last week to meet two of my dearest hermanas in person for the first time. It was so much more than I could’ve hoped for or imagined. Thursday morning was the day that marked the five years. I was sitting on the balcony of a hotel room in downtown Miami as the sun kissed my skin (Praise the Lord, ‘cause the midwest winter was killing me!) when I looked around and the tears started falling.

This time around though I was crying because my weird little prayer in 2014 that led me to leave the white evangelical church in 2017 was the same prayer that led me to worlds that were waiting for me all along. These worlds have hermandad (sisterhood), these worlds are made of salsa, festejo y reggeaton. These worlds carry liberation theologies that have carried me for so long and they are covered with the poetry the skies are singing in praise. And most of all, these worlds are a reminder of how loved I am by Jesus every day.

Here, in this place I am loved as all the things all those white supremacist oppressive worlds couldn’t love (or wouldn’t dare to love). I am loved in my Blackness, I am loved as woman, as someone who experiences the U.S as an undocumented citizen, in my fat body, my Spanish speaking tongue, and so many other things — I am loved. I am loved. I am loved.

It will always be a miracle to me that I survived, and even more now because I know that I’m past survival. I am finally able to live.

Miami, FL, USA - March 2022